OF WHAT WAS ELIZABETH MARCH AFRAID? WAS IT OF HER HUSBAND’S STRANGE WAY OF SPYING ON HER?

OR THE SUSPICIOUS ACTIONS OF THE OTHER PEOPLE IN THE HOUSE?

WAS SOMEONE REALLY TAMPERING WITH HER SLEEPING PILLS? POISONING THE CHILDREN? FORGING HER NAME TO CHECKS? SETTING SMALL FIRES IN HER WORKSHOP?

WAS IT A PLOT AGAINST HER—OR WAS SHE HERSELF SLIPPING DANGEROUSLY, MURDEROUSLY OUT OF CONTROL?

THE IRON

COBWEB

URSULA CURTISS

WALTER J. BLACK

NEW   YORK, N. Y.

THE IRON COBWEB

Copyright © 1953 by Ursula Curtiss

All rights reserved

One

WHEN HAD she begun to feel afraid? Now, this instant, in this tiny shocking part of a November afternoon? Or a day, a week, a month ago, her brain hiding its own uneasy knowledge in a deep-down layer that consciousness didn’t plumb?

Elizabeth March didn’t know, then or later, but she always remembered that crisp shuddery day. Branches restless against the sky, a threat of snow on the air. Her own long spacious comfortable living-room, walled in misty gray, curtained in red and green and white striped linen, firelit. The hands on the gilt wedding-present clock, miraculously preserved through five years, pointing to four o’clock. And, close and clear, the sound of a baby crying.

She was on her feet instantly, wrenching the front door open on the icy air. The sounds were unmistakable now, small mewings followed by loud meowing wails. Elizabeth ran down the steps between cedars and found the source: three and a half year-old Maire, snow-suited in navy blue, lying nonchalantly back in her wagon and mimicking at the sky.

Relief—and that was frightening in itself—turned to anger. “Maire!” she said sharply. “Stop that at once. What in the world do you think you’re doing?”

The child tilted upright, pale curls that looked like chiffon escaping wildly from under the navy helmet. “That’s my baby,” she said, her voice as severe as Elizabeth’s. “My baby cries all the day long.”

She wasn’t far removed from a baby herself; hang onto that. “Tell her from me,” said Elizabeth weakly, “that she’ll have to go up to her room if she’s going to make all that racket.”

She left Maire scolding talkatively at the empty air; she went back up the steps and turned just in time to see Noreen Delaney, the children’s young nursemaid, rounding the corner of the house, her cheeks rosy with cold, her voice full of reproach. “Maire Ann March, I thought you were a nice big girl. Here’s poor little Jeep been looking for you, but he thought it was a baby on the lawn and not his sister . . .”

She caught sight of Elizabeth then, and permitted herself a smile and an anxious, “You’ll catch your death without a coat, Mrs. March. I thought I might pull them once around the block in their wagon before supper.”

“Don’t get too cold yourself,” said Elizabeth.

“Oh, we’re all mittened. In you go. Jeep. . . .”

Jeep, John Paul when he attained the age of dignity, climbed laboriously into the red wagon. At two, Elizabeth thought, watching, it must be quite a hazardous feat. He accomplished it safely, Maire shouted, “Take good care of my baby. Mama,” Noreen turned for a smile and a wave and they were gone, down the lawn and under the trees and behind the high privet hedge.

Elizabeth, shivering, went back to the fire. She wasn’t really aware of physical cold; the chill was deep and inner. She blamed herself for her annoyance at Maire; the child was—what would the specialists call it at fifteen dollars an hour—compensating. And Jeep too, very possibly, because who knew what went on behind the wide wondering eyes of a two year-old boy? They heard talk about doctors and hospitals and a baby and apparently understood nothing, but when Elizabeth left in that white rigid hush, to be gone two weeks, they expected her to return with a baby.

And so did I, thought Elizabeth leadenly, and so did I.

Skip that, skip with every ounce of mental strength the thing that happened daily to thousands of women—the pain, the confusion, the submission; afterwards the serene and lazy wonder: a sister for Maire, or a boy to bounce and tumble with Jeep? And then her doctor at her bedside instead of a nurse; instinct told her the meaning of that, the dreadful final meaning. She still had to listen to his voice, ruffled out of its expensive calm, telling her that she must be brave, that she must think of the other children. . . .

Extraneous, all of it, because that was six weeks ago and she was well again. She had rested obediently and swallowed quantities of capsules, and allowed herself to be caught up again in the hair-raising pace set by two small children. There were still the nights, long, merciless, loud with the things that Oliver, her husband, would not say. That if she had listened to him, if she had not been so illogically insistent upon flying to New York for the wedding of a friend, her accident on the way to join him at the airport could never have happened.

If he had said it, if he had not turned his head away so sharply when she tried to say it, its echoes would have died away between them before this.

But it was the days that you lived and gradually the sense of loss had dulled; little by little Oliver’s face had lost its quietly frantic look. After a while, with the help of a new nurse for the children and the efficient presence of a cousin temporarily-turned-housekeeper, it was almost as though the months of waiting and the final failure had never been.

Except that there was something wrong, something as delicate and disturbing as motion sensed out of the corner