A Charmed Life (20 page)

There was a tiny pause. “I couldn’t,” said Martha faintly. “Not to dinner.” “Because of the Murphys? Don’t be crazy,” said Jane. “You don’t have to be afraid of
them.
Miles is still in love with you. Everybody says so. That’s why he bought the portrait.” “That isn’t
true,”
Martha’s voice protested. “And if it were, it would be all the more reason….” “Not to come?” said Jane. “I don’t see that at all. He’s settled down now. He’s not going to
do
anything unless you encourage him. Anyway,” she added, “they may not come. Because of the weather. And
somebody’s
got to eat that roast.” “No,” said Martha. This firmness was not like Martha, Jane said to herself. “Is it John?” she ventured. “Did he tell you not to come?” Martha remained silent. “He doesn’t have to know,” remarked Jane. “You’ll be home before he is.” “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” cried Martha in a horrified voice. “Well, then, tell him after he gets back. Tell him you felt lonely. Why shouldn’t you go out to dinner if he does in Boston?” “I don’t know,” said Martha. “I must say, it does sound rather silly when you think about it.” “Then you’ll come,” said Jane. She felt Martha hesitate. “No,” Martha said finally. “I’d better not. He might call me, from Boston, and it would worry him if I weren’t here.” “He calls you up,” exclaimed Jane, “when he’s just gone for the day?” “Sometimes,” said Martha, proudly. Jane considered this strange; to her mind, it argued a lack of security. “Oh, come anyway,” she said. “He probably won’t call. I’ll have Warren stop by for you at seven. Don’t forget to bring your book; we’ve only got two copies, unless Harriet Huber finds one. And bring some herbs from your garden.” “No,” pleaded Martha, but Jane rang off. She was certain Martha would come, to the play-reading, if not to dinner, and probably to both.

But as soon as she felt satisfied that she had won her point, a slight uneasiness beset her. She was not sure that Warren would approve of Martha’s coming to dinner; they had agreed that it would be better for the Sinnotts to arrive afterward, so as not to embarrass the Murphys. To Jane’s mind, John’s absence altered everything: Martha would just be an extra woman who could be slipped in next to Harold Huber, like somebody you were having for charity. But Warren might not see it that way; he might feel that Jane had betrayed him. And if he ever found out about the telegram … ! In the stuffy phone booth, Jane felt suddenly queasy; she rested her head against the telephone and tried to collect herself. Her eyes wandered sidewise out into the drugstore; the druggist had his back turned and the soda-fountain girl was reading a comic book. But Jane had the conviction that they had just been watching her and listening to her conversation. Against all reason, the notion fastened itself on her that the whole village knew that Warren’s mother was dead. She drove her station wagon very slowly out toward the cleaning woman’s house; two cars passed her, as she crawled along, and again she felt that eyes had turned to study her.

There was nothing unusual in that, she assured herself; she was a bit of a curiosity in the village and people always stared. They thought she was a character, just because she was sensible and easygoing. Her ideas made people laugh, and she did not mind; all her brothers had teased her, and in boarding school and college, she had been looked on as a card. People laughed at her because she was innocently logical. She was being logical, now, about Warren’s mother; she had thought it out, step by step, reasonably, as she did all her ideas. Nobody could possibly know about the telegram (that was all her imagination); the Western Union man was a typical closemouthed Yankee who would not tell anybody anything, not even the time of day, unless he had authorization. There were dozens of stories about him.

Jane’s heart began to race. She had overlooked one factor. Supposing the Western Union man telephoned to make sure the telegram had reached them? She had no way of knowing whether the phone was still off the hook. Faintness overtook her. She was not used to deception, she realized, except in small things; up to now, she had only told white lies and did not mind being caught in them. In fact, it was rather fun to let Warren catch her in an untruth; quite often she would give herself away, with giggles, like a kid playing hide-and-seek, just to let him pounce on her, the way he had last night.

