Doris Delaney Palmer did not believe in wasting time. All her life, whenever she had wanted anything, she had fixed an unmoving eye on her ultimate goal and had proceeded toward it until her purpose was accomplished. Now her desire was to keep Lisa and Chris Pappas out of Cooper Station and she went about this the way she had always done everything else; quickly, finally and thoroughly. On the day after the Town Guardians’ meeting at which Chris Pappas had been engaged to teach at the high school, Doris went to see her attorney, Richard Strickland, and asked him to draw up a formal petition of protest against the young schoolteacher. Richard Strickland was shocked and disturbed.
“Just what do you expect to accomplish with this?” he asked.
“I’m going to get it signed,” replied Doris.
Richard Strickland’s eyes narrowed a little. “How come you’ve got the axe out for Christopher Pappas?” he asked.
“I do not have the axe out, as you put it, for anyone,” protested Doris. “It is simply that I have a responsibility to the parents and children of Cooper Station and I fully intend to see that that responsibility is fulfilled.”
“Doris, I’ve been your lawyer for fifteen years and I think that during that time I’ve always given you fairly good advice. Now I’m advising you to leave this thing the hell alone. Pappas has a valid contract signed by the majority of the Guardians and the petition you want me to draw up won’t change a thing!”
Doris’s hands trembled a little with an outrage she tried to keep hidden.
“Pappas was elected by Nathaniel Cooper who has never had a thought in his head that didn’t concern either his mills or his idiot child and by Jim Sheppard who should never have been elected as a Guardian in the first place. I’m the only one of three who thinks of the welfare of our children and, as I pointed out to you, I fully intend to do a good job of it.”
“There are a few other things you’re forgetting,” said Strickland. “Pappas was graduated with honors from the state university and he was so successful at his first teaching job that another town offered him a three-hundred-dollar raise for their school.”
“Pappas also walked out on that job,” said Doris with heavy sarcasm. “He is also a foreigner from Cooper’s Mills and is married to a girl who was three months’ pregnant before the wedding.”
Richard Strickland sighed. “Two mistakes, Doris,” he said. “Should anyone hold two mistakes against a man for the rest of his life?”
“Mistakes are one thing,” said Doris. “Irresponsibility is something else again. Cooper Station is a nice, clean town full of respectable people. We certainly don’t need people of the Pappas’s ilk here and especially we don’t need a man like that teaching our children! There must be some way to stop this outrage.”
“Well,” Richard Strickland sighed again, “you could try to get a petition for a referendum. I don’t recall that it’s ever been done but twenty-five percent of the voting population of the town can petition for a referendum in which the townspeople could overrule any specific action of the Town Board of Guardians. It all goes back to the day when all the affairs of the town were decided at town meetings. Seems nobody was willing to give up the idea entirely that the townspeople should control their own affairs.”
“Then draw up a petition for a referendum,” Doris said.
“Listen here, Doris,” said the lawyer, “most people don’t want to get mixed up with anything like this. You’ll never get enough people to sign it. Why don’t you just forget the whole thing.”
“I have no intention of forgetting anything,” said Doris and then smiled a little. “I don’t imagine the citizens of this town will be unwilling to sign the petition when I finish talking with each and every one of them.”
“All right,” Strickland said, “I’ll have it for you tomorrow. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I know precisely what I’m doing,” said Doris and marched out of his office.
Next day, Richard Strickland met Jess Cameron on Benjamin Street.
“Seen Doris?” he asked the doctor.
“No,” replied Jess. “Should I?”
“You’ll have to hang on to your hat when you do,” said Strickland. “She’s on the warpath again.”
If there’s one thing Richard loves more than the law, thought Jess, who was very tired, it’s a cliché.
“Which warpath is it this time?” he asked aloud.
“She’s got a petition for a referendum that she’s going to circulate around town,” replied Richard.
“A referendum for what?” asked the doctor.
“She wants the townspeople to reverse the decision of the Guardians to hire that new schoolteacher they approved the other night, Pappas.”
