You said that to yourself, over and over again, that night in Cleveland when Lucy was going away. Go ahead, go ahead, you repeated, what in heaven’s name are you waiting for?
Or, finally, forget it.
You did neither. You dangled on the peg of your irresolution until a street-car motorman decided it for you.
Why was Erma so curious about Lucy? It has never been like her to show an interest in anyone without a plain and direct profit in sight. All her generosities and graceful gestures have a quality of indifference that renders them lifeless; she is warm only when she is in pursuit, avid and ready to seize. But by exception she was actively curious about Lucy. She insisted on seeing her at once, as soon as Lucy returned to Cleveland, and a dinner party was arranged, informally, only you three and Dick and another couple—that young doctor and his wife who had been Erma’s chum at school.
A week later, in the afternoon, she took Lucy to a concert; you were irritated when you heard of it, and remarked that it was amusing to see Erma doing the Grand Duchess.
“She’s nice and friendly,” said Lucy, surprised. “It didn’t occur to me that I was being patronized.”
“Do you like her?”
“Oh, all right. I wanted to hear the concert anyway. I don’t like anyone very much, except you.”
There were no lonely evenings then. You had finally, not long after Dick’s return to town, moved to the Jayhawker Club, to one of the large rooms with an entrance hall on the top floor, and every day there would be phone messages, invitations, notes. Obviously, as you see now, you had become an interesting object of speculation in that circle of whispers and surmises and scandals which constituted the high world in that noisy and sprawling municipal monster sitting on the lake shore. Doubtless a picture was composed of you as an aggressive and successful young business executive who could reach out with his right hand and take the lovely Erma with her great fortune, or with his left and gather in the fresh young beauty and innocence of Lucy. Lucky dog. A man who would go far.
You were a great deal with Lucy. There was a trip to the canyon on your birthday—Erma had forgotten about it—and Lucy spent the preceding evening in her aunt’s kitchen baking a cake which tumbled out of the basket during your descent down the bluff and was cruelly mangled on the rocks at the bottom. You often took her riding of an evening, or to a dance or theatre.
You had never written that letter.…
She had not been back long, it was towards the end of October, when one evening you were dining at Winkler’s Restaurant and she suddenly said:
“It looks as if I’m going to New York soon. Mereczynski has opened a studio there and Mr. Murray says he can get him to take me. I don’t know if I’m worth it; I’ve written to Father about it.”
You felt at once that she intended to go, that she would go. You were vastly surprised, and you were panic-stricken; not till that moment had you been aware that underneath her simplicity and her quietness was a strength which made her immeasurably your superior. Had you felt it unconsciously and leaned upon it? Had you misjudged also your own importance to her? Were all men always helpless like this with women? But good lord Lucy wasn’t a woman; she was a young girl taking piano lessons whose idea of an exciting experience was teaching you how to milk a cow.
“How soon would you go?”
“I don’t know, probably a couple of weeks, as soon as Mr. Murray can make the arrangements. If I am to go at all it might as well be at once.”
“In two weeks,” you said, and then were silent. Her hand was on the table, and you placed yours on top of it; she laid down her fork and with her other hand patted yours and pressed it, smiling at you. Then she picked up her fork again and went on eating.
“You’re certainly casual about it.” You spoke almost desperately, feeling that you were being forced into an untenable position without choosing it or desiring it. “I’ve been wanting to ask you to marry me. Of course you know that. If you go to New York that will be the end of it.”
You hesitated, then finished more desperately and rapidly: “Unless you’ll promise to marry me before you go.” There. Done. At last, settled.
But Lucy laughed! And said:
“Well, you did ask me after all.”
“I’ve wanted to since the first day I saw you,” you declared. “I took it for granted you knew. You did know, you couldn’t help it. Ever since I met you I haven’t cared a hang about anyone else. I didn’t even go home for a week this summer, though I’d promised I would. But I’ve never known what to say to you. I don’t know even now how you feel about me—”
She stopped smiling, and her voice was more serious than you had ever heard it:
“I don’t either. I never have known how we feel about each other. I like you so much, much more than I’ve ever liked anyone, but there’s something in you I don’t like, and I don’t know what it is. That’s what troubles me about it, that I don’t know what it is.”
