Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  ‘Does writing mean so much to you, Richard?’ she asked once.

  ‘Of course! It’s the way I make my living.’

  ‘I’ve plenty for both of us.’

  Harland nodded cheerfully. ‘And I don’t mind living on my wife’s money,’ he admitted. ‘But — well, I don’t write for money, really.’ He kissed her. ‘Writing’s just one of my ways of saying how much I love you!’

  She smiled up at him, mischievous challenge in her eyes. ‘There are ways I like better,’ she assured him, but her laughter was not genuine. She resented everything which stole from her a part of Harland. At Sea Island she saw how easily he and Ruth were friends, and driving back to Warm Springs he spoke of Ruth so often that she said at last, smiling carefully: ‘You know, Richard, you ought to have married Ruth instead of me. You’d be perfectly congenial.’

  He chuckled. ‘I haven’t noticed that you and I have any trouble getting along.’ And he asked teasingly: ‘Jealous?’

  ‘I’ve always been jealous of Ruth,’ she assented. ‘Everybody has always liked her, and practically no one ever liked me! She’s so — so — ’ She exploded helplessly: ‘So darned good!’

  He laughed, a great gust of laughter. ‘And you’re a regular Jezebel, of course,’ he cried, and braked the car to a stop and took her in his arms; and she whispered:

  ‘I’m jealous of anything that touches you, Richard! Of your garments, of the chair where you sit and the bed where you sleep and the ground you tread on!’ Her voice was hoarse and shaken, her eyes hot and burning; and he held her close, profoundly moved, whispering many reassurances.

  But not often did she let him thus see the intensity of her desire to exclude every thought save of her from his mind. She dared not, for when Harland felt the curb, he laughingly or sternly shook it off; and she would not willingly teach him the habit of resisting her. She won no victories, but she avoided any outright defeats. Even in her careful campaign to leave Danny behind at Warm Springs she worked by indirection, seeking to influence Doctor Mason or Danny himself rather than to persuade Harland. Thus by refraining from making an open issue she escaped abject surrender.

  When at Joe Severin’s farm she saw the strong bond between him and Harland and the affection between Harland and Leick, she hated them because they had a part of him which she could never share. At Back of the Moon, directing Leick and working with him while she brought the camp nearer her desires, she set herself to win him, thinking she might separate him from Harland either by herself capturing his devotion or by provoking Harland to send him away; and by an easy familiarity, a deliberate yet subtle coquetry in manner and in dress which if it moved him to any overt word or act she could instantly disavow, she sought to play upon him. She led him to talk about himself, and he told her about the shore farm where he had lived with his father and mother till they died. She asked why he had never married.

  ‘Well, Mom liked to keep the house just so,’ he explained, with a smile in his tone. ‘And I never found anyone that was a good enough housekeeper to satisfy her; and Pa wa’n’t so well, the last few years, so I had the farm work to do and couldn’t leave them.’ She declared it was a pity and a shame that he should have sacrificed himself for them; and he said: ‘Well, ma’am, I’ve most generally noticed I ’get the most fun out of doing things for other folks and not worrying too much about myself.’

  She laughingly insisted that many a girl must have set her cap for him; and he grinned. ‘Well, if they did, I didn’t know it,’ he declared. ‘I never did know much about women anyway.’

  He was so steadily himself that she began to suspect he was wiser than he seemed, began to fear his thoughtful watchfulness. He made an inconspicuous fourth in their small world, always at hand yet never intrusive. She knew that though Richard’s morning hours at his work were sacred, not to be interrupted by her or by Danny, he sometimes took a recess to join Leick on the wharf for a few minutes of quiet talk; and when from the cabin above she heard their voices, she envied Leick this companionship with Richard from which she felt herself excluded.

