After the Fire (11 page)

I don't understand, Hyacinth said to herself. And for no reason at all except perhaps to have something to do, she looked around the room.

A little family, a couple with three children, sat directly in her view. The children were sweet, French and well behaved. The wife was just an average woman. But the man had a remarkable face. Bulky and square, it was not like Gerald's, not a classic face that anyone would talk about, but it had something else, an expression that brought her back to look at it again. It was the way he was gazing at his wife. There was such tenderness in that
small crinkle of a smile! It brought an answering message from the wife, as if they, too, had some knowledge between them that was their secret and only theirs. Then he reached over and for a moment covered her hand with his own.

“What are you staring at?” Gerald inquired. “What's so interesting?”

“Was I staring? That's awful of me, I didn't mean to. They just seemed so nice.”

“Did you notice that she has no chin? A little surgery would improve her.”

“He loves her anyway.”

“Ah, you still do notice things! That I didn't see. How can you tell that he loves her?”

“There are ways…. Tell me, do I need any surgery?”

Gerald regarded her carefully.

“You're examining me as if you had never seen me before.”

“No, actually you don't need it. You have good bones—a trifle angular, but good. No, you're all right.”

“Just dull,” she said.

He laughed. “Ah, Hy, stop fishing for compliments.”

“I don't always have to fish. Arnie admires me. I get fine compliments from him.”

“Arnie! He's got women all over the place. Kentucky, Florida, every place. Wherever there are horses, he has a woman. Women.”

Her hands were trembling. Blinking her eyes so that no moisture would show, she fumbled in her handbag for a cigarette. Before she had lighted it, Gerald cried out.

“What, again? Oh well, what's a little lung cancer? Of course, you might remember that you have two children.”

Dropping the cigarette, she stared at him. “All right. But why, why, why don't you tell me what's wrong between us? A blind man could tell that there is. I have a right to know. Am I boring? Ugly? Mean? What?”

“Nothing's wrong! For God's sake, Hy, nothing. Eat your dinner. Have some more wine.”

I don't understand.

In bright sunshine the next day, they raced through Paris. Hyacinth was barely able to keep up with him; from the Etoile down to the president's palace, across the river and back to the Place de la Concorde, they rushed through the shimmering afternoon.

“You need to be young in this city,” he said, and then to her astonishment, “I'm already too old.”

“Why, that's nonsense!” she cried. “Old at thirty-four?”

“No. This is a city made for youth, for youth that has leisure and means.”

He is feeling sorry for himself, sorry about all the years when he did not have this, she thought, and was angry at his self-pity.

“I'm going to visit the hospital,” Gerald said. “A man at home gave me the name of somebody who'll show me around.”

“Fine. I'll go to the Rodin museum and meet you later.”

She was forcing cheer that she did not feel even on
reaching the museum, so filled with treasures. Half-seeing them, she walked about feeling heavy and cold.

Then suddenly something struck her as if she had been stabbed: a small sculpture of a man with a joyous young woman raised high in his arms, as one picks up a laughing child.
“Je suis belle,”
she read. Yes, of course.
I am beautiful when I am loved.
And for long minutes she stood there looking at the faces, the wonderful young bodies and the gladness.

After a while, she went downstairs and out through the lovely gardens. To be in Paris, of all the places in the world, and to be so troubled! To feel so lonely! She walked on. At a shop window filled with children's clothes, she stopped before the prettiest little dress she had ever seen—white linen, unadorned except for a band of roses appliquéd from neck to hem. There were rosy shoes to match. Emma would love those shoes. They did not have her sizes, but they could have them by tomorrow.

“Positively? Because tomorrow will be our last day. The next morning we fly home.”

Yes, they would have the dress and shoes by late afternoon. All the way back to the hotel, she kept thinking about her children. For the first time since they had left home, she felt a painful longing for their faces, for Jerry's merriment and Emma's curiosity. With all her heart, she longed for her children.