Jess felt himself tighten with anger. “But Doris can’t—” he began and then checked himself quickly.
“Doris can’t what?” asked Strickland curiously.
“She can’t possibly be so inhuman as to try to keep a man from making a living for himself and his family.”
The lawyer shrugged. “She doesn’t care if he makes a living,” he said, “she just doesn’t want him making it here in Cooper Station.”
“I see,” said Jess.
“Well, I don’t,” replied Strickland. “But you know Doris once she gets set on something. Remember the time she didn’t want that Jew fellow opening a clothing store here? You notice he never did get into town.”
“I remember,” said Jess. “But that time nobody bothered to fight her. Maybe this time she’s bitten off more than she can chew.”
“I doubt it like hell,” said the lawyer. “I’ve known Doris for years and she’s always managed to get what she goes after.”
“Well, she’ll never get my signature on her damned petition,” said Jess. “I’m a little tired of Doris wearing her respectability like a mink coat.”
“Well, I suppose she’s entitled,” said Strickland. “Doris has always been a good woman with the interests of the town at heart ever since she moved here.”
Like hell, Jess wanted to say as he watched the lawyer climb into his car and drive away. He remembered a story his father had told him about Doris Delaney Palmer and he wondered now as he had then about the woman.
If the truth were known, he thought, I don’t imagine that Doris could afford to talk about anyone else in the world.
Jess was even more correct than he imagined. If the whole truth had been known, Doris would never have been able to live in Cooper Station in the first place.
Doris Delaney was born in Belfast, Ireland. By the time she was fifteen years old she had a pair of full, pointed breasts, a tiny waist and a set of well-flared hips. She had also learned to read and she knew that she was never going to be satisfied with being a housemaid for a wealthy Irish family. Getting to the United States was one of the first goals Doris set for herself and it took her three years to save and borrow enough money for a steerage-class passage. When she was eighteen she landed in New York, sure that everything good that the United States had to offer would soon be hers. Doris had the lovely dark hair, the clear blue eyes of the Irish and a brogue that was as thick as good carpeting. Within two days she had secured a position as chambermaid with a wealthy family named Justine who owned a town house on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Doris learned her new duties quickly and well and within a month, Mrs. Justine promoted her from the upstairs of the house to the main floor.
“You are a good girl, Doris,” said Mrs. Justine, “and a smart and pretty one. I shall teach you your new duties myself so that you’ll never be able to use the excuse that you’ve forgotten anything important. You will have to serve tea on our at-home days and you’ll have charge of the front door on Tarkington’s day out. You must be neat and well groomed at all times and Doris, with that brogue of yours, I’d rather you spoke as little as possible. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Doris and thought, How I hate you, you fat bitch. “I understand.”
Mrs. Justine nodded in satisfaction. “Just smile that pretty smile of yours,” she said. “That is all that will be necessary.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Doris and smiled.
Doris wore a black uniform with a little white apron which she tied tightly around her little waist and a narrow starched ruffle on her black hair. Her lips were naturally red and her cheeks pink and when Mrs. Justine had lady callers they always commented on Doris’s looks.
“Oh, she’ll do,” said Mrs. Justine deprecatingly.
“And she’s so quiet and well trained,” said the ladies.
“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Justine modestly. “I trained her myself.”
Doris smiled sweetly at all the ladies and kept her eyes demurely downcast, but she listened to every word and every inflection and at night, in her room, she sat on the edge of her bed and repeated what she had heard until the sound of Ireland began to erase itself from her voice.
When the Justines had gentlemen callers, the men never said much to Doris. They just looked, and more than once Doris had to brush away a searching hand as she made her way from the butler’s pantry to the drawing room. But she learned to do it in such a way that the gentlemen were never insulted. Her smile and her gentle, repulsing hand seemed to say, “But sir, I am nothing but a lowly housemaid. If I weren’t, things might be different, but I have to think of my job.” The gentlemen always seemed to understand.
