The Man Who Loved His Wife (17 page)

She ran off. The rustle of her silk petticoat died away. Fletcher barely noticed. To appease his conscience he grasped at the vision which did not, this time, show the face of the unimportant lover, but only the tangle of limbs accompanied by sighs and purrs, blended gasps, the outcry of consummation.

Tears moistened burning eyes. He was crying. It was unthinkable . . . he, Fletcher Strode. He tried to exorcise self-pity by thinking of sums added daily—stocks, real estate holdings, industrial investments, bonds, and bank accounts. Bitterness would not be bribed.
Elaine, the fair, Elaine, the lovable.
He heard his voice, the old strong voice of Fletcher Strode, heard echoes of raucous laughter, and deliberately revived the vision, watched the embrace tighten, heard the sighing, moaning, singing out of joy in love. He knew the name of her unimportant man. There were not many lovers in Elaine's life these days. Surely she would not squander herself upon the delivery boys who came to the door, not the clerks with whom she flirted while she questioned the ripeness of melons. The red-haired doctor was not an unimportant lover; he was pale, stringy, thin, Jewish, but not unattractive, and what was more important to Elaine, he was a man who could talk to her about things that were Gothic or ambivalent or nonobjective. Irrelevantly Fletcher recalled a night, shortly after he had started his diary, when he had asked Elaine if she had ever questioned the meaning of life. “Doesn't everyone?” Her tone had snubbed him. “When you're a sophomore it's the burning question.”

Fletcher Strode had never been a sophomore. At sixteen he had left school and become an errand boy, at eighteen he was a salesman, at twenty-three a success. His mind had been filled with schemes and tactics. He had never questioned his purpose in life because he had known it was to make money. Profit had been habit and reflex. His mind had not been permitted the
luxury of abstract thought. And his reward was a wife who snubbed him as though he were no more than a sophomore. How much did the red-haired doctor make a year when he was twenty-two? Could that skinny highbrow, with all of his education, think more deeply than Fletcher Strode? If Elaine were to read her husband's diary, she would recognize the quality of his meditations.

He returned to his desk, found his favorite entry:

Evil is in the air around us. Look at those nearest you. Every soul contains every sin. In the hidden self a murderer waits . . .

And:

When I used to sing in church I believed in good and evil. Nowadays it is the style to say evil is sickness. Where has goodness gone to? Is the modern world just a big hospital?

And:

When you defend what's yours you have got to destroy something. It can be the very thing you are trying to defend.

He could no longer hypnotize himself by rereading his profoundest ideas. Pride had deserted, too. The diary provided no more solace than the Bourbon. Nothing could console him. There was no peace on earth for Fletcher Strode.

It would not do to let her see him with red eyes and moist cheeks. He rubbed at his face, refolded his handkerchief, thrust it back into his pocket neatly, locked away the diary, turned out the lights, checked the doors. Performing these small duties, he became himself again, master of the house, and reflected upon his thoughtfulness in leaving a light lit in the hall for Don and Cindy.

He walked along the corridor aggressively so that Elaine would hear him. Her door was shut. Underneath he saw a pencil of light. He stopped there, waiting to be asked to come in. In other days after disagreement and a loss of temper, they had both shown contrition, sought forgiveness, and found it in each other's arms. No quarrel had been allowed to last beyond
bedtime. His standing there, meekly waiting for her invitation, showed the depth to which Fletcher Strode had fallen. “I am a cuckold,” he cackled, “I am a cuckold. Fletcher Strode!”

His voice had returned, but he was too involved in contradictions to notice this minor miracle. He loved her, he hated her, he needed her, he never wanted to look into her eyes again. Certainly she had heard his footsteps, had noted the pause, had deliberately ignored his presence at her door. She would never forgive the blow, would forever loathe the sight . . . and the
sound
. . . of him. Since he had been forced to give up so much else, she was all he had, the only thing that made his life endurable.

