HE TRIED AGAIN, AND again there was no answer. Off and on all morning Matthew Poole had tried to reach her to say whatever there might be to say, what he did not know. She was out. Each time he tried to call her, he had left his office and phoned from the row of booths in the lobby, though his secretary would never lift the receiver once the bulb on her desk glowed red. Knowing that was not enough. It was not security he needed but a sense of unrupturable privacy which he could not have in the realm of his busy office with the door opened at precisely the wrong moment by one of his partners.
Dori was asleep when he left at eight, not really asleep rather, for she was still smiling—smiling and happy, her eyes closed and sleep drifting into her again, or was it she who was drifting into sleep? He liked the first phrasing. She had begun to wake while he was dressing and he had told her not to let herself really wake—it had been nearly five when they had gone to sleep, a loss of rest he might have deplored or resented at some other time but which now was one more token of success and fulfillment. She had drowsily nodded at his words and her eyes had closed and she had smiled.
Why should he be so touched by this one small point, this small embellishment? Finding no answer, he at once felt impatient and desirous, a loutish need to go straight back to her and, almost without greeting, put her down on that sofa, or the bed, or the floor, and fall upon her as if he had not been near a woman for a year. There was something in her own passion that roused him beyond restraint; it was not merely that she was new, nor that they were ten thousand miles removed from the fatigue of familiarity—
He dismissed the thought, as a treachery, a lie, a tawdry falsehood. Not everybody experienced the lessening of desire in marriage, at least not to the extent he knew. Jack and Alma were still good together; Jack Henning was his closest friend and he had said so, unequivocally with a thumping robust lewdness that he, Matthew, had called a boast, a brag, all the while knowing that it was exactly the truth. Jack Henning was his age and had been married as long as he, and would not bother to say they were good together if they had long since lost the impulse toward one another that sought and was satisfied, sought and was satisfied, even at lengthening intervals as was inevitable with the passing of time. No man in his forties was fool enough to hope that after years of marriage and familiarity there would be the initial frenzy of need, the same insistence and insatiability. But if one could sustain that in marriage, how fortunate that man would be.
Man or woman. He thought of Joan. Perhaps she also had found that sexual delight—not merely sexual satisfaction striven for and achieved, sometimes arduously achieved, but spontaneous sexual delight—was to be had now only with another man. Had she anybody else? He had asked himself that several times in the past few years, for she was as tactful as he about not going near any situation between them that would normally lead them to bed together, and each time he asked it with less need to know the answer.
Once again he left his desk, this time for a luncheon appointment with two clients, about a contract that had been abrogated, not a case that caught at his deepest interests. His years of self-discipline in the practice of his profession, however, marshaled his full abilities to their discussion, but interrupting his concentrated attention there was the knowledge that there was a girl in the world he was suddenly entwined with, a girl he would soon be talking to again, seeing again, taking to bed again. He had gone home in the morning for breakfast with the kids, letting them assume he was coming from the airport; then he had changed and shaved and left for the office. That night the Hennings were due for dinner; he considered calling it off and seeing Dori again but it was so rare that they had people in for an evening that he had let it alone.
After luncheon he tried her number again; she was still out. Suddenly he was vexed and angry. She had mentioned some morning appointment; she must have gone straight to the paper after it. She had talked about her job, not very fully, as if she had only partial interest in the new arrangement on the new paper, compared to the years of attachment to the troubled Trib which had finally gone under. He called the paper. She was out, perhaps on assignment. “She doesn’t keep staff hours,” a voice said, and he replied with a brisk “I know, thanks.”
Persistent—he had always been called a persistent devil by people who did not like him and he supposed it was true enough. He had been called self-centered too, and that was doubtless equally true. Even in love that seemed the most outgoing and generous, the love for one’s children, was there not in fact an enormity of self-interest? Was there any joy he had ever known comparable to the joy he felt in Hildy and in Johnny?
His father must have felt that about him, but he was ten when his father died and he had virtually no memory of him. His mother, a lawyer like his father, most certainly had felt—He stopped quickly; he did not want to think of his mother just then.
