Whispers

  “Okay. That business last week when she went to school with a ten-cent-store ring on each finger. She looked ridiculous, and I said so, but you let her do it anyway.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s the style in her grade. So it looks ridiculous—what difference? So I let her do it, and now I’m a failure as a mother.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t call you a failure.”

  But you’ve thought it. I know. Ever since I let the baby drown.

  “You implied it,” she said.

  “What’s all this quibbling? What are we doing here?” Exasperated, he punched his fist into his palm.

  She should really not argue with him. Just don’t talk back, she told herself. He’s tense, he has to leave early in the morning, he needs his rest. Annie will forget about this, I’ll forget, and it will all pass if I just keep quiet.

  Yet a quick answer leapt from her mouth. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I know what I’m doing. I’m trying to cope.”

  He stared as if in astonishment. “You? You are? Coping? While I’m working my head off on the brink of the biggest opportunity of my life—of our lives—calmly keeping myself together and doing an expert job in spite of the disaster here at home, the disaster that you allowed to happen—”

  She sprang up. “Back again to Emily, are you? This is too much. It’s insane.”

  “Insane? You don’t want to hear it, I know. And if you notice, I haven’t talked about it. Purely out of consideration for your condition, Lynn. Purely.”

  “Louder! Speak louder so she’ll be sure to hear this.”

  He strode to the door, closed it, and said in a lower voice, “I warned you and warned you about her and that bastard, but in your laissez-faire way you did nothing. You didn’t watch her, you ruined a beautiful girl, you ruined her life.”

  Lynn’s anger mounted. “Listen here, you with your phony accusations. I could have done some accusing, too, in my time if I’d wanted to, and my accusations wouldn’t have been phony either. You know darn well what—”

  Robert sprang up, grabbed her arms, and shook her. “If you weren’t pregnant, I know what I’d—”

  “Take your hands off me, Robert. You’re hurting me. Now, you let me alone, you hear?”

  “Goddamn crazy house,” he muttered, walking away. “I’ll be glad to get out of it in the morning.”

  She lay down, hoping for sleep. Anger was disaster. Some people throve on it, but it sapped her; some bodies just were not programmed for anger. She lay awake while Robert undressed and did his small last-minute chores. She heard his shoelace break as he sat on the side of the bed removing his shoes; she heard him fumble in the weak lamplight, searching for another lace.

  When at last he got into bed, she did not turn to him, as was their custom, nor did he turn to her.

  In the morning when she woke, he was gone.

  It was a brilliant morning. It turned the view from the kitchen window into a Japanese print: Brittle black branches on the hill’s crest cut patterns against the sky. Lynn stared at it, unseeing; on this day it could give her no pleasure. Nothing could. A faint nausea rose to her throat, and she pushed her cup away. Too much coffee. Too many heavy thoughts.

  The house was quiet, and the hum of its silence was unbearably mournful. She got up, moving her clumsy body to the appointment book on the desk. There was nothing much for today except the monthly visit to the obstetrician, who would scold her for not having gained weight; years ago they used to scold you for gaining it. Other than that, there were just a few little errands and marketing. Lunch with Josie had been crossed out because Josie had a cold, and that was just as well, for she was in no mood for sociability.

  Dr. Rupert having been called away, Lynn was to see an associate, a young man, younger than she, his curly hair hanging almost to shoulder length over his white coat. The look had gone out in the eighties, but now, in the nineties, it was apparently coming back. Wrapped in white sheeting, she sat on the examining table observing him while he read her record.

  “Nausea last month, I see. How is it now?” he asked her.

  “I still have it now and then.”

  “It’s not usual in the sixth month.”

  “I know. I didn’t have it the other times.”

  “It says here that you feel unusually tired too.”

  “Sometimes.” She didn’t feel like talking. If he would just get on with it and let her go! “I’m much larger than I was with my other babies, so I guess there’s just more to carry.”

  He looked doubtful. “Could be. But your blood pressure’s up this morning. Not terribly, but definitely up. Is there any reason that you can think of?”