  But most of all she envied and hated Danny. He was always with them. At night his bed was separated by only a single thickness of boards from Harland’s. He was actually nearer Harland than she, for despite the dividing wall their beds were only inches apart, while between hers and Harland’s there was a lane three or four feet wide. When, as on warm nights was usually the case, they slept on the screened veranda, their beds lay end to end with Harland’s between hers and Danny’s; and if she were wakeful — sometimes she lay long with wide eyes, her ears attuned to the night sounds in the forest — she could hear Danny’s soft breathing almost as easily as she heard Harland’s.

  She saw that not only physically but spiritually the bond between him and Danny was maddeningly strong. If at night Danny sat up in bed, or in his sleep touched the partition between their two rooms with his elbow, or even if he slept restlessly, Harland was apt to rouse and call in a low tone:

  ‘All right, Danny, old top?’

  And Danny would answer sleepily: ‘Sure, Dick, I’m fine.’

  But she herself could leave her bed, move about the room, go into the living room, and she might even go out of doors, without waking Harland at all. There were nights when she slept as lightly as a cat, waiting for the hateful moment when Danny would stir and Harland would call to him in’instant and tender solicitude; and when this happened, she lay biting her lip in the darkness. More than once, when Danny and Harland had exchanged a low-spoken, reassuring word and were asleep again, she deliberately got up from her bed and walked to and fro and made small unnecessary noises just to see whether Harland would wake and call to her; and the fact that he did not left her to lie in a storm of shaking rage till dawn.

  The rare hours when she and Harland could be alone together, to recapture those tempestuously beautiful moments which once had been so freely theirs, had a clandestine character which she hated; and yet she planned for them hungrily, for when Danny was about, Harland was always restrained. If she came to kiss him, he was likely to say in amused warning: ‘Careful! Danny can see us!’

  ‘But darling, after all, we’re married!’

  ‘I know, but you’ll embarrass him!’ He was only half-serious, laughing at her protests; but as time passed there began to lie under her jealous longing a desperate alarm. Danny was an incubus of which she might never be free!

  Defensively, she wooed the boy as one woos a rival, spending long hours with him, winning him completely. They conspired together to surprise Harland, as for instance when Danny swam across the pond; and after that day they began secretly to plan that he would presently try the longer swim, from one end to the other. He was eager to do it, and she encouraged him; but they would not tell Harland, Danny insisted, till the great deed was done. She never confessed that Harland had forbidden their trying such another adventure alone.

  They intended to stay at Back of the Moon till September; and as August drew near its end, Ellen began to believe she could endure the short time that remained. Then — on the heels of a series of sullen hot days which had frayed her temper thin — Danny proposed to Harland that they go to fish the trout hole before an approaching thunderstorm, and Harland — despite her protests — agreed. The idea that these two must never be alone together, implanted by her mother’s word at Sea Island last winter, had assumed an extravagant importance in her eyes, and she wished to go with them now; but some stubborn despair restrained her. She was weary with the long struggle, and she let them go.

  When they were gone she lay dry-eyed on her bed alone and faced what seemed to her the truth. This was the beginning of the end. Danny today had won a little of Harland away from her. He would win more and more. She recognized the fact that she must, as long as Danny lived, share Harland with the boy.

  As long as Danny lived! As long as Danny lived! The phrase repeated itself over and over in her mind, as a cracked record repeats itself on the phonograph.

>   – II –

  From that hour, like a figure lurking in the shadows, too dimly seen to be recognized, the thought of Danny’s death — or of her own — was in Ellen’s mind. There was in her, from some forgotten ancestor, the emotional intensity of the Slav, which knows no halfway ground between keen exuberance and abject hopelessness; and despair overwhelmed her now. Her passion for her father had transferred itself to Harland, but Harland did not readily submit to it. She felt in him always something that was held back from her, some inner self which she could neither touch nor move; and there had been hours when, even in his arms, conscious that he was not so completely surrendered to her as she was to him, she had hated him and sought to beat and buffet him — and she hated him the more because he laughed in tender delight at her violence.

