Afterward, she poured another and held it in her hands and sat down in a deep chair. This second one she sipped, and she was perfectly right, as she had been before in identical circumstances. Her head began to feel better at once, clearer and less painful, and the only disadvantage to this was that she began to think clearly of Joe Doyle and to want to be with him again. Remembering the night and its excitement, she remembered also his bad heart, and it occurred to her that the excitement had probably not been good for the heart. What if he had died in her arms? This would have been a great shock and a terrible complication, but at the same time there was in the idea a quality of total consummation that was at once thrilling and. terrifying. She did not wish to go on thinking like this about Joe Doyle, and so she began to think instead about her father, who was dead. Thinking about her father always made her feel lost and lonely, even so long after he had died, but thinking about him had at least the comfort of escape, for it was necessary to go away in her mind from this time and place.
When she went away in her mind to think about her father, she seemed always to go to the same place in the beginning, and this place was the street that ran in front of the house in the town in which she used to live, and the time of her arrival there was always evening of a summer day. The street was sad and lovely on summer evenings, and it ran both ways into a kind of eternal bittersweet status quo in which nothing ever changed. Great oaks and elms and maples grew in the parkings on both sides and touched leaves above, and below the overhead arc of limbs and leaves it was cool and shadowed, with just enough filtered light to make things softly visible, and among the leaves were a thousand singing cicadas.
She was standing by the street in front of the house, and she felt very sad and in love with herself, and she turned and walked slowly up the walk from the street to her house, which was one of the finest houses in town, and on the walk coming toward her was her father, whom she loved more than anyone on earth, even including herself. They met on the walk, and her father put his arms around her and held her and stroked her hair. Nothing was said, not a word by either of them, and after a while he released her and went on down the walk, and. she went on in the opposite direction toward the house, and that was the end of the way she seemed always to start thinking about her father. Maybe it was something that had actually happened, but she couldn’t remember that it had happened in just such a way at such a time, and it was more likely that it was only an association of imagery that stood together for the way she had felt about him.
• • •
James McAdams, her father, was the only man she ever loved with the simple, asexual love of a child, and all loves that followed were corruptions. When she was fourteen, he died suddenly in an automobile accident, and everyone thought at the time that she was very brave and stoical because she did not cry or display her grief, but the reason she didn’t was that she was too numbed by pain and too terrified by the realization that she lived in a world where something like this could happen to someone like him, and collaterally to her. After his burial, while her mother in smart black was receiving the sympathy of relatives and friends in the living room, she locked herself in her own room alone and finally cried bitterly for a long time in the terrible emptiness in which he had left her, and after that she never cried again for any reason, although many things happened to her that were worth crying about.
She knew other men, of course, and as she grew older she knew far too many for her own good, but she never quite knew why she did, or why she kept making the complete concessions that she made, the repeated sacrifice of herself. The truth was, having lost the best man of all, she despised all others. Having given to the best man her best love, she was compelled to give a lesser love to all who followed, and the love she gave, although she would never know it, was a necessary expression of her contempt and despair.
At the age of eighteen, she was sent to a good college for young women in New York. She was already becoming a considerable problem, having acquired a limited notoriety at home, and it was felt that college would give her new interests and a new direction, but it didn’t. As a matter of fact, it proved to be an almost intolerable burden, so far as she was concerned, and after completing the first year and slightly more than half the second, she was suspended for failure to make satisfactory marks. Her scholastic failure was genuine enough, but it was also a fortunate convenience for the authorities at the school, for there were other matters for which she could have been suspended or expelled, and it was practically certain the punitive action could not have been avoided much longer.
Home again, she was again a problem. She seemed always to be in a fever of excitement or in a paralysis of depression, and in the fever there were far too many affairs with random men and far too much of the drinking that increased steadily as she grew older, and in the paralysis there was also too much drinking, although she did not then see any men or want to see any. Her mother suggested that she consult a doctor, meaning specifically a psychiatrist, but Charity refused. Three times she considered deliberately what it would be like to die, and what would be the most agreeable way to accomplish death, but she never even came to any conclusion, let alone reaching a point of taking any action, and she wondered afterward if she were actually seriously considering death at all, and if she would not be too great a coward to kill herself for any reason whatever.
Then she met Oliver Alton Farnese. There was a local Farnese, a cousin to Oliver and a relatively poor relation, although he was by local standards affluent enough. Oliver had come from New York on a matter which was a combination family-business deal that was not publicized and not generally known but concerned, in fact, a loan that the local Farnese was trying to secure. Oliver usually had nothing much to do with Farnese business, but in this case, since it was a relatively unimportant matter that concerned a cousin, he was allowed to handle it. It gave him something to do and made him feel useful.
