JANE AND WARREN Coe had asked the Miles Murphys over from Digby for the day. Everybody in New Leeds had been counting on Jane to do it; the community wanted to know how Miles Murphy was taking his second wife’s return. “Why, it’s simple as pie,” Jane had been scoffing, cheerfully, all summer long. “I’ll just ask them down. They won’t see anything strange in it. We always ask them down in October, to go for a walk or something. Don’t we, Warren?” “Nearly always,” emended Warren, who was a very conscientious person. “Why, if we don’t ask them this year,” yawned Jane, through September, “Miles will be hurt. Miles is awfully touchy. He’ll think it’s because of Martha.”
Nevertheless, when the appointed day came, both the Coes felt uneasy. They were afraid Martha would find out, and though, of course, it was not Martha’s business whom they asked where, they now wished they had told her. The most horrible contingency had presented itself to Warren, a poor sleeper, during the night: he imagined Martha and John, out for a walk on the beach, surprising him and Jane with the Murphys. “Wouldn’t that be awful?” agreed Jane, in a solemn whisper, when he confided this fear to her at breakfast. She clapped her hand to her cheek and dropped her big, undershot jaw, staring at Warren over the toaster. But secretly she was excited by the prospect; her schoolgirlish heart throbbed to adventure. She liked the plot to thicken, so long as she and Warren could figure in it as innocent spectators. “How could I know?” she already heard herself lamenting, her irrepressible giggle starting to make its way up, like a bubble, from her solar plexus. Just the same, she was nervous. She let Warren have his way about the choice of picnic site: even though the cove was tame, compared to walking out on the breakwater, it was safe because Martha hated it. Both Martha and Miles Murphy could be dangerous enemies, she said thoughtfully.
The Coes had no enemies. They were the best-liked couple in New Leeds. Jane was a big, tawny, ruminative girl, now thirty-eight, who played the oboe and the bagpipes. She had a fresh, orangey, milkmaid’s complexion and round, curious blue eyes that kept rolling in their sockets; she liked to sit crosslegged and always looked as if she were still wearing a middy blouse and bloomers. Her maternal grandfather, a German chemist, had invented a children’s laxative, and her grandfather on the other side, also German, had done very well in the sheet-music business. Unlike the other New Leedsians, she had never had to worry about money. Though you could not tell it from the way they lived, she was said to have a capital of more than half a million very shrewdly invested by her mother’s man of business. Besides this, Warren had a tiny income that had been left him by his father’s bachelor brother, who was something in shipping in New Orleans: Jane had a multitude of cousins but Warren’s family, on both sides, was dying out; his father had died young, and his mother was an invalid.
Warren was an only child. He was now fifty, but you would never guess it. He had an eager, boyish face, rather like a bird’s, with a thin, beaked nose and bright spots of color, high in either cheek. He had fair, thin hair, which Jane always cut for him, using professional clippers, so that he had the mazed look of a person just out of a barber’s chair. His frame was slight and thin-chested. He smiled a great deal, happily, and had a habit of raising himself on the balls of his small feet, as if he were trying to see over the heads of a crowd. This alert, expectant air was always with him. He seldom sat down, for before he came to New Leeds he had taught for nearly twenty years at a school of design and had spent his days and nights moving about from easel to easel, looking over shoulders. He was a very excitable, forward-gazing person, very moralistic and high-principled; every moment was an adventure to him. Warren loved his relationship with Jane; they told each other all their thoughts, exclaiming over the differences. Jane was indolent; he was full of ginger. Jane was a bit unscrupulous; he was an idealist. Jane was equable; he was easily cast down. But they shared an appetite for life that woke them every morning, greedy for the new day, to be divided, fairly, between them, like a big fresh apple.
This greed for experience was their innocent vice. They did not smoke, except for Jane’s occasional denicotinized cigarette; they drank in extreme moderation, often from the same glass: “I’ll just take some of Jane’s,” Warren usually proffered, partly because he hated to waste anything and partly for the fun of sharing. They never touched real coffee. When they were alone, they ate whatever health food Jane had been reading about—yogurt, wheat germ, figs, vitamin soups made in the blender with nine raw vegetables. Yet they were not cranks; like good children, they cleaned their plates when they were out to dinner and came back for seconds. They appreciated fine cooking but thought it unfair to Jane to keep her standing over a hot stove when nature outdoors was so beautiful. They loved long walks, and Warren was a systematic nudist, though he always took pains not to give offense to the neighbors; it shocked him to see some of his friends stripping on the beach, in plain view of an old lady who sat in her second-story window with field glasses.
