But Jon had not replied. He had left one of the few men who had believed in him.
He was thinking of this now. He felt anger against young Father McNulty, to whom life was very simple. Father McNulty “loved” people. Oh, for God’s sake! What was there to “love”? Suddenly he thought of Jenny Heger, the trollop. He turned and went into his office again and sat down at his desk. Aimlessly, he began to clear out the drawers.
He found the small framed photograph of his dead young wife, Mavis. He set it on his desk and stared at the lovely face, framed in its masses of fair hair, at the full soft neck, the full smiling lips, the small but merry eyes, the gentle, sloping shoulders. Eagerness for life shone from the low wide brow, the dimpled chin, the delicate shadow under it. Mavis. Beautiful, laughing Mavis, with the womanly breast, the tiny waist, the swelling hips, the rounded arms and thighs! He took the photograph carefully from the frame and tore it to bits and threw the fragments into his wastebasket. After a moment, he dropped the frame into it, also.
“I’m glad you’re dead, Mavis,” he said. “I often wanted to kill you.”
The house telephone suddenly rang on his desk, and he started, for it had broken the intense and terrible silence. He lifted the receiver.
“Jon?” said his mother. “Wouldn’t you like to have
a
cup of tea with Jenny and me?”
“No, dear.”
“I know you’re there, brooding. It isn’t good for you, Jon.”
“It’s very good.”
“Please come.” ,
“Not while she’s there.”
Marjorie sighed. “It’s getting dusk. Won’t you drive Jenny to the bank?”
“No, Mother. I never do. What’s the matter with Jim?”
“Nothing. But I don’t like you brooding.”
“I’m not brooding. I don’t brood. I’m just clearing things out.”
Marjorie sighed again. “Very well, Jon. But do come home soon. Jenny is about to leave.”
“Give her my love.” He slammed the receiver back on the telephone. He sat staring at nothing for a long time, while the twilight deepened. A man’s whole life. The best years of his life. It had come to nothing at all. It had been destroyed in
a
single moment, and the years were as if they had never existed. He looked into the dark hollow place which must absorb the rest of his life. He opened another drawer and took a bottle of whiskey from it, and a glass, and began to drink.
Mrs. James Morgan looked about the suite so anxiously prepared for her by her son. “It really isn’t very elegant,” she said in a discontented voice.
“Mama, it’s the very best this town can offer. I know.”
She leaned on her two canes and gazed with deeper discontent at everything.
“It’s not what I’m accustomed to, in the home.”
She turned to Robert. “Tomorrow,” she said, “if I am a little better, we must look at the four homes you mentioned, my dear.”
He could not help himself. He said, “You mean the houses, Mama.”
She frowned. For some reason he was not now intimidated at her frowns. “Homes, dear Robert.”
“Mama. A house in which one lives becomes a home to those who live there. But other people’s houses are not ‘homes.’ You don’t refer to other people’s houses as ‘homes,’ only houses.” He took a deep breath. “To call other people’s houses ‘homes’ is a vulgarism.”
“Indeed! Did you learn that silliness in this little town, which wouldn’t fit in a corner of Philadelphia?”
“I’m learning a lot of things I never knew before—Mother. And Hambledon may be small, but it is alive.”
“I don’t think I’m going to like it. Why do you call me ‘Mother?’ “
“Because you are my mother, and I’m no longer a child.”
She stared at him indomitably, but he stared back at her, smiling. “Indeed,” she said again. But she was frightened. Was she about to lose her son, as she had lost her husband? The thought was incredible and alarming. But he had become very strange and seemed taller and very male. This was revolting. “I feel faint,” she said. Robert helped her to a chair. “I could do with a glass of fresh water,” she added. Robert brought her water. He was smiling again, “I am not well,” she complained. “All this dampness—”
“Would you like an Aspirin tablet?”
“Robert! I never take drugs! I bear my arthritis like
a
Christian.”
“Pain that can be alleviated should be. It’s not valiant to suffer unnecessary pain.”
