The same sound from the same TV program intermittently belched through the Bailey living room where Beau, the evening paper in his lap, now slept. He snored lightly and he stirred from time to time. But whenever the TV set gave forth its collective guffaw, its mechanical replica of the mechanical mirth of morons who opened their mouths and chortled every time the emcee made sucking motions with his hands (and who slammed their mouths shut when the same all-pimple showed them his palms), whenever this rock-slide cacophony struck his ears, Beau’s belly jiggled in cadence, his snoring ceased and a miniature replica of the audience noise escaped him.
Indeed, in many homes and public places, where people had no idea what program was on the air or what jest occasioned the brickbat risibility of the unseen audience, the mere sound elicted that response—a chuckle, cackle or snort. For they were so slavishly conditioned to this style of diversion, so inertly used to, the inanities which push-buttoned their sport, that the mere noise of other nitwits being tickled elicited the reflex. They laughed without knowing why, or even that they laughed. They laughed while drying dishes and emptying garbage and adding columns of figures and shaving and defecating and picking their noses and reading Sunday-school lessons and swallowing pork pies and custards and beer. They chortled.
Beau, among them, though asleep and patently troubled in his slumber, nonetheless snored and snickered, tittered, nickered, nasalized and woke up with a start because Netta had spoken to him-yelled, rather, since her first words had been overridden by a fresh, oblong block of guffaw, and she detested above all else to be outshouted. All Beau heard, or needed to hear, was “Telephone!”
He got out of his chair and buttoned the top of his fly as if the telephone were going to be able to see. Then, as if it had the additional power to do harm to him, he snatched up his highball and gulped it down protectively.
He picked up the instrument and cleared his throat. His tone was suddenly buoyant and friendly, “Howard Bailey speaking.”
“This is Jake.”
If Netta had been in the hall she would have seen that Beau’s face lost all its color. The whisky, too, went out of his brain. Nothing was left but a pallid and wobbling man’s body, frantic eyes—but the voice intact, for Beau knew his wife would be listening though she could not look. She always listened.
He said, after a pause, “Oh, yes. How are you?”
A businessman, Netta decided upstairs. Somebody of whom Beau was slightly afraid, which didn’t mean much, since he was somewhat afraid of everybody. She looked down bitterly at the bedroom floor as if she could see through it and watch her husband standing below. She would have liked to listen in on an upstairs phone but Beau, six months before, with a remarkable show of determination had had the second-floor extension removed. It was an “economy measure” he had said, but she had known his true motive: to prevent her from eavesdropping on his calls.
The voice that reached Beau was level, a little too level and, though not foreign, it used English in a fashion alien to Green Prairie—in a way which anyone familiar with American dialects would have identified as related to Chicago, to the South Side, to the period of 1920-1930. “Shallcot Rove ran fifth today, Mr. Bailey.”
“Yes, I know. Of course.”
“It puts the total up to five thousand, even.”
Beau gave a little laugh. “As much as that, eh? I wouldn’t worry. I expect the market will take a turn for the better—”
“No more ‘market,’ Mr. Bailey, until you pay up.”
“I’ll come down and have a conference in a day or two…” Beau could feel the sweat forming and he could hear Netta on the stairs.
“Yes,” the voice of Jake said flatly. “You come down to The Block tomorrow, to the horse room, Mr. Bailey. And I think you better bring the five thousand. If not all, then at least half. And half later—but soon. And no more bets. Frankly, I told the Bun not to take bets from you last week, till you paid. I was sore at the boys for doing it against orders. He is home sick now because I was so sore. I made him sick.”
Jake hung up.
So did Beau. He hung up fast and found, by listening to his wife’s tread, there was time to get back through the archway into the living room (sunken two steps since the remodeling) with the appearance of casualness. The wall then hid him long enough so that he was able to whip out his handkerchief and wipe his face. He contracted his abdomen in an effort to flush up a little blood, for he could see in the mirror wall around the fireplace that he was pale. He tipped the Scotch bottle over his highball glass, with his free hand—and when Netta came through the archway he was apparently imbibing the weak dregs of a drink, prior to pouring a fresh one.
Even she did not realize he had just gulped four fingers of straight liquor.
