Clay-Shuttered Doors

For months I have tried not to think about Thalia Corson. Anything may invoke her, with her langorous fragility, thin wrists and throat, her elusive face with its long eyelids. I can’t quite remember her mouth. When I try to visualize her sharply I get soft pale hair, the lovely curve from her temple to chin, and eyes blue and intense. Her boy, Fletcher, has eyes like hers.

To-day I came back to New York, and my taxi to an uptown hotel was held for a few minutes in Broadway traffic where the afternoon sunlight fused into a dazzle a great expanse of plateglass and elaborate show motor cars. The “Regal Eight”—Winchester Corson’s establishment. I huddled as the taxi jerked ahead, in spite of knowledge that Winchester would scarcely peer out of that elegant setting into taxi cabs. I didn’t wish to see him, nor would he care to see me. But the glimpse had started the whole affair churning again, and I went through it deliberately, hoping that it might have smoothed out into some rational explanation. Sometimes things do, if you leave them alone, like logs submerged in water that float up later, encrusted thickly. This affair won’t add to itself. It stays unique and smooth, sliding through the rest of life without annexing a scrap of seaweed.

I suppose, for an outsider, it all begins with the moment on Brooklyn Bridge; behind that are the years of my friendship with Thalia. Our families had summer cottages on the Cape. She was just enough older, however, so that not until I had finished college did I catch up to any intimacy with her. She had married Winchester Corson, who at that time fitted snugly into the phrase “a rising young man.” During those first years, while his yeast sent up preliminary bubbles, Thalia continued to spend her summers near Boston, with Winchester coming for occasional weekends. Fletcher was, unintentionally, born there; he began his difficult existence by arriving as a seven-months baby. Two years later Thalia had a second baby to bring down with her. Those were the summers which gave my friendship for Thalia its sturdy roots. They made me wonder, too, why she had chosen Winchester Corson. He was personable enough; tall, with prominent dark eyes and full mouth under a neat mustache, restless hands, and an uncertain disposition. He could be a charming companion, sailing the catboat with dash, managing lobster parties on the shore; or he would, unaccountably, settle into a foggy grouch, when everyone—children and females particularly—was supposed to approach only on tiptoe, bearing burnt offerings. The last time he spent a fortnight there, before he moved the family to the new Long Island estate, I had my own difficulties with him. There had always been an undertone of sex in his attitude toward me, but I had thought “that’s just his male conceit.” That summer he was a nuisance, coming upon me with his insistent, messy kisses, usually with Thalia in the next room. They were the insulting kind of kisses that aren’t at all personal, and I could have ended them fast enough if there hadn’t been the complication of Thalia and my love for her. If I made Winchester angry he’d put an end to Thalia’s relation to me. I didn’t, anyway, want her to know what a fool he was. Of course she did know, but I thought then that I could protect her.

There are, I have decided, two ways with love. You can hold one love, knowing that, if it is a living thing, it must develop and change. That takes maturity, and care, and a consciousness of the other person. That was Thalia’s way. Or you enjoy the beginning of love and, once you’re past that, you have to hunt for a new love, because the excitement seems to be gone. Men like Winchester, who use all their brains on their jobs, never grow up; they go on thinking that preliminary stir and snap is love itself. Cut flowers, that was Winchester’s idea, while to Thalia love was a tree.

But I said Brooklyn Bridge was the point at which the affair had its start. It seems impossible to begin there, or anywhere, as I try to account for what happened. Ten years after the summer when Winchester made himself such a nuisance—that last summer the Corsons spent at the Cape—I went down at the end of the season for a week with Thalia and the children at the Long Island place. Winchester drove out for the weekend. The children were mournful because they didn’t wish to leave the shore for school; a sharp September wind brought rain and fog down the Sound, and Winchester nourished all that Sunday a disagreeable grouch. I had seen nothing of them for most of the ten intervening years, as I had been first in France and then in China, after feature-article stuff. The week had been pleasant: good servants, comfortable house, a half-moon of white beach below the drop of lawn; Thalia a stimulating listener, with Fletcher, a thin, eager boy of twelve, like her in his intensity of interest. Dorothy, a plump, pink child of ten, had no use for stories of French villages or Chinese temples. Nug, the wire-haired terrier, and her dolls were more immediate and convincing. Thalia was thin and noncommittal, except for her interest in what I had seen and done. I couldn’t, for all my affection, establish any real contact. She spoke casually of the town house, of dinners she gave for Winchester, of his absorption in business affairs. But she was sheathed in polished aloofness and told me nothing of herself. She did say, one evening, that she was glad I was to be in New York that winter. Winchester, like his daughter Dorothy, had no interest in foreign parts once he had ascertained that I hadn’t even seen the Chinese quarters of the motor company in which he was concerned. He had an amusing attitude toward me: careful indifference, no doubt calculated to put me in my place as no longer alluring. Thalia tried to coax him into listening to some of my best stories. “Tell him about the bandits, Mary”—but his sulkiness brought, after dinner, a casual explanation from her, untinged with apology. “He’s working on an enormous project, a merging of several companies, and he’s so soaked in it he can’t come up for a breath.”