“How you have changed, Robert! In these few short days! I hope that horrible man, Dr. Ferrier, don’t corrupt you.”
” ‘Doesn’t’ is the word, Mother. ‘Don’t’ is plural, not singular.”
“Are you correcting my English now, Robert?” She was very agitated.
“Mother, you are among strangers in Hambledon. In Philadelphia you had friends who overlooked your errors. Forgive me, but it is true.”
“My father was an intellectual minister! He didn’t believe that ladies should be overburdened with learning, but he taught me himself.”
He didn’t teach you much, then, thought the incalcitrant Robert. Then he gentled. “Mother, I’m only trying to help.”
“You are impertinent, Robert. You are ungrateful. First, you decline to practice in Philadelphia, where we have old, devoted friends. Then you decide on this miserable little country place and come under the influence of a frightful man —I know it!—who don’t, I mean doesn’t, have any reputation among respectable people. You bring me here, in this damp town, with my arthritis, and insist on me leaving all my friends—”
“Mother, you needn’t stay here if you don’t like it. You can always live in Philadelphia.”
“Leave you stay here alone? Alone! Among corruptions? You must think I’m an unnatural mother! Robert, how could you have possibly believed that?”
Robert was silent. She said, “Besides, I’ve already rented our home, for a very good rental. You are all I’ve got, Robert.”
“You have all my aunts in Philadelphia, and my cousins,”
“My only child! Thrown to the heathen.”
I must be patient, thought Robert. She said, “That murderer! And to think my only child has been influenced by him! It’s criminal. He should be driven from the country.”
Robert sighed. “He was acquitted, Mother.”
“We’ve come to a pretty pass, in this nation, when criminals can be loosed on the public again to continue their crimes.” She put her handkerchief to her dry eyes. “I only know this, Robert: He will never enter the home so long as I am alive.”
“I don’t think he’ll come without an invitation. Mother, wouldn’t you like to lie down before dinner?”
She was tempted not because she was really in pain but because bed had always been her retreat and her revenge against her family. But Robert was “strange,” and her fright quickened. She must know more of this mystery in order to defend herself. She said, “I am too stimulated by that dreadful journey, and all the soot and the noise. It was my first experience in traveling. I didn’t like it. Those vulgar people!”
“It was only four hours, Mother, and you traveled Pullman.”
“Four hours of sheer misery, Robert! You don’t know what it means to be a delicate female.”
Thank God, thought Robert. “Well, it’s oyer now. We can make plans. The house nearest the offices is smaller than the others I looked at, but it’s very comfortable. Four nice bedrooms, with a good view. And servants are cheaper than in Philadelphia. There’s a nice garden and really pleasant lawns. The price is very reasonable, too. I think you’ll like it.”
“Only four bedrooms? One for you, Robert, one for me, the other two for servants. Where shall our guests sleep?”
“We can build another bedroom onto the house. There is
a
lot of land.”
“Expensive! What do they want for the home?”
“Only ten thousand dollars.”
“Exorbitant! In this little country place!”
“It’s in the best section. By the way, Mrs. Ferrier has asked you to tea tomorrow, if you feel well enough.” He added, “She is considered the first lady in Hambledon, Mother.”
“I shouldn’t dream— You said, ‘the first lady’? How could that be, with her son a murderer?”
“Mother, the judge and the jury decided he wasn’t a murderer! Please remember that. If you call him a murderer here, you can be sued for libel. Well. I must decline the invitation, then?”
“Oh, how my poor headaches! You confuse me, Robert. Decline? Did I say so? How you confuse me!”
“Suppose you think of it tomorrow? You’ll know better then how you feel.”
“Sleeping in that bed, there.” Her thin high voice was full of self-pity. “How can we be sure it don’t have vermin—”
“Mother, it’s very clean, I assure you. The word is ‘doesn’t,’ not ‘don’t.’”