Netta was forty-eight and, though she had never had the coloring which made Lenore so peculiarly beautiful, she hall once possessed the same perfect features and the same unusual, slightly slanted shape of eye. Netta was a Hiver City girl, the daughter of a railroad brakeman who had seven other children. As a child, she had learned all I here is to know about the flea-bitten ways of life. Her world had been a mean street seen through second-hand lace curtains darned not to show. She had worked her way through normal school in near-by Lummus Center and taught second grade for two years. But she had never entertained an intention of making a career of teaching. Normal school had been her only feasible way of acquiring something resembling education. She had not even wanted real erudition—general or specific—merely its sufficient facsimile.
Netta was pretty as a young woman; she was also durable and indomitable. Her personality was identical with her ambition which had been formed, delineated and defined to the utmost detail by American advertising. It is true, as advertising exponents hold, that advertising is educational and brings to millions a numberless bounty of cultivated benefits. It is also true, although the advertising exponents dislike to be reminded of the fact, that while their art creates a demand, often where demand did not thitherto exist, this same demand, in the case of multitudes, is greater than the fiscal capacity for its satisfaction or the cultural control for its employment. A struggle for additional revenue to satisfy cravings both synthetic and inordinate ensues everywhere in the land. Among persons whose morals are weak, the struggle becomes, ipso facto, unscrupulous.
Had she been reared in a strict, Presbyterian family, Netta’s ethics would have been mighty indeed: she would have become a moral Midas. Unfortunately, her father, the brakeman, had been nominally a Methodist but actually merely an alcoholic. Her mother, though sporadically pious, by a kind of heritage from a backslid Baptist grandparent, was a woman of negligent libido with a chronic weakness for receiving and returning affection due, perhaps, to the small amount she ever received from or gave to her husband.
The result was that Netta’s brothers and sisters, all younger, were in some hidden doubt concerning their true and probably several sires. Such circumstances obtain widely among the impoverished; they obtain at least quite often amongst the well-born and the well-heeled, too, though here they are differently regarded. In such latter circles, drunkenness may be known as
“temperament” or “sensitivity” and loose sex manners in a mother may be designated as anything from “feminist pioneering” to what the country-club set does for fun. Poverty is deprived of such pretty tissues to put between human pretensions, and the almost universally rejected fact that people are, after all, animals.
So Netta passed through childhood and into her early teens with one determination: to have nice things someday. The method was always apparent: marriage. In the Sister Cities it was easy for Netta to meet young men with money: they came to the dance halls, the saloons, the places of even more flagrant disrepute. They even came cruising in River City, through the gaslit district, driving large cars and looking for precisely what Netta was at sixteen.
She learned much from them—though at seventeen she barely escaped marrying a drummer of forty who had what she thought of at the time as “money.” She learned gradually that her end could be achieved only if she had adequate formal schooling, which was why she trained as a teacher. Tuition was free. She had found out, by the time she got her degree, that the style of man she wanted—rich, of course, important, social, urbane and worldly—would also have to be (if he were to marry her) weak and vain and somewhat gullible.
She marked down Howard Bailey within ten minutes of their first meeting, at a picnic on the banks of the Green Prairie River in 1928. They were married—rather hastily and to the infinite puzzlement of Beau—and there Netta’s luck failed. In 1929 Beau’s father (who had owned an automobile agency in River City) shot himself to death, two weeks after the historic Black Friday, which wiped out other thousands of millionaires. Beau was left with nothing but his job in the Sloan Mercantile Trust Company. Curiously enough, Netta discovered that, though the self-evident thing to do was to get divorced and find a new spouse whose bonds and stocks had not been touched by the market collapse, she was by then attached to Beau in a way she could not fathom. His very weakness, his dependency, made her postpone repeatedly even talk of divorce.
Those were home-brew days, bathtub-gin days. Lenore was a result of the overpowering quality of such anodynes, in the waning epoch of prohibition and jazz.
Years passed. Beau, the handsomest senior in his high school (where the nickname had attached), started to shed, one by one, the attributes of male beauty. His dark hair silvered, lost its curl, began to vanish. His skin reddened and his face became puffy. He skirmished with reducing for years and gave up. His mustache and eyebrows turned gray and he was obliged at first to touch them up. Later, dye and a toupee restored a sort of ghostly caricature of the “handsome Dan” he had been. He had flat feet, which exaggerated the out-toeing, ducklike walk he developed as a fattening man with no more musculature than that of a youth whose only sport had been the Charleston. At the same time, he was still full of a kind of eager and boyish affection; a willing listener, he was also popular at parties for having the largest fund of dirty jokes of any man in the two juxtaposed states. In addition, Beau was extremely good at figures.
