The Man Who Loved His Wife (31 page)

“I'll come along.”

“A doctor isn't necessary. The young lady appears to be in good health.”

“Do you want me, Elaine? I think we can arrange to overcome Sergeant Knight's objections.”

“You, too, Mr. Hustings. They may want to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course, sir.” Don turned to Cindy. “Will you be all right, dear?”

“Don't they want me?”

“Thanks for offering to cooperate, Mrs. Hustings, but your signed confession is sufficient. Try to get a bit of rest,” said Knight and blessed her with a smile. “You've been through enough today.”

“What about Mrs. Strode? She's been through plenty, too.” Ralph persisted.

Elaine said, “Thank you, Ralph, but if you really want to help me I'd like you to get me a good lawyer. May I change my clothes, Sergeant Knight? This dress doesn't seem quite correct for the police station.”

WHILE THEY WATCHED, she had kept up the appearance of calm, but once she had shut herself into a lonely room, feeling was permitted. Her hands were clumsy. No matter how she tried to hurry—and she felt it important to get done—she fumbled. Choice was impossible. She changed three times, went back to the dress she had first selected. It was too heavy for the weather, but proper with long sleeves and a decently mature hemline. Her hair was wound into a demure knot at the nape. The occasion demanded stockings, a girdle, gloves. White or black? She was not on her way to the funeral, but would certainly be photographed as a widow.

Everybody was busy, Ralph and Knight competing for the telephone, Don changing his clothes and comforting his wife with another drink. Corbin had carried out the beige dress in the plastic bag, also the uncovered suits and cashmere coat. He put them on the backseat of Knight's unmarked car. The two cops in the black-and-white police car watched with curiosity and asked questions, which Corbin refused to answer.

Softly, so that none of them should notice, Elaine went to Fletcher's room. Windows were open, the air heavy with twilight heat. “The smog will be terrible,” Elaine said aloud, tragically, as though bad air were the worst she had to face. She studied furniture, drapes, the uncovered mattress, small trinkets Fletcher had cherished, leather boxes, a pair of brushes, a shell shoehorn an old girl friend had brought him from Naples, and her own picture in a leather frame beside his bed. She thought of him stumbling in here on Monday night after he had waited so long and humbly at her door. What a comedown it had been, what a slackening of pride after he had cursed and struck her, to come begging alms of tenderness. She had been cold and deaf to his need, had indulged the spiteful need to punish him. If she had opened her door and her arms, if they had (without hope of fulfillment) been content to give each other warmth and physical reassurance, to grow drowsy in sweet intimacy, Monday night would have been like any other and she would have been up early on Tuesday to cook his breakfast.

She forced herself to recognize truth, to see it all again, contrition and impulse, instant and movement. No matter how people probed and bullied, there would be questions to answer. “I did love him,” she said aloud and as dully as she had spoken of the smog.

Ralph waited in the living room. There was no air conditioner to shut out the sounds of life. Twilight noises entered, the humming and buzzing, the wind in the olive tree, and the endless rumble of cars. At the touch of a hand Ralph whirled about. A dark woman looked at him out of shadowed eyes. She rose upon the balls of her feet to touch his cheek with her lips, then drew away as though such liberties had already been denied her.

“Ralph, dear, you've been so good to me. Far too good.”

“We're getting you Peter Albi. A patient of mine is one of his partners, they're both going to meet you downtown. You know who Albi is?”

“I'm sure he'll be just fine.” Elaine looked out at the garden, watching a pair of rabbits as if their nibbling at her plants meant more than the reputation of her lawyer.

“How do you feel? Are you alright?”

“Fine. Much better now.”

“Better?” Ralph squinted at her skeptically.

“Yes indeed. I won't have to tell a lot of lies. I'm no good at it. It was the lies that wrecked me.”

“You lied?” He retreated to the impersonal manner of the consulting room. “You lied?” he said as if he had asked, “You bled?”

