“I’d get him to help before a big quiz too. When we were finishing up the semester, in Social Studies or whatever, I wouldn’t have a clue about what she was going to ask on the test, but Larry always knew. He’d tell me half a dozen things, maybe, and five would be right there on the final. A flash of insight, like you said.”
“Similar, perhaps.”
“But the thing was . . . it was . . . was—”
She gulped and gasped so loudly that even I realized she was about to cry. I hugged her, perhaps the most percipient thing I have ever done.
“I wasn’t going to tell you that, and I guess I’d better not or I’ll bawl. I just wanted to say you’re Larry, because my husband never minded him, not really, or anyhow not very much, and he’d kid around with him in those days, and sometimes Larry’d help him with his homework too.”
“You’re right,” I told her, “I am Larry, and your name is Martha Williamson, although she was never half so beautiful as you are and I had nearly forgotten her.”
“Have you cooled down enough?”
“No. Another five minutes, possibly.”
“I hope you don’t get the aches. Do you really think I’m beautiful?”
I said I did, and that I could not tell her properly how lovely she was, because she would be sure I lied.
“My face is too square.”
“Absolutely not! Besides, you mean rectangular, surely. It’s not too rectangular either. Any face less rectangular than yours is too square or too round.”
“See? You are Larry.”
“I know.”
“This is what I was going to tell, if I hadn’t gotten all weepy. Let me do it, and after that we’ll . . . You know. Get together.”
I nodded, and she must have sensed my nod in a movement of my shoulder, or perhaps a slight motion of the mattress. She was silent for what seemed to me half a minute, if not longer. “Kiss me; then I’ll tell it.”
I did.
“You remember what you said in the kitchen?”
“I said far too many things in the kitchen, I’m afraid. I tend to talk too much even when I’m sober. I’m sure I couldn’t recall them all.”
“It was before that awful man came in and took my room. I said the people going to Hell were dead, and you said some were and some weren’t. That didn’t make any sense to me till later when I thought about my husband. He was alive, but it was like something was getting a tighter hold on him all the time. Like Hell was reaching right out and grabbing him. He went on so about me looking at other men that I started really doing it. I’d see who was there, trying to figure out which one he’d say when we got home. Then he started bringing up ones that hadn’t been there, people from school—this was after we were out of school and married, and I hadn’t seen a lot of them in years.”
I said, “I understand.”
“He’d been on the football team and the softball team and run track and all that, and mostly it was those boys he’d talk about, but one time it was the shop teacher. I never even took shop.”
I nodded again, I think.
“But never Larry, so Larry got to be special to me. Most of those boys, well, maybe they looked, but I never looked at them. But I’d really dated Larry, and he’d had his arms around me and even kissed me a couple times, and I danced with him. I could remember the cologne he used to wear, and that checkered wool blazer he had. After graduation most of the boys from our school got jobs with the coal company or in the tractor plant, but Larry won a scholarship to some big school, and after that I never saw him. It was like he’d gone there and died.”
“It’s better now,” I said, and I took her hand, just as she had taken mine going upstairs.
She misunderstood, which may have been fortunate. “It is. It really is. Having you here like this makes it better.” She used my name, but I am determined not to reveal it.
“Then after we’d been married about four years, I went in the drugstore, and Larry was there waiting for a prescription for his mother. We said hi, and shook hands, and talked about old times and how it was with us, and I got the stuff I’d come for and started to leave. When I got to the door, I thought Larry wouldn’t be looking anymore, so I stopped and looked at him.
“He was still looking at me.” She gulped. “You’re smart. I bet you guessed, didn’t you?”
“I would have been,” I said. I doubt that she heard me.
“I’ll never, ever, forget that look. He wanted me so bad, just so bad it was tearing him up. My husband starved a dog to death once. His name was Ranger, and he was a bluetick hound. They said he was a good coon dog, and I guess he was. My husband had helped this man with some work, so he gave him Ranger. But my husband used to pull on Ranger’s ears till he’d yelp, and finally Ranger bit his hand. He just locked Ranger up after that and wouldn’t feed him anymore. He’d go out in the yard and Ranger’d be in that cage hoping for him to feed him and knowing he wouldn’t, and that was the way Larry looked at me in the drugstore. It brought it all back, about the dog two years before, and Larry, and lots of other things. But the thing was . . . thing was—”
I stroked her hand.
“He looked at me like that, and I saw it, and when I did I knew I was looking at him that very same way. That was when I decided, except that I thought I’d save up money, and write to Larry when I had enough, and see if he’d help me. Are you all right now?”
“No,” I said, because at that moment I could have cut my own throat or thrown myself through the window.
