The telephone rang at nine-thirty and it was Brenda McCollum to ask them to an egg-nog party on Christmas Eve; Elizabeth said they would love to but were busy. It rang again at five minutes of ten.
Oliver said, “Damn it, of all days. Moulton’s called an eleven-thirty conference. I’d like to sneak out the back way, but—”
“You can’t, of course not,” Elizabeth said, carefully bright. “Oh well, the skies won’t fall. Have a nice meeting.”
“Isn’t that too bad,” said Constance abstractedly, glancing up from the desk in the living-room. “Oliver’s tied up, is he?”
“So it seems. I’ll see you later, or rather sooner,” Elizabeth said, and closed the front door behind her and walked down the lawn to her car.
Oliver had calculated the time to a nicety, he hadn’t pricked the bubble an instant too soon. It was a pity he had told her only a few days ago about Moulton’s extended West coast trip. Otherwise it might have sounded like the truth.
Hathaway saw her early and said with emphasis that she looked frightful; what was she trying to do to herself? Elizabeth sat in a fever of impatience while he asked questions, stared at her brightly, and at length wrote notes and a prescription. The taxi she called came instantly, and it was just ten minutes of twelve when they pulled in at the curb opposite Oliver’s office building.
She leaned forward. “Driver, I’m meeting someone here and we’re going on. It shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”
Noon, Oliver had said to the unknown voice on the telephone two days ago. And he would have to get wherever he was going. Elizabeth watched the stream of lunch-hour traffic at the mouth of the International Chemical building, half-hoping that Oliver would not emerge at all, knowing coldly that he would.
Even then, at seven minutes of twelve, she might have missed him if it hadn’t been for a snarl in the sidewalk traffic caused by a lost and bewildered French poodle. In the small island of space made by veering pedestrians, Oliver appeared between the gilt-grilled doors of the gray marble lobby, halted briefly to cup his hands around a match and started up the block. Elizabeth watched him without feeling anything at all.
He was going to cross the street, he was hailing the cab at the comer. Elizabeth clasped her hands tightly together in her lap and made a decision she hadn’t consciously considered, perhaps because she hadn’t wanted to look closely at it. She leaned forward again to the driver. “Oh, we’ve missed each other. It’s that red and yellow cab up ahead. Driver. If you’ll follow that . . .”
“The one that fella just got in?” said the driver baldly.
“Yes.” She was stony with not caring. He had probably waited like this often, with women checking up on their husbands, men checking up on their wives. She hadn’t thought she could ever do that, but the odd part of it was that at the last minute everything whittled down to the simple necessity of knowing. What to do when you knew was something else again, and not even the most knowledgeable taxi driver could help you there. . . .
Oliver’s cab led them into a part of Boston Elizabeth didn’t know and wouldn’t have been able to find again. She had stared at the red and yellow fenders ahead so long that she had stopped seeing them, and she was startled when the driver said laconically, “There goes your friend,” and drew in to the curb.
She had had change ready; she dropped it into his outstretched palm and was out of the cab without ever having seen his face at all.
Nine
REVOLVING DOORS carried Oliver out of sight. With an instinctive caution she hadn’t known she possessed, Elizabeth waited until a balding mink-faced man in a trench coat had followed him before she walked up the three shallow steps and spun her way into the lobby of the Hotel Savoia.
She couldn’t have said exactly how the Savoia ticketed itself, but it did. It might have been the general amber gloom, lighted at cautious intervals by a pink silk lamp, or the lounging bellboy whose eyes roved over her with a kind of bored speculation; it might have been the blonde seated with improbable hauteur just beside the elevators or the slumbrous silence that pervaded the whole lobby. She had thought herself numb and too driven to care, but her instant and violent distaste was so strong that it was an effort to remember why she was here, and to find Oliver in the dimness.
To her right were a Western Union counter and a bookstall, directly opposite her, across an area of small couches and chairs with a few unwinking occupants, were the elevators and an alcove lined with public telephones. At the end of the lobby to her left, Oliver’s head and shoulders rose out of a giant rubber plant at the desk. Elizabeth advanced a little; he was talking to the room clerk, and then bending his head intently.