They seemed utterly different from the other New Leeds people—a thing Jane often pondered on, aloud, in a dreamy reverie, studying her bare toes in her Mexican thong sandals and half-wondering whether she was getting a callous. You would never have thought, she said, that she and Warren would fit in; they were too normal. And yet they were crazy about it; and in ten years’ residence—they had come during the war when Jane had been certain the small city they lived in would be bombed—they had become an indispensable fixture. They were the social center of New Leeds; they supposed it was just because they were so normal. They served as a sort of switchboard that plugged in on the various crisscrossed lines. “We’re just a public utility,” said Warren with his mild, happy smile. In all the years they had been here, they had never had a fight with anybody, not even with Miles Murphy, who had fought with nearly the whole town at the time of his divorce from Martha. They had managed to keep his friendship while refusing to take sides. “I have a lot of respect for Miles,” Warren still reiterated, after seven years; he was not afraid to say it to Martha. As he explained to her when he was painting her portrait last month, he liked her because he could say to her the things he really thought. Loyalty to a side, he said, had been instilled in him by his southern mother, but he now thought you had to be loyal to all sides, to the truth as you saw it, which, when you came down to it, meant being loyal to yourself. Cleaning his brushes, he watched Martha anxiously to see if she followed his thought. He had a way, he knew, of making things that were simple, darn it, to other people very complex to himself, but Martha always listened, with her absent, encouraging nod. “Probably it’s an old idea to you,” he said apologetically, and Martha smiled. She never tried to deceive him. “I value that quality!” he always cried when her candid tongue was aspersed.
What he valued in Miles was something different—Miles’s intellectual equipment. Sitting on the beach, in the noonday sun, he felt thrilled, as always, by Miles’s mind. The man was not attractive physically. He was a fat, freckled fellow with a big frame, a reddish crest of curly hair, and small, pale-green eyes, like grapes about to burst. His large face, with its long plump crooked nose, was flushed from the efforts of his digestive tract: lobster shells and the bones of two fried chickens lay piled up, waiting to be buried; two empty Moselle bottles, from Jane’s father’s cellar, lay on their sides in the sand. As usual, after eating and drinking, Miles was breathing heavily, like a spent athlete: he gave the impression of virtuous fatigue even when he had been over-indulging. But he had a brilliant mind, and beside him Warren felt very humble. It was Warren’s great sorrow that he had gone straight from a military academy into art school; he had missed the experience of college. Miles had been educated by the Jesuits at Fordham, and from there he had gone on to Heidelberg and the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics. Later on, for a brief time, he had studied with Jung at Zurich. There was scarcely anything Warren could think of that Miles had not done; he had been a successful playwright, with a hit show, about the Jesuit fathers, running on Broadway when he was only twenty-three, a boxer, practically professional, who used to work out with Hemingway, a psychologist, a lay analyst, a writer of adventure stories, a practicing mystic, a magazine editor. He was on that kick, as he called it, when he met Martha, who was just a girl graduate at the time. He was the type, said Jane, that was very attractive to women; he had had three wives and innumerable mistresses and a couple of illegitimate children, besides the present baby and the little boy who had died. And of course, he was a heavy drinker, which proved, according to Martha, that he really cared nothing about women. All heavy drinkers, she had insisted, were sexless underneath—a remark that had been bothering Warren for years. Warren had a very good memory, which he had never thought of as a handicap or an anti-social trait before he came to New Leeds. He used to store up the things his friends said and come back later, if need be, for clarification, after he had turned them over in his own mind. But here, when he reminded people of something they had said five years before, they either did not remember having said it or announced, lightly, that they had changed their opinion. This vagueness and instability put Warren in a dreadful state; he felt as if he held a ring of keys to fascinating cabinets that had had their locks changed privily by some malicious prankster. Looking at Miles now, for instance, brooding and silent, with his scarred chin sunk onto his chest, smoking a cigarette that his new wife had lit and put between his lips, Warren felt as if he might possibly have the key to him in that long-ago observation of Martha’s. But when he had recalled it to her, timidly, in another connection (for he did not see quite how it worked, Freudianly), Martha had made a grimace and said, with a rueful glance at John, “Oh dear, did I say that?”
Warren hungered for serious conversation, which was one of the reasons he had recently turned from nature to portraiture; he liked to draw the sitter out. On other occasions, he was constantly being disappointed, though New Leeds was full of people who had had interesting lives. “I’d like to get your point of view,” he would say, finally, at a cocktail party, to the person he had been waiting patiently to query, but the person, like as not, was tipsy by the time Warren got to him or else only wanted to gossip. Watching Miles today, Warren had the premonition that he was going to be disappointed again. Last year, when the Murphys had come down, Miles had been very interesting; he had advised Warren to read Nietzsche, and Warren had been looking forward to a renewal of the discussion. He had several points he wanted to make; he had underlined passages in the Modern Library Zarathustra that seemed to contradict some things Miles had said about Nietzsche’s thought. But Miles, when he had arrived this noon, had promptly turned the subject aside. “The translations are all terrible,” he said briskly. “You can’t understand Nietzsche if you don’t read him in German.” Warren, for a second, had been mad as a hornet; a few years ago, the same thing had happened with Plato. A point had come up, and Miles had said, “Read the Republic,” and when Warren had done it and called up Miles in New York, all primed on the cave myth, Miles had told him that you couldn’t understand Plato except in the original. Reminded of his earlier admonition, he had said, “I don’t remember it. I must have been drunk.”
