The Man Who Loved His Wife by Vera Caspary

Author:Vera Caspary [Caspary, Vera]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558618473
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

8

THE SKY RUMBLED, THE HOUSE QUIVERED, THE earth shook, windows rattled. Elaine was awakened but not alarmed; the breaking of the sound barrier was no more startling than any other of the daily shocks. Fire and police sirens, bloody accidents and hairbreadth escapes on the highways, the testing of civil defense alarms, motor horns, and Muzak had become the ordinary sounds of modern living. The explosion shuddered to silence. In its wake Elaine heard a voice. Or was the sudden frantic cry a fragment of a dream so terrifying that consciousness had driven it back into the cave of the unremembered? She felt bound to the bed, sodden. Last night, in despair, she had swallowed two sleeping pills from Fletcher’s hoard. Her limbs seemed not to belong to her body. Her jaw throbbed.

“Elaine!” The voice was Cindy’s. She flung herself into the room. “Something terrible. Daddy—”

Elaine threw off the blankets, leaped out of bed. Cindy followed her along the hall, saying that the telephone had wakened her, that no one had answered until she had dragged herself out of bed. It had been a long-distance call from Daddy’s broker in New York. He had commanded her to wake her father. “Some stuff about stocks, he wanted to answer a wire Daddy sent yesterday. He said it was more important than letting Daddy sleep.” By prattling about details, Cindy avoided the unspeakable truth.

In Fletcher’s room the curtains were still drawn. Cindy had switched on the ceiling lamp. It threw cruel light upon the bed. Fletcher lay on his back. The body was covered to the hips with a sheet. His powerful, tanned torso was bare. White against the dark flesh was the triangle of porous cloth that protected the opening at the base of his throat.

Elaine walked as if in a trance, her hand stretched out like a blind woman’s. The sight of death so frankly uncovered caused a kind of paralysis. Fletcher was no less rigid than the woman standing with her hand extended above his body. At the door, like a lost child in her ruffled, baby doll nightgown, Cindy sobbed.

“He must have killed himself,” Elaine said and stared at her hand as though she were surprised by her ability to move it. She looked about the room like a stranger who had never seen it before. And her hand dropped heavily, brushing the edge of the mattress.

No longer a desolate child, Cindy had become an old woman with a hag’s jutted chin, fierce eyes, hard cords in her neck. “Why do you say that? How do you know?”

Elaine pushed her aside and went to the telephone. Cindy had left the handset dangling. Elaine hung up and waited for the dialing tone. The first name that came to her mind was Ralph’s. She looked up his number and called his office. An operator’s stilted voice asked if this was an emergency call. “Yes,” Elaine said. “My husband’s dead. This is Mrs. Fletcher Strode.”

“How can you?” wailed Cindy.

If the girl had not been sniffling behind her, Elaine might have let go herself.

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