It was a piece of advice too good for me to be able to take. True, I didn’t talk to her; she wouldn’t let me. But I went on talking to myself—talking and talking till the ambrosia turned into wormwood or was contaminated by the horrible gamy taste of forbidden pleasure, of sin recognized and knowingly indulged in. And meanwhile the miracle was duly proceeding. Steadily, rapidly, without a single setback, Henry was getting better.”
“Didn’t that make you feel happier about things?” I asked.
Rivers nodded his head.
“In one way, yes. Because, of course, I realized even then, even in my state of imbecile innocence, that I was indirectly responsible for the miracle. I had betrayed my master; but if I hadn’t, my master would probably be dead. Evil had been done; but good, an enormous good, had come of it. It was a kind of justification. On the other hand how horrible it seemed that grace for Katy and life for her husband should be dependent on something so intrinsically low, so utterly vile-base-foul, as bodies and their sexual satisfaction. All my idealism revolted against the notion. And yet it was obviously true.”
“And Henry?” I asked. “How much did he know or suspect about the origins of the miracle?”
“Nothing,” Rivers answered emphatically. “No, less than nothing. He was in a mood, as he emerged from the sepulcher, in which suspicion was unthinkable. ‘Rivers,’ he said to me one day when he was well enough to have me come and read to him, ‘I want to talk to you. About Katy,’ he added after a little pause. My heart stopped beating. This was the moment I had dreaded. ‘You remember that night just before I got ill?’ he went on. ‘I wasn’t in my right mind. I said all kinds of things that I oughtn’t to have said, things that weren’t true, things, for example, about Katy and that doctor from Johns Hopkins.’ But the doctor from Johns Hopkins, as he had now discovered, was a cripple.
And even if the man hadn’t had infantile paralysis as a boy, Katy was utterly incapable of even thinking anything of the kind. And in a voice that trembled with feeling he proceeded to tell me how wonderful Katy was, how unspeakably fortunate he had been to win and hold a wife at once so good, so beautiful, so sensible and yet so sensitive, so strong and faithful and devoted. Without her, he would have gone mad, broken down, fizzled out.
And now she had saved his life, and the thought that he had said those wild, bad, senseless things about her tormented him. So would I please forget them or, if I remembered, remember them only as the ravings of a sick man. It was a relief, of course, not to have been found out, and yet, in some ways, this was worse—worse because the display of so much trust, such abysmal ignorance, made me feel ashamed of myself—and not only of myself, of Katy too. We were a pair of cheats, conspiring against a simpleton—a simpleton who, for sentimental reasons which did him nothing but credit, was doing his best to make himself even more innocent than he was by nature.
“That evening I managed to say a little of what was on my mind. At first she tried to stop my mouth with kisses. Then, when I pushed her away, she grew angry and threatened to go back to her room. I had the sacrilegious courage to restrain her by brute force. ‘You’ve got to listen,’ I said as she struggled to free herself. And holding her at arm’s length, as one holds a dangerous animal, I poured out my tale of moral anguish. Katy heard me out; then, when it was all over, she laughed. Not sarcastically, not with the intention of wounding me, but from the sunny depths of a goddess’s amusement. ‘You can’t bear it,’ she teased. ‘You’re too noble to be a party to a deception!
Can’t you ever think of anything but your own precious self? Think of me, for a change, think of Henry! A sick genius and the poor woman whose job it’s been to keep the sick genius alive and tolerably sane. His huge, crazy intellect against my instincts, his inhuman denial of life against the flow of life in me. It wasn’t easy, I’ve had to fight with every weapon that came to hand. And now here I have to listen to you—talking the most nauseous kind of Sunday School twaddle, daring to tell me—me!—you cannot live a lie—like George Washington and the cherry tree.
You make me tired. I’m going to sleep.’ She yawned and, rolling over on her side, turned her back on me—the back,” Rivers added with a little snort of laughter, “the infinitely eloquent back (if you perused it in the dark, like Braille, with your finger tips) of Aphrodite Callipygos. And that, my friend, that was as near as Katy ever got to an explanation or an apologia. It left me no wiser than I was before. Indeed it left me considerably less wise; for her words prompted me to ask myself a lot of questions, to which she never vouchsafed any answers. Had she implied, for example, that this sort of thing was inevitable—at least in the circumstances of her own marriage? Had it, in actual fact, happened before? And if so, when, how often, with whom?”
“Did you ever find out?” I asked.
Rivers shook his head.
“I never got further than wondering and imagining—my God, how vividly! Which was enough, of course, to make me more miserable than I’d ever been. More miserable, and at the same time more frenziedly amorous. Why is it that, when you suspect a woman you love of having made love to somebody else, you should feel such a heightening of desire? I had loved Katy to the limit. Now I found myself loving her beyond the limit, loving her desperately and insatiably, loving her with a vengeance, if you know what I mean. Katy herself soon noticed it. ‘You’ve been looking at me,’ she complained two evenings later, ‘as though you were on a desert island and I were a beef steak. Don’t do it. People will notice. Besides, I’m not a beef steak, I’m an uncooked human being. And anyhow Henry’s almost well again, and the children will be coming home tomorrow.
Things will have to go back to what they were before. We’ve got to be sensible.’ To be sensible…I promised—for tomorrow. Meanwhile—put out the light!—there was this love with a vengeance, this desire which, even in the frenzy of its consummation, retained a quality of despair. The hours passed and in due course it was tomorrow—dawn between the curtains, birds in the garden, the anguish of the final embrace, the reiterated promises that I would be sensible. And how faithfully I kept the promise! After breakfast I went up to Henry’s room and read him Rutherford’s article in the latest issue of Nature.
And when Katy came in from her marketing, I called her ‘Mrs. Maartens’ and did my best to look as radiantly serene as she did. Which in my case, of course, was hypocrisy. In hers it was just a manifestation of the Olympian nature. A little before lunch, the children came home, bag and baggage, in a cab. Katy was always the all-seeing mother; but her all-seeingness was tempered, generally, by an easy tolerance of childish failings. This time, for some reason, it was different. Perhaps it was the miracle of Henry’s recovery that had gone to her head, that had given her not only a sense of power but also a desire to exercise that power in other ways. Perhaps, too, she had been intoxicated by her sudden restoration, after all those nightmare weeks, to a state of animal grace through gratified desire.
Anyhow, whatever the cause may have been, whatever the extenuating circumstances, the fact remained that, on that particular day, Katy was too all-seeing by half. She loved her children and their return filled her with joy; and yet she was under a kind of compulsion, as soon as she saw them, to criticize, to find fault, to throw her maternal weight around. Within two minutes of their arrival she had pounced on Timmy for having dirty ears; within three, she had made Ruth confess that she was constipated; and, within four, had inferred, from the fact that the child didn’t want anyone to unpack for her, that she must be hiding some guilty secret.
And there—when, at Katy’s orders, Beulah had opened the suitcase—there the poor little guilty secret lay revealed: a boxful of cosmetics and the half-empty bottle of synthetic violets. At the best of times Katy would have disapproved—but would have disapproved with sympathy, with an understanding chuckle. On this occasion, her disapproval was loud and sarcastic. She had the make-up kit thrown into the garbage can and herself, with an expression of nauseated disgust, poured the perfume into the toilet and pulled the plug. By the time we sat down to our meal, the poetess, red-faced and her eyes still swollen with crying, hated everybody—hated her mother for having humiliated her, hated Beulah for having been such a good prophet,
