A Charmed Life (3 page)

Martha’s story was famous, and not only from her own telling. She had left her first husband’s second house in the middle of the night, in a nightgown, driving his Plymouth sedan, which ran out of gas and stranded her on the road to John’s cabin, so that she had had to get out and walk, and was picked up by the milkman—tear-streaked, with loose hair and torn mules. He “delivered her to the feller with the milk,” and passed the tale on his rounds, wherever a goodwife was up. It was not literally true that she had left the town forever in her nightie, as New Leeds gossip told it; she had gone back the next morning in John’s shirt and rolled-up seersucker pants, with her hair in a braid, and packed her clothes while her husband was scouring the village for her in the town taxi. Nor was the nightgown transparent. Nor had she made love with John until that night or uttered a word against her husband during the twelve afternoons they had talked together on the beach; she had been guilty before, but not with John.

Nor—she now said to herself, gritting her teeth—had she stolen the wretched Plymouth,
pace
her husband’s partisans; it had been repossessed by the financing company, when her husband, unnerved by the debacle, had ceased to make the monthly payments. Nor, to conclude, had she left a child behind—not her own, at any rate;
his
—a six-year-old boy, whom she had rescued, as a matter of fact, in the fire, when his own father had forgotten him. She was not responsible when the child died the following year, of natural causes, not of his father’s neglect, which was a tale she never concurred in, though to those who
knew
the father it had a certain plausibility.

Martha eyed the clock. It occurred to her that John
(dear
John, she murmured to herself, thinking with horror of her first husband) might have fallen asleep. In gratitude to him as her remembered deliverer, she fought down the impulse to go and see whether he would like a cocktail now. He is suffering from shock, she said to herself, tenderly; he needs rest; when he feels better, he will come out by himself. But all the while her nervous demon kept asking whether he realized what time it was. So long as he lay there, shut off in the bedroom, she could not read, she could not even start cooking the supper, for these activities seemed to her discourteous in view of his cut. Under the circumstances, there seemed nothing she could do, appropriately, but muse. She lit a cigarette, feeling even for this a little heartless, and threw the match into the fire.

In the stillness, her critics spoke up. Ever since she and John came back here, she had felt surrounded by criticism—whenever she entered a store, with her head held high and her arm linked through her husband’s, not seeking to be recognized. She knew this feeling to be senseless; she had always been popular in the village. But when a storekeeper, wiping his hand on his apron, and shooting it out across the counter, would roar, “Glad to see you back, Missus,” she felt a ridiculous gratitude. However, some of the natives seemed to know her all too well. “Notice you’re back,” said the fish-man softly, gutting a bass in his smelly shop. “Long time no see.” She did not even remember him, she protested, and yet he called her “Martha” in a voice that made her squirm. If she had not had John, she said, her bewildered mind would have toppled at the things that had evidently been said about her, about both of them, here in New Leeds, and were still being said, apparently, if the Coes’ hints could be trusted. She could almost believe she was dreaming and that the awful stories were true, rather than think the opposite: that people deliberately made them up. They were still harping, for example, on the dead stepchild. John had been furious with Jane Coe for telling her this; he knew how agitated Martha got over such things. It appalled her that the village mind was still churning up the past, tossing the old dirty linen back and forth impersonally, like one of the washing machines in the new laundromat. This was an aspect of their return that neither of them had ever foreseen: that Martha would be thrown back, seven years, into her own ancient history, to start up all the old battles, defensively, as if they had never been won.

She tried now, loyally, to stop thinking about the dead stepchild, for she knew John disapproved. But she could not forgo defending herself. She had honestly—yes, truly—done her best by the boy; the proof was that so many people had thought he was her own child. When she ran away, she had felt dreadful about leaving him; John could support that. Coming back that final morning, she had even had the crazy notion of taking the child with her—a thing quite impossible, of course, unless she and John had been willing to be kidnappers and hide out for the rest of their lives. Nobody, she said to herself, had the right to expect that of her, and was there anybody who dared say that she ought to have sacrificed herself and stayed with her husband for the child’s sake? Nobody but that hateful man himself, who in fact had used that as an argument when he wrote to her in New York, telling her that he would not connive at a divorce—a strange argument, forsooth, when he had always been jealous of her affection for the boy, terming it their “unholy alliance.” And of
course
it would have been unhealthy for the child if Martha had sacrificed her life to him; the poor babe would have been poisoned by the fumes of renunciation…. There was no reason whatever why she should not have done what she did.