He looked down at her. She was a gaunt woman and almost as tall as himself. She had obstinately worn her widow’s black weeds over all these years, “as was proper.” She was sixty years old, for she had been long a spinster before she had married James Morgan, an impoverished young physician eight years her junior. He had, frankly, married her for her money. Her father had indeed been a minister, but he had inherited a considerable fortune from a bachelor uncle, a scoundrel who had, however, admired the clergy and had hoped that his nephew would redeem him from a possible hell. “It ain’t that I believe in hell,” he had said to his lawyers. “But you never can tell, can you? Better hedge my bets.” Jane Morgan had, in the course of events, inherited her father’s money, she being a spinster and her two brothers affluent in their own industrious right. Her father had never expected that “poor Jane” would ever marry, with her long severe face, her cold gray eyes, her wide thin mouth and her dim brown hair. And, worst of all, her stupidity and rigid character. So he had mercifully provided for her future, not dreaming that a young Dr. James Morgan, fresh out of medical school, would ever see her and decide to marry her, long after his own death.
The dim brown hair was thin and white now, and Jane Morgan stubbornly covered it with a cotton and lace cap, as in the days of her Victorian youth. Ladies who did not wear caps in their “homes” were really not ladies. Her long nose had become sharper and whiter and thinner over the years, and beaked down over her grim mouth, which was surrounded by deep lines. Everything about her was rigorous and uncompromising. She had been thirty-four when Robert had been born and had been firmly fixed in her pattern of living and convictions. Sex had been a most horrendous experience for her, and she had never recovered from the “shame” and indignity of her son’s birth. Yet, in the silently feverish and unpliant ways of spinsters she had violently adored her young husband and had almost devoured him.
He had, thought young Robert now, in sympathy, consoled himself somewhat with a gay young widow in Philadelphia and a number of other ladies of happy character, all of them encountered in his examination rooms. In his boyhood Robert had been horrified at this “betrayal” of his mother by that “nastiness” and “unspeakable affront” to her wifehood. Now he congratulated his father and understood, and that, he thought as he looked down on his mother now, was reprehensible of him. He smiled. He doubted that even his minister-grandfather would have condemned poor young James.
Robert said, “I’ve ordered a nice little dinner for us here in the suite, Mother. Your favorites: chicken broth, lean lamb chops, creamed potatoes, a little buttered turnip, a salad, and some tarts and fruit and cheese. Shall I ring for it now?”
“I don’t believe I can take anything, Robert, but a little cinnamon toast and lemon hot tea.”
Only a month ago he would have cajoled and persuaded her. But now he said, “Very well. I’ll cancel the order and give your own, and I’ll go down to the dining room and have my dinner for myself. It would be wrong of me to nauseate you by having my big dinner upstairs.”
“Let you eat alone in a public dining room? Robert!”
“I’ve been eating there almost every night, Mother, and I haven’t been seduced yet.” Unfortunately, he added to himself.
“Robert! What shameless talk is this? No, I will sacrifice my natural revulsion. Order the dinner, Robert.”
“Only one order? For myself?”
She looked up at him sharply. She didn’t like that easy tone, that indifferent tone, from a son ordinarily most solicitous. “I will sacrifice myself,” she repeated. Robert, smiling under his red-gold mustache, rang for the double dinner. He then excused himself to wash in his own room. He hummed when he went down the corridor. Poor old girl. She was a terrible bore and prig, and, yes, vulgar.
The moment she was certain that her son had left, Mrs. Morgan briskly put aside her canes and moved smartly to the windows to look down on the town. The sidewalks were gleaming with moisture in the dusk. Umbrellas moved in a solid phalanx below, and the gaslights were lit, surrounded by auras of dull and streaming yellow in the rain. But the lamps were scattered, and it was very quiet. Horrid little town. Her Robert would soon tire of it, and then they’d return to civilization, in Philadelphia. Well, she’d see. She’d have tea with that woman tomorrow and let her know that Mrs. Morgan was condescending to her, she the mother of a murderer.
“I really cannot force myself to eat anything,” she complained to Robert when the table was laid in her suite and the savory food set before her.