She avoided his eyes. “I need to pick up Tabby.”
“What are you thinking?” He was holding her hands, waiting for her to meet his eyes. Let it come, he thought, whatever it was she’d guessed; let them put it to rest.
“I’m thinking that I want a cigarette.”
“What else?”
“The car may need gasoline.”
“What else?”
“You’re strange today, Dex. You’re making me nervous.” At last she returned his gaze from within her oval of mink.
“What else?” he asked softly.
“You’re restless. Unhappy. You’ve been for months.”
“What else?”
“Isn’t that enough?” she asked, impatient. But she held his gaze.
“Only if there’s nothing more.”
“You’re off your game. Father said so, too.” She broke away, took a cigarette from the silver case on her bureau, and placed one between the bright stripes of her lips.
“Did he,” Dexter said, lighting it with her onyx lighter.
“I wasn’t supposed to tell you that,” she said through a stream of smoke. “You drove me to it.”
“Your father said that?”
“Promise you won’t tell him.”
“I won’t.” He sat back down on the bed, trying to manage his extreme disquiet. That the old man had thought along those lines—that was nothing. Dexter had as much as told him so. But the fact that it had been said aloud in Harriet’s presence—discussed—was a horse of a different color. It implied a family conversation of which Dexter had been the topic.
He breathed Harriet’s smoke, craving one himself. “When?”
“Just in passing.”
“Recently?”
“I don’t remember. Forget it.”
“Like hell you don’t.”
From his first meeting with the old man at the hunt club years ago, their communication had been forthright and direct. Under what circumstances should Dexter need to be discussed? He felt injured and wanted his wife not to see it.
“Why don’t you come with us?” she said, sitting on the bed beside him.
He scoffed. “To play bridge with Booth?”
“Tabby can play. I don’t have to.” She’d taken his hand. There was a skittering avoidance about her eyes.
“You’re nervous,” he said.
“You used to like going there.”
“Why are you nervous?”
“I hate to see your feelings hurt, that’s all.”
“I’m just tired.”
He was uncertain what was happening between them—whether it was something important or nothing at all. He would know only when he’d slept.
He stood and began pulling down shades. Harriet crushed out her cigarette. “I’ll lie down, too,” she said, moving close to him and spreading her long fingers over his chest. He felt their cool slenderness through his shirt. She’d taken off her hat, and her auburn hair fell loose.
“I thought you had to go.”
“Tabby won’t mind if I’m late.”
Her smile had a downward tilt that made it look naughty. How he’d always adored that smile! Dexter breathed the smell of her hair and felt a trickle of distrust. She was a pretty stranger standing too close, making a jittery effort to seduce him. He thought: I will never touch this woman again.
“You go ahead, baby,” he managed to say warmly. His sudden revulsion for his wife felt dangerous—a poison that would remain inert only until she perceived it.
He lay with eyes shut and listened for the front door. When he knew she’d gone, he slept a parched, fitful sleep. He woke at noon, as usual, washed, dressed, and readied himself to go to Heels’s place. Although his head ached, he felt saner. What had gone wrong with Harriet, exactly? Nothing so bad, it seemed now.
As he was taking his coat from the front closet, he sensed, or heard, someone else in the house. “Hello,” he called.
A faint reply: the twins. It was Saturday. Dexter climbed the stairs to their room and thrust open the door without knocking, moved by a habitual wish to catch his sons unaware. Their startled faces shamed him. Phillip was struggling into a shirt; Dexter glimpsed the gash of his appendix scar and experienced heartbreak so profound that he lurched toward his son with a notion of embracing him. The boy turned wary eyes upon him. “Are we in trouble?”
“No,” Dexter said. “No. Goodness.”
He’d been avoiding their bedroom for weeks, protesting the redundant prizes they were bent on winning in pointless contests. But the room had been transformed since his last visit. Now the roller skates, bugles, accordions, and slingshots were nowhere in sight. “Say, what happened to all your loot?”
“We brought it to Saint Maggie’s,” John-Martin said.
“For soldiers’ children,” Phillip added.
Once again, Dexter found himself chasing events that seemed to have run away from him. A vision of the importunate deacon, hands outstretched to receive this windfall, wafted through his mind. “When?”
The boys consulted each other. “Lately,” John-Martin said.
“You mean recently?”
“Recently,” they agreed.
A narrow table had been introduced between their beds, converting them into a pair of workbenches. John-Martin sat upon his, facing a spread of balsa wood, rubber cement tubes, waxed paper, and Bluejacket instruction pamphlets.
“Airplanes?” Dexter asked.
“Why does everyone think that?” John-Martin huffed.
“Ships,” Phillip explained. “We’ve just begun.” After a pause he added, “Recently.”
Dexter noticed for the first time that the challenging snap of John-Martin’s tone was exactly offset by the caress of apology in Phillip’s. Was that new? “Why not airplanes?” he asked.
Both boys stared at him; he’d missed something obvious. “Grady,” they said.
“We’re going to sea ourselves when we’re sixteen,” John-Martin said with a show of carelessness.
“If you give your permission,” Phillip said. “And the war is still on.”
Dexter felt the boys’ quick brown eyes appraising his reaction. Clearly, they’d been more aware of the collective Grady worship than he’d supposed. “Sixteen is awfully young,” he said.
“We’ll be ready.”
“If we stop monkeying.”
“We stopped last week!”
“Except for this morning.”
Their window faced the sea. From habit, Dexter’s eye sought the parade of ships past Breezy Point. “Look,” he said. “Here comes a tanker.”
“The porch has a better view,” John-Martin said.
“You watch ships from the porch?” Dexter was surprised; he had never seen them do it.
“When no one is home,” John-Martin said.
“Which is a lot,” Phillip put in.
“Let’s go look,” Dexter said. “I like to do that, too.”
The telephone rang as they were descending the stairs, and Dexter picked up the extension in the front hall. Heels. “Everything all right?” Dexter asked.
“Frankie Q. telephoned the Pines early this morning,” Heels said. “He mentioned some kind of activity at the boathouse. You might want to take a look on your way over.”
A telephone call from a son of Mr. Q.’s was unusual. “Someone was in there a few weeks ago,” Dexter mused.
“Frankie seemed . . . surprised that I didn’t know where to find you,” Heels said. “I told him ours was a marriage built upon trust.”
Dexter laughed. “What did he say?”