Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [46]
“One evening,” Younger went on, “I came home to find a cheval glass of ours, an antique, a wedding present from my aunt, lying in pieces on the parlor floor. It turned out that Nora had deliberately broken it. That night she fought more furiously than ever. One of her blows landed, and I finally struck her—with the back of my hand, against her cheek. The force of it was stronger than I intended. She fell to the floor. To my astonishment, she apologized. It was the first time she’d ever apologized. She railed at her own folly, praised me for my kindness, and protested her undying love for me. She threw her arms around me and begged my forgiveness. She began to cry. I thought we had finally come to the end of it.
“Instead a pattern had begun. Our quarreling would start again, swell to its old proportions, and then we’d come to blows. Or rather, she would try to land blows until at last I struck her, at which point she would soften and beg to be forgiven. But the strangest thing of all was that I discovered that I could forestall the worst of our quarreling by—a—by cutting straight to the end of the pattern, in our intimate life.”
“I don’t understand,” said Colette.
“No, and I’m not going to explain it,” said Younger. “But it worked. For a while at least; not for long. When we were out in public—on a street, in a theater, anywhere—Nora began flying into rages, accusing me of being attracted to other women. Which I was, naturally, if they were attractive. At first I didn’t deny her accusations, but in the end, just to quiet her down, I told her she was imagining it—that it was all in her head. She knew I was lying, but she seemed to prefer the lie to the truth.
“Then the young wife of a rich old patient asked me to make a house call. Her husband was dying. I was there a long while. Very sad. When I got home that night, I found myself concealing it from Nora. There was nothing to conceal, but the wife was famously charming—she’d been an actress—and I knew if I told Nora, there would have been an endless night of pointless recriminations. It had all become so boring, so monotonous. So I told her a different story; she believed me. At that moment, I realized I no longer loved my wife.
“About two months later, the same woman called me again. Her husband was dead, and she was resuming her career on Broadway. She said she had a painfulness in her lower back from rehearsals. She asked me to come to her house and have a look at it. I did. After that she asked me to make house calls several times a week. I lied about it recklessly to Nora.
“One day a note from the actress came to our apartment, requesting my presence as soon as possible. Of course Nora saw the note, and of course she understood at once all the lies I’d been telling her. She accused me of the affair; I confessed it. We divorced, scandalously, having been married little more than a year—and the most comic fact was that I hadn’t had an affair at all. At least it would have been comic if Nora hadn’t died shortly afterward. They wired me the news in Boston. She had fallen from a subway platform into a train. They called it an accident, but I doubt it. The one thing they did discover was that she was with child when she died. Freud says I feel responsible for her death.”
“Do you?” asked Colette.
“It’s worse than that. I was happy she was dead. I’m still happy about it, to this day.”
Hutteldorf Station was the end of the line. In the town center of an otherwise bucolic and thickly wooded district stood a few low apartment houses. One of these was Gruber’s address, but no one by that name lived there now. Younger discovered nothing useful until he approached a matronly woman sweeping the courtyard .
“Hans Gruber?” she said. “Who all the girls were mad about? The tall young man with the blond hair and beautiful blue eyes?”
Younger translated this description without comment. Precisely by not reacting to it, Colette acknowledged its accuracy. He thought he saw color rising to her face.
“Of course I remember,” said the woman. “What