“No,” she said firmly. “No, not as we have. Not suddenly, without warning, without reason, just” — She snapped her fingers for illustration — “overnight. One day no mention of it, no discussion; the next, all packed already, and on the train, and on our way. The refugees in Belgium and northern France had to do that in the summer of Fourteen; but there’s no war here, why should we?”
“Sometimes you have to move, to better yourself,” he said incautiously.
“No,” she said again. “No. That doesn’t fit our case either. In New York there would have been fifty-five a week waiting for you. And in a little while, my father would have given you the backing to open a brokerage office of your own. He said as much to you. Instead you never went back there. Not even to let me pick up my things. You came on out here — at forty-five. A year later you’re back to fifty, still five short of what you would have been getting in New York all this time. Now, from here, you’re ready to go on someplace else, where you won’t work at all at first, maybe for weeks, until you can locate something. Is that betterment, is that advancement?”
He couldn’t answer that. “You’re getting all wrought up,” he protested. “And you’ve just finished a meal. That isn’t good for you. Here, sit down at least. Drink a glass of water.”
She clung stubbornly to the back of the chair, as if it were some sort of a barrier between them, set up by him, that she couldn’t pass by in order to reach him as she would have wanted to.
“No,” she said wearily, “I can’t sit down to this. I’ve sat too many times before. When you tell me what it’s my right to know, then I’ll sit down beside you again, where my place is.”
“What do you want me to say? We’re going to San Francisco. There isn’t any reason. What do you want me to say?”
She remained standing. “Be fair with me, Press, I’ve always been fair with you.”
“How am I being unfair?”
“Do you call this being fair, what you’re doing to me now?”
She left the chair at last, but she went across the room, she held her back to him.
He shaded his eyes for a moment, in hopelessness. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. We’ll be at this all night.”
She didn’t answer. She had one of their window curtains in her hands, was paying it off a few inches at a time, seeming to study its edges as she went.
“All I can do is go back over what I’ve said before. I thought there would be better opportunities in San Francisco. I... I understand it has certain advantages over here. I’m getting tired of it here, I’m getting stale. I... well, I wanted to go there and try it out, that’s all.”
“All this comes at seven o’clock, on a Thursday evening. On Wednesday, on Tuesday, on Monday, never a word, never a warning. Even this very morning, not a sign, not an indication. You paid the electric bill on Saturday, you didn’t tell them to discontinue. You even spoke to Sorenson about putting in a new sink for me, because the old one leaks. Why? For just the two or three days that were left?”
She came back to the chair again. She didn’t grasp it any more; she let her forearms slump from across the top of it, hands clasped, in a sort of bitter patience.
“Why? Out of a clear blue sky like that.”
He looked at the table before him.
“Either tell me the truth, or don’t tell me anything at all.”
How can I, he pleaded with her piteously in his silence.
She shook her head, at her thoughts, not at anything he’d said. “No. There’s been something hanging over us from the first that hasn’t been right.”
God, oh, God! he cried out to himself. At last even you begin to feel it too.
“I don’t know what it is. I only know it’s something that’s wrong, something that’s bad for us. I’ve felt it so many times, and denied to myself that I did, keeping my head buried in the sand like an ostrich. Now, tonight, I’m going to face it. I’m going to look it in the eye, if I never did before.”
His head went down lower, almost as though there were a weight on the back of his neck.
“And what have I to lose, anyway?” she went on. “I have very little left of anything. Very little, anymore. Yes, now I take stock. Now I add up the ledger. And what do I find?”
He’d closed his eyes.
“Is this all I am to have? This half life, this shadow life, this nothing at all? Is that what I thought marriage would be? Money doesn’t matter, it isn’t the lack of that I mind. I wouldn’t give you two cents for it. I’ve never missed it a day since I married you! But there should be roots, there should be a foundation. We should be building something. I should feel I’m helping you build something. That’s the only thing that helps to make the dreary, lonely days go by. And by the time I get it up so high, you come along and tear it all down again, and all my dreary lonely days went for nothing. Then you want to take me to a new place, and let me try to build some more, and then you’ll tear that down in turn. And I have nothing. Nothing. Nothing. You won’t let me.”
A sob choked in her throat, but there were no tears.
It was no tirade; she spoke low and in a dulled accent, as if communing with herself, with him not there at all. It was all the more dreadful for that.
“You took me from my father and mother. Well, every wife must follow her husband, and I wanted to go with you. That’s the marriage vow. But you made it into a permanent exile, you cut me off from them completely. No visits in-between, to break the separation; while she was still here, while I still could have enjoyed her. You kept me away, and now she’s dead, and I can never see her again. She died without my seeing her alive again. For me, she died the day I married you. And that shouldn’t be. I loved my mother.
“You took something else from me. Press, that I was meant to have. We don’t have to name it, we both know what it is. And that’s another face I’ll never see.” Her eyes blazed momentarily in accusation, her voice deepened to a curdled resentment. “Who are you, God? What right had you to do that to me?”
“Don’t!” he whispered, and swerved his face violently aside. As violently as if he’d suddenly experienced an excruciating earache on that side, where she was.
“ ‘Don’t.’ It’s so easy to say that. I never cried ‘don’t’ to you. Maybe I’ve been in pain too as you are now. Pain that you gave me. I’ve spared you too long, Press. If I had pleaded ‘don’t,’ would you have spared me? Will ‘don’t’ bring back my mother? Will ‘don’t’ bring back the baby I might be holding at this moment? Will ‘don’t’ bring back New York to me, the years that might have been sunny and carefree but are spoiled now and thrown away? Those first few years of marriage? You’ve smashed up all my hopes and dreams. I can almost hear something crunch now on the floor whenever you move around too much. It must be the sawdust, I guess, running out of their seams.”
That night in Wise’s bathroom came back to him, and he knew that not a word she said was untrue, not a word she said unjust.
She’d caught up. Just as she’d once caught up to him in love, so now she’d caught up in hopelessness and despair.
“Life isn’t supposed to do that to you, what you’ve done to me. It’s not that cruel. You are though! Life takes away from you, but it gives something back in exchange at least. For everything it takes, it’s given you something else. If it takes your youthful dreams, then maybe it’s given you money instead. If it’s taken your money, then maybe it’s given you love instead. If it takes your love, then at least, then at least, it lets you stay in one place, with the same sights and the same familiar faces around you, to help you bear it. Even the people in the shabbiest tenements on First and Second Avenue, they know that next year they’ll still have that same roof over their heads. That they’ll always be there, where they’ve always been. At least they’re home, they’re home, they’re home.