Come Along with Me (16 page)

“And then of course in addition there would be the realization that there is actually no tie like that of flesh and blood. No love like that between brother and sister.”

“We have always been very close, Mr. Johnson.”

“Of course. Unusually so, I daresay.”

“Perhaps we have. Too close, perhaps.”

“Neither of you could do very well without the other, I suppose. And it is so hard when one is ill.”

“Very hard.”

“I suppose you have never been so ill?”

“Never.”

“But I daresay if you
were
, your brother would care for you as attentively as you care for him.”

“If he could, yes.”

“He has so much more to worry about. His children, his wife.”

“He would hardly have much time for
me
.”

“His wife would need him. She is so dependent, she could hardly spare him to care for his sister. Only his sister, when his wife and children need him at home.”

“I am sure she would be most concerned if anything happened to me.”

“Most concerned, yes. She is really very fond of you, I suppose.”

“We are very fond of each other. Quite companionable.”

“Perhaps your mutual concern over your brother brought you even closer together. You share one dear object, after all.”

“Charles is very dear to both of us.”

“Of course. His wife is probably with him now.”

“I ought to go back.”

“Not at all. If she is there, you can hardly be needed.”

 * * * 

“Now then,” said the landlady heartily, “here you are, back again much before you're wanted. My little joke,” she added, looking at Paula's frown. “I am indeed a great joker. And you didn't stay long. Nothing to worry about with your sister, neither. She's up with the poor gentleman has been so ill, and I daresay gives him better medicine than any of us could, with the smile on her sweet face. And so you met Mr. Arnold?”

“Arnold? He said his name was Johnson.”

“And so it is, if he says so. I'll be calling you Arnold or Heathen or something, give me my head; I never could remember a name and that's the truth. So you met him, whatever he chooses to call himself?”

“I ran into him by accident.”

“So you did, dear, so you did. And you'll be wanting to know now where you can meet him next?”

“Nothing of the sort,” said Paula stiffly. “I was about to go up—”

“To the high rock again? He won't be
there
by now. Tomorrow maybe. Try late tonight in front of the great fire, after the rest of us are abed.
There
you will find him.”

“Certainly not,” said Paula.

“Well, then it'll take you a while,” said the landlady. “And the things he can tell you and all. Solid rock,” she continued smoothly as Virginia came into the room, “and standing here since no one knows when.”

“How is Charles?” Paula asked Virginia.

“Feeling much better, thank you,” Virginia said.

“I'll just go up for a minute.”

“Please don't,” said Virginia hastily. “I mean, he said he was going to try to sleep and it would be better not to disturb him.”

 * * * 

“And then of course there's Virginia, so weak, and so safe.”

“She's not entirely safe—”

“Not entirely. But for all you or I could do . . .”

“She's very fond of me.”

“And very fond of Charles. But so dependent. So pretty, too, and so weak, and so fragile. Such a pretty girl.”

“I have been very necessary to her.”

“Of course now that Charles is better you will not be quite so necessary. They will have each other again.”

“That is as it should be.”

“As you say. That is as it should be. And you?”

“I shall go home again, I suppose.”

“Home?”

“I have a small apartment. I left there of course while Charles was so very ill. It was necessary for me to stay with Virginia.”

“But now you will go back?”

“I have not been asked to stay with Virginia.”

“They have each other again. And the children, and their home. I suppose they will feel sorry for you?”

“Sorry for me?”

“That you have gone, I mean. Sorry to be without you.”

“I suppose so.”

“See how the fire shines on the walls. It is perfectly safe here in this room, of course. This room is solid rock. It is only in the rest of the house that fire might be a danger. The rest of the house is of wood.”

 * * * 

“Virginia, will you come exploring with me
today
?” Paula stood by the window; it was her daily habit now to take her breakfast there, sitting in the great wooden chair, where she could keep sight of the sea. During the day she found the sound and the smell and the sight of the sea almost a necessity for her, and at night she either sat late in the rock room with the great fire roaring before her and the sound of the sea all outside, or lay straight and silent on her narrow bed with the windows open onto the cliffs below and the sea almost in her room. “We've been here almost a week, and I don't believe you've so much as stepped outdoors.”

