The Angry Wife (8 page)

He remembered that there was a winding little stair that went up out of the back porch and he walked there and began to mount it softly. It led, as he well remembered, straight past the second floor into the attic. When he had been a boy he had escaped his father’s wrath more than once by that stair, dragging little Tom after him by the wrist. Under the attic eaves they had hid until wrath was spent and they dared come down again. He had not climbed the stairs since he had first gone away to the university, the year before he was married. Now the steps creaked under his weight but he went on.

The door at the top was closed and he knocked softly.

Georgia’s voice called, “It’s not locked!”

He had a second’s wonder, “locked against whom?” and then he lifted the old-fashioned latch and looked in. She lay on the bed, dressed, but with her hair down and hanging over the pillow. At the sight of him she leaped up and gathered her hair together in one hand.

“Oh—I thought it was Bettina!” she gasped. Her cream-colored face went pale.

“Don’t be frightened, Georgia,” he said quickly. “I had to find you—I had to tell you. Look here, I say—please listen, Georgia, because I’ve got to tell you—”

She had her hair knotted now, looping the ends through without hairpins. “Yes, sir, please—”

“Your mistress thinks—she has an idea that there’s something going on between Bettina and my brother.”

Georgia’s very lips went pale. “How did she know?”

“Then there is something?”

“I can’t tell you, Master Pierce.”

Against his will he saw her black brows clear against her skin and the separate blackness of her long lashes set into her pale eyelids.

“I only wanted to warn you,” he said sternly. “I think Bettina ought to be prepared. It’s natural that her mistress can’t be pleased. I’m not pleased myself.”

Georgia’s dark eyes fell. Her narrow hands fluttered at her apron. “No, sir. I’m not pleased, either. I told Bettina so. And Bettina isn’t happy. She knows she can’t—” Georgia stopped.

He wanted to ask “Can’t what?” But his dignity would not allow him. He was in a dangerous place, and he wanted to be out of it.

“You had better find her and tell her,” he said severely.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, Master Pierce.”

He turned to the door abruptly and crept down the stair again. Once he wondered if the girl were staring after him and he turned and took a quick glance. But the door was shut.

He reached the back porch and then his office in safety and he opened a door in the panel and took out a decanter and a glass and drank deeply of wine. The smell of October grapes reminded him of the day when he had come home, he thought to peace at last. “God,” he muttered with bitterness, “what peace!” and drank again.

Upstairs in her own room Lucinda sat alone. She had come in, her skirts swirling, and had at once locked the door and sat down to think. Why she locked the door she did not know, but it was her first instinct. Now and then she locked it against Pierce in the night when she wanted to sleep, and in bed she lay wakened when she heard him turn the knob and find it locked and then curse and swear softly under his breath. He had learned that it was useless to call her. Nothing would persuade her to unlock the door after she had locked it. She would lie laughing into her pillow because she felt arrogant and powerful. She had a whip in her hand over Pierce, her husband, whom she loved.

She wanted the door locked now against him because she wanted to be alone. Her room was silent and safe, closing her in from everybody. She had made the room exactly what she liked, and somehow even during the war she had kept it so. The flowers on the carpet were clear against the deep white pile of the background. It had come from Paris, and it would last forever. Georgia cleaned it with cornmeal twice a year even when cornmeal was their only food. The dirty meal was given to the pigs so it was not all waste. But she would not have dared to let Pierce know.

So it was with the organdy curtains at the window. Somehow they were starched, even when there was no white bread. Georgia made the starch out of potatoes, long soaked.

She sat thinking and staring out of the window, and little darts of fear and premonition ran needling through her veins. She tried to ignore them. It was Tom, not Pierce. But Pierce had not been really angry with Tom. Pierce sided with Tom in his heart. Men stood together against women, and Pierce stood by Tom. She longed for a woman friend to talk with, a woman who would feel as she did against men, and made up her mind that she would ride over and visit with Molly MacBain. Maybe she would tell her and maybe she wouldn’t, but anyway it would be strengthening just to talk with a woman. When she came back she would decide about Bettina. She put aside an uneasy thought that maybe she ought not ride now that she was going to have a baby. Pierce would be cross with her about it. She had not ridden for a month—let him be cross, though! She wanted to disobey him. But she delayed decision, nevertheless, and went on thinking.