And yet, at this very moment, irrationally, Martha was troubled by the thought that if she had stayed, Barrett might have lived. Self-flattery, no doubt, she said to herself with a wry little shrug, stamping out her cigarette. She knew very well, moreover, that she had not hesitated long about leaving him. Martha was not sentimental: just as she was recalling, sadly, how she had grieved over Barrett’s death, her memory tapped her sharply, like a teacher’s ruler, and reminded her that she had not given Barrett a thought during the months when he must have been sickening; she had forgotten clean about him until she learned he was dead.

This clarity of mind, as she grew older, was more and more wearisome to Martha. She was tired of knowing the truth as it piled up, leaving less and less room for hope and illusions. John, she thought, was the same. He, too, was beginning to see things in this clear, sharp light. They still “loved” each other, but this love today was less a promise than a fact of life. If they could have chosen over again, neither would have chosen differently. Neither of them knew anyone they would have preferred to the other. They could not even imagine an ideal companion they would put in the other’s place. From their point of view, for their purposes, they had had the best there was. There lay the bleakness; for them, as they were constituted, through all eternity, this had been the optimum—there was no beyond. There was nothing.

And if this, thought Martha trenchantly, was “maturity,” she did not care for it; she would almost rather be dead. It had occurred to her more than once, as a speculation, that perhaps she
was
dead. This was what she would have said, probably, if she had sat by as a commentator and watched herself crawl back here, but, not being a commentator, Martha still had hope. She was just the opposite of John; she would not admit that she had hope, while he would not admit that he despaired. She was afraid to. She feared that this hope might be an illusion, which she had in common with every wreck and derelict who had floated up on the beach. It might be nothing more than the old “free will” of the philosophers, which was a part of the apparatus of consciousness and told nothing one way or the other about reality.

To think that such a hope was still alive in the twenty-one chronic town drunkards, in the barbital addict and the three village idiots, no doubt, as well as in all the beached failures and second-raters of the twenties and thirties, was ludicrous from the outside—Martha could assure them of that—but nobody could see himself from the outside, not even Martha at her most objective, when she seemed to be straining out of the window of her nature, to catch a glimpse of John and herself in the round.

Martha heaved a sigh. She yawned from hunger. The more one knew, the less one could predict, it seemed. In human life, as in palmistry, no sign had a fixed meaning. In the workshop, last week, they had found an old book of the hand, which Martha said, after study, was just as reliable as psychoanalysis; you could make palmistry match your life just as well as Freud’s theories, assuming you thought you knew what your life was. John’s right hand, for instance—his “made” hand—had no fate line, which could mean that he had entrusted his fate to Martha—they had both seen this, wryly smiling, the minute he stretched out his palms to her. They had found poor Barrett, too, in both their hands, with the bad-luck sign around him, which made Martha say—a thing she half believed—that Barrett was the reason they had not been able to have a child yet, though the doctor had found nothing wrong. It was a punishment laid on her. If she had decreed that they should kidnap Barrett, John, she knew, would have done it; he had had faith in her nobility of purpose.

A deeper sigh escaped her. Then she stiffened on the sofa. She had heard a stirring from the bedroom. There was a loud yawn, a creaking of bedsprings, a slow, dragging step. Her heart bounded. She declined to be hurt because he had slammed the door. Indeed, she had almost forgotten it, which was the way all their quarrels ended nowadays. Another sign—but how to read it? She went quickly to meet him in the kitchen. As he came out of the bedroom door, his hair was rumpled and his face was creased, but his high, boyish color had come back. Evidently he had been sleeping. This at once relieved and slightly irritated her. She looked at his hand; the blood had soaked through the bandage, but the actual bleeding had stopped. “You’re better,” she said gaily.

