soap. Somebody gave it to me when I was married, fifteen years ago. I don’t know who. Some maid, some music teacher?somebody like that. It was good soap, good English soap, the kind I like, and I decided to save it for the big day when Larry made a killing, when he took me to Bermuda. First, I was going to use it when he got the job in Bound Brook. Then I thought I could use it when we were going to Boston, and then Washington, and then when he got this new job, I thought maybe this is it, maybe this is the time when I get to take the boy out of that rotten school and pay the bills and move out of those bum hotels we’ve been living in. For fifteen years I’ve been planning to use this cake of soap. Well, last week I was looking through my bureau drawers and I saw this cake of soap. It was all cracked. I threw it out. I threw it out because I knew I was never going to have a chance to use it. Do you realize what that means? Do you know what that feels like? To live for fifteen years on promises and expectations and loans and credits in hotels that aren’t fit to live in, never for a single day to be out of debt, and yet to pretend, to feel that every year, every winter, every job, every meeting is going to be the one. To live like this for fifteen years and then to realize that it’s never going to end. Do you know what that feels like?” She got up and went over to the dressing table and stood in front of Laura. Tears had risen into her large eyes, and her voice was harsh and loud. “I’m never going to get to Bermuda,” she said. “I’m never even going to get to Florida. I’m never going to get out of hock, ever, ever, ever. I know that I’m never going to have a decent home and that everything I own that is worn and torn and no good is going to stay that way. I know that for the rest of my life, for the rest of my life, I’m going to wear ragged slips and torn nightgowns and torn underclothes and shoes that hurt me. I know that for the rest of my life nobody is going to come up to me and tell me that I’ve got on a pretty dress, because I’m not going to be able to afford that kind of a dress. I know that for the rest of my life every taxi driver and doorman and headwaiter in this town is going to know in a minute that I haven’t got five bucks in that black imitation-suede purse that I’ve been brushing and brushing and brushing and carrying around for ten years. How do you get it? How do you rate it? What’s so wonderful about you that you get a break like this?” She ran her fingers down Laura’s bare arm. The dress she was wearing smelled of benzene. “Can I rub it off you? Will that make me lucky? I swear to Jesus I’d murder somebody if I thought it would bring us in any money. I’d wring somebody’s neck?yours, anybody’s?I swear to Jesus I would?”
Someone began knocking on the door. Alice strode to the door, opened it, and went out. A woman came in, a stranger looking for the toilet. Laura lighted a cigarette and waited in the bedroom for about ten minutes before she went back to the party. The Holinsheds had gone. She got a drink and sat down and tried to talk, but she couldn’t keep her mind on what she was saying.
The hunt, the search for money that had seemed to her natural, amiable, and fair when they first committed themselves to it, now seemed like a hazardous and piratical voyage. She had thought, earlier in the evening, of the missing. She thought now of the missing again. Adversity and failure accounted for more than half of them, as if beneath the amenities in the pretty room a keen race were in progress, in which the loser’s forfeits were extreme. Laura felt cold. She picked the ice out of her drink with her fingers and put it in a flower vase, but the whiskey didn’t warm her. She asked Ralph to take her home.
After dinner on Tuesday, Laura washed the dishes and Ralph dried them. He read the paper and she took up some sewing. At a quarter after eight, the telephone, in the bedroom, rang, and he went to it calmly. It was someone with two threatre tickets for a show that was closing. The telephone didn’t ring again, and at half past nine he told Laura that he was going to call California. It didn’t take long for the connection to be made, and the fresh voice of a young woman spoke to him from Mr. Hadaam’s number. “Oh, yes, Mr. Whittemore,” she said. “We tried to get you earlier in the evening but your line was busy.”
“Could I speak to Mr. Hadaam?”
“No, Mr. Whittemore. This is Mr. Hadaam’s secretary. I know he meant to call you, because he had entered this in his engagement book. Mrs. Hadaam has asked me to disappoint as few people as possible, and I’ve tried to take care of all the calls and appointments in his engagement book. Mr. Hadaam had a stroke on Sunday. We don’t expect him to recover. I imagine he made you some kind of promise, but I’m afraid he won’t be able to keep it.”
“I’m very sorry,” Ralph said. He hung up.
Laura had come into the bedroom while the secretary was talking. “Oh, darling!” she said. She put her sewing basket on the bureau and went toward the closet. Then she went back and looked for something in the sewing basket and left the basket on her dressing table. Then she took off her shoes, treed them, slipped her dress over her head and hung it up neatly. Then she went to the bureau, looking for her sewing basket, found it on the dressing table, and took it into the closet, where she put it on a shelf. Then she took her brush and comb into the bathroom and began to run the water for a bath.
The lash of frustration was laid on and the pain stunned Ralph. He sat by the telephone for he did not know how long. He heard Laura come out of the bathroom. He turned when he heard her speak.
“I feel dreadfully about old Mr. Hadaam,” she said. “I wish there were something we could do.” She was in her nightgown, and she sat down at the dressing table like a skillful and patient woman establishing herself in front of a loom, and she picked up and put down pins and bottles and combs and brushes with the thoughtless dexterity of an experienced weaver, as if the time she spent there were all part of a continuous operation. “It did look like the treasure…”
The word surprised him, and for a moment he saw the chimera, the pot of gold, the fleece, the treasure buried in the faint lights of a rainbow, and the primitivism of his hunt struck him. Armed with a sharp spade and a homemade divining rod, he had climbed over hill and dale, through droughts and rain squalls, digging wherever the maps he had drawn himself promised gold. Six paces east of the dead pine, five panels in from the library door, underneath the creaking step, in the roots of the pear tree, beneath the grape arbor lay the bean pot full of doubloons and bullion.
She turned on the stool and held her thin arms toward him, as she had done more than a thousand times. She was no longer young, and more wan, thinner than she might have been if he had found the doubloons to save her anxiety and unremitting work. Her smile, her naked shoulders had begun to trouble the indecipherable shapes and symbols that are the touchstones of desire, and the light from the lamp seemed to brighten and give off heat and shed that unaccountable complacency, that benevolence, that the spring sunlight brings to all kinds of fatigue and despair. Desire for her delighted and confused him. Here it was, here it all was, and the shine of the gold seemed to him then to be all around her arms.
