The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith

When she came into the grocery she obviously interrupted a conversation about herself and her husband. The grocer leaning across the counter to speak confidentially to a customer straightened up abruptly and signaled at her with his eyes, so that the customer, in a fairly obvious attempt at dissimulation, looked stubbornly in the opposite direction for almost a minute before turning quickly to take one swift, eager look.

‘Good morning,’ she said.

‘What’ll it be for you this morning?’ he asked, his eyes moving to the right and left to insure that all present observed him speaking boldly to Mrs Smith.

‘I don’t need very much,’ she said. ‘I may be going away over the weekend.’

A long sigh swept through the store; she had a clear sense of people moving closer, as though the dozen other customers, the grocer, the butcher, the clerks, were pressing against her, listening avidly.

‘A small loaf of bread,’ she said clearly. ‘A pint of milk. The smallest possible can of peas.’

‘Not laying in much for the weekend,’ the grocer said with satisfaction.

‘I may be going away,’ she said, and again there was that long breath of satisfaction. She thought: how silly of all of us – I’m not sure any more than they are, we all of us only suspect, and of course there won’t be any way of knowing for sure … but still it would be a shame to have all that food in the kitchen, and let it go to waste, just rotting there while …

‘Coffee?’ the grocer said. ‘Tea?’

‘I’m going to get a pound of coffee,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘After all, I like coffee. I can probably drink up a pound before …’

The anticipatory pause made her say quickly, ‘And I’ll want a quarter-pound of butter, and I guess two lamb chops.’

The butcher, although he had been trying to pretend indifference, turned immediately to get the lamb chops, and he came the width of the store and set the small package on the counter before the grocer had finished adding up her order.

One good thing, she was thinking about all this – I never have to wait anywhere. It’s as though everyone knew I was in a hurry to get small things done. And I suppose no one really wants me around for very long, not after they’ve had their good look at me and gotten something to talk about.

When her groceries were all in a bag and the grocer was ready to hand it to her across the counter, he hesitated, as he had done several times before, as though he tried to gather courage to say something to her; she was aware of this, and knew fairly well what he wanted to say – listen, Mrs Smith, it would start, we don’t want to make any trouble or anything, and of course it isn’t as though anyone around here was sure, but I guess you must know by now that it all looks mighty suspicious, and we just figured – with an inclusive glance around, for support from the butcher and the clerks – we all got talking, and we figured – well, we figured someone ought to say something to you about it. I guess people must have made this mistake before about you? Or your husband? Because of course no one likes to come right out and say a thing like that, when they could so easily be wrong. And of course the more everyone talks about this kind of thing, the harder it is to know whether you’re right or not …

The man in the liquor store had said substantially that to her, fumbling and letting his voice die away under her cool, inquiring stare. The man in the drugstore had begun to say it, and then, blushing, had concluded, ‘Well, it’s not my business, anyway.’ The woman in the lending library, the landlady, had given her the nervous, appraising look, wondering if she knew, if anyone had told her, wondering if they dared, and had ended by treating her with extreme gentleness and a sweet forbearance, as they would have treated some uncomplaining, incurable invalid. She was different in their eyes, she was marked; if the dreadful fact were not true (and they all hoped it was), she was in a position of such incredible, extreme embarrassment that their solicitude was even more deserved. If the dreadful fact were true (and they all hoped it was), they had none of them, the landlady, the grocer, the clerks, the druggist, lived in vain, gone through their days without the supreme excitement of being close to and yet secure from an unbearable situation. If the dreadful fact were true (and they all hoped it was), Mrs Smith was, for them, a salvation and a heroine, a fragile, lovely creature whose preservation was in hands other than theirs.

Some of this Mrs Smith realized dimly as she walked back to her apartment with the bag of groceries. She, at least, was almost not in doubt; she had known almost certainly that the dreadful fact was true for three weeks and six days, since she had met it face to face on a bench facing the ocean.

‘I hope you won’t think I’m rude,’ Mr Smith had said at that moment, ‘if I open a conversation by saying that it’s a lovely day.’