She gave you a warm and friendly smile.
“For a while,” she went on, “I thought it was because you couldn’t make up your mind whether you cared for me enough to marry me, but then I couldn’t make up my mind either, so that couldn’t be it.”
“Mine’s made up now,” you declared. “It has been, for a long time.”
“Yes. Mine isn’t. I don’t know about us. Though if you’d asked me last summer I’m pretty sure I’d have said yes.”
Yes, she would have, you knew she would have. This did not much resemble any of the scenes of sweet capitulation you had so often constructed in fancy; it did not in fact resemble much of anything unless it were a horse with a bundle of hay suspended on a pole in front of him so that he never quite reached it.
You see now more or less all around yourself, and inside too, as you sat there that evening and confronted the petty barrier of her indecision and made no plunge to demolish it. At the time you felt forlorn and defeated, and probably that was the impression Lucy got; a considerable urnconscious histrionic feat. Much more subtle than any voluntary blackguardism!
On the eve of her departure, two weeks later, you became incautious; your careful cowardice was very nearly broken down by a free and genuine impulse. You had been with her nearly every day of those last two weeks, and had insisted on nothing. Now you comprehend very little of it; then you understood nothing at all. You spoke constantly of the loneliness you would feel when she had gone. You declared, with careful levity, that if she wouldn’t stay in Cleveland you would follow her to New York and get a job tuning pianos in Mereczynski’s studio. She tranquilly completed her preparations, letting you be with her as much as you would, and as the day approached you found more and more difficulty in meeting her frank and quizzical eye.
She was to take a sleeper Wednesday night. Tuesday evening you dined again at Winkler’s. After dinner you drove her home and, arriving there and observing that it was only ten o’clock, it was suggested that you stay a while. Finding the library and parlor occupied by Aunt Martha and a bridge party, Lucy said you could find refuge in her room, and ran upstairs ahead of you. It was then that you hesitated on the stairs, wondering if you should bother to go back and turn on the lights of the car, and she called down to you:
“Well, aren’t you coming up?”
You had been in Lucy’s room before, without particularly noticing what was in it; either she had the gift of making her surroundings seem colorless, or they were in fact so through her own indifference to them. This night, perhaps scenting danger, you stood just inside the threshold and glanced around at the big, neat, fat-looking bed, the two straight chairs, the pile of music on a table, the enormous trunk in a corner with its lid open, being packed. Lucy had taken off her coat and hat and was seated at the dressing-table, arranging her hair.
“As soon as I get to New York I’m going to get a bob,” she announced. “Then I can just give my head a shake and there I’ll be.”
You remonstrated, declaring that she had the most beautiful hair in the world, to be kept at all costs.
“All right, I’ll send it to you,” she laughed.
She had some snapshots, taken during your summer visit, which you had not yet seen, and you helped her dig them out of the trunk; and she sat cross-legged on the bed, propped against the pillows, while you sat beside her and took the pictures from her one by one. You hardly saw the pictures, though you looked at them and discussed them and laughed together over them. She had never seemed so close to you, physically; her skirt, twisted up to her knee, seemed not to be there at all; as her fingers brushed against yours, or your shoulders touched, it felt infinitely intimate, like the feel of your own hand on your own body when, relaxed in bed, you give yourself a sleepy careless caress; and she smelled warm and clean and very sweet. You almost held your breath till she touched you again, and you passionately hoped that she would not notice, that she would go on letting her shoulder meet yours as you leaned over to take a picture from her. She must not know that you were lost within her, and she within you, nor feel the divine tenderness that had suddenly overwhelmed you. You struggled to keep it in front of your eyes; if you ceased to be able to look at it you were gone; you could not understand this swift unexpected threat of annihilation; and you could not permit it. Something precious, something without which you could not live, was in peril and must be preserved, though you could neither then nor now give it a name. You only knew that Lucy must touch you again, you must go on like this forever, enfolded in her closeness; and she must not know. This precarious ecstasy was a secret not to be shared; even, shared, would be shattered. Violently must be shattered.
