“I know I’m not pretty,” she said, after you dressed and were sitting beside her on her bed. “I know you think all those things about me.”
“Don’t talk about it.” You took a last puff on your cigarette, got up and crossed to the ashtray on the dressing-table, and came back and crawled in behind her and lay down. You had phoned Erma you wouldn’t be home. Maybe you would never go home; you were too weary to think any more of what you would or would not do.
“These pajamas are the heaviest ones you’ve got,” said Millicent. She twisted herself around on the bed and put her hand inside your sleeve, up beyond the elbow, and patted your arm with her fingers. Then she removed it and began stroking your neck, and your chest; and then you felt its familiar warm clinging steady movement on your leg.
“What do you think I am?” you protested feebly.
“It doesn’t matter, just for fun, that was an hour ago,” she said.
You lay back on the pillow and closed your eyes. No matter. If there was anything left of you she was welcome to it. In the other room, an hour before, when you were still trembling with the remnants of your futile and abortive rebellion, the first touch of her hand had sent fire through you, an intense instantaneous blaze of sensation which caused you to shudder so violently that you convulsively seized her wrist and for a moment held it still. Now it seemed soothing and restful, faintly alive but not disturbing. Nevertheless, after a minute or two you stirred a little, and the hand clingingly followed your movement; you opened your eyes and saw that she was watching your face, her lips pressed together, her eyelids drooping, her head bent a little towards you; and as you sighed and closed your eyes again you heard her chuckle.
Later, alone between the sheets and under the blankets, the room dark and icy cold, you lay on your back with your eyes open, telling yourself that this was the bed in which that man was lying, that morning, only a little more than a week ago. You had no very strong feeling about it, but it was impossible to lie there and not think about it. So you could do this, here you were, without batting an eye. What, you wondered grimly, what for instance if the sheets and pillowslip had not been changed? You squirmed; but you thought, yes, doubtless, it seems that anything is possible. You were aware that among your family and friends and acquaintances you were thought to be rather a fastidious person—in Jane’s verbally emancipated circle, ridiculously so. Fastidious and somewhat immaculate. This would amuse them. All of this. In a flash your thoughts were on Millicent, and you felt your brain go tight: was this a final surrender, were you—you fought it off—enough, enough! You forced your mind back to the Christmas guest as a comparatively painless subject.…
In the morning, when you had dressed and were ready to leave she was still sound asleep.
You were not long in suspense about Dick, for the afternoon of that same day he went to your office with you after the Board meeting, and after you had finished discussing the reports, he suddenly said:
“By the way, what about our old college friend? Did you see her yesterday? She said you’d kept her waiting over an hour.”
“Yes, she said she’d seen you,” you replied readily, prepared.
“Did she tell you that cock and bull story about her husband?”
“Why…yes…she’s been married.”
“Married hell! I’ll bet she’s been the daughter of a dozen regiments. Did you fall for it?”
“Sure.” You managed a grin. “I’d fall for anything.”
“Funny.” He turned back from the door. “I’d better be careful though, you smashed me once for insulting her innocence. Remember? Battling Bill.” He laughed; and for reply you joined in. He went on:
“And I said—what did I say?”
“You said she had a nasty line.”
“By god you remember it! I’ve often wondered—she looks to me as if she still has it. Funny woman—homely as hell and yet, she has a look in her eyes that makes you curious. You’d better look out, Bill. What does she want?”
“Money, of course.”
“Sure, but how much? You’d better be careful how you give it to her. Do you want me in on it?”
No, you said, it wouldn’t be necessary, it was only a matter of a thousand or so to help her out of her present difficulties. Why the devil was he asking so many questions? It was none of his business. Still it was only natural; as a matter of fact, though it had never occurred to you before, if it hadn’t been for Millicent you wouldn’t be here now, you would never have heard of the Carr Corporation, you would never have met Erma. Yes, your wealth and position in life, your success, your happy possession of a rich and beautiful wife, were all owing to your zeal in defending Millicent’s pure childhood. A pleasantly fertile thought.…For Dick too the episode had had its emphasis—though not in the same degree as for you—naturally, he would be interested in this reappearance of that little bitch—that’s what he called her—after many years.
