Whispers

  “Do you remember how she used to say she married me because I liked cats?”

  “I remember.” And she thought, but did not say, It was because your eyes smiled too. She said instead, “Are there—do you have instructions about Barney’s food and things?”

  “I’ll write them out. Where’s a pencil?” He went rummaging and, in an obvious attempt at cheer, kept talking. “Let’s see: litter box, carrier, collar and leash, almost never used but good to have, some canned food, his favorite kind. Of course, he likes scraps whenever you have fish for dinner.”

  “Dover sole?” she asked, forcing a laugh, needing to seem lighthearted.

  He responded in kind. “Oh, naturally. Only the best. And you might let him have a couple of spoons of ice cream now and then, any flavor but coffee. He doesn’t like coffee.”

  Standing on the walk, she watched while Bruce and the neighbor’s son put the birdbath and the unprotesting cat with his belongings into the station wagon. Then the moment of departure came, and suddenly there was nothing to say. Uncomfortable with this vacuum, she remarked that the neighbor’s son seemed to be a fine boy, rather mature for fifteen.

  “That’s what you have to look forward to with Bobby,” he replied.

  “I hope so. I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will.”

  “So, I guess it’s good-bye,” she said, and, absurdly, held out her hand.

  “A handshake, Lynn?” Holding her face, he softly touched her lips with his own. Then he put his arms around her, held her close, and kissed her again.

  “Take care of yourself, Lynn. Take good care.”

  “And you. You do the same.”

  “I worry so about you. I have for a long time.”

  “There’s no need. I’m fine. I’m strong.”

  “Well, but if you ever need anything, call Tom Lawrence, will you?”

  “I won’t need anything. Honestly. Believe me.”

  “Tom cares about you, Lynn.”

  Tom, she thought, says the same about you. It would be comical if things weren’t all so mixed up. And, turning from him so that he might not see her wet, blinking eyes, she climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “Be sure to write to us now and then, especially to Annie.”

  “My special Annie. I’ll always be there for her.”

  “You are the best, the kindest,” she said, and, able to say no more, started the engine.

  The last she saw of Bruce as the car moved off was the sunlight striking his glasses and his arm upraised in farewell. The last she saw of the little house was the kitchen window, where Josie’s red gingham curtains still hung. Her eyes were so wet that she could barely see to drive.

  Robert is probably right about him, she thought. He’s the kind who really may never marry again. He’s lost. And the word echoed: lost. It was a tolling bell, grave and sorrowful and final. She would probably never see him again. He would drift and she would drift, and they would not meet.

  At home there was hustle and bustle. Annie at once took over the care of the cat.

  “Barney knows me best,” she insisted. “He should be my cat. I’ll be responsible for his food and his vet appointments and everything.”

  “And will you clean the litter box too?” Lynn asked.

  “Absolutely. Now I have to introduce him to Juliet. I really don’t think there’ll be any trouble, do you?”

  “I don’t think so. If there is, we’ll learn how to handle it.”

  Robert was still in the yard with Bobby. At the moment the little boy was stretched on the grass with Juliet, and both were watching Robert hammer a playhouse into shape. He does everything well, Lynn thought, observing the swift competence and the masculine grace.

  Seeing her, he called, “Like it? He’ll be able to use it before you know it.”

  “It’s time for his bath.” She walked out and picked up the baby. “Oh, my, wet through. You do need a bath.”

  The boy laughed and caught hold of her hair. Robert gave them a look of such intensity that she had to ask curiously, “What is it?”

  “You. Both of you together. Your lovely, tranquil spirit. I don’t deserve you.”

  She did not want her heart to be touched or moved. She wanted just peace, calm and practical and friendly.

  “Dinner will be heating while I bathe Bobby. Then I have Annie’s scout meeting tonight. It’s for mothers and daughters, so will you put him to bed?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Come see when you’re finished there,” she called back from the kitchen door. “I’ve brought Bruce’s cat.”

