house imaginable, and that they were idiotic not to
take it for another summer. It had been easy to
work themselves up to a sense of how hot and deserted
the city was getting, of how cool and ambrosial were
the charms of Marietta. Anthony had picked up
the lease and waved it wildly, found Gloria happily
acquiescent, and with one last burst of garrulous decision
during which all the men agreed with solemn handshakes
that they would come out for a visit ...
“Anthony,” she cried, “we’ve
signed and sent it!”
“What?”
“The lease!”
“What the devil!”
“Oh, Anthony!” There was utter
misery in her voice. For the summer, for eternity,
they had built themselves a prison. It seemed
to strike at the last roots of their stability.
Anthony thought they might arrange it with the real-estate
agent. They could no longer afford the double
rent, and going to Marietta meant giving up his apartment,
his reproachless apartment with the exquisite bath
and the rooms for which he had bought his furniture
and hangings—it was the closest to a home
that he had ever had—familiar with memories
of four colorful years.
But it was not arranged with the real-estate agent,
nor was it arranged at all. Dispiritedly, without
even any talk of making the best of it, without even
Gloria’s all-sufficing “I don’t care,”
they went back to the house that they now knew heeded
neither youth nor love—only those austere
and incommunicable memories that they could never share.
There was a horror in the house that summer.
It came with them and settled itself over the place
like a sombre pall, pervasive through the lower rooms,
gradually spreading and climbing up the narrow stairs
until it oppressed their very sleep. Anthony
and Gloria grew to hate being there alone. Her
bedroom, which had seemed so pink and young and delicate,
appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here
and there on chair and bed, seemed now to whisper
with its rustling curtains:
“Ah, my beautiful young lady, yours is not the
first daintiness and delicacy that has faded here
under the summer suns ... generations of unloved women
have adorned themselves by that glass for rustic lovers
who paid no heed.... Youth has come into this
room in palest blue and left it in the gray cerements
of despair, and through long nights many girls have
lain awake where that bed stands pouring out waves
of misery into the darkness.”
Gloria finally tumbled all her clothes and unguents
ingloriously out of it, declaring that she had come
to live with Anthony, and making the excuse that one
of her screens was rotten and admitted bugs. So
her room was abandoned to insensitive guests, and
they dressed and slept in her husband’s chamber,
which Gloria considered somehow “good,”
as though Anthony’s presence there had acted
as exterminator of any uneasy shadows of the past
that might have hovered about its walls.