You could read Dick like an open book; it appeared certain that he suspected nothing beyond a compassionate gesture to a woman in trouble, for old time’s sake.
A year ago, almost; yes, actually nearly twelve months of hours and minutes since that night, each day confronted with the next, an ordeal not to be tolerated. “It wasn’t very nice of me to have Mr. Martin here,” she said that night, “I won’t do that anymore.” So utterly weary that the force of gravity itself seemed overpowering and irritating, you were relaxed, a dead weight, in the leather chair. You weren’t sufficiently interested to bother to reply. All the same, after that you slept here very seldom; sometimes you would go home as late as two or three in the morning. Unconsciously, so that at first you weren’t even aware of it, your attitude toward the place was changed; it was no longer your place, the things were no longer your intimate and friendly possessions, they belonged to you no more. Whereas formerly you had shrunk only from her, only in her had felt an alienness and a threat, henceforth all was foreign, each thing here was an enemy. You never brought back the little bronze vase; it is still at home on top of the bookshelves in your dressing-room.
Preoccupation with her, or rather with yourself with her on you, more and more continuously filled your mind. At the theatre in the middle of a scene, at a bridge-table at home, at your desk at the office, you would find your thoughts on her in spite of your efforts to drag them away. Resenting her, hating her, jibing at her, more rarely trying honestly to understand her; numberless thousands of times picturing her dead, with an inexhaustible inventiveness of detail. She would disappear; in the paper you would see an account of a woman found drowned (in the Hudson? yes, that would be most likely), you would go to the morgue and there she would lie under a sheet, her face swollen; or the phone would ring and it would be the police to say that a woman had been killed by an automobile on Amsterdam Avenue, in her purse had been found a card bearing your name and address, and would you kindly come and identify her; or merely some evening you would find her sick in bed and, on calling a doctor, would be told that it was her heart, she had only a few hours to live. She would breathe her last under your eyes. These pictures would float endlessly in your head until by repetition they became meaningless, and you would invent others; death itself would grow stale, and you would imagine her gone, for any one of a hundred reasons, to far-off and inaccessible places—after all, you wanted her dead only to you; but these dispositions had a lack of finality that was never satisfying. Always she could come back.
Most frequently of all you would fancy yourself in love; this would happen oftenest at home in bed, during the hours before you went to sleep, especially on those nights when you had not gone to see her. This was in all ways the most thrilling and satisfying; for one thing, you had never been in love, as you understood it. Nearest with Lucy; and now sometimes you used her; her husband long dead, there would be a meeting, casual and unforeseen, and one look into each other’s eyes would be enough—a complete mutual abandonment and fusion, no one else would exist. Tears would spring to her eyes, and you would be unable to speak, nor would it be necessary.…Mostly though, Lucy would not come to life and your lover was ideally created; sometimes a beautiful and worldly duchess, met at the Salle Pleyel in Paris or at a little inn in the Pyrenees; at others an innocent and laughing virgin, a radiant girl who would overwhelm and blind you, and who would finally gravely sigh and confess that, despite your age, you were for her love’s youth, forever. Duchess or virgin, she was always fair-haired, grey-eyed, with clear blooming skin, as lovely as love itself; and the end was always the same. Thinking it more manly to tell her than to write, you would go to Eighty-fifth street to see Millicent, and as she sat motionless in her chair with the comprehension of an unimagined doom distending her eyes and distorting her features, you kindly but inexorably bade her farewell. Sometimes you reproached her and sometimes not; sometimes you left a large sum of money for her and sometimes you didn’t; but the essentials were the same.
