urged the married condition on bachelors – priests, who did not know the price of eight ounces of tea.
“Some brides bring lamps and lampshades,” said Mme. Carette. “A glass-front bookcase. Even the books to put in it.” Her husband had owned a furniture shop on Rue Saint-Denis. Household goods earmarked for Berthe and Marie had been stored with relatives for some twenty years, waxed and polished and free of dust. “An oak table that seats fourteen,” she said, and stopped with that. Berthe had forbidden her to draw up an inventory. They were not bartering Marie.
“Some girls have money,” said Marie. Her savings – eighteen dollars – were in a drawer of her mother’s old treadle sewing machine.
A spasm crossed Louis’s face; he often choked on his food. Berthe knew more about men than Marie – more than her mother, who knew only how children come about. Mr. Ryder, of Berthe’s office, would stand in the corridor, letting elevators go by, waiting for a chance to squeeze in next to Berthe. Mr. Sexton had offered her money, a regular allowance, if shewould go out with him every Friday, the night of his Legion meeting. Mr. Macfarlane had left a lewd poem on her desk, then a note of apology, then a poem even worse than the first. Mr. Wright-Ashburton had offered to leave his wife – for, of course, they had wives, Mr. Ryder, Mr. Sexton, Mr. Macfarlane, none of whom she had ever encouraged, and Mr. Wright-Ashburton, with whom she had been to Plattsburgh and Saranac Lake, and whose private behavior she had described, kneeling, in remote parishes, where the confessor could not have known her by voice.
When Berthe accepted Mr. Wright-Ashburton’s raving proposal to leave his wife, saying that Irene probably knew about them anyway, would be thankful to have it in the clear, his face had wavered with fright, like a face seen underwater – rippling, uncontrolled. Berthe had to tell him she hadn’t meant it. She could not marry a divorced man. On Louis’s face she saw that same quivering dismay. He was afraid of Marie, of her docility, her monogrammed towels, her dependence, her glass-front bookcase. Having seen this, Berthe was not surprised when he gave no further sign of life until the twenty-fifth of June.
During his absence the guilt and darkness of rejection filled every corner of the flat. There was not a room that did not speak of humiliation – oh, not because Louis had dropped Marie but because the Carettes had honored and welcomed a clodhopper, a cheapjack, a ginger-haired nobody. Mme. Carette and Marie made many telephone calls to his office, with a variety of names and voices, to be told every time he was not at his desk. One morning Berthe, on her way to work, saw someone very like him hurrying into Windsor Station. By the time she had struggled out of her crowded streetcar, he was gone. She followed him into the great concourse and looked at the times of the different trains and saw where they were going. A trapped sparrow fluttered under the glass roof. She recalled an expression of Louis’s, uneasy and roguish,when he had told Berthe that Marie did not understand the facts of life. (This in English, over the table, as if Mme. Carette and Marie could not follow.) When Berthe asked what these facts might be, he had tried to cross her glance, as on that first evening, one man to another. She was not a man; she had looked away.
Mme. Carette went on embroidering baskets of flowers, ivy leaves, hunched over her work, head down. Marie decided to find a job as a receptionist in a beauty salon. It would be pleasant work in clean surroundings. A girl she had talked to on the bus earned fourteen dollars a week. Marie would give her mother eight and keep six. She did not need Louis, she said, and she was sure she could never love him.
“No one expected you to love him,” said her mother, without looking up.
On the morning of the twenty-fifth of June he rang the front doorbell. Marie was eating