VI

A door banged and banged at the rear of the daycoach; torn tabloids drifted or slid along the gritty linoleum of the aisle; a hot breeze smelling of coal gas swept through the car. The young sailor with the wise look recrossed his legs and slumped farther down in the seat, resting almost on the small of his back, shifting his buttocks under him in a suggestive fashion till the flyless front of his dark pants was stretched tight across his abdomen and groin. He folded his arms. Ethel Grandin knew he was looking at her with a grin, challenging her to look back. She scanned the aisle for a vacant seat. The car was full. She closed her eyes, like the sailor nodding against the windowpane, and pretended to doze.

Ethel Grandin not only loved her husband, she was still in love with him. There had never been anyone else and there never would be. It did not belittle either his love or hers to say that she loved him because he had been nicer to her than any other man she had ever known. This was the simple truth; and for a woman who had an inborn timidity of the male, it counted for a good deal. Curiously enough she possessed a real affinity with men and vastly preferred their company to women, but she was by nature afraid of them and had been afraid ever since, at thirteen, when she came home from school one noon with her underpants mysteriously bloodied, her mother had grasped her by the shoulders and dreadfully, savagely, threateningly muttered: “From now on don’t you ever dare let a boy touch you, do you hear? Don’t you ever dare!” The overheard conversations of other girls, much later, had somewhat cleared up the meaning of what her frightened mother had been unwilling to explain; but the fear of men took root, persisted, and she couldn’t truly say she had wholly got rid of it to this day. This timidity did not matter so long as she had—and knew she had—her husband’s love. Not knowing, her confidence in herself was rapidly vanishing.

With him she had never been afraid, not even from the first. The fact that it was she he had chosen established her as a woman of importance, if only to one man; and his passion had awakened undreamed-­of possibilities. At the difficult beginning of their love-­making he had been the soul of tact and caution, so unlike other men she had heard of. Under his caresses she opened up to him and for the first time in her life came into her own: alive, aware, confident of the future and her role in it. In a matter of weeks she changed. No one could have told her in her teens that she would one day sleep with a man she was not married to, but she had slept with John Grandin, wanting it as much as he did, with no sense of sin whatever (despite her mother’s fearful warnings), scarcely even a sense of surprise, except the surprise of discovering that the act of love was by no means an easy matter.

At first this had consisted of hours and aching hours of straining together, yearning for the next step yet dreading what it might be, then fancying in herself a hopeless despairing in­adequacy. She remembered one terrible night when suddenly she had broken away from his embrace and turned to the wall, to sob out her grief and shame alone; and when he, astonished, had pulled her to him again and tenderly whispered, “Darling . . . what’s the matter,” her tears flooded his shoulder as she poured forth her misery because the act of love had gone forward so painfully, with no hope even yet that it would be attained: “I’m not right for you, there must be something wrong with me . . .” But he had comforted her, whispering, “Darling, don’t you know I love you besides that? It doesn’t matter about tonight . . .” Only much later did she realize fully how gentle, controlled, and considerate he had been. Regardless of her reticences or inexperience, most men would have carried through quickly, brought the matter home and achieved their satisfaction, with small regard for the girl they might be hurting or losing. Not he; he had loved her enough to wait. By some almost feminine intuition he seemed to know how it was with her, and he couldn’t have been kinder or more patient with her ignorance. It was one of the things she had always been grateful to him for. At that most important moment of her life he had not failed her; and the result was: she fell in love with him, and had never fallen out of love since.

The pleasures of love had soon turned into the solider pleasures of marriage. About sex she had known nothing. Even in college, when the girls in the dormitory talked of such matters, she had left the room—priggishly, perhaps, but she couldn’t have helped herself. Whatever she knew now she had learned from her husband; and once the step was taken, there had been so much to learn. Perhaps it was an immature or a childish thought, but with a man who loved her, a husband of one’s very own, it was for the first time wonderful to be a grownup, free to abandon oneself to love without fear of parental disapproval, without their even knowing. And she had been good for him; she knew she had always been good for him. To deny this now, or to reproach herself because it had been otherwise, would have been to deny all that had been between them in the past. Because of this, what had been happening lately had confused and humiliated her, so that she was fast losing the belief in herself which she had found only in her marriage.

Where had she failed? For somewhere in their marriage there was failure. How otherwise could she have reached such a state of uncertainty? Her husband seemed to be going from her, a fact she had only fully realized this week. Had he lost interest? Didn’t their love mean to him what it did to her? Fatigue of marriage was a deadly thing, but others had weathered it before and they could weather it too—provided they knew what the matter was beyond mere fatigue, restlessness, boredom. She had as much to give him as ever but he seemed to have forgotten it was there. In what way was the failure hers? She had no means of knowing because she had no clue. She only knew that this week—this week in Maine away from the husband whose presence (because she loved him) prevented her so often from speaking her mind—she had been able to review the past few years of their marriage as if in a new light, and the conclusions she had arrived at were frightening and upsetting. In spite of the dreadful uncertainty of many many nights alone in her bed while her husband sat up in his study, she had still thought—because it had become her habit to think so—that she was happily married. Now she had discovered bitterly that her role in his life was little more than that of housekeeper.