Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“Mrs. Berker.” He held out his hand to her, fumbling awkwardly for words that would compensate for the contempt he had been feeling and had scarcely tried to hide. “I’m glad to meet you. Lorraine often talked about you – and wrote about you.” Lorraine had mentioned her once or twice: the prominent clubwoman and gracious hostess, a little stuffy and straitlaced as befitted her social position, though she had been a successful career woman before her love marriage to the rising young executive Berker–

Her hand, thick and coarse-grained, gripped his warmly. “Mercy me, don’t call me ‘Mrs. Berker,’ call me ‘Ma’! I guess we’re still related even if poor Lorraine ain’t with us any more.”

“Yes,” he said. “Ma.” The bitter bleating word incredibly brought tears to his eyes.

He was glad that she had turned away from him to peer through the dirty window into the house. “Look at that now. He’s gone back to sleep in there. Excuse me a minute. I’d ask you in only the parlor’s in such a mess.”

She pulled open the screen door and paused in the doorway for an instant before she went in. “Just sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you.”

For an instant of no more than a heartbeat’s duration the angles of her cheekbones and jaw had caught the light in such a way that he saw her resemblance to Lorraine. The line of the skull was there beneath the aging flesh, tender, pathetic, and clear, like a sculptured fragment of youth caught out of time. Just for that instant, it seemed that Lorraine had come back and was standing before him, heavy from the grave and cruelly aged by the eternal hours of death.

It was no more than a trick of the eye perhaps, but it had the stern and general sadness of deep insight. He saw more clearly than he ever had before that flesh was as grass, youth and beauty impermanent and precious, life itself a perishable good to be used while it lasted, generously and honorably. Even in pain and sorrow there was a sweet excitement, a sense of life; and a hard-earned pleasure like a boxer’s in submission to the punishment of time. The one irreparable loss was that of life itself. Lorraine was the one to be sorry for, the dead girl married to oblivion, and not the worn-out woman who had borne and survived Lorraine, who carried still within her declining body the talismanic fragments of youth.

The slamming of the screen door set a period to his thought. He sat down in the worn canvas chair his mother-in-law had vacated, and watched the street, trying to throw his attention away from himself, away from Lorraine and her family and the past, from all the bottomless spiral anguish of the world. Women were walking babies and shopping-carts on the pavement. A delivery boy went by on a red scooter that emitted a continuous stuttering raspberry. A paralytic old man passed the house inch by inch, walking quadrupedally with two canes. He was so old and thin, with the withered skin hanging in folds from his obstinate skeleton, that it was a wonder he could move at all. He stopped at regular intervals to rest and to look up at the sun, the emergency battery on which he depended for another month or another year of life.

Bret smiled at the old man with the sun in his face, half from sympathy and half from envy. At that age the only problem was to live, to wring another drop of energy from food and weather, cover another city block by minuscule degrees, reconquer the lengthening space between waking and sleeping. For a while in the hospital he had been like an old man himself, an old man or an infant, who needed nothing but sleep and food, until his resurgent mind had driven him like a cruel angel out of the Eden of the physical life. It was a hard rebirth into the adult world. He still had a nostalgia for the warm and quiet places of mental death, and a wildly yawing inclination to self-pity. Only in the last week had he been able to face the memory of Lorraine, to recognize the difficult fact that he had destroyed himself through her. No doubt the years of the war had softened him up for the final blow; Lorraine was the one who had found the fatal crack in his defenses.

For a while after their quick and ill-timed marriage he had held the truth at bay. During the first weeks of separation, when the one physical love of his life had been cut off and left him raw and sensitive to the masculine life of the ship, it had been important to him to keep her image intact. She was a good girl, a devoted wife, perhaps a little harebrained, but basically as sound and sweet as an apple; this was the icon that gave him strength in return for his uncritical worship. Then time and distance, working together like acids in combination, dissolved the fabric of the illusion. The memories of their marriage day and their drunk honeymoon fell into the patterns of reality, and her infrequent letters came to fill in the blanks. She was selfish. She was a liar. She was lazy and discontent. She was a fool. And he, who had married her between drinks on time he owed to another woman, was worse than a fool.

Even so he had enough integrity and objectivity to try to make the best of it. If he had made an unfortunate marriage so had she. He answered her letters dutifully. He sent her as large an allotment as he could afford, and, when she asked for it, the money for the down payment on the house, more than half the money he had saved for writing his book when the war ended. He tried to keep his thoughts loyal to her and to give her the benefit of whatever doubts he had. Meanwhile he lived on his nerve and by his sense of duty. Neither of these was enough to sustain a man indefinitely in the operational area. The last seven weeks before the ship was lost there was an average of eight or ten general quarters a day, but they didn’t disturb him much because he had given up sleeping almost entirely.

Now there were no more doubts. Lorraine’s morals, like her mind, had been as light as a net balloon. The only mystery was why he had not seen it on the first night. As casually as any tart she had let him pick her up and take her to his hotel room. He suspected he was only one in a long series of lovers that did not end with him, a second-class private in the nocturnal army that had bivouacked on her young mons . Perhaps the man who had caught her on this porch with Garth had been her steady lover, but even if that was so, she had been willing to be unfaithful to him, and with such a creature as Garth. He couldn’t hate the girl who had betrayed him and then died suddenly in the midst of her light sins. She had nothing to lose but her life, and she had lost it. Her body was already half turned to dust. All his hatred settled on the man who had been the last to violate her bed, the shadowy man who had taken her life as hostage to his jealousy.

The screen door creaked behind him, and he jumped up to meet Lorraine’s father, who was framed in the doorway like a living portrait of depression.

“That’s your son-in-law, Pa. Lieutenant Bret Taylor, no less. Go on out and make yourself sociable.”

Berker pushed the screen door partly open and slid through. He was wearing a faded denim shirt that gaped open at the neck, showing the mat of wiry hair on his chest, a shade darker than his gray stubble beard. His breath was winy, and the whites of his swollen eyes were wine red. He held out a grime-cracked hand with the forefinger cut off below the first joint.

“I’m glad to meet you,” Bret said as they shook hands.

“Same here. I guess you noticed I got a missing finger. Lost it in a corn cutter in 1915. I went down in the silo to look for it, but couldn’t find it. Probably made pretty good ensilage at that–”

“Now, Pa, the Lieutenant don’t want to hear about that.” She smiled apologetically at Bret. “It’s the first thing he wants to tell them about whenever he meets anybody.”