The ride to the office was a nightmare … Tall buildings swept past, façades of granite as gray as the leaden skies of midwinter, beehives of commerce where men and women brushed shoulders without touching hands.
Autumnal leaves blowing, and the gray buildings sweeping past. Despite Tommy, despite everything there was no shining vision to warm Sally from within. A cottage must be lived in to become a home and Sally had never really had a home.
One-night stand! It wasn’t an expression she’d have used by choice, but it came unbidden into her mind. If you live for nine years with a man who can’t relax and be human, who can’t be warm and loving you’ll begin eventually to feel you might as well live alone. Each day had been like a lonely sentinel outpost in a desert waste for Sally.
She thought about Tommy … Tommy wasn’t in the least like his father when he came racing home from school, hair tousled, books dangling from a strap. Tommy would raid the pantry with unthinking zest, invite other boys in to look at the Westerns on TV, and trade black eyes for marbles with a healthy pugnacity.
Up to a point Tommy was normal, was healthy.
But she had seen mirrored in Tommy’s pale blue eyes the same abnormal calmness that was always in his father’s, and the look of derisive withdrawal which made him seem always to be staring down at her from a height. And it filled her with terror to see that Tommy’s mood could change as abruptly and terrifyingly cold …
Tommy, her son. Tommy, no longer boisterous and eager, but sitting in a corner with his legs drawn up, a faraway look in his eyes. Tommy seeming to look right through her, into space. Tommy and Jim exchanging silent understanding glances. Tommy roaming through the cottage, staring at his toys with frowning disapproval. Tommy drawing back when she tried to touch him.
Tommy, Tommy, come back to me! How often she had cried out in her heart when that coldness came between them.
Tommy drawing strange figures on the floor with a piece of colored chalk, then erasing them quickly before she could see them, refusing to let her enter his secret child’s world.
Tommy picking up the cat and stroking its fur mechanically, while he stared out through the kitchen window at rusty blackbirds on the wing …
“This is the address you gave me, lady. Sixty-seven Vine Street,” the cab driver was saying.
Sally shivered, remembering her husband’s voice on the phone, remembering where she was … “Come to the office, Sally! Hurry, hurry—or it will be too late!”
Too late for what? Too late to recapture a happiness she had never possessed?
“This is it, lady!” the cab driver insisted. “Do you want me to wait?”
“No,” Sally said, fumbling for her change purse. She descended from the taxi, paid the driver and hurried across the pavement to the big office building with its mirroring frontage of plate glass and black onyx tiles.
The firm’s name was on the directory board in the lobby, white on black in beautifully embossed lettering. White for hope, and black for despair, mourning …
The elevator opened and closed and Sally was whisked up eight stories behind a man in a checkered suit.
“Eighth floor!” Sally whispered, in sudden alarm. The elevator jolted to an abrupt halt and the operator swung about to glare at her.
“You should have told me when you got on, Miss!” he complained.
“Sorry,” Sally muttered, stumbling out into the corridor. How horrible it must be to go to business every day, she thought wildly. To sit in an office, to thumb through papers, to bark orders, to be a machine.
Sally stood very still for an instant, startled, feeling her sanity threatened by the very absurdity of the thought. People who worked in offices could turn for escape to a cottage in the sunset’s glow, when they were set free by the moving hands of a clock. There could be a fierce joy at the thought of deliverance, at the prospect of going home at five o’clock.
But for Sally was the brightness, the deliverance withheld. The corridor was wide and deserted and the black tiles with their gold borders seemed to converge upon her, hemming her into a cool magnificence as structurally somber as the architectural embellishments of a costly mausoleum.
She found the office with her surface mind, working at cross-purposes with the confusion and swiftly mounting dread which made her footsteps falter, her mouth go dry.
Steady, Sally! Here’s the office, here’s the door. Turn the knob and get it over with …
Sally opened the door and stepped into a small, deserted reception room. Beyond the reception desk was a gate, and beyond the gate a large central office branched off into several smaller offices.
Sally paused only an instant. It seemed quite natural to her that a business office should be deserted so late in the afternoon.
She crossed the reception room to the gate, passed through it, utter desperation giving her courage.
Something within her whispered that she had only to walk across the central office, open the first door she came to to find her husband …
The first door combined privacy with easy accessibility. The instant she opened the door she knew that she had been right to trust her instincts. This was his office …
He was sitting at a desk by the window, a patch of sunset sky visible over his right shoulder. His elbows rested on the desk and his hands were tightly locked as if he had just stopped wringing them.
He was looking straight at her, his eyes wide and staring.
“Jim!” Sally breathed. “Jim, what’s wrong?”
He did not answer, did not move or attempt to greet her in any way. There was no color at all in his face. His lips were parted, his white teeth gleamed. And he was more stiffly controlled than usual—a control so intense that for
