“Oh, half brother,” Nicholas sighed mockingly, “how eager you are!” And he lifted my helpless hand and slipped my ring, and my father’s ring, the signet ring of our house, off my finger. “I give you your freedom, brother of my house,” he said, and he gestured at the gallows.
Then, laughing still, he turned again and went through the crowd, as I cried after him, and raged at my bonds to escape and be on him, but the crowd roared me back and the jailers forced me up the steps of the scaffold. And from the height, I saw one thing. I saw Nicholas, on his way home, as he turned and waved at me; and then, as I saw him ride alone, up the long road to the smoldering embers of my house, I buried my head in my hands and knew cruelly that now, indeed, the devil held the hill.
WHAT A THOUGHT
DINNER HAD BEEN GOOD; Margaret sat with her book on her lap and watched her husband digesting, an operation to which he always gave much time and thought. As she watched he put his cigar down without looking and used his free hand to turn the page of his paper. Margaret found herself thinking with some pride that unlike many men she had heard about, her husband did not fall asleep after a particularly good dinner.
She flipped the pages of her book idly; it was not interesting. She knew that if she asked her husband to take her to a movie, or out for a ride, or to play gin rummy, he would smile at her and agree; he was always willing to do things to please her, still, after ten years of marriage. An odd thought crossed her mind: She would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.
“Like to go to a movie?” her husband asked.
“I don’t think so, thanks,” Margaret said. “Why?”
“You look sort of bored,” her husband said.
“Were you watching me?” Margaret asked. “I thought you were reading.”
“Just looked at you for a minute.” He smiled at her, the smile of a man who is still, after ten years of marriage, very fond of his wife.
The idea of smashing the glass ashtray over her husband’s head had never before occurred to Margaret, but now it would not leave her mind. She stirred uneasily in her chair, thinking: what a terrible thought to have, whatever made me think of such a thing? Probably a perverted affectionate gesture, and she laughed.
“Funny?” her husband asked.
“Nothing,” Margaret said.
She stood up and crossed the room to the hall door, without purpose. She was very uneasy, and looking at her husband did not help. The cord that held the curtains back made her think: strangle him. She told herself: it’s not that I don’t love him, I just feel morbid tonight. As though something bad were going to happen. A telegram coming, or the refrigerator breaking down. Drown him, the goldfish bowl suggested.
Look, Margaret told herself severely, standing just outside the hall door so that her husband would not see her if he looked up from his paper, look, this is perfectly ridiculous. The idea of a grown woman troubling herself with silly fears like that—it’s like being afraid of ghosts, or something. Nothing is going to happen to him, Margaret, she said almost aloud; nothing can happen to hurt either you or your husband or anyone you love. You are perfectly safe.
“Margaret?” her husband called.
“Yes?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, dear,” Margaret said. “Just getting a drink of water.”
Poison him? Push him in front of a car? A train?
I don’t want to kill my husband, Margaret said to herself. I never dreamed of killing him. I want him to live. Stop it, stop it.
She got her drink of water, a little formality she played out with herself because she had told him she was going to do it, and then wandered back into the living room and sat down. He looked up as she entered.
“You seem very restless tonight,” he said.
“It’s the weather, I guess,” Margaret said. “Heat always bothers me.”
“Sure you wouldn’t like to go to a movie?” he said. “Or we could go for a ride, cool off.”
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’ll go to bed early.”
“Good idea,” he said.
What would I do without him? she wondered. How would I live, who would ever marry me, where would I go? What would I do with all the furniture, crying when I saw his picture, burning his old letters. I could give his suits away, but what would I do with the house? Who would take care of the income tax? I love my husband, Margaret told herself emphatically; I must stop thinking like this. It’s like an idiot tune running through my head.
She got up again to turn the radio on; the flat voice of the announcer offended her and she turned the radio off again, passing beyond it to the bookcase. She took down a book and then another, leafing through them without seeing the pages, thinking: It isn’t as though I had a motive; they’d never catch me. Why would I kill my husband? She could see herself saying tearfully to an imaginary police lieutenant: “But I loved him—I can’t stand his being dead!”