She thought he was incredibly daring, she thought he was unbelievably vulgar, but she did not think he was rude; it was a word ridiculous when applied to him.

‘No,’ she had said, recognizing him, ‘I don’t think you’re rude.’

If she had ever tried to phrase it to herself – it would hardly be possible to describe it to anyone else – she might have said, in the faintly clerical idiom she had learned so thoroughly, that she had been chosen for this, or that it was like being carried unresisting on the surface of a river which took her on inevitably into the sea. Or she might have said that, just as in her whole life before she had not questioned the decisions of her father but had done quietly as she was told, so it was a relief to know that there was now someone again to decide for her, and that her life, inevitable as it had been before, was now clear as well. Or she might have said – with a blush for a possible double meaning, that they, like all other married couples, were two halves of what was essentially one natural act.

‘A man gets very lonesome, I think,’ he had told her at dinner that night, in a restaurant near the sea, where even the napkins smelled of fish and the bare wood of the table had an indefinable salty grain, ‘a man alone needs to find himself some kind of company.’ And then, as though the words had perhaps not been complimentary enough, he added hastily, ‘Except not everyone is lucky enough to meet a charming young lady like yourself.’ She had smiled and simpered, by then fully aware of these preliminaries to her destiny.

Three weeks and six days later, turning to go in through the door of the shabby apartment house, she wondered briefly about the weekend ahead; she had been naturally reluctant to buy too much food, but then, if it turned out that she should be there, there would be no way to buy more food on Sunday; a restaurant, she thought, we will have to go to a restaurant – although they had not been together to a restaurant since that first dinner together since, even though they did not actually have to economize, they both felt soberly that the fairly large mutual bank account they now had ought not to be squandered unnecessarily, but should be kept as nearly intact as possible; they had not discussed this, but Mrs Smith’s instinctive tactful respect for her husband’s methods led her to fall in with him silently in his routine of economy.

The three flights of stairs were narrow and high, and Mrs Smith, with the immediate recognition of symbols she had inherited, had always had, potentially, and was now using almost exclusively, saw the eternal steps going up and up as an irrevocable design for her life; she had really no choice but to go up, wearily if she chose; if she turned and went down again, retracing laboriously the small progress she had made, she would merely have to go up another way, beginning, as she now almost realized, beginning again a search which could only, for her, have but one ending. ‘It happens to everybody,’ she told herself consolingly as she climbed.

Pride would not allow her to make any concessions to her position, so she did not try particularly to walk silently on the second-floor landing; for a minute, going on up the next flight, she thought she had got safely past, but then, almost as she reached her own door, the door on the second landing opened and Mrs Jones called, piercingly and as though she had run from some back recess of her apartment to the door when she heard footsteps.

‘Mrs Smith, is that you?’

‘Hello,’ Mrs Smith called back down the stairs.

‘Wait a minute, I’m coming up.’ The lock on Mrs Jones’s door snapped, and the door closed. Mrs Jones came hurriedly, still a little out of breath, down the landing and up the stairs to the third floor. ‘Thought I’d missed you,’ she said on the stairs, and, ‘Good heavens, you look tired.’

It was part of the attitude that treated Mrs Smith as a precious vessel. Her slightest deviation from the normal, in the course of more than a week, was noted and passed from gossip to gossip, a faint paling of her cheeks became the subject of nervous speculation, any change in her voice, a dullness of her eye, a disarrangement in her dress – these were what her neighbors lived on. Mrs Smith had thought early in the week that a loud crash from her apartment would be the sweetest thing she could do for Mrs Jones, but by now it no longer seemed important: Mrs Jones could live as well on the most minute crumbs.

