“Yes,” he said. “She has been awake since about half past twelve. But there wasn’t anything to do but insist that you were already in bed asleep and trust to luck.”
“You mean, she hasn’t been asleep at all?”
“No. It was the telephone, like I told you. About half past twelve.”
With her hands still spread to the fire she glanced at him over her furred shoulder, her face rosy, her eyes at once bright and heavy, like a woman’s eyes after pleasure, with a kind of inattentive conspiratorial commiseration. “Telephone? Here?
At half past twelve? What absolutely putrid — But no matter.” She turned now, facing him, as if she had only been waiting until she became warm, the rich coat open upon the fragile glitter of her dress; there was a quality actually beautiful about her now — not of the face whose impeccable replica looks out from the covers of a thousand magazines each month, nor of the figure, the shape of deliberately epicene provocation into which the miles of celluloid film have constricted the female body of an entire race; but a quality completely female in the old eternal fashion, primitive assured and ruthless as she approached him, already raising her arms.
“Yes! I say luck too!” she said, putting her arms around him, her upper body leaned back to look into his face, her own face triumphant, the smell now warm woman-odor where the frosty fragrance had thawed. “She said at once, now. So we can go. You see? Do you understand? We can leave now. Give her the money, let her have it all. We won’t care. You can find work; I won’t care how and where we will have to live. You don’t have to stay here now, with her now. She has — what do you call it? absolved you herself. Only I have lost the car key. But no matter: we can walk. Yes, walk; with nothing, taking nothing of hers, like we came here.”
“Now?” he said. “Tonight?”
“Yes! She said at once. So it will have to be tonight.”
“No,” he said. That was all, no indication of which question he had answered, which denied. But then, he did not need to because she still held him; it was only the expression of her face that changed. It did not die yet nor even become terrified yet: it just became unbelieving, like a child’s incredulity. “You mean, you still won’t go? You still won’t leave her? That you would just take me to the hotel for tonight and that you will come back here tomorrow?
Or do you mean you won’t even stay at the hotel with me tonight? That you will take me there and leave me and then you—” She held him, staring at him; she began to say, “Wait, wait. There must be some reason, something — Wait,” she cried; “wait! You said, telephone. At half past twelve.” She still stared at him, her hands hard, her pupils like pinpoints, her face ferocious. “That’s it. That’s the reason. Who was it that telephoned here about me? Tell me! I defy you to! I will explain it. Tell me!”
“It was Martha Ross. She said she had just let you out at the corner.”
“She lied!” she cried at once, immediately, scarce waiting to hear the name. “She lied! They did bring me home then but it was still early and so I decided to go on with them to their house and have some ham and eggs. So I called to Frank before he got turned around and I went with them. Frank will prove it! She lied! They just this minute put me out at the corner!”
She looked at him. They stared at one another for a full immobile moment. Then he said, “Then where is the brooch?”
“The brooch?” she said. “What brooch?” But already he had seen her hand move upward beneath the coat; besides, he could see her face and watch it gape like that of a child which has lost its breath before she began to cry with a wild yet immobile abandon, so that she spoke through the weeping in the choked gasping of a child, with complete and despairing surrender: “Oh, Howard! I wouldn’t have done that to you! I wouldn’t have! I wouldn’t have!”
“All right,” he said. “Hush, now. Hush, Amy. She will hear you.”
“All right. I’m trying to.” But she still faced him with that wrung and curiously rigid face beneath its incredible flow of moisture, as though not the eyes but all the pores had sprung at once; now she too spoke directly out of thinking, without mention of subject or circumstance, nothing more of defiance or denial: “Would you have gone with me if you hadn’t found out?”
“No. Not even then. I won’t leave her. I will not, until she is dead. Or this house.
I won’t. I can’t. I—” They looked at one another, she staring at him as if she saw reflected in his pupils not herself but the parchment-colored face below stairs — the piled dirty white hair, the fierce implacable eyes — her own image blanked out by something beyond mere blindness: by a quality determined, invincible, and crucified.
“Yes,” she said. From somewhere she produced a scrap of chiffon and began to dab at her eyes, delicately, even now by instinct careful of the streaked mascara. “She beat us. She lay there in that bed and beat us.” She turned and went to the closet and drew out an overnight bag and put the crystal objects from the dressing-table into it and opened a drawer. “I can’t take everything tonight. I will have to—”
He moved also; from the chest of drawers where the small empty photograph frame sat he took his wallet and removed the bills from it and returned and put the money into her hand. “I don’t think there is very much here. But you won’t need money until tomorrow.”
“Yes,” she said. “You can send the rest of my things then, too.”
“Yes,” he said. She folded and smoothed the notes in her fingers; she was not looking at him. He did not know what she was looking at except it was not at the money. “Haven’t you got a purse or something to carry it in?”
“Yes,” she said. But she did not stop folding and smoothing the bills, still not looking at them, apparently not aware of them, as if they had no value and she had merely picked them idly up without being aware of it. “Yes,” she said. “She beat us. She lay there in that bed she will never move from until they come in and carry her out some day, and took that brooch and beat us both.” Then she began to cry. It was as quiet now as the way she had spoken. “My little baby,” she said. “My dear little baby.”
He didn’t even say Hush now. He just waited until she dried her eyes again, almost briskly, rousing, looking at him with an expression almost like smiling, her face, the make-up, the careful evening face haggard and streaked and filled with the weary and peaceful aftermath of tears. “Well,” she said. “It’s late.” She stooped, but he anticipated her and took the bag; they descended the stairs together; they could see the lighted transom above Mrs. Boyd’s door.
“It’s too bad you haven’t got the car,” he said.
“Yes. I lost the key at the club. But I telephoned the garage. They will bring it in in the morning.”
They stopped in the hall while he telephoned for a cab. Then they waited, talking quietly now and then. “You had better go straight to bed.”
“Yes. I’m tired. I danced a good deal.”
“What was the music? Was it good?”
“Yes. I don’t know. I suppose so. When you are dancing yourself, you don’t usually notice whether the music is or isn’t.”
“Yes, I guess that’s so.” Then the car came. They went out to it, he in pajamas and robe; the earth was frozen and iron-hard, the sky bitter and brilliant. He helped her in.
“Now you run back into the house,” she said. “You didn’t even put on your overcoat.”
“Yes. I’ll get your things to the hotel early.”
“Not too early. Run, now.” She had already sat back, the coat close about her. He had already remarked how sometime, at some moment back in the bedroom, the warm woman-odor had congealed again and that she now emanated once more that faint frosty fragrance, fragile, impermanent and forlorn; the car moved away, he did not look back.
As he was closing the front door his mother called his name. But he did not pause or even glance toward the door. He just mounted the stairs, out of the dead, level, unsleeping, peremptory voice.
The fire had burned down: a strong rosy glow, peaceful and quiet and warmly reflected from mirror and polished wood. The book still lay, face down and open, in the chair. He took it up and went to the table between the two beds and sought and found the cellophane envelope which had once contained pipe cleaners, which he used for a bookmark, and marked his place and put the book down. It was the coat-pocket size, Modern Library Green Mansions. He had discovered the book during adolescence; he had read it ever since.
During that period he read only the part about the journey