“Margaret,” her husband said. “Are you worried about something?”
“No, dear,” she said. “Why?”
“You really seem terribly upset tonight. Are you feverish?”
“No,” she said. “A chill, if anything.”
“Come over here and let me feel your forehead.”
She came obediently, and bent down for him to put his hand on her forehead. At his cool touch she thought, Oh, the dear, good man; and wanted to cry at what she had been thinking.
“You’re right,” he said. “Your head feels cold. Better go on off to bed.”
“In a little while,” she said. “I’m not tired yet.”
“Shall I make you a drink?” he asked. “Or something like lemonade?”
“Thank you very much, dear,” she said. “But no thanks.”
They say if you soak a cigarette in water overnight the water will be almost pure nicotine by morning, and deadly poisonous. You can put it in coffee and it won’t taste.
“Shall I make you some coffee?” she asked, surprising herself.
He looked up again, frowning. “I just had two cups for dinner,” he said. “But thanks just the same.”
I’m brave enough to go through with it, Margaret thought; what will it all matter a hundred years from now? I’ll be dead, too, by then, and who cares about the furniture?
She began to think concretely. A burglar. First call a doctor, then the police, then her brother-in-law and her own sister. Tell them all the same thing, her voice broken with tears. It would not be necessary to worry about preparations; the more elaborately these things were planned, the better chance of making a mistake. She could get out of it without being caught if she thought of it in a broad perspective and not as a matter of small details. Once she started worrying about things like fingerprints she was lost. Whatever you worry about catches you, every time.
“Have you any enemies?” she asked her husband, not meaning to.
“Enemies,” he said. For a moment he took her seriously, and then he smiled and said, “I suppose I have hundreds. Secret ones.”
“I didn’t mean to ask you that,” she said, surprising herself again.
“Why would I have enemies?” he asked, suddenly serious again, and setting down his paper. “What makes you think I have enemies, Margaret?”
“It was silly of me,” she said. “A silly thought.” She smiled and after a minute he smiled again.
“I suppose the milkman hates me,” he said. “I always forget to leave the bottles out.”
The milkman would hardly do; he knew it, and he would not help her. Her glance rested on the glass ashtray, glittering and colored in the light from the reading lamp; she had washed the ashtray that morning and nothing had occurred to her about it then. Now she thought: It ought to be the ashtray; the first idea is always the best.
She rose for the third time and came around to lean on the back of his chair; the ashtray was on the table to her right, now, and she bent down and kissed the top of his head.
<
br /> “I never loved you more,” she said, and he reached up without looking to touch her hair affectionately.
Carefully she took his cigar out of the ashtray and set it on the table. For a minute he did not notice and then, as he reached for his cigar, he saw that it was on the table and picked it up quickly, touching the table underneath to see if it had burned. “Set fire to the house,” he said casually. When he was looking at the paper again she picked up the ashtray silently.
“I don’t want to,” she said as she struck him.
WHEN BARRY WAS SEVEN
BARRY: Eight hundred and nine pages. That’s the biggest book I ever owned.
SHIRLEY: You ought to take a while reading that.
BARRY: But I’m not going to start it until I go to bed. Because I don’t want to finish too soon.
SHIRLEY: Look, Mr. Untermeyer has autographed it to you.
BARRY: Yes, I saw that already. Now (complacently) I have two books with the writer’s name written on.
SHIRLEY: TWO?
BARRY: Yes. This book, and Louis Pasteur. Because on the outside of my Louis Pasteur book it has “Louis Pasteur” in gold handwriting, and it would be senseless to use his name in handwriting unless he really wrote it. It’s senseless. Because why would somebody else write his name? So now I have two books. Mr. Untermeyer and Louis Pasteur.
SALLY: I have books from Jay Williams with his signature.
