Inside, with the door closed, after throwing his coat on a chair, Pete asked abruptly:
“Did you expect me back?”
Lora shook her head. “Why should I?”
“Intuition,” he grinned. “You might have, since there’s no train for nearly an hour.”
“You’ve been to the station and back?”
“Sure. When I walk fast I jerk a bit—souvenir of the war—but I can still get along.”
“Well. You have thirty minutes to wait. You may as well come in and sit down.”
He followed her into the living room, back to the chairs in front of the fire. She was thinking, I shouldn’t have let him in, I’ve got to have more time, I won’t say a word and just wait for him to go, it wasn’t fair for him to come back like this.…
“It’s crazy not to wear gloves,” Pete was saying. He stood close to the fire, warming his hands, exactly as he had done when he had entered with Lewis two hours before. “You can’t walk satisfactorily with your hands in your pockets, and nowadays it takes a couple of miles or more to get my blood going enough to reach my fingers. Not age, surely; I’m not that far gone; I think it must be another trench memento. It thickened my brain and thinned my blood.”
He paused, rubbing his hands, and Lora inquired politely how long he had been in France.
“Four months and eleven days after the armistice. Then I went back again. But I’m sorry I mentioned it. It’s not fit to talk about.”
“Roundabout.” He grinned. “Since I’ve unearthed the details of your history you think it only fair that I divulge my own, is that it? Nothing simpler. I spent a year in Paris—according to the official Canadian records, at the Sorbonne. I taught mathematics at a college in Ohio. I drove a moving-van in Cleveland. I worked on newspapers in Montreal, Saint Louis, Peoria and Chicago. Two years ago I came to New York. My career has just begun. That, you will notice, is one of the outstanding features of my career, its tendency to keep on beginning. It preserves my enthusiasm and prevents my getting into a rut.”
“You’ve been in New York two years?”
He nodded. “So near and yet so far, is it not? That’s what I was thinking here a little while ago, sitting here, while your boyfriend was trying to stick his tongue out and say boo.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No? How about thinking it?”
“I didn’t think it either.”
“Well, I did.” He had taken the chair nearest her, the one Lewis had sat in earlier in the evening, and now he bent his head and drew his eyebrows down to peer at her. He said abruptly, “I see you’ve got a new watch.”
She stirred a little and put her right hand over her left wrist, then at once removed it again.
“It isn’t new.”
“It’s very pretty. Much nicer than those cumbersome things they used to make. I noticed it, earlier, as soon as I came in the room.” He took his eyes away and directed them at the fire, and after a short silence he went on, “You know, giving you that damn watch was my one undiluted stupidity. I’ve never been able to forget it. It was a symbol, a token of a weakness I disown and the validity of which I deny. Thinking of the watch, naturally I thought of you, I thought of you wearing it—” He broke off shortly, and turned to her, “You did get it? You went back to the room.…”
For reply she nodded. His eyes went back to the fire.
“Of course you would. I had no doubt of that. I used to say to myself, well, there was Lora. The pretty little piece who worked in a candy factory and never ran out of money. I used to sing here and there—you can imagine it, you’ve heard me sing: Lora and Petey were lovers, and oh, my, how she could love.…Then I’d think of the watch, and I could see you finding it there on the pillow and putting it on.…Bah. It made me sick. It interfered with my mitosis, it induced a suspension of function among my viscera.” He turned to her and said abruptly, “Have you still got it?”
“No,” she said, “I’m sorry—”
He said nothing. She went on, “I was in trouble, and I sold it. I was going to have a baby. It was a long time ago.”
She knew perfectly well he would smile with his mouth crooked, but nevertheless she winced a little when she saw it.
“Afterwards, when I got money, I tried to get it back, but it was gone.”
“Splendid!” Pete exclaimed. “You sold it to buy baby clothes. It wasn’t anything to brag about, I suppose by now it’s junk, but if not I’ll bet I know who has it. It is being worn by a clergyman’s wife who lives on Staten Island, and on Sundays when her husband’s watch isn’t running, as it usually isn’t, she lets him take hers to the pulpit with him to time the services by. That’s the watch I bought. Splendid! A worthy fate. It was amusing just now, when you got apologetic. Good lord, have you never heard of the maternal instinct? Its resourcefulness? Its fierce indomitable will? The desperate extremes it will go to? Why, to gain its ends, an instinct like that would sell a grandfather’s clock, even Big Ben himself, let alone one little wristwatch. Which reminds me, on one occasion your instinct seems to have slipped up somewhere. A couple of hours ago you heard me speaking—on a matter of business—regarding some children and their fathers. Four children, and four fathers—probably a record. But why not five? This is just between you and me, it’s not intended for the official dossier. Why not five? The eldest was born in the summer of nineteen-eighteen. There is in the dossier one little hint of the question I’m putting; the man who went west discovered echoes of some old murmurs about infanticide in the inquiry that followed your father’s death; but of course I have other reasons for asking myself, why not five? It occurs to me that you might be willing to help me find the answer.”
