“He probably said,” Mrs. Smith said, “that it was none of your business.”
“But everybody’s wondering,” Mrs. Jones said. “And of course no one can know for sure.”
“You won’t know for sure until . . .” Mrs. Smith tried not to smile.Mrs. Jones sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” she said.
“Well,” said Mrs. Smith reasonably, “what exactly is it you want me to do?”
“You could get some kind of information,” Mrs. Jones said. “Something that would let you know for sure.”
“I keep telling you,” Mrs. Smith said, “there’s only one way I can ever know for sure.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Mrs. Jones said.
“I could run away from my husband,” Mrs. Smith said. Mrs. Jones was surprised. “You can’t run away from your husband,” she said. “Not if it isn’t true, you couldn’t do that.”
“I have really no grounds for divorce,” Mrs. Smith said. “It is a very difficult subject to mention to him.”
“Naturally, you wouldn’t have discussed it,” Mrs. Jones said.
“Naturally,” Mrs. Smith said. “I could hardly search his clothes—there is nothing, I happen to know, in the pockets of the suit hanging in the closet and searching his overcoat pockets and his dresser drawers would hardly turn up anything convincing.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I mean,” said Mrs. Smith in explanation, “even if I discovered, say, a knife—what difference would it make?”
“But he doesn’t do it with—” Mrs. Jones began, and stopped abruptly again.
“I know,” Mrs. Smith said. “As I recall the details—and I haven’t read much about them, after all—he generally does it—”
“In the bathtub,” Mrs. Jones said, and shivered. “I don’t know but what a knife would be better,” she said.
“It’s not our choice,” Mrs. Smith said wryly. “You see how silly we sound? Here we are, talking as though we were children telling ghost stories. We’ll end up convincing each other of some horrible notion.”
Mrs. Jones hesitated for a minute over her own reactions, and finally decided to be mildly offended. “I really only came up,” she explained with dignity, “to let you know what people were saying. If you stop to think about it for a minute, you ought to be able to understand why someone might want to help you. After all, it’s not me.”
“That’s why I think you ought not to worry,” Mrs. Smith said gently. Mrs. Jones rose, but as she reached the door she was unable to keep herself from turning and saying urgently, “Look, I just want you to know that if you ever ever need any help—of any kind—just open your mouth and scream, see? Because my Ed will be up as fast as he can come. All you have to do is scream, or stamp on the floor, or, if you can, race downstairs to our place. We’ll be waiting for you.” She opened the door, said with a voice that she tried to make humorous, “Don’t take any baths,” and went out. Her voice trailed up from the stairs, “And remember—all you have to do is scream. We’ll be waiting.”
Mrs. Smith closed the door rather quickly and, before she started to think, went out to the kitchen to see to her groceries, but Mrs. Jones had put the things away. Mrs. Smith found the pound of coffee, and measured water into the coffeepot, thinking of her promise to the grocer that she would finish the pound of coffee herself. Mr. Smith drank coffee sparingly; it made him nervous.
Mrs. Smith, as she moved about the bleak little kitchen, thought, as she had often before, that she would not like to spend her whole life with things like this. It had not been so in her father’s life, where a peaceful, well-ordered existence went placidly on among objects which, if not lovely, had at least the pleasures of familiarity, and the near-beauty of order, and Mrs. Smith, who had then been Helen Bertram, had been able to spend long days working in the garden, or mending her father’s socks, or baking the nut cake she had learned from her mother, and pausing only occasionally to wonder what was going to happen to her in her life.
It had been clear to her after her father’s death that this patterned existence was no longer meaningful, and had been a product of her father’s life rather than hers. So that when Mr. Smith had said to her, “I don’t suppose you’d ever consider marrying a fellow like me?” Helen Bertram had nodded, seeing then the repeated design which made the complete pattern.
She had worn her best dark-blue dress to be married in, and Mr. Smith had worn a dark-blue suit so that they looked unnervingly alike when they went down the street together. They had gone directly to the lawyer’s, for the wills, and then to the insurance company. On the way, Mr. Smith had insisted on stopping and buying for the new Mrs. Smith a small felt dog which amused her; there had been a man selling these on the street corner, and all around his small stand were tiny wound-up dogs which ran in circles, squeaking in shrill imitation of a bark. Mrs. Smith brought the box with the dog in it into the insurance company and set it on the desk, and while they were waiting for the doctor she had opened the box and found that there was no key to wind the dog; Mr. Smith, saying irritably, “Those fellows always try to cheat you,” had hurried back to the street corner and found the stand, the salesman, and the performing dogs gone.
“Nothing makes me more furious,” he told Mrs. Smith, “than to be cheated by someone like that.”
The small dog stood now on the shelf in the kitchen and Mrs. Smith, glancing at it, thought, I could not endure spending the rest of my life with that tawdry sort of thing. She sometimes thought poignantly of her father’s house, realizing that such things were gone from her forever, but, as she told herself again now, “I had my eyes open.” It will have to be soon, she thought immediately after, people are beginning to wonder too openly. Everyone is waiting; it will spoil everything if it is not soon. When her coffee was finished she took a cup into the living room and sat down on the couch where Mrs. Jones had been sitting, and thought, it will have to be soon; there’s no food for the weekend, after all, and I would have to send my dress to the cleaners on Monday if I were here, and another week’s rent due tomorrow. The pound of coffee would be the only detail unattended to.
