The three flights of stairs were narrow and high, and Mrs. Smith, with the immediate recognition of symbols she had inherited, had always had, potentially, and was now using almost exclusively, saw the eternal steps going up and up as an irrevocable design for her life; she had really no choice but to go up, wearily if she chose; if she turned and went down again, retracing laboriously the small progress she had made, she would merely have to go up another way, beginning, as she now almost realized, beginning again a search which could only, for her, have but one ending. “It happens to everybody,” she told herself consolingly as she climbed.
Pride would not allow her to make any concessions to her position, so she did not try particularly to walk silently on the second floor landing; for a minute, going on up the next flight, she thought she had got safely past, but then, almost as she reached her own door, the door on the second landing opened and Mrs. Jones called, piercingly and as though she had run from some back recess of her apartment to the door when she heard footsteps.
“Mrs. Smith, is that you?”
“Hello,” Mrs. Smith called back down the stairs.
“Wait a minute, I’m coming up.” The lock on Mrs. Jones’s door snapped, and the door closed. Mrs. Jones came hurriedly, still a little out of breath, down the landing and up the stairs to the third floor. “Thought I’d missed you,” she said on the stairs, and, “Good heavens, you look tired.”
It was part of the attitude that treated Mrs. Smith as a precious vessel. Her slightest deviation from the normal, in the course of more than a week, was noted and passed from gossip to gossip, a faint paling of her cheeks became the subject of nervous speculation, any change in her voice, a dullness of her eye, a disarrangement in her dress—these were what her neighbors lived on. Mrs. Smith had thought early in the week that a loud crash from her apartment would be the sweetest thing she could do for Mrs. Jones, but by now it no longer seemed important: Mrs. Jones could live as well on the most minute crumbs.
“Thought you’d never get home,” Mrs. Jones said. She followed Mrs. Smith into the bare little room which, with a small bedroom, a dirty kitchen, and a bath, was the honeymoon home of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Jones took the package of groceries into the kitchen while Mrs. Smith hung up her coat in the closet; she had not bothered to unpack many things and the closet looked empty; there were two or three dresses and a light overcoat and extra suit of Mr. Smith’s; this was so obviously only a temporary home for them both, a stopping-place. Mrs. Smith did not regard her three dresses with regret, nor did she particularly admire the suits of Mr. Smith, although they were still a little unfamiliar to her, hung up next to her own clothes (as his underwear in the dresser, lying quietly beside her own); neither Mr. nor Mrs. Smith were of the abandoned sort who indulge recklessly in trousseaus or other loving detail for a preliminary purification.
“Well,” said Mrs. Jones, coming out of the kitchen, “you certainly aren’t planning to do much cooking this weekend.”
Privacy was not one of the blessings of Mrs. Smith’s position. “I thought I might be going away,” she said.
Again there was that soft, anticipatory moment; Mrs. Jones looked quickly, and then away, and then, sitting herself down firmly upon the meager couch, obviously decided to come to the point.
“Now, look, Mrs. Smith,” she began, and then interrupted herself. “Look, why this ‘Mrs.’ all the time? You call me Polly, and from now on I’ll call you Helen. All right?” She smiled, and Mrs. Smith, smiling back, thought, how do they find out your first name? “Well, now, look here, Helen,” Mrs. Jones went on, determined to establish her new familiarity immediately, “I think it’s time someone sat down and talked sensibly to you. I mean, you must know by now pretty well what people are saying.”
Here we are, Helen Smith was thinking, two women of the singular type woman, one standing uneasily and embarrassed in front of a window, wearing a brown dress and brown hair and brown shoes and differing in no essential respect from the other, sitting solidly and earnestly, wearing a green and pink flowered housedress and bedroom slippers—differing, actually in no essential, although we would both deny indignantly that we were the same person, seeking the same destiny. And we are about to enter into a conversation upon a fantastic subject.
