She always sings it like that; she doesn’t know the rest of the words. Except that second baby, why the hell doesn’t she put that in at least. If you can call it singing. Long ago, back in the old days, long ago, her voice had a thrill in it—maybe it still has—something has, but it can’t be her voice.
It did have, though, that first night you heard it again. Not long ago you cursed fate for letting coincidence find her for you, but the wonder is you didn’t find her sooner. Over five years she had been here in New York, sometimes perhaps near enough to be seen or heard—on a subway train, or in a department store, or on the street somewhere. Sooner or later…
You got to the theatre after the curtain was up, as usual when with Erma. It was the evening before her departure for the Adirondacks. Soon after the curtain fell, at the close of the first act, you heard a voice directly behind you:
“I guess I left my handkerchief in the ladies’ room.”
The effect was curious. You didn’t recognize it, it didn’t even occur to you that you had ever heard it before, but it stirred you amazingly; you were startled and alert; not turning your head, you let some question of Erma’s go unanswered and waited breathlessly for it to sound again. A man’s baritone had replied to it:
“Shall I lend you mine?”
Then the first voice:
“Yes, I guess you’ll have to.”
You turned like lightning and looked rudely, directly into her face, and recognized her at once.
If you had had an ounce of brains you would have told Erma you had a sudden attack of indigestion or dementia praecox or something and got up immediately and left the theatre. With the ghost you had made of her growing stronger and more hateful every year you might have known it was dangerous. Or perhaps you expected the reality to kill itself and the ghost too? You did not in fact calculate at all. You sat throughout the intermission listening to the scraps of her voice, and by the end of the second act, feeling her presence so near, you were in a state of intense excitement.
“Maybe the woman found it,” she had said. “I’ll go back after the second act and see.”
When the curtain fell again you mumbled an excuse to Erma and were out of your seat and at the rear of the orchestra before the lights were on. She came up the aisle on the arm of her escort, a tall thin man in a brown suit, and you stood aside as they passed. Then he went one way and she another, and you darted after her and touched her on the shoulder.
“I beg your pardon, but aren’t you Millicent Moran?” you said.
She turned and looked at you calmly.
“I used to be, but now I’m Mrs. Green,” she replied. You saw by her face that she knew you before her sentence was ended, but characteristically she finished it before she added in slow surprise:
“Why, I remember you.”
“Battling Bill,” you stammered.
“Will Sidney,” she said. “It’s awfully nice to see you again.”
“I’m surprised you knew me.”
Seeming to have nothing to reply to this, she stood and looked at you. You felt suddenly foolish and uncertain, at a loss what to say, but a wild and profound excitement was racing through you. You hesitated.
“Maybe we could meet some time and talk over old times,” you said. “I have no card with me, but you can find me in the phone book. William B. Sidney.”
“That would be nice,” she agreed.
“And if I could have your address—”
She gave you her address and phone number and you planted them firmly in your mind. Then she said goodbye and was off, presumably to the ladies’ room to find the lost handkerchief.
Throughout the last two acts and intermission you were fearful that she might say something to you there in the seats, forcing you to introduce her to Erma and dragging in the escort, who you supposed was Mr. Green. He was a stiff and thoughtful-looking person, wearing a neat business suit and a high starched collar, hard to place; you guessed him as being something queer, like a newspaper financial writer or an expert on garbage disposal. At all events, you acutely did not want Erma to know anything about it and were greatly relieved when the last curtain fell and you became aware that they were on their way up the aisle towards the exit.
That night you could not sleep. That was nothing unprecedented for you, but the wakefulness had a new character, not the familiar spasmodic jerks from strained artificial quiescence into irritated alertness, and back again, endlessly. No, you were completely and unprotestingly awake.
