‘Well, that did you a lot of good! What are you going to do now?’
Nothing, keep going. Sleep with Mona, of course, without that making any real difference.
Saturday morning, or Friday evening, Isabel or I, or both of us, would go and pick up the girls in Litchfield. We would present, in the car, the image of a united family.
Except that I no longer believed in the family. I no longer believed in anything. Not in myself, not in other people. Basically, I no longer believed in mankind and I was beginning to understand why Ray’s father had shot himself in the head.
Who knows if that might not happen to me some day? It was a comfort to have a revolver in the night-table drawer.
On the day when I will have had enough of struggling in the void, one squeeze of the trigger – and it’s over.
Isabel would manage quite well with the girls, and they would receive a handsome insurance payout.
No one could read those thoughts on my face. You get so used to people that you keep seeing them the way you saw them for the first time.
Did I, for example, notice that Isabel was past forty and that her hair was starting to turn grey? I had to make an effort to convince myself that we had both passed the midpoint in life and would swiftly become old folks.
Wasn’t I already an old man to my daughters? Would they ever have imagined that I wanted to make love to a woman like Mona? I bet they told themselves that we no longer made love, their mother and I, and that that’s why they don’t have a whole bunch of brothers and sisters.
I went home and found Isabel busy cooking. She was looking down, and I touched her cheek with my lips, as usual, then went to change my jacket for an old one I wear at home, of soft tweed with leather elbow patches.
I opened the liquor cabinet and yelled, ‘Do you want one?’
She knew what that meant.
‘No, thanks . . . Or, just a weak one . . .’
I made a weak Scotch for her and poured one a lot stronger for myself.
She joined me in the living room. She was wearing the flowered housedress she had adopted for domestic chores.
‘I haven’t changed, yet.’
I held out her glass.
‘Here’s to you . . .’
‘And here’s to you, Donald . . .’
I thought I heard a special solemnity in her voice, a kind of message.
I preferred not to look at her eyes, for fear of seeing something different there. I went to sit in my armchair in the library, and she went back to work.
What had she thought when she found the cigarette butts? When she had gone out to the barn, didn’t she know that she would find them, or at least some trace of me?
What had made her suspect that when I’d left the house to look for Ray I’d had no intention of battling against the blizzard?
She hadn’t seen me change course, the night had been too dark. She would not have been able to hear me shouting because of the wind.
At the moment when I stepped outside, even I was uncertain . . . I had only veered off after taking a few steps.
Did she know that I had been a coward? Because that’s what it was, at the beginning. An insuperable physical cowardice. I had been at the end of my strength and needed to escape that ordeal at any cost.
Could she have guessed that? Only on the bench did I understand that I was glad that Ray had disappeared and would probably die, unless he found his way again through some miracle.
Had she also understood? And if so, what were her feelings towards me? Contempt? Pity? I’d seen nothing like that in her eyes. Nothing but curiosity.
Another, wilder idea occurred to me. Isabel had read Olsen’s mind, which explained some of her questions, but Olsen didn’t really know me and thought like a policeman.
The lieutenant had looked at us in turn, Mona and me, asking himself if there were any ties between us. Of that I’m certain. I would bet that he made discreet inquiries. Well, during the Ashbridges’ party it so happened that I was never near Mona.
Does Isabel imagine that Mona and I meet secretly?
I go to New York about once a week and spend the day there. Sometimes I spend the night. Ray was often off travelling, because his agency has offices in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
When she saw me come back to the house alone, did my wife think, even for an instant, that I had taken advantage of that nightmarish storm to get rid of Ray?
Now that I think back coolly, it doesn’t seem impossible. I truly believe that if she were to learn that I had killed a man, she would not show any more reaction but would go on living with me and looking at me as she does: with curiosity, hoping to understand.
We ate alone together in the dining room with the two silver candelabras on the table as usual, each with its two red candles. It’s a tradition with her. Her father, the surgeon, was somewhat fond of display.
In my home, above the printing press and the offices of the Citizen, we lived much more simply.
Speaking of which, my father had not called me to ask for details about Ray’s accident, even though he still published the weekly paper in Torrington, one of the oldest newspapers in New England, having lasted over a hundred years.
He’d lived alone since the death of my mother. He had returned to his bachelor habits and when not eating at the restaurant across the street, where he had his table, he liked to fix his own meals. The woman who cleaned the offices every morning would go upstairs to tidy things there and make his bed.
We lived only around thirty miles from each other, yet I hardly went to see him more than once every two or three months. I would enter his glass-walled office, where he worked in his shirt-sleeves. He would look up from his papers, appearing surprised to see me.
‘Hello, Son . . .’
‘Hello, Father . . .’
He would continue writing, or correcting proofs, or telephoning. I would sit in the only available armchair, which had been in the same place when I was a child.
‘Are you content?’
‘Everything’s fine, yes . . .’
‘Isabel?’
