“But I—”
“No excuses,” he said, and hung up.
She turned and was startled to see Johnny Quinn smiling down at her, a fresh drink in his hand. He had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. His shirt was very white in the first gloom of dusk.
“You’re so beautiful I’ve got stage fright,” he said.
“Johnny, please. I have to change. I’m going out.”
“Out! What kind of runaround—”
“Some very old and very good friends. She was a sorority sister of mine. Ben was an instructor at the same time Tom was. Tom wired them I’d be here. Really, Johnny, it would look very strange if I tried to get out of it.”
He looked angry and disappointed for a moment; then he managed to smile at her. “I see what you mean.” He put his hands on her shoulders and looked down into her eyes. “But we understand each other.”
“Do we, Johnny?”
He gave her a quick and strenuous kiss. “That answers your question.”
“Does it?”
“I’ll leave a light in the window. Hurry home, honey. Get a nice little headache and leave early.”
It was one of the strangest evenings of her life. Ben Hagerman — balding, rumpled, wry, full of wonderful, hesitant warmth — met her in the lobby, kissed her heartily on the cheek, and hurried her out to a shabby old station wagon parked half a block from the hotel.
“There must be some sinister secret,” he said, after he had yanked the car away from the curb. “More than being in the cosmetics industry, dear Molly. The years are leaving no mark. You could be one of my students. A pact with Lucifer?”
“Call me Doriana Gray. Ben, you are as bad a driver as ever.”
“And Ginny still keeps her eyes closed, and I still resent it. It’s good to see you, Miss Molly. So good.”
He drove her through the last edge of dusk to a small house on a small street between Brays Bayou and the Texas Southern campus. Ginny came running to hug Molly as she got out of the car, then to hold her at arm’s length and look at her in the glow of the porch light and say, “You look like a fashion model. How indecent of you! How unkind!” And hugged her again.
Ginny was plump, and there were wings of gray in her dark-brown hair. They went into the confusion of the child-worn house, where the youngest was doing a vastly inept job of feeding himself in his kitchen high chair and the five-year-old twins were engaged in mortal combat.
That first part of the evening was the warm part, the do-you-remember part, with genuine gaiety and laughter. It lasted through dinner, through the cooperative cleanup, and until they were settled in the living room-dense with books and records and prints and stacks of professional journals, with the lights low and the children asleep and red Mexican wine within reach. That was when the strangeness began. That was when the absence of Tom became a tangible thing. There was an empty chair he had never seen and certainly never sat in, but it seemed as if he had just left the room for a few moments.
She knew all the reasons it should be that way. Before they had married, and for many months after both marriages, there had been so many evenings of talk, that good speculative talk. They had solved all the weighty problems of Western civilization. The group of four had had a special balance, an interplay — Ben, the skeptic; Ginny, the poet; Tom, the mystic; and Molly, the idealist.
Molly soon realized that after all the do-you-remembers had been covered, Ben and Ginny were trying to steer the conversation into old patterns, alternately bringing up the sort of topic the four of them used to leap upon with gusto. But it wasn’t working. New topics were seized too eagerly. They listened with artificial avidity. They laughed too quickly. All the comments they made seemed too obvious. And each new topic died in its turn.
For a time, Molly thought it was all due to Tom’s absence, and then she was forced to admit to herself something she had been trying to conceal, out of her love for Ben and Ginny. Their observations seemed incurably adolescent, as though they had been trapped forever in the old years, when the four of them had been very young. Their opinions, though charming and witty, seemed to have no relationship to the real world. She had heard of this happening to old friendships. Ben and Ginny are as they used to be, she thought, and I have grown and changed, so that now this kind of talk seems artificial and boring and ever so slightly silly.
With this realization, she began to look at Ginny Hagerman in a different light, identifying her as the Molly who-might-have-been. The equation did not lend itself to any pat solution. She had to balance Ginny’s makeshift wardrobe and dire need of a hairdresser and shabby but comfortable home and her adolescent fascination with conversational abstractions against a love and a contentment and a closeness in her marriage that were as tangible in that small room as light and heat. A narrow world, but a cozy one indeed.
Just as she was feeling confident of her analysis, two of Ben’s graduate students dropped in — a big, dark, moody-looking boy named Sam Alston, and a frail little angel girl named Laura Lee Brewer. They had been walking and had seen the lights and decided to let Ben settle an argument they were having. They tried to leave at once when they saw the Hagermans had a guest, but Ben insisted they stay.
The argument concerned the validity of Heidegger’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s statements regarding primitive monotheism. Molly, because of what she had learned during the time she had been close to Tom’s work, was able to follow the thread of the argument for the first few minutes. Then suddenly they were beyond her range. She gave up and leaned back and looked toward Ginny, prepared to give her a conspiratorial wink, as one outsider to another. But she found Ginny following the discussion with great intensity. Soon, to Molly’s astonishment, Ginny made a fairly lengthy comment, which the others listened to and gravely accepted.
In that moment, Molly Murdock had to re-evaluate all that had gone before. There was nothing adolescent about this discussion. In all the previous talk, Ben and Ginny must have been simplifying, keeping the talk at an undemanding level; in effect, they had been patronizing her. The idea made her so furious she forced herself to smile, and she tried to recapture the gist of the discussion.
“On that point,” Sam Alston was saying, “I’ll go right back to Murdock’s original treatise on Barth.”
Ben gave a yelp of delight, grinned at Molly, and said, “See how Tom comes up as an authority?”
“What do you mean, sir?” Sam Alston said.
“This is Doctor Murdock’s wife,” Ben said. “I thought you realized that.”
“We didn’t!” Laura Lee said in a hushed voice.
The two young people stared at Molly, and she had the feeling they were seeing her for the first time. There was a curious awe, a reverence in their look, tinged with an almost imperceptible flavor of disapproval.
“Is Doctor Murdock in Houston?” Sam Alston asked, incredulity in his tone.
“He is in Vermont,” Molly said tartly. “With our children and three crates of reference works, writing a new book.”
“I never thought of him as being married,” Laura Lee said humbly. “He’s a very great man. I guess you know that. I guess you’re very proud of him.” She looked at her watch. “Sam, we really should go. Thanks for the wine, Doctor Hagerman, and for being a referee. Thank you, Mrs. Hagerman. And — it’s been an honor to meet you, Mrs. Murdock.”
Ben walked to the door with them and came back, smiling. “Sudden attack of stage fright,” he said. “They were aching to ask about the personal life of Doctor Thomas England Murdock, household god of all philosophy majors, but they didn’t have the nerve.”