This chance encounter had brought to a focus all the stray implications of a question that you had dodged for years: what to do with the ghost of little Millicent which more and more dominated your most intimate and secret moments, which was gradually assuming so complete a control of your fancy that there threatened soon to be no reality left except the chair you sat on and the food you ate. It was a most capricious ghost, with a varied and checkered career extending over twenty years. At times long periods had elapsed without a single appearance; at others it was with you almost constantly, if not actively guiding or overpowering your thoughts, at least hovering dimly on the border of consciousness. It had been most assertive and insistent at such times as some source of active interest had been withdrawn from you, as for instance when Lucy went away, or when you lost the companionship of your sisters by Jane’s marriage, or when you returned from Europe alone. You lay for hours, recalling and analyzing, objectively and dispassionately, these familiar phenomena.
At times you had hated it. You rejected it as infantile, shameful, unmanly, vile. You felt so but you never thought so, because on those occasions there was such a boiling turmoil of sensations within you, the blood rushed so hotly to your head and your fingertips, that thought was out of the question. If later you tried to think about it you found that with the sensation and the revulsion gone it was too unreal and remote to have any significance. Then it would return—but not necessarily the same. Sometimes it was as pleasant and inoffensive as picking roses in Erma’s garden at Whitestone.
Now that you had seen her again, it struck you as amazing that not once in all the years had you thought of trying to find her. Not that you hadn’t done it, but that it hadn’t even occurred to you. You might easily have traced her. You might have found her five years ago, ten—
What for?
For life! For someone to care about, to quarrel with, to be jealous for, to be tender to—you could snap your fingers at Erma’s catty contempt, you could smile at Dick’s furious and dominating roar, Jane could bring up her brats and start a free love colony as far as you were concerned.…
Bah, you thought, you were vastly exaggerating the importance of this. All men had their fantasies and their pet dreams; the healthy and sensible thing to do was to take them as they came and let it go at that. As for Millicent, the woman, Mrs. Green, she was assuredly of no significance whatever. She had nothing to do with ghosts. You recalled how she had looked, standing before you in the theatre: her slim, slightly drooping figure in its plain dark dress, her dull light brown hair, combed carelessly with strands escaping here and there at the edges, her level slate-colored unblinking eyes, her pale unnoticeable face. You would have said that whatever passion her blood might have held had been washed out long ago. She was ten years younger than you; thirty now, then. She had a husband; children, probably. She had excited you all right, but that was just the stirring of a memory; you had been a fool not to swallow the impulse to speak to her. She might quite easily make herself a nuisance, writing and telephoning.
You finally got to sleep.
You arose late the next morning, not intending to go to the office, for Erma’s departure-days were always crowded with last-minute errands and problems. This time she was bound for the Adirondacks, to spend the summer roughing it in a twenty-room cabin she had bought from the Hatton estate. John and his wife and two maids had gone up the preceding week; four or five other servants took the morning train; Erma was supposed to leave right after lunch in the new Lincoln, with Dorst driving. They finally got off about five, leaving you with a pocketful of memoranda about hats, rugs, dog-biscuit, tennis rackets.
You were expected to follow in a week or so, but you hadn’t definitely committed yourself. You supposed you must go somewhere; no use hanging around New York in July and August. In the meantime you took a room at the club.
At the office, the following morning, you rather expected to find one of the pink slips on your desk: “Mrs. Green telephoned; no message.” It wasn’t there; nor the next day, nor the next. You remembered with amusement your experience with Mrs. Davis in Cleveland; well, at least Mrs. Green would never bring you a son nearly as old as yourself to send off to Europe to have a good time at your expense. Apparently she didn’t intend to bring you anything; there was no word from her.
One morning, about a week after Erma’s departure, you went from the club directly to Park Avenue and from the drawer of your desk got the leaf torn from the theatre program on which you had scribbled the address and phone number. You called the number at once, from the instrument in your room, and after a prolonged ringing her voice answered, sleepy and muffled.
“I’m sorry if I got you out of bed,” you said.
“Yes,” she replied, “I don’t usually get up till noon.”
