"Boys," she said, addressing the children, "would you please do your reading in the other room till breakfast is ready."
"Us?" Victor said. "Why?"
"Because I say so."
"Are we doing something wrong?" Wally asked.
"No, honey, you're not. I just want to be left alone for a moment with daddy."
I felt myself shrink inside my skin. I wanted to run. I wanted to rush out the front door and go running down the street and hide.
"Get yourself a coffee, Vic," she said, "and sit down." Her voice was quite flat. There was no anger in it. There was just nothing. And she still wouldn't look at me. The boys went out, taking the comic section with them.
"Shut the door," Mary said to them.
I put a spoonful of powdered coffee into my cup and poured boiling water over it. I added milk and sugar. The silence was shattering. I crossed over and sat down in my chair opposite her. It might just as well have been an electric chair, the way I was feeling.
"Listen, Vic," she said, looking into her coffee cup, "I want to get this said before I lose my nerve and then I won't be able to say it."
"For heaven's sake, what's all the drama about?" I asked. "Has something happened?"
"Yes, Vic, it has."
"What?"
Her face was pale and still and distant, unconscious of the kitchen around her.
"Come on, then, out with it," I said bravely.
"You're not going to like this very much," she said, and her big blue haunted-looking eyes rested a moment on my face, then travelled away.
"What am I not going to like very much?" I said. The sheer terror of it all was beginning to stir my bowels. I felt the same way as those burglars the cops had told me about.
"You know I hate talking about love-making and all that sort of thing," she said. "I've never once talked to you about it all the time we've been married."
"That's true," I said.
She took a sip of her coffee, but she wasn't tasting it. "The point is this," she said. "I've never liked it. If you really want to know, I've hated it."
"Hated what?" I asked.
"Sex," she said. "Doing it."
"Good Lord!" I said.
"It's never given me even the slightest little bit of pleasure."
This was shattering enough in itself, but the real cruncher was still to come, I felt sure of that.
"I'm sorry if that surprises you," she added.
I couldn't think of anything to say, so I kept quiet.
Her eyes rose again from the coffee cup and looked into mine, watchful, as if calculating something, then fell again. "I wasn't ever going to tell you," she said. "And I never would have if it hadn't been for last night."
I said very slowly, "What about last night?"
"Last night," she said, "I suddenly found out what the whole crazy thing is all about."
"You did?"
She looked full at me now, and her face was as open as a flower. "Yes," she said. "I surely did."
I didn't move.
"Oh darling!" she cried, jumping up and rushing over and giving me an enormous kiss. "Thank you so much for last night! You were marvellous! And I was marvellous! We were both marvellous! Don't look so embarrassed, my darling! You ought to be proud of yourself! You were fantastic! I love you! I do! I do!"
I just sat there.
She leaned close to me and put an arm around my shoulders. "And now," she said softly, "now that you have…I don't quite know how to say this…now that you have sort of discovered what it is I need, everything is going to be marvellous from now on!"
I sat there. She went slowly back to her chair. A big tear was running down one of her cheeks. I couldn't think why.
"I was right to tell you, wasn't I?" she said, smiling through her tears.
"Yes," I said. "Oh, yes." I stood up and went over to the cooker so that I wouldn't be facing her. Through the kitchen window, I caught sight of Jerry crossing the garden with the Sunday paper under his ann. There was a lilt in his walk, a little prance of triumph in each pace he took, and when he reached the steps of his front porch, he ran up them two at a time.
The Last Act
ANNA was in the kitchen washing a head of Boston lettuce for the family supper when the doorbell rang. The bell itself was on the wall directly above the sink, and it never failed to make her jump if it rang when she happened to be near. For this reason, neither her husband nor any of the children ever used it. It seemed to ring extra loud this time, and Anna jumped extra high.
When she opened the door, two policemen were standing outside. They looked at her out of pale waxen faces, and she looked back at them, waiting for them to say something.
She kept looking at them, but they didn't speak or move. They stood so still and so rigid that they were like two wax figures somebody had put on her doorstep as a joke. Each of them was holding his helmet in front of him in his two hands.
"What is it?" Anna asked.
They were both young, and they were wearing leather gauntlets up to their elbows. She could see their enormous motor-cycles propped up along the edge of the sidewalk behind them, and dead leaves were falling around the motor-cycles and blowing along the sidewalk and the whole of the street was brilliant in the yellow light of a clear, gusty September evening. The taller of the two policemen shifted uneasily on his feet.
Then he said quietly, "Are you Mrs Cooper, ma'am?"
"Yes, I am."
The other said, "Mrs Edmund J. Cooper?"
"Yes." And then slowly it began to dawn upon her that these men, neither of whom seemed anxious to explain his presence, would not be behaving as they were unless they had some distasteful duty to perform.
"Mrs Cooper," she heard one of them saying, and from the way he said it, as gently and softly as if he were comforting a sick child, she knew at once that he was going to tell her something terrible. A great wave of panic came over her, and she said, "What happened?"
"We have to inform you, Mrs Cooper.
The policeman paused, and the woman, watching him, felt as though her whole body were shrinking and shrinking and shrinking inside its skin. that your husband was involved in an accident on the Hudson River Parkway at approximately five forty-five this evening, and died in the ambulance… The policeman who was speaking produced the crocodile wallet she had given Ed on their twentieth wedding anniversary, two years back, and as she reached out to take it, she found herself wondering whether it might not still be warm from having been close to her husband's chest only a short while ago.
"If there's anything we can do," the policeman was saying, "like calling up somebody to come over…some friend or relative maybe…
Anna heard his voice drifting away, then fading out altogether, and it must have been about then that she began to scream. Soon she became hysterical, and the two policemen had their hands full trying to control her until the doctor arrived some forty minutes later and injected something into her arm.
She was no better, though, when she woke up the following morning. Neither her doctor nor her children were able to reason with her in any way at all, and had she not been kept under almost constant sedation for the next few days, she would undoubtedly have taken her own life. In the brief lucid periods between drug-takings, she acted as though she were demented, calling out her husband's name and telling him that she was coming to join him as soon as she possibly could. It was terrible to listen to her. But in defence of her behaviour, it should be said at once that this was no ordinary husband she had lost.
Anna Greenwood had married Ed Cooper when they were both eighteen, and over the time they were together, they grew to be closer and more dependent upon each other than it is possible to describe in words. Every year that went by, their love became more intense and overwhelming, and toward the end, it had reached such a ridiculous peak that it was almost impossible for them to endure the daily separation caused by Ed's departure for the office in the mornings. When he returned at night he would rush through the house to seek her out, and she, who had heard the noise of the front door slamming, would drop everything and rush simultaneously in his direction, meeting him head on, recklessly, at full speed, perhaps halfway up the stairs, or on the landing, or between the kitchen and the hall; and as they came together, he would take her in his arms and hug her and kiss her for minutes on end as though she were yesterday's bride. It was wonderful. It was so utterly unbelievably wonderful that one is very nearly able to understand why she should have had no desire and no heart to continue living in a world where her husband did not exist any more.