Gertrude was a stray. She had been born with a taste for exploration, and she did not have it in her to center her life with her affectionate parents. People who did not know the Flannerys concluded from Gertrude’s behavior that she was the child of a bitterly divided family, where drunken quarrels were the rule. This was not true. The fact that little Gertrude’s clothing was ragged and thin was her own triumph over her mother’s struggle to dress her warmly and neatly. Garrulous, skinny, and unwashed, she drifted from house to house around the Blenhollow neighborhood, forming and breaking alliances based on an attachment to babies, animals, children her own age, adolescents, and sometimes adults. Opening your front door in the morning, you would find Gertrude sitting on your stoop. Going into the bathroom to shave, you would find Gertrude using the toilet. Looking into your son’s crib, you would find it empty, and, looking further, you would find that Gertrude had pushed him in his baby carriage into the next village. She was helpful, pervasive, honest, hungry, and loyal. She never went home of her own choice. When the time to go arrived, she was indifferent to all its signs. “Go home, Gertrude,” people could be heard saying in one house or another, night after night. “Go home, Gertrude. It’s time for you to go home now, Gertrude.”
“You had better go home and get your supper, Gertrude.”
“I told you to go home twenty minutes ago, Gertrude.”
“Your mother will be worrying about you, Gertrude.”
“Go home, Gertrude, go home.”
There are times when the lines around the human eye seem like shelves of eroded stone and when the staring eye itself strikes us with such a wilderness of animal feeling that we are at a loss. The look Francis gave the little girl was ugly and queer, and it frightened her. He reached into his pockets?his hands were shaking?and took out a quarter. “Go home, Gertrude, go home, and don’t tell anyone, Gertrude. Don’t?” He choked and ran into the living room as Julia called down to him from upstairs to hurry and dress.
The thought that he would drive Anne Murchison home later that night ran like a golden thread through the events of the party that Francis and Julia went to, and he laughed uproariously at dull jokes, dried a tear when Mabel Mercer told him about the death of her kitten, and stretched, yawned, sighed, and grunted like any other man with a rendezvous at the back of his mind. The bracelet was in his pocket. As he sat talking, the smell of grass was in his nose, and he was wondering where he would park the car. Nobody lived in the old Parker mansion, and the driveway was used as a lovers’ lane. Townsend Street was a dead end, and he could park there, beyond the last house. The old lane that used to connect Elm Street to the riverbanks was overgrown, but he had walked there with his children, and he could drive his car deep enough into the brushwoods to be concealed.
The Weeds were the last to leave the party, and their host and hostess spoke of their own married happiness while they all four stood in the hallway saying good night. “She’s my girl,” their host said, squeezing his wife. “She’s my blue sky. After sixteen years, I still bite her shoulders. She makes me feel like Hannibal crossing the Alps.”
The Weeds drove home in silence. Francis brought the car up the driveway and sat still, with the motor running. “You can put the car in the garage,” Julia said as she got out. “I told the Murchison girl she could leave at eleven. Someone drove her home.” She shut the door, and Francis sat in the dark. He would be spared nothing then, it seemed, that a fool was not spared: ravening lewdness, jealousy, this hurt to his feelings that put tears in his eyes, even scorn?for he could see clearly the image he now presented, his arms spread over the steering wheel and his head buried in them for love.
FRANCIS had been a dedicated Boy Scout when he was young, and, remembering the precepts of his youth, he left his office early the next afternoon and played some round-robin squash, but, with his body toned up by exercise and a shower, he realized that he might better have stayed at his desk. It was a frosty night when he got home. The air smelled sharply of change. When he stepped into the house, he sensed an unusual stir. The children were in their best clothes, and when Julia came down, she was wearing a lavender dress and her diamond sunburst. She explained the stir: Mr. Hubber was coming at seven to take their photograph for the Christmas card. She had put out Francis’ blue suit and a tie with some color in it, because the picture was going to be in color this year. Julia was lighthearted at the thought of being photographed for Christmas. It was the kind of ceremony she enjoyed.
Francis went upstairs to change his clothes. He was tired from the day’s work and tired with longing, and sitting on the edge of the bed had the effect of deepening his weariness. He thought of Anne Murchison, and the physical need to express himself, instead of being restrained by the pink lamps of Julia’s dressing table, engulfed him. He went to Julia’s desk, took a piece of writing paper, and began to write on it. “Dear Anne, I love you, I love you, I love you…” No one would see the letter, and he used no restraint. He used phrases like “heavenly bliss,” and “love nest.” He salivated, sighed, and trembled. When Julia called him to come down, the abyss between his fantasy and the practical world opened so wide that he felt it affected the muscles of his heart.
Julia and the children were on the stoop, and the photographer and his assistant had set up a double battery of floodlights to show the family and the architectural beauty of the entrance to their house. People who had come home on a late train slowed their cars to see the Weeds being photographed for their Christmas card. A few waved and called to the family. It took half an hour of smiling and wetting their lips before Mr. Hubber was satisfied. The heat of the lights made an unfresh smell in the frosty air, and when they were turned off, they lingered on the retina of Francis’ eyes.
Later that night, while Francis and Julia were drinking their coffee in the living room, the doorbell rang. Julia answered the door and let in Clayton Thomas. He had come to pay for some theatre tickets that she had given his mother some time ago, and that Helen Thomas had scrupulously insisted on paying for, though Julia had asked her not to. Julia invited him in to have a cup of coffee. “I won’t have any coffee,” Clayton said, “but I will come in for a minute.” He followed her into the living room, said good evening to Francis, and sat awkwardly in a chair.
Clayton’s father had been killed in the war, and the young man’s fatherlessness surrounded him