The Justines had three children, two girls named Pamela and Patricia, ages fifteen and seventeen, and a son, George, who went to Princeton. The girls, however, went to school in New York and lived at home and Doris copied their talk and their mannerisms and when no one was about she sneaked into their rooms and tried on their clothes. In the end, of course, she got caught. George Justine, home from school for the weekend, found Doris in Patricia’s room, wearing one of Patricia’s good dresses and posing in front of Patricia’s full-length mirror.
“What have we here, my pretty maid?” he demanded as he came up behind her.
Doris whirled. “I didn’t think anyone was home,” she said weakly.
“A lucky thing for you they aren’t,” replied George sternly, “or you’d be out on the streets bag and baggage.”
Doris sized him up shrewdly and decided against playing the frightened housemaid.
“I suppose you’re going to tell,” she said boldly. “Well, go ahead. I won’t have any trouble finding another family to work for.”
“Oh ho,” said George. “You won’t, will you? You think it would be easy to go somewhere else without a reference from my mother?”
Doris looked up at him. “I’ll be my own reference,” she told him.
“You are a saucy one, aren’t you?” said George. “And I imagine that you think you’re quite special and very attractive besides, don’t you?”
“I’m just as attractive as some of those girls with skimmed milk complexions that I’ve seen you bring here,” said Doris.
“You little hellion!” said George and laughed as he pulled her into his arms.
Doris kicked him in the shins. “Just because I work here don’t think that you own me,” she told him angrily.
George held onto his shin. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
“So now you can go tell your mother,” said Doris. “I don’t care. But anyone who wants a kiss from me has to ask me.”
George laughed again. “All right,” he said, “I’m a reasonable man. May I have the pleasure of kissing you, Your Highness?”
“Not until after I get out of this dress,” said Doris. “Now turn your back.”
George did so at once, but Doris made sure that she was in a position where all George had to do to look at her was to raise his eyes and look into the mirror that faced him from the opposite side of the room. She let him see part of one leg and the tops of her breasts as she struggled back into her uniform and when she told him that it was all right for him to turn around she saw that the back of his neck was pink and that he was breathing rapidly. He reached for her at once.
“Not in here,” she said. “Someone might come in.”
“Nobody’s going to come in,” replied George. “You promised.”
“I never did. But I will anyway. I have to dust the library in a few minutes. You come in there as if you were looking for a book and then I will.”
George dropped his arms reluctantly. “All right,” he said. “I’ll come down in a few minutes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
Doris smiled up at him and her lips were very red and moist looking.
“Please hurry,” she said.
“Oh, I will,” said George more breathless than ever. “I sure will, Doris.”
But by the time he entered the library, George had calmed himself to the point where he could take Doris in his arms quietly and expertly as befitted a Princeton man. He kissed her on the mouth without bumping her nose or doing anything else awkward and Doris never moved.
“Is that how they teach you to kiss at that fancy school of yours?” she asked him.
“I’ve kissed some of the finest girls in New York,” George said. “And I’ve never had any complaints.”
“Humph,” said Doris and turned away from him.
“I suppose you know plenty about kissing,” said George following her about the room as she dusted.
“More than you do,” she said.
“All right then, show me.”
She put down her duster at once and put her arms around his neck. Her breasts pressed into his chest and she moved gently against him and then he felt her tongue against his teeth.
“My God!” he whispered when it was over. “My God!”
“And I’ve never been to Princeton,” said Doris. “I learned everything I know from books.”
“There aren’t any books that teach you things like that,” said George, still unable to control his breathing.
“Oh, yes there are.”
“Where?”
“You’ll tell if I let you know.”
“No, I won’t, Doris. Honestly, I won’t.”
“There are books like that right here in this room.”
“You’re crazy,” said George. “If you think my mother would allow books like that in this house you’re stark, staring crazy.”
“All right,” said Doris. “Don’t believe me then,” and she went on dusting.
“Just show me,” demanded George.
“No, I won’t. You think I’m crazy and you don’t believe a word I say so I’m not going to show you anything. Besides, you’ll tell.”
