IT WAS TEN THIRTY that night when the phone rang and Celia thought, Dorr, something’s wrong. The one worry that still fretted her was that Dori might suddenly wake up one night, sick, and be there all alone, without even a maid to summon help. But the voice on the phone was a man’s voice, not very familiar.
“Celia, it’s Matthew Poole, I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Heavens. In this house?” She laughed. “Even the kids are awake.”
“I gathered you were night owls. Something Marshall said once about Nachtmusik.”
“And not always kleine.” She was ridiculously glad to hear from Matthew Poole. All at once she knew she had been right at Dori’s a couple of weeks ago, though they had not referred to it since. “It’s rather fun to get late phone calls, unless it’s some drunk, so did you want Marshall?”
“As a matter of fact, it’s you, not Marshall.” He was keeping his voice light and wondered if she knew he was. “I’ve been trying to reach Dori Gray and having no luck, and I hoped you’d give me an address that would find her.”
“She’s away for a few weeks.”
“That’s what her doorman said; I went by there. Some sort of cruise, and you pick up her mail every few days.”
“Yes, I do.”
“But I’d like to wire or cable her and I wondered if you’d give me the next stop on her itinerary.”
“I, well, you see—”
There was a pause. Like Dori she had rehearsed the answer to every foreseeable comment or question, but this was one she had not foreseen and she was caught. To say to Matthew Poole, You can’t wire or cable her, all you can do is write her at her regular address and I’ll forward it and she will get it in due time—this would be a rudeness so signal that it would flag his attention at once.
It was he who broke the silence. “Look here, Celia,” he said, no longer casual. “I know about Dori. She told me the last time I saw her. So even if you’re not telling anybody else where she is—”
“Know what about Dori?” It sounded cautious, and it was cautious. She did like Matthew Poole, but she did not know him very well, and how could she be sure that when he said he knew about Dori, he actually knew this? Dori certainly had not told her that he did.
“Know that Dori—I wish this weren’t the telephone.”
“We’re not bugged. Are you?”
He laughed; the whole concept was uncomfortable. “It might be better if you could let me see you tomorrow or next day for a few minutes. Would you?”
“Tomorrow if you like.”
“About five? For about ten minutes?”
“Even fifteen.”
As she was putting up the receiver she glanced again at the clock. Only five minutes had passed; Dori would not be asleep. Of course she would consult her as to whether to tell him where she was; the only question was whether it would distress her to know he was trying to see her, and if so, whether she might not wait until morning so as not to risk Dori’s having a worried night. Or ought she to keep it to herself until she had seen Matthew Poole, heard what he had to say and had something more informative to pass along to Dori than the mere fact of his telephone call?
She wished she could ask Marshall’s opinion, but that would only end by irking her, as she had been irked when she had finally told him Dori was pregnant. “Is this for real?” he had said. “I thought she couldn’t.” She could hear again the instant curiosity in his voice, very satisfying indeed.
“It will be born in July.”
“Is the guy willing to get married?”
“He is married, with four children.”
“Who is it?”
“My guess is that it’s a newspaperman she’s been seeing for a year or so, but you know Dori about what she calls ‘he-said-I-said’ talk. I did gather they were winding up their affair when it happened.”
“Did he walk out on her when he knew?”
“She didn’t tell him.”
He nodded as if to say, Sensible girl. Then he had asked how people were taking it.
“Nobody’s ‘taking it’ because nobody knows about it except her brother Gene and me, and now you. She’s not going to play Emancipated Female for her own ego and have her kid called ‘dirty little bastard’ all its life.”
“Good for her.” He had glanced down at his work then, and she had known that his brief curiosity was over. He knew everything he needed to know; male-like, he now was returning to important things like the contracts being drawn up for a subsidiary company specializing in cartridges of taped music. She had been irked then; a hundred times since she had been irked again for he never showed more than a perfunctory interest whenever she gave him any further news about how things were going. Nor would he now if she asked his advice about Poole’s call.
She was irritated at her dear beloved husband. He was still, after eighteen years, the one man she could imagine being married to, was still, among the hundreds of men she had met through his large business connections, the only one she could imagine as an abiding and continuing person in her life. Mainly he was easy to get along with, though they had the usual number of spats and quarrels, and he was delighted with the kids, though he never had enough time for them. He seemed happy with her most of the time, though he was quickly bored if she talked about politics, and if he had ever had in those eighteen years an affair with another woman, he had had the wit and the skill to keep it to himself in every way, with no telltale absences or careless shreds of evidence. So he was a good husband and it was a good marriage but at times she wanted to scream at him or hit him for being so immersed in his big successful record business that his attention span for anything else was about four minutes long.
