The Collected Stories of William Humphrey

by William Humphrey

  Then I encountered the smile of Edward Gavin. He was sitting by the window beneath which Janice stood to wave to me. He was not the only man my age, but he was the only one who looked as if he felt himself to be. It was when I asked if I might share his seat that he gave me his smile. Such politeness as mine, or perhaps it was my desire to share a seat with anyone, apparently confirmed my innocence, for several people turned and smiled. But my man’s smile was a friendly smile.

  He nodded toward Janice and asked, “Married long?”

  “Two months,” I said.

  He spared me the pleasantries. In fact, after telling me his name he said nothing. I told about myself, pausing often to let him say something, but he didn’t, and finally, growing ashamed of my egotism, I said, “Married yourself?”

  “Twenty years,” he said wearily.

  I smiled. But I was at that stage of my own when to hear a man joke about his marriage was not funny to me. “It doesn’t seem to have hurt you,” I could not help saying.

  To my surprise he got to his feet. The train was slowing for Webster’s Bridge, the first stop after Cressett. That was where this man Edward Gavin got off, having commuted just three miles.

  Being the last stop on the line, barely within commuting distance, Cressett was the starting point for the morning train, the 8:02. The coach was empty when we came in and each man and woman took a seat to himself, like a herd of milch cows trained to go to their separate stalls. Oh, I noticed pairs who sat together daily, but I noticed also that after a grunt or two they settled down to as deep a silence as those who sat alone until their seats were shared by strangers getting on at stops down the line; indeed, I decided that those pairs had agreed to sit together just to keep each from having to sit with anyone he disliked even more. And so for me the coach came soon to have the atmosphere of an elevator ride prolonged for nearly two hours. The evening train, which had a lounge car and which set out from Grand Central loaded full of people going home from work, promised to be more sociable. But I learned quickly that if anything can make a person more ill-tempered than having to go to work in the morning, it’s having to go home in the evening, and so the occasional gusts of sociability from the gin rummy games on the evening train only intensified the general incivility.

  I found myself thinking again of the man Gavin’s smile. I looked out for him and saw that he sat regularly with no one but that he did not seem to resent it quite so much as others if someone sat with him. He lived in Webster’s Bridge, I knew now, having seen him board the train there every morning since the first, so when we stopped there one morning, the seat next to me being empty, of course, I invited him with a look to take it. He seemed to recognize me with something other than pleasure; in response to my look he frowned deeply, and he took a seat up the aisle.

  Coming home that night, as we drew up the line, I left my seat and worked my way up to the head coach. Edward Gavin was there. The sight of him then was something of a shock. Slumped in his seat, abandoned to his exhaustion, he resembled nothing so much as an elder brother of the man I had seen before. But when he saw me he drew himself together and his smile performed the most amazing transformation on his face, as when a photographic print lies in the developer and the washed-out features of a face suddenly collect themselves into life. I forgave him completely his unfriendliness of the morning. Tell yourself there’s nothing personal in it, that anyone else could do just as much—still it does something to you, makes you feel good, to have your approach bring that much change to a person’s face.

  I said, however, that if he did not feel like talking to anyone …

  He rejected vigorously the implication that he was tired, commanded me to sit, and talked with animation. Then the conductor came in and announced Webster’s Bridge. I gathered up my topcoat and brief case and stood in the aisle to let him out.

  He made no move.

  “This is only Webster’s Bridge,” he said.

  I was about to reply when I saw that his eyes had narrowed strangely, narrowed with something very much like suspicion. Then I saw that upon his lips had come a playful, almost sinister smile. He seemed to be daring me to ask for an explanation.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh, yes,” and sat down.

  My bewilderment quickly gave way to fear. He seemed to know this and to be enjoying it. We rode silently for what seemed a long while. When he finally offered to talk it was not to ease me. For the time left he chatted gaily and forced me to answer his questions, and all the while he kept smiling his playful, sinister smile.

  When he boarded the train next morning at Cressett he did not share my seat because I’d made sure he couldn’t by sharing someone else’s and because I was hiding behind a newspaper. But I distinctly felt that he knew I was behind that paper; I could feel his smile coming right through it. Nor did I ride out with him that evening. Again, sitting behind my paper, I felt he knew I was in the same coach; in fact, though I had waited until I saw him seated and then gone to another coach, he had come into my coach when we were a few miles up the line. And his knowing I was there did nothing to keep him from getting off—and with an air as careless, as regular as you please—at Webster’s Bridge—only Webster’s Bridge!

  I watched him for a week. One morning he would get on one place, the next morning the other. One night he would get off at Webster’s Bridge, then take the train at Cressett the next morning, and another time it would be the other way around. Sometimes he’d take the train at neither place, yet be in Grand Central and take the train out that evening.

  I would often look around me to find if any of the others noticed these goings-on, or to find if any observed my interest. Everyone was busy or tired from a busy day, everyone was too self-absorbed, and I felt silently reprimanded for my idle nosiness—which did nothing to check it, as you may imagine. I may say, though, that after a few looks around at my tired and busy and self-absorbed fellow passengers, I was ready to give Edward Gavin my sympathy if his only reason was to have a little variety in his life and be different from them, who got on and off at the same stop every day.

