The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (25 page)

“In those days,” he informed me in an aside, “people were beginning to talk about repression and all that sort of thing.

“I don't know how many women I've had since Dolores Davis. If you want to know,” he said, “ask Alice. I'll bet she can tell you!”

… And so the spring wore on and the strange, perverse troubles of the Gavins wore on and I thought how many changes of the season had brought no change to them and I wondered why I thought it ever would.

One night Gavin took me to dinner to the house he kept in Webster's Bridge. There was something—something unpleasant, I grant—but at the same time something rather touchingly innocent in his way of reminding us every few minutes that we were all doing something we oughtn't to be. I felt embarrassed for Leila—not for the obvious reason, but because she seemed unaware how insignificant a place she, as a person in her own right, had in Gavin's heart, and I remember trying to help her out by arousing a spark of jealousy in him with questions about the husband she still had somewhere, though if he had been jealous of her he would have seen the eyes she was making at me.

VI

It must be hard, in keeping up an illusion, to be helped by the one person who has seen through it, no matter how sympathetic he may be. One morning, towards which I'd seen signs accumulating, Gavin allowed me to do all the talking, thereafter he responded but feebly to my reports of Alice's maneuvers, then I missed him for three days running and after that his participation in our game was no more than perfunctory and I began to miss him regularly every other day or so, both in the morning and in town at night, then for four or five days at a stretch, and at last for as long as two weeks together. I could imagine him picking up another newcomer, first accusing him of being a detective if not something more outlandish, and training him for my role.

Meanwhile Janice's father continued to ply me with gifts of fine cigars and rare books and old brandies, until she told him he would spoil my taste. He seemed to have had his answer in readiness. “No,” he said, “I'll whet it.” He must have. I got ambitious in the late spring and spent nights working overtime, and on one of those nights on the late train when I left my seat in the deserted coach and went out on the platform for a breath of air, I found Gavin. We must have stood for five minutes not three feet apart in the yellow light, he looking out one window at the night rushing past and I out the other, and then he recognized me first. Had he not I don't believe I would have known him at all. He was so changed that I know no way to express it but to say that now he looked his age. And though he was pleased to see me, his smile failed to enliven his face much, as it had done on a former occasion.

Our meetings had been ritualized before, and now I took his weariness and his pleasure at seeing me as a cue to begin again where we had left off. I said, “My, she must be really out to get you this time.”

His reaction was slow. He thought for a moment with visible effort, apparently not knowing what I was talking about. Then he cried, “No!”

“No?” I echoed weakly.

And, seeing that I was not sure of it, that I had said it only to cheer him up, he laughed and said, “That old business is all over, Charley.” There was a maturity in his tone which saddened me.

I remembered telling him once that like Dorian Gray he looked younger with each sin. Obsessed, desperate as his life had been, it was just what he had thrived on, it was what had kept him going. I felt guilty for having allowed him to tire of me. I said, “Hah! You're playing right into her hands. That's just what she intends—to lull you into complacency.”

For a moment I thought I had reawakened him. For a moment the old fear came into his eyes. Then he said, “Nonsense. You're just trying to scare me.”

We returned to the coach and when we were seated he turned suddenly and caught me looking aggrievedly at the changes in his face and he said, “You're looking older, Charley.”

It was not the irony of this which made me thoughtful. He had always been too self-absorbed to notice my looks or anything else about me. Our mutual interest had been him. Strange, to think that becoming less selfish could be a sign of a man's breaking up. He was all solicitude now and he presumed upon our friendship to hope earnestly that my marriage was working out well. And then he asked rather determinedly what I was doing out so late.

I said I had worked late.

Janice was a fine girl, he said.

I agreed.

He hoped I appreciated her, he said, with more than a shade of doubt in his look.

Now, just what had those few weeks since I'd seen him done? I asked after Alice, to which he replied in a tone from which I guessed that she was still alive, or that if she was dead that he hadn't heard about it, then I asked after Leila and he replied in the very same tone. I waited for an explanation.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “You didn't know about that, did you? How long has it been since I saw you? Well, she and I broke up, oh, it must be, oh, five or six weeks ago.” He was amazed, apparently, to realize that it was no longer ago. He wanted then to tell me something more, but something that he did not know how to lead up to, and finally he decided to dispense with any lead-up. “Well, about her,” he said. “I've told Katherine about her, of course, but all the same—”

He paused and I nodded to show that I had explained Katherine to myself. But this did not altogether please him. I had placed her, perhaps, a little too categorically.

“You get off with me at Webster's and come in for a while. Have dinner,” he said.

It was no use my protesting the time. I had to see Katherine.

She was waiting for him, standing in the light of the doorway, waving. He stopped the car and she started out to meet him, but when she saw me get out of the car she stopped and, to my astonishment, grew quite flustered. Awkwardness was the last thing I expected—I can't tell you how long it was since I had seen a woman blush—and it was still less to be expected in a woman who looked like she did. For she was one of us, all right; such things as her relation with Gavin were not unheard-of to her; perhaps, indeed, she was what the women I knew only thought they were; there were depths of sophistication in her eyes and she carried herself in the approved way; she was knowing, chic—despite her innocent calico dress and her frilly little apron—but, as the evening taught me, there had remained an incorruptible simplicity in her and she filled her position with a refreshing un-ease.

No, she was not naturally the earnest, simple young matron sort, nor was their union, hers and Gavin's, the rocking-chair and reading-lamp and hassock-y kind which I saw through the open door. Things had changed here since Leila's time, and the thought of a life of sin in such ultra-middle-class respectability had me ready to laugh aloud—until I caught Katherine's look as it came to me over Gavin's shoulder when he hugged her. That look told me what I should have known—that he, not she, was responsible for that room, that dress and that apron, and it warned me not to laugh.