Now she gazed for a third time at the clock and then dialed Dori. “You’re not asleep,” she greeted her. “I can tell by your voice.”
“Of course I’m not.”
“Dori, for a minute I wondered whether to hold this back until tomorrow, but I decided not.”
“Hold what back?”
“Well, Matthew Poole just phoned and asked for your address, and naturally I ducked and then he persisted and asked if he could stop in tomorrow.”
“Stop in where tomorrow?”
“Oh here. I didn’t give him your address or phone or anything, of course.”
“Of course.” She swallowed in a suddenly dry mouth. “What did he say, Cele?”
“Just that he’s been anxious to get in touch with you and had phoned and phoned and then that he went by your house and asked your doorman and got the cruise bit and also that I picked up your mail to forward. So he wanted me to give him the next stop on your itinerary, as if he’d cable you or call you person-to-person at the North Pole or wherever.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I got around it, sort of gulping ‘Well, you see,’ and not being too good about managing it. Then he switched tactics and said he ‘knew’ about you, that you’d told him the last time he’d seen you, so even if I wasn’t giving your address to anybody else—”
“ ‘Knew’ about me? Did he say what he knew?”
“He was as cagey as I, as if he didn’t know if I knew. Anyway, then I decided I’d have to clear it with you before he gets here. He’s coming at five unless you tell me to head him off.”
“Oh Cele.” She fell silent, and Cele waited in silence too. The telephone line was live between them, they each knew it, nobody had to ask, “Are we cut off?” yet neither was ready to say the next word. Dori was waiting for order to come, for her heart to stop its lurching, for a decision to be made about what to say, how much to say. “He does know I’m pregnant,” she said firmly at last. “He also knows that it had happened just before I met him. Remember the Martin Luther King night when I suddenly told you I had been having an affair and that it was all over—”
“Certainly I remember. But you barely started and then you clipped it short.”
“I know I did. Well, anyway, I haven’t seen Matthew Poole, or heard from him, since New Year’s, and I don’t know what this call of his means, but of course give him my phone number and address if he wants them, and after he’s been, will you call me and—” She burst into an embarrassed laughter. “Will you listen to me? Clickety-clack, clackety-click, like some gushing adolescent.”
Cele laughed too. “That’s not what adolescents sound like. Liz would say ‘groovy’ or ‘hey, man,’ or something lyric and poetic like that. Me, I’m glad you’re shook up. I hope he’s worth it; I told you we didn’t know him very well but liked him.”
“I am all shook up. Cele, what I’m trying to say is all of a sudden there was Matthew at your house and then three or four weeks later, there was no more Matthew, and I do want to tell you all about it but now I have to wait and see what any of this means.”
“Sure you do.”
“Call me.”
“I might at that. Good night. I have a feeling of being deus ex machina or something, big sense of power.”
Dori tried to go back to the book she had been reading, but couldn’t keep her mind on it. She was wondering what Matthew’s sudden determined effort to find her might mean.
That he loved her, that he had at last “got it into shape,” that he was going to come to her in remorse and longing and renewed passion.
Her body swirled with her own sexuality at the thought, swirled and spun and swooped as it had not since the day they had parted. Except in dreaming, she had been devoid of sexuality, despite Dr. Jesskin’s pronouncements on the heightened presence she could expect. Now suddenly she saw that it was still possible, instantly possible, waiting only to be summoned forth from whatever locked and frozen cell it had fled to on that fierce day when he had gone off with his coat over his arm.
But that was the day after New Year’s and this was the middle of April. Three months to get it into “some sort of shape”? Three months to come to terms with it? There was something wrong in the equation. A week, two weeks—she would have understood that, have read nothing into it, would never have needed to excuse it or make allowances for it. But three months? A quarter of a year? A third of a pregnancy? Something was excessive about it, something in Matthew was all twisted round or knotted up, else he would not have needed three months.
But remember the way you blurted it out at him.
Now don’t go blaming it on yourself; you can’t always be in the wrong. Don’t you go twisting it around and knotting it up until it’s all your fault. You’ve always been too damn ready to be the hurt instead of the hurter and he did hurt you, and then kept on hurting you, on and on.
