Another Woman's House (3 page)

The house—Alice's house—was very quiet. By this time Aunt Cornelia was having her own sip or two of sherry and listening to the radio in the big, comfortable corner room upstairs; the room she had had as a child long ago. The radio would be drawn up close to her sofa, the door closed. Servants, quiet, deft, trained by Alice, were busy in the back of the house. Presently, as the twilight grew deeper, Barton would paddle back into the room to draw crimson curtains across the French windows, to offer the evening mail and papers on a silver waiter, to glance efficiently at the table before Myra in case the ice needed replenishing, or to put another log on the fire.

Her heart seemed to close against a sharp little stab of pain. How strange it was that in a few months one could grow to love a house and all its customs. Or a man! How did love begin and when? All at once, fully, with deep sudden tide, or little by little, small currents adding themselves together gently and so secretly that by the time it took on its real identity and was recognizable as love it was too late to do anything about it.

She knew exactly when she had recognized the thing that had happened; there was nothing, however, that was dramatic about it. It was, in fact, rather silly because she'd been brushing her teeth. Brushing and thinking of the day ahead of her and suddenly it occurred to her to wonder why an ordinary, pleasant but merely routine day should be in prospect so touched with an anticipatory excitement, something mysterious and gay and promising.

It's like Christmas morning, when I was a child, she thought. And then, instantly: I'm in love with Richard.

It had disclosed itself to her like that, absurdly, between one brush and the next. Why do I feel like this? Because I love him. She had stopped automatically, struck with it. An absurd figure, too, not romantic with her dark hair curled up from the shower and twisted in a tight knot on top of her head, and her face shiny from soap, toothpaste on her lips, and an enormous white bath towel wrapped tightly around her. It was a ridiculous Greek statue effect; she'd seen that, absently. And thought: it cannot be true, what am I thinking!

But it was true.

And if there had been no beginning, there had to be an end.

A useful old phrase stirred in her consciousness. It would have to be nipped in the bud. But it wasn't in the bud, unfortunately. It was in full bloom.

Richard had been silent for a moment or two. He said gently, “You are smiling.”

Smiling? At herself, then; wryly, at her own expense. She said, avoiding a reply, “Another drink?”

“No—yes.” He rose and came to her and poured it, standing tall and square before her, his solid body outlined against the glow of the fire. Again she would not look up into his face; she watched his hands on the glass decanter, the clear amber pouring into the glass. He added soda and ice and went back to his chair opposite her and sat forward, elbows on his knees, twirling the glass in his hands absently. “He said abruptly, “Myra, please stay.”

She had not expected that. She said, confused and also abrupt, “No, I can't.”

“Why?”

“I told you. Tim needs me. Aunt Cornelia has given me already more than I can ever try to repay.”

There was another deliberate second or two before he spoke. He said then, “Your reasons are mixed. Aunt Cornelia loves you. She needs you. And I …” he stopped and looked at the glass in his hand.

What had he been about to say? I want you? Suppose he had said that! Her imagination raced irresistibly on—suppose he'd said, “I need you—I want you—please stay. Not to take care of Aunt Cornelia; not to see to the household orders; not even to sit with me during this lonely, haunted hour before dinner, but because I want you.”

She swirled the cold glass in her hand so the ice tinkled lightly. Richard did not complete his half-begun words. He said instead, “Of course Aunt Cornelia feels that you must be free to do what seems best to you. She said that when she told me, just now.”

Myra leaned forward quickly. “She has done everything for me, Richard. You know that. And for Tim. It seems ungrateful, selfish, to leave her now. I realize it, Richard. But I …” She checked herself, dismayed. What had she been about to say? That she must go; there were reasons—a reason?

Richard said gravely and directly, “You and Aunt Cornelia are too close, you mean too much to each other for there to be any talk of obligations between you. If she's been like a mother to you, you've been a dearly loved daughter to her. But if you feel Tim needs you, you must go, of course. When were you planning to leave?”

So the short, small battle was over.