“It makes me nervous,” said Virginia. She smiled across the coffee jug at Paula. “I think I'm beginning to feel caught in by the island. Almost homesick for land on all sides instead of sea.”

“Charles likes it.”

“Sometimes,” said Virginia. “Sometimes he's as much afraid as I am.”

“Afraid, Virginia?”

“
You
know,” Virginia said, gesturing vaguely. “You get to feeling so sort of cut off from everything. No way of escape. No way to get home again.”

“I thought I'd run up and see Charles after breakfast,” Paula said. “Is he sleeping?”

“Resting, anyway. Why don't you put it off until after lunch?”

“I will probably not be back. I intended to take a lunch with me and spend all day on the rocks.”

“What can you find to
do
out there?”

“I find it stimulating, nothing but the sea and the rocks and nothing between them but me.”

“And do you run across the other guest?” Virginia asked innocently.

“I sometimes gather shells, but there are no very interesting ones.”

“You spoke once of another guest,” Virginia said insistently. “Didn't you once mention an odd little man?”

“Suppose I just run up and say good morning to Charles, and spend just a minute trying to cheer him up?”

“He's cheerful enough. Why don't you wait till tonight?”

“I'd like to see him now, if you're sure you don't mind.”

Silently, Virginia followed Paula upstairs and into the room Virginia and Charles shared. Paula had been here daily since they came, but Charles had not yet come downstairs, protesting that he was convalescing well enough in his bed, with the smell of the sea in his room and its sound in his ears always, and the landlady's good food brought to him regularly. He looked better, Paula thought; he had more color in his face—surprising, since he had not been outdoors or even had fresh air in the room—and he was astonishingly vigorous for someone who had been so very ill for such a long time.

“Good morning, Charles dear,” she said as she entered. “And how well you look today!”

“I feel splendidly well,” Charles said from the bed. He hoisted himself up slightly and turned his cheek for his sister's morning kiss. “
You
look well, Paula.”

“I love it here. I'm afraid Virginia is bored, though.”

“Is she?” Charles smiled over Paula's head at Virginia. “I don't think so,” he said.

“You must try to get outdoors, Charles, and get nearer the sea. I can't tell you how invigorating I find it.”

“Perhaps
you
do,” Charles said. “Virginia and I prefer it indoors. We like our sea through windows.”

“And
here
's the poor gentleman's breakfast,” said the landlady, bustling in with her tray. “Did he think I had forgotten him? When I was only waiting for hot corncakes from the oven? And see that you eat all of it, my poor Mr. Ellison, and we will have you well in no time at all.”

“Will you have your breakfast, darling?” Virginia asked. She came closer to the bed. “Excuse me, Paula; let me come in here and see that his tray is right. Darling, are you hungry? I had such a wonderful breakfast downstairs.”

“Good morning, Miss Ellison,” said Mr. Johnson from the doorway. Paula looked up, over the heads of Charles and Virginia and the landlady and saw him, somehow taller, standing leaning against the doorway. “And how are
you
this morning?”

“I had eggs, and homemade sausage, just as you have, only I didn't have these wonderful corncakes. Just try one, darling. I believe Mrs. Carter made them especially for you.”

“And how is your poor sick brother?
Is
he any better? And your sister-in-law, how is she?”

“Good morning, Mr. Johnson,” Paula said.

“I beg your pardon, dear?” said Virginia, looking back at Paula over her shoulder. “Did you ask Charles something?”

“I doubt if she will bother with
me
, Miss Ellison. I doubt very much if she would ever be interested in me now.”

Paula turned and stared, first at Charles and Virginia, who was bending over him laughing and feeding him, and then at the landlady, who was watching Paula silently and with an expression which might have been humorous.