She felt restless and uneasy. She jumped up from the big chair and reached for her coat. She had to move, stir, stretch, not sit bound in that chair in this limited space. Never since living here had she gone out for a walk at this hour but she was going out now. She threw a scarf over her hair, wondered briefly whether the heavy coat would be too warm, wore it anyway, and let herself out into the mild night.
There was still music drifting from open windows up and down the wide street but few people. She turned toward the park, knowing that she would not enter it, and began walking briskly down Central Park West. Ahead lay all the night splendor of the New York sky, the twinkling levels of whole lighted floors in some of the great buildings, the reckless fling of other lights as if they had been strewn from a wild hand at accidental windows. She loved it. No matter what happened to her in the future she would always live in New York. It was her city, her hometown, her world. For all its viciousness and crime and noise and filth and cruelty, it also was the core of all the life she really valued: music, theater, ideas, books, newspapers, people. London rebuked her at once, Paris, Rome, and she made obeisances and apologies to her memories of all three but still she walked on toward the great jagging skyline below the park, loving it.
She walked on the west side of the street, past one apartment building after another, their lobbies alight, nearly all presided over by doormen. She felt safe proceeding from one pool of lighted sidewalk to the next like a child jumping from rock to rock to cross a stream. If anybody did dart out at her from an intervening strip of shadow, one cry would bring help.
But nobody darted. Soon she felt foolish for having considered so dire a possibility; between the sheepishness and the exalted response to the night sky, she slowly regained an inner calm. The wariness was tempered, she suddenly saw; the rush of readiness for Matthew was still there but in some way it was tempered too.
She was changing. Not only her body, but she, the whole being that she was. These months over here alone had surprised her in some unfathomable depth of herself, far down, far below anything she had known of herself before. This loneliness of the three months over here had not been her old enemy, had not been arid, not a long spell of bleakness that would remain and remain and remain, not the old-style loneliness she had always fought off like a dark tenacious illness. This had been a factual aloneness, that was all. There had been many days and evenings when she saw not one soul but a grocery clerk, yet there had been no misery in the idea alone.
She was changing. She hadn’t thought of that, but tonight, with Matthew once again entering her life, on whatever basis, tonight she wondered for the first time if it would be the same Dori Gray he would find.
She woke thinking, He may call me right after he sees Cele. But how to get through all the hours until five? She was due at Dr. Jesskin’s at eight thirty and she was glad the day was starting with a specific task to do. Dr. Jesskin’s house visits were to have started with this one but when she had seen him in March he had said, “You are splendidly thin and tight; your musculature is clearly of the highest order.”
“The exercises you ordered. And the three hard miles every single day.”
“It must have been there before the exercises. Are you an athlete?”
“I love tennis and swimming, and I’ve always done lots, but not as an athlete, on school teams or anything.”
“They have served you. Sometimes it is simply a case of good health, and good construction to start with. At any rate you will still be able to come here next month and my house calls will start in May. So you see I have made one miscalculation already. I am glad.”
Her good construction. Each time she had recalled the phrase again, she had smiled. That and the three thinkings were the things she would always remember about him probably, apart from the great thing. She knew nothing about him as a person, only as a doctor, and if there was any flaw in him as a doctor, either through the long years of the “so-called sterility” period or now during these incredible months since the day of infamy, then it was a flaw too microscopic for her unaided vision. She remembered the smiling faces on his desk, his wife and children, and thought, No wonder.
She had switched from the old fur coat at last, to an old loosely cut tweed of her own that was equally shapeless and nonrevealing, but as her taxi drew up to Dr. Jesskin’s office, she still looked quickly about, up and down the avenue, fumbling for her fare so that if there were a familiar face anywhere she could sit back unseen until any danger of a meeting was past. Here on Park Avenue, there was still danger; over there where she lived, she had long since learned that there was none.
She had quickly given up the old sports hat pulled down far on her face, realizing that in the scarf-over-the-hair environment there she was merely calling attention to herself. She had taken to scarves too, because of the severe cold, but since the first thaw of March, she had even given those up most of the time. She never had her hair done any longer; that was her only disguise. She let it grow, washed it every few days, let it hang loosely around her neck, and at times thought, I’ll never go back to the damn beauty parlor racket again anyway. That final rinse they always give you “for highlights,” really! Now she saw that her own hair was slightly deeper in tone, more really brown, and she liked it. Some sketchy gray had begun to come in at the temples, for so long toned away by the “rinse,” and she saw it with some surprise, with some displeasure, and then, upon reflection, with acceptance and even with approval. It was becoming, just a faint grayish feather above the outer corner of each eye, and she had never even known before that the paired plumes were there.
