The Innocent (3 page)

Half asleep, he said quite distinctly, “No. No.”

She made her resistance more stern. She touched him differently so that Charles became aware of it and turned away, grunting unamicably.

“The baby, darling,” she whispered penitently. “Six o'clock feeding.”

He muttered what she preferred not to translate into, “Damn the six o'clock feeding,” and pushed his face into his pillow.

Even for a short while Marjorie hated to leave him displeased with her. She bent over Charles so that her hair touched his neck. (It was her best feature, soft and curled and sweet.) “I'll be back soon, my love.”

But Charles only drew his shoulders up to protect his neck and pushed his face further into the pillow. “If you go,” his posture indicated, “you needn't come back.”

It was always like that every time she had to get up for little Pete, every time she couldn't do what Charles wanted to because the baby required care. That was why she tried so hard not to wake Charles, to avoid the little scene they had just had. Marjorie put her robe on and pushed her feet into her mules and smiled at the hump of Charles on the bed, thinking she could placate him later. She loved him so much, so madly much, that he would know it and forget her desertion as soon as she came back to him. He would know that nothing in the world could take her from his bed, not a fire, not a flood. Only little Pete.

She crept through the dark bedroom, out into the living room, through the dining room, and into the kitchen. Here she could put on the light, at last. The kitchen was fine and large and tidy enough, although it was obvious in the flare of the electric bulbs that it lacked the finishing touches; it didn't shine. It had probably looked much better when that Edna girl had taken care of it. Marjorie had a silly desire to explain to the girl, when she came for her uniforms in the morning, that she couldn't help it. The kitchen was neglected because nothing mattered in this apartment now but Charles and little Pete. “I am not Mrs. Carter,” she wanted to say.

But I am Mrs. Carter, she told herself. She yawned and rubbed her eyes, then opened the refrigerator and removed one of the four-ounce baby bottles filled with formula and carried it to the stove. Even though she longed to return to Charles, Marjorie did not neglect to wash her hands before she touched the sterile tongs with which she would lift the nipple out of its sterile jar. When putting the nipple on the bottle, she touched only that part of it which would not go into little Pete's reluctant mouth. With a delicate infant you had to be a fanatic. It didn't need Dr. Larker shaking his head over little Pete to warn his mother that a couple of germs an ordinary five-week-old could handle easily would bowl little Pete over for good.

Yawning again, so widely she thought her jaw would crack, Marjorie wished Charles would understand that she didn't enjoy taking care of little Pete all day and half the night. She wished he would understand why she had to get rid of Miss Brush and take on the job herself.

Charles had been hurt. “But you said, you promised that after the baby came, it would be the way it used to be.”

She had tried laughing him out of it, saying he was acting like a child whose mother had promised to take him to the circus and who had to break her promise. But then she couldn't laugh, because he wasn't a child; he was Charles and his beautiful mouth was sulky and he turned away from her, and she wanted just as much as he did to have everything the way it used to be. She made another promise: as soon as little Pete was really strong, she would get a nurse for him. As soon as little Pete stopped making Dr. Larker shake his head, she could go back to her job.

Charles kissed her hand. “Darling, I know how hard it is for you. I just love you so much. I want to be with you all the time. Is that asking too much?”

“You couldn't ask too much.” It was a miracle that he should want her so much. Didn't it need a miracle to make the first last and the last first? Hadn't she always been last and Claire first? Hadn't she been the last to be chosen since she was a little girl? “The cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone.” Hadn't she been the little girl who didn't get any letters when they played post office? Why shouldn't she promise anything, anything, to Charles who had made the miracle happen?

Of course she couldn't fulfill her promises just yet, and Charles had very little ability to anticipate. Pleasure deferred was pleasure lost to Charles. He felt cheated. He looked cheated. He acted as if Marjorie had cheated him. All she could do was the best she could do, and Charles would have to take it and like it. But it was hard on Marjorie. When you love a man as Charles was loved, you do not want to deny him anything.