Still, Warren had not yet given up hope of the afternoon. It all depended on chance. Miles, as Jane said, was a moody soul. It was the mixture of blood in him; he was half Irish and half German. Miles himself said it was the devil of a combination; when he was in black spirits, he talked about himself as a mongrel and blamed his parents for marrying. That was his Irish mood. On his German side, he was more poetic and visionary. He had a theory that the Germans and the Irish were all the same mystic people—Celts, and he used Jane’s tawny hair to prove it. He got his own red hair, he told them, from his mother’s family. He had an affinity with Jane; he liked to get her to talk about her German ancestors. That was why she always brought up the Moselle from her father’s cellar for him. Warren was interested in Jane’s ancestors too; the family’s scientific interests had opened his eyes to a whole new side of life and changed the direction of his painting. But he always felt a little disturbed when Miles got going on Friedrich Barbarossa—it made him think of the Nazis. In another mood, however, Miles would give the Germans what-for and say their trouble was they had never been Christianized properly, except the people in the Rhineland, where Jane’s family came from.
Like all the outstanding people Warren had ever known, Miles was inconsistent. Today he might suddenly stand up and shake himself and tell his wife they were going home. Or he might come to the studio, where Zarathustra was laid out, and talk for the rest of the day. And the wife and baby would have to wait till he was ready to go, even if it was the middle of the night. One night, last winter in New York, the Coes had heard, the baby had nearly been smothered under the overcoats on a bed at a wild party. Miles had a theory about children; he thought you should treat them rough until they reached the age of reason, which he set at eight or nine, the year the child was able to learn its catechism and prepare for its first communion. This theory, Warren admitted, made him see red. And Miles meant it furthermore; he was not just talking through his hat. For a hard-boiled unbeliever, Miles had a strange admiration for the rules and observances of the church; Mother Church, he said, was a great little psychologist—look at the confessional. And he thought Spare the Rod was sound psychology too, up to the age of reason.
The baby, at present, was lying on a blanket, sucking a chicken wing. Helen Murphy had carried him down the beach on her back, in a sort of fishnet bag that Miles had designed for her. Miles did not believe in sitters, and they had never been able to keep a servant—not for lack of money, for Helen had plenty, but because of Miles’s tempers and drinking habits. Warren sat looking at the baby; he loved children and he and Jane were childless. The two women were talking in low voices; Miles had sunk into abstraction. Warren undid the white handkerchief he wore around his head, like a housemaid’s dust cap, to protect his brain from the sun. He leaned over to the baby and, smiling, began to wiggle his ears. He knew Miles was watching him, sardonically, from narrowed, slightly bloodshot eyes, but in such matters as these Warren was a fearless traditionalist. The baby, to his joy, smiled back. At this moment, Jane chose to mention the Sinnotts. Warren’s heart sank; he slumped into the sand. He felt, as he said later, about as big as a minute. Jane’s curiosity, brimming out of her big round eyes, gave the show away. He was cross as the dickens. He and Jane had compacted not to mention Martha unless Miles or Helen did it first, but when it came to gossip Jane was weak and disloyal, like a bad little girl. She was now looking rather shamefaced, her eyes cast down and a tentative grin twitching her wide red mouth; later she would say that Miles would surely have thought it funny if she had not mentioned Martha.
Miles sat up, chewing on a spear of beach grass. “How are they getting along?” he inquired, with evident interest. Warren felt terrifically relieved to find that he had been wrong, as usual. There was a slight pause; the Coes eyed each other. “You haven’t seen her?” said Jane, looking at Miles curiously. Miles shook his head. “I’ve never seen her,” mused Helen. “Of course, I feel I know her from what Miles has said.” She said this in a simple, deferential tone that made a great impression on Warren. This tall placid brunette girl simply worshipped Miles, which was what Miles had always needed. Everything about him, apparently, was sacred to her, including his ex-wives; she sounded almost as if Martha were a holy relic of Miles’s past, like his first baby shoes. Warren was amazed; he felt he was getting to know Helen finally. “That’s funny,” he said, sliding over to her, brightly, with his winning smile. “That you haven’t seen her, I mean. You’d think you would have run into each other at the Stop and Shop or the Arena Theater or meeting the train or something. It’s almost like a reverse coincidence. Mathematically—wouldn’t you say, Miles?—the chances would be all the other way. I mean if Helen and Martha missed each other umpteen times . . . ?” His high thin voice halted as he saw that Miles was not interested in a statistical discussion.
