The walls of the living room were yellow with the nicotine given off by the talk of death. The entire house was dim, cut off from the world, all the air sucked out under great pressure. Mr. and Mrs. Spaulding walked about the parlor in a little solemn merry-go-round of emptying ash trays, clearing dishes, and turning out the lights.
Mr. Spaulding went up the stairs without a sound save a kind of old engine coughing. He was already in bed when his wife arrived, exhilarated, and got in. She lay half smiling, glowing, in the dark.
Finally, she heard him sigh.
“I feel terrible,” Leonard Spaulding said.
“Why?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he moaned. “I just don’t feel good. Depressed.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You and that damned Mrs. Hette. Christ, what an evening. Will, he’s not so bad. But her and you. Christ, Christ, talk, talk!” He groaned in the dark room, all misery and ancient tiredness.
She tightened up. “We never have any one in any more.”
“We’re getting too old to have people in,” he cried, faintly. “There’s only one thing for old people to talk about, and you talked about it, by God, all evening!”
“Why, we didn’t—”
“Shut up,” he said, wearily, pleadingly, like a small withered child beside her. “I want to sleep.”
They both lay for five minutes in the dark. She turned away from him, cold, stiff, her eyelids tight clenched. And just before her anger at him seeped away and sleep flooded down all through her like a drenching of warm rain, she heard two faint far women’s voices talking one unto another, distantly, obscurely:
“My Will’s funeral was the finest the town ever had. Flowers? Thousands! I cried. People? Everyone in town!”—“Well, you should have been at Leonard’s funeral service. He looked so fine and natural, just like he was asleep. And flowers? Land! Banked around and banked around, and people!” — “Well, Will’s service was” — “They sang ‘Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.’” — “—people—” — “—flowers and—” — “—singing—”
The warm rain pattered over her. She slept.
The end
