“Some,” he said. “There was Grandy. You hadn’t told him.”
“Why not?”
“I think you rather liked the idea of a dramatic fait accompli, for Althea’s sake.”
Mathilda squirmed. He was making her out a blind little fool, a hurt, silly child. Her face burned because, although it wasn’t true, it had a strange possibility to it, an accusing possibility.
“Well,” he went along easily, “you didn’t know what to do. Finally, you sat down and wrote him a letter—the last thing you did before I took you to the pier.” He had a letter in his hand.
“A letter to Grandy?” She felt proud of being so rational. “How does it happen he hasn’t kept it?”
“Because of what it says!” cried Francis impatiently. “My God, Tyl, you forget! We thought you were drowned. The letter was … all I had.”
She thought, I can’t catch him. He always wiggles out with a sentimental answer. She unfolded the letter.
The letter was not only in her handwriting; it was in her words. The turn of the phrases. There were even some that referred to family matters, such as saying “a Julius,” when you meant a myth. An old story about a man named Julius who never came. Nobody could have known how to use that word! The letter was signed with her own cryptic formula. “Y.L.U.D. Your Loving Ugly Duckling.”
“You took that to Grandy?” she asked, and her voice trembled. “He believed it?”
“Yes,” said Francis gently. “Yes, of course. But I didn’t take it to him until late in February. You see, the news about your disappearance came while I was still at camp. I got out of there so fast the red tape is still bleeding where I cut it.” He grinned.
Her heart jumped. The grin was more terrifying than anything else he’d said or done, somehow. She realized that this was a man of great force, very much alive, a strong man, a consequential human factor. And here he was, claiming to have let his life and affairs revolve around her. Nor could she imagine any reason for it.
“I was frantic. I couldn’t find you. Look, Tyl,” he said boyishly, “what else could I do? I had to go where Grandy was, because if by any miracle you did turn up, you’d let him know. And listen, my darling—”
“I have been listening,” said Mathilda. She raised her head. “Have I heard it all?” She stood up. “I don’t know how you managed that letter,” she said steadily, “but it’s all lies, just the same.” Fight him, her instinct said. “And I would like to see,” she said boldly, “if you please, the man who married us.”
He had been watching her intently. Now, when she lashed out, he didn’t flinch. Instead, his face softened. “Good,” he said. “I’ll have the bags sent over to the station. We may just have time.”
A maid in the corridor called her “Mrs. Howard.” Mathilda stammered something. The clerk downstairs leaned across to say in a warm undertone, “Welcome back, Mrs. Howard.”
Francis led her across the lobby. He was looking down, smiling a little, a smile not exactly triumphant, but rather as if he hoped she wouldn’t be angry that he was right.
“You’re very thorough,” she said stiffly. But she was scared.
“The headwaiter?” he asked. “Shall we find him? Or shall we go into the bar?”
“No,” she said. “No more, not these.… It was a minister?”
“It was a minister.”
“I want to see him.”
“I’d better phone,” he said, and left her. The lobby floor was billowing a little under her feet. She thought, He couldn’t bribe a minister or make him lie.
7
When Grandy opened the door of his study to go forth, Jane could see from her desk down the long room to where Althea was languidly dusting the floor. Althea wore a blue denim coverall and her silver-blond hair was tied up in a blue scarf. She wore gloves—dainty ones, too—and now Jane saw her fold her hands around the handle of the dust mop and lean picturesquely on it. Althea dusting the living-room floor was something to watch, a picture. Althea made the most of her opportunities in Grandy’s servantless house. She never missed an opportunity to be a picture.
And Grandy, thought Jane, with his dramatic sense. It was like living in the middle of a movie all the time, to be in this house with the pair of them. The way he opened the door of the study. Not merely so that he could go through it into the next room. No, there had to be a flourish, a significant sweep. He opened the door as if he were blowing a fanfare for himself.