They had their dinner. Gerald had missed the man at the hospital, so he had spent the time buying gifts. Punctilious as always, he had chosen appropriately for Hy's
parents, for Arnie, for Emma and Jerry, for the people in the office, and for Sandy, in appreciation.

They went to a nightclub with the Americans whom Gerald had met in the hotel lobby. And sitting there beside her husband, Hyacinth felt again the loneliness that had corroded the afternoon. He and the other couple were enjoying everything, the crowd, the bustle, and the prance of the naked women. Pretending to be one with the mood, she feigned pleasure. Truly she found no fault with any of this; people were entitled to their tastes. If only she could know what Gerald really wanted, she would willingly give it to him.

What could be wrong? Another woman? Was that absurd, or was it not? It was absurd; he had everything, her ceaseless love, his work, their children, their home, everything. She sat there twisting her rings: the wedding band and the precious diamond chip he had bought with his first month's pay.

“Well,” he said in their room that night, “just one more day. I could turn around and come right back here again next month.”

“I didn't think you loved it that much.”

“Who, me? What makes you say that?”

“You haven't been very jolly these last few days, Gerald. Haven't I been asking you why you're so morose?”

“Morose? You mean because I didn't enjoy the tour at Chartres?”

“Of course I didn't mean that. Please, please, don't dodge the question. Answer me: Is it anything I've done? Be honest with me.”

“No, and no, and no again to your silly question.”

“Do you swear it?”

“Yes, I swear it.”

Lamplight fell upon the bright black hair and on the dimple in the chin that softened the intensely virile face. She thought of the sculpture she had seen that afternoon, and without intending to, she made a sound that was part outcry and part sigh, blinking the tears back, although not before he had seen them.

“What's the matter with you, Hy? What is it? Oh, I hate to see you like this. If it's my fault, I'm sorry. But there's no reason, you're imagining—”

She ran to him. “Pick me up and carry me to the bed the way you used to do. I love you so….”

Later, while Gerald slept his usual peaceful sleep, she lay awake staring through the darkness at the outlines of the marble mantel, of flowers on a table, and of luggage, the best fine luggage, waiting in the corner. She had wanted affirmation, and he had given it, or had at least pretended to. Can there be, she asked herself, an impersonal way of doing what is so personal? Why yes, of course there can be. It is as if you did not care who lay there with you.

Quietly, she slid out of the bed and went to the window. It was very late, and traffic in the grand Place had slowed. Lanterns bordered the bridge that stretched across the river. On the other side stood stately public buildings, presenting to the world the face of dignity, that face which human beings present each day to one another.

But beyond these, and all through the great pulsing city, in the little spaces where men and women live
together, there are myriad others besides Hyacinth who, in a different language from hers, are crying her same cry, baffled by loneliness and a fear of falling.

Francine's telephone call came before breakfast in the morning. “Jim died. He slipped away without warning after dinner last night.”

T
oo many things occurred during the following six weeks for Hyacinth to think very much about herself, so that the time in Paris receded abruptly into a distant past. The present loomed large. Poor Granny, the invincible, having reached her limit with this totally unexpected loss of her second son, had gone to a retirement home. Francine, at the insistence of her sons, had left for a long vacation trip with them through the Northwest and Alaska.

“Don't worry about her,” Gerald said. “Francine will get along. She's strong and very smart. She always was the brains of your family.”

Rather shocked, Hyacinth protested, “Brains! And my father had none, I suppose?”

“Very different. He was an intellectual, a gentle soul. But Francine is smarter. Smart enough not to let it show too much. I wouldn't want to be on her list of enemies.”

This remark, along with other idle bits and pieces of
the turmoil and tragedy that accompany a death, was in Hyacinth's mind on a morning in late summer when she received an anonymous telephone call.

“You don't know me,” a woman said, “and in a way I'm ashamed of what I'm doing, not giving you my name. It's dirty and cowardly. I've been putting this off for weeks. But suddenly just now, I decided I must. It's about your husband, and a woman.”

The hand that held the phone shook so much that Hyacinth had to brace it with the other hand. “What are you saying? Tell me who you are.”

