A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

You never can, you never do. Just as that man recognized you on the sidewalk that day, someone else will surely come along some day and wreck everything you and he have built; your home, your trust in one another, your happiness. Isn’t it better to tell him now of your own accord—

And risk losing him, losing the one chance I’ve ever had to be the same as other people are?

— than to live in dread and insecurity for years to come, never knowing when the revelation will occur. Isn’t it better to lose him now, if you must, than to lose him later? Won’t it hurt less, won’t it cost less? And lose him or not, at least then you can hold your head up high all the rest of your days.

She got very little sleep that night, but her sleeplessness wasn’t due to anticipations of coming happiness.

And in the candy-store all the next day the problem rode her back like a monkey, whispering first in one ear, whispering next in the other, whispering now yes, whispering now no.

And even when she was with him that evening, it wouldn’t let her be, making her smile less, making her miss things that he said, taking the edge off her contentment at being with him. Until finally he noticed it himself, and asked her what it was, and whether she regretted her decision.

“No,” she said fervently. “No. Oh, no.”

In the meantime all their little preparations, which to them were not little at all, were going on apace. They went apartment-hunting, in the evenings and on Sundays, which was the only free time they had, but finally had to give it up. Most of the places they looked at were priced too high for them to afford, and those that weren’t were sordid. They finally temporized by agreeing that he would give up his own room, which was the smaller of the two, and move in with her, but he insisted that he take over the rent.

They even did a certain amount of window-shopping for furniture, and when they passed for instance a glossy walnut dining-table with a bowl of wax fruit on it, would stop and say “We’ll get something like that some day,” even though they knew it would be a long, long time before they could afford the eighty-nine-fifty that was asked for it. “Let’s see how we’d look at it.” Then they would both dip their knees a little and crouch down, standing out there on the sidewalk, so that their reflections on the showcase-glass seemed to be sitting down at the table.

“Did you see the faces of any small kids peeking up over the edge of the table just then?” he asked her.

“I saw one,” she said. “How many did you see?”

“I saw two,” he said.

She smiled, and took his arm more closely than before.

They took out the license, took their blood-tests, were okayed, and everything was in readiness for the coming Saturday, and still she hadn’t told him.

Now that she had a deadline to meet, the problem became insupportable, crushing. She almost couldn’t breathe with the weight of it. It was taking the joy out of what should have been some of the happiest days of her life. She had even considered going to a priest and asking his advice, although she had no formalized religious beliefs and had never been a churchgoer. But instinctively she realized that the decision must come from her, she must be the one to make it, for it would be lacking by that much in grace, less worthy by that much of remission, of indulgence, if it came only at the behest of some stranger of the cloth and not from the depths of her own heart.

If she had had a week’s grace more, she probably would have taken that week, that much more time, trying to make up her mind, and still not have succeeded. But there was no more time left. This was Thursday, and they were being married Saturday. The shortness of it forced the issue. It had to be tonight or not at all. She couldn’t wait until the very night before they were married to tell him; there would have been something indecent about doing that. And unfair to him, not giving him time, curtailing his power to make a decision.

It was settled, then. In both regards. She was going to tell him, and she was going to tell him tonight, this very night.

When they met at their usual place, which was still the bus-stop of their early days, and he made some remark about dinner, she quickly put him off.

“No, not just yet. I want to tell you something first. We can eat later on, if we cat at all.”

“Go ahead, tell,” he grinned amiably.

She looked around her at the teeming foot-traffic. “Not right here.”

“Let’s go in someplace and get a cup of coffee, then.”

But she felt she needed something stronger to brace her, to see her through this ordeal that lay immediately ahead. She had drunk only sparingly in her old life, and since then not at all. But she needed courage, a back stop, to face what she had to do now.

“I could use a beer instead,” she told him. “It might help to — lubricate my throat.”