The Betsy (1971) (14 page)

She shook her head. “That was Junior. He’s staying at the club tonight. He’s too tired for the drive home.”

“Did you tell him I was here?”

“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t have made any difference.” She picked up another glass from the cocktail table in front of him. “Let me fix you a fresh drink.”

“Fix one for yourself while you’re at it,” Loren said. “You look like you can use it.”

“I can’t have any,” she said. “Not till I finish weaning the baby.” She handed him his glass. “Now you just relax and make yourself comfortable while I give your grandson his ten o’clock feeding. I won’t be long.”

Loren got to his feet. “I’ll come with you.”

She gave him a curious look but didn’t answer. He followed her up the steps to the nursery. A tiny night bulb glowed in a corner of the room, casting a faint yellow light behind the crib.

They walked silently and looked down at the baby. He was asleep, his eyes tightly shut. She reached in and picked him up. He began to cry almost immediately.

“He’s hungry,” she whispered, crossing swiftly to a chair and sitting in it. She was in the shadows, her back to the light. He heard the soft rustle of her clothing, then abruptly the cries ceased and instead there was a faint smacking sound as the baby fed.

She looked up at him. His eyes glowed like an animal’s in the reflected yellow light. There was a strangely intense expression on his face. “I can’t see,” he said.

Slowly she turned in the chair until she and the baby were bathed in the soft glow. She heard his footsteps and when she looked up, he was standing over them.

“My God!” he said in a hushed voice. “That’s beautiful!”

A warm wetness rushed through her and she was suddenly angry. “You might try telling that to your son.”

He didn’t speak. Instead he placed his hand on her bare shoulder and pressed her reassuringly.

Startled, she looked up into his face for a moment, then turned and kissed his hand. The tears ran into her eyes and spilled down her cheeks onto his hand. She leaned her face against him. “I’m sorry, Daddy Hardeman,” she whispered.

His free hand stroked her hair gently. “That’s all right, child,” he said softly. “I understand.”

“Do you?” she whispered, almost savagely. “He’s not you. He’s cold, he keeps everything inside himself, locked up where nobody can reach him.” She looked up at him. “I’m not like that at all. I—”

He placed a silencing finger on her lips. “I said I understand.”

She looked at him without speaking. She felt the strength of him flowing out and enveloping her and she knew he felt all the things that she did. “Is it so wrong?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“I saw you with that woman on my wedding night,” she said.

“I know you did,” he answered. “I saw it in your eyes.”

“Then what makes that right and this wrong?”

Again he shook his head slowly. “The time. This is not the time.” He looked down at the suckling child. “You’ve got more important things to do.”

The old unreasoning anger came up in her. Why did he always have to be sure of himself, so right? “I’m a fool,” she said bitterly. “A damned stupid fool.”

“No, you’re not,” he said with a smile. “You’re just a normal healthy young woman whose husband deserves a swift kick in the ass for neglecting his homework.” He started for the door. “And maybe I’m just the man to do it.”

“No,” she said. “You keep out of it. There’s only one thing I want from you.”

“What is that?” he asked.

She rose from the chair and placed the baby back in the crib. Carefully she arranged the covers around the sleeping child and turned to him. She walked toward him, her fingers fastening the buttons on her blouse. She stopped in front of him and looked up. “You tell me when it is the time.”

The muscles of his face seemed to reshape themselves into planed angular lines. She could see a pulse beating in his temple. His hands shot out suddenly and took her breasts. She felt the milk from them seep through her blouse into his palms.

His voice was angry. “You bitch! You couldn’t wait, could you?”

“No,” she said almost calmly. She put her hands on him and felt his bursting strength. Her insides seemed to turn into a hot boiling liquid. Her legs gave way and she sagged against him. “My bedroom’s through that other door,” she managed to gasp.

He picked her up and carried her through into the other room. With one hand he closed the door silently behind him and carried her over to the bed. She tumbled into it and stared up at him as he began to undress. She reached across the bed and turned on the small night table lamp.

He was almost naked now. “What are you waiting for?” he asked savagely. “Take off your dress!”

She shook her head without speaking, never taking her eyes from him as his union suit dropped to the floor and he stepped toward her. Then she looked up into his face. “You tear it off me,” she said. “The way you did that girl’s.”

In a moment the dress was torn into shreds and he was on his knees before her. He held her legs back and apart and lowered himself into her.

She shoved her half-clenched fist into her open mouth to keep herself from screaming. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” She was seized by paroxysm after paroxysm of climax and spending. She shut her eyes tightly and this time she was the girl she saw in the mirror.

 Chapter Eight

She awoke a few minutes before the baby’s two o’clock feeding. Loren was sleeping on his stomach, one arm thrown across the pillow, shielding his eyes from the night lamp, his long legs stretched down the length of the bed, his feet awkwardly reaching past the edge. This close he didn’t seem to be as hairy as she had thought, his body covered instead with a fine, soft, red-gold fur through which the whiteness of his skin gleamed.