“She’s changed,” said Jane, thoughtfully. “How, Jane?” said Helen, with her warm, interested smile. Despite the fact that she and Miles had been married two years now, she still had a slight, hovering air of ingratiation, as if she were Miles’s secretary; she had a long, straight figure and buxom legs, which she wound around each other unobtrusively; she carried her cropped head a little to one side, and kept her lips slightly parted. “Well,” said Jane. “More hectic for one thing. Wouldn’t you say so, Warren? They laugh a lot at parties. They’re both quite witty, you know, and that rather scares people in New Leeds.” Miles nodded, with an air of acumen; he had a funny way of listening, not to the things you said, but to something behind them; you could feel him click like an adding machine when a congenial thought was deposited. “She isn’t nearly as popular as she used to be,” continued Jane, candidly, avoiding Warren’s eye. “People say they’re too critical.” “Ah,” said Miles. There was a silence. “They seem very much in love,” volunteered Jane, slowly. “Seem!” reproachfully cried Warren. “You oughtn’t to say that, Jane. Of course, they’re in love. If they aren’t, who is?” Jane giggled. “Warren is awfully loyal,” she said to Miles. “Why, that makes me hot under the collar,” protested Warren, sitting up and moving his bare thin neck, as if a real collar were confining it. “I’m not loyal. I’m just going by what I see. How would you feel, Jane, if somebody said, ‘The Coes seem very much in love’? Why, I’d fight the person that said that. Don’t you agree with me, Miles? Why, that was an awful remark, darling.” “They seem to be in love—that’s all I said,” returned Jane, with composure. “Well, they are,” said Warren, fiercely subsiding. He retied the handkerchief carefully round his head. The Murphys laughed.
“After all, Warren,” suggested Jane. “There was that story. Last week.” Warren’s bright face sobered; the spots of color paled; he nodded glumly. The Murphys were all ears. “Should I tell it, Warren?” asked Jane. “Might as well,” he answered, folding his arms, with a gloomy, stoical mien and bowing his kerchiefed head. “Excuse me, dear,” he added. “Well,” said Jane, “the story is they’ve been fighting. They came to the doctor all cut up and smelling of alcohol. They claimed they fell through a window.” “All cut up, Jane?” gently inquired Helen. “Well,” said Jane. “I haven’t actually seen them.” “I have,” said Warren. “I met them this morning. I forgot to tell you, Jane. It was just their hands.” “But isn’t that peculiar?” said Helen. “Peculiar is right,” said Warren emphatically; he hated to have his close friends involve themselves in a scandal, even if it was just from thoughtlessness—it spoiled his image of them. “Mind you,” he added, pointing his finger suddenly at Miles, “I don’t think this proves they’ve been fighting. But I can’t see how they both broke a window unless they were spifflicated.” “That’s the strange part,” continued Jane. “That’s why everybody’s discussing it. They hardly drink at all. Much less than they used to. At least, when they’re out in public. Probably they’ve become secret drinkers.” She waggled her jaw. “They say that’s very common with romantic couples like that. They move to the country and pull the shades and start drinking and the next thing you know there’s a suicide pact.” “Have you ever heard of that, Miles?” demanded Warren, his eager falsetto breaking in on Jane’s deep, comfortable tones. “Martha says it’s quite frequent.”
“Martha says?” exclaimed Miles. His large frame jerked upward and sideward, as if somebody had stuck him in the ribs. “You mean she talks about it?” “Not about herself,” qualified Jane. “About other people. There was a case in the papers the other day, people we used to know, and that’s how she explained it.” “Very interesting,” said Miles, nudging Helen’s behind with his perforated shoe. “How do you mean?” said Jane. Miles stroked his chin. “Martha is a very sick girl,” he said. The Coes glanced at each other, surreptitiously. “I’ll give you two examples,” said Miles, after a pause. “You remember the fire we had?” The Coes nodded. “Well, she talked about the fire incessantly before it happened. She was convinced the house was going to burn down because of some private guilt of her own. And then, by God, it did.” “You don’t mean you think she started it?” cried Jane. Miles shrugged. “I’ve been studying some poltergeist cases recently and I recognized the pattern. I don’t know how I missed it before. She was the first one up that night and normally she sleeps like a log. She’d rescued the boy before I knew what was what. The boy was asleep too. Nobody smelled smoke but Martha, and she got herself and the boy completely dressed before she called the fire department.” “Good Lord,” said Jane. “Yes,” said Miles. “Notice—she didn’t want to hurt anybody. That’s typical of these cases. It’s an attention-drawing mechanism, primarily.” “She felt overshadowed by Miles,” elucidated Helen. “But she was quite beside herself,” said Miles, “when the insurance people came down to investigate. Wanted to put the blame on some poor devil of a workman who’d done the wiring. Never gave a thought to the fact that he’d be prosecuted if the insurance people believed her. She said it was her fault, really, that she’d instructed him to commit a violation—all poppycock. It was her neurotic way of confessing the truth, of saying, in symbolic language, that the fire was her fault; she was the firebug. And you know, by God, I remembered something she told me once—that when she was a little girl she used to put her younger brother up to setting fires; he’d get the blame and she’d watch the blaze. The brother never knew it; she was clever, the way she instigated him; he thought all through his boyhood that he was the pyromaniac.”
