PART V
Laurence felt cleaner and happier in his attitude toward Winnie than he had ever been able to feel when she was alive. He did not go to the cemetery very often, but he saw to it that there were flowers planted in the plot, and that the place was well cared for.
He was cold and still inside himself. His soul had been turned to iron. And he weighed carefully in the scales of justice what had been done by her and what by him. He refused to pity her or himself.
But this could not last. His justice began to live and to ache with the pain of its own decisions. Then he threw it all away. It was only when he allowed himself to despise Winnie thoroughly that he could love her. He would not be killed with remorse.
His children were his greatest pain. He was so close to Bobby that his pride in the child was only a hurt. Laurence was harsh with the child, and before strangers did nothing but find fault.
One day Bobby dropped his toy engine out of the living-room window, and when it fell in the street a bad boy ran off with it. Bobby came crying to his father, but Laurence would give no sympathy.
"If May cried like that nobody would be surprised," Laurence said. "Why didn't you go out and make the boy give it back?"
"He wouldn't div it back! He wanted it!" Bobby bored his scrubby fists into his streaming eyes. His sobs were futile and rebellious.
"Go out and take it away from him. Next time you let some little ragamuffin in the street run off with your toys, don't come to me about it. May would probably let anybody, that wanted to, run off with the dearest thing that she possessed, but that's no excuse for you."
Bobby was so angry that for a moment he forgot to cry. He did not understand his father's cross words, but they were not what he wanted and he hated them.
Unmoved in her humility, May heard herself deprecated. She accepted contempt as the poor take dirt. Her father's tolerant disapproval lay on her ugliness, but she could not think how she would be without it.
And yet he never scolded her. When her grandmother was provoked with her he only said, "Leave her alone. You can't change her." And he always petted her. But May knew wordlessly that he was only kind to her. She was humble.
Something inside her died faintly. It was like a death at the end of a sickness, a relief which she dimly felt as defeat.
Yet she was fond of her father. She was glad he did not scold her. She would run to meet him when he came home from work and cling delightedly with her little claws to his strong small hands. Mostly she was unaware of the tightening and stiffening of his wrist and of his readiness to loose her when she let her palm slip from his. She was even oblivious to the contrast presented by the spontaneity of his brusque affection for Bobby. It was only now and then, as by some unnamed sixth sense, she knew that he was not wanting her touch. Then she would draw back, bewildered and ashamed of herself, but neither sad nor angry, and would find herself in her stupidity weltering in that same pitch-bright shadow which was always on her soul whether he forgot it or not.
However, if he was willing to forgive her, if he felt contrite for what he had shown, and held out his hand to her, her heart immediately lifted. She was up above herself in the sure definite outlines of his world, and she was glad. She clapped her hands and danced. There was not a spark of jealousy or reproach in her too yielding nature.
Laurence, half concealing it from himself, despised her subconscious forgiveness. But, since he could do nothing to improve his relation with her, he was very generous with candy and sweets and playthings.
The baby could sit up now, propped against pillows. It was fat and well. It had pallid skin and red blond hair. Its heavy cheeks hung forward and between them was sunk its droll, loose mouth, very red and wet. Its very blue eyes conveyed neither pleasure, surprise, nor recognition as yet, but it showed anger, and even delight, with its hands and arms and its body, that was long with fat bowed legs. It liked best to sit in the bath, its weak back supported by its grandmother's hand, and strike the clear green surface of the water with its stiff outspread palm.
Laurence never, in his heart, admitted a relation with the baby. The child disconcerted him. He was ashamed of his intimacy with it, and that it took him for granted.
When he leaned toward it, it held out its fat arms with their creased wrists, and went to him. It sat unsteadily on his knee. The blond hair on its head was furry and lustrous and grew down the flat length of its skull at the back into the thick fold of its neck. As it moved its body its head bobbled as though it were about to topple off. When Laurence touched the baby's delicate skin he found it always damp with a cold fragrant sweat, and if he pressed the flesh it mottled with color, like a bruise.
With an eager, half-directed gesture, it would reach out and clutch his watch chain. It liked to jerk and dangle the chain. Sometimes Laurence teased it and it fretted.
Laurence said that the baby was stupid.
"Of course he can't know you! He's only four months old!" Mrs. Farley defended indignantly.
Laurence sentimentalized his mother's devotion to the baby, but that did not alter his own reaction. The child made no appeal to him. He gave it back to the grandmother. He did not want it near him for long at a time.