How had she ever thought this room was dim? It seemed suddenly floodlit, without shadow or shelter from the countless stares, sharp as drawn knives, that had found her face, slyly, without her knowing it. The woman in the bookstall, the clerk at the Western Union barrier, the lounging bellboy, the blonde beside the elevators, a spinsterish man on the nearest sofa—their eyes pinned her against a wall of light, dissecting, cataloguing. It was the old, old dream of suddenly discovering in the midst of the assembly hall that you had no clothes on, but it was not a dream. Briefly, Elizabeth hated Oliver for the mere fact of bringing her here.
In another instant she would have to bolt and run . . . shakily, she pushed back a glove and pretended an oblivious glance at her watch. She couldn’t read its face, but the small gesture shattered the spell. The male spinster began to tweak his nose nervously, the blonde readjusted her hemline, the woman in the bookstall turned her back—but in the interval Oliver had left the desk and was walking rapidly across the lobby toward the elevators.
She could still have escaped, she could have fled out into the winter sunlight, hoping to find a remnant of the pride she had had to shed at the door. But then she would have shed it for nothing. . . . No. Find out what there was to know, what there was to fight—or, indeed, if victory would be a little more intolerable than loss.
Elizabeth did what no power on earth could have forced her to do ten seconds ago: she walked briskly across the lobby, passing within two feet of Oliver and the group of people leaving the elevator, and stood in front of the telephone book on a chain in line with the elevators, so that his back was half turned to her. It crossed her mind wryly that it was helpful in situations like this to know your husband’s habits. Oliver would give his floor number as he entered the elevator . . . but would he, here?
“Six,” said Oliver, startlingly close by.
Six. No good at all, unless . . . The uniformed boy had stepped out of the elevator and was waiting for more passengers. A man and woman Elizabeth hadn’t seen before were crossing the lobby. The blonde stood up, gave her a curious glance and followed them into the elevator. The doors closed and they were gone. Elizabeth walked to the elevators and pressed the button and was rewarded instantly. It was the second elevator down, and the operator was benign and white-haired. “Six, Ma’am. Getting colder, isn’t it? Looks as if we might have snow for Christmas after all.”
Elizabeth said that it did, and stepped out on six. Her heart was pounding; for a wild instant she confused that with the faint rapid sound of footsteps in one of the near corridors. Oliver’s walk, quick, unerring . . .
She was up a short stem of corridor, and she was in luck; as she stood at the point of intersection, motion at the far end of the hall to her right caught her eye. She turned her head just in time to see Oliver disappearing behind a door that closed quietly after him.
Silence again, dimly busy with the echo of traffic. From somewhere close by sounded a heavy crash of glass, and a woman’s voice said stormily, “Ox!” All Elizabeth’s detachment dropped away, and she was acutely, incredulously aware of her errand in this furtive, pink-lit hotel. Not an automaton after all, not a woman she would have felt sorry and a little embarrassed about, but herself, Elizabeth March. In search of the shabbiest possible information about her husband, and finding it.
She forced herself up the corridor Oliver had taken, and looked at the room number. This was reality; it would be difficult, later, convincing herself of that. She wondered whether she would ever be able to forget the gray light from the window striking waterily across the numerals, or the little triangular chip in the paint just above them. Then she walked quickly away.
The room clerk watched her as she approached the desk; had he noticed her earlier across the lobby, seen her waiting, entering the elevator so urgently? The rose-red coat flared like a candle in the dusk; she was conscious of an automatic lift of eyes as she passed.
He listened attentively while, deliberately vague, she told him about a friend of a friend registered at the hotel. She believed the number of the room was 619, and the name—she had trouble finding one in the confusion of her mind—was Hunt.
The clerk gazed at her sardonically. “Sorry, Madam. There’s no one by that name registered here at the moment.”