  Alarmed, she responded quickly. “Well, no. Is it bad?”

  “No. I said not terribly. Still, one has to wonder why it’s up at all. Has anything upset you?”

  His smile wanted to persuade her, but she would neither be persuaded nor tricked into any admission. Yet, some answer had to be given.

  “Perhaps it’s because my husband has just left for Europe, and that worries me a little. I can’t think of anything else.”

  He was looking straight into her eyes. His own were shrewd, narrowed under eyebrows drawn together as they might be if he were doing a mathematical computation or working a puzzle.

  “I was wondering,” he said slowly. “Those marks on your upper arms—”

  “Marks?” she repeated, and glancing down, saw above her elbows the blue-green spots where Robert’s thumbs had pressed last night.

  “Oh, those.” She shrugged. “I can’t imagine. I bruise easily. I’m always finding bruises and can’t remember how I got them.”

  “Symmetrical bruises. Somebody made them,” he said, flashing the same easy smile.

  As if she didn’t see through him! His deliberately casual manner, coaxing, as if he were speaking to a child!

  The father said to the new bride, “Somebody made those marks. Lynn, I want to know.”

  “Is there something you want to tell me?” the doctor asked her now.

  Thinking she heard a note of curiosity in his voice, she felt the hot sting of indignation. It was the new style these days; you got it on television and in print, people saying whatever came into their heads without manners or tact, prying and snooping with no respect for privacy; just let it all hang out.

  “What can you mean?” she retorted. “What should I possibly want to tell you?”

  The young man, catching her expression, which must have been fierce, retreated at once.

  “I’m sorry. I only asked in case you had something else on your mind. So, that’s all for today. Next month Dr. Rupert will see you as usual.” And he turned back to the chart.

  Her heart was still pounding when she left the office. Meddler. Officious busybody. She wondered whether he would write, Two bruises, upper arms, on the chart.

  Even as she pushed the cart through the supermarket a little while later, she was still aware of her heartbeat. Then, in the parking lot as she was unloading the cart, she caught sight of Harris Weber and his mother in the next row of cars. And her heart began its race again. They hadn’t seen her yet, and she bent lower over the bags so that they might leave without noticing her. This avoidance was not because of any ill feeling toward them, for she had almost none toward Harris and certainly none at all toward his mother; it was because the unknown woman knew things about her, about her and Robert.… And she wanted to hide, not to look the woman in the face and have to see there—what would she see there? Curiosity? Pity? Contempt?

  But they were taking so long that by now the boy must have recognized her car and would know she was leaning ostrichlike over the groceries in order to avoid them. Something told her to look up, not to hurt the boy.

  “Hello,” she said, and raised her arm in a slight wave.

  He gave her his bright, familiar look, that candid look with the masculine sweetness in it, whose appeal she had felt from the very first.
br />   “Hello, Mrs. Ferguson.”

  “How are you?” she called across the car’s hood.

  “Fine, thanks. And you?”

  She nodded and smiled; the mother nodded and gave in return a smile that said nothing; it was merely polite and perhaps a trifle shy. That was all. And they drove away, the old car sputtering out of the parking lot.

  There, Lynn told herself, that wasn’t so bad. It had to be done. Yet the little encounter had given her another kind of sadness—not for herself, but for Emily. She went home, put the groceries away, sat down to read the mail, mostly bills and Christmas cards, and with the sadness still in her, listened to the drowsy hum of the silence.

  The telephone rang. She must have been dozing, for it startled her, and she jumped.

  “Hello,” said Robert.

  “Where are you?” she cried.

  “In London. I told you, we took the day flight so we’re staying the night here, and we leave for Berlin in the morning. It was a fine flight.”

  “That’s nice,” she said stiffly.

  “Lynn, it’s night here, but I couldn’t go to sleep without talking to you. I waited till you’d be back from the doctor’s. How are you?”

  “How is my health, do you mean, or my state of mind?”

