She was, too, insistently enchanted with Laurel Falls; shortly, she said, Ernest would renew his boyhood ties and they would get around a little socially, and would start to entertain, as Ernest’s mother wished them to. Then she showed Starr a print, lifting it from the fixing-bath, of a portrait which Ernest had taken, Starr reflectively observed, on an eight-by-ten sheet, of an eye, a wen, an ear.
Ernest said brusquely, “Our gardener,” and Starr said, “Remarkable,” and Bertha said brightly, “It settles so, don’t you think, on the things that are really important?”
Madam Tuffman said nothing except (in reply to Starr) goodbye.
A month later Madam Tuffman phoned again. She told Starr’s secretary, Miss Wadsworth, that the tweak seemed still to be there and she would appreciate it if Dr. Starr would call. On his way to this second visit Starr still considered that a mild arthritic or rheumatic condition might be setting in, but when he heard again a listing of the twinges and their obscure locations, he dismissed the probability from his thoughts. He wanted, as was his custom, to be perfectly frank and tell Madam Tuffman that she was wasting both her money and his time, but the strength of some deep emotion which lay beneath the liveliness of her dark eyes prevented him.
So he suggested that she give his former prescription a further chance, being uncomfortably aware that she appreciated its pathetic innocuity but was grateful for its value as an excuse (yes, he thought, that was it) to bring him into the house. He realized later that it was then, at that moment, when a tacit understanding sprang up between them that the twinges would remain, and that he would dose Madam Tuffman with the most shameless simples whenever she wanted him to come.
She said after this arrangement was so psychically settled upon: “You will think me a doting parent, Doctor. Unfortunately, I am. A man once read the bumps on Ernest’s head when he was a child, and said that there was nothing that Ernest couldn’t do. Sort of a Carlylean possession of a fixed capacity which could be turned with equal success into any channel Ernest might choose. The latest proof seems to be golf. Ernest never played before, but he has practically lived on the links during the past month — he and Bertha.”
“And photography? The studio in town?”
“Oh, that! At least we can store winter apples and potatoes in the cellar again. It seems that Ernest is already much better at the game than Bertha, who has golfed for years in Honolulu.”
“Evidently a natural talent. I wish I possessed it.”
“In fact, Ernest is almost as good as that Mabel Hoplin divorcée; and she, I understand, approaches being professional. I continue to refer to golf.”
“They play together?”
Madam Tuffman looked vague.
“Bertha tells me so.” Her eyes were once more penetratingly lively. “Bertha wanted him to. It seems that the change in climate has made her tire easily.”
“That’s a comforting thing about climates. You can attribute any ailment whatever to them.”
“So I have found.” Madam Tuffman fingered an inconsequential handkerchief deeply bordered with Brussels lace. “Are you by any chance golfing at the club this afternoon, Doctor?”
He said, after a moment: “Yes, Mrs. Tuffman. I am.”
Starr did some telephoning after he left, and managed to arrange a foursome for five o’clock. He reached the clubhouse shortly before four. He found Bertha Tuffman seated on its glass-enclosed southern veranda reading a book for which she had made a plain paper dust-cover. He suggested cocktails or tea.
“Tea, if you don’t mind, Doctor.” Starr gave the order to a waiter, and Bertha said: “I simply don’t drink. It’s a habit that’s missing in me constitutionally... I do like your course here.”
“Have you finished for the day?”
“I found nine holes enough.” Her voice stayed charmingly bright. “I’m continually expecting Ernest to divorce me for a dynamo. He’s indefatigable.”
Starr equably shook out the climatic change between Honolulu and Ohio, and Bertha gratefully agreed that her lessening spryness was, of course, due to that. Shortly, on almost any tomorrow, she would be feeling herself again. Not that she was ill. Her laughter at this absurdity was gay and clear. She would concede brief moments of nostalgia, moments when she would lie on the rattan chaise longue of their bedroom and fancy, while her eyes played among the wallpaper’s tropical pattern of strong green leaves, that she was back in her childhood of Hawaii. But such moments swiftly passed. No, it wasn’t any illness it was simply that she wanted to live as fully as Ernest did, to be not only a helpmeet but a teammate as well, while Ernest sprinted with his boundless bravura along his kaleidoscopic succession of tracks.
Bertha said, again, that she wanted to live. Leaving the statement, this time, quite flat. Then she stood up abruptly and said, while her smile grew set and strained, that she would be right back.
Starr sat and observed through glass panes the eighteenth hole, toward which Ernest Tuffman and Mabel Hoplin (the amateur in divorces) were so springily walking, trailed by their flushed and sweated caddies. Then the club’s perennial debutante paused at his table — an Ethel Sweetloss, starved down into the Misses and eye-shadowed into a mauve version of Mimi’s penultimate gasp in La Bohème.
Miss Sweetloss said, huskily: “Why the dust-cover, Doctor? Brushing up on some extracurricular techniques with the knife?”
Starr broke loose from his abstraction and stood up. He saw that Miss Sweetloss had opened the book which Bertha had been reading. He recognized the work as one of the better anthologies on famous real-life murders. He managed to smile back at Miss Sweetloss as he took the book from her hand.
“Just a busman’s holiday, Miss Sweetloss — among the cyanides and the more scarlet fields of human behavior...”
The successive visits did not, at the time, seem significant. Starr missed meeting Bertha or Ernest during all of them, as both were involved in a full swing of social activities. Over and above their fictional base of twinges, a précis of the visits simply bulked largely with Madam Tuffman’s opinion that Bertha was quite definitely very deeply in love with Ernest.
Madam Tuffman pointedly made something special of the fact, as if she wanted Starr to realize that it was not an ordinary love in just an affectionate or a biological sense, but that it had a devotional flavor, like a half-portion of the more notable examples such as Romeo and Juliet: a half-portion in that Madam Tuffman didn’t seem so sure about Ernest as a prototype for the party of the first part. And neither, she had sensed, did Bertha.
But then, you never could tell about Ernest. Madam Tuffman had never been able to and she doubted whether anyone else ever could, even a wife. He lowered so, like thunder, and then could be gentle as a zephyr-ean coo from a dove. She supposed it was the trouble with having loose dynamite in his veins instead of blood The lamb!
Golf, of course, had long been discarded as an accomplished fact, and Mabel Hoplin had as cavalierly been discarded with it. The latest flame on the horizon was a sloop. Something in the nature of Jack London’s Sea Wolf, in which Ernest would install Bertha and (if Madam Tuffman washed — but she didn’t) his mother, and away with it all to some black-flied tropical hell in the South Atlantic...
It was a midsummer visit which definitely served as an overture to the affair’s desperate end.
Madam Tuffman believed that Bertha was going to have a child. She intended to bring Bertha to Starr’s office on the following day, for his opinion. From her own exhaustive fund of personal experience Madam Tuffman was satisfied with the symptoms, which included, among other trivia, moody fits of a temperamental melancholy. Bertha had increasingly kept to her room, the complimentary papering of which Madam Tuffman now considered a mistake, for it seemed to be getting on Bertha’s nerves. She had overheard Bertha muttering fiercely to herself: “The leaves — the twining leaves.”