Had he not been lazy, he might have been a mathematical prodigy. Lenore’s scientific aptitude came that way.
Emmet Sloan, board chairman of the Sloan Mercantile Trust, a far-seer and expert conniver, the richest man in the Sister Cities, had been Beau’s boss. When Mr. Sloan died in 1935, “of Roosevelt,” they said, his widow, Minerva, became the head not only of the bank but of the sundry factories, newspapers, mines, railroads and other interests her late spouse had collected, created and purloined.
Minerva Sloan, a size forty-four daughter of one of River City’s oldest and best families, was even shrewder and tougher than her husband. She knew Beau Bailey’s weaknesses the first time she saw him. But he had always been amiable, sedulous and amusing: Minerva liked rough jokes. She saw to it that he rose steadily in the bank, for his mathematical skill was exploitable.
She saw to it that men were put where they could watch his more important acts. She realized that he was useful for his brain and also might (someday in a pinch, and owing to his feeble sense of ethos) be made even more useful as the patsy before an embarrassing investigating committee, or on the occasion of a shaky lawsuit.
It did not occur to her, however, that he was stupid enough, as cashier of her largest bank, to bet on horses. The idea had never crossed Netta’s mind, either. She had not questioned the occasional “bonuses” and “little bonanzas” he had fetched home recently. (For at first, Beau had been extremely lucky.) Netta was used to taking cash unquestioningly; it was only its dearth that aroused her to sharp attention….
As Lenore entered her teens, as the Baileys struggled up the complex social ladders of River City and Green Prairie, Netta saw that her luck had potentially taken a swing for the better, after many hard years which she regarded, not , without a sort of reason, as loyal and sacrificing.
Lenore was going to be beautiful. Soon she was beautiful. To Netta, who had herself parlayed prettiness into a marriage that provided some, if not all, of the products recommended by class advertising, beauty could be stage-managed so as to open the grand cornucopia.
Unfortunately, Lenore proved to be a person in her own right. She early developed an interest in the boy next door, the Conner kid, which Netta regarded as mawkish and entirely inappropriate. This youngster wanted, even as a mere boy, to become nothing more remunerative than an architect. In addition, Lenore had inherited her father’s mathematical ability and in high school became greatly interested in science, especially physics. Netta felt that perhaps the most difficult operation of her life had been the one by which she had managed to hinder her daughter from becoming a teacher, a professor, a laboratory worker or a technician. The struggle involved had become a kind of stalemate. Lenore had gone to college and come dutifully back home. She had not taken the job the du Ponts offered her and had in fact allowed her science to rust; but she had not married a rich man either—and she was twenty-four.
There was one rich man, especially, whose name adorned Netta’s mind year after year.
The fact that Lenore had once attracted and then rejected him was, quite possibly, the largest thorn in Netta’s thorny life. He was eminently eligible, extremely handsome, socially so impeccable that his in-laws would automatically be lifted to the top strata, and destined to be very rich; he was Minerva’s son, Kittridge Sloan.
If Beau’s family background was average, Netta’s had been far below the American norm; hence, in a real sense, she had improved herself far more than he. Furthermore, though both had skeletons in their private closets, though indeed Netta’s young womanhood (a closed book from the day she saw Beau) was the kind which reformers wrongly imagine leads invariably to a wretched end in some such place as Buenos Aires, the Baileys had attained a complete “respectability.” They found pleasure in that estate.
They were, according to their lights, good to their one child and they furnished her with what they truly believed to be a splendid home environment. They were worthy members of the River City Episcopal Church and rose early every Sunday morning, often in spite of painful hangovers, to drive across the Central Avenue Bridge to services. Netta taught a Sunday-school class and Beau, who had a fair tenor voice, led the hymns in Sunday school. Minerva Sloan was the Sunday-school superintendent. But even that fact, which explained why they traveled so far to attend church when there were many handier places of worship in Green Prairie, did not mean their faith was entirely opportunistic. They did believe in God, childishly, as the source of pleasures and gifts and undue punishments.