“Whew!” said Warren, running his hand across his brow. He glanced at Jane wonderingly: did she credit this story? He would have liked to argue one or two points in it with Miles, but he hated to let Helen think he disbelieved her husband. His heart, as he told Jane, sank to his boots. The blue day was blackened for him; he knew he would not sleep for thinking of this tale. Either way he looked at it, it was horrible, horrible for Martha, if true, horrible for Miles, if false. And horrible for him and Jane to be listening to it, crouched around Miles on a lovely fall afternoon. “Understand,” said Miles. “I don’t hold it against her. All that’s in the past. I think now I mishandled her. I didn’t allow for the fact that she was a very frightened kid when I married her. Helen thinks so too.” His wife bobbed her head in quick, sympathetic agreement. “I thought,” said Miles, “I could teach her self-knowledge. But when she found out I was on to her, she flew the coop.” He laughed. Warren felt deeply shocked. “And she took her revenge. I don’t blame her. She has the modern girl’s vindictive mania for publicity. She could have left me any time in broad daylight, without any fanfare. But she had to do it in a nightgown, at three o’clock in the morning.” Warren caught his breath; this was not the way Miles had told the story before.
Warren and Jane too—he could tell from the look in her eyes—remembered perfectly well the morning Miles had come out to their house in a taxi, his red beard unshaven, fumes of liquor still on his breath, looking for Martha and crying. According to the story he told then he had locked Martha out of the house in her nightgown, in a fit of drunken humor, and gone up to bed fully expecting her to come back in the kitchen door, which was open—that sort of thing was always happening in New Leeds, he had insisted, and the wives did not take it seriously. Martha’s story, which Jane and Warren had always believed, was that Miles had waked her up, kicked her out of bed, and pushed her step by step down the stairs and out the front door and ordered her not to come back—John Sinnott had seen the bruises, and the little boy, Barrett, according to the cleaning woman, had been watching over the banister.
“It was another put-up job,” said Miles, cool as a cucumber. “I was little brother this time. She got the idea it would be nice for me to lock her out, and she set me on to do it. She woke me up from a sound sleep and told me she was in love with Sinnott and dared me to put her out of the house. I was the patsy.”
“I can understand,” finally said Jane, after a very long silence, “that she provoked you, Miles. But did she actually tell you, in so many words, to lock her out of the house? It doesn’t sound like Martha.” Warren nodded eagerly. “No question about it,” said Miles. “It was the case of her brother all over again, don’t you see?” explained Helen. “She put the idea in Miles’s head.” Warren sighed. He thought Miles was lying, and this depressed him terribly; it meant Miles was a person he could no longer talk to honestly. At the same time, he pitied Miles; he supposed Miles half-believed the things he was saying, though even a rather dumb soul, like himself, could see plumb through them and realize that all that about having forgiven Martha was a lot of hooey. Warren could not imagine that if he and Jane should ever separate—even if it were Jane’s fault—he would ever say such awful things about her.
And he guessed that was a limitation, in a way; he lacked the bravado to tell such a big lie. He was old-fashioned. He had liberated himself in his painting, and he and Jane had engaged in some pretty daring experiments in bed, but socially he was no pioneer. Probably, at bottom, he was as big a scoundrel as Miles; in his heart, perhaps he really wanted to beat up women and brag and lie and was just the prisoner of his inhibitions. The psychoanalyst had shown him, five summers ago, that he was full of unreleased aggressions; the cramp he had developed in his right hand cleared up like magic when the analyst proved to him that it was not a painting block but plain muscular tension; the Coes had been having a little boundary dispute with their neighbor, and what Warren really wanted, underneath, it turned out, was to punch the fellow in the jaw. The analyst had opened his eyes to a lot of things; all moral values, to the analyst, were just rationalizations: ego massage. Warren’s own values came from an identification with his mother and from being the class underdog in a sadistic military school, where they used to tear up his water colors and make him do dirty drawings. Any values he had learned that way were probably subjective and specious; no doubt he was just a bottled-up bully who overcompensated in the other direction. And yet you had to live with your values, Warren stuck to that, though he had been awfully interested to get the analyst’s point of view. Your rationalizations, darn it, were part of you too. Even if he knew he was a pharisee, he still leapt up when a woman came into the room. And it still made his blood boil to hear Miles spin a theory at Martha’s expense, though of course he was just as much of a hypocrite himself to sit there and smile when he wanted to kill the guy. Probably a worse hypocrite, as Jane would be able to tell him, when they talked it over together: the reason he was so hopping mad was probably a selfish one. He did not want to admit that Martha could be dishonest because he needed her honesty: she was the only person in New Leeds, outside of Jane, who understood what he was doing in his painting.