BARRY: (reasonably) Well, you are older than I am.
(later, Barry still carrying his book with him everywhere) BARRY: This is the heaviest book I ever owned. SHIRLEY: YOU have done everything with that book except read it. Stop carrying it around and look inside, for heaven’s sake. BARRY: I have already read the story about Louis Pasteur.
SHIRLEY: (nervously) Well? Is it all right? Does he know what he’s talking about?
BARRY: Yes. He knows very well. He knows all the facts. Of course I do not know the facts about some of the other people he has written about—(mispronouncing)—Leo Tolstoi, or Winston Churchill, but about Louis Pasteur, I think he has gotten all the facts.
SHIRLEY: Will you write to him and tell him you think so?
BARRY: (considering) Yes. When I have read a little more. First, though, I have to weigh it.
SHIRLEY: Weigh it? The book?
BARRY: Yes. It is the heaviest book I ever owned. Also it costs six dollars and ninety-five cents and that is almost seven dollars. I think Mr. Untermeyer would like me to find out how much it weighs.
SHIRLEY: And how much does it weigh?
BARRY: (over the bathroom scales) Twelve pounds? No, that is with my foot. Three pounds. That is really a pretty heavy book. Pretty heavy for a young boy like me to carry.
SHIRLEY: Look, creep. You aren’t supposed to carry it, you’re supposed to read it.
BARRY: All right. I will read Mark Twain.
(later, Barry reading in a big study chair, vis-à-vis Stanley, also reading)
BARRY: Dad, what are you reading?
STANLEY: Moby Dick.
BARRY: HOW many pages does it have?
STANLEY: Oh, God, five hundred or so. Too many.
BARRY: (with enormous satisfaction) My book is larger.
STANLEY: (defensively) But I have to read footnotes and then Melville’s correspondence and then more books about—
BARRY: Who wrote your book?
STANLEY: Herman Melville.
BARRY: (superior) I don’t think that he is in my book. I have a writer named Leo Tolstoi.
STANLEY: Well, Melville—
BARRY: YOU may read my book when I have finished. There are some pages about Darwin you can read. Probably you would like them.
BEFORE AUTUMN
ALL THAT SUMMER SHE had been increasingly aware of the growing turbulence among the trees, and in the grasses, and around the hills; in the vegetable garden each morning there had been vague markings of snails, and the trees were less certain of their birds, somehow, she thought, and more noisy in the wind. That the paints had something to do with it she was certain; before the sudden violence of green in the paint box the grass flattened and grew bladed and pale, and the hills plunged mistily ahead of a purple so carefully compounded of blue, and red, and white, and sometimes, in the late afternoons, yellow. Even Daniel became less of a husband, less of a reddish-brown certainty, and more of a careful blend of plum and ochre, with brush strokes to simulate tweeds… “Possibly,” she would think, “if I paint more carefully… since everything but Daniel seems to stay such a long time…”
But what of this new irresistible impulse to draw the curtains against the trees, to read by lamplight in the mornings, to move carefully into a room to Daniel, saying, “My dear, could you arrange to look less ruddy, for my sake…?” And that incredible question, at dinner, over the candles, to his open mouth—“Daniel, do you do everything the way you chew your food?”
As certainly it was not the coming of fall, always frightening, for the month was only… she would stop and think… July, in the middle, and the days long and hot.
Narrowing it down, finally, to the colors in her room, she determined on a change from pale yellow to lavender and pink, but, surrounded by curtain material, she found that her paint box could duplicate exactly (blue, touched with pink, and much white; red, watered into rose) and she folded and boxed her cloths to wait until September, when she had intended to change anyway. Then, to Daniel’s mild questions (“What if I should rush in ardently and shriek: ‘Daniel, for sweet heaven’s sake, will you go kill something…?’!”):
“Curtains all tacked together, honey?”
“Quite finished, Daniel, thank you.”
“Like them better, now you’ve got them?”