Occasionally when he leaned over the carriage and let its fingers stray through his stiff, gray-sprinkled hair, he lost himself in the feeble touch of its hands. It knew nothing. It did not care. It was almost as if it loved him without knowing him, and somehow he wanted to be loved like that. It relieved him of himself.
"Eh, you little beggar!" he would exclaim, floundering with the foolish word, and he would shake its clutching finger roughly.
As the baby stared at him, it made a happy sound. Its soul, sweet and a little blank, lay on the surface of its eyes, and there was something awesome in its stupid naked little looks, among the grown people who had forgotten how to be naked like that even with themselves.
Laurence flushed and his eyes dimmed with emotion. The softness and helplessness of the baby took his male self. He wanted to do something for it. He could not even buy it a sweet.
"Poor little thing! Poor little thing!" he murmured to himself. However, the definiteness of his responsibility toward it was a relief to him in the unsettled state of his life.
It was five months after Winnie's death before Laurence began frankly to consider his freedom and what he should do with it. It came over him suddenly and he knew that he must have been thinking of it before without having realized it.
It made him feel unreal and as if he did not even belong to himself any more.
The children had his mother and Winnie's parents, and required no sacrifice of him. He tried to stir himself to rebel against the children. He might go abroad and leave them and do some of the things which had been impossible before.
He could not do it. He did not want to enough. His disgust with himself gave him a sort of peace. He flowed out of himself in his despair, like a thing too full that has been relieved. His spirit was sodden. There was nothing he wanted. Nothing he wanted to do.
And yet he played with the idea of departing from his present life. He talked vaguely about himself in a way that disturbed Mrs. Farley's secretly growing peace of mind. She gave him side glances but she did not dare to show openly that there was anything to fear.
Laurence deliberately allowed his dress to become more and more untidy. When he met a woman in a bus or a car he was consciously impolite. Then all at once he saw himself inwardly and knew that women were troubling him, that he had not actually eliminated them in his desires.
So he went one day and found a prostitute and, as if it were to slay something in himself, let her take him to her room.
The experience did nothing for him. He came away feeling sore and beaten. He resented women. He was restless. Some unadmitted thing wanted its own in his life.
To his father and mother he began to talk more than ever about going to Europe.
Mrs. Farley never rebuked him when he talked of leaving her, but her mouth drew into a pucker and he could see that she cried.
He never gave her any comfort when she did this, but after he left her it was as though he had been through an illness which had taken his strength. Her tears had drained his determination. He did not care. He was dull. He wondered what was the matter with him.
When Laurence looked at his mother's stooped back in its dowdy cotton dress and the wispy hair clinging to the sweated nape of her yellow wrinkled neck, her verbal acceptance of his resolution to go abroad maddened him. He was not certain that he wanted to go and he required her articulate resistance to force him to it.
Instead, she persisted in speaking to others of "Laurence's departure," as though it were already a settled thing.
Mr. Farley said, "I don't know! I don't know! You know what you want, Laurence." He felt that no one but himself understood growing old. What his wife knew of old age he did not regard as knowledge. She was old without understanding it. He had stopped writing to Helen without ever having made any definite proposal to her. He felt obliged to send her checks for their boy, but if she did not acknowledge them, though it hurt him, he was glad. He tried not to think of her. His conviction of age was born of knowledge that was deep in his flesh, and so it was good. It was beyond doubt. It was his. He felt, without being able to express it, that truth was at the end of things. And that what he had come to now was truth because there was nothing more. It was the end of life. He felt that some day it would matter very little whether Laurence went abroad or not. Alice's restless eccentricity troubled Mr. Farley like a dream, but he knew that her unrest would grow weak like his own. She would know truth as he knew it.
When he left the living-room where he had been with Laurence and Alice, Alice said, "Papa Farley walks as though he were a hundred."
"Maybe he is."
"You're very cryptic, Laurence."
"I'm tired, Alice."
"Well, you haven't grown tired through exerting yourself on behalf of any one else," Alice said sharply.
"Nor have you, I think."
"I've done something for your children."
"I wish God had provided you with a family, Alice."
Tears rose to Alice's dull, ravaged eyes. She stared at him helplessly. "Good God!" she said at last. "And what are you?"
Laurence sat very still and unmoved, smiling, his pipe between his teeth, but his lip trembled in a sneer. "Heaven forbid that I should be expected to know!" he said.
