Read Online What Alice Knew by Paula Marantz Cohen - Free Book Online Page A

Katherine,” he told the woman sitting next to him, who nodded placidly.
    Katherine Loring was a tall woman in her midthirties, with a plain, pleasant face. Although she had no disposition to talk unless she had something to say, she did like to listen, making her an ideal companion to Alice, who had, in the course of the past few years, developed a fierce dependence on her. William and Henry understood that the relationship worked, apparently for both parties, and had tacitly agreed not to question it. The one exception, if it could be called that, was in Henry’s recently published novel, The Bostonians , in which a female friendship was unflatteringly portrayed. When confronted, Henry had denied that his fiction bore any relationship to life, and Alice had decided to take him at his word or not care that he was lying. She and Katherine did exist in a possibly unhealthy symbiosis. William had once insinuated that she could not get well because it would deprive her friend of the job of nursing her. To this, she had responded, “It’s expected in a marriage for the two partners to depend on each other in complementary ways. If I were a man, I could go out and do something in the world, and then Katherine could take care of me the way your wife takes care of you. But since I can’t do that, I let her take care of me this way.”
    There was no countering such simple and elegant logic.
    “You should teach Sally to make corn fritters,” William counseled. “That is, if you can get corn in this country. Can you get corn here, Henry?” He turned to his brother.
    “I really don’t know, William. I am not the devotee of corn that you are.”
    “I’ll have to ask John Sargent. I’m sure he likes corn.”
    Alice, who had barely touched the mutton or fritters on her tray and was instead nibbling on a piece of cake, cut the discussion short. “So the woman’s death yesterday was suicide and not murder?”
    William had tried to forget the image of the beautiful dead woman and had no wish to discuss what had happened, but he realized, suddenly, that he had forgotten to tell Alice about the boy. “The woman had a son,” he explained quickly, “ten or eleven years old. A bright-seeming sort of boy, extraordinarily resilient and eager to be of use. I said you might have some errands for him to do.” He spoke apologetically, realizing that Alice might find it presumptuous that he had made arrangements without asking her. “I know it’s an imposition, but his situation is pitiful. He sleeps on the floor of an elderly cripple and scavenges for both of them. And with his mother dead there in front of his eyes—”
    Alice cut him short. “Of course, you were right to send the boy to me,” she reassured him with a wave of her hand. “There’s not much work for him here, but I can always find something for him to do. He can wash down the front steps and scrub the walkway. Those tasks supply endless labor, since they are no sooner done than they have to be done again.”
    “So many things people do are useless,” noted William. “Their only purpose is to demonstrate that one has the time to do them or the income to have them done.”
    “But it’s the gratuitous that constitutes civilization,” objected Henry airily.
    “There is such a thing as too much of the gratuitous,” countered William.
    “And who’s to determine what is too much?”
    “We have only to follow Aristotle: ‘Everything in moderation.’”
    “I’m afraid that maxim would not produce much art,” asserted Henry, growing more adamant. “One isn’t likely to write or paint very well on a Fletcher diet.” He was referring to the strict regimen of food and exercise that William and his wife followed and had tried to impose on him, needless to say, without success.
    “To return to the subject at hand,” said Alice, interrupting an argument that she knew was capable of producing hurt feelings on both sides, “tell us, William. Have you and