In the late afternoon the maid set out high tea for us, before our departure for New York. Thalia suggested that perhaps one highball was enough if Winchester intended to drive over the wet roads. Win immediately mixed a second, asking if she had ever seen him in the least affected. “Be better for you than tea before a long damp drive, too.” He clinked the ice in his glass. “Jazz you up a bit.” Nug was begging for food and Thalia, bending to give him a corner of her sandwich, apparently did not hear Winchester. He looked about the room, a smug, owning look. The fire and candlelight shone in the heavy waxed rafters, made silver beads of the rain on the French windows. I watched him—heavier, more dominant, his prominent dark eyes and his lips sullen, as if the whiskey banked up his temper rather than appeased it.

Then Jim, the gardener, brought the car to the door; the children scrambled in. Dorothy wanted to take Nug, but her father said not if she wanted to sit with him and drive.

“How about chains, sir?” Jim held the umbrella for Thalia.

“Too damned noisy. Don’t need them.” Winchester slammed the door and slid under the wheel. Thalia and I, with Fletcher between us, sat comfortably in the rear.

“I like it better when Walter drives, don’t you, Mother?” said Fletcher as we slid down the drive out to the road.

“Sh—Father likes to drive. And Walter likes Sunday off, too.” Thalia’s voice was cautious.

“It’s too dark to see anything.”

“I can see lots,” announced Dorothy, whereupon Fletcher promptly turned the handle that pushed up the glass between the chauffeur’s seat and the rear.

The heavy car ran smoothly over the wet narrow road, with an occasional rumble and flare of headlights as some car swung past. Not till we reached the turnpike was there much traffic. There Winchester had to slacken his speed for other shiny beetles slipping along through the rain. Sometimes he cut past a car, weaving back into line in the glaring teeth of a car rushing down on him, and Fletcher would turn inquiringly toward his mother. The gleaming, wet darkness and the smooth motion made me drowsy, and I paid little heed until we slowed in a congestion of cars at the approach to the bridge. Far below on the black river, spaced red and white stars suggested slow-moving tugs, and beyond, faint lights splintered in the rain hinted at the city.

“Let’s look for the cliff dwellers, Mother.”

Thalia leaned forward, her fine, sharp profile dimly outlined against the shifting background of arches, and Fletcher slipped to his feet, his arm about her neck. “There!”

We were reaching the New York end of the bridge, and I had a swift glimpse of their cliff dwellers—lights in massed buildings, like ancient camp fires along a receding mountain side. Just then Winchester nosed out of the slow line, Dorothy screamed, the light from another car tunnelled through our windows, the car trembled under the sudden grip of brakes, and like a crazy top spun sickeningly about, with a final thud against the stone abutment. A shatter of glass, a confusion of motor horns about us, a moment while the tautness of shock held me rigid.

Around me that periphery of turmoil—the usual recriminations, “what the hell you think you’re doing?”—the shriek of a siren on an approaching motor cycle. Within the circle I tried to move across the narrow space of the car. Fletcher was crying; vaguely I knew that the door had swung open, that Thalia was crouching on her knees, the rain and the lights pouring on her head and shoulders; her hat was gone, her wide fur collar looked like a drenched and lifeless animal. “Hush, Fletcher.” I managed to force movement into my stiff body. “Are you hurt? Thalia—” Then outside Winchester, with the bristling fury of panic, was trying to lift her drooping head. “Thalia! My God, you aren’t hurt!” Someone focussed a searchlight on the car as Winchester got his arms about her and lifted her out through the shattered door.

Over the springing line of the stone arch I saw the cliff dwellers’ fires and I thought as I scrambled out to follow Winchester, “She was leaning forward, looking at those, and that terrific spin of the car must have knocked her head on the door as it lurched open.”