Would she have dinner with you? Yes. This evening? Yes. Should you call for her at seven? Yes. You hung up, wondering if she had been too sleepy to know what she was saying. Habitually arising at noon didn’t sound much like the mother of a family.
Although two or three of the cars, and Foster, had been left behind by Erma and were at your disposal, you thought it best to take a taxi; you decided not to dress, and were glad of it when you got to the dingy little room on Twenty-second Street and found her waiting for you in the same nondescript dress she had worn at the theatre. She had her hat on.
“I wish I’d asked you to make it half-past six,” she said. “I only eat breakfast at noon, so I’m always pretty hungry around six o’clock.”
It was hot, the first hot night of the summer, and you took her to the Castle, on Thirty-sixth Street, where you could sit by an open window. Your efforts at conversation, which became more desperate as the evening advanced, were fruitless and finally ridiculous. She seemed entirely devoid of opinions even regarding food, but was by no means indifferent to it. You were insufferably bored, and at length exasperated; it was impossible, you thought, that any human being out of the grave could be so utterly colorless and flat. Doubtless she had been the same as a child—the change was in you. You looked at her pale inscrutable face and tried to recall the eager restless hours when you used to await her knock at your door.…
Dinner over, you suggested a show or a drive through the park and along the river. Here she had an opinion; she would love the drive. You found an open taxi and went back and forth in it for two hours, until you were dizzy, feeling almost as if you were entertaining a deaf and dumb schoolteacher aunt from the Middle West. When you finally returned to Twenty-second Street you left her at the outer door and sighed with relief that it was over.
And phoned her again within three days, god knows why. It is strange that you did it without feeling any hint of the old uneasy misgiving—naturally and almost gaily indeed, reflecting that you might as well be bored by that funny sphinx as by the blockheads at the club or yourself.
Those first few times with her you did succeed in dragging forth, gradually and bit by bit, many of the details of the twenty years since her mother had hauled her aboard that westbound train. Not that you were especially interested, but there seemed to be nothing else she could talk about at all. They had gone to Indianapolis, she said, where an uncle lived, and there Mrs. Moran had resumed the profession of washerwoman and continued at it for eight years, until Millicent graduated from high school. On the very day of high school commencement Mrs. Moran took to her bed, and died three weeks later, in the middle of the night, with her educated daughter holding her hand and staring at her with dry eyes.
“No, I didn’t cry,” said Millicent. “I never have cried but once.”
She wouldn’t say when that was.
She had gone to live with her uncle, and got a job filing papers in a law office. This was not to her liking (too dull, she said!) and she soon gave it up and through her uncle, a floorwalker, got a place at the stocking counter of a large department store. All this was merely preparation for her real career, which began when at the age of twenty-one, three years after her mother’s death, she was offered a position at the cigarstand of a big hotel—as she said, the swellest hotel in Indianapolis. You have heard five or six versions of the genesis of that job; probably the one about the assistant hotel manager buying stockings for his wife is most nearly correct. For four years she stood there peddling cigars and cigarettes to the cosmopolitan world of Indianapolis notables, commercial travelers, visiting lecturers and barbershop customers, until one day Clarence Green, covering Indiana and Illinois for the Rubbalite Company, a middle-aged widower, asked her to become his wife.
They were married at once, and when shortly afterwards he was transferred to eastern territory, came to New York and established themselves in a flat. Here the story became so vague as to be almost incoherent. It appeared that toward the end of the first New York summer she had returned from a week in the country with her friend Grace something or other to find the flat bare, stripped of everything except her personal belongings. At some stage or other there was a divorce and an award of alimony amounting to a hundred and fifty dollars a month.
“He’s very prompt with it,” she said. “It’s never been more than four days behind time.”
It appeared also that she had had several offers of marriage in the past three years, one from a very wealthy man who owned a house in the country, but she had decided that the alimony was enough to live on, and it was so nice not to have to bother about anyone else. You were incredulous about the proposals; she wouldn’t tell you any names; she said she didn’t want to compromise anybody. You looked at her critically: why would any man want to bathe in that stagnant pool?
