It was a lot of little things; it was nothing in particular, yet it was everything at once. She was smiling a little more; she was bustling a little more; there was more zest to her kiss. She’d changed the curtains on the windows. She had more lights lit. As on a party night, as on a Christmas Eve. And she herself burned brighter. Her color was higher, her eyes more glowing. The incandescence of some kind of joyous excitement was alight within her.
Why, she even had a special dish for supper, a Sunday sort of dish. Leg of lamb, with capers, and with roast potatoes.
She had their little slab-topped box-square Victrola going, as though she’d timed it so that the record should begin spinning just as she’d first heard his key in the outside door and not a moment sooner. Something gay, something jaunty; a new dance that had come out this year, they called the fox trot. The latest of the long line of animal and barnyard gaits and prances, and the last. “Hel-lo-o-o-o-o Fris-co-o-oh!” it greeted him raucously, like some sort of metallic parrot.
“What’s up?” he said.
“You’re home, that’s what’s up. Isn’t that enough?”
She led him by the arm. “Now here’s your chair.” She even edged it toward the table for him as he took his stance over it. “Now give me your plate.” She filled it for him. “Now eat your lamb.”
“But won’t you tell me?” he said. “I’ve got to know. This suspense is killing me.”
“Tell you what?” she said. “You mean I’m not as nice to you as this on other nights? Why, what an unkind thing to say! And I thought I was doing so beautifully.”
This went on through the whole meal, a teasing, a parrying, such as they hadn’t known since their courtship days.
“Oh, please, that record,” he had to say at last, after about the tenth consecutive salutation to San Francisco.
She jumped up and stilled it. “I guess I am likely to wear it out. I just bought it today. Seventy-five cents. Wasn’t that extravagant? But they give you a package of needles free with each one. And it’s been so long since we had a new record.”
She even had his favorite dessert.
“I didn’t do it myself,” she added hastily, “because I can’t do pies yet. But it’s fresh; I got it at Mueller’s, that German bakery around the corner from here. His wife does all their baking herself.”
When they were through, he tried to rise. “I’ll help you do the dishes.”
“No, sit here in this other chair, over here.” She led him to it. “Just smoke a cigarette. Here’s a match.”
She blew it out in that quaint, awkward way women still had with matches. Had to blow twice to make it go out once.
“Don’t I help you other nights?”
“Tonight,” she said mysteriously, “is tonight. Don’t you move now. Be right back.”
When she was through she came in and stood behind him a moment, let her hand stray through his hair. He reached out for her without looking, drew her around in front of him. There she sank down upon her knees in a docile crouch on the floor beside him.
“What is it? Will you let me in on it now?”
The phrase seemed to strike her mischievously. “Maybe I will ‘let you in’ on it. I’ll think about it.”
He waited.
“Well?” he said at last.
“Wait a minute,” she commanded, “I want to get this right. You know, there’s one time in a man’s life when he has a hard time finding just the right words. That’s when he proposes marriage. And there’s a time in a woman’s life like that too.”
“Are you proposing marriage to me?” he chortled. “You’re a little late, aren’t y—?”
She overrode the interruption with a shake of her head. “We’re going to have company.”
He was startled, and altogether unpleasantly. He sat up straighter, as though a pulley controlled his motions and had just been given a violent jerk.
“Your father’s coming out. Did you hear from him? Did he wire?”
She shook her head, hilariously.
“Somebody you’ve never seen. Somebody younger.”
For a moment he knew a worse feeling, a deeper feeling, than the merely startled one just preceding; a hidden fright that she could not have guessed was there.
“How do you know?”
“I should know. I’m his mother. I will be when he gets here.”
He caught her to him and hid her face against his breast, and she didn’t understand it was a protective gesture, a warding off of an impending event. The way you hold someone close when you want to guard them against a threatened danger, that you may recognize but that they (perhaps) do not.
He reached down single-armed, without disturbing her, and picked up his fallen cigarette from the carpet and put it out.
His face was haunted. He was hiding the wrong face, hers, the blissful one, and showing the one that should not have been seen: pale and taut and stricken with dismay.
His tongue peered once or twice between his lips, trying to dislodge the words that would not come at first.
And when they did they were few and they were quiet-spoken, but they were strong and they were granite-hard with self-preservation and they doomed her.
“We can’t. We may suddenly want to move on, from here to the next place. We must be free to go at a moment’s notice. We can’t be held down. For months and months we’d be nailed to one place. It would hold you, and you would hold me. It would be like a millstone around our necks. I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t live through it. I don’t want you to. I won’t let you... When did he tell you? When did you find out?”
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Her heart must have been too busy just trying to keep on going.
“You’re going to have to go to another doctor. With me. I’ll find one. And I’ll take you to him myself. Right away. Before — too much time has gone by.”
Afterwards, he looked down and there was a tremendous circular damp spot, all over the left breast of his shirt. She was gone, but it was there. About where his heart was supposed to be.
21
She was a dutiful wife. She was a wife a Japanese or a Kaffir might have envied him. She was selfless. His wish was hers. No, not even that; she had no wish; there was only one wish, his, and she was the implement used to carry it out.
She sat there beside him on the cracked and peeling leather of the doctor’s waiting-room divan. This other doctor, of labyrinthine inquiries and low-voiced confidences. A waiting room whose shades were drawn, behind windows that held no shingle. She made no scene, no whimper, she cast no pleading eye upon him. He held her hand in his, but whether to give her courage or to instill continued obedience, only he could have told.
They were alone in here. This was a place where patients came one at a time. And the very purpose of those who came here was to be thought alone. To be made alone.
The door opened and a nurse came out.
“The doctor is ready now.”
Marjorie’s face paled a little, but she made no other sign. She cast her eyes down thoughtfully, as if listening for him to say the word, the single word, the magic word, that would come now at the end, to free her from this horrid spell, to break this dark, untrue enchantment.
She couldn’t hear it, for he didn’t say it.
He tightened his grasp on her hand, as though he thought she might break and try to run away.
“Don’t be frightened,” he commanded her.
“I’m not,” she answered.
“She’s not frightened,” the nurse repeated with professional patronage.