“Mrs. Carter—” Paula said.

Mrs. Carter shrugged.

Mr. Johnson went on smoothly, “It had to be one or the other of you, you see; I told you I was waiting for your sister-in-law, but you
would
come first. It was your decision, you know; I would have been satisfied with either.”

“Just don't try to answer him, dear,” Mrs. Carter whispered. “There's no answer he'll take.” She put a protective arm around Paula. “Try to hide behind me,” she said very softly.

“No use, Mrs. Carter,” he said, and smiled sadly. “No use at all, you know.” He nodded at Paula. “
She
knows,” he said, and went swiftly and silently away.

[c.
1951
]

A DAY IN THE JUNGLE

The whole performance of the first two hours was so shockingly, so abominably, easy, that her only vivid feeling about it was surprise that the institution of marriage might pretend to be stable upon such elusive foundations, as though the humiliation of the wedding and the bad dreams of the long nights and the hideous unprivate months were an end and not a means, as though two people sought one another out for no more than this, this surprise that it should all be so easy to leave one another. The other, fainter, emotion, hidden far beneath the surprise, she refused to identify as any kind of fear, but called it excitement instead.

It had been most pleasant packing her suitcase, consciously choosing those clothes she would not ordinarily wear in the middle of the week, the nice dresses and the good suit and—with a distant humorous nod at the popular interpretation of what her position was to be—her black evening dress, and the few pieces of really good jewelry she owned, thinking that perhaps she might not have another chance at her clothes, that they might be packed up and sent her, perhaps, or lumped in with other possessions and sold (item: one blue-and-green print house dress, coffee stain on right sleeve, two small safety pins on lapel) and wondering, briefly, if the nicely chosen, not expensive shoes and the hat so suitable for lunching with other young matrons might, after all, suit her now, since they had so obviously been bought from and for a married state. The suitcase had gone with her on her honeymoon and afterward on the vacations and incidental week ends in the country and to the hospital where she lost the baby, and had its accustomed place, much more than she had herself, on the top closet shelf; taking it down was in itself an act of departure, dusting it, opening it to the scent of her traveling cologne, its reminiscence of trains, of hotel desks, of distant parts. She was able to get everything in, remembering handkerchiefs, toothbrush, stockings from the rack in the bathroom, which she had washed last night before it was clearly evident that she was leaving, and she had rinsed and hung them up innocently, as though she might never be going away again.

She had been very angry while she washed her stockings, and angry when she finished the dinner dishes and angry even before that, having her dinner alone, and the fact that he did not come home at all had not made her any the less angry, waiting there in her chair by the radio planning neat bitter things to say to him. (“Do you expect a wife to sit alone night after . . .” “If you prefer the company of your friends to . . .” “Before we were married you used to . . .”) The phrasing of a note to him had been still another pleasure, since she knew by then that she was leaving and could say anything she pleased. She had written first, “Dear Don, I've decided I don't have to take this any more . . .” and had torn that one up, and had then written, “Don, I've had enough and I'm leaving,” and had torn
that
one up, and had written, “I'm not going to stand for this any longer,” and had of course torn
that
one up, and had finally written, “Dear Don, I know I'll be happier somewhere else,” and had let that one do because already the enchantment of writing farewell notes was evaporating and she was restless to get on to something else. She had written “love, Elsa,” very firmly at the foot of the note, set the note unfolded on his dresser and then on the table in the living room and finally on the telephone pad where they usually left messages for one another, and she carefully tore her previous notes into small pieces and put them into the garbage pail and emptied the coffee grounds onto them, so that Mrs. Hartford, coming in to clean this morning (for she had slept, finally, lying on the bed in her clothes next to the packed suitcase) might not be able to piece them together and know with relish that Mrs. Dayton had fumbled her farewell note before finally walking out on Mr. Dayton and no wonder, too. It was no more than Don deserved if Mrs. Hartford came before he came home and read the note on the telephone pad and met him at the door with knowing glances, watching with satisfaction from the corner of her eye while he in turn read the note, smiling to herself as he went bewildered from living room to bedroom, saw that the suitcase was certainly gone; she debated leaving her wedding ring on the dresser but decided at last that Mrs. Hartford was not trustworthy.

