Whispers

by Belva Plain

  “She worries about you too.”

  “There’s no need to,” Lynn said, wanting to seem, and wanting to be, courageous.

  He did not answer. Perhaps it was the positioning of the furniture and the fireplace and the same tension of immediate grief that restored abruptly the day when Bruce had brought Annie home. And she told him so, saying, “You have always been there when I needed you. I know that you talked to the girls when I was out of the room that day.”

  “I only tried to mend, to find a way for you all to survive together.”

  He swirled the brandy, tilting and tipping and studying the little amber puddle.

  Then abruptly he inquired, “Has it worked?”

  Lynn’s courage left. She felt herself broken. She saw herself backed against the kitchen wall this morning, so small and weak, so insignificant in the face of Robert’s anger. No one must ever know of that insignificance.

  Bruce’s eyes were studying her with a gravity almost severe. He asked again, “Has it?”

  Faltering, she replied, “Yes, but now because of Emily, he—”

  The cat came in, Josie’s exquisite white cat; curling itself around Bruce’s ankle, it made a diversion for which Lynn was grateful.

  He smoothed the cat’s fur and looked over again at her.

  “What did he do?”

  “He was quite—quite furious. He—” And now she was truly broken, unable to go on.

  “He struck you, didn’t he? This morning, before you came to the hospital.”

  She stared at him.

  “Dear Lynn, dear Lynn, do you really think we don’t know? And haven’t known for I can’t remember how long? That day in Chicago I knew, and even before that we both did. Oh, when first we suspected, we told ourselves we must be wrong. It’s hard to think of Robert’s using force; he’s always so coldly polite when it’s plain that he has a rage inside. One doesn’t imagine him being common enough to be violent.”

  Bruce’s laugh was sardonic. And Lynn could only keep staring at him.

  “I remember when we first met. We were invited to your house. You had made a wonderful dinner, coq au vin. And we had never had it before, although it was a fashionable dish then. How trustful you were! It was what we both thought of you. The way you looked at Robert. How can I put it? I’m floundering. It’s hard to make clear what I mean. Josie and I, we are—how shall I say it—more equal in our marriage. But you seemed so tender to him, and there’s so much love in you, even for that plant over there.”

  “But there’s love in him too,” she said, choking. “You don’t know. I’ve loved him so. You don’t know—or maybe you do have some little idea how good he was when I let Caroline die. He never blamed me, although anybody else would—”

  “Now, stop right there. Anybody else would say it was an accident. Accidents happen. A child pulls away from you and runs into the street. An adult stumbles and falls down the stairs in front of your eyes. Are we supposed to be infallible? And as for not blaming you—ah, Lynn, admit it, in a hundred subtle ways he lets you know it was your fault, but he—he the magnanimous—forgives you! Crap, Lynn. Crap. Stop the guilt. You did not kill Caroline!”

  Bruce was on a talking jag. It was as if all the pent-up fear and grief and anger at the fates that were taking Josie away were storming within him, lashing to be released.

  “Maybe I’ll be sorry to have talked to you like this, but right now I’m sorry I didn’t do it a long time ago. Only, if I had you wouldn’t have listened and then you’d have ended up by hating me.”

  “No,” she said truthfully, “no, I could never hate you. Not you.”

  For there was something about him that had always touched her heart: the candor, the simplicity, the vigorous bloom of a man who was healthy in body and in mind.

  “That day you came over,” he continued, “that morning when you told us you had fallen into the thorn hedge, don’t you think we knew what had really happened? Tom Lawrence told us about the dinner at his house, and how he found you when he brought back your purse the next day. Oh, don’t worry!” He flung up his hand. “Tom never talks. He’s too decent for that. He was only concerned that you were in trouble.”

  Lynn put her face into her hands. And he went on relentlessly.

  “The day when you came to tell us you were pregnant, we could hardly believe that you would tie yourself up again. Josie was sick over it.”

  “Why are you doing this to me, Bruce?” she burst out.

