A Charmed Life Read Online Free Page A

counter, would roar, “Glad to see you back, Missus,” she felt a ridiculous gratitude. However, some of the natives seemed to know her all too well. “Notice you’re back,” said the fish-man softly, gutting a bass in his smelly shop. “Long time no see.” She did not even remember him, she protested, and yet he called her “Martha” in a voice that made her squirm. If she had not had John, she said, her bewildered mind would have toppled at the things that had evidently been said about her, about both of them, here in New Leeds, and were still being said, apparently, if the Coes’ hints could be trusted. She could almost believe she was dreaming and that the awful stories were true, rather than think the opposite: that people deliberately made them up. They were still harping, for example, on the dead stepchild. John had been furious with Jane Coe for telling her this; he knew how agitated Martha got over such things. It appalled her that the village mind was still churning up the past, tossing the old dirty linen back and forth impersonally, like one of the washing machines in the new laundromat. This was an aspect of their return that neither of them had ever foreseen: that Martha would be thrown back, seven years, into her own ancient history, to start up all the old battles, defensively, as if they had never been won.
    She tried now, loyally, to stop thinking about the dead stepchild, for she knew John disapproved. But she could not forgo defending herself. She had honestly—yes, truly—done her best by the boy; the proof was that so many people had thought he was her own child. When she ran away, she had felt dreadful about leaving him; John could support that. Coming back that final morning, she had even had the crazy notion of taking the child with her—a thing quite impossible, of course, unless she and John had been willing to be kidnappers and hide out for the rest of their lives. Nobody, she said to herself, had the right to expect that of her, and was there anybody who dared say that she ought to have sacrificed herself and stayed with her husband for the child’s sake? Nobody but that hateful man himself, who in fact had used that as an argument when he wrote to her in New York, telling her that he would not connive at a divorce—a strange argument, forsooth, when he had always been jealous of her affection for the boy, terming it their “unholy alliance.” And of course it would have been unhealthy for the child if Martha had sacrificed her life to him; the poor babe would have been poisoned by the fumes of renunciation…. There was no reason whatever why she should not have done what she did.
    And yet, at this very moment, irrationally, Martha was troubled by the thought that if she had stayed, Barrett might have lived. Self-flattery, no doubt, she said to herself with a wry little shrug, stamping out her cigarette. She knew very well, moreover, that she had not hesitated long about leaving him. Martha was not sentimental: just as she was recalling, sadly, how she had grieved over Barrett’s death, her memory tapped her sharply, like a teacher’s ruler, and reminded her that she had not given Barrett a thought during the months when he must have been sickening; she had forgotten clean about him until she learned he was dead.
    This clarity of mind, as she grew older, was more and more wearisome to Martha. She was tired of knowing the truth as it piled up, leaving less and less room for hope and illusions. John, she thought, was the same. He, too, was beginning to see things in this clear, sharp light. They still “loved” each other, but this love today was less a promise than a fact of life. If they could have chosen over again, neither would have chosen differently. Neither of them knew anyone they would have preferred to the other. They could not even imagine an ideal companion they would put in the other’s place. From their point of view, for their purposes, they had had the best