“Four?” Edward had dropped into a chair, staring up at her. He had tried a short laugh and accomplished a strange disturbing sound. He had asked, “You mean counting me?”
Again the hesitation, the low voice, “Not counting you, Edward.”
“But this is grotesque” was all Edward had been able to say, then he had lost his temper and said many things, while she had stood tensely by the fireplace, with one elbow resting on the mantel, watching him. The expression of her eyes had been the impersonal, appraising expression that was in her eyes now as she worked on his bust. When he quieted he had asked, “I know Rice died, but what happened to the others? Divorced?”
“No, Edward.”
He remembered the calm assurance of her tone, and it occurred to him now for the first time that she had met his eyes throughout the incident. She had never looked away, once she had told him there were four.
“They’re dead, Edward,” she had said flatly.
“All four? All four died on your hands?” he had exclaimed.
Thinking of it, Edward’s heart seemed now to rustle like autumn leaves and her answer still was brittle in his ears: “I should think, Edward, you’d be more considerate. It isn’t fair to cross-examine me about things past. I’ve had my share of misfortune and I’d like to forget it.”
“But look here, Elaine, I’m your husband,” he had said. “We were married to share our lives, not just a part of them. Marriage is a contract and all the facts should be set forth, all the...”
“You’re talking like a lawyer.” She had waved one hand impatiently. “Oh, Edward, you know you’d have been even more upset if I’d told you in the beginning. I didn’t tell you simply because I knew you’d mind.”
“Well, I do mind,” he’d said. “I mind like hell. I don’t mean about George and Larry and whoever else. I mean, damn it, you should have told me. You shouldn’t have kept it from me.”
But later he had softened. He’d been sympathetic and, holding her hand, had said, “Darling, you’ve had a lot of bad luck, I know. I suppose I can understand your being secretive about it, but please, let’s have no more of it. Let’s tell each other everything. What do you say? No more secrets.”
She had clung to him then and sobbed and whispered, “No more secrets, darling,” and the next few days had been the best of their marriage. But he had been unable to get those four out of his head. He had known that it was pointless to ask about them, but he could not keep them out of his thoughts. After all — four husbands! He had begun to form mental pictures of them, to assign physical characteristics and character traits.
The last one, that man Rice, he knew about. Elaine had met him out on the Coast, been his wife about a year. It was heart disease that had taken Rice, he remembered. Then there was George, who was stuffy. Edward conceived of George as a large man with a prominent chin and rather choking high collars. She had passed Larry off rather casually. But what was his last name? And who in blazes was the other fellow, the one somewhere in between?
It was the one between, the man without a name, who troubled Edward most. Several times he had been on the point of asking about him, but he had not dared return to those bitter days of distrust and evasion. Often he had tried to lead the discussion around to the subject, such as the time they’d been to a cocktail party downtown and had stopped for one more at the Brevoort on a fine spring day when the hedges were set out and sunlight fell on the tables.
“Darling,” he had said after the second Manhattan, “where were you born?”
“Where? In a hospital, I suppose. What difference does it make?”
“I mean what part of the country? What town?”
“I haven’t any idea, Edward. You know I’m an orphan.”
“But you know who your parents were, don’t you?”
“Just their names.”
“Then where were you brought up? In a foundling home?”
“Edward, are you going to pry again? Please. I had rather a rough childhood and I’d rather not talk about it.”
“All right,” he had said. “Sorry, Elaine.”
But it did seem, he had thought, that she would know her home town. It couldn’t be far from the foundling home. It would be in the same state, certainly. She must know the state.
That was the worst part of it, Edward reflected. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, even though he told himself that he ought to let the matter drop before he caused a barrier more serious than her secretiveness, than the four husbands, the four dead men.
He wondered now if he should have consulted a psychiatrist. It was unhealthy the way his thoughts had returned to those four men, and he had realized that it could not go on so indefinitely. But there were things he had to know and she should have told him. This other fellow, this in-between man, he had a name, and Edward felt he ought to know it.
One day he had been reading Pope from a handsomely bound library set that Elaine had put in the shelves and he came across a marked passage in a translation from Homer that said:
He read it aloud, asked, “You mark it, dear?”
“I?” Elaine had raised her eyebrows. “Of course not. Why should I?”
“I wonder who did,” Edward had said. “Asphodel. That’s the flower of the dead that blooms in hell. Nice line, too... where souls unbodied dwell, In ever flow’ring meads of asphodel. Where did the book come from?”
She had moved her shoulders uneasily, her eyes turning aside in evasion. Edward had persisted, “Whom did it belong to? Rice?”
“I believe so.” She had risen. “Time for bed, Edward.”
“Yes, all right. In a moment.”
But Edward had closed the book on his knees and sat staring into the fire. It was an odd passage to have marked, where souls unbodied dwell, and he wondered if Rice’s hand had made the pencil lines in the margin, if Rice had known about the three before him, if those three had been unbodied, but present and accounted for, as all four were for Edward. It was a beautiful, exotic word, asphodel, and Edward had thought that it somehow suited Elaine. Then he had wondered if he had called her that, this fellow Rice. To himself he might have called her Asphodel.
It was that morbid line of thought again, running through his mind as he sat posing in the studio. That night he had tried to stop it by throwing the book to the floor. But sleepless in bed he had thought of Rice and found him as absorbing as the fellow in between, whose name he did not know. He’d been a newspaperman on the Coast, Edward knew, and rather small potatoes, at that. An obvious mismatch for Elaine. But the man had liked poetry and he had found that passage and marked it. Asphodel, the pale lily of the dead.
The word repeated itself in Edward’s brain now as he sat looking at the bronze faun, and his lips moved silently in saying it. Was it only three days since he had seen the letter in her handbag? It seemed like weeks.
They had been about to go out for the evening, and as Edward opened the door the telephone had rung. Elaine had answered it, and after a moment he heard her clear voice saying, “Wait, I’ll get a pencil and jot it down.”
She had returned. “Do you have a pencil, Edward?”
“No. Afraid not.”
“I must have one.” She had opened her handbag, found a pencil, and dropped the bag on a refectory table.
Edward had waited impatiently in the foyer. It had been one of those idle moments when the mind pauses and the eye strays, and for a long time he had looked at the sheet of green paper that had fallen from her bag before he bent over to pick it up. It was because of the letterhead, Greenvale Cemetery, that his eyes had dropped to the lines of type below. It was a bill for the upkeep of a cemetery plot in a small town fifty miles from New York. He had hardly digested the fact when Elaine returned.