`No, it isn't. Are you in love with Susanna?'
I didn't answer him.
`In case you're wondering,' he said, `I haven't touched her since 1945. I ran into some trouble with that house detective, Sipe-'
I said impatiently: `I know. You knocked him down.'
`I gave him the beating of his life,' he said with a kind of naive pride. `It was the last time he tried to pry any money out of me.'
`Until this week.'
He was jolted into temporary silence. `Anyway, Susanna lost interest-'
`I don't want to talk about Susanna.'
`That suits me.'
We had moved back into the corridor that led to the library, out of hearing of the room where Elaine was. Hillman leaned on the wall like a bystander in an alley. His posture made me realize how transient and insecure he felt in his own house.
`There are one or two things I don't understand,' I said. `You tell me you spent one night with Carol, and yet you're certain that you fathered her son.'
`He was born just nine months later, December the twelfth.'
`That doesn't prove you're his father. Pregnancies often last longer, especially first ones. Mike Harley could have fathered him before the Shore Patrol took him. Or any other man.'
`There was no other man. She was a virgin.'
`You're kidding.'
`I am not. Her marriage to Mike Harley was never consummated. Mike was impotent, which was one reason he was willing to have the boy pass as his.'
`Why was that so necessary, Hillman? Why didn't you take the boy and raise him yourself?'
'I did that.'
`I mean, raise him openly as your own son.'
`I couldn't. I had other commitments. I was already married to Elaine. She's a New Englander, a Puritan of the first water.'
`With a fortune of the first water.'
`I admit I needed her help to start my business. A man has to make choices.'
He looked up at the chandelier. Its light fell starkly on his hollow bronze face. He turned his face away from the light.
`Who told you Mike Harley was impotent?'
`Carol did, and she wasn't lying. She was a virgin, I tell you. She did a lot of talking in the course of the night. Her whole life. She told me Mike got what sex he got by being spanked, or beaten with a strap.'
`By her?'
`Yes. She didn't enjoy it, of course, but she did it for him willingly enough. She seemed to feel that it was less dangerous than sex, than normal sex.'
A wave of sickness went through me. It wasn't physical. But I could smell the old man's cow barn and hear the whining of his one-eyed dog.
`I thought you were the one who was supposed to be impotent,' I said, `or sterile.'
He glanced at me sharply. `Who have you been talking to?'
`Your wife. She did the talking.'
`And she still thinks I'm sterile?'
`Yes.'
`Good.'
He turned his face away from the light again and let out a little chuckle of relief. `Maybe we can pull this out yet. I told Elaine at the time we adopted Tom that Weintraub gave me a test and found that I was sterile. I was afraid she'd catch on to the fact of my paternity.'
`You may be sterile at that.'
He didn't know what I meant. `No. It's Elaine who is. I didn't need to take any test. I have Tom to prove I'm a man.'
He didn't have Tom.
28
WE WENT INTO the sitting room, the waiting room. Though Tom was in the house the waiting seemed to go on, as if it had somehow coalesced with time. Elaine was in her place on the chesterfield. She had taken up her knitting, and her stainless-steel needles glinted along the edge of the red wool. She looked up brightly at her husband.
