"Which brings me," I nodded, "to the matter in hand. I got a nephew. A brainy apple and a good kid. And you had a girl here—or on your call list—till about six months ago, named Marcia something—who's gone to live with Paul—he being the nephew."
Hattie said, "Yes," and waited.
I realized that a dozen years is a long time in which not to see anybody—a time long enough for a change, especially if one has quit drinking, married again, and so on and so on and so on. Hattie was afraid I was up to some sort of Presbyterian nasty-work—and she was ready to be disappointed. Ready not to help me call the cops on Marcia, so to speak, and ready to write off one more guy as a galvanized hypocrite.
I said, "In my frank opinion, Paul is not the sort who will be happy with an ex-houri. And I don't say that because he's my nephew and because I'm broad-minded about everybody but who-touches-me. Let me tell you what Paul's like—and how he came to confide in me on the situation—how he got into it—and how he's acting about it as of this afternoon."
"Tell me."
The longer she listened, the more she relaxed. When finally I stopped talking she walked over to the window, where she had stood when I came in. Her broadening buttocks and shoulders blotted out most of the river-gleam and the Jersey-glow, which you could see from there—but not the boat-hoots which came up around her, wallowing through the city, buzzing the middle ears of the millions. She stood there a while. The frame of faraway light blinked around her and the ferry boats and the freighters hollered pensively at each other. When she turned around, there were tears not only in her eyes but on her cheeks.
"If people only knew what I know!" She said it in a quiet voice with nothing of the brash timber of her usual speech.
"I'll buy that. I'll even add a big apothegm, Hat. People have found out so much, they are now obliged to learn the rest. The whole God-damned, agonizing, exalted rest of it."
She smiled in a woebegone way and got a Kleenex from a drawer. "It'll take thousands of years," she said. "They've been making the same mistakes, that long."
"Yeah. Meanwhile, we've got Paul and Marcia. I'm supposed to have lunch with them tomorrow. You can see—from what I've told you—why I think the thing will fold—painfully. There is, however, a chance it won't. A chance that depends on what sort of girl Marcia is, mostly. Which is why I came up here."