There had been a time—an all-too-recent time—when I would have accepted this new twist as a godsend. I’d made my noble gesture and it hadn’t worked. Now even the police were advising me to scuttle back, chastened but unhurt, to my safe little niche. Yes, there’d been a time all right when I’d have jumped at it. But I didn’t want it now.
And it wasn’t for Angelica, except insofar as she was an innocent person in a jam where she didn’t belong. I’d escaped completely from Angelica. It was for myself. (Dimly I remembered that Angelica had said something very like that and I’d mocked her for it. But I put it out of my mind.) If you didn’t learn anything from life, you might as well be dead. And, in the last few agonizing days, it seemed, I had learned a few things at least. I knew now that I didn’t want to be a vice-president just because C. J. had chosen to award me a prize for the biggest lie of the year. I didn’t want to accept Betsy’s love on the falsest of false pretenses. I didn’t want a home for Rickie that stank the way this one was beginning to stink. I didn’t want to be a Dave Manners any more; I didn’t want to be an Ellen Hodgkins; I didn’t want to be a Paul Fowler.
Now that I’d been forced to take a good look at myself, I knew that the only way to be bearable to myself was to go smashing on, whatever happened, yelling out the truth until in the end, if only from exhaustion, they would have to believe me. And I saw, too, exactly what I had to do. First I had to give up everything to which I was no longer entitled and which, in any case, I no longer wanted. I’d go to C. J.; I’d let him know that I’d lied to him and was going publicly to disavow the lie; then I’d resign. After that, I’d tell Betsy everything, too. If she left me, she left me. But now that I was looking directly instead of obliquely, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t leave me. If she was what I thought she was, she’d take it and she’d understated that only by saving Angelica, at whatever cost, could I regain my validity as a husband. And, once I’d done that, we could come together on a level of honesty. I’d get a job far away from the corrupting benevolence of C. J. We could start a life that was a life.
If I was merely strutting, I wasn’t conscious of it. I didn’t in any way feel a Colorful Figure of Drama. I only felt stubborn and at peace—the way I had felt at Centre Street.
I looked at my watch. It was only three-thirty. C. J. would still be at the office. When something had to be done, there was nothing like doing it quickly. I went to Callingham Publications, Inc.
I was with C. J. an hour. He knew it all anyway. Ellen had called him. I might have realized she would jump to the phone the moment I left the house, to prove once and for all that she was the humblest, perhaps, but the most loyal of all the retainers.
It is strange how, when you finally turn head-on to face something that you have dreaded, most of its horror evaporates. C. J. was far angrier, far more righteously indignant, far more vindictive than I ever dreamed he could be. He raged, he yelled, he made every kind of threat. It would be my word against his and Daphne’s. Did I imagine that the Police Commissioner, his oldest and dearest friend, would give the slightest credence to anything I tried to say? What was I anyway but a third-rate little upstart whom he, out of the goodness of his heart, had raised out of the gutter? By God, if I imagined I’d ever find a job anywhere else, I was out of my mind. He’d hound me; he’d—he’d get me committed. That’s what he’d do. If I dared to breath a word of this to the papers, he knew psychiatrists… And, as for Betsy’s income, if I thought I was going to live off that, I’d soon find out that his lawyers would break her mother’s will. Finally, when all these increasingly extravagant threats didn’t work, he swung completely around to a honeyed, wheedling, Father-to-Son-in-Law characterization. How could I do this to poor little Daphne?
“Listen, Bill, you’re a sensible man and I’m a sensible man. If you don’t think we’re paying you enough around here, I can run to a raise, a considerable raise. Let me call that Lieutenant and tell him you had a kind of brainstorm and that, because you’d been married at one time to the woman…”
It was all embarrassing, of course, and rather funny. But to me, with my new-found sense of direction, that was all it was. It was as if I were listening to someone from a totally different culture—like a cannibal chief or a Malayan head-hunter.
