hair’s all falling out, and he’s got the shakes. So you say, ‘Charlie, Charlie, you’re looking great.’ So then he says, shaking all over, ‘I never felt better in my life, never.’ So then you go your way, and he goes his way.
“I can see that it isn’t easy for Vera, but what can I do? Honest to God sometimes I’m afraid she’ll hurt me?brain me with a hammer while I’m asleep. Not because it’s me, but just because I’m a man. Sometimes I think women today are the most miserable creatures in the history of the world. I mean, they’re right in the middle of the ocean. For instance, I caught her smooching with Pete Barnstable in the pantry. That was the night she lost the earring, the night when I came back from Minneapolis. So then when I got home, before I noticed the earring was gone, I said what is this, what is this smooching around with Pete Barnstable? So then she said?very emancipated?that no woman could be expected to limit herself to the attentions of one man. So then I said what about me, did that work for me, too? I mean, if she could smooch around with Pete Barnstable, didn’t it follow that I could take Mildred Renny out to the parking lot? So then she said I was turning everything she said into filth. She said I had such a dirty mind she couldn’t talk with me. After that I noticed she’d lost the earring, and after that we had the scene about how sapphires are such cold stones, and after that..
His voice dropped to a whisper, and at the same time some women in the booth on the other side of me began a noisy and savage attack on a friend they all shared. I was very anxious to see the face of the man behind me, and I called for the check, but when I left the booth he was gone, and I would never know what he looked like.
When I got home, I put the car in the garage and came into the house by the kitchen door. Cora was at the table, bending over a dish of cutlets. In one hand she held a can of lethal pesticide. I couldn’t be sure because I’m so nearsighted, but I think she was sprinkling pesticide on the meat. She was startled when I came in, and by the time I had my glasses on she had put the pesticide on the table. Since I had already made one bad mistake because of my eyesight, I was reluctant to make another, but there was the pesticide on the table beside the dish, and that was not where it belonged. It contained a high percentage of nerve poison. “What in the world are you doing?” I asked.
“What does it look as if I were doing?” she asked, still speaking in the octave above middle C.
“It looks as if you were putting pesticide in the cutlets,” I said.
“I know you don’t grant me much intelligence,” she said, “but please grant me enough intelligence to know better than that.”
“But what are you doing with the pesticide?” I asked.
“I have been dusting the roses,” she said.
I was routed, in a way, routed and frightened. I guessed that meat heavily dosed with pesticide could be fatal. There was a chance that if I ate the cutlets I might die. The extraordinary fact seemed to be that after twenty years of marriage I didn’t know Cora well enough to know whether or not she intended to murder me. I would trust a chance deliveryman or a cleaning woman, but I did not trust Cora. The prevailing winds seemed not to have blown the smoke of battle off our union. I mixed a Martini and went into the living room. I was not in any danger from which I could not readily escape. I could go to the country club for supper. Why I hesitated to do this seems, in retrospect, to have been because of the blue walls of the room in which I stood. It was a handsome room, its long windows looking out onto a lawn, some trees, and the sky. The orderliness of the room seemed to impose some orderliness on my own conduct?as if by absenting myself from the table I would in some way offend the order of things. If I went to the club for supper I would be yielding to my suspicions and damaging my hopefulness, and I was determined to remain hopeful. The blue walls of the room seemed to be some link in the chain of being that I would offend by driving up to the club and eating an open steak sandwich alone in the bar.
I ate one of the cutlets at dinner. It had a peculiar taste, but by this time I couldn’t distinguish between my anxieties and the facts involved. I was terribly sick in the night, but this could have been my imagination. I spent an hour in the bathroom with acute indigestion. Cora seemed to be asleep, but when I returned from the bathroom I did notice that her eyes were open. I was worried, and in the morning I made my own breakfast. The maid cooked lunch, and I doubted that she would poison me. I read some more Henry James in the garden, but as the time for dinner approached I found that I was frightened. I went into the pantry to make a drink. Cora had been preparing dinner, and had gone to some other part of the house. There is a broom closet in the kitchen, and I stepped into it and shut the door. Presently I heard Cora’s footsteps as she returned. We keep the pesticides for the roses in a cabinet in the kitchen. I heard her open this cabinet. Then she stepped out into the garden, where I heard her dusting the roses. She then returned to the kitchen, but she did not return the pesticide to the closet. My field of vision through the keyhole was limited. Her back was to me as she spiced the meat, and I couldn’t tell if she was using salt and pepper or nerve poison. She then went back to the garden, and I stepped out of the broom closet. The pesticide was not on the table. I went into the living room, and entered the dining room from there when dinner was ready. “Isn’t it hot,” I asked when I sat down.
“Well,” said Cora, “we can’t expect to be comfortable, can we, if we hide in broom closets?”
I hung on to my chair, picked at my food, made some small talk, and got through the meal. Now and then she gave me a serene and wicked smile. After dinner I went into the garden. I desperately needed help, and thought then of my daughter. I should explain that Flora graduated from the Villa Mimosa in Florence, and left Smith College in the middle of her freshman year to live in a Lower East Side tenement with a sexual freak. I send her an allowance each month and have promised to leave her alone, but, considering the dangerousness of my position, I felt free to break my promise. I felt that if I could see her I could persuade her to come home. I telephoned her then and said that I must see her. She seemed quite friendly and asked me to come to tea.
I had lunch in town the next day, and spent the afternoon at my club, playing cards and drinking whiskey. Flora had given me directions, and I went downtown on the subway for the first time in I don’t know how many years. It was all very strange. I’ve often thought of going to visit my only daughter and her own true love, and now at last I was making this journey. In my reveries the meeting would take place in some club. He would come from a good family. Flora would be happy; she would have the shining face of a young girl first in love. The boy would be serious, but not too serious; intelligent, handsome, and with the winning posture of someone who stands literally at the threshold of a career. I could see the fatuity in these reveries, but had they been so vulgar and idle that I deserved to have them contravened at every point?the scene changed from a club to the city’s worst slum and the substitution of a freak with a beard for an earnest young man? I had friends whose daughters married suitable