You were in her room, late at night; you had dined at Arrowhead Inn and afterwards sat out on the terrace to get the breeze from the river, waiting till after midnight to return to the city’s hot walls and pavements. She was on the couch—which presumably served also as a bed—propped up against the wall with the two skinny pillows behind her, and you sat in the rickety wicker chair.
“I’ll probably go up to the Adirondacks the end of the week,” you said. “My wife is wondering why I stay down here in this furnace. I haven’t told her I met an old college friend.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“The rest of the summer probably. I don’t usually come back until after Labor Day. Maybe even later.”
“Your wife is very rich, isn’t she?”
You nodded. “I’m worth a good deal more than I ever expected to be but I’m a pauper compared with her. When I remember how I used to cut down on cigarettes so I could buy candy for you—”
“I still like candy,” she said.
“Then I’ll have to bring you some, for old times’ sake. A bushel basketful, just to show off.”
She was silent. You looked at her and saw that her motionless eyes were regarding you steadily, fixedly, so that you felt uncomfortable and moved your own eyes aside. A thrill of expectancy ran through you; you sat perfectly still for what seemed a long time, glancing at her and away and back again.
“Come here,” she said in a low dead voice, without moving; not moving even her lips, it seemed.
You got up instantly, but without haste, and went and sat on the edge of the couch beside her.
At the first touch of her hand you felt yourself tremble all over; you caught your breath, and something within you struggled to retreat, to get you to your feet and away. But you were already overcome and helpless; indeed, as you see now, you had been at the first sound of her voice that evening in the theatre. It seems insane, and it’s a puzzle beyond your unraveling. In all her gestures there is something terrifying and irresistible: the way her skinny calves press against your leg when she sits on your lap, the feel of her feet, neither warm nor cold, but over-powering, when they touch you, above all the thrill when she puts her hands on you. She must have known from the beginning that you were done for; why did she wait so long? She told you afterwards that she felt she must be fair to Mr. Gowan! At times it has almost seemed that she expects you to believe her obscene nonsense.…
That first night you didn’t stay long; you finally became aware that she was running her hand through your hair and was saying, “It’s so late I guess you’d better go.”
You felt embarrassed and didn’t want to look at her face. Her hand was burning you, though its stroke was now steady and peaceful. You twisted around and got off the couch and onto your feet, glanced at your watch and looked around for your hat.
“You called me Mil,” she said.
“Yes.”
“When you go out downstairs don’t bang the door.”
“All right.”
“I’ll see you again, won’t I?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll telephone.”
She remained on the couch as you let yourself softly out of the room.
You got a taxi on Seventh Avenue, but on arriving at the club didn’t feel like going in, to bed. You walked the deserted streets, aimlessly, until the early summer dawn approached. You felt that something profound and inescapable was happening to you, and you could understand neither the thing itself nor the deep discomfort of your feeling about it. The sensation of guilt and uncleanliness was nothing new; that had often come with fantasy and even with Erma; but not as now with a dread and disgust that terrified you. Were you letting yourself in for something so ugly that for once you would not be able to argue yourself into forgiveness? You thought impatiently that such bunk was unjustified and unreasonable; after all a woman was a woman, and hands were hands, and it was damn funny if you were too fastidious to get your shoes soiled a bit.
Your thoughts stammered all around the question of what you were going to do. You would not stay here to lose your summer in taxicab trips to roadhouses ending in a series of adventures like this night. With a shudder you recalled the room: the creaky old wicker chair with jagged straw-ends sticking out of the arms, the cheap worn carpet, the couch-cover stiff with dirt, covered with spots, the ancient and tenacious remains of a crushed chocolate cream on one edge. Of course it wasn’t entirely her fault, you can’t live at the Sherry-Netherland on a hundred and fifty a month, but she might at least scrape off that chocolate.
