be able to leave the dance early, because she was on the committee; if Will wanted to go home, she would get a ride with someone else. He had never gone home from a party without her, and he hated the idea. Maria put on a wrap and kissed the children, and they went off to dinner at the Beardens’.
At the Beardens’, the party was large and late. They drank cocktails until after nine. When they went in to dinner, Will sat beside Ethel Worden. She was a pretty young woman, but she had been drinking Martinis for two hours; her face was drawn and her eyes were red. She said that she loved Will, that she always had, but Will was looking down the table at Maria. Even at that distance, he seemed to take in something vital from the play of shadow upon her face. He would have liked to be near enough to hear what she was saying.
Ethel Worden didn’t make it any easier. “We’re poor, Will,” she said sadly. “Did you know that we’re poor? Nobody realizes that there are people like us in a community like this. We can’t afford eggs for breakfast. We can’t afford a cleaning woman. We can’t afford a washing machine. We can’t afford…”
Before dessert was finished, several couples got up to leave for the club. Will saw Trace Bearden handing Maria her wrap, and got up suddenly. He wanted to get to the club in time to have the first dance with her. When he got outside, Trace and Maria had gone. He asked Ethel Worden to drive over with him. She was delighted. As he put the car in the parking lot at the country club, Ethel began to cry. She was poor and lonely and hungry for love. She drew Will to her and wept on his chain-mail shoulder, while he looked out the back windows of the station wagon to see if he could recognize Trace Bearden’s car. He wondered if Maria was already in the clubhouse or if she was having trouble in a parked car herself. He dried Ethel’s tears and spoke to her tenderly, and they went in.
It was late by then?it was after midnight?and that dance was always a rhubarb. The floor was crowded, and plumes, crowns, animal heads, and turbans were rocking in the dim light. It was that hour when the band accelerates its beat, when the drums deepen, when the aging dancers utter loud cries of lust and joy, seize their partners by the girdle, and break into all kinds of youthful and wanton specialties?the shimmy, the Charleston, hops, and belly dances. Will danced clumsily in his mail. Now and then, he glimpsed Maria in the distance, but he was never able to catch up with her. Going into the bar for a drink, he saw her at the other end of the room, but the crowd was too dense for him to get to her. She was surrounded by men. He looked for her in the lounge during the next intermission, but he could not find her. When the music started again, he gave the band ten dollars and asked them to play “I Could Write a Book.” It was their music. She would hear it through the bedlam. It would remind her of their marriage, and she would leave her partner and find him. He waited alone at the edge of the floor through this song.
Discouraged, then, and tired from his traveling and the weight of his chain mail, he went into the lounge, took off his helmet, and fell asleep. When he woke, a half hour later, he saw Larry Helmsford taking Ethel Worden out the terrace door toward the parking lot. She was staggering. Will wandered back to the ballroom, drawn there by shouts of excitement. Someone had set fire to a feathered headdress. The fire was being put out with champagne. It was after three o’clock. Will put on his helmet, propped the visor open with a folded match paper, and went home.
Maria danced the last dance. She had a drink from the last bottle of wine. It was morning then. The band had gone, but a pianist was still playing and a few couples were dancing in the daylight. Breakfast parties were forming, but she refused these invitations in order to drive home with the Beardens. Will might be worried. After she said goodbye to the Beardens, she stood on her front steps to get some air. She had lost her pocketbook. Her tights had been torn by the scales of a dragon. The smell of spilled wine came from her clothes. The sweetness of the air and the fineness of the light touched her. The party seemed like gibberish. She had had all the partners she wanted, but she had not had all the right ones. The hundreds of apple blossoms that she had tied to branches and that had looked, at a distance, so like real blossoms would soon be swept into the ash can.
The trees of Shady Hill were filled with birds?larks, thrushes, robins, crows?and now the air began to ring with their song. The pristine light and the loud singing reminded her of some ideal?some simple way of life, in which she dried her hands on an apron and Will came home from the sea?that she had betrayed. She did not know where she had failed, but the gentle morning light illuminated her failure pitilessly. She began to cry.
Will was asleep, but he woke when she opened the front door. “Mummy?” he asked as she climbed the stairs. “Mummy?… Hello, Mummy. Good morning!” She didn’t reply.
He saw her tears, the gash in her tights, and the stains on her front. She sat down at her dressing table, laid her face on the glass, and went on crying. “Oh, don’t cry, Mummy!” he said. “Don’t cry! I don’t care, Mummy. I thought I would but I guess it doesn’t really matter. I won’t ever mention it, Mummy. Now, come to bed. Come to bed and get some sleep.”
Her sobbing got louder. He got up and went to the dressing table and put his arms around her. “I told you what would happen if you wore that costume, didn’t I? But it doesn’t matter any more. I’ll never ask you anything about it. I’ll forget the whole thing. But come to bed now and get some sleep.”
Her head was swimming, and his voice droned on and on, shutting out the noises of the morning. Then his anxious love, his nagging passion, were more than she could support. “I don’t care. I’m willing to forget it,” he said.
She got out of his embrace, crossed the room to the hall, and shut the guest-room door in his face.
Downstairs, sitting over a cup of coffee, Will realized that his supervision of Maria’s life had been anything but thorough. If she had wanted to deceive him, her life couldn’t have been planned along more convenient lines. In the summer, she was alone most of the time, except weekends. He was away on business one week out of every month. She went to New York whenever she pleased?sometimes in the evening. Only a week before the dance she had gone into town to have dinner with some old friends. She had planned to come home on a train that reached Shady Hill at eleven. Will drove to the station to meet her. It was a rainy night and he remembered waiting, in a rather gloomy frame of mind, on the station platform. As soon as he saw the distant lights of the train, his mood was changed by the anticipation of greeting her and taking her home. When the train stopped and only Charlie Curtin?half tipsy?got off, Will was disappointed and worried. Soon after he got home, the telephone rang. It was Maria calling to say that she had missed the train and would not be home until two. At two, Will returned to the station. It was still rainy. Maria and Henry Bulstrode were the only passengers. She walked swiftly up the platform in the rain to kiss Will. He remembered that there had been tears in her eyes, but he had not thought anything about it at the time. Now he wondered about her tears.