“Doris, I swear I won’t tell, and I don’t think you’re crazy and I do believe you. I swear it.”
She looked at him for a long time then went to the humidor that sat on a corner of Mr. Justine’s desk. She rummaged through it for a moment and finally brought out a small gold key. Then she went to the locked bookcase directly behind the desk and unlocked the doors.
“There,” she said.
“I knew you were crazy,” George said in disgust. “Those are my father’s books on economics and law and things like that. After all, he is a stockbroker and that’s his library of business books.”
Doris smiled. “Take a look at one.”
It took George Justine only a few minutes to realize that his father, Theo, was the owner of one of the most extensive pornographic libraries in existence. His face grew whiter and whiter as he picked up one book after another and his hands trembled violently.
“Have you looked at all of these?” he asked at last.
“I’ve read every single one of them,” said Doris.
“My God!” said George weakly. “Does my father know?”
“Don’t be such a fool. Of course he doesn’t know.”
“How did you find out about the key?”
Doris smiled. “I know a lot of things about this family,” she said. “Little things that none of you would want outsiders to know. I wasn’t really worried when you caught me in Patricia’s dress, you know. If you’d said you were going to tell and had gone to your mother, I don’t think she would have fired me.”
“What kind of things?” demanded George.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Doris.
“Tell me at once.”
“Oh, things like your sister Pamela lets that friend of yours Edward Duckworth open the front of her dress when the two of them are supposed to be out looking at the garden.”
“I don’t believe you!” cried George.
“Well, don’t then. But it’s true just the same. Ask her if you don’t believe me. Ask him.”
“You know very well that I’d never insult either of them with such a question,” said George.
“Don’t then.”
“You’re nothing but a disgusting little sneak,” said George. “I don’t know how I could ever have thought that you were sweet and pretty.”
“I am sweet and pretty,” said Doris. “It’s just that I’m alone in the world and I have to look after myself.”
George did not even glance at her as he stamped out of the room and Doris smiled and hummed as she picked up her duster and finished her work.
For the most part, Doris had judged George Justine correctly. He could not keep away from the locked bookcase in his father’s library and now he took to coming home from Princeton almost every weekend.
“He’s a fine boy,” said Mrs. Justine. “He loves his home and his family. Why, just look. Other boys his age have nothing on their minds but carousing about every weekend and George comes home to his family.”
But when the Justines went out on Saturday evenings, they could never get George to accompany them. He always pleaded a heavy study schedule or a headache and as soon as the family was out the front door he made his way to the library. Doris smiled and waited and as the weeks passed, a terrible anger grew in her. For if George Justine could not keep away from his father’s books, he could and did keep away from Doris.
She smiled at him and posed in front of him and as often as possible she managed to be in the same room with him, but George never smiled back and all he ever said to her was either “Good morning, Doris” or “Good night, Doris.”
You bastard, she thought viciously. You blue-nosed bastard. Just you wait.
But summer arrived and George prepared to go north to Bar Harbor with his mother and sisters and Doris was still as virginal and untouched as the day she got off the boat. It was the only time her shrewdness had failed her and it was the last time in her life that she ever misjudged a man. Never again did she allow herself to become overconfident or make the mistake of overplaying her hand.
“You’ll spend the summer here,” Mrs. Justine told Doris. “You and cook and one of the other girls. And you must all take very good care of Mr. Justine. He gets very upset at times when the family is away and I want all of you to make things as pleasant as possible for him.”
Doris had counted heavily on the summer at the shore and she almost wept with frustration. On the morning that the family left, George Justine stopped her in the hall of the second floor.
“My father knows,” he said.
“Knows what?” demanded Doris.
“You know what,” whispered George angrily. “He saw one of those books in my room.”
“You’re a fool, George Justine,” said Doris.
“He knows that you know, too.”
“I knew you’d tell.”
“I wasn’t going to take all the blame by myself,” said George. “He asked me how I’d found out and I told him.”