Carefully, so as not to awaken him, she moved from the bed. The moving made her suddenly aware of her own body. Every cell of her was filled to the bursting, alive, rich, and completed. “So this is what it is like,” she thought in wonder.

Silently, she slipped into a robe and went into the baby’s room, shutting the door behind her. She stood over the crib, looking at the sleeping baby. For the first time, it all made sense to her. He was not a baby any more. He was a man child and some day he would be large and strong and fill a woman just as she had been filled.

Her breasts began to ache and she touched them, then went to the dresser and took the already prepared warm bottle from its thermos container. She tested the temperature of the formula against the back of her hand. It was just right. She took the baby from the crib, sat in the chair, and gave him the rubber nipple.

He took one suck and spit it out. He cried protestingly. “Shh,” she whispered softly, pushing the nipple back into his mouth. “You have to get used to it sometime.”

He seemed to understand because he began to suck hungrily at it. She bent and kissed his suddenly sweating face. “Man child,” she whispered. She had never felt her love for him as strongly as she did at this moment.

She heard the door open behind her and when she looked up, Loren was standing over them. He was naked and tawny in the yellow light and the strong male smell of him was pungent in her nostrils.

“How come the bottle?” he asked after a moment.

“You left nothing for him,” she replied simply.

He didn’t answer.

“It’s all right,” she added. “He’s in the middle of being weaned anyway.”

He nodded without speaking and then went back into the other room. She looked down at the baby. The bottle was half empty, it was time to burp him.

When she came back into the bedroom, he was sitting on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette. He looked at her inquiringly as she closed the door behind her. “He went right back to sleep,” she said.

“It’s a great life,” he smiled. “Nothing to do but eat and sleep.” He got to his feet. “Time for me to go.”

“No.”

He looked at her. “We’ve been crazy enough,” he said after a moment. “The thing for me to do is get out of here and make sure it never happens again.”

“I want you to stay.”

“You’re crazier than I am.”

“No, I’m not,” she said steadily. “Do you think I could let you go now that you taught me what it is like to really be a woman? What it is like to really be loved?”

“Fucked, you mean,” he said flatly. “They’re not the same things.”

“Maybe to you they’re not,” she answered. “But they are to me. I love you.”

“One good fuck and you’re in love?” he asked sarcastically.

“Isn’t that enough of a reason?” she returned. “I might have gone my whole life and never known how much I could feel.”

He was silent.

“Look,” she said quickly, the words tumbling from her lips almost one on top of the other. “I know that after tonight it will be over. That it will never happen again. But it’s not tomorrow yet, it’s still tonight and I don’t want to lose a moment of it.”

He felt the stirring in his loins and knew from the expression in her eyes that she was aware of it. He felt a sudden anger with his self-betrayal. “We can’t stay in this room,” he said harshly. “The servants—”

“You stay in Loren’s room,” she said. “Through the connecting door.”

He began to pick up his clothing. “What will you tell them?”

“The truth,” she smiled. “That it was too late for you to drive home. After all, what can they say, you’re still my father-in-law, aren’t you?” She looked up at him. “One thing bothers me. I don’t know what to call you. Daddy Hardeman seems ridiculous now.”

“Try Loren,” he suggested. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.” He followed her into the other room. “How long have you had separate bedrooms?” he asked.

“Always,” she answered. She reached for the clothing over his arm. “Let me hang these for you, or they won’t be fit to wear in the morning.”

He watched her drape the suit neatly over the wooden valet. “I thought you had the same bedroom.”

“Never,” she replied. “Loren said that he was a poor sleeper. Besides, you and Mother had separate bedrooms.”

“Only after she became sick,” he said. “We slept in the same room for the first twenty years of our marriage.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said, taking his shirt and placing it on a hanger.

“You’re both too young to have separate rooms,” he said. He looked at her shrewdly. “I know there’s nothing the matter with you. What’s wrong with Loren?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes meeting his. “He’s different. He’s not like you.”

“What do you mean, different?”

“He just doesn’t seem to demand very much from me.” She hesitated a moment. “Now that I think about it, the only time we ever make love is when I seem to suggest it. Even on our wedding night, I wanted him so badly that I lay naked in the bed waiting for him, and he asked if I was too tired.”

“He was never a very strong boy,” he said awkwardly. “Sort of delicate. His mother used to worry a great deal about him. I thought she worried too much at times. But that was the way she was. He was her only child and she knew that she would never have another.”

“I would like to give you a child,” she said.

“You already did. A grandchild.”

She shook her head. “More than that. One of your own. You’re a man who should have had many children.”

“It’s too late for that now.”

“Is it, Loren?” she asked, walking toward him. “Is it too late?”

He looked down into her face without answering.

“You never kissed me,” she said.

He placed his hands under her shoulders and lifted her toward him. She felt his thumbs digging into her armpits, his strong fingers pressing into her back, crushing her breasts against him. His mouth came down hard against her lips. The hot liquid fire began to soak her loins.