A picture fell from your fingers into her lap. You reached for it together, and your hand closed upon hers, on her soft skirt, on her leg. She looked at you, and her eyes widened and her face became suddenly still as marble. You leaned forward and kissed her. You kept your lips on hers, put your arms tight around her and pressed against her, hard, pressed her back against the pillows. You kept your right arm close around her and, never releasing her mouth, with your other hand caressed with blind and clumsy strokes her back, her hair, her shoulder, her neck and throat.
“My love, oh Lucy my love,” you gasped. You twisted around and lay against her and put your lips again on hers, murmuring, “Kiss me, please kiss me.”
She was silent, but she kissed you, again and again. She held you close with strong and urgent arms. “My love, my dear love,” you whispered. Awkwardly your hand forced itself within the neck of her dress, at the back. She shivered, suddenly and violently, withdrew herself, pushed you away, and sat up, breathing hard and not looking at you.
“I think you tore my dress,” she said, feeling at it.
You swung yourself around, got onto your feet, on the floor, and stood there, betrayed and ridiculous, fumbling in your pocket for your cigarette case. She too got off the bed, arranged her skirt, and without saying anything went to the dressing-table mirror, and twisted herself about, first this way, then that, trying to see the tear in her dress.
“I’m sorry if I tore it,” you said from across the room. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sorry.”
She came over and stood in front of you, quite close, and put her hands on your shoulders. She tried to smile and you tried to look at her troubled eyes.
“I’m almost crying,” she said. “I can’t figure it out. What was wrong? I’m not afraid of anything we might do. I should love to have you tear my dress, but it was no good.”
“I’m sorry,” was all you could say. “I’m awfully sorry, Lucy.” As she stood there with her hands still on your shoulders you thought to take her again in your arms, but she moved away, to the bed, and began picking up the scattered pictures.
“Aunt Martha will wonder what we’re doing,” she said.
“Yes,” you agreed, “I’d better go.”
“I can’t eat with you tomorrow evening after all, because she asked me to have my last dinner here. She told me to invite you, if you care to come.”
You remarked that they would probably prefer to have her to themselves, that they didn’t like you anyway. “I’ll come later, after dinner, if I may, and go to the train with you.”
“All right. Yes, do that. That would be nice.”
She went downstairs with you to the hall and outer door. You felt awkward and completely helpless; you had no idea what was happening, what you intended, what she thought or felt. You were pure idiot, without direction or purpose or understanding. At the door you took her hand and she smiled at you, you said no matter what, you went off down the steps into the dark and heard the door close behind you.
Carrying your concealed and uncomprehended torture. If since maturity you have approached any human being with candor and have been accepted clearly and honestly, surely it was so with Lucy—and the result was total bewilderment. There was something in her that frightened you profoundly, or something in you which deeply felt a menace far below the level of reason. When you go digging around in yourself you can uncover almost anything, you have fitted together the pieces of many a complex puzzle; but with Lucy, where the complexity was least, you are most at sea. Good god how simple it was! She offered you everything, everything that you needed and desired.…
All next day at the office, that last day, wretchedly nervous, you felt certain that it was at last decided. You would go out to her house immediately after dinner, that would give you three hours with her, the train didn’t leave till eleven. There was no other possible course. Say you didn’t go until nine, there would still be two hours—and two minutes would in fact be enough. After what happened last night, if you did not do that, if you did not have the guts to say, there’s nothing wrong with it, you are mine, I am yours—you would be too contemptible in your own eyes to exist. You told yourself bitterly that it was not a question of fairness to her; she could do very well without your fairness or anything you might give her; there was merely the necessity that you continue to grant yourself the right to breathe. Desire for Lucy, specifically, or even the suffocating revulsion against a surrender to the fascination in her, had nothing to do with it. Either you had the integrity of your appetite as a living organism, or where was life?
