Promises (27 page)

“I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, for months, actually, not wanting to, stifling my thoughts, telling myself that you were going through a crisis and that it would pass. You would go for help. Maybe in secret you were already doing so. I thought all that, but I didn’t want to think you were, quite simply, having a
cheap, underhanded affair. Stupid, stupid!” She struck her forehead with her palm. “It happens all the time, and yet I never thought of it. Even that night when I accused you and you denied it, I was so willing, I wanted to believe your denial. I
wanted
to, Adam!” She began to weep. “Maybe I did know the truth. Is that possible? That the knowledge was there, and I smothered it?”

He thought: This is what I dreaded. Now here it is, and what do I do?

He was not ready, he had no words with which to meet this torrent of emotion, so he could only evade, only parry and delay.

“Then explain yourself! Convince me, if you can, that I’m wrong. No, of course you can’t. Look at your face in the mirror. The truth is written all over it. Oh, my God!” she cried, and sat down, huddled, clasping herself and rocking as if seized by some internal agony.

He felt a dreadful pity and was helpless. He seemed to be confronted with a catastrophe of nature. His strength ebbed and he, too, sat down, struggling to endure and somehow get through the horror. Once he leaned over to touch Margaret’s shoulder and yet, as if paralyzed, did not do it.

Minutes passed on the clock, five, seven, ten, before she raised her suffering red face, and begged, “Can’t you answer me? It’s my life, my whole life! Don’t you understand?”

He gave a deep, long sigh and answered, very low, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Just tell me why, why?”

“I don’t know.… It happens. It happens all the time.”

“But to us? Weren’t we happy, Adam?”

He was cornered. Unable to look into her piteous eyes, he let his gaze rest upon her white sash as he mumbled, “Infatuation. That’s the answer, I guess.”

When she sprang up he was shocked by the sudden violence of her move. Her arm swept out, sending a little porcelain vase to smash on the floor.

“No, leave it there. Let it smash. You’re smashing the roof in with your ‘infatuation,’ aren’t you? And for that awful woman we saw in New York telling me about her ‘crush’ on you—for her you will ruin everything. A long-lasting crush, isn’t it, for her to follow you, after all these years.”

“She didn’t follow me. She just happened to move here. It just happened to work out that way.”

Margaret swallowed hard and knocked her small fists together.

“Well, Adam, things will have to unhappen, that’s all. Perhaps you’ve forgotten a few small facts, that we have three children. I’m not going to let this damn foolishness hurt them for one minute. You are not going to tear this family apart. You and I are going to go for some counseling and set things straight. But first, promise me that you’re finished with her.”

When she moved aside, Adam had a full view of the photographs that Nina had once so skillfully arrayed on the old piecrust table. Now suddenly he saw something new: They all looked alike, Margaret and her people, all, even the bearded great-grandfather, having the same expression, responsible and candid, yet slightly reserved, with kindly eyes and proud chins. And Megan, he thought, although they say she looks like me, is the same.

There was a quality in these faces that encouraged him to respond to them with their own pride and candor, or as much of these as in the circumstances he was able to muster.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “God knows, I’ve never wanted to hurt you, and I still don’t. But as people move through life, things change. Even when you don’t want them to, they do. And I don’t know what else to say.”

Margaret walked to the window and stood there looking out just as the streetlamps came on. No one passed on the quiet, familiar street. And for a second Adam wondered what scenes were this moment being enacted in some other quiet, familiar houses on streets like this one.

When she turned back toward him, her eyes were filled again with tears. “The humiliation,” she said softly. “The two of you tricking me, laughing together at my stupid ignorance, my foolish trust in you.”

“No one ever laughed at you.”

“Where does she live? What does she do? Since she certainly knows all about me, I have a right to know all about her.”

For a moment he hesitated, and mistaking his hesitation for refusal, Margaret cried, “You might as well tell me. I can easily find out.”

Thinking, If she goes there, and I don’t believe she will, Randi can cope, he replied, “She sells real estate. She has a house not far from Randolph Crossing.”

“And this has been going on how long?”

“A couple of years,” he said.

Squirming under the cross examination, he suddenly felt the same helpless anger that Jenks had made him feel. Yet Margaret had every right to ask. What else
would any woman do? As if she had read his thoughts, she cried out again.

“Do you know there are women who would throw you out of the house for this? Maybe throw a frying pan at your head too? Or file for divorce?”

Divorce. Bite the bullet, Randi said. It was inevitable. Nevertheless, there was a sinking in his stomach, a cold fear that brought back the sensation that students have when they enter the examination hall and the blue books are given out.

“Often,” he said in that same low voice and not looking at Margaret, but rather at the suddenly threatening face of her great-grandfather, “divorce is the best solution.”

She stared at him. “What? What did you say?”

“It isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

“For us?” she cried.

“It hasn’t been working out for us,” he said steadily. “Neither of us is happy anymore.”

“What do you mean?” she gasped. “What are you saying?”

“That we will both be better off if we face the truth.”

“The truth! Am I going crazy here? Am I really hearing this? You would leave me, just walk away from everything”—and Margaret waved her hand, indicating the house and, as he well knew, the children upstairs—“in exchange for that woman?”

“You make it too simple. Emotions are.…” He was faltering, yet there was no way to make plain a thing so complex, so contradictory, and yet so compelling.

“Oh, my God, what has she got that is missing in
me?” And Margaret clasped her hands in the age-old gesture of despair.

He was pinned to the wall, and there was no escape. “It’s not that there is anything missing in you. It’s just that I love her. She is the love of my life.”

