Whispers

  He began at once. “We need more order in this house. It’s too slipshod. People come and go as they please without having even the decency to say where they’re going or when they’re coming back. They have no sense of time. Coming home at all hours as they please. You’d think this was a boardinghouse.”

  The poor children. What had they done that was so bad? This was absurd. And she thought again: It is his conscience. He has to turn the tables to put himself in the right.

  “I want to know whenever and wherever you go to another house, Annie. I want to know with whom you are associating.”

  The child stared. “The other fathers aren’t like you. You think this is the army, and you’re the general.”

  It was an oddly sophisticated observation to come from the mouth of an eleven-year-old.

  “I won’t have your impudence, Annie.”

  Robert never raised his voice when he was angry. Yet there was more authority in his controlled anger than in another man’s shouts; memory carried Lynn suddenly back to the office in St. Louis and the dreaded summons from Ferguson to be “reamed out”; she had never received that summons herself, but plenty of others had and never forgot it afterward.

  “You’d better get hold of yourself, Annie. You’re no baby anymore, and you’re too fresh. Your schoolwork isn’t good enough, and you’re too fat. I’ve told you a hundred times, you ought to be ashamed of the way you look.”

  Gooseflesh rose on Lynn’s cold arms, and she stood there hugging them. It was unbearable to be here, weakened as she was today, but still she stayed as if her presence, silent as she was, was some protection for her children, although she was certainly not protecting them against these words, and there was no need to guard them from anything else. Never, never had Robert, nor would he ever, raise a hand to his girls.

  Her mind, straying, came back to the present. He had been saying something about Harris, calling him a “character.” That nice boy. She could not hear Emily’s murmured answer, but she plainly heard Robert’s response.

  “And I don’t want to see him every time I walk into my home. I’m sick of looking at him. If I wanted a boy, I’d adopt one.”

  Annie, whose face had turned a wounded red, ran bawling to the door and flung it open so violently that it crashed against the wall.

  “I hate everybody! I hate you, Dad!” she screamed. “I wish you would die.”

  With her head high, tears on her cheeks and looking straight ahead, Emily walked out.

  In Robert’s face Lynn saw the reflection of her own horror. But he was the first to lower his eyes.

  “They needed what they got,” he said. “They’re not suffering.”

  “You think not?”

  “They’ll get over it. Call them back down to eat a proper dinner in the dining room.”

  “No, Robert. I’m going to bring their supper upstairs and leave them in peace. But yours is ready for you.”

  “You eat if you can. I have no appetite.”

  She went upstairs with plates for Emily and Annie, which they both refused. Sick at heart, she went back to the kitchen and put the good dinner away. Even the clink of the dishes was loud enough to make her wince. When it grew dark, she went outside and sat down on the steps with Juliet, who was the sole untroubled creature in that house. Long after the sky grew dark, she sat there, close to the gentle animal, as if to absorb some comfort from its gentleness. I am lost, she said to herself. An image came to her of someone fallen off a ship, alone on a raft in an empty sea.

  And that was the end of Saturday.

  On Sunday the house was still in mourning. In their rooms the girls were doing homework, or so they said when she knocked. Perhaps, poor children, they were just sitting in gloom, not doing much of anything. In the den Robert was bent over papers at the desk, with his open briefcase on the floor beside him. No one spoke. The separation was complete. And Lynn had a desolate need to talk, to be consoled. She thought of the people who loved her, and had loved her: her parents, both gone now, who would have forfeited their lives for her just as she would do for Emily and Annie; of Helen, who—and here she had to smile a bit ruefully—would give a little scolding along with comfort; and then of Josie. But to none of these would she or could she speak. Her father would have raged at Robert. And Helen would think, even if she might not say, “You remember, I never liked him, Lynn.” And Josie would analyze. Her eyes would search and probe.

  No. None of these. And she thought as always: Marriage is a magic circle that no outsider must enter, or the circle will never close again. Whatever is wrong must be solved within the circle.

