The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (22 page)

“You might think I don't know what's going on, living back here in this wilderness—immured, as you might say. But I manage to know pretty well, considering that I never learned to drive a car. Edward, you know, always discouraged me from learning. And I used to think it was because he enjoyed having me dependent on him. Well, I just want you to know that I know all about Edward.”

“All about—”

“All about his philanderings, of course,” she said impatiently. “Don't pretend you don't know about them. Everybody knows about Edward's philanderings. Poor boy, he thinks he is so careful and so clever and he gives himself away every time he turns around.”

I remembered our encounter in the train and I could not help laughing.

“Yes, it is amusing, isn't it?” she said. “And at the same time rather touching. I think that's why I like him, you know—he is such a poor liar. He's always working up some little affair for himself and he can hardly enjoy it for fear I'm going to find out. In fact, I sometimes believe that his real pleasure is in thinking he's putting something over on me, and not in the poor girl herself at all. Just now it's some little beauty parlor operator down in the city.”

I supposed she had not been as recently posted as she thought. Then I decided that she simply hadn't bothered to keep up to date.

“I can't tell Edward this, you understand. It would hurt his pride. He'd hate to know I had known all along despite his elaborate pains, and he would die to know I didn't mind. I just didn't want you to think I was a perfect fool. So,” she concluded in an intimate tone, as though we were both long accustomed to pampering him, “don't let on to him that I know. Let him have his fun.”

Naturally, her anxiety to set me right so quickly made me suspicious. It hardly seemed likely that she could care so little, that her vanity should not have been at least a little wounded by her husband's escapades. But by the time I left I was pretty well convinced that none of her vanity was invested in her husband. As soon as she got over this one hurdle she could think of nothing—certainly not of how late she was keeping me—except her “work,” and I gathered that it left her no time to care what Edward did with himself. Moreover, I got the feeling about her that she was just as happy to have Edward busy himself in that way elsewhere.

III

All afternoon I watched the snow swirl past my office window and at three I phoned Janice to ask how much had fallen in Cressett. I was thirty minutes getting a line through and I learned that there it was worse than in the city, that it had given way now to a steady rain that was turning everything to ice.

In Grand Central it was announced that frozen switches would hold the schedule up all night. A single train might get through around 1:00
A.M.
I decided to stay over in town. I was turning away with the rest of the crowd by the gate when my arm was caught.

“Staying over?” asked Gavin. “Ah. Haven't had your dinner, I don't suppose. Since we're stranded down here why don't we make the worst of it together?”

I said I would have to call Janice and Gavin stood with me in the long line of conscientious husbands waiting for the telephone booths and when my turn came I said, “Like me to tell my wife to call yours and tell her?”

“Don't bother,” he said. “She wouldn't believe it.”

Out in the street the snow had stopped and it was hard to believe that it was not possible to get home to Janice tonight. We decided on a hotel and registered for rooms and then Gavin knew a restaurant on Forty-first Street. They knew him, too, for the waiter said, “I thought you might be turning up here tonight, Mr. Gavin.”

We ordered drinks.

“Well, here's how,” said Gavin. But he stopped his glass at his lips, a shrewd smile formed on them and his eyes went hard. I looked at him questioningly, as he seemed to be waiting for me to do. “Hmmm,” he said. “The waiter wasn't the only one who thought I might be turning up here tonight.”

He left this quivering on the air, then, “See that man over there—don't look now.”

I waited a decent interval, then bent to pick up my napkin and stole a glance at the little bald man at the bar. “Don't tell me he's anyone worth knowing,” I said.

Gavin gave me his smile of mystery and left me to wait.

“No-o,” he mused, looking up suddenly from his drink, “just a private eye.”

I was touched, and so I used a gentle tone in saying, “Well now, I believe you once thought I might be a detective hired by your wife, too.”

This did not have the effect I had intended. “Yes!” he cried, much amused. “Things were going very badly just then, and I must have been seeing detectives everywhere I looked.” Then he nodded towards the bar and said, “He knows I've spotted him, so he'll pay his check and leave in a minute. Poor guy. What a job. And on a night like this.”

“Then how do you know that man is a detective any more than I was?” I asked.

“Oh, I can tell,” he said earnestly. “I really wasn't very sure about you, you know.”

“Oh,” I said, “not very sure. Just sure enough to—”

“Look,” he said. “See? He's paid his check and left, just as I told you.”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose that's proof enough.”

He nodded.

“Let me tell you something,” I said.

“I'll bet I can tell you what you're going to say,” he said. “You're going to tell me I have nothing to worry about from my wife.”

He must have seen from my face that he had hit it right. He went on, “I'm sure that's what she gave you to feel the other night when you had your little tête-à-tête. I suppose she told you something like this: ‘Poor Edward. Really, it's pathetic. He's just like a little boy who thinks he's putting something over on his mother.'”

He mimicked her with amazing accuracy, and looking at that boyish face of his it was hard to keep in mind that he had lived with her voice for twenty years.

“Don't you see,” he continued, “it's proof she needs. Whenever she meets a new person she tries to get some by pretending she doesn't care about the whole thing.”

Well, this was possible, of course, and for a moment I wavered. Then I recalled his wife's obsession with her career. I said, “Don't you see that your wife is too interested in her so-called work to care—”

“Hah! Her so-called work!” He laughed so loudly that the couple in the booth across the floor turned to stare. “And you ought to know!” he cried. “I've always said so, of course, but you're a real professional. Pathetic stuff, isn't it? But tell me,” he leaned across the table and whispered, “you didn't give anything away, did you? You didn't mention Webster's Bridge, I hope. It's very handy for me having things set up like that. And besides its being so convenient, I can't help being just a little proud of it. The last place she thinks to look is right under her nose. The very nearest town. In fact, right over the mountain behind her house! You didn't, did you?”