“Much better, thank you, Daniel.”
“Why thank me, I only paid for them.”
And he would smile at her, because that was a joke.
It was not until the coming of Jimmie Wilson that she made any effort to break away from Daniel. And Jimmie was only fifteen, and still vague and blurred; no tweeds, she thought, and no tan. Jimmie moved next door, so easily, and played ball against the fence, and moved about his house, and became friends with Daniel, and Jimmie’s mother expected to be called upon. Jimmie, sitting on the porch, pale against the trees and the hills and the grass, first gave her the idea, and then there was the preparation, so careful, so cautious:
“Jimmie, you should learn to paint; you should try to paint the hills and the trees around here.”
“As a matter of fact, ma’am, I don’t have much time for things like painting. There’s school, and scouts, and then my homework, you know.”
“You have a painter’s hands, Jimmie.”
Long afternoons; frequent, warm afternoons. (“Jimmie, can you help me cut the roses today? The thorns are so bad, and I have no gloves…” “Do you have a minute, Jimmie? Come and talk to me while I do my nails here in the sun… isn’t it warm?” “When shall I give you a painting lesson, Jimmie?”)
Nothing obvious, nothing daring. Jimmie’s mother was called upon, learned to use the back gate, called in return. (“Jimmie, pass your mother her tea, like a nice boy.”)
A very careful, very cautious, easy and lazy preparation.
“Jimmie, my husband is going to teach you to shoot, he says.”
“I know, he promised me a long time ago. We have to wait until deer season, though.”
“Why for the deer season, Jimmie?”
“Why, to kill anything.”
“I see. You won’t kill each other, then?” (Too sudden? Too daring?)
“You can’t kill anyone with those guns!”
“I’m so glad to hear that, Jimmie. I must confess that I had been worried. But why can’t you kill anyone with those guns?”
“Oh, you learn to be too careful. No one wants to get hurt.”
“I wouldn’t want you to get hurt, Jimmie. But I’m sure my husband’s very careful.”
“Of course he is. They wouldn’t let him h
ave a gun if he weren’t.”
“Do you want a gun, Jimmie? I’ll buy you one if you like.”
“Why, thanks very much… Gee…” (too soon; he was surprised) “but of course you couldn’t; it’s too much, and my mother&”
“Well, we’ll see. But I’m sure you’ll need one.”
“I’ll see what my mother says.”
“Don’t let yourself get hurt with it, Jimmie. But then, of course he’s very careful. I can’t describe how careful he is.”
There, it had been started; it would work of itself from now on. Jimmie knew, she was sure, and sympathized, and would help; she was sure because she could paint him so well. She was there in her room, painting, that day after talking to Jimmie, when Daniel came home.
“Painting again, honey? And by lamplight?”
“The sun hurts my eyes, Daniel.”
“Better see an oculist, then. Got to take care of your eyes.”
“I shall, thank you, Daniel.”
“Don’t thank me, honey, I only pay for it.”
THE STORY WE USED TO TELL
THIS IS THE STORY that Y and I used to tell, used to tell in the quiet of the night, in the hours of the quiet of the night, and the moonlight would come, moving forward, moving close; used to whisper to each other in the night…
And I, Y would say, had to go first. With the moonlight making white patterns in her hair, she would shake her head and say: I had to go first. Remember, she would say. In this very house. That night. Remember? And the picture, and the moonlight, and the way we laughed.
We had sat on the foot of the bed, the way we used to when we roomed together in school, talking together and laughing sometimes in spite of the grief that filled Y’s great house. It was only a month or so after her husband’s funeral, I remember, and yet being together again, just the two of us, was somehow enough to make Y smile sometimes, and even occasionally laugh again. I had been wise enough not to remark on the fact that Y had closed off the rooms of the house in which she had lived with her husband, and had moved into an entire new wing of the old place. But I liked her little bedroom, quiet and bare, with no room for books, and only the one picture on the wall.
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 23