Tony had said on the telephone, “But what happened, Bob? A big quarrel? You sound serious.”
“Just look after her. We didn’t quarrel, no. It’s like a trial. I want to try it.” Shocked silence at Tony’s end. “She may like you better.”
“Oh, no.” Tony defensive now. “You’ve got me wrong, Bob.”
“Try it. I invite you.” Robert had hung up.
The following Sunday evening around eight, Robert got a telegram from Lee: cannot understand you. please come home. i am so unhappy. lee.
Robert had sent his furnished-room address to Lee on Friday, so she would have got his note Saturday morning. He had not sent the name or telephone number of his landlady, so maybe it had been easier for Lee to send a telegram straight to the address. Robert had found it under his door, when he got back from supper.
And that had been that. After a minute’s debate Robert had driven back home. He had not been able to bear the thought of Lee unhappy—either because of being alone, or because of not liking Tony, or of being bored or annoyed by him. Robert had been willing to leave his week’s rent with Mrs. Kleber, but she gave it back to him except for a charge of one extra day.
Lee’s first words to him had been, “What is the matter, Bob? And Tony! What’re you trying to do? I never said I liked Tony.”
Tony had not been there when Robert got home. Tony had been polite, helpful, it seemed, but Lee did not want him.
Robert fell on his cell cot exhausted, and had to be awakened for his early supper. Hours ago they must have poked lunch at him. He couldn’t remember, he must have been daydreaming then.
“God, I wish I had a radio,” he murmured to himself. He would have switched on anything just to take his mind off Lee and himself. It grew dark early, because it was December. He walked and walked around his cell, deliberately tiring himself so he could sleep.
The next day at one-thirty P.M. his parents came. Robert was allowed to go into a side room with table and chairs and to talk with them. There were no other prisoners in the room, and only two other cells in the place, as far as Robert could see.
His mother was nervous and looked as if she had been weeping. She was blondish, wore a green tweed dress and a sheepskin coat. His father was as tall as Robert, six feet, a man of fifty, a logical man. Robert recognized the downturning of his father’s strong mouth. His father was displeased, he didn’t understand, was going to be stubborn. Robert remembered that look from his childhood, for his minor misdemeanors. His father now had reason to be grim.
“Bobby, you must tell us what happened,” said his mother.
“What they said happened,” Robert replied. “It’s the truth.”
“Who’s they?” asked his father.
“The police, I suppose. I called the police,” said Robert.
“We know that,” said his mother. “But what happened at home?”
“Nothing.” He stopped, having been about to say that he must have had a moment of irrationality, of anger. But that wasn’t it.
“You had a quarrel? You’d had a few drinks?” asked his father. “You can tell us the truth, Bob. We’re in a state of shock, I can tell you that.” His father was making an effort to get his words out; he glanced at Robert’s mother, then looked back at Robert. He said quietly and earnestly, “It’s not you, Bob. You worshiped Lee, that we know.—Can’t you talk to us?”
“Was there another man in the picture?” asked his mother. “We thought of that. This Tony you mentioned in your letters—”
“No, no.” Robert shook his head. “Tony is a very polite fellow.”
“Polite, well,” said his father tolerantly, hoping for a lead here.
“No, it’s got nothing to do with Tony,” Robert said.
His mother asked gently, “What did Lee do?”
“Nothing,” Robert answered. “She just changed.”
“Changed how?” asked his father.
“She turned into a different person from the one I married. She didn’t do anything.—Maybe she was just herself, after all. Why not?” He tried to sound reasonable. What they were talking about was perhaps not susceptible to reason, not to be understood in logical terms. Also Robert had never been intimate with his parents, or tried to talk with either of them about his moods, his crushes and loves in his adolescence. They had been sympathetic about his wanting to go to art school, though Robert knew his father had considered it impractical, somehow “easy,” undemanding and unrewarding. He was an artist, therefore more sensitive, Robert supposed they thought, so what he had done must be all the more unbelievable to them.
