The Snare

16. MAURICE

16. MAURICE "Jake Springland?" said Isabel. She had started repeating it over and over, in different tones of voice. "Jake Springland!" "Oh, she won't marry him. I don't guess she will." Maurice stepped up the pressure with delicate persistence. He did this, as Isabel knew, because he did not think they had a loophole for creeping out of it, for pretending she wasn't doing what she said she was doing, hadn't done what she said she had done. After three weeks of their not hearing a word, not being able to find her, thinking of going to the police, the letter had come. "You'll probably hear about it anyway , so I'd better tell you . . . I'm down in the Quarter to be near the man they said was mixed up in the murder case, though none of that was true . . . he's from the outside and didn't know how to stay out of things . . . but okay, he's okay . . . wish you could meet him but not now as we have to see how things work out. . . . I wasnever in love before, I nowrealize, but making things right for everybody is too much for me to think about . . . wish it wasn't. . . . Love you both, Julia." All day Isabel strove, at times with real strength, to get it firmly in accord with her image of Julia that a defining thing like this had actually, finally occurred. She wandered in the house and garden and did something Maurice remembered her doing from long before, back in the thirties when she lost her chance at motherhood: she sat in the window-seat corner with her legs tucked up before her, arms encircling them. He recalled this to her, tenderly, having stayed home from work to be with 124 Elizabeth Spencer 125 her. "You look as young now as then." "If age was all I felt . . ." She could not finish, her voice broke, and his had trembled. In the bright sunlight streaming through the window they held together, merging, then parting with lingering fingers, though even in parting, as Julia had often observed, they still seemed together. "To ruin herself!" Maurice kept saying. "New Orleans can take in anything, I've always said that." "It's not New Orleans that's in question. It's the men in it, singly and individually, a conservative bunch when it comes to marrying, and you know that after this " "Someone from outside again?" Isabel was hopeful. She was even beginning to identify a little; who wouldn't have a romantic heart if a handsome young bandit came along who also played a guitar and sang? Yet in the same moment Isabel knew this wouldn't do: Julia was not a romantic, only Isabel was, and thinking of Julia it seemed that in the dappled thick of a still swamp, something wild and beautifully marked and half-seen shot by; the leaves flickered, slapping together, as she passed, vanishing. From this moment, observing clearly perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time in a final definitive way, the separateness of Julia as creature from herself as woman, Isabel knew that the worst of the shock was over. Inevitably, something wild and reasonless would be done by this strange child one day. Stirring about the big house, morning-fresh, on chores which healed her, she remembered once when Maurice's father—she'd called him Dev like everyone else—had gone into a rage over something in a note which had been delivered to him by hand from the world outside. Whatever it had said had driven him up into the attic and there he had rampaged like a mad old elephant (she had said to Maurice) hurling old furnishings about, rummaging in crates, breaking them apart at the seams. He had gone on for hours like this until she telephoned Maurice at the office. "Well, it's all his stuff up there," 126 T H E S N A R E said Maurice. His voice had a wry smile in it. "Unless he sets the house on fire, just let him have it out." That was before Julia. Dev had fallen asleep up there, or so she always supposed, after it was over with. She had tiptoed up the stifling narrow stair that led above, peering through the keyhole, and seen him sprawled in a chair. She...