She had finished her fourth cup of coffee—drinking by now hastily and even desperately—when she heard her husband’s step on the stairs. They were still a little embarrassed with one another, so that she hesitated about going to meet him just long enough for him to open the door, and then she came over to him awkwardly and, not knowing still whether he wanted to kiss her when he came home, stood expectantly until he came politely over to her and kissed her cheek.
“Where have you been?” she asked, although it was not at all the sort of thing she wanted to say to him, and she knew as she spoke that he would not tell her.
“Shopping,” he said. He had an armful of packages, one of which he selected and gave to her.
“Thank you,” she said politely before she opened it; it was, she knew by the feel and the drugstore wrapping, a box of candy, and with a feeling which, when she felt it again later, she knew to be triumph, she thought, of course, it’s supposed to be left over, it’s to prove the new husband still brings presents to his bride. She opened the box, wanted to take a candy, thought: not before dinner, and then thought, it probably doesn’t matter, tonight.
“Will you have one?” she said to him, and he took one.
His manner did not seem strange, or nervous, but when she said, “Mrs. Jones was up here this afternoon,” he said quickly, “What did she want, the old busybody?”
“I think she was jealous,” Mrs. Smith said. “It’s been a long time since her husband has taken any interest in her.”
“I can imagine,” he said.
“Shall I start dinner?” Mrs. Smith asked. “Would you like to rest for a while first?”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
Now, for the first time, he seemed awkward, and Mrs. Smith thought quic
kly, I was right about the food for the weekend, I guessed right; he did not ask if she was hungry because—and each of them knew now that the other knew—it really did not matter.
Mrs. Smith told herself it would ruin everything to say anything now, and she sat down on the couch next to her husband and said, “I’m a little tired, I think.”
“A week of marriage was too much for you,” he said, and patted her hand. “We’ll have to see that you get more rest.”
Why does it take so long, why does it take so long? Mrs. Smith thought; she stood up again and walked across the room nervously to look out the window; Mr. Jones was just coming up the front steps and he looked up and saw her and waved. Why does it take so long? she thought again, and turned and said to her husband, “Well?”
“I suppose so,” Mr. Smith said, and got up wearily from the couch.
The Story We Used to Tell
This is the story that Y and I used to tell, used to tell in the quiet of the night, in the hours of the quiet of the night, and the moonlight would come, moving forward, moving close; used to whisper to each other in the night . . .
And I, Y would say, had to go first. With the moonlight making white patterns in her hair, she would shake her head and say: I had to go first. Remember, she would say. In this very house. That night. Remember? And the picture, and the moonlight, and the way we laughed.
We had sat on the foot of the bed, the way we used to when we roomed together in school, talking together and laughing sometimes in spite of the grief that filled Y’s great house. It was only a month or so after her husband’s funeral, I remember, and yet being together again, just the two of us, was somehow enough to make Y smile sometimes, and even occasionally laugh again. I had been wise enough not to remark on the fact that Y had closed off the rooms of the house in which she had lived with her husband, and had moved into an entire new wing of the old place. But I liked her little bedroom, quiet and bare, with no room for books, and only the one picture on the wall.
“It’s a picture of the house . . .” Y said to me. “See, you can barely see the windows of this very room. It’s before my grandfather-in-law remodeled it, which is why the new wing isn’t there.”
“It’s a beautiful old place,” I said. “I almost wish he hadn’t changed it so much.”
“Plumbing,” Y said. “There’s nothing wrong with plumbing.”
“No,” I said, “but I’m glad you’ve reopened the old wing . . . it must have been a gorgeous place in—say—your grandfather-in-law’s time.”
And we looked at the picture of the old old house, standing dark and tall against the sky, with the windows of this very room shining faintly through the trees, and the steep winding road coming through the gates and down to the very edge of the picture.
“I’m glad the glass is there,” I said, giggling. “I’d hate to have a landslide start on that mountain and come down into our laps!”
“Into my bed, you mean,” Y said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep, with the old place overhead.”
“Grandpop’s probably still in it, too,” I said. “He’s wandering around in a nightcap with a candle in the old barn.”
“Plotting improvements.” Y pulled the covers up over her head.
I told her, “God save us from all reformers,” and went across the hall to my own room, pulled the heavy curtains to shut out the moonlight, and went to bed.
And the next morning Y was gone.
I woke up late, had breakfast downstairs with a first assistant footman or something of the sort presiding (even Y, married for four years into a butler-keeping establishment, had never found out which one to send for to bring tea in the afternoons, and had finally given up completely and taken to serving sherry, which she could pour herself from a decanter on the sideboard), and finally settled down to read, believing that Y would sleep late and come down in her own sweet time.
One o’clock was a little late, however, and when the menagerie began announcing lunch to me, I went after Y.