During the afternoon Erma telephoned; she hadn’t seen you for a week, she said; how about dinner that evening? You replied that you were sorry, it was impossible. When she insisted you were almost curt in your refusal, which must have been somewhat startling to her. To hell with her, you thought heroically.
You left the office a little later than usual and went to your room at the club. After a rather early dinner, alone, you got the car from the garage; the man there helped you put the top up, for it had begun to rain—a cold determined drizzle. It was then barely eight o’clock, and you decided you didn’t want to arrive so early, you would drive around a while; your last drive as a free man. This calculation would indicate that you were still sentient, but that was demonstrably false, for on putting the car away the preceding evening you had noted that the gasoline tank was nearly empty, and walking to the garage only ten minutes ago you had reminded yourself that you must have it filled, but now you drove off without thinking of it.
You stopped first at the club and got the books and candy you had bought for Lucy, reflecting that she might decide to go on to New York and return later, and if she didn’t it wouldn’t matter. Then you headed south, toward the Heights and the country beyond.
It rained steadily. You decided that you might as well turn at Lewellyn Road, but when you got there you went straight through. You drove slowly and carefully into the black night, the city now behind, watching the straight glistening rain streaks in the rays of your headlights. Were they silver or steel? Steel, you decided.
You did not look at your watch once.
All the time during this sneaking crawl into the night you felt yourself to be thinking, thinking indeed with unusual rapidity and complexity; but no post-analysis has revealed anything that could even with politeness be called cerebration. You considered in careful detail the effect that would be produced on Erma and Dick by the announcement of your engagement to Lucy; how soon you would be married; where you would live; whether Jane would like Lucy. The last, for some reason, stumped you, and you drove your mind away from it—you couldn’t imagine any contact between Jane and Lucy. All this as you drove into the rain with the city far behind, your forgotten watch ticking the seconds from one chaos into another, and the last drops of your gasoline tank being sucked into the inexorable cylinders.
A little beyond Myer’s Corners, almost directly in front of the white house at the foot of the long hill, there was a sputter from the engine, the car jerked once or twice, and slid gently to a stop as you guided it to the side of the road. You didn’t even bother to look at the tank; you knew at once it was empty. You did look at your watch; it was twenty minutes to ten.
You waited five or ten minutes, but no car passed and none was in sight. You got out and stumbled towards the house whose white form showed dimly through the rain and darkness; there was no light showing, but you finally roused someone, a man in a nightshirt who gruffly said he had neither telephone nor automobile and slammed the door in your face.
You went back to the car and looked at the gas gauge and tried again to start the engine; it spluttered derisively and stopped with a grunt. The first two cars you hailed went by without even slackening speed; the third, going towards town, stopped a hundred feet beyond you and you ran up to it. There was a man in the front seat and dim shapes in the back. He could take you only as far as Myer’s Corners, where he turned right towards Fossville. After another wait, in the rain, at Myer’s Corners, you were finally picked up by a farmer in an old Ford, and were carried by him almost to the city’s edge, to where the Elmwood car line crosses the highway. The cars ran only every half-hour, but one would be due in about five minutes, the farmer said—and headed his Ford around to return to his home, which he had passed three miles back. It was then nearly ten-thirty, and you figured you could just make it to the railroad station if the streetcar made good time.
A dazzling headlight came suddenly around the bend, blinding you, there was the rush of the oncoming car, you stood near the track and waved your arms frantically, and it was all over. The car’s bell clanged, it whizzed by and disappeared into the night like a scared elephant. You sat down on the end of the wet culvert, at the side of the road, with your feet in two inches of water, and cried like a baby. It was the first time you had cried since boyhood. At those times, in those days, you had always gone to Jane; and now, naturally, you thought of her. You despised your abdication of manhood, and you knew there was no person in the world who would not despise it, except Jane. You sat there in the rain, engulfed in desolation, and bawled for her.
