A Charmed Life by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page B

sideward, as if somebody had stuck him in the ribs. “You mean she talks about it?” “Not about herself,” qualified Jane. “About other people. There was a case in the papers the other day, people we used to know, and that’s how she explained it.” “Very interesting,” said Miles, nudging Helen’s behind with his perforated shoe. “How do you mean?” said Jane. Miles stroked his chin. “Martha is a very sick girl,” he said. The Coes glanced at each other, surreptitiously. “I’ll give you two examples,” said Miles, after a pause. “You remember the fire we had?” The Coes nodded. “Well, she talked about the fire incessantly before it happened. She was convinced the house was going to burn down because of some private guilt of her own. And then, by God, it did.” “You don’t mean you think she started it?” cried Jane. Miles shrugged. “I’ve been studying some poltergeist cases recently and I recognized the pattern. I don’t know how I missed it before. She was the first one up that night and normally she sleeps like a log. She’d rescued the boy before I knew what was what. The boy was asleep too. Nobody smelled smoke but Martha, and she got herself and the boy completely dressed before she called the fire department.” “Good Lord,” said Jane. “Yes,” said Miles. “Notice—she didn’t want to hurt anybody. That’s typical of these cases. It’s an attention-drawing mechanism, primarily.” “She felt overshadowed by Miles,” elucidated Helen. “But she was quite beside herself,” said Miles, “when the insurance people came down to investigate. Wanted to put the blame on some poor devil of a workman who’d done the wiring. Never gave a thought to the fact that he’d be prosecuted if the insurance people believed her. She said it was her fault, really, that she’d instructed him to commit a violation—all poppycock. It was her neurotic way of confessing the truth, of saying, in symbolic language, that the fire was her fault; she was the firebug. And you know, by God, I remembered something she told me once—that when she was a little girl she used to put her younger brother up to setting fires; he’d get the blame and she’d watch the blaze. The brother never knew it; she was clever, the way she instigated him; he thought all through his boyhood that he was the pyromaniac.”
    “Whew!” said Warren, running his hand across his brow. He glanced at Jane wonderingly: did she credit this story? He would have liked to argue one or two points in it with Miles, but he hated to let Helen think he disbelieved her husband. His heart, as he told Jane, sank to his boots. The blue day was blackened for him; he knew he would not sleep for thinking of this tale. Either way he looked at it, it was horrible, horrible for Martha, if true, horrible for Miles, if false. And horrible for him and Jane to be listening to it, crouched around Miles on a lovely fall afternoon. “Understand,” said Miles. “I don’t hold it against her. All that’s in the past. I think now I mishandled her. I didn’t allow for the fact that she was a very frightened kid when I married her. Helen thinks so too.” His wife bobbed her head in quick, sympathetic agreement. “I thought,” said Miles, “I could teach her self-knowledge. But when she found out I was on to her, she flew the coop.” He laughed. Warren felt deeply shocked. “And she took her revenge. I don’t blame her. She has the modern girl’s vindictive mania for publicity. She could have left me any time in broad daylight, without any fanfare. But she had to do it in a nightgown, at three o’clock in the morning.” Warren caught his breath; this was not the way Miles had told the story before.
    Warren and Jane too—he could tell from the look in her eyes—remembered perfectly well the morning Miles had come out to their house in a taxi, his red beard unshaven, fumes of liquor still on his breath, looking for Martha and crying.