Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  She recognized this difference, said more than once, after a lavish yielding: ‘I love you so much more than you love me, Richard. If you ever stopped loving me, I’d die. And I’d want to die!’ This was true of her, yet he knew — with a faint sense of guilt — that it was not true of him. Most men, he suspected, were or might be self-sufficient; it was women who lived to the utmost only through surrender — which was at the same time possession.

  His life after their marriage took on a new dimension, and — the creative instinct in him again awake — he turned to his work with a keen zest he had never known, and with a fecundity of invention so greatly increased that it was as though he had acquired a sixth sense. He perceived in the pattern of human life complexities he had net hitherto suspected, and he began to comprehend emotional deaths which till now had seemed to him unreal. theatrical, factitious. His hours at his desk were filled with a high excitement, his hours with her were wholly contenting. Only rarely did any shadow cloud their days. Once she asked, as though wishing to be reassured: ‘Am I all right with Danny, Richard?’

  ‘Wonderful,’ he assured her.

  ‘Sometimes I just hate him,’ she confessed, only half-jesting. ‘He’s had so much of you that I can never have.’

  He laughed teasingly. ‘Ellen the Desirous! Never satisfied.’ Then, suddenly husky: ‘When I watch you with him, I’m always imagining what you’ll be like with our own sons.’

  She asked, her eyes searching his: ‘You want a son, don’t you, Richard?’

  ‘Some day, of course. Don’t you?’

  ‘Some day, yes.’ Then she caught him fiercely close. ‘But not soon, Richard!’ she whispered. ‘I want you all to myself for a while. No one else! Just us two! Just you and me!’

  He held her strongly. ‘Just us two!’ he assented. ‘And, of course, Danny.’

  ‘Oh, of course!’ She spoke without emphasis. There was often this disturbing flatness in her voice when they discussed Danny.

  ‘We’re all he’s got in the world, you know,’ he reminded her in steady warning. ‘We’ve got to stand by!’

  She laughed and kissed him. ‘Don’t worry, darling. I love him as you do, my dear.’

  – II –

  A later incident made him remember the brief misgiving he had felt that day. They had left Danny for the Sea Island week end with her mother and Ruth, and he found Mrs. Berent’s tongue as sharp as ever. ‘Well, Mr. Harland, you don’t lock as though you’d suffered any yet,’ she commented, when they arrived, and Harland laughed and said:

  ‘No. Being married to this daughter of yours has been pretty tough sometimes, but so far I’ve been able to stand it.’ He dropped his arm affectionately around Ellen’s waist, and she clasped his hand with hers, pressing his against her side.

  ‘I haven’t begun to bite any pieces out of him yet,’ she assured her mother; and the older woman made a stubborn sound.

  ‘Time enough!’ she declared. ‘You will!’

  She told them at dinner that evening that Quinton had arrived at the ranch a few hours after their departure. ‘He came breathing out threatenings and slaughter,’ she declared. ‘If you’re wise, Ellen, you’ll not cross his path again.’

  Harland was troubled. ‘Why didn’t he answer your wire, I wonder?’ he asked Ellen, and he saw her mother look at her sharply.

  ‘He did, Richard,’ Ellen said at once. ‘Don’t you remember? His answer came while you and Mr. Robie were off after the preacher.’

  Harland started to speak, then held his tongue; yet he felt Mrs. Berent’s sharp eyes upon him, and when he and Ellen were alone he said: ‘See here, Ellen, you didn’t tell me about any telegram from Quinton.’

  She smiled. ‘Poor darling! And I made you back me up when I fibbed to Mother, didn’t I? Did your New England conscience hurt? Mother’s always been a troublemaker, Richard. We’ll have to teach her not to interfere.’

  ‘What did Quinton go out there for?’

  ‘To forbid the banns, I suppose! Russ is a hard loser. Forgive me? I couldn’t have him bothering us. I’d made up my mind I wanted you, you see; so talk would have done no good.’ Seeing his doubt, she came to kiss him, crying: ‘I’d do worse than lie to keep you all mine and always mine, my dear! Don’t ever blame me for loving you, will you?’

