Molly came up to him now and slipped her arm through his. Lucinda met his eyes with smiling tolerance. Long ago she had ceased to have any jealousy toward Molly. He knew that. But now sudden perception came into his mind. Had her tolerance begun after that first time he had gone to see Georgia? Had she said to herself, “Let him have anyone except Georgia?” He felt Molly’s plump shoulder pressing his arm and could barely keep himself from moving from her in repulsion at Lucinda’s duplicity.
“Come!” he said, forcing himself to heartiness. “The guests are waiting.”
“John was asking if you’d want to go to Baltimore in October,” he said to Lucinda that night. He sat watching her while she performed the last rites upon her skin. Her maid had brushed and braided her hair and gone away. It was past midnight. The guests were in their rooms.
Lucinda did not look at him. At the mention of Baltimore she stiffened. It had been on a visit to Baltimore that she had discovered that he sometimes saw Georgia. Not that he had to this day acknowledged it — he maintained that he went only to see Tom, and upon that they had quarreled.
“I hope I have the right to see my own brother!” he had insisted coldly.
She had turned to him with dreadful acumen. “As if you could lie to me!” she had cried. “Pierce Delaney, I can see through you as though you were made of glass! You want to see Georgia!”
He had been staggered. She had discovered what he himself had refused to know. Then she had spat out the words at him. “You and your brother Tom!”
He had stared at her, his blood frozen in his veins with terror. “How foul women are,” he had muttered, and he had left the room instantly. They had never spoken of Georgia again.
She did not speak of her now. “Everything depends upon when Martin and Mary Louise decide to be married,” she said lightly.
“I have no desire to go to Baltimore,” he said. “I’m getting too old for such shindigs.”
She laughed at this. “As if you didn’t know you are handsomer than ever!” She came and sat on a footstool at his knee. The glow from the coals in the small brass decorated grate, which she had brought over from England shone upon her face. He felt an amazing tenderness for her and put his hand on her neck. But she slipped from under his touch. “Not tonight,” she said firmly.
He withdrew his hand quickly and with anger. “You don’t allow me even to show you affection, without thinking I—” he broke off.
Lucinda laughed. “I know you too well, my dear,” she said — Then she yawned. “But I have nothing on my conscience. I am a very good wife to you, I’m sure — you are treated well, Pierce, and you know it.”
“I don’t want to be — treated well — as you call it—” he said.
“Now let’s not begin on what you want — at this hour of the night,” she said. She got up quickly and moved about, straightening one small object after another, a luster bowl on the table, a small French clock beside her bed, a Dresden china pair of figures on the mantel, the crystal-hung candlesticks on the mantel.
“I know it means nothing to you what I want,” he said somberly. “You’ve made out a formula for me, damn you, Luce! You run me on a schedule — a timetable — you don’t allow anything for my feelings—”
“Your feelings, my dear,” she interposed, “always have the same common denominator.”
He clasped his jaws shut and got up. “Good night,” he said.
“Now you are angry,” she said brightly. “You can’t bear the truth, can you, Pierce! You never could … So you’ll never get the truth from me … I promise you! Don’t worry!”
She was angry, too, and this was rare enough to make him pause. “I am not angry,” he said more mildly. “It’s just that you — think you know everything — about everything.”
“Only about you,” she said.
She climbed into the high bed and lay back against her lace-edged pillows and yawned again.
“Good night, Pierce,” she said. “Get up in a good mood tomorrow, please.” She blew out the lamp and he had to stumble through the darkness as best he could.
He went into his own room prickling with rage. She had put him in the wrong again in her own inexplicable fashion. But he was not in the wrong. She had him in a cage of her own making, a cage whereby whatever he said she let him know that she had known already what he was going to say and how he was going to feel. He rebelled against her calm assumption that there was nothing in him which she did not know and yet he was hamstrung by the thought that even so she might be right. She had an uncanny way of ferreting out his most secret thought. Whether there was something in this of the telepathy out of which people were making parlor games nowadays — but he had gone to such absurd lengths as not to think in her presence of things which he wished to keep to himself. And yet he loved her more than ever, too, in a helpless fashion. She was in his being, his children’s mother. He wished Sally were at home, but Sally was at school in Lewisburg … And Sally was growing away from him, too — he suspected her of it. Even last summer she was always off on some visit or other. He had never felt close to Lucie, the last child to be at home. Lucinda had hired an English governess for her.
He sighed and climbed into his great bed and blew out the lamp. Away from Malvern people looked up to him as a successful man. Even at Malvern they looked up to him. Only Lucinda reduced him to an unreasonable, disgusting creature, always at the mercy of — of animal passion. He closed his eyes and waited fretfully for sleep.
In late May John asked him to go to Philadelphia to look at the site for a great new terminal building. He showed the letter to Lucinda. She read it, and raised her eyebrows.
“I suppose you think you have to go,” she said.
“It is not a matter of what I think,” Pierce returned with firmness. “When John asks me to do something for the business I must do it.” She shrugged her shoulders at the word “business,” and the talk was ended.
He approached Philadelphia with his usual calm. Many times now during the years he had come here to see Tom. Many times? Perhaps half a dozen times, all told, always with business as his honest purpose. Out of the half dozen times twice he saw only Tom, downtown at his hotel. They had exchanged brief news about the family on both sides. The other times he had gone to Tom’s home.
Tom had had no more children. Leslie had grown up and had gone to New York to work on a newspaper. There he had married a young West Indian. Pierce had never seen her, but he had looked at the wedding photograph in the parlor of Tom’s home. If he was surprised at the sight of the dark loveliness of the girl in the long white satin gown and cloudy white veil he had said nothing. Not by one word did he ever let Tom know such surprise. Leslie had grown into a handsome fellow dismayingly like Pierce’s own father. He was clever and quick and more and more he had cut himself off from his family and lived in the world of his own kind in New York.
Lettice wanted to be a trained nurse and Georgy was to be a teacher. Of all the children only Georgy was filled with the fierce flame of equality. She was going south, she said, as soon as she finished school, and work for the sharecroppers. Georgy was dark, so dark that she would have to move into the Jim Crow cars in Virginia. Pierce smothered the strange feeling it gave him when he thought of the slim brown creature who was his own niece having to declare herself. Some day, of course, he told himself in the secret recesses of his conscience, all such things would have to cease. His own niece, Jim Crowed on the railroad that enriched Malvern — but he could do nothing about it. … Small Tom no one knew. He was in the throes of boyhood, a tall, gangling, curly-haired boy whose lips were a trifle too full.
John MacBain met him at the station and together they got into a carriage and the black coachman drove them to the busiest part of downtown, where the new building was to stand. It would cover a whole block.