Alice could not bear him near her. She went out, her heavy hips swinging with a kind of reluctant determination under her dingy rough cloth skirt, her broad, fleshy shoulders defiantly set.
Laurence noted, familiarly, wondering why it hurt him, how her wet, brown hair was half combed, tucked askew; and that her collar was off the band of her blouse at the nape of her neck, showing a patch of swarthy skin.
She rushed up the stairs and he could hear her slam the door of her room. He almost imagined he could hear her shriek as he had one time at night.
When Laurence talked to Alice about going away, she said, "Good God! Go anywhere! If you had had any guts you would have gone before this."
Mrs. Farley, hearing this, was afraid of Alice's violence, yet hoarded the consciousness of the weakness to which it confessed. Alice's face was already debauched with some secret passion. Mrs. Farley grew hard and strong against it.
"You mustn't mention Mr. Ridge in Alice's presence," she told Laurence one day. When she said it she looked strong and secret.
They were at table. Alice had not come down to dinner. May had been permitted the occasion to eat with her elders. In her small, dumb face, her eyes, turned on her grandmother, were timidly alive with interest. May's face was like a yellow pearl, melting in its coldness with the terrified warmth of her blue-black eyes.
She sat squirming in her chair, smoothing her dress down over her stomach, but, when her grandmother frowned at her, she undid herself.
"May, do you want——" Mrs. Farley leaned toward the child.
May knew what her grandmother thought. May was in terrible fear of being sent off to the toilet before she could tell what she had to say. "Aunt Alice talks to herself!" she blurted out shrilly.
Immediately she said it, the table surrounded by grown people melted away from her, and she was in herself, half drowned, as in a lake of pitch tingling with moonlight.
When May came out of herself, she saw her grandmother making knowing grimaces at Laurence, and Grandpa Farley looking ashamed and unhappy. Then May was sorry she had told about Aunt Alice.
"How do you know Aunt Alice talks to herself?" Laurence asked.
May looked at her father intensely, like a little surprised doe. Each experience to her was unique and absolute, like a forest creature's. There was no recognition in her seeing, and because all faces were strange to her she knew them better.
"I—I—I heard her—lots of times—in her room and when—when we were out walking." Her small hand continued to smooth her stiff dress over her hollow little belly, and she felt her ring burning a cold circle around her finger—ring that was a pain and a joy to her.
Mr. Farley, ashamed for Alice, played with his fork.
Mrs. Farley said, "Alice always had a terrible temper and got her feelings hurt needlessly, but I never imagined she would develop the crazy morbidness she has shown lately."
Mr. Farley could not bear the talk about pain any longer. He got up. "I think I'd send Alice her dinner," he said to no one in particular. He added, "I have some letters to write so I won't wait until the rest of you are finished."
When Mr. Farley was out of hearing, Mrs. Farley said, pursing her lips, "You know there was insanity in your father's family, Laurence."
"Yes. You told me once. Aunt Celia." Then Laurence frowned at his mother and nodded toward May. He hated his mother's attitude toward Alice, but, because he loathed it, he always defended it. What his instinct warned him against, he always refused to give up. When his mother, hoop-shouldered, weakly resistant, looked at him with her unyielding, self-enwrapped eyes, it was because of the very shudder which it gave him, that he hardened himself to take it. He was kind to her as an apology for his contempt.
Mrs. Farley turned to May. "Fold up your napkin."
May rolled the soft cloth in her little trembling hand. She had hoped when she spoke that her father and grandmother would somehow relieve her of Aunt Alice whom she carried inside her so oppressively, but now she knew they would not.
"Go upstairs and begin to undress yourself," Mrs. Farley said.
"Yes'm." May slid to her tiptoes. Her belly ached with a kind of sickish hunger. She went out into the hall to the foot of the stair, and laid her pale hand on the cold, slick rail which caught dim reflections from the bright open door of the dining-room. She would have to go up alone, past Aunt Alice's door. The dark did not want her because she had told. It was white and blind against her eyes.
Quivering in every limb she tiptoed up the steps.
When Laurence was alone with his mother he said, a little sharply, "Alice is inclined to be a busybody and to make herself generally obnoxious, Mother, but I don't believe her condition is as bad as you seem to imagine. You must remember that all old maids don't go mad."
Mrs. Farley kept her eyes away. "You don't see what I do. You heard May. Alice has had this curious obsession of trying to separate me from her father——" Mrs. Farley could not go on. She stood up and began to draw off the tablecloth to shake the crumbs out.
