“What are you talking about?”
“You make so many blunders and you make them in such an efficient, self-confident manner.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like a child, always scheming and thinking you’re getting away with something.” He drew up his knee viciously and the box bounced off the bed.
She backed away, frightened and sincerely bewildered. She couldn’t understand why he was making a fuss. The tie was pretty, and what’s more, it looked expensive. She might have paid five dollars for it.
“The label, darling,” he said.
“What?”
“Not that I mind wearing dollar ties, I do most of the time, anyway. It’s your effrontery, because this is practically the first present you’ve ever given me. And more than effrontery, it’s your sly stupidity.”
“You can’t . . .”
“Sly, because you’ve no sense of human values, and stupid because you always overlook one or two details. You always think you can put something over on people, that no one is smart enough to catch on to you. And all the time you’re as transparent as glass.” He leaned back against the pillows. His voice was low but distinct. “You’d make a very poor murderer. They’d have you hanged within a month.”
There was a long silence. She said at last, in a bored way, “Well, that was quite a speech, Charles.”
“I have lots more material.”
“Have you?”
“Oh, yes. I’m gradually getting things straightened out, a detail here and there, a discrepancy—what the doctor said and what you said he said . . .”
“I don’t pretend to remember his exact words.”
“You haven’t the grace to pretend anything. For a whole month you’ve sat in that chair over there waiting for me to die.”
“That’s a lie.” And it was a lie. She didn’t want him dead. She had only thought, off and on during the years of their marriage, how pleasant it would be if Charles didn’t come home some night. That was natural, that was human, a lot of wives thought that about their husbands sometimes. It didn’t make her a criminal. Yet Charles treated her like one, exactly as if he’d read her mind and convicted her on her thoughts.
“That’s your secret, Martha. You don’t pretend anything. You haven’t even got sense enough to pretend you married me for anything but my money.” His voice had risen and his eyes glowed feverishly in their sockets. “Have you? Did you?”
She was startled by his fury, but in the back of her mind she felt a cold contempt for anyone who could lose his control so completely. She said, “I don’t believe you’re in any condition to talk.”
“I may never be in any condition to talk. You tried once and you’ll try again . . .”
“All this fussing about a tie. It’s disgusting.”
“Won’t you, Martha?” he shouted. “You will try again?”
“For heaven’s sake lower your voice. The servants will hear you.”
“I want them to hear, I want everyone to hear!”
Quietly, so he hardly realized she was moving, she backed toward the door and closed it. Then she stood against it, as if defying him to get up and push her aside and open it again.
“Open that door,” he ordered.
“Don’t be ridiculous. If you think I’m going to let an hysterical invalid make a fool of me in front of—”
“They’ll hear me anyway, I’ll see to it.”
“Have you gone completely insane, Charles? I’ve done nothing against you.”
He struggled to a sitting position and began to scream clearly and deliberately: “I accuse my wife of trying to kill me! I am perfectly sane. I have evidence. My wife . . .”
In two seconds she was across the room and had her hand over his mouth.
“Stop it. I warn you, Charles, stop it.”
He pulled feebly at her hand. Drops of sweat oozed out of his forehead and his screams were muffled into little animal grunts.
“I told you to be quiet,” she said. “You can’t fight me. I won’t take my hand away until you promise to be sensible.”
He was still for a moment and there was no sound but his labored breathing. Then, with a final spurt of strength, he sank his teeth into the palm of her hand.
She was too surprised to move. She felt her own warm blood and the thick frothy saliva from his mouth slide slowly down her wrist and touch the sleeve of her coat.
Filth, her mind shrieked. Filth, filth.
She stared in frozen horror at her hand.
Charles was smiling. “I can’t fight you, eh? Perhaps not according to the rules, but I do all right. Eh, Martha?” His mouth, smeared with her blood, was moistly red and voluptuous.
“Filth,” she said in a dazed voice. “You filth.”
She turned and walked blandly away, supporting her wounded hand with her good one, carrying it with tenderness and loathing as if it were her torn, bloody baby.
Confronted by the closed door she stopped, unable to comprehend that there was a door between her and escape, and that it must be opened before she could find water to wash this indescribable filth from her hand. She felt no pain, she seemed partially paralyzed as if Charles’s saliva was a poison that was swiftly destroying her nerve centers.
“Martha . . .”
“I must,” she said, “I really must—wash my hands. I must . . .”
“Turn around.”
She obeyed, slowly. Charles was still smiling, his rich, red mouth drawn back from his pink teeth, his eyes passionate and beautiful with fever.
“Did you ever put pennies in your mouth when you were a kid?” he said. “That’s how your blood tastes. Metallic.”
Her image began to waver before his eyes, to become larger and larger. White face, black dress, red blood. The colors bounced and jostled each other. Red face, black blood. She grew noisily, clinking like pennies, spreading into the corners of the room.
“Get out! Get out of my corners! Get out, get out!”