“Mathilda is in New York,” he chanted, “even now.” He seemed to be tasting each word. “I spoke to her on the telephone.” The way he said it, the warmth and wonder he could pour out with that voice of his, made you reflect what a miracle the telephone was, pay mental tribute to Alexander Graham Bell, realize the strides of modern civilization, all in a flash, and then go on to consider the infinite pathos of human affection, and, somehow or other, also the gallantry of the human spirit in the face of the infinite.
Althea said, “Was Francis with her?” She had a clear, high voice. She articulated well through her pretty, small mouth, with a precise, rather strong-minded effect.
Grandy put his ten fingertips together in pairs, tapped his mouth with the long triangle of his forefingers. “Oh, yes,” he said, “and I think … spaghetti!” The lines around his eyes crinkled up shrewdly. “I shall begin my sauce. Yes, spaghetti will be exactly right. Both friendly and delicious, but not distracting.”
Althea made a slow, wide circle with the mop. “They’ll be here for dinner,” she remarked. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a comment. It was as if the thought in her mind had got expressed accidentally.
“Flowers!” cried Grandy.
“Let Jane do the flowers,” Althea said. I’m just out of a sickbed. I decline to get my feet wet.”
“The rain is only in your sulky little heart,” said Grandy lightly.
Oliver, standing in the arch, asked suspiciously, “What rain? Whose heart?”
The minister’s house was one of those city brownstones with a high stoop and a double-doored entry. The white lace curtains were spotless and crisp. The paint around the window frames was neat and newly done.
A servant opened the door. Her face broke into welcome. “Mr. Howard and your bride!” she said. “Oh, the doctor will be glad. I’ll tell him.”
She went briskly down the hall to tap on a door toward the back of the house. Francis was whispering in Mathilda’s ear, saying that the servant had been a witness. To their wedding, he meant. Mathilda couldn’t speak.
She felt the quiet of the house oppressing her. The very cleanliness, the spotless carpet, the shining wood of the stair banister, the faint smell of polish and soap, seemed inhuman and frightening. Somebody spoke from above.
A tiny elderly woman with soft, faded skin and faded blue eyes was standing on the stairs. “My dear,” she said in a lady’s voice, “we read in the papers that you were safe. How very kind and thoughtful of you to come.”
The strange woman came all the way down into the hall and her hands touched Mathilda’s. Her tiny hands were ice cold.
Francis said, apologetically, “She’s been through a good deal, Mrs. White.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. They looked at Francis very intently, very searchingly. They seemed to cling to his face, to pull away reluctantly at last She whispered, “Poor child.”
“She would like to see Doctor White,” said Francis, and Mathilda had a strong sense that he was suffering.
“Of course,” the woman murmured. They followed her in the track of the servant, who had vanished. This woman tapped, too, on the same door, and then she opened it. For a moment Mathilda could see only the outline of a man sitting behind a desk. He rose.
He said in a soft, powerful voice, “My dear Mrs. Howard—” He, too, came and touched both her hands.
Mathilda clutched. She was frightened. She found her fingers twined around his big hands as if she had been a child. She said, “I would like to talk to you by myself, please.”<
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“Why, of course,” he said with a certain tenderness. “Please, Hilda.”
When they were alone, Mathilda said, “Doctor White, you aren’t going to tell me that you performed any marriage … that I am the girl you married to—to Mr. Howard? Are you?”
His heavy brows lifted. “I am not likely to forget your face,” he said. His eyes did not falter or change his odd look of sorrow. “You have a very beautiful face, my dear.”
Mathilda was unbalanced a moment by such a strange and unexpected compliment to her appearance. Then she cried, “But I’m not the girl! If there was a girl! He’s been trying to convince me, but I’ve never seen him before! I’ve never seen you! It isn’t true! Please!”
He drew a book toward him and showed her the page. She saw the names again: John Francis Howard. Mary Frazier, written in her own hand. “No,” she cried. She sank back in the chair and put her hands to her eyes.
“You are confused,” said the minister in his soft, mellow voice. “That is a terrible feeling. I know. Won’t you have faith that all will come clear to you in a while?”