He was screaming again when I left the office. As I passed his secretary’s desk, she looked at me in stricken apprehension—with the Callingham Publications, Inc. expression which I had known so well and which I hoped and prayed I would never see again.
“Mr. Harding. For pity’s sake, what have you been saying to him?”
“Just—good-by,” I said.
Good-by! The word seemed wonderful to me. As I drove home, I savored its bouquet. I wasn’t Vice-President in Charge of Advertising any longer. I wasn’t anything but a man on my own again. And I felt ten years younger. Everything was miraculously changing. Now, after C. J., even the prospect of confessing to Betsy was no longer painful. It was, incredibly, pleasant. At last the invisible barrier between us would be smashed. That night we would be husband and wife again for the first time in weeks.
As I let myself into the apartment, Ellen and Rickie were in the hall. Ellen must just have brought him back from his afternoon walk. When she saw me, she flushed a deep crimson and started pulling Rickie down the passage toward the nursery. But he yelled out, “Hi, Pop,” and, breaking free of her grip, ran to me, jumping up at me enthusiastically. I picked him up in my arms. Ellen paused, glanced at me and then scurried on to the nursery. Rickie put his arms around my neck.
“There’s such a jerk in my school. His name is Basil. Isn’t that a jerky name?”
As I held him and looked at his solemn face, I thought, with elation: Soon, thank God, there won’t be any more Ellens or fancy apartments with fancy nurseries; there’ll just be me and my wife and my son. An image came of Ellen in her white, vestal nightgown with the plump pigtail flopping over her shoulder, as she had glared, right there, at Angelica and me on the couch. Something woke Master Rickie. Her words came back to me and, impulsively, I said to Rickie, “Do you remember that woman I brought to see you one night when you were in bed?”
“You mean the night when I had my tooth pulled and I was awake at two o’clock?”
“Yes. That night. Do you remember her?”
“Oh, her.” Rickie was twisting a bunch of my hair into a knot with immense concentration. “Of course I remember her. She was my other mother, wasn’t she? The one I used to have before we lived here.”
It happened just like that—almost as if Fate were helping me now that I had started to help myself. It seemed almost unbelievable that Rickie had recognized Angelica when he hadn’t seen her for almost three years. But it had happened. He did remember her. And not only that; he remembered the time he had seen her from the cuckoo clock striking two, and the actual day—the day when he’d been to the dentist which would be unanswerably established in the dentist’s appointment book. The day… the hour…
There was a witness. I was holding him in my arms. I had the laugh on Trant after all.
I felt excitement flowing through me. A key sounded in the door behind me. I turned, still holding Rickie.
Betsy came in. Her face lit up with its quick, appealing smile.
“Hi,” she said. “The whole family to greet me.”
chapter 19
Now! I thought. I’ll tell her now.
Rickie clambered down out of my arms and ran to Betsy who bent and kissed him in that quick, almost desperate way she had with him as if, at any minute, someone might snatch him away from her.
“Bill, darling, be an angel and fix me a drink. I’ve had what used to be called a terrible day at the office. I’m going to change. I’ll be out in a minute.”
She went down the corridor, holding Rickie’s hand, while he chattered on about the jerk called Basil. I went into the living room and made Martinis. As I waited for Betsy, I felt tense and nervous—but it was an almost pleasurable nervousness, t
he way an actor must feel just before a first-night curtain, a nervousness tempered by the knowledge that nothing could be gained by running away and that everything could be won by going ahead.
Betsy came in smiling. She’d changed, into a green dress. She looked fresh and young.
“Ah!” she said. “Where’s that Martini?”
She came to me and, as I handed her the cocktail, she kissed me.
“Darling, you don’t know what’s the matter with Ellen, do you? When I went into the nursery, she scurried out like a herd of stampeded zebras. Do you suppose something’s gone wrong with little Gladys?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not that.”
She sat down on the couch, looking up at me and sipping the cocktail. “So you do know?”
