And even then they’re apt to keep on bumping up against each other.
It’s still a pretty small town.” He paused, squinting down the street.
“Oh, look", he said, hoisting his left brow. “Our Lois. She walks in beauty, like the night.
Ralph gave him an impatient look, which McGovern ether did not see or pretended not to. He got up, once again touching the tips of his fingers to the place where the Panama wasn’t, and then went down the steps to meet her on the walk.
“Lois!” McGovern cried, dropping to one knee before her and extending his hands theatrically. “Would that our lives might be united by the starry bonds of love! Wed your fate to mine and let me whirl you away to climes various in the golden car of my affections!”
“Gee, are you talking about a honeymoon or a one-night stand?”
Lois asked, smiling uncertainly.
Ralph poked McGovern in the back. “Get up, fool,” he said, and took the small bag Lois was carrying. He looked inside and saw three cans of beer.
McGovern got to his feet. “Sorry, Lois,” he said. “It was a combination of summer twilight and your beauty. I plead temporary insanity, in other words.”
Lois smiled at him, then turned to Ralph. “I just heard what happened,” she said, “and I hurried over as fast as I could. I was in Ludlow all afternoon, playing nickel-dime poker with the girls.”
Ralph didn’t have to look at McGovern to know his left eyebrow-the one that said Poker with the girls! How wonderfully, perfectIT Our Lois.” would be hoisted to its maximum altitude. “Is Helen all right?”
“Yes,” Ralph said. “Well, maybe not exactly all right-they’re keeping her in the hospital overnight-but she’s not in any danger.”
“And the baby?”
“Fine. Staying with a friend of Helen’s.”
“Well, come on up on the porch, you two, and tell me all about it.” She linked one arm through McGovern’s, the other through Ralph’s, and led them back up the walk. They mounted the porch steps that way, like two elderly musketeers with the woman whose affections they had vied for in the days of their youth held safe v between them, and as Lois sat down in her rocking chair, the streetlights went on along Harris Avenue, glimmering in the dusk like a double rope of pearls.
Ralph fell asleep that night bare instants after his head hit the pillow, and came wide awake again at 3:30 a.m. an Friday morning, The knew immediately there was no question of going back to sleep; he might as well proceed directly to the wing-chair in the living room.
He lay there a moment longer anyway, looking up into the dark and trying to catch the tail of the dream he’d been having. but couldn’t do it. He could only remember that Ed had been in it… and Helen… and Rosalie, the dog he sometimes saw limping up or down Harris Avenue before Pete the paperboy showed up.
Dorrance was in it, too. Don’t forget him.
Yes, right. And as if a key had turned in a lock, Ralph suddenly remembered the strange thing Dorrance had said during the confrontation between Ed and the heavyset man last year… the thing Ralph hadn’t been able to remember earlier this evening. He, Ralph, had been holding Ed back, trying to keep him pinned against the bent hood of his car long enough for reason to reassert itself, and Dorrance had said “I wouldn’t) that Ralph ought to stop touching him.
“He said he couldn’t see my hands anymore,” Ralph muttered, swinging his feet out of bed. “That was it.”
He sat where he was for a little while, head down, hair frizzed up wildly in back, his fingers laced loosely together between his thighs.
At last he stepped into his slippers and shuffled into the living room.
It was time to start waiting for the sun to come up.
CHAPTER 4
Although cynics always sounded more plausible than the cockeyed optimists of the world, Ralph’s experience had been that they were wrong at least as much of the time, if not more, and he was delighted to find that McGovern was wrong about Helen Deepneau-in her case, a single verse of “The Beaten-Up, Broken-Hearted Blues” seemed to have been enough.
On Wednesday of the following week, just as Ralph was deciding he’d better track down the woman Helen had spoken with in the hospital (Tillbury, her name had been-Gretchen Tillbury) and try to make sure Helen was okay, he received a letter from her. The return address was simple-)just Helen and Nat, High Ridge-but it,A,as enough to relieve Ralph’s mind considerably. He sat down in his chair on the porch, tore the end off the envelope, and shook out two sheets of lined paper crammed with Helen’s back-slanted handwriting.
Dear Ralph [the letter began], I suppose by now you must be thinking I decided to be mad at you after all, but I really didn’t.
It’s just that we’re supposed to stay out of contact with everyone-by phone and letter-for the first few days. Rules of the house. I like this place very much, and so does Nat. Of course she does; there are at least six kids her age to crawl around with. As for me, I am finding more women who know what I’ve been through than I ever would have believed. I mean, you see the TV showsOprah Talks with Women Who Love Men Who Use Them for Punching Bags-but when it happens to you, you can’t help feeling that it’s happening in a way it’s never happened to anyone else, in a way that’s brand new to the world. The relief of knowing that’s not true is the best thing that’s happened to me in a long, long time…
She talked about the chores to which she had been assignedworking in the garden, helping to repaint an equipment shed, washing the storm windows with vinegar and water-and about Nat’s adventures in learning to walk.
The rest of the letter was about what had happened and what she intended to do about it, and it was here that Ralph for the first time really sensed the emotional turmoil Helen must be feeling, her worries about the future, and, counterbalancing these things, a formidable determination to do what was right for Nat… and for herself, too. Helen seemed to be just discovering that she also had a right to the right thing. Ralph was happy she had found out, but sad when he thought of all the dark times she must have trudged through in order to reach that simple insight.
I’m going to divorce him [she wrote]. Part of my mind (it sounds like my mother when it talks) just about howls when I put it that bluntly, but I’m tired of fooling myself about My situation, There’s a lot of therapy out here, the kind of thing where people sit around in a circle and use up about four boxes of Kleenex an hour, but it all seems to come back to seeing things plain. in my case, the plain fact is that the man I married has been replaced by a dangerous paranoid. That he can sometimes be loving and sweet isn’t the point but a distraction.
I need to remember that the man who used to bring me hand-picked flowers now sometimes sits on the porch and talks to someone who isn’t there, a man he calls “the little bald doctor.” Isn’t that a beaut? I think I have an idea of how all this started, Ralph, and when I see you I’ll tell You, if you really want to hear.
I should be back at the house on Harris Avenue (for awhile, anyway) by mid-September, if only to look for a job… but no more about that now, the whole subject scares me to death! I had a note from Ed-just a paragraph, but a great relief just the same-saying that he was staying at one of the cottages at the Hawking Labs compound in Fresh Harbor, and that he would honor the noncontact clause in the bail agreement. He said he was sorry for everything, but I didn’t get any real sense of it, if he was. It’s not that I was expecting tear-stains on the letter or a package with his ear in it, but… I don’t know.
It was as if he wasn’t really apologizing at all, but Just getting on the record. Does that make sense? He also included a $750 check, which seems to indicate he understands his responsibilities. That’s good, but I think I’d have been happier to hear he was getting help with his mental problems.