He stopped and waited, but Lora said nothing and would not look at him.
“Come,” he persisted, “I don’t claim any rights—even though I’m supposed to have an instinct of my own which should clamor for its destiny—but you’ll admit that my curiosity is valid. I might fairly press for an answer, don’t you think?”
Still she was silent. He was peering at her again.
“I do mean to have an answer,” he insisted. “Do you remember that? The Sunday mornings you would get breakfast at the room, and I would bellow at you, do I get another piece of bacon or do I not, I mean to have an answer, my love. That’s the present situation, I mean to have an answer, my love.”
Lora opened her lips long enough to say, “You won’t get one,” and closed them again.
“But it did arrive,” Pete said. “That seems to have been pretty well established by the testimony of the maid—Martha, wasn’t it—at the inquest. Reinforced by the information furnished later by Mrs. Ogilvy, otherwise Cecelia, I never liked her. Your mother, by the way, nearly got herself into serious trouble; they couldn’t pry her mouth open. She was a medieval heretic confronted by the black-robed Inquisition; she raised her eyes toward heaven, or lowered them toward hell—the details are meager—and refused to utter a word. The sympathy of the community saved her from the righteous rigor of the law. But Martha was frightened and spilled the beans. There was a search for you high and low; you were traced as far as Chicago, and that’s where Cecelia came in, they suspected her of having hid you in a closet or under the bed. Acute fellows. What they were looking for was a baby, live if necessary but preferably dead, for that was what they had smelled. Pleasant inoffensive little game of hide and seek. They didn’t find it. It’s all forgotten now, of course, so you run no risk if you satisfy my curiosity.”
“No,” Lora said. She said again, “No. I won’t talk about it. There was no baby.”
“Oh, well.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If you won’t. Maybe you’re a little vague about it yourself; apparently your father was a man of action.”
“You sent a man out there?” said Lora.
“My paper did.”
“Did he see my mother?”
“He sure did. Oh, it’s all right so far, he said nothing about you, he had strict orders on that point. He saw your mother twice, but she wouldn’t talk, at any rate not about this. Otherwise she was quite chatty.”
“She still lives there?”
He nodded. “In a big brick house with three or four servants and a bald gentle husband.”
Lora stared at him. “A husband!”
“Indeed, yes. You know, it’s hard to believe all this is news to you. You’re not putting it on? No, I suppose not. She has a husband all right, got him years ago, I don’t know just when.”
“What’s his name?”
“I forget.” He considered. “It wouldn’t be Davis?”
Lora shook her head. Bald, she thought, and gentle. A newcomer, probably. Well! Her mother had a bald and gentle husband and a big brick house! She didn’t like the idea at all, it didn’t fit, and she resented it. She felt the irritation of the resentment within her, and that seemed absurd—good lord, wasn’t her mother welcome to a husband if she wanted one? The balder and gentler the better. But the resentment remained, and induced a sort of confused pseudo-disbelief. If she got on a train and went back to that town tomorrow she could not even go to her father’s house, there would be strangers in it; her father would be nowhere, actually not anywhere; and to find her mother she must ask, and could not even properly ask, not knowing her name. Certainly all this was true, but it could not at once be believed, and meanwhile must be resented. She thought the resentment was silly, but she did not try to banish it; indeed, she clung to it, and to all the shreds of emotion she could muster, regarding her mother and the absurd bald husband, regarding the house of her father and her father himself, now a ghost, a wraith that floated grotesquely from the hard reality of memory into the unsubstantial vapor of fact, and back into memory again.
