Early Friday morning she came with another request. She had a letter
from her husband which she handed to Lary, ostentatiously. David
was entirely willing that she should go to Detroit. In fact, he had
promised Sylvia that they together would visit her as soon as the
housecleaning and redecorating of the apartment was over. He would have
earned a vacation when the Jacksonville contract was finished.
“Now, Larimore, if you will look after the ticket--and the sleeper
berth--I’ll only take a suit case, and your father can bring what I
need in his trunk. By that time, I’ll know about the weather, and what
kind of clothes I need. I want the ticket via Chicago. It’s so much
shorter than the other route.”
“Chicago?” Something feline, insinuating, in her tone arrested him.
“There’s no direct route from Springdale to Detroit via Chicago. You
would have to go to Littlefield and wait there for the St. Louis
train--and in Chicago it would mean going from one station to the
other. The last time you tried that, you got lost, and missed your
connection.”
“But I must--that is, I’d prefer to go that way. It wouldn’t matter if
I did miss my train. Sylvia wants me to do some shopping for her.”
“Shopping on Sunday, mamma?”
As the woman hurried from her son’s presence, Judith heard her mutter:
“There’s more than one way to kill a cat.”
V
Saturday was consumed with the endless little things that went to
the preparation for a journey. At noon Lavinia sent Dutton out to
post a letter to Sylvia. It was plastered over the upper third with a
combination of pink and green stamps. Lavinia Trench abhorred that sort
of thing; but she would not ask Larimore for a proper stamp to insure
Sunday delivery of her letter. She shunned him with an animosity that
was not to be misinterpreted. He had angered her profoundly. She told
Judith that she would go to the station in Hafferty’s cab and wait
there until David came in. In such a case he would not mind sitting
with her until her train arrived. She had evidently asked too many
favours of her son. She had always supposed that sons were glad to
serve their mothers.
Judith sought to analyse the woman’s torn state of mind. Did she always
get into such a fever when she was going away from home? Lavinia had
travelled much, in spite of her oft repeated assertion that she never
went anywhere, never had any pleasure ... nothing but the dull drudgery
of a wife and mother. Before her visit to Bromfield she had been in
just such a mental state. But was it, exactly, this condition of mind?
Two years ago, everything that Lavinia did--every subterfuge, every
veiled speech or cruel innuendo--was carefully thought out. It all had
a direct bearing on the main object. She must go to Bromfield, and she
would not admit to her family--nor indeed to herself--that she had need
to go. From infancy she had been devious, approaching her goal by the
most tortuous path. She was this way in her housekeeping. One could not
be a martyr if things were easy. The simple, natural way was hateful to
her--the refuge of lazy wives.
This much Judith had set down, in her effort to understand her
mother-in-law’s curiously warped psychology. But now there was a new
phase. The episode of Sylvia’s letter, accidentally burned in the grate
on a steaming July day, sufficed to betray a significant breaking-up
of the tough fibre of an irrational but tremendously efficient mind.
The mycelium of decay--some deadly fungus--had penetrated the heartwood
of Lavinia Trench’s being. She went into a panic at the slightest turn
in her plans. She no longer counted upon the unforeseen contingency,
or guarded against it. That that crashing letter--the occasion for
this hurried trip to Detroit--was not from Sylvia, Judith was morally
certain. From whom, then? She laid the perplexity wearily aside. With
one unknown quantity, she might have solved the equation. Here were
two unknown and unknowable quantities, since Lavinia--after her two
disastrous blunders--refused to talk except in monosyllables.