By means of the letters she knew how they lived. She knew more about each than the other did. She knew when they quarrelled and felt exultation; she knew when they were reconciled and felt raging and impotent despair. Sometimes at night she would become one of the two of them, entering their bodies in turn and crucified anew by her ubiquity, participating in ecstasies the more racking for being vicarious and transcendant of the actual flesh.
One evening she received the letter telling that the wife was pregnant. The next morning she waked a neighbor by running out of the house in her nightdress, screaming. They got the doctor and when she was well again she told that she had mistaken the rat poison for tooth powder. The postmaster told about the letters and the two looked upon her again with interest and curious pity. “Twice,” they said, even though the letters continued to come; “what a shame. Poor girl.”
When she recovered she looked better. She was thinner and her eyes had cleared up, and she slept peacefully at night for a while. By the letters she knew when the wife’s time would be, and the day she went to the hospital.
Although she had recovered completely she did not dream any more for some time, though the habit she had formed in her twelfth year of waking herself with her own weeping, returned, and almost every night she lay in the darkness and the mock orange scent, weeping quietly and hopelessly between sleep and slumber. How long must this go on? she said to herself, lying flat and still and for a time tear-flushed of even despair in the darkness and the dying rumor of turpentine; how long?
It went on for a long time. She was gone from the town for three years, then she returned. Ten years later she began to dream again. Then she was walking to and from school twice a day with her daughter’s hand in hers, her manner on the street confident and assured, meeting the town with level and tranquil eye.
But at night she still waked herself with her own weeping after the old habit, waking wide-eyed from a sleep in which for some time now she had been dreaming of negro men. “Something is about to happen to me,” she said aloud into the quiet darkness and the scent. Then something did happen to her. One day it had happened, and after that she dreamed hardly at all any more, and then only about food.
V
At last the letter came telling of the birth of a daughter and of the mother’s death. Enclosed was a newspaper clipping. The husband had been killed by a motor car while crossing the street to enter the hospital.
The next day Zilphia went away. Her partner said she would be gone a year, perhaps longer, to recover from her sickness. The letters from the city sweetheart ceased.
She was gone three years. She returned in mourning, with a plain gold band and a child. The child, a girl, had eyes like wood ashes and dark hair. Zilphia told quietly of her second marriage and her husband’s death, and after a time the interest died away.
She opened the house again, but she also fixed a day nursery in the room behind the shop. The window was barred, so she need not worry about the child. “It’s a nice pleasant room,” she said. “Why, I grew up there, myself.” The shop was doing well. The ladies never tired of fondling little Zilphia.
They still called her Miss Zilphia Gant. “Somehow you just can’t conceive of her as a wife. If it were not for the child.…” It was no longer out of tolerance or pity now. She looked better; black became her. She was plump again in the wrong places, but to people in our town that and more is permitted a woman who has served her appointed ends.
She was forty-two. “She is as fat as a partridge,” the town said. “It becomes her; it really does.”
“I should be, from the way I enjoy my food,” she said, pausing to chat with them on the way to and from school with little Zilphia’s hand in hers and her open coat, stirring in the wind, revealing her sewing apron of black oil cloth, and the straight thin glints of needles in her black bosom and the gossamer random festooning of the thread.
The End
