a knife. She might try to knock you out with a club and make a run for it. You can't take any chances. You take the gun, and if you have to use it, don't hesitate.'
I held back a few minutes longer. But finally they talked me into taking it.
29
Driving home in the rain, with my guts kind of knotting and unknotting, I thought about Elizabeth and how goddam unfair it was that I had to do all the dirty work on a deal she'd really started.
I hadn't hired Carol. I never would have brought her into the house. Maybe I wasn't too satisfied with married life, but it never occurred to me to do anything about it. It was Elizabeth who had brought her in. It was just one more stupid thing she'd done that I had to be the fall guy for.
About a year after she'd had her miscarriage I went home one afternoon and some dame was in the living- room with Elizabeth. I stuck my head in the door to say hello, and she and this woman both looked kind of embarrassed. And then Elizabeth laughed and told me to come in.
'This is Mrs. Fahrney, Joe,' she said. 'Mrs. Fahrney is connected with the children's protective society.'
'Oh?' I said, wondering if she had a kick on some of the shows I'd been playing. 'That must be very interesting work.'
'Well-it is,' said the dame, glancing at Elizabeth.
And Elizabeth laughed again.
'We may as well tell him,' she said. 'He'll have to sign the papers, anyway.'
'The papers?' I said.
'I was keeping it for a surprise, dear. We're going to have a son. The sweetest little boy baby you ever-'
'Wait a minute,' I said. 'You mean you want to adopt someone else's kid?'
'Not someone else's, Joe. Ours. Perhaps I should have told you sooner, but-'
'I guess you should have, too,' I said. 'I guess you might have saved this lady a trip out here if you had. Any time I have any kids of my own I guarantee I'll feed 'em and take care of 'em and do everything else I'm supposed to. But I'm not spending my dough and my time on other people's brats. I don't want any part of 'em.'
Elizabeth sat biting her lip, looking down at the floor. This woman got up and walked over to her.
'I'm sorry, Mrs. Wilmot,' she said. 'I'll run along now.'
'Oh, wait a minute,' I said. 'I didn't mean all that. If she wants to adopt this-boy, it's all right with me.'
'But it isn't all right with me,' she said, looking straight through me. 'Good-by, Mrs. Wilmot.'
And she sailed out the door without giving me a chance to reason with her.
I tried to explain to Elizabeth how I felt. A kid is always a hell of a big expense and we just couldn't spare the dough from the show. And, anyway, how could you tell what you were getting into when you take a kid out of an orphans' home?
All Elizabeth would say was, 'I understand,' and she didn't understand at all.
Well, no one can say I'm not human, and I was kind of ashamed of the way I'd acted. I suppose she did get lonesome around the place by herself, and when she got a cat I didn't say a word. I don't like cats. They demand too much attention. If you're trying to read or eat or no matter what you're trying to do a cat will butt right in on you. Short of killing them, there's no way of keeping them from rubbing against your legs or jumping into your lap or just bothering you in general.
I didn't say a word, though. When it got to where it bothered me too much I'd just go to my room and lock the door.
I guess it finally got on Elizabeth's nerves, too, because she gave it away to someone. I never asked who and she didn't say. I was just satisfied that it was gone.
About six months later she bought a dog-a tan-and-white collie pup. And I didn't say anything about that, either, but I never knew a minute's comfort at home until she got rid of it. I can't stand dogs. I mean, I can't. And if you'd been on the bum as much as I have, you'd know why.
Well, so that brings us up to Carol. And I know what you're thinking-it's what I thought at first- but it's not the case. She didn't take Carol as a substitute for the cat or dog. She didn't treat her half as good as she'd treated either one of them.
I've already told you how she didn't even give her a decent feed the first night she was there. That's just a sample of the way she acted toward her. And it didn't get me anywhere when I jumped her about it.
'Really, Joe, you amaze me,' she said, sort of smiling down her nose. 'How can you possibly be interested in the welfare of a girl like that? I'm already willing to admit it was a mistake to bring her here.'
'Well, she's here,' I said, 'and she's going to stay. And we're going to treat her decent, too.'
'Are we?'
'All right, don't, then,' I said. 'But if you won't do anything for her yourself, don't stand in my way.'
'I won't,' she said, still smiling. 'That's a promise. I won't stand in your way at all.' And that was the way it ended.
All that was ever done for Carol was done by me. I hadn't lied to Appleton about that. But it was Elizabeth that brought her into the house in the first place. I don't know why, unless it was just another one of her ways of getting my goat, and I don't know that it matters.
All I know is that Carol coming there is what started all the trouble, and that it was left to me to clean it up.
There was one thing that still puzzled me and always had-the money. The way Elizabeth had argued about a split. The way she'd kept telling me I'd be sorry if I tried to get out of sending her the insurance dough.
The people who really care about money are those who lack something without it, and Elizabeth had always felt just as complete and respectable and important without a dollar as she had with a pocketful. She'd been saving and thrifty, sure, but that was more habit than anything else. She'd proved a hundred times over that money didn't mean a thing to her.
When she'd first begun to make an issue of it I thought she was just trying to put a spoke in my wheel, to make it harder to settle the problem between her and Carol and me. And right up until the last, I guess, I was expecting her to say, 'All right, have your Carol and everything else. I'd scrub floors before I'd take a penny from you.'
That would have been Elizabeth's way of doing things, and maybe I would have taken her up on it and maybe I wouldn't have. The point is that she did just the opposite-something that just didn't fit in with her character. And now when it mattered least of all, I couldn't get it out of my mind.
I remembered how insistent Carol had been on sending Elizabeth the money herself, and the answer to that one popped into my head and made me shiver. She hadn't intended sending it. She'd have burned it up first. She hated her enough to do that, to risk getting us all in trouble just to take one final punch at Elizabeth.
It had to be the answer, because I never wrote even a business letter if I could get out of it and I sure wouldn't have written Elizabeth after we were all washed up. It was a standing joke around the house, my not writing to anyone. At least it had been a joke back in the beginning, back during the first year that Elizabeth and I were married.
We were awfully cramped for dough that year. We had good prospects and I knew we'd pull out in the long run, but I was trying to do too many things at once and we ran short. It got so bad that I even considered closing down for a while and going back to driving film truck. But right at the time when things looked darkest this old uncle of Elizabeth's died back East, and everything was jake. He left her twenty-five hundred dollars, enough to clear up the mortgage on the Barclay home with a thousand left over.
Well, I took her down to the train when she started back to collect, and while we were waiting on the platform she asked me to send her a dollar.
'Send you a dollar?' I laughed. 'What's the idea? Here, I'll give you-'
'No, I want you to send it to me, Joe. I know that's the only way I'll hear from you.'
'Oh, now,' I said. 'I don't think I'm that bad. I'll drop you a card.'
'Oh, but you are that bad,' she said. 'Send me the dollar or you'll be sorry when I come back.'
She was kidding, you know, like newly married people will. But I thought if it meant that much to her I'd play along. And that was the cause of two of the worst weeks I've ever spent in my life.
I am careful about money; a businessman has got to be. I'd double-checked the hotel address where Elizabeth was supposed to be staying, and I put a five-day return on the envelope when I mailed it. And then,
