Fortune's Hand (32 page)

“Ellen, I've known that for a long, long time.”

“I think you must know everything about me.”

He smiled rather sadly. “We've been together long enough, haven't we, in our disjointed way?”

“Yes, yes, we know each other.” And she thought aloud, “He's not the Robb I knew. It is possible that I am not any longer the Ellen he married, but I do not think so. Whatever I am, good or bad, I believe I am the same as I have always been. And so what we had is gone. I didn't want it to happen, but it did. And I love you, Philip. And that's the whole story.”

“Not quite. A story has to have an ending.”

They lay together in a kind of dream. The clock chimed. The cat's bell tinkled when it came into the room, stared at them, and lay down.

“I didn't know you had a cat,” he said irrelevantly.

Like me, she thought, he does not know how to talk about this. He is aware of all the questions in our silence. There they are, hanging in the air, as visible as handwriting on a wall, if you have the courage to look.

And she said abruptly, “Julie has a roommate, a very bright girl, a lovely girl, I thought at once when I met
her. Last week she learned that her parents are going to be divorced. Now she's leaving college. Of course, that's a wrong decision, but she's crushed, isn't she? She's unable to make the right one. And her own parents did it to her.”

“In my work I see that too often.”

“Julie adores Robb. She's closer to him than to me.”

He was stroking her hair. A tremendous yearning rose within her.

“I would like you to stay with me for the rest of the night,” she said. “I would like to sleep with you.”

“Darling Ellen … Darling Ellen, not here. Not in Robb's house. Not until he knows.”

“Until he knows? Where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us here. We've taken our first big step. At least we know now where we are. The next step is yours. One day, in one instant, the answer will flash into your head, and you will see what to do.”

“And you will be there?”

“I will be there.”

He kissed her mouth, her hands, and her wet eyes. They clung together until the clock struck three. Then he got up, took his slicker, and went out.

“Let us hope,” Mrs. Vernon had wailed, “that we can all get through this in one piece.”

As to whether we are in one piece, Ellen thought, on reaching home after Penn's removal to Wheatley, we may be still in one piece but it's badly damaged. The day had been even more of an ordeal than it might have
been because Robb had insisted on asking Philip, as a special favor, to accompany them.

“I wish you wouldn't ask him, Robb,” she had said.

“I'm fagged out, can't you see? I've got sixteen problems on my mind.”

“I'm fagged out, too. It hasn't exactly been restful here,” she said. “I don't see why we need Philip, anyway. I really don't want him.”

“Enough,” he said crossly, “I'm going to ask him. It'll be good for Penn.”

She had not mentioned Philip's presence at the house that night, and once in the car, in the backseat with Penn, she waited to hear whether Philip would. But he did not. They had merely glanced at each other. She imagined that he must be feeling the same unsteadiness here in the car with Robb, and was thankful that her view of him was limited to the back of his head.

The two men had talked to each other all the way. About what, she did not know; she was in a fog.

A pair of policemen had brought Penn home. The kind woman had obviously pressed his clothes, which must have been soaked. He must also have had a solid breakfast because he was not hungry, although Mrs. Vernon had fussed over blueberry pancakes and everything else that he liked.

“I had a ride in his blue car,” Penn had said, pointing at the police car. “The radio was on all the time. It was nice.”

A few remarks of this sort were all he had to make about his adventure, so it was likely that this drastic removal from home would not matter much, either.

They had sat him down in the sunroom where he always enjoyed the swinging sofa and told him about the wonderful place called Wheatley.

“There's a swimming pool,” Robb said, “and you can go in it every day.”

“With my ball?”

Robb looked blank, but Ellen knew that the ball was a striped beach ball. Eddy had brought it long ago and it had never been used. It had lain in the corner of Penn's room. He simply liked to look at it.

“With your ball,” she said quietly. “And Fatty Bear and everything you want.”

“And TV?”

“They have TV, of course they do.”

“Will Rusty come, too?”

