place began to seem a veritable anthill. “How many more people live in the house?” he asked.
“Well, there’s Mr. Lightfoot in the front room downstairs, and another downstairs room that’s rented but the young lady hasn’t moved in yet. She’s a quiet girl who’s gone to visit her family up north for a few days. She should be back soon. The three empty rooms, counting this, is because my university students have left. The middle room next door to this is empty too.”
Both of them stood in uneasy pre-contractual silence, Walter moving his eyes from the interior of the closet to the window and back again, and the landlady moving hers at a lower level, from his suitcases to his shoes and finally bringing them to rest against the modern sloping legs of the dresser. Neither made an effort to break the conversational impasse until a loud rasping voice from downstairs shouted, “Grace, I found your goddam cat in my room again!”
With a gasp the landlady threw herself through the door and disappeared down the stairs as though into a well. Walter, after the slight shock had worn off, walked to the window and gazed down into a backyard that was strangely beautiful.
It was as if the yard had been spared the deterioration of the house, and had remained a semi-rustic symbol of a day long past. Most of the other yards he could see were well freed and spacious also, kept neat and green and flower-planted by their present owners, an enclave of shaded quiet unknown and undreamed of by those in the steady stream of traffic on the street outside,
He heard a movement behind him, and swung around to find the landlady standing in the doorway holding a large yellow cat. She tried to smile but her face still bore traces of the sudden fear and concern she had shown when she rushed downstairs. She closed the door gently behind her and advanced into the room, gently placing the cat on the floor.
“That was Lightfoot you heard hollering,” she said. “Peanuts sometimes wanders into his room, and he hates cats.” She placed a hand against her mouth, drawing him into a whispered intimacy. “Mr. Lightfoot drinks,” she finished.
He watched Peanuts conducting a tour of inspection of the floor, with particular emphasis on his suitcases. Then the big cat approached him and rubbed against his legs. “He’s a fine cat,” he said.
“She’s a lady cat, ain’t you, Peanuts? Old man Martin in the basement says ginger cats are nearly always boys, but I don’t believe him. Anyway, she’s not.” As the cat continued to rub against him the landlady said, “She likes you.” He knew then, without particular enjoyment, that he had passed muster as a prospective roomer.
“It’s nine dollars a week, you said on the phone — ?” he began.
“Yes, Mr. Fowler. I run a clean and decent house here. This room has a good view of the garden, and you have garden privileges of course. As I already said I can’t allow cooking in here, but if you stay here next winter I might be able to fix you up with a hot plate and things for making a cup of coffee. I’m Mrs. Hill.”
“How do you do,” he said, proffering a ten-dollar bill.
Since meeting her he had been trying to pin down her slight accent. It was Germanic, and didn’t go with her name.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Hill,” he asked, “Are you German?”
She hesitated a second too long before she answered, “No, I’m Swiss.”
She extracted a receipt pad from a pocket of her cardigan and pulled an unseen pencil stub from the nest of her hair. As she wrote out the receipt she said, “Guests have to be out of your room by eleven o’clock, and I don’t like my men roomers bringing in too many women.” Clicking her teeth in a conspiratorial grin, “I know what men are, you know.” She pulled a crumpled dollar bill from the same pocket that had held the receipt pad and handed it to him along with his receipt, taking the ten dollars with the practised ease of a craps table croupier. Then with a flourish she handed him a pair of keys she had been palming all along.
“How long do you think you’ll be staying with us, Mr. Fowler?”
“I really don’t know.”
“You said on the phone you were an editor, I believe?”
“Yes.”
“What do you edit?”
“A small magazine. Just a trade paper. Real Estate News.”
“It sounds like a pretty important job.” Glancing around the room with an apologetic air. “This isn’t much of a place for a magazine editor to move into.”
“It’ll do. I’ve lived in worse places than this.” Seeing her bridle slightly, he hurried on. “I prefer to live in a furnished room — for now anyway. This one’s fine.”
She searched the floor for the cat as she said, “This isn’t much but it’s quiet here, I don’t believe in bothering my roomers.”
After she had gone he sat on the edge of the bed and contemplated the present. He wondered how Brenda and the boys were doing. Everything had happened so suddenly that he was still numbed from the shock of finding himself alone. For the past month he had tried to bring cohesion to his thoughts, to reconstruct piece by piece the march of events that had separated him from his wife and children. There was nothing when taken alone that was responsible, but a number of little things, insignificant in themselves but adding up to something that could be called incompatibility or even outright enmity between himself and Brenda.
Of course, there had been another woman. He smiled grimly as he thought of it. The woman was a proofreader employed in his office, a middle-aged spinster called Ivy Frobisher, a woman who meant less than nothing to him but who had served as the focal point of his wife’s irrational jealousy and hate. Once, when half drunk, he had mentioned an incident with Ivy which his wife had seized upon and used as an admission of things much worse between them.
Since then he had wondered why he had sacrificed a position of moral and ethical strength on the altar of his wife’s silly suspicions. At the time, he had wanted to show her that he was not a captive of marriage, that he was still a man whom some other women found attractive. Somehow, in his drunken state, this had seemed an opportunity he could not forego. Brenda had seized on it as a profession of guilt, and for the next six months had not let up on her insistence that what she knew was only part of the whole.
The whole story was much less than she believed, and was of such small consequence that now, long after it had contributed its venom to her hatred, he could scarcely credit it with breaking them up. The incident was this.
It was a cold autumn evening, and he had returned to his office to finish an editorial he was writing. He had been surprised to find Ivy still in the office, and had walked across to her desk.
“What are you doing here, Ivy?” he had asked.
“I’ve got some copy to go over, Mr. Fowler,” she said. “That piece about suburban school costs.”
Somehow as he looked down into her upturned face he saw her for a split second as she really was. Behind her heavy glasses and plainly handsome features she was a woman, and he had just discovered it. She saw his look, and taking off her glasses let her eyes pay naked thanks to him. He pulled her head against his chest and they remained like this for several seconds. Then, with a shudder, she rose to her feet and pulled him to her. Their mouths met in a long and trembling kiss, and her body curved itself against him.
