She dropped into a chair before the fireplace and took the glass he handed her. "Can't you tell? Don't I radiate how I feel?" She laughed quietly. "He wants to know if I like it. It's priceless, you brilliant darling, and you got it for eight thousand dollars! Aren't you smart!"
"Happy anniversary, Anita."
"I want a stronger word than happy."
"Ecstatic anniversary, Anita."
"Ecstatic anniversary to you, Paul. I love you. Lord, how I love you!"
"I love you." He had never loved her so much.
"Do you realize, darling, that that grandfather clock alone is worth almost a thousand dollars?"
Paul felt terribly clever. It was fantastic how well things were turning out. Anita's contentment with the place was genuine, and the process of weaning her from one house to another, from one way of life to another, seemed, in a miraculous few minutes, to have been almost completed. "This is your kind of surroundings, isn't it."
"You know it is."
"Did you know the clock had wooden works? Think of it? Every part whittled out of wood."
"Don't worry about it. That's easily remedied."
"Hmm?"
"We can get an electric movement put in."
"But the whole charm -"
She was in a transport of creativity now, and didn't hear him. "You see - with the pendulum gone, an electrostatic dust precipitator would fit right in the lower part of the case."
"Oh."
"And you know where I'd put it?"
He looked around the room and saw no spot for it other than where it was. "That niche there seems ideal."
"In the front hall! Can't you just see it there?"
"There is no front hall," he said in puzzlement. The front door opened right into the living room.
"Our front hall, silly."
"But, Anita -"
"And that spice cabinet on the wall - wouldn't it be darling with some of the drawers sticking out, and with philodendron growing from them? I know just the spot in the guest room."
"Swell."
"And these priceless rafters, Paul! This means we can have rough-hewn beams in our living room, too. Not just in the kitchen, but the living room, too! And I'll eat your classification card if that dry-sink won't take our television set."
"I was looking forward to eating it myself," said Paul quietly.
"And these wide-board floors: you can imagine what they'll do for the rumpus room."
"What did the rumpus room ever do for me?" said Paul grimly.
"What did you say?"
"I said, what did the rumpus room ever do for me?"
"Oh. I see." She laughed perfunctorily and, her eyes bright, she searched for more plunder.
"Anita -"
"Yes? Oh! What a delightful Cape Cod lighter."
"Listen to me for just a minute."
"Certainly, darling."
"I bought this place for us to live in."
"You mean just the way it is?"
"Exactly. It can't be changed."
"You mean we can't take any of these things out?"
"No. But we can move ourselves in."
"This is another one of your jokes. Don't tease me, darling. I'm having such a good time."
"I'm not teasing! This is the life I want. This is where I want to live it."
"It's so dark, I can't see by your face whether you're serious or not. Turn on the lights."
"No lights."
"No electricity?"
"Only what's in your hair."
"How do they run the furnace?"
"No furnace."
"And the stove?"
"Firewood. And the refrigerator is a cold spring."
"How perfectly hideous!"
"I'm serious, Anita. I want us to live here."
"We'd die in six months."
"The Haycox family lived here for generations."
"You are playful tonight, aren't you? Just so straight-faced and everything, keeping your joke alive. Come here and kiss me, you sweet clown."
"We're going to spend the night here, and tomorrow I'm going to do the chores. Will you give it a try, anyway?"
"And I'll be a good old fat farm Mama, and get breakfast on the wood stove - coffee, homegrown eggs and cream, home-baked biscuits drowned in homemade butter and jam."
"Would you?"
"I'd drown in butter and jam first."
"You could learn to love this life."
"I couldn't, and you know it."
His temper was rising again, in response to bitter disappointment, as it had done an hour before in Homestead. And again he was looking for something short of a slap in her face that would shock humility into her. The sentence that came out had been ready for a long time. He spoke it now, not because now was the right time, but because it packed a punch.
"It doesn't matter what you think," he said evenly. "I've made up my mind to quit my job and live here. Do you understand? I'm going to quit."
She folded her arms across her chest, as though fighting a chill, and rocked in silence for a few moments. "I thought maybe that was coming," she said at last. "I thought maybe that was what you were up to. I'd hoped it wasn't, Paul. I'd prayed it wasn't. But - well, here we are, and you've said it." She lit a cigarette, smoked it in shallow, tasteless puffs, and blew the smoke through her nose. "Shepherd said you would."
"He said I was about to quit?"
"No. He said you were a quitter." She sighed heavily. "He knows you better than I do, apparently."
"God knows it'd be easy enough to stick with the system, and keep going right on up. It's getting out that takes nerve."
"But why quit, if it's so easy to stick with it?"
"Didn't you hear anything I said in Homestead? That's why I took you there, so you'd get the feel of things."
"That silly business about Katharine Finch and Shepherd?"
"No, no - God no. About how people like us have taken all the self-respect from all the others."
"You said you felt like a horse's ass. I remember that."
"Don't you, sometimes?"
"What an idea!"
"Your conscience, dammit - doesn't it ever bother you?"
"Why should it? I've never done anything dishonest."
"Let me put it another way: do you agree things are a mess?"
"Between us?"
"Everywhere! The world!" She could be appallingly nearsighted. Whenever possible, she liked to reduce any generalization to terms of herself and persons she knew intimately. "Homestead, for instance."
"What else could we possibly give the people that they haven't got?"
"There! You made my point for me. You said, what else could we give them, as though everything in the world were ours to give or withhold."
"Somebody's got to take responsibility, and that's just the way it is when somebody does."
"That's just it: things haven't always been that way. It's new, and it's people like us who've brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it's quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something."
"If someone has brains," said Anita firmly, "he can still get to the top. That's the American way, Paul, and it hasn't changed." She looked at him appraisingly. "Brains and nerve, Paul."
"And blinders." The punch was gone from his voice, and he felt drugged, a drowsiness from a little too much to drink, from scrambling over a series of emotional peaks and pits, from utter frustration.
Anita caught the strap of his overalls and pulled him down to kiss him. Paul yielded stiffly.
"Ohhhhhhh," she chided, "you're such a little boy sometimes." She pulled him down again, this time making sure he kissed her on the lips. "You stop worrying, now, you hear?" she whispered in his ear.
"Descent into the Maelstrom," he thought wearily, and closed his eyes, and gave himself over to the one sequence of events that had never failed to provide a beginning, a middle, and a satisfactory end.