The Snare

4. MAURICE DEVIGNY

4. MAURICE DEVIGNY As he went to work that morning, catching a taxi because he had gossiped too long with his wife, Maurice Devigny thought things over as regards his niece and could come up with nothing except increased feelings of curiosity, vague anxieties. Several years back he had been anxious about her for different reasons; then one day it had dawned on him that she had certainly by now lost her virginity to any one of the number of youngmen who had called to ask her for dates from high school age on, and had done so moreover without making any production of it or embarrassing anybody or letting it in any way affect her poise and good humor. From then on he had had almost too much confidence in her life sense and had gone so far as to be a little jealous of the air of freedom and lightness which surrounded her comings and goings. In other words, he'd proved it: he wasn't prurient, he wasn't a prude. It was not his style to be so. If he had ever really resented Julia, it had been when she was a child. She had entered a household already complex with his father's presence and added to it another layer of complexity. She wasn't even his own—she was Isabel's sister's child, not a Devigny at all. In love with his own marriage, he had dreamed away whole sections of his life on children that never came about, now never would. Early in their eager young passion, Isabel had miscarried once, then conceived again ridiculously soon after. His father had let him know what the trouble was: "There's such a thing as too 48 Elizabeth Spencer 49 much, son. All your carryings-on upset the little things." "Stop, Father . . . hush saying it to me. It's too late to talk about." And so it was, the second time. He'd got one of those medical pronouncements that made his heart freeze up, his blood run backwards as though drawn off into a vacuum. He had even been shown the second child, a tiny boy, well-formed. The doctor had brought it to him. It was an ultimate cruelty, perpetrated by a cold young medical man who did not even know what he was doing, doubtless thinking of it as a friendly gesture—a man should be able to see his son, even though the son is stone dead after premature birth and three hours of breath and daylight. The young doctor could forget in the next few minutes and probably had done so, but the precious outline was cameo-carved for good and all on the memory of Maurice Devigny, a father for three hours only. No use to dwell on it. Their fault, was it? His father had been pointing it out, but he had thought so too, long before, after the first one. It was one of the irrational sexual convictions that people carry, more real than truth. And back of it in time, but continuing forward into time, always behind, around and before them simultaneously, remained the great joy of their marriage. It lived with him always, from the ceremony onward. A winter marriage, church fresh with green smilax, masses of white chrysanthemums, and Isabel, nineteen and a virgin still, a gardenia circlet on her brow; he could smell the flowers yet as she knelt by him and turned, leaning toward him for the ring, sense the chill-warm in the petal flesh, too much sweetness to draw in. A New York honeymoon: his father had given it to them. Neon-lit nights very black and tall, the buildings straight and so lofty their heads could not be found, their sides sleek and rich, all polished granite was the impression he had then. A gloss of snow slanted past, through dark and light and into dark again, dampbrushing their fresh cheeks, catching in their enchanted lashes. The hotel room smelt of its own rich carpet. Going back 5 0 T H E S N A R E to New Orleans on the Pullman, little towns glowed past in early evening or slept by starlight, and at stations, porters trundled baggagepast in the dead of night, groups clustered in the cold on wooden platforms, seen through a crack in the green curtains; the human mystery seemed near...