5
The horror passed and she began to move with brisk economy. Holding a handkerchief against the palm of her hand, she pulled the sheet up over Charles. (How calm he looked now, as if he had purified himself by spitting out all his venom and bile on her.) She picked up the tie from the floor, replaced it carefully in the box and set it on the bureau. All that fuss about a tie, it was really disgusting. She would not permit herself to believe that he had any other reason for fussing. The sole reason was the tie, and she could fix that easily enough—she would simply never buy him another one.
She took a final look at Charles. Later, when he woke up, he would be apologizing all over the place, he would grovel as he usually did after he’d lost his temper. She would, not too readily, of course, accept his apologies and they would resume their life together as if nothing had happened.
As far as she could tell, no one had heard Charles’s insane accusations. In one way it was a pity. Whenever he acted up like this, Charles was pretty careful to let no one hear him except her, so that people were fooled into believing that he was an extremely amiable man. The servants adored him (naturally—he made no demands on them); Laura and her mother thought he was wonderful (he was, with them); and his friends were continually telling her how lucky she was (lucky to be alive).
It was extraordinary how he managed never to give himself away to anyone else but her. She even felt a certain detached admiration for him in this respect, but it was tempered by a deep uneasiness: Is there something about me that brings out all this venom, could it be me?
She opened the door and stepped into the hall. Laura was standing at the head of the stairs and something about her posture indicated that she’d been standing there a long time, deliberately listening. She was wearing her school clothes, a red, baggy sweater and a plaid skirt, and she had a notebook under her arm.<
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“I just got home,” she said. “I was coming up the steps and I heard Charley shouting. I just wondered.” She glanced away, hugging the notebook, balancing her weight on the edges of the soles of her saddle shoes. She was thin and dark, with straight thick brows and narrow eyes that had a disconcerting I-know-and-you-know-that-I-know expression. She practiced this expression in front of a mirror every morning when she combed her hair, and it was quite effective. “I just happened to hear him.”
“Stand properly; you’ll ruin your shoes.”
“Are we going away?”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
“I heard—I just wondered.”
“Of course we’re not going away. Charles is ill, he’s under a strain and sometimes he gets peculiar ideas.”
“Can I go in and see him?”
“No,” Martha said sharply. “He doesn’t want to see anyone. And stand properly.”
“The gym teacher said it was good for you to stand on the sides of your soles. It strengthens the arches.”
“You may tell the gym teacher for me that it also ruins the shoes.”
“Well, you can always buy new shoes but you can’t buy new arches.”
“You’re getting too fresh,” Martha said.
In her own bathroom she washed her wound and poured alcohol over it. The bite wasn’t deep but she hoped it was deep enough to leave a scar. Scars were useful weapons.
When she returned to the hall Brown was there with Laura. Brown jumped when he heard her step.
“Mr. Pearson has had another bad spell,” Martha said. “I’m going to phone the doctor.”
Unhurriedly she descended the steps.
Laura and Brown exchanged glances.
“She’s got a bandage on her hand,” Laura said casually. “See it?”
“No.”
“I bet they had a fight.”
“You’re a crazy kid,” Brown said, frowning.
“As a matter of fact, I heard them. I heard every single word. I could tell, if I felt like it. I will if you’ll let me have your car on Saturday.”
“You nearly wrecked it last time.”
“It wasn’t my fault. I told you all about it.”
“Beat it,” he said roughly.
“It’s lucky I’m a liberal or I’d have you fired for the way you talk to me when nobody else is around.”
“Try it, canarylegs.”
A flush spread up along her neck to her cheeks. “I couldn’t be bothered. We’ll be moving out one of these days anyway.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“Wait and see.”
“I’ve been waiting.”
“You’re not the only one.” She intensified her knowing expression. “I never liked it here much anyway. It’s disgusting to keep a butler in this day and age.”
She saw Brown’s eyes narrow in anger and she turned with an air of victory and walked away.
“One of these days I’m going to pin your ears back,” Brown called after her. “If I thought they’d stop flapping long enough for me to catch hold of them.”
“Oh, really?”
She balanced her notebook on top of her head to improve her posture and glided solemnly down the hall.
Once inside her bedroom (done in red plaid wallpaper that she’d picked out herself) she took up her position at the vanity mirror. She spent a good deal of time here, trying to decide what she looked like. Sometimes she looked quite beautiful, a subtle haunting beauty that brought gentle tears to her own eyes, and then she would decide to be an actress. But other times she looked perfectly awful and she visualized herself in cap and gown, receiving her Ph.D. in front of an admiring throng: “She’s not pretty, no, but what a mind the girl has, one of the truly great minds of the century!”
Today she had a pimple on her chin and another beside her left ear, and she had just gotten a C in Lit. I, so she decided to become a psychologist. She narrowed her eyes and looked like a psychologist.
