Shadow of Guilt (2 page)

Impulsively she sat down on the arm of my chair. “What’s the matter with her, anyway? I’m marrying Chuck, aren’t I? I’m doing all the right things. Why does she treat me as if I was a juvenile delinquent? Oh, George dear, I’m mad to go to that party. Couldn’t you fix it with her? Please!”

As her hand moved, shamelessly coaxing, over my hair, I remembered the blossoming look on my wife’s face when Don Saxby had been sitting at her feet, and along with the desire to make Ala happy came a perverse impulse to punish Connie for doing me out of my few priceless hours with Eve.

“I’ll fix it,” I said.

“Oh, George, you are an angel.”

Ala kissed me enthusiastically and was off in a cloud of white taffeta. I turned out the lights and went upstairs to my wife.

Connie was in bed. She’d left the reading light on, and her face under the gleamingly brushed hair looked pale and young. As I took off my jacket, I felt a great disinclination to start a scene but I forced myself to speak.

“I told Ala she could go to that party.”

My wife sat up. She was wearing a sexy black nightgown. It was all wrong for a Corliss. “Oh, George.” Her voice was tight with exasperation. “Won’t you ever learn I’m not an ogre? When I keep her from doing something there’s always a reason.”

I sat down on the edge of my bed and started to take off a shoe. “For heaven’s sake, she’s nineteen. She’ll be married in a month. What possible harm can it do?
”

“For one thing there’s Mr. Saxby. I hardly know him.”

“Hardly know him?” I felt the jump of irritation. “When you got him a job? When you appear to have been seeing him day in day out for months?”

“But that isn’t true. I helped him because I always try to help people when I can. But I’ve only seen him three or four times.”

“It didn’t look that way to me. It looked as if you had your head in a gas oven over him.”

Suddenly it had all gone wrong. We weren’t arguing about Ala any more. We had slid onto far more unfamiliar and dangerous ground.

For a moment she sat looking at me. Then in the tight voice she said, “Would it make any difference to you if I did have my head in a gas oven about Mr. Saxby?”

“Well—do you?”

Her hands caught at the edge of the sheets. “You hated the whole evening, didn’t you?”

“Please, for pity’s sake…”

“All you wanted was to be back sitting there in your office reading reports. I saw the whole evening going to pieces. So when Mr. Saxby showed up, I—I thought he might help.”

“Help? Help—how?”

“My God, just by being there. By being somebody new.” Her voice came as a cry from the heart. “What is it, George? I try. You can’t accuse me of not trying. What’s happened to us? I don’t understand.”

I realized I could use that moment as a springboard to talk about incompatibility and lay the groundwork for the divorce. But I knew in the same instant that I couldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t just the feeling of guilt. It wasn’t even cowardice. Almost for the first time in years she’d given me a glimpse of what went on inside and with it a crippling realization of the vacuum of loneliness into which, in spite of all her virtues, efficiencies and good intentions, she had managed to drift. Whether she knew it or not, she was as anchorless as I had been before I met Eve—and she had no one.

I made myself go over to her, and as I sat down on the edge of her bed, an utterly unwelcome memory came of how it had used to feel years ago to be sitting on her bed; the excitement, the pride, the—what? The triumphant astonishment that I, just a hick New England junior-junior executive in the Corliss combine, had been looked upon with favor by the boss’s beautiful daughter?

At that time, she and everything surrounding her had all seemed a dazzle of wonder to me—a dazzle which I had naively, youthfully, misinterpreted as love?

“Connie…” I put my arms around her and kissed her, trying not to think of Eve. For a moment she let me hold her, then she drew almost briskly away.

“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what got into me. It’s terribly late, dear. We’d better get some sleep.” Her hand was pushing me gently off the bed. “And, George, it’s all right about Ala. I’ll tell her in the morning.”

I hated her capitulation to be as total as that. “But if you really think…”

“No, it’ll be all right. I guess I’m too strict with her sometimes. Good night, George.”

Next morning at breakfast a huge box of yellow roses arrived for my wife. When I left for the office, she was arranging them with expert efficiency in a large white vase.

