“I guess I’d better stay and take care of you for a little while longer,” she said.
Riding to work in the morning, Francis saw the girl walk down the aisle of the coach. He was surprised; he hadn’t realized that the school she went to was in the city, but she was carrying books, she seemed to be going to school. His surprise delayed his reaction, but then he got up clumsily and stepped into the aisle. Several people had come between them, but he could see her ahead of him, waiting for someone to open the car door, and then, as the train swerved, putting out her hand to support herself as she crossed the platform into the next car. He followed her through that car and halfway through another before calling her name?“Anne! Anne!”?but she didn’t turn. He followed her into still another car, and she sat down in an aisle seat. Coming up to her, all his feelings warm and bent in her direction, he put his hand on the back of her seat?even this touch warmed him?and leaning down to speak to her, he saw that it was not Anne. It was an older woman wearing glasses. He went on deliberately into another car, his face red with embarrassment and the much deeper feeling of having his good sense challenged; for if he couldn’t tell one person from another, what evidence was there that his life with Julia and the children had as much reality as his dreams of iniquity in Paris or the litter, the grass smell, and the cave- shaped trees in Lovers’ Lane.
Late that afternoon, Julia called to remind Francis that they were going out for dinner. A few minutes later, Trace Bearden called. “Look, fellar,” Trace said. “I’m calling for Mrs. Thomas. You know? Clayton, that boy of hers, doesn’t seem able to get a job, and I wondered if you could help. If you’d call Charlie Bell?I know he’s indebted to you?and say a good word for the kid, I think Charlie would?”
“Trace, I hate to say this,” Francis said, “but I don’t feel that I can do anything for that boy. The kid’s worthless. I know it’s a harsh thing to say, but it’s a fact. Any kindness done for him would backfire in everybody’s face. He’s just a worthless kid, Trace, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Even if we got him a job, he wouldn’t be able to keep it for a week. I know that to be a fact. It’s an awful thing, Trace, and I know it is, but instead of recommending that kid, I’d feel obligated to warn people against him?people who knew his father and would naturally want to step in and do something. I’d feel obliged to warn them. He’s a thief.”
The moment this conversation was finished, Miss Rainey came in and stood by his desk. “I’m not going to be able to work for you any more, Mr. Weed,” she said. “I can stay until the seventeenth if you need me, but I’ve been offered a whirlwind of a job, and I’d like to leave as soon as possible.”
She went out, leaving him to face alone the wickedness of what he had done to the Thomas boy. His children in their photograph laughed and laughed, glazed with all the bright colors of summer, and he remembered that they had met a bagpiper on the beach that day and he had paid the piper a dollar to play them a battle song of the Black Watch. The girl would be at the house when he got home. He would spend another evening among his kind neighbors, picking and choosing dead-end streets, cart tracks, and the driveways of abandoned houses. There was nothing to mitigate his feeling?nothing that laughter or a game of softball with the children would change?and, thinking back over the plane crash, the Farquarsons’ new maid, and Anne Murchison’s difficulties with her drunken father, he wondered how he could have avoided arriving at just where he was. He was in trouble. He had been lost once in his life, coming back from a trout stream in the north woods, and he had now the same bleak realization that no amount of cheerfulness or hopefulness or valor or perseverance could help him find, in the gathering dark, the path that he’d lost. He smelled the forest. The feeling of bleakness was intolerable, and he saw clearly that he had reached the point where he would have to make a choice.
He could go to a psychiatrist, like Miss Rainey; he could go to church and confess his lusts; he could go to a Danish massage parlor in the West Seventies that had been recommended by a salesman; he could rape the girl or trust that he would somehow be prevented from doing this; or he could get drunk. It was his life, his boat, and, like every other man, he was made to be the father of thousands, and what harm could there be in a tryst that would make them both feel more kindly toward the world? This was the wrong train of thought, and he came back to the first, the psychiatrist. He had the telephone number of Miss Rainey’s doctor, and he called and asked for an immediate appointment. He was insistent with the doctor’s secretary?it was his manner in business?and when she said that the doctor’s schedule was full for the next few weeks, Francis demanded an appointment that day and was told to come at five.
The psychiatrist’s office was in a building that was used mostly by doctors and dentists, and the hallways were filled with the candy smell of mouthwash and memories of pain. Francis’ character had been formed upon a series of private resolves?resolves about cleanliness, about going off the high diving board or repeating any other feat that challenged his courage, about punctuality, honesty, and virtue. To abdicate the perfect loneliness in which he had made his most vital decisions shattered his concept of character and left him now in a condition that felt like shock. He was stupefied. The scene for his iniserere mei Deus was, like the waiting room of so many doctor’s offices, a crude token gesture toward the sweets of domestic bliss: a place arranged with antiques, coffee tables, potted plants, and etchings of snow-covered bridges and geese in flight, although there were no children, no marriage bed, no stove, even, in this travesty of a house, where no one had ever spent the night and where the curtained windows looked straight onto a dark air shaft. Francis gave his name and address to a secretary and then saw, at the side of the room, a policeman moving toward him. “Hold it, hold it,” the policeman said. “Don’t move. Keep your hands where they are.”
“I think it’s all right, Officer,” the secretary began. “I think it will…”
“Let’s make sure,” the policeman said, and he began to slap Francis’ clothes, looking for what?pistols, knives, an ice pick? Finding nothing, he went off and the secretary began a nervous apology: “When you called on the telephone, Mr. Weed, you seemed very excited, and one of the doctor’s patients has been threatening his life, and we have to be careful. If you want to go in now?” Francis pushed open a door connected to an electrical chime, and in the doctor’s lair sat down heavily, blew his nose into a handkerchief, searched in his pockets for cigarettes, for matches, for something, and said hoarsely, with tears in his eyes, “I’m in love, Dr. Herzog.”
IT is a week or ten days later in Shady Hill. The seven-fourteen has come and gone, and here and there dinner is finished and the dishes are in the dish-washing machine. The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light. Donald Goslin has begun to worry the “Moonlight Sonata” again. Marcato ma sempre pianissimo! He seems to be wringing out a wet bath towel, but the housemaid does not heed him. She is writing a letter to Arthur Godfrey. In the cellar of his house, Francis Weed is building a coffee table. Dr. Herzog recommends woodwork as a therapy, and Francis finds some true consolation in the simple arithmetic involved and in the holy smell of new wood. Francis is happy. Upstairs, little Toby is crying, because he is tired. He puts off his cowboy hat, gloves, and fringed jacket, unbuckles the belt studded with gold and
