Strangers on a Train

Three

He had called Miriam immediately, and she had arranged to meet him at the high school that lay between their houses.

Now he stood in a corner of the asphalt gamefield, waiting. She would be late, of course. Why had she chosen the high school, he wondered. Because it was her own ground? He had loved her when he had used to wait for her here.

Overhead, the sky was a clear strong blue. The sun poured down moltenly, not yellow but colorless, like something grown white with its own heat. Beyond the trees, he saw the top of a slim reddish building he did not know, that had gone up since he had been in Metcalf two years ago. He turned away. There was no human being in sight, as if the heat had caused everyone to abandon the school building and even the homes of the neighborhood. He looked at the broad gray steps that spilled from the dark arch of the school doors. He could still remember the inky, faintly sweaty smell on the fuzzy edges of Miriam’s algebra book. He could still see the MIRIAM penciled on the edge of its pages, and the drawing of the girl with the Spencerian marcel wave on the flyleaf, when he opened the book to do her problems for her. Why had he thought Miriam any different from all the others?

He walked through the wide gate between the crisscross wire fence and looked up College Avenue again. Then he saw her, under the yellow-green trees that bordered the sidewalk. His heart began to beat harder, but he blinked his eyes with deliberate casualness. She walked at her usual rather stolid pace, taking her time. Now her head came into view, haloed by a broad, light-colored hat. Shadow and sun speckled her figure chaotically. She gave him a relaxed wave, and Guy pulled a hand out of his pocket, returned it, and went back into the gamefield, suddenly tense and shy as a boy. She knows about the Palm Beach job, he thought, that strange girl under the trees. His mother had told him, half an hour ago, that she had mentioned it to Miriam when Miriam last telephoned.

“Hello, Guy.” Miriam smiled and quickly closed her broad orangey-pink lips. Because of the space between her front teeth, Guy remembered.

“How are you, Miriam?” Involuntarily he glanced at her figure, plump but not pregnant looking, and it flashed through his mind she might have lied. She wore a brightly flowered skirt and a white short-sleeved blouse. Her big white pocketbook was of woven patent leather.

She sat down primly on the one stone bench that was in the shade, and asked him dull questions about his trip. Her face had grown fuller where it had always been full, on the lower cheeks, so that her chin looked more pointed. There were little wrinkles under her eyes now, Guy noticed. She had lived a long time, for twenty-two.

“In January,” she answered him in a flat voice. “In January the child’s due.”

It was two months advanced then. “I suppose you want to marry him.”

She turned her head slightly and looked down. On her short cheek, the sunlight picked out the largest freckles, and Guy saw a certain pattern he remembered and had not thought of since a time when he had been married to her. How sure he had once been that he possessed her, possessed her every frailest thought! Suddenly it seemed that all love was only a tantalizing, a horrible next-best to knowing. He knew not the smallest part of the new world in Miriam’s mind now. Was it possible that the same thing could happen with Anne?

“Don’t you, Miriam?” he prompted.

“Not right now. See, there’re complications.”

“Like what?”

“Well, we might not be able to marry as soon as we’d like to.”

“Oh.” We. He knew what he would look like, tall and dark, with a long face, like Steve. The type Miriam had always been attracted to. The only type she would have a child by. And she did want this child, he could tell. Something had happened, that had nothing to do with the man, perhaps, that made her want a child. He could see it in the prim, stiff way she sat on the bench, in that self-abandoned trance he had always seen or imagined in pregnant women’s faces. “That needn’t delay the divorce though, I suppose.”

“Well, I didn’t think so—until a couple of davs ago. I thought Owen would be free to marry this month.”

“Oh. He’s married now?”

“Yeah, he’s married,” she said with a little sigh, almost smiling.

Guy looked down in vague embarrassment and paced a slow step or two on the asphalt. He had known the man would be married. He had expected he would have no intention of marrying her unless he were forced to. “Where is he? Here?”

“He’s in Houston,” she replied. “Don’t you want to sit down?”

“No.”

“You never did like to sit down.”

He was silent.

“Still have your ring?”

