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By Root 2797 0

boys were coming home and she had begun searching for Frank’s face in the streets. It was the woman with whom he had lived who had told her, for Frank had given this woman’s name as his next-of-kin. The woman, having told her, had not known what else to say, and she stared at Florence in simple-minded pity. This made Florence furious, and she barely murmured: ‘Thank you,’ before she turned away. She hated Frank for making this woman official witness to her humiliation. And she wondered again what Frank had seen in this woman, who, though she was younger than Florence, had never been so pretty, and who drank all the time, and who was seen with many men.

But it had been from the first her great mistake—to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men. Frank claimed that she got it all wrong side up: it was men who suffered because they had to put up with the ways of women—and this from the time that they were born until the day they died. But it was she who was right, she knew; with Frank she had always been right; and it had not been her fault that Frank was the way he was, determined to live and die a common nigger.

But he was always swearing that he would do better; it was, perhaps, the brutality of his penitence that had kept them together for so long. There was something in her which loved to see him bow—when he came home, stinking with whisky, and crept with tears into her arms. Then he, so ultimately master, was mastered. And holding him in her arms while, finally, he slept, she thought with the sensations of luxury and power: ‘But there’s a lots of good in Frank. I just got to be patient and he’ll come along all right.’ To ‘come along’ meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom ‘coming along’ is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive. For ten years he came along, but when he left her he was the same man she had married. He had not changed at all.

He had never made enough money to buy the home she wanted, or anything else she really wanted, and this had been part of the trouble between them. It was not that he could not make money, but that he would not save it. He would take half a week’s wages and go out and buy something he wanted, or something he thought she wanted. He would come home on Saturday afternoons, already half drunk, with some useless objects, such a vase, which, it had occurred to him, she would like to fill with flowers—she who never noticed flowers and who would certainly never have bought any. Or a hat, always too expensive or too vulgar, or a ring that looked as though it had been designed for a whore. Sometimes it occurred to him to do the Saturday shopping on his way home, so that she would not have to do it; in which case he would buy a turkey, the biggest and most expensive he could find, and several pounds of coffee, it being his belief that there was never enough in the house, and enough breakfast cereal to feed an army for a month. Such foresight always filled him with such a sense of his own virtue that, as a kind of reward, he would also buy himself a bottle of whisky; and—lest she should think that he was drinking too much—invite some ruffian home to share it with him. Then they would sit all afternoon in her parlor, playing cards and telling indecent jokes, and making the air foul with whisky and smoke. She would sit in the kitchen, cold with rage and staring at the turkey, which, since Frank always bought them unplucked and with the head on, would cost her hours of exasperating, bloody labor. Then she would wonder what on earth had possessed her to undergo such hard trial and travel so far from home, if all she had found was a two-room apartment in a city she did not like, and a man yet more childish than any she had