But now, for the first time, she recognized, she had done something that Warren might take a grave view of. He might not think it was funny or delightfully in character for Jane to be suppressing this telegram. And once she started lying, she would have to keep it up. If she did not produce the telegram the minute she got home, she would have to claim she had never got it, no matter what, assuming she was questioned. Her original plan had been to “discover” the telegram in their mailbox early tomorrow morning, when she could come to the village on some pretext. Warren, she reckoned, would be too busy packing and trying on the suit to press any inquiries about why it had not been delivered earlier. And by the time he got back from Savannah, it would be too late to follow it up; nobody would remember. Only two people, Jane reasoned, had seen her get the telegram this morning, and one of them, after all, was an idiot, who did not know one day of the week from another. The real problem, she now decided, was the Western Union man, who was the old-fashioned, conscientious type. If the phone was still off the hook and he kept trying to get them, he might send a man out from the phone company or even drive out himself in his old Ford to deliver it in person. Or would he check with the postmistress, to find whether the Coes had got their mail? That would make three people who knew. And what if Warren’s relations, down there, got worried when they did not hear from him and put a tracer on the telegram?

Jane stopped the car by the roadside. She was shivering all over. This was what it felt like, apparently, to embark on a career of crime. It was not worth it; she could see that at once. Honesty was the best policy. Whoever said that was right. She marveled, sitting there, at the women who made a practice of deceiving their husbands. How did they do it? She thought of the New Leeds wives who had had clandestine love affairs: Ellen Gray, in the old days, and Martha, when she was married to Miles. She could understand their doing it once, but to keep it up, as a regular thing? Her teeth began to chatter, as her mind stole amazedly back over the course of romantic history: Queen Guinevere, Mary Stuart—living every hour in the fear of discovery. How had they done it? She had never approved, much, of adultery; the fun of marriage was sharing things with your mate. But she had never before considered how much courage adultery took, far more than the act repaid—days of suspense for a few seconds of pleasure. She had always thought of herself as a hardy soul, but now she saw that she had never really dared. Daring, she cogitated, was a matter of taking chances. It was like statistics or gambling; you had to compute probabilities. And there was always the unforeseen, the little thing you overlooked that would catch you up in the end—what they called contingency. She herself already felt like a different person, just for thinking of deceiving Warren, or rather she felt the same, but everything else had changed and become somehow slippery, like when Alice went through the looking-glass—into the fourth dimension, Warren said; that mathematician had explained it to him.

Devoted as she was to Warren, she had always found his mathematical theories a little bit boring, and she noticed that other people did too. But now she perceived that there was a human side to all that: people who were afraid began to count and reckon, just as she was doing, and they were faced, straight off, with infinity. And when you were afraid, something queer happened to time. Looking at her watch, she found that only ten minutes had passed since she left the drugstore, though it seemed like an hour at least. Her thoughts, evidently, were racing like her pulse; that was what it must mean to live a double life, like Paul.

And yet, she reflected, it was not anything wrong she was contemplating. To keep Warren in ignorance was the kindest and most sensible thing. It would be almost a sacrifice, on her part, to go through all this anxiety so that he could have a few hours’ peace. The only way it could hurt Warren not to know would be if the story got out that he had had a party the night after his mother’s death. But he could always say that he didn’t know, which would be true. Furthermore, it was not a party, exactly, but something educational. After all, it was a
tragedy
they were going to read, which would put Warren right in the mood.

A smile twitched at Jane’s lips; her eyes goggled. She felt tickled by her own power of reasoning. Other people would say she was outrageous, but it was only the truth she was thinking. Wasn’t tragedy supposed to be a cathartic? She put on an innocent expression and arranged her plastic hood attractively over her tawny hair. A brand-new idea had come to her. She was going to the Western Union office and send a telegram for Warren to his old aunt: “Impossible leave today because of storm. Taking plane Savannah tomorrow morning. Grief-stricken. Love to all.” But as she considered this message, she saw that it would not do. It would satisfy the Western Union man, but the dating would give her away. Warren’s aunt would be bound to let the cat out of the bag by asking Warren about the storm; old people like that were always interested in weather conditions. Jane pondered. Lying was not easy, when you had to cover your tracks. But it stimulated your brain, like doing a chess problem: you had to think ahead to all the possible moves on the other side of the board. The easy thing would be to go home and tell Warren now and get it over with, but she could not bear to give up, now that she was started. A solution would come to her; solutions always had. The point was to word a telegram so that it could sound as if it had been sent tomorrow, in case Warren ever saw it, and at the same time to fix it so that the Western Union man would not wonder…. Just as she was despairing, the light suddenly broke: she would send a night letter! “Warren taking plane. He will arrive Savannah, today, Saturday, p.m. and will phone you from airport. Both of us very sad to hear of mother’s passing. Condolences to all. Signed, Jane Coe.” She counted over the words to make sure it was long enough not to surprise the Western Union man that it was going as a night letter; luckily, her small economies were famous in the village. He would not think a thing of it, unless she started explaining. “Never apologize, never explain,” she said to herself sagely, starting up the engine.

