“You don’t—” Oliver whipped off his tie, “think you ought to go sooner?”
“What for?” Deception was effortless just so far, and besides, she had to know whether there was substance to the shadow in Oliver’s eyes. She said very slowly, “Hathaway’s only an obstetrician, you know.”
Silence. Oliver moved roughly away from the bureau and took a cigarette from his bedside table without looking. He said coolly, “And what’s the inner meaning of that?”
“This.” Why was it so like taking a hurdle? “As you’ve pointed out, the affair of the roses was no tragedy. But it happened. Weirdly enough, it seems to me that you’ve a notion I did it.”
There never used to be these blanks, she thought, these moments when we both go off away from each other and all the lines of communication are down. What’s happened, what’s making us behave this way?
Oliver seemed to have had the same wonder; he swung to face her. “Elizabeth—”
She would not be melted, she would not be forced into remembering the way things had been. She said evenly, “You do think so, Oliver, don’t you?”
The match he had been holding flickered out. He said without lighting another, with halts between the words, “You were—thinking about something else. My God, everybody pulls up grass and plucks at wicker and peels off bark—it’s the nature of the beast. What the hell,” said Oliver, suddenly and explosively violent, “does it matter, and why do we have to keep on talking about it? I’m sorry I ever brought the damned things home.”
“That,” observed Elizabeth stiffly into the sudden darkness, “was prettily put.”
“I suppose it was. Sorry. Maybe it was a cunning florist’s trick . . . let’s forget it anyway. End of episode.”
His voice sounded sleepy. Elizabeth lay rigid, her mind slipping back to yesterday and that disturbing sense of unease, like the slyest of motions somewhere in the background.
She hadn’t caught the motion itself, or the hand. But this, the roses, was the very tangible proof of its existence. This, and not Oliver and Lucy—or perhaps an offshoot of Oliver and Lucy—was what had made her afraid.
Afraid, under the softest possible blankets, with her husband not six feet away and her children safely healthily asleep only a wall’s thickness from her. More afraid than she had ever been in her life, because there was nothing to fight.
Bells counted themselves distantly in the clear cold night. Five of us, all told, thought Elizabeth, turning restlessly on her other side. Five and maybe one more, whom all of us know and one of us won’t admit, something that isn’t flesh and bone but more of an entity than any of us. . . . Finally, interruptedly, she slept.
Thanksgiving came and went; in the face of Constance’s mute horror Elizabeth sewed up the turkey with red thread and felt ridiculously gay. It was impossible not to with the children in the kitchen; they formed an instant and devoted attachment to the docile creature in the roasting pan. Jeep said dubiously, “Might bite you,” and Maire said earnestly, “No, he loves you. Jeep,” and the turkey went into the oven amid pattings and farewells.
And even after that there were days when everything was almost all right. Almost, because it was as though there were a wall of glass between herself and Oliver. They could speak and smile through it, and go briskly about their lives on either side of it, but it was there. Elizabeth forgot that at times until she bumped into it and hurt herself.
There were the other days, when the children caught her mood and translated it in their own disastrous fashion. Maire had perfected her technique and could now not only cry like a baby but like a whole nursery full of babies; the sound of it sawed ceaselessly at Elizabeth’s nerves. Jeep was like a small rogue elephant: the phonograph suddenly stopped functioning, toys fell magically to pieces, the breakage in the kitchen shot up at an appalling rate.
Elizabeth, clinging grimly to calm, thought, Careful, this is like virus. Nothing to do but wait it out.
Oddly enough, in spite of the betraying words that kept echoing in her brain, she found Lucy Brent a welcome distraction. Lucy was a being from another world, crisp, definite, untroubledly sure of herself. If the other woman noticed a subtle change in their relationship, and very little escaped the brilliant dark eyes behind the restless flow of chatter, she said nothing.
Lucy was there on the third of December, when Elizabeth’s bank statement came. She said, “Aren’t you lucky, all I ever get around the first of the month is bills,” and stood. “Steven’s home, feeling frightful, and I really should be there to stroke his brow. Mind if I phone the drug store first?”
“Go ahead,” Elizabeth said absently. It was a barren mail—soap coupons, what looked like an advertisement addressed to Oliver, the bank statement. At the phone, Lucy asked for the pharmacist. Elizabeth slit the long brown envelope, looked at her balance, which was surprisingly less than she’d thought, and ruffled idly through the cancelled checks. Constance, cash, the stocking shop, Noreen, Noreen, Noreen, cash again . . . and what was this?
In her first casual glance Elizabeth thought it was a check she’d written while she was still in the hospital; her signature looked somehow laborious, not quite her own. She pulled the check free of the others and examined it, and Lucy’s voice and the room around her dropped away in her sudden incredulous attention to the slip of pale blue in her hand.
The check was made out to Sarah E. Bennett, Noreen’s predecessor, in the amount of her week’s salary, thirty-five dollars. It was dated October 29th, and everything was in order except that that was nearly two weeks after Mrs. Bennett had departed for Canada to take over the household of a suddenly widowed sister, and the handwriting was not Elizabeth’s.
Altogether, there were three of them.
Four
“WHAT’S