  Now, like sand from a clenched fist, he was slipping through her fingers. She had lost a little of him, never to be recaptured as long as Danny lived. But — Danny might die; and surely, if Danny were gone, Harland would forget him and be wholly hers. When — on pretext of stuffing the dead hummingbird — she asked Leick to bring her father’s field kit from Bar Harbor, it was not with any fixed design. But — there was a bottle of arsenic in the kit, and arsenic was death.

  Leick that day departed soon after breakfast. The morning was breathlessly quiet. The oppressive heat which had persisted for days still lay in a smothering blanket across the land; and even Danny, usually completely good-natured, confessed:

  ‘I’ve had about enough of this, haven’t you, Ellen? If it keeps on we’ll begin to snarl at each other.’ She made no reply, and he said: ‘I’m going to stay in the water as much as I can today.’ And then in sudden inspiration: ‘Listen, Ellen, why don’t I swim the lake the long way?’ His tones lifted. ‘We’ll never get a better chance. There’s no wind, and the water’s warm as milk, and I can do it! I swam over an hour yesterday in the cove, without getting tired at all.’

  ‘It’s all right for you. You’ll be in the water,’ she reminded him. ‘But for me it means sitting in the boat in the hot sun for hours.’

  ‘You can swim along with me some of the time, and push the boat,’ he argued. ‘That will keep you cool. Come on, Ellen, let’s, and surprise Dick. It will tickle him so.’

  She felt a stirring of anticipation in her, a sense of something imminent, terrible and yet welcome. ‘You’ll be in the water a long time,’ she said doubtfully. ‘You may get chilled.’

  He laughed. ‘Say, if there ever was a day when it would be fun to get a chill it’s today!’

  She agreed at last, but she took dutiful precautions against mishap to him. When they went down to the boathouse, he in scant trunks and she in her bathing suit with a light robe to protect her from the searing sun, she carried blankets and a jar of vaseline, the blankets in case he had to be taken into the boat before the swim was finished, the vaseline to grease his body thoroughly before he entered the water. They planned that he should start at the farther end of the lake, in that cove where there was a sandy beach, and finish his course here at the boathouse. Danny hoped he might reach the cove about the time Harland was done with his morning’s work.

  ‘Just the right time to surprise him,’ he exulted, and he anticipated what Harland would say, and planned his proud reply.

  They embarked in silence, taking the skiff, Ellen at the oars. When the boathouse was out of sight she said rebelliously: ‘This is the clumsiest boat to row.’

  He laughed and began to sing that song about the Walloping Window Blind; and — secure now from Harland’s observation — he made ready for his undertaking. He unbuckled the braces which supported his shrunken legs and took them off. He sat in the stern facing Ellen, and she tried not to look at his thin and knobby limbs, hating with a strong and almost nauseating violence his malformation. She rowed steadily, and Danny began to rub vaseline on his legs and arms, his shoulders — broad and brawny as those of a boy years older than he, the muscles well developed as though to compensate for the weakness of his legs — and his chest and stomach and sides. Watching him, she admitted grudgingly that he had a beautiful head, with a noble brow crowned by soft light curls, and wide intelligent eyes, and a flexible and tender mouth. His head seemed too large for his body, yet seeing only his countenance, one forgot his physical imperfections. His very beauty made his shrunken legs the more repellent to her eyes.

  ‘I’ll do your back before you go into the water,’ she told him, and he nodded. His body glistened in the sun, and small drops of sweat forced their way through the oily film which covered his skin and trickled down his chest and his arms. She saw these tiny globules with a fastidious distaste. His greased body seemed to her hideous. She felt toward him that profound revulsion which makes the wolf pack turn upon the wounded member.

  Danny talked steadily, wishing they had brought a watch so they might know exactly how long it took him to swim the full distance. They had as always breakfasted early, for they habitually rose with or before the sun, and Danny guessed it was even now no more than half-past nine. ‘Dick nearly always works till noon or later,’ he reminded her. ‘I think I can surely get in sight of the cove, at least, before he leaves the boathouse. Don’t you?’ She answered inattentively, smiling as though amused at his eagerness, while she was thinking: He’ll take Richard from me! Richard will never cease to love him. I can’t fight him. I shall never have all of Richard, never as long as Danny lives!

