In the Still of the Night by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Read Free Book Online

full of promise in the morning and its brief ecstasy in the afternoon had come to an end in a cold, bleak classroom under the merciless eyes of a too-curious child.
    Kate slept with her husband that night. They had gone out to dinner with a client of Martin’s. She had offered to make dinner, but Martin preferred a restaurant where, frankly, Kate could carry the principal burden of entertaining a man not easily entertained. She flirted with him openly, flatteringly, or as Martin put it, like a courtesan. It was intended as a compliment. There were not many things Martin liked better than to be the envy of his peers. She took a painful pleasure in making love with him when he was already so greatly pleased with her. She was great at giving pleasure, she thought ironically, and making do herself. The rites of married love had become mostly an agony. She had not reached the peak of self-deception where she could substitute one man for another in her fantasy. Afterwards, when Martin had returned to his own bed, contented and full of sleep, she was free to dream of Dan and a life with him.
    Martin soon was breathing with deep regularity, while sleep was beyond her. She got up and went to the adjoining sitting room where, when Martin was away, she used to come up early in the night and read. The house had seemed too big. Now it was not big enough. At one of the deep, high windows with the shutters folded into the wall, she parted the drapes and stared out at the night.
    There was no longer the street traffic after midnight in the East Nineties such as used to continue into the early hours of morning. An occasional taxi, a furtive pedestrian, drunk or lost or homeless, with all his earthly goods stacked in a grocery cart headed for a bench along the Central Park wall. What would it be like to be in need, to be among the pitied or among the despised, an object of surreptitious nudges? They had been cast out of paradise, she remembered jesting to Dan in the museum. But suppose they were discovered? They must not let that happen. If there was to be a future for them, they must themselves take the first step at bringing it about. They must salvage some small dignity at least. Theirs was not the first such love in history, only the first for them. The children would understand, Sheila certainly, in time. And Martin: she could name a half-dozen women who would open their arms to him. His hurt would pass, perhaps even his outrage. Dan could make a good confession and petition the archdiocese, the Vatican if necessary, to be released from his vows. They had spoken of it: such release could only happen after a period of separation from her and from the most sacred of his duties. It would not happen, she knew that. Dan would rather wait and pray for the day that priests could marry, so self-persuaded the day was coming he could grant himself premature indulgence. And to tell the truth and shame the devil, she too preferred to wait. Be honest, Kate: now is forever.
    Her thoughts became as a thousand tongues babbling half-finished sentences from her subconscious. Try as she might, she could not hold those flashes of memory she wanted most to dwell on now—their first touch, love first spoken, promises, longings shared, such as for the sweet peace they had never known of sleep together after love. She stared at the street lamp beneath her window, to hold onto that longing at least. But it became a halo, then a face: it might have been the image of St. Francis as on the prayer card that memorialized her mother’s death. She could not hold to that either: it had become the face as she had glimpsed it in the museum door, the face confronting her at the tunnel door. The pounding in her ears had to be her own heartbeat and not the rhythm of running footsteps. When she closed her eyes, opened them, and looked again, there was only the street lamp and its misty halo.
    At dawn, Martin, an early riser, found her curled up in an afghan, deep in a