“It wouldn't have been necessary if that little idiot hadn't taken the bag away. A cheap suicide,” she said bitterly. “That's what everyone would have believed, the suicide of a man who wanted passionately,” the word affected her, she clasped her hands under her chin, “to die.” Sharply, as if Ralph had contradicted this, she demanded, “Doesn't the diary prove it?”

“You said you hadn't read the diary.”

“No, I hadn't. At first, when I gave it to him, I asked Fletcher what he was writing, but he became so mysterious about it that I knew . . .” She stopped to shake off a painful thought. “No, I didn't know he thought I
wanted
to kill him. But the diary, you said it yourself, was an invitation to death. It must have been in both of us, deep down, hidden, for all that time. Oh, God!”

“I thought that Don,” Ralph said, seizing the thought that he had heard incorrectly or misinterpreted the confession, “Don . . . such an opportunist. I thought . . .”

“You're not listening. I've been trying to tell you, Ralph. Please listen.”

An hour before—or was it a month? a year? centuries?—there had been a madness drawing them together. Now, it seemed, they lived in different countries and spoke languages that could not be translated. “You don't want to know. But it's true. He knew how it would be. Fletcher!” She softened at the name. “He wanted so much to die. I knew. For such a long time, Ralph. I knew at night when I'd go in and look at him asleep. He didn't want to wake up. Ever!”

Ralph was frozen, incapable of speech or direct thinking. He dwelt in a vacuum. A sudden silence had shut out all of the living world: centuries had become mute; household appliances
had quit moaning; no planes flew overhead; no cars rumbled on the hill road.

Elaine's voice crashed into the silence. A whisper assaulted reluctant ears. Lamely at first, “I told him that I was leaving him. Fletcher! I said I couldn't take any more,” she said, and then in a great rush, added, “I meant it. I wanted to be free. I wanted to go away, far . . .” The pause was too abrupt. She choked back memory, but found herself unable to exorcise a scene from her wicked dream—a ship, the man, infidelity as evil and more enduring than the moment of physical sin. She closed her eyes and turned her head away as though she could draw a curtain on the past. “But I knew I couldn't. Ever. I could never leave him, and it would go on and on like that. And on and on, forever.” She tried to walk away from herself, moving about the room, and in her restlessness going faster and faster so that she seemed to be running toward some far-off goal. And spoke to the air, to a vision, to someone who was not there. “He cried that night. Imagine! Fletcher! Crying.” She paused, listening. Illusion, a motor horn, an echo?

“You'll tell this to your lawyer?” Ralph's throat was affected. He spoke thickly.

“I wanted to be free.”

The far-off cry sounded again, but whether it was in her head or on a street below the hill, she could not tell. Free? This, too, was illusion. No matter what her lawyer pleaded, a jury decided, a judge decreed, there would never be a day without memory, nor a night free of his ghost. Fletcher Strode would always possess her.

“Are you cold?” Ralph asked, for she was shivering in the hot room.

The world was again filled with the small noises of living. Ralph heard crickets, the first night bird's note, a cough somewhere in the house, a voice in another room, the pounding of his heart. On one level of his mind, the habitual and professional, he considered symptoms, the thunder of blood in his head, rapid pulse, chill, the death of sensation in his hands; on another plane, bemused by the discovery of her other nature,
he wondered how he felt about her. He could find no words of comfort, could not will himself to speak, nor offer a gesture of affection.

Elaine had gone back to the window. In the swift twilight the marigolds were turning gray, the white chrysanthemums had become lavender. “It was a lovely garden,” she said and sighed. “I suppose Mr. Albi will want to use the mercy killing argument.” Her eyes found the climbing rose that she and Fletcher had bought the week they moved into the house. It was Fletcher's flower, the only one he had ever planted. “Perhaps it was. Perhaps.”

“Of course,” Ralph said. “It couldn't have been anything else.”

“I wonder.”

Knight came into the room. “Are we ready?” He asked with a jovial smile as if they were going out together on a date.