Gradually these fantasies came to occupy the greater part of your life. The one about Jane rarely varied. She and Victor were in a railroad accident, and though he was instantly killed, she escaped with injuries which left her a cripple for life—not exactly crippled, but her beauty completely destroyed—the physical details were blurred. You left Erma and made a home for Jane and the children and, entirely indifferent to Millicent, spent the rest of your life in that brotherly devotion. This touching drama was often rudely interrupted by your sense of humor—really it was a little too obvious—you had always resented Jane’s overthrow of your generous plans for her and the girls, and this was a little too pat, usually you were smiling at yourself before you reached the finale. Nevertheless you returned to it.…
Day after day at the office, leaving the routine, which was about all that was left of your duties, more and more to Lawson, you would sit at your desk or stand at the window with your mind wearily trying to drug itself with these stale and infantile stories. Sometimes at the end of the day, sometimes earlier, occasionally even before lunch, finding it no longer bearable, you would take your hat and go home, or perhaps to Jane’s house or to the club. You tried taking long walks, but that was worse than the office; you were more alone, and you dreaded to be alone. Almost equally you dreaded being with people; everybody irritated you with their demands on your interest in things which appeared to you utterly inconsequential. Especially Jane; never had she appeared so idiotically active. First of all, of course, came her children, but she had a dozen enthusiasms at once and she was always crowding them on you. When you went to her house in the afternoon she was always out, or there was a crowd coming to tea, or one of the children had something wrong with him, or there was something you must do. Adler was to talk at the New School for Social Research, didn’t you want to go? Or what did you think of the proposal for the registration of aliens, would you write letters to senators and congressmen about it? One day when it was too much for you and you protested irritably, not the first time, she came over to your chair and put her hand on your shoulder and said:
“Will, dear, what’s the matter?”
“What do you mean what’s the matter? Nothing so far as I’m concerned,” you declared.
“Yes there is,” she insisted quietly. “You’re unhappy about something. I suppose, if it were anything that is any of my business you’d have told me about it; but whatever it is, if it’s making you unhappy it is my business. We used to tell each other everything. Is it Erma?”
“Good lord no!” You added hastily, “It’s nothing. I’m all right.”
After a pause, “You won’t tell me,” she said, and stayed there patting your shoulder. You made no reply, there was no impulse to reply. As for telling her, you would rather have told Dick, or Schwartz, or even Erma. Not likely!
Erma was too preoccupied with herself to take much notice of you. Her difficult period. It still is; how long does it last for heaven’s sake? She’s difficult all right; you’ve been a well-matched pair this last year. Moved to arithmetic by the approach of this physiological phenomenon, you reflected incredulously that she was forty-three, two years older than yourself. She didn’t look more than thirty. Her skin was still as fresh and healthy-looking as an apple, and the lord knows her tongue hadn’t stiffened up any. When she suddenly decided to go to Florida, around the last of January, it was at first a great relief, but soon you were considering that the important thing was to get rid of time somehow, even disagreeably, and wishing her back again.
You moved to the club, and still you seldom slept at Eighty-fifth Street. Some weeks you would go there only once; others you were there every evening. You never went without phoning her in advance, and you never phoned her without a feeling of unreality, a feeling that you were doing something too implausible to be believed in. Put to the torture, you could not have answered the question, why do you do this? Seated at the desk, your hand would reach for the telephone (for you had discontinued the trips to the cigar store booth); you would draw it back and demand, why? Sometimes, you would dispose of the question out of hand with a grim and determined reaction: all right, I won’t; and you wouldn’t; but that merely postponed it for twenty-four hours. Oftener, you would sit and argue it. What need could she satisfy that could not be better satisfied elsewhere? How could there be any actual bond between you; and if there were none, except in your imagination, could you not control that and defeat it? Homely, vulgar, half-witted, illiterate—how could you see all that so well and still be blind to it?