You needed to be away for a while anyway. You rejected definitely the Adirondacks. Not only was Erma there, but there would certainly be a gang of the old familiars, and you were fed up with them. If you went to Jane’s at the seashore—no, you might stand Victor in small doses, but not as a steady diet. You could go to Idaho—Larry had left two weeks previously, with Dick’s half-million in the corral and his plans of empire complete. You would be in the way, not at all welcome, and what would you do when you got there? All right, then go somewhere alone, anywhere out of this damn town, Quebec, Bar Harbor, Nantucket, take one of the cars and drive along the Maine coast. You were perfectly free to go where you would, you had plenty of money, you had good health and a sound intelligence—it was funny if you couldn’t amuse yourself somehow.
Incredulously you became suddenly aware that along with this you were wondering if you could not safely go off with Millicent somewhere without risk of recognition.…
It was after dawn when you finally went to your room, relaxed your body in a tub of hot water, ate a sandwich and some coffee, and got to bed just as the day’s heat began to creep through the window and the city’s clamor started its infernal crescendo.
The next day but one you telephoned. She was sorry, she couldn’t see you that evening, she had an engagement. With Mr. Gowan? you asked idiotically. Oh no, she said, with another young man. Tomorrow evening, then. No, she was sorry, tomorrow evening Mr. Gowan was going to take her to a show. You observed that the hot spell was terrible, and she said she didn’t mind it a bit.
“Maybe we could make it Friday,” she said.
Friday evening it was raining and was much cooler, so you gave up your plan for a drive into the country and took her to a theatre instead. You had seen the play before and didn’t care much for it, so you amused yourself by watching her out of the corner of your eye—her silent motionless absorption, her hands folded in her lap, so still that when they moved you almost jumped.
“I believe I could go to a show every night for a year including Sunday,” she said after the first act.
“I wouldn’t want to if they were no better than this one,” you replied.
“I’ve seen it five times.”
“What! Five times!”
“Yes. Not because it’s so good, but in the summer time you run out when you go as often as I do.”
You were astonished; later you learned that it was her one passion, that she would willingly see any play five times, or ten, anything from the Follies to Ibsen.
You went directly from the theatre to Twenty-second Street. You had decided not to go in, but you went. Entering, you decided you would stick to the wicker chair, but you didn’t. At two in the morning you were still there, propped against one of the skinny pillows smoking a cigarette.
“I bought a car the other day,” you said. “It will be delivered tomorrow morning. I thought it would be fun for us to drive out of town some of these hot nights.”
She sat munching the Dutch chocolates you had brought, with the same old gestures, methodical as some automatic engine of destruction.
“It must have cost a lot of money,” she observed. “I don’t see why we couldn’t use one of your wife’s cars, if she has so many.”
You explained again the risks which a man of your prominence must avoid.
“I couldn’t stay away all night,” she declared. “If I did and Mr. Green found out about it…”
You were glad that her concern for her alimony imposed caution upon her too, but you wished she’d stop calling her husband Mr. Green.
“No, we couldn’t do that,” you agreed, “I meant to drive out in the country for dinner, maybe sometimes have a picnic lunch in the woods somewhere.”
Her hand stroked your knee and her eyes closed slightly, as they had a little before, as they have a thousand times since.
“It would be nice to be in the woods with you,” she said. “Last summer I used to go with Mr. Gowan out on Long Island. And Mr. Peft had a boat in the Hudson River—that was two years ago.”
“You know a lot of men, don’t you?”
She chuckled—a low faint rattle that left her shoulder, resting against you, perfectly motionless.
“Wouldn’t you like to know though,” she said.
“What does Mr. Gowan do?”
You were learning that she had three separate methods of replying to a straight question like that, each sharply distinct from the others, as though she had made formulas of them. This time she chose to be direct.
“He runs taxicabs. He doesn’t run them himself—he owns thirty-seven of them—the brown ones with a little bird on the door.”