So it was ten o'clock in the morning, half an hour before Mrs. Hartford was due, when Elsa Dayton, leaving her husband as she had always suspected she might, went down the steps of her apartment house with her suitcase. She turned once and looked back up at the windows of what had been until now her home, and found them blank and unexciting as always, and thought, if living with Don had been a little bit more exciting . . .

Going to a hotel had always been part of leaving Don, because it was not necessary to explain to a hotel clerk, as it would be to a mother or a friend or an aunt, that she had left Don for once and all, and did not want to talk about it, and no, there was no particular reason, even his staying away so much, except that there had just come a point when she wanted to leave, and please, she did
not
want to talk about it.

She had almost no money. It occurred to her as she went to the corner to catch a taxi—something Don's true wife would not have done—that somehow with a crisis like this one ordinary problems were suspended, so that where yesterday she had not had enough money to do her week's shopping, and dared not charge more at the grocer's, she felt today that money was so small a worry, and no longer a concern of hers; Don must simply find a way of providing them both with money, and now that her interests no longer participated in his, she had abandoned the intention of making his meager funds go as far as possible. He was not a partner now, he was an opponent, and vulnerable here, and he could borrow money if he chose. Yesterday's inability to say to—for instance—Roger, in the office, “Can you let me borrow some money?” would vanish under this new way of life; perhaps Don was not a better credit risk because his wife had left him, but she suspected that the deep sympathetic mutual feelings of men about their wives would promote a fund for Don as surely as if his house had been struck by lightning.

Thinking these things for lack of anything else to think about—this was, after all, a new world for her, with new standards and probably new laws, and entering upon it suddenly, equipped with no more than a few dollars and a black evening dress in a suitcase, was a thing to be done warily and without prepared courses of action—she sat in the taxi with her suitcase beside her on the seat, and looked with wonder and delight at the familiar streets which led her from Don's apartment to the hotel she had chosen because (she did not admit this to herself) it figured so prominently in the gossip columns which she read avidly every morning.

She was wearing a dark-red wool dress and her beaver coat and high-heeled black shoes and a black hat which she described to herself, without any deliberate meaning, as flirtatious. She came into the hotel carrying her suitcase and felt that no one observed that she was a local housewife dressed up at ten-thirty in the morning, rather than some freed creature from another town, who might have thought as she went across the lobby, “Right
now
, at home, they're polishing the silver and setting up the plates, and here
I
am in a hotel being waited on and not doing a thing!” She registered at the desk, the first time she had ever done such a thing alone, without betraying anything except that she intended to spend a day or two in the hotel. The facts that she was admitted without comment or even an appraising look, that her room was number
808
, that the quarter she gave the bellboy was accepted with no more than a “Thank you, madam,” could not communicate any awareness of the unbelievable daring of her position. She had even signed her name “Elsa Masters Dayton.”

She was not quite, however, in the position of a visitor; she could not once in her room shower and change to another dress (she had only put this dress on half an hour before, after all, and had showered not ten minutes before
that
) and then go out to visit points of interest about the town. She had no shopping to do, no important items which she could find nowhere else but in town, and nothing she had been waiting and planning to do, no long-anticipated calls to pay. She did do, finally, what she might have done at home; she took off her dress and shoes and lay in her slip on the bed, reading a mystery story.

