Martha was puzzled. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Did something happen at school?”
“Uh uh.”
“Is there something you want and you don’t like to ask for it?”
“Uh uh.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, what’s got into you?”
“I’m thinking.”
“She’s growing up,” Charles said.
She didn’t want to grow up. She wanted to be a little baby or an old woman or a dog or a horse or anything but Laura growing up.
Usually she got on very well with Charles. He seemed to understand that the house was too quiet and their mode of living too dull for a sixteen-year-old. He put himself out to be entertaining, deliberately creating noise and confusion. After dinner he would play the piano and sing very loudly to cover up his mistakes. Laura would sing with him, giggling whenever he struck a wrong note.
Now and then Martha came in, to empty Charles’s ashtray or pick up a piece of sheet music that had fallen on the floor. She didn’t try to stop the noise or even look disapproving. She simply ignored them both out of existence, as if she had gone suddenly blind, or deaf, or had moved into a vacuum where no sounds could penetrate and Charles was real and realized only through his ability to dirty an ashtray.
Once, when she came in, Charles stopped playing and swung around to face her.
“Martha...”
“Oh, don’t stop playing on my account, Charles.”
“We never have any fun together, do we?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Let’s go dancing tomorrow night. Buy yourself a new dress. We’ll have dinner at Chez Maurice and go around to the Embassy or some place afterwards.”
She had bought the dress, but the next afternoon she sent Laura to tell Charles that she had a headache and didn’t care to go out.
“But why?” Charles asked.
“I don’t know,” Laura said. “Maybe she has a headache.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“She was crazy about the dress. She took me with her to buy it. It’s awfully cute blue velvet with a slit in the skirt and a big white flower at the waist.”
“O.K. It’s all right. I’m getting too damn old to dance, anyway.”
That had been a year ago. The dress hung in a cellophane bag in Martha’s closet. From a little way off it looked brand new, but when Laura tried it on one day she noticed that there were smudges around the hem as if someone had worn it and danced in it, and the petals of the white flower drooped as if crushed between two bodies or bruised by a hand.
Someone had worn it. Not Lily — she wouldn’t have the nerve. Not Laura herself, because the dress didn’t fit her. So it was Martha. Maybe she put it on when she was alone in her room just to wear the thing out.
Or maybe, Laura thought with a shock, she even dances in front of the mirror holding a pillow the way I used to do when I was just a kid.
There was something frightening in this idea about Martha. It seemed to imply things Laura didn’t understand and to suggest sly secrets she didn’t want to hear. It left her with the same shameful feeling as her dream of being married to Charles.
She readjusted the mirrors again. The pancake makeup helped, and besides this was her best angle, three-quarters face. She looked pretty enough to be a chorus girl. She toyed with the idea of becoming the first chorus girl/psychologist in history. It would be hard, but at least she would get on the cover of Life Magazine, and never again would she have to get down on her knees and beg Brown to let her borrow his wretched little car. People would give her cars, also mink coats. Chorus girls needed strong arches, so she walked around the room ten times on the outside edges of her shoes.
Having thus rescued her life from the ashes and dusted it off, she proceeded out into the hall to look for Brown, a mean and stingy man, if there ever was one, and she wouldn’t be seen dead in his lousy car if she had one of her own.
From the landing halfway down the stairs, she saw the doctor’s car winding up the driveway. He was coming to see Charles, of course. Charley had fainted and Martha had a bandage on her hand.
She forgot all about finding Brown. She sat down on the windowseat, biting her thumbnail, realizing for the first time since she’d overheard the quarrel that it hadn’t been an ordinary quarrel. Charley was kicking them out — her and Martha and her mother. What terrifying, awful power men had. Charles had only to say “Get out,” and they were forced to leave.
But it was not Martha who left, after all. It was Charles himself. Dr. MacNeil explained it to Martha downstairs, after he had talked with Charles. He was puzzled, he said, he was at a loss. As Mrs. Pearson knew, he was an allergist and the study of allergies was, more than any other branch of medicine, closely related to the study of psychiatry.
Would Mrs. Pearson grant that Mr. Pearson showed some degree of neurosis?
Mrs. Pearson would be delighted to grant it.
Very well then, Mrs. Pearson would understand that this most unfortunate accident with the aspirin tablets would have a more devastating effect on the mind of a nervous and introspective man like Mr. Pearson than it would on an ordinary man.
Ordinary men do not become ill from aspirin, Mrs. Pearson pointed out.
How true. But suppose he did. Would not an ordinary man feel to a lesser degree exactly as Mr. Pearson felt, that his wife was responsible?
Was the doctor implying...?
No, the doctor was not implying. Mrs. Pearson could not have known that Mr. Pearson had developed an allergy to aspirin. He, himself, Mr. Pearson’s own doctor, could not make an accurate list of the things to which Mr. Pearson was sensitive. The list was continually changing, as was usual in the case of a genuine anaphylactic personality. The amount of histamine manufactured in Mr. Pearson’s system during the years he had treated him was enough to kill off the entire household.
Dear me.
Quite. Had Mrs. Pearson ever heard of the Freudian concept of the death-wish?
No, she hadn’t, she didn’t want to, and she wished he would go away and leave her alone. His eyes probed her like needles. He had a broad forehead and thick, black brows that moved with a life of their own. By contrast, his chin was round and fat and pink as a marshmallow, with a dimple in the middle as if a child had stuck a finger into it.
She concentrated on the dimple and said, “I didn’t let myself realize until today what Charles was actually thinking about me.”
“It’s hard for you, I know,” MacNeil said with professional sympathy. “But illness distorts the perspective of a man by narrowing his world, limiting it to one room and perhaps one person. In this case, you are the person. Whether it’s a matter of choice or necessity, I have always considered it unfortunate for members of a family to nurse each other during illness. Ordinarily family life produces enough friction under the best of circumstances, and when a man is ill his world, as I said, is narrower and more intense. His sensibility is exacerbated and leads him into extremes. He is both irritable and apologetic, both self-pitying and proud.”
“In a roundabout way, you’re advising a separation, aren’t you?”
“A temporary separation is vitally important.”
“I suppose it’s useless to try and reason with him?”
“You don’t reason with a delusion any more than you reason with a pneumonia virus. Your husband must be given time to heal. You, on your part, must realize more fully than you do now that he loves you very profoundly.”
She smiled dryly. “Charles can be very convincing sometimes.”
“Oh, he didn’t tell me that. It’s so obvious that he didn’t have to.”
“It’s not obvious to me.”