She looked at him, startled. What was he trying to tell her? That she was mad?
“Try not to—dwell on it,” he went on, with difficulty. “I don’t think you can doubt your own senses.”
“No,” she said, stiffening. “I don’t doubt them. And he can’t make me. Nor can you.”
“That’s right,” he said calmly. “Rest on what you remember, on your own best belief. My dear, if you are right and we are all … mistaken, for some terrible reason, then it must become clear sooner or later.”
“But why?” she cried. “Why isn’t it clear now? I’m not mistaken. I’m not sick. Why”—her voice rose hysterically—“why does everybody tell me this lie?”
He came around the desk and put his big hands on her shaking shoulders. “Remember this,” he said at last: “I have known Francis before. I know that he has no wish to harm you, Mathilda. And you are not sick. Don’t believe that for one second. Don’t consider it.” He walked away from her.
And the blood drained away from her heart in sudden panic because something about this man was familiar to her. He was a stranger, but some things about him she seemed to know.
“Come to see me again.” He seemed distressed. He opened the door to the hall. The woman came and Mathilda felt herself being led away. The woman was talking softly about tea.
Mathilda was puzzled and angry and frightened, and comforted. She felt somewhere in this quiet house a secret, a secret to do with herself. She was comforted by a queer sense that if she knew she would understand. At the same time, she resented that there should be any secret.
“I won’t drink tea here!” She flung it in the woman’s face.
“Poor child,” murmured Mrs. White.
When Francis and the doctor came belatedly through the door, she searched the minister’s face for that sympathy. But his face had turned to stone. Even his eyes had changed. They no longer seemed to be seeing her. The sympathy and the mystery both were gone. He said, “I’m very sorry.” But he was not. Not any more.
Mathilda thought to herself, Don’t make a scene. Don’t cry. Get to Grandy. Grandy will know what to do.
8
“Did you know Rosaleen Wright?”
She was startled. They had been sitting side by side on the train, like strangers. She said, “Of course.”
“Did you like her?”
“Of course,” she said again. “We are good friends.”
“Were,” said Francis.
“What?”
“She’s dead, you know.”
“I … didn’t know,” said Mathilda finally. She was shocked clear out of her own circle of thoughts. “What happened to her?” she asked quietly, in a minute. “Was she ill?”
“She hanged herself,” he said.
Mathilda wanted to scream. “Is this another of your lies?” she managed at last. She thought she had never been so buffeted and shaken up and confused and shocked by anyone in her life. This man seemed dedicated to the business of upsetting her.
“Why should I lie about that?” he snapped back angrily.
She shook her head. She held up her hand as if to beg for an interval between the shocks he kept dealing. Rosaleen, who was such a dear, such a comfort, so much her friend, the only one Althea had never bothered to take away. Rosaleen, whose steady friendship she’d known and kept and never flaunted, lest Althea stir herself to spoil it. Rosaleen, who was so steady and so strong, couldn’t be gone, couldn’t have been driven desperate, couldn’t have been so shaken—
“I don’t believe it!” she gasped.
“Don’t believe what?” He was eager.
“That she’d do that.”
“Now, don’t you?” he said oddly.
“No.”
“That’s the story,” he shrugged. “She hanged herself five days after you were reported lost. In Grandy’s study. She stood on his desk and—”
“Oh, no!” she cried. “Never!”
“You knew her well?” His voice was warm. He must have leaned closer.
“But tell me,” she gasped, “why did she? Why?”
“No reason.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there wasn’t any reason.”
“But there must have been! I don’t understand! What a dreadful thing!” Mathilda wrung her hands. “Oh, poor Grandy!”
“Poor Grandy indeed,” he muttered.
Something in his voice touched off her anger again. She leaned forward and twisted to confront him. “There you go again. Now, why do you say that?”
He looked up innocently.
“You don’t like Grandy. What is it? What are you trying to do? There’s no use denying. I can tell.”