  She walked through the house and the yard doing useless make-work, as she had done the day before. In the living room she studied Robert’s photo, but today the rather austere face told her nothing except that it was handsome and intelligent. In the yard the two new garden benches that he had ordered from a catalog stood near the fence. He was always finding ways to brighten the house, to make living more pleasant. He had hung thatched-roof birdhouses in secluded places, and one was already occupied by a family of wrens. He had bought a book of North American birds and was studying it with Annie, or trying to anyway, for the child’s attention span was short. But he tried. So why, why was he—how, how could he—

  The telephone rang in the kitchen, and she ran inside to answer it.

  “Bruce went fishing yesterday,” Josie reported, “and brought home enough for a regiment. He wants to do them on the outdoor grill. How about all of you coming over for lunch?”

  Lynn lied quickly. “The girls are studying for exams, and Robert is working at his desk. I don’t dare disturb him.”

  “Well, but they do need to eat,” Josie said sensibly. “Let them come, eat, and run.”

  She was always sensible, Josie was. And at that moment this reasonableness of hers had its effect on Lynn, so that she said almost without thinking, “But I’ll come by myself, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Of course,” said Josie.

  Driving down Halsey Road through the estate section, and then through the town past the sportswear boutiques, the red-brick colonial movie, and the saddlery shop, all at Sunday-morning rest, she began to regret her hasty offer. Since she had no intention of confiding in Josie, she would have to make small talk, or at least Josie’s version of small talk, which would involve the front page of The New York Times. Yet she did not go back, but drove through the little town and out to where the great estates had long ago been broken up, where new tract houses stood across from the pseudo-Elizabethan tract houses that had been put there in the twenties.

  It was one of these that the Lehmans had bought, a little house with mock-oak beams and leaded glass windows. It was a rather cramped little house.

  “He can afford better,” Robert had remarked with some disdain.

  And Lynn had answered innocently, “Josie told me they couldn’t afford anything better because of her medical expenses.”

  Robert had exclaimed, “What? Well, that’s undignified, to say the least, going all over the neighborhood telling people about one’s business.”

  “She’s not going all over the neighborhood. We’re friends.”

  “Friends or not, the woman talks too much. I hope you don’t learn bad habits from her.” And then he had said, “Bruce is cheap. He thinks small. I saw that from the beginning.”

  But Bruce wasn’t “cheap.” Josie’s sickness had cost a small fortune, and as Josie herself had said, who knew what was yet to come? It was she who hadn’t let him spend more. He would have given the stars to her if he could.

  He was in the backyard when she drove up, sanding a chest of drawers, concentrating with his glasses shoved up into his curly brown hair.

  He summoned Lynn. “Come, look at my find. What a job! I picked it up at an antiques barn way past Litchfield last week. Must have twenty coats of paint on it. I have a hunch there’s curly maple at the bottom. Well, we’ll see.”

  His enthusiasm was
appealing to her. His full lips were always slightly upturned, even in repose; she had the impression that he could sometimes hardly contain a secret inner happiness. A cleft in his chin gave sweetness to a face that, with its high cheekbones and jutting nose, might best be described as “rugged.” A “man’s man,” you could say; but then she thought, a “man’s man” is all the more a woman’s man too.

  “You’ve really been having a great time with your antiques since you moved east,” she said.

  When she moved from the shade into the glare he saw her face. For an instant his eyes widened before he bent back over his work and replied, as though he had seen nothing.

  “Well, of course, New England’s the place. You can’t compare it with Missouri for early Americana. You’d think that the old villages had been combed through so long now that there’d be nothing left, but you’d be surprised. I even found a comb-back Windsor. It needs a lot of work, but I’ve got weekends, and with daylight saving I can squeeze in another hour when I get back from the city. Where’s Robert? Still working, I think Josie said?”

  “Yes, as usual, he’s at his desk with a pile of papers,” she replied, sounding casual.

