Elizabeth sounded her horn curtly, passed a Cadillac proceeding at a waddle, and was clear of die traffic. At a little after five o’clock it was almost dark; only a dimming lip of icy lemon light on the horizon separated the marshes from the sky. The evening was bleak, windy. With the car heater turned on full, Elizabeth was cold to the core.
October 29th, the checks had been cashed, the first at 10:14 A.M., the second at 12:46 p.m. On October 29th she had been home from the hospital only three days, and the whole of that interval was a clouded dream, distant, unreal, further blurred by the sedatives she took when the before-dawn dark became intolerable. She had been aware of the household functioning dimly below her, but apart from Constance’s brisk consultations and Noreen’s occasional worried entrance, it might have been the household of another woman.
How, then, to pin it down to a presence here, an undeniable absence there? It wasn’t so simple a matter as Noreen, Lucy, Constance, because Mr. Delbow had picked up instantly a detail that she had missed. Two pens had been used in the forging of the checks, which suggested the possibility of a companion. “Probably,” the assistant cashier had said thoughtfully, “a man. It generally is in cases of this type.”
Elizabeth watched her headlights streaming into the dark. She said to herself firmly. You don’t know what associates Mrs. Bennett had, or how often they came to the house when we were out. How simple for one of them to take the necessary materials, to—
If she had been speaking aloud, it would have stuck in her throat; as it was her mind stopped dead, mocking her. It pointed out that the checks, like the roses, like the subtle malaise pervading her home, were the result of evil ripening and swelling and finally beginning to seep out behind a known and trusted face.
Elizabeth put an involuntary hand to her temple, pressing upwards; brought it back to the wheel. No time for desperation when you were driving, no time for an uprush of fear.
She was home before Oliver, but just barely; by the time she had changed her suit and come downstairs again, Oliver was in the kitchen and the children had forgotten their supper in the usual torrent of delight. Noreen was standing by in smiling resignation. At Elizabeth’s entrance Oliver turned a look of unconvincing severity on the children, who were jumping and clambering at his overcoat pockets. “After your supper. Hello, lion.”
His kiss grazed Elizabeth’s cheekbone. She said lightly, “Hello— aren’t you cold!” and moved easily away. “Maire, not your fingers. . . .”
Maire ate scrambled eggs out of her palm, swung her legs in excitement and said in her high clear voice, “Daddy, Mama was in Boston!” Jeep echoed her, not quite as comprehensibly, and they both turned a look of admiration on Elizabeth, who busied herself instantly at the toaster. She had forgotten that to the children Boston was a magical end-of-the-world place, for the simple reason that Oliver went there every morning.
At her side Noreen murmured, “I don’t think it’s quite done,” and Oliver, hanging up his overcoat, said, “Did you really go into town, or is this from the usually unreliable source?”
She hadn’t meant to lie to Oliver, she hadn’t meant the matter to come up at all. But this, her first trip into Boston since the hospital . . . and Oliver’s eyes were not as casual as his voice. She told him what she had told Constance: “You know those books I ordered from Haysmith’s—I thought they might have come in and he’d forgotten all about me.”
“Why, the old fool,” said Oliver, mildly amazed. “I happened to be near there just before I came home, and thought I’d check. He could at least have told me you’d been in.”
Had he gone to Haysmith’s, or was this a test? Elizabeth thought bitterly. Just because you’re lying doesn’t mean he is, and said, “The shop was quite busy, I suppose he forgot.”
Outwardly, that was the end of it; to Elizabeth, who carried the deception about with her like a stone all that evening, it had the frightening aspect of a beginning. This was how people put distance between each other, and couldn’t close it again because there were too many lies, too many subterfuges to cross with any kind of dignity. Most marriages didn’t, as people said, go on the rocks, because that implied a sudden and smashing impact. It wasn’t that, it was a slow day-by-day inching away from closeness, so that eventually another goal was nearer than your marriage and it was easier to go forward than to go back.
Is this, thought Elizabeth huntedly, what we are doing to each other—and to the children, who should matter more than either of us?
She knocked at Constance’s door before she went to bed, aware, and disliking it, that she was looking for a way to cross the most shocking name off that short ugly list. There couldn’t be any questions, but you could find reassurance in a glance, a gesture. . . .
But she didn’t. There was a pause before the answering, “Elizabeth? Come in,” and then a rapid rustling of taffeta. When Elizabeth opened the door Constance was sitting at her dressing-table, her hair out of its smooth daytime rolls, her long face a little flushed. Her eyes under their thick white lids were fleetingly the eyes of a stranger, quick, sharp, measuring. If she had opened the door without knocking, Elizabeth wondered shakenly, would there have been quite another scene, quite another Constance?
That was ridiculous, and—frightening. Constance had been getting ready for bed, of course, and had tried on the taffeta housecoat Elizabeth had given her for her birthday