He tried the telephone again and gave up. He would send some flowers and try to put Dori out of his mind. Each hour made her more vivid, made their two days more important in retrospect. This was no simple affair; he had had affairs ranging all the way from a quick easy encounter to a complicated convoluted entanglement from which he soon had need only to escape; he knew affairs and needed them and valued them for the part they played in keeping a none too happy life going.
The Hennings made the evening easier. He marveled again at how pleasant it was to have good friends in one’s own house, at one’s own table, with one’s children there, scrubbed and sweet and clever; in a year Hildy would be off to college, and God knows what rebellious young Johnny would take it into his head to be doing. But it was good.
Usually the people Matthew valued he saw away from the house. In the office, over luncheon, over drinks, during the summer months when. Joan and the kids were away at Truro—his own personal friendships, except for the Hennings, were normally carried on in the world outside. He no longer struggled to change that, and no longer struggled to remake Joan. How could a man be angry at a wife because she was shy? He could, at the beginning, try to get her past it, try to help her overcome it, try to coax, urge, wheedle, give her moral support, but if finally he saw that there was some incurable, some neurotic cut to her character that made her half sick with apprehension about meeting people, welcoming them, entertaining them at home, why, then, finally he had to accept her as she was and change his own expectations and his own ways of behaving.
Long ago he had learned that it was too difficult to have friends come to the house for dinner or the evening. Inevitably they felt so chilled that sooner or later they remained away, as one remains indoors in inclement weather. Not that if was Joan’s purpose to freeze them out. At the beginning, in the first year of their marriage, she had tried to make all his friends welcome, and with the Hennings she had succeeded. Jack was so easygoing himself, with such equability and good nature, that he was easily able to ignore Joan’s manner, able indeed to admire Matthew for handling it so adroitly. Alma Henning was not so equable; for a long time she had been confused by her own inability to get through to Joan but she had finally seen that there was no point in pushing for a level of easy camaraderie that wasn’t within Joan’s grasp, and she had let it go at that. Matthew was interesting enough by himself, she had once told her husband, and he and Matthew together took over the evenings anyway, so that she could relax into a low output of effort and get by. While they were young, with no maid in either household, she would help Joan with dinner and washing up, and since they had their first babies in the same year, a surface kind of talk was easy. Later it was harder but Alma kept on managing and Matthew had been grateful. With lesser friends than the Hennings it had always been the same depressing cycle: the hearty first visit, the less hearty second, a straining and striving, and sooner or later an excuse offered and an invitation turned down.
“She’s shy,” he had said in those early days when he loved Joan with a young man’s fervor. He had said it to his own mother again and again, his mother who had been so happy when he married, so quick to praise Joan’s looks, to approve their apartment, admire Joan’s cooking, Joan’s taste. “It’s only that she’s shy.” For a while it had been enough, though long afterwards, after his mother’s death when it was too late, he had seen it could never have been enough, that his mother had been far too intelligent not to see the small wounds Joan gave her for exactly what they were, Joan’s nonappearance the first time they were asked up to meet some of her friends, Joan’s last-minute backing out as they were about to go to a funny movie; Joan’s withholding of any sign of warmth.
But at the time he had seen only the week-to-week particularity, never the total that was putting itself together. Gradually—who could trace back these minor sadnesses?—every visit from or to his mother had become a tension, with the span between arrival and departure growing shorter and shorter, with a sort of gelid determination keeping the talk going. Once when he had chided Joan for never calling his mother week in and week out, she had wept, and in the first year of marriage a bride’s tears could outlaw any other consideration. “Darling, nothing could be worth your being so unhappy.”
He would do the phoning himself, he had decided, but somehow he did not. As time piled itself on time, he had begun to think that when they had children, all would be well; Joan would not be so shy, there would be the natural talk and shared love that everybody could partake of. But Hildy’s birth had deepened the chasm. Joan by then had yielded totally to her own aversion for her mother-in-law, still denying the aversion but no longer making even one phone call a year to her.