  “I admire his energy. To say nothing of his headful of ideas. There’s no stopping him.” Smiling, Bruce turned back to the sander. “As for me, I’m driving my wife crazy with this stuff. She doesn’t care about antiques.”

  “She cares about you, and that’s what matters,” Lynn told him, and went inside conscious of having blurted out something too serious for the time and place.

  Josie was on the sun porch with the paper and a cup of tea. She looks thin, Lynn thought, thinner since I last saw her a week ago. Still, her bright expression of welcome and her strong voice were the same as always. The body had betrayed the spirit. And this thought, coming upon her own agitation, almost brought tears to Lynn.

  “Why, whatever’s happened to you?” Josie cried, letting the paper slide to the floor. “Your face! Your legs!”

  “Nothing much. I slipped and fell. Clumsy.”

  “Is that why you’ve been crying?”

  “That, and a silly mood. Forget it.”

  “It would be sillier to forget it. You came for a reason.”

  Lynn tucked her long cotton skirt over her spotted legs. “I fell into the hawthorn hedge in the dark.”

  “So it hurts. But what about the mood?”

  “Oh, it’s just been a bad day. The house is in turmoil, perhaps because they got upset over me. And we just don’t seem to know sometimes how to handle the girls. Although it will straighten out, I’m sure. When you called, I suppose at that moment I needed a shoulder to cry on, but now that I’m here, I know I shouldn’t have come.”

  Josie regarded her from head to foot. “Yes, you should have come. Let me get you a cup of tea, and then you can tell me what’s on your mind. Or not tell me, as you please.” She went quickly to the door and turning, added, “I hope you will tell me.”

  “We don’t seem to know how to handle the girls,” Lynn repeated. “But you know our problems already. I needn’t tell you that Robert doesn’t approve of Emily’s boyfriend. And Annie won’t try to lose weight, she stuffs herself, and Robert can’t stand that.”

  She stopped, thinking again, I shouldn’t have come here to dump all this on her. She looks so tired, I’m tired myself, and nothing will come of all these prattling half-truths, anyway.

  “I do know all that,” Josie said. “But I don’t think you’re telling me the whole story,” she added, somewhat sternly.

  Like my sister, Lynn thought, she can be stern and soft at the same time, which is curious. I never could be.

  “They’re good girls—”

  “I know that too.”

  “Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. These are hard times in which to rear children. I’m sure lots of families have problems worse than ours. Yes, I am making too much of it,” Lynn finished, apologizing.

  “I don’t think you are.”

  There was a silence in which Lynn struggled first with words that were reluctant to be said, and finally with words that struggled equally hard to be released.

  “Yesterday Robert was furious because Emily came home too late.”

  “Do you think she did?”

  “Yes, only I wouldn’t have been so angry about it. And Annie, you know she wants to have her hair straightened and Robert says that’s ridiculous, and there is always something going on between Robert and Annie, although he does try hard. Yesterday she screamed at him. She was hysterical, almost. She hates everybody. She hates him.” And Lynn, ceasing, gave Josie an imploring look.

  “Tell me, is it only Robert who is having this trouble with the girls? Just Robert?”

  “Well, yes. It’s hard for a man to come home from a trying day and have to cope with children, when what he needs most is rest. Especially a man with Robert’s responsibilities.”

  “We all have our responsibilities,” Josie said dryly.

  For a moment neither woman said more. It was as if they had reached an impasse. Lynn shifted uncomfortably in the chair. When Josie spoke again, she was careful to look away from Lynn and down at her own fingernails, saying with unusual softness, “Isn’t there anything more?”

  Lynn drew back in alarm. “Why, no. What should there be?”

  “I only asked,” said Josie.

  And suddenly Lynn began to cry. Muffled broken phrases came through her tears.