  “Both.”

  “My health is all right. The other is what you might expect.”

  “Lynn, I’m sorry. I’m so awfully sorry. I said it was a good flight, but it wasn’t, because I kept thinking about us all the way. About us and Annie. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, God knows. I never do.”

  “You hurt her because she isn’t Emily. She isn’t beautiful, and—”

  “No, no, that’s not true. I do everything for her, everything I can. But I’m not as patient as you are, I’ll admit that. I always do admit when I’m wrong, don’t I?”

  She wanted to ask: Shall I count the times you do, the times you don’t, and give you the ratio? But that kind of hairsplitting led nowhere. It was like jumping up and down on the same spot.

  She sighed. “I suppose so.”

  “I get frustrated. I want so much for her, and she doesn’t understand. Annie’s not easy.”

  There she had to agree. Yet she fenced with her reply, saying sternly, “Nobody is, Robert.”

  “That’s not so. You are. You are the kindest, the gentlest, the most reasonable, sensible, wonderful woman, and I don’t deserve you.”

  Was this the frowning, hostile man who had shouted last night in the kitchen, hurt her arms, and turned his back on her in the bedroom? Yes, of course he was. And somewhat scornfully she admonished herself: Don’t tell me again that you’re surprised.

  “Lynn, are you there?”

  “I’m here, I’m here.”

  “Tell Annie I’m sorry, will you?”

  “Yes, I’ll tell her.”

  “The whole thing was stupid, the way we turned away from each other without saying good-night as we always do, or without saying good-bye this morning. What if one of us should have an accident like the Remys and we were never to see each other again?”

  The Remys, who had lived across the street. Linda and Kevin. The words pierced her. She could still hear Linda’s terrible cry when they called to tell her of the accident; the sound had rung down the block so that people had come running, and Linda had gone mad.

  “He left for work an hour ago!” she screamed, and had kept screaming. “He left for work an hour ago!”

  “That angry night would have been our last one. Think about it,” Robert said.

  A heart attack. A plane crash, or a car crash on a foreign road in fog and rain. His mangled body. They would return it to America. He would never sit in that chair again.

  “Lynn, are you all right? What is it?”

  “I’m all right.”

  But he had pierced her. It felt like internal bleeding. She was seeing herself in the house alone—because what are one’s children, more than an extension of oneself? These vulnerable girls, this unborn infant to care for, and he not coming back. No man’s voice, no man’s dependable step coming up the stairs at the end of the day. No man’s strong arms.

  “I guess my nerves wore thin,” she said. “I should have brought you and Annie together before night. But I was just plain mad. And then, I’m not twenty years old anymore,” she finished ruefully.

  “Yes, you are, as you were when I met you. You’ll always be twenty. Tell me you love me a little. Just tell me that, and it’ll hold until I come back. Tell me you’re not angry anymore.”

  Her very flesh could feel the vibrations in his voice, the quiver of his pain.

  “I love you all so much, but you first of all. I’m nothing without you, Lynn. Forgive me for the times I’ve hurt you. Forgive me, please.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  The marks on the arms, the hot-tempered words so dearly repented of—what are they in the end compared with all the goodness? Nothing. Nothing.

  Thousands of miles apart, we are, and still this tie renews itself as if he were in this room or I in that strange room in London, and we were touching one another. Astonishing!

  So her anger dissolved. It lifted the chill that had clung like a wet pall all that day, and comfort began to warm her.

  “And you love me, Lynn?”

  “Yes, yes I do.”

  In spite of everything, I do.

  “Take care, then, darling. Give my love to the girls. I’ll call again in a couple of days.”

  Relief was still flooding, and she was still sitting there cradling the plastic instrument in her hands as if it could still hold some essence of that relief, when it rang again.

  “Hello, this is Tom Lawrence. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.” And she actually heard the lilt in her own voice.