“Yes. I know.”
A thought, which hadn’t occurred to me in the egotism of my Great Moral Transformation, came to plague me. C. J. would never subscribe to the Fund again. He might even, in his vindictiveness, try to wreck it. That would be an enormous blow to Betsy—a second enormous blow. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the full realization of what I had to tell her, and shame for what I had done soured the satisfaction that my efforts to redeem myself had brought.
She was watching me with a little puzzled frown between her eyes. “Bill, is something the matter?”
“Do you remember saying once that you didn’t want me to protect you from unpleasant things?”
“Of course I remember. Bill, what is it? Is it—is it something to do with Angelica?”
The fact that Angelica was the first disaster that sprang to her mind showed me how right I had been, how deeply ingrained her insecurity about Angelica was. I felt guilt again and fury against myself and love and pity for Betsy hopelessly mingled together.
I said, “Yes, it’s about Angelica.”
“You mean, they’re bringing her to trial?”
“Yes. But it isn’t that. Betsy, before I tell you, I’ve got to make one thing plain. I know what you’re thinking. So I’m going to say it. I don’t have any feeling for Angelica at all. Whatever I did, however it comes out when I tell you, you’ve got to believe that. It’s you I love.”
She put the drink down on the coffee table and got up, her face very white and set.
I said, “You believe that, don’t you?”
“Tell me, Bill. Tell me. What is it?”
“All afternoon I’ve been with C. J. I’ve resigned.”
“Resigned? But—but what has that to do with Angelica?”
“I resigned because I had to tell C. J. I couldn’t stand by Daphne’s phony alibi any more. You see, Angelica’s been indicted; they’d almost certainly convict her because she doesn’t have an alibi. But she does have an alibi. At two o’clock, the time Jaimie was killed, she was here in this apartment with me. This morning I went to Centre Street and told Trant everything.”
It was terrible to see her face, not because she was collapsing but because she was making such an immense effort to keep control.
In a voice dry as dust, she said, “But you never saw her; you never even knew she was in New York. She made Jaimie promise, you said…”
I went to her and put my hands on her arms which were resting straight and stiff at her sides. “I didn’t tell you. I wanted to. I meant to. Then I kept putting it off and off… and, baby, if I tell you the truth, you’ll know it’s the truth, won’t you? And when I swear to you that she doesn’t mean one hoot in hell to me…”
“Please.” She drew herself away from my hands. “Please… just tell me. That’s all. Just tell me.”
I told her everything that had happened from my first meeting with Angelica in the bar to the climactic night when she had come to the apartment. I left nothing out. Because now I could understand it and see it in its proper perspective, I could even admit to her how I’d felt about Angelica, the false excitement, the flare-up from the past, even the final, humiliating sexuality which had been aborted by Ellen. It was the time, I knew, to get it all out. This was the real crisis of our marriage. It mustn’t be blurred.
While I was talking, she never sat down. She just stood there, motionless, in front of the couch, watching me. I was pulled between relief and suspense—the relief of stripping away all the flyblown wallpaper of lies and agonizing suspense at how she was going to take it. I couldn’t tell from her face. It was like stone, indomitable, Spartan—the face of the unwanted Callingham child who had learned from the cradle that everything in life was hostile anyway and had to be endured. Her face made me cruelly conscious of the fact that I, who should have been the exception, had joined with the hostile world against her. I hated myself then even more than I had hated myself in the days of actual deception.
“I was going to tell you,” I said. “After the Ellen episode, I was so disgusted with myself I swore I was going to let you know everything the moment you got back from Philadelphia. Then the murder came and C. J.’s call and, before I knew it, I was trapped into the alibi for Daphne. Baby, can you see? Through all the unattractiveness, the stupidity, can you…?”
Her face had relaxed. Suddenly, as incredulous gratitude rushed through me, she smiled.
“You poor thing!” she said.
“I’m not a poor thing. I’m a jerk and a heel.”