  “It wasn’t just the children this time. It was because of me—at Tom Lawrence’s house—it was too late, and Robert came—and I was dancing—Robert was angry, really so awfully—of course I knew I shouldn’t have been dancing, but—”

  “Now, wait. Let me get this straight. You were dancing with Tom, and Robert—”

  “He was furious,” sobbed Lynn, wiping her eyes.

  “What the hell was wrong with dancing? You weren’t in bed with the man. What do you mean, you shouldn’t have been? I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous,” Josie said hotly. She paused, frowned as if considering the situation, and then spoke more quietly. “And so you went home and had an argument near the thorn hedge and—”

  Lynn put up her hand as if to stop traffic. “No, no, it wasn’t—” she began. For a red warning had flashed in her head. Robert is Bruce’s superior in the firm. It won’t do, no matter how much I care about Bruce and Josie, for me to undermine Robert at his work. I’ve said too much already. Stupid. Stupid.

  It was just then that Bruce came into the room.

  “I’m taking time out. You don’t mind, Boss?” he began, and stopped abruptly. “Am I interrupting anything? You two look so sober.”

  Lynn blinked away the moisture that had gathered again in her eyes. “I was spilling out some minor troubles, that’s all.”

  Josie corrected her. “They are not minor, Lynn.”

  “I’ll leave you both,” Bruce said promptly.

  But Lynn wanted him. It would have been inappropriate and subject to misinterpretation for her to tell him: Your presence helps me. You are so genuine. So she said only, “Please stay.”

  “You’ve told me, and since I would tell Bruce anyway after you left, he might as well hear it from me now.” And as Lynn sat like a patient, listening miserably while a pair of doctors discussed her case, Josie repeated the brief, disjointed story.

  Bruce had sat down in an easy chair. His legs rested on an ottoman, while his arms were folded comfortably behind his head. This informal posture, and his deliberate, considering manner of speech, were reassuring.

  “So you had a row over the girls. Does it happen often?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. Annie and Robert—”

  Bruce put his hand up. “I don’t think you should be talking to me about Robert,” he said gently.

  Lynn felt the rebuke. She ought to have remembered Bruce’s sense of ethics. And she stood up, saying quickly, “I’ve really got to run home and see about lunch. We can talk another time.”
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  “Wait,” said Bruce. “Josie, do you agree with me that Lynn needs advice? You’re much too close to her to give it, but don’t you think somebody should?”

  “Definitely.”

  “What’s the name of that fellow you knew who went into counseling, Josie? You had such a high opinion of him, and he settled in Connecticut, I think.”

  “Ira Miller,” Josie said promptly. “You’d like him, Lynn. I can get you the address from my alumni bulletin. I’ll just run upstairs.”

  “I’m not sure I want to do this,” Lynn told Bruce when they were alone.

  “You have lovely girls,” he said quietly. “Your little Annie is my special person. You know that. And if they’re a problem or making trouble, you need to find out why, don’t you?”

  He was trying not to look at her face or her dreadful legs when he repeated the question. “Don’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You know so, Lynn.”

  “Yes.” They were right. She had to talk to somebody. There was a volcano in her head, ready to erupt in outrage and grief. Relief must come. It must. And it was true that to a stranger she would be able to say what she could not say to these old friends: My husband did this to me.

  “I called him for you,” Josie reported. “I took the liberty of making an appointment for you tomorrow afternoon. He couldn’t have been nicer. Here’s the address.”

  As they walked Lynn to her car, Bruce said, “I hear your dinner was a big success.”

  “Goodness, how did you hear that?”

  “Tom Lawrence. I met him yesterday morning jogging.”

  “Oh, dear, I suppose he told you how awful I looked when he came to the house to return my purse? I was still in my housecoat, and—”

  “The only thing he told me was that you should do something with your talent, and I agree.”

  “It’ll be about half an hour’s drive tomorrow,” Josie said. She smiled encouragement. “And that’s even allowing time for getting lost.”

  “Good luck,” Bruce called as Lynn drove away.