She was that way, fiercely protective—even after he told her that I was his only friend—of his dream of domesticity, the sentimentality of which was simply incredible. He had to show me all of it, and it was like a trip through a Sears Roebuck catalog: the kitchen, a vision of decalcomania and chintz, the silver service (Orange Blossom pattern), the newly redone knotty pine breakfast nook for two and the dining room for eight, the gadgets which were enough to make housekeeping a chore for Katherine—and throughout our tour I noticed her shy but determined affection for him and I approved her not letting my presence keep him from feeling it.

I was their first guest, so they treated me to all their accumulated hospitality. They treated me also to all the traditional foolery which newlyweds feel called upon to amuse older people with. There was a little skit in which he burlesqued his own easy householder air, one in which she demonstrated her wifely interest in his business day and her inability to understand the devious workings of the masculine world; then he tried to fix the iron which he must do if he were to have a clean shirt for tomorrow, and there was, of course, his disastrous attempt, in the costume of her apron, to mix the salad dressing.

While she prepared the dinner and he and I sat in the living room, he tried not to let me see how completely she absorbed him, tried to pay some attention to what I said, would engage me in earnest talk—only to break off and dash into the kitchen to get down from the shelf something for which she had only just begun to reach. And once he had to call me out there to show me that she had been about to put cinnamon on the asparagus, thinking it was pepper.

“She's nearsighted!” he said rapturously. He thought this the most attractive, the most delightfully quaint, the most wondrously lovable quality any woman ever possessed—he had even made her feel it was something to be modest over—while she, it was apparent, thought herself inhumanly blessed to have got a man with twenty/twenty vision.

After dinner, over drinks, while they spared me only the minimum polite attention, I began to feel quite rosy. I was touched by the innocence and the sincerity of it, but more than that, by its being for Gavin so climacteric. I was beginning to feel quite paternal towards them, when suddenly …

“Mommy!”

It came from upstairs. It was all that was lacking. It was too much. I burst out laughing. Gavin looked at me reproachfully and he and Katherine exchanged stricken glances.

“I'll go,” said Gavin.

It was the moving, Katherine explained. It still frightened Shirley to wake in a strange bedroom. “She's used to having me sleep with her,” she said—then blushed violently.

Gavin, embarrassed at so much happiness, came down bearing a little girl who hugged him tightly and, ashamed of being seen in a crisis by a stranger, buried her face in his neck. When at last she was ready to be presented, Gavin introduced me as her Uncle Charley. Skeptical as she was of this sudden connection, even she, it seemed, had resolved to humor him.

He passed her to Katherine and sat looking at the picture they made and then suddenly his hospitality was at an end. “Your wife will be worried,” he said in a tone which admitted no argument, and I supposed that in his new state this was a thing he did not want to be responsible for.

As he drove me home I watched his face in the glow of the dashboard light. Perhaps it was only that I noticed it for the first time then, but his face had undergone another of those transformations of which it was so capable; it lost years as the man in the ads loses his headache on taking the pill. He was almost deliriously happy and he couldn't get rid of me fast enough to carry out his determination. And yet, he told me later, he had thought at one point of taking me with him, to have someone to share his joy—that was how little difficulty he foresaw and how little need he felt for privacy when he asked Alice for a divorce.

He found a car in the drive, Victoria's car. This put him out of his stride for just a moment, then he realized that he could count upon her presence as a help. After all, what had Victoria said for twenty years but that Alice would do well to get rid of him? And if it occurred to him to reckon the effect of Robert's presence, he dismissed it, as anyone who knew Robert—or perhaps I should say, as anyone who knew Victoria—was bound to do.

He was disappointed to find the fully lit drawing room empty and it annoyed him to have to search for them. I think he actually was impatient to share his enthusiasm with them and when he burst into the studio where they sat I believe he half-expected them to guess his state and congratulate him.

He did not even pause over Alice's question, “Where have you been?”

Then he began to notice with some surprise that the looks on their faces were not friendly.

“Where have you been?” Alice repeated. “These ten days.”

He had actually forgotten how long it was since he had been home. In his late joy he had forgotten that he had another home in Cressett. Amazement over this was his first thought, then the full impact of Alice's question struck him. The irony of it was too much and he laughed. To gain a moment's time he strolled across the studio to the window, where, to look more at ease, he tapped out a rhythm on the drawing table. His fingers came back to him capped with dust. He looked at them slowly, then at the three faces. He saw Victoria smile faintly and he saw Alice flush. He knew then why Victoria was here and in Alice's face he saw what it had cost her to ask her sister to come.

Little was said by anyone. Their faces spoke for them. Gavin stood with his hopes still in his eyes and Victoria sat surveying him and Alice sat looking, as he told me later, very much as she had the first time he ever saw her. All Alice's professional dreams had at last deserted her and she had been brought sharply to face the fact of her age. She was bitter. All her resistances had been lowered and so when Gavin had not come home for ten days she had found herself vulnerable in some small but vital organ of female vanity that she never knew she had. She had become the helpless little spinster that he had married and she knew she had no one to fall back upon except Victoria. That was not going to be any soft cushion to fall back on, but something more like cold stone, and she was determined that if her rest henceforth was to be uneasy, Edward's would be, too. Victoria, she knew, had waited a long time for this; one whipping post, Robert, had never given her the workout she needed daily, and Alice was determined that for every lash she felt she would make Edward feel two. He had something now that he really wanted, something through which she could hurt him.

She did not want him back. Marrying him in the first place had meant for her that she no longer needed a husband. He had never suited her anyhow. She would have liked a husband like Robert, one who allowed himself to be made over into a kind of decorative, thoroughbred-looking hearth dog.