A Charmed Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

goose,” he said calmly. “Why don’t you make us a drink?”
    Martha looked at her watch. She was thinking of the doctor’s office hours, which were doubtless the same as they had always been—seven to nine in the evenings. She did not like the idea of John’s sitting in the doctor’s waiting room (if she could get him there) with liquor on his breath. The story would get around that he had hurt himself when drunk, like all the other New Leedsians, who were always catching on fire, falling into open wells or sunken gardens, tripping on stairs, crashing up in their cars. At the same time, Martha yearned for the festivity of cocktails, and John, no doubt, needed it. She suddenly perceived that if she hurried and forgot about the doctor, they could have dinner almost on time and a drink before it too; the day would be almost a normal day, after all, as if the cut and the quarrel had never been. “All right,” she agreed. “An Old-Fashioned?” He nodded, approvingly. Martha’s Old-Fashioneds were a sign of love. She did them with bourbon, no fruit, and half a lump of sugar, in their best glasses, rubbing the rims with orange peel and lemon peel and putting in a silver muddler. As she set John’s drink before him and got a chicken out of the icebox and an onion from the vegetable bin, she was happy again. She had just remembered somebody’s telling her that the present doctor here was a penicillin fiend, and her conscience was at rest: John said you could not trust a doctor who trusted to penicillin.
    “Talk to me,” he ordered, pointing to the chair opposite him. “I ought to start the supper,” said Martha, indicating the cut-up chicken. “Let me just put it on,” she pleaded. She poured olive oil into the frying pan, turned up the heat, and in a minute threw in the chicken. “Excuse me,” she murmured and hurried out the door with the flashlight. She came back with a bunch of thyme and parsley, got out the chopping board and the onion, and sat down across from him with her drink. “I love you,” she announced.
    But he had sunk into despondency. “I wonder whether you do,” he said, frowning, and pulling at the bandage, which was stiff with dried blood. “Sometimes, Martha,” he went on, raising his eyes, “I think it’s all words with you.” Martha’s eyes widened. “That’s what He used to say,” she cried—so they usually spoke of her first husband, as a capitalized pronoun. “So you told Him you loved him, too,” observed John. Martha shook her head. “No,” she said earnestly. “Never?” John pounced. “Hardly ever,” conceded Martha. The truth was she could not remember saying it, but she supposed that now and then she must have, when asked, from politeness. “What did he mean, then,” demanded John, “by saying it was all words with you?” “I don’t know,” said Martha heavily. “He might have been talking about Barrett.”
    There was a strained silence. Ever since they had been back, Martha had been encountering these discrepancies. A phrase or an incident from her first marriage would suddenly crop up in her memory, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle that seemed to have come from the wrong box. The horrifying thought that there could be a similarity, a common element in her two marriages, had struck her more than once recently. She kept going back to the past for reassurance, to remind herself of the differences.
    “Did I ever tell you,” she now murmured, “about the time I hit Him over the head with a highball glass?” John frowned and shook his head. “Oh, yes,” she said gaily. “Two stitches.” she watched him nervously to see what he thought of this revelation. He was shocked. “Of course, I had provocation,” she added. “But can you imagine me doing such a thing?” “No,” he said in a flat voice, glancing almost suspiciously at her frail figure and candid, innocent face. “That’s the way I was then,” she declared, sighing. “You can’t