He should have put his foot down hard—now he saw it—should have turned on Joan and said, Damn it, suppose I treated your mother this way? Make do, put on an act at least with mine; she is getting old and she loves me and she has never hurt you and this damn cliché of daughter-in-law antipathy is not going to be our cliché anymore. Millions of families the world over have the mother-in-law-daughter-in-law problem, and somehow they cope, so damn it, you cope.
But he had never said it. When Hildy was born, his mother had come up once or twice; each time had been stiffly formal, like a state visit, with everybody knowing it would last no more than half an hour.
“Would you like to hold the baby?” He could still hear Joan saying it, politely, distantly, could still see his mother sitting alone on their sofa, holding her first grandchild, looking mostly down at the baby, sitting there as if she were a stranger in her son’s house, which of course she was.
The last such visit had ended with Joan saying at the closing door, “Thank you for coming,” in the tone one would have used to a visiting teacher from the neighborhood school. He had seen his mother’s face change, but his one emotion was relief that the door was closing and the miserable visit ending.
Again months passed and again he determined to institute some communication between them. But the sight of the telephone would make him wonder what to say; the pen in his hand would pause after “Dear Mother.” She did not call him either; only occasionally did he let himself know that her silence was a dignity. Then he would wonder if he were being callous with his own silences, perhaps even cruel, but the very idea of having it out with her made him uneasy. Reproof, the rebuke of women—he had always hated it and instinctively turned away from it.
Hildy began to talk, Hildy began to walk, Hildy was one year old and then two, enchanting as all two-year-olds are enchanting, and never once did he decide, It is too much, whatever is wrong between Joan and her, she doesn’t deserve this from me. Only during the last weeks before Johnny’s birth did he finally tell Joan he was going to start seeing his mother alone, taking Hildy along too, but before he actually did it, there was a phone call from her office that she had had a severe coronary and had died. The unknown voice had added tonelessly that of course it was the third attack in little over a year.
“Yes,” he had said as tonelessly.
He resented her death. His mother had never told him of any of these attacks, had robbed him of the chance to set things right between them, had left him with words unsaid that would now stay unspoken forever. But he had sobbed that night when he was alone and forced himself to put names to his actions and his non-actions, still rejecting “cruel” or “callous,” but seeking on, as if he were in a courtroom, himself both the accuser and the accused.
Only later, a long time later, could he accept the first fringe of truth in his unwilling fingers. He was not cruel or callous, but he couldn’t handle emotional problems close to the nerve. He reacted badly, he could think only of how to end them, deaden them, escape them, nullify them. It was a weakness; he did not like it in himself. In any marriage it could become a major danger. In any love affair it was a danger too.
He had been married for eight years when he had his first affair. It released him from a thousand docilities and a thousand blindnesses; he felt a man renewed, his own man. Joan knew instinctively that he was no longer the same Matthew, and he agreed that she was right. “You’re having an affair,” she had said. “Am I?” he had answered, and she had accepted it for the statement he had meant it to be.
The idea of divorce must have occurred to Joan in the next nine years, as it had occurred to him; in the most banal of all phrases, they had stayed together because of the children. They had each stayed married because neither could consider giving up the one true pleasure left. The children were, to him, the full source of happiness and pride; to leave them, to see them only at preordained intervals, to drop out of their daily living, was not to be contemplated. The children and his work—that was enough.
And then he went to Marshall Duke’s house and met Dori Gray. How could one know so surely that here was haven, here was a readiness for warmth, to receive it and to give it, here was eagerness and need? He had known it and had felt himself respond to it and had known that his life was going to change.
Now sitting silent over coffee with the Hennings, he thought of her again as she had been when he left her that morning, saw again the faint curving of a smile on her sleepy lips. Something had stirred in him at the sight, had touched him, and he had been unable to catch it. He had wanted to waken her, to tell her again how he felt, but he had kept silent, staring down at her, saying nothing. Was it that silence that had brought him twelve hours later to remembering his mother and the words unspoken forever to her? How strange, how harsh and unbidden, the associative freaks of memory, and how helpless one was against them. Yet this harshness now did not repel him; it seemed to speak to him with an urgency he did not yet understand, in a code he could not yet decipher.
