A Charmed Life Read Online Free

solemnly. Two months later, on John’s birthday, they had telephoned the realty agency and agreed to send the down payment.
    It was fate, they concluded. For good or ill, it was intended for them. Their conventional friends said, “Aren’t you very courageous?”—hinting both at the past, for there had been a considerable scandal, and at the fact that the house, as it turned out, was a bargain because the previous owner had committed suicide in the workshop. John and Martha had laughed and shrugged. They liked to be brave; dauntlessness was their medium. The fact that Martha trembled gave a shimmer to their exploits. They had bought the house because, as Martha explained to sundry perplexed listeners, they were afraid of being afraid to buy it. They rose to the challenge. Martha was now thirty-three and John was thirty-two, but they never refused a risk. And they had known perfectly well, despite the Coes’ assurances, that they would have to run the gauntlet of the village curiosity.
    Martha’s story was famous, and not only from her own telling. She had left her first husband’s second house in the middle of the night, in a nightgown, driving his Plymouth sedan, which ran out of gas and stranded her on the road to John’s cabin, so that she had had to get out and walk, and was picked up by the milkman—tear-streaked, with loose hair and torn mules. He “delivered her to the feller with the milk,” and passed the tale on his rounds, wherever a goodwife was up. It was not literally true that she had left the town forever in her nightie, as New Leeds gossip told it; she had gone back the next morning in John’s shirt and rolled-up seersucker pants, with her hair in a braid, and packed her clothes while her husband was scouring the village for her in the town taxi. Nor was the nightgown transparent. Nor had she made love with John until that night or uttered a word against her husband during the twelve afternoons they had talked together on the beach; she had been guilty before, but not with John.
    Nor—she now said to herself, gritting her teeth—had she stolen the wretched Plymouth, pace her husband’s partisans; it had been repossessed by the financing company, when her husband, unnerved by the debacle, had ceased to make the monthly payments. Nor, to conclude, had she left a child behind—not her own, at any rate; his —a six-year-old boy, whom she had rescued, as a matter of fact, in the fire, when his own father had forgotten him. She was not responsible when the child died the following year, of natural causes, not of his father’s neglect, which was a tale she never concurred in, though to those who knew the father it had a certain plausibility.
    Martha eyed the clock. It occurred to her that John (dear John, she murmured to herself, thinking with horror of her first husband) might have fallen asleep. In gratitude to him as her remembered deliverer, she fought down the impulse to go and see whether he would like a cocktail now. He is suffering from shock, she said to herself, tenderly; he needs rest; when he feels better, he will come out by himself. But all the while her nervous demon kept asking whether he realized what time it was. So long as he lay there, shut off in the bedroom, she could not read, she could not even start cooking the supper, for these activities seemed to her discourteous in view of his cut. Under the circumstances, there seemed nothing she could do, appropriately, but muse. She lit a cigarette, feeling even for this a little heartless, and threw the match into the fire.
    In the stillness, her critics spoke up. Ever since she and John came back here, she had felt surrounded by criticism—whenever she entered a store, with her head held high and her arm linked through her husband’s, not seeking to be recognized. She knew this feeling to be senseless; she had always been popular in the village. But when a storekeeper, wiping his hand on his apron, and shooting it out across the