She had threatened to leave him. If, by God, she deserted him, he would end it now. There would be no more vacillation. Every day he counted the pills hidden in the riding boot.

On the other side of the door Elaine waited, knowing that he stood there, humble and indecisive, this man who had never in his life wavered in decision. She had but to speak a word and he would open the door, bare his remorse, reaffirm love. She was afraid. Of what? “I love him.” The words had no power. Her jaw throbbed, every nerve end twitched. After a while she heard him walk away. His steps were slow and heavy as though he carried a great load.

8

THE SKY RUMBLED, THE HOUSE QUIVERED, THE earth shook, windows rattled. Elaine was awakened but not alarmed; the breaking of the sound barrier was no more startling than any other of the daily shocks. Fire and police sirens, bloody accidents and hairbreadth escapes on the highways, the testing of civil defense alarms, motor horns, and Muzak had become the ordinary sounds of modern living. The explosion shuddered to silence. In its wake Elaine heard a voice. Or was the sudden frantic cry a fragment of a dream so terrifying that consciousness had driven it back into the cave of the unremembered? She felt bound to the bed, sodden. Last
night, in despair, she had swallowed two sleeping pills from Fletcher's hoard. Her limbs seemed not to belong to her body. Her jaw throbbed.

“Elaine!” The voice was Cindy's. She flung herself into the room. “Something terrible. Daddy—”

Elaine threw off the blankets, leaped out of bed. Cindy followed her along the hall, saying that the telephone had wakened her, that no one had answered until she had dragged herself out of bed. It had been a long-distance call from Daddy's broker in New York. He had commanded her to wake her father. “Some stuff about stocks, he wanted to answer a wire Daddy sent yesterday. He said it was more important than letting Daddy sleep.” By prattling about details, Cindy avoided the unspeakable truth.

In Fletcher's room the curtains were still drawn. Cindy had switched on the ceiling lamp. It threw cruel light upon the bed. Fletcher lay on his back. The body was covered to the hips with a sheet. His powerful, tanned torso was bare. White against the dark flesh was the triangle of porous cloth that protected the opening at the base of his throat.

Elaine walked as if in a trance, her hand stretched out like a blind woman's. The sight of death so frankly uncovered caused a kind of paralysis. Fletcher was no less rigid than the woman standing with her hand extended above his body. At the door, like a lost child in her ruffled, baby doll nightgown, Cindy sobbed.

“He must have killed himself,” Elaine said and stared at her hand as though she were surprised by her ability to move it. She looked about the room like a stranger who had never seen it before. And her hand dropped heavily, brushing the edge of the mattress.

No longer a desolate child, Cindy had become an old woman with a hag's jutted chin, fierce eyes, hard cords in her neck. “Why do you say that? How do you know?”

Elaine pushed her aside and went to the telephone. Cindy had left the handset dangling. Elaine hung up and waited for the dialing tone. The first name that came to her mind was Ralph's. She looked up his number and called his office. An operator's
stilted voice asked if this was an emergency call. “Yes,” Elaine said. “My husband's dead. This is Mrs. Fletcher Strode.”

“How can you?” wailed Cindy.

If the girl had not been sniffling behind her, Elaine might have let go herself. It was safer, she felt, to force herself to immediate tasks. “We'd better have some coffee.” She measured it out and poured water into the pot as though this were an ordinary day and she were preparing her husband's breakfast. Her eyes were dry. “You'd better wake Don.”

“He's not here.”

“What! He's gone out? So early?”

“He had a very early appointment. About a job,” Cindy said between sobs. Don wanted to be away from the house in case the real estate agent called. He had given her instructions carefully. “He thought the conference might last all morning, and he has a lunch date, too.”

“Can't you get in touch with him?”

“I don't know where he is,” wept the girl.

“You'd better lie down and try to pull yourself together. I'll take care of things,” Elaine said.