Eugene Bradford Varley, named after his grandfather, was well aware that he was Dori’s favorite brother and equally aware, he asserted, that he deserved to be. “If I were a low-minded oil tycoon like Ron,” he had once said, “I wouldn’t expect anybody but oil wells to like me, and if I were a high-minded snob like Alan, I’d not even expect that.”
This amiable self-esteem was one of the characteristics Dori found so likable in him and one she wished she shared. Gene never needed reassurance from anybody about anything. He never needed to explain himself, justify himself, defend himself. If you disapproved of something he said or did, you disapproved; it was your right. If you tried to persuade him to change, he might try in turn to persuade you that he need not change, that you might have overlooked this or that aspect of the matter, but his attempt at persuasion would be mild, low-keyed and brief. If you opposed him outright, and showed scorn or anger or, worst of all, indifference, he drew down a windowshade in his eyes and closed you out, and you knew that you would not have the chance again to show scorn or anger or indifference because you would not be likely to see Gene Varley even one more time.
Which made him, Dori had once told him, a despot. A nice despot, a rational despot, but a despot nevertheless, because his rule over his emotions and his mind was absolute. “Most of us poor benighted folk,” she had said, “are always taking Gallup polls of our own constituent opinions before we can finally point to one as the probable winner.” He had agreed that he generally spared himself the wear and tear of inner conflict and had said it in a way that told her she would do well to start doing the same.
But all that was a long time ago and a general observation. He wouldn’t need to admonish her now, she thought, as she picked up the telephone to call him. She was still at Cele’s. How the day had vanished she did not know; they had gone out to lunch together and ordered celebratory champagne cocktails; they had gone to a music store for some records they each wanted for Christmas gifts and then to a bookstore as well. Now suddenly it was four and the early twilight of winter had begun and she was afraid she had waited too late in the day.
“Professor Varley, please.” She almost never called him at the university, for she never knew his schedule of classes, seminars or student meetings. He picked up the phone, sounding affable. “It’s me, Gene. I wondered if I could come over tonight. There’s something I’d love to talk over if you’re free.”
She heard him ask his secretary whether there was anything on his calendar and knew there would not be. Ellen long ago had learned to compress their social life into the weekends, since he was so opposed to any ordained activity during the evenings of his bursting workweek. The university aside, he was a voracious reader; he loved music; he could spend hours in his darkroom, developing the dozens of extremely good pictures he had managed somehow to take since his last bout with his cameras. Bout was the wrong word, for his addiction was chronic and endless, with nothing intermittent about it, though with Jim and Dan both grown and gone from home, his favorite and handiest subjects were no longer easily available and his addiction harder to support.
“Looks okay tonight,” he said. “Around seven?”
“I’d thought about eight, eight thirty. I’m at Cele’s for dinner but I can leave right after. They’re going to the theater.”
“Fine. Then come whenever.”
“Thanks. I hoped it could be tonight.”
“Anything wrong?”
“Quite the opposite. Something great.”
“You got fired!”
“You idiot.” She laughed and thought, How like Gene. He was even more unequivocal than Cele about urging her to try free-lancing, and with a tougher practicality in his argument. “You’ve got a certain leverage, Dori, though I wish you’d cut out from that savings bank and into this boiling bull market. But even so unless you want to try for the Times or the News, neither of which would have the sense to want your kind of stuff, what sort of future is there for newspapering in New York?”
“No future, but don’t crowd me.”
He never crowded her. She did have a certain leverage—and some part of her training by her businessman father made her hold back from chipping it away on frivolity or risking it in the market like everybody else. She had never regretted rejecting alimony; to her lawyer’s astonished protests, she had only said, “I happen not to be the alimony type.”