“Changed how?” his father repeated. “Neglecting you maybe, paying more attention to the baby. I’ve heard of that happening, but—”
“It was not that.” Robert was suddenly impatient, wanted to end the useless conversation. “I’ve been absolutely unreasonable,” Robert said, “and I deserve everything they’re going to give me or do to me.”
His mother’s hand shook as she reached in her pocketbook for a tissue, but she was not weeping now. She gave her nose a pinch. “Bobby, we’ve talked to a lawyer by telephone, one who knows the state laws here, and we’ll see him this afternoon. He says if there had been a quarrel about anything, if you’d been angry about something, it would help you when—”
“I refuse that,” Robert interrupted, “because it’s not true.”
His parents exchanged a glance, then his father said calmly, “We’ll see you again, Bob, after we talk with the lawyer. When is it, Mary, four, isn’t it?”
“Between four and four-thirty, he said.”
“He’s coming to see us at our hotel, and I know he’ll want to talk with you tomorrow morning. His name is McIver. Good man, I’m told.”
It was all less important to Robert than a stage play taking place at a distance from him. Lawyers, rules, putting everything into abstract phrases, more abstract than himself and Lee—which was difficult enough for Robert.
His parents got up from their chairs. Robert thanked them. They left, and Robert with them, walking quietly out of the room, into the hall, where a guard stood up to escort Robert to his cell. His mother pressed Robert’s hand. The guard looked at Robert’s hand afterward, as if to see if his mother had put anything into it.
Before the guard closed his cell door, Robert asked for some paper and a pen. The guard brought him three sheets of ruled paper (Robert disliked ruled paper) and a ballpoint pen. When he sat down at the little table, he realized that a pack of cigarettes was bulging his back pocket. His mother had produced the pack from her handbag, Robert remembered, saying something about having had to use a machine to buy them in a hurry or she would have bought a carton.
Robert closed his eyes, deliberately tried to make his mind go blank, and at the same time think about his theme, as he did with sculpture, but now his theme was Lee as a person. When he tried to think of Lee as a piece of sculpture, he often thought of the words grace, strength, sometimes one or the other, sometimes combined. Grace was easy to combine with Lee. She had never made a clumsy gesture that he could recall. She walked gracefully, as if she weighed nothing. But the strength? She had had it, all her own, a strength that he didn’t understand.
Finally he wrote (it seemed to him a fragment, but he could go back or forward from here):
To see her wilt before my eyes like that was frightening to me, like a slow death in itself. People speak of blossoming with childbirth, love, all that. It was not true in Lee’s case. But what I write here is by no means an effort on my part to excuse what I did.
Did he have to add that awful last sentence? Well, he could cross it out later. For whom was he writing this, anyway?
She gave up her photography, except for some mediocre pictures of the baby. What can one do with a baby? At least in regard to Lee’s former bent of character, intellect, t
ragedy in the human face—nothing. Instead of her good cameras, she might as well have been using a cheap pocket camera. She had stopped talking about the photography exhibitions in Indianapolis and Chicago. We used to go quite a lot. We knew some of the photographers who lived in those cities. They had gradually stopped visiting us.
All this was so unnecessary! I can look back now on the work Lee did just before we married, just after. Terrific! And easy for her! Powerful! I thought I was the cause of all this downslide, this collapse really, so I offered to go away, support her from afar, as it might be, until she found maybe another man to share her life with. She declined this and
Here Robert stopped, seeing suddenly the living room that last evening, Lee’s photographs gracing the walls, blown-up, her old good stuff, people, buildings. There hadn’t been a quarrel, no. Lee had been on her feet, talking about ordinary things—that there had been a telephone call from Fred Muldaven, a friend of Robert’s who lived in Chicago, a painter. Melinda had been in her crib in the kitchen then. It was around six or seven in the evening. Robert had been in a strange mood, he had realized, staring at Lee without listening much to what she said. He had just driven back from Chicago, and maybe he had been drinking a cold beer straight from the can.
“Beecham’s has a sale of desert boots,” Lee had said, “and you could use a new pair. Those look awful.”