“Oh, but there must be.” She was on firmer ground now that they both knew he didn’t believe her. “I’m quite sure she said the Savoia, Room 619. Would you,” she stared coolly back at him, “mind checking, please.”
The clerk sighed audibly and turned to ruffle through a slender stack of cards. He withdrew one and held it a little apart from the others; when he faced her again, Elizabeth, every nerve bared, saw instantly the subtle change in his manner.
A frond of the rubber plant quivered near her cheek. The clerk said with a kind of suave enjoyment, “Room 619 is occupied by a C. G. Massman. Sorry.”
He had dropped the “Madam” pointedly, he was dismissing her with his eyes, his tone, a careless turn of his shoulder. “Alfred. Did Mr. Casales speak to you . . .”
Elizabeth walked away, on fire with fury at herself, at Oliver, at the knowing impudence that seemed to saturate the air. She didn’t know what prompted her to look back. The room clerk had his elbows on the desk, confiding in an antique bellboy who was watching her retreat with a wrinkled, appreciative grin.
They all know a joke when they see one at the Savoia, Elizabeth thought, feeling the grin like a scald on her back. Damn you, Oliver, for every minute of this . . .
She clung to her anger as she would have clung to a spar, because under it waited the yawning and bottomless fear.
It was bitterly cold, driving home. She kept herself fiercely from thinking, because there wasn’t room in her mind for both traffic and shock. She reached the house at about two o’clock and found it empty and mockingly serene.
A match to the living-room fire, a cup of scalding tea—and then, inescapably, the facts. What, after all, did she know? That Oliver had made an obscure appointment by telephone and warned his caller to secrecy; that he had lied to her in order to keep the appointment, that it had had to be kept in a bedroom in a shady side-street hotel, under arrangements so blatant that even the hotel employees were amused.
That—because it came down to this—in the short space of not quite two months her life had gone casually to pieces.
Was it possible that all this was unconnected, that Oliver was so carried away by another woman that he had forgotten all his latent fastidiousness, his dislike of marital murk?
If that were true, then her marriage was as good as dissolved, because even if she could manage to go on living with Oliver, she could not possibly live with herself.
If it were not true—and it was that sliver of incredulity that had persuaded her to follow Oliver from his office—then he was caught in the same delicate mesh of malevolence that was spinning itself about everything she loved.
Why?
Constance, arriving in a little flurry of cold air, seemed mildly surprised to find her back. “I thought you might spend the afternoon in town, you go in so seldom. Have you been home long?”
“Only a few minutes.” Elizabeth watched her cousin removing her gloves, putting the finger tips and wrist edges meticulously in line, folding them away in her purse. Constance, she thought, was very like sand going through an hourglass, recording everything, affected by nothing. She said, “The children are out for a walk, I gather.”
“I believe,” Constance was vague, “that Noreen had promised them something about the pond. It’s too bad, isn’t it, that you couldn’t have made your trip into town with Mrs. Brent.”
Was there anything more than idleness in the thick-lidded eyes? No . . . no. Elizabeth flicked out a match with care. “I didn’t know Lucy was going in.”
“Oh, she may not have been. I picked up a few last-minute things in town just after you left, and when I saw her at the station I just assumed, for some reason . . . tell me,” said Constance, “what did the doctor say?”
“What doctors usually say. Liver-and-iron and sleep.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, surprised, and turned her head, in time to see Constance flushing as unhappily as though she had been caught making a face at Elizabeth’s back. She said awkwardly, “I just . . . you’ve seemed so—” and Elizabeth, sorry for her and regretting her own crispness, said, “It was just the usual check-up. But I haven’t been sleeping as well as I ought.”
“Nerves,” said Constance briskly, herself again. “Although I must say that for the last night or two I’ve been unusually wakeful myself. It’s the wind, I think, it makes you hear things.”
“We’re quite exposed here,” Elizabeth said, and thought with sudden dreariness how little it took to remind her of fear, of the night when the sounds at the door had not been the wind.