Over the years she had discovered that she liked having something solid, liked seeing the interest mount up, a few hundred dollars a year, liked it when intangibles like inflation forced banks to raise interest rates on loans she had never yet made and on deposits she had never yet depleted. Oh hypocrisy, she sometimes thought. It’s a wartime inflation because of an undeclared war you despise. But you don’t refuse the interest, you don’t give it away, you would be embarrassed to be such a crank, such a high-principled nut. You like it. You like the feeling it gives you. Especially when something comes up that takes money. Like now.
If she had had to go to Cele asking for a loan, how different today would have been. If she were going now to Gene to ask for support, how she would dread this visit. If she were penniless, unable to give up her weekly pay, how fearful a problem would be facing her. Suddenly she imagined a procession of frightened girls, as if they were figures on a frieze, their heads bowed, their faces tight with terror, all caught in the horror of unsought and unwanted pregnancy. Was it only money that made the difference?
“What’s the big news?” her brother asked as she arrived. “Here, I’ll take that.” He took her coat, and then threw it at one of the chairs in the square entrance hall of the apartment.
“You’re a help,” Dori said, retrieving it and hanging it up in the coat closet. From the living room Ellen called, “Coffee—come on in,” and almost at once Dori was repeating the opening words she had used that morning with Celia. “The most incredible thing has happened.” But as she went on swiftly to tell them, Ellen said, “Oh, no,” her eyes wretched. Gene said, “Good Lord, that is news,” and did something she had never seen him do. He began to pace the room. Up and down, back and forth, in silence, he crossed and recrossed it, going off to the windows, coming back to them on the sofa, but turning quickly as if he were forbidden to sit down.
Dori thought, For once it’s me who’s without conflict. Under the bravado she felt a distance from them, not unexpected from Ellen but lonely and unlooked-for from her brother. He was now standing at the windows, drawing the draperies back and looking carefully out at the night as if the slow drift of snow had become a matter of professional concern.
“The one thing I do know,” he said at last, coming back to them, “the one sure thing is that keeping it a secret won’t work. Whether you go to Wyoming or some town in Vermont or even go visit Ron and Maude in England—no matter where you try to hide out, this is bound to get out.”
“Why? Who’d want to do me in the eye enough to tell it?”
“Nobody would want to. Say you don’t have one enemy in the world. Say you don’t know one gossip in the world. Say you don’t even know one careless person in the world. Just the same it’s going to get talked about somehow, by somebody, either viciously or innocently as hell, with no faintest ulterior motive. In any case, goodbye secret.”
“Then okay,” Dori said vigorously. “If it’s ‘goodbye secret,’ it’s goodbye. I can’t see why it has to, though. Only you two and the Dukes are going to know. Maybe not Marshall—Cele wasn’t sure she’d tell him.”
“Why not?” Ellen said, not looking at her.
“He’s pretty conventional, under all that modern talk.”
Ellen seemed about to defend Marshall but changed her mind. “What about Jim and Dan? You don’t want us to keep it from them or their wives, the way Cele intends to keep it from Marshall?”
Before Dori could answer, Gene put in mildly, “Dori hasn’t had time to even consider Jim and Ruth or Dan and Amy. What we do about them can be put off for just now, can’t it?”
“I was only thinking,” Ellen said quickly. Then she addressed herself to Dori once more. “Not that they couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret. I’m sure nobody would want to do you in the eye. Heavens. But I think Gene is right—somebody is bound to forget and say something—”
“Would you forget?”
“Don’t sound that way,” Ellen answered.
“What way?”
“I don’t know.”
But Dori knew. She had been so sure of warmth and approval, and she had been suddenly reminded that neither warmth nor approval was as automatically bestowed as one wanted them to be. She glanced up at her brother, but he had resumed his pacing. There was again a silence and Ellen said, “We all need a drink. I’ll go get ice cubes.” Dori looked after her. There had always been some basic distance between herself and Ellen, what she jokingly called “the in-law mile,” but usually it was bridged over by the civilized cement of good manners because of Gene and the boys. To find Gene distant as well was another matter entirely, and inside her something ached and something else was angry.