“Warren did her portrait last month,” Jane was saying. “Oh, I should love to see it,” murmured Helen. “Shall we go and look at it, Miles?” Miles made a sound of consent and heaved himself up from the sand. “Is she still so lovely?” Helen asked, arranging the baby in the bag. Warren watched her wanly, almost forgetting to help. She was bound to be disappointed in the portrait—people always were. They looked at his paintings and said, “Oh,” in a surprised tone; when he explained the theory behind them, they listened but kept glancing uneasily back at the canvases, as if they could not find the connection. For a moment he suspected Helen of insincerity: did she really want to see the painting or was she only interested in getting Miles moving? The afternoon wind had risen and the little cove was full of wavelets. Miles, warmly dressed in wool muffler, wool shirt, and tweed jacket, might never give a thought to the fact that the baby could take cold. If it had been Martha, Warren reflected, she would have told him they had to leave on account of the baby and Miles would have said, “Nonsense,” and they would have had a fight. But Helen, the Coes agreed, was a better manager; she tried to lead Miles without his knowing it, but she never argued, they noticed. If he said, “Nonsense,” she said, “Yes, dear,” as if she honestly welcomed the correction, even when Miles was in the wrong. Warren sometimes wondered whether this was altogether good for Miles; he would hate it, himself, if Jane tried it.
Still, he admired Helen for her selfless devotion, and he undertook to answer her question seriously, as they walked along the beach, back to the house. Helen had the baby; he had the knapsack with the lunch things. Miles and Jane brought up the rear, walking slowly: Jane was looking for driftwood. “Jane could tell you better,” he said. “I look at her as a painter. She has a lot of animation in her face. An academic painter, with late baroque light effects, could make her very arresting. That’s the way I would have done her in my early phase: a smoldering little saint with fair hair and white skin and black eyes. Some people might call that beauty. But when you study her you see that her face is asymmetrical. One profile’s classic; the other’s irregular. The eye is narrower and longer; the nose has a little bump; the mouth twists. Personally, I find that profile a lot more interesting. You can see her medical history in it, for instance. She must have had adenoids as a kid and she’s astigmatic and she learned to eat on one side of her mouth when she had a tooth out in her early twenties. The layman doesn’t notice these things.” He stooped to pick up a sand dollar, examined it, and put it in the pocket of his canvas trousers. “In the old days,” he continued, with a sideways glance at Helen, “they used to think they could tell a witch if the profiles didn’t match. Jane would have been burned. That’s what got me started noticing. One side of Jane’s face is reflective; she even has a tiny cast in that eye, and there’s a funny droop to the mouth. The other is active and practical. It’s awfully interesting stuff when you get onto it. Women, I find, are more two-faced than men, which is what the human race has always thought anyway.” Helen smiled vaguely. Her own parts were rather curiously assembled—small, round head, small ears, large legs, large, full long neck—though she was a pleasant-looking woman, taken as a whole. “John Sinnott,” added Warren, “has the most regular features I’ve ever seen. His profiles exactly match, which is frightfully rare. And the features are small too, cameo-cut, though he’s a tall man. It’s a French Renaissance face. Probably Norman blood.” “You’re interested in ancestry?” said Helen. “Oh, terrifically,” said Warren. “I suppose it’s the southern side of me. Ever since I started these new portraits, I’ve been studying anthropological types. Jane took her major in anthropology. We’ve been looking up some of the old books on phrenology too—wonderful stuff.” He sighed. “Those old boys knew a lot that we moderns have forgotten. Have you ever gone into phrenology?” Helen shook her head. “Try it some time,” advised Warren, over his shoulder, as he began to scale the sand cliff, holding out his left hand for Helen after he had got a foothold. “Of course, I know you’re busy,” he added apologetically, pulling her upward, “with the baby and the house. But I’d love to know what you and Miles thought of it. I have some heads and charts in the studio; I’ll show you, if you’d like.” And he hurried ahead, bending back the briars to make way for Helen and the baby.
