The Iron Cobweb

by Ursula Curtiss

  Elizabeth put an involuntary hand to her temple, pressing upwards; brought it back to the wheel. No time for desperation when you were driving, no time for an uprush of fear.

  She was home before Oliver, but just barely; by the time she had changed her suit and come downstairs again, Oliver was in the kitchen and the children had forgotten their supper in the usual torrent of delight. Noreen was standing by in smiling resignation. At Elizabeth’s entrance Oliver turned a look of unconvincing severity on the children, who were jumping and clambering at his overcoat pockets. “After your supper. Hello, lion.”

  His kiss grazed Elizabeth’s cheekbone. She said lightly, “Hello— aren’t you cold!” and moved easily away. “Maire, not your fingers. . . .”

  Maire ate scrambled eggs out of her palm, swung her legs in excitement and said in her high clear voice, “Daddy, Mama was in Boston!” Jeep echoed her, not quite as comprehensibly, and they both turned a look of admiration on Elizabeth, who busied herself instantly at the toaster. She had forgotten that to the children Boston was a magical end-of-the-world place, for the simple reason that Oliver went there every morning.

  At her side Noreen murmured, “I don’t think it’s quite done,” and Oliver, hanging up his overcoat, said, “Did you really go into town, or is this from the usually unreliable source?”

  She hadn’t meant to lie to Oliver, she hadn’t meant the matter to come up at all. But this, her first trip into Boston since the hospital . . . and Oliver’s eyes were not as casual as his voice. She told him what she had told Constance: “You know those books I ordered from Haysmith’s—I thought they might have come in and he’d forgotten all about me.”

  “Why, the old fool,” said Oliver, mildly amazed. “I happened to be near there just before I came home, and thought I’d check. He could at least have told me you’d been in.”

  Had he gone to Haysmith’s, or was this a test? Elizabeth thought bitterly. Just because you’re lying doesn’t mean he is, and said, “The shop was quite busy, I suppose he forgot.”

  Outwardly, that was the end of it; to Elizabeth, who carried the deception about with her like a stone all that evening, it had the frightening aspect of a beginning. This was how people put distance between each other, and couldn’t close it again because there were too many lies, too many subterfuges to cross with any kind of dignity. Most marriages didn’t, as people said, go on the rocks, because that implied a sudden and smashing impact. It wasn’t that, it was a slow day-by-day inching away from closeness, so that eventually another goal was nearer than your marriage and it was easier to go forward than to go back.

  Is this, thought Elizabeth huntedly, what we are doing to each other—and to the children, who should matter more than either of us?

  She knocked at Constance’s door before she went to bed, aware, and disliking it, that she was looking for a way to cross the most shocking name off that short ugly list. There couldn’t be any questions, but you could find reassurance in a glance, a gesture. . . .

  But she didn’t. There was a pause before the answering, “Elizabeth? Come in,” and then a rapid rustling of taffeta. When Elizabeth opened the door Constance was sitting at her dressing-table, her hair out of its smooth daytime rolls, her long face a little flushed. Her eyes under their thick white lids were fleetingly the eyes of a stranger, quick, sharp, measuring. If she had opened the door without knocking, Elizabeth wondered shakenly, would there have been quite another scene, quite another Constance?

  That was ridiculous, and—frightening. Constance had been getting ready for bed, of course, and had tried on the taffeta housecoat Elizabeth had given her for her birthday weeks ago; that would account for the swift crisp motion of fabric that had followed her knock.

  Constance’s gaze became suddenly inquiring; Elizabeth, searching vacantly for a pretext, seized on the housecoat. “I was right, that’s a marvelous color for you. Does it fit?”

  “Oh yes. That is, I think—” Constance was nervous. She stood too suddenly and one balancing hand sent something crashing lightly to the surface of the dressing-table. Elizabeth glanced idly down; it was a photograph of herself, the one her publishers had used for the back of her first book jacket. She was looking slantingly down and across the camera. Her hair had been longer then, and a delicate angling of light emphasized the pale backward lift of it. The photograph hadn’t been in the guest room when Constance came, thought Elizabeth idly, it hadn’t been there—

  Constance was waiting; she forced herself back to attentiveness and an admiring inspection of the housecoat. She wished, as she said goodnight and went along the hall, that she had never knocked at her cousin’s door, that she hadn’t seen her photograph there. That she hadn’t heard that hurrying rustle, as though taffeta arms had gone up hastily to rearrange lifted-back hair.

