his stomach, making him look portly. Maria’s hands moved quickly. When she had covered a branch with blossoms, she would hold it up and say, “Isn’t that pretty?” Then she would stand it in a corner where there was the beginning of a forest of flowering branches. Upstairs, the three children slept.
The decorations-committee job was the kind of thing Maria did best. She did not like to go to early-morning meetings on the reform of the primary system, or to poke her nose into dirty hospital kitchens, or to meet with other women in the late afternoons to discuss trends in modern fiction. She had tried being secretary of the Women’s Club, but her minutes were so garbled that she had had to be replaced?not without some hard feeling. On the evening of the day when she was relieved of her position, Will had found her in tears, and it had taken him hours to console her. He relished these adversities. She was young and beautiful, and anything that turned her to him for succor only made his position more secure. Later, when Maria was put in charge of the mink-stole raffle to raise some money for the hospital, she had kept such poor records that Will had had to stay home from the office for a day to straighten things out. She cried and he comforted her, where a younger husband might have expressed some impatience. Will did not encourage her inefficiency, but it was a trait that he associated with the fineness of her eyes and her pallor.
While she tied flowers she talked about the fete. There was going to be a twelve-piece orchestra. The decorations had never been so beautiful. They hoped to raise ten thousand dollars. The dressmaker had delivered her costume. Will asked what her costume was, and she said she would go upstairs and put it on. She usually went to the Apple Blossom Fete as a figure from French history, and Will’s interest was not intense.
Half an hour later, she came down, and went to the mirror by the piano. She was wearing gold slippers, pink tights, and a light velvet bodice, cut low enough to show the division of her breasts. “Of course, my hair will be all different,” she said. “And I haven’t decided what jewels to wear.
A terrible sadness came over Will. The tight costume?he had to polish his eyeglasses to see it better?displayed all the beauty he worshipped, and it also expressed her perfect innocence of the wickedness of the world. The sight filled poor Will with lust and dismay. He couldn’t bear to disappoint her, and yet he couldn’t let her flagrantly provoke his neighbors?a group of men who seemed at that moment, to his unsettled mind, to be voracious, youthful, bestial, and lewd. Watching her pose happily in front of the mirror, he thought that she looked like a child?a maiden, at least?approaching some obscene doom. In her sweet and gentle face and her half-naked bosom he saw all the sadness of life.
“You can’t wear that, Mummy,” he said.
“What?” She turned away from the mirror.
“Mummy, you’ll get pinched to death.”
“Everybody else is going to wear tights, Willy. Helen Benson and Grace Heatherstone are going to wear tights.”
“They’re different, Mummy,” he said sadly. “They’re very different. They’re tough, hardheaded, cynical, worldly women.”
“What am I?”
“You’re lovely and you’re innocent,” he said. “You don’t understand what a bunch of dogs men are.”
“I don’t want to be lovely and innocent all the time.”
“Oh, Mummy, you don’t mean that! You can’t mean that! You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I only want to have a good time.”
“Don’t you have a good time with me?”
She began to cry. She threw herself on the sofa and buried her face. Her tears ate like acid into Will’s resolve as he bent over her slender and miserable form. Years and years ago he had wondered if a young wife would give him trouble. Now, with his eyeglasses steaming and the brocade jacket bunched up around his stomach, he stood face to face with the problem. How?even when they were in grave danger?could he refuse innocence and beauty? “All right, Mummy, all right,” he said. He was nearly in tears himself. “You can wear it.”
Will left the next morning for a trip that took him to Cleveland, Chicago, and Topeka. He called Maria on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and the maid said that she was out. She would be putting up the decorations in the club, he realized. The pancakes he ate for breakfast on Thursday disagreed with him at once, and gave him a stomach ache that none of the many medicines he carried with him in his suitcase could cure. Friday was foggy in Kansas, and his plane was grounded until late that night. At the airport, he ate some chicken pie; it made him feel worse. He arrived in New York on Sunday morning, and had to go directly to his office, and did not get out to Shady Hill until late Saturday afternoon. It was the day of the party, and Maria was still at the club. He spent an hour raking dead leaves from the flower beds at the side of the house. When Maria came home, he thought she looked superb. Her color was high and her eyes were bright.
She showed Will the costume she had rented for him. It was a suit of chain mail with a helmet. Will was pleased with the costume, because it was a disguise. Exhausted and bilious, he felt he needed a disguise for the dance. When he had bathed and shaved, Maria helped him strap himself into his coat of mail. She cut some ostrich plumes off an old hat and stuck them gaily into his helmet. Will went toward a mirror to see himself, but just as he got there, the visor slammed shut, and he couldn’t get it to stay open. He went downstairs, holding on to the banister?the chain mail was heavy?and wedged the visor open with a folded timetable and sat down to have a drink. When Maria came down in her pink tights and her gold slippers, Will rose to admire her. She said that she would not