The Coes lived in a modern house that had been designed for them by a cousin of Jane’s. It stood on a bluff, overlooking the open ocean; the Coes now wished they had built in a hollow, the way the old settlers had, for the situation was very windswept, and nothing but dune grass and dusty miller and wild beach peas could get a footing in the whirling, shifting sand. In their early years, they had tried to keep a goat there; Jane had read that goat’s milk was terribly good for you and they were going to write to the Trappists for their receipt for cheese. But the goat was not happy; the reindeer moss, Jane concluded, was bad for it, and they had had to give the poor animal away, before she perished, to an eccentric old lady, one of the local characters, who was a zoophile and ran a sort of pound for all the discarded animals of the neighborhood, chiefly the half-wild cats the summer people abandoned. Yet the windy, barren, desolate setting had, it turned out, one unexpected advantage. Beaten by the storms, the house had weathered, so that it now seemed to belong to the landscape. The squat rectangular building, with futuristic hardware, painted gray originally and topped by a roped-off sundeck, now looked like an old-fashioned wooden icebox that had been wintering for generations on a New Leeds back porch. The Coes liked this effect and assigned credit to themselves for not having fought Nature. Everything fitted in, the worn tarpaulin covering the sundeck, the goat’s post—even the cylindrical bottled-gas tanks by the kitchen door, which looked so unsightly against a traditional house—harmonized with the main structure and with the sand heaped around it and the patches of reindeer moss and the gray sea birds circling above.
Warren’s studio, into which he now showed the guests, stood fifty feet away from the main house. It had a two-story window with north light, which at present was obscured by three army blankets tacked up to keep out the cold. There were cushioned benches around the walls, lamps, a station-stove, and bookcases put together with bricks and planks. Warren was a very tidy man, and the corner in which he painted—pinning back the blankets—was impeccably neat; an oblong of floor around his easel had been swept with a hearthbroom he kept for the purpose. But the rest of the large room was a dusty, cobwebby jumble; he never heeded it unless they had company, but then he felt a quick embarrassment, seeing the shamble through their eyes: Jane’s mother’s piano, which they never used, blocking a side window; the pair of rusty English bicycles propped against the wall; the ping-pong table, covered with a stained sheet of canvas; the broken washing machine; the deep-freeze that had proved impractical because the electricity was so uncertain during the stormy season; the electric doughnut-maker and the combination waffle iron and sandwich grill, the roto-broiler, the mixmaster, the special pizza machine—all the gadgets sent Jane by her gadget-minded family perishing here as in a boneyard; the sun-faded draperies from the big living-room window; the badminton set. It was a comic spectacle, Warren ineluctably knew; Miles could hardly keep from guffawing, and he did not blame him. Smiling apologetically, he got out the whisk broom and began to brush off the cushioned benches so they could put the sneezing baby down; he used the feather duster on the piano. Removing his kerchief, flushing, he explained for the hundredth time that a modern house did not have much storage space. “Damn fool,” he said, vehemently, “pardon my French, I ought to have had the sense to build a two-story garage.” He knew the Murphys were thinking that it was Jane’s fault and he hated them for thinking it; at the same time, he mildly and politely desired to share their mirth. Miles was prowling about the room, studying the derelict objects with the air of a scientific connoisseur. “What, for God’s sake, is this, Warren?” he demanded, pointing to the infra-red broiler that Jane had got last Christmas, when they were trying a high-protein diet. Warren explained how it worked or, rather, he gamely joked, how it had worked. Jane was in the house, getting a tray of drinks, and it gave him a queer feeling to be jesting so boldly without her, almost like an escapade.