  So she won him to quick forgetfulness, and the days were bright. With Ruth they rode the beaches and the island trails, Mrs. Berent preferring a sunny corner by the pool. The bridle paths ran through groves of ancient live oaks hung with sweeping scarves of warm gray moss which might after a night of rain show pale green. Yellow jasmine spangled the forest with gold, and there were flowers everywhere, and they spent hours exploring the hidden ways. Harland, now that he began to know Ruth better, no longer thought of her as plain, though of course she was not beautiful as Ellen was beautiful. She rode, he found to his surprise, as well as Ellen did; but while Ellen’s horse, when they returned to the stable, was dark with sweat and flecked with foam, Ruth’s was always cool and unwearied.

  One night there was dancing at the dinner hour. When he took a turn with Ruth — she danced, he found, as well as she rode — she said: ‘I want you to know, Dick, that Mother and I are ever so glad about you and Ellen.’

  ‘I know,’ he agreed, thinking she meant that he need not be disturbed by Mrs. Berent’s habitual tone. ‘Your mother’s bark is worse than her bite.’

  ‘She was doubtful at first,’ Ruth confessed. ‘But she’s content now that she’s seen you together.’

  ‘I was doubtful myself at first,’ he admitted, with a chuckle.

  ‘I was a bachelor and liked it. But now I know I was only half-alive.’

  ‘Ellen is sweet, really,’ she assured him. ‘I don’t need to tell you that. But she’s strong, and till she learned to love you, she never — yielded to anyone. She’s nicer than ever now.’

  ‘There never was anyone like her,’ he agreed. ‘You should see her with Danny.’

  ‘She loves him because you do,’ she assented.

  The night Harland telephoned to Danny to say they would prolong their stay, Mrs. Berent asked many questions about the youngster, and Ellen told her the routine of their days.

  ‘I’m with him all morning,’ she explained, ‘while Richard works. Danny’s such a dear, lovable boy. Then Richard joins us for the afternoons, and sometimes we have lunch together, and sometimes if it’s fine we take long drives, the three of us.’

  Mrs. Berent asked shrewdly: ‘Doesn’t she ever let you and Danny have a minute alone, Mr. Harland?’

  Harland realized, with a disturbed surprise, that he had not in fact been alone with Danny since he and Ellen were married. ‘We like to be all together,’ he told her, evading a direct reply; yet he wondered whether Danny did sometimes wish they might have an hour to themselves. Then he felt Ellen watching him and met her eyes and smiled. ‘We wouldn’t have it any other way,’ he declared.

  ‘You never will have it any other way,’ Mrs. Berent assured him. ‘Ellen will see to that. She’ll never let you out of her sight again.’ They laughed at her together, but Harland, though he smiled with them, brushed his hand across his face with the gesture of a man who, walking through the forest at dawn, feels laid across his cheeks the tiny, clinging strands which spiders during the night have spun.

  – III –

  Spring came drifting northward, flooding these southern lands with flowers, and on moonlit nights the mockingbirds were singing. Harland wrote to Leick to make all ready for them at Back of the Moon, and he told Ellen more and more about the spot so dear to him.

  ‘But I’m worried about how you’re going to like it,’ he admitted. ‘It’s rather primitive, you know.’

  ‘I’ll love it. I’ll always love any place that means so much to you.’

  ‘You’ll like Leick,’ he promised, and he told her something about the years when he and Leick from spring to fall had been inseparable.

  ‘I’ll probably hate him,’ she laughing
ly declared. ‘He’s known you so much longer than I. I shall make him tell me all about you.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have chance enough. Up there, I get up at daylight, work till noon; so you’ll have Leick to yourself all morning. Leick and Danny.’

  She spoke slowly. ‘Have you talked to Doctor Mason about Danny’s going, Richard? I’m not sure he wouldn’t be better here, for a few months more.’

  ‘Oh no! He loves it there as I do. He’ll have all the swimming he wants, of course; and you can help him with his exercises.’

  ‘What does Doctor Mason think?’

  ‘I haven’t asked him.’ He laughed in forced confidence. ‘If he doesn’t agree, we’ll take Danny anyway!’

  She linked her arm in his. ‘Don’t be too disappointed, Richard, if it seems best to leave Danny here.’

