“Of course you don’t mean it. What’s the joke?”
“There’s no joke. I’m going to chuck it. This is not the life for me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a good deal saved, thanks to your and Dick’s generosity, and I may buy the Martin place out in Idaho where I went last summer. He’ll sell cheap.”
“Going to raise cattle?”
“Perhaps. Or get a job in the forest service. I don’t know.”
Evidently he had been considering it for some time.
That evening you went to see Jane, at the house on Tenth Street where you expected to find the usual crowd. You intended to take Jane off somewhere and persuade her to bring Larry to his senses. But when you arrived the rooms on the ground floor were dark, and proceeding brusquely upstairs, you found Jane and Larry alone in Jane’s room.
“I suppose Larry’s told you of his contemplated renascence,” you said to Jane.
“Yes.”
“We’ve just been talking about it,” Larry said. “Jane thinks it’s all right.”
Jane put her hand on yours. “You run away, Larry,” she said, “and let Bill and me talk. Please. Go on.”
He went, observing that he would see you in the morning at the office. “Meanwhile that you’ll smooth out my childish irritation,” you observed.
“Yes,” she agreed unexpectedly, pressing your hand. “It’s a darned shame. This was bound to hurt you. I told Larry so the first time he spoke to me about it.”
“So it’s been cooking for a long while. I like the picture of you and Larry calculating the chances of my eventual recovery.”
There was no reply. You looked up, and saw tears in Jane’s eyes.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever cried about,” she said finally. “I seem to feel more touched by what things mean for you than by what they mean even for myself, let alone anybody else.”
A month later Larry was on his way West. If Jane had been futile with you, how much more futile had you been with him!
You could dance around in that cage forever. Futility begins where? With you, though, it has almost certainly arrived by the time you went to the home of Mrs. Davis. You were fifteen, seventeen, no matter.
One winter Monday afternoon found you on her porch with an umbrella which she had left on some previous day at old Mrs. Poole’s on the other side of town. She herself opened the door.
“How do you do, William. Thank you so much.” Then, as you flushed and twirled your cap, “Won’t you come in a little while? Mother is spending the week in Chicago and my husband won’t be home for hours.”
You had several times previously crossed the moat of the lawn and advanced as far as the pure white portal, but never before inside the castle itself.
“We can sit here on the couch and go over next Sunday’s lesson.” She was probably watching your face, for she added almost at once, “Or would you rather just talk?”
You blurted out, “just talk,” and sat down on the edge of the couch beside her.
The second time you went, invited without the excuse of an errand, she told you all about her husband. It seemed that although he was a fine man, he had more or less deceived her into marriage by concealing from her girlish ignorance some of its more difficult and profound aspects.
You nodded, trembling; no word would come.
“Sit down by me. Here, put your head in my lap, like that. Don’t you like to be near me and put your head in my lap? You are a very dear boy, only you are nearly a man. Why not pretend you are a man, and kiss me?”
You discovered then that the girls at school knew very little about kissing, and you yourself, as a matter of fact, knew less.
Granting all your neat formula of futility, it is strange that you were never curious as to the nature and depth of Mrs. Davis’s attachment to you. Was it for her an episode among a hundred, or was it all that her avowals declared?
III
What if Mrs. Jordan had heard him come in? Or even seen him? She might very well have been standing by the grill, her hands full of milk bottles, when he went up the stoop. His hand still on the rail, he half turned about there on the stairs, undecided. Timid, futile, vengeless, actionless...
There has not been one major experience in your life in which you were the aggressor. The Davis affair was her doing. It was so again with Lucy Crofts. And each crisis in your economic and business life, which means the Carr Corporation, has been so little guided by you that you might as well have been at home asleep. Throughout the first months, and even years, you served as an information channel between Dick and the intricate parts of the vast organism he was getting into his fist. For that function you were well-fitted and you fulfilled it excellently.
Dick would get in from the Carrton plant usually on Friday evening, late, and you and he would go to the café on Sheriff Street, because he said he could relax there more easily than at home.
Dick, having ordered a three-inch steak, would gulp a stein of beer without stopping, lick the foam from his lips, settle back in the big leather chair and sigh contentedly. By the time the steak arrived you would be reading from sheets of memoranda neatly arranged on the table before you.
Meanwhile, the social side of life he entirely ignored, refusing even to appear at Erma’s Sunday teas, and you were pulled along with him.
“You’ll both die of ingrown dispositions,” Erma would observe indifferently. “Damon and Pythias, victims of the Iron Age.”
“Go on and deposit your dividend checks,” Dick would reply with equal indifference.
Gradually, after Dick’s return to Cleveland, you began to find time on your hands. One evening you looked through the little red memorandum book and found Mrs. Davis’s Cleveland address, placed there six years before from the only letter you had ever received from her.
The next afternoon you telephoned, and there she was. You were made aware that you were more deeply interested than you had suspected by the excitement.
Would she — that is — how about going out to dinner?
“Well, you see, I’m afraid I can’t. There are so many things always to do, and I always eat dinner at home with my husband...”
Idiotically, you asked after Mr. Davis’s health.
You perhaps remember so vividly because it was so characteristic of your absurdity, your futility. There have been other examples, only more extended, like the winter devoted so completely to Lucy Crofts, or like the summer, only four years ago, which you and Erma spent at Larry’s ranch.
It was Erma’s idea, suggested by a rodeo she saw in New York, and impelled of course by her constant restlessness. She and Larry seemed to hit it off; she was given the best horse on the place, and usually she was out riding the range with him. At times you suspected that he was being a bit harried, but you had been chronically suspicious of Erma for so long a period that this was merely the continuation of a state of mind.
One evening at the dinner table you noticed that Larry and Erma scarcely spoke to each other. All you got out of it was a faint amusement for you had long since grown accustomed to Erma’s talent for creating tensions with almost anyone when she was in certain moods.
Sometime in the dead of night you awoke out of a dream, suddenly aware that something was wrong. You kicked out a foot. Erma wasn’t there. You heard a noise somewhere, a faint mumbling trickling through the thin bare walls. You got out of bed and groped your way to the door and softly opened it.