If she talked to Bettina it would set the girl up. Her own mother had never noticed her father’s mulatto children. They grew up in the servants’ quarters and everybody knew and nobody said anything. It was her father who had bought Georgia and Bettina and now that she thought of it she remembered how her mother had looked when he had come in and thrown down papers.

“I’ve brought you two likely house girls, Laura,” he had shouted.

Her anger against Bettina grew. Why, maybe even in her own mother’s house, her own father—

She began to cry softly. It was sadly hard to be a woman, so hard to hold her own when she had no real power at all and had to ask for everything she wanted, even new satin to cover the parlor furniture! She had to get what she wanted anyway she could. She thought of all the things she wanted. Every room in the house needed something new. Pierce didn’t understand that the house was her world, her place where she had to live. Men went out but women stayed at home and in the home they had to have new things sometimes or go crazy fretting and mending. She wiped her eyes and sighed and then got up suddenly and put on her grey riding habit and went downstairs, feeling sad and a little weak.

Out on the lawn Joe was waving a branch over the sleeping children and no one else was to be seen. She did not want to meet Pierce and she had a conviction that Bettina and Tom were together this very minute, probably up in his room. Bettina still came and went there. It made her physically sick to think of it, here where she lived, in her own home! She clenched her hands against her breast and thought of marching upstairs. But she did not. A woman had to think how to do a thing like that. Just to make a fuss wasn’t enough.

She went outside the open door and down the steps and Joe got to his feet. She motioned to him and he came softly across the grass.

“Tell Jake to bring a horse around quickly, and don’t wake the children.”

“Yassum,” Joe whispered. He went noiselessly away and she sat down on the bottom step and pulled her hat over her eyes to shade her skin from the sun. If she walked around the boys would wake out of sheer contrariness and she wanted to ride off by herself. Maybe she would go to see Molly. Maybe she wouldn’t. She just wanted the feeling of running away. If Pierce worried about her, let him be worried.

She saw Jake leading the horse and got up and went to meet him, so that the horse’s hooves would not clatter on the gravel. Joe stooped and she stepped into his hand and sprang into the side saddle and lifted her whip.

“If your master wants to know where I am, tell him I’ve gone for a ride and that’s all.”

“Yassum,” Joe said. He stood looking after her thoughtfully and scratching himself, his head, his armpits, the palms of his hands. “Reckon there’s some kinda ructions,” he mumbled to himself. He tiptoed back to the tree and looked down on the little sleeping boys. A small breeze had sprung up and he sniffed it. “Reckon it’ll keep off the flies,” he mumbled. He settled himself under the tree, his head on a root, folded his arms and dropped into instant sleep.

Upstairs in her room Georgia sat crying softly and waiting for Bettina. She was afraid of her younger sister, and yet the time had come when Bettina must tell her everything. If the two of them didn’t stand together, then what would happen? They had always told each other everything and had made their little world secure here in this room. But she knew Bettina had something hidden. Bettina didn’t talk any more. At night when they lay in bed where they used to talk, whispering so that nobody could hear, now only she talked, and Bettina lay listening and answering a word or two, and then lying awake. She knew Bettina lay awake, because in the night she heard her sigh.

“Honey, can’t you sleep?” Every night nearly she waked to ask the question.

“I can sleep after awhile, maybe,” Bettina answered.

In the morning she made excuses that the night air was hot or the moonlight too bright. But the real reason was that there was something always awake in Bettina nowadays. She couldn’t get to sleep any more, not the old deep sleep when they never even dreamed, because they were so tired when night came and morning came so quickly. And now she knew what it was in Bettina.

Still she did not come, and at last Georgia dared wait no longer, lest her mistress call and hear no answer. She washed her face and put on a fresh white cotton dress and went downstairs into the pantry and began to clean the silver.