There was nobody in sight on the street and she stepped quickly into the office. Miss Stein was not yet there but Miss Mack said, “There you are, always on the dot,” and led her in to change. “The doctor is ready. He’s always on the dot too—you’d better believe it.”
The locution amused her. She was more and more fond of Miss Mack, increasingly impressed with her behavior. Not once in all the visits since that day of the lab report had Miss Mack betrayed the fact that she knew Dori was pregnant. She seemed to have perfected some trick of seeing her only from the neck up; even when her hands were busily draping that sheet around torso and legs, she directed her gaze only at the upper part of her body, above the pregnant belly, above the enlarged breasts, above any and all evidence, even avoiding any direct gaze into Dori’s eyes, settling instead on a point just below her chin.
Now as she stripped, Dori had the mischievous impulse to turn naked to Miss Mack and say, “Hey, look, I’m pregnant,” but to Miss Mack it would have been a gibe, a jeer at the way she did her job, so the impulse died. In the togalike sheet, she stepped on the standing scale in the examining room, knowing in advance what her weight would be, and heard Miss Mack say, “Good, you’re obeying orders; the fatties annoy us so.”
For the first time Dori used the small step stool to get herself up on the table. A sign of progress! Again the stirrups, the hiss of the sterilizer, the clink of steel instruments, but how marvelously unrelated to the years of dogged persistence and fading hope. Even if she had been like some pregnant women, prey to a dozen ailments and miseries all through, this was what she would never have let herself forget, this blessed difference from that void time.
“Good morning, and how has it been going?”
“Good morning, Doctor.” From the table, she twisted her head backward to where he was coming in by the door from his office. “Except for my panic call that day about a lawyer, I’ve been grand.”
He ignored the reference. “No physical discomfort in any way?”
“Not really. I don’t skip and hop and run, but nothing you could label physical discomfort.”
“I expected not.”
He began the examination, silent as always, swift, satisfied. Then he moved his stethoscope down from her rib cage to her protruding belly, gently pressing it here and there until suddenly he nodded and smiled. “Strong and clear,” he said.
“Oh, Doctor!”
“Do you want to hear for yourself?”
“Of course I do. Can I?”
He reached for another stethoscope, saying, “This one is weighted, to amplify sound,” and fitted the twin tubes to her ears. She raised her head, craning forward, and then sat up, lowering her head to shorten the distance. Dr. Jesskin was holding the rounded listening tip to the spot where he had heard the hidden heartbeat, and she waited to hear it too. But she heard nothing. She sat forward a little more. She could hear nothing.
“It is there,” he said calmly. “Sometimes the untrained ear does not catch it, but it is there. Quite decided, quite clear.”
She listened again and suddenly said, “I think, I really do think—I can’t be sure.”
“You undoubtedly did.” Dr. Jesskin took the ear tubes back and turned toward the scale, stooping to read the precise quarter pound. Then he said, “When you are dressed,” and returned to his office. Dori glanced in triumph at Miss Mack who returned the glance with her air of knowing nothing, as if stethoscopes placed on stomachs sent no message to her brain. Even her remark about fatties annoying “us” had not been a definite admission that she knew Dori was pregnant; twelve years ago during the “sterility visits,” if her weight had been what it should be in the charts of Miss Mack’s mind, she would have been as likely to say, “good, the fatties annoy us.”
Dr. Jesskin stood as she went in to his desk. Sometimes he did this, with a courteous reach for the back of her chair, at other times he sat ignoring her entrance entirely, reading the opened folder and his last notations. Today his expression indicated that there were no notations on which he needed to refresh himself.
“You follow every textbook of normalcy,” he said. “It would be extraordinary if any deviation showed up now. How do you sleep?”
“I take a couple of aspirin and then read until about twelve.”
“You will later on want some help, and then I will prescribe.” He looked at the ceiling as if to avoid a direct glance. “My friend Bob Cox is more than ready, I will say eager, to handle your case. This time I told him much, everything I know of you and the long history behind this birth. It is all in confidence, I need not say. Even from his partners.”
She started to thank him but he waved off any such idea. “You will not need to consult him until much later, perhaps in September or October. And I miscalculated again; his fee will be no extravagance at all.”
