Behind her a man’s voice called, “Martha! Oh, Martha!” and for a second she hesitated because the voice sounded like Charles’s. It held the same bantering note, as if there was something intrinsically humorous about her name and the repetition of it. It was not Charles’s voice, of course. But her mistake was significant. It showed how much of the time she thought about him, how completely he had pervaded her life.
“Martha!”
She stopped and turned around. A man in a light brown suit and no hat was threading his way through the crowd towards her. She didn’t recognize him, and she was on the point of walking on and pretending she hadn’t heard him.
But it was too late. He was beside her, his hand familiarly touching her arm.
“Well, Martha.” He stood very close to her, smiling, and because they were the same height their closeness seemed indecently intimate.
She drew away and said stiffly, “I’m sorry, I...”
“I thought it was you hiding behind those glasses. Come on over here. I want to look at you.”
He gave her a friendly little push and she moved, from sheer momentum and shock, and stood in the doorway of a florist’s shop. There was a sheaf of daffodils in the window flanked by white china swans. She tried to concentrate on the daffodils, count them, one, two, three, four... He was deeply tanned and in contrast his eyes looked very pale and excited. He had a queer, tense way of standing, as if he was all ready to do something drastic, like snatch her purse or break into a hundred-yard dash. Anyway, there were twelve daffodils. An even dozen. A round dozen. A...
She turned and faced him. “Well, Steve. How nice to see you again.”
“Just got back a week ago. First thing I did was to phone the old number. But you weren’t there, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“Take off those glasses and let me have a look at you. You’ve changed, Martha.” He was frowning and his face wore a disappointed expression.
“Oh, have I? Well, in five years you can expect a reasonable amount of change.”
“I want to talk to you. Come on in some place and have a drink.”
“No, sorry. I can’t.”
He smiled, very faintly. “Why not?”
“Well, it wouldn’t look right.”
“Why not again?”
“Besides, I have the car waiting.”
“Can’t cars wait by themselves or have they got them so personalized now that they have to have a companion?”
“This one happens to have a chauffeur in it,” she said with careful indifference.
He took a step back and said, “Well, well. Doing all right for yourself, eh, Martha?” He noticed then for the first time what she was wearing. “Husband dead?”
“Of course not. Why should he be dead?”
“Shouldn’t be. But then a hell of a lot of people are. Including me, almost.”
“Really?”
“I have a few pieces of flak here and there. When they get them all dug out of me, I’ll send you one for a souvenir. Do you want it plain or inscribed, for Auld Lang Syne?”
“I don’t consider that very witty.”
“No.” He avoided her gaze. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”
“Why aren’t you in uniform?”
“I’m out now. I’m a civilian.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Do? Well, first I’ll take a rest and then I’ll write a book not about the war, and when the book doesn’t sell, I’ll get my old job back on the News.”
“You mean you’re going to stay here?”
“That’s right.” He added dryly, “I hope you don’t mind. It’s a pretty big city, there should be room for both of us.”
“Why should I mind? As a matter of fact, Charles and I will do our best to help you.”
“Thanks.”
“If you’re serious about writing a book, perhaps Charles can help you make some good contacts. He knows a great many important people.”
“If it’s a good book, I won’t need good contacts, but it’s kind of you.” He glanced at her curiously. “Charles. Is that his name?”
“Yes.”
“I’d heard you married a good guy.”
“That’s nice.”
“I was very glad, naturally. I was hoping you’d get someone more suited to you than I was.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, as if they needed some restraint. “Why the funny clothes? Remember the blue dress with the white flowers on it?”
“Blue dress?” It was at the bottom of a trunk packed in layers of tissue paper and mothballs. The last time she’d taken it out to look at it she found that the flowers had yellowed. She had told Charles that she had a headache, and she went to bed and stared for a long time up at the ceiling in bitter silence. “No, I don’t remember.”
He traced a pattern on the sidewalk with the toe of his shoe.
“What’s he like? Charles, I mean.”
“He’s... well, he’s very nice. He’s older than I am. He’s good-looking and he has a nice sense of humor.”
“And money. In fact, the works.”
“In fact, the works, as you say.”
“Well, I’m damn glad to hear it.” He spoke with too much emphasis. “I really am. I’d like to meet him.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“Oh?”
“Charles has been very ill.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
He twitched his shoulders and she saw that his suit was too small for him. She had told him once that he always got his coats too small and that the next time she would go with him to the tailor to supervise the measuring. But the next time he had gone to a tailor he had ordered uniforms and she didn’t even know about it until later. He had walked out of her life as completely as if he’d stepped off the edge of the world.
Yet here he was back, an image in a florist’s window. The daffodils grew out of his throat, reached up their yellow heads to touch the tip of his ear. The swans drew away, arching their delicate necks in elegant disdain.
“Look,” she said. He looked, and saw himself framed in flowers. Neither of them smiled.
“Well,” he said finally. “I don’t want to keep you.”
“It isn’t that I wouldn’t like you to meet Charles. But he has been ill...”
“Don’t apologize. I hardly think Charles would like to meet me,” he said pointedly. “Anyway, I probably wouldn’t fit in. You have quite a place, I suppose.” He hesitated, as if he didn’t want to hear about any more things she had but couldn’t stop himself from asking. “Have you?”
“It’s quite nice.”
“He probably built it for you when you were married, as in the Ladies’ Home Journal.” She didn’t answer and he went on, with a laugh: “It’s a damn funny thing, but in Italy whenever I wanted something to read like Time or the New Republic or the New Yorker, all I could ever find was the Ladies’ Home Journal. I became quite fond of it. I used to read the recipes. We all did. We had a kind of journalese talk. ‘If you’ve never tried fried green olives minced with chocolate ice cream, you’re really missing something.’ It got to be practically a code.”
He paused. She said quietly, “He built the house for me.”
“Sure. He would. Indirect lighting? Automatic heat, glass bricks, built-in bar?”
“There’s no need to...”
“Sun deck? Terrace? Maybe even a fountain?” He saw by her eyes that he’d struck it right. “By heaven, a fountain! I’ll be damned. Now wait, let me guess about the fountain. It’s one of these naked water-baby affairs, and the little darling is spewing the water out of its mouth. Am I right?”
“It’s not a neuter baby, it’s the infant Hermes.”