How Like a God

XII

The voice came faintly from above, through the closed door at the front of the upper hall, not yet within his eyes’ range:

It was thin and colorless and it could scarcely be called a tune. Not a monotone, rather three or four false and mongrel tones, alternating crazily into a petty and exasperating chaos. There was a long pause, and then it came again:

It stopped.

He trembled violently, then controlled himself with an effort, and remained motionless. The voice sounded once more, more faintly than before. So, he thought, she isn’t seated, reading. She’s moving around doing something. Can’t hear her footsteps, probably she has on those slippers with the felt soles...

She always sings it like that; she doesn’t know the rest of the words. Except that second baby. Why the hell doesn’t she put that in at least? If you can call it singing. Long ago, back in the old days, long ago, her voice had a thrill in it — maybe it still has — something has, but it can’t be her voice.

It did have, though, that first night you heard it again.

You got to the theatre after the curtain was up, as usual when with Erma. It was the evening before her departure for the Adirondacks. Soon after the curtain fell, at the close of the first act, you heard a voice directly behind you:

“I guess I left my handkerchief in the ladies’ room.”

The effect was curious. You didn’t recognize the voice, it didn’t even occur to you that you had heard it before, but it stirred you amazingly. Not turning your head, you let some question of Erma’s go unanswered and waited breathlessly for it to sound again. A man’s baritone had replied:

“Shall I lend you mine?”

Then the first voice:

“Yes, I guess you’ll have to.”

You turned like lightning and looked rudely, directly into her face, and recognized her at once.

“Maybe the woman found it,” she was saying. “I’ll go back after the second act and see.”

When the curtain fell again you mumbled an excuse to Erma and were out of your seat and at the rear of the orchestra before the lights were on. She came up the aisle on the arm of her escort, a tall thin man in a brown suit, and you stood aside as they passed. Then he went one way and she another, and you darted after her and touched her on the shoulder.

“I beg your pardon, but aren’t you Millicent Moran?” you said.

She turned and looked at you calmly.

“I used to be, but now I’m Mrs. Green,” she replied. You saw by her face that she knew you before her sentence was ended, but characteristically she finished it before she added in slow surprise:

“Why, I remember you.”

“Battling Bill,” you stammered.

“Will Sidney,” she said. “It’s awfully nice to see you again.”

You felt suddenly foolish and uncertain, at a loss what to say, but a wild and profound excitement was racing through you. You hesitated...

“Maybe we could meet some time and talk over old times,” you said. “I have no card with me, but you can find me in the phone book. William B. Sidney.”

“That would be nice,” she agreed.

“And if I could have your address—” She gave you her address and phone number and you planted them firmly in your mind. Then she said goodbye and was off, presumably to the ladies’ room to find the lost handkerchief.

Throughout the last two acts and intermission you were fearful that she might say something to you there in the seats, forcing you to introduce her to Erma and dragging in the escort, who you supposed was Mr. Green.

That night you could not sleep. You recalled how she had looked, standing before you in the theatre: her slim, slightly drooping figure in its plain dark dress, her dull light brown hair, her level slate-colored unblinking eyes, her pale unnoticeable face. You would have said that whatever passion her blood might have held had been washed out long ago.

You finally got to sleep.

She did not write or telephone, and one morning, about a week after Erma’s departure, you called the number and after a prolonged ringing her voice answered, sleepy and muffled.

“I’m sorry if I got you out of bed,” you said.

“Yes,” she replied, “I don’t usually get up till noon.”

Would she have dinner with you? Yes. This evening? Yes. Should you call for her at seven? Yes. You hung up, wondering if she had been too sleepy to know what she was saying.

Those first few times with her you did succeed in dragging forth, gradually and bit by bit, many of the details of the past twenty years. Not that you were especially interested, but there seemed to be nothing else she could talk about at all. She and her mother had gone to Indianapolis, she said, where an uncle lived, and there Mrs. Moran had resumed the profession of washerwoman and continued at it for eight years, until Millicent graduated from high school. On the very day of high school commencement Mrs. Moran took to her bed, and died three weeks later.

“No, I didn’t cry,” said Millicent. “I never have cried but once.”

She wouldn’t say when that was.

She had gone to live with her uncle, and got a job filing papers in a law office. This was not to her liking (too dull, she said!) and she soon gave it up and through her uncle, a floor-walker, got a place at the stocking counter of a large department store. All this was merely preparation for her real career, which began when at the age of twenty-one, three years after her mother’s death, she was offered a position at the cigar-stand of a big hotel — as she said, the swellest hotel in Indianapolis. For four years she stood there peddling cigars and cigarettes to the cosmopolitan world of Indianapolis notables, commercial travelers, visiting lecturers and barber-shop customers, until one day Clarence Green, covering Indiana and Illinois for the Rubbalite Company, a middle-aged widower, asked her to become his wife.

