by Edna O'Brien
4
Kate came in quietly and found him in the study standing over Maura, who was sitting on the couch. At first it seemed as if he had his arms around the girl.
“Oh, togetherness,” Kate said. “Perhaps I’m too early.” He turned around, acknowledged the fact that he saw her, and returned to attend to Maura’s eye. He was obviously taking out a smut, because he had a small paintbrush in one hand, and an eyeglass fixed in the socket of his left eye.
“It’s all right, sir, it’s all right,” Maura said as she leaped up and went out of the room.
“Well, that’s one way of returning,” Eugene said.
“Have I done something wrong?” she said gently, undoing the last two buttons of her coat.
“No, no, just your customary kindness,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, and waited. She would have to withdraw the remark.
“I think if you make too free they take advantage,” she heard herself say.
“Indubitably.” A word he used when he had no intention of saying anything.
“She drinks milk straight from the bottle, it’s rimmed with lipstick.” She, who meant to dispense only kindness.
“Baba’s well,” she said then, in the hope of retrieving the evening. She had her coat across her arm and was intending to hang it near the fire in a moment.
“Cheers,” he said. “I was breathless to hear how she was.” She stood wondering, then asked if she could get him some supper, and when he declined she asked why in a grieved tone. He didn’t feel like supper. He felt like tidying all his records, dusting the sleeves, putting some sort of order into them.
“I thought of making soup for us.” She stood there at a loss, chagrined, sorry, moving from one foot to the other, thinking that as she counted ten he would say something to detain her. He was in one of his moods. He reminded her then of a lightning rod, tuned only to the elements, indifferent to people. His back was getting thicker, or perhaps it was the winter woollens that made him shapeless. He still held himself more erect than anyone she knew.
“Well, I suppose I’d better go to bed,” she said.
“Suppose you’d better.” He did not turn around and give the semblance of a kiss by making a kiss-noise, as was his habit lately.
Upstairs she lay awake and planned a new, heroic role for herself. She would expiate all by sinking into domesticity. She would buy buttons, and spools of thread other than just black and white; she would scrape marrow from the bone and mix it with savory Marmite to put on their bread; she would put her lily hand down into sewerages and save him the trouble of lifting up the ooze and hairs and gray slime that resulted from their daily lives. She listened in vain for sounds.
When she came down in the morning she looked for clues to his humor. There was the skin of an apple on a plate, and the daily sentence in block capitals for Cash to write out. Until such time as he went to school his father wrote something out for him to copy. Underneath there was a scribbled sentence, which Kate took to be a memento for herself:
Now and then he thought all women could not possibly be bitches, but not for long, reality was always at hand.
She read it a few times but decided not to comment on it.
At twelve o’clock, as usual, she brought his tea on a tray, but she chose a nicer cloth, and had worried away the tea stains in his china cup by applying bread soda.
“I thought I’d do it properly,” she said as he sat up and reached for the heavy, thick-knit jersey on the floor.
“Yes,” he said, “it helps to make an effort.” She sat on the side of the bed, holding the tray that he had balanced perfectly on his knees. He kept looking at one pane of the diamond-paned window. It was caked with snow.
“I must clean those windows,” she said, trying to humor him. She both knew and did not know that what she said had come too late. Finally, when she’d made no progress, she went downstairs, calling Cash. He was with Maura, dancing to pop music from the radio. Like a little miniature man, he steered the clumsy, pink-armed girl around, and smiled lovingly up into her jolly, flushed face.
“It’s time we got on with the lunch,” Kate said in a pinched voice.
“Oh no,” the child said, “me like dancing.” His mother put her arms out and drew him from the warm kitchen into another room, where she reclaimed him with frantic kisses.
“What game will we play?” she said, humoring him.
“Put treasure in a box,” he said, “and draw a map and I’ll look for it.”
She found a box under a sofa where Eugene stuffed things—papers, maps, books, shoe trees, carrier bags, fishing rods.
“What will we put in it?” she asked.
“Treasure.”
“Sixpence?”
“No.”
“What?”
“I told you. Treasure.”
She heard Eugene call from upstairs, “Turn off that cat-alley moaning.”
Maura still had the radio going, full blast.
“Turn off that cat-alley moaning,” Kate said, passing on the blame.
She put a bead from a broken necklace in the box, drew the map, and sat there while her son crawled around the room asking if he was getting hot or cold, depending on where he was. She said what she had to say, but had no heart in it.
For weeks Eugene barely spoke. It continued to snow. Bulky icicles hung from the ledge of the coal bunker, and when they washed clothes they had to dry them indoors. The quiet, sad drip of the wet clothes and his silence were the only sounds she noted during those weeks. He put ammonia around the house in saucers to take the sulphur fumes away, and when the fog came down in the evening it, too, seemed not to move or wander the way fog does, but to stand still and be hardened by the frost. Even the clothes stiffened in the night, if the boiler went out.
