Melissa and Peter were playing poker. “He’s very successful,” Melissa was saying. “He owns his own company. But he nags at me, we fight a lot. You know? Sometimes when he invites me out he makes me change what I’m wearing, just to suit him. He goes charging into my closet and pushes all my dresses down the rod, figuring what he’d like better. What can you do with a person like that?” Peter frowned at his cards. He wasn’t even pretending to listen.
Margaret was talking about a man too, but in her own toneless way. She lay on a couch with her feet up, twining a limp lock of hair around her finger and telling Mary about someone named Brady. “I was planning to bring him home, before this happened,” she said.
“Oh, don’t,” said Mary, rocking Billy serenely. “Everything goes wrong in this house.”
“But he keeps asking me to marry him. Mother would have a fit if she didn’t meet him first.”
“Well, coming from someone who eloped—”
“Mother met him first.”
“Only if you count when he brought in the groceries,” Mary said. “She’s not much for heart-to-heart talks with stray delivery boys.”
“You don’t have to be so snide about it.”
“I’m not. Can’t we have a normal conversation? I don’t know why you want to get married anyway — you’re not the type.” She arranged Billy more comfortably, checking his sleep with her mouth tucked in and competent-looking. “Too disorganized. Any man would be climbing the walls. You must still think marriage is floating around in a white dress. Well, it isn’t.”
“I know that, I read the ladies’ magazines.”
“They expect you to take care of them, it’s not the other way around. Always asking you to pick up, put away, find things for them. Look at Morris — every morning I tell him the butter’s kept in the butter bin. He never listens. He opens the refrigerator and panics. ‘The butter, where’s the butter, we’ve run out of butter again.’ ‘It’s in the butter bin, dear.’ Oh, you’d never last through that. I often think of chucking it all myself.”
The telephone rang. Matthew crossed to the armchair and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” he said.
“Oh, Matthew,” said Andrew.
“Hello, Andrew.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. Why?”
“You aren’t glad to hear from me.”
“Of course I am,” said Matthew.
“I can tell from your voice.”
“Don’t be silly,” Matthew said. “Were you calling about anything in particular?”
There was a chipping sound at the other end of the line — Andrew doing something nervous with the phone. His hands were always busy, twisting or fidgeting or kneading his thumbs, while the rest of him was limp and motionless. Like a rag doll, he tended to remain where he was left — New York, in this case, after a try at college there. It took vast amounts of other people’s energy to change his life in any way, and lately no one had felt up to it. What was the use? In New York he lived in a pattern as unvarying as the tracks of a toy train — from rooming house to library to rooming house, lunch every Wednesday with Melissa in the only restaurant he approved of (the only one he had been in; someone had once taken him there) and home three or four times a year, shattered and white over the change in his schedule. He distrusted planes (a family trait) and panicked at the swaying of trains, and had never learned to drive. All he had left were buses. Buses, Matthew thought, and started. “Holy Moses,” he said. “You’re in Baltimore.”
“You forgot,” said Andrew.
“Oh no, I just—”
“You forgot I was coming. Would you rather I just went back again?”
“No, Andrew.”
“There are plenty of buses out of here.”
“I knew you were coming. I just never heard what time,” Matthew said. “I’ll be right down.”
“Oh, well—” “Wait there.”
“Well, if you’re sure you’re expecting me,” said Andrew.
“We are. Stay there, now. Bye.”
He hung up and started out of the room immediately. “I have to get Andrew,” he said.
“Oh, Lord,” said Melissa. “This is too much at once.”
“I’ll be back in a while.”
“Tell him in the car, Matthew. Get it over with.”
“Are you crazy?” Mary asked. “Why did we keep it from him, if we’re just going to dump it on him now? Don’t you say a word, Matthew. Bring him on home. Maybe we’ll wait till tomorrow.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Melissa said. “I have a nervous stomach.”
Matthew left. In the hallway he met Elizabeth, who was just coming down the stairs with her suitcase and knapsack. Her burdens made her look lopsided. She still wore her church dress, with pieces of damp bark down the front. When she saw him, she stopped on the bottom step. He had an urge to trap her there, under glass, complete with her baggage and her peeling handbag and her falling-down hairdo, until life was sorted out again and he could collect what he wanted to say to her. “Can’t you wait?” he asked. “Don’t go yet. Won’t you just wait till I get back from the bus station?”
“Oh, the bus station,” Elizabeth said. “That’s where I’m going.”
“What for?”
“Well, I’m catching a bus. You could give me a lift.”
“Oh, I thought — I had pictured you getting a ride.”
“Not at such short notice,” Elizabeth said.
She handed him the suitcase. Of all the sad things going on today, it seemed to him that the saddest was that single motion — Elizabeth flashing the luminous inner side of her wrist, with its bulky leather watchstrap, as she passed him her suitcase. Where were her bulletin board drivers, those laughable old cars full of Hopkins students that used to draw up at the door? Where were her blue jeans, and her moccasins with the chewed-looking tassels, and her impatient, brushing-away motion when he tried to help her with loads that looked too heavy?
“Are you waiting for something?” Elizabeth said.
“No.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“But — so fast? You haven’t said goodbye yet. Mother’s still in her room.”
“I’ll write her a bread-and-butter letter.”
“Well, if that’s the way you want to do it,” Matthew said.
They hurried down the sidewalk, with Elizabeth’s turned-up pumps making clopping sounds and her knapsack swinging over one shoulder. “Hop in,” Matthew said. “We have to get to Andrew before he takes the next bus out again.”
“Oh, Andrew,” said Elizabeth, but her voice was dull and tired. It sounded as if she had had enough of Emersons.
All the way downtown, Matthew kept choosing words and then discarding them, choosing more, trying to make some contact with Elizabeth’s cold, still profile. He drove absentmindedly, and had to be honked into motion at several traffic lights. “You won’t get to see how those new shrubs make out,” he told her once. Then, later, “Will August be a good time for me to visit you?” She didn’t answer. “I get my vacation then,” he said. Elizabeth only drew a billfold from her handbag and started counting money. “Do you have enough?” he asked her.
“Sure.”
“Did Mother ever pay you for this past week?”
“Pay me?”
When Elizabeth answered questions with questions, it was no use trying to talk to her.
They passed dark narrow buildings that had suddenly brightened in the spring sunlight, old ladies sitting on crumbling front stoops taking the air, children roller-skating. In the heart of the city, in a tangle of taverns and pawnshops and cut-rate jewelers, black-jacketed men stood on the sidewalks selling paper cones of daffodils. Matthew drew up in front of the bus station, where he parked illegally because he was afraid of losing both of them, Andrew and Elizabeth, if he took more time. “Don’t get away from me,” he told Elizabeth. “Wait till I find Andrew. Don’t leave.”