The Wicked Widow by Beatriz Williams

Author:Beatriz Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2021-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

Act IV

I Drink My Cup of Sorrow

(and make it a double)

GREENWICH VILLAGE, NEW YORK

March 1925

1

ON THE anniversary of the night we met, another note from my husband dropped in my lap. They used to drop regular, every couple of weeks. Patsy brung it to me on account of I didn’t have much heart to waddle over to Christopher’s joint myself that particular evening, exactly one year after I first set eyes on Oliver Anson Marshall right there at the bar counter. That stool he sat on, this stool me. Didn’t have the heart for it. Last thirtieth of January I was so free as a sleek young bird, and never imagined in a thousand years how that wide-shouldered fellow in the gray suit had arrived to overturn my life. Now his child kicks and grows in my belly, and he himself might be anywhere on the face of the earth, and probably under it. My heart aches so hard it might break. Anyhow Patsy skipped next door for her glass of milk and to shoot the breeze with Christopher, like she did regular and still does, and when she skipped back—smear of milk on her upper lip, like always—she brung me that note.

It was written in stub pencil all smeared up and said:

Now the ice is thick enough we drive right across the lake. Last night was clear and full of stars, the moon was a slim crescent and I thought of you as I stared at the sky. I wondered whether you were asleep or lying awake and whether you have let your hair grow some more or cut it back short. I see from the newspaper that the New York weather has improved in recent days and I hope you’re getting all the fresh air and sunshine you crave. I sometimes think about the way the sun always found your red hair and turned it into a fireball, and how lucky I was to bask in the glow. Next week I join the Burlington convoy. God watch over you and P.

Now I am no more superstitious than the next bastard, but it seemed to me uncanny that I should receive such a talisman one year exactly after I had met the sender. Like a sign from heaven, almost, even though I yet despised the man for loving so useless and diabolical a notion as honor more than me and Patsy, and I had no more idea of sending him some kind of answer than I had of walking down Christopher Street naked in my present interesting condition.

In the first note that Christopher passed me across the bar, which arrived only a week after Anson’s departure, Anson told me that if I truly meant those last words I spoke in the precinct house, he would not reproach me nor seek to reclaim his old life when his work was done. In other words, he would stay dead, if dead I wanted him to remain. Gallant of him, I guess, and I couldn’t have agreed more.

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