“No, I really can’t, thanks just the same.”
“What a pity. I’ve so enjoyed talking to you. You’re a veritable tonic for me, Harry. I feel better than I have for weeks and weeks. I do wish you’d stay a bit longer.”
“Sorry, I have to get home.”
“Home. Of course. I keep forgetting you’re married now. I keep forgetting my manners too, I’m afraid. How is your wife?”
“Thelma’s fine, thank you.”
“Thelma. What a pretty name, it just suits her. Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you one other thing Ron said on the telephone. I couldn’t quite understand it myself. Perhaps you can.”
“I’ll try.”
“He seemed to be under the impression that he had harmed you in some way. I’ll see if I can give you his exact words. ‘I’ve done something terrible to Harry and I’m sorry, I want him to know I’m sorry.’ Do you know what he meant?”
“No.”
“You must have some idea.”
“None. None at all.” Harry rose. His face felt stiff, like cardboard, as if it would crack if he tried to move it. “I don’t know what he was talking about.”
“How very odd, don’t you think?”
“I — yes. Yes, it is.”
“But you mustn’t let me keep you with my chattering.”
She extended her hand and Harry took it just as he had when he greeted her, but this time he wanted to squeeze it hard, as hard as possible, until he could hear the bones squeak.
“Is something wrong, Harry? You’re so pale.”
“Nothing is wrong.”
“Well, give my best to Thelma. You’re a lucky man, she’s such an attractive young woman.”
“Yes. Please say good-bye to your mother for me.”
“Of course. It was sweet of you to come, Harry. We must get together more often.”
They exchanged brief farewells and Harry went out into the hall, leaving the door of Dorothy’s room open as he’d found it.
He should have closed it. All the way down the steps he fancied he heard noises coming from the tower, little chuckling sounds. Dorothy was laughing. The princess was burping after her banquet. Harry wished she would choke.
Eleven
Marian Robinson, a spinster at thirty by choice, was now in her middle forties and the choice had long since been taken out of her hands. Marian’s reaction to this fact was characteristic: she had begun to hate men, all men, with an almost religious intensity. She saved clippings, and collected stories, of men who had murdered, embezzled, kidnapped, beaten their wives, been unkind to cats, or committed any of fifty other acts which she found distasteful. She was, therefore, in the correct frame of mind when her cousin Thelma phoned and asked if she could share Marian’s apartment for a time.
To Marian this could mean only one thing, that Thelma had finally discovered she was married to a brute, a lecher, or at the very least an alcoholic, and the poor girl needed sanctuary. Marian’s apartment was small, closet space minimal and bed linen insufficient, but Marian was quite prepared to make sacrifices for a good cause, such as the dissolution of a marriage. When Thelma, upon arriving, made it clear that Harry was not a brute or even an alcoholic, Marian swallowed her disappointment along with two aspirin tablets and a cup of strong hot tea.
Thelma did not confide in Marian either the fact of her condition or the rather circuitous route by which she’d reached it. She told her merely that she and Harry had had a slight argument.
The two women had a light supper in the kitchen and Marian was washing the dishes and Thelma drying when the front doorbell rang.
“I’m not expecting anyone,” Marian said. “Are you?”
Thelma shook her head listlessly.
“You don’t suppose it’s that husband of yours, do you? I told him quite distinctly on the phone that as far as he was concerned you were incommunicado.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Well, I’ll just go and give him a piece of my...”
“No. No, Marian. I’ll answer it. You sit down and have another cup of tea, it will do you good.”
“I don’t need any good done to me,” Marian said crisply. “It’s you I’m worried about, you look like a ghost.”
“I can face — handle things. You just wait here and stop worrying.”
Marian would never have admitted it aloud but she found it rather pleasant to be told what to do for a change. At the insurance office where she’d worked for twenty-three years she gave the orders. It wasn’t always easy but it had to be done. She had some dozen girls under her. She knew none of them liked her, some of the younger ones made fun of her behind her back and called her Old Corsets, and others sat around hoping she’d fall down and break a leg. Marian knew the whole office would go to pot without her, so she was careful about falling and kept right on giving orders whether or not they made her popular. In the past Marian had never actually paid much attention to Thelma, but now she thought how different Thelma was from the girls in the office, not silly, and not timid by any means, just sort of sweet, in a womanly way.
Marian poured herself a third cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table to enjoy it. She did not intend to eavesdrop, heaven forbid, but it was surprising the way sounds carried in a small apartment.
When Thelma opened the door Harry did not wait to be asked to enter. He thrust his way inside like an overzealous salesman, then closed the door and stood with his back against it in a kind of childish defiance, as if he were daring her to evict him.
He looked so silly that Thelma wanted to laugh, but she knew if she laughed she might also cry. The two, laughter and tears, seemed inextricably knotted inside her so that she couldn’t move one without disturbing the other. She said quietly, “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“I had to.”
“I asked you to wait. I can’t — I don’t feel qualified to discuss anything with you reasonably.”
“O.K. Be unreasonable.”
“Don’t play games, Harry.”
“I think it’s you playing games,” he said, with a little smile to soften the criticism. “Mysterious notes, hints, forebodings. I’m just an ordinary man. I don’t understand mysterious notes, I’ve never had a foreboding in my life, and I guess I can’t take hints very well either. What’s it all about, Thelma?”
Instead of replying, she moved to the opposite side of the room as if she feared intimacy or anger and wanted to get as much distance between Harry and herself as possible. It seemed safer and easier to face him across Marian’s mohair sofa and rose and brown Axminster rug.
Harry raised his voice to bridge the distance. “We’re not a couple of kids any more, Thelma. We’re married. We’ve shared a great many things. Whatever’s bothering you, we’ve got to share that too.”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I have to share it with — with somebody else.”
“Marian?”
“Marian.” She began to laugh, and almost instantly she could feel the sting of tears inside her eyelids.
He looked away, giving her time to compose herself. “All right, not Marian. Who, then?”
“I begged you not to come here, not to force me to talk before I was ready, before I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“What’s happened to Ron. I can’t — I can’t talk to you until I know where Ron is.”
“Ron, he’s part of your trouble?”
Her face disintegrated like paper crushed in a fist. “Oh God, I begged you, I asked you not to... Why did you come? Why can’t you let me alone? Why didn’t Ralph tell you?”