He had a soft spot for her, even though she intimidated him a little. Several times, he had joked to me:
‘You didn’t deserve a woman like her . . .’
To which he invariably added, dutifully:
‘No more than I deserved your mother . . .’
She had died three years earlier.
‘Your girls?’
He was never really sure about their ages and thought of them as much younger than they were.
He was seventy-nine. He was tall and thin, stooped. He’d been stooped, skinny, with a true gleam of malice in his little grey eyes for as long as I’d known him.
‘The office?’
‘I’m not complaining . . .’
He looked out of the window.
‘Say! You’ve got a new car . . .’
He’d kept his for more than ten years. True, he hardly used it. He edited the Citizen practically by himself, and his rare collaborators were volunteers.
A woman in her sixties, Mrs Fuchs, whom I had known for ever as well, took care of soliciting advertising.
My father printed business cards, announcements, prospectuses, catalogues for the local stores. He had never sought to expand his business, which was, on the contrary, slowly shrinking.
‘What are you thinking about?’
I looked up, as if caught out. Force of habit!
‘My father . . . It occurred to me that he hasn’t called us . . .’
Isabel no longer had her father or mother, only two brothers, both living in Boston, and one married sister in California.
‘I’ll have to go and see him one of these mornings.’
‘You haven’t been there in over a month . . .’
I resolved to go to Torrington. It would interest me to see my father and our house again, with my new eyes.
Back in the library, I hesitated between my paper and the television. I finally opened the paper and f
ifteen minutes later, while I listened to the hum of the dishwasher, Isabel joined me.
‘Don’t you think you should call Mona?’
Was it a trap? She seemed sincere, as always. Would she have been capable of insincerity?
‘Why?’
‘You were her husband’s best friend. She probably doesn’t have any real friends in New York, and Bob Sanders flew home without bothering to stay a single day more . . .’
‘Bob is like that.’
‘She must feel lonely in that big apartment. Will she be able to keep such a big place?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did Ray have money?’
‘He earned lots of it . . .’
‘He also spent lots of it, didn’t he?’
‘I suppose . . . His share of Miller and Miller must represent a tidy sum.’
‘When do you plan to go and see her?’
It was not an interrogation. She was speaking unaffectedly, as a woman would to her husband.
‘Give her a call. Believe me, it will do her good . . .’
I knew Ray’s number by heart because I used to see him now and then when I was in the city. I dialled the number and listened to the phone ring a rather long time.
‘I don’t think there’s anyone home.’
‘Unless she’s gone to bed . . .’
At the same instant, I heard Mona’s voice.
‘Hello . . . Who’s calling?’
‘Donald.’
‘It’s kind of you to call me, Donald. If you knew how lost I feel here . . .’
‘That’s why I phoned. It was Isabel’s idea.’
‘Be sure to thank her for me.’
I thought I heard a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
‘If you weren’t so far away, I’d ask you to come and spend the evening with me . . . Good old Janet does what she can . . . I wander around from room to room without knowing where to go . . . Has that ever happened to you?’
‘No.’
‘You’re lucky . . . This morning was awful. The procession that took for ever, then those people, at the cemetery . . . If you hadn’t been there . . .’
So, she had noticed that he had taken her arm.
‘I could have just collapsed in a heap, from weariness . . . And that big pompous Bob who greeted me so ceremoniously before dashing off to the airport . . .’
‘I know.’
‘Did the Millers speak to you?’
‘They asked me if I would be handling your affairs.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘That I would help you insofar as I could . . . You should understand, Mona, that I don’t want to impose myself. I’m only a small-town lawyer . . .’
‘Ray considered you a first-rate attorney.’
‘There are a lot more clever ones than I in New York . . .’
‘I’d like it to be you . . . Unless Isabel . . .’
‘No. She would not see any problem, on the contrary.’
‘Are you free Monday?’
‘What time?’
‘Whenever you want. You’ll have two hours of driving . . . Would eleven o’clock be all right?’
‘I’ll be there . . .’
‘Now I’m going to do what I already wanted to do at five o’clock this afternoon: swallow two sleeping pills and go to bed. If only I could sleep for two days . . .’
‘Goodnight, Mona.’
‘Goodnight, Donald. Until Monday . . . Thank Isabel again for me.’
‘I will, right away.’
I hung up.
‘Mona says thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘First off, for everything you did for her. Then, for letting me handle the estate.’
‘Why ever would I oppose that? Have I ever objected to you handling some business matter?’
It was true. I had to laugh. That wasn’t like her. She never allowed herself to express an opinion. At most, from time to time, in certain cases, a look of approval or, on the contrary, a slightly vague look, which in itself constituted sufficient warning.
‘You’re going to New York on Monday?’
‘Yes.’
‘By car?’
‘That will depend on the weather. If they forecast more snow, I’ll take the earliest train . . .’
There. It was simple. We were chatting like a normal couple, quietly, with ordinary words. Anyone looking on and listening would have taken ours for a model marriage.