“The love of your life! Then everything you ever said to me was a sham. All our years, almost nineteen of them, a sham.”

“I didn’t think it was. I didn’t think they were. It’s just that things happen.”

“Things happen? Am I losing my reason? You really said that?”

He did not answer.

“And the children? The life we’ve built for them here?”

A look of disbelief came over her face such as you see on people who pass a hideous accident on the road and have to turn away. It seemed to him that he was actually witnessing the outflow of her strength and her vital fluids, as if she were about to die here in this room. He had cut her with a cruel knife, he had savaged her, and, knowing that he had done so, stood up to go to her.

She gave a shrill cry. “No, don’t touch me! Don’t come near me with your phony sorrow.”

“It isn’t phony. You can’t know what grief I feel, doing this to you. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it.”

She fell onto the sofa. And he said gently, “Margaret … I’ll take care of you all. Don’t think I will ever abandon you and the children. I could never do that. I will be a caring father, the same father I have always been. And as for you, you don’t think so now, but you’re still young and you deserve—”

“Get out,” she said. “You have nothing more to tell me. You’ve said it all. Get out.”

So he left her lying there, went into the sterile little room where he now slept, and sat down. Well, he had done it; the scene he had so dreaded and so often postponed had been enacted. And yet his feelings were ambivalent. Relieved of secrecy and deception, he certainly did feel lighter and cleaner; he felt free; the way was finally open. Yet he had killed Margaret’s spirit. In spite of his mental reassurance about her future possibilities, about Fred Davis or some unknown Prince Charming, he had destroyed a part of her that would never be the same. And feeling that to be true, he was deeply sad. Tomorrow, too, they would have to inform the children.…

For a long time he sat quite still, thinking and weighing many things. Probably it was a mistake to have been as blunt as he had been. He should probably not have used that phrase
love of my life.
He could hardly believe that he had really spoken it and had crossed the divide. Yet it was the truth.

It must have been an hour or more before he walked with soundless steps into the kitchen, closed the door, and picked up the telephone.

“Well, Randi. It’s done,” he said. “I’ve done it.”

W
hen the sobs died away into exhaustion, Margaret began to feel the cold. The room was dark. Someone must have come in and turned off the light. She got up, lit a lamp, and, shivering, stood staring into the pink bulb. Turning her head slowly, she looked around the room. Nothing had changed. It seemed entirely possible that she had been hallucinating, that Adam had not been sitting in the green chair talking about a divorce. Yet there was the evening paper, and the tapestry pillow was on the floor where he always left it, although it belonged on the chair. The house was quiet in the stillness that comes after midnight. A few hours from now it would awaken, and its occupants would have to resume where they had left off.

How had this thing happened? What was going to happen to them all?

Upstairs, the bedroom doors were open. In the dim hall light she discerned Julie’s huge stuffed panda on the
rocking chair beside the bed. What was this going to do to Julie, tender Julie, who took life so hard?

Dear God, she murmured, clutching the banister. And Rufus, hearing the merest whisper of a voice, looked up from his bed. When she bent to stroke his head, he thumped his tail. And this small display of love from the dog—a dog!—was too much for her. If he had been able to understand language, she would have knelt beside him and asked him for comfort.

Then she thought of Nina, wondering what she would say if and when the rupture should come to pass, the total rupture of the five lives beneath this roof. Given the direction Nina had taken, she would probably find an excuse for Adam, Margaret thought bitterly.

She lay down again in the dark with her mind going over and over the unreality of this night, forming questions that had perhaps no answer. How is it possible after so many years that had been quite reasonably happy, that were contented, for an unknown woman to appear out of nowhere and destroy our peace? Our trust? While I was living my simple day, teaching, marketing, tending this home—or perhaps one night while I was sleeping in his bed with my head on his shoulder—she was already crossing the continent on her way here to rob and wreck.

And we have such beautiful children. Is that nothing to him?

There were more questions. At what point could she have stopped this if she had known, for surely such things did not happen at first glance, first contact? Or did they? That woman had come here looking for Adam. And he.… Chemistry, they called it. In the laboratory, chemistry followed the rules!

The first light was touching the butterflies on the wallpaper when at last she fell asleep.

When Margaret awoke, full sunshine covered the carpet and the feel of noon was in the room. There were voices and motion in the house. It took a few seconds for her to orient herself, to grasp the facts that this was Sunday, that she had a headache, and that Adam had asked for a divorce. She sprang out of bed and ran to the mirror, there to be appalled by the sight of her swollen, shining eyelids. Her impulse was to go back to bed and hide this ugly proof of her devastation, but when Megan knocked, she realized that hiding would be not only foolish, but impossible.

“I’ve been waiting outside your door for you to wake up,” Megan said.

Margaret could think of nothing better to answer than “I look awful, don’t I?”

“Yes. Cold water will help. And then you can wear sunglasses.”

“I need to shower and get dressed.”

“I shouldn’t have told,” Megan said.

“Yes, you should have.”

“Is it going to be serious?”

“I hope not.”

“I saw you on the sofa when I came back from Betsy’s. I didn’t want to disturb you, so I just turned the light off.”

“I’m sorry you had to see me like that.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Not yet.”

The two women studied each other, their visual contact
accomplishing in moments what words would need minutes to do.

“I hear Dad talking on the porch. Who’s with him?”

“Uncle Fred, making his Sunday visit. Do you want breakfast or lunch?”

“Neither, thanks. If I do, I’ll help myself.”