“I can't. I really can't. Please understand.” The voice was soft, even trembling. “I'm not an acquaintance of yours, you've never even met me. I only know you by reputation in the community. I know you're a good woman with a nice family. I've had troubles of my own, and I just can't bear to see yet another woman being spat on, as men do. That's all. I thought if I told you what's happening, you might be able to do something about it before it's too late. The woman works in your husband's office.”

The telephone clicked off. Hy put her head down on the desk. Dirty and cowardly, people say, and yet there was something in the manner that rang true.

“I don't know,” she whispered.

When she raised her head, the room seemed to swim in a circle. It took a few minutes before she was able to steady herself and call Moira. You could trust Moira. She would put everything aside and come right over.

They sat on the porch steps. After Hyacinth had spoken
her few words, there was a long silence. Sweating, hot and cold, she waited.

Then Moira spoke slowly, not looking at Hyacinth, but out across the sun-browned grass.

“I've known it for quite a while, Hy. The one who minded the children while you were in France—she's the one. I knew it before that, and I've kept asking myself whether I should tell you. I'm guessing that Gerald knows I know, and that's why he doesn't like me.”

“How did you find out?”

“Are you sure you want to hear all this? What good will it do you?”

“I have to hear it. Tell me.”

Moira sighed. “Things get around. People talk. One woman's husband is a doctor, and his office nurse is a friend of that one, of—of Sandy. Somebody saw Gerald in the car with her, leaving the shore on a Sunday. Somebody saw—oh, what's the use? They've been seen, that's all.”

“So everybody knows, except me.”

Now it was the trees that moved slowly in a circle, tilted against the sky. Hyacinth stood up, leaning against the doorframe.

“Are you going to be all right, Hy?”

Moira's kind face was so anxious that it seemed she was the one who must cry.

“No, I feel very weak, that's all. No strength.”

“Go in and sit down. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You don't deserve it. Are you sure you're all right?”

“Yes, really. Really, Moira.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

Hyacinth smiled. “I'll have to, won't I?”

“Do you want me to stay here with you?”

“No, thanks. I have to get moving and take care of the children.”

“I'll take them home with me. They can stay for supper. Don't worry about them.”

“Thank you. Thank you for everything, Moira.”

“A dirty, anonymous phone call,” Gerald said. “And you take it seriously? Some malicious woman is envious of you, someone sick in the head who has nothing to do but spill venom.”

“She wasn't like that.”

“Like what? What do you know about her? This is ridiculous, and I'm surprised at you.”

It would be wrong to involve Moira, so Hyacinth said only, “Other people know. The woman said I could ask about your being seen in a car with Sandy.”

Gerald laughed. “Well, well! Sandy is a valuable employee, and still I'm not permitted to give her a lift in my car now and then? That's immoral, I suppose.”

“It was on the road to the shore.”

“Her sister lives on the road to the shore. And where on the road, anyway? It's fifty miles long, for Pete's sake. Don't you see how ridiculous this is and how insulting?”

A small, persistent part of her mind, wanting to believe him, was holding hard against the larger part that knew differently. And she was so, so tired. It had been a long day since morning, probably the longest day in her life.

“Come, let's get something to eat,” he said, kindly now. “I have to eat fast and get back to the hospital.”

“I meant to cook something, but I didn't. These are just leftovers. Hamburgers left over.”

This was not the dinner to which Gerald was accustomed. But he only said cheerfully, “Good enough. Stay there if you're not feeling well, and I'll heat them.”

When they had eaten, she went to fetch the children at Moira's house. Gerald helped bathe them, and together they read to them before putting them to bed. Then they went downstairs, Gerald to watch a ball game and Hyacinth to sit with an unread book and a whirl of thoughts.

Surely he could not be thinking of divorce. If only for those two asleep up there, those two whom he adored, he would never do that. And surely, if he had such intentions, would a man like Gerald, so critical, so fastidious, even dream of replacing her with somebody like Sandy? She looked across the room at him. No. The very idea was ludicrous.