One afternoon a week Netta sewed with the colored women at the Mildred Tatum Infirmary. It was, to be sure, a Sloan charity. But Netta enjoyed that afternoon sincerely: she liked colored people and felt, in a sense, completely at home with them. Moreover, Beau not only led Sunday-school singing out he contributed generously to the River City Boys Club, which was not a Sloan charitable concern, and he gave a certain amount of time to that rather sad American enterprise of “leading” boys. Beau was also a member of the Elks, Kiwanis, and the Society of Green Prairie Giraffes. He served as the perennial treasurer of all three. He was also an active Republican and had been a leading and early Eisenhower protagonist, after finding—surreptitiously and owing to his acquaintance with the accounts—that Minerva had made a large contribution to the Eisenhower campaign fund. The measure of Beau’s stance in such matters was this: that if he had discovered Minerva was backing Stevenson, he too would have paid lip service to the Democratic Party, but without enthusiasm, and he would doubtless have voted for Ike secretly, denying it afterward.
The Baileys, in sum, were not intentionally evil people. Like many, they were engaged in striving toward that place in life where their hypocrisies, small dishonesties, speculations and shady deals would become “unnecessary.” To them, as to millions of other American families, not only “keeping up” but “getting ahead” have priority over conscience; honor is a luxury they conceive of as desirable, even ideal, but possible only to those lucky few who somehow have run all the gantlets, crossed all the goals, and bought all the nationally advertised essentials, including airplane trips abroad, summer homes, large annuities and permanent vaults.
Theirs were the vices of ambition, which has come to be identified with progress, thus obscuring its other name—greed.
They were superficially much like their neighbors, the Conners, and only underneath unlike in certain ways. Neither Henry nor Beth Conner was greatly afflicted by the desire for things. Henry was content to stay forever the head of the accounting department of the J. Morse Company, the second largest hardware store chain in the state; Beth was not particularly interested in clothes, in country-club living, in “society,” in concerts or plays or lectures (doings regularly patronized by the Baileys), or even in modernizing her house or relandscaping her yard.
“She seems,” Beau once said perplexedly, “to like kind of beat-up housewares and sprangly bushes outdoors and old duds.”
In money contributed and time devoted, the good works of the Conners far outweighed the somewhat opportunistic benevolences of the Baileys. Henry Conner belonged to even more organizations—charitable, fraternal or merely sportive. Henry, indeed, was known to thousands of his fellow citizens, and his warmth and down-to-earth wisdom endeared him to them all. His younger son’s joke about his election to the office of dogcatcher was warranted: if he had desired office, Henry could have been elected to any of dozens. For that very reason he had been appointed a sector warden. Beau Bailey, on the other hand, while known to hundreds of the most prosperous citizens of his region, was not known to thousands—save perhaps as a dimly recalled face at a teller’s window, in the days before he had a desk and his own office.
Yet it was Beau who regarded himself as “important” in the community, a figurehead and social pillar. Netta shared that belief. Both Beth and Henry Conner would have deemed silly the suggestion that their family was “important.”
Such, in outline, was the background of Netta Bailey, née Meddes; such therefore was the etiology of her emotion when she carne downstairs while her husband was on the telephone, occupied by nothing more than a marriage-long habit of anxious inquisitiveness and a very slight feeling, not that the phone call was of a serious nature but that her husband had been a little quieter, a little more obsequious than usual. She saw now that Beau was frantically afraid. His swift effort to dissemble went to no purpose: She said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing whatever.”
“Beau. You can’t fool me.”
“I’m not trying to!”
Netta walked around the bleached mahogany table in the room’s center. Her eyes needled. She was somehow made more ominous, where it would have rendered most women ineffective, by the fact that she had been “experimenting” after supper with creams and lotions: her rusty-musty hair overtopped a towel and dangled from it and her face gleamed greasily.
“Okay,” she said steadily. “Who was it?”
“Netta, for God’s sake! It was a business call.”
“Your business, though. Not the bank’s.”
Beau made a tactical error. “How can you tell?”
The question allowed her to pretend the reality of a mere assumption. “So it was personal. Beau! What have you been up to?”
“Nothing, I tell you. Nothing.”
Netta sat down on the arm of the huge, flower-print-covered divan the decorator had chosen for them. “You can tell me now or you can argue awhile. Either way, Beau, I’ll find out from you.”
His voice suddenly filled the room, taut, shrill, surprising him even more than Netta. “None of your goddamned business!”
“It’s really bad trouble, isn’t it?”