“I’ve noticed,” Mrs. Smith said carefully, “that there’s a lot of unusual interest in us. I’ve never been on a honeymoon before, of course, so I can’t really tell whether it’s only that.” She laughed weakly, but Mrs. Jones was not to be put off by sentiment.
“I think you must know better than that,” she said. “You’re not that wrapped up in your husband.”
“Well… no,” Mrs. Smith had to say.
“And furthermore,” Mrs. Jones went on, looking cynically at Mrs. Smith, “you’re not any blushing eighteen-year-old girl, you know, and Mr. Smith isn’t any young man. You’re both people of a reasonably mature age.” Mrs. Jones seemed to feel that she had made a point here, and she said it again. “You are both people who have outlived their youth,” she said, “and naturally no one expects that you’re going to go around billing and cooing. And furthermore you yourself are old enough to show some intelligence about this terrible business.”
“I don’t know what kind of intelligence I ought to show,” Mrs. Smith said meekly.
“Well, good heavens!” Mrs. Jones spread her hands helplessly. “Don’t you realize your position? Everyone knows it. Look.” She settled back, prepared to demonstrate reasonably. “You came here a week ago, newly married, and moved into this apartment with your husband. The very first day you were here, people thought there was something funny. In the first place, you two didn’t act like you were the types for each other at all. You know what I mean—you so sort of refined and ladylike, and him…”
Rude, Mrs. Smith thought, wanting to laugh; he said he was rude.
Mrs. Jones shrugged. “In the second place,” she said, “you didn’t look like you belonged in this house, or in this neighborhood, because you always had plenty of money, which, believe me, the rest of us don’t, and you always acted sort of as though you ought to be in a better kind of situation. And in the third place,” Mrs. Jones said, hurrying on to her climax, “it wasn’t two days before people began to think they recognized your husband from the pictures in the paper.”
“I see what you mean,” Mrs. Smith said. “But a picture in the paper—”
“That’s just what started us really thinking,” Mrs. Jones said. She enumerated on her fingers. “New bride. Cheap apartment. You made a will in his favor? Insurance?”
“Yes, but that is only natural—” said Mrs. Smith.
“Natural? And him looking just like the man in the paper who mur—” She stopped abruptly. “I don’t want to frighten you,” she said. “But you should know all about him.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Mrs. Smith said in her turn, coming away from the window, to stand in front of Mrs. Jones so that Mrs. Jones had to look up from her seat on the couch. “I know all these things. But how many newly married couples are there who make wills in each other’s favor? Or take out insurance? And how many women over thirty get married to men over forty? And maybe sometimes the men look like pictures in the paper? And with all this talk and gossip about us all around the neighborhood, you notice no one’s been even sure enough to say anything?”
“I wanted to call the police two, three days ago,” Mrs. Jones said sullenly. “Ed wouldn’t let me.”
“He probably said,” Mrs. Smith said, “that it was none of your business.”
“But everybody’s wondering,” Mrs. Jones said. “And of course no one can know for sure.”
“You won’t know for sure until…” Mrs. Smith tried not to smile.
Mrs. Jones sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” she said.
“Well,” said Mrs. Smith reasonably, “what exactly is it you want me to do?”
“You could get some kind of information,” Mrs. Jones said. “So
mething that would let you know for sure.”
“I keep telling you,” Mrs. Smith said, “there’s only one way I can ever know for sure.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Mrs. Jones said.
“I could run away from my husband,” Mrs. Smith said.
Mrs. Jones was surprised. “You can’t run away from your husband” she said. “Not if it isn’t true, you couldn’t do that.”
“I have really no grounds for divorce,” Mrs. Smith said. “It is a very difficult subject to mention to him.”
“Naturally, you wouldn’t have discussed it,” Mrs. Jones said.
“Naturally,” Mrs. Smith said. “I could hardly search his clothes—there is nothing, I happen to know, in the pockets of the suit hanging in the closet and searching his overcoat pockets and his dresser drawers would hardly turn up anything convincing.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I mean,” said Mrs. Smith in explanation, “even if I discovered, say, a knife—what difference would it make?”
