Cancel All Our Vows (22 page)

He heard the whisper of her step in the grass, and she came up behind him and he felt her hand on his shoulder. “Ah, Fletch. Fletcher, darling.” Her voice was thick and she was crying. Whore hand on his shoulder.

He spun and struck blindly at her with all his strength, struck with his open hand, not saying a word or making a sound. The hard slap rang loud in the night. His palm and fingers stung. It knocked her down and she sprawled back onto her shoulders, her skirt going up, her long legs scissoring in the moonlight, and he thought that her legs had looked like that to the Rice boy. He leaned his shoulders against the side of the house, holding his stinging fingers tightly.

She lay still on the grass on her back for a moment and then pushed herself up into a sitting position and leaned over to one side and spat, and he knew that he had cut her mouth.

“Fletch, darling. Darling, you’ve got to listen to …”

“There’s not one damn word you can say. Not one.”

“But I can’t let you think that I … that I …”

“Did you let him? Did it happen? Isn’t that the only thing you can say?”

“Yes, but …”

“Yes, but it only took thirty seconds, darling, so it really
doesn’t count,” he said in a mincing imitation of her voice.

“But you don’t understand. You don’t understand!”

“What the hell is there to understand? For Christ’ sake, are there degrees? Middle-aged bitch getting her thrills from school kids. You’re a prize, you are! How did you get him to do it? A little cash on the line, maybe?”

“Don’t,” she moaned softly. “Oh, don’t!” She spat awkwardly again, and gagged.

“Don’t soil our lovely marriage with my nasty words? This is what gets me. You did it with my kids about sixty feet away from you. That’s fine. Educational for the little rascals. We’re done, Jane. Completely and utterly and finally done.”

He watched her get awkwardly to her feet. The fine clear co-ordination of her body seemed to have deserted her utterly. “You’ve got to listen to me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Jane. I haven’t got to listen to you. I haven’t got to do a damn thing to you or for you or with you. I haven’t a single obligation left, as far as you are concerned. My obligation is to the kids. Are they home?”

“I turned out their lights and I was walking out when I heard Martha screaming.”

“It’s a good thing. Now listen to me. I don’t want them to know or suspect what their mother has done. You understand that?”

“Of course, but …”

“Shut up and listen. I’ll move my stuff into the study. We’ll try to act normal until I decide exactly what can be done. I’m going to get custody of them. You aren’t fit, and any court will tell you that. I’m making that kid correspondent, and I’m going to make damn sure that if you try to fight it, Martha will testify. The best thing you can do is accept it as quietly as possible.”

“Fletcher!”

“Shut up! I’ve never felt so damn dirty in my life.”

He walked away from her and into the house and went directly into the bedroom. He decided it would be easier to carry his clothing to the study-guest room in a suitcase. He took the suitcase off the closet shelf as she came in.
Her face was chalky and expressionless. The left side of her mouth was puffed where the lips were split and his fingers had left raised red stripes on her cheek.

He opened the suitcase on a chair and pulled out the top dresser drawer. He heard the creak as she sat on his bed.

“I just want you to hear how it happened. At first he was fresh. And then he apologized and I thought we were friends. I was lonesome for you. I drank too much and I was getting sick and he came out and said I should swim. The world was going around and around.”

“At least spare me the details. I don’t want a play by play.”

She made no sign that she had heard him. “He swam out into the lake with me. I felt all funny and dreamy and apart from everything, like I didn’t exist. He kissed me. I let him do it because I didn’t think there would be any harm in that, and I was drunk and I was mad at you and I thought by kissing the boy I was getting even with you. But I couldn’t think clearly.”

“Will you, for God’s sake, shut up!” he said, feeling a crazy anger. He slammed a stack of shirts into the suitcase and saw, under where they had been, in the drawer, the cracked leather of the holster and the blue oiled steel of the ugly and deadly-looking nine millimeter Mauser he had bought from a GI in Antwerp. The two clips lay beside the holster. He stood in a moment frozen in time.

“He kissed me again and again and he got the top of my suit down around my waist. He had his hands on me and I was scared and in a funny way it made me helpless to have him touching me, and in some funny way in my mind it seemed like it was you, so that I was half scared and half thinking it was all right because I was drunk, very drunk and floaty.”

The dreadful words and the dreadful flat voice went on and on. He watched his hands slide the automatic out of the holster and take a clip and slip it up until it clicked in place, with a small, evil, oiled sound. He remembered that it was double action and you did not have to work the slide like on the forty-five, but merely pull the trigger. He turned and aimed it at her where she sat there, misty on
the bed, hazy in his vision. And he noted with mild wonder that the barrel of the automatic was as steady as if it rested on rock.

She looked at the gun and looked at him. He knew that she was terrified of guns. It was perhaps the only thing in the world that scared her.

She looked back at the gun and she licked her lips and said, “Maybe you have to do it. I don’t know. Maybe it is something you have to do and should do, but I’m going to go right on talking until you pull the trigger, Fletcher. Because the only thing I have left is to tell you what happened.”

“If you keep talking you’ll force me to do it.”

She looked into his eyes, ignoring the gun. “You have to understand about my having the crazy idea that it was you. Because, you see, nobody else has ever had me but you. You know I was a virgin when we were married. And in fifteen years there was never anybody else but you, which I think you know in your heart if you think for a minute. So, being drunk, I guess that was why anybody touching me had to be you. And yet I had that crazy fear. But I couldn’t do anything. He got my suit all the way off out there in the lake.”

He knew he was breathing through his open mouth. He could hear the harsh quick sound of it. Everything in the world was blurred but her eyes.