“Isn’t that nice,” said Doris sarcastically. “What is he going to do? Throw me out?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t want to do anything until Mother and the girls had left.”
“You bastard,” whispered Doris viciously.
George stood up straight. “You brought it all on yourself,” he said sanctimoniously. Then he turned and went downstairs to join his mother and sisters.
Days passed and Doris waited nervously for the axe to fall, but Mr. Justine neither said nor did a thing. Toward the middle of July she began to breathe more easily and think that perhaps Mr. Justine had chosen to ignore the whole episode. But one hot night she was in her third-floor room, dressed in a thin wrapper and brushing her hair, when there was a knock at her door. She opened it quietly and Theo Justine stepped into her room.
“Keep still,” he ordered. “If you make a sound, I’ll have you thrown out into the streets bag and baggage.”
“What is it?” whispered Doris.
Theo Justine leaned back against her closed door and his eyes grew heavy as he looked at her.
“Take off your clothes,” he said.
Doris stepped away from him, more in surprise than in fear.
“But sir,” she protested, playing for time to think. “I’m just a young girl. A good girl. I’ve never been with a man before. Please, sir. Don’t make me. What would Mrs. Justine say?”
“Shut up,” said Theo Justine. “I’m not going to hurt you and Mrs. Justine is in Bar Harbor. Do as I say. Quickly.”
As Doris began to slip the wrapper off her shoulders she heard him turn the key in the lock, but he never moved away from the door. He stood and leaned against it, his arms straight down, his hands flat against the panels, and only the sound of his quickened breath betrayed the fact that he was in the room at all. Doris stood nude before him and as his eyes traveled over her, she watched him.
The old bastard, she thought in sudden exultation. All he wants is a free look. Well, it’s not going to be as free as he thinks it is.
“Turn around,” said Theo Justine and Doris turned slowly, letting him admire her and the sound of his breathing filled the whole room.
“Lie down on the bed,” he said and Doris lay down and put her arms over her head. She made her body curve, so that one hip was thrust up higher than the other and when she looked at Theo, he had moved his hands from the door panels and was holding his groin. Doris sighed deeply and moved a little on the bed and with one gigantic breath that was almost a sob, Theo Justine reached his climax and it was over. He turned and left her room as quietly as he had come.
During the weeks that followed, Theo Justine came to Doris’s room more and more often and as time passed she grew more and more bold with him. She still followed his panting orders, but more slowly now. Sometimes she walked to within six inches of him and cupped her breasts with her hands and rubbed her nipples with her thumbs until they stood out hard and pink and all the time she watched Theo’s face. When she lay down on the bed now, she spread her legs a little and she said, “Come over here, Mr. Justine. You can’t see everything from way over there.” Sometimes she traced the outline of her dark triangle with her fingertips and said, “Aren’t you tired of just looking, Mr. Justine? Wouldn’t you like it all?”
“Adultery is a sin,” rasped Theo Justine. “I’ve never been with any woman other than my wife since we married.”
Doris smiled and moved her body on the bed.
“But you’d like to be with me, wouldn’t you?”
“I can’t,” whispered Theo. “I can’t.”
Doris laughed out loud and turned over onto her stomach, then she began to contract and relax the muscles in her buttocks until they quivered and she listened to Theo’s harsh whisper.
“Turn over, Doris. Please turn over. Please, Doris.”
She made him beg and plead, often until tears streamed down his cheeks.
“What’ll you give me if I do?”
“Anything. Anything you want. Just please turn over, Doris.”
“A hundred dollars if I show you something special?”
“Yes. Yes. Anything you want.”
Theo stood at the foot of her bed and Doris turned over slowly, very slowly. She drew up her knees and watched him and his eyes never moved from her body. Suddenly, she let her knees separate.
“Do you like this, Mr. Justine?” she asked softly.
Theo did not answer her. With a great cry he fell on her and struggled and fought his way into her and Doris tasted blood where she had bitten through the shoulder of his dressing gown. When it was over, it was Theo who wept. Doris held his head cradled against her breasts and listened to him sob and even with the throb of pain that burned between her legs, she smiled up at the ceiling.
