September Song by William Humphrey Page A

York City. Registering at a hotel as husband and wife, answering to the name “Mrs. Warner,” never lost its thrill for her.
    Planes were for rent at the local airport. Her visits to Boston to see her mother became more frequent. Toby was pleased that she and her mother now got along so much better than always before. She said that now that her mother was old she felt she must make up to her for the bad feeling between them over the years. Her mother said, “I’m just your excuse to fly that fool airplane. At your age!”
    On her forty-eighth birthday Toby gave her a Piper Cub. That brought her a twinge of remorse.
    â€œNow that you own your own plane you’re flying not more but less—hardly at all,” he said. “Don’t you like it? Did I buy the wrong kind?”
    â€œOh, I’ll get back to it in time,” she said.
    She wondered at his lack of suspicion, and his misplaced trust in her shamed her. It also rather irritated her. Was it that she was too old, too long settled, too domesticated to be suspected of any wrongdoing? She was so conscious of her guilty happiness she felt it must show in telltale ways of which she herself was unaware. She had read Madame Bovary and remembered Emma’s saying to herself in awe, “I am an adulteress!” She felt transfigured, hardly knew herself. This alteration in her must show, if not to Toby then to others. She half-hoped it did! Her dread of disclosure had to contend with a wild wish to have the whole world know. They took her for a middle-aged matron, conventional, unadventurous, yoked to a dull, inattentive husband. They should only know! As for Toby, he took her for granted. Wouldn’t it give him a shaking up if she were to tell him!
    They never considered getting divorced and marrying each other. As she could see, his deception troubled John, but the guilt he felt was as much toward his son for what he was doing to his mother as toward her. Bruce adored his mother. At twenty-three he showed no inclination toward any other woman. It was doubtful that he would ever marry. He adored his father, too. Adored him as the consort of his queen. Marcia was a fiercely proud woman—perhaps even proud of enduring a marriage that went against her grain. To be divorced would humiliate her.
    She too balked at the step. Toby was a one-woman man and without her would be helpless in a hundred little ways. She pitied him—another reason for not loving him—but while it often grated her, she took a certain satisfaction in his dependence upon her. She was fond of Toby, in her way. Some of his habits irritated her: his reading at meals, his smoking in the car, etc., but she was fond of him—or so she kept telling herself. She did not love him, but she shrank from hurting him—or from the guilt she would feel if she did. She told herself that given the choice between her deceiving him and her leaving him, he would choose to have her stay. She had her children, too, whom she hesitated to shock, whose censure she dreaded. And she feared her mother, a Boston puritan, one of a long line, with strict views on sex, marriage, duty, self-denial. A formidable woman. Once when somebody said to her offhandedly, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” she took it as a personal affront. Drawing herself up stiffly, she said, without a trace of self-irony, “ I am. If I weren’t I’d change.”
    And both were daunted by the prospect of such upheaval, the loss of disapproving friends, the sheer undertaking of creating a new life in a new place. Bad though they might be, old habits were hard to break, and fresh frontiers, while beckoning, were also scary when you reached a certain age. It made you feel old, cowardly and lazy to admit it, but it was easier to rock along with things as they were.
    Still, despite all these deterrents, she would have made the break if he had urged it. But, as when they danced, he led, she