Fortune's Hand (33 page)

“Fine. But don't try to make a fool of me. You complained, and justifiably, I'll admit, that I was humiliating
you when I did what I did. But this is far worse. This is an insult to me here in my own house.”

“Nothing happened!” she cried. “Nothing, I tell you!”

“I don't believe you. The secrecy, yours and his, betrays you. I'm no fool, Ellen. You spent the night here together with him.”

How dare he! He, the smug male, admitting freely, albeit with an apology she was expected tolerantly to accept as one forgives a naughty boy—She was furious.

“And if I had done so, which I didn't, what's the difference between you and me?”

“A tremendous difference, and you know it.”

“Why? Because you're a man and I'm not?”

“Because you wouldn't do it without love.”

“That's true.”

“You see, I know you.”

Who could contradict that? To be sure he knew her, longer than Philip did.

“Then you know I tell the truth.”

“So tell me the truth. What did you do here that night?”

“We waited for news of Penn. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we just quietly sat.”

Robb was studying her face. Now, avoiding his scrutiny, she played with the varicolored beads on her bracelet. We are nearing a crisis, she thought. What are we going to do? she asked herself, returning as if in a nightmare to that other long-ago afternoon in his sparse little student's flat, to that other triangle with its
anxious lies and the same question:
What are we going to do?

Her eyes filled with tears. He watched her wipe them away and tuck the tissue back in her pocket before he spoke again.

“Perhaps you are in love with him. Otherwise, why the tears?”

What do I tell him? This is the point at the crossroads where a person has to turn east or west. Choose.

He was waiting, drumming his fingers on the back of the chair.

I do not want to hurt him, she thought. I really do not, although he deserves it. How easy it would be just to continue in civility, I doing my work, he doing his, each of us in our own parallel life! How can I, in spite of all, how can I rip us apart? It is the death, the death of a love.

“Every second in which you postpone your answer is an answer, Ellen.”

She raised her eyes and said quite simply, “Yes. I am in love with Philip.”

“I see. And when did you first discover this astounding fact?”

His lips were so tightly drawn together as to make a thin, straight slash across his face. She wanted to run from the room, away from this collision. But she stood as tall as she could and replied.

“Longer ago than I was aware of it, I think now. Then, when I became aware of it, I fought it down. But it grew, anyway. It grew for both of us.”

“You're a slut,” he said, he who was so careful of his language.

“You don't mean that, Robb. Sluts are the women you pick up on your trips away from home.”

“You! Julie's mother!”

“Julie need never know unless you tell her, and I pray that you don't.”

“Are you so much ashamed of yourself, then?”

“No, not at all. It is simply that I will do anything not to hurt her. A break between you and me will be terrible for her, and she doesn't deserve it. No child does.”

“How can she fail to find out when you ride off into the sunset with your hero?”

“I have no intention of doing that, Robb.”

“Do you actually expect me to stay in this house here with you?”

“Why not? I have stayed with you even when you lied to me. Oh, I know, I know you said it's different, but I don't accept that.”

His rage was subsiding. Perhaps it had been too forceful to last, an explosion that left him empty. He looked merely ill, drooping against the back of the chair, as if he needed support. If she had done nothing else to him, now she had crushed his pride, a pride so fragile that Wilson Grant's frosty, unjust reproofs had been able to cripple it. She had not wanted to crush it. But as he himself had said, things happen.

“Am I crazy?” he asked, speaking as if to himself. “Is it possible that we were wrong for each other? That I should have—”

“Should have what? Stayed with Lily?”

“Well.” There was a long pause until he spoke again. “Well, yes.”

The vast room was almost dark. A vast sadness filled it. And she saw that their rage, which half an hour before might have brought them to blows—if they had not both been so “civilized”—was gone, faded into a mutual despair.

“Poor Julie!” she cried.