“Why, it’s a regular cemetery of their hobbies,” Miles expatiated to Helen. Warren gently smiled. “That’s what John Sinnott told me,” he agreed. “He says I should do a painting, ‘The Artist in His Studio.’ Only he thinks I should call it, ‘The American Artist in His Studio.’ ” “Ah,” said Miles, nodding. All at once, his belly began to heave. “That’s good,” he cried, slapping his thigh. “Damn good!” He shook his handkerchief open and wiped the tears from his eyes. Dust flew. Warren waited courteously till the temblor of mirth had subsided. Thanks to Martha’s explanation, he was able to see what John and Miles saw: a satiric canvas, after Titian, in which he himself, the artist, a tiny dusty figure, was pushed into one corner, while his wife’s scientific gadgets and games and decorative fads monstrously took over the foreground. But to him, as he had tried to make clear to Martha, the objects in the room were not ridiculous, though he could see how in the aggregate they might appear so, to an outsider. To him, they evoked exciting memories, of midnight feasts shared with Jane, bicycle trips, skating on winter ponds, ping-pong rallies, doughnuts and cider; the piano made him think of Jane’s mother, and the deep-freeze recalled the hurricane two years ago when the electricity had been off three days and the road blocked, and they had lost nine gallons of assorted ice creams, which he and Jane had poured into buckets and taken on foot to the goat-lady. And it was not Jane’s fault that the appliances broke down; it was partly the climate—the sea air was bad for machines. She was not a good housekeeper, but, darn it, he admired her for that. All the women in her family had been fanatic housekeepers, and Jane had had the gumption to rebel. Martha had shrieked when Jane admitted that Warren had not had an ironed shirt in three years, but if he did not mind, why should Martha object? He would rather have Jane’s companionship than a stiff shirt any day. So he always said, and what was more he meant it. In his young days, he had been quite a dandy: he had carried a stick and yellow gloves and had his clothes made by a Turkish tailor. But those days were over. He had let Jane give his things away to a refugee without batting an eye. You could not dress like a stuffed shirt in New Leeds unless you were a dodo. It was John Sinnott, actually, that New Leeds chuckled over, when he came to parties in a dark business suit and white shirt. And Warren did not go to the city often enough any more to make it worth while to own a city suit. For those rare occasions, his gray corduroy, with a necktie, looked perfectly all right, especially if Jane touched up the shirt collar for him. In fact, as Jane told him, he looked much more the artist in that soft material.
The only thing that gave him anxiety was the thought of his mother’s funeral—what would he wear? She was past seventy-five now, living in a boardinghouse in Savannah; her sister wrote that she was getting very frail. He was resigned to the prospect of her dying, except for that one thing—the suit to follow her to her grave in; he still had his bowler hat, which Jane had overlooked. This absurd worry preyed on his mind sometimes during the night, even though he assured himself that when the fatal telegram came, Jane would think of something. She was awfully resourceful.
He knew some people thought he was dominated by Jane. Miles, for instance, this minute, was saying to him in a grave undertone: “If it was my wife, Warren, she’d clean this place up.” Miles, of course, thought only about his own comfort; he ate and drank like an Elizabethan, dressed in a florid style, with loud shirts and tweeds and silk socks, never considering for a minute that it was a human being who waited on him and catered to him and kept his things in order, laying out on a silent valet—Jane had seen it—everything he was going to wear, right down to the handkerchief and the necktie, while she had the baby and all the housework to think of. There was a sound at the door, and Warren hurried to open it. Wrapped in a shawl, Jane stood there with a tray of ice and bottles and glasses. “Let me help you, dear,” smiled Warren, taking the tray from her and urging her into the warm room. He noticed that she had forgotten the fizzy water and he skipped out to the house to get it, before she could realize and try to go instead. And he was glad to do a little service like that to help her, for he knew blamed well that she had a lot to put up with from him; he was a selfish cuss to live with, preoccupied with his painting, abstracted, not dry behind the ears yet, intellectually. For a girl who had grown up in a big family and who could have married anybody she wanted—or a darn sight better anyway—it was not a normal life.
And when Jane had married him he had not been nearly the person he hoped he was now, thanks to her. It tickled him to think of his outgrown self—a conventional, safe little water colorist and pen-and-ink man, doing the usual stiles and cottages and dilapidated mansions and wrought-iron gates and Paris roofs and doorways; he had liked architectural themes and hoped to be a modern Piranesi or Callot. He had had to unlearn all that, bit by bit, like tearing your skin off piecemeal—some job for a man over forty. He could never have done it if Jane and her family had not stood by, financially and morally.
He came back into the room quietly, carrying a pitcher of water; they seemed to be out of fizzy. “Oh, Warren,” exclaimed Jane, who was putting wood in the stove, “you didn’t need to do that. I brought water.” And sure enough, to his embarrassment, there was water in another pitcher on the tray. He felt like two cents. “We’re out of soda,” said Jane, with an awkward laugh. “I guess that’s what Warren went for.” “I’m sorry, dear,” said Warren. “I thought you’d forgotten it.” “I did,” confessed Jane. “I forgot to order it at the store. I always forget something.” “Never mind, never mind,” said Miles, with an air of testy magnanimity. Jane poured the drinks and Warren got ready to show the portrait.
It was a big picture, like all his recent work—six by eleven. He hauled it out, unwrapped the outer canvas, fixed the lights, and then stood back to see what they would say. “Oh,” said Helen, after a moment. “Ah,” said Miles. “Do you see anything of Martha in it?” queried Warren, looking up at the portrait. He himself saw nothing but Martha, refracted all over the canvas. He had been trying something new, a dispersed, explosive cubism, in dark, smoky colors, in which the sitter’s personality-nucleus was blown apart into its component solids. There was a geyser of smoke in the middle representing the moment of fission; he was trying to get time, the fourth dimension, into his painting. “I think I see her nose,” Miles said finally, when he had backed up against the farther wall.