Well, Isabel considered me a coward or a murderer, take your pick. And I – I had decided that on Monday, I would cheat on her with Mona.
The house was purring along as usual, because it was a living thing, perhaps because it was very old and had sheltered so many human lives. The rooms, with time, had grown larger. Windows had been changed into doors. Dividing walls had been built, others torn down. Barely six yards from our bedroom, a swimming pool had been cut into the rock.
The house breathed. Now and then the furnace could be heard starting up in the basement. At times a radiator clanked; at others, the wood panelling of a room or one of the beams would creak. Until December, we’d had a cricket chirping in the fireplace.
Isabel opened her paper and wiped off her glasses, because for several years she has needed glasses to read. They made her eyes different, less sure of themselves, not as clear, as if they were frightened.
‘How is Higgins?’
‘He’s fine.’
‘Has his wife recovered from the flu?’
‘I didn’t ask him . . .’
We were gently webbing ourselves in for the rest of the evening, and I had lived like this for seventeen years.
5.
It happened, just as I had expected, and I don’t think Mona was surprised. I’m even almost sure that she was expecting it, that she was hoping for it, which doesn’t mean that she is in love with me.
Before that, Isabel and I had had the traditional weekend with our daughters.
The two of us had gone to get them in Litchfield, without dodging the fifteen-minute conversation with Miss Jenkins, who has small, glittering black eyes and who sputters when she talks.
‘If only all our pupils could be like your Mildred . . .’
To be honest, I detest schools and especially all those occasions when parents are reunited with their children. First of all, you see yourself again at every age, which already creates a certain uneasiness. Then you remember, in spite of yourself, the first pregnancy, the infant’s first cry, the first baby clothes and finally the day when you take the child to nursery school and leave by yourself.
The years are marked, like stages, with the distribution of prizes, with vacations; traditions are created, which you imagine are immutable. Another child is born, who goes through the same rites, has the same teachers.
You find yourself with a daughter of fifteen, another of twelve, and you’ve become a man on the decline.
As in that song about Little Jimmy Brown: the bells of birth, the bells of marriage, the bells of burial. Then it starts again with others.
Mildred had hardly got into the car before asking:
‘Can I spend the night at Sonia’s, Mommy?’
It’s always their mother they ask for permission, as if I didn’t count. Sonia is the daughter of Charles Brawton, a neighbour who is vaguely our friend.
‘Did she invite you?’
‘Yes. There’s a little party, tomorrow evening, and she insisted that I should sleep over . . .’
Mildred has a face so delicious looking that you’d like to eat it right up. Her complexion is fair like her mother’s, but sprinkled with freckles on her nose and under her eyes. She’s in despair over them, when they are what give her such charm. Her features are still rather childlike, and her body as well, which resembles a doll’s.
‘What do you think, Donald?’
I must admit that Isabel never fails to ask my advice. But if I had the misfortune to refuse, I’d set the children against me, so I’ve always sai
d yes.
‘Then what about me!’ exclaimed Cecilia. ‘I’m going to be left alone in the house?’
Because being there with us, that’s being alone! Everyone praises the family, togetherness among parents and children. Cecilia is twelve and is already talking about solitude.
It’s true. I was like that at her age. I remember dreary, interminable Sundays with my parents, especially when it rained.
‘We’ll invite one of your friends over . . .’
So, we parents call one another up. We arrange exchanges.
‘Could Mabel come and spend the weekend at our house?’
Sunday morning at eleven, the four of us gathered together again to attend church. There as well, you can see people growing older from year to year.
‘Is it true that your friend Ray died in our garden?’
‘It’s true, dear.’
‘Will you show me the place?’
We did not show it to her. With children, we act as if death did not exist, as if only other people, strangers, those outside the family or the small circle of friends, pass away from life into death.
No matter. All that isn’t important. What’s odder is that Cecilia suddenly said, while we were having Sunday breakfast, ‘Are you sad, Mommy?’
‘Not at all . . .’
‘Is it because of what happened to Ray?’
‘No, dear . . . I’m the same as always.’
Both girls look more like their mother than like me, but Cecilia has something different about her. Her hair is almost brown, her eyes are hazel, and, when she was still quite little, she was already saying things that surprised us.
She must think a lot, have an inner life we don’t suspect.
‘Are you both taking us back?’
‘Ask your father . . .’
I said yes. We drove them back Sunday night. We had hardly seen them, in the end.
I watched television. I’d be hard put to say what Isabel did. She is always busy.
Our cleaning lady came back to work. Her name is Dawling. Her husband is the local drunk, the true, complete drunk, who gets into fights every Saturday night in bars and is found sleeping on a sidewalk or next to a road.
He has tried every kind of job and been fired from every one of them. For a short time, he has been raising pigs in a hut he built from old planks at the bottom of his property. The municipality is trying to stop him, because everyone complains about it.
The Hand Page 8