Charles wasn't used to denial. That wasn't his fault. It was not Charles' fault if his mother and then his aunt had spoiled him. And can I blame them? Marjorie thought. She tried to picture Charles at three in a sailor suit, or Charles at six on a pony. She thought, even with his front teeth gone he must have been breathtaking.

While she warmed the nursing bottle in a saucepan of hot water, while she tested it anxiously on her wrist, Marjorie tried not to think that she was afraid again, that the dark apartment was again menacing. Although she disliked to waste electricity, Marjorie left the light on in the kitchen and the door open while she went back through the dining room, into the living room and up the narrow stairs that began behind a door.

It was a long distance from the stairs to their bedroom. It was awfully far away for a tiny baby like Pete. Of course, the arrangement had been perfect when Miss Brush slept in the study upstairs, next to Pete, but when she left Marjorie had not moved the baby down, much as she would have liked to. She could not plump him in their bedroom because she knew he would disturb Charles. She could not leave Charles' bed and sleep upstairs with little Pete. That much I can't do, she thought. “Not even for you,” she said, bending over the small white crib, tilting the light shade so it wouldn't shine in the infant's eyes. “Can you imagine any woman leaving a man like Charles for an ugliness like you?”

She set the milk down on the bed table and listened to her son's snuffling breath. Then, still bending, Marjorie undid the sash of her robe, removed it and pulled her nightgown over her head. She took the robe and gown to the adjoining bathroom. (There was a regular suite up here, bedroom, study, and bath. Much too expensive for them, but apartments were still as scarce as hen's teeth.) Marjorie hung her robe and nightgown on the hook behind the door and found her old wadded robe, her spinster robe which she had discarded when Charles became her lover, but which she used now for the night and early morning feedings. Little Pete's stomach wasn't too strong; quite often he threw up on her, and although she didn't mind the sour smell (it was her baby, after all) she knew better than to come back to Charles like that. Therefore these precautions. For some reason she remembered a mystery story in the study next door, where the bookshelves were full of them. In that book the murderer had taken all his clothes off so there would be no bloodstains on him. Marjorie tried to smile at the comparison, shuddered, and, slipping on the squalid old robe, tied the rope belt tight enough to hurt.

That was to punish herself for being morbid. Perhaps it was because this bedroom, which had been Claire's, made her morbid. Perhaps it was because it was just as Claire had left it, for they had just pushed little Pete's crib in, just stuck his bathinette into Claire's bathroom. She thought that she must try again to override Charles' objections and sell Claire's furniture to a second-hand dealer even if, as Charles said, they wouldn't get beans for it that way. This way it wasn't a nursery at all. This way made little Pete look so temporary. Marjorie waited at the bathroom door so that her nervousness wouldn't upset the delicate infant in the crib. If he was upset he would not take his formula. She made herself blank, and then love and solicitude, her will that he should live, flowed into the emptiness inside her. Marjorie carried little Pete into the bathroom and took his wet clothes off. Looking down at the ugly, bluish, scrawny body with the feeble limbs that seemed to dangle, Marjorie could appreciate that he resembled a plucked chicken, but that made her love him more, made her more fierce in her determination to keep him alive. While she changed him, she hummed the songs her mother used to sing to her. She believed that the baby, now staring in her direction with his fixed, blind eyes, could hear the love in her voice. He drank even more milk than she had hoped for, and she was filled with triumph and gratitude as if he had done it for her. In fact, she believed he had. She changed his bedclothes, put him in the crib, carefully tucking in the covers, not so tightly that he would be cramped, but tight enough to keep him safely covered. She did not dare kiss him—germs—but she touched his fingers to her lips and then she touched her hand to the top of his tiny head, where the soft spot was.

Only then did she permit herself to remember Charles. Marjorie went back to the bathroom and scrubbed off any lingering odor of little Pete. She brushed her soft hair. She scrubbed her teeth with the extra toothbrush she kept up here just for this purpose and sprinkled some eau de Cologne on her hair and on the back of her neck and shoulders. Then it was time for her nightgown again and her frivolous robe.