“Who said it was trouble?” His face had puckered like the face of a baby trying to decide whether to produce a tantrum or a spell of pitiable tears.
“How much is it going to cost us?”
“Netta—stop jumping to such crazy conclusions!”
She could tell, to a decibel, a hairbreadth, when he was lying and when he was not. She went on implacably, “If you’ve just hocked something—or borrowed on the cars….”
“What have we got to hock that isn’t already hocked, including the cars?” He stared at her with momentary self-righteousness.
She said, “Then it is money?” Her arms were folded now on the back of the divan and her uncorseted body sagged between the two supports of rump and elbows.
“Quit hounding me.” He reached for the bottle.
“No more drink until you explain.”
He put the bottle down. Another man might have continued the defense for hours, even for days. Beau himself might have gone on fencing for a time, in spite of an inner awareness of inevitable capitulation, save for the fact that he was now far more afraid of another person than of Netta. It was the first time in his life such a thing had happened to him. He took a chair. He lighted a cigarette. He looked at his intent wife and said, “Okay. You brought it on yourself. This time we really are in a jam.”
“I brought it on myself! We are in a jam! Speak for yourself, bright boy!”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “just how bad a jam it is. If I hadn’t borrowed up to the full value on my insurance…!” He pointed his forefinger at his temple, cocked his thumb in a pantomime of shooting himself.
“How much money?” she asked again, unimpressed by his drama.
“Five thousand dollars.”
Netta moaned softly, sagged, slid from the arm of the divan onto the cushions. “Five—
thousand—dollars.” She murmured the words, wept them. “Even one thousand the way we’re fixed…!” Then she screamed, “How in God’s earth do you owe that?”
Tears filled Beau’s eyes. “All my life,” he recited, “I’ve done just one thing and one thing only, scrimped and sweat and slaved and hit the old ball, so you and Lenore could have a fine life. I have no pleasures of my own, no vices, no indulgences—”
She was looking at him, white-faced, oblivious to his stale stock of good providing.
“Those—‘bonuses,’ you called them! The ‘little windfalls,’ you said! The fur coat you got Lenore! The new deep-freeze you made a little killing just in time to pay for! All that?”
“A man,” he responded in a ghastly tone, “can get so devoted to his family he’ll stop at nothing for their sake—”
Netta said a word she had learned in her childhood environs, monosyllabic and succulent-sounding. It was one of the first words she had ever known. She sat up. “You’ve been gambling!”
“How do you know?”
“Horses!”
“And I did all right.” Her guess seemed to release him. “And if I had some real dough to lay on the line, I could get back what I’m down—!”
“Where? What bookie. Jake! That was Jake on the phone!”
Now, for the first time, Netta was more frightened than angry. “Beau, do you really owe Jake Tanetti five thousand dollars?”
“I didn’t think it was that much. I thought—around three. But he says five.”
“Then it’s five.” Netta sat silent for a moment, her chest heaving. Once or twice she looked speculatively at Beau. Finally she smiled at him wanly. “Come over here. Sit beside me.”
“Net, I don’t want to. I’m too ashamed.”
She beckoned. Heavily, he rose and cautiously approached. He seated himself as gingerly as if the divan had been an electric chair. But Netta didn’t swat him or even yell at him. She just took his hand and held it in her own and stared at it and finally said, softly, “Beau, my boy, you’ve done some dumb things in your day, but—this is really Grade-A trouble. I’m not sore. I’m sorry.”
She meant it. Meant the compassion she displayed, the calm. Intellectually Netta knew that the only way to manage Beau now would be with gentleness. Anything harsh might easily snap the thin threads of his remaining pride and cause him to do something still more rash. Not suicide. But—he might confess to Minerva Sloan and throw himself (and her and Lenore, as incidentals) on the mercy of the old woman. There was no such thing as mercy in Minerva, Netta knew; she’d had a good deal of experience in the absence of mercy. So there was reason for her to hold her tongue and to treat Beau with restraint.
But something much deeper also moved Netta, something she did not understand. It was pity. She realized that she had never pitied Beau before; she had always, in fact, felt slightly inferior to him because of her background. Now, however, she suddenly felt equal. His descent to this level, his victimization by the bookmaker, even his gambling per se, as his way of trying to clamber from his eternally sticky finances, touched Netta in a familiar spot. Her mother, father, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles had lived in this place, owing what they could not pay, guilty of merely taking a chance and losing, and faced in sudden consequence with the malignity of forces vastly mightier than themselves: rackets, unions, the law, the church, street gangs, hoods, noble powers that became suddenly evil and evil powers that were ceaselessly opposed to everybody, to life itself and letting live.
