He pointed to a place nearer the opposite wall than to them. “She fell down on the carpet right there. See where I’m pointing? She fell down very suddenly. Fell like a stone.” And as if to reassure her, he said, “It’s not the same carpet. Don’t be alarmed. I had it changed.”
“Illness?”
“I didn’t know at first, I couldn’t tell. She was conscious, her eyes stayed open. But she couldn’t talk, or wouldn’t. She kept thrashing around on the floor, as if she were having a convulsion. Saliva kept flowing out of her mouth, in spurts. It shone silvery, in little foamy patches. That’s why I had the carpet changed, later on. And she started to bite at it. She pulled little tufts out of it with her teeth.”
Sweat was pouring down his own face now.
Starr? This was the same Starr who died in my own arms so quietly, so unassumingly, later on? “Not temporary insan—?”
“No,” he said quickly, before she had time to finish. “I couldn’t do anything with her. She became worse each time I tried to go near her. When I’d try to pick her up in my arms, she’d thrash violently. Unmanageably. A spasm would go through her, almost like a patient undergoing electric-shock therapy.”
He swallowed some of his drink. He looked as though it were pulling all the lining off his throat as it went down.
“I had to phone for an ambulance finally. The intern examined her right there on the floor where she was lying. He said it was shock. Acute shock. Emotional shock. He said he’d seen it in soldiers, during the Korean War. He gave her a needle to quiet her, and, of course, they took her to the hospital.”
Now he took another drink, a worse one, a more hurtful one.
She took a chance and opened her handbag narrowly, just about the width of the edge of her hand, and dipped inside and pulled out a handkerchief. It had a little cologne on it, but that couldn’t be helped. She threw it over toward him, and he picked it up and mopped his soaking forehead with it, and then pressed it between the palms of his hands.
“As she went out that door on the stretcher, that was the last time I ever saw her. I never saw her again to this day. She never came back here from that night on.”
“But — how is it you didn’t go with her? Doesn’t a husband usually go with his wife, when she’s taken ill like that?”
“She wouldn’t let me. She carried on so terribly. You see the needle didn’t take effect quickly enough, and she must have heard me say I’d ride over with her in the ambulance. She started to moan and plead to them not to let me come near her, she didn’t want me to come near her. Finally the intern took me aside and said it might be better if I didn’t, the idea seemed to have an exciting effect on her. To wait awhile and give her time to quiet down. He said he didn’t think it was anything to worry about, it was just a nerve crisis of some kind.
“So I walked the floor, walked the floor, all night long.”
He stopped suddenly. He gave her a peculiar look and said, “Why am I telling you all this?”
“I don’t know,” Madeline said quietly. “There are times when everybody has to tell somebody things — and I’m the one this time.” Then she added, “Finish it. You’ve already told me so much, it doesn’t matter if you go ahead. I’d like to hear the rest.”
“The rest is very little,” he said. “I gave them time to get her there, and then I called the hospital. They’d checked her in — I’d arranged for a private room — and they told me she was asleep.
“I stayed on my feet all night. I went around the very first thing the next day, and they told me she was resting quietly, but I must have patience, I couldn’t see her yet, she still wasn’t in any condition to be disturbed.
“I went back in the evening. There was a new nurse on duty, but she told me the same thing.
“Well, for the first three, maybe four, days I could understand it and I could accept it.” He clenched his fist, and then splayed the fingers open again in all directions. “But for three weeks — three weeks — three weeks” — he said it three times — “I visited that hospital twice a day. Forty-two visits. And somewhere along in those weeks I finally caught on. It might have been hospital regulations in the beginning but it was her own doing that was keeping me out by this time. She must have refused to see me and ordered them not to admit me. I couldn’t even reach her by phone. The nurse always answered each time, and wouldn’t let me talk to her. I tried writing. The letters came back unopened inside typed hospital envelopes.”
“And then?”
“And then. The forty-second time I went around there was the evening of the twenty-first day. I got a different message that time. The nurse told me she’d checked out that morning, without leaving any forwarding address. They didn’t know where she’d gone.”
He fell silent for a minute, and she thought it was over.
But it wasn’t. Suddenly he went on, “The nurse was very worldly-wise, you know how nurses are. She looked at me very closely and she said, ‘I don’t know what happened between the two of you, Mr. Herrick. She didn’t tell me, and I don’t want to know, it’s not my business. But don’t you think it’s better for her sake if you keep away from her from now on, don’t try to go after her, don’t try to find her. That young girl we had in here all those weeks wasn’t fooling, wasn’t acting a part. She’s a real sick girl.’ And she took a very small envelope out of her desk drawer, one of those little things they use for holding pills and capsules, and handed it to me. It was sealed and nothing was written on it. I didn’t open it until I’d taken it home with me.”
“What was in it?” she asked when the halt had become noticeable.
“Do you really want me to tell you what was in it? You don’t leave me anything, do you?”
She gestured imperturbably with one turned-up hand.
“My wedding ring was in it. Hers. The one I’d bought her. And another thing, a terrible thing. I don’t think any husband ever got a thing like that, from the wife who was walking away from him.”
And again he couldn’t seem to bring it out, but this time she didn’t ask.
“A scrap of toilet tissue. That had been soiled. It was folded all around the ring. The ring was embedded in it.”
She backed her hand to her mouth, in reflex dismay.
After that he didn’t talk anymore. What more was there to say, after what he’d told her at the very last?
Now was the time for her to talk, and after she’d talked, for him to die.
“I met Starr once,” she said tonelessly, casually.
She could tell he didn’t think he’d heard her right. “You what? What was that you said?”
“I met Starr once.”
“After she left me?”
“After she left, yes.”
Hope was lighting up his face, even this soon. It was like a flame. He was handsome with hope, dazzle-eyed with it.
“No, no,” she said quickly, and motioned to him forbiddingly. “Don’t hope. Don’t. It’ll hurt twice as much after, if you do.”
His face died again, went out again.
God, how he loves her, she thought. But what did he do to her—?
His mouth was hanging open, mutely begging, silently pleading.
“Yes, I’m going to tell you. I’m going to tell you about it, all about it. Just as you told me your story, from your end, I’m going to tell you my story, from my end. Isn’t it funny how the two of us come together, and piece the two pieces together, and then we have the whole story.”
“Hurry,” he panted, almost like a man dying of thirst.
“It was last May, a year ago. I was going to kill myself.”
“Why?”
“Do you want to know something? It’s hard to remember why. Because life had no meaning, I guess. Because — just because. I had a gun, the only thing my father left me when he drank himself to death. I put the gun to my head and actually pulled the trigger and the gun didn’t go off.”