The Hand

by Georges Simenon

  Wouldn’t Isabel have been capable of calling him? Of telling him, for example:

  ‘Listen, Warren . . . I’m worried. For some time now, Donald hasn’t been the same . . . His moods have changed. He seems very strange.’

  I abruptly looked Warren right in the eye. He’s an old friend. He was at the Ashbridges’ on 15 January.

  ‘You find me very strange as well, do you?’

  He was so startled that he had to catch his glasses.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just what I said. For a while now, when I go by, people have tended to turn around and whisper . . . Isabel looks at me as if she were wondering what’s happening to me, and I strongly suspect her of having sent you here.’

  ‘Donald, I assure you . . .’

  ‘Am I very strange, yes or no? . . . Do I seem like a man in full possession of his wits?’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not in the least . . . Get this: sometimes, in New York, I meet a woman friend with whom I have sexual relations . . .’

  I spoke those words with sarcastic emphasis.

  ‘Does that surprise you?’

  ‘Why would it surprise me?’

  ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘I’d heard it mentioned . . .’

  ‘You see! . . . And what else have you heard?’

  He must have been sorry he’d come, he felt so embarrassed.

  ‘I don’t really know . . . That you might make certain decisions . . .’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘To go and live in New York . . .’

  ‘To get divorced?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Did Isabel talk to you about it as well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you seen her recently?’

  ‘That depends on what you mean by recently.’

  ‘Within the past month?’

  ‘I believe so . . .’

  ‘Did she go to see you at your office?’

  ‘You’re forgetting patient confidentiality, Donald.’

  He tried to smile while saying those words as casually as possible. He was getting to his feet, but I did not set him free yet.

  ‘If she went to see you, it wasn’t because of her health. She went to talk to you about me, to tell you that she was worried, that I wasn’t myself any more.’

  ‘I don’t like the turn this conversation is taking.’

  ‘Neither do I, but I’m beginning to be fed up with being an object of curiosity . . . I did not go looking for you. You are the one who came here, under a poor pretext, to peer up my nose, take my temperature . . .

  ‘Are there some tests you’d like me to have? . . . Have you seen enough to reassure my wife? . . . Do I seem very strange to you as well, because I start telling people what’s bothering me?

  ‘You’re much more Isabel’s friend than you are mine . . . All our friends are in the same boat. Isabel is an extraordinary woman, of exemplary devotion, of boundless goodness . . .

  ‘Well, my dear Warren, one doesn’t sleep with devotion and goodness. I’ve been doing that for too long not to be fed up with it. I will go to New York or elsewhere, when I please, no matter what the honourable citizens of this county think of that . . .

  ‘As for Isabel, if she’s worried, reassure her: I have no intention of divorcing and of remaking my life elsewhere . . . I will continue to work in this office and go home obediently to the house . . .

  ‘So, do you still find me very strange?’

  He shook his head sadly.

  ‘I don’t know what’s come over you, Donald . . . Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Not yet . . . I’m going to in a moment . . .’

  I was beside myself. I don’t know why I suddenly became so furious. Especially with poor Warren, who is truly the last person with whom I could be angry. The pill-doctor, as the children call him. In his visits, he lugs along a Gladstone bag that looks like a travelling salesman’s case. All one side is kitted out with tubes and flasks and, after listening to his patient’s chest, he looks over his collection, selects a flask, takes from it (according to need) two, four, six pills, which he slips into a little envelope.

  He has pills of every colour: reds, greens, yellows and rainbow-tinted ones my daughters, when younger, naturally preferred above all others.

  ‘Here . . . You’ll take one fifteen minutes before dinner and another before bed. Tomorrow morning . . .’

  Poor Warren! I had dumbfounded him, and my anger vanished as quickly as it had come.

  ‘I apologize, Warren . . . If you were in my place, you would understand. As for my mental state, I don’t think you need to worry yet. Do you agree?’

  ‘I did not think for an instant that . . .’

  ‘Yes, well, but others have thought so for you. Reassure Isabel . . . Don’t tell her that I said to . . .’

  ‘You’re really not angry with me?’

  ‘No.’

  I wasn’t angry with him, but I was troubled, because I wondered if I hadn’t just discovered the reason why there was anxiety in my wife’s eyes.

  She had always been so sure of me, so sure of what she must have considered my equanimity, that she could not believe that I had deliberately changed.

  I kept coming back to the cigarette butts she had disposed of. Was it possible that she’d believed that I had pushed Ray?

  My trips to New York, my intimacy with Mona, paraded almost cynically after my friend’s death – did they not seem like proof to her?

  In which case, I had to be of unsound mind. That was the only way for her to explain my attitude.

  I had just spoken of drinking. Indeed, I went to have a Scotch in the bar across the way, frequented mostly by truck drivers, where I almost never go.

  ‘Another, please . . .’

  Here as well people looked at me, of course, and if Lieutenant Olsen had come in, my attitude would have given him something to think about.

  Another one who had his doubts. I was surprised that he hadn’t tried again. Was he convinced Ray’s death was due to a simple accident?

  He must have heard that I was Mona’s lover and that we could be seen in New York walking arm in arm.

