`That's nonsense,' he protested. `I've been faithful to you all my life.'
`Except in ways I couldn't cope with. Like when you brought the Harley boy into our home. The great altruist. The noble counselor.'
`You have no right to jeer at me,' he said. `I wanted to help him. I had no way of knowing that he couldn't be reached.'
`Go on. You wanted a son any way you could get one.'
He said stubbornly: `You don't understand. A man gets natural pleasure from raising a boy, teaching him what he knows.'
`All you succeeded in teaching Mike was your dishonesty.'
He turned to me with a helpless gesture, his hands swinging out. `She blames me for everything.'
Walking rather aimlessly, he went out to the back part of the house.
I felt as if I'd been left alone with a far from toothless lioness. She stirred in her chair: `I blame myself as well for being a fool. I married a man who has the feelings of a little boy. He still gets excited about his high-school football teams. The boys adore him. Everybody adores him. They talk about him as if he was some kind of a plaster saint. And he couldn't even keep his own daughter out of trouble.'
`You and your husband should be pulling together.'
`It's a little late to start, isn't it?'
Her glance came up to my face, probed at it for a moment, moved restlessly from side to side.
`It may be that you'll kill him if you go on like this.'
`No. He'll live to be eighty, like his father.'
She jerked her marcelled head toward one of the pictures on the wall. Seen from varying angles, her head was such a handsome object I could hardly take my eyes off it. It was hard to believe that such a finely shaped container could be full of cold boiling trouble.
I said, partly because I wanted to, and partly to appease her: `You must have been a very beautiful girl.'
'Yes. I was.'
She seemed to take no pleasure even from her vanity. I began to suspect that she didn't relate to men. It happened sometimes to girls who were too good-looking. They were treated as beautiful objects until they felt like that and nothing more.
`I could have married anybody,' she said, `any man I went to college with. Some of them are bank presidents and big corporation executives now. But I had to fall in love with a football player.'
`Your husband is a little more than that.'
`Don't sell him to me,' she said. `I know what he is, and I know what my life has been. I've been defrauded. I gave everything I had to marriage and motherhood, and what have I got to show for it? Do you know I never even saw my grandson?'
Mrs. Harley had said the same thing. I didn't mention the coincidence.
`What happened to your grandson?'
`Carol put him out for adoption, can you imagine? Actually I know why she did it. She didn't trust her husband not to harm the baby. That's the kind of a man she married.'
`Did she tell you this?'
`More or less. Mike is a sadist, among other things. He used to swing cats by their tails. He lived in this house for over a year and all the time I was afraid of him. He was terribly strong, and I never was certain what he was going to do.'
`Did he ever attack you?'
`No. He never dared to.'
`How old was he when he left?'
`Let me see, Carol was fifteen at the time. That would make him seventeen or eighteen.'
`And he left to join the Navy, is that correct?'
`He didn't go into the Navy right away. He left town with an older man, a policeman who used to be on the local force. I forgot his name. Anyway, this man lost his position on the force through bribery, and left town, taking Mike with him. He said he was going to make a boxer out of him. They went out to the west coast. I think Mike joined the Navy a few months later. Carol could-' She stopped in dismay.
`What about Carol?'
`I was going to say that Carol could tell you.'
The angry smile twisted and insulted her mouth. `I must be losing my mind.'
`I doubt that, Mrs. Brown. It takes time to get used to these shocks and changes.'
`More time than I have. More time than I'll ever have.'
She rose impatiently and went to the mantelpiece. One of the trophies standing on it was out of line with the others. She reached up and adjusted its position. `I wonder what Rob thinks he's doing in the kitchen.'
She didn't go and find out what he was doing. She stood in an awkward position, one hip out, in front of the