“It still hurts,” he protested. “But you’re better,” she repeated. “You looked awful before. You
glistened
like a sweating piece of store cheese.” She smiled, trying to cajole him, as if the “old” John of an hour before were a trying guest they had got rid of and were now ready to discuss. He flexed his hand and made a rueful face. Martha looked at him in alarm. “It
really
hurts?” she cried, with a shiver of sympathy. And all at once she was flooded with penitence. “Do you think you cut a tendon?” she timidly asked. But John seemed to read her thoughts, which were rushing ahead to death and judgment. “Don’t be a goose,” he said calmly. “Why don’t you make us a drink?”

Martha looked at her watch. She was thinking of the doctor’s office hours, which were doubtless the same as they had always been—seven to nine in the evenings. She did not like the idea of John’s sitting in the doctor’s waiting room (if she could get him there) with liquor on his breath. The story would get around that he had hurt himself when drunk, like all the other New Leedsians, who were always catching on fire, falling into open wells or sunken gardens, tripping on stairs, crashing up in their cars. At the same time, Martha yearned for the festivity of cocktails, and John, no doubt, needed it. She suddenly perceived that if she hurried and forgot about the doctor, they could have dinner almost on time and a drink before it too; the day would be almost a normal day, after all, as if the cut and the quarrel had never been. “All right,” she agreed. “An Old-Fashioned?” He nodded, approvingly. Martha’s Old-Fashioneds were a sign of love. She did them with bourbon, no fruit, and half a lump of sugar, in their best glasses, rubbing the rims with orange peel and lemon peel and putting in a silver muddler. As she set John’s drink before him and got a chicken out of the icebox and an onion from the vegetable bin, she was happy again. She had just remembered somebody’s telling her that the present doctor here was a penicillin fiend, and her conscience was at rest: John said you could not trust a doctor who trusted to penicillin.

“Talk to me,” he ordered, pointing to the chair opposite him. “I ought to start the supper,” said Martha, indicating the cut-up chicken. “Let me just put it on,” she pleaded. She poured olive oil into the frying pan, turned up the heat, and in a minute threw in the chicken. “Excuse me,” she murmured and hurried out the door with the flashlight. She came back with a bunch of thyme and parsley, got out the chopping board and the onion, and sat down across from him with her drink. “I love you,” she announced.

But he had sunk into despondency. “I wonder whether you do,” he said, frowning, and pulling at the bandage, which was stiff with dried blood. “Sometimes, Martha,” he went on, raising his eyes, “I think it’s all words with you.” Martha’s eyes widened. “That’s what He used to say,” she cried—so they usually spoke of her first husband, as a capitalized pronoun. “So you told Him you loved him, too,” observed John. Martha shook her head. “No,” she said earnestly.
“Never?”
John pounced. “Hardly ever,” conceded Martha. The truth was she could not remember saying it, but she supposed that now and then she must have, when asked, from politeness. “What did he mean, then,” demanded John, “by saying it was all words with you?” “I don’t know,” said Martha heavily. “He might have been talking about Barrett.”

There was a strained silence. Ever since they had been back, Martha had been encountering these discrepancies. A phrase or an incident from her first marriage would suddenly crop up in her memory, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle that seemed to have come from the wrong box. The horrifying thought that there could be a similarity, a common element in her two marriages, had struck her more than once recently. She kept going back to the past for reassurance, to remind herself of the differences.

“Did I ever tell you,” she now murmured, “about the time I hit Him over the head with a highball glass?” John frowned and shook his head. “Oh, yes,” she said gaily. “Two stitches.” she watched him nervously to see what he thought of this revelation. He was shocked. “Of course, I had provocation,” she added. “But can you imagine me doing such a thing?” “No,” he said in a flat voice, glancing almost suspiciously at her frail figure and candid, innocent face. “That’s the way I was then,” she declared, sighing. “You can’t conceive it, John.”