“Lay her down, man!” An important little fellow had rushed up, a doctor evidently. “Lay her down, you fool!” Someone threw down a robe, and Winchester, as if Thalia were a drowned feather, knelt with her, laid her there on the pavement. I was down beside her and the fussy little man also. She did look drowned, drowned in that beating sea of tumult, that terrific honking of motors, unwilling to stop an instant even for—was it death? Under the white glare of headlights her lovely face had the empty shallowness, the husklikeness of death. The little doctor had his pointed beard close to her breast; he lifted one of her long eyelids. “She’s just fainted, eh, doctor?” Winchester’s angry voice tore at him.

The little man rose slowly. “She your wife? I’m sorry. Death must have been instantaneous. A blow on the temple.”

With a kind of roar Winchester was down there beside Thalia, lifting her, her head lolling against his shoulder, his face bent over her. “Thalia! Thalia! Do you hear? Wake up!” I think he even shook her in his baffled fright and rage. “Thalia, do you hear me? I want you to open your eyes. You weren’t hurt. That was nothing.” And then, “Dearest, you must!” and more words, frantic, wild words, mouthed close to her empty face. I touched his shoulder, sick with pity, but he staggered up to his feet, lifting her with him. Fletcher pressed shivering against me, and I turned for an instant to the child. Then I heard Thalia’s voice, blurred and queer, “You called me, Win?” and Winchester’s sudden, triumphant laugh. She was standing against his shoulder, still with that husklike face, but she spoke again, “You did call me?”

“Here, let’s get out of this.” Winchester was again the efficient, competent man of affairs. The traffic cops were shouting, the lines of cars began to move. Winchester couldn’t start his motor. Something had smashed. His card and a few words left responsibility with an officer, and even as an ambulance shrilled up, he was helping Thalia into a taxi. “You take the children, will you?” to me, and “Get her another taxi, will you?” to the officer. He had closed the taxi door after himself, and was gone, leaving us to the waning curiosity of passing cars. As we rode off in a second taxi, I had a glimpse of the little doctor, his face incredulous, his beard wagging, as he spoke to the officer.

Dorothy was, characteristically, tearfully indignant that her father had left her to me. Fletcher was silent as we bumped along under the elevated tracks, but presently he tugged at my sleeve, and I heard his faint whisper. “What is it?” I asked.

“Is my mother really dead?” he repeated.

“Of course not, Fletcher. You saw her get into the cab with your father.”

“Why didn’t Daddy take us too?” wailed Dorothy, and I had to turn to her, although my nerves echoed her question.

The house door swung open even as the taxi bumped the curb, and the butler hurried out with an umbrella which we were too draggled to need.

“Mr. Corson instructed me to pay the man, madam.” He led us into the hall, where a waiting maid popped the children at once into the tiny elevator.

“Will you wait for the elevator, madam? The library is one flight.” The butler led me up the stairs, and I dropped into a low chair near the fire, vaguely aware of the long, narrow room, with discreet gold of the walls giving back light from soft lamps. “I’ll tell Mr. Corson you have come.”

“Is Mrs. Corson—does she seem all right?” I asked.

“Quite, madam. It was a fortunate accident, with no one hurt.”

Well, perhaps it had addled my brain! I waited in a kind of numbness for Winchester to come.

Presently he strode in, his feet silent on the thick rugs.

“Sorry,” he began, abruptly. “I wanted to look the children over. Not a scratch on them. You’re all right, of course?”

“Oh, yes. But Thalia—”

“She won’t even have a doctor. I put her straight to bed—she’s so damned nervous, you know. Hot-water bottles ... she was cold. I think she’s asleep now. Said she’d see you in the morning. You’ll stay here, of course.” He swallowed in a gulp the whiskey he had poured. “Have some, Mary? Or would you like something hot?”

“No, thanks. If you’re sure she’s all right I’ll go to bed.”

“Sure?” His laugh was defiant. “Did that damn fool on the bridge throw a scare into you? He gave me a bad minute, I’ll say. If that car hadn’t cut in on me—I told Walter last week the brakes needed looking at. They shouldn’t grab like that. Might have been serious.”

“Since it wasn’t—” I rose, wearily, watching him pour amber liquid slowly into his glass—“if you’ll have someone show me my room—”

“After Chinese bandits, a little skid ought not to matter to you.” His prominent eyes gleamed hostilely at me; he wanted some assurance offered that the skidding wasn’t his fault, that only his skill had saved all our lives.

“I can’t see Thalia?” I said.

“She’s asleep. Nobody can see her.” His eyes moved coldly from my face, down to my muddy shoes. “Better give your clothes to the maid for a pressing. You’re smeared quite a bit.”