She tore her mouth from him and laid her head on his chest. She closed her eyes and her lips brushed against his shoulder and he could hardly hear her soft whisper. “Oh, God, I hope this night never ends.”

He held her very still and very tightly. Because the one thing both of them knew was that morning was just a few hours away.

“More coffee, Mr. Hardeman?”

Loren nodded. He looked across the breakfast table at Sally and waited until the impassive butler had filled the cup and left the room. “You didn’t eat your breakfast.”

“I’m not really hungry,” she said. “Besides I still have ten pounds to lose until I’m back to where I was before the baby was born.”

He picked up his cup and sipped the strong black coffee. He thought of the way she looked at six o’clock that morning.

He awoke when she had slipped from the bed to give the baby his morning feeding but he deliberately kept his eyes closed so that she would think he was still asleep. He felt her standing there at the side of the bed, looking down at him. After a moment, she moved away and he peeked at her through slitted lids.

She was nude and in the gray light of the early morning he could see the faint blue and purple bruises of his passion on her fair skin. She seemed to wander about the room almost aimlessly and without purpose. She paused before the dresser and suddenly there were two of her, back and front, one in the mirror. But she didn’t look at herself. Instead she picked up his heavy pocket watch and looked at it for a moment, then put it down and took up the gold cufflinks made in the shape of the first Sundancer he had built. These she looked at for a long time. After she had put them down, she turned and looked back at him in the bed. He shut his eyes quickly.

He heard her moving around the room again, then the closing of the door behind her and, after a moment, the faint sound of running water coming through the walls from her bathroom. He rolled over on his back and opened his eyes.

He was in his son’s bed, in his son’s room, and the smell of his son’s wife was still on the pillow beside him. His eyes wandered around the room. Everything in it reflected Junior’s love of antique furniture. The dresser and mirror, the chairs, even the delicate Duncan Phyfe desk that sat in the bay of the window. All were his son’s.

A peculiar sorrow seemed to weigh him down. Elizabeth had said so many times that his life had been a succession of failures when it came to his son. That he never really allowed for the differences between them and that try as he might, he could not reshape Junior in his own image.

He closed his eyes wearily. If those were failures, what was this? Another failure? Or betrayal? Or even worse, a final usurpation of his son’s life and place? He drifted into a fitful sleep.

When he opened his eyes again it was after eight o’clock and she was standing next to the bed. She was wearing a simple dress and her face was scrubbed, without makeup, her eyes clear and her hair pulled back behind her head in a neat bun.

“Junior’s calling you from the office,” she said in a flat voice.

He swung his feet off the bed. “What time is it?”

“About eight forty.”

“How did he know I was here?”

“When you weren’t at the meeting this morning, they tried your house. They were told that you had mentioned you might come over here last night but they didn’t think of calling until they tried several other places first.”

“What did you say to him?” he asked.

“I told him that we were up late and that I thought you should stay over instead of driving back.”

“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet. A stab of pain shot through his temples. “Could you get me some aspirin?” he asked, walking to the small desk and picking up the telephone. “Hello.”

“Father?” Junior’s voice was thin and metallic in the phone. “I’m sorry I didn’t know you were there, I would have come home.”

“That’s all right,” Loren said. “I made up my mind at the last minute.”

She came back into the room with two aspirins and a tumbler of water. He gulped them down.

“Duncan’s completed the plans for the revised assembly line for the Loren Two,” Junior said. “We wanted to get your approval.”

“How does it look?”

“It seems all right to me,” Junior said. “We should be able to save about two hundred and ten dollars per unit by final assembly.”

“Then okay it,” he said abruptly.

“Without your seeing it?” There was surprise in Junior’s voice.

“Yes. You might as well get used to taking the responsibility. You’re the president of the company, you make the decisions.”

“But—what are you going to do?” Junior was puzzled.

“I’m taking that vacation I promised myself,” he heard himself saying. “I’m going to Europe for a year and I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“I thought you weren’t going until next month,” Junior said.

Loren looked up at Sally. “I changed my mind.”

She looked into his eyes for a moment, then silently left the room. He turned back to the telephone. “I’ll go home and change clothes,” he said to his son. “I’ll see you later this afternoon.” He sat down wearily in the spindly Duncan Phyfe chair behind the desk and waited for the aspirin to take his morning headache away.

Now she looked across the table as he put his coffee cup back on it. Her voice was controlled. “You’re running away.”

“Yup,” he nodded.

“Do you think it will make anything different?”

“Maybe it won’t. But five thousand miles can keep us out of a lot of trouble.”

She didn’t speak.

He looked at her steadily. “I have no regrets about what happened. But we were lucky. No one got hurt. This time. But I know myself. If I were to stay, I wouldn’t be able to keep away from you. And eventually, that’s got to destroy all the things and people we don’t want to hurt.”

She was motionless in her chair. “I love you.”

He was silent for a long moment. “And I love you, I think.” There was a note of pain in his voice. “But that doesn’t matter now. It’s much too late in the game. For both of us.”