There, at least that was settled. She would be a psychologist, but for a while she’d keep it a secret. Last winter she had made the mistake of telling Charley she intended to become a missionary. Charley had laughed and laughed. Not two weeks after that she discovered that her inspiration, an aging Youth Leader from the Y.M.C.A., had a wife and two children and was not going to Darkest Africa or Darkest India but merely to another Y.M.C.A. A truly terrible blow, and she rallied from it only because she had to for the mid-winter exams.
Everything happens to me, thought the psychologist. Life is just one pitfall after another. One horrible, shattering disillusionment followed by another horrible shattering disillusionment.
But always she rallied, she survived. To look at her no one would ever dream what she had been through. There wasn’t a wrinkle in her face (pimples didn’t count, they could happen to anybody), and her forehead was as smooth and serene as a mountain lake. Life had beaten her but she came up smiling. She smiled, at the same time keeping her eyes narrowed so that she appeared to be squinting in strong sunlight.
Most infelicitous, she thought, frowning. A most infelicitous physiognomy.
She rearranged the mirrors to examine her profile. Her nose was nice, but the pimple beside her ear spoiled everything. It was no ordinary pimple, it was huge, it glowed, it was phosphorescent. She couldn’t bear it, she wished she were dead.
But, as usual, she rallied. She coated her face liberally with pancake makeup. It made smiling difficult, but who wanted to smile anyway? What was there to smile about? Oh, the horror, the disillusionment! Oh, the C in Lit., the Y.M.C.A. and the phosphorescent pimple!
My life is ashes, she thought. Just plain ashes.
Though Laura’s adolescent mind vacillated from one extreme to another, in her judgments and decisions about herself, she showed considerable maturity in judging other people. Nothing that went on between Charles and Martha escaped her, and years ago she had decided that she would never get married. Charles was all right when Martha wasn’t around. The fault must, therefore, lie in marriage itself. She remembered that her father and mother had been happy together, but she wondered now if it hadn’t been all a pretence for her sake. Perhaps her mother and father had felt exactly as Charles and Martha felt about each other but were better able to conceal it. It was a disturbing thought, and it worried her.
Sometimes when she was in bed at night all her worries would bunch themselves together and lie on her heart, heavy as lead. She had a recurring dream, a bad, shameful dream, in which Martha died and she herself was married to Charles. These dreams had begun when she was fourteen and whenever she had one she couldn’t bear to talk to Charles for days afterward. She would sit around, mute and stubborn.
Martha was puzzled. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Did something happen at school?”
“Uh uh.”
“Is there something you want and you don’t like to ask for it?”
“Uh uh.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, what’s got into you?”
“I’m thinking.”
“She’s growing up,” Charles said.
She didn’t want to grow up. She wanted to be a little baby or an old woman or a dog or a horse or anything but Laura growing up.
Usually she got on very well with Charles. He seemed to understand that the house was too quiet and their mode of living too dull for a sixteen-year-old. He put himself out to be entertaining, deliberately creating noise and confusion. After dinner he would play the piano and sing very loudly to cover up his mistakes. Laura would sing with him, giggling whenever he struck a wrong note.
Now and then Martha came in, to empty Charles’s ashtray or pick up a piece of sheet music that had fallen on the floor. She didn’t try to stop the noi
se or even look disapproving. She simply ignored them both out of existence, as if she had gone suddenly blind, or deaf, or had moved into a vacuum where no sounds could penetrate and Charles was real and realized only through his ability to dirty an ashtray.
Once, when she came in, Charles stopped playing and swung around to face her.
“Martha . . .”
“Oh, don’t stop playing on my account, Charles.”
“We never have any fun together, do we?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Let’s go dancing tomorrow night. Buy yourself a new dress. We’ll have dinner at Chez Maurice and go around to the Embassy or some place afterwards.”
She had bought the dress, but the next afternoon she sent Laura to tell Charles that she had a headache and didn’t care to go out.
“But why?” Charles asked.
“I don’t know,” Laura said. “Maybe she has a headache.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“She was crazy about the dress. She took me with her to buy it. It’s awfully cute blue velvet with a slit in the skirt and a big white flower at the waist.”
“Okay. It’s all right. I’m getting too damn old to dance, anyway.”
That had been a year ago. The dress hung in a cellophane bag in Martha’s closet. From a little way off it looked brand new, but when Laura tried it on one day she noticed that there were smudges around the hem as if someone had worn it and danced in it, and the petals of the white flower drooped as if crushed between two bodies or bruised by a hand.
Someone had worn it. Not Lily—she wouldn’t have the nerve. Not Laura herself, because the dress didn’t fit her. So it was Martha. Maybe she put it on when she was alone in her room just to wear the thing out.
Or maybe, Laura thought with a shock, she even dances in front of the mirror holding a pillow the way I used to do when I was just a kid.
There was something frightening in this idea about Martha. It seemed to imply things Laura didn’t understand and to suggest sly secrets she didn’t want to hear. It left her with the same shameful feeling as her dream of being married to Charles.
Experiment in Springtime Page 5