At one o'clock she dressed again and swung her coat over her shoulders and went out of her room and locked the door and went downstairs in the elevator, standing quietly without interest in other people, with the weight of her coat pulling her shoulders down. She walked into the cocktail lounge, stepping quickly with her high heels across the quiet lobby; she was not at all clear about what she intended to do, except that she knew surely that a cocktail before lunch would not today give her a headache. She chose a table, deliberately but with not more than a swift casual glance around, in a corner and hard against another table where a man (gray hair, she noticed in her one quick look, gray suit) was sitting alone, and when she sat down she thought, It's as though we were strangers at a dinner party and had been seated next to one another and I have only to speak to him as though our hostess had mumbled both our names. She was acutely conscious of her pink nail polish and wondered, as she might have during the first uncomfortable minutes at a dinner table, if she might disgrace herself by spilling something on him. He was compelled, almost in self-defense, to help her with her coat when she struggled to shift it from her shoulders to the back of her seat, and she smiled at him and said kindly—perhaps he was shy—“They put these tables so close together, don't they?”

He smiled back at her and said, “They certainly do,” which, if hardly a cosmopolitan answer, was at least civil and did not sound as though he regularly met lovely women who had nefarious designs upon him; he sounded, in fact, quite as though she reminded him of the wife of one of his younger friends, and she wondered briefly if she would have spoken to him at all if he had been Don's age, or if she had been married too long to know how to talk familiarly to younger men.

She told the waiter that she would like an old-fashioned, please, in the tone of one who regularly orders for herself and knows precisely what she wants, and then she turned to the man next to her and remarked, “I can never get used to this town for the first few days.”

“
I
don't like it,” he said immediately. “I'd be just as happy if I never had to
see
the place again.”

“You're from the West, aren't you?”

“Chicago,” he said. “And you?”

“Maine,” she said; she
had
come from Maine originally.

“Nice country up there,” he said. “Whereabouts in Maine?”

“A small town named Easton,” she said. “Near Augusta.”

“We drove through Maine one year,” he said. “Spent three weeks.”

“It's lovely country,” she said.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“Are you in town on business?”

“Only way they ever
get
me here,” he said. “Give me Chicago every time.”

“I've never been to Chicago,” she said.

“Great town,” he said.

It was the moment in the dinner-table conversation when she might properly have turned to the gentleman on her left and asked him where
he
was from, but failing that, she took up her cocktail and sipped at it, and accepted a cigarette and a light, and looked with interest around the room, and smiled at him because she could not think of anything to say. He seemed the very type of man she had expected to meet, without ever realizing it—middle-aged, and quiet, and respectable, a man for whom her black evening dress would be quite daring enough. Although her uneasiness in his presence had not quite worn off, and her larger, less-defined strange feeling (which she had called at various times since the night before,
anger
, and
excitement
, and
pleasure
) still remained at the back of her mind, hampering her free enjoyment of the moment, she leaned back against the soft leather of the chair and thought happily about the black evening dress.

“I'll be mighty glad to get home tomorrow,” he said. (“At home, right now, they're all going out to lunch together from the office . . .”)

“
I
wouldn't,” she said. (“Mrs. Hartford had probably forgotten to do the kitchen shelves . . .”) “I mean, I always hate to leave.”

He hesitated, and she thought for a minute that he would say something indicating that perhaps he did
not
have to leave tomorrow, and then he said, “The town's all right if you just want to enjoy yourself. Shows, you know—nightclubs, and all that. No good for people like
me
, though.”

“I don't believe
that
,” she said, and thought, I am positively simpering.

“One thing you got to say for this town, though,” he said, “people are always ready to help you. Taxi drivers and cops and even people on the street—always give you a hand. That way,” he added, thinking deeply, “they're sort of like people out West. You know, out West everyone's more friendly, somehow.”

“Perhaps I ought to go out West, then,” she said.

“You'd like Chicago. Well,” he said, and put out his cigarette, “time to get to work, I guess. I hate these late lunches—people here never seem to get around to eating till sometime in the afternoon. Home,” he told her firmly, “we have our lunch at twelve sharp.” He rose and half bowed to her. “Very pleasant,” he said. “Hope you enjoy your stay.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And
you
have a nice trip home.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Good-by.”