I'd dropped the name deliberately, without preparation, and got the reaction I was looking for. Elaine's delicate blonde face crumpled like tissue paper. `Good Lord,' she said, `is that still going on? Even in the midst of these horrors?'
`I don't know exactly what is going on.'
`They're lovers,' she said bitterly, `for twenty years. He swore to me it was over long ago. He begged me to stay with him, and gave me his word of honor that he would never go near her again. But he has no honor.'
She raised her eyes to mine. `My husband is a man without honor.'
`He didn't strike me that way.'
`Perhaps men can trust him. I know a woman can't. I'm rather an expert on the subject. I've been married to him for over twenty-five years. It wasn't loyalty that kept him with me. I know that. It was my family's money, which has been useful to him in his business, and in his hobbies. Including,' she added in a disgusted tone, `his dirty little bed-hopping hobby.'
She covered her mouth with her hand, as if to hide the anguish twisting it. `I shouldn't be talking this way. It isn't like me. It's very much against my New England grain. My mother, who had a similar problem with my father, taught me by precept and example always to sulkier in silence. And I have. Except for Ralph himself, you're the only person I've spoken to about it.'
`You haven't told me much. It might be a good idea to ventilate it.'
`Do you believe it may be connected in some way with-all this?'
She flung out her arm, with the fingers spread at the end of it.
`Very likely it is. I think that's why your husband and Miss Drew got together this morning. He probably phoned her early in the week. Tuesday afternoon.'
`He did! I remember now. He was phoning from the bar, and I came into the room. He cut it short. But I heard him say something to the effect that they must absolutely keep quiet. It must have been that Drew woman he was talking to.'
The scornful phrase made me wince. It was a painful, strange colloquy, but we were both engrossed in it. The intimacy of the people we were talking about forced intimacy on us.
`It probably was her,' I said. `I'd just told Lieutenant Bastian that she was a witness, and Bastian must have passed it on to your husband.'
`You're right again, Mr. Archer. My husband had just heard from the lieutenant. How can you possibly know so much about the details of other people's lives?'
`Other people's lives are my business.'
`And your passion?'
`And my passion. And my obsession, too, I guess. I've never been able to see much in the world besides the people in it.'
`But how could you possibly find out about that phone call? You weren't here. My husband wouldn't tell you.'
`I was in Miss Drew's apartment when the call came. I didn't hear what was said, but it shook her up.'
`I hope so.'
She glanced at my face, and her eyes softened. She reached out and touched my arm with gentle fingers. `She isn't a friend of yours?'
`She is, in a way.'
`You're not in love with her?'
`Not if I can help it.'
`That's a puzzling answer.'
`It puzzles me, too. If she's still in love with your husband it would tend to chill one's interest. But I don't think she is.'
`Then what are they trying to conceal?'
`Something in the past.'
I hoped it was entirely in the past. Susanna, I had learned in the course of the morning, could still hurt me where I lived.
`It would help if you'd go into it a little deeper. I know it will also hurt,' I said to myself and her.
`I can stand pain if there's any purpose in it. It's the meaningless pain I can't stand. The pain for Tom, for instance.'
She didn't explain what she meant, but she touched her blue-veined temple with her fingertips.
`I'll try to make it short, Mrs. Hillman. You said the affair has been going on for twenty years. That would take it back to around the end of the war.'
`Yes. The spring of 1945. I was living alone, or rather with a woman companion, in a house in Brentwood. My husband was in the Navy. He had been a squadron commander, but at the time I'm talking about he was executive officer of an escort carrier. Later they made him captain of the same ship.'
She spoke with a kind of forlorn pride, and very carefully, as if the precise facts of the past were all she had to hold on to.
`In January or February of 1945 my husband's ship was damaged by a kamikaze plane. They had to bring it
