The Angry Wife (28 page)

“Only about you,” she said.

She climbed into the high bed and lay back against her lace-edged pillows and yawned again.

“Good night, Pierce,” she said. “Get up in a good mood tomorrow, please.” She blew out the lamp and he had to stumble through the darkness as best he could.

He went into his own room prickling with rage. She had put him in the wrong again in her own inexplicable fashion. But he was not in the wrong. She had him in a cage of her own making, a cage whereby whatever he said she let him know that she had known already what he was going to say and how he was going to feel. He rebelled against her calm assumption that there was nothing in him which she did not know and yet he was hamstrung by the thought that even so she might be right. She had an uncanny way of ferreting out his most secret thought. Whether there was something in this of the telepathy out of which people were making parlor games nowadays—but he had gone to such absurd lengths as not to think in her presence of things which he wished to keep to himself. And yet he loved her more than ever, too, in a helpless fashion. She was in his being, his children’s mother. He wished Sally were at home, but Sally was at school in Lewisburg … And Sally was growing away from him, too—he suspected her of it. Even last summer she was always off on some visit or other. He had never felt close to Lucie, the last child to be at home. Lucinda had hired an English governess for her.

He sighed and climbed into his great bed and blew out the lamp. Away from Malvern people looked up to him as a successful man. Even at Malvern they looked up to him. Only Lucinda reduced him to an unreasonable, disgusting creature, always at the mercy of—of animal passion. He closed his eyes and waited fretfully for sleep.

In late May John asked him to go to Philadelphia to look at the site for a great new terminal building. He showed the letter to Lucinda. She read it, and raised her eyebrows.

“I suppose you think you have to go,” she said.

“It is not a matter of what I think,” Pierce returned with firmness. “When John asks me to do something for the business I must do it.” She shrugged her shoulders at the word “business,” and the talk was ended.

He approached Philadelphia with his usual calm. Many times now during the years he had come here to see Tom. Many times? Perhaps half a dozen times, all told, always with business as his honest purpose. Out of the half dozen times twice he saw only Tom, downtown at his hotel. They had exchanged brief news about the family on both sides. The other times he had gone to Tom’s home.

Tom had had no more children. Leslie had grown up and had gone to New York to work on a newspaper. There he had married a young West Indian. Pierce had never seen her, but he had looked at the wedding photograph in the parlor of Tom’s home. If he was surprised at the sight of the dark loveliness of the girl in the long white satin gown and cloudy white veil he had said nothing. Not by one word did he ever let Tom know such surprise. Leslie had grown into a handsome fellow dismayingly like Pierce’s own father. He was clever and quick and more and more he had cut himself off from his family and lived in the world of his own kind in New York.

Lettice wanted to be a trained nurse and Georgy was to be a teacher. Of all the children only Georgy was filled with the fierce flame of equality. She was going south, she said, as soon as she finished school, and work for the sharecroppers. Georgy was dark, so dark that she would have to move into the Jim Crow cars in Virginia. Pierce smothered the strange feeling it gave him when he thought of the slim brown creature who was his own niece having to declare herself. Some day, of course, he told himself in the secret recesses of his conscience, all such things would have to cease. His own niece, Jim Crowed on the railroad that enriched Malvern—but he could do nothing about it. … Small Tom no one knew. He was in the throes of boyhood, a tall, gangling, curly-haired boy whose lips were a trifle too full.

John MacBain met him at the station and together they got into a carriage and the black coachman drove them to the busiest part of downtown, where the new building was to stand. It would cover a whole block.

“It’s a great expense even for a terminal,” Pierce said.

“It won’t just be a terminal,” John retorted. “We are planning to push the road on north—to Newark, maybe, and Jersey City, or even to New York.”

“I hope it is worth it to the stockholders,” Pierce said somewhat bleakly.

He and John represented different elements in the business. Pierce considered himself and was considered the representative of the stockholders. John was president and represented management. John said crisply, “You know our policy, Pierce—it’s always been sound—management conservative and stockholders patient, labor responsible. Then we’ll all win together.”

