The Love of a Good Woman

Rupert’s mother had embroidered with flower baskets and took it in there and she could still smell the smell. And there on the table was sitting the dark-red box with Mr.Willens’s things in it and his name on it and it had been sitting there all the time. She didn’t even remember putting it there or seeing Rupert put it there. She had forgot all about it.
    She took that box and hid it in one place and then she hid it in another. She never told where she hid it and she wasn’t going to. She would have smashed it up, but how do you smash all those things in it? Examining things. Oh, Missus, would you like me to examine your eyes for you, just sit down here and just you relax and you just shut the one eye and keep the other one wide open. Wide open, now. It was like the same game every time, and she wasn’t supposed to suspect what was going on, and when he had the thing out looking in her eye he wanted her to keep her panties on, him the dirty old cuss puffing away getting his fingers slicked in and puffing away. Her not supposed to say anything till he stops and gets the looker thing packed up in his box and all and then she’s supposed to say, “Oh, Mr. Willens, now, how much do I owe you for today?”
    And that was the signal for him to get her down and thump her like an old billy goat. Right on the bare floor to knock her up and down and try to bash her into pieces. Dingey on him like a blowtorch.
    How’d you’ve liked that?
    Then it was in the papers. Mr. Willens found drowned.
    They said his head got bunged up knocking against the steering wheel. They said he was alive when he went in the water. What a laugh.
IV. LIES
    E NID stayed awake all night—she didn’t even try to sleep. She could not lie down in Mrs. Quinn’s room. She sat in the kitchen forhours. It was an effort for her to move, even to make a cup of tea or go to the bathroom. Moving her body shook up the information that she was trying to arrange in her head and get used to. She had not undressed, or unrolled her hair, and when she brushed her teeth she seemed to be doing something laborious and unfamiliar. The moonlight came through the kitchen window—she was sitting in the dark—and she watched a patch of light shift through the night, on the linoleum, and disappear. She was surprised by its disappearance and then by the birds waking up, the new day starting. The night had seemed so long and then too short, because nothing had been decided.
    She got up stiffly and unlocked the door and sat on the porch in the beginning light. Even that move jammed her thoughts together. She had to sort through them again and set them on two sides. What had happened—or what she had been told had happened—on one side. What to do about it on the other. What to do about it—that was what would not come clear to her.
    The cows had been moved out of the little meadow between the house and the riverbank. She could open the gate if she wanted to and go in that direction. She knew that she should go back, instead, and check on Mrs. Quinn. But she found herself pulling open the gate bolt.
    The cows hadn’t cropped all the weeds. Sopping wet, they brushed against her stockings. The path was clear, though, under the riverbank trees, those big willows with the wild grape hanging on to them like monkeys’ shaggy arms. Mist was rising so that you could hardly see the river. You had to fix your eyes, concentrate, and then a spot of water would show through, quiet as water in a pot. There must be a moving current, but she could not find it.
    Then she saw a movement, and it wasn’t in the water. There was a boat moving. Tied to a branch, a plain old rowboat was being lifted very slightly, lifted and let fall. Now that she hadfound it, she kept watching it, as if it could say something to her. And it did. It said something gentle and final.
    You know. You know.
    W HEN the children woke up they found her in bountiful good spirits, freshly washed and dressed and with her hair loose. She had already made the Jell-O crammed with fruit that would be ready for them to eat at noon. And she was mixing batter for cookies that could be baked before it got too hot to use the oven.
    “Is that your father’s boat?” she said. “Down on the river?”
    Lois said yes. “But we’re not supposed to play in it.” Then she said, “If you went down with us we could.” They had caught on at once to the day’s air of privilege, its holiday possibilities, Enid’s unusual