“But—”
“He feels some sort of vested interest: we are old friends. He was at Harvard Law while I was at Harvard Medical. Now his son and my son are finishing up at Law and in June they both become junior clerks in his office.”
“Will they be working on my case too?”
“Neither one will ever hear your name or see your documents.” He consulted his desk calendar, but only as a reflex action, hardly pausing over the riffling pages. “Now as to the next part of your schedule, the seventh and eighth months. You will of course no longer come to the office. I begin the house calls. Eight thirty in the morning, May thirteenth, on my way here—will that be convenient?”
“Any time is convenient.”
“Do you know what the advent of the seventh month means?”
“That it would live.”
The four words were so simple, so strong, that the sudden waver in her throat startled her. It was like the first time she had felt the small firm thump; again there was that chasm between what she had always known and the moment it became her private knowing, within her own blood and bones and ligaments.
“That is so,” Dr. Jesskin said. “It would have achieved completion in the biological order, but of course you will go to full term and not need to prove that.”
He sounded genial, pleased with her as if this advent of the seventh month were an achievement she was to be praised for, and she left feeling that she had been applauded by the one mentor whose good grades and good graces she most wanted in all the world. Only when she was once more tucked safely into a taxi did she suddenly think, I wonder if he’ll take Miss Mack along on May thirteenth, to stand there, during the house call. She laughed aloud, and then for the first time since she had entered Dr. Jesskin’s office she remembered that this afternoon at five Matthew would be talking about her to Cele.
The doorbell rang but she moved automatically toward the telephone and then stopped, knowing it had made no sound. Ever since Cele had called her two hours ago, she had waited for his call, even turning the evening news program down low so that the volume left wide margins for hearing her muted telephone bell at its first ring.
“He’s just left,” Cele had said. “He really is determined to see you. He said right off and flat out that you were in love: That was almost the way he greeted me, sort of, ‘Thank you for letting me come. Look here, you see, Dori and I are in love, were in love, no, let me say I was in love with Dori and then he went on to say he’d been going through a—‘bad time’ is what he called it, and he didn’t once say ‘pregnant’ as if he still wasn’t sure I knew and wasn’t about to give you away. He sounded as if it had been pretty rough, and that it had baffled him, I mean his own feelings had, and that finally something had clued him into another way of looking at it, and that he wouldn’t want me to give him your address without checking first with you, but would I call you long distance then and there wherever you were, at his expense, and ask you, and then give it to him. He nearly fell apart when I said you were right in New York and that I had already had your permission and then gave him your number and your address.”
Ten times she had wanted to interrupt Cele’s tumble of words but so sure was she that Matthew would telephone within minutes that she was afraid to tie up her own line and had held back all her questions. But then nothing. She had tried to eat and could not; she had bathed quickly, ready to go wringing wet to the telephone, but it had remained silent. She had dressed in the navy blue silk and put on the white coral earrings, just in case his call included a question about when he could see her, and as if there were some guarantee of continuity if she appeared now to him as she had appeared on that wrenched-off last visit.
Not the same. Now there was nothing faint and hesitant and uncertain. There still was her own slenderness in arms, legs, face, throat, but now there was a hard shining belly, not soft or pudgy or fat, but hard and gleaming like stretched silk.
The doorbell rang again and this time she moved swiftly to the door, hand on the knob, eye to the peephole. “Who is it?”
“Me, Matthew.”‘
The deep voice, the Matthew sound, like no other sound. She drew the bolts and opened the door. There he stood, thinner, older, his face not happy in greeting. “Cele said you were alone, so I decided not to talk first on the telephone.”
“Oh Matthew,” she said, and all the wary words were lost. She stepped aside and he came in, saying nothing, looking at her, looking at her face as if to draw forth from it something sustaining, looking openly down to the bulk he had never seen, openly and easily and without pretense. Then he looked up again, saw the brush of gray he had never seen in her hair, saw her intent eyes.
“My God, you are beautiful,” he said. He still did not move toward her and she stood still, not wanting to make the first gesture, not wanting to offer him the first touch. “I thought you couldn’t be the way I remembered, and you are.”
He turned abruptly and looked at the room, also carefully and at length. “So here’s where you’ve been all along.” He made a sound that would have been a laugh at some other time. “And I was imagining you in England or France or Timbuktu. Celia Duke said you like being here.”
“I’ve grown attached to it. Isn’t it hideous?”