“Rusty can come with us when we visit you.”

Penn seemed to consider that. “No, not Rusty,” he decided. “Julie.”

“Yes, yes, Julie.”

I must not cry
, Ellen said silently.
Must not
.

And she saw that Robb's lips were compressed. He was gazing over Penn's head toward the far window.

Did ever parents have to endure, anywhere else, at any other time, such pain? Ah yes, they did, they do, and somehow they find the strength to do it. At least Penn was not protesting. The so-difficult child who could not bear the slightest change in routine had grown into an affable, slow youth who took life fairly easily. And for that, they had to be very, very thankful. Yet this was the day that would go down in memory as
the day of Penn's departure from home; not quite as hard to bear as the day of a funeral, it was close to it.

Arrived at Wheatley, he had seemed to be pleasantly indifferent. He shook all the extended hands, gave his name, and spoke his short sentences with good cheer. It was lunchtime, and he sat down willingly to enjoy it with his usual healthy appetite. Afterward there were to be games, and it would be best, Philip said, to leave him then.

A teacher accompanied him to the place of farewell on the front lawn. Neat and clean, for he liked to be so, Penn smiled at the three who comprised most of his little world. Only Mrs. Vernon and Julie were missing. It helped Ellen to recall that, much as he loved and followed Julie about, her absence really meant nothing much to him. Yet he had asked for her—

Most likely she had thought, he would not miss any of them too badly. These people here were kind. You could see that they were. Philip, moreover, had vouched for them.

Standing there before her son, she remembered what a beautiful infant he had been, more beautiful than Julie. Even now there was the charm of feature and of innocence on his face. She had wanted to put her arms around him, but that always annoyed him, and so with a lump in her throat so painful that she could barely swallow, she had merely patted him on the shoulder and said a few unemotional words.

“Good-bye, Penn. Be a good fellow. We'll be back soon.”

Robb had given him a chocolate bar. “Save it for
dinner,” he had said roughly, and turned away to hide his eyes.

“Good-bye, Philip,” Penn had called as they went toward the car. It was over. And here they were.

We would be helping each other this evening, Ellen thought, if there were not so much unfinished business between the two of us. At supper they had been sitting in silence until Mrs. Vernon, obviously with the intent of enlivening their mood, had tried to find the bright side.

“Sure we'll miss him terrible. Yes we will. Still, it'll be better for him, and to tell you the truth, for the rest of us, too.”

Mrs. Vernon, however, knew nothing about the unfinished business.… Nor did Robb know all of it. No doubt he was waiting for her to attack him about the “Mrs. MacDaniel” who had answered the telephone.

As if he had expected her, he looked up from his desk when she came into his home office.

“Let's make it short,” he said. “Let's save what little is left of our energy. I broke my promise. This was not like that other business, though. Not at all. You ought to know that. I don't even know her name and I don't want to. It was a crazy impulse. I'm not sure that makes any difference to you.… But I hope so and I'm terribly sorry. I apologize. It happened. What else can I say?”

“I suppose that says it all. It's strange, though, to hear you talk this way. You are not ordinarily a man of so few words.”

“Ellen … I'm just terribly tired.”

Indeed, he looked miserable. The dark semicircles below his eyes made him suddenly old, as he might be thirty years from now, or perhaps not even then. Suddenly she was sorry for him, and sorry, too, about her little dig.

“All right. As you say, it happened.”

She had confused him. He had expected a terrible protest, or more than that, a tirade such as she had given him once before.

“You act as though it means nothing to you,” he said as if he were the injured one.

“What do you want of me? I can't stop you. Shall I weep and implore you? I'm long past that.”

“The strange part of it is that men do it all the time. Not that it's right, but they do.” Robb spoke as if he were musing to himself. “And since their wives don't know about it, life goes on uninterrupted, and everybody is happy.”

“You don't know who's happy and who isn't. You and I look happy, I'm sure. Yet how far apart we are! But politely, so politely that maybe you haven't even noticed how far.”