“But he doesn’t do it with—” Mrs. Jones began, and stopped abruptly again.
“I know,” Mrs. Smith said. “As I recall the details—and I haven’t read much about them, after all—he generally does it—”
“In the bathtub,” Mrs. Jones said, and shivered. “I don’t know but what a knife would be better,” she said.
“It’s not our choice,” Mrs. Smith said wryly. “You see how silly we sound? Here we are, talking as though we were children telling ghost stories. We’ll end up convincing each other of some horrible notion.”
Mrs. Jones hesitated for a minute over her own reactions, and finally decided to be mildly offended. “I really only came up,” she explained with dignity, “to let you know what people were saying. If you stop to think about it for a minute, you ought to be able to understand why someone might want to help you. After all, it’s not me.”
“That’s why I think you ought not to worry,” Mrs. Smith said gently.
Mrs. Jones rose, but as she reached the door she was unable to keep herself from turning and saying urgently, “Look, I just want you to know that if you ever ever need any help—of any kind—just open your mouth and scream, see? Because my Ed will be up as fast as he can come. All you have to do is scream, or stamp on the floor, or, if you can, race downstairs to our place. We’ll be waiting for you.” She opened the door, said with a voice that she tried to make humorous, “Don’t take any baths,” and went out. Her voice trailed up from the stairs, “And remember—all you have to do is scream. We’ll be waiting.”
Mrs. Smith closed the door rather quickly and, before she started to think, went out to the kitchen to see to her groceries, but Mrs. Jones had put the things away. Mrs. Smith found the pound of coffee, and measured water into the coffeepot, thinking of her promise to the grocer that she would finish the pound of coffee herself. Mr. Smith drank coffee sparingly; it made him nervous.
Mrs. Smith, as she moved about the bleak little kitchen, thought, as she had often before, that she would not like to spend her whole life with things like this. It had not been so in her father’s life, where a peaceful, well-ordered existence went placidly on among objects which, if not lovely, had at least the pleasures of familiarity, and the near-beauty of order, and Mrs. Smith, who had then been Helen Bertram, had been able to spend long days working in the garden, or mending her father’s socks, or baking the nut cake she had learned from her mother, and pausing only occasionally to wonder what was going to happen to her in her life.
It had been clear to her after her father’s death that this patterned existence was no longer meaningful, and had been a product of her father’s life rather than hers. So that when Mr. Smith had said to her, “I don’t suppose you’d ever consider marrying a fellow like me?” Helen Bertram had nodded, seeing then the repeated design which made the complete pattern.
She had worn her best dark blue dress to be married in, and Mr. Smith had worn a dark blue suit so that they looked unnervingly alike when they went down the street together. They had gone directly to the lawyer’s, for the wills, and then to the insurance company. On the way, Mr. Smith had insisted on stopping and buying for the new Mrs. Smith a small felt dog which amused her; there had been a man selling these on the street corner, and all around his small stand were tiny wound-up dogs which ran in circles, squeaking in shrill imitation of a bark. Mrs. Smith brought the box with the dog in it into the insurance company and set it on the desk, and while they were waiting for the doctor she had opened the box and found that there was no key to wind the dog; Mr. Smith, saying irritably, “Those fellows always try to cheat you,” had hurried back to the street corner and found the stand, the salesman, and the performing dogs gone.
“Nothing makes me more furious,” he told Mrs. Smith, “than to be cheated by someone like that.”