They were married at once, and when shortly afterward he was transferred to eastern territory, came to New York and established themselves in a flat. Here the story became so vague as to be almost incoherent. It appeared that toward the end of the first New York summer she had returned from a week in the country with her friend Grace something-or-other to find the flat bare, stripped of everything except her personal belongings. At some stage or other there was a divorce and an award of alimony amounting to a hundred and fifty dollars a month.

“He’s very prompt with it,” she said. “It’s never been more than four days behind time.”

You were in her room, late at night. She was on the couch against the wall with the two skinny pillows behind her, and you sat in the rickety wicker chair.

“I’ll probably go up to the Adirondacks the end of the week,” you said. “My wife is wondering why I stay down here in this furnace. I haven’t told her I’ve met an old college friend.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“The rest of the summer probably. I don’t usually come back until after Labor Day. Maybe even later.”

“Your wife is very rich, isn’t she?”

You nodded. “I’m worth a good deal more than I ever expected to be but I’m a pauper compared with her. When I remember how I used to cut down on cigarettes so I could buy candy for you—”

“I still like candy,” she said.

“Then I’ll have to bring you some, for old times’ sake. A bushel basketful, just to show off.”

She was silent. You looked at her and saw that her motionless eyes were regarding you steadily, fixedly. “Come here,” she said in a low dead voice, without moving, not moving even her lips, it seemed.

You got up instantly, but without haste, and went and sat on the edge of the couch beside her.

That first night you didn’t stay long; you finally became aware that she was running her hand through your hair and was saying, “It’s so late I guess you’d better go.”

The next day at one you telephoned. She was sorry, she couldn’t see you that evening, she had an engagement. Tomorrow evening, then. No, she was sorry.

“Maybe we could make it Friday,” she said.

Friday evening it was raining and was much cooler, so you gave up your plan for a drive into the country and took her to a theatre instead. You went directly from the theatre to her room on Twenty-second Street. You had decided not to go in, but you went. At two in the morning you were still there, propped against one of the skinny pillows smoking a cigarette.

“I bought a car the other day,” you said. “It will be delivered tomorrow morning. I thought it would be fun for us to drive out of town some of these hot nights.”

She sat munching the chocolates you had brought, with the same old gestures, methodical as some automatic engine of destruction.

“It must have cost a lot of money,” she observed. “I don’t see why we couldn’t use one of your wife’s cars, if she has so many.”

You explained again the risks which a man of your prominence must avoid.

“I couldn’t stay away all night,” she declared. “If I did and Mr. Green found out about it...”

You were glad that her concern for her alimony imposed caution upon her too, but you wished she’d stop calling her husband Mr. Green.

“No, we couldn’t do that,” you agreed. “I meant to drive out in the country for dinner, maybe sometimes have a picnic lunch in the woods somewhere.”

Her eyes closed slightly, as they had a little before, as they have a thousand times since.

“It would be nice to be in the woods with you,” she said. “Last summer I used to go with Mr. Gowan out on Long Island. And Mr. Peft had a boat in the Hudson River — that was two years ago.”

“You know a lot of men, don’t you?”

She chuckled. “Wouldn’t you like to know though,” she said.

“What does Mr. Gowan do?”

“He runs taxicabs. He doesn’t run them himself — he owns thirty-seven of them — the brown ones with a little bird on the door.”

“That’s funny.”

“Why?”

“Oh nothing, only he didn’t look to me like a man who would run a fleet of taxicabs.”

“How do you know what he looks like, you’ve never seen him.”

“Sure I have, that night at the theatre.”

She turned her head; you felt her chin rubbing against your hair; then she bent down and softly bit your ear.

“That wasn’t him,” she said.

“Who was it then?”

She chuckled. “It was Mr. Green.”

Her husband! Of course not. You gave up, exasperated at her petty infantile obscurantism.

It was a week or so later, after you had been out several times in the roadster, that you found courage to speak to her about her clothes. You weren’t sure how she would take it, and you didn’t know what you might be letting yourself in for.

“I’ve never paid much attention to clothes,” she said indifferently. “Even if I had money, it’s so much trouble.”

Later, when you gave her money to buy things herself, underwear and nightgowns, she carefully gave you the exact change the next day, with the cash slips and price tickets in a neat pile, added up. She’s always been straight about money, presumably because she doesn’t care much about it. You might have known better when she handed you that bunk about Dick, though of course that’s not the same thing. Nor the alimony either; there’s no finding out anything she wants to hide; you don’t know to this day whether she actually did get alimony from her husband, nor for that matter whether she was ever married.

Your first suspicion of that came the day up at Briarcliff when you proposed a trip somewhere, and suggested central Pennsylvania as a locality where you would run slight risk of meeting anyone who knew you. When you asked her about that she seemed not at all concerned.

“But not so long ago you were afraid to stay out overnight,” you reminded her.

“Yes. Well... it doesn’t matter.”

“We can stay a week, or two, or a month, just as we like. What say?”

“I think it would be very nice.”

All right; that was settled. From the eminence of the Lodge you looked out across the expanse of woods and meadows to where a strip of the Hudson was flashing in the distant sunshine, and wondered why the devil you were doing this.

You have continued to wonder to this minute.