Netta came closer to loving Beau then than ever before.
“You’re the cashier of a big bank,” she said carefully, “so you can’t gamble. That means this business must not come out.”
“If I don’t pay Jake—”
“Sure. If you don’t—it will. That’s Jake.” She said it as if “Jake” were a force of nature, not a person. “So he has to get paid.”
“How?”
“That’s what we’ve got to figure. He’ll probably take something down….”
Beau brightened a little. “He said he would. Half now. Half later.”
“So, okay. All you need right off is two grand and a half.”
He shrugged. “Might as well be two million.”
“I’ve heard you say, Beau, you could lay your hands on fortunes, and nobody would be wiser for years.”
He pulled away from her. “The bank?”
“You said…?” she gestured casually.
“My God, Net! I said so, sure. Portfolios full of negotiable stuff that I check, sometimes.
You could slip out millions and borrow on it—cash it in—and nobody would know till somebody looked. Maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe longer. But that’s out!”
“You got any different inspirations? Or better ones?”
“That one isn’t even an idea. Look, Net. I appreciate the way you’re taking this. I-I-I guess I thought you’d just kick me out on the street if you got the facts. But I’m not borrowing from the bank without notice. No embezzlement. Defalcation. No. That would be strictly criminal. I could go to jail!”
“Have you thought just where you stand now, and what could happen if you didn’t pay up Jake?”
“I could lose my joh—”
“Lose your job, my eye! Jake has put men in the Green Prairie River in a barrel of cement for less. That’s the only way he can keep his books in the black: making his collections tough.”
“Maybe Hank Conner…?”
“Look, Beau. You borrowed five hundred from Hank last year. Remember? And eight hundred, two… three years before that.”
“Sure. But—”
“But what? Hank’s generous. He’s a damned good neighbor in a lot of ways. He’s come to your rescue five or six times. And you never paid him back a cent.”
“Sure, but he knows I’m good for it. Someday I’ll—”
“Someday you’ll—nothing! You don’t even know how much you’ve borrowed, over the years. Okay, go to Hank. If you get the twenty-five hundred, I’ll really think he’s crazy. If you don’t….” She broke off. She had already said enough about his access to inactive portfolios.
Enough for the moment. To Netta, raised in the wrongest part of that wretched territory on the wrong side of every track, being in trouble with Jake Tanetti was far more dangerous than lifting a few bonds from a bank—especially when one way or another you would make sure to get the bonds back before their absence was checked.
Beau drew a long breath, exhaled, picked up the bottle, saw that Netta was not going to forbid him, and poured a highball. He breathed again and said relievedly, casting the whole burden away from himself and toward the woman, “Brother! Are we in a mess!”
In the hall, the front door dosed with a click. Lenore came in, tiredly, her coverall over her arm. She set down the Geiger counter. “Is there anything unusual about the Baileys being in a mess?”
“This time,” her mother said, “it’s a real one. Beau…!”
His eyes implored. “Don’ t—Mother! Not to Len!”
Netta brought to an end her state of uncompromising sympathy. Beau deserved to be punished. And so, for that matter, did Lenore. Just for being intractable. Just for passing up her opportunities. Just for refusing to do what a daughter should in behalf of parents who had sacrificed everything. Netta thought that if Lenore had any sense of obligation they wouldn’t be sweating now over any measly five thousand dollars.
She said, “Your father, Lenore, has at last succeeded in making the priceless kind of horse’s behind of himself I always expected.”
The girl dropped on the end of the divan near her parents and ran her fingers into her hair, pulling out pins, letting it fall. “Now what?”
Netta told her in a few flat sentences.
Lenore said nothing. Her eyes filled and overflowed. She didn’t look at her mother or her father. She just sat still, crying silently. Her anguish was a source of satisfaction to her mother, an intolerable spectacle for her father.
“ Don’t baby.” he kept saying. “ Don’t cry. Net and I will find a way out of it. We always have.” But she kept on crying. After a while she rose and went to her room and left her parents sitting together, not talking. Beau had a drink.