“What do you propose we do about it?”
“Offer Thelma money to leave town. Once she’s gone, the rumors will die down, people will forget, I can begin to live again.”
“How much money?”
“Fifty thousand dollars. It would be worth that much to me to see the end of her.”
“Suppose she refuses?”
“I don’t see why she should. She has nothing to gain by staying here, except shame and humiliation and ridicule.”
“Perhaps that’s what she wants, self-punishment, self-debasement.”
“Thelma’s too sensible for that.”
“My dear Esther, one of the things you learn early in my profession is that you can’t tell from the outside who’s sensible and who’s not, and a great deal of the time you can’t tell for certain what’s sense and what’s not. As far as I was able to gather, Mrs. Bream is not the usual femme fatale with a string of extramarital affairs behind her. She’s an ordinary virtuous woman who has committed the kind of sin which ordinary virtuous women don’t permit themselves to commit. If they do, they suffer. Mrs. Bream is suffering, suffering doubly because of the drastic consequences of her infidelity. In such a frame of mind she’d be unlikely, I think, to accept the kind of pay-off you suggest.”
“Why?”
“It might seem to her a reward for having done something she loathes herself for.”
“You read too much psychology.”
Birmingham permitted himself a small tight smile. “Not at all. I practice it.”
“I still think you’re wrong about Thelma.”
“Quite possibly. I talked to her only once, yesterday, in the presence of her attorney. She said very little, seemed uninterested, detached. Finally she complained of feeling ill, stomach cramps, dizziness, and so on. Purely psychosomatic, of course.”
“Have you ever,” Esther asked coldly, “been pregnant, Mr. Birmingham?”
“Fortunately, no. When I left, Mrs. Bream was trying to get in touch with the doctor, and her attorney was hopping around the office like a nervous stork. I deplore such excitements. Her attorney, by the way, hinted delicately at a small monthly stipend from the estate until the baby is born. This is impossible, naturally.”
“Why?”
“Any payment — including the one you suggested — would be a virtual admission that your husband was responsible for the child. Then, later, when the child is born, we wouldn’t have any grounds to fight the case. Mrs. Bream, or rather, her attorney, who will probably receive twenty-five percent of any settlement, would be in a position to make some pretty stiff demands.” He added on a note of cheer, “Of course there’s always the possibility that Mrs. Bream won’t carry the child to term, or that it will be born dead, in which case our responsibility ends.”
“What an inhuman remark to make.” Esther had turned white with anger and her hands trembled as she lit a cigarette.
“It wasn’t intended as such. You have an unfortunate tendency to over-emotionalize the issue. A natural womanly reaction, of course, but it increases the difficulty of my position.”
“What is your position, to distort the facts?”
“My dear Esther...”
“You know the truth and so do I. Let’s face it.”
“Facing the truth,” Birmingham said bluntly, “is going to cost you a heap of money.”
“All right. I’ve got a heap of money, haven’t I?”
“Considerable, yes. You also have two arms, but that’s hardly a reason for discarding one of them.”
“A very poor analogy. Look, Mr. Birmingham, let’s get this straight. I hold no brief for Thelma. I don’t like her and never have. But I feel a certain obligation toward her because I...” She hesitated, coloring slightly. “Because I understand her position. It could happen — has happened — to other — other women. I don’t intend to fight any claims she makes on the estate. My conscience wouldn’t allow it.”
Birmingham had not been Galloway’s lawyer at the time of his divorce, but he remembered the case and Esther’s role in it and be began to realize that it was futile to argue with her. Whether or not she liked or approved of Thelma Bream, she had made a very strong identification with her: There went I. Only I was luckier.
“Very well,” he said. “We’ll let the matter ride for the present.”
You will, I won’t, she thought. But aloud she said cordially, “Of course. I’ll see you to the door.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“It will be a pleasure.”
She stood at the door watching his departure. He walked stiffly down the broad stone steps of the veranda and crossed the driveway to his car with ponderous dignity, like a penguin crossing an Antarctic waste, never missing the warm places of the world because he did not know they existed.
Though she had disliked Birmingham for years, she had never before openly opposed him. Now, like a child who has suddenly issued a declaration of independence, she felt a new power and vitality, as if some secret well of energy had been tapped. She ordered old Rudolph to check her car and bring it around to the front of the house. Then she went upstairs to dress for town. For the first time in a month she passed the closed door of Ron’s room without the increased heartbeat of fear and guilt.
“You’re out of practice,” Rudolph said. “You better let me drive you, Mrs. Galloway.”
“No thanks. You can stay and help Annie with the boys. Tell them,” she added, “tell them they’ll be going back to school tomorrow.”
Usually, when Esther drove downtown, she avoided the heaviest flow of traffic. Today she deliberately sought it out, feeling a pleasant, reassuring sense of anonymity. She was a woman in a car among hundreds of other women in cars. There was nothing special about her to attract attention. No one would bother watching her. No one but some crank on a telephone would believe she murdered her husband.
At the Bank of Commerce, on the corner of King and Yonge, she withdrew from her checking account two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, sealed them in an envelope and addressed it to Thelma. It was not an act of kindness or of pity, but one of compulsion, and the emotions behind it were deeper and stronger than kindness or pity.
Whatever the reasons, it was, for Esther, the first step back into the flow of life. Others followed, as spring passed into summer. She met friends for lunch at the King Edward or the Royal York or the Plaza. She and Nancy took their combined brood of six to Sunnyside for a day of rides. She wrote to Harry, cheerful, impersonal letters which he answered in the same vein. She went to dinner at the Winslows’ house and to several outdoor concerts with Joe Hepburn, who was tone-deaf but liked fresh air and crowds. The first week in July she drove the two boys and Annie up to the lodge near Wiarton, and promised them a return trip before school started again in September.
Aside from sending the money to Thelma once a month she had no contact with her, but she heard from Turee that Thelma was having a difficult time during her pregnancy. She had rented her house in Weston and taken a small apartment in town to be nearer her doctor in case of emergency. Esther wrote down Thelma’s new address in her address book, and the following day, a stifling morning in early August, she drove slowly past the apartment house on Spadina, trying to find enough courage to stop and ring the bell. But the car kept right on going as if of its own volition, and Esther thought, There was no parking space anyway. And it’s so hot. And early — she might not even be up. Besides, I have nothing special to say to her, no comfort to offer her, no special formula, no guarantee.
Throughout the summer she had been making similar excuses to herself, and while they oiled the surface of her mind, they did not seep down and touch the grit and gravel underneath. She was stoned by dreams of identification in which she became Thelma, harassed and trying to defend herself, accused and trying to justify herself, continually at the mercy of some cold-eyed stranger or some false friend. The accusing figures in the dreams varied — Birmingham, Turee, an unknown policeman who resembled her father, a schoolteacher she had once hated — but the accused was always the same, Thelma-Esther, like a double exposure, one image superimposed on the other.