And in the same instant she saw the subtle, almost imperceptible change that came into his eyes, and she knew that he was dead.
She stared at him, feeling her lips draw back from her teeth and the muscles cording in her throat, and then she was running up the stairs to the lobby.
She saw an usher, and started toward him, and then felt she would fall before she could reach him. She sat down suddenly on a marble bench and covered her face with her hands. She had to tell someone what she had seen, she knew — and yet she could not. For a few moments a door had been opened on an incredible, terrifying world, but now that door had closed, and no fear she had ever known was like the fear she felt at the thought of opening it again.
Laughter reached her through the door to the nearest aisle, and she glanced toward it. There were people in there, hundreds of them. It would be so easy to slip in among them, into the darkness... Oh, Lord, why had it had to happen while she was there? She had never done anything wrong. Why should she have to be the one? She couldn’t live through another moment of the world she had just seen, she knew. She couldn’t live through being questioned by the police about it, describing the boys who had executed Teddy, coming face to face with them in court.
A minute dragged by, and then another, and then Carol got slowly to her feet and moved to the aisle and down its dark length looking for a seat.
Epitaph
by Erskine Caldwell
(Copyright, 1954, by Erskine Caldwell)
Maybe, if I’d told Ray, things would be different now. But I never told Ray anything... so there’s only one thing I can do...
There’s nothing else I can do. I can’t go on living any longer. Even one more day of this torment would be more than I could endure.
I’ve been married for two years now, and no other man in the whole world could possibly have been as dear to me as my husband, Ray, has been every day of our life together I can’t imagine how he could have been more devoted to me, and I’m glad he’s the only man I’ve ever been truly in love with. I could never, never, never love anybody else as I love Ray. But for two years now I’ve been living in constant torment, and I just can’t stand it another day.
What has happened to me is my own fault. Ray had nothing to do with it. He doesn’t even know about it. I’m the one to blame.
During all this time, night and day, I’ve tried to think of every possible way of persuading Walter Green way to let me go so I can stop deceiving Ray. I’ve been on my knees I don’t know how many times and begged him to let me go, but Walter won’t listen to me. Every time I try to talk to him about it he threatens to tell my husband. Ray has always said he’ll leave me if I ever deceive him and he finds out that I’ve been unfaithful, and I know he means it. I love him so much I’d do anything in the world to keep him from leaving me. I don’t want to deceive Ray — it’s the last thing on this earth I want to do. I want to be faithful to him because he’s Ray, and my husband. I hate myself every minute of the day for what I’ve done.
Four years ago, when I was twenty-three, I went to work as bookkeeper in Walter’s office. I had just finished my commercial courses at business college then. That was two years before I married Ray Hammond. Walter was a commission agent for tung oil shippers and he had a small brokerage office on the second floor of a red brick building near the waterfront between the river and Jackson Square. Walter, who had lived in New Orleans all his life, was thirty-four then, and he had taken over the management of the commission business when his father died. There were many commission agents and forwarding companies in that section of the city, it being within a few blocks of the Mississippi River wharves and docks.
Walter was a bachelor and he lived in an apartment on the third floor of the same building. It was a large, spacious apartment with a wonderful view of the river and it had a wide, iron lacework veranda overlooking the Square. Walter was a well-dressed, handsome man with a tall, erect figure. He had very dark hair — much darker than mine — and twinkling clear eyes. It always seemed to me that it would have been easy for any girl to fall in love with him, and probably many did. I was on the verge myself of falling in love with him many times, and I’ve often wondered what would have happened to me if I had. I went up to Walter’s apartment on the third floor after office hours several times a week, sometimes staying all night with him instead of going home to Gentilly where I lived with my mother and younger sister. Every time I stayed with Walter in those days I would have eagerly consented to marry him if he had asked me. He never asked me, but he did say many times that I was good-looking enough to satisfy any man and that he would rather have me than any girl he had ever known.
During that first year, and before I met Ray, Walter took me on week end trips to Biloxi and Gulfport and Pass Christian all summer long and we went sailboating on the Gulf and lay on the beach in the moonlight. I was happy then, because I realized how very lonely I had been before becoming intimate with Walter. He was the first man I had desire for and the first man I was willing to make love with, and maybe for that reason none of the things we did seemed to me to be improper. I thought surely he was going to ask me sooner or later to marry him, and I always hoped he would each time we were together. However, he never once proposed marriage.
“Walter,” I asked him one night on the beach at Biloxi, “are all your brothers and sisters married?”
“All three married and settled down early in life, honey,” he said, laughing about it. “But I was always different. I guess it’s just the way I am. I’m still on the outside looking in.”
“Is that the way you want it to be, Walter?” I asked.
“It sure is, honey,” he said with unmistakable meaning in his voice. “I always make it a practice to have things the way I want them.”
It was about a year after that when I met Ray Hammond, and he asked me to marry him a week after we met. Ray was kind and generous and considerate, and I was certain from the very beginning that I would never regret it if I married him. He was not handsome like Walter, and he couldn’t afford to wear expensive clothes, but he appealed to me more than anyone else I had ever known. Ray worked for an insurance company, and he said that in a few years he would be able to support both of us, and probably two or three more in time. I knew he wanted children, and I did, too. He was willing for me to keep on working until the time came when I was to have our first child. Ray was twenty-eight then, and he looked forward to being assistant manager of the insurance office in two more years.
“We’ll be on our feet in a year or two,” he said confidently, “and you won’t have to work another day after that. That’s something I can promise. You just wait and see.”
“I don’t mind working, Ray,” I told him. “But I do want to make a home for us, and I’ll stop the day you want me to.”
“I’m going to see to it that we don’t have to wait too long for that time to come,” he said. “That’s my big ambition in life right now.”
When I told Walter the next day what I was planning to do, he told me to go ahead and marry Ray if I wanted to, but that he was not going to give me up and that he expected me to keep on coming to his apartment after business hours as I had for the past two years. I couldn’t believe he really meant what he said, and, since I was so deeply in love with Ray, we went ahead and married. We left right away for a week’s honeymoon in Florida. I was so happy with Ray that I forgot all about Walter and what he had said he expected of me.