You think it was Jane you bawled for? There doesn’t seem to be much ground under that, does there? When was she ever a support for your weakness? How about the time you wired her to come to New York and she didn’t take the trouble to answer? Oh sure, she explained it, she could explain anything. How about all the times you could have gone to her and never did? Now, behind your back, impelled by pity—to hell with her.
As for the Lucy business, she didn’t seem to know what it was all about, any more than you did, when finally you told her of it. It was the following summer, when you took your vacation early in order to spend two weeks at home while Jane was there. You hadn’t been there more than three days before you were wishing you hadn’t gone. Your mother might as well not have existed; Margaret and Rose were strangers; Larry was rarely seen except at mealtime; and Jane was always at the store and expecting you to be there too. It was on the porch late one evening, when your visit was nearly over, that you told her of Lucy. You had of course mentioned her in letters, but at arm’s length, making phrases. Now you spoke of it in detail and with feeling; you gave Jane to understand that it was a case of a grand passion unaccountably thwarted by the tragic vagaries of obscure fate.
“I certainly intended to ask her to marry me,” you declared. “It seemed foreordained and inevitable. She clearly expected it too, felt the same way about it. Surely we were made for each other if any two people ever were. And yet it was no go, there was something somewhere that made it impossible. I was with her out at her uncle’s house the night before she left, and we had a long talk up in her room. I don’t want to seem conceited about it, but she practically put it up to me, and all of a sudden I saw plainly that it wouldn’t do, I’d been kidding myself. I suppose I was a coward not to tell her straight out how I felt about it, but it seemed so darned brutal I couldn’t do it. She was so lovely, standing there, close to me, looking at me—I wish you could see her. She was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known—everybody said no one in Cleveland could touch her for looks. You see, I’d introduced her to our set, which is of course the most exclusive bunch in the city, and she made all the other girls look like the run of the mill. Including Erma. I wish you could see her.”
“It seems curious,” said Jane. “If you did really love her.… How could you help telling her—how could you say goodbye without telling her—have you heard from her? Have you written to her?”
You shook your head. “You see I didn’t really say goodbye at all. Oh this is a confession all right, this is no proud tale of conquest, I was a darned coward, I was damn well ashamed of myself. I was supposed to go out the next evening and take her to the train, but something or other came up, I forget what, and I didn’t go.”
“You just didn’t go!”
“Yes. It was pretty bad, I suppose. She’s probably forgotten all about me by now but anyway it was a rotten way to act. I honestly think I was in love with her—I must have been. You used to say I had strong intuitions about people, and I think it must have been that somehow unconsciously I felt that it wouldn’t work, at least that marriage wouldn’t. Remember she’s a musician, she’s an artist, she has that temperament. Maybe it would have been all right if I’d been realistic about it and taken her for my mistress—”
You said that deliberately, for the sake of the little thrill it gave you; it was piquant, it made your lips feel dry so that you wet them with your tongue, to talk calmly to Jane about taking a girl as your mistress. You had never spoken so frankly to her about that sort of thing, but what the deuce, you thought, we are mature and not prudes.…
To your shocked surprise Jane laughed. She stopped swinging the hammock, so she could laugh thoroughly.
“You say that as if it meant cutting her up in slices and cooking her in butter,” she declared. “Maybe that’s really what she wanted, if she’s as remarkable as you say. You certainly ought to be ashamed, Bill, if she really wanted you—you acted like a bounder and a dumb Galahad put together.”
You flared up in resentment:
“She was only a young girl, she was under twenty, and I respected her, if that’s what you mean by dumb Galahad. To hear you talk you might think you were one of the founders of the National Free Love Society or something.”