Sometimes you would say, these things happen, they are fate. Many people are held together by bonds so profoundly concealed that to reason they seem idiotic, and yet so strong that no force can loosen them. Very well, if this had happened to you it was not your fault; why not accept it and have done with it? For ten years you had been complaining that life was stale, nothing interested you; you were interested enough now, weren’t you? What were you ashamed of? She was homely, vulgar, half-witted, illiterate.…Bah, words. She was false and treacherous. Maybe not, if you accepted her—who wouldn’t be, the way you were acting? She was evil—what do you mean, evil? No, damn it, don’t squirm out of it, don’t evade it, don’t jump away from it like a scared imbecile—what do you mean, evil? Perverted…O classic blah! Ha, Erma too then? And Mrs. Davis, especially Mrs. Davis. And everybody alive, judging from what you hear. Dick, about the only time you heard him talk of it, made no bones about it. And what that orchestra conductor said when he was on trial during the war—of course that’s different, he was a European.—So you’re trying to get away from it again—no you don’t—oh no, you don’t—what do you mean, evil? You don’t mean perverted, that’s silly. What do you mean?
Well. Evil is not seen, it is felt. It is not defined, it is conveyed. Deliver us from evil. It depends of course on what is evil to you. She is obscene. You always take a bath.…
Grant the evil. That’s why. She is evil, and you get a kick out of it. No. You get revulsion, disgust, hatred. Bitter and burning hatred. But you have harbored her for twenty years. She turned into a ghost and then she came back again. Did you hate the ghost? You hated yourself. There’s no answer to that; you’re crazy. Go on and telephone, you might as well. Tell her you hate yourself more than usual tonight, so you’re coming up and take her to a show.…
Sometimes you would go directly from the office and take her to dinner, but more often you would dine first at the club. But for her insatiable fondness for the theatre, there would have been nothing to do except sit and read, until spring came and you could drive into the country, for there wasn’t a subject under the sun she would talk about. You’ve tried her a thousand times; she simply wouldn’t talk. Did she ever, alone with Grace, for instance? Not when you were along, for occasionally, finding Grace there, you would invite her to accompany you to dinner, and Millicent wouldn’t say twenty words during the entire meal. Once or twice, when Grace returned with you after dinner and you went to the leather chair with a book, you could hear them in the bedroom by the hour—Grace’s low-pitched, pleasant but endless chatter about nothing, and only at long intervals Millicent’s thin grave tone: “That must have been very nice.”
She always seemed to be afraid of words; she wouldn’t even answer questions if she could help it. Like the day you asked her about Dick. That was in late spring, around the middle of May. Erma had returned from Florida and was talking of going to Scotland for the summer, and wanted you to go along. You and she had dined with Fulton and his fourth wife, on his roof, and, allured by the mild May air, she had suggested a walk and had sent Dorst on to pick you up at Fifty-ninth Street. As you were crossing the avenue at Fifty-seventh you got caught in the center and stood there at the edge of the solid slow-moving traffic, glancing carelessly at the cars as they crept past; and suddenly your careless glance became a stare as you saw Dick and Millicent side by side in a taxicab not ten feet away. They were looking the other way and obviously had not seen you, nor had Erma seen them.
“How far are we?” said Erma. “I’m getting tired. Damn physiology anyway. Come along to Scotland and we’ll ride around on ponies—we’re too old to walk.”
You were conscious of no particular emotion, except curiosity. It was not conceivable that Dick—and yet he had married Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes. He had done other things too; he was weird, and catholic, when it came to women. This was rich—oh this was juicy! The homely little slut!
The next day was Saturday and Dick didn’t come in. In the evening you went to Eighty-fifth Street early, before dinner, and after you had glanced through the evening paper you found an opportunity to say casually, with your eye on her face:
“Have you seen Dick since that day at the office?”
She displayed not the slightest change of expression.
“Dick? You mean Mr. Carr?”
“No, I mean Moby Dick. I mean Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London.”
She looked at you calmly without replying.
“Yes, I mean Dick Carr. Have you seen him?”
“Why yes, we saw him that evening at the theatre, don’t you remember?”
“No. It wasn’t me. You were probably with Mr. Peft or Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Barrymore.”
She chuckled. “I remember now, it was Grace. She thought he was very good-looking.”
