that was what Laura had been. A strange cool girl she was, with a capacity for violent love that Beth had almost accidentally roused. It had only lasted a short while—the space of a semester—and for Beth it had not seemed serious, for she was falling in love with Charlie at the time, and Charlie won her handily. That was when Laura had disappeared.
Beth and Charlie had talked it over, had even tried to help Laura. There was little about the curious affair that Charlie didn’t know; little that he couldn’t forgive. And, it should be added, little about it that he understood.
When he and Beth married he was confident that she would forget it, and to a large extent she had. At first, anyway. She liked men, she was married to one. She had children now and a stable home. Most important in Charlie’s eyes, she had him. And besides, she was a sensible girl. When Laura dropped out of Beth’s life physically, Charlie had faith that she would drop out emotionally as well.
Beth had rarely mentioned Laura over the years, and now, when she spoke of her dream at the breakfast table, it was the first time Charlie had even thought of Laura in over two years. So he was startled, but he didn’t want it to show.
“What was the dream?” he asked.
“Not much. Just Laura, sitting there.”
“Where?”
“That room we had on the third floor at the Alpha Beta house.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all. Polly, damn it, don’t wipe your fingers on your dress!” Her four-year-old daughter grabbed a paper napkin guiltily.
“Don’t swear at the kids, honey,” Charlie said mildly.
“Don’t scold me in front of them,” she said.
He sighed, feeling a quick hot frustration, a sensation that was much too common for comfort these days, and picked up the paper again. “What else about Laura?” he said.
“Nothing else. Silly dream.”
But it haunted her. And Charlie had a feeling there was more to it than she told him. He kept his eyes on the paper another five minutes and then rose from the table. “Got to get going,” he said. He kissed his two children goodbye and then came around the table behind Beth.
“ ’Bye, honey,” he said into her ear, and blew into it gently.
“Have a good day,” she said absently.
He wished gloomily that she would see him to the door.
“Daddy, when you get home will you make me a kite?” Skipper said suddenly. He was five, just a year older than his sister, and he looked very much like Beth.
“Sure,” Charlie said, still looking at the short dark curls on the back of his wife’s head. He stroked her neck with his finger.
“Yay!” Skipper cried.
Beth squirmed slightly, irritated by Charlie’s wordless loneliness and a little ashamed of herself. Charlie left her finally and went toward the front door, slipping into his suit coat as he went. Beth felt his gaze on her and glanced up suddenly with a little line of annoyance between her eyes.
“Something wrong?” she said.
“No. What are you doing today?”
“I’m flying to Paris,” she said sarcastically. “What else? Want to come?”
“Sure.” He grinned and she softened a little. He was handsome, in a lopsided way, with his big grin and his fine eyes. The kids set up a clamor. “Can I come too? Can I come too, Mommy?”
And when Charlie went out the door he heard her shout at them in that voice that scared him, that voice with the edge of hysteria in it, “Oh, for God’s sake! Oh, shut up! Honest to God, you kids are driving me insane!”
And he knew she would slam something down on the table to underline her words—a jam jar or a piece of tableware, anything handy.
He drove off to work with a worried face.
BETH LOVED HER KIDS THE WAY SHE LOVED CHARLIE: AT A distance. It was a real love but it couldn’t be crowded. She had no patience with intimacy. The hardest years of her life had been when the two babies arrived within eleven months of each other. One was bad enough, but two! Both in diapers, both screaming and streaming at both ends. Both colicky, both finicky eaters.
Beth was completely unprepared, almost helpless with a screaming nervousness that put both Charlie and the kids on edge. She never quite recovered from her resentment. A few years later, when the worst was over, she began to wonder if her quick awful temper and desperation had made the children as nervous as they were. She blamed herself bitterly sometimes. But then she wondered how it could have happened any other way.
But when Polly shut herself in a closet and cried all afternoon, or Skipper threw a tantrum and swore at her in her own words, or when Charlie sulked in angry silence for days on end after a quarrel, she began to wonder again, to accuse herself, to look wildly around her for excuses, for escape.
Beth had just one friend that she saw with any regularity, and that was the wife of Charlie’s business partner. Her name was Jean Purvis, and she and Beth bowled together on a team. Beth had been searching for ways to get out of it since she had started it. Bowling bored her and so did Jean. But you couldn’t help liking the girl.
Jean Purvis was a good-hearted person, a natural blonde with a tendency to plumpness against which she pitted a wavering will power. She had two expressions: a little smile and a big smile. At first Beth envied her sunny nature, but after a while it got on her nerves.
She must have had days like other people, Beth thought. She must get mad at her husband once in a while.
But if Jean ever did it never showed and her eternal smile made Beth feel guilty. It was like an unspoken reproach of Beth’s sudden wild explosions and cloudy moods, and it made her resent Jean; it made her jealous and contemptuous all at once.
Jean Purvis and her husband Cleve were the only people that Beth and Charlie knew when they first moved to California. Cleve and Charlie were business partners now, manufacturing toys, and it had been Cleve’s drum-beating letters that encouraged Charlie to give up his law apprenticeship and move to the West Coast.
Beth reacted angrily at first. “I like the East!” she had exclaimed. “What do I know about California? Everybody in the country is headed for California. It’ll be so crowded out there pretty soon they won’t have room for the damn palm trees.”
“Cleve has a good start in business,” Charlie said.
“Charlie, what in God’s name do you know about making toys? I’d be glad if you’d make one decent slingshot for Skipper and call it quits,” she told him.
But his stubborn head was already full of ideas. “One craze, one big hit—we’d strike it rich,” he said. “One Hula Hoop, one coonskin cap, something like that.”
“You sit there like a grinning happy idiot ready to throw your whole career, your whole education, out the window, because your old fraternity buddy is making plastic popguns out in Pasadena and he says to come on out,” Beth cried, furious. “I don’t trust that Cleve Purvis anyway, from what I’ve heard about him. You always said he was a heavy drinker.”
But he had made his mind up, and with Charlie that was the same as doing a thing. He could not be moved.
Charlie left Beth and the two babies in Chicago with her uncle and aunt while he went out to Pasadena to join Cleve and find a place to live.
Beth loved it. Her Uncle John was fond of spoiling her. Beth was his daughter by proxy; he had no children of his own. She had been