I woke early, with clear September sun at the windows of the room, with blue sky behind the sharp city contours beyond the windows. There was none too much time to make the morning train for Albany, where I had an engagement that day, an interview for an article. The maid who answered my ring insisted on serving breakfast to me in borrowed elegance of satin negligee. Mrs. Corson was resting, and would see me before I left. Something—the formality and luxury, the complicated household so unlike the old days at the Cape—accented the queer dread which had filtered all night through my dreams.

I saw Thalia for only a moment. The heavy silk curtains were drawn against the light and in the dimness her face seemed to gather shadows.

“Are you quite all right, Thalia?” I hesitated beside her bed, as if my voice might tear apart the veils of drowsiness in which she rested.

“Why, yes—” as if she wondered. Then she added, so low that I wasn’t sure what I heard, “It is hard to get back in.”

“What, Thalia?” I bent toward her.

“I’ll be myself once I’ve slept enough.” Her voice was clearer. “Come back soon, won’t you, Mary?” Then her eyelids closed and her face merged into the shadows of the room. I tiptoed away, thinking she slept.

* * *

It was late November before I returned to New York. Free-lancing has a way of drawing herrings across your trail and, when I might have drifted back in early November, a younger sister wanted me to come home to Arlington for her marriage. I had written to Thalia, first a note of courtesy for my week with her, and then a letter begging for news. Like many people of charm, she wrote indifferent letters, stiff and childlike, lacking in her personal quality. Her brief reply was more unsatisfactory than usual. The children were away in school, lots of cold rainy weather, everything was going well. At the end, in writing unlike hers, as if she scribbled the line in haste, “I am lonely. When are you coming?” I answered that I’d show up as soon as the wedding was over.

The night I reached Arlington was rainy, too, and I insisted upon a taxi equipped with chains. My brother thought that amusing, and at dinner gave the family an exaggerated account of my caution. I tried to offer him some futile sisterly advice and, to point up my remarks, told about that drive in from Long Island with the Corsons. I had never spoken of it before; I found that an inexplicable inhibition kept me from making much of a story.

“Well, nothing happened, did it?” Richard was triumphant.

“A great deal might have,” I insisted. “Thalia was stunned, and I was disagreeably startled.”

“Thalia was stunned, was she?” An elderly cousin of ours from New Jersey picked out that item. I saw her fitting it into some pigeon hole, but she said nothing until late that evening when she stopped at the door of my room.

“Have you seen Thalia Corson lately?” she asked.

“I haven’t been in New York since September.”

She closed the door and lowered her voice, a kind of avid curiosity riding astride the decorous pity she expressed.

“I called there, one day last week. I didn’t know what was the matter with her. I hadn’t heard of that accident.”

I waited, an old antagonism for my proper cousin blurring the fear that shot up through my thoughts.

“Thalia was always individual, of course.” She used the word like a reproach. “But she had savoir faire. But now she’s—well—queer. Do you suppose her head was affected?”

“How is she queer?”

“She looks miserable, too. Thin and white.”

“But how—”

“I am telling you, Mary. She was quite rude. First she didn’t come down for ever so long, although I sent up word that I’d come up to her room if she was resting. Then her whole manner—well, I was really offended. She scarcely heard a word I said to her, just sat with her back to a window so I couldn’t get a good look at her. When I said, ‘You don’t look like yourself,’ she actually sneered. ‘Myself?’ she said. ‘How do you know?’ Imagine! I tried to chatter along as if I noticed nothing. I flatter myself I can manage awkward moments rather well. But Thalia sat there and I am sure she muttered under her breath. Finally I rose to go and I said, meaning well, ‘You’d better take a good rest. You look half dead.’ Mary, I wish you’d seen the look she gave me! Really I was frightened. Just then their dog came in, you know, Dorothy’s little terrier. Thalia used to be silly about him. Well, she actually tried to hide in the folds of the curtain, and I don’t wonder! The dog was terrified at her. He crawled on his belly out of the room. Now she must have been cruel to him if he acts like that. I think Winchester should have a specialist. I didn’t know how to account for any of it; but of course a blow on the head can affect a person.”

Fortunately my mother interrupted us just then, and I didn’t, by my probable rudeness, give my cousin reason to suppose that the accident had affected me, too. I sifted through her remarks and decided they might mean only that Thalia found her more of a bore than usual. As for Nug, perhaps he retreated from the cousin! During the next few days the house had so much wedding turmoil that she found a chance only for a few more dribbles: one that Thalia had given up all her clubs—she had belonged to several—the other that she had sent the children to boarding schools instead of keeping them at home. “Just when her husband is doing so well, too!”

