All These Condemned Read Free Page A

the years, wrapping him in strand after strand before performing the brutal operation. Any single strand could have been broken. But not all of them. She had debased both of us.
    I decided not to wake him and tell him. He would know soon enough that they had found it. I went back down the hallway toward the living room. I wondered if Steve were in his room. His door opened so suddenly it startled me.
    “Noel,” he said, saying it, as he always does, with that special tone that is for me. “I thought that was your step. Nobody else walks quite that way.” He took my wrist and pulled me, unprotesting, into his room. He closed the door quietly.
    “What a mess!” he said. “God, what a mess! Is Randy carrying on again?”
    “He’s still sleeping. I gave him pills. He needs to sleep.”
    He had been washing his hands. His sleeves were rolled up. The crisp brown hair on his strong arms was matted and wet where he had dried hastily and imperfectly. He put his hands on my waist and they felt strong. I am glad I am slim for him. I am glad he likes shoe-button eyes, an upper lip that is a little too long, and my flavor of gravity. He pushed his mouth down hard on my lips, taking away my breath and my will.
    “This is still the same,” he said against my hair, still holding me.
    “No,” I said. “It isn’t the same. It was simple yesterday, wasn’t it? Everything was perfectly dandy.” I began to cry. I hadn’t wanted to cry. We sat on his bed, his arm around me.
    “You better tell me what you mean, Noel.”
    I had to explain it carefully. “Last night she was there. He had a place to go. Emotionally, I mean. That could be the end of it. With no regrets, because I finally stopped loving him. It took a long time to stop, but I finally stopped. She had become his whole life. And I was just such a little part of it, he would hardly have missed me. But now he needs me, Steve.”
    “That’s a trap,” he said. “Females fall into it all the time. Maternal stuff. Poor little man needs you. Don’t be ridiculous.”
    “She turned him from a man into a flunky. He’s going to need help if he tries to turn back into a man.”
    “For richer and for poorer? In sickness and in health?” Steve said bitterly. I did not like the curl of his lip. It was contemptuous of me, of the person I am. And if he loveswhat I am, what I believe is a part of me … And he should not show contempt.
    “I only know what I have to do.”
    “Then I’m to consider this the brush-off.”
    It was not what I wanted him to say, God knows. I did not want such an easy and empty victory. It was his duty to talk me out of it, to give me all the reasons why I should leave Randy as we had talked about it last night. He should have given me all the reasons why he wanted me to leave the sinking ship that was Randolph Hess.
    But that was not the dreadful thing, the most dreadful thing. I am sensitive to people. I see little clues in their faces. And I saw, in Steve’s face, a concealed relief. As though something were going far easier for him than he had anticipated.
    I made myself test him. “Really, Steve, after all, haven’t we got just a little bit too serious about all this? I mean it made it more dramatic and all, but … after all, we
are
a couple of adults, aren’t we?”
    He looked at me in a startled way and then he laughed softly. “God, Noel, you’re a package of surprises. You’re right. We are all grown up.”
    I smiled. “And it didn’t mean as much as we said it did.”
    He ruffled my hair. “I guess not, kitten. But you’ve been awful good for me. I want you to know that. I mean just knowing somebody like you.”
    And that was the end of it, of course. I felt more soiled than when I had gone to look at her body. Than when I had sat and looked at the face of my sleeping husband, hating him. More soiled, because at least those emotions had beendirect and honest. But this with Steve had been a cheapness. A baseness. Week-end