“The old — the old—” Amy cried, shuddering and clinging to Howard. “Why does she hate me so? What have I ever done to her? Let’s move. You can work.”
“No. She won’t live always.”
“Yes, she will. She’ll live forever, just to hate me.”
“No,” Howard said. In the next year the child died. Again Amy tried to get him to move.
“Anywhere. I won’t care how we have to live.”
“No. I can’t leave her helpless on her back. You will have to start going out again. Dance. Then it won’t be so bad.”
“Yes,” she said, quieter. “I’ll have to. I can’t stand this.”
One said “you,” the other, “I.” Neither of them said “we.” So, on Saturday nights Amy would dress and Howard would put on scarf and overcoat, sometimes over his shirt-sleeves, and they would descend the stairs and stop at Mrs. Boyd’s door and then Howard would put Amy into the car and watch her drive away.
Then he would re-enter the house and with his shoes in his hand return up the stairs, as he had used to do before they married, slipping past the lighted transom. Just before midnight, in the overcoat and scarf again, he would slip back down the stairs and past the still lighted transom and be waiting on the porch when Amy drove up. Then they would enter the house and look into Mrs. Boyd’s room and say good night.
One night it was one o’clock before she returned. He had been waiting for an hour in slippers and pajamas on the porch; it was November. The transom above Mrs. Boyd’s door was dark and they did not stop.
“Some jelly beans set the clock back,” she said. She did not look at him, dragging her clothes off, flinging the brooch along with her other jewelry onto the dressing table. “I had hoped you wouldn’t be fool enough to stand out there and wait for me.”
“Maybe next time they set the clock back I won’t.”
She stopped, suddenly and perfectly still, looking at him over her shoulder. “Do you mean that?” she said. He was not looking at her; he heard, felt, her approach and stand beside him. Then she touched his shoulder. “Howard?” she said. He didn’t move. Then she was clinging to him, flung onto his lap, crying wildly: “What’s happening to us?” striking herself against him with a wild abandon: “What is it?
What is it?” He held her quiet, though after they were each in their beds (they already had two of them) he heard and then felt her cross the intervening gap and fling herself against him again with that wild terrified abandon not of a woman but of a child in the dark, enveloping him, whispering: “You don’t have to trust me, Howard! You can! You can! You don’t have to!”
“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