“This is a damned politicians’ town,” Pierce growled. “You’re going to have to line the pockets of a hundred or two of them.”

“We never have played politics and we never will,” John said firmly. “Once start bribing politicians and they’ll drive you to bankruptcy with their greed.”

Pierce looked doubtfully at the big square. It was hard to imagine the shops and houses torn down and a great high building reared in the midst of these pushing crowds of people.

“I’m afraid of expansion, John,” he said. “Remember what expansion did to us in those other years.”

“This isn’t expansion,” John retorted. “We are following trade this time—not going ahead of it. We’re connecting the terminals that trade has already made—not building side lines.”

“John, as long as the railroad is under your management I’ll agree to anything,” Pierce said at last. “But don’t take your hands off the engine for one moment.”

John gave his thin long smile. “I plan to live another thirty years, Pierce,” he drawled. “And all I’ve got to live for is the railroad.”

They parted, John having got his way, “as management always does,” Pierce told him with a rueful smile, and then Pierce kept the carriage and drove across town into the quiet streets where Tom’s world was. A peaceful world, Pierce always thought, aloof and untouched by rivalry or struggle. It had been a matter for secret surprise to him that Tom had lifted no banners and had led no crusade for the people into which he had married. “In your own way,” he had once told Tom, “you have lived as selfish a life as I have myself at Malvern.”

“There is a difference,” Tom had retorted. “My life in itself has been a revolution—yours hasn’t.”

He thought of Tom’s words now as he drove down the tree-lined street. Quietly, house by house, the well-to-do Negroes had moved into this fine and old section of the city. There was nothing external to tell of the change. Houses were spacious and lawns were neat, gardens were beautiful and the streets clean. A few well-dressed children played behind closed iron gates. One had to look closely to see that they were not white. Pierce had always the illusion when he came here that he was leaving one country and going into another, as in Europe one passed from Germany into France. He was uneasy in the illusion, for this was a country within a country.

He got out of the cab before the whitewashed stone house, paid the cabman and opened the white-painted gate. He walked down the path to the front door and rang the bell. A maid in a white frilled apron opened the door. She greeted him quietly and asked him to come in. At the same moment he heard light footsteps on the stair and Georgy ran down. She stood still upon seeing him, uncertain, as all Tom’s children were still uncertain of him. He saw the doubt in her dark eyes and felt compunction. After all, these children were not to blame for being born.

He held out his arms unexpectedly, and with a rush of wonder she came into them. He felt her thin young arms hug him. Then he stepped back. “You’ve grown, my child,” he said.

She smiled, her teeth very white. “I do grow,” she said. Her voice had a lovely musical lilt, and he noticed it for the first time.

“Is my brother Tom at home?” he asked.

“We expect Father in about an hour,” she replied. “He and Mother went to see some pictures at the art gallery.”

“Nobody home but you?” he asked.

“Aunt Georgia is upstairs,” she replied.

There was the briefest pause. He put down his hat and stick on a table.

“I wonder if you two could give me some tea?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. She skipped upstairs ahead of him, and he heard her calling, “Aunt Georgia—someone’s here—I’m going to make tea!”

So she avoided the use of his name, as they all did. Even Bettina in all these years had managed without speaking his name. There was a delicacy in them that was too proud to presume upon relationship. He appreciated the quality but was somehow conscience-smitten because of it. Then he went into the upstairs parlor which had become Georgia’s own.

There was no use in pretending that the sight of her did not move him. But what it was that he felt he did not know and would not discover. Something was released in him, a tension broke. He wanted only to sit in her presence and draw his breath in great sighs of relief.

She sat by the open window, dressed as usual in a full soft white dress. She turned her face toward him and her dark eyes were liquid and calm. She did not smile nor speak a word. “Georgia,” he said. He sat down in the chair opposite her and gazed at her and she gazed back at him in silence.

He brought himself back with effort. “Well, how are you?”

“Quite well,” she replied. “You look well,” she added.

“I’m getting old,” he said gently.

