Did Mamacita approve the January–May romance? Do wedding bells toll for Harrison Shepherd? Not just yet, says airport clerk Jack Curtis, who viewed the couple’s passports on their recent return to the Ashville-Hendersonville airport. Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome kept a tight hand on his Shrinking Violet, but as of January 26 she is on the books as “widowed.” And the bachelor? Curtis reports: “still single.”
February 6
When she came in with both arms loaded and dumped the mail and papers in a heap on the dining room table, my first thoughts were purely selfish. Alas, this mess. The world comes in. I’d wanted her to take more days off after our return, craving time upstairs undisturbed. To be in my pajamas still at suppertime, the shades still drawn, reeling out my tale of Lord Itzá and his troubles. A story needs a good collapse.
She began talking before she’d unbuttoned her coat, plainly out of sorts. She is not like that, filling up a silence with idle talk, the goings-on at Mrs. Bittle’s while we were away. Then came the report that Mr. Judd had died, on Christmas Day.
So that was it, I thought. I gave condolences.
“Well, it was his time. Even Marian Bittle thought so, and she is not one for philosophy. She said the son came right away and took care of everything, so she could go on with her Christmas. But this is what floored her. Before the old man was even buried, nine people read the obituary and came asking to let the room. Some of them had families, can you imagine? Wanting to bring a wife and children, all to live in the one room. There’s no rooms for let anywhere. It’s all the war marriages, and now these babies nobody thought to expect. Mrs. Bittle says a man bought a potato field outside town and is putting up two hundred houses out there, just houses, she says, not a single shop for them to get their goods. I suppose they’ll have to come all the way into town for that. And the houses all alike, maybe each one is a little different shade of color, but the same house over and over, lined up in a row.”
“Goodness. It sounds like Moscow. Who would live in a place like that?”
“Well, that’s the thing. The plan is for two hundred houses. But seven hundred families are already lined up to buy them.”
Then she sat down at the table and began to sob. It has never happened before. The day the agent came to the door she felt faint afterward, and put her head on the table, but this was different. Her shoulders racked. She let out a thin, throbbing wail.
“Now, it can’t be as bad as that.” I sounded like an actor in a play. Two absurd people in this room, and I had not been introduced to either one. I was still thinking somehow her distress went back to the housing shortage.
She’d seen the first of the stories several days ago, but didn’t phone, hoping to spare me embarrassment for a while. Or else, not knowing what to say. All the stories linking us romantically, she has been carrying that alone. Remarks and stares at the library and the market. I know she is often recognized.
I couldn’t read much of it. It made me feel too helpless, lost in some landscape of murdered truth. Lev would have been scientific, tracking the trail of this particular prevarication, studying how the branches diverged and where the thing started. Probably in Star Week or the Echo, though the story also made the reputable papers, and of course the Trumpet. It always begins somewhere, one howler waking up the others. They pass it on, embellished, not through any creative drive but only a pure slothful failure to verify a fact. If the reporters made any calls, it would have been for soliciting a denial. Failing that, they run it as truth, upping the ante just enough to put their own byline on it. The lady is “demure” and then “fatally demure” and then has a “tragic past.” I am evidently now locked in a battle with an “old-fashioned Mexican family” over my right to pursue the love match.
Only when I made the coffee did I see my hands were shaking. I have had dreams of being shot, watching the blood pour out, and wondering whether it hurts.
I set a cup near her elbow, but couldn’t sit down opposite her, not like a husband facing a wife across a meal. We used to do that at Mrs. Bittle’s, of course, when I was the cook and she the worldly secretary. A lot of water under the bridge. I stood.
After a time she sat up, and looked at the coffee strangely, as if it had been delivered by fairies. It struck me like a draught of cold air then, about Mrs. Bittle and the housing shortage. “Is she making you move out because of this?”
“She raised my monthly rate. She said she would have to, if I meant to stay there. Due to the publicity.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re in a bind, and she’s taking advantage. Do you want me to call her?”
“How would that look, Mr. Shepherd? You protecting me.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll pay it. She knows I couldn’t find a single other room in town, with things the way they are.”
“Is the shortage really as bad as that?” Of course it is in the papers, everywhere. It just didn’t occur that everywhere was here.
“Folks read the obituaries and the homicides now, Mr. Shepherd, to find a room let open. But the police and the undertaker families get those. The rest of us had just as well reckon the next house to open up for us will be the cedar box.”
“Mrs. Brown, goodness. This isn’t like you.” It weighed: these rooms I have, riches undeserved. For a single person who could easily live in little more than a cedar box, and frequently has.
“Anyhow, I’ve gone years without a hike at Mrs. Bittle’s,” she said. “The new man is paying twice as much. I’m lucky to have what I have.”
“I’ll raise your salary to compensate for it.”
“You needn’t.”
“No, I will. If you can find another place suitable, tell me what it costs.”
She went to the water closet and ran the water in there, probably washing her face. When she came out she retrieved the letter opener from the drawer where she keeps it, like the woman in a play who draws the revolver from the bureau. Instead of shooting the villain, she sat down and began to sort envelopes into piles. Not glancing up.
“Look. I’ll talk to the presses about this, or send out a statement. Denying the romance business. Whatever you want me to do, to defend your name.”
“I’m nobody, I don’t have any name. It’s your own you have to think about.”