As if he had suddenly realized that Ellen had left them alone, Gene turned and spoke hurriedly. “The grocer might talk, in whatever small town you go to, the postman, the next-door neighbor, the druggist, whatever story you tell them about your missing husband. That’s what Ellen meant, that somehow it would get out and start being a nice juicy scandal. Why can’t you come here?”
“Here?”
“Right here with us, for the duration. You can have Jim’s old room, or Dan’s, and if we have guests, you can lock your door and stay put.”
“Oh Gene.” Unexpectedly her eyes stung. She should have known, through all the pacing and all the silence. “Thanks for asking me, but of course that’s impossible.”
“What’s so impossible about it? Here, you’d never have to go near a postman or grocer or druggist—”
“But what about Norah—are you going to fire her and let me be the cleaning woman? What about your nice talkative doorman? I would have to get out to street level once in a while, wouldn’t I? And what about your Miss Pulley, when she comes here to work?”
“None of that is what you mean. You mean Ellen. I can make her see it; she was caught short just now, but she’ll adjust. I don’t think you ought to hold it against Ellen that her reaction time is slower than ours on something like this.”
“I don’t, I really don’t.” She looked at him earnestly, but she knew he did not believe her, and could not believe her because of course she did hold it against Ellen. “If I were a hippie or yippie, Ellen would say, ‘Oh, well, what do you expect of those dirty longhaired slobs?’ and then she’d be tolerant about it. But being me—good family, New England background, forty years old—why, it’s unthinkable.”
She broke off. She never permitted herself the indulgence of complaining to any man about his wife—why should she think it permissible with her own brother? He must know, as she did, that Ellen’s “reaction time” was rooted in a kind of class snobbery—“people like us simply don’t have illegitimate children”—and knowing it about his wife, he must regret it. Aloud she said, “Excuse it, please. I didn’t mean to give a lecture about Ellen. I do think it would be tough as all get-out for both of you with me here, locked away like crazy Aunt Hattie up in the attic when guests come.” He laughed and she went on, hurrying to consolidate her small victory over her blunder. “Once I find the right place to go on the lam, Gene, you’ll agree it’s best all round.”
“Maybe so.” He looked dubious and then suddenly more positive than he had looked all evening. “Why isn’t it better yet to tell the whole world to go to hell? Then you’d stay right in your own apartment, lead a normal life, see people you like, get help from anybody who gives a damn about you and stop all this clowning about hideouts and secrets.”
“Oh Gene, it sounds so wonderful. Today, in a phone booth, I imagined just that. I imagined calling the paper and telling them, calling everybody I know, telling them, even calling Tony just to say, Look, I did it, I always knew that someday I’d be able to.”
Ellen came back with the ice bucket and there were drinks to be made. Dori’s expression signaled Gene not to reopen the subject and he talked of student restlessness at Columbia and at half the other campuses in the land, liking it. Students were fed to the teeth with “the biggest bureaucracy there is except the army.” From students they went to the restlessness among civil rights leaders, the growing fury of the blacks—“I still can’t say ‘blacks’ without forcing myself,” Dori said—and by the time she left, she had nearly forgotten the constraint between herself and Ellen, thinking instead of what Gene had offered as the best plan of all.
Why don’t I? she thought as she walked home. He had put into words just what she had felt as she saw the shine of the telephone booth on the street that morning. Cele had wondered about it too, obliquely raising the point and then backing away from the risk of influencing her. But why not tell the world to go jump in the lake and have nothing to do with the whole complicated twisty business of living a secret?
She glanced around as if expecting a sign, a directive. It was still snowing, easily, and the city lay in the white hush any snowfall lends its streets. Why didn’t she? Why shouldn’t she? She was no poor frightened girl in trouble. She was not ashamed. Nobody on earth could make her feel this as disgrace. Then why did she not obey her instinct and shout it from the rooftops? She glanced up at the snow-touched terraces atop the apartment buildings. From right up there—why don’t I?
