“—in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
It’s over, and she’s married to a murderer.
“You may kiss the bride, my son.”
The veil dissipated like morning haze lifting in the sunrise.
Her lips were so cool against his, he thought. So loyal. So trustful, more than anything else.
12
Now they were back at her house for the reception. Glittering electric lights in crystal chandeliers, women in evening dresses, a giddy hubbub of voices and laughter, the strains of the waltz and the hesitation played in an adjoining ballroom by a five-piece orchestra.
They were standing alone together for a moment, he and she. Alone in all that crowd. Champagne goblet in each one’s hand.
She extended hers toward him. He extended his toward her. Their goblets met, with little silvery clink.
“Mrs. Prescott Marshall,” she said softly, with grateful upraised eyes.
(“Mrs. Murderer,” he amended, unheard.)
Her eyes strayed to his bosom, suddenly stopped there.
“Ah, darling, you’ve hurt yourself. There’s a tiny speck of blood on your shirt front.”
His head went sharply downward, riveted.
“How was it? Where? Shaving?”
If she hadn’t been a girl, she would have realized before speaking that couldn’t have been; you shaved before, not after, your shirt was on. She would realize it in a moment anyway...
“Perhaps trimming my nails before,” he said, with lack of full breath. “I was in a hurry.” And defensively put one hand behind his back.
She kissed her own fingertip, then touched the place with it.
With sudden fierceness, he gulped down the rest of his champagne. His throat swelled with it as it forced its way down.
She slipped away a moment later, with a whispered, “I’m going up now. Nobody’s looking, this is a good opportunity.”
He stayed there by himself, where they’d been standing.
He stole a look down at it.
It was such a small speck, such a tiny one.
It was so bright, though. It shone so. You could see it all over the room.
His hand crept up to it, and stayed there, covering it.
But under his hand, he knew, it was still there.
13
Night scene, Atlantic City. Double life, on a honeymoon. Solitude, on a honeymoon. Secret thoughts.
In the bed, Marjorie sleeping, alone. Never so alone, not even before her marriage. For before their marriage, his thoughts at least were with her. Now she hasn’t even those. Sleeping alone, in innocence, in trust, in confidence.
And at the floor-length windows, open to the June night, the watcher. Not seeing what is there to see, but watching something that is not there to see. Something that no one can see but the eyes of fear. His eyes.
Beautiful night, beautiful scene. Wasted, unseen. Rustle of silk, that is the surf. As if some superhuman dry-goods merchant were continually rolling, then unrolling, a gigantic bolt of the precious stuff, trying to sell it all along the shore.
Licorice-black sea, with a meshed trellis of silver running up it to the horizon line, aiming toward an unseen moon somewhere high above. As if put there for someone to climb. And below, like fogged pearls, the lights of the boardwalk, like the double strands of a necklace spread out along the shore.
And under that still, interrupting it at one point, at the one point where the windows are, the motionless inked-in outline of a head and shoulders. A head that sometimes breathes a little moonlit smoke. A head that watches the night slowly spend itself and be no more. A head that thinks and fears, and has no one, knows no one, to turn to.
Night scene, Atlantic City. Double life, within the very bridal suite. Secret thoughts. Hidden knowledge. The sleeper and the watcher.
14
Daybreak, Atlantic City. Secret life, on a honeymoon. Life apart.
In the background the towering Moorish hotel turrets, scarcely a light in all their multiple perforations. Somewhere behind one of these dark niches, a girl, sleeping alone. Guileless, in love with a chimera; in love with something that vanishes as her eyes drop shut, that only reappears again as they reopen. Alone, and not even knowing her own aloneness.
Nearer at hand, the elevated trestle of the Boardwalk, lights out now. Nothing moving along it as far as the eye can see, from down by the Inlet to up toward Ventnor, save a little empty paper bag, stirring and skipping and stopping again, in the dawn breeze.
Tiger-striped sky of daybreak; yellow, and gray, and black stripes, rising up out of the somber lead-colored water.
And on the beach, a lone figure, sitting on its haunches, the only erect object for miles along the gray, deserted sand. Not seeing the sea, not seeing the sky, not seeing the day break. Head bowed between knees. As if mourning the irrevocable. Never stirring. Only a strand or two of his hair stirring now and again, lifted by the breeze. Live hair on a dead figure.
Beach scene, Atlantic City, dawn. Secret sorrows. Life apart.
15
He first met the other man on the hotel piazza, he coming in, the other man stationary by the rail.
He would have passed him by, but the other man spoke and claimed him. The other man was alone there, in all that long defile of regimented wicker chairs, and they were conspicuous to one another. It was six in the morning.
The other man was older than he, by a good deal, and he was benign, and no one to be wary of; he was just a little too prying, a little too observing, and — at the first only — a little boring. Then suddenly he wasn’t boring any more, he had become the most compelling factor in Marshall’s whole existence at the moment.
He was stoutish too, and he looked as such people usually do in their summer-vacation clothes. Which is to say, just a trifle too eager to appear jaunty.
“Good morning, there.”
“Morning,” Marshall said, without applying any adjective.
“Both of us early birds, I see.”
Marshall kept trying to walk on in through the hotel entrance. “Yes, we are.”
The man had extended his hand, as an invitation to shake with him, even from the distance at which they stood from one another. Then started to close it by moving over toward him. Marshall couldn’t continue walking on in any more, after that. He had to wait for the hand to reach his own. It wasn’t in him to be that ungracious. This would only take a moment, anyway.
“See you around. May as well get this over with. I’ve been trying to get around to it for several days now. Then we can go on from there. My name’s Ponds. We’re here from—” He mentioned some faraway town — “for a little rest, before the summer rush gets under way.”
“Marshall. New York.”
“That’s the place, all right. Last summer we went over to Europe. Never again — not after the time we had getting back from there! They were sleeping on the open decks on the trip home, and lucky just to be on the ship, I can tell you. It was a madhouse. Germans were thirty miles from Paris, night we left there. Just had to pick Fourteen to go nosing around over there. From now on I stay where I belong.”
He mopped his brow in recollection, even a year later.
“Not bad, this place down here, though. It’s our first time down. We usually don’t come this far east.”
“Ours too.”
“Honeymoon, right?”
Marshall nodded.
“We spotted that right away. So did everyone else, I guess. You know how it is. Everybody takes a proprietary interest, sort of. All the world loves a lover. Shouldn’t let it embarrass you. Lovely little lady you’ve got there with you.”