He’s freezing me out, she thought as she watched for him to get up, to eat his toast, to go to the lavatory, to put on his coat, to go out, and then hours later to come back in again. Sometimes, if there was a program in his pocket, she knew he’d been to a concert or to theater. Jealousy drove her to search for ticket stubs, to see if there was one or two, but he was careful not to leave anything like that around. She hardly slept, except for the first half hour after getting into bed, when she would fall asleep from total exhaustion and then waken crying, fully alert to everything. They shared the same bed, but he saw to it not to retire until it was morning and time for her to get up.
Once, she stayed on in the morning, and in his sleep he touched her and drew back suddenly, as if he were an animal who had just touched an electric fence and received an appalling shock. For the first time she looked old, really old.
5
One day after lunch Kate took several swigs of whiskey from a bottle that she kept in her handbag, and braved it.
“What are we doing, what are we doing?” she said to Eugene, thinking that by an open appeal she would break through to him.
“I haven’t noticed that I struck you lately.” He was putting his coat on to go out.
“We’re like enemies. We’re not like man and wife at all.”
“I should hope not.”
“But why?” she begged. “Why? Why?” After all, he had been the one to urge marriage and child on her, and he must have known that she was impetuous.
“It’s not just my fault, it’s yours, too, it’s ours,” she said, thinking guiltily of all the women’s things he had done for the child, like putting a drawstring of twine through a Fair Isle jersey that did not gather in around the neck.
“I must say it took me quite a time to get to know you,” he said. “I must congratulate you on your simpleton’s cunning, and your simpleton’s servile ways.”
He, who exacted obedience!
“We all have faults,” she said, moving back a bit in case he smelled the whiskey and delivered a lecture about alcohol.
“Fortunately, some of us know about honor,” he said. It was strange, though consistent, how in a row he stiffened and tal
ked the wooden language of tracts.
“Honor,” she said, unable to think of her own words or resort to her own argument.
“The things you do, count, not your cheap little justifications.” He had his gray-flannel scarf on and was smoothing his hair down before putting on a corduroy cap. Luckily Maura and Cash were out feeding the ducks, so they could talk without fear of being heard.
“Can’t we talk,” she said, “really talk?” Even if they did, what would they say? He had been a great believer in airing one’s difficulties, but at this point neither of them was capable of listening.
He was giving his attention to the cap.
“Eugene,” she said desperately.
He moved his face from its image in the mirror and looked at her, as though looking at the most ultimate outrage that could have befallen him. Where was the woman he had never had the good fortune to meet?
“We’ll get over it, we’ll get through it,” she said, pitying him, pitying herself. “I’ll be better.”
He shook his head and looked at her grimly, the look of a gravedigger.
“You won’t. It’s your nature to lie, like your lying, lackeying ancestors.”
“Oh, stop,” she said, gripping him.
“Excuse me, I detest vulgarity,” he said, picking her arm up and dropping it at her side. He put his hand on the door catch.
“Just say one nice thing,” she said, trembling. If he went now it was final. Because his temperament—at least he called it temperament—was such that when people failed him he detached himself from them completely. They ceased to exist anymore for him.
“You live your life, I live mine. That’s fair, isn’t it?” He had opened the door and icy air rushed into the hall.
“Where will I live?”
“Plenty of cozy bed-sitting rooms around.”
Was he telling her to go?
“And Cash?” she said.
“I might let you see him on humanitarian grounds, but of course your morals make you unfit to be a mother.” The two words “humanitarian” and “morals” stuck out like barbs on wire. And the tears she shed now were tears of rage and self-pity.
“I didn’t sleep with him,” she said. It was no longer necessary to hide about Duncan. She wished she had the courage to say the word “fuck” and offend him more.
“The intention was there,” he said. “In the eyes of the law that is what counts.”
“You bastard,” she said directly to his gray-flannel face. In his mind he had already dealt with her and meted out the punishment that a judge would have done.
“You vicious bastard,” she said.
He struck her once across the cheek.
“That’s right, hit me,” she said. “Contradict all your noble, potty theories.” He believed in the gentle art of persuasion, in change through knowledge, in the twentieth-century game of brainwashing. One cheek blazed while the other felt as cold as stone.
“I don’t have to,” he said, almost smiling. “There are other things I can do.” And he went out.
“But what things?” she called, but the men shoveling snow off the footpath made it impossible for her to repeat it. She was in her bedroom slippers and could not very well follow him out. She ran to the window and watched him walk down the street, his gait free as a man who had just had lunch and was enjoying a little fresh air. True, what he once said to her about being born to stand outside windows and look in at the lit-up muddle of other people’s lives. The scene they had just had was her scene, not theirs. He was apart from it; as he said in jest, he did not attach himself to living people. To sky, to stones, to young girls, he said. To young girls, she thought bitterly, whom he would never meet and therefore never know well enough to despise.
She went upstairs to find the handbag with the broken clasp in which she’d hidden Duncan’s love letters. Better put them in the boiler before things became terrible. The bag was wrapped in a nightgown—the very one in fact that she wore when the water broke and Cash was pushing his way into the world—just as she’d left it. She pulled it open and found that the letters were gone. The inside of the bag, smeared with face powder, was treacherously empty. A small typed note fell out:
They are where you cannot find them, safe with my lawyer. I have no doubt but that they will come in useful.