He roused. “No. No. That can't be. We have lived this way, and we can go on doing it. You have your work, and I have mine. When Julie comes home, we'll play our parts. And when she's not home, I can be here less often if I choose, and so can you.” With a small, twisted smile, he concluded, “That's easy enough to arrange.”

“I don't want to drive you out of your home.”

“You're not driving me out. I don't even have to look at you if I don't want to, when I'm here. That's one of the advantages of a large house.”

“Oh Robb, let's try not to hate each other if we can! Let's not make it so ugly.”

“Let's not make it more ugly than it is, you mean. That's a large order. But you have my word, Ellen.”

He went upstairs. And stiff with shock, she sat upright, listening to the sound of his steps as he carried his belongings out of their bedroom.

Ellen did no work for a week. The usual materials, paper, pen, and drawing pencils, lay on the desk, but no ideas came out of the turmoil in her head. She tried to
reconstruct the happenings of the past few days, but the effort was exhausting and confusing. One thing telescoped into another, back and back, the process seeming to stop at the birth of Penn; before that she seemed to remember only sun and flowers, and that was far too simplistic to make any sense.

Late one morning, she gave up and drove into town, there to do a few minor errands, browse in a bookshop, and keep walking. On a familiar corner, she passed a church. It seemed to her that they were always having a wedding, or a funeral, in that particular church; had Robb and she not stood there once and watched a couple emerge in a cloud of rice? Now, for no good reason other than impulse, she waited until the mourners had departed and then walked into the vacant building to sit down and feel the silence. Perhaps she would find refreshment in its peace.

But light, pouring through lavender stained glass, was mournfully diluted. In its shafts a million dust motes streaked the air. Continuously renewed, they must settle on the floor, the pews, on hands and shoulders. An old woman in black knelt, praying. A forgotten bunch of funeral flowers lay bedraggled on the floor, below which lay the moldering bones of people long departed. The very air was heavy with a thousand sorrows.

And another impulse, a different one this time, struck Ellen: What was she doing, mourning here, she, a woman possessed by love? She got up and walked out.

For a moment she stood at the top of the steps and
observed the street. Trucks grumbled past her loaded with good things, shoes, newspapers, bananas, and television sets. A boy whistled with two fingers in his mouth, a dog lifted his leg at the lamppost, and a fat man paused to light a cigar. It was life. Life! And for the first time in many days, she felt the surge of it.

Into her handbag she had thrust an envelope with an address on it. Very likely he would be home by now, or on the way. Never having known exactly where he lived, she had still been imagining an apartment, those three small rooms that she had furnished in her mind with books and a pair of cats asleep in a basket. It surprised her, therefore, to stop at a cottage with a yard, a small plot of roses, and a large dog. He was a Newfoundland, and friendly. But as she went up the walk, he barked as he should do, until Philip opened the door.

“It's over,” she said. “I can come and go as I want, and nobody will be hurt. You told me you would be here.”

“My God, my God.” He held out his arms. “Come in.”

F
rom where Julie stood, it was possible to see her two little rooms and closet-sized kitchen all at once.

“Not bad,” Ellen said.

“Well, it does have variety, to say the least. Thrift-shop rugs and sofa, Great-grandpa's gorgeous rolltop desk—did I tell you they had to take off the door to get it in here?—the modern recliner that I bought with my birthday money, and your beautiful tea set, which I shall now use for your tea. You shouldn't have given it to me. It's so upper-crust for the neighborhood.” She laughed. “Me, serving afternoon tea.”

“I think it's lovely, even though I don't have time to do it, either. Don't forget, I'm a working woman, too, now.”

“Don't I know that? With that good early review and the book not even out yet? I'm terribly proud of you, Mom, and always have been.”

“Mutual admiration society, aren't we? Because I'm terribly proud of you, too. I tell everybody that my daughter is a reporter.”