Charity met him at a dinner party to which she went reluctantly with her mother, and three weeks later, two weeks after Farnese had planned to return to New York, she married him quietly in the chapel of the Episcopal church. The marriage was considered by Charity’s mother as an incredible stroke of the best possible luck. In a way this was so, for it solved for her a serious problem that she was utterly incapable of solving herself. For Charity it really solved nothing, but she at least thought rationally about it and married Farnese deliberately for two good reasons. In the first place, she thought it would be pleasant to live on Park Avenue in New York City and have all the money she could possibly spend. In the second place, she did not love him in the least and therefore felt no emotional commitment to him. If she had loved him, she wouldn’t have married him.
• • •
Now she had thought herself from Joe Doyle to James McAdams to Oliver Farnese, and she was in danger of coming around the circle to Joe Doyle again, the same way one came by her theory around the circle from good to bad or bad to good, and what she needed to do and had better do was to think constructively about Oliver, how she could most convincingly tell him all necessary lies when he came home, which would be soon. She looked at the little electric clock beside her bed and saw that it would be, in fact, exactly twenty-five minutes from now, at six o’clock, and she knew this definitely because Oliver always knocked on her door at six o’clock if he did not see her first in some other part of the apartment. Of course, she wasn’t always in the apartment at all, when he came home, but she was certain that he knocked on the door of her room those times too, for it was part of his schedule.
She couldn’t decide whether to be contrite or casual or physically solicitous, which would require an effort but would possibly divert him, and the more she thought about it, the more difficult it became to decide and the more fearful she became, for she was truly afraid of him and often had to exercise the most rigid control in order to hide it. She remembered then that there was still another Martini left in the shaker, which was just the thing to r
educe her problem to the most absurd simplicity, and so she got up and poured the Martini and sat down again and began to drink it, and she immediately decided that she would be casual. Drinking slowly, she began to watch the two hands of the clock move toward six o’clock. She couldn’t actually see the hands move at all, but nevertheless they constantly came closer and closer to the formation of a straight angle, and her tension kept increasing with the imperceptible movement of the hands, and this meant, of course, that she would be neither contrite nor casual nor solicitous when the time came, but rather coldly courteous, a form of combined hostility and fear that would not make a bad situation better.
• • •
Just before six, the hands almost at the point of their farthest separation, she finished her third Martini and got up and carried the shaker and glass and two bottles into the bathroom and set them in the tub. She wished now that she had dressed instead of remaining naked under a robe, which made her feel somehow more vulnerable, but it was too late now, actually six exactly, and while she looked at the clock and wished she were dressed, at fifteen seconds after the hour, Oliver knocked on the door. She went at once and let him in, and he followed her a few steps into the room and stood watching her as if she were some kind of curiosity that interested him mildly. The thin scar along the mandible was livid. “How are you, my dear?” he said.
He often called her his dear, and it made her uneasy. A long time ago, when she was a child, she had gone to a movie in which there was an evil duke, something like that, and the duke, for a reason she couldn’t remember, had kept his little niece locked in a room in a stone tower of his castle, and every time he went to see her, the first thing he said was, “How are you, my dear?” in just the way that Oliver said it. It was something that had stuck in Charity’s mind, and often at night after seeing the movie, she had dreamed that the duke was standing by her bed and smiling and saying, “How are you, my dear?” and she had wakened in terror and lain rigidly without opening her eyes in the fear that the evil duke, if she looked, would actually be there.
“I’m perfectly well, thank you,” she said.
“Are you?” he said. “It seems to me that you’re looking rather tired.” “No, not at all. I’m feeling perfectly well.” “Did yon have an interesting time last night?”
“Not particularly. It was rather dull, as a matter of fact. I went to a cocktail party at Samantha Cox’s in the afternoon and to several places afterward.”
“If it was so dull, why didn’t you come home?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You understand how it is when you get started with something. You simply go on and on for no good reason.”
“That’s very interesting, my dear. I’m always interested to know why you do things you don’t want to do. Tell me about it, please.”
“Why I do things?”
“No. What you did last night. The several places you went after Samantha’s.”
“It’s hardly worth while. It was nothing at all that would amuse you.”
“Nevertheless, I’d like to hear about it. Especially how it happened that you didn’t come home. It’s true that you didn’t come home, isn’t it? I was sure that you weren’t in your room when I left this morning.”
“Yes, it’s true that I didn’t come home. I stayed all night with Bernardine Dewitt.”
“I see. Was Bernardine with you all evening?”
“Yes. She was at Samantha’s, and a group of us went to this Italian restaurant because someone said that the food was exceptionally good, but it didn’t particularly appeal to me. As you know, I don’t especially care for Italian food.”