“Yes.” His class ring from Chicago, that Miriam had always admired because it meant he was a college man. She was staring at the ring with a self-conscious smile. He put his hands in his pockets. “As long as I’m here, I’d like it settled. Can we do it this week?”

“I want to go away, Guy.”

“For the divorce?”

Her stubby hands opened in a limp ambiguous gesture, and he thought suddenly of Bruno’s hands. He had forgotten Bruno completely, getting off the train this morning. And his book.

“I’m sort of tired of staying here,” she said.

“We can get the divorce in Dallas if you like.” Her friends here knew, he thought, that was all.

“I want to wait, Guy. Would you mind? Just a while?”

“I should think you’d mind. Does he intend to marry you or not?”

“He could marry me in September. He’d be free then, but—”

“But what?” In her silence, in the childlike lick of her tongue on her upper lip, he saw the trap she was in. She wanted this child so much, she would sacrifice herself in Metcalf by waiting until four months before it was born to marry its father. In spite of himself, he felt a certain pity for her.

“I want to go away, Guy. With you.”

There was a real effort at sincerity in her face, so much that he almost forgot what she was asking, and why. “What is it you want, Miriam? Money to go away somewhere?”

The dreaminess in her gray-green eyes was dispersing like a mist. “Your mother said you were going to Palm Beach.”

“I might be going there. To work.” He thought of the Palmyra with a twinge of peril. It was slipping away already.

“Take me with you, Guy? It’s the last thing I’ll ask you. If I could stay with you till December and then get the divorce—”

“Oh,” he said quietly, but something throbbed in his chest, like the breaking of his heart. She disgusted him suddenly, she and all the people around her whom she knew and attracted. Another man’s child. Go away with her, be her husband until she gave birth to another man’s child. In Palm Beach!

“If you don’t take me, I’ll come anyway.”

“Miriam, I could get that divorce now. I don’t have to wait to see the child. The law doesn’t.” His voice shook.

“You wouldn’t do that to me,” Miriam replied with that combination of threat and pleading that had played on both his anger and his love when he loved her, and baffled him.

He felt it baffling him now. And she was right. He wouldn’t divorce her now. But it was not because he still loved her, not because she was still his wife and was therefore due his protection, but because he pitied her and because he remembered he had once loved her. He realized now he had pitied her even in New York, even when she wrote him for money. “I won’t take the job if you come out there. There’d be no use in taking it,” he said evenly, but it was gone already, he told himself, so why discuss it?

“I don’t think you’d give up a job like that,” she challenged.

He turned away from her twisted smile of triumph. That was where she was wrong, he thought, but he was silent. He took two steps on the gritty asphalt and turned again, with his head high. Be calm, he told himself. What could anger accomplish? Miriam had used to hate him when he reacted like this, because she loved loud arguments. She would love one even this morning, he thought. She had hated him when he reacted like this, until she had learned that in the long run it hurt him more to react like this. He knew he played into her hands now, yet he felt he could react in no other way.

“I haven’t even got the job yet, you know. I’ll simply send them a telegram saying I don’t want it.” Beyond the treetops, he noticed again the new reddish building he had seen before Miriam came.

“And then what?”

“A lot of things. But you won’t know about them.”

“Running away?” she taunted. “Cheapest way out.”

He walked again, and turned. There was Anne. With Anne, he could endure this, endure anything. And in fact, he felt strangely resigned. Because he was with Miriam now, the symbol of the failure of his youth? He bit the tip of his tongue. There was inside him, like a flaw in a jewel, not visible on the surface, a fear and anticipation of failure that he had never been able to mend. At times, failure was a possibility that fascinated him, as at times, in high school and college, when he had allowed himself to fail examinations he might have passed; as when he married Miriam, he thought, against the will of both their families and all their friends. Hadn’t he known it couldn’t succeed? And now he had given up his biggest commission, without a murmur. He would go to Mexico and have a few days with Anne. It would take all his money, but why not? Could he possibly go back to New York and work without having seen Anne first?

“Is there anything else?” he asked.

“I’ve said it,” she told him, out of her spaced front teeth.