  After three weeks something happened, but for which I suppose I should have lost interest and should have forced myself to find some perfectly logical and prosaic explanation for him, and have forgotten the man altogether, especially if I could have found someone who looked at all pleasant to ride with. It was this:

  One night the person sitting in front of me got off at the stop before Webster’s Bridge, revealing Gavin sitting in the head of the coach. I fell to thinking of him and his two train stops and I became so absorbed in it, said the names of the two towns to myself so many times, that when the conductor came in and announced Webster’s Bridge I got up, put on my coat, took up my things, and got off the train.

  As I was walking down the platform still puzzling and looking for Janice in the crowd, I realized my mistake and felt so foolish that instead of chasing after the train as it pulled out I stood stock-still. When I did begin to run it was too late and at the end of the platform I gave up and stood panting for breath. Then I saw a man standing in the red platform lights, his hand on the door of a station wagon inside which sat a woman. It was Gavin, and he was staring at me wildly.

  The next afternoon as I hurried up the platform in Grand Central I found myself overtaken by him. He smiled as though nothing had happened, asked if I was riding with anyone, whether I had got into a rummy foursome yet, and when I finally managed to say “no,” suggested that we ride up together. “After all,” he said in a side-of-the-mouth way as he gave me a hand up the steps, “we’d might as well be as friendly as possible under the circumstances, hadn’t we?”

  We were barely seated when he said, “Strange, isn’t it, what jealousy can do to a person? Read a story the other day about an old couple who’d been married fifty years and all that time the woman had lived in jealousy of the husband’s dead first wife. Now, the author takes you inside the husband’s mind early in the story and you know that he had
completely forgotten that first wife. You see the irony. Woman might have had a full life. There it was just waiting for her. If it hadn’t been for her jealousy. For which she had no reason at all. Isn’t that just like people? Women especially. Take my wife now—”

  I must have blushed at this sudden, tasteless confidence.

  “You know my wife,” he said, and it was not a question.

  “Not at all,” I hastily replied.

  He smiled at me knowingly, intimately. “Come now,” he said. “You an advertising artist and new in town and don’t know my wife?” His tone was quite insultingly incredulous. Apparently those two qualifications of mine were enough to make his wife certain to know me. He then gave me another long, sly, familiar smile, which, to my amazement, I saw was meant to convince me that there was no use trying to deny that I knew his wife.

  “Alice, you know, has this one fixed idea,” he said. “The same as the woman in that story. Comes from sitting home all day with nothing to do, so her imagination gets somewhat—hmm”—he leered—“inflamed.”

  Imagine telling this to a stranger!

  “Poor Alice,” he said, and he shook his head sadly. “Of course, I guess I haven’t been always as model a husband as the one in that story,” he added slyly. “Poor Alice,” he insisted. “No-o, no, I guess you couldn’t say I’ve always been that model,” and in the tone of this was considerably less of genuine repentance than of fond reminiscence. Then he seemed to have caught himself saying too much. “It’s got so bad, Alice’s jealousy, I mean, that I can’t even keep a secretary. I have to keep one on the sly in Webster’s Bridge and work with her in the evenings. I don’t have to tell you what Alice thinks I’m out doing those evenings. You may wonder why I risk keeping her just three miles down the line from home. But doesn’t that prove how innocent”—he laid a broad emphasis on the word, and as though that weren’t enough, accompanied it with a wink—“it all is? Would I be so stupid if it was something more?” He had thought this out carefully and was obviously pleased with it. He wanted to avert my suspicions, but at the same time he was obviously too proud of his prowess to resist letting me in on the truth, so that it all added up to the most proudly guilty protestation of innocence you ever saw.

  Well, it was all so strange that I did not immediately realize its implication for me. Then the night when he had said that this was only Webster’s Bridge came back to me, and his wild glare beneath the station lamp the night before, and I realized that he thought I had deliberately watched and followed him. I was insulted and about to tell him so, and then I had to ask myself what else could the man think on seeing me, breathless from running, on the platform of the station where he knew I did not belong, where I had tried to lure him into getting off before. No wonder he was sure I knew his wife. He probably thought, and well he might from the look of things, that I was in her pay.

  I said, “Mr. Gavin, if you’ve got troubles with your wife, I—well, I’m very sorry.” My stupidity infuriated me. “But, but I assure you”—and here I got infuriated at my pompousness—“that I do not know your wife. I don’t even know you! Last night—well, last night I, I got off the train at the wrong stop, that is at Webster’s Bridge, out of pure absentmindedness. Pure absent-mindedness. And when I realized my mistake I ran after the train and I missed it, as you know.” I could have kicked myself for that “as you know.” I was conscious also that people were turning to stare, for I had grown a bit loud. Now I whispered, “If you think I had any other reason, why, then, why you’re wrong, that’s all. And, really, you ought to look into things a little further before you come up to a man and begin accusing—well, forget it!” And with this I left him and found a seat in another coach, cured of my loneliness for a train companion.