  Then she closed the door and carried Bobby upstairs. “I worry about you,” Bruce had said, with the implication that she was somehow in peril. But it was not so, for she was going to be in control. I can run this house and this family like clockwork, she told herself, holding her child. I can keep a happy order here, and I can cope with anything.

  She was strong, and she was proud.

  A few days later she went to New York for the pre-Christmas sales. Now that their financial future was uncertain, she had to shop with a particular care, to which for a long time she had been unaccustomed. Hurrying homeward past Salvation Army Santa Clauses and shop windows festooned with glass balls and tinsel arabesques, she worried whether the coat and skirts would fit Annie properly.

  But there was something else on her mind, something that, because of her preoccupation with Josie’s death and Robert’s depression, she had locked away in the dark. However, it did not accept the darkness, but struggled out again and again, as if to force her to examine it.

  There was something odd about Aunt Jean’s connection to Querida. Or there would be, provided that Emily’s report was correct. Or provided that the name over the shop’s door belonged to the Querida—which it might well not, she thought now, summoning common sense and probabilities.

  She was passing through the neighborhood, and it gave her immediate recall, such as follows a chord, a flavor, or a scent; it brought back the day when events had crashed upon each other like cars on a foggy highway; there had been Robert’s attack in the kitchen, her flight into Bruce’s arms, and Emily’s sorrowful leavetaking. And it seemed to her that all these were somehow linked in ways that she could not fathom, that these things had their origin in one place, one time.

  I have to know, she thought, as she came to the street, to the shop, and, with a thumping of the heart like a pounding on a door, stood there looking in the window.

  A row of dog paintings was on display. They were all the fashion these days; the English-country-house look was the right look, casual elegance among rural acres for the homes of people who had never owned either an acre or a dog and possibly would never want to, she thought, surveying the haughty pugs, Queen Victoria’s favorites, and the sporting setters, flaunting their proud tails. But there among them hung an unfamiliar creature, a strange beast, looking so much like Juliet that it could have been Juliet.

  Abruptly her feet made the decision to enter and she found herself inside.

  A small, dark woman limped across the room and took Juliet out of the window.

  “It’s not old,” she said in reply to Lynn’s query. “I’ve put it with the old ones because it has a nineteenth-century look. Actually, it’s the work of a man who simply likes to paint dogs, any kind.”

  “It’s charming.”

  The dog, sitting on a doorstep, had the same alert, faintly concerned expression that Juliet wore whenever the family drove away without her.

  “Yes, I see by your face how much you like it,” the woman said.

  “It’s the image of our dog.”

  Lynn’s heart was pounding, and while she was seeing the painting, she was also seeing the woman. Had Robert not spoken about “a job in a gallery,” and “a dabbler”? Still, his “beauty” could certainly not be this person, whose angular face with its flat black eyes was topped by a dome of coarse black hair. Relief and disappointment met and mingle
d. In one way she “had to know,” she wanted to behold the woman who had first occupied her place; but in another way there was dread.

  She returned to the picture. It would be a fine surprise for Robert, something to enliven him. They might hang it in his den at home or better still in his office. For an instant she forgot that at present he did not have an office.

  “It’s not expensive. The price is on the tag.”

  The price was most fair. Since the painting was small enough, she could carry it home right now. And she handed over her credit card.

  The woman looked hard at the card and slowly turned her eyes up toward Lynn.

  “Robert V. W. Ferguson. So now you’ve come too,” she said. “I was wondering whether you would.”

  Lynn’s knees went so weak that she had to perch on the stool that stood beside the counter, and she stammered.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your daughter Emily was here a while back, the day after Thanksgiving.”

  Emily in New York? But Emily was in New Orleans! We talked on the phone on Thanksgiving day. She must have flown in to see this woman, and gone back to college without telling us.…

  The woman was staring at Lynn in open curiosity.