  Five

  DECEMBER WAS snowy, and made of elastic. Elizabeth got through the days with a determined briskness, plunging into her Christmas shopping, which she dreaded ordinarily, with a fervor that astonished everyone around her, Maire talked about sleds; Jeep, for reasons known only to himself, hoped ardently for a fly-swatter.

  There were a number of things to remember the early part of December by, and Elizabeth remembered them all; while October 29th had dropped into a void and was just now sending up echoes, every day had become a new day of battle. And battle with what? Shadows, nerves, imagination . . . ?

  No. Forged checks were made of paper and ink, and cunning.

  Maire plummeted the full length of the stairs on her head and had to be rushed to the hospital for X-rays. Jeep stuffed his panda into the toilet, flushed it, and consulted nobody about the mounting level of water on the bathroom floor; when he had tired of watching it he simply went away. The kitchen ceiling dried eventually, and Oliver, looking like a man determined to hold his tongue at all costs, painted it laboriously.

  Hathaway’s nurse called up and postponed Elizabeth’s appointment; she reported this stiffly and conscientiously to Oliver, who met her eyes and glanced quickly away. Gradually, and somewhere in herself terrified that it could happen at all, she accustomed herself to two existences that overlapped but never blended.

  There was the one in which everything was what it seemed, and she was a dutiful mother to the children and the reasonable facsimile of a wife to Oliver, and went about with Lucy Brent and succumbed to Steven’s quiet encouragement sufficiently to spend grim, trying-to-work hours up in the studio.

  There was the other one, in which she was alone and afraid, cut off from appeal by the dread of further damaging her marriage. In which, if she let her desperately fixed attention flicker, everything might topple, and anything might happen.

  Like the roses, like the misty date of October 29th when a woman pretending to be Sarah Bennett had walked into Elizabeth’s bank, it was nothing you could put an accusing finger on. It was like a picture delicately out of drawing, or a phonograph record with a slightly warped center. It was all wrong only if you knew and loved the view or the melody.

  But it was calculated; there was a brain behind it, wholly concerned with the quiet growth of fear.

  It was, perhaps most of all, the affair of Jeep’s birthday on the thirteenth of December.

  There was protocol on Jeep’s birthday. Ten minutes after Oliver had had his first glimpse of his son, while Elizabeth was still pleasantly giddy over a long-awaited cigarette, they had agreed never to lose Jeep in the Christmas rush. “Who knows, it might warp him for life,” Oliver had said, “so as long as the funds hold out, let’s keep him separate. Did you know you were burning a hole in your bedspread, Mrs. March?”

  So there was as much panoply over Jeep’s birthday as though it had fallen in July. Presents, and something in the way of consolation for Maire, all to be opened when Oliver arrived with ice cream and candles for the cake. Everything was wrapped and waiting at five-thirty, and the children, who had been asking since morning, “Is it Jeep’s birthday yet?” had obligingly disappeared. For no
reason at all Elizabeth was startled when the fall of the knocker turned out to be Steven Brent.

  He was diffident, standing against the icy dark, sensing her surprise at once and half turning away. The porch lamp made his hair very fair, deepened the hues in the shy tired face. “Crale saw the synopsis today and likes it very much. There are just a couple of things . . . but you’re busy, so I’ll—”

  “Not at all, come on in.”

  Elizabeth took him out to the sunporch where they wouldn’t be disturbed, and switched on lamps. Light flowed softly over the rope rug, woven in golden parquet squares, over yellow and red armchairs, a fat black hassock, a wall of windows glimmeringly full of reflections. They sat on the couch at the end of the long narrow room; Steven put the typed synopsis and its manila envelope on the coffee table and frowned absently at a memo in his hand.

  “As I say, Crale’s most enthusiastic. He does question, and I must admit that I do, too, the fact that the daughter who willfully vanishes doesn’t make more of an effort to communicate with the mother. Don’t you think . . .”

