“You’ll wake the children.”
“My mother’s cooks had a better life. They had pleasant rooms. No one could come into the kitchen without their permission.” She knocked the coffee grounds into the garbage and began to wash the pot.
“How long was Trencher here this afternoon?”
“A minute. I’ve told you.”
“I don’t believe it. He was in here.”
“He was not. I didn’t let him in. I didn’t let him in because I looked so badly. I didn’t want to discourage him.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. He may be a fool. He may be insane but the things he’s told me have made me feel marvelously, he’s made me feel marvelously.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Go? Where would I go?” She reached for the purse that is kept in the kitchen to pay for groceries and counted out of it two dollars and thirty-five cents. “Ossining? Montclair?”
“I mean with Trencher.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, “but who can say that I shouldn’t? What harm would it do? What good would it do? Who knows. I love the children but that isn’t enough, that isn’t nearly enough. I wouldn’t hurt them, but would I hurt them so much if I left you? Is divorce so dreadful and of all the things that hold a marriage together how many of them are good?” She sat down at the table.
“In Grenoble,” she said, “I wrote a long paper on Charles Stuart in French. A professor at the University of Chicago wrote me a letter. I couldn’t read a French newspaper without a dictionary today, I don’t have the time to follow any newspaper, and I am ashamed of my incompetence, ashamed of the way I look. Oh, I guess I love you, I do love the children, but I love myself, I love my life, it has some value and some promise for me and Trencher’s roses make me feel that I’m losing this, that I’m losing my self-respect. Do you know what I mean, do you understand what I mean?”
“He’s crazy,” I said.
“Do you know what I mean? Do you understand what I mean?”
“No,” I said. “No.”
Carl woke up then and called for his mother. I told Ethel to go to bed. I turned out the kitchen light and went into the children’s room.
THE CHILDREN felt better the next day, and since it was Sunday, I took them for a walk. The afternoon sun was clement and pure, and only the colored shadows made me remember that it was midwinter, that the cruise ships were returning, and that in another week jonquils would be twenty-five cents a bunch. Walking down Lexington Avenue, we heard the drone bass of a church organ sound from the sky, and we and the others on the sidewalk looked up in piety and bewilderment, like a devout and stupid congregation, and saw a formation of heavy bombers heading for the sea. As it got late, it got cold and clear and still, and on the stillness the waste from the smokestacks along the East River seemed to articulate, as legibly as the Pepsi-Cola plane, whole words and sentences. Halcyon. Disaster. They were hard to make out. It seemed the ebb of the year?an evil day for gastritis, sinus, and respiratory disease?and remembering other winters, the markings of the light convinced me that it was the season of divorce. It was a long afternoon, and I brought the children in before dark.
I think that the seriousness of the day affected the children, and when they returned to the house, they were quiet. The seriousness of it kept coming to me with the feeling that this change, like a phenomenon of speed, was affecting our watches as well as our hearts. I tried to remember the willingness with which Ethel had followed my regiment during the war, from West Virginia to the Carolinas and Oklahoma, and the day coaches and rooms she had lived in, and the street in San Francisco where I said goodbye to her before I left the country, but I could not put any of this into words, and neither of us found anything to say. Sometime after dark, the children were bathed and put to bed, and we sat down to our supper. At about nine o’clock, the doorbell rang, and when I answered it and recognized Trencher’s voice on the speaking tube, I asked him to come up.
He seemed distraught and exhilarated when he appeared. He stumbled on the edge of the carpet. “I know that I’m not welcome here,” he said in a hard voice, as if I were deaf. “I know that you don’t like me here. I respect your feelings. This is your home. I respect a man’s feelings about his home. I don’t usually go to a man’s home unless he asks me. I respect your home. I respect your marriage. I respect your children. I think everything ought to be aboveboard. I’ve come here to tell you that I love your wife.”
“Get out,” I said.