I was glad when the wedding party had departed, and I could plan to go back to New York. Personally I think a low-caste Chinese wedding is saner and more interesting than a modern American affair. My cousin “should think I could stay home with the family,” and “couldn’t we go to New York together, if I insisted upon gadding off?” We couldn’t. I saw to that. She hoped that I’d look up Thalia. Maybe I could advise Winchester about a specialist.

I did telephone as soon as I got in. That sentence “I am lonely,” in her brief note kept recurring. Her voice sounded thin and remote, a poor connection, I thought. She was sorry. She was giving a dinner for Winchester that evening. The next day?

I had piles of proof to wade through that next day, and it was late afternoon when I finally went to the Corson house. The butler looked doubtful but I insisted, and he left me in the hall while he went off with my card. He returned, a little smug in his message: Mrs. Corson was resting and had left word she must not be disturbed. Well, you can’t protest to a perfect butler, and I started down the steps, indignant, when a car stopped in front of the house, a liveried chauffeur opened the door, and Winchester emerged. He glanced at me in the twilight and extended an abrupt hand.

“Would Thalia see you?” he asked.

“No.” For a moment I hoped he might convoy me past the butler. “Isn’t she well? She asked me to come to-day.”

“I hoped she’d see you.” Winchester’s hand smoothed at his little mustache. “She’s just tired from her dinner last night. She overexerted herself, was quite the old Thalia.” He looked at me slowly in the dusk, and I had a brief feeling that he was really looking at me, no, for me, for the first time in all our meetings, as if he considered me without relation to himself for once. “Come in again, will you?” He thrust away whatever else he thought of saying. “Thalia really would like to see you. Can I give you a lift?”

“No, thanks. I need a walk.” As I started off I knew the moment had just missed some real significance. If I had ventured a question ... but, after all, what could I ask him? He had said that Thalia was “just tired.” That night I sent a note to her, saying I had called and asking when I might see her.

She telephoned me the next day. Would I come in for Thanksgiving? The children would be home, and she wanted an old-fashioned day, everything but the sleigh ride New York couldn’t furnish. Dinner would be at six, for the children; perhaps I could come in early. I felt a small grievance at being put off for almost a week, but I promised to come.

That was the week I heard gossip about Winchester, in the curious devious way of gossip. Atlantic City, and a gaudy lady. Someone having an inconspicuous fortnight of convalescence there had seen them. I wasn’t surprised, except perhaps that Winchester chose Atlantic City. Thalia was too fine; he couldn’t grow up to her. I wondered how much she knew. She must, years ago, with her sensitiveness, have discovered that Winchester was stationary so far as love went and, being stationary himself, was inclined to move the object toward which he directed his passion.

On Thursday, as I walked across Central Park, gaunt and deserted in the chilly afternoon light, I decided that Thalia probably knew more about Winchester’s affairs than gossip had given me. Perhaps that was why she had sent the children away. He had always been conventionally discreet, but discretion would be a tawdry coin among Thalia’s shining values.

I was shown up to the nursery, with a message from Thalia that she would join me there soon. Fletcher seemed glad to see me, in a shy, excited way, and stood close to my chair while Dorothy wound up her phonograph for a dance record and pirouetted about us with her doll.

“Mother keeps her door tight locked all the time,” whispered Fletcher doubtfully. “We can’t go in. This morning I knocked and knocked but no one answered.”

“Do you like your school?” I asked cheerfully.

“I like my home better.” His eyes, so like Thalia’s with their long, arched lids, had young bewilderment under their lashes.

“See me!” called Dorothy. “Watch me do this!”

While she twirled I felt Fletcher’s thin body stiffen against my arm, as if a kind of panic froze him. Thalia stood in the doorway. Was the boy afraid of her? Dorothy wasn’t. She cried, “See me, Mother! Look at me!” and in her lusty confusion, I had a moment to look at Thalia before she greeted me. She was thin, but she had always been that. She did not heed Dorothy’s shrieks, but watched Fletcher, a kind of slanting dread on her white, proud face. I had thought, that week on Long Island, that she shut herself away from me, refusing to restore the intimacy of ten years earlier. But now a stiff loneliness hedged her as if she were rimmed in ice and snow. She smiled. “Dear Mary,” she said. At the sound of her voice I lost my slightly cherished injury that she had refused earlier to see me. “Let’s go down to the library,” she went on. “It’s almost time for the turkey.” I felt Fletcher break his intent watchfulness with a long sigh, and as the children went ahead of us, I caught at Thalia’s arm. “Thalia—” She drew away, and her arm, under the soft flowing sleeve of dull blue stuff, was so slight it seemed brittle. I thought suddenly that she must have chosen that gown because it concealed so much beneath its lovely embroidered folds. “You aren’t well, Thalia. What is it?”