She clung to these because she was afraid of what was trying to replace them. Her mind kept trying to escape, and fiercely she forced it back. What had flashed into it when she had opened the door and saw Pete there on the threshold, was now perfectly plain, and that was what she was desperately determined to conquer and suppress, at least until he had gone and she could consider it calmly, could shut herself up with it alone in her room and have it out. The urgency of it amazed her and filled her with panic; with him sitting there in the chair next to her, so close she could have reached out and touched him, she knew she dared not trust her thoughts for a single instant. She must touch him—heaven help her, father, the ghost of her father, and mother with a bald and gentle husband.…She must let him know that she wanted to feel him…dead now, and always had been dead, and mother wouldn’t let them pry her mouth open, he had said, and he had said why not five, he wanted to know about the baby he had put in her.…He had put in her, god think of that, there he was, and all those nights, he was the one who knew how to do that…right now, right this instant…but she couldn’t talk about that, she had told him so, she would not talk about that time when she had without any doubt been ready to get her father’s revolver from the bedroom and shoot him with it and now he had shot himself.…No use pretending about it, what she wanted, look at his legs stretched out like that, and the cuffs of his shirt were dirty, they always were, if he put on a clean shirt when he got up the cuffs would be soiled by the time he got his hair combed, if you could call it combing…she could comb his hair all right, all his hair, and she would, his head first, it was more exciting to lead up to it…but not now, refinements could come later…not now…for now, oh, now.…
She sighed sharply and deeply and jerked herself up in her chair. Pete glanced at her. She could not have told what he had been saying. She looked at her watch and said brusquely:
“You’d better go or you’ll miss the train.”
“What?” he demanded. “Already?”
“You have only fifteen minutes.”
“I hate to leave this fire. And this chair. And you.”
“I’m afraid there’s no help for it.”
“The hell there ain’t.” He grinned at her. “You haven’t got a bed for me?”
“Of course not. Don’t be silly.”
“Well, here I go.” He didn’t move. “Isn’t there a later train? There must be. God, I hate trains. And the subway; if I knew how to make a bomb I’d blow it up. Particularly do I hate trains at night. You know that. Now if I could sleep here, on that couch for instance, and get up to a good breakfast of eggs and thick bacon, and take a train in the daylight, when you can at least see where you’re going—”
She had got up from her chair. She interrupted decisively, “Come. Really. You’ll miss it.”
He didn’t move. Without lifting his head his eyes went swiftly up her body and down again, and though she didn’t see it she was aware of it. “I’ve another idea,” he said. “Come and sit on my knee—straddle, you know—and I’ll tell you the story about the princess who couldn’t remember what to do with her fingers.”
Lora stood perfectly still, but she knew she couldn’t stay that way; if she stood a moment longer she would begin to tremble and he would see it. Besides, standing there in front of him it would be too easy…just a step, two steps, to him.…She sat down in her own chair again, upright, with her backbone stiff.…
“I don’t like stories anymore,” she said.
“Don’t tell me.” He grinned at her. “That was the first thing that struck me when I saw you. Not tonight, a month ago it was, when I came out to make sure it was you. I walked out from the village and found a convenient hole in the hedge to look through. Your eldest boy came along and gave me a start—as sure as I live, I thought, there’s one of my cells running around on its own legs. That was before details and dates had been collected; I discovered my mistake later. Then I saw the girl and another boy or two in the back yard, around the corner of the house, and I said to myself, there can no longer be any doubt of it, I’ve absolutely been cuckolded. Then suddenly you appeared around the other corner of the house and there you were, on the terrace, with your hair blowing into your eyes. You had some shears and a basket in your hand and you came across the yard and stopped not far from my hole and began cutting flowers. I almost called to you, but remembered the ethics of my profession just in time. Furthermore, it wasn’t you—that is, it wasn’t the veteran mother of countless children by countless fathers—it was instead a charming and appetizing little girl whose neck I had wanted to wring for twelve years because I had once been ass enough to give her a wristwatch. By the way, it appeared to me that day, from a distance of fifteen feet, that you were wearing it.”
“No.”
“It wasn’t the one you have on.”
“No.”
“I see, your gardening equipment I suppose. One for golfing, one for motoring—didn’t I tell you once your appropriate scene was stucco and roses in Oak Park? Congratulations, you’ve made good. Better, even; the flora are up to standard, and as to two-legged fauna, you’ve more than your share. That being true, why, you ask, do I offer to tell you the story about the princess who couldn’t remember what to do with her fingers? Why do I seek to disrupt an established and smoothly running schedule? Albert the artist, let us say, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, experiments in rhythm and composition; on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays Lewis the lawyer, man of affairs—shall we suspect here a sacrifice to Mammon? Looking at him, I should say certainly a sacrifice. And on Sundays catch as catch can.”