“That’s too bad. I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy your dinner. Tell me where you went after the restaurant.” “Well, to all those places down in the Village. We all got to drinking quite a bit and going from one place to another, and I don’t remember at all clearly what the places were. After a while, Bernardine began to become ill, which isn’t unusual, and wanted to go home, and we took her there. She was in a pretty bad condition, really, and I went up to her apartment with her and put her to bed, and she kept asking me to stay, and so I finally did because there was nothing else I could do as a friend.”
“Certainly. I understand that. You are very loyal, my dear, if nothing else.”
• • •
She thought she detected an inflection in his voice that might have been irony, and she looked at him closely from the corners of her eyes to see if there was any sign of it on his face, but she couldn’t see any in his expression, which was attentive and sober, and she began to think that she was going to get away with the lie much more easily than she’d hoped.
“The only thing I don’t understand,” he said, “is why you didn’t call and let me know where you were. It would only have been considerate to have called.”
“Well, I didn’t think you’d worry, and I’m sorry if you did. I thought you would assume that I was staying all night with someone.”
“Quite right. That’s exactly what I assumed.”
“It’s all right, then, I wouldn’t have wanted you to worry.”
“Thank you, my dear. You’re very kind. You can’t imagine how relieved I am to know that it was Bernardine you spent the night with, for I had the idea it was a cheap little piano player named Joe Doyle.”
He said it so quietly that she didn’t for a second quite grasp the significance of what he’d said, and then, when she did, she felt instantly and terribly sick to the stomach and in imminent danger of losing her Martinis. She understood that she wasn’t going to get away with the lie so easily as she’d begun to think, that she wasn’t, in fact, going to get away with it at all, but she couldn’t see how Oliver could possibly know already about Joe Doyle. Although it was plainly futile to adhere to the story about staying with Bernardine, it was just as futile to try now to make up another one that would be any better, and what she would have to do would be to take a position of being maliciously persecuted and decline to explain anything whatever.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“Of course you do, my dear. I mean that you are, besides other things, a pathological liar.”
“Well, I can see that you are angry and determined to accuse me of all sorts of things that aren’t true, and I don’t believe I feel like listening to it.”
“Oh, come, my dear. It’s time we were honest with each other. Shall I tell you exactly what you did last night? You went, as you said, to the Italian restaurant, and then you went, as you also said, to several places in the Village. After that, however, you deviated slightly from the truth. Instead of going to Bernardine’s you went off with Milton Crawford to a nightclub in the vicinity of Sheridan Square. You left that place alone and walked down the street to another place named Duo’s, and it was there that you picked up the piano player — and I want to compliment you on your good taste and discrimination in picking the piano player instead of the bartender or the porter. Eventually, omitting the details, you went with him to his room or apartment in a residence south of Washington Square, and you stayed there with him for the rest of the night. What did you do while you were there, my dear? Please tell me what you and the piano player did to amuse yourselves.”
“I’ve already told you where I went and what I did, and it’s obvious that you have decided not to believe that or anything else I may say, so I don’t care to talk about it.”
She kept watching him from the corners of her eyes, her fear of him assuming a kind of supernatural quality, for she felt that he must surely be at least a minor malignant deity who was capable of knowing by extrasensory perception everything she did and thought, and every place she went. He was still looking at her as if she were a curiosity, and his voice had not raised or shaken while he was telling her about last night and Joe Doyle, but the thin scar was now dead white against his skin, and there was a bright sheen to his eyes that made him appear to be blind. She knew that he was certainly furious, but she was suddenly aware
that he was also feeling something besides fury, a violent ambivalence of some sort, and then immediately she realized what it was he was feeling. He was looking at her and thinking about what he had just asked, what she and Joe Doyle had done together in the room in the house just south of Washington Square, and he was by his thinking excited carnally. Knowing this, she had the oddest notion that her robe had simply disintegrated to leave her naked in front of him, and she was ashamed of her nakedness, which was something she had not been for a long time.
“Surely you’ll tell me,” he said. “Remember that I’m your husband, my dear. Don’t you think that I have earned your confidence?”
She merely shook her head, not answering, and he walked across to her slowly, and she thought with a queer kind of detachment that the sheen of blindness on his eyes was very much like the shimmering intense heat on the surface of the streets on a blistering day.
“Did you do this?” he said. “And this? And this?”
She had not dreamed his hands could be so compelling and strong, nor that they could draw from her imperiously what she did not wish to give, and afterward, long after he was gone, she lay exhausted and immobile in her shame.
CHAPTER 9
She lay and listened and heard Oliver leave at seven. She concentrated for a few minutes on remembering what day it was and what Oliver regularly did in the evening of that day, and pretty soon she remembered that it was the day when he had dinner at his club and played bridge afterward. He would be home again not earlier than ten-thirty and not later than eleven.
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