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 them and that hair that looks like somebody pulled it out of the middle of a last year’s cotton bale, and she said, ‘Of course you understand that you will have to leave this house at once. Good night.’”
“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