  “I’ll tell you why I’m calling. I wonder whether you can do me a favor. My sister’s in town with her daughter. They live in Honolulu, and she thought it was time for Sybil to see what lies beyond Hawaii. Sybil’s twelve. Don’t you have a girl about twelve?”

  “Yes, Annie. She’s eleven.”

  “That’s great. May we borrow her? Do you think she’d like to go into the city? We’d see a show, maybe a museum or maybe the Statue of Liberty. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds lovely.”

  “Well, then, we’ll pick Annie up tomorrow morning, if that’s all right, and we’ll take the train in.”

  “Annie’ll be thrilled. She loves New York.”

  “It’ll be a new experience for me, with two ladies that young. My sister wants the morning off by herself to do the shops, so I’ll be on my own with the girls for a while.”

  “You’ll do very well, I’m sure.”

  “She’ll like Sybil. A nice kid, even if she is my niece.”

  A faint worry passed through Lynn. For some reason she imagined the sister to be like the excessively smart young women whom she had seen at that party in Tom’s house. She would be incredibly thin, and her daughter would be, too, dressed in French clothes, and looking sixteen years old. There were plenty of girls like that, but Annie was not one of them.

  So it was with some relief that she greeted the party at the door the next morning. Tom’s sister, who might have been his twin, was pretty and proper and friendly. Sybil, like her, was neither thin nor fat, although not as pretty as her mother. Annie would have a good day.

  Lynn’s prediction turned out to be right. Annie had a wonderful Saturday. At dinnertime she repeated triumphantly, “I had chocolate cake with raspberries and cream. I told them my father says I’m too fat, and Tom said when I’m older I’ll want to diet and not to worry too much in the meantime.”

  “ ‘Tom’? You called Mr. Lawrence ‘Tom’?”

  “He told me to. Because Sybil calls him ‘Uncle Tom.’ ”

  Light snow, mixed with rain, had begun to freeze. In the moment of quiet it could be heard tinkling on the windowpanes.

  “It’s nice eating here in the kit
chen,” Emily said. “Cozy.”

  It was true. In the dining room with only four at the table, it always seemed that ten or twelve more were missing, for the table, an original Sheraton, was long enough to seat eighteen. The room always seemed to echo. Robert said, though, that a dining room was meant to be dined in.

  Annie was still full of her day. “I told him I hate my hair, it’s so kinky. And he said I can have it straightened if I want to. I said my father won’t let me, and he said I could do it when I was grown up because I could do whatever I wanted then. He said he knew a lady who had it done, and she loved it afterward.” Annie giggled. “I’ll bet he meant one of his wives.”

  Lynn and Emily glanced at each other. And Emily scoffed, “You don’t know anything about his wives.”

  “Yes, I do. Sybil told me. He’s had two. Or maybe three, she thinks.” Annie, looking thoughtful, stopped the fork midway to her mouth. “You know what? If you ever divorce Dad, I think you should marry Tom.”

  “Why, Annie! As if I would ever divorce Daddy.”

  “I should think you would pick Uncle Bruce,” Emily remarked. “You love him so much.”

  She had a twitch at the corner of her mouth as she spoke, that might have been humorous, or cynical, or both. Lynn looked away.

  And Annie said seriously, “Yes, of course I love him, silly, but he has Aunt Josie.”

  Lynn rebuked them. “This is all silly. And don’t you dare say anything as idiotic as that in front of Daddy either. He’s coming home the week after next on Wednesday.”

  “Eleven more days. Only eleven more days,” Annie said. “I thought he was going to stay longer.”

  “Well, he’ll be finished with his work by then,” Lynn explained, “so it will be time to come home.”

  Annie grumbled. “He just left. What’s the use of going away when he just turns around and comes right back? He can’t be doing very much. I hope they give him a bigger job next time.”

  “Go let Juliet out. She needs to go,” Lynn said.

  On the Monday, when school reopened, Emily came home without Annie, grumbling, “That kid! She missed the bus again. Now I suppose I’ll have to get in the car and go back for her. And she’ll be soaked, too, standing outside in this mess.”