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defaming our marriage by degrees.
    By the time Joe Lanigan had driven her, hand to wounded eye, back to the clinic, it was all she could do to fight off a heavy sob in her chest. As if he knew it, Mr. Lanigan was more thegentleman than ever, treating her with the delicacy and gentility he might his starch-gloved grandmother.
    But when he’d delivered her to the front door, he touched her arm lightly, which he ought not to have, fingers sliding down her arm to her hand. And he turned her toward him and spoke quietly, solemnly, far too close to her twitching face, tears gluing on her lashes still. And he said this, and it was like a claw hammer to her heart:
    “For all the world, Mrs. Seeley, I’d not leave your side. Were you my wife, for all the world, I’d not lose my way from you. I’d not abandon you to the world. Not in such hard times, not in any time. I’d not leave you out there in the dark middle, not you with that angel’s face, that beating chest, the pulse in your wrist I can feel even now. I’d not leave your side, Mrs. Seeley. I’d like to meet the man who could.”
    That night, under covers and eyes still twitching, flickering back into her head, she dared think of a world where she, barely out from behind her father’s coats, would have fumbled her way to the likes of Joe Lanigan rather than her husband, brushing middle age even at thirty-five. Dr. Everett Seeley, with each passing year more like some gaunt returning soldier from far-off battles, those once-gallant features half ruined, those dark-ringed eyes and blue-edged cheekbones and the slow shuffle and the smell of his shirts on the ironing board. Dr. Seeley, so noble, so kind, but slipping from her with every passing second since they met. All he was was what was almost gone. The only thing that truly remained was the very thing that stripped their pockets clean twice a year since they’d married and finally sent him miles away, leaving her here, lovelier than ever and ripe for picking.
    Oh, Joe Lanigan, you’ve found yourself a fellow sinner—how did you know it? Was it on my face like a witch’s mark? Or was it something vibrating in my eyes, something that said I am yours, I am yours.
     
    M ARION WAITED. She waited and Joe Lanigan did not call again the next day, nor the following. And the weekend came, and there was Saturday, the day of the planned birthday gala for Mr. Ephraim Solway at the El Royale Hotel, to which he had invited her and she had firmly, frantically declined.
    At noon, collar itching and feeling squirmy and hot, she walked to the Pay’n Takit to buy laundry starch. On the way out, head heavy with thoughts, the bent ceiling fan stirring dust and rustling moth flies, she saw a wire canister by the register filled with chocolate nougatines wrapped in sticking waxed paper. Her hand clasped over one like a crow’s claw, she walked out of the store and onto the street, tearing off the wrapper and tucking it into her mouth and letting it sit there, strips of the wax still sticking to it, powdering her tongue, taking just enough of the pleasure away to send her back to the store, mouth clotted, to buy a second and pay for both, even as it would mean, for her at least, for the way she judged herself, no new shampoo for the week and she’d have a bologna sandwich for supper.
    At one o’clock, she carried her laundry basket across the street to the Maddens, who let Mrs. Gower’s boarders use their electric washing machine if they brought their own soap flakes and put change in the kitty. Marion had grown up washing with a board and wringer, big kettle and bluing—it took a day or more. But then she was washing for the whole family and now she was just washing her own two work dresses, her nightgown, her underthings, her sheets and bath towel, which Mrs. Gower was supposed to launder but did not.
    The hours stretched, arched, curled back, and Marion stoodin the Gowers’ backyard where her dresses hung, paper dolls