‘Thought you’d never get home,’ Mrs Jones said. She followed Mrs Smith into the bare little room which, with a small bedroom, a dirty kitchen, and a bath, was the honeymoon home of Mr and Mrs Smith. Mrs Jones took the package of groceries into the kitchen while Mrs Smith hung up her coat in the closet; she had not bothered to unpack many things and the closet looked empty; there were two or three dresses and a light overcoat and extra suit of Mr Smith’s; this was so obviously only a temporary home for them both, a stopping-place. Mrs Smith did not regard her three dresses with regret, nor did she particularly admire the suits of Mr Smith, although they were still a little unfamiliar to her, hung up next to her own clothes (as his underwear in the dresser, lying quietly beside her own); neither Mr nor Mrs Smith were of the abandoned sort who indulge recklessly in trousseaus or other loving detail for a preliminary purification.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Jones, coming out of the kitchen, ‘you certainly aren’t planning to do much cooking this weekend.’

Privacy was not one of the blessings of Mrs Smith’s position. ‘I thought I might be going away,’ she said.

Again there was that soft, anticipatory moment; Mrs Jones looked quickly, and then away, and then, sitting herself down firmly upon the meager couch, obviously decided to come to the point.

‘Now, look, Mrs Smith,’ she began, and then interrupted herself. ‘Look, why this “Mrs” all the time? You call me Polly, and from now on I’ll call you Helen. All right?’ She smiled, and Mrs Smith, smiling back, thought, how do they find out your first name? ‘Well, now, look here, Helen,’ Mrs Jones went on, determined to establish her new familiarity immediately, ‘I think it’s time someone sat down and talked sensibly to you. I mean, you must know by now pretty well what people are saying.’

Here we are, Helen Smith was thinking, two women of the singular type woman, one standing uneasily and embarrassed in front of a window, wearing a brown dress and brown hair and brown shoes and differing in no essential respect from the other, sitting solidly and earnestly, wearing a green and pink flowered housedress and bedroom slippers – differing, actually in no essential, although we would both deny indignantly that we were the same person, seeking the same destiny. And we are about to enter into a conversation upon a fantastic subject.

‘I’ve noticed,’ Mrs Smith said carefully, ‘that there’s a lot of unusual interest in us. I’ve never been on a honeymoon before, of course, so I can’t really tell whether it’s only that.’ She laughed weakly, but Mrs Jones was not to be put off by sentiment.

‘I think you must know better than that,’ she said. ‘You’re not that wrapped up in your husband.’

‘Well … no,’ Mrs Smith had to say.

‘And furthermore,’ Mrs Jones went on, looking cynically at Mrs Smith, ‘you’re not any blushing eighteen-year-old girl, you know, and Mr Smith isn’t any young man. You’re both people of a reasonably mature age.’ Mrs Jones seemed to feel that she had made a point here, and she said it again. ‘You are both people who have outlived their youth,’ she said, ‘and naturally no one expects that you’re going to go around billing and cooing. And furthermore you yourself are old enough to show some intelligence about this terrible business.’

‘I don’t know what kind of intelligence I ought to show,’ Mrs Smith said meekly.

‘Well, good heavens!’ Mrs Jones spread her hands helplessly. ‘Don’t you realize your position? Everyone knows it. Look.’ She settled back, prepared to demonstrate reasonably. ‘You came here a week ago, newly married, and moved into this apartment with your husband. The very first day you were here, people thought there was something funny. In the first place, you two didn’t act like you were the types for each other at all. You know what I mean – you so sort of refined and ladylike, and him …’

Rude, Mrs Smith thought, wanting to laugh; he said he was rude. Mrs Jones shrugged. ‘In the second place,’ she said, ‘you didn’t look like you belonged in this house, or in this neighborhood, because you always had plenty of money, which, believe me, the rest of us don’t, and you always acted sort of as though you ought to be in a better kind of situation. And in the third place,’ Mrs Jones said, hurrying on to her climax, ‘it wasn’t two days before people began to think they recognized your husband from the pictures in the paper.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘But a picture in the paper –’

‘That’s just what started us really thinking,’ Mrs Jones said. She enumerated on her fingers. ‘New bride. Cheap apartment. You made a will in his favor? Insurance?’

‘Yes, but that is only natural –’ said Mrs Smith.

‘Natural? And him looking just like the man in the paper who mur –’ She stopped abruptly. ‘I don’t want to frighten you,’ she said. ‘But you should know all about him.’