“I didn't! What do you think—”

“Of course,” he said, “it wouldn't have made the least difference if you had.”

This was exactly what I myself had been going to say. It was disconcerting, this way he had of lifting phrases out of my mind and putting them to his use.

“Because she has such pride,” he said, “that if you told her it had been right under her nose all along then she
couldn't
let herself believe it. I wish you had told her. I ought to draw her a map to the place and tell her the best hours to find me there. Then she could never let herself believe it. Next time she asks you, tell her!”

“Let me tell you an easier way to put an end to your fears,” I said. “You don't have anything to—”

Suddenly he looked weary and apologetic and he gave a sigh. “Charley, forgive me,” he said. “Forget it all. I'm sorry to have dragged you into this mess. Why, we're almost strangers. I appreciate it, don't think I don't. But don't let yourself get involved. Don't let me talk to you about it. It's been going on like this for years and—here. Here's the waiter. Eat your dinner and forget it.”

After dinner he suggested a show. We strolled over towards Broadway. We stopped to shelter a light for cigarettes. We moved on and Gavin jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “To think,” he said, “it's my money that guy's getting for trailing me.”

“Why, that's not even the same man!” I cried. “Are you blind as well?”

“Of course it's not the same man.” Gavin was being patient with me. “The first one knew I'd spotted him, so this one relieved him. They always work in pairs.”

“Look,” I said, pointing to where the man stood innocently examining the billboard of a musical revue. “He's just somebody out looking for something to do with himself. Listen, you'd better get a grip on yourself. You'd better—”

“Well, so long as I'm paying for it,” he said grimly, “I might as well have fun.”

He edged up close to this pudgy little man and stressing his words for his benefit, said, “Hell, Charley, do you mean to tell me that the best you can do on a night away from the wife is a girlie show? Now come with me and I'll show you a real hot time. (See him take that down in his notebook?)”

“That's his wallet and he's counting his money!” I whispered.

It was one of those standing sandwich boards with pictures of the chorus girls and this tired little man had moved around to the other side for a look at the rest of them. He was rubbing his hands because of the cold and this gesture gave him the look of an old-fashioned lecher, an impression of which he was aware. His timid excitement shone on his face and I took him for a salesman in town for the night, whose main enjoyment of this show would come from thinking all through it of his unsuspecting wife sitting at home in Weehawken or somewhere. He had heard what Gavin said—he could not have helped hearing—and he leered at me around the sandwich board to let me know that he, too, was out on a spree.

Meanwhile Gavin was rattling on. “Listen, Charley, this is kid stuff.” (This, too, the little drummer or whatever he was, heard, and frowned; Gavin was belittling the fun he had planned for himself.) “I'll get us a couple of hot numbers to warm this winter evening. How do you like yours, married or single? I like mine already broken in. I once knew a little woman in White Plains. Her husband was a salesman, always out on the road, and that made things very nice. He's probably caught out on the road somewhere tonight. She was all right, let me tell you. Those salesmen's wives, they don't get much and they're always ready for—”

Now the little man flung a look at Gavin and strode away from the marquee in dignified outrage.

“Listen, Charley,” he said, projecting his voice after the retreating figure, “let's rent a car and go up to Webster's Bridge. I'll phone my girl and tell her to get in a friend for you!”

“Ssh!” I hissed. “If the man
was
a detective—” Was I going as crazy as he?

“Well, that'll give her something to think about,” he said, standing with his hands on his hips and watching his detective slip off to make his report.

I would try one last time to disabuse him. “Now, Gavin,” I began, patiently, sympathetically, “believe me. You have nothing to fear from your wife. Nothing. She doesn't care what you do with yourself so long as—”

He was beginning to smile tolerantly at me again.

“Listen. Do you know what she said to me? ‘Let him have his fun,' she said.”

“Now, Charley,” he said, “think a minute. Does that sound likely to you?”

IV

Gavin did not feel it was disloyal of me to go to Alice's teas. He assumed that I shared his judgment of Alice and her circle and he thought my duplicity a good joke on her. In the beginning I went often. Gavin was never there; he hated the men who came even more than the women; and that desperate and phantom fear he had of Alice became all the more pathetic when I observed that I never once heard her mention his name.

Perhaps Gavin's judgment did influence me, for from the start I felt myself obscurely unsuited to that crowd. This seemed unnatural, for they were the people with whom I ought to have felt most in sympathy, so I kept going there in an effort to overcome it, or at least to determine whose fault it was, theirs or mine. And finally I went back because Alice was so importunate.

Alice was always eager to ingratiate herself with a new person; she was especially so with me. Perhaps because I had met Edward first she felt she had to work to overcome a certain prejudice in me. When she learned, as she somehow learned all her sister's movements, that I had met Victoria, she had, she thought, and she was not far wrong, another prejudice to overcome in me. She was even more anxious for my company when during the winter it became known that I'd landed a fair-sized contract.

The price of admission to one of Alice's teas was a slow, worried shake of the head in answer to her question, “How is your work going?”

Now Alice had the best ear in Cressett for whisperings that some person was on his way up, or on his way out, and it was only because your work was known to be going very well that you had been asked to her house. But …

“Oh, that's too bad,” she would say sympathetically, and the more successful you were known to be the more her face beamed with satisfaction. “But then, what do you expect?” she would say. “If you keep on doing the same old things year after year they love you, but just try something a bit new and they're afraid to risk it.” This was directed at her sister Victoria, who was doing very well indeed on the same old thing. Alice herself was forever changing her “style” abruptly and trying something new, “experimenting” as she called it. Her final words of consolation would be, “Well, we all seem to be in a slump just now, but we'll come out of it, won't we?”