Chapter Fifteen
“I think,” Hannah said softly, staring at the visitor who stood in her doorway, “that you’d better come in. That is to say,” she added, recovering from her surprise enough to note his surprise, “would you like to come in. Gray?”
“No, actually I wanted you to come out—with me, tonight. Until I got this note,” he said, holding it out for her to see, as though he still thought she might deny writing it.
That was only one of the wild fancies that had occurred to him as he’d raced his horses downtown.
But he’d mostly thought that it might have been something he said, or someone had said about him. Even then, it didn’t make sense.
Now he saw she’d been sitting in the dark, and yet even the light from the hallway was enough to show him she’d been crying.
He’d a sudden urge to take her into his arms to comfort her, but suppressed it so violently his hands clenched to fists at his sides, because at the same time he wanted to shake her for believing the worst of him, however it had come about.
He wasn’t perfect, he mightn’t even be good enough for her, and he knew it.
But he’d never done anything to cause her pain, nor would he.
He stood on her doorsill and waited because he no longer knew what else to do.
“I owe you an explanation,” she said, her chin coming up.
“I was a coward before—all this time before. It’s nothing you’ve said or done.
It’s something I shouldn’t have done, or at least, it’s something I should have said.
Please come in,” she said quietly, “it’s not a thing I can explain in a doorway. ”
He followed her into the parlor and waited while she lit the lamps, and then sat in a chair she indicated, his cloak still in his hands, his hands still clenched hard, especially when he saw traces of the ravages of her sorrow on her face.
She looked almost as bad as he felt, and when he realized that swollen eyes and tear-stained cheeks didn’t make her any less desirable to him, he felt even worse.
Because now he knew he was in for it, this was the one woman he wanted, all right, and she had more power over him than he’d known he’d given her.
Still, he didn’t mind that half so much as the pain he felt at seeing her distress, and if he couldn’t console her, he didn’t know what he would do.
She sat opposite him, folded her hands in her lap, and gazed at him.
One of the things about her that delighted him was the air of high drama that clung to her: how she so often seemed to be unconsciously enacting life as though it were a part she was playing.
He only realized that now because that aura of excitement and theater was absent tonight.
She was still beautiful, nothing could change that.
But she was sad and composed, and somehow diminished, as he’d never seen her.
“Gray,” she said at last, “I’ll try to explain as simply as I can. When we met, I’d no intention of walking out with you, remember? I was, I suppose, more or less maneuvered into it.”
“And you’re angry about that now?” he asked, amazed.
“No, no,” she said at once. “No. If anything, I’m angry at myself for it.
You see, I oughtn’t to have gone on seeing you, no matter how pleasant I found it.
I was married once, you know, and it was dreadful, and I never intended to become involved with a man again.
I know,” she said in a rush, suddenly fearful she’d presumed too much, or at least fearful that she’d let him know she had, “that you’ve never asked for more, but lately we’ve become so much more…
that is to say it seemed to me, lately, that you—that I—that… ”
“You’re right,” he said, cutting her off, “I was—I am going to ask you to marry me.”
All the color left her already pale face.
“Oh Gray,” she said in tones too truly tragic to be theatrical. “Oh Gray,” she said, and put her face into her hands.
He rose and came to her side, and kneeling by her chair, put a hand gently to her hair.
“Here,” he said, and somehow, although she was waving him off, she found herself weeping into his collar, and then she was in his arms as he picked her up for a moment, before he sat down with her on his lap.
“Yeah. Better,” he said, holding her close as she turned her head into his shirt, “because now you don’t have to look at me.
Sometimes you can say more that way. But at least I can hold you as you do.
Why?” he whispered into her ear, causing her to shiver as well as weep, “Why should you cry, honey? If you don’t want me, you can just tell me.
But I suspect you do want me; I’m not that high on myself that I can’t see when someone doesn’t care for me.
We understand each other fairly well, Hannah,” he said as he smoothed some of her soft storm cloud of hair back from his lips.