He suddenly laughed. There was a burst to the sound, a breaking of constriction, a freeing, and he stepped toward her and said, “Oh, my God, Dori.” He put a hand on her shoulder and drew her toward him and felt her move within the drawing arm and suddenly she was tight against him and he felt the hard rounding bulk of her that he had never felt, and again he said, “My God, Dori,” and the words were gritty in his throat.
“What about a drink?” she said, pulling back from him. “I need one too.” He said, “Scotch, please,” and the hesitant look returned. A thin strip of sympathy went around her throat like a cord, unexpected and tight, and she said, “You take the big chair. It’s the only decent one in the place.”
While she made their drinks he was silent and so was she. Then she sat down on the low wood platform and looked up at him and smiled. He was so strained and uncomfortable that the impulse rose in her to say, “Never mind, it’s over now, don’t feel awful about it, let’s forget it.” But something clamped down on the words—it was not over, not really, not until it was understood equally by each of them and accepted equally, if acceptable it proved to be. One could “understand” anything; long ago she had understood Tony and his sudden announcement that he was through, but that had been no protection from what lay ahead. Just the same she could not find it in her to insist here and now on an accounting.
“What about the Benting case?” she asked over her untouched Scotch. “And Johnny, is he all right again at school?”
He answered the second question first, and she saw his relief in the alacrity and detail with which he spoke. He talked of Hildy too, of her increasing aloofness and secretiveness; at her birthday party, he had not been astonished at the shaggy look of some of her friends, nor at the incessant twang of guitars, but he had once thought that he had smelled the acrid sweet smell of marijuana. He had wanted to go straight in and ask, “Is anybody smoking pot in here?” and had not done it, remembering Hildy’s harsh scorn of “parents who thought they could run every minute of their children’s lives.” Had not done it, and felt not proud of his restraint but uncertain of his fitness for parenthood in the new universe of liberated youth. “If there was ever a classless society,” he ended, “today’s teen-agers are it—they’re wonderful, they’re impossible, all of them alike.”
And then he told her briefly about Jim Benting and his parents, and the appeal, and again she heard relief in his voice, as at a reprieve. He really did not want to explain the three months, not yet at least; he did not want to go over the weeks of absence, he wanted only to forget them. He had come to some point with himself that had made him ashamed of his own behavior, and he was grateful that she was not standing there invincible and demanding, a Juno figure of outraged womanhood demanding explanations.
“Oh, Matthew,” she suddenly said, “you don’t really want to talk about it now. Cele said you called it ‘a bad time,’ and I thought you’d want to tell me but if you don’t want to for a while, you don’t need to.”
He suddenly stood up, looking down at her. “It’s nothing I’m proud of.”
She put her hand out as if she were going to touch him but did not. “You once said we shouldn’t make all the young mistakes, remember?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then let’s not.”
There was silence and then he was down beside her, his arms around her, his mouth against hers. “Darling, I’ll be careful,” he said at last, and passion swirled again in her, a vortex, rotating upon itself, not to be resisted. She undressed, stood naked for a long time, letting him see her as she was, turning down no light, seeking no nightgown or covering. He looked at her and nodded as if in acceptance, and she nodded too, gazing down at her distended body, seeing gladly the gourdlike roundness, so purposeful with its silken taut stretch of skin.
Matthew stayed most of the night, making a telephone call after midnight which she could hear clearly from the bathroom where she had gone to give him a semblance of privacy when he said he’d better call home. “I’m sorry to call this late,” he said almost formally into the telephone, “but I won’t be in for a couple of hours yet.” She wondered at the formality, and wondered for perhaps the first time what, exactly, was the actual status of his and Joan’s relationship, when staying out half the night could be managed with one brief phone call after midnight. Obviously there was very little of any tight proprietary hold left. On both sides? Or only on his?
For the first time she wondered if this loose arrangement made Joan unhappy and wanted to ask him and could not. A swift memory flew across her mind of Dick Towson saying of his own absences from home, “I’ve got a damn good marriage in all the usual twenty-five-years-of-it ways, steady, and no surprises, and all the kids know I’ll always be back, so it’s okay and you and I don’t ever have to worry about it.” Perhaps Matthew could say the same thing about Joan and his kids and say, too, “You and I don’t ever have to worry about it.” As if he were saying, That is intact.