“I’ve been to Paris on a Cook’s tour,” Jane laughed. “Where if you overhear a workman say you have pretty legs, you soon learn there’s nothing personal about it, he’s just a lover of nature. The first time a man accosted me on the street I acted like a perfect fool, I was mad and flustered, I couldn’t remember a single French word, and he walked along beside me, talking right to the point, for blocks, and finally I exploded at him, depechez-vous! He was so startled, he went off without even lifting his hat.—Not that spending a month in Paris made me a scarlet woman. At present, alas, no man can truthfully call me his mistress.”
“Good god I hope not!” you blurted out.
You reflected that there was more of the puritan in you than you had suspected. You were sorry you had brought up the mistress thing at all, if Jane was going to take it this way and talk as if—well, as if she were just a woman too—that is, a woman with the ordinary vulgar appetites and possibilities.…She had not, to your knowledge, ever been in love—though for that matter you had been away almost continuously for seven years. At least, she had never spoken seriously of any man. Presumably she had been kissed—well, on the whole, yes—but at that you were willing to wager that she hadn’t except in fun. Probably no man had ever thought her as lovely and adorable as you did, for you, being her brother, were naturally prejudiced. Anyway, the idea of her being anything common, or doing anything, was too grotesque to be thought of at all.
She said suddenly:
“Are you going to marry Erma?”
You were a little startled. “Not that I know of,” you replied. “No, not even if I wanted to, which I don’t. She’s a grand lady, much too grand for me.”
“Not too grand to put you in control of her property.”
You laughed. “I’m not in control of anything. She can recall that piece of paper whenever she wants to, which might be day after tomorrow. No, she’s out of my class.”
“You’ll marry her, you’ll see.”
“I’ll not marry anybody, at least not for a long time. Maybe never.” Something tightened within you as you remembered that night in the cold autumn rain. “I tell you I wanted to marry Lucy. I wanted to. There are things I haven’t told you.…I cried about it. Cried like a baby.”
Jane stopped the hammock again, this time not to laugh.
“You what? You cried!”
“Yes. Sat in the rain and bawled, wishing you’d come along and give me a cookie. If there’d been a good, deep hole handy I think I’d have jumped in.”
She came to you, just a step from the hammock to your chair, and put her hand on your shoulder so that her arm slanted downwards across the back of your head.
“Why, Bill,” she said. “Why, Bill.”
Not a question, they weren’t even words. You raised your hand and placed it on hers, there on your shoulder, but you were uneasy and irritated. Why had you told her? Silly, damned silly.
All the same, the feel of her hand was good on your shoulder.
“You poor kid,” she said.
You patted her hand ostentatiously, and laughed. “I guess I should have married Mrs. Davis,” you declared. “As it is, I go now to my chaste and lonely bed. You’d better go too, it’s late, and I suppose you have to get to the damn store before sunrise.’’
No, there was no reason to think she understood anything about it, but what can you expect, neither did you. What does it matter anyhow; things happen and you can stand around forever asking why, you’ll never get anywhere. It wouldn’t do any good even if you could prove it; the next thing that happened to you would prove you were wrong and you’d have to start all over again. Come to think of it, Jane never tries to prove anything. Neither does Erma. Women don’t, mostly. Erma is more apt to give reasons though—just for the sake of the exercise.
How curious she was about Lucy! Did you see her off and how did she look, and have you heard from her, and a list of questions as long as the Miami River. Well, by god, Erma never got her ears full. Strange how far away people are when they seem so close. Only a day or two after Lucy left you went with Erma to a dance, and were so intimate, so familiar, and yet you were as remote from her as the farthest star. Imagine saying to her, night before last I sat on a culvert with my feet in a ditch full of water, and wept. Not only not then, in the first days after Lucy had gone; even less likely now, after being married to her for eleven years. Never could you say that to your wife, though you might, conceivably, to your chauffeur, or the fat little waiter at the Manufacturers’ Club.
Or to Mrs. Jordan.…