  II

  Imagine my astonishment when after this the man seemed to go out of his way to bump into me on the train, in the stations and on the street in Cressett. I chose a different coach each morning and evening but he always found me and on the evening train if the seat beside me was taken he took the nearest seat and waited until the person beside me got off. He made no mention of what had passed between us, but he seemed to feel it had given us the basis for a close friendship, close enough for him to wink at me now when he got off the train in the evening at Webster’s Bridge and to show me with a leer what an exhausting night he had had of it when he got on in the morning. He boasted so much I began to have suspicions.

  He was pretty crude, and so I was not eager to accept his offer to drive me home from the station one night. Janice had phoned in the afternoon to say that our car was in the garage. Gavin saw me getting into the taxi and hurried over and was so insistent that I had to give in.

  On the way he slowed at a side road and suggested stopping in at his place for a drink. I did not protest. I wanted to get a look at his wife.

  “Like you to meet my wife,” he said grimly.

  Beneath the name Gavin on his mailbox was the name Metsys.

  “Any relation to—”

  “Sister.”

  I was thinking, as you have no doubt guessed, of Victoria Metsys, the woman who, by drawing upon Picasso, Klee, and Miro for her subway posters, had started a whole new trend in advertising art twenty years ago. Gavin seemed nonchalant enough, I thought, about having her in the family. This I could understand better when I saw his house: he had not done badly himself.

  A man bringing you to meet his wife could not very well prepare you by saying, “Oh, by the way, you must expect her to look twenty years older than I.” But if Gavin had, he would have saved an awkward moment when I said to myself, “Why, she must be fifty!” and what I was thinking showed all too plainly on my face. This must have been painful enough for Mrs. Gavin, but the next moment I made things worse by turning involuntarily, as though I needed to recheck his age, for another look at Edward. What I saw in his face then explained why he had not prepared me; it was not the first time he had enjoyed this trick.

  We sat, and while Gavin told her about me I studied his face. I could believe now that he was her age, but the way he had chosen to show me was the only way I could have been convinced of it. It was the way his face was made that gave it its youthful look. It was thin and small, there would never be much flesh on it to sag, and the overall impression it gave was one of such boyish fun that the lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth would for a long while yet be thought to come from laughter rather than from years.

  Gavin left the room to mix drinks and the first thing Alice said to me was, “I’m older than my husband, you know.” It took coolness to come out with it like that. I had wondered already how she met this problem—it was too big for silence—and I admired her way. Then, “Two years,” she said, and though I didn’t doubt her, this specification somehow robbed the thing of its daring self-assurance.

  I said, “You’re Victoria Metsys’ sister, aren’t you?”

  It had not occurred to me that she might be something in her own right and that Alice Metsys was a name I ought to know, or pretend I knew, as well as Victoria. Her smile showed me my mistake. It was a smile that had had a lifetime of service in answer to that remark, “Oh, Victoria’s sister!”

  She knew my work, it seemed, and talking about it served as the excuse for showing me some of hers, hers of a certain period, she said, which mine reminded her of—not, she added, that she meant to accuse me of copying her. She thumbed through some magazines kept under the end table, though they were, at the newest, five years old and two of them defunct, and found some “little spot fillers she had tossed off, just to help out the editors,” and a four-inch ad for a short-lived breakfast food which I’d forgotten all about but now remembered trying once and then a year later, when I was packing to move, discovering the box on the shelf alive with weevils. Her work bore no resemblance whatever to mine. What it was like, embarrassingly like, was the highly individual work with which her sister Victoria had burst upon the world twenty years ago. She might not enjoy being Vi
ctoria’s sister, I thought, but if she hadn’t been, those drawings would never have been published.

  Gavin reminded me of the time and said he didn’t want my wife mad at him for holding up dinner. But Alice said she had to show me the house. She seemed, in fact, to feel she had to show and tell me everything about herself in the few minutes before I went home.

  I praised every room we passed through on our way to the conservatory, and I praised that, though not quite strongly enough, it seemed. She was wild about flowers herself, she said, and I could believe it, for in this room it was as if the spring and summer had been brought in out of the cold. So I waxed appreciative and said of a peony that I had never seen such a lovely chrysanthemum. She seemed to have extravagantly high hopes for our similarities and sympathies, and this disappointed her unreasonably. But it appeared that one way or the other she was not going to permit the least difference between us, for she then said in a confidential tone, “To tell you the truth, I don’t really care a lot for flowers myself.”

  What she did care about was setting me right on one point without delay. She was afraid I thought something was being put over on her, and she wanted me to save my pity.

  “You might think I don’t know what’s going on, living back here in this wilderness—immured, as you might say. But I manage to know pretty well, considering that I never learned to drive a car. Edward, you know, always discouraged me from learning. And I used to think it was because he enjoyed having me dependent on him. Well, I just want you to know that I know all about Edward.”

  “All about—”

  “All about his philanderings, of course,” she said impatiently. “Don’t pretend you don’t know about them. Everybody knows about Edward’s philanderings. Poor boy, he thinks he is so careful and so clever and he gives himself away every time he turns around.”

  I remembered our encounter in the train and I could not help laughing.