Pacing up and down the living room he began an angry
rehearsal of the speech he would make to her when
she came in—
“So this is love!” he would begin—or
no, it sounded too much like the popular phrase “So
this is Paris!” He must be dignified, hurt, grieved.
Anyhow—“So this is what you
do when I have to go up and trot all day around the
hot city on business. No wonder I can’t
write! No wonder I don’t dare let you out
of my sight!” He was expanding now, warming to
his subject. “I’ll tell you,”
he continued, “I’ll tell you—”
He paused, catching a familiar ring in the words—then
he realized—it was Tana’s “I
tell.”
Yet Anthony neither laughed nor seemed absurd to himself.
To his frantic imagination it was already six—seven—eight,
and she was never coming! Bloeckman finding her
bored and unhappy had persuaded her to go to California
with him....
—There was a great to-do out in front,
a joyous “Yoho, Anthony!” and he rose
trembling, weakly happy to see her fluttering up the
path. Bloeckman was following, cap in hand.
“Dearest!” she cried.
“We’ve been for the best jaunt—all
over New York State.”
“I’ll have to be starting home,”
said Bloeckman, almost immediately. “Wish
you’d both been here when I came.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t,” answered
Anthony dryly. When he had departed Anthony hesitated.
The fear was gone from his heart, yet he felt that
some protest was ethically apropos. Gloria resolved
his uncertainty.
“I knew you wouldn’t mind. He came
just before lunch and said he had to go to Garrison
on business and wouldn’t I go with him.
He looked so lonesome, Anthony. And I drove his
car all the way.”
Listlessly Anthony dropped into a chair, his mind
tired—tired with nothing, tired with everything,
with the world’s weight he had never chosen
to bear. He was ineffectual and vaguely helpless
here as he had always been. One of those personalities
who, in spite of all their words, are inarticulate,
he seemed to have inherited only the vast tradition
of human failure—that, and the sense of
death.
“I suppose I don’t care,” he answered.
One must be broad about these things, and Gloria being
young, being beautiful, must have reasonable privileges.
Yet it wearied him that he failed to understand.
She rolled over on her back and lay still for a moment
in the great bed watching the February sun suffer
one last attenuated refinement in its passage through
the leaded panes into the room. For a time she
had no accurate sense of her whereabouts or of the
events of the day before, or the day before that;
then, like a suspended pendulum, memory began to beat
out its story, releasing with each swing a burdened
quota of time until her life was given back to her.
She could hear, now, Anthony’s troubled breathing
beside her; she could smell whiskey and cigarette
smoke. She noticed that she lacked complete muscular
control; when she moved it was not a sinuous motion
with the resultant strain distributed easily over
her body—it was a tremendous effort of
her nervous system as though each time she were hypnotizing
herself into performing an impossible action....
