“Yes,” he said. “I know. It’s all right. It’s all right.” So after that, just before twelve, he would put on the overcoat and scarf, creep down the stairs and past the lighted transom, open and close the front door noisily, and then open his mother’s door where the mother would be propped high on the pillows, the book open and face down on her knees.
“Back already?” Mrs. Boyd would say.
“Yes. Amy’s gone on up. Do you want anything?”
“No. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Then he would go up and go to bed, and after a time (sometimes) to sleep. But before this sometimes, taking it sometimes into sleep with him, he would think, tell himself with that quiet and fatalistic pessimism of the impotent intelligent: But this cannot go on forever. Some night something is going to happen; she is going to catch Amy. And I know what she is going to do. But what am I going to do? He believed that he did know.
That is, the top of his mind assured him that it knew, but he discounted this; the intelligence again: not to bury it, flee from it: just discounting it, the intelligence speaking out of the impotence: Because no man ever knows what he will do in any given situation, set of circumstances: the wise, others perhaps, drawing conclusions, but never himself. The next morning Amy would be in the other bed, and then, in the light of day, it would be gone.
But now and then, even by daylight, it returned and he from the detachment of his cerebration contemplating his life, that faulty whole whose third the two of them had produced yet whose lack the two of them could not fill, telling himself, Yes. I know what she will do and I know what Amy will ask me to do and I know that I will not do that. But what will I do? but not for long, telling himself now that it had not happened so far, and that anyway it was six long days until Saturday: the impotence now, not even the intellect.
II
So it was that when he waked to the bell’s shrilling he already knew that the bed beside his own was still empty, just as he knew that, no matter how quickly he reached the telephone, it would already be too late. He did not even wait for his slippers; he ran down the now icy stairs, seeing the transom above his mother’s door come alight as he passed it and went to the phone and took the receiver down: “Oh, Howard, I’m so sorry — this is Martha Ross — so sorry to disturb you, but I knew that Amy would be anxious about it. I found it in the car, tell her, when we got back home.”
“Yes,” he said. “In the car.”
“In our car. After she lost her switch key and we brought her home, to the corner. We tried to get her to come on home with us and have some ham and eggs, but she—” Then the voice died away. He held the cold receiver to his ear and heard the other end of the wire, the silence, fill with a sort of consternation like an indrawn breath: something instinctive and feminine and self-protective. But the pause itself was hardly a pause; almost immediately the voice went on, though completely changed now, blank, smooth, reserved: “Amy’s in bed, I suppose.”
“Yes. She’s in bed.”
“Oh. So sorry I bothered you, got you up. But I knew she would be anxious about it, since it was your mother’s, the family piece. But of course, if she hasn’t missed it yet, you won’t need to bother her.” The wire hummed, tense. “That I called or anything.” The wire hummed. “Hello. Howard?”
“No,” he said. “I won’t bother her tonight. You can call her in the morning.”
“Yes, I will. So sorry I bothered you. I hope I didn’t wake your mother.”
He put the receiver back. He was cold. He could feel his bare toes curling back from the icelike floor as he stood looking at the blank door beyond which his mother would be sitting, high-propped on the pillows, with her tallow face and dark inscrutable eyes and the hair which Amy said resembled weathered cotton, beside the clock whose hands she had stopped herself at ten minutes to four on the afternoon five years ago when she first moved again. When he opened the door his picture had been exact, almost to the position of the hands even.
“She is not in this house,” Mrs. Boyd said.
“Yes. She’s in bed. You know when we came in. She just left one of her rings with Martha Ross tonight and Martha telephoned.”
But apparently she had not even listened to him. “So you swear she is in this house this minute.”
“Yes. Of course she is. She’s asleep, I tell you.”
“Then send her down here to say good night to me.”
“Nonsense. Of course I won’t.”
They looked at one another across the bed’s footboard.
“You refuse?”
“Yes.”
They looked at one another a moment longer. Then he began to turn away; he could feel her watching him. “Then tell me something else. It was the brooch she lost.”
He did not answer this either. He just looked at her again as he closed the door: the two of them curiously similar, mortal and implacable foes in the fierce close antipathy of blood. He went out.
He returned to the bedroom and turned on the light and found his slippers and went to the fire and put some coal on the embers and punched and prodded it into flame. The clock on the mantel said twenty minutes to one. Presently he had a fair blaze; he had quit shivering.
He went back to bed and turned off the light, leaving only the firelight pulsing and gleaming on the furniture and among the phials and mirrors of the dressing table, and in the smaller mirror above his own chest of drawers, upon which sat the three silver photograph frames, the two larger ones containing himself and Amy, the smaller one between them empty.
He just lay. He was not thinking at all. He had just thought once, quietly, So that’s that. So now I suppose I will know, find out what I am going to do and then no more, not even thinking that again.
The house seemed still to be filled with the shrill sound of the telephone like a stubborn echo. Then he began to hear the clock on the mantel, reiterant, cold, not loud. He turned on the light and took up the book face down and open from the table beside his pillow, but he found that he could not keep his mind on the words for the sound which the clock made, so he rose and went to the mantel. The hands were now at half past two.
He stopped the clock and turned its face to the wall and brought his book to the fire and found that he could now keep his mind on the words, the sense, reading on now untroubled by time. So he could not have said just when it was that he found he had ceased to read, had jerked his head up. He had heard no sound, yet he knew that Amy was in the house. He did not know how he knew: he just sat holding his breath, immobile, the peaceful book raised and motionless, waiting. Then he heard Amy say, “It’s me, Mother.”
She said “Mother,” he thought, not moving yet. She called her “Mother” again. He moved now, putting the book carefully down, his place marked, but as he crossed the room he walked naturally, not trying to deaden his footsteps, to the door and opened it and saw Amy just emerging from Mrs. Boyd’s room.
She began to mount the stairs, walking naturally too, her hard heels sharp and unnaturally loud in the nightbound house. She must have stooped when Mother called her and put her slippers on again, he thought. She had not seen him yet, mounting steadily, her face in the dim hall light vague and petal-like against the collar of her fur coat, projecting already ahead of her to where he waited a sort of rosy and crystal fragrance of the frozen night out of which she had just emerged.
Then she saw him at the head of the stairs. For just a second, an instant, she stopped dead still, though she was moving again before it could have been called pause, already speaking as she passed him where he stood aside, and entered the bedroom: “Is it very late? I was with the Rosses. They just let me out at the corner; I lost my car key out at the club. Maybe it was the car that waked her.”
“No. She was already awake. It was the telephone.”
She went on to the fire and spread her hands to it, still in her coat; she did not seem to have heard him, her face rosy in the firelight, her presence emanating that smell of cold, that frosty fragrance which had preceded her up the stairs: “I suppose so. Her light was already on.
I knew as soon as I opened the front door that we were sunk. I hadn’t even got in the house good when she said ‘Amy’ and I said ‘It’s me, Mother’ and she said, ‘Come in here, please,’ and there she was with those eyes that haven’t got any edges to