She had thought there was no need for Jesskin’s three thinkings. She had made the one decision, the only decision: to go ahead. Wrong—she had not made it; it had sprung full-blown, a new being in her life, strong, firm, beautiful. There had been no gestation period needed, no elapsing of time, no birth pangs. In the same instant that her mirror had gleamed its faint signal to her, in that instant the yes was born.
Now came conflict. A secret or not a secret? Keep silent or shout it out? She had taken it for granted that this was private, that this wasn’t something you announced on a loudspeaker, but all day today there had come the pull of other desires, to tell Tony, to phone the paper, to agree with Cele, with Gene, with those snowy terraces up there in the sky. Would there be other conflicts? She wanted no others, she would hate them if they came, hate herself if she shilly-shallied until they took on size and shape and substance. There were matters to be solved, certainly, the logistics of the whole thing, all sorts of matter-of-factnesses to be disposed of, but these were merely the practical considerations, not to be dignified by the concept Conflict.
She must not let real conflict get a foothold, she knew herself well enough to know that. She had gone through periods in the past where she couldn’t be decisive about the simplest things, whether to wash her hair, whether to go for a walk, how to phrase a letter, and she remembered them with a horror and a dread. Of course they had come only in times of sadness and depression, not in a buoyant time like this, but perhaps the mysterious process of growth was the same—she mustn’t risk it—perhaps if the seed of conflict were embedded at all, it would attach itself to the flesh of life and expand and grow until there was no way to abort it.
Her own metaphor made her suddenly smile. When to tell Matthew, how to tell him, that was also a problem to be solved well and thoughtfully, with care but without conflict.
She glanced at her watch as she drew near a streetlight. It was nearly eleven. Off and on, all day long, Matthew had kept returning to her mind, kept claiming part of her through the excitements and celebrating and discussing, Matthew the unnamed, Matthew the unspoken. Even with her entire attention apparently on Cele, on Gene or Ellen, he had been there, an interior presence to whom she would any moment return. Now that she was alone, tired from the massive day, eager for bed and rest and silence, it was as if she were going fully toward him once again.
There was a letter slipped under her door when she got to her apartment and for a moment she thought, The Christmas rush already? Does it start this early in the month, and so late in the afternoon? This must have come after Nellie had left for the day.
It was a business envelope, its upper left corner engraved Weston, Solomon, Jones and Poole, over which, in longhand, he had written “Poole—personal.” Her name was handwritten too, and there was no stamp on the envelope; he had sent it by boy or come by and left it himself. She lifted the flap easily; it was barely glued, as if it were not very private, and there was no salutation.
I tried several times to phone you today, but this may be better. Have you any idea how remarkable you are? How beautiful and how responsive? At forty-two a man is not likely to be misled about love. I know that it is not a constant, that it can diminish or grow, and that at the start nobody can be certain which of the two it will do. But having bought in this careful coin an alibi for the future, I think I may tell you that I am not a diminisher by nature. I will be telephoning tomorrow.
MATTHEW
It was written in a strong flowing hand easy to read except for the m’s and n’s which looked like linked and topless o’s in the middle of words but not at either the beginning or end, so that she did not have to pause over “man” but did over “diminish” which rippled along as if it were
Somehow this was endearing, and she looked at the two words, diminish and diminisher, with a fondness that set them apart from all the rest. Then she began to read his note at the beginning once more, but suddenly realized her neck was moist and knew she was still in her snow-wisped coat, standing there inside her front door reading her first letter from Matthew. She slipped out of the coat, threw it down on a chair, remembered saying “You’re a help” to Gene and hung it up properly in the closet, finding some small amusement in this repeated ritual. Then she went into the living room, sat down on the sofa—the sofa she could never look at without remembering him there with her—and read the letter once more.
—Lots of women in the history of the world have told somebody who wasn’t the father that he was—
—Just pick somebody off the street?
—You could start an affair and then tell him and get married.