“That’s why I want to marry you. That, and about three hundred other reasons,” he added, smiling as he stroked her hair.
She stopped weeping.
“You can’t,” she said, moving her head to the side so that she couldn’t see him even if her eyes were open; although she took comfort from him, for he’d his cheek against her hair, and she’d her hand on his heart.
“My husband left me because there’s something wrong with me,” she said in a small, flat voice, and could feel his body tighten beneath her.
“I don’t know what it is,” she went on, “I wish I did. I’ve tried.
Just look at all my books,” she added, and felt his head move slightly as he gazed at the shelves of medical books she gestured toward.
“It was embarrassing to buy them. How the clerks stare at you!” she said on a shaky laugh.
“But I could do it because I always pretended they were for my mother. Not that I could tell her,” she said on a sniff.
“Ah well, but you met my father, can you imagine me confiding in him? Especially such a thing? I don’t know if he’d be amused, amazed, or ashamed, or…
Anyway,” she said in a sadder voice, “I’m not even that close with Mother, she’d never keep a thing from him, even if I’d dared to speak of it to her.
The books didn’t tell me anything,” she went on.
“I did write to a doctor who wrote one of them years ago, and he wrote back and said an unmarried female oughtn’t to be concerned with such things. I tried not to be.”
She hesitated, before she said, “But after I met you, since I’ve been home.
I’ve been to see two doctors. One thought I was some immoral creature from the theater, after Lord knows what sort of profane advice.
That wasn’t so bad as yesterday…the other doctor, just yesterday told me…
” she paused, and he could feel her swallow before she said, “… he said I was too tense to examine and that I should come back next week, and he’d give me ether and have all his students watch.
Oh, Gray, for all I wanted to know, I could not! ”
She was trembling as he tried to soothe her by murmuring that of course, she should not. But his mind was working feverishly.
“Just what is it that you need to know?” he finally asked, and then realizing how foolish that sounded—because if she knew she wouldn’t need to know—he struggled to find a way to phrase his question so as not to embarrass her, but so that he might understand.
It was odd, he thought, as he reveled in the feel of her as she lay curled so close to him, that a man could bed a woman, even a lady, without embarrassment, but that it was so damned hard to talk about the same thing with one.
She spoke before he could rephrase his question.
“Our marriage was never consummated, John said,” she whispered into his shoulder.
“He said it was because there’s something wrong with me.
He said I’m imperfect, and his doctor said so, too.
He must have been right, because after he left me, he fathered a child on another woman.
I know,” she said on a muffled wail, “because I traveled to Philadelphia for his funeral and saw the boy. It was his image. Gray, there’s no doubt of it. ”
“Why couldn’t the marriage be consummated?” Gray persisted, uninterested in the child. “Why did he say he couldn’t?”
“He said…he said I wasn’t made right, that’s all he said,” she answered.
After a moment of silence, as he wondered what he could ask next, she added, in such a small voice that he held his breath so that he could hear her, close as she was to him, “From the outside I look normal. I know that. But the inside…I looked with a mirror once, and I don’t know. How should I know?”
“Sure, that’s right,” he said, soothing her, before he realized, for the first time, that it was. It was a natural fact that a man’s private parts weren’t all that private. A woman’s might well be a mystery to her if she was a lady. It was a thought that had never occurred to him before.
They sat very still, her sobs subsiding, his hand moving slowly over her back and her hair as he thought.
“When did it go wrong?” he asked at last.
“Ah, when he couldn’t,” she said, and then remembering, she fell still, fighting to find a way to say it as a lady should, or at least so that she wouldn’t die of shame as she did.
“Just tell me about the first time,” he said, “however you can.”
It was a thing she’d never mentioned to any other woman. It was a thing she’d never said to a doctor. But here, close in the arms of the one man she’d have for her life, if she could, she somehow found the courage, if not all the words, to try to explain. But she kept her head turned from him.