In Tom’s room Bettina sat with her hands in her face, listening and shaking her head again and again while he talked. He still had to rest in the afternoon and she read to him to help him rest. But today he had begun talking and talking.

“Bettina, you’ve got to do what I say,” he insisted. “We can’t go on in the house like this. It’s horrible. It makes our—our relationship just like any—any—”

He tried to pull her hands away from her face and she struggled against him and then yielded suddenly and sat looking at him, her face all bare and quivering. They knew each other so well now. She knew him to the bottom of his soul. In the long hours when she had been caring for him he had told her everything, every suffering, every loneliness, from the pain of a younger brother growing up in this house, Pierce always the stronger and the handsomer and the more brilliant and the more loved, and he always second, to the agonies of the prison camp and the slow starvation of body and soul in the war.

And she had told him everything, too, and he knew what it was to be a woman like any other but inside a dark skin, and what it was to be a servant in this house and forever a servant somewhere. She told him of her mother and how her mother had taught Georgia and her to keep themselves apart and to cling always a little higher and nearer to the white people. But she did not tell him what her mother would have said now. Her mother had not known what it was to love a man so much that it no longer mattered that he was white. She had separated herself even from her mother because she loved Tom more than she loved herself.

“So I want you to marry me, Bettina,” Tom was saying, “and you’ll be my true wife.”

She was shaking her head again and he reached out his hands and took it between his palms and held it so that she could not shake it. “Yes, you will marry me,” he insisted. “The war was, fought so you could be free to marry me. It makes everything worth while to me—all I’ve been through. It makes me understand the good of suffering. We’re free to marry.”

“No, we’re not,” she said stubbornly.

They had been through all this before and would go through it again and she would always say no, over and over. For of course he couldn’t marry her. It would ruin him. He’d have to leave Malvern, and Pierce wouldn’t give him any money.

“Why not?” Tom demanded. He knelt in front of her and held her hands so that she could not cover her face again.

“The war didn’t change how people feel,” she said. “It’s how people feel that counts. They feel toward colored people just like they did before the war. Miss Lucie, she hasn’t changed. It doesn’t make any difference to her that Georgia and me get wages. She still thinks she owns us, I know.”

“But she doesn’t own you,” Tom said impatiently. “It’s your fault if you keep feeling she does.”

“I don’t feel she does,” Bettina said with patience. “What I’m saying
is
about her. You and she belong to the white people and I belong to the colored folks. She feels the colored folks still belong to the white people, and it don’t matter about the war or the law or anything so long as she feels that way and so long as you are white and I’m not. That feeling is going right on and the way she feels is the way she’s going to act, and she isn’t ever going to act like I was your wife, no matter if we marry, and if she don’t act that way, it won’t be that way, because she won’t let it.”

“Good God, Bettina, Lucinda isn’t everybody!” Tom cried.

“She’s like everybody,” Bettina said simply. She gazed at him sadly and smiled.

But he would not accept the smile. “You don’t love me enough,” he complained.

“I love you enough to have the baby and if you want more, I love you enough for any more,” she replied.

He groaned. “But what are we going to do? We can’t stay here—”

“You can stay here,” she said steadily. “And you can find me a little house somewhere near enough and there I’ll live, and you can come whenever you can. It’ll be my life.”

He was not strong enough for her. He bent his head on her knees and she laid her cheek against the back of his head.

“It’ll be a happy life for me,” she whispered. “Happy enough—”

Lucinda’s horse was tied to the fence and she and Molly were talking upstairs in the bedroom. She had decided suddenly that she would go and see Molly MacBain because she was disturbed by a thought which had come to her as she was cantering through the woods along the Malvern stream. Pierce had made a path for horses along the stream before the war and had ordered it cleared as soon as he came home, but she had not ridden along it until today.

“Maybe the war has really changed things,” this was the dreadful thought. “Maybe colored women aren’t any more just—property. Maybe Tom can really marry Bettina—legally!”