Louisa Hall - Trinity

When I rang the bell, nobody came. Then I pushed the door open. Then I stepped into the chaos. There were women coming and going from the kitchen, and men walking purposefully between rooms, everyone ignoring my presence until finally that lawyer stepped into the foyer and saw me.

He shook my hand and thanked me for coming. Robert, apparently, was resting upstairs. The lawyer led me into the living room and sat me down on the white brocade sofa.

In the dining room, three men I didn’t know were bent over a tall stack of papers. And in the living room, by the kitchen door, two women were conferring quietly in the corner, smoking oddly long cigarettes, standing so still with their long, elegant necks that I thought to myself that they were like two potted plants.

Kitty, however, kept coming and going, storming around with her fury. She was still wearing the same black dress with a cinched belt at the waist.

Then the lawyer sat down beside me and told me that Robert had been given only two days to respond to the charges against him. He was, the lawyer told me, in a very bad state. The previous night, when he came back from his meeting with Strauss, he’d been very agitated, so he’d taken one of Kitty’s pills. Then he’d collapsed in the bathroom. The next morning, he’d woken, and written a letter back to the commission, letting them know that he contested the charges.

He refused, he said, to resign. He didn’t care what information came out. He had always been loyal to his native country.

And so, the lawyer told me, the hearings had been scheduled for April. Robert wanted to write another letter responding individually to each of the charges, some of which were patently false, and others of which might have been true but still had no bearing on his loyalty to his country.

While the lawyer explained that he’d tried to discourage Robert from contesting the charges, and gave me a summary of the contents of that letter, I watched Kitty storming around, bringing empty glasses back into the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the lawyer in the bow tie was saying that the hearing would be a circus. He said it would be a real inquisition.

He said that painful things would come out, personal things that Robert had meant to keep hidden. Then he fell silent for a few moments, and watched Kitty coming and going.

When he started talking again, his voice was a little bit quiet and wistful.

Personal things, he said again, while we sat together on that white brocade sofa, might be leaked to the public.

In this day and age of paranoia and snooping, he said, you couldn’t expect privacy to be respected at all.

Then he told me again that he’d advised Robert to resign without contest, but Robert had refused.

He believed, he said, in the truth. He wanted it all to come out.

That’s what that lawyer told me. Then he was called by one of those men standing at the dining room table. He excused himself, and for a while I sat there, alone in Kitty’s living room, on a white brocade sofa that reminded me of my mother’s.

Twice, I saw Robert’s daughter with her dark hair and her blue eyes wandering by like a sylph: into the kitchen, then out of the kitchen, and back up the wide, carpeted staircase.

Once I saw Robert’s son venture halfway down the stairs. Then he turned and went back up.

And still Kitty was storming around, and I started to wonder when in this process Robert had told her about the night he went back to San Francisco to visit that former girlfriend.

Was it before she gave him one of her pills? Was it after she’d roused him from the floor of the bathroom, when she was sitting beside him on the cold tile?

Or had he told her about it years back, maybe even when they lived on the mesa, when he first began to suspect he’d been followed?

Or, stranger yet, was she still in the dark? I watched her, storming around with that ferocious expression, and after a few minutes that lawyer’s pretty blond wife brought me a drink.

Then I was alone again for a while, and out of boredom I reached into the pocket of my camel-hair coat and pulled out a hardened white eyeball.

I almost laughed. Then I looked at it for a minute, that remnant of the old days when I drove in Kathy’s Studebaker and the leaves changed on the trees lining the highway.

Then I unwrapped the cellophane and let that eyeball drop onto the floor. It bounced twice, then rolled off under the sofa, and I knew I’d never find it again, in my coat pocket or anywhere else.

WHEN THE LAWYER CAME BACK, HE APOLOGIZED FOR HIS RUDENESS.He told me he’d called me to the house to ask if I’d stay in Princeton over the break.

He reiterated that Robert wanted to answer each of the charges in detail, and suggested he might need help with dictation.

Then I went home, and when Stan got back from work, I told him I was staying in Princeton over the break.

He’d just walked in the door, and he was still smiling.

Poor Stan. Full of hope and a sense of his good fortune, he was moving toward me to kiss me, but when I said that, he pulled up short.

For a moment, he looked confused.

“But you can’t,” he said. “We’re going to my parents’.”

“He needs me,” I said.

“He’s only your boss,” Stan said.

“You’re only my husband,” I said.

And then, for the first time, I realized: all those months, I thought I was a wife.

I thought my new goodness and my new, more organized aesthetic were the result of having become a wife. Of having submitted myself to my husband.

But finally I realized that I’d never submitted to him.

It was something else I’d submitted to, something bigger than him, something so big that Stan couldn’t see it. Realizing that, I felt a surge of pity for Stan. Then I tried to be kinder.

“You’ll have a great time without me,” I said in a much gentler voice.

But poor Stan: he’d finally seen it.

The scales were falling away from his eyes. Then I was eighty-six pounds, and my coat was tattered, and my eyes were on fire and my hair was falling out of my head, and poor Stan finally saw me.

I stood there without moving. I let him see what I’d become. Once, I’d been a pretty girl. Once I was the sweet, pretty girl that he married. Now I was a revolting little reptile he hated.

“You’re choosing your boss over me,” Stan said.

His voice had finally changed. Suddenly it was clear to us both that he loathed me.

“He needs me,” I said again.

“I need you,” Stan said.

But in the end, he went alone, and I stayed with Robert in Princeton.

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, I REPORTED TO THE OFFICE, AND THERE WASRobert, standing by the door with his hat on. I didn’t take my own hat off, or my camel-hair coat. I just followed him out. All day, in the cold, we walked around campus. I had my pad and my pencil. I thought he’d start dictating a response. But he just walked around campus in silence.

Then we headed back to the office.

And for a few days, that was a pattern we kept: walking around campus, me with my pad, him leaning forward, smoking Chesterfields and facing the bare trees and the stone buildings in silence.

At night, when I got home, I tried to think what I could give him to help him. I went through all of Stan’s favorite records. Then I went through my own books. Then I remembered that sampler.

For a moment, when I took it out, I wanted to keep it: my sister’s blank sampler. The only artifact I had from her life.

But then I laughed to myself, thinking that wasn’t the lesson my sister taught me.

So the next morning, I went to the office and gave Robert the sampler. I told him my sister made it during home economics at St. Stephen’s, in the unit for decorating your shelter.