The gas jet hissed softly above them, and the white curtains before the open windows were like white stirring shadows against the thick night beyond.
Laurence began to talk of some indifferent subject and Mrs. Farley dared not bring him back to the thing of which she wished to speak.
One afternoon a fancy struck Laurence to abandon work and go out to Winnie's grave.
Summer was passing and it was half cold again. The sunshine was a pale fluid trickling across the withering grass of the cemetery. The maples were already beginning to turn and their ghostly scarlet leaves were like pale flattened flames. He stood by the grave and heard the hissing of the wind through the sunny grass, and the rattle of husks in the cornfield that ran along the cemetery wall.
The plowed fields beyond were purple plush, misted with a fire of green. Nearer, dirty brown sheep moved over the raspberry-colored stubble. Between Laurence and the sun was glowing foliage that seemed to burn with a secret.
The sight of the mound, beaten in by the autumn winds, and already somewhat sunken, made him sick.
When he went home he said to his mother, "I've some good news for you. I've given up the struggle."
Mrs. Farley did not look at him when he said this. She was startled and afraid to answer at once. They were in the kitchen, and, smiling a little, she stared before her into the sink, by which she stood.
The clear stream of water, dancing with light, hung like a thread of glass as it flowed slowly from the shiny spigot into the porcelain bowl. The back door was ajar and the bitter-sweet smell of wet, dying grass floated into the room.
"What do you mean?" she asked at last.
He had seated himself in a careless heap near the table. His eyes were bright, and, as he gazed at her with a sharp, pained look, seemed sightless. "Just that. I have decided there is no more escape from old age in Europe than at Coney Island."
Mrs. Farley was afraid of showing how relieved she was; so she asked, "Do your father and Alice know that dinner is nearly ready?"
Laurence rose and went out of the room to call them. With a shiver of wonderment, she looked over her shoulder to watch his broad back and rocking legs as he disappeared.
Now he'll get married again, she told herself.
Mrs. Farley did not know what was occurring, but she felt herself growing strong again in the house. Her husband was coming back to her. He tried to court her favor, and, without appearing conscious of it, she showed a growing toleration for him. Winnie's death, she explained to herself, had shocked them into their senses, and she was glad with a weak, malicious gladness which she would not admit. To escape the responsibility of her own emotions, she began to go to church more frequently. Having God on her side, in her humility she felt triumphantly cruel.
But as if to conceal her relief from herself, she developed an even greater passion for self-denial than she had hitherto shown. Mr. Farley felt her shabbiness as a reproach to him, and he begged her to buy clothes, but she was always able to think of some excuse for not doing so.
Tonight, when he came into the kitchen, he had a large pasteboard box under his arm. He could not persuade her to look at it.
Her hands were in the rushing sink-water. She would not turn round.
"If you have bought me a dress," she said, "I don't want it! You know how May needs school clothes and Laurence seems to take no responsibility whatever for her appearance, and there's that leaky ceiling in the bathroom that I have been trying to get mended for a month. You might have seen to some of those things before you spent money on clothes for me. Heaven knows it matters little enough to anybody whether I am dressed up or not." And she added, "If you insist on my having clothes you should have given me the money to buy them. I could probably have gotten something more economical and at least been sure that it fit."
Mr. Farley listened to her. He had a tired, apologetic smile, almost ashamed. He felt sorry for her and for himself. He was patient.
"Now, Mother, I think Laurence and I can promise you that the bathroom ceiling will be mended in a few days, and if you would only look at the clothes you could see whether they fit or not, and if they didn't I could exchange them."
"It isn't as if I didn't appreciate the thought——" She stopped, keeping him outside her—outside her vague, ungiving eyes. "I have to be practical for the lot of you," she said.
"Well, Mother, you can be as practical as you like about the house, but I want to keep you looking nice."
She was on the verge of retorting to him, but she restrained herself.
He felt that she was about to say something which he could not answer, and that it was time for him to leave her alone. He went out.
The room was still but for the swish of the brush that was making the white sink glow with cleanliness.
In Mrs. Farley's knotted, unsteady fingers, the back of the scrubbing brush bumped on the sides of the porcelain bowl. A fly buzzed fiercely in the luminous dark against the windowpane, then was still, like a spring that had fiercely unwound.
Mrs. Farley rested an instant. The brush slid from her fingers and clattered against a dish. She wiped her eyes with her apron. She was tired, but with weak patience, victoriously ungiving, she held out against life.