“That isn’t true,” Lora said. She sat still upright, her hands folded in her lap with the fingers intertwined, her eyes on his face. “I know what you’re doing, you’re trying to make me angry. You used to do that and it used to work. But I don’t get angry anymore, and what you say isn’t true, not a word of it.”
“It was only a guess, I may have the days wrong.”
“I tell you it isn’t true!”
“What isn’t?” He peered at her. “What isn’t true?”
“What you said.” She stopped, shutting her lips tight, then began again, “You know I can’t talk. Listen, Pete. I don’t want to talk. That isn’t true, what you said—it isn’t true with Albert or Lewis or anybody. It never has been, the way it was with you. Now I’m an awful fool, I shouldn’t have talked at all, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’ve never felt that way, not once, I’ve never done any of those things, I’ve never wanted to. I think I was crazy, with you. It was so long ago it seems like another person and I can’t believe it, but I must have been crazy. Now… again…I knew it right away this afternoon when I saw you getting out of the car with Lewis…”
She felt herself trembling, and stopped.
“Crazy hell,” Pete said. “Come over here.”
She shook her head. He got up and stood beside her chair for a moment, then reached down and began removing the pins from her hair. A strand fell, then another, while she sat motionless.
“I like it better down,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? Talk about crazy, you’re crazy if what you just said is true. Good god, are you a dried-up nun, to take it out in praying and pinching yourself? Ah, your throat is as smooth and white, your hair still talks to my fingers, and who would dream—let me see, let me see—who would dream that four pairs of lips had dined and breakfasted there?” He chuckled. “Infant lips, mind you—the others shall not be counted now. Just as it should be, precisely a handful, a warm round handful—that is unquestionably an improvement, formerly they were firmer and more discreet—this is better, riper—Oh, much riper and better. You would deny all this? And this, and this? Here—come—what—”
Suddenly and swiftly she slipped out from under his hands and his face, drawing herself down and forward, free of him, and the next instant was on her feet three paces away, facing him. She was breathing quickly, and the hand that was rearranging the front of her dress was visibly trembling.
“What the hell,” he said, straightening up but making no move towards her.
“Not here,” she said.
“All right. But you needn’t get heroic about it. I wasn’t contemplating rape.”
“I’m not heroic. I had to do that.”
“Well.” He grinned, and bowed. “What next? Your room? That would be better, of course. Upstairs? I confess I’m a little impatient myself.”
She shook her head. “Not here. Not tonight.”
“Not tonight! You are crazy. Good god, are you holding out for a courtship?”
“I’m not holding out. Don’t be smart, Pete. Don’t you see—I want it to be better. The children are upstairs, and I don’t—not here. You can rape me if you want to, that’s exactly what you can do—do you remember how we did that? I’ll come anywhere you say. In town, in New York. Not here.”
“So you’re putting me off. What for?”
“I’m putting myself off.”
“Come to town with me now then. Is there a train?”
She shook her head. “There’s a train, the last one, but I won’t go now. I’ll come tomorrow, any time you say.”
“Let me sleep here, and we’ll go in together in the morning.”
Again she shook her head. “Please, Pete, don’t. I’ve got to arrange things. I’ll come, listen, there’s a train that leaves here at two in the afternoon, gets to Grand Central a little after three. You meet me at the station, or tell me where to come if you’d rather. I’ll stay all night if you want me to; I can arrange that. You must go now, please. Please go.”
“These long engagements are dangerous, my love. By tomorrow I might forget all about it.”
“No you won’t.”
“The hell I won’t. You’re right probably, but you’re not so nice this way, you know too much.”
He stood an instant, intently and silently regarding her, then turned abruptly and started for the vestibule, and she followed. “You wouldn’t like my room,” he went on, as he got into his coat, “it smells of garlic, I think they must have rubbed it into the walls. Besides, it’s barely possible we might be interrupted. There seems to be a lot of extra keys.”
“Oh. Well…somewhere else then.…”
“No, it will be all right, we’ll barricade the damn thing. But I’d better meet you at Grand Central. Around three, in the waiting room?”
He was on the terrace, and she was standing on the threshold of the open door. She nodded.
“Yes. A little after.”