‘I appreciate your concern,’ Mrs Smith said in her turn, coming away from the window, to stand in front of Mrs Jones so that Mrs Jones had to look up from her seat on the couch. ‘I know all these things. But how many newly married couples are there who make wills in each other’s favor? Or take out insurance? And how many women over thirty get married to men over forty? And maybe sometimes the men look like pictures in the paper? And with all this talk and gossip about us all around the neighborhood, you notice no one’s been even sure enough to say anything?’

‘I wanted to call the police two, three days ago,’ Mrs Jones said sullenly. ‘Ed wouldn’t let me.’

‘He probably said,’ Mrs Smith said, ‘that it was none of your business.’

‘But everybody’s wondering,’ Mrs Jones said. ‘And of course no one can know for sure.’

‘You won’t know for sure until …’ Mrs Smith tried not to smile. Mrs Jones sighed. ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,’ she said.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Smith reasonably, ‘what exactly is it you want me to do?’

‘You could get some kind of information,’ Mrs Jones said. ‘Something that would let you know for sure.’

‘I keep telling you,’ Mrs Smith said, ‘there’s only one way I can ever know for sure.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ Mrs Jones said.

‘I could run away from my husband,’ Mrs Smith said. Mrs Jones was surprised. ‘You can’t run away from your husband,’ she said. ‘Not if it isn’t true, you couldn’t do that.’

‘I have really no grounds for divorce,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘It is a very difficult subject to mention to him.’

‘Naturally, you wouldn’t have discussed it,’ Mrs Jones said.

‘Naturally,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘I could hardly search his clothes – there is nothing, I happen to know, in the pockets of the suit hanging in the closet and searching his overcoat pockets and his dresser drawers would hardly turn up anything convincing.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I mean,’ said Mrs Smith in explanation, ‘even if I discovered, say, a knife – what difference would it make?’

‘But he doesn’t do it with –’ Mrs Jones began, and stopped abruptly again.

‘I know,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘As I recall the details – and I haven’t read much about them, after all – he generally does it –’

‘In the bathtub,’ Mrs Jones said, and shivered. ‘I don’t know but what a knife would be better,’ she said.

‘It’s not our choice,’ Mrs Smith said wryly. ‘You see how silly we sound? Here we are, talking as though we were children telling ghost stories. We’ll end up convincing each other of some horrible notion.’

Mrs Jones hesitated for a minute over her own reactions, and finally decided to be mildly offended. ‘I really only came up,’ she explained with dignity, ‘to let you know what people were saying. If you stop to think about it for a minute, you ought to be able to understand why someone might want to help you. After all, it’s not me.’

‘That’s why I think you ought not to worry,’ Mrs Smith said gently. Mrs Jones rose, but as she reached the door she was unable to keep herself from turning and saying urgently, ‘Look, I just want you to know that if you ever ever need any help – of any kind – just open your mouth and scream, see? Because my Ed will be up as fast as he can come. All you have to do is scream, or stamp on the floor, or, if you can, race downstairs to our place. We’ll be waiting for you.’ She opened the door, said with a voice that she tried to make humorous, ‘Don’t take any baths,’ and went out. Her voice trailed up from the stairs, ‘And remember – all you have to do is scream. We’ll be waiting.’

Mrs Smith closed the door rather quickly and, before she started to think, went out to the kitchen to see to her groceries, but Mrs Jones had put the things away. Mrs Smith found the pound of coffee, and measured water into the coffeepot, thinking of her promise to the grocer that she would finish the pound of coffee herself. Mr Smith drank coffee sparingly; it made him nervous.

Mrs Smith, as she moved about the bleak little kitchen, thought, as she had often before, that she would not like to spend her whole life with things like this. It had not been so in her father’s life, where a peaceful, well-ordered existence went placidly on among objects which, if not lovely, had at least the pleasures of familiarity, and the near-beauty of order, and Mrs Smith, who had then been Helen Bertram, had been able to spend long days working in the garden, or mending her father’s socks, or baking the nut cake she had learned from her mother, and pausing only occasionally to wonder what was going to happen to her in her life.