Suddenly, now that her purpose was accomplished, it seemed incredible that she had undertaken it; incredible that she had voluntarily given up all the things that were so deeply and so blindingly dear to her. How could she have made an irrevocable choice! How could she have said words that would remove her from that house, from Richard, from the satisfaction of being in the same house with him, eating at the same table, meeting him like this for an hour or so alone before dinner? In doing so she had prepared her own heartbreak.

But heartbreak for her was already prepared; it came with love for Richard. It was an inextricable part of it, and to love him was to accept it. It struck her briefly that it was strange to describe anything that had to do with Richard in melodramatic terms; melodrama did not go with Richard's saneness, and matter-of-factness.

Was it possible that now for the last time she sat with Richard during that quiet hour of dusk before a fire?

But her decision had been made. “Tomorrow, Richard,” she said.

“Tomorrow! That's very sudden!” His eyes sharpened. “Tim hasn't got himself into any trouble, has he?”

“No, no.”

“He seemed to me a little jumpy when he was out here last week-end. There's nothing on his mind, is there? Any—worry, I mean. Money or …”

“Oh, I don't think so, Richard. I'm sure he'd tell me.” She thought soberly of Tim. Her preoccupation with her own problem had distracted her from the problem of helping Tim to settle quietly into civilian life. She realized, rather guiltily, that Tim had not seemed quite himself on the previous week-end, or, indeed, since he had returned from China. She said, “He does seem very quiet. Aunt Cornelia said morose. But I don't think there can be any special reason for it, except the aftermath of war. I think he'd tell me. And he likes his job. He particularly wants to do well at it, because you got it for him.”

“He will,” said Richard reassuringly. “Don't worry about the youngster, Myra.”

She looked at him gratefully and then saw the closed, withdrawn look she now recognized settle over his face. Because of Tim, of course; he was remembering; the thing had happened during Tim's last leave before he went overseas. Timothy Lane had been, in fact, a witness.

Myra said quickly, to divert Richard's thought, “I'll be in New York, only forty-three minutes away, if you want me”—her tongue slipped there; her own private interpretation of the phrase made her momentarily shy and self-conscious; she went on hurriedly—“if anything goes wrong, I can come back. In any case, I'll come back often to see Aunt Cornelia.”

“And me, I hope,” said Richard, and leaned back in his chair.

There was an air of conclusion about it. So she had got what she wanted. Or rather not what she wanted; but what she must have. Naturally she didn't want it. How long did it take to get over loving anybody?

Already she knew regret. No longer to listen for Richard's car about dusk, for the excited bark of the Scotch terrier, for the sound of the door, for the murmur of words with Barton and then the quick, hard steps along the hall, back past the stairway, to the library where he'd find her and a fire and flowers with, now, the cool spring dusk outside the French windows.

Well, it was done; she couldn't change it. The glass felt cold in her hands, as if its chill could creep into her body and remain. The beauty of the room was dulled; the fire had lost its warmth and glow. She put down the glass and clasped her hand around the ruby silk of the chair, soft and smooth to her touch. And thought of Alice who had chosen it; Alice with her beauty, Alice with her fair skin and hair; her soft and fragile loveliness.

Richard said, from the shadow of the wing of the chair, “Is it the house, Myra? Is it—this room?”

Even though she had been thinking so strongly of Alice, for an instant she did not see the significance of his question. Then she sat upright quickly. “No!—Richard, no!”

“You and Aunt Cornelia have been here so long that I didn't think you minded. That is, not now. But I expect some people do rather—mind.”

Had they too looked at the Capo di Monte cupid and wondered what it had seen and what it could tell and what worse it had heard? Particularly the words it had heard? No one had even known that.

And Richard had never in all those months spoken to her even obliquely of Alice.

She did not wish the silence to last. “It is a very beautiful room,” she said quietly. “The whole house is beautiful.”

Again he seemed to glance at her sharply from the short triangular shadow.