That had been merely unimportant, boring. A couple of years before, Lee would have paid no attention whether his desert boots were worn out, or if his shoes needed a shine. Old falling-apart clothes had their place, and it was nice to dress up sometimes, too, but why talk about it? Why bother trying to please the public, or whoever might look at his sloppy desert boots?
Yet nothing that evening had been what Robert could call the last straw. Rather the atmosphere had been one of quiet gloom, hopelessness, a slowing up as if something were coming to an end, like a train losing momentum because the engine has been shut off. They had gone into the kitchen. Melinda, symbol of the future, had for once been sleeping quietly. And had any vision of Lee at the Chicago art school danced before his eyes as he watched her fussing at the stove? Had any of her enchanting air of “I don’t care if I ever see you again or not,” as in the days before they married, come back into his head? Whatever, it was all gone now. He had picked up the rolling pin, floury from something Lee had just made, and that had been it.
Robert got up from the chair and walked around the cell. He moved back to the table, his hand reached out for the cigarette pack, and drew slowly back. He was thinking of something else—Lee dead, the baby at Lee’s mother’s, himself dead, too. It was all abstract somehow. There had been no word from Lee’s mother, or from Fred Muldaven (that was a new friendship and Robert supposed that Fred was now afraid of him), only from his parents, natural appurtenances, calling on him, because by blood they were linked, like a triple star floating around in space. And to be just a little more concrete, though the fact as such did not matter, Robert was going to spend the next fifteen years (with the lightest sentence) in prison, working if he worked at all in a prison art department, being told when to get up and when to go to bed, being reminded of Lee day after day by barred window and door, being reminded of the way she had been, which was even worse.
He wrote one more sentence: What a terrible shame I once loved her so much. I do think that ruined everything.
Then he did light a cigarette, and stood looking at the gray and rather rough wall across from his cot. And Melinda. Should he write one more sentence to that young creature of whose personality he knew nothing at all? He knew something, of course: she seemed to be cheerful by nature, but that could change by the time she was twelve or so.
He decided not to write a word to Melinda. She was in good hands. She would grow up to hate him. She would look at all the pretty, the beautiful photographs of her mother, and hate him. And his statues of Lee? Would Lee’s mother have those thrown away, broken up?
Robert sat on his cot for a couple of minutes, finishing his cigarette. Then he put it out in the metal ashtray on his table. For no reason he lifted his left hand and looked at his watch: 4:37 in the afternoon.
Robert stooped by his cot, facing the wall opposite in the position of a runner about to take off. Then he ran forward with all the force he had, all the force, he felt, that he had ever put into his work, and very briefly with a vision of a statue of Lee, better than any he had ever made. His head hit the wall.
THE TROUBLE WITH MRS. BLYNN, THE TROUBLE WITH THE WORLD
Mrs. Palmer was dying, there was no doubt of that to her or to anyone else in the household. The household had grown from two, Mrs. Palmer and Elsie the housemaid, to four in the past ten days. Elsie’s daughter Liza, age fourteen, had come to help her mother, and had brought their shaggy sheepdog Princy—who to Mrs. Palmer made a fourth presence in the house. Liza spent most of her time doing things in the kitchen, and slept in the little low-ceilinged room with double-deck bunks down the steps from Mrs. Palmer’s room. The cottage was small—a sitting room and dining alcove and kitchen downstairs, and upstairs Mrs. Palmer’s bedroom, the room with the two bunks, and a tiny back room where Elsie slept. All the ceilings were low and the doorways and the ceiling above the stairway even lower, so that one had to duck one’s head constantly.
Mrs. Palmer reflected that she would have to duck her head very few times more, as she rose only a couple of times a day, making her way, her lavender dressing gown clutched about her against the chill, to the bathroom. She had leukemia. She was not in any pain, but she was terribly weak. She was sixty-one. Her son Gregory, an officer in the R.A.F., was stationed in the Middle East, and perhaps would come in time and perhaps wouldn’t. Mrs. Palmer had purposely not made her telegram urgent, not wanting to upset or inconvenience him, and his telegraphed reply had simply said that he would do his best to get leave to fly to her, and would let her know when. A cowardly telegram hers had been, Mrs. Palmer thought. Why hadn’t she had the courage to say outright, “Am going to die in about a week. Can you come to see me?”
