The Unsuspected Read Online Free PDF Page B

newsman. She could let fly. She could be as vivid and as colorful with her emotion as she liked. She said, "Grandy has taken care of me since I was nine. He's been my father and my mother and my uncles and my aunts. He's taught me all I know and given me just about everything I've ever had of any value. All the things you can't buy. He's given me my home. He made it home for me. He's picked my schools. He's cared. He's spent thought and trouble on me. He's my family. And not because we have the same blood, either, but because he wanted to be, because he loved me and I love him. He is, in my considered opinion, the best and wisest man in the world, and anything he chooses to do is all right with me, and always will be. And if you
    won't tell the cab driver where to go, I will. Or I'll scream. Choose one!”
     
     She saw, through her anger, with satisfaction that the man had really collapsed now. At least he had fallen back into his corner and was sitting there somberly, and it was as if he were locked inside a shell of very thick silence. He was saying nothing in seventeen
    different languages. He was stopped, gagged. He'd shut his mouth. Well , she thought, he'd better.  
     
    "Driver," said Mathilda.
     
    The man got some words out painfully. "No, don't," he said. "We are to telephone."
     
    "There are telephones everywhere," she said coldly. "Particularly in the Grand Central Station."
     
    "Yes, but my—" He pulled himself together in order to speak at all. "Grandy sent me," he said. "Nobody's going to hurt you, you know. You don't really think so, do you?"
     
    "Certainly not," said Mathilda with airy contempt.
     
    "No train for an hour and a half," he said. He seemed rather indifferent suddenly. He looked out of the cab window, away from her. "If you like, I'll leave you after we telephone. You'll have to wait somewhere."
     
    Mathilda sat back. She was still seething. She tried to remember exactly what he had said that had set off so much anger. But the phrase didn't come back to her accurately. She began to feel that she'd been too vehement. She had made a show of herself. She under-stood, now, that it had all been part of the home-coming emotion somehow.
     
    His withdrawn silence smacked of reproach. After all, if Grandy had sent him— She cast about for some remark, something in the way of small talk, to indicate that the storm was over. She said chattily, "I hope you realize that I don't even know your name."
     
    He did a strange thing. He put his hand up and covered his eyes, and sat very still and tense. She wondered if he had heard. "I don't know your name," she repeated.
     
    "My name is Francis Howard," he said stiffly. He took his hand down and went back to looking out of the cab window. She could see his ear, the line of his cheek, not his eyes.
     
    Howard. Mathilda's mind took what she at first thought was a capricious swoop, back to the interview with the press. Then she cried out, "Howard!"
     
    He didn't look around, though he moved his head a trifle warily,
     
    "That was funny!" Mathilda said. "There was one man who seemed to think— He said my husband— Why, that's what he called me! Mrs. Howard!"
     
    "He did?" said Mr. Howard, in a bored, perfunctory way.
     
    And he said no more. Mathilda stopped talking. Really, he was the limit. Certainly it was an odd thing to have been said and the coincidence was very odd. "Your husband is waiting for you, Mrs Howard." Any normal human being, thought Mathilda indignantly
    would want to know all about it, especially when it was the same name. He wouldn't just sit, looking indifferently away, out of the window.
     
    The cab pulled up. A doorman helped them out, a bellhop came for her suitcase. She knew the place. Francis guided her into the lobby, into the elevator. Mathilda stood stiff and cold. The funny thing was that just as they walked into the elevator, as he gave the
    floor number to the boy, she caught a flash of his eye on her, and it was a