A few nights before that, she had said, after dinner, that she wanted to go to the movies in the village. Will had offered to take her, although he was tired, but she said she knew how much he disliked movies. It had seemed odd to him at the time that before going off to the nine-o’clock show she should take a bath, and when she came downstairs, he heard, under her mink coat, the rustling of a new dress. He fell asleep before she returned, and for all he knew, she might have come in at dawn. It had always seemed generous of her not to insist on his going with her to meetings of the Civic Improvement Association, but how did he know whether she had gone off to discuss the fluorination of water or to meet a lover?
He remembered something that had happened in February. The Women’s Club had given a revue for charity. He had known before he went to it that Maria was going to do a dance expressing the view of the Current Events Committee on the tariff. She came onto the stage to the music of “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” She wore a long evening dress, gloves, and a fur piece?the recognizable getup of a striptease artist?and, to his dismay, she was given a rousing reception. Maria walked around the stage and took off her fur piece, to applause, shouts, and some whistling. During the next chorus, she peeled off her gloves. Will pretended to be enjoying himself, but he had begun to sweat. With the third chorus, she took off her belt. This was all, but the uproarious applause she had been given rang again in Will’s ears now and made them warm.
A few weeks earlier, Will had gone uptown for lunch?a thing he seldom did. Walking down Madison Avenue, he thought he saw Maria ahead of him, with another man. The dark-red suit, the fur piece, and the hat were hers. He did not recognize the man. Acting impulsively where he might have acted stealthily, he had shouted her name?“Maria! Maria! Maria!” The street was crowded, and there was the distance of half a block between them. Before he could reach the woman, she had disappeared. She might have stepped into a taxi or a store. That evening, when he said to Maria, cheerfully enough, that he thought he saw her on Madison Avenue, she answered crossly, “Well, you didn’t.” After dinner, she claimed to have a headache. She asked him to sleep in the guest room.
The afternoon of the day after the dance, Will took the children for a walk without Maria. He lectured them, as he always did, on the names of the trees. “That’s a ginkgo… That’s a weeping beech. That bitter smell comes from the boxwood in the hollow.” It may have been because he had received no education himself that he liked to give an educational tone to his time with the children. They recited the states of the Union at the lunch table, discussed geology during some of their walks, and named the stars in the sky if they stayed out after dusk. Will was determined to be cheerful this afternoon, but the figures of his children, walking ahead, saddened him, for they seemed like live symbols of his trouble. He had not actually thought of leaving Maria?he had not let the idea form?but he seemed to breathe the atmosphere of separation. When he passed the tree where he had carved their initials, he thought of the stupendous wickedness of the world.
The house was dark when they came back up the driveway at the end of their walk?dark and cold. Will turned on some lights and heated the coffee he had made at breakfast. The telephone rang, but he did not answer it. He took a cup of coffee up to the guest room, where Maria was. He thought at first she was still sleeping. When he turned on the light, he saw that she was sitting against the pillows. She smiled, but he responded warily to her charm.
“Here’s some coffee, Mummy.”
“Thank you. Did you have a nice walk?”
“Yes.”
“I feel better,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Half past five.”
“I don’t feel strong enough to go to the Townsends’.”
“Then I won’t go.”
“Oh, I wish you would, Willy. Please go to the party and come home and tell me all about it. Please go.”
Now that she urged him, the party seemed like a good idea.
“You must go, Will,” Maria said. “There’ll be a lot of gossip about the dance, and you can hear it all, and then you can come home and tell me all about it. Please go to the party, darling. It will make me feel guilty if you stay home on my account.”
At the Townsends’, cars were parked on both sides of the street, and all the windows of the big house were brightly lighted. Will stepped in the lamplight, the firelight, and the cheerful human noises of the gathering with a sincere desire to lose his heaviness of spirit. He went upstairs to leave his coat. Bridget, an old Irishwoman, took it. She was a freelance maid who worked at most of the big parties in Shady Hill. Her husband was caretaker at the country club. “So your lady isn’t with you,” she said in her sweet brogue. “Ah, well, I can’t say that I blame her.” Then she laughed suddenly. She put her hands on her knees and rocked back and forth. “I shouldn’t tell you, I know, so help me God, but when Mike was sweeping up the parking lot this morning, he found a pair of gold slippers and a blue lace girdle.”
Downstairs, Will spoke with his hostess, and she said she was so sorry that Maria hadn’t come. Crossing the living room, he was stopped by Pete Parsons, who drew him over to the fireplace and told him a joke. This was what Will had come for, and his spirits began to improve. But, going from Pete Parsons toward the door of the bar, he found his way blocked by Buff Worden. Ethel’s story of their neediness, her tears, and her trip to the parking lot with Larry Helmsford were still fresh in his mind. He did not want to see Buff Worden. He did not like it that Buff could muster a cheerful and open face after his wife had been seduced in the Helmsfords’ station wagon.