“Missus Palmer?” Elsie stuck her head in the door, one floury hand resting against the doorjamb. “Did Missus Blynn say four-thirty or five-thirty today?”
Mrs. Palmer did not know, and it did not seem in the least important. “I think five-thirty.”
Elsie gave a preoccupied nod, her mind on what she would serve for five-thirty tea as opposed to four-thirty tea. The five-thirty tea could be less substantial, as Mrs. Blynn would already have had tea somewhere. “Anything I can get you, Missus Palmer?” she asked in a sweet voice, with a genuine concern.
“No, thank you, Elsie, I’m quite comfortable.” Mrs. Palmer sighed as Elsie closed the door again. Elsie was willing, but unintelligent. Mrs. Palmer could not talk to her, not that she would have wanted to talk intimately to her, but it would have been nice to have the feeling that she could talk to someone in the house if she wished to.
Mrs. Palmer had no close friends in the town, because she had been here only a month. She had been en route to Scotland when the weakness came on her again and she had collapsed on a train platform in Ipswich. A long journey to Scotland by train or even airplane had been out of the question, so on a strange doctor’s recommendation, Mrs. Palmer had hired a taxi and driven to a town on the east coast called Eamington, where the doctor knew there was a visiting nurse, and where the air was splendid and bracing. The doctor had evidently thought she needed only a few weeks’ rest and she would be on her feet again, but Mrs. Palmer had had a premonition that this wasn’t true. She had felt better the first few days in the quiet little town, she had found the cottage called Sea Maiden and rented it at once, but the spurt of energy had been brief. In Sea Maiden she had collapsed again, and Mrs. Palmer had the feeling that Elsie and even a few other acquaintances she had made, like Mr. Frowley the real estate agent, resented her faiblesse. She was not only a stranger come to trouble th
em, to make demands on them, but her relapse belied the salubrious powers of Eamington air—just now mostly gale-force winds which swept from the northeast day and night, tearing the buttons from one’s coat, plastering a sticky, opaque film of salt and spray on the windows of all the houses on the seafront. Mrs. Palmer was sorry to be a burden herself, but at least she could pay for it, she thought. She had rented a rather shabby cottage that would otherwise have stayed empty all winter, since it was early February now, she was employing Elsie at slightly better than average Eamington wages, she paid Mrs. Blynn a guinea per half-hour visit (and most of that half hour was taken up with her tea), and she soon would bring business to the undertaker, the sexton, and perhaps the shopkeeper who sold flowers. She had also paid her rent through March.
Hearing a quick tread on the pavement, in a lull in the wind’s roar, Mrs. Palmer sat up a little in bed. Mrs. Blynn was arriving. An anxious frown touched Mrs. Palmer’s thin-skinned forehead, but she smiled faintly, too, with beforehand politeness. She reached for the long-handled mirror that lay on her bedtable. Her gray face had ceased to shock her or to make her feel shame. Age was age, death was death, and not pretty, but she still had the impulse to do what she could to look nicer for the world. She tucked some hair back into place, moistened her lips, tried a little smile, pulled a shoulder of her nightdress even with the other and her pink cardigan closer about her. Her pallor made the blue of her eyes much bluer. That was a pleasant thought.
Elsie knocked and opened the door at the same time. “Missus Blynn, ma’am.”
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Palmer,” said Mrs. Blynn, coming down the two steps from the threshold into Mrs. Palmer’s room. She was a full-bodied, dark blond woman of middle height, about forty-five, and she wore her usual bulky, two-piece black suit with a rose-colored floral pin on her left breast. She also wore a pale pink lipstick and rather high heels. Like many women in Eamington, she was a sea widow, and had taken up nursing after she was forty. She was highly thought of in the town as an energetic woman who did useful work. “And how are you this afternoon?”
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