“Well enough! Don’t fuss about me.” And even as I stared reproachfully she seemed to gather vitality, so that the dry pallor of her face became smooth ivory and her eyes were no longer hollow and distressed. “Come.”

The dinner was amazingly like one of our old holidays. Winchester wore his best mood, the children were delighted and happy. Thalia, under the gold flames of the tall black candles, was a gracious and lovely hostess. I almost forgot my troublesome anxiety, wondering whether my imagination hadn’t been playing me tricks.

We had coffee by the library fire and some of Winchester’s old Chartreuse. Then he insisted upon exhibiting his new radio. Thalia demurred, but the children begged for a concert. “This is their party, Tally!” Winchester opened the doors of the old teakwood cabinet which housed the apparatus. Thalia sank back into the shadows of a wing chair, and I watched her over my cigarette. Off guard, she had relaxed into strange apathy. Was it the firelight or my unaccustomed Chartreuse? Her features seemed blurred as if a clumsy hand trying to trace a drawing made uncertain outlines. Strange groans and whirrs from the radio.

“Win, I can’t stand it!” Her voice dragged from some great distance. “Not to-night.” She swayed to her feet, her hands restless under the loose sleeves.

“Static,” growled Winchester. “Wait a minute.”

“No!” Again it was as if vitality flowed into her. “Come, children. You have had your party. Time to go upstairs. I’ll go with you.”

They were well trained, I thought. Kisses for their father, a curtsy from Dorothy for me, and a grave little hand extended by Fletcher. Then Winchester came toward the fire as the three of them disappeared.

“You’re good for Thalia,” he said, in an undertone. “She’s—well, what do you make of her?”

“Why?” I fenced, unwilling to indulge him in my vague anxieties.

“You saw how she acted about the radio. She has whims like that. Funny, she was herself at dinner. Last week she gave a dinner for me, important affair, pulled it off brilliantly. Then she shuts herself up and won’t open her door for days. I can’t make it out. She’s thin—”

“Have you had a doctor?” I asked, banally.

“That’s another thing. She absolutely refuses. Made a fool of me when I brought one here. Wouldn’t unlock her door. Says she just wants to rest. But—” he glanced toward the door—“do you know that fool on the bridge ... that little runt? The other night, I swear I saw him rushing down the steps as I came home. Thalia just laughed when I asked about it.”

Something clicked in my thoughts, a quick suspicion, drawing a parallel between her conduct and that of people I had seen in the East. Was it some drug? That lethargy, and the quick spring into vitality? Days behind a closed door—

“I wish you’d persuade her to go off for a few weeks. I’m frightfully pressed just now, in an important business matter, but if she’d go off—maybe you’d go with her?”

“Where, Winchester?” We both started, with the guilt of conspirators. Thalia came slowly into the room. “Where shall I go? Would you suggest—Atlantic City?”

“Perhaps. Although some place farther south this time of year—” Winchester’s imperturbability seemed to me far worse than some slight sign of embarrassment; it marked him as so rooted in successful deceit whether Thalia’s inquiry were innocent or not. “If Mary would go with you. I can’t get away just now.”

“I shall not go anywhere until your deal goes through. Then—” Thalia seated herself again in the wing chair. The hand she lifted to her cheek, fingers just touching her temple beneath the soft drift of hair, seemed transparent against the firelight. “Have you told Mary about your deal? Winchester plans to be the most important man on Automobile Row.” Was there mockery in her tone? “I can’t tell you the details, but he’s buying out all the rest.”

“Don’t be absurd. Not all of them. It’s a big merging of companies, that’s all.”

“We entertain the lords at dinner, and in some mysterious way that smooths the merging. It makes a wife almost necessary.”

“Invite Mary to the next shebang, and let her see how well you do it.” Winchester was irritated. “For all your scoffing, there’s as much politics to being president of such a concern as of the United States.”

“Yes, I’ll invite Mary. Then she’ll see that you don’t really want to dispense with me—yet.”

“Good God, I meant for a week or two.”

As Winchester, lighting a cigarette, snapped the head from several matches in succession, I moved my chair a little backward, distressed. There was a thin wire of significance drawn so taut between the two that I felt at any moment it might splinter in my face.

“It’s so lucky—” malice flickered on her thin face—“that you weren’t hurt in that skid on the bridge, Mary. Winchester would just have tossed you in the river to conceal your body.”