  “I don’t know. I suppose I hope you will start to think.”

  “Oh, my God, oh, my God!” she cried.

  He jumped to his feet and, sitting down on the sofa, took both her hands in his.

  “Oh, Lynn, I’ve hurt you. Forgive me, I’m clumsy, but I mean well. Don’t you think I’m glad you had Bobby? That’s not what I meant at all.”

  Her baby. Her little boy. She wanted to hide. And in her despair she turned and put her head on Bruce’s shoulder.

  “Yes, he struck me this morning. We had some words about Emily, and he was furious.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Poor little Lynn.”

  “It wasn’t—it wasn’t so much that my face was hurt, it was that I felt, I feel, like nothing. Can you understand? Like nothing.”

  His big hands smoothed the back of her head softly, over and over.

  “Yes,” he murmured, “yes.”

  “Maybe you can’t. It’s so different with you and Josie.”

  “It is. It is.”

  His voice was bleak. Like an echo, it came from far off, detached from the warm, living shoulder to which she clung, detached from the warm hand that cradled her head.

  “This morning I hated him,” she whispered. “His filthy temper. And still there is love. Am I crazy? Why am I so confused? Why is living just so awfully hard?”

  “Lynn, I don’t know. I don’t know why dying is so hard either. On this day, all of a sudden I don’t know anything at all.”

  She raised her head and looked into his expressive face, on which, over the short season of this summer, deep lines had been written. And it seemed to her that they two, on this hollow, emptying day, must be among the most miserable people in the world.

  He pushed her bangs aside and stroked her forehead, saying with a small rueful smile, “How good you are, how sweet. You mustn’t give up, you mustn’t despair.”

  “Please don’t be kind to me. I can’t bear it.”

  Yet, how clearly she needed the kindness of encircling arms, of human warmth! And so, impulsively, she raised her arms around his neck; he pulled her to him, and she lay against his heart. It was consolation.…

  So they held to each other, each sunk in grief, not speaking. In unison they felt the rise and fall of breath, and in unison heard the beat of the other’s heart.

  The room was still. From the yard came pigeons’ throaty gurgles, a peaceful sound of untroubled life. A clock somewhere else in the house struck the half hour with a musical ping, leaving a sweet, glittering chime in the air. Neither moved. In this quiet, one could simply float, assuaging against each other’s limp and weary body the need for comfort.

  Then, little by little, there began a response. Up and down her spine, perhaps unconsciously, his hand moved. It was so soft, this fluttering touch, this delicate caress, and yet from it a subtle pleasure began to travel through her nerves. After a time—how long a time she could not have said and never afterward remembered—there came from the deepest core of sensation a familiar fire. And she knew that he was feeling it as well.

  It was as if, outside of the self that was Lynn Ferguson, she was observing ever so curiously a film in slow motion.

  The film gathered speed. The actors moved inexorably, his lips on her neck, his fingers unfastening her blouse, her skirt falling into a yellow heap on the floor. Neither of them spoke. She lost all thought. He lost all thought. Desperate and famished, they hastened; it was a kind of collapse into each other, a total fusion.…

  When sh
e awoke, he was gently shaking her. Startled, disoriented in time and place, it was a moment before she understood where she was. In that moment, as she later recalled it, she was free of care; the knot of tension at the nape of her neck had disappeared; she was normal.

  That moment ended, and she knew what had happened, knew that after it had happened, she had dozed, resting in this man’s arms as if she belonged there. Appalled, she met his eyes and saw in them a duplication of her own horror.

  He had dressed himself, but she was naked, covered only by the plaid knit throw that he had put over her. Through long evenings and on rainy afternoons she had watched Josie knit that throw. Knit, cable, purl, rose and cream and green.

  “I have to get to the hospital,” he said dully.

  “You have no car,” she said.

  “They’ve brought mine back.”

  This dialogue was absurd. It was surreal.

  The afternoon had faded. From the window where Josie’s beautiful white cat slept on the sill came an almost imperceptible movement of air and a creeping shade. The room became a place where, helplessly, one waited for some onrushing, unstoppable disaster.