It had been clear to her after her father’s death that this patterned existence was no longer meaningful, and had been a product of her father’s life rather than hers. So that when Mr Smith had said to her, ‘I don’t suppose you’d ever consider marrying a fellow like me?’ Helen Bertram had nodded, seeing then the repeated design which made the complete pattern.

She had worn her best dark-blue dress to be married in, and Mr Smith had worn a dark-blue suit so that they looked unnervingly alike when they went down the street together. They had gone directly to the lawyer’s, for the wills, and then to the insurance company. On the way, Mr Smith had insisted on stopping and buying for the new Mrs Smith a small felt dog which amused her; there had been a man selling these on the street corner, and all around his small stand were tiny wound-up dogs which ran in circles, squeaking in shrill imitation of a bark. Mrs Smith brought the box with the dog in it into the insurance company and set it on the desk, and while they were waiting for the doctor she had opened the box and found that there was no key to wind the dog; Mr Smith, saying irritably, ‘Those fellows always try to cheat you,’ had hurried back to the street corner and found the stand, the salesman, and the performing dogs gone.

‘Nothing makes me more furious,’ he told Mrs Smith, ‘than to be cheated by someone like that.’

The small dog stood now on the shelf in the kitchen and Mrs Smith, glancing at it, thought, I could not endure spending the rest of my life with that tawdry sort of thing. She sometimes thought poignantly of her father’s house, realizing that such things were gone from her forever, but, as she told herself again now, ‘I had my eyes open.’ It will have to be soon, she thought immediately after, people are beginning to wonder too openly. Everyone is waiting; it will spoil everything if it is not soon. When her coffee was finished she took a cup into the living room and sat down on the couch where Mrs Jones had been sitting, and thought, it will have to be soon; there’s no food for the weekend, after all, and I would have to send my dress to the cleaners on Monday if I were here, and another week’s rent due tomorrow. The pound of coffee would be the only detail unattended to.

She had finished her fourth cup of coffee – drinking by now hastily and even desperately – when she heard her husband’s step on the stairs. They were still a little embarrassed with one another, so that she hesitated about going to meet him just long enough for him to open the door, and then she came over to him awkwardly and, not knowing still whether he wanted to kiss her when he came home, stood expectantly until he came politely over to her and kissed her cheek.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked, although it was not at all the sort of thing she wanted to say to him, and she knew as she spoke that he would not tell her.

‘Shopping,’ he said. He had an armful of packages, one of which he selected and gave to her.

‘Thank you,’ she said politely before she opened it; it was, she knew by the feel and the drugstore wrapping, a box of candy, and with a feeling which, when she felt it again later, she knew to be triumph, she thought, of course, it’s supposed to be left over, it’s to prove the new husband still brings presents to his bride. She opened the box, wanted to take a candy, thought: not before dinner, and then thought, it probably doesn’t matter, tonight.

‘Will you have one?’ she said to him, and he took one.

His manner did not seem strange, or nervous, but when she said, ‘Mrs Jones was up here this afternoon,’ he said quickly, ‘What did she want, the old busybody?’

‘I think she was jealous,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘It’s been a long time since her husband has taken any interest in her.’

‘I can imagine,’ he said.

‘Shall I start dinner?’ Mrs Smith asked. ‘Would you like to rest for a while first?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ he said.

Now, for the first time, he seemed awkward, and Mrs Smith thought quickly, I was right about the food for the weekend, I guessed right; he did not ask if she was hungry because – and each of them knew now that the other knew – it really did not matter.

Mrs Smith told herself it would ruin everything to say anything now, and she sat down on the couch next to her husband and said, ‘I’m a little tired, I think.’

‘A week of marriage was too much for you,’ he said, and patted her hand. ‘We’ll have to see that you get more rest.’

Why does it take so long, why does it take so long? Mrs Smith thought; she stood up again and walked across the room nervously to look out the window; Mr Jones was just coming up the front steps and he looked up and saw her and waved. Why does it take so long? she thought again, and turned and said to her husband, ‘Well?’

‘I suppose so,’ Mr Smith said, and got up wearily from the couch.