CHAPTER FIVE

Row after row of sedate brownstone houses met Blake in his part of Brooklyn and stolidly followed his homecoming. There was no shaking them off. When he left one behind, a similar house rose beside it. In summer a few hotels before whose doors lines of taxis churned, along whose tops roof gardens sparkled in the sky, sent a thin trill of vivacity through the surrounding section; in winter even the hotels were quiet. He chose his own home by number instead of by recognition and, noting his baby carriage behind the stairs, he knew that he had made no mistake. All the circumstances of his daily return: the evidence of the child; the bell ticking eagerly to his ring; the door opening to his footsteps; the shaft of light in its angle, ready to embrace--all these details, a source of cheer and comfort perhaps to his neighbor returning like himself, he never failed to find oppressive. He just brushed his wife's cheek, so softly extended, and went by.

Edith spoke of the weather, carefully circling his defection from dinner. They never quarreled. She was determined that he should have no fault to find with her, not realizing that, with a person one should love and doesn't, the very lack of faults is in itself the most alienating fault.

She hung up the coat he had thrown over a chair. There was nothing more to do in the kitchen so she sat down near him. She was tall, graceful, had always carried herself with dignity, and a strain, a weariness about her, the first hint of the erosion of her daily life, could not destroy the perfect balance of her features, the peculiar charming shade of her red hair, firmly coiled. All her gestures remained calm. When she wheeled the baby carriage, thinking--thinking of Blake and of their child and of herself--people would take her for a nice-looking young matron, a little pale perhaps, a little tired from household duties.

"I guess I'll lie down," said Blake. "Will you leave some coffee for me?"

He preferred to work from midnight to dawn, then to sleep till afternoon, a schedule to which his wife had adapted herself with distinct doubts of its irregularity. Especially now, since the birth of the baby, she found the custom trying. But she would not say much. Only...

"Is Jerry coming again?"

"No. He can't work without a piano."

She looked relieved. Jerry was to write the music for the play, and when he and Blake collaborated, clicking a typewriter and humming portions of songs, the baby stirred, Edith was afraid the neighbors might complain. Someone had already spoken to the janitor about the noise of the typewriter in the small hours. She mentioned this to Blake without comment.

He glanced up quickly. "I could work in Jerry's room," he said, "I'll have to anyhow, once in a while. He can't do much here because there is no piano."

"Where would Jerry sleep then?"

"Oh, well..." He did not feel that he cared to explain the various ways in which Jerry whiled away his nights.

"It won't be very pleasant for me, to be alone," said Edith softly.

"Well, we don't have to work together yet. I thought, if you had rather..."

"No. Only--the baby--but I think he's grown used to it."

Blake said no more.

It was this indifference, an impenetrable neutrality of action, word, expression, that defeated her time after tune as the smooth back of a duck defeats drops of water. With a man who ignored the past and would not glance at the future, she found fewer and fewer loopholes to evoke past tendernesses, to envisage future plans. She watched him from under her lids. He sat on the couch, turning the sheets of a newspaper and, though he uttered no word, it was apparent that he waited for her to relinquish him so that he could go to sleep. He sat there, sober, thin-faced, with his mouth in a tight line. Of late he held his mouth in a glummer, closer line than ever and spoke as if it were a trouble to open it.

She observed--but it was so impossible to feel, to know what he thought. The effort to concentrate and seize his mind behind the pale, high temples only drained her own mind of every idea, of every hope, and left her dry, her body taut, and within her, her nerves, the muscles of her heart fluttering in a disordered measure, frightening, unrestrainable. She made a grimace, attempting to control them, concluding, as she always did, that she had been weakened by the birth of the child. She was not able to rise just yet.

To justify her presence she asked with a certain timidity, though it was such a natural question from a wife to a husband, "Are you worried over anything?"

A fresh line cut itself between his brows. He shook his head.

But this gesture was not colorless as usual; there was a distinctness to it, a harshness, that seemed to her to offer a clue. "Would it be about money?"

"Do you need any money?" he said briefly.

"I shall soon."

Now he pondered above the paper, studying the wall and keeping very quiet. This silence cut her to the heart. In the past she had perhaps laid too much emphasis on his pursuit of an alien will-o'-the-wisp, on the snapping of those moorings which she could see no sensible reason to loosen. She was sorry for that, even if she still saw no reason and still longed for the moorings. In spite of herself, she often tried to impress upon him subtly the harassment of their present life in contrast to their old life, hoping the difference would become as clear to him as it was to her, certain that once it was clear it would also be abhorrent. At the same time she could not bear to see him thus struggling with his eyes on the opposite wall. And at the same time it was true that she would soon need money, and it was Blake she had to look to for its provision.

"I'll have to ask Fred," he muttered, more to himself than to her. "He ought to have some ready for me now."

"I can't see why he doesn't pay you regularly," ventured Edith.

"Oh, it's the way they do things. The acts don't always pay regularly. It's show business." He emphasized the last words by a sneer and Edith glanced at him with a sudden, swift hope.

"Blake," she said, "I have a letter from your mother. Wouldn't you like to go back home for a short visit and look around? Perhaps you would like it so much better now." In her eagerness, she was leaning over and looking wistfully into his eyes.

He withdrew them. "No!" he said.

"It wouldn't be giving up. It would be just a visit."

"No."

But they were talking now, they were discussing their common life, and even negation was more cheerful than a return to silence.

"You know I'm not so well, Blake," she went on gently. "It's my heart."

He could not help a pale smile behind the paper. He looked to see whether she, too, had noticed. But no, she was entirely unaware, entirely serious, as she continued, "Having the child has strained my heart, the doctor says."

Now he looked her straight in the eye. "Whose fault was that?" his eyes challenged her, and, flushing, she would not lower hers and answered them with pride.

"Well?" he said.

"The rest would do me good."

He rustled a sheet of his paper while she waited. She had some moments to imagine the elation with which she would return home, the relief at having removed him, at least for a while, from this environment which had so changed him, so that his next words struck her with twice the force of surprise.

"Well, why don't you go, then?" he said quietly. "I guess I can raise the fare, if that worries you."

She was speechless. She stared at him, searching his immobility with a last intense and useless effort, like a searchlight attempting to probe a stone wall. Every line of his face was obvious to her; she saw the tight-shut lips, the pale brows drawn together, the cheeks too thin for their squareness, and a light lock of hair falling over the temples, and that was all. For a second his neutrality had vanished; a rift had appeared in the wall, offering a glimpse of what lay behind it, and had closed in that second, too swiftly for her to see. Why had she not been alert? Now, search as she would, scan every detail of his expression, no trace remained of where the rift lay, much less of why it lay there, if it did. She rose at last. At the door she paused, trying to get less than an idea, merely a hint of some idea.

"Would it relieve you," she asked, "if I went home for a time?"

"What do you think?"

She went into the kitchen and set about making fresh coffee with many small busy movements, so as not to think at present. When she looked into the room again the light had been put out and she could not see his face where he lay on the couch. But she thought that he slept.