Ala went to the party. Connie was all graciousness about it but then spoiled everything by waiting up for her and letting me know next morning that she hadn’t got back until after three. “And almost drunk,” she said. Since anyone under twenty who took more than one Dubonnet was “drunk” to Connie, I paid little attention. Besides, everything about my life at Sixty-Fourth Street had become blurred into unreality. All I lived for was the thought of Thursday, and finally it arrived. Around six, after Eve had already left the office, I walked up Madison and across town in the Forties to her little apartment between Lexington and Third.

Eve lived in the shabbiest of brownstones, but she didn’t give a damn about luxury. After a poverty-stricken California childhood, shackled by ailing parents and a delinquent kid brother, followed by an even drearier marriage to a peevish invalid in Bakersfield who had lingered on for four grueling years, it was still an enormous thrill for her to be independent. Oliver Lord, her husband, had left her twenty-five thousand dollars insurance money, and with that safely in the bank and her salary from Consolidated she felt secure, which was all that mattered to her. The difference between her way of life and the Corliss one was as extreme as anything could be. Maybe that was one of the many reasons why, when I found her, I knew I had finally found myself.

Usually, for reasons of discretion, we’d eat a makeshift supper in her little apartment, but that night both of us were seized with a feeling of recklessness and Eve suggested we should go around the comer to a French restaurant. I was feeling an almost drunken exhilaration, and by the time we’d got to coffee a huge contentment had spread through me. As soon as Ala was married, I could ask for the divorce. It would be a tough time for all of us, but it would work. Nothing could stop it now. Improbably, at thirty-seven I had found my love—simple love for a simple woman who had nothing to offer but the astounding fact of herself.

Her hand, very small and pretty, was lying on the table. I put my own hand on it.

“Where shall we go for the honeymoon?” I said.

I knew I was breaking every rule; we were both superstitious about tempting providence. But I didn’t care, and as Eve turned quickly to me, her face warming with her wonderful, unexpected smile, I knew she didn’t care either.

“What’s your mood?” I said. “Europe? Mexico? What about the Caribbean? Jamaica? Tobago?”

“Tobago!” As she repeated the word, Eve’s eyes were sparkling as if Tobago were the Elysian Fields. She looked about two years old. Our faces were almost touching. I leaned toward her and kissed her.

That was when I heard a voice saying, “Good evening, Mr. Hadley.”

For a split second I froze. Then I sprang away from Eve. Don Saxby was standing in front of the table.

Of all the people in the world! I thought. But then I saw that his smile didn’t have a trace of an I’ve-caught-you-out smirk. It was a friendly, even diffident smile.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I was sitting across the room. I wouldn’t have come over, but—well, there’s something I think you ought to know. Ala’ll be here any minute. We’ve got a dinner date.”

I glanced at Eve. I could tell she was wishing the floor would yawn and engulf her.

“Mr. Saxby—er—Don,” I said, “this is Mrs. Lord. She works at my office. I mean, this is most embarrassing. It isn’t… well, I think I ought to explain…”

“Please don’t explain.” Don Saxby shifted his smile from Eve to me. “I’m extremely uninterested in other people’s business. Live and let live. That’s an old Saskatchewan proverb.” As he spoke, Ala came in and at once saw all three of us. She hesitated, obviously surprised, then she hurried toward us.

“Does she know?” asked Don Saxby.

“No,” I said. “For God’s sake, no.”

“Okay.”

Ala reached the table then.

“Hi,” I said. “Mrs. Lord and I have been getting a bite to eat after our labors at the office.”

Ala turned to Don Saxby. “Oh, dear, what a catastrophe. We’ve been caught out.” She looked at me dubiously. “George, you’re not going to tell Connie, are you?”

“I don’t get it,” Saxby said. “What’s a catastrophe and what’s Connie got to do with it?”

Ala gave an exaggerated shrug. “There was a ghastly scene after the party on Tuesday. I’m not supposed to see you again. If you knew the complications! I had to tell Connie I was going out with Rosemary Clark. Oh, dear…”

She was still watching me, her young face half apprehensive, half coaxing. Don Saxby was watching me, too. The smile in his eyes was as friendly as ever.

He said, “I don’t think Mr. Hadley’s going to rat on you, are you, Mr. Hadley?”

His eyes moved from mine after a second, but the second was long enough for me to realize that he was indicating not a threat, which he might well have done, but merely a neutrality pact. It was a plea I could hardly reject.

“Of course I’m not going to rat,” I said. “In fact, let’s have a drink and a little togetherness.”

