The Scarlet Letters Read Free Page A

man’s only flesh and blood.”
    Martha shut her eyes.
    â€œLike you?” said Nikki horridly. “Wives like Martha exist only in Victorian novels, and a husband who doesn’t know it ought to be altered.”
    â€œWill you stop interrupting? Besides, Martha, Dirk was tight. Probably if he’d been sober–”
    Martha opened her eyes. “When he’s sober it’s worse.”
    â€œWorse? How do you mean?”
    â€œWhen he’s sober, I can’t keep telling myself that he’s saying those horrible things because he’s drunk.”
    â€œYou mean Dirk actually believes you’re sleeping around?”
    â€œHe tries not to. But it’s become an obsession, something he can’t control.”
    â€œMay I say nuts?” inquired Nikki.
    â€œNikki, you aren’t in love with him. I am.”
    â€œIf he were my husband, I’d give him something to have an obsession about!”
    â€œHe’s sick …”
    â€œThis is going to hurt,” said Ellery. “Either he’s sick, Martha–or he’s right.”
    Nikki leaped. “Martha, I’m taking you over to my place this minute. This minute.”
    â€œSit down, Nikki, and shut up. Or go into the next room. If Martha wants my help, I’ve got to know what the problem is. I’m not going to deliver a sermon–I’ve seen worse crimes than adultery. So first, Martha, tell me: Are you what Dirk called you tonight–a nymph?”
    â€œIf I am, he hasn’t caught me at it yet.” Martha’s face continued to show nothing. “Look, boys and girls, I’m a gal who’s trying to save her marriage. If I weren’t, I shouldn’t be here.”
    â€œTouché,” said Ellery. “Now tell me everything you know about Dirk that might explain this jealousy complex of his.”
    About Dirk’s childhood Martha was largely in the dark. He also had been an only child. The Lawrences were East Shore Marylanders, Southern sympathizers during the Civil War. Dirk’s mother’s family were South Carolina Fairleighs, with a distinguished history of slaveholding and aristocratic poverty.
    Whatever Dirk had lacked as a boy, it was not material. The Lawrence wealth was inherited from his Great-grandfather Lawrence, who had gone West after Appomattox, made millions in mines and railroads, and returned to Maryland to restock the family coffers.
    â€œDirk’s father never did a lick of work in his life,” Martha said. “And neither did Dirk till he put on a uniform. His father sent him to VMI, but he was kicked out after a year for chronic insubordination. He decided he wanted to be a writer. Pearl Harbor caught him living in Greenwich Village, wearing a beard and trying to make like a poor man’s Hemingway on an allowance of a mere ten thousand a year. He enlisted–in relief, I think–and he was an officer with the paratroopers in Belgium when he got the news that his parents had both been killed in an automobile accident.
    â€œIt wasn’t till he got home after the war that Dirk learned two things: One, that the police suspected Mr. Lawrence of having deliberately run the car, with himself and Mrs. Lawrence in it, off the road–”
    â€œWhy?” asked Ellery.
    â€œI don’t know, unless it had something to do with the other thing Dirk found out when he got back. His father had run through every penny of the Lawrence fortune and had left nothing but debts.
    â€œDirk went back to New York, broke except for what he had on his back. He tried writing again, but after a few months of starvation he looked for a job. A publishing house took him on in the editorial department, and he was with the firm over two years. The job lasted till 1948, when he was twenty-eight years old.
    â€œI’ve met some of the people he worked with there,” said Martha, “and they all paint the same picture. Dirk was