“He towed me in, swimming along, and he kept his hands on me and it kept me in that funny helpless floaty feeling. If he’d let me alone for a minute I would have come out of it. And in the shallow water he picked me up and took me over to the raft. Then we were in darkness and, oh, my darling, I knew then that it was you as he was against me, and then I touched the back of his head and the hair was all wrong and it brought me out of it. I fought him, Fletcher. He’s terribly strong. I fought hard and I found a heavy glass tumbler I’d dropped off the dock and I hit him with it as hard as I could, twice, and then he threw it away after he twisted it out of my hand. He had my arm pulled across me like this and I hit him with my free hand and he pinned that too, and pinned me with his weight so I couldn’t move. While I was fastened down
there, and it was horrible, like animals fighting in the dark, he moved and … I felt it happen. It was a hard pain, and he had done it and I couldn’t fight any more. I lay there like I was dead and he did what he wanted to do to me and went away from me. I wanted to die. I wished I was dead. It was like my whole world had ended. It wasn’t his fault, any more than mine. He thought I … was a different sort of person. And then he was ashamed of doing it. I had to face you and come home with you. And afterward I cried, you remember, and if you had asked me why I was crying then, I would have had to tell you. And this morning I knew that I couldn’t ever tell you, and I knew a thing like that would never happen again, and so I thought I would make it up to you for all the rest of your life. Doing little things for you. And maybe tell you when we were both old. Now I’ve said all of it, and I guess if you have to … do it you better do it quick because I don’t think I can sit here any more without crying again, and I don’t want to be crying when you … do it to me.”

She looked at him steadily and gravely. He looked down at the gun, turned and released the clip and dropped it in the drawer, put the gun back in the holster and snapped the strap.

He finished packing the suitcase, closed it and snapped the locks. She was lying back across the bed, looking up at the ceiling.

“Are … you still going to … divorce me, Fletch?”

He paused in the doorway. “What else can I do? I can’t live with you. I can’t look at you without remembering that little scene. I can’t ever touch you again. I get sick at the idea.”

She neither looked at him nor answered. He went into the study and stripped the cover off the studio couch and made it up. There was no need of a blanket. The still night had folded warmly and wetly around the house. He undressed and went to bed with the study door closed. The moon made a pattern on the rug. She could have screamed, couldn’t she? No, that story was full of holes. She’d wanted it, and maybe she’d put up a little scrap for the sake of appearances. But not much of a scrap. Roosters chase chickens who never seem to be running as fast as
they can. Once rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it. Hell, she knew which side of the bread they put the butter on. Make him think it was a form of rape, and you can go right on having your cake and eating it too. Take your pick of all the strong, eager young men. And let the gullible husband keep you in pretty clothes and pay for your nice house. What kind of a fool was he supposed to be?

The liquor surged around in his head. Oh, a dandy party! The finest of the social season. Sunday afternoon the Wyants entertained a small group at their new home on Coffeepot Road. During the evening the Wyants made plans for their pending divorce.

The memory of the Chicago redhead drifted back across his mind. He forced it away quickly. Not the same sort of thing at all.

Chapter Thirteen

Fletcher drove to the office through the first glaring, blinding heat of a new day. This heat wave was never going to break. The world was going to be like this from now on.

Breakfast had been particularly hideous. Awakening to the realization of what had happened the night before had been bad enough. But breakfast had been enormously worse. She had tried to cover the discoloration of her face with powder. When he had come out to breakfast she had said, “Good morning.”

He had merely glanced at her, making no response, feeling a vague shame not only for his own reluctance to respond, but also because of the memory of melodrama, that incredible scene, both passionate and ridiculous. And he knew that he had come perilously close, in his hurt and disappointment, to pulling the trigger. Had he done it, it would have been in the spirit of a child smashing a favorite toy because it had pinched his finger.

The half-drunk melodrama of the night before now seemed ludicrous in the hot bright light of the new morning. He had no idea of what to say to her, and so he said nothing. When her back was turned he looked cautiously at her. She wore a faded cotton dress and her hair was not as neat as it usually was in the morning. As she took the few steps between stove and sink she moved heavily. Watching her, he had the weird feeling that there were two women involved, two Janes. And he should hold this one close and they could comfort each other, and both despise the evil the other one had done.

When Judge and Dink came to breakfast he tried to simulate a touch of morning cheer. He saw that Jane was doing the same thing, and from the reaction of the children,
their quick puzzled glances, he knew that they were both overdoing it.

“Gee, what happened to your face, Mom?” Judge asked.

“I tripped over one of the deck chairs in the dark last night, dear.” Her voice was quick and gay and her eyes were dead.

“What was all that yelling?” Dink demanded. “You and those people were making an awful lot of noise.”

“I guess everybody was just having a good time,” Fletcher said.

Dink gave him a quick sharp look. “They sounded mad to me.”

The children ate with unfamiliar solemnity. Whenever Fletcher was looking down at his plate, he could feel them looking at him. When he looked up, though, they would be busy with their food.

When he got up to go the children were still there, so he went around to Jane’s chair, bent and kissed her cheek and said, “Good-by, dear. ’By, kids.”

Jane got up quickly and almost ran out of the kitchen, making a thick strangled noise in her throat as she left the room. It reminded him of Dink on Saturday morning.

“What’s wrong with Mom?” Judge demanded.

“She … just doesn’t feel very good today. I want you both to be good. Be quiet and don’t nag her. It won’t hurt you to spend a quiet day, both of you.”

Strangely, there was no objection. He kissed Dink, rumpled Judge’s hair and glanced back at them as he left the kitchen. They both sat there looking at him, and he thought he saw the light of accusation in their eyes.