We ordered drinks, relaxed and talked. Gradually I began to realize something which made the intricate situation more intricate. Ala was crazy about Don Saxby, and I was almost sure he was fascinated with her. He was mature enough, of course, to be able to play it cool, but Ala was far too young to hide anything. It was in her eyes, her voice, even in the line of her neck as she turned to talk to him. She had never looked even remotely like this with Chuck Ryson.

My God, I thought, where do we go from here?

As though on cue Don Saxby said, “It’s too bad Connie’s suddenly turned against me. I can’t really see why she should, but it’s loused up my plan.” He turned to Ala. “Remember that couple you met at the party—Tom and Marian Green? They were very taken with you. They’re giving a big party up at their place in Stockbridge this weekend. They called this morning and wanted to know if I wouldn’t bring you up tomorrow. Now I guess I’ll have to put them off.”

Ala looked at him, stricken. Then she turned to me. “Oh, George, couldn’t I go?”

“Hardly, if Connie objects to me,” Saxby said.

“But George, the Greens, they’re frightfully rich and respectable, with a daughter at Miss Porter’s, all the Connie things. I could tell her I was going out to Westport with Rosemary. Her parents are still in California. Rosemary wouldn’t tell. Connie would never know. Oh, George…”

As I looked at her, I realized that in the tangle of my own problems I’d never really come to grips with the great Ryson wedding, never really faced the fact that Ala was only nineteen, that she’d been pushed relentlessly for years toward an engagement which was resolving everything for Connie but perhaps was resolving nothing for her. What was Chuck to her, anyway, when she could look at Don Saxby like this? Just Connie’s choice? The good solid kid who’d worshiped her for years—the obvious future?

Saxby said, “I’d hate to do anything Connie wouldn’t like. She’s been wonderful to me.”

I looked at him, realizing that if he were a smooth operator he could so easily be forcing our hands, but he wasn’t trying at all. What’s more, Don Saxby wasn’t the point. He could have been Joe Doakes or Ted Jones or Sam Smith. I knew the idea of Ala going off to a week-end house party with a man, any man, would horrify Connie, but what the hell was wrong with it? What harm could it possibly do to give her a chance to find herself a little before Connie inexorably slammed the door of the wedding shut on her?

“Okay, Ala,” I said. “If you really want to go…”

I got back to Sixty-Fourth Street just before eleven. Connie had gone to Carnegie Hall with Milly Taylor, one of her committee secretaries who adored her. They arrived soon after me, Connie very grand and formal, Miss Taylor looking dowdy and, as always, a little too grateful.

“Hello, dear.” Connie crossed to my chair and bent to kiss me. An instinct, born of frayed nerves, warned me she was going to run her hand across my hair, one of her few demonstrative gestures. I was right. “I’m so sorry we’re late. Have you been home for hours?”

“Not too long,” I said.

“I do hope you’re not exhausted. Ala’s out with Rosemary Clark. Thank God she’s got at least one sensible friend. Darling, do fix Milly a nightcap.”

I fixed Miss Taylor her nightcap. Miss Taylor enjoyed her nightcaps. She settled down to it, babbling as usual about how wonderful Connie was. Around midnight, Ala dashed in exuberantly. Soon, with a smoothness which impressed me, she said, “Oh, Connie, Rosemary wants me to go out to Westport with her tomorrow for the weekend. Is that all right?”

“Of course, dear,” said Connie.

Soon Miss Taylor rose to leave, and Connie went out with her into the hall. Instantly Ala swept over to me.

“George darling, come up in about five minutes. Please.” She ran out into the hall, calling, “Good night, Miss Taylor. Good night, Connie.”

Connie came back into the living room.

I said, “I’m beat. I think I’ll go up to bed.”

“All right, dear. I’ll just straighten up down here. I hate leaving a mess for Mary in the morning.”

I went upstairs and tapped on Ala’s door.

Ala was still in the untidy stage. Not only were her jazz records scattered around the floor of the room, but there were all sorts of discarded garments strewn over chairs and tables. The chaos reminded me of how young she was—how absurdly young to be married in a month.

“George.” She jumped up from the bed where she had been sitting next to a dreadful old wool elephant which I’d given her the first year she’d come to us. Her eyes were round and shining with the wonder of everything. “Oh, George, you do like him, don’t you?”