  “Oh, God,” she groaned.

  He turned away, saying only, “I’ll let you get dressed,” and left the room.

  Shaking, with nausea rising to her throat, she put on her clothes. On the opposite wall there hung a mirror, one of Bruce’s antiques, with a surface of wavy glass that distorted her face as she passed it. This ugly distortion seemed fitting to her, and she stopped in front of it. Ugly. Ugly. That’s what I am. I, Lynn, have done this while she lies dying. I, Lynn.

  And Robert said, “On the health and lives of our children, I swear that I have never been unfaithful to you.” He would not have sworn it so if it were not true. Whatever else he was, he was not a liar.

  She had expected Bruce to be in a hurry, but when he returned, he sat down on the chair across from the sofa. So she sat down, too, neat, proper Lynn Ferguson with the shaking stomach, the knot as tight as ever it had been at the nape of her neck, and her feet neatly placed on the floor. She waited for him to speak.

  Several times he began, and as his voice broke, had to stop. Finally he said, “I think we must forget what happened, put it out of our minds forever. It was human.… We are both under terrible strain.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking down at her feet, the suburban lady’s nice brown-and-white summer pumps.

  His voice broke again. “That this could happen—I don’t know—my Josie—I love her so.”

  “I am so ashamed,” she whispered, looking not at Bruce but at the white cat.

  “We will have to forget it,” he repeated. “To try to forget it. But before that, I must apologize.”

  She gave a little shrug and a painful frown as if to say, There is no need, the burden is just as much mine.

  “And something else: I should never have told you what I did about Robert and forced your answer.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What you said was true.”

  “All the same, you will be sorry you admitted it. I know you, Lynn. I know you very well.”

  “I have admitted it to no one but you, and I trust you.”

  He put on his glasses, restoring the old Bruce, the one she had known, the brotherly friend with whom such a thing as had just passed between them would have been an impossibility. And he said, “Perhaps that’s your mistake.”

  “What? Trusting you?”

  “Oh, God, no, Lynn. I meant your mistake in not admitting it to anyone else.”

  “Such as who?”

  “Well, once I would have said—I did say—a counselor. But now I would say Tom Lawrence.’ ”

  To ask for advice, for help, from Tom? And she remembered the scene at the club pool, remembered the humiliation and her own defiant invitation to the golden wedding.

  “A lawyer? No.”

  “He’s not only a lawyer, Lynn. He would care. He admires you. Believe me, I know.”

  He is also the man who thinks I belong in the nineteenth century, an anachronism, part charming, part absurd. That, no doubt, is what he finds interesting, only because it’s different from what he sees around him, those blunt, independent women at his party that night. If he knew what I have done just now in this room, he would have to laugh through his amazement. “The joke’s on me,” he would say. She could hear him say it and see the crinkles forming around his light, bright eyes.

  Her mind leapt: What if Robert knew! And terror seized her as if she were alone in a stalled car at midnight, or as if, alone in a house, she heard footsteps on the stairs at midnight.

  She stood up, fighting it off. “I’ve been gone all day. The baby … And Emily, I must talk to Emily.”

  He saw her to the door and took her hand. “Go home. Drive carefully.” The lines in his forehead deepened with anxiety. “Are you all right? Really?”

  “I am. I really am.”

  Naked with a man who wasn’t Robert. With Josie’s husband …

  “We’ve done no harm, Lynn. Remember that. It was just something that happened. We’re both good people. Remember that too.”

  “Yes,” she said, knowing that he hoped she would forget because, not believing it himself, he needed to have someone else believe it. But he himself would remember this betrayal of his darling Josie.

  “I have to get to the hospital,” he said.

  “Yes, go.”

  “I’ll call you if anything—”

  “Yes, do.”

  So she left Josie’s house.

  It was Bobby who relieved the silence at the table, which Eudora had thoughtfully set before leaving, although it was not her job to do so. From the freezer she had taken one of Lynn’s pot pies and heated it. Lynn thought, It is because she pities me.