The small dog stood now on the shelf in the kitchen and Mrs. Smith, glancing at it, thought, I could not endure spending the rest of my life with that tawdry sort of thing. She sometimes thought poignantly of her father’s house, realizing that such things were gone from her forever, but, as she told herself again now, “I had my eyes open.” It will have to be soon, she thought immediately after, people are beginning to wonder too openly. Everyone is waiting; it will spoil everything if it is not soon. When her coffee was finished she took a cup into the living room and sat down on the couch where Mrs. Jones had been sitting, and thought, it will have to be soon; there’s no food for the weekend, after all, and I would have to send my dress to the cleaners on Monday if I were here, and another week’s rent due tomorrow. The pound of coffee would be the only detail unattended to.
She had finished her fourth cup of coffee—drinking by now hastily and even desperately—when she heard her husband’s step on the stairs. They were still a little embarrassed with one another, so that she hesitated about going to meet him just long enough for him to open the door, and then she came over to him awkwardly and, not knowing still whether he wanted to kiss her when he came home, stood expectantly until he came politely over to her and kissed her cheek.
“Where have you been?” she asked, although it was not at all the sort of thing she wanted to say to him, and she knew as she spoke that he would not tell her.
“Shopping,” he said. He had an armful of packages, one of which he selected and gave to her.
“Thank you,” she said politely before she opened it; it was, she knew by the feel and the drugstore wrapping, a box of candy, and with a feeling which, when she felt it again later, she knew to be triumph, she thought, of course, it’s supposed to be left over, it’s to prove the new husband still brings presents to his bride. She opened the box, wanted to take a candy, thought: not before dinner, and then thought, it probably doesn’t matter, tonight.
“Will you have one?” she said to him, and he took one.
His manner did not seem strange, or nervous, but when she said, “Mrs. Jones was up here this afternoon,” he said quickly, “What did she want, the old busybody?”
“I think she was jealous,” Mrs. Smith said. “It’s been a long time since her husband has taken any interest in her.”
“I can imagine,” he said.
“Shall I start dinner?” Mrs. Smith asked. “Would you like to rest for a while first?”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
Now, for the first time, he seemed awkward, and Mrs. Smith thought quickly, I was right about the food for the weekend, I guessed right; he did not ask if she was hungry because—and each of them knew now that the other knew—it really did not matter.
Mrs. Smith told herself it would ruin everything to say anything now, and she sat down on the couch next to her husband and said, “I’m a little tired, I think.”
“A week of marriage was too much for you,” he said, and patted her hand. “We’ll have to see that you get more rest.”
Why does it take so long, why does it take so long? Mrs. Smith thought; she stood up again and walked across the
room nervously to look out the window; Mr. Jones was just coming up the front steps and he looked up and saw her and waved. Why does it take so long? she thought again, and turned and said to her husband, “Well?”
“I suppose so,” Mr. Smith said, and got up wearily from the couch.
THE SISTER
MARGARET LOOKED AT HER brother with the first conscious affection she had felt for him in her life. He looks big and awkward and childish, she thought, and whatever he’s going to say is going to be right out of the movies. She watched him shut the door and stand just inside it for a minute, wondering how to start. Then he came slowly over and sat down uneasily in the pale blue slipper chair beside the bed.
“Golly,” he said.
Margaret laughed. “Golly,” she said.
“You really going?” her brother asked.
“Sure am,” Margaret said.
Her brother ceremoniously took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered her one. She shook her head, pointed at the lighted cigarette she had left on the edge of the dresser. Her brother lit his, and went across the room to the table and got an ashtray.
“You’re going to burn the dresser scarf, leaving cigarettes around like that,” he said.
“Been doing it ever since I started sneaking cigarettes in here,” Margaret said.
“Mother put an ashtray in my room a couple of weeks ago,” her brother said. “Guess she’s started getting smarter. She never gave you an ashtray till you came home from college.”
“I was smoking when I was fifteen,” Margaret said.
Her brother rose and began to wander around the room. He came over to the bed and looked at the suitcase Margaret was packing. “I remember this dress,” he said, lifting a corner of the hem, “you wore it the night I couldn’t find a date for Dick and you came instead. We went to the country club dance.”
“Those were the days when I still felt like an old maid,” Margaret said.
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 12