How Like a God

III

What if Mrs. Jordan had heard him come in? Or even seen him? She might very well have been standing by the grill, her hands full of milk bottles, when he went up the stoop. His hand still on the rail, he half turned about there on the stairs, undecided. Timid, futile, vengeless, actionless...

There has not been one major experience in your life in which you were the aggressor. The Davis affair was her doing. It was so again with Lucy Crofts. And each crisis in your economic and business life, which means the Carr Corporation, has been so little guided by you that you might as well have been at home asleep. Throughout the first months, and even years, you served as an information channel between Dick and the intricate parts of the vast organism he was getting into his fist. For that function you were well-fitted and you fulfilled it excellently.

Dick would get in from the Carrton plant usually on Friday evening, late, and you and he would go to the café on Sheriff Street, because he said he could relax there more easily than at home.

Dick, having ordered a three-inch steak, would gulp a stein of beer without stopping, lick the foam from his lips, settle back in the big leather chair and sigh contentedly. By the time the steak arrived you would be reading from sheets of memoranda neatly arranged on the table before you.

Meanwhile, the social side of life he entirely ignored, refusing even to appear at Erma’s Sunday teas, and you were pulled along with him.

“You’ll both die of ingrown dispositions,” Erma would observe indifferently. “Damon and Pythias, victims of the Iron Age.”

“Go on and deposit your dividend checks,” Dick would reply with equal indifference.

Gradually, after Dick’s return to Cleveland, you began to find time on your hands. One evening you looked through the little red memorandum book and found Mrs. Davis’s Cleveland address, placed there six years before from the only letter you had ever received from her.

The next afternoon you telephoned, and there she was. You were made aware that you were more deeply interested than you had suspected by the excitement.

Would she — that is — how about going out to dinner?

“Well, you see, I’m afraid I can’t. There are so many things always to do, and I always eat dinner at home with my husband...”

Idiotically, you asked after Mr. Davis’s health.

You perhaps remember so vividly because it was so characteristic of your absurdity, your futility. There have been other examples, only more extended, like the winter devoted so completely to Lucy Crofts, or like the summer, only four years ago, which you and Erma spent at Larry’s ranch.

It was Erma’s idea, suggested by a rodeo she saw in New York, and impelled of course by her constant restlessness. She and Larry seemed to hit it off; she was given the best horse on the place, and usually she was out riding the range with him. At times you suspected that he was being a bit harried, but you had been chronically suspicious of Erma for so long a period that this was merely the continuation of a state of mind.

One evening at the dinner table you noticed that Larry and Erma scarcely spoke to each other. All you got out of it was a faint amusement for you had long since grown accustomed to Erma’s talent for creating tensions with almost anyone when she was in certain moods.

Sometime in the dead of night you awoke out of a dream, suddenly aware that something was wrong. You kicked out a foot. Erma wasn’t there. You heard a noise somewhere, a faint mumbling trickling through the thin bare walls. You got out of bed and groped your way to the door and softly opened it.

The mumbling instantly became voices, loud enough to be recognized. You tiptoed in your bare feet down the narrow hall to the door of Larry’s room.

“You’re a little fool,” Larry was saying. “Can’t you take a hint?”

Then Erma, somewhat louder and much more calmly.

“Come, Larry, you’re the fool. Why do you pretend I’m not attractive to you? Such conceit. Don’t you know that I made you kiss me the first time I decided it was worth the trouble?”

“The first and the last. You’ve no sense of decency, Erma. Now go.”

“It would be nicer to kiss me now — like this.”

You heard a quick movement, and another. Larry’s voice came, “I tell you to go, I mean it,” and immediately you heard something that you would have given a great deal to see — a loud sharp slap, the smack of a heavy open palm.

You tiptoed swiftly back down the hall. What if it were Erma up there now in that room; imagine yourself here on these stairs, equipped, desperate, with death in your heart! Bah, you couldn’t even slap her as Larry did that night.