The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [230]
So I slept.
How was I to know she would go and hurt herself? She cheated, she cheated too.
Father, Eugene! What you went and found, was it better than this?
And where's Jinny?
MUSIC FROM SPAIN
One morning at breakfast Eugene MacLain was opening his paper and without the least idea of why he did it, when his wife said some innocent thing to him—"Crumb on your chin" or the like—he leaned across the table and slapped her face. They were in their forties, married twelve years—she was the older: she was looking it now.
He waited for her to say "Eugene MacLain!" The oven roared behind her—the second pan of toast was under the flame. Almost leisurely—that is, he sighed—Eugene rose and walked out of the kitchen, holding on to his paper; usually he put it in Emma's hand as he gave her the good-bye kiss.
He listened for "Eugene?" to follow him into the chill of the hall and wait for "Yes, dear?" He saw his face go past the mirror with a smile on it; that was a memory of little Fan's fly-away habit of answering her mother—and the sticking out of her two pigtails behind her as she ran off, the fair hair screwed up to the first tightenings of vanity—"That's my name." She had now been dead a year.
He put on his raincoat and hat, and secured his paper flat under his arm. Emma was still sitting propped back in her chair between table and stove, with the parrot-tailed house-coat just now settling in a series of puffs about her, and her too small, fat feet, as if they had been the most outraged, propped out before her. He knew the way Emma was looking in the kitchen behind him not because he had ever struck anyone before but because, with her, it was like having eyes in the back of his head. (Only in the back of his head!) Why, now, drawing her breath fast in the only warm room, she sat self-hypnotized in her own domain, with her "Get-out-of-my-kitchen" and "Come-here-do-you-realize-what-you've-done," all her stiffening and wifely glaze running sweet and finespun as sugar threads over her.
But Eugene went down the hall—now he heard like an echo her wounded cry and the shriek of the toast-pan—and pulled the apartment door locked behind him. He never could bear the sound of his own name called out in public, and she could still fling open the door and cry "Eugene Hudson MacLain, come here to me!" down the stairs.
A tremor ran through his arm as it struggled with the front door, and he stepped through to the outside and the perfectly still, foggy morning. He let his breath out, and there it was: he could see it. The air, the street, a sea gull, all the same soft gray, were in the same degree visible and seemed to him suddenly as pure as his own breath was.
The sea gull like a swinging pearl came walking across Jones Street as if to join him. "Our sea gulls have become so immured to San Francisco life," he would remark on walking in Bertsingers'—for you came in to work with a humorous remark—"they even cross the streets at the intersections now." He couldn't have hurt Emma. There couldn't be a mark on her.
She was stronger than he was, 150 pounds to 139, he could inform old Mr. Bertsinger Senior, who liked to press for figures. He and Emma MacLain could at any time be printed in the paper where all could see, side by side naked and compared, in those testimonial silhouettes; maybe had been. Emma knew he hadn't hurt her; better than he knew, Emma knew.
He sighed gently. By now—for she did take things in slowly—the rosy mole might be riding the pulse in her throat as it did long after the telephone rang late in the night and was the wrong number—"Why, it might have been a thousand things." Pretty soon, with her middle finger she would start touching her hairpins, one by one, going over her head as though in finishing her meditations she was sewing some precautionary cap on.
Eugene was walking down the habitual hills to Bertsingers', Jewelers, and with sharp sniffs that as always rather