The family intactness. As if he were saying, Sure, I love you, but what’s that got to do with anything—meaning his continuing patterns, his true life at home, apart from her. To her, home used to mean that closed apartment; intact used to mean her other life over there on the other side of the park, her real life, with her books and paintings and colors and continuity. Now home was here, right in this place where she lived day by day; the truest life she had ever known was this life, not the other one she had accepted for so many years as the only one.
Change. People did change, life did change, not everything remained intact and untouchable forever. She, in any case, had changed already. Was it only temporary, delusive, not to prove real later on, when July twenty-third had come and gone? It was the first time the question had presented itself, but at once it had stature and importance.
“Darling, are you all right?” Matthew called. With a start she realized that his telephone call had ended minutes ago, and that she had stayed shut away as if to hide her skimming thoughts. In the instant she returned to him she forgot them, so wonderful was it to see him there, sitting on the edge of the disheveled bed, eager for talk, eager for her presence, eager soon to make love again. He stayed until four in the morning and when he was leaving, he said, as if he had left a sentence dangling a moment before, “But it’s no young mistake to put the ‘bad time’ on the record instead of evading it permanently.”
“I meant only that you didn’t want to talk about it tonight.”
“Maybe tomorrow night I will. About nine thirty?”
But through the second evening he did not talk about it, nor on the third. He wanted to be “filled in” on everything she had done; she found it delightful to retrace each step for him, the dilemma of the hideout, the rejection of Wyoming and Washington and all the other far-flung ideas, the apartment hunt and Mrs. Steffani, the brotherly mail drops, the reservation already made at Harkness.
“If you want more exotic postmarks than California and London,” he said, “we have some affiliate attorneys in Tokyo and Honolulu and Rio.”
“That would really clinch it. I’m not keeping in touch with many people anyway; to let them forget about my being gone is better. But one or two judicious little letters from Tokyo or Rio would fill it in for fair.”
Only afterward did she realize that she had said nothing about Cox, Wheaton, Fairchild, Tulliver and wondered that she had forgotten. She also wondered why Matthew had not asked her about her arrangements for the adoption. Was he still intending to check it out for her at the office, and proceed from there? And if he was, would she tell Dr. Jesskin to tell his Bob Cox that she wouldn’t be needing his services after all?
She felt a most unexpected reluctance to do so. She had appealed to Dr. Jesskin in crisis, and he had given time and thought and care to this, which was no integral part of his function as her doctor. Now to brush it all aside—“the lawyer I mentioned has come back and will handle it for me, thanks anyway”—that was impossible.
Better not let it chivy her; better let time take charge, as time had taken charge of so many other things. She did not want to accost Matthew with it either: You’re keeping awfully silent about lawyers on this adoption; are you trying to tell me something? Would you rather not get mixed up in it?
It was on Friday night, with the weekend separation facing them, that Matthew suddenly said, “I told you I could be a selfish bastard, and I guess that was the basis of this whole damn thing.”
He had still not talked about the bad time; now she went quite still, waiting, a nervous longing in her to have it over with and let it slide backwards into the past again. But he was talking about the night Jack Henning had finally demanded to know what was eating him and how he had, to his own surprise, sat there and told Jack about her.
“Then Jack said, ‘You offered to help her’ and I said it wasn’t like that, that you were a million miles from wanting help, and I told him why, and then a couple of weeks later, I suddenly remembered the way he had looked, comprehension dawning in him as if he had seen something basic and wondered what had kept me from seeing it. I knew he’d decided on the spot that it would be no good to spell it out for me, that I had to come on it all by myself. He was right.”
He turned away from her, and she wished it were over. Resentment arose obscurely in her, that he was still in misery over this, letting her see he was, as if he were charging her with it still.
Tony had done that transfer too. The very day after he had smashed their marriage, he had sent a letter from his office, by messenger to speed it, saying he was sending for his clothes and moving to a hotel, that he could not “go through another such night.” It was the letter of an ill-used man.
“And that basic thing,” Matthew went on heavily, “was that if you had been in a state of misery about getting pregnant, I’d have come through like a brick.”
“You would have. I never doubted it.”
“I’d have stood by, I’d have been a hero. But you weren’t miserable. You were happy, and I hadn’t had a damn thing to do with it. There was the shutout right there.”
“But Matthew—”
“I couldn’t take it, that it hadn’t anything to do with me, that it had happened for you before I even came along. That was the ultimate shutout, and nothing was going to change that, not ever.”