“Not noticed! Why, you've been fighting me for years. Everything I've wanted to do, you've fought. Every step of the way. You disapproved of people I liked. You made an issue of this house. You—”

At this Ellen had to interrupt. “I haven't said one word about this house from the day we moved in, until we argued three days ago.”

“You didn't have to say anything. Oh, you've smiled, you've gone about your work, and that's a very fine
thing. But I've sensed your mood.” His voice rose. He had not realized before how much resentment he had hidden from himself. “I left the airport in such a state that it's a wonder I didn't drive the car off the road. And it wasn't all because we were saying good-bye to Julie.”

“No, it was because of that land out there.” And she waved toward the window, beyond which a gentle twilight was falling.

“You needn't worry anymore about that land. I'm not buying it.”

“A wise decision,” Ellen said quietly.

“No, I'm not the one who made it. Events did it for me. The hurricane. There was a mudslide at the new building site down near the Gulf. The whole damn hill came down over us.” Robb stood up, and in great agitation, paced the small room. “We'll never be ready in time. We're bound to lose some of our leases, maybe most of them.”

His arm swept the desk, knocking a jar of pencils to the floor. There was something pathetic about the sight of him on his knees, picking them up.

“You've had too many troubles at one time,” she said. “Penn, and your lady at the hotel, and now this. Why don't you go for a walk? You always feel better afterward. We can talk about things later.”

When he was gone, she sat for a little while, feeling a chill of loneliness. Penn's loud voice was no more. Mrs. Vernon's television was at the other end of the house. She stood up and went downstairs where books warmed the library. For an instant, she thought of calling
Philip; and then, deciding that this was certainly not the time, instead she called Julie, who would want to know how everything had gone today.

“I couldn't help crying a little this morning,” Julie said. “Poor Penn! But now that I think it over, I see it will be better for him, and for the rest of us, too.”

“You sound like Mrs. Vernon, darling.”

“There's nothing bad about that. Still, I know how hard it must be now, at the start, for you and Dad. And I am so thankful you have each other. I think of you so often, especially since what happened to my roommate's parents.”

Dear Julie. Dear, unselfish, happy, ignorant Julie. How could a mother reply to her except with loving trivia about the college paper and a new winter jacket? That being done, and having said good-bye, Ellen sat still at the telephone, with her pounding head in her hands.

Robb's voice roused her some minutes later. He came into the room with a loud demand and a piece of paper in his hand.

“What's this doing on the floor in the coat closet?”

It was an envelope addressed to Philip Lawson. Apparently it had held a telephone bill. On the back, in a hurried scrawl, was the MacDaniels' address.

She tried to think. Of course it had dropped out of his pocket when he had hung up the wet slicker. Robb was standing above her waiting. He had never before seemed so tall.

“Why, I just don't know,” she began.

“Don't know? You don't know he was here in this house?”

“I meant—he was here, of course I know that. I told you he was. I just don't know about the envelope.”

She was making a fool of herself. And why was she afraid? Sooner or later, it had to come out. It needed to come out.

“You didn't tell me, Ellen. When was he here? And why the secrecy?”

She stood up. At least when she stood, he did not tower above her. “I called him for help when Penn was lost. You were away,” she said as her thoughts took shape. “You were having your good time when I called you, and that—that woman answered my call.”

“Don't rub that in, Ellen. It has nothing to do with this. I must have been in the shower, and no one told me you had phoned, or I would have called right back. At least I admit what I was doing, and I apologized. I advise you to tell me what you were doing.”

“I told you—”

“You gave me a detailed history about Rusty, and his mother, and the police, but you never mentioned Philip Lawson, and I want to know why. It's also very strange that all the way to Wheatley and back, he never mentioned it, either.”

“He never mentioned it because it was unimportant. Not that his help was unimportant—I don't mean—” She was stumbling over her words again. “Don't shout at me,” she said.