This was meant to be a joke but sent a jolt of injury through her, that he should regard Josiah with such insouciance. Yet she allowed her father to take her hand and lead her: down the stairs, out the door. She walked toward her house, feeling his eyes on her the whole way. “Go to bed!” he shouted as she opened her door. She flashed him an obedient smile and waved good-bye.
Inside, the air was cool, and slightly dank. It was an odd house, large in the new way but built like one of the older Colonials on Bray or Lufkin, the windows small, the clapboards thin, the floorboards wide and already creaky, built to relieve her father’s embarrassment at having built such an opulent, modern house himself. There was no back door, no way to get down to the bay without her father seeing. Susannah moved slowly up the narrow stairs, the steps disingenuously sized for smaller, centuries-old feet. She paused, thinking of her father’s anger, and of what he would do if he learned about Josiah’s nocturnal flights. He could not possibly understand Susannah’s inaction. She would not understand it if another woman told her: how such a thing could occur and you could just go on, inside and out, as if nothing had changed. It wasn’t that she liked it, or that she hadn’t been glad when for a week or so he seemed to have stopped. And it wasn’t that she felt tepid toward Josiah. He was still the most beautiful man she had met. This morning, half asleep, he had rubbed her shoulders in bed, grunting softly about the water boys wanting raises like their counterparts had gotten at Babson’s, about Sam Turpa’s brother who’d lost his two fingers fishing and needed work, about the Sacco and Vanzetti mess, and she had wanted him awfully, deep in her legs, as badly as she wanted to swim. But that was the biggest no-no, the no-no even Susannah fully believed in, because really how could you have it both ways? She had given him her advice—give them the raises, find the brother a job, but stand (gently) firm against Anarchy disguised as Labor, don’t let your men be seduced, offer a few little perks, a midmorning break, a once-a-month dinner, fire a ringleader or two in warning. She watched him dress. He went down to breakfast and she stayed on her stomach, wishing it were big enough already that she could not lie on it, waiting for desire to drain away.
Susannah was a rational woman. She knew, based on her observations of the world, that a man’s running around was never ended by a wife’s interfering, unless she outright killed him. This was part of what stopped her from accusing and berating Josiah. Also, she had her father’s loyalty, which was intense and pure and had been this way for so long, sitting on her shoulders like a fur, warm but heavy, very heavy, that she did not require loyalty in and of itself—she knew it was not an end. But most powerful was the fact that she blamed Josiah’s behavior on herself. Back when she first spotted him outside the blacksmith shop she experienced her attraction to him simply: the man had the poise of the rugby player with none of the arrogance. Yet something more mercenary had driven her, too, however unaware of it she imagined herself at the time: in Josiah’s innocence, in his willingness to be shaped and molded, she saw the potential for a kind of power, for herself. She had courted him as a man courts, promising wealth, fine clothing, a beautiful house. She had created him, in a sense, set him up to be the sort of man he now was, and he had gone along, bossing at the quarry, running for mayor, and—now—running around on her. Meanwhile she had failed to give him a family. So. How could she blame him? Susannah saw his affair as his right—she saw her ignoring it as a kind of apology.
Slowly up the narrow stairs she went, meeting each foot with the other before attempting another step, like a caricature of a heavily pregnant woman, though she looked the same as she always had. She bent at the knee more than was necessary, so as to feel and use the strength of her thighs. How she wanted to swim! But maybe this was her trouble. Maybe her mother had given up all her strength to Susannah so that Susannah had two times as much as a normal woman, which meant she could swim long distances and endure her husband’s infidelity and bear her own barrenness with equanimity for so many years but not, never, any children. Maybe it was all tangled up like that, one strength another weakness, and if only she could happily lie in bed all day and weep to her husband all night and make him promise never to stray again, her pregnancy would continue, she would not bleed, and the next thing to come out of her would be a child.