  I did not have a third drink, although I wanted one. I went back across the street to the office.

  ‘Are you going to New York, this week?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because if you go, I’d ask you to do something for me there . . . What neighbourhood will you be in?’

  ‘Around Fifty-sixth Street . . .’

  ‘It’s a document to be registered at the Belgian Consulate, in Rockefeller Center . . .’

  ‘I might be going in on Thursday.’

  ‘Say, you really shook him up, that poor Warren . . . It wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t help overhearing . . .’

  ‘Do you find me strange, too?’

  ‘Strange, no, but you have changed. To the point that I wondered if you would stay here and if I ought to look for a partner . . . For me, that would be a catastrophe. Do you see me, at my age, training up some youngster? . . . Didn’t the Millers offer to bring you in with them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Now that surprises me . . .’

  I wasn’t telling the truth. No, they had not made me a direct offer. They had, however, asked me about my plans, my life in Brentwood, and I had understood where they were going.

  They, too, were mistaken about my relationship with Mona. They thought it was a great love affair and imagined that in a few weeks I would be settling in New York to live with her and get married.

  Then I would really have stepped into Ray’s shoes!

  ‘Anyway, I’m glad you’re staying . . .’

  From his office, which faces the street, he’d seen me head over to the bar, which wasn’t one of my habits.

  What does he think, this old fox who looks more like a wily horse trader than a lawyer?

  Too bad! Let them think what they want,
the whole lot of them, Isabel included, of course, Isabel first of all.

  When I got home, she welcomed me with a simpering smile, as if I were unhappy or ill.

  It’s a game that is beginning to grate on me, and I’ll have to get used to it. I ought to decide once and for all to pay no more attention to her expressions.

  She plays them like cards, deliberately. They’re her secret weapon. She knows I’m trying to understand, that it makes me uneasy, eats away at my assurance.

  She deploys an entire range of looks like precision instruments. I might reply to words, but you cannot reply to eyes.

  If I asked her, ‘Why are you looking at me that way?’ she would answer with another question: ‘In what way am I looking at you?’

  In every way. It changes with the days, the hours. Sometimes her eyes are empty, and that’s perhaps the most disconcerting look. She’s there. We are eating. I say a few words, to avoid a painful silence.

  And she looks at me with absent eyes. She watches my lips move the way one watches the lips of a fish open and close in its bowl.

  At other times, on the contrary, her pupils contract, and she stares at me as if asking an anguished question.

  What question? Did she still have any, after seventeen years of marriage?

  Her attitudes, her poses, her way of holding her head tilted to the left, the hint of a smile hovering about her lips, all that never changed, remained immutable. A statue.

  Unfortunately, that particular statue was my wife, and she had eyes.

  The most curious thing was, morning and evening, when I leaned down to brush her forehead or cheek with my lips: she did not move, not a twitch.

  ‘Good Morning, Isabel . . .’

  ‘Good morning, Donald . . .’

  I might just as well have been putting a dime into the slot of a collection box in church.

  I tried not to undress in front of her any longer. It bothered me, just as it bothered me to see her half naked.

  For her part, she kept doing it. She did it on purpose. Not immodestly, she had always been very modest. But like an acquired right.

  There were only two men in the world before whom she had the right to undress: her husband and her doctor.

  Had Warren, after our encounter, called her up? Had he reassured her? Had he told her what had happened?

  There were moments when I wanted to make a commotion, like that morning in the office. I restrained myself. I did not want to give her that satisfaction. Because she would have been satisfied.

  Not only was she intelligent, good, devoted, indulgent, what-have-you, but I would have handed her the palm of martyrdom besides!

  I really hated her. And I realized that it was not so much her fault, or mine, either. In short, she represented everything I had suffered, the stifling of my whole life, that humility I had imposed on myself.

  ‘Don’t put your fingers in your nose . . .’

  ‘You must respect old people . . .’

  ‘Go wash your hands, Donald . . .’

  ‘We don’t put our elbows on the table . . .’

  Those words, it wasn’t Isabel who said them. It was my mother. But for seventeen years, Isabel’s eyes had told me exactly the same thing.

  I knew I had only myself to blame, since I had chosen her.

  And the best part is that I had chosen her on purpose.

  To keep an eye on me? To judge me? To prevent me from committing too many stupid blunders?

  It’s possible. It’s hard for me to remember what I was thinking when I met her. I was hesitating, at the time, over joining Ray in New York. I’d also been approached about a job in Los Angeles, and I had been tempted.

  What might I have become? What would I have become, without Isabel? Would I have married a Mona?

  Would I, like Ray, have earned a lot of money while despising myself to the point of talking about suicide?

  I haven’t any idea. I prefer not to know, not to ask myself any further questions. I would have liked to draw up a well-organized, neat dossier, without any smudges.

  I haven’t come close.

  And I continue, at my age, to spy on my wife’s eyes!

  2.

  The Easter vacation was painful. The weather was splendid: every day the same still-youthful sun and a few gilded clouds in the sky. Beneath the living-room windows, the rock garden was crowded with flowers and humming with bees.

