Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [1]
But she had held out. She did not want any money from Thomas J. Haskell. Neither a lump sum settlement nor a lifetime annuity in the form of alimony. She had already taken as much from the man as she wanted. He paid court costs and he paid her lawyer’s fee, but that was all he paid.
The annulment was easily arranged. Her lawyer selected the grounds—breaking a premarital promise to raise a family. They had been married two years and had not conceived any children, so this was a handy excuse for the termination of the marriage. It took hardly any time at all and she was free and away from him, out of their apartment and into a room of her own, out of their double bed and into her single bed.
She had been just twenty-two when she married Tom Haskell. She was twenty-four now, a slender girl with finely chiseled features. Her hair was that very dark shade of brown hardly distinguishable from black, and she wore it long so that it reached almost to her shoulders. It was versatile hair; she could spin it into a French roll, braid it into adolescent pigtails, bind it up into a severe chignon or have it teased into something still more flamboyant. But most of the time she wore it long and flowing, very simple but very effective. That was the way she had always worn it as a girl, and she could remember sitting for hours at her mirror, brushing it herself or having it brushed systematically by her mother.
She was five and a half feet tall, narrow-waisted, with high firm breasts and narrow hips. Her complexion was quite light, her mouth small, her eyes a very deep blue, her forehead high. When men looked at her quickly their first impression was one of facile attractiveness; they had to look a second time to realize that she was beautiful. Her beauty was a quiet sort, less than dramatic, the beauty of refinement.
Born in Pennsylvania, in Scranton, a town she scarcely remembered except for vague recollections of smoky air and dirty little houses. When she was seven her father, after a careful analysis of his assets and liabilities, realized the impossibility of increasing the former to the point where they compared favorably to the latter and, after setting his house in some semblance of order, drove his car to the outskirts of town, and blew out his brains with a .45-calibre automatic pistol.
She remembered little of her father. He had smelled of liquor and cigars, he had held her on his lap and had told her wonderful stories.
That was about all.
After the funeral, after the settling of accounts, she and her mother had moved north to Syracuse, in New York State. She had aunts and uncles there. Her mother worked and Rhoda went to school, and during her third year in high school her mother went to the hospital for an operation, and just eighteen months later, and a week before Rhoda graduated from high school, her mother died.
There was a little insurance money and there was a scholarship, and she went to Harpur College, in Binghamton, and majored in English. She worked nights clerking at a drugstore and she worked summers counseling at a girls’ camp at Lake George. After four years she had a diploma. She took it to New York and carted it around from one publishing house to the next, looking for an editorial position. A trade journal publisher hired her as a receptionist.
She met Tom Haskell there. And dated him, and took his ring, and married him. And lived with him for two years in an apartment on East Eighty-Fifth Street just a few blocks from the park.
“You’re done with it now,” her lawyer had told her. “Glad to be Miss Rhoda Moore again?”
“Yes, very glad.”
A brief touch on the shoulder. “You’re free now. You had a rotten time and he was a pretty rotten man, but you don’t want to let the experience sour you on men in general. We’re not all bad. You’ll take it easy now, relax a little, start building a new life. Pretty soon you’ll meet some guy and get married again. You’re a young girl,