  It was a plot Elizabeth had been playing with for two years; she knew every twist and turn and objection, and she could let her attention wander. She came in nicely at intervals with, “Oh, not necessarily, don’t forget she’s fortyish,” or, “You’re quite right, I hadn’t thought of that.” In between, she found herself studying the man beside her on the couch.

  Of them all, Steven hadn’t changed. He was still shy, quiet, concerned—vividly aware of nuances, comfortably silent about them. You forgot your tenseness with Steven because of his very receptiveness. Elizabeth was totally unprepared when he let the memo flutter to the coffee table and took off his glasses with a driven air and said, “Look here, Elizabeth, let’s do this some other time. You’ve probably gathered that this isn’t what I came about at all.”

  Somewhere in the middle of that, Oliver was standing in the open doorway, and in the near distance Noreen’s voice said hurriedly, “Oh, I think Mrs. March is—” and then died.

  It was almost, thought Elizabeth, as though the girl had tried to thrust herself bodily between Oliver and the porch door. Surely Noreen wasn’t mad enough to think—

  She hadn’t time for that because Oliver, packages in his arms, was smiling at her inquiringly and Steven was standing, bundling the synopsis back into its envelope. “I’m just on my way—I’ve been trying to get your wife back to the grindstone.”

  “Where she belongs,” said Oliver mildly. His eyes weren’t mild. Bluer than Maire’s, bluer even than Jeep’s, they rested briefly on Elizabeth and it was almost like a quick angry touch of his hand. His gaze flicked to Steven, he said politely, “Time for a drink?” But it was only that, the barest politeness.

  Steven was aware of it; his glance at Oliver was quiet. “Can’t, thanks, I’ve been too late as it is. I’ll leave this with you, Elizabeth, and give you a ring in a day or so. . . .”

  He was gone, and there was a moment at the door when Elizabeth felt as though she, too, should be saying good-night to the overcoated stranger beside her. Then the door closed, and Oliver was again her husband, a man she loved through a glass wall; and Oliver was saying, “Are you really back at work? Good. . . . Let’s have the birthday and then a drink. Where are the kids?”

  They usually flew to the door; with instinctive perversity they hadn’t tonight. “Up in their room, I guess. I’ll get them,” Elizabeth said, and escaped up the stairs from Oliver’s brilliant scrutiny. If there was to be this, an awkwardness every time she discussed her book with her editor—

  Maire was sitting on her bed, ruffling through a book of animal photographs; Jeep, chanting tonelessly, was involved with plastic scissors and a magazine on the floor. He had a dull and thwarted look because the scissors wouldn’t cut, none of his usual loud fury. Noreen, folding laundry into the bureau drawers, looked up and smiled with an air of held-in excitement. Elizabeth said brightly, “Daddy’s home, and it’s Jeep’s birthday. Happy birthday. Jeep. Aren’t you going to come down and see what you’ve got besides cake and ice cream?”

  They came, lethargically. Noreen, smiling and scolding anxiously, hurried down the stairs to set the table in the dining-room. Elizabeth, wondering, watched Jeep unwrap his presents—a fleet of tiny trucks, a dog whose tongue lapped in and out when you pulled him, a miniature merry-go-round. There was no spark anywhere; it was as though Jeep had been waked up in the middle of the night and brought down to admire his toys, puzzled, sleepy, half resentful.

  Elizabeth glanced alertly at Maire and saw the same thing. She had scoured the town for a pig of suitable size and expression, and had found at last a calico animal with lifelike white lashes and a foolish smile tucked under its snout. Maire opened it and said with a glimmer of animation, “Pig,” and then put it carelessly down on the floor. Noreen said softly, “Oh, darling, what a beautiful pig.” Her eyes met Elizabeth’s, apprehensively.

  Oliver said, “Looks like we’ve come to the wrong party. Maybe the ice cream . . . ?”

  Constance had come down; she said sedately, “Happy birthday. Jeep,” and presented a rubber fire truck. Noreen brought in the cake and lighted the candles and put ice cream in two dishes. Oliver watched the children mounting the unaccustomed chairs and said suddenly, “Know something? They’re sick.”

  “Nonsense,” said Elizabeth, firm but worried. “What have they had today, Noreen?”