She wasn’t in her room, the bed had been slept in, and none of the menagerie knew where she was. More than that, no one had seen or heard of her since I had left her the night before; everyone else had thought, as I did, that she was sleeping late.
By late afternoon I had decided to call Y’s family lawyer, John, who lived on an adjoining estate and had been a close friend of Y’s husband, and a kind adviser to Y. And by evening Y’s lawyer had decided to call the police.
At the end of a week, nothing had been heard from or of Y, and the police had changed their theory of kidnapping to one of suicide. The lawyer came to me one of those afternoons with a project for closing up the house.
“I dread saying it, Katharine, but—” He shook his head. “I’m afraid she’s dead.”
“How can she be?” I kept crying out, I remember. “I tell you I was with her all that evening. We talked, and she was happier than she has been for weeks—since her husband died . . .”
“That’s why I think she’s dead,” he said. “She was heartbroken. She had nothing to keep her alive.”
“She had plans . . . she was going to sell this house, and travel! She was going to live abroad for a while—meet people, try to start life over again—why, I was going with her! We talked about it that night . . . and we laughed about the house . . . she said the picture would fall on her bed!!” My voice trailed off. It was, I know certainly, the first time I had thought of the picture since I had left Y in her room, with the moonlight coming in and shining on her pale hair on the pillow. And I began to think.
“Wait until tomorrow,” I begged him. “Don’t do anything for a day or two. Why . . . she might come back tonight!”
He shook his head at me despairingly, but he went away and left me alone in the house. I called the menagerie, and ordered my things moved into Y’s room.
The full moon had turned into a lopsided creature, but there was still moonlight enough to fill the room with a haunted light when I lay down in Y’s bed, looking into the empty windows in the picture of a house. I fell asleep thinking miserably of Y’s cheerful conviction that the old man was loose in the picture, plotting improvements.
The moonlight was still there when I woke up, and so was the old woman. She was hanging on the inside of the glass of the picture, gibbering out at me, and she looked twenty feet high, standing in front of that picture of the house. I sat up in bed and backed as far away from the picture as I could, realizing, in the one lucid moment I had before the cold terror of that thing hit me, that she was on the inside of the glass, and couldn’t get out.
Then suddenly she moved aside and I could see the road leading down from the house, and, while I watched, Y came through the gates, running, and waving desperately at me. I could feel my eyes getting wider and wider and the back of my neck getting colder and colder, and then I knew that I had been right and that Y had been caught in some malevolence of the old house, and I began sobbing in thankfulness that I had found her in time.
I picked up my slipper and smashed the glass of the picture and held out my hands to Y to hurry her on toward me. And then I saw that the old woman, no longer hanging on to the inside of the glass, was now free, and in the room with me, and I could hear her laughing. I fell back on the bed in a wild attempt to shove the old woman back into the picture and I could just see Y, dropping her hands in helpless grief, turn around and start slowly back up the road to the house. Then the room went out from under me, and the glass on the picture closed around me.
“I was waving at you to go away,” Y was saying over and over. “You should have left me here and gone away. We can’t ever get out now—either of us. You should have gone away.”
I opened my eyes and looked around. I was in the dining room of the house, but so changed and gloomy! It was dark, and there was no furniture, no ornamentation. The place was still, and damp.
“No plumbing, either,” Y said dryly, noticing the bewilderment on my face. “This picture was painted before the improvements were put in.”
“But—” I said.
“Hide!” Y whispered. She pushed me into a corner, out of the light of the one candle on the floor.
“Oh my God,” I said, and grabbed Y’s hands.
Through the doorway came the old man, giggling and pulling at his beard. He was followed by the old woman, silent now, but with a glittering grin, and half waltzing.
“Young ladies!” the old man called in a shrill, cracked voice, looking eagerly about the room. He picked up the candle and began going to the corners with it. “Young ladies,” he cried, “come out! We are going to celebrate! Tonight there is to be a ball!”
“Y!” I said. He was coming toward us.
“There you are, there you are. Lovely young ladies, shy over their first ball! Come ahead, young ladies!”
Y gave me one look, and then moved slowly forward. The old man waved the candle at me, calling, “Come along, don’t be too demure, no partners then, you know!” and I followed Y into the room. The old man waved at the woman then, saying, “Let the musicians start now,” and our first ball began. The music did not materialize, but the old man danced solemnly, first with Y and then with me, while the old crone sat dreamily in the corner, swinging the candle in time.
While the old man was dancing with Y, he would wave at me roguishly as they passed, calling out, “Wallflower!” and something that was very like a grin would come over Y. And once when he was dancing with me and we passed Y, sitting on the floor in abject misery, he cried out sternly: “Come now, look gay! Honey catches more flies than vinegar, you know!” And Y actually began to laugh.
No one could possibly say that I enjoyed myself at my first ball. But, you see, I still thought I was lying on Y’s bed, dreaming of the picture. Later, when the old man had limped off to bed, after kissing our hands gallantly, Y and I sat on the dining room floor and talked about it. In spite of the icy touch of the old man’s fingers which lingered on our hands, in spite of the chill of the stone floor and the memory of the old crone’s cackling, we sat there in the dark together and told each other that it was all a horrible dream.