Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

She walloped him with anything and everything she could get her hands on — one of her own flat-heeled house-slippers with a wilted pom-pon stitched to it, or a magazine if its pages were stiff enough to be rolled into a good tight bludgeon — but her favorite implement came to be a large, round, shallow aluminum skillet, which had a wooden grip attached to it. This was feather-light in weight, but for some undetermined reason hurt more than all the heavier things did. It was so large in diameter that she couldn’t fail to hit him with at least part of its surface, even in oblique shots. Also it tired her less to wield it. She could bounce it like a yo-yo.

He told Marie sometimes he couldn’t even stand up to walk when she finally released him, he had to get away by crawling along the floor on his hands and knees.

In the beginning he was too small to complain coherently to his father about it. Then later, when he might have been able to, she warned him if he did she would give him such a beating on the day following that it would make all the previous spankings seem to have been like caresses. The whole thing was a moot point, in any case. His father’s paternal instinct was practically nil; all he had was mating-instinct.

Then, on the day that he found that his legs had grown long enough to carry him beyond her reach faster than she could overtake him, the epoch of corporal punishment ended as irrationally as it had begun. She was top-heavy and water-logged with beer, and after a few floundering attempts to go after him during which she nearly brained herself falling over rolling beer-cans and the sides of chairs, she gave up trying.

An uneasy armed truce existed between them for a brief period after this — no more than a week, possibly — during which, if he had to go past her, he went past on the outside, with some table or chair between them. Then this too ended, and a state of complete neutrality set in. They ignored each other from then on, for the rest of the time she remained in the house. Whatever spark of malignancy had existed in her mind that had made her want to maltreat him had dimmed and gone out for lack of anything to feed on. Or perhaps she had convinced herself to her own satisfaction by now that she was a better woman than the first wife.

They never exchanged a direct word from then on, communicating only through his father.

Then, around the time he was entering his teens, his father finally got tired of her marathon, around-the-clock drinking and threw her out of the house. Paradoxically, he no sooner had than he started drinking heavily himself. He lost his job, and Don had to support the two of them by whatever means he could, working as a grocery delivery-boy and anything else he could rummage up. When he was seventeen his father finally had to be taken away to an institution. And that about ended all further family-life, as far as Don was concerned.

The rest, for the ten-odd years or so that followed until he met Marie, was just humdrum but honest hard work. Little rooms in rooming-houses run by motherly women (who sometimes washed and hung his socks for him while he was at work). No real friends, just the men he worked alongside. No individual girls, just an occasional transient, without any commitment.

And that was he, the part she didn’t know.

A curious sort of regression seemed to have taken place in him during the course of the simple, plaintive little recital; she couldn’t tell whether it was just in her imagination or not. He seemed to have grown younger. He seemed less mature than he had at the start. Whether in mien, or posture, or whether it was because of the substance of what he’d been telling her, she couldn’t divine. When he’d first begun, he’d been sitting there adult, casual, self-sure, hand curled at case on table, cigarette spiking its knuckles. By the time he was done, he was huddled like an awkward, abashed boy, hunched forward over his lap, hands limply linked as if to wring them, feet slanted toward each other on the floor, toe to toe. He harassedly brushed some hair that wasn’t there back from his forehead.

She felt a sudden urge to put her arms around him and hold him to her, and she couldn’t understand it, it almost frightened her a little, for she knew it wasn’t love, the mutual love of the equal for the equal, but something else. And how could she, anyone like she, have any of the maternal in her?

But as a matter of fact, even in the larger, over-all picture, something parallel to this had been going on, unobtrusively but steadily, almost from the time she’d first known him. That first day on the sidewalk, her quick, confused impression of him had been that of a seasoned, hard-bitten man, who knew the score, who knew what he was doing, every move of it; who threw a punch and then calmly walked her off with him. Not a word wasted, not a motion wasted.

Then, as she got to know him better, as the artichoke-leaves of his heart slowly peeled off one by one beneath her tender, prying fingers, he seemed to become younger, or at least less mature, all the time. This wasn’t a physical thing, a thing of appearance, it was more a matter of outlook, of attitude, of occasional remarks and unguarded responses and unpremeditated reactions, the pattern of the personality.

There were even times when she felt as if she were the older of the two, which was absurd of course.

It came at last, and when it came it came quite impromptu, as everything between them had so far.

They were out walking together, aimlessly, contentedly, the crowd streaming all around them, their hands hanging loosely down between them, just linked by their hooked pinkeys.

“Know something?” he said.

“No, what?”

“Gee, I’d like to be married to you.”

Her face blazed with joy like a bonfire. “You would!”

Then she saw that he was waiting for more than that, so she gave it to him. “I’d like to be married to you too, Don.”

And that was all there was to it. There went her balcony-scene, her suitor on bended knee, her moonlight, mandolins and magnolias.

They just stopped and stood there where they were, pressed close to each other but not embracing, he looking down into her eyes, she looking up into his, his hands resting on her shoulders, hers within the crook of his arms. The people coursing by had to split into two streams to pass them, then came together again farther on. One or two noticed them and smiled. Most of them didn’t even see them.

They only said two things in all that time they stood there.

They said, “Don.”

They said, “Marie.”

That night, alone in her room, alone in her bed, alone with her happiness, for the first lime that little black speck, that single cinder in all the immensity of her serene blue sky, started to whirl nearer, to enlarge, to elongate like the black funnel-cloud of an onrushing tornado into the semblance of a looming, brow beating exclamation-point.

Something inside her kept saying, I’ve got to tell him, now that we’re going to get married. I can’t marry him without telling him.

But something else, less dogmatic or maybe just less brave, answered: “Or can I? Others have, and gotten away with it. Why can’t I?”

You never can, you never do. Just as that man recognized you on the sidewalk that day, someone else will surely come along some day and wreck everything you and he have built; your home, your trust in one another, your happiness. Isn’t it better to tell him now of your own accord—

And risk losing him, losing the one chance I’ve ever had to be the same as other people are?

— than to live in dread and insecurity for years to come, never knowing when the revelation will occur. Isn’t it better to lose him now, if you must, than to lose him later? Won’t it hurt less, won’t it cost less? And lose him or not, at least then you can hold your head up high all the rest of your days.