I wanted to go to her and take her in my arms. But I felt too ashamed and dimly, in my happiness, I realized that the melodramatic clichés had validity after all. I couldn’t cross to her because “I didn’t feel worthy of her.”
Her smile had gone. She was watching me solemnly. “How did Father take it?”
“He made every kind of threat.”
“But you resigned. You didn’t let him fire you.”
“Sure I resigned.”
“I’m glad about that part, anyway. You never really belonged there with all those people eating out of Father’s hand. I hated it for you and I always felt it was my fault you were there.”
I said: “C. J. won’t subscribe to the Fund any more.”
“Do you think I care about that when he’s always made me come crawling for every cent? I don’t need Father. Neither of us needs Father.”
She did need her father, of course. All her life she had tried doggedly to win his approbation. But she was ready to reject him for me; I looked at her with a kind of awe, thinking: Does anyone have a wife like this? I said, “And you understand about Angelica?”
Her Martini was standing on the table by her side. She picked it up, took a sip and put the glass down. “Yes. I understand. When any woman’s as beautiful as that…”
Her voice faltered. I read the danger signals, crossed to her quickly and put my arms around her.
“It isn’t that. It’s nothing to do with how she looks. It was just a hangover from the past. I was sorry for her living there in all that squalor and then…”
“Bill,” she said. “Please don’t go on about it.”
Her eyes flashed to mine and then dropped away. I drew her closer and kissed her. For a moment she was stiff in my arms; then she relaxed against me. It was all right again, and my gratitude and happiness were complete.
Gradually she edged away from me. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. When they arrested Angelica, didn’t she tell them all this?”
“No. She didn’t want to cause any trouble for me.”
“Didn’t want to cause trouble for you? But—but they’ve let her go now.”
“Not yet. When I told Trant this morning, he didn’t believe me.”
“Didn’t believe you?”
“I know it sounds crazy. But Angelica had denied it all. And then, when I brought him here to Ellen, she denied it too. She was scared of C. J., of course, scared he’d renege on little Gladys. And Paul, too. I’d told him everything, you know. But when Trant challenged him, he denied it too.”
She turned to face me. “Paul denied it too?”
“You know how he is? He was trying to protect me and then he was scared of C. J. too. H
e thought if he stood by me, C. J. would hold it against him. Trant had been skeptical from the beginning. But after that you can’t really blame him. He figured I was making it all up, that I had some crazy idea of trying to save her because I was in love with her. He couldn’t act on it, he said, until I got him some proof.”
If I hadn’t been so carried away by my new sense of well-being, I might have realized what was happening. But I didn’t. I merely blundered on.
“But it’s going to be all right. I saw that just now when you came in, when I was talking to Rickie. There is a witness, after all. I took Angelica in to see Rickie that night. It was the day he’d been to the dentist and, when we were with him, the cuckoo clock struck two. He remembers all that and he remembers Angelica too. He called her his other mother, the one he used to have before he lived…”
“Bill!” The word exploded from her. I looked at her, suddenly shocked out of my euphoria. Her face was almost without color and her lips were a thin, hard line. “You’re not going to drag Rickie into this?”
“But, baby…”
“Are you out of your mind? A little child. Six years old. Dragging him to the police with some impossible, rehearsed tale. Frightening him to death, warping him…”
“But, Betsy, it’s the only way to save Angelica.”
“Save Angelica. That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? Rickie doesn’t matter. You don’t care what it does to Rickie, that for the rest of his life he’ll remember that his mother was in jail as a murderer. If you take him there, if they still go ahead, he’ll have to appear in court. He’ll never forget it—how could he?—for as long as he lives.”
She was furiously angry. But it wasn’t that which made me cringe. It was the look in her eyes of misery and complete defeat. Why hadn’t I realized that, in Rickie, I was slashing at the very core of her being? Why had I been such a moron as to expect, since she could take almost anything, that she could take everything?
The Man with Two Wives Page 15