“If you’re going over that again!” Winchester strode out of the room. As Thalia turned her head slightly to watch him, her face and throat had the taut rigidity of pain so great that it congeals the nerves.

I was silent. With Thalia I had never dared intrude except when she admitted me. In another moment she too had risen. “You’d better go home, Mary,” she said, slowly. “I might tell you things you wouldn’t care to live with.”

I tried to touch her hand, but she retreated. If I had been wiser or more courageous, I might have helped her. I shall always have that regret, and that can’t be much better to live with than whatever she might have told me. All I could say was stupidly, “Thalia, if there’s anything I can do! You know I love you.”

“Love? That’s a strange word,” she said, and her laugh in the quiet room was like the shrilling of a grasshopper on a hot afternoon. “One thing I will tell you.” (She stood now on the stairway above me.) “Love has no power. It never shouts out across great space. Only fear and self-desire are strong.”

Then she had gone, and the butler appeared silently, to lead me to the little dressing room.

“The car is waiting for you, madam,” he assured me, opening the door. I didn’t want it, but Winchester was waiting, too, hunched angrily in a corner.

“That’s the way she acts,” he began. “Now you’ve seen her I’ll talk about it. Thalia never bore grudges, you know that.”

“It seems deeper than a grudge,” I said cautiously.

“That reference to the ... the accident. That’s a careless remark I made. I don’t even remember just what I said. Something entirely inconsequential. Just that it was damned lucky no one was hurt when I was putting this merger across. You know if it’d got in the papers it would have queered me. Wrecking my own car ... there’s always a suspicion you’ve been drinking. She picked it up and won’t drop it. It’s like a fixed idea. If you can suggest something. I want her to see a nerve specialist. What does she do behind that locked door?”

“What about Atlantic City?” I asked, abruptly. I saw his dark eyes bulge, trying to ferret out my meaning, there in the dusky interior of the car.

“A week there with you might do her good.” That was all he would say, and I hadn’t courage enough to accuse him, even in Thalia’s name.

“At least you’ll try to see her again,” he said, as the car stopped in front of my apartment house.

* * *

I couldn’t sleep that night. I felt that just over the edge of my squirming thoughts there lay clear and whole the meaning of it all, but I couldn’t reach past thought. And then, stupidly enough, I couldn’t get up the next day. Just a feverish cold, but the doctor insisted on a week in bed and subdued me with warnings about influenza.

I had begun to feel steady enough on my feet to consider venturing outside my apartment when the invitation came, for a formal dinner at the Corsons’. Scrawled under the engraving was a line, “Please come. T.” I sent a note, explaining that I had been ill, and that I should come—the dinner was a fortnight away—unless I stayed too wobbly.

I meant that night to arrive properly with the other guests, but my watch, which had never before done anything except lose a few minutes a day, had gained an unsuspected hour. Perhaps the hands stuck—perhaps—Well, I was told I was early, Thalia was dressing, and only the children, home for the Christmas holidays, were available. So I went again to the nursery. Dorothy was as plump and unconcerned as ever, but Fletcher had a strained, listening effect and he looked too thin and white for a little boy. They were having their supper on a small table, and Fletcher kept going to the door, looking out into the hall. “Mother promised to come up,” he said.

The maid cleared away their dishes, and Dorothy, who was in a beguiling mood, chose to sit on my lap and entertain me with stories. One was about Nug the terrier; he had been sent out to the country because Mother didn’t like him any more.

“I think,” interrupted Fletcher, “she likes him, but he has a queer notion about her.”

“She doesn’t like him,” repeated Dorothy. Then she dismissed that subject, and Fletcher too, for curiosity about the old silver chain I wore. I didn’t notice that the boy had slipped away, but he must have gone down stairs; for presently his fingers closed over my wrist, like a frightened bird’s claw, and I turned to see him, trembling, his eyes dark with terror. He couldn’t speak but he clawed at me, and I shook Dorothy from my knees and let him pull me out to the hall.

“What is it, Fletcher?” He only pointed down the stairway, toward his mother’s door, and I fled down those stairs. What had the child seen?

“The door wasn’t locked—” he gasped behind me—“I opened it very still and went in—”

I pushed it ajar. Thalia sat before her dressing table, with the threefold mirrors reiterating like a macabre symphony her rigid, contorted face. Her gown, burnished blue and green like peacock’s feathers, sheathed her gaudily, and silver, blue, and green chiffon clouded her shoulders. Her hands clutched at the edge of the dressing table. For an instant I could not move, thrust through with a terror like the boy’s. Then I stumbled across the room. Before I reached her, the mirrors echoed her long shudder, her eyelids dragged open, and I saw her stare at my reflection wavering toward her. Then her hands relaxed, moved quickly toward the crystal jars along the heavy glass of the table and, without a word, she leaned softly forward, to draw a scarlet line along her white lips.