  “She had a lot of questions, but I didn’t answer them. She’s too young, sweet and young. Besides, it’s up to you to tell her whatever you want her to know.”

  Lynn’s voice came in a whisper. “I know nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not much. Only that you didn’t get along.”

  “Didn’t get along! There’s a bit more to it than that, you can be sure.”

  The black eyes bored into Lynn. “You’re a pretty woman. He liked blondes, I remember.”

  Lynn was in panic. She had come here wanting to find out—what? To find out something about Robert that other people—Aunt Jean—knew and had kept hidden. And now that she was here she was in panic.

  “He must have told you something about me.”

  “That there was a child, a boy,” Lynn whispered again.

  “Yes. He’s a man now, living in England. He’s had a good life: I saw to that. And you? Do you have other children?”

  “Another girl, and a boy ten months old.”

  “A nice family.”

  The air in the confined and cluttered space held bad vibrations; there was an impending intimacy from which Lynn now shrank. What she must do was to stand up and leave the place, picture and all. But she was unable to move.

  Querida’s eyes roved over her, coming to rest on the fur coat and the fine leather bag. “I see that he has accomplished what he wanted to.”

  And Lynn, mesmerized, submitted to inspection. The brusque remark, that could have been offensive, was somehow not. It was merely odd. Whatever could Robert have seen in this woman? Two more ill-matched people one could hardly imagine.

  As if she had read Lynn’s mind, Querida said, “I don’t know how we ever got mixed up. It was just one of those things, I guess. He was brilliant, won all the scholarships, and God knows he was good looking. I was Phi Beta Kappa, and I suppose he was impressed by that. I was no beauty, although somewhat better looking than I am now, that’s for sure. We were together only three or four times and I got pregnant. I didn’t want an abortion, and I’ll say this much for him, he did the right thing for those days, anyway. He married me.”

  Had she no inhibitions? Why was she telling these things to a person who had not asked to hear them?

  “We were dirt poor, both of us. Hadn’t anything, never had had anything.”

  Poor? The trips to Europe and Querida’s prominent family? What of them?

  “Why do you look surprised? Are you surprised?”

  “Yes,” Lynn murmured.

  “I suppose he told you I was beautiful. He always liked to tell me about his former lovers, how exceptional they were. And I suppose he drew you a picture of his distinguished patrician background. Poor Robert. He did it so often that he really believed it. Anyway, by your time they were dead, so what difference? But I knew. I knew the mother with the doilies and the tea wagon. The genteel poor. Pretense, all pretense. She was pathetic, a decent little woman, half the size of her husband, and helpless under his fists.”

  “I don’t want to hear this!” cried Lynn, shuddering.

  “But maybe you should.”

  You could feel the anger burning in this queer woman, as if her very skin would be hot to the touch. She was eccentric, neurotic, or even perhaps a trifle mad.… And still you had to listen.

  “Jean worries about you. Oh, yes, she’s kept in touch with me over the years. She’s a good soul, like her sister, and she’s never been sure about you and Robert.”

  This was too much, this infringement of the decent privacy that Lynn had guarded all her life.

  “People have no right—” she blurted, but the other, ignoring her indignation, continued.

  “Do you know how Robert’s mother died? They were in their car on the turnpike, the two of them. A man at a tollbooth notified the police when he saw what was wrong, but by the time the police caught up with them it was too late. She had been trying to jump out of the moving car, away from him. The people in the car behind had seen it. The car swerved and hit a tree. They were both killed. Good for him, and none too soon. And those,” Querida said, “are the distinguished Fergusons.”

  Oh, the horror! And the woman would not stop the gush of words. Perhaps she could not.

  “Do you see this leg? My hip was broken. Yes, the story repeats itself, although not all the way, because I knew enough to get free. Yes, Robert did this to me.”

  Now Lynn recognized that she herself was in a state of physical shock; her mouth went dry, her palms wet, and her heart was audibly drumming in her ears. She sat quite still, not having moved from the support of the counter at her back, sat and stared as the nervous voice resumed.

