Fletcher Flora: Desperate Asylum

“Who were the others?” he said.

“Others?”

“The ones before me.”

“What difference does it make? It had nothing to do with you then.”

“I know. I guess I’m jealous.”

“You shouldn’t be. If you’d been there, it wouldn’t have happened. Except with you, I mean. Anyhow, it wasn’t others. It was just other.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better. It makes him sound like someone special, whoever he was.”

“I thought he was special, but it turned out he wasn’t.”

“What happened to him?”

“It was during the war. He went into the army and didn’t come back.”

“Killed?”

“No. I don’t think so. He just didn’t come back.”

“Were you sorry?”

“I was glad. I didn’t want him to get killed, but I didn’t want him to come back, either.”

He picked up his cup and hers and carried them to the sink.

“I’ll take you home,” he said.

“You don’t have to. I can go alone.”

“I want to do it.”

“All right. If you really want to.”

She lived with her mother in a house that was about two miles from the diner, and he said he would get a taxi, but she said she would rather walk, so they did. At the house it happened again, and it hadn’t lost anything, and afterward he walked back to town to his own room and sat there thinking about her. He looked down from his window into the street and watched a policeman walk slowly along the other side. The policeman stopped to rattle the door of each shop to see if it was locked, and after he had passed, the street was empty for a long time. Then there was a drunk who got too close to the curb and slipped off and fell in the gutter and got up and stayed in the gutter and walked carefully to the corner and out of sight across the intersection. The street was empty again for a while, after which there was a taxi going one way and a milk truck going the other, and by that time Emerson had decided that he would marry Edwina, not because of what they had done, because he felt like he had to, but just because it was something he wanted.

The next day when she came to work he told her. “Are you sure?” she said.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you. I thought about you all night, and it hurt, and I kept wanting you.”

“Still? Even after—?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad.”

“Was it the same with you?”

“It’s the same with everyone when they’re in love.”

“I can’t understand how it happened to you. With a guy like me. You could get almost anyone if you tried.”

“Well, silly, I don’t want almost anyone. I want you.”

“But why?”

“I don’t want to pick it apart. Maybe because you’re a shrewd guy who will have a nice restaurant and bar downtown that people will go to and talk about and go back to. Maybe because you’ve got a funny, ugly face that makes me feel excited. I wish I were smarter. I wish I had gone to high school and even college. Then people would say what a brilliant wife Emerson Page has. Everyone would say what a lucky fellow Emerson Page is to have a wife like that.”

“That’s what they’ll say anyhow. They see what you look like, they won’t care if you’ve ever been through high school, or any school at all.”

“No, really. I want to know things. I think everyone has a kind of obligation to read books and develop his intelligence and all that, don’t you?”

He hadn’t thought about it at all, but he said he agreed with her. He thought she was very cute when she talked like that. Now that he had made up his mind, he wanted to get married right away.

“Let’s close the diner and go down to the City Hall and get a license,” he said.

“Do you really want to? Don’t you want to think about it? It would be all right if you changed your mind.”

“No, I don’t want to think about it anymore. I want to get married.”

“We’ll have to wait three days. It’s the law.”

“The hell it is! Why?”

“We’ll have to take blood tests and things. You got anything catching, honey?”

“Not that I know of. You never can tell, of course, with a wild guy like me.”

“Oh, sure. You’re wild, all right. You couldn’t even tell about me.”

“Well, I thought you were decent. You know how some girls can fool a guy. How the hell was I supposed to know you were promiscuous?”

“Listen. You sound like someone who’s changing his mind. Maybe we’d better hurry down to City Hall and get that license before you talk yourself out of it.”

“I’m not going to talk myself out of anything.”

“All right, then. Let’s go.”

They did. They locked the diner and went down to the City Hall and got a license and waited three days and got married. After that they found a large room with a bath above a clothing store for forty dollars a month and moved into it, and everything was remarkably wonderful, and neither of them regretted what they had done or wished for a minute that they hadn’t done it. From the bed in the room, they could read the neon identification of a shabby funeral parlor across the street, and they sometimes lay there quietly and talked about dying, and how it would be to be dead, and how neither of them would want to live without the other now that they knew what having each other was like. Beyond the funeral parlor in the sky, they could see the brighter wash of light from the better downtown area, and they talked about the restaurant and bar they would have there, the place of integrity, and he began to understand after a while that her mind was much more daring and decisive than his.

“How much money do you have?” she said.

“A couple thousand,” he answered.

“All right. Take the two thousand. You’ve never used your loan rights under the GI Bill. Add that. We could mortgage the house my mother’s living in. It belongs to her, of course, but she’d borrow on it if I asked her. Add that. It would come to something, honey. A lot of money. What I mean is, why wait? We could have the place right now. Right now, Em!”

Her voice in talking about it acquired a desperate urgency, as if they might die tomorrow and lose all of their chances forever, and it frightened him a little.

“I don’t know, Ed. Maybe it’s too soon.”

“It’s not too soon! It’s not, it’s not!”

“We’d need a lot of luck.”

“Sure, we would. And we’d get it. Our kind of luck, Em. Good luck.”

She was irresistible, so they finally did it, and they had the luck. They found the building in the place they wanted, and they sank over ten grand in it right away, and people came to it and came back, and every year they sank more and made it better, and it made money for them and made them happy, and at last they had it securely, and, best of all, they had each other and would go right on having each other until it was time to find out how it was to be dead.

And now, at this time in the place of integrity, he stood at the window and watched the snow falling, and remembered all these things that had happened, and saw Avery Lawes get out of his black Caddy at the curb and cross the sidewalk to the door.

Letting the drapes fall together across his view of the street, he turned and watched Avery come through the door and shake the snow from his hat. He had known Avery for as long as he could remember, as one boy is likely to know another in a town of thirty thousand. Avery was the last of the Laweses, the first family of Corinth since the beginning of Time — which was, in the minds of those who cared, the beginning of Corinth — and he lived now, as the family had always lived, in a big house of red brick on High Street above the river. In spite of social position, however, Avery had always been a pretty good kid by the standards of kids. He had gone to public school like the others, had always been rather shy and withdrawn, displaying sometimes an appealing eagerness to be liked and accepted. A handsome boy, he was now a handsome man, slender and graceful, as if he’d been specially tutored in the proper way to hold himself and to walk and to gesture restrainedly with his hands. He talked slowly and precisely and softly because of an impediment in his speech which showed up to embarrass him if he got careless.