“Under protest?”
“Hell, no. I enjoy it. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.”
Betsy came in as Beth was pouring the orange juice and she exclaimed brightly, “Hi, Mrs. Ayers! Did you stay all night?”
“Sh!” her father told her. “Come here and let me button you. Mrs. Ayers is going to surprise Mommy. We don’t want her to know she’s here.”
“Oh,” she said, turning big eyes, made bigger still by the lenses in front of them, on Beth, while Jack did up a row of pearl buttons on the back of her dress.
“There,” he said. “Eat.”
Beth had the uncanny feeling that everything she saw and heard, every bit of this little morning ritual she was sharing with them, would tie Laura closer to her and help her understand herself. Nothing was unimportant. She remembered it all.
“When does Laura get up?” she asked while they ate.
“Not till ten or so. It depends,” he said.
“She isn’t working, then?”
“No.” It was emphatic. She sensed that he didn’t want his wife to work.
“Who did you tell her I was?”
“She asked me this morning,” he said, grinning. “I told her you were my mother. Stood her on her ear.”
“Did it? Is your mother dead or something?”
He laughed. “No. Laura’s never laid eyes on my mother, and neither have I for thirty years. But I call Laura ‘Mother.’ It started out as a joke and ended up a family institution. I was calling her Mother long before I had any notion of marrying her. A Freudian slip, I suppose.”
Betsy giggled, more at the tone of his voice than at his words, for they didn’t make much sense to her.
“I’ll be home after five,” he told Beth when he finished. “We’ll go out for dinner or something.” He got up and Betsy followed him. At the kitchen door he turned to add, “Say, tell Laura to call George McCracken and cancel that order, will you? I’ve changed my mind. And tell her to mail a check to Dr. Byrd. It’ll save me writing it down.”
“Sure,” Beth said.
When they had gone she felt suddenly scared, suddenly on her own without anyone to help her through it, and she almost wished that Laura knew she was there. It was going to be such a hard shock for her. Or was it? Would she take it in stride the way she seemed to have taken the rest of her life?
Beth cleaned up the breakfast dishes, leaving the coffee and wrapping the muffins in waxed paper for Laura. She smoked incessantly out of sheer nervousness and she began to wonder if it would ever be ten o’clock.
But Laura was quicker than that. It was only a little past nine when Beth heard her getting up, heard the familiar morning sounds that Jack had been making an hour ago. And all at once Beth was overwhelmed with the significance of it. It seemed as if all she had suffered and begun to learn so painfully and searched for so clumsily was about to be revealed to her, as if her very soul would come walking out of that bedroom with Laura and show itself to her for the first time and answer all her questions.
She was almost more afraid of seeing her true self than of seeing Laura now and she sat on the edge of the chair with her whole spine shivering and her hands hot and sweaty.
The bedroom door opened and from her seat Beth heard Laura cross the living room, the dining area. For a shattering second she felt the gray faintness that possessed her in tense emotional storms and she clamped her eyes shut. But the feeling passed and she opened them again. They opened on Laura.
She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and at the moment Beth saw her she was still too stunned to speak. There was not even a trace of amazement yet on her face, just morning sleepiness and the heart-piercing beauty that Beth had loved so passionately long ago.
For some moments they simply stared at each other, both too full of feeling to speak or move. And then Laura raised trembling hands to her face and Beth heard her voice, clear and familiar now, break as she spoke her name. It took her another second to realize that Laura was crying.
Beth sprang to her feet and went to her, only to find herself helplessly shy and unable to touch her. Until Laura lowered her hands and turned diamond-bright eyes up to her and reached for her.
They kissed each other with such tenderness, such perfect accord, such lovely waiting warmth, that Beth felt dizzy with it. Laura simply moved into her arms, giving herself to her with that whole-souled generosity that thrilled Beth almost to tears. They clung to each other, and still there were no words between them, there seemed to be nothing to say. Beth held her tight, feeling a flood of strength and sureness come into her arms, as she put her head down against Laura’s and kissed her throat, her ears, the delicate expanse of shoulder that her negligee revealed. She could feel Laura trembling and it delighted her inexpressibly, this overpowering response they could feel for each other. It was as if Laura had known all along and was welcoming her home.
“I thought you might have changed,” Beth whispered finally. “I thought you might never have forgiven me. Oh, Laura, Laura, oh my darling Laura.”
But Laura, sensing better than Beth the futility of words at such a moment, pulled away, seeming to glide out of Beth’s arms. Her eyes, her whole face glowed with a beguiling reticence that Beth remembered with a wrench of the heart, and she followed as Laura moved away from her, across the kitchen to a window.
“Laura, say something,” Beth pleaded. “Say it’s all right that I’m here. Say you’re glad to see me.”
Without looking at her Laura