She forced herself to go back to Fletcher's room. There was a bluish cast to his flesh, and his face was expressionless as stone. He did not look like a man who had tumbled a girl about on beds and couches, on the back seat of a car, on the sand at the beach and, one crazy night in Kentucky (he had just won nine hundred dollars at the races) on the bathroom floor. She could not recall shared laughter, the touch of his hand, the scent of his flesh, the quarrels and the fun. Nothing; not even the fury of last night's insult, the hurt they had given each other. Upon the bed she saw, not her husband, not her lover, not her man—death lay there. “I'm sorry, Fletch,” she said in a voice directed at nothing and with no life in it.

THE MORNING FOG had lifted. Watery sunshine shimmered on the hill while the streets below lay drowned in warm mist. The temperature rose. Sweating in a wool jacket, Ralph wished that doctors could dress as comfortably as truck drivers. He rang
the Strodes' bell several times before the door was opened. The daughter stood there. She wore a dark robe that gave the correct note of mourning. Her fair hair had been combed, but lay limp about her face. “In there,” she said through a damp handkerchief pressed to her lips.

Elaine stood beside the bed. Ralph took her hands. They were cold and dry. She wore a transparent nightgown with only spaghetti straps over her shoulders. Ralph was embarrassed by the lightly shrouded nudity, so that he could not offer the comfort of an embrace. Her quiet manner seemed sadder than a teary display of grief. “What happened?”

She nodded toward the bed.

“I mean this.” He raised his hand toward her bruised face.

She shuddered as though he had touched a sharp instrument to an open wound. “It's nothing.”

It was clear that she did not want to speak ill of the dead. While Ralph began his examination of the body, she stood motionless with bowed head.

“Put on some clothes. You're disgusting!” cried Cindy.

“Excuse me.” Elaine used the tone of a minor social error. She hurried out of the room.

There was nothing for Ralph to do but inform the coroner's office. He used the kitchen phone so that he could make a report without adding to the distress of Fletcher Strode's women. He had barely hung up when the telephone rang. Elaine hurried to answer. She was covered from chin to instep by a flowing robe of a soft moss-green fabric. The call was from New York. Mr. Stoner said he had called before but been disconnected, and had tried for half an hour to get a connection. He had profitable information for Fletcher and wanted to tell him immediately.

Elaine could not blurt out the news that her husband was dead. “Sorry, he can't come to the phone now. He's not feeling well. I don't want to disturb him. You might call back later in the day.”

“How can she?” wailed Cindy. “She hasn't shed a tear.”

“Shock affects some people that way. They cut off all feeling, but later they suffer in other ways.” Ralph spoke curtly. He
had already noted Cindy's intolerance of her stepmother, but wondered at the vindictiveness in this hour of grief.

Like a simple housewife on an uneventful day, Elaine carried in the tray with coffee. Finally, when she had poured out three cups and asked about cream and sugar, she spoke of Fletcher. “Did he suffer?”

“I can't say. It doesn't look that way, but I've only made a superficial examination. I should say he became unconscious quickly. There's nothing in his face nor the position of the body to show that he struggled.”

“I'm glad.”

“We'll know more after the autopsy.”

Cindy sprang up as though she had been catapulted out of her chair. “There's not going to be any autopsy on my father.”

“My dear,” Ralph used his smoothest bedside tone, “you've got nothing to be alarmed about. It's the regular routine of the coroner's office.”

“What do we want a coroner for?”

In a voice sharpened by the strain of self-control Elaine said, “Let the doctor do what he has to.”

“It's the law, Mrs . . .” For the life of him Ralph could not remember the girl's married name. “When a doctor's called in after death has occurred, he may not sign a death certificate unless he's seen the patient within three weeks or has been treating him for a condition that might cause mortality. Let's not get upset. It's quite natural, I assure you.”

All the color had been drained from Cindy's face. She trembled violently. “You weren't my father's doctor. Why did she call you?”

“He's my doctor. I thought of him first,” Elaine said.