He rose from his seat and walked to the fireplace. Finding a spot on the mantel free of expensive porcelain, he put his hand there and stared into the fire, prodding the dead end of a log with the tip of his highly polished shoe as he spoke on.
“She’s a widow, you know. But it turns out she was only married briefly—and unsuccessfully. In every way. Her husband said he couldn’t consummate it, and he didn’t tell her why, and she don’t know, and I’ll be damned if I’ll try to seduce her to find out, because of what it would do to her if he was right, or to us if he was wrong. And I won’t have her going for surgery to know why, and that’s all these damned priggish New York doctors are offering her. And if you ever mention this to anyone, you’re not my brother anymore; much as I love you, Josh, that’s the way of it, I swear it.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you feel that way,” Josh said, unperturbed, “because only a low dog would talk about it. But I’m not surprised. Lucy said there was something—she said there wasn’t any way she could believe Hannah was ever a married woman.…You’re right, it’s a problem. Damn. But, I’d think…”
“No!” Gray said, turning around and holding one hand up high, “Don’t Josh. Don’t you do it. For once, you better not. I appreciate your advice, always have, but see, this is too important to me for it. It’s my life, I have to make my own mistakes. If I make yours,” he said, smiling sadly, “then I can only blame you for it, for the rest of my life. That ain’t half-fair, is it?”
His brother looked at him and said nothing. But he’d a queer pang in his heart, the way he’d felt the time he’d seen his oldest off to school on the first day. Gray had grown beyond him, and he was glad as he was sorry for it.
“Why, it would be like me asking you if you made love with your clothes on,” Gray continued, still attempting to explain, and haphazardly seizing on another problem that had been nagging at him since he’d heard about it. He’d been wondering uneasily whether his own preference for only wearing his skin at such times mightn’t be an aberration.
“What?” his brother asked, diverted. “That’s like bathing with your union suit on—nothing to the point, and about as effective as it would be fun. Although,” he added speculatively, “I hear respectable folk do just that, why, I remember Doc, back home, telling me there’s many an old girl married half her life and with a passel of kids, who still don’t know how the old man does it—and what’s worse,” he said, grinning, “she don’t know why, neither.”
They laughed together, in that moment looking very like brothers. But then Gray stopped, and his head came up. His eyes were suddenly alight with more than merriment.
“Yeah!” he said excitedly, “Uh-huh! That might just be it! Josh, you old hoss, you just might have done it!”
“Done what?” Josh asked.
“Given me some good, sound advice—or at least, a bead on where to get it,” Gray said. “Thank you, thank you, big brother, you’ve done it again. I think I’m going to be leaving town for a while—just a short while, but then I’ll be back, and I think I’ll know what to do then.”
“Of course I’ve given you good advice,” Josh said, rising to take his brother’s proffered hand, “even if I don’t know how I did it. But Gray,” he added seriously, “now don’t go off half-cocked, whatever you do. She’s a fine girl, and no mistake. But life is long.”
“Longer if you don’t have what you need in it,” Gray said with equal seriousness, “—forget about what you want.”
“Boy, look what you done,” Josh sighed, holding his brother by the shoulders, and lapsing back into a drawl as he always did when talking to his brother as in the old days, “You done growed up on me.”
“Funny, I wasn’t even trying,” Gray said, and meant it.
He was wearing evening clothes. Black tailcoat and straight-cut trousers, a white waistcoat over a white shirt with a pleated front, and he held his hat in his hand and his cape over his arm. The only color to him was his bright hair, his gold watch fob, and even in the dim light of the corridor, his shining blue eyes. She was wearing an old, formless gown and her hair was down, hanging halfway to her waist. She’d opened the door to the knock, and it was Gray standing there, looking like a man from a better life. His eyes went to her hair, and she wondered if she should ask him in at all. But she knew she had to hear whatever it was he’d come at this hour to say, and so she gestured, and without a word, he stepped over her doorsill.
His hand reached out to her hair, and though he wore gloves and she knew hair could feel nothing, she felt his fingers as they seemed to marvel over the texture of her hair. Someone had to say something, she thought, it was really absurd, him appearing at this time, unannounced, without a word. He seemed almost too sober, so it wasn’t that, and yet now that she looked at him, she knew it was no dire emergency either, because the only urgent thing about him was the way he looked at her mouth.
“Gray,” she said, and then he kissed her.
He hadn’t meant to, but she’d looked so warm and flushed and sleepy, and he’d never seen the glory of that storm of hair unleashed, and once she was in his arms and under his lips, there was no question but that he should kiss her. She clung to him and gave him back as much as he was giving, except that when his hands came to her breast, she didn’t put her hands on his chest as well, but only kept them buried in the hair at the back of his neck and sighed into his mouth.
It was so good for both of them that it was several minutes before they got used to it. And then, as greedy as they were giddy with pleasure, they wanted more— which ended it. Because that wasn’t a place either one of them knew how to proceed to just yet. It involved a lot of other thinking, and that was the slow-moving thought that kept him from moving further, and her from letting him. She somehow found the wit to step back just as he began to remember why he’d come and let her go from his arms.
“I came to say good-bye,” he said.
Her face went white, and so he added immediately, “For a little while, only a little while, there’s things I have to see to, back home. Well, Royal and Peggy are going tomorrow, you know, and so I thought I’d help them, too. But I’ll be back in no time. Almost on the return train. Before the new year,” he said as she turned away from him. He clenched his hands to keep from pulling her back to him, and stared at the long silky fall of her hair as it swirled about her back.
“What would be the point of that?” she asked. “I mean to say, why bother?”
“You know why as well as I do,” he answered.
“Which means you know very little,” she said.
“I came to say good-bye, for a little while,” he said again, not knowing what else to say, because the reason he was going was still so new to him. And not a thing he could tell her now, in any case.
She turned back to him and inclined her head, like an empress acknowledging a peasant. As she was so poorly dressed, it was like a gesture right out ofA Heroine in Rags, one of his favorite plays—the scene where the heroine is revealed to be a princess—he recognized it, and couldn’t help but grin.
“Thank you. Your Highness,” he said, and took her back into his arms, and though this time she did protest, his mouth swallowed the words, and his hands stroked the anger down until she was breathing his breaths when he finally was able to find the will to let her go again.
“I’ll be back,” he said, and put on his hat and left.
She raged at him throughout the night—when she wasn’t condemning herself.