The next morning there was an envelope with a hundred-dollar bill in it that had been slipped under her door sometime during the night and as August came to a humid end there was a neat stack of bills under the stockings in Doris’s dresser drawer. Theo came to her almost every night now, and every time he swore to her that it would be the last but Doris had learned well from his supply of hidden books. She made love to him with a perfection that was in itself almost a perversion and Theo could not keep away from her.
By the time September came and the family returned, there was a new quality to Doris’s smile. It was self-confidence and power and it even showed in the way she stood and walked.
“I must say,” said Mrs. Justine crossly, “that a summer in the city didn’t hurt you a bit, Doris. You’re blooming like a rose.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Doris demurely.
“Theo my dear,” said Mrs. Justine. “You look exhausted. I know I should have insisted that you leave business to join us at the shore. Just look at you.”
Doris filled Theo’s coffee cup and smiled when she saw the way his hand shook.
One evening, toward the end of October, Theo Justine was alone in his library. Mrs. Justine had gone to a concert with the girls and George had not come home for the weekend. Doris waited until the rest of the household were in bed, then she went downstairs. She faced Theo across his desk and she did not mince words.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
Theo put his head in his hands. “I knew it was going to happen,” he said.
“Well, it’s too late to feel sad now,” said Doris briskly. “What are we going to do?”
He raised his face. “We?” he asked stupidly.
“Who do you think?” demanded Doris. “Surely you don’t expect me to cope with this thing alone?”
“I can’t do anything,” protested Theo. “I have my family to think of.”
“I’m not asking you to leave your silly family,” said Doris. “I’m just telling you that I have to be looked after and that someone is going to have to support the baby.”
Theo might have been a fool in many ways but he was also a businessman. He knew when a deal was in the offing.
“How much?” he asked at last.
“Fifty thousand dollars,” said Doris bluntly.
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“No, I’m not. But you very possibly may be if I decide to open my mouth.”
“No one would ever believe you,” said Theo.
“Maybe not everyone,” said Doris. “But enough people would to make things ugly for you. Your wife, for instance. And your children. And I might even decide to get a lawyer or go to the newspapers.”
“Who’d believe a little Irish housemaid?”
“We can try to find out if you’d like.”
Theo Justine sighed. “I’ll have it by the end of the week,” he said. “And as soon as I hand it over to you, I want you out of my house.”
“That’s what you say now,” said Doris with a sly little smile. “But there’ll be nights when you’ll be sorry I’m not here.”
“Get out of here,” said Theo.
He paid her in cash and Doris left the Justine house in the middle of the night. From the moment she left, she covered her tracks well. She opened an account in an obscure bank, keeping just enough money with her to see her through the months to come and she left New York for Philadelphia. She found a small apartment and took very good care of herself during her pregnancy, not for the sake of the child soon to be born, but for her own. She posed as a widow and oddly enough people in Philadelphia believed her just as had the people at the bank in New York. The baby, a boy, was born in the spring and Doris began to make plans at once. When her son was six weeks old, she left Philadelphia and returned to New York. She rented a cheap room and withdrew her money from the bank and she waited for a dark rainy night. It came at the end of the second week in June and Doris dressed her son in clothing she had bought in a cheap, crowded store. She wrapped him in a blanket and carried him through the rain to a Catholic church three blocks from her rooming house and when she got there she fed him and waited until he was asleep. Then she got up quietly and left him lying in the corner of a dark pew. Within an hour she was on a train bound for Boston, her few belongings packed in one suitcase that was lined with over forty-eight thousand dollars in cash. By the time the train arrived in Boston, Doris had washed all remembrance of New York, the Justines and her son from her mind. None of that had ever happened. She was twenty-one years old and her life was just beginning.
Doris Delaney never got through the locked door of Boston society, but with her looks, her smart address and her new wardrobe, she managed to attach herself to the fringe that dwelt right outside. She met Adam Palmer, at a charity ball at the Copley and made up her mind to marry him.