“That’s funny.”
“Why?”
“Oh nothing, only he didn’t look to me like a man who would run a fleet of taxicabs.”
“How do you know what he looks like, you’ve never seen him.”
“Sure I have, that night at the theatre.”
She turned her head; you felt her chin rubbing against your hair; then she bent down and softly bit your ear.
“That wasn’t him,” she said.
“You told me it was.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have asked.”
“Who was it then?”
She chuckled again. “It was Mr. Green.”
Her husband! Hell, of course not. You gave up, exasperated at her petty infantile obscurantism. Feeling your irritation perhaps, her hand crept up and gently stroked your arm. At first you wanted to move away from it or push it off, but soon your blood quickened…you became quite still.…
“Not any more,” you said, almost pleading, and put your hand up and covered hers with it.
“It’s very late,” she sighed.
It was a week or so later, after you had been out several times in the roadster, that you found courage to speak to her about her clothes. You weren’t sure how she would take it, and you didn’t know what you might be letting yourself in for. But the endless alternation of those two cheap dresses, the dingy brown and the awful polka-dot, was too much for you. And good lord, such hats. You had a high opinion of your own taste—not only was it naturally good, but it had been excellently trained by ten years of Erma. Of course, you thought, there’s no occasion to get extravagant about it.
“I’ve never paid much attention to clothes,” she said indifferently. “Even if I had money, it’s so much trouble.”
You had considered a couple of dresses and hats, but found that one thing led surprisingly to another. Once started, she became almost enthusiastic, particularly about shoes; but even with shoes she never said, yes, I want that. She would admit preferences, always a little grudgingly, but it was left to you to make the definite decision. You wondered how she ever got things bought alone.
The new things were an improvement, but they looked funny on her. Her skin was absolutely without color, the same dead grey all over her face, without any shade of difference between her cheeks and her chin or her ears and her forehead, and she never uses any rouge or lipstick though she constantly dabs herself with powder that has a strange tint of brown in it. She must get it in Harlem—only as far as you know she’s never been there. Her face hadn’t been so noticeable with those drab old dresses, but when she put on something with life and color in it, it was almost startling to look at her.
When you gave her the money to buy some things herself, underwear and nightgowns, she carefully gave you the exact change the next day, with the cash slips and price tickets in a neat pile, added up. She’s always been straight about money, presumably because she doesn’t care much about it. You might have known better when she handed you that bunk about Dick, though of course that’s not the same thing. Nor the alimony either; there’s no finding out anything she wants to hide; you don’t know to this day whether she actually did get alimony from her husband, nor for that matter whether she was ever married. Your first suspicion of that came the day up at Briarcliff when you proposed a trip somewhere, and suggested central Pennsylvania as a locality where you would run slight risk of meeting anyone who knew you. When you asked her about that she seemed not at all concerned.
“But not so long ago you were afraid to stay out overnight,” you reminded her.
“Yes. Well…it doesn’t matter.”
“We can stay a week, or two, or a month, just as we like. What do you say?”
“I think it would be very nice.”
All right; that was settled. From the eminence of the Lodge you looked out across the expanse of woods and meadows to where a strip of the Hudson was flashing in the distant sunshine, and wondered why the devil you were doing this.
You have continued to wonder to this minute. There’s something in it that pushes you along always a little ahead of yourself, so that you never quite catch up. Like suggesting that trip. Admitting that there’s something in it you can’t resist, that’s no reason for entirely losing your senses. Why couldn’t you use her and buy things for her and get some pleasure out of it—no, you had to wallow, you had to try to squirm out of it somehow, you were afraid to be away from her, you must eat with her and sleep with her so that there wouldn’t be a single moment she wouldn’t be gnawing away at you like a rat.
Already, many a night in that little hotel in the Pennsylvania mountains, as she lay beside you, you felt that if she touched you again it would be unbearable. Once you said:
“For god’s sake, Mil—”