“Just a minute,” he said, “before you go all intuitional on me. Why do I say ‘Poor Grandy, indeed’? Because it strikes me you feel sorry for the wrong person. Poor Rosaleen! Don’t you think?” He closed his eyes. “You don’t even try to imagine what I might be feeling. Can’t you tell? You fly off the handle about Grandy. He’s the one.” He opened his eyes and met hers boldly, almost impudently. “Can’t you see I’m jealous of that old man?”
Mathilda bit her lip. “Maybe,” she said in a queer, high little voice, “you and I are just two other people.”
He didn’t smile. He reached into his pocket as if he’d thought of something. Mathilda brought her eyes to focus on what he held. She saw her own face, laughing.
Francis was murmuring, “Not that it caught you. Two dimensions wouldn’t be enough. The beauty you’ve got is pretty near fourth dimension. It’s motion. It’s time. It’s what I said, like flying.”
Her throat felt dry again. What he said was babble. But this was a picture of herself that she had never seen. She thought, The camera doesn’t lie. Then she thought, It’s a trick.
But for the first time her imagination did encompass the impossible, and she thought, just fleetingly, What if all that he says is true? Nonsense. You might forget, but you don’t invent another way of passing the same time and paste it over the gap in your memory. She must get to Grandy. She must not look at anything any more.
When the train got in, he took her quickly to a cab. Mathilda felt a little sick and dizzy. She’d had no time to be prepared. How could she face Oliver? How could she find a way to think of him, a way to live her life in his physical presence?
Oliver had always been around. Such a nice guy, such fun, always around, always willing to go swimming, to play a little tennis. Always ready to gossip or just chat. Oliver had no driving energy toward a purpose of his own. Nothing ever interfered with his availability. What he did for himself, work, if any, was always done unobtrusively, of second importance in his scheme of things. He was always around. One grew to depend on it.
Oh, she thought, he would be there now. Married to Althea. How to face Althea? How to hide this as she had always hidden Althea’s power to hurt her?
Ever since they were little girls, and Tyl’s feet and eyes were too big for the rest of her, and she was unsure and shy, Althea, full of grace and pretty poise, had always been watching with her shining eyes. If Tyl had a friend or began an awkward progress toward something less lonely, Althea would manage to slip between and dazzle the friend away. Perhaps she never meant to do it. Perhaps she couldn’t help it. No good. Tyl’s heart wasn’t ready for charity yet. How could she face them?
She was astonished to hear Francis say, “Take it easy, Tyl. He’ll be feeling brotherly and a bit miffed. He thinks you’re mine.”
“Is Althea there?” she asked painfully.
He hesitated. Then he said, almost pityingly, “Why do you let Althea throw you? Don’t you know she’s envious of you? Always has been?” and while Mathilda gasped, he added savagely, “Althea’s been tight in bed with la grippe, but she’s up now.”
Mathilda didn’t understand that savage tone, she didn’t understand him, but she felt softened toward him.
Grandy’s portico. The big white front door.
Oliver said, “Well, Tyl!” He took her hand. He kissed her cheek. She felt nothing. The moment was blurred. There was Althea, standing back in the hall. She wore yellow. She was exquisite. Her oddly shining gray eyes weren’t looking at Tyl at all.
A blond girl in a black wool frock who had the face of a baby doll smiled at her and went running down the long living room, calling, “Mr. Grandison!”
Tyl waited where she was for Grandy. She saw him coming—the arrogantly held gray head, the beak of a nose, the lively eyes behind the pince-nez, the unimpressive body with the fat little bulge of a tummy, the thin legs, the biggish, awkward feet.
She began to laugh and cry. He was purring. His beautiful voice that seemed not to need any breath came pouring out in endearments. Through her own tears, she could see in his black eyes the eternal spectator, who viewed with such lively interest and delight this dramatic and emotional moment in which he took part. He was just the same. She threw herself into his arms. She felt so safe. It was wonderful to feel so safe.
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