  He knew she might be right, and to hide his own fears he spoke curtly. ‘There’s no question of leaving him here. If he can’t go — why neither can we, that’s all.’ Then, realizing that his tone had been abrupt: ‘But I’m sure he’ll be able to go, Ellen. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t,’ she promised. ‘If Danny is better off here, you and I will stay, of course. Don’t consider me at all. Last summer here was really quite comfortable. I didn’t mind it much.’

  She was so patiently submissive that he exploded. ‘Damn it, of course I’ll consider you! But we have to consider Danny too!’ Then when she did not speak he regretted his tone and said cheerfully: ‘You’ll find I’m a different man at Back of the Moon. The trammels of civilization — whatever they are — fall away. I go pagan up there.’

  ‘Men are all pagans,’ she assented, nodding. ‘They love to get off by themselves and pretend to be savages. But I’ve some pagan in me, too, my dear.’ She drew his head down, kissed him with a tender ferocity: ‘I wish there were going to be just the two of us, this first summer there. I’d be as pagan as you choose!’

  A few days later — he postponed this as long as he could, dreading what the answer might be — Harland asked Doctor Mason’s opinion.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ the other confessed. ‘Mrs. Harland’s told me about the place. It seems pretty rugged for a boy on crutches.’

  Harland resented this advantage she had taken, forestalling what he might say to the physician. ‘She’s never been there,’ he pointed out. ‘So she doesn’t know what it’s like.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ the doctor suggested.

  Harland did so, explaining how easy it would be to make Danny comfortable. ‘Talk to him yourself,’ he urged. ‘He knows better than either you or I what it will be like for him.’

  Doctor Mason nodded. ‘I will.’ He smiled. ‘Probably Mrs. Harland sees it from the feminine point of view.’

  Harland said: ‘Well, she’s a woman!’

  ‘She put it pretty strongly,’ the other remarked, his eyes veiled, his tone conveying an unspoken criticism. He added a saving word. ‘But I’m sure she’s only thinking what’s best for Danny.’

  ‘Why, naturally!’ Harland assented, coloring; and he spoke strongly. ‘She’s devoted to him!’ He wondered as he spoke why he felt it necessary to defend Ellen.

  ‘Of course,’ Doctor Mason agreed. He rose, nodding in dismissal. ‘Well, we don’t need to decide the question yet. I’ll talk to him.’

  So in the end it was Danny himself who cast the deciding vote. When Harland heard the verdict, he was too jubilant to wonder whether Ellen was as pleased as he. He wrote to old Mrs. Huston, who had served his mother and father and who since Mrs. Harland’s death was in fact mistress of the house on Chestnut Street, to expect them in mid-June; and when they arrived there she greeted Danny with tearful affection, putting him at once to bed, tending him devotedly. To Ellen she gave a welcome so restrained that Ellen laughingly told Harland she felt like an intruder.

  ‘She couldn’t disapprove of me any more obviously if I were a light-o’-love you’d picked up on the street somewhere,’ she declared.

  ‘She’s jealous,’ he explained. ‘She’s ruled the roost so long! But if you want to win her, just get sick. She loves taking care of people. You see how she is with Danny.’

  ‘We might leave him here with her,’ she suggested, her tone light enough to make it clear that she was joking; but she added: ‘Even the trip north tired him. Maybe it would be wiser if we stayed here in Boston with him?’

  ‘He wouldn’t let us. He knows how much Back of the Moon means to me.’

  ‘We might leave him in Bar Harbor,’ she proposed. ‘With Mother and Ruth. He likes Ruth, and she’d be happy taking care of him, and we could see him often.’

  He said at a tangent, resenting her persistence: ‘You’re always so ready to turn things over to Ruth! As though she were a maid of all work, or something.’

  She nodded indifferently. ‘She’s adopted, you know,’ she explained. ‘She was Father’s brother’s daughter, and he died. She’s lived with us since she was a baby, and of course Mother’s made a regular slave out of her. She could take care of Danny all right.’

  He was astonished at this revelation, yet it seemed to make clear many things in Mrs. Berent’s attitude toward Ruth, and in Ellen’s, which had puzzled him. His suddenly awakened sympathy for Ruth sharpened his irritation. ‘I see,’ he commented. ‘Well, we won’t dump Danny on her hands, anyway! He’s our job, Ellen.’