Marjorie, leaving the door to the stairway carefully ajar, hoped little Pete would sleep through until nine, anyhow. It wouldn't be fair to Charles if he didn't. When she climbed into bed again, the perfume, warmed by her body, sifted into her nostrils. Delicious. She was glad, for Charles. “Darling,” she said, for she could see his eyes were open. “Oh, my darling.”

He was unforgiving. He stared ahead of him as if, like little Pete, he couldn't see her. She lay down close to him and her hands moved over his shoulders and down his back to where it narrowed into his waist. Her hand so fully appreciated him, made it so obvious to him how wonderful, how precious it thought him, that Charles relented. Marjorie's hands made it plain that she adored him, that he was first, and this was always a necessary preliminary to any response from Charles. Without it he was passionless. Marjorie had not thought this out. It was not technique. As Beck had insisted, her analysis of Charles' relation to her was imperfect, but without knowing it, quite divorced from knowledge, Marjorie showed in her love-making the sureness that she exhibited throughout her relation to Charles. She did the right things without knowing why and without knowing they were right.

The bedroom became light enough to see all too plainly that it was now eight-thirty. It was time for Marjorie's next task, which was detaching Charles from his warm bed. Charles loved bed; it was as difficult to get him out of bed as to pry an oyster from his shell, and it had to be done tactfully, which wasn't the case with oysters. Charles went off to his job with the most obvious reluctance. He was not happy in his work and Marjorie knew it. If she did not quite feel, as Eve suggested, that it was unfair of the world not to pay Charles a salary just for being, she almost felt it. Marjorie would have been delighted to work for him. She had enjoyed being a buyer in Bloomingdale's, and if Charles would only be patient, she would go back to her job as soon as little Pete could take it. But now it couldn't be helped. Marjorie had to get Charles out of bed. She did it nicely and soft-talked him into a good mood about it.

While Charles showered, Marjorie fixed his breakfast with as much care as she had prepared little Pete's formula the night before. With the baby she had to get nourishment down; with Charles she had to prevent too much food from going down. If she wasn't there to fix the toast and see that he had no second helping, no second pat of butter, he would succumb. She had to tell Charles at every meal what a crime it would be to bury perfection under layers of fat. Today she did so, looking trim and concerned in a fresh cotton housedress. She leaned across the table and watched each mouthful Charles took. This built him up, this filled the emptiness inside him, the quivering maw of insecurity which otherwise he would have stuffed with food. Marjorie brushed Charles' hat. She held his coat. She slapped his gloves across her hand and then gave them to him. Standing in the doorway, for Charles preferred her to stay there until the elevator came up for him, she heard Pete's mew. “I must run, darling,” she said, blowing him a kiss, trying not to see that he would have preferred her to let the baby cry while she waited for him to leave. “Take care of yourself, darling.” She knew that he was now scowling toward the elevator door, but it couldn't be helped. “Coming, Petey,” she called, but to herself, under her breath, so that Charles wouldn't hear her.

Claire's room, little Pete's room, was bright even before she drew the curtains. Little Pete blinked his wrinkled eyelids in the sunshine and Marjorie laughed at his comical, injured expression. She had to change him again and did it patiently, her hands as smoothly moving as on Charles' back, so that the baby felt she believed him unique, as Charles had felt it. Although Marjorie had not eaten her breakfast and her stomach rumbled, she patiently gave Pete his boiled water which he first thought he did not want and the cod liver oil he definitely didn't want. She stood with her small hand on his back, gently patting until he fell asleep, then she could tiptoe down to eat.

Marjorie was the mother type.

Drinking warmed-up coffee, she read an item in the paper about an Italian mother who had turned her son over to the police. She had led them to his hiding place which was, symbolically enough, under her skirts in her closet.
When Sergeant Halliday entered the Pelotte apartment at Mrs. Pelotte's request, he found her son, Joseph, cowering under the clothes in the closet. Joseph, according to his mother, had shot and killed a storekeeper while in the act of breaking into his jewelry store at 3121 Park Concourse, the Bronx. “Take him,” Mrs. Pelotte said. “You take my Joe. He'sa no good. My Joe, he'sa killed a man.”