“I hadn’t thought of it before,” said Constance reflectively, starting for the stairs, “but you are quite exposed, aren’t you, Elizabeth?”
Oliver asked her about the doctor too, with a casual “Everything all right this morning?” when he got home that evening, with a subtly different tone up in their bedroom.
“What did Hathaway really say?”
“That I’m a little underweight and could use a few vitamins, but then,” said Elizabeth, “doctors always like you round and rosy.”
She could feel Oliver’s waiting silence behind her; she could feel the mount of her own bitter surprise at the fact that he could make any reference at all to that morning. She took refuge in action, brushing her hair so vigorously that it hurt, seeing almost as clearly as her own reflection the uncrossable chasm that lay just under the surface between herself and Oliver.
Once he knew that she had followed him to the Savoia, once the knowledge of his deception was a shared and admitted thing, there could be no going back. An impulsive word from her would open the chasm—and no power on earth could close it again.
Part of the plan of whoever it was who hated her?
Oliver was leaning against his bureau, dark head bent, frowning down at the cuff-links he rattled like dice in his palm.“Hath-away didn’t suggest your taking a vacation, getting away for a while?”
No mistaking the eagerness there, or the faint surprise, as though —Elizabeth had a flashing memory of Oliver at the telephone, severing a Boston connection—he had asked Hathaway to put forth such a suggestion. He wouldn’t have to worry about surreptitious calls then, or awkwardly broken lunch dates—was that why he had inquired so restlessly about Constance’s plans the other night?
She caught back a tumble of words; she thought clearly. The children. You aren’t only yourself, you’re the children too. And if you confront Oliver and he admits what you’re afraid of and you make the only possible answer, you make it for Maire and Jeep too.
She said, “No, he didn’t say anything about it,” and, very casually, “Don’t forget to pick up Maire’s sled tomorrow, will you?”
Christmas Eve came with a dark and biting cold. Elizabeth hunted for the red candles and pinned up fragrant sprays of fir, dug through the attic for last year’s lights and the treetop angel and didn’t, in all the furious activity, escape the naked fear that walked with her all day long.
She had learned to dread the lulls, the plea
sant normal times when everything she loved was safe and near her and anything else was built of shadows. It was as though Christmas were a talisman, to be snatched from her; as though she were especially vulnerable on this of all days, and violence might burst forth at any moment among the flowers and firelight.
Noreen Delaney left at three o’clock, flushed and smiling and protesting at the presents Elizabeth put into her arms. Oliver departed to pick up the tree; Constance, restrainedly festive in brown satin, put on an apron and began to make canapes. Lucy and Steven Brent were coming for cocktails, and Elizabeth, trying grimly to ignore the web that bound them all together, had asked the Stock-bridges and Bill and Ellie Seaver.
The children settled down to untangle an immense snarl of red satin ribbon, and Elizabeth joined Constance in the pantry and thought, Really, this is quite simple, and went back in the midst of the peaceful silence to find the white leather chair slipcovered in Christmas seals. Maire cried bitterly when they were removed; Jeep, philosophical, picked them up quietly as they were removed and transferred them to the wall.
Elizabeth sat them firmly down to listen to carols, and found that the small hushed faces and faraway eyes seemed like an invitation to malice, and frightened her more than ever.
By six o’clock she had them bathed and fed and in bed, with intense queries as to whether Santa Claus would come down the chimney when there was a fire burning in the fireplace. Elizabeth said gravely that they would put the fire out at once, and went into her own room to dress.
Not the satin-paneled black—she had worn it that other night when the Brents had come, and it still carried memories of shock. The copper faille, then, making a great deal of her white throat and very little of her waist, belling in crisp extravagant folds. She dressed; she went downstairs to find Oliver and Bill Seaver closeted in the pantry, making drinks, and Ellie Seaver, pink and gold and giddy, trapped bewilderedly in a conversation about tulips with Constance. At six-thirty the Stockbridges arrived, and the Brents.
The Iron Cobweb Page 7