  When they came to the far beach, the boy, babbling happily, turned and swung his limp and ropelike legs over the skiff’s stern, presenting his back to her to be anointed. She spread the vaseline evenly and thickly. ‘There!’ she said at last. They were in shallow water, and he slipped overside, supporting himself by holding to the stern of the skiff while he turned to face the open lake, beginning at once to swim.

  As he moved slowly away from the shore, she kept abreast of him. Danny set as his immediate goal the tip of the point which extended out into the lake. When he reached that spot he would have covered half the distance. She saw that he guided himself by watching landmarks on the shore they had left, and after a time she said quietly: ‘Don’t worry about your direction. I’ll keep you on your course.’ She was pushing the oars, sending the skiff stern first through the water. The sun was hot, and toward the point ahead the air shimmered and rose in waves, and refraction produced a blurring of the shoreline, making it seem like a low bluff, like a dark wall.

  Ellen marked their progress by a rock on the shore, a blasted tree, the eagle’s nest. She wished she had worn a hat, or dark glasses, for the glare upon the water blinded her and made her head ache throbbingly. When she looked toward Danny, his legs, seen through the clear water, were distorted in a way which exaggerated their fragility, making them seem to be soft, boneless things which wavered limply behind him; and she shivered with repugnance at the sight.

  He swam steadily, with a long, easy side stroke, floating low in the water, timing his breathing well; but she began to feel trapped, constricted, bound; and, eager to escape, wishing he would hurry, she said once: ‘You’re not making very fast progress, Danny. You’re not halfway to the point.’

  He looked ahead. ‘I’ll have to speed up a little,’ he agreed.

  ‘If you’re too long in the water you’ll get cold, maybe take a cramp.’ Her thought found words.

  He laughed confidently. ‘Today? Not a chance! The water’s soupy!’

  The minutes drifted tediously by. To her eye it seemed they scarce moved at all; but the shores on either side began to withdraw. She watched the point still far ahead, impatient for him to arrive within easy reach of land again. Danger hung in the sullen air, danger lay like an oily film across the mirror of the water, danger tinted with a brassy hue the arched and silent sky; and she felt the oppression of fear. But it was for herself, not for Danny, that she was afraid.

  They reached the widest part of the lake, the point which was Danny’s immediate goal no more than a quarter-mile ahead. He had been swimm
ing on his left side, but now he changed sides; and she watched the back of his head and the movements of his arm and shoulder and his fluttering, trailing legs. In a sharpened attention she saw that he swam more slowly now; and after a moment he turned again to face her, said apologetically:

  ‘I was getting a little tired, so I shifted, to rest up.’

  ‘Float for a while,’ she suggested. A pulse beat in her throat.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right.’ His mouth twitched as though with plain. I had a kink in my side,’ he admitted. ‘But it’s gone.’

  He began to swim again, and she watched him alertly. An expert swimmer herself, she knew that he should give up, should come into the boat; and she thought: Suppose I were not here. Suppose he were swimming alone, and caught a cramp which left him helpless. How deep, she wondered, was the water where they were? How deep down would he sink, slowly, slowly, whitely, in the dark depths?

  ‘I think I’m getting tired,’ he confessed, pausing, treading water, turning on his back to float, looking to her for advice.

  If she told him to abandon this attempt, he would do so; but she did not. ‘Rest,’ she advised. ‘You don’t want to give up when you’ve come so far. There’s no hurry. We’ve all day.’

  He nodded obediently, but when he began to swim again, there was a roughness in his stroke which testified to his fatigue. She should take him into the boat, wrap him in blankets, hurry him back to camp.

  But — if he wanted to stop, let him say so! Let his be the decision!

  ‘I’ll get my second wind in a minute,’ he promised, a little breathlessly; but in the effort of speaking he swallowed a mouthful of water and choked and coughed and grinned. ‘Better keep my mouth shut,’ he said, and swam on. The point drew slowly nearer.