“How cold it is in here,” I said, stupidly, glancing toward the windows, where the heavy silk damask, drawn across, lay in motionless folds. “Fletcher said—” I was awkward, an intruder.

“He startled me.” Her voice came huskily. She rouged her hollow cheeks. It was as if she drew another face for herself. “I didn’t have time to lock the door.” Then turning, she sought him out, huddled at the doorway, like a moth on a pin of fear. “It wasn’t nice of you, Son. It’s all right now. You see?” She rose, drawing her lovely scarf over her shoulders. “You should never open closed doors.” She blew him a kiss from her finger tips. “Now run along and forget you were so careless.”

The icy stir of air against my skin had ceased. I stared at her, my mind racing back over what I knew of various drugs and the stigmata of their victims. But her eyes were clear and undilated, a little piteous. “This,” she said, “is the last time. I can’t endure it.” And then, with that amazing flood of vitality, as if a sudden connection had been made and current flowed again, “Come, Mary. It is time we were down stairs.”

I thought Fletcher peered over the railing as we went down. But a swift upward glance failed to detect him.

The dinner itself I don’t remember definitely except that it glittered and sparkled, moving with slightly alcoholic wit through elaborate courses, while I sat like an abashed poor relation at a feast, unable to stop watching Thalia, wondering whether my week of fever had given me a tendency to hallucinations. At the end a toast was proposed, to Winchester Corson and his extraordinary success. “It’s done, then?” Thalia’s gaiety had sudden malice—as she looked across at Winchester, seating himself after a slightly pompous speech. “Sealed and cemented forever?”

“Thanks to his charming wife, too,” cried a plump, bald man, waving his glass. “A toast to Mrs. Corson!”

Thalia rose, her rouge like flecked scarlet on white paper. One hand drew her floating scarf about her throat, and her painted lips moved without a sound. There was an instant of agitated discomfort, as the guests felt their mood broken so abruptly, into which her voice pierced, thin, high. “I ... deserve ... such a toast—”

I pushed back my chair and reached her side.

“I’ll take her—” I saw Winchester’s face, wine-flushed, angry rather than concerned. “Come, Thalia.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll be all right—now.” But she moved ahead of me so swiftly that I couldn’t touch her. I thought she tried to close her door against me, but I was too quick for that. The silver candelabra still burned above the mirrors. “Mary!” Her voice was low again as she spoke a telephone number. “Tell him at once.” She stood away from me, her face a white mask with spots of scarlet, her peacock dress ashimmer. I did as I was bid and when I had said, “Mrs. Corson wishes you at once,” there was an emptiness where a man’s voice had come which suggested a sudden leap out of a room somewhere.

“I can never get in again!” Her fingers curled under the chiffon scarf. “Never! The black agony of fighting back—If he—” She bent her head, listening. “Go down to the door and let him in,” she said.

I crept down the stairs. Voices from the drawing-room. Winchester was seeing the party through. Almost as I reached the door and opened it I found him there: the little doctor with the pointed beard. He brushed past me up the stairs. He knew the way, then! I was scarcely surprised to find Thalia’s door fast shut when I reached it. Behind it came not a sound. Fletcher, like an unhappy sleepwalker, his eyes heavy, slipped down beside me, clinging to my hand. I heard farewells, churring of taxis and cars. Then Winchester came up the stairs.

“She’s shut you out?” He raised his fist and pounded on the door. “I’m going to stop this nonsense!”

“I sent for a doctor,” I said. “He’s in there.”

“Is it—” his face was puffy and gray—“that same fool?”

Then the door opened, and the man confronted us.

“It is over,” he said.

“What have you done to her?” Winchester lunged toward the door, but the little man’s lifted hand had dignity enough somehow to stop him.

“She won’t come back again.” He spoke slowly. “You may look if you care to.”

“She’s dead?”

“She died—months ago. There on the bridge. But you called to her, and she thought you wanted—her.”

Winchester thrust him aside and strode into the room. I dared one glance and saw only pale hair shining on the pillow. Then Fletcher flung himself against me, sobbing, and I knelt to hold him close against the fear we both felt.

What Winchester saw I never knew. He hurled himself past us, down the stairs. And Thalia was buried with the coffin lid fast closed under the flowers.