Adam Palmer was a good businessman but he was notoriously lacking in the ways of the world. Doris posed now as an orphan who, although fixed well enough financially, was totally alone in the world. Adam was first sympathetic, then very sorry for her and at last, in love with her. Within three months of the charity ball at the Copley, he asked Doris to marry him.
“I know I’m much older,” he said apologetically, “but I’ll try to make you happy.”
“Oh, Adam, my dear,” said Doris gratefully.
“You’ll like Cooper Station,” Adam told her. “It’s a nice town, a pretty town.”
Doris had counted on remaining in Boston and was startled at this announcement.
“But, Adam, what about your business?”
“Oh, it practically runs itself now,” he said comfortably. “I come down on the train and spend a day or two here every week, but the rest of the time I go up home and putter around. There’s breathing room in Cooper Station which is more than I can say for this place.”
Doris shrugged mentally. Perhaps it was better this way, after all. Adam would never be upper crust in Boston and maybe it was better to be a big fish in a little pond like Cooper Station than to be no fish at all.
“Oh, Adam,” she said softly. “You’ve made me so happy.”
“I love you, Doris,” he said. “You’ll never be sorry.”
They were married in Boston and went to Niagara Falls for the wedding trip and Adam Palmer treated his wife as if she were made of fragile china that might shatter under his clumsy touch. Doris did nothing to offend his strict New England sensibilities. She wore a nightgown that covered her from head to foot and she shivered as if in fear when Adam tried to touch her.
“Oh, Adam, Adam,” she cried. “I’m so frightened!”
“I love you, dear,” he repeated over and over. “I’d never harm you.”
At last she let him force his knee between her thighs and then she tightened herself against his onslaught. When at last he penetrated her, she gave such a cry of agony that Adam Palmer never doubted for a moment that he had deflowered a virgin.
Doris Delaney Palmer did well in Cooper Station. She joined the Congregational Church and became attached to various clubs and committees. Within five years the town elected her to serve as a Guardian and the mantle of respectability that Doris wore perpetually fitted her as if she had been born with it in place. Within ten years, there were many people who never stopped to remember that Doris had been born elsewhere, so completely did she suit Cooper Station. The only person who ever wondered about Doris was Dr. Gordon Cameron. She had come to him because she suffered from acutely painful menstrual cramps and in the course of his examination, the doctor had seen the episiotomy scar that gave her secret away. But he kept silent. Afterwards, as he filled out a card, he asked casually, “Have you ever been pregnant, Mrs. Palmer?”
“Of course not,” said Doris, but her hands had begun to sweat. “Why do you ask that?”
Dr. Gordon Cameron smiled. “There’s nothing unusual about that, is there?” he asked. “A lot of married women get pregnant. I just wondered if perhaps you had ever been so and then perhaps aborted.”
“Not that I know of, I’m sure,” said Doris.
Gordon Cameron sat still for a long time after Doris had gone. In the end, he made a note of what he had seen on Doris’s card.
“You’re joking,” said Jess when his father showed him what he had written.
“No, I’m not,” said Gordon. “Sometime, somewhere, Doris Delaney Palmer gave birth to a child.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Jess. “Adam never said anything about a child.”
“I don’t think Adam knows,” said Gordon. “She’s had that scar a good long time. For much longer than she’s had Adam.”
The next few weeks were hell for Doris. She was sure that Gordon Cameron knew something and that he would go to Adam Palmer with it. But the weeks drifted into months and Gordon treated her as he always had, with a sort of quiet courtesy, and Doris breathed easily again.
He doesn’t know anything, thought Doris in relief. He never did. His question was one that he might ask any woman.
No one ever mentioned anything even faintly connected with a child to Doris again until years later, during the Second World War. Doris was serving on the board of the Red Cross chapter in Cooper’s Mills when Lisa Pappas came to her one day to complain that her allotment checks were not arriving on time.
