XI
Cecily Saunders returned home nursing the yet uncooled embers of her anger. From beyond the turning angle of the veranda her mother called her name and she found her parents sitting together.
“How is Donald?” her mother asked, and not waiting for a reply, she said: “George Farr phoned again after you left. I wish you’d leave a message for him. It keeps Tobe forever stopping whatever he is doing to answer the phone.”
Cecily, making no reply, would have passed on to a French window opening upon the porch, but her father caught her hand, stopping her.
“How is Donald looking today?” he asked, repeating his wife.
Her unrelaxed hand tried to withdraw from his. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” she said harshly.
“Why, didn’t you go there?” Her mother’s voice was faintly laced with surprise. “I thought you were going there.”
“Let me go, daddy.” She wrenched her hand nervously. “I want to change my dress.” He could feel her rigid, delicate bones. “Please,” she implored and he said:
“Come here, Sis.”
“Now, Robert,” his wife interposed. “You promised to let her alone.”
“Come here, Sis,” he repeated, and her hand becoming lax, she allowed herself to be drawn to the arm of his chair. She sat nervously, impatiently, and he put his arm around her. “Why didn’t you go there?”
“Now, Robert, you promised,” his wife parroted futilely.
“Let me go, daddy.” She was rigid beneath her thin, pale dress. He held her and she said: “I did go there.”
“Did you see Donald?”
“Oh, yes. That black, ugly woman finally condescended to let me see him a few minutes. In her presence, of course.”
“What black, ugly woman, darling?” asked Mrs. Saunders, with interest.
“Black woman? Oh, you mean Mrs. What’s-her-name. Why, Sis, I thought you and she would like each other. She has a good, level head, I thought.”
“I don’t doubt it. Only—”
“What black woman, Cecily?”
“—only you’d better not let Donald see that you are smitten with her.”
“Now, now, Sis. What are you talking about?”
“Oh, it’s well enough to talk that way,” she said, taut and passionate, “but haven’t I eyes of my own? Haven’t I seen? Why did she come all the way from Chicago or wherever it was with him? And yet you expect me—”
“Who came from where? What woman, Cecily? What woman, Robert?” They ignored her.
“Now, Sis, you ain’t just to her. You’re just excited.”
His arm held her fragile rigidity.
“I tell you, it isn’t that—just her. I had forgiven that, because he is sick and because of how he used to be about—about girls. You know, before the war. But he has humiliated me in public: this afternoon he—he—Let me go, daddy,” she repeated, imploring, trying to thrust herself away from him.
“But what woman, Cecily? What is all this about a woman?” Her mother’s voice was fretted.
“Sis, honey, remember he is sick. And I know more about Mrs.—er—Mrs. Powers than you do.” He removed his arm, yet held her by the wrist. “Now, you—”
“Robert, who is this woman?”
“—think about it tonight and we’ll talk it over in the morning.”
“No, I am through with him, I tell you. He has humiliated me before her.” Her hand came free and she sprang toward the window.
“Cecily?” her mother called after the slim whirl of her vanishing dress, “are you going to call George Farr?”
“No! Not if he was the last man in the world. I hate men.” The swift staccato of her feet died away upon the stairs, and then a door slammed. Mrs. Saunders sank creaking into her chair.
“Now, Robert.”
So he told her.