I almost choked at that, and it must have flustered West because there was a silence before he answered. “I better get my suitcase.”
“Are you married, Mr. West?”
This time there was a long pause before he answered in such an odd voice that I peeped over the top of my paper. “I was. My wife died.”
“Oh, she did? Well, I’m alone too — except for Mr. Holder who boards here. My husband was killed. My friends all tell me they don’t see how I bear up, but we have to, don’t we?”
“Yes, we do.”
“Of course we do. What kind of a job do you have?”
“Oh — why, I’m a clerk.”
“You don’t make much money then, do you?”
“No.”
“Well, maybe you will some day.”
Considering his age, this didn’t seem likely. West coughed and stood up. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Coombs. And I’ll be back at nine-thirty.”
She went to the door with him. “That’s perfectly all right. I think we’ll get along just fine, don’t you?”
So he came back that night at nine-thirty sharp, dragging a battered old suitcase and thanking Mrs. Coombs at every other step. She hovered over him all the way up to his room, and well she should. She was robbing him blind on the room. She was still up there asking questions and telling him how she had to bear up when I went out. I had a date with Rose that night.
From the beginning I could tell that something was going to happen. I could feel it in the musty air of that old gray rattrap, which looked just like a dozen other old rattraps on the same street. There was something electric in the air between those two dull looking people. I decided to stay a while.
Mrs. Coombs showed a strange interest in her new lodger. When he got home from work around six in the evening, she would meet him at the door with what she probably thought was a cheerful smile and ask, “And how are you this evening?”
“All right,” he would reply. He wouldn’t look directly at her, maybe because her pale blank eyes disconcerted him. Then she would follow him upstairs, talking all the time and throwing in a question now and then. She would tell him to turn on the light, that he was perfectly welcome to use the light, but he would say he didn’t need it. Finally she would tell him they were going to get along just fine — as though they hadn’t been — and then go downstairs.
One evening she brought him up a steaming cup of cocoa. I was in my room at the time, but I never heard her come up. She must have scared West. She had a trick of never seeming to enter a room; she just appeared in it.
“I thought you might like a cup of hot cocoa. It’s nice and hot. You need something like this.”
Peering around the door, I could see her profile in West’s doorway. She had on a new dress and a bare touch of rouge, but I don’t think West noticed.
West thanked her in his timid way and she went on to make him feel welcome — as only she could. “That’s perfectly all right. You’re just as welcome as you can be. Now the couple that were here before didn’t appreciate anything. He was all right, but she just tried to take over my whole house. Why, when she got their meals, she was in my kitchen over an hour sometimes.”
“Oh, they cooked here, did they?”
“Yes, I let them use the kitchen. Why, she’d have run me right out of my own house if I’d let her. She even wanted to bring her girl friends here.”
That one gave me a kick. I’d asked her once if I could bring Rose around, and she nearly, hit the ceiling. Said she was running a respectable house and “that woman” — as she called Rose — wasn’t going to run her out of her own house. She had no objections to male friends, though.
“You don’t have many friends, do you?” she asked West.
“No”
“No, of course you don’t. Well, I think you’re just a fine person. You’re quiet and you don’t take a lot of baths and use up a lot of hot water. I think we’ll get along just fine, don’t you?”
“Oh yes.”
“Sure we will. Sure we will.”
So, every evening after that she used to take him a cup of cocoa. At first he didn’t seem eager, but later he appeared pleased as though he felt happy somebody was taking notice of him.
It was about two or three weeks later that I came home from work one night and was walking down the hall to my room. West’s door was open and on the rickety old table was a photograph of a woman. I walked in to look at it. She was about thirty, with blonde hair and regular features, but she looked reckless around the eyes. Then I heard West coming in, so I went to my room. Mrs. Coombs came up the stairs with him, jiggling the cup of cocoa and talking a steady streak.
I heard her stop short and she must have seen the picture. She couldn’t have been in his room all that day. The cocoa cup almost fell out of her hands.
“Who’s that?” she demanded hoarsely.
“That’s my wife,” he answered.
I could see her advance on the picture as though it were alive. “I thought you said your wife was dead.”
“I did.” His voice sounded a little shaky.
“What have you got her picture here for then?”
I swore to myself. It was just the kind of fool question she would ask, one with no answer. West made the mistake of trying to answer it.
“I–I like to remember her.”
“What for? She’s dead, isn’t she? What does she care?”
I could see West trembling. When Mrs. Coombs walked toward him as though to smell his breath, he shrank back. “What are you shaking for?” she rasped. “Have you been drinking?”
“Oh no. I don’t drink. You know that.”
She turned and came out, the cocoa still in her hand. Her face was working and she was talking to herself as she went down the stairs. I remember noticing that the wind was beginning to blow outside. It always wailed through one of the spouts.
Ten minutes later I heard her voice in West’s room. “Were you smoking?” she demanded.
“Yes, I was. Isn’t that all right?”
“Well, I can’t have any smoking here. I just can’t. I’m willing to do my part, but I have to draw the line somewhere.”
“But — but you never said anything before...”
“Well, I just can’t have it. My friends all tell me I shouldn’t put up with it. They all tell me.” And down she went, muttering.
For a week or two afterward West got no cocoa. Then one night Mrs. Coombs met him at the door as though nothing had happened and held out to him the joyful hope that they were going to get along just fine. She even brought him his cocoa. But if he thought by this that the unpleasantness was over, he must have had an awful jolt. It was just starting. Mrs. Coombs had her hunting eye fixed on the dead wife’s picture and all that it represented.
One evening she drifted up the stairs with a picture in her hand. As usual, she must have startled West. Fie was easy to startle anyway, and living under the same roof with her wasn’t helping any. I could see her walk purposefully toward the wife’s photograph, glancing slyly at West the while. “I brought you a nice new picture, a pretty landscape, for your room.”
After a short silence he answered. “Thank you very much. I’ll hang it on the wall.”
“On the wall? Why don’t you put it in that frame?” She was staring at him, but pointing at the photograph.
“Well — Mrs. Coombs — I couldn’t do that.”
She gripped her picture so tightly that it almost crumpled. “Don’t you like my picture?”
“Of course I like it and I appreciate everything you’ve done, but...”
“But you’d rather have that woman here, is that it?”
“But, Mrs. Coombs, she’s—”
“Don’t Mrs. Coombs me, mister. If people don’t appreciate things—!”