“I’ve just got to have that money when I’m supposed to, Mrs. Palmer,” said Lisa. “I’ve got the baby to think of.”
Afterwards, Doris could not remember if it was because she was tired or whether she had had an exceptionally trying day or if it was because she sometimes mourned the passing of her own youth that she spoke to Lisa as she did.
“If you’d behaved yourself before you were married,” she said to Lisa, “you wouldn’t have to worry about a child now.”
And Lisa Pappas, striking out with fear and hatred, gave out with the purest shot in the dark.
“At least when I was in trouble,” she cried, “the man responsible married me.”
Lisa turned and ran out of Doris’s office in the Red Cross building and Doris sat quite still until the trembling began.
She knows, thought Doris in horror. Somehow, she knows.
And no matter how often, after that, that Doris told herself it was impossible that a child like Lisa could know anything about her, Doris could never quite believe it. It seemed to her that whenever Lisa looked at her the knowledge stood out on her face.
I know about you, said Lisa’s look. You’re not so much. If the truth were known, you’d have to leave town in a hurry.
And now Lisa Pappas was going to move right into Cooper Station unless Doris prevented it. She’d be the wife of a schoolteacher and at every school function, Doris would have to watch Lisa looking at her with the look of knowledge in her eyes.
Not that she really frightens me, Doris thought. She’s probably sleeping with Jim Sheppard. That’s probably how she got him to sponsor Chris Pappas.
Doris had hated Jim Sheppard from the day he was elected to the Town Board of Guardians. Her best friend, Callie Webster, had run against Jim and practically everyone in town said that Jim hadn’t a prayer against Callie. But Callie was defeated for the same reason that many popular candidates for office are defeated. Overconfidence on the part of the constituents. People were so sure that Callie would be elected anyway that many of them didn’t even bother to attend the meeting, and when the ballots were counted, Jim Sheppard had won by two votes.
“It’s impossible!” Doris Palmer had raged.
But it had happened and from that day on, Jim Sheppard was Doris’s sworn enemy. He would not bow to her wishes and he would not be put under her thumb. On practically every issue, he sided with Nathaniel Cooper, and Doris’s rage grew.
Doris began to circulate her petition. She spent all her evenings and most of her afternoons calling on people and by the time it was June, she had all but fifty names she needed signed up. She also saw to it that no one with a house for rent allowed the Pappases to even view the place and if it hadn’t been for Jess Cameron, Lisa and Chris would never have moved into Cooper Station at all.
When Jess became aware of what Doris was doing, he went at once to Nathaniel Cooper.
“That bitch is trying to keep Lisa and Chris from finding a place to live here in town,” said Jess angrily. “It’s about time that someone fought that woman.”
“Well, what do you want me to do?” asked Nathaniel. “I can’t very well move them into my house, can I?”
“No, but we can go to Anthony,” said Jess. “The gardener’s cottage behind his place has been sitting idle for years. The Pappases could live there.”
“Good Lord, Jess,” said Nate. “You know how Anthony is. He’d never hear of it. He likes being alone too much.”
“We could ask him,” countered Jess stubbornly.
Nate shrugged. “They’re your eardrums. Remember that when my dear nephew blasts off.”
But Anthony did not blast off. “Sure,” he said when Jess and Nate spoke to him. “I’ve always been a sucker for a lost cause. Just tell Mrs. Pappas to keep her kids away from me and we’ll get along fine.”
Lisa threw her arms around Jess when he told her the news, and the very next day she drove to Cooper Station to begin the job of cleaning the long-empty cottage. Anthony Cooper watched her walk down the graveled drive that led to the little house.
You can tell by the way she walks that she was made for loving, he thought. Then he smiled cynically. And you can also tell that she’s not getting enough of the right kind.
He was still smiling when Lisa had rounded the curve and disappeared from view.
Anthony dropped the curtain he had been holding aside to watch Lisa.
Maybe this afternoon, if he felt up to it, he’d take a walk down that way and see if there was anything he could do.