“Didn’t you know I’d have been ten times happier if you had been part of it? I wished so terribly that it had been you, I was on the verge of telling you it was you.” He winced, but she could not be sure why. Was it simply regret that she had not lied to him?
“There’s nothing about the whole damn story I can feel good about,” he said at last. “I’m not going to cop any plea and rationalize my way out of it. Even when I finally saw it all, I also saw what it’s like to love somebody the way you loved when you were a young man but without the freedom you had when you were young, to follow through and say, Let’s marry.” He compressed his lips; he looked angry. “I wish to God I could say it, darling.”
“I wish to God you could, too.” Joy leaped within her. It was as if he had said it. He wants to, she thought, that’s what matters. It’s like being pregnant; the primitive thing is what matters, not the social thing of having people know. This is the same now with Matthew; what counts is the primitive thing that he wants to say it: Let’s marry. He wants to say, Let’s marry.
Aloud she said, “But from the first minute you made it clear that you would never leave your kids. I’ve known it, you’ve known it, it’s been part of everything.”
“Yes, everything.” He looked the way he had looked the first night he had come back, older, thinner, not very happy. Long ago she had thought of him as a man who was not often happy, and then she had forgotten that. Now she remembered it again and her heart went out to him.
Cele finally said, “Matthew Poole put me into it, so you might as well get over your reticences and tell me about it.”
Hesitantly at first, then more easily, Dori did. It was remarkable that she had needed to keep silent for so long, for she discovered now that there was a definite pleasure in talking about herself and Matthew, in talking separately about him, about his life, his family, his work.
There was no impulse to confide intimacy of detail, nor did Cele indicate any eagerness for it. Indeed at one point Cele interrupted to say, “Remember at school how I used to sit up half the night giving you a blow-by-blow of some new date and how you finally stopped me?”
“How did I?”
“By being brutal.”
“Brutal how?”
“It was sophomore year and I’d just come back from a football weekend in New Haven, fairly snorting with triumph. You looked at me coldly and said, ‘Okay, but not one word about Then he tried to kiss me.’”
They burst out laughing, and Dori said, “I don’t remember that at all.”
“I used to be god-awful,” Cele said. “No taste, no asterisks, I used to read love letters aloud to you until you said you wanted to throw up whenever I opened an envelope.”
“I must have been god-awful too.”
“There you go, defensive little Dori. I was a blabbermouth slob, is the truth, and it took me years to learn what you knew all along. Anyway, go on about you and Matthew.”
Dori did not spare herself when it came to “blasting him with it like a load of buckshot.” She told it all, astonished anew that what she had so thoughtfully planned in advance should have got so out of hand and become so inept and abrupt. “I never blamed him for going off in a shock reaction.”
“Oh Dori, you’ll be the end of me.”
Dori nodded as if in agreement. “The only thing I couldn’t see was why it took him so much time to manage it. It took his friend Jack only that one evening to see what had hit him so hard and they were drunk.”
“It’s always easier to get to the heart of the matter when it’s not your matter.”
Dori was grateful, as if Cele were exonerating Matthew. It was all the more surprising, when she had come to the end of her recital, to have Cele say, “But there’s something about your Matthew I don’t quite get.”
“What?”
“Why doesn’t he get a divorce? Other men do.”
“I know they do.”
“Good men, not just rats.”
“But Matthew—”
“Is he Catholic?”
“He’s nothing. He was born Presbyterian. It’s not religion, it’s his children. Mostly his son.”
“But his children are sixteen and fourteen.”
“Even so. Johnny is a pretty troubled child and God knows what would happen if his father walked out on him now.”
“Maybe one reason he’s troubled is having a father who’s unhappy, who hasn’t been really happy for years.”
“Matthew would never have said one word about that to either of them.”
“He’s not home much at night, is he? You think kids have no unconscious minds absorbing things like that?”
Dori was suddenly angry. Cele had no right to raise such questions; she didn’t know enough about Matthew, could not know enough about him and his situation and his problems, yet here she was right spang in the middle of the forbidden territory of divorce and remarriage, territory Dori had put beyond the pale from the first moment, in her thoughts, in her fantasies, in her whole existence. Perhaps that was why she had been so reticent with Cele all along about Matthew, instinctively guarding those boundaries from casual assault, even with the most loving of motives.
They had to remain intact too.
Cele was apparently affected by her long silence. When she spoke again it was to say, almost carefully, with none of her usual good humor and vigor, “So much for that. You know more about it than I do.”
“I do, Cele. I really do.”