“Well, have you seen him since?—Oh what’s the use. I just wondered how you would handle it. I saw you and Dick in a taxicab on Fifth Avenue last evening.”
She picked up a book from the table, made as if to sit down with it, and then put it back again, and remained standing. The movement was unhurried and methodical, but for her it was a frenzy of agitation.
“I suppose you were on your way here?” you sneered, trying not to.
She was standing still as a statue, the way she so often does, her arms hanging at her sides, her head languidly erect, motionless as a grey dark cloud on a windless day.
“I’m sorry you saw us,” she said. “I didn’t want you to know until it was all done.”
“Really!” You put the paper down and stared at her. “Really!”
“I think he is going to give me a lot of money,” she went on. “I’ve only seen him twice, and we don’t do anything you wouldn’t like. Even if I would he wouldn’t want to. He said he wouldn’t. He used to give me money a long time ago—when I knew you. He’s just sorry for me, and he’s so rich.…”
“I thought you didn’t care for money.”
“I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t want money from you. I’d take all I could get from him. I think he’s going to give me one hundred thousand dollars. He says I could live on the interest.”
“Where were you going last night?”
“We ate dinner at a restaurant downtown to talk it over, and he was bringing me home. He didn’t come upstairs though.”
“What restaurant?”
“Why, I didn’t notice. He took me.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“At the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street.”
She turned and sat down; she was through. You looked at her, and you let the next question die in your throat; when her lips got that twisted look and her eyes turned away from you like that, with a jerk, you might as well question a tree-stump. There was a rush of blood to your head, but you fought it back. You got to your feet, shoved your hands into your pockets, and walked to the window and back again.
“I don’t believe a goddam word of it,” you said.
She didn’t reply; she was reading; but after a long pause, seeing that you weren’t going to speak again, she said, “It’s all true. I wouldn’t lie to you about Mr. Carr.”
Always before that, in your occasional conversations about him, she had called him Dick.
Of course, you got nothing more out of her. Late that night walking home, as you often did, you considered at your leisure the amazing fact that while you might not have been greatly affected by an admission from her that Dick was sharing her favors with you, you were furiously humiliated by the idea of his making a princely gift that would mean financial independence for her. Bah, you thought, no danger, remember her alimony tale. Anyway Dick, though generous, wasn’t a jackass. Then the alternative…well, what of it, Dick or Mr. Gowan, Dick or Mr. Martin…what’s the difference.…But underneath was a deep and intense resentment.
She didn’t mention it again. Now and then you would say, “When you get the hundred thousand let me know, we’ll have a spree,” but she would either not reply or would say, “I haven’t got it yet,” as if you were talking of the laundry. Once or twice you came near asking Dick about it, point-blank, but the words wouldn’t come out. If it were true, he would certainly say so—and what then? Or if it proved to be merely one of her little inventions, it would be embarrassing and would open up difficulties. But you wanted miserably to know.…
Did you know that Dick had been here, in the apartment? No you don’t know it even now for a certainty, though for a while you thought you did, that evening you found the inscription on the statue. That was June, late in June, just before Erma sailed for Scotland. You had been here before dinner, and for an hour or two afterward, before you noticed it; you saw it when you went over to take a book from the table. There it was, printed in big black sprawling letters on the rough unpolished marble of the column: BATTLING BILL. You must have betrayed your surprise by an exclamation or something, for when you turned to Millicent, she had already looked up from her book and her eyes were on you. You were furious, instantly suspicious, but you tried to control your voice.
“Who did that?” you demanded, pointing at it.
“I did, this morning, I just happened to think of it,” she replied.
“That’s a lie. I want to know who did it.”
With no resentment in her voice, but speaking a little more slowly than usual, and a little louder, “There’s no sense in your telling me I lie everything I say,” she said, and resumed her book.
You approached her chair. “All right, then you did it. Why?”
