The Fourth Side of the Triangle Read Free Page B

background or resources? She was not like other women.
    â€œIt’s never happened before,” she said, and her lips compressed ever so slightly, as if to say, And it should not have happened now; but the lip compression was as far as the criticism would ever get. “I know that men have, well, certain feelings that women may not have, and there are undoubtedly situations in which they—you—cannot control yourselves absolutely. But with your father it’s never happened before, Dane, I’m quite certain of that.” It was as if she were pleading her husband’s case before some attentive court. She sat in her chair with hands lapped over, no hint of tears in her childlike blue eyes—a fragile figure of middle-aged porcelain.
    He shouldn’t have done it to her, Dane ruminated. Not to Mother. She’s not equipped. Regardless of the deficiencies of their intimate life together, he shouldn’t have made her a victim of this commonest of marital tragedies. Not after living with her all these years. Not after taking her little Victorian self as it was and molding it to his accommodation. What did she have without her husband? Ashton McKell was her reason for being. It left her like a planet torn loose from its sun. Dane began to feel angry.
    It made him re-examine himself, because at first he had been inclined to see it through male eyes. What might it be like to visit a father’s home and find some brittle, dyed creature in her sharp-featured forties … “Dane, this is your stepmother.” “Oh, Ashie, no! You call me Gladys, Dane.” Or Gert, or Sadie. Dane shivered. Surely his father couldn’t have fallen that low. Not some brassy broad out of a night-club line.
    â€œMother, has he said anything about a divorce?”
    Lutetia turned her clear eyes on him in astonishment. “Why, what a question, Dane. Certainly not! Your father and I would never consider such a thing.”
    â€œWhy not? If—”
    â€œPeople of our class don’t get divorces. Anyway, the Church doesn’t recognize divorce. I certainly don’t want one, and even if I did your father wouldn’t dream of it.”
    I’ll bet, Dane thought grimly. He forbore to point out what Lutetia perfectly well knew—that so long as neither of the parties remarried after a civil divorce, no rule of the Episcopal Church was broken. But how could she stand for the adultery? To his surprise, Dane discovered that he was taking an old-fashioned view of his own toward the disclosure. Or was it simply that he was putting himself in his mother’s place? (All at once, the whole problem became entangled. He found himself thinking of the McKell money. The McKell money meant nothing to him, really—he had never particularly coveted it, he had certainly not earned a cent of it, with his two inheritances he did not need any part of it, and he had repeatedly refused to justify his legatee status in respect to it. Yet now the thought that the bulk of it might wind up the property of “another woman” infuriated him.)
    â€œHe’s cheated on you, Mother. How can you go on living with him?”
    â€œI’m surprised at you, Dane. Your own father.”
    She was ready to forgive adultery. Did the drowning woman refuse the life preserver because it was filthy with oil scum?
    Lutetia sat patiently on a chair which a young male favorite of le roi soleil’s brother had given to his own female favorite—sat patiently and unaware of this aspect of the chair’s history—and stared without seeing it at a painting of the Fontainebleau school in which rusty nymphs languished under dark trees … a painting hanging where the portrait had hung of her Grandmother Phillipse, dressed in the gown she had worn on being presented to “Baron Renfrew” a century ago.
    â€œI would give your father a divorce, of course,” she went on in her