“That's not why I stayed here,” he said and got up and went to stand before the fire, facing her. The lamps were not lighted. Barton would light them, going quickly from one to the other, when he came to pull the curtains. The thin soft April twilight lay now in the room; the sky was lemon and blue beyond the windows; the firelight behind Richard silhouetted his dark head and solid figure but his face again was slightly shadowed. He said, “I love the place. I've always known it was to be mine, naturally; I had no brother. I was trained to see to it; as I was trained in business, and the responsibility that goes with money. The house is too big; in these days nobody would build a place like this. But considering the vast houses that were built at about the same time this house was built, when there were no taxes and little regulation of business, this place isn't really bad; it could have been worse. It is still practicable to live in. But the point is, it is my home.”

He paused and drank and went on thoughtfully. “My great-great-grandfather chose the site. My great-grandfather supervised the holly hedge; my grandmother laid out the rose garden. My mother tended the roses.” He nodded toward the hall. “Aunt Cornelia came down that stairway fifty years ago in her mother's wedding gown, white satin and rosepoint. My father, then, was about ten, home from school for the occasion, slightly confused, he told me, because of champagne and because Cornelia was going to England with her new husband and her new title. The next time he came home from school there was a Christmas party and he met my mother. She came in from the snowy night and she was wearing a little white fur hood and—he said once—the winter stars were in her eyes.” His voice was very quiet; he paused for a moment and said, “He was a nice guy, hard in a way, and hard to know, quick to make decisions and all hell wouldn't move him when they were made. Quick to anger, too, but just. Cold on the outside; loyal to the bone. Generous. Stubborn.”

“Like you,” she said irresistibly, smiling.

He gave her a quick look and said, amused, “Am I stubborn? I wish then I had his certainty; he never doubted the chosen course of his own life.”

A sudden pulse leaped in her throat. What choice and course of his own did Richard question? But then at once, without explaining, he went on, “I think my mother was his guiding star.”

The swift pulse beat quieted as quickly; he hadn't meant anything. She said, quickly, too, as if to cover an awkwardness which actually, since he had not meant anything, did not exist, “Her portrait was one of the first things Aunt Cornelia showed me when we arrived.”

It hung in the formal ivory-and-gold drawing room—a pretty, gentle-looking woman, in an evening gown of the period with bare shoulders and pearls and her brown hair done in a very high pompadour. Alice's portrait, too, still hung in the same room—incredibly beautiful in her wedding gown, the misty lace of her veil framing her face, pearls at her white throat, her soft brown eyes luminous and young. At first she had wondered why it was not removed. Pride in his name on Richard's part? Then, as time went on, she grew accustomed to it. She failed to see it. And, as a matter of fact, the room in which it hung was almost never, now, in use.

Richard said, “My mother's portrait used to hang here, over the mantel. I used to come to this room when I'd be at home from school. My father would summon me once during each vacation, question me about school reports and life in general in a very brisk and businesslike way, then, having discharged his duties as a father, he'd pour me a small glass of sherry and rub his mental hands together in a sort of satisfied way and sit down for a man-to-man visit. He was”—he paused, and the fire crackled and Richard said again, half smiling—“he was a nice guy.”

He put his glass on a table near by, beside the great bowl of yellow daffodils. He lighted a cigarette and went back to stand before the fire.

“This room, of course, was different then. Ugly, I suppose, great heavy cases of books with glass doors; furniture that had drifted in from the rest of the house—stiff, old—a roll-top desk was there, and a couch—black leather with a rolled head. This fireplace had a dark fumed oak mantel. There were no French doors, but a couple of narrow windows. The terrace was there and, of course, the view. But it was very different.”

His voice was different too, no longer rather tender and musing. It, like his face, seemed to change and close in upon itself whenever some word or thought led to Alice. And, of course, Alice had made the changes in the house. Alice who had been a perfect wife. Alice with her perfect taste for beauty, her perfect housekeeping. Alice who had been perfect at everything except in one instance.

Richard said suddenly, looking directly at Myra, “What I started to say is that this is my home. Nothing can change that. Not even”—he took a breath of smoke and said—“not even murder.”