He shielded his eyes with his hands and she saw that he was shocked and disgusted. “In matters like this,” he said, his eyes still shielded, “I work with Dr. Herzog. I can give you his telephone number or I’ll be happy to call him myself and make an appointment.”
“I will not go to Dr. Herzog,” Melissa said, weeping. “I cannot.”
She left the rectory and at home telephoned Narobi’s. The cook had ordered the groceries and she asked for a case of quinine water, a bunch of water cress and a box of peppercorns. “Your cook had a case of quinine water delivered this morning,” Mr. Narobi said. He was unpleasant. “Yes, I know,” Melissa said. “We’re having guests.” Emile came a little while later.
“I’m sorry I left you in New York,” Melissa said.
“That’s all right.” He laughed. “I was just hungry.”
“I want to see you.”
“Sure,” he said. “Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there’s this shack,” he said. “Some of the fellows and me have this shack down by the cove. I’ll check in at the store and meet you there in half an hour.”
“All right.”
“You go over the railroad bridge,” he said, “down to the cove. There’s a dirt road there by the dump. I’ll get there early and make sure no one’s around.”
She hardly saw the place beyond the wall near where she lay. “You know,” he said, “for lunch I had the Manhattan clam chowder and then a hot roast-beef sandwich with two vegetables and pie with ice cream and I’m still hungry.”
Emile and Mrs. Cranmer lived on the second floor of a two-family frame house. The house was painted a dark green with white trim—the green turned black in the rain and was one of a species, gregarious in that one seldom finds them alone. They appear in the suburbs of Montreal, reappear across the border in Northern lumber and mill towns, flourish in Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland and Chicago and go underground briefly in the wheat states to appear again in the depressed neighborhoods of Sioux City, Wichita and Kansas City, forming an irregular and mighty chain of quasi-nomadic domiciles that reaches across the entire continent.
On her walk home in the evening from Barnum’s Mrs. Cranmer passed the house that had been hers when Mr. Cranmer was alive. It was a large brick and stucco house. Twelve rooms! The dimensions and conveniences of the place returned to her like an incantation. The house had been sold by the bank to an Italian family named Tomasi. In spite of her struggle to accept the doctrines of equality that had been taught to her in school she still felt some bitterness that people from another country, people who had not yet learned the language and the customs of the United States, could possess the house of someone who was native born like herself. The economic facts were inescapable and she knew them but this didn’t cure her bitterness. The house still seemed to be hers, still seemed in her custody, still reminded her of the richness of her life with Mr. Cranmer. The Tomasis spent most of their time in the kitchen and the front windows were usually dark but this evening a fringed lamp in one of the windows was lighted and beyond the lamp she could see, hanging on the wall, the enlarged photographs of some foreigners, the men with mustaches and high collars and the women in black. There was a powerful otherness for her in looking into the lighted windows of a house where her life had been centered. On she went in her comic-strip shoes.
The evening paper was in the mailbox. She usually looked at this in the kitchen. The most sensational stories dealt with the covert moral revolution that was being waged by men of Emile’s age. They robbed, they pillaged, they drank, they raped and when they were locked up in jail they ripped out the plumbing. She reasoned that their parents were to blame and she sent up to heaven a completely sincere prayer of thanksgiving over the fact that Emile was such a good boy. In her own youth she had seen some wildness but the world had seemed more commodious and forgiving. She had never been able to settle on who was to blame. She feared that the world might have changed too swiftly for her intelligence and her intuition. She had no one to help her sift out the good from the evil. When she had finished with the paper she usually went into her room and unfastened those gallant bindings that signified that she had known the love of a good man. She was never unready, she was never slovenly. She put on clean slippers and a clean cotton dress and then as a rule she cooked the supper. This night she went directly into her bedroom, lay on her bed in the dark and cried.