She looked up, but did not answer. You stood staring at her, then went and looked again at the inscription, printed unevenly on the rough marble; then, with a shrug of your shoulders, went to the bathroom and came back with a towel. As you bent over, rubbing the letters off one by one with your back to her, Millicent’s voice came, unruffled and calm:
“One of the girls downstairs that’s studying art gave me the crayon. She said it was art crayon. I guess that’s what made me think of it, I wanted to use it on something.”
Still you thought it must have been Dick; she didn’t have wit enough. Was it Dick, had he been here? Probably; but just as probably not. There’s no telling—hell, there’s no telling anything. You hadn’t been here the evening before, he might have done it then. Or she might have been telling the truth.…
With that trivial episode something seemed to break. You knew you must do something. Finally and inescapably you must do something. There was nothing to do, you told yourself in bitter despair, nothing you could do. Very well, you must do something anyhow. Anything, no matter what, but something definite, the time was past for arguing about it. Night after night you could not sleep, sometimes you didn’t even go to bed. The fantasies had deserted you, and your mind was left naked and raw. One night, long after midnight, you walked from Eighty-fifth Street clear to the Battery and stood there, on the edge of the pier, wondering if you would really drown if you jumped in.…A man and woman walked past, and a policeman came up and began talking to you.…
Go to Scotland with Erma? Good god no. She went, more hostile and resentful than you had ever seen her, still in the midst of her difficulty, with a maid and a nurse and a dozen trunks. Why not, then, swallow the thing whole and go off somewhere with Millicent for good? That appeared to you the most definite and conclusive; it’s the sensible thing to do, you said. But you couldn’t even propose it to her; the prospect overwhelmed you with its surrender and degradation. Then go to Paul, in Rome; he was your son, tell him so; what was a son for? Bury yourself in his life—sure. It didn’t take long to dispose of that. It’s strange how clear-headed you were about it—a wonder you didn’t take a ship and chase that phantom and try desperately to clutch it.
All right, but you must do something.…
You were afraid to tell Millicent you were going to leave her and never see her again, afraid of the unconcerned disbelief you knew you would see in her face. You told her merely that you were going away alone and didn’t know when you would be back, but she must have remarked that your manner of saying it was odd. When you told Dick, briefly, that you needed a change and were leaving for an indefinite period he didn’t seem surprised, but was considerably concerned; and you didn’t even write to Jane, who was at the seashore with the children. Even if you had wanted to you couldn’t have replied definitely to Dick’s anxious questions, for beyond the first step you had no plans. One evening around the middle of July you went to the Pennsylvania Station and got a westbound train.
The activity of the preparations had buoyed you up, the packing, the arrangements at the office, the formidable wad of travelers’ checks from the bank, this had an air of decision and purpose; but that night in the Pullman compartment you sat in misery and desolation, locked in your little box as the solid-vestibuled extra-fare tram hurled itself through the night like a screaming idiot. You were running away, a beaten coward, but that didn’t trouble you. Where were you going and what were you going to do? The project you had formed with a thrill of hope now appeared puerile and ridiculous, an aimless and empty gesture of forlorn desperation; nevertheless you would go through with it. Tomorrow morning.…You invited fantasies, but they wouldn’t come; or forced to appear, there was no blood in them, merely puppets on strings; and with a fierce masochism your mind would dart away from them to plunge itself into the gloom of reality. You were going—from nothing into nothing. You were running away—from nothing; for though unformulated and unadmitted you felt profoundly the conviction that what you were struggling blindly to escape from would never be left behind—it was there with you, tenaciously and eternally; it was buried in your heart, in your flesh and bones; no matter what agonies it might bring, no matter what sacrifices you might offer or what frenzied retreats you might make, it was literally inescapable. There was no imaginable way out.
But out of what? Good god what was it? You suddenly beat your fists against your knees, frantic, and shouted against the roar of the train:
“But it’s terrible, it’s terrible! I’d do anything, by god I’d do anything!” And then sat there looking at the black window, ashamed and afraid, wondering in sober earnest if you were going mad.