Then Larry came, was welcomed graciously by Dick, and sent off to the Carrton plant, and you began to feel a solidity in life; you were catching hold of an edge here and there. Above all, one particular edge.
On arriving in New York you had suggested that Jane and Margaret and Rose leave the little flat in Sullivan Street and set up a household for you, in any part of the city they might select. This was your most cherished gesture and the thought of it warmed you for months.
Jane said no. The others were more than willing, but she vetoed it flatly. She said that you might want to get married, and that you should assume no such encumbrance. You protested that you were only thirty-one, and that you wanted never to get married, anyway. No, she wouldn’t do it. You remained in your little two-room suite at the Garwood.
You were a great deal with her, more than at any period before or since. You took her to plays and concerts, subscribed to the opera, and persuaded her to use the accounts you opened at two or three of the stores. You met a lot of her friends — a strange assortment, there were none you ever really liked except young Cruickshanks, then just a boy, writing verses on the back of menus and grandly offering them to the restaurant manager as payment for his meal. You thought Margaret was in love with him. And you liked Victor at first; no use denying it, you thought him agreeable and likable. He seemed to you more normal and balanced than anyone else in that crowd.
One Saturday in May, lunching with Jane downtown, you insisted that she drive with you the following morning to look at a house somewhere north of White Plains which you had been told of by one of the men in the office.
“There are nine rooms, two baths, everything modern, and it’s at the edge of a wood on top of a hill overlooking one of the reservoirs,” you told her. “Sounds like the very thing we want. I think you’d like it.”
“I know I would,” said Jane warmly, too warmly. “It sounds perfect. But it’s impossible. You see, I’m going to be married.”
“I thought... I thought—” you stammered.
You stopped. You couldn’t say that.
“Who is it?”
She smiled. “Victor, of course. You really didn’t know? You must have. I’ve been as silly as a schoolgirl.”
You lost your head and almost made a scene there in the restaurant. You pretended to no power of veto, but by heaven, if you had it you would certainly use it on Victor Knowlton — a half-baked writer and lecturer, coarse-grained, opinionated. You had heard curious tales about him which had amused you at the time, but which, remembered now, convinced you that he was no man to marry your sister.
“No man is expected to be a saint,” you concluded, “but neither should he be a promiscuous pig, if he expects a decent woman to marry him.”
“I don’t think I need defend Victor against the charge of being a promiscuous pig,” said Jane slowly. “That’s a little strong, isn’t it? Anyway it’s his own affair, just as my own checkered past is mine. And from your own standard you must admit it’s decent of him to want to marry me after having had me for nearly a year. Of course it’s true that I’ve argued against it, but now that we’ve decided to have children—”
You stared at her. This couldn’t possibly be your sister, your dear Jane. You wanted to yell at her, shout some insult at her, but you felt suddenly weak, done in, and frightened. Well, it’s all over, that’s that, you told yourself, standing on the narrow Fulton Street sidewalk, after she had parted from you at the restaurant door and hurried off to the subway.
Any man who expects to get anything from a woman is a fool, or if he does it’s just an accident. No matter who she is, she takes what she wants, and a fat lot she cares about you. Erma would agree with you all right; she’s at least honest about it. Mrs. Davis didn’t hurt you any maybe; she used you; what did she give you? A son; a hell of a favor that was, he ate a dozen dinners at your expense and made an ass of you with that joke of a statue — though he may not have meant it — and he’s spent over seven thousand dollars of your money hanging around Paris and Rome.
Lucy — Lucy wasn’t a woman, she was Lucy. It would have been the same with her — no. No! That was like a raindrop that never falls from the cloud — is whirled upward instead, to float above the atmosphere eternally, finding no home.
The most savage and insolent feast though was that of little Millicent, in that room with the afternoon sun lazing at the window, long ago, as she went silently back and forth collecting things from your closet and dresser and piling them on a chair, and finally turned and came towards you...
Abandoned, bitter, with nothing anywhere in reach to hold onto, you were not surprised that the old familiar fantasy returned; you accepted it, and felt her hands again for the first time in many months, the night after Jane left you standing in front of the restaurant.
X
He turned and walked over the strip of dingy carpet to the foot of the second flight of stairs. Above was semidarkness, drifting down almost to the foot of the stairs like a threatening fog. He hesitated before it, dully, enveloped in silence. Nothing could be more ordinary or familiar to him, yet he hesitated, feeling a strange new quality in the dim dreariness.
That was the time to fight it, he told himself, so plainly that he thought it was muttered words, though his lips did not move.
Then you might have beaten it and come free...
Jane had been married nearly a year; you had decided to tolerate Victor, but you saw them infrequently, partly because you felt that Margaret and Rose were trying to use you for a good thing and you didn’t intend to stand for it. Especially Rose. Jane, trying to manage a baby and a job at the same time, was too busy to notice it.
You sat there that night in Erma’s elaborate bedroom, wondering what was up. It was her first big dinner and dance at the house on Riverside Drive, and had been marvelously successful; she could do that sort of thing so easily, almost without thought. But why had she asked you to stay after the mob had left?
The door from her dressing-room opened, and she entered, fresh and charming with no trace of the night’s fatigue, wearing a soft yellow negligee. She stroked your cheek with her hand.
“Poor Bill, you’re tired,” she said.
You were somewhat disconcerted. “Not so very,” you said.
“Neither am I,” she replied, “put your arm around me.”
You held her close, at first mechanically, like a conscientious proxy; then, approaching excitement, on your own account. A strange night that was. Like watching yourself from the top of a mountain, too far away to see clearly...
In the morning it astonished you that she arose when you did and insisted that you have fruit and coffee with her; and there, at the breakfast table, she announced her opinion that it would be a good idea to get married.
“Since we’ve known each other over twelve years,” you said, “that suggestion, at this precise moment, is open to a highly vulgar construction. I can’t think why you propose it.”
“I’m tired of being Veuve Bassot. I want to invest in a husband.”
“At least you’re frank about it.”
“You ask why, and you insist. Perhaps I’m still curious about you, which would be a triumph. Or, maybe, I merely want a screen inside my bedroom door, in case the wind blows it open...”