  In spite of the cool air, the girls swam in the pool, and their mother took two or three dips there. We went on a trip to Cape Cod, where we walked barefoot for a long time on the sand by an almost-unruffled sea.

  Deep inside me, I no longer felt like a husband or father. I wasn’t anything any more. An empty carcass. An automaton. Even my profession as a lawyer no longer interested me, and I saw too clearly the crookedness of my clients.

  I was no better than they were. I hadn’t made any attempt to keep Ray from dying in the snow at the foot of the cliff. The question was not to determine if my intervention would have changed his fate. Baldly put, the fact was that I had gone to sit on the red bench in the barn.

  And gradually, smoking cigarettes and sheltering from the blizzard, I had felt a physical satisfaction, a warmth in my chest, at the idea that he was dead or dying.

  That night, I had discovered that for the entire time I had known him I had never stopped envying and hating him.

  I was not the friend and neither was I the husband, the father, the citizen whose roles I had played. It was just a façade. The whited sepulchre of the scriptures.

  What was left?

  All through this vacation, which left me no escape, Isabel seized the chance to watch me more closely than ever.

  It’s as if my dismay delights her. It would never occur to her to help me. On the contrary, she manages diabolically to shove my head underwater.

  For example, I tried two or three times to strike up a conversation with Mildred. She is beginning to be of an age to tackle serious subjects. Each time, Isabel’s look immobilized me.

  It seemed to say: ‘Poor Donald . . . So, you don’t see that you won’t get anywhere, that your daughters have no connection with you?’

  That connection, they’d had it when they were little. They had turned more readily to me than to their mother.

  What image do they have of me now? I don’t count any more. When they ask my advice, they don’t wait for my answer.

  I’m the fellow who spends his days in an office to earn the necessary money, a fellow who’s growing old, whose face is beginning to look gaunt, who no longer knows how to laugh or play.

  Does Isabel realize that she’s running a risk? It’s possible. I admit that I no longer know. I’ve had just about enough of interpreting her looks and seeing her staring at me.

  With the children, she is playful, full of bright ideas. Every morning, she was the one who came up with an agreeable activity for the day. Agreeable for her and the girls, of course.

  We made several excursions, including two hikes in the mountains. I hate excursions, picnics, long walks in Indian file during which you automatically pull up wild flowers along the path.

  Isabel is radiant. At least when she’s talking to our daughters. As soon as it’s me she’s looking at, me she’s talking to, she turns back into a wall.

  Does she intend to push me to the breaking point? She seems to want to go to the very limit and then, perhaps, she’ll hold out her hand to me, murmuring:

  ‘Poor Donald . . .’

  I am not poor Donald. I am a man, fully a man, but that is something she will never admit.

  The children must have noticed that tension. I sensed a certain wariness, a certain disapproval in my daughters, especially when I pour myself a drink.

  And now, each time I offer Isabel a Scotch, she just happens to reply primly:

  ‘No, thanks.’

  I’m obliged to drink alone. I did not overdo it a single time. There has never been the slightest slippage in my behaviour. No stumbling over wo
rds, no nervous excitement.

  My daughters still look at me, when I have a glass in my hand, as if I were committing a sin.

  This is new. They’ve often seen us have a drink or two, their mother and I. Has Isabel said something to them?

  There’s a kind of complicity among them, the same complicity as between Isabel and my father. She has the gift of being sympathetic, of provoking admiration, confidence.

  She is so good, so understanding!

  She’d be better advised to take care, because one of these days I might reach my limit. I have set myself a course of conduct and am sticking to it, but I’m beginning to grit my teeth.

  I did not drive the girls back to Litchfield, leaving this chore to my wife. On purpose. So that she could cook up her schemes with them at her leisure. I defied her, basically.

  ‘You mustn’t pay attention to your father’s strange behaviour, children. He’s going through a difficult phase . . . Ray’s accident really shook him, and his nerves have not recovered yet . . .’

  ‘Why does he drink, Mommy?’

  She could tell them that I don’t drink more than any of our friends. She definitely doesn’t do that.

  ‘Because of his nerves, as I said. To steady himself.’

  ‘Sometimes, he looks at us as if he barely knows us . . .’

  ‘I know. He shuts himself up inside . . . I spoke to Dr Warren about that, and he went to see him.’

  ‘Dad is sick?’

  ‘It’s not an illness, properly speaking . . . It’s in his mind. He gets these ideas . . .’

  ‘Is it what they call a nervous breakdown?’

  ‘Perhaps . . . It’s like that. It happens often, at his age . . .’

  Is that how all three of them talk about me? I’d swear to it. I can just hear them. Isabel’s soft, indulgent voice as she bestows upon the children the limpidity of her gaze . . .

  How reassuring it is to be looked at like that! You feel as if you were diving into a fresh, cool and generous soul that is immune to the passing years.

  I’m furious. At the office, my secretary is beginning to watch me uneasily as well. If this continues, everyone will start feeling sorry for me.

  Sorry, or afraid?

  I can feel Higgins’ confusion. For this old rogue, life is simple. It’s every man for himself. Anything goes, as long as it’s legal. And there are a thousand normal ways of getting around the law.