  “It wasn’t the first time, although it was the worst. We were ice skating. He asked me what there was for dinner, and I said we’d pick up some fast food on the way home. I wasn’t a good housekeeper. I’m still not, and that infuriated him. But he infuriated me with his compulsive ways, so neat, so prompt, so goddamn perfect. So he went absolutely mad about the dinner. A thing like that could trigger him.”

  Lynn’s dry lips formed a statement: I told you I don’t want to hear any more. Yet no sound came out.

  “It was almost dark, and we were the last ones on the lake. So he slapped my face, and his gloves had buckles on the wrists. He shoved me, and I fell on the ice. He kicked me, and I couldn’t get up. Then he was scared, and he ran to a public phone to call an ambulance. When they came, I was almost fainting with the pain. I heard him say, ‘She fell.’ ”

  If she would just stop and let me get out of here, Lynn thought, and then rebuked herself: You know you have to stay to the end, to hear it all.

  “A neighbor woman cared for the baby while I was in the hospital. When he came and started talking about the ‘accident,’ I told him I never wanted to see him again. So I took my child and left. I had a friend in Florida who gave me a job, and I let him get the divorce on the grounds of desertion. I didn’t care, I wanted no part of him. I said if he ever came near me or the child, I would expose him and ruin him forever.” Again there came that forced, grim laugh. “I must say he has supported the boy generously—not me, because I wouldn’t take a penny of his anyway. Now my son is twenty-four and independent.

  “My hip wasn’t set right. They tell me it should be broken again and reset. But I don’t want to go through all that. I keep it this way as a remembrance of Robert.”

  Why was she revealing this terrible story after all these years? It was to take revenge for her suffering. It was to destroy Robert’s marriage, especially if it should be a good one.

  “And do you think it does any good to go to the police? Do you? Well, I’ll tell you. It doesn’t. I went once. They didn’t even take me seriously. I came in a nice car. We both ha
d jobs then, and we had pooled our money for it. We had a neat apartment in a decent neighborhood. What are you complaining about?’ they asked me. The guy can’t be all bad. You should see the things we see. Straighten it out. Don’t make him angry. Of course, if you want to swear out a complaint, we can arrest him and make a big stink. Then maybe hell lose his job, and where’ll you be? Nah, think it over. You women don’t know when you’re well off.’ That’s what they told me. I see I’ve upset you.”

  “What did you expect?” Lynn’s pity and horror collided. Her head reeled, and her voice filled with tears. “You had no right to dump all this stuff on me. I came in to buy a picture, and—”

  The other woman’s tight face softened. “I suppose I shouldn’t have talked,” she said. “I shouldn’t be involved in this at all. But when your daughter came I suspected—never mind. Do you still want the picture? I’ll let you have it for nothing. My way of apologizing.”

  Lynn slid off the stool. “Yes, I want it. And I want to pay for it.”

  “As you wish. I’ll wrap it.”

  Although her heart was still pounding, she was beginning to recover and take command of herself. With a show of casual dignity she walked around the walls as if to examine the paintings hung there, yet, in her agitation, scarcely seeing them at all.

  After a moment the voice pursued her. “You don’t believe me.”

  Lynn turned and went back to the counter. “Whether I do or not,” she said quietly, “doesn’t matter. Just give me the picture, please, so I can go.”

  In the silence, now throbbing with the words that had been spoken there, she waited while the package was being wrapped. Querida’s fingers delicately handled paper, cardboard, and twine; she had oval nails and a strong profile as she bent over the work. An intelligent face, thought Lynn.

  The silence broke abruptly. “He made her life a hell. I’m talking about Robert’s father and mother. Her people hated him. They begged her to leave him, but she wouldn’t. A little bit proud, a little too ashamed. I know. I’ve seen them, the soft ones who listen to the sweet apology and believe it won’t happen again. You, too, I’m thinking.”