  Emily had eaten earlier by herself and gone to her room.

  “Emily said to tell you she has a headache. But you’re not to worry, it’s nothing,” Eudora said, while her eyes told Lynn, I pity you.

  Eyes told everything. Eyes averted told of guilt or shame or fear. Robert’s glance fell on Lynn’s cheek, where the split skin showed a thin red thread. Lynn looked down at her plate. Robert fed soft pieces of potato to the baby.

  The baby bounced in the infant seat. When he dropped his toy, Robert retrieved it; when he threw his toy, Robert had to get up and fetch it from under the table.

  “Toughie,” Robert said. “Little toughie.”

  Lynn said nothing. The boy was beautiful; the hair with which he had been born and that he had lost soon after birth was now growing back, silky and silver white.

  She imagined herself saying to this child: Your father, whom I loved—love still, and God alone can explain that—I wish He would because I am incapable of understanding it myself—your father has struck me once too often.

  Is it Josie who has made this time different from the other times? Or Eudora who has made it seem like the last straw? Or simply that it is, it truly is, the last straw for me, and me alone.

  The telephone rang. “Shall I take it or will you?” asked Robert.

  “You, please.”

  Any hour the phone could bring the news of Josie’s death. Her legs were too weak to carry her to the telephone; her hand would not be able to hold it.

  But it was only from the PTA. “A Mrs. Hargrove,” Robert reported as he sat down again. “You’re asked to be class mother for Annie. I said you’d call back.”

  He spoke without inflection or tone. Then he stretched his arm to reach the basket of bread, as if he could not bring himself to ask for the bread, he who was contemptuous of anyone who had poor table manners, of what he would call “the boardinghouse reach.” So she handed the basket to him, their hands grazing, their eyes meeting blankly.

  The evening light lay delicately on mahogany and turned the glittering pendants on the chandelier to ice. The baby, out of some secret bliss of his own, spread his adorable arms and crowed. And Emily was hiding in her room. And Annie, fragile
Annie, would soon be coming home.

  It was unbearable.

  Emily looked up from the open suitcase on the bed when Lynn came in. The doorknobs were hung with clothes and the chairs were strewn with more; sweaters, shoes, skirts, and slacks were heaped together. On the floor along with Emily’s Walkman were piles of books, and her tennis racket leaned against the wall.

  “So soon?” asked Lynn.

  “Mom, I wanted you to know beforehand, not shock you by having you walk in like this. The thing is, I delayed telling about Tulane, I delayed because I dreaded it, and now I’m at the last minute. Freshman indoctrination starts the day after tomorrow, and I’ll have to leave tomorrow morning. Oh, Mom!”

  “It’s all right,” Lynn said, swallowing the inevitable pain.

  “I tried to call you at the hospital this afternoon, but you weren’t there. I didn’t know where else to try.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “The nurse in Josie’s room said you and Uncle Bruce had left.”

  “We didn’t leave, we only went to the cafeteria for coffee and a doughnut.” And Lynn, suddenly aware of exhaustion, shoved a shoe aside and sat down on the edge of a chair.

  “I was hoping you’d get home early so we could talk.”

  “I went back to Josie’s room and stayed late.”

  Emily’s eyes filled. “Poor Josie! She was always so good to me, now more than ever. It’s not fair for her to die.”

  Youth, youth, still astonished that life can be unfair.

  “I wish I could see her again to tell her how much I love her and how much I thank her for what she’s doing. But I did thank Uncle Bruce. I thanked him a thousand times.”

  “Josie wouldn’t hear you if you did go. She’s in a coma.”

  “Like a deep sleep.”

  “Like death.”

  On the pillow lay the face, the head so small now that the hair had fallen; under the blanket lay the body, so slight that it barely made a displacement. And while she lay there, where had her husband been, where her dearest friend?

  With enormous effort Lynn pulled her mind back from the edge of the cliff. “Have you talked to your father at all?”