—I’m such a rotten liar. …
Again conflict, again, another kind, a horror in it and a sudden magnetic power, pulling her forward, beckoning, tempting. She started slightly as if at a noise and went to her room quickly, tossing the letter on her turned-down bed and tapping the tiny ON switch of her radio. Mozart came into the room, fresh and bright, and again she started, for it was so similar to the quintet they had heard Monday evening. Monday, Thursday—three days, seventy-two hours, and an entire new world spinning in the infinite space of the unexpected? All at once she felt unreal, felt unable to manage, not fitted for so profound a change in all her patterns and all her abilities. What made her so sure she could go ahead? How could anybody manage alone and in silence? Nature had never intended it for solitude, God had never.
Oh cut that out, she thought roughly, the one damn thing you’re never going to do is go sentimental. You can feel good or bad, happy or horrible, afraid or not afraid, but you can never, not even once, feel sorry for yourself.
She felt better at once. She went to her desk, took out from the upper drawer a small oblong package which her newspaper and stationery store had delivered earlier in the week. She opened it and drew out a refill for her desk calendar and also a narrow little book in a red cover that matched a row of ten or twelve other narrow little books in red covers in a small bookcase behind her. Daily Reminder was stamped on all of them, and on this, in bright gold letters, the numerals 1968. The combination looked strange and she paused over it for a moment. She leafed through the pages quickly until she came to July, and then more slowly until she came to the twenty-third. It was a Tuesday. She remembered Dr. Jesskin’s warning that July 23rd was “a theoretical date,” that it might be a few days earlier or later, but she stared at that one page and then, in the upper right corner she wrote, very lightly, very small, 280. She smiled at the figure as if in salute and began to undress. Without looking directly toward her bed she could see Matthew’s letter, a small white marker lying there as if to denote a particular presence.
How completely good it was, to have a letter like this, and how long it had been since she had received one. Dick Towson rarely wrote because he was a telephoner. When she did hear from him it was by a telegram, cable or picture postcard, and she had never even remarked on it until now, so usual had non-letter-writing become in this age of speed and terseness. ARRIVING NINE THIRTY STOP FLIGHT EIGHT FOUR ZERO STOP LOVE YOU STOP
She laughed and glanced again at the letter waiting for her on her bed. Out in the kitchen the house buzzer sounded its raucous clatter and she went to it, surprised. The kitchen clock showed eleven thirty; unexpected callers didn’t appear at eleven thirty, and she had long ago told the doorman not to announce people he recognized as her friends. “Some flowers,” he said now, pompous as always. “They’re in the package room. I missed you when you came in, so will I send them up now?”
“Thanks, please do.”
They were odd spidery-looking great discs, as round across as large chrysanthemums, white and tall and fragile, their hearts edging into a young yellow green. She had seen them in florists’ windows but did not know their name, and now she touched them with her fingertips as if some tactile recognition would suddenly inform her. She arranged them in her tallest vase, an etched crystal vase that had been a wedding present—the continuity of physical things—and carried them into the living room, to set them upon the coffee table in front of the sofa.
Flowers and a note from your lover. How old-fashioned, how outmoded; as the young would have it, what a drag. She could hear the derision in the word and automatically moved toward her dictionary. One of her hobbies was language, the derivation and shifting usage of words and phrases, and she knew all the in slang because it was part of her writer’s need to know it. She rarely used any of it when writing or talking, but tracking it down was always amusing. She remembered how astonished she had been, on reading a Trollope novel recently, to see that one of the fashionable words a century ago, borrowed from the people in the pubs, was “gammon.” Gammon as an expletive, gammon as a rebuke, gammon as a mild oath. Then too she had gone straight to her bedroom where, on a tallish mahogany stand, her great unabridged dictionary reposed, always open, and found eight or ten meanings for that surprising word. Now as she turned the left-hand pages back to the d’s, the telephone rang. Before she reached it, she knew it would be Matthew, and before she answered, she knew she would say, Oh, of course, even for an hour.