“It’s good,” she murmured.

“You don’t change,” he said.

She clasped her soft beautiful hands on her lap and he looked at them. He had never touched even her hand. Now he put out his own hand.

“After all these years I suppose I may?” he said abruptly.

Her creamy face flushed delicately. Then she put out her right hand and he took it between both his. The blood beat in his ears.

“I want to be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t know what it is that I feel when I am with you—but something very comforting. I wish you could live in my house again, Georgia. My house has not been the same without you. Even now I—we—miss you.”

“I can’t live there,” she murmured.

“I know that,” he said. “I don’t ask it.”

He pressed her hand and laid it softly on her knee and sat back in his chair. “You and I—we’ve never talked out to each other. Now—I want to, Georgia.”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s time. I’ve always thought that when we began to get old—we could.”

They heard the brisk footsteps of Georgy coming up the stair. “Tomorrow,” he said. “Will you drive with me into the country? I’ll tell Tom.”

“Yes,” she said, and bent her head. He saw the softly parted hair, and the downcast lashes, the turn of her lips.

“Here’s the tea,” Georgy cried at the door, “and I made cinnamon toast—”

He moved through the rest of the day in a strange lassitude of mind and body. In all these years he had not spoken to Georgia of himself nor of her. And yet he had known always that she waited unchanged. Tom and Bettina came home. He heard their voices and footsteps and the children’s voices. Then he heard Tom’s steps along the hall to the guestroom where he was sitting.

He had never slept under Tom’s roof since his first visit. But he had said to Georgy as she cleared away the tea things, “I shall stay here, my child, if you have a room for me.”

Her face lit with joy. “Oh—will you?” she breathed. “Of course—the guestroom—it’s always ready—”

“Then I will go to it—I am tired.” He had been touched by her joy.

She had brought him into this cool green and white room and had tiptoed away. He had closed the door, frightened and bewildered by the depths of his feeling and yet he was calm. He wanted to sleep—to sleep and rest, and yet he was not sleepy. He sat down in a deeply cushioned chair and leaned back and closed his eyes. Now he was face to face with something that he knew was inevitable, that he had always known was inevitable. Whatever was to come, he had at last met the unavoidable. Whatever it was he had forbidden himself he would forbid no longer.

Tom knocked at the door gently and he said, “Come in,” and his brother came in.

“Are you ill?” Tom exclaimed.

“No,” Pierce said.

“But you’re white as a sheet!”

“Tom, I’m frightened and relieved—but I don’t know what I am going to do—”

Tom sat down and gazed at him with anxiety. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know,” Pierce said. “But I am going to sleep here tonight, Tom. And I have asked Georgia to let me talk with her tomorrow—a long talk—such as I have never allowed myself.”

Tom’s face grew stern. “To what end, Pierce?”

“I don’t know,” Pierce said. “When I know I’ll tell you honestly, Tom—or she will.”

Pierce dismissed the driver and took the carriage himself. He was ashamed of his involuntary and yet surprised relief at the fact that no one would realize that Georgia was—not a white woman. He had driven along the empty side streets into the roads which led most quickly to the country.

“I don’t know why I didn’t want to talk inside the house,” he said frankly. They had scarcely spoken at all as he drove. She had smiled once or twice. He had glanced at her and from her calm had grown calm himself.

“It’s a beautiful day,” she said.

The mild day was almost windless and the afternoon was bright. No one had been at the door to see them go. Tom had made an excuse of not being able to get back from school until late, and the children did not come back at noon. Bettina had gone to visit a friend. The house had been empty when they left it, and he knew it would be empty when they got back.

Outside the city limits he drove up a winding lane which was hidden by trees until it came to the top of a hill. There he stopped. “This looks like our hill,” he said. He waved his whip at the view. “We can enjoy the world spread before us while we talk.”

He fastened the horse to a tree and she put her hand in his and stepped out of the carriage. Even today she had worn her soft white muslin frock. The shawl around her shoulders was white wool, and her bonnet-shaped straw hat was white.