She trembled with shame, with anger that he should know and not have confronted her, that he should have confiscated them and not be ashamed, that he should be as small and mean and obsessional as herself.
She ran downstairs, opening drawers and books, wildly and without direction. She opened a ledger in which he normally kept notes about his earnings, his health, and the weather, and on the center page she found her obituary:
So this is her, my special, hand-picked little false heart, into whose diseased stinking mind, and other parts, I have poured all that I know about living, being, and loving. Tonight I had the pleasure of actually seeing her in the arms of that chinless simpleton whom we met months ago at D.’s party. At supper she patently lied to me about having to see Baba and I accompanied her, guessing that her excuses were flimsy. She could not bring me to Baba, it was too private; she got off a bus, took another, donned some idiotic clothes in a ladies’ room, and went to a pub to be with him. I could have gone in and knocked out the few front teeth he has left, but it would have been contamination. I went to a pub down the street and had a whiskey and got home in plenty of time to await her. I did not tackle her. There is no need to now. In a way it is a relief to know it is over. Somehow I always knew she would destroy it.
It was dated correctly. He’d written it the night she saw Duncan last. He’d even blotted it carefully, not one smear, and commas in the right places.
For the first time she felt some intimation of the enormity of his buried hatred for her, for women, for human follies. There was no doubt about what she must do. She sought out Cash and Maura, sent the girl on a half-day, and brought Cash home, telling him they were going on a little journey. She packed some things into a suitcase and some boxes, and prayed that they would get away without being caught. She’d rung Baba and a taxi was on its way to take them from the violated lair to somewhere less awful.
6
She came here later in a taxi carrying two fiber suitcases and two cardboard boxes. Stuff that I wouldn’t be seen dead with.
“Are we on our holidays?” the kid kept saying because of the luggage. Not that it looked jolly. Far from it.
“Come in,” I said. Because I knew everything she was going to say before she said it.
“Oh, Baba,” she said, “I think I’m going to kill myself.”
“Come on, girl,” I said, “facts.”
“He found out about Duncan,” she said. “He hit me and threatened to take Cash away, and he hates me.” Millions of women getting hit every day, and I myself forced to strip once on the imprimatur of my husband because three of his pals bet I had no navel. How could I have functioned without a navel? The telephone rang.
“Don’t answer it,” she said, jumping up. She said he’d be on her trail soon. He was out for a walk and would come in and find her note.
“What’s in the note?” I asked.
“Just that we weren’t right for each other.”
Imagine leaving a note like that when he was a fanatical man.
“He says I’m rotten,” she said. He was full of character, of course, and she wasn’t. She wasn’t bad, but like any woman she’d take mission money to buy clothes, or if she met some man she liked she’d persecute him until she had loaded him with the love trophy. Knowing this about her, Eugene was so righteous he made a constant splash about his integrity. They were mad in two different ways.
“I’ve left,” she said. “It’s all over.” She’d obviously done some very thorough packing because the kid was unloading the contents of the boxes into our elegantly louvered drawers: curtain rings, empty perfume bottles, old envelopes, broken belts.
“What did you bring t
hat junk for?” I said.
“Association,” she said, without a smile.
Association or not, she’d have to take them away. Frank wouldn’t have her in our house with danger brewing. Frank was very careful; you know, slaughter your wife so long as you do it indoors.
“Who’s that?” the child said, holding two photographs. One of Kate as kid leaning on her mothers shoulder. It was the mercy of God her mother got drowned or she’d still be going around tacked onto her mother’s navel. And one of Eugene looking like an advertisement for hemlock. That, as you can imagine, started her off on a right orgy of drip. His strong face. Where had it gone wrong? A year ago she had written evidence from him that she was the genuine Kate in ten thousand Kates, because of her alarmingly beautiful face, and disposition, her tender solicitude and worth; and she’d written back to him—he was only in the other room, for God’s sake—that he was her buoy, her teacher, the good god from whose emanations she gained all.
“Ring Duncan,” I said. I would have said “Ring the Prime Minister” if I’d thought it would have helped. I sent her upstairs to do it in privacy while I chatted up the kid. It was really serious for me. She didn’t know it, but Frank got very difficult after we were married. He stopped being a slob, if you know what I mean. I traced all back to the evening of our wedding. For a start we were refused admission on the plane because of his being drunk and he said did they know that his wife was wearing a Balenciaga while they hauled him away to cool off in some private room. Next day when we got away—to some bloody resort that an agent fixed for us—there were gangs of men smirking at me in my buff-colored suit, and he sent me upstairs to put something respectable on. I owned nothing respectable. At dinner he said the food was oily. He’s the sort who, the minute he gets across the English Channel, says the food is oily. That night to add to our joys I had the curse—excitement or some bastard thing—even though I’d worked out all my dates well ahead. He wanted to call a doctor.