  So she was silenced. On the way to Back of the Moon they stayed a night at Bar Harbor. After dinner, Ellen led Harland out of doors, and she showed him the wide gardens and the lawn sloping to the rocky shore, and the small study and workshop which Professor Berent had built many years ago on a knoll above the water. In the workroom, Harland watched her go to and fro, lifting things and putting them down again, seeming to find happiness in thus touching objects her father had touched. He saw a jar labelled ‘Arsenic’ and felt, as normal persons will, a cold shiver of distaste. ‘Why don’t you throw that away?’ he suggested. ‘Someone might get hold of it.’

  ‘No one ever comes here but me — and sometimes Ruth, to dust things,’ she assured him. ‘It’s perfectly harmless, as long as you don’t swallow it.’

  ‘I’ve always heard that even breathing the dust might kill you,’ he remembered. ‘Didn’t people get arsenic poisoning from wallpapers or something?’

  ‘Fairy tales!’ she said smilingly, and they turned out of doors again. The fine moon had risen and the night was warm, and they lay on the turf above the sea and watched the moon across the water, and the slow surf surging against the rocks below made the ground on which they lay faintly tremble. Harland was conscious of a deep intangible disturbance in him, an emotional anticipation like that which one may feel before the curtain rises at the opera, when the orchestra sets the key for the tragedy to follow. The night was fine, the moon was bright, Ellen was lovely and tender here beside him; yet there was a vibration in the very earth itself, transmitted from the rocks on which the long swells beat, which seemed to warn him that this sweet and stable world was insecure.

  They stayed long there above the sea, their low tones mingling. Once Harland suggested that they go to say good night to Danny, but Ellen would not.

  ‘Just forget everyone else but me for once, won’t you?’ she pleaded, and she said in a low tone: ‘There’s never been a single day — except maybe just at the very first — not a single day, and hardly even a single hour since we were married when you’ve thought of no one in the world but me.’

  ‘I don’t have to think of you, dearest! You’re a part of me. The biggest and best part of me.’ He meant to reassure her, yet there was a profound intensity in her words which were inadequately met by his inanity.

  ‘You don’t understand how much I love you, Richard,’ she said gravely. ‘You’ll never understand how jealously I love you. I hate sharing your thoughts with anyone else at all. Even with Danny!’ The hot passion in her tones was like the first rumble of a distant storm.

  ‘You’ve been wonderful to
him,’ he insisted, uneasily clinging to the commonplace.

  ‘I know! Oh, I know!’ She drew closer to him till she lay pressed against his side, and he dropped his arm across her waist, turning toward her, tugging her closer. ‘It’s ever so good of me, too!’ she assured him lightly. ‘Because I’m so jealous of him I’m ready to scratch his eyes out all the time!’

  He laughed as she was laughing, and he said honestly: ‘I know, Ellen. You’re swell about it. I know it’s tough for you, but —he has no one but us. He’s shut off from all his old friends. We’ve got to be his whole world for a while.’

  She asked after a moment, in a small voice, her face buried in his shoulder: ‘Will you send him away to school in the fall?’

  ‘Yes, if he wants to go. He’ll want to go on to college with the boys he’s always known.’

  ‘Boarding school?’

  ‘He’s always gone to day school. He’ll probably live at home, at least till he goes to college.’

  ‘I’ll be good to him, Richard,’ she promised, turning for his kiss. ‘As good as I know how.’ He held her close and gratefully, and the moon was silver on the sea.

  – IV –

  At breakfast Mrs. Berent was in an unaccountably malicious humor. She told them that Russ Quinton had called upon her a few days before to ask for news of Ellen. ‘He was elected prosecuting attorney, last fall,’ she said. ‘He’s very proud of himself!’

  ‘I can’t imagine Russ in politics,’ Ellen declared. ‘With his temper he makes so many enemies.’

  ‘Probably he thinks he can work off his bad temper by sending people to jail,’ Mrs. Berent suggested, and she added: ‘He hasn’t forgiven you, Ellen. He makes a joke of it; but if you’re wise you’ll never give him a chance to get even.’

  ‘I’m not planning to murder anyone, Mother,’ Ellen said evenly. ‘If that’s what you mean.’