  “Just their lunch, Mrs. March, and a light one—bacon and string beans and custard—because I knew they’d be having their birthday supper. But they do look—”

  It wasn’t long in the deciding. Maire fiddled with her spoon; Jeep, gluttonous, swallowed two fat mouthfuls and returned them with a surprised air to the rug. Noreen sprang for cloths, Constance said thoughtfully, “Well, you know, they didn’t seem quite—” and Oliver transported Jeep to the bathroom.

  Elizabeth, oddly frightened, said, “Maire, you’ve been eating something, both of you. What was it?”

  And Maire, pale and docile, said, “Candy.”

  “Show me.” Elizabeth was crisp and commanding, not letting the panic show. It was a mark of how dreadfully familiar she was growing with her enemy, the subtle creator of her other world, that she never for an instant doubted the source of the candy.

  But this was the first time it had touched the children.

  There had evidently been a great deal of candy—bon-bons, from the look of the crumpled foils, purple and green and silver, stuffed in a greedy shining heap into the bottom of the children’s toy chest. Not the kind of candy you gave wholesale to children, unless you wanted to bring about exactly what had happened.

  Elizabeth looked hard at Maire and gradually her legs stopped trembling; the child’s eyes were heavy and a little glazed and she had one hand pressed exploringly to her stomach, but—she could say it now, she could face it in her own mind—the candy hadn’t been poisoned.

  The door opened and Oliver thrust Jeep into the room. “He’s empty,” he said briefly, and met Elizabeth’s eyes. “I’ll leave this to you, shall I?”

  Elizabeth turned down Maire’s bed, lifted Jeep into his crib, and began some casual, off-hand questions. She realized almost at once that it was useless, because the children didn’t know where the candy had come from. They had found it there in their toy chest, and it was only sensible to eat it as fast and as furtively as possible because otherwise it would have been taken away from them.

  “But there must have been a box.” Elizabeth met Maire’s and said with firmness, “Candy always comes in a box. Or a bag.”

  She waited. Jeep said ponderingly, “Where box, Mama?” and Maire thought it over and went to investigate the toy chest. She said very positively, “It was just in there, just like that.”

  Just like that—spilled carelessly there, glittering and gay to catch a child’s eye at the time of day when they picked up their toys with reluctance and returned them helter-skelter to the chest. Elizabeth was carefully bright. �
�Then someone must have come into your room and left them there for a surprise. Who could that have been?”

  “Daddy,” said Jeep promptly.

  “No, not Daddy. Who else has—”

  “Mama,” said Jeep with an air of fond finality.

  “No. Maire, who else has been—?”

  The door opened and Noreen came in, her face clearing at the sight of the children sitting alertly up in their beds. “Are they all right, Mrs. March? Do you think they’re coming down with something?”

  “A light attack of bon-bons,” Elizabeth said, rising. Because the children were watching and listening she kept her voice friendly as she said, lifting the foils out of the chest, “Ever seen these around before?”

  She didn’t hear the first part of Noreen’s reply. Staring down at the papers in her own cupped palms, she was suddenly aware that she herself had seen them, or something very like them, not long ago . . . where? When?

  “—some kind of chocolates,” Noreen was saying with a worried air. “And they look—expensive, don’t they? The children must have found them while I was hanging the laundry—I left them here with their books and told them to start picking up their toys. But where did they come from?”

  “That,” said Elizabeth lightly, “is the mystery.” She kissed the children and went to the doorway. “They’re overdue for bed as it is, so let’s talk about it later . . .”

  But it was Oliver she talked to first. Constance was starting dinner, and Oliver stood motionless at a window in the living-room, staring out into the dark. His back looked grim. At Elizabeth’s entrance he said without turning, “They’d done their birthdaying ahead of time, I gather. What was it, did you find out?”

  “These.” Elizabeth showed him the crumpled foils. “I’ve a feeling I’ve seen this brand somewhere before—have you?”

  Oliver gave them a short glance. “No. Where in the name of God did they get them?”

  Inside Elizabeth a brief astonishment turned to anger. She said evenly, “We’ll probably figure it out a little sooner if you don’t swear at me,” and tossed the papers into the fireplace.