Tomorrow morning, when she brought Warren the bad news, she would tell him that she had just sent that message for him, from the Western Union office, and he would say, “Wonderful, dear,” as he always did when she thought ahead for him. Then, even if his aunt should happen to show him the telegram, Warren would be too hot and bothered to notice the NL, for night letter, up among the symbols at the top. If he did, he would think it was a mistake.

In the little telegraph office, heated by a station-stove, Jane lost her usual aplomb. The Western Union man in his brown buttoned sweater unnerved her; he was so silent and poky. He did not make a sound as she wrote out the message for him, printing in big letters. She felt she ought to say something as his cracked brown finger moved laboriously over the yellow sheet she handed him, marking each word while she waited, sweat breaking out on her brow. Finally, he looked up over his glasses and scratched his head. “Sure you want to send it this way, Mrs. Coe?” he said, with a sharp look. Jane nearly passed out; she felt just as she used to when she was called into the head mistress’s office. “As a night letter, you mean?” she blurted out. “Yes … I think so…. It’s cheaper, and the person it’s going to will be out all day anyway. When they get it, you see, today will be tomorrow, or the other way around.” She could have killed herself when the telegrapher, nodding his old head slowly back and forth like a rocker, finally saw fit to reply. “That’s your business,” he observed. “Tweren’t that I was thinking of.” He got up from his stool and meandered over to the window. “Looks to me,” he said, “like a three-day blow. Doubt Mr. Coe will get a plane tomorrow morning.” Relief made Jane giddy; she nearly laughed aloud. “Why don’t you add, ‘Weather permitting’?” she suggested brightly, pointing to the telegram. “Put it after ‘plane.’ ‘Weather permitting, he will arrive Savannah …’?” The telegrapher considered. “That’s it,” he nodded. “Don’t cost you no more.”

Jane bolted out of the office. He was a rare one, all right, she said to herself, and he held her in the palm of his hand, if he only knew it, like that awful creature in
Madame Bovary.
She was still shaking when she drove up to the cleaning woman’s house and parked for a minute to steady her nerves before having to face another native. The way they watched you steadily, without saying a word, seemed to her suddenly sinister, like being surrounded in the jungle. She longed for a confidante, to whom she could explain herself, but Warren was the only person who would understand and sympathize. Some day, she decided, she would tell him what she had gone through this morning, and they would laugh about it together; it would become one of Jane’s exploits. “Do you remember the time your mother died?” she could hear herself begin, and her face, in the car mirror, at once assumed a sheepish bad-girl look, with the lower lip thrust out and the long chin dropped, while the big blue eyes rolled appealingly, ready to dance, if only a partner invited. She was two people, really, as Warren had delightedly discovered, first on their honeymoon, and then again and again, just as he thought he had her settled. There were big Jane and little Jane, stern Jane and guilty Jane, downcast Jane and blithe Jane—she knew this from scolding herself as she used to scold her doll. And it was bad Jane, she recognized, who had the upper hand this morning. She had just done something
awful.
But now that she admitted it boldly, gazing hangdog at herself in the mirror, she promptly felt much better. Fear left her; some day she would confess to Warren and that would take care of remorse. She honked the horn for the cleaning woman and waited, at the wheel, unflurried. There was plenty of time for everything, so long as she took it easy and reminded herself that nothing mattered, really. She could still get Will Harlow, and if she didn’t, so much the worse. Moreover, if she was lucky, she might catch the high-school principal at lunch, when she went to get the glasses.