Julie grimaced. “Social news. Mrs. So-and-So's dinner for the benefit of the So-and-So Society. But I'm promised a chance at book reviews, and that's a big step up. When I finish my graduate degree, you'll see something, I hope. But that's enough about work. Here, let's put the card table by the window. There's a great bakery across from the office, and I bought scones.”

“Very British.”

“Andrew likes them. Have I told you that he lived in England?”

“He came from here, you said, some little town down near the Gulf.”

“Yes, but later, after his father died, his mother married an Englishman. He was fifteen when they moved to England. But he always wanted to come back. Then he was lucky enough to get this job on the paper right here. Were you impressed when you met him, Mom?”

“Tell me more about him.”

When someone asks you to describe a person who is very dear to you, you'd think that you would have a million things to say, Julie thought. But as it happens, and simply because there is so much to say, you suddenly don't know how to begin. Out of the myriad of facts and features that comprise a human being, how shall I select? Shall I say that he plays a marvelous game of tennis, loves good music, animals, and good food? That he is a wonderfully gentle and considerate lover?
Certainly he's intelligent, or he wouldn't be the assistant to the paper's star reporter.

“He has a great sense of humor,” she said. “We like old slapstick comedies on television, the kind where people slip on banana peels or throw pies at each other. We go to amusement parks and act half our age.”

“That doesn't sound like you.”

“It does now. I grew up in a very serious household, Mom.”

“Yes,” said her mother, stirring her tea.

She looked thoughtful, even vaguely troubled, and Julie said quickly, “Don't misunderstand. I wasn't an unhappy child. Not at all! I just took life very seriously because that's the way you and Dad were. You still are, really.”

“Yes,” said her mother again, and paused. “I was married very young, right after college. I never had a fun apartment of my own like this one. Never had a job. Never went to graduate school.”

“Do I hear regrets, Mom?”

“No, no. I was merely explaining the difference.”

It had been very different indeed. Only a few months older than her daughter was now, she had worn the bridal dress and lace veil in the photograph on the piano at home. A year after that, she had become a mother. Then Penn had arrived.… And she still looked as glowing as she had in the bridal dress.

“So he works for Rufus Max,” Ellen said. “I never miss his column. Sometimes it seems to me that there's not much difference between an investigative reporter and a detective.”

“Oh, the stuff he knows! I'd love to have Dad meet him. He'd be fascinated. They're both bookworms. Andrew spends all his money on books. He must have two thousand piled up in his little rooms here—on the floor, the chairs, the bed, every place except the stove.”

“Why not invite Dad and him both to have some scones like these one afternoon?”

“What? Get hold of Dad or Andrew in the afternoon? I'd have to lasso them both. It was hard enough for me to get time off today for myself. I was thinking it would be so nice to have dinner at home one Saturday. Andrew still lives the way students live in this neighborhood, on spaghetti and canned soup. Or sometimes, when he feels richer, he gets a hamburger dinner at the corner. I don't do much better myself. So I get nostalgic whenever I think of Mrs. Vernon's cooking.”

Ellen laughed. “Not my cooking?”

And Julie returned the laugh. “No, Mom, not yours. It was nourishing, but that's about all I can say for it.”

Ellen appeared to be thinking. “You know,” she said finally, “I do believe we really ought to have you and Andrew come to dinner. Mrs. Vernon would love to meet your boyfriend, I'm sure. Did I tell you she visited Penn again last week? They had a nice visit, as usual, and she went away feeling happy because he's happy.”

“I'm going to go up there again with Andrew. When I first told him about Penn, he was really interested.”

He had played checkers with Penn. And watching them bent over the board, two young men not all that apart in age, she had been struck not so much by the difference between them, but by the basic human similarity,
the gentle attention of Penn and the kindly patience of Andrew.

This kindly patience had then brought someone else to mind, and did so again now.

“How is it we never see Philip anymore? I can't believe I haven't seen him since we moved from our old house.”

“I talk to him now and then. He lets us know whenever he visits Penn.”

“He was so wonderful with Penn. We really ought to see him.”