It had started when they read the obituary, Mr. Jamieson’s obituary, in the city paper. Until the year before, they had known the Jamiesons only as neighbors who kept to themselves. She taught botany at the college forty miles away, so she had to spend a good deal of her time on the road. He was a poet. But for a poet, and for an old man—perhaps twenty years older than Mrs. Jamieson—he was rugged and active. He improved the drainage system on his place, cleaning out the culvert and lining it with rocks. He dug and planted and fenced a vegetable garden, cut paths through the woods, looked after repairs on the house—not just the sort of repairs that almost any house owner could manage after a while but those that involved plumbing, wiring, roofing, too.
When they read the obituary, Carla and Clark learned for the first time that Leon Jamieson had been the recipient of a large prize five years before his death. A prize for poetry.
Shortly afterward, Clark said, “We could’ve made him pay.”
Carla knew at once what he was talking about, but she took it as a joke.
“Too late now,” she said. “You can’t pay once you’re dead.”
“He can’t. She could.”
“She’s gone to Greece.”
“She’s not going to stay in Greece.”
“She didn’t know,” Carla said more soberly. “She didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I didn’t say she did.”
“She doesn’t have a clue about it.”
“We could fix that.”
Carla said, “No. No.”
Clark went on as if she hadn’t spoken.
“We could say we’re going to sue. People get money for stuff like that all the time.”
“How could you do that? You can’t sue a dead person.”
“Threaten to go to the papers. Big-time poet. The papers would eat it up. All we have to do is threaten and she’d cave in. How much are we going to ask for?”
“You’re just fantasizing,” Carla said. “You’re joking.”
“No. Actually, I’m not.”
Carla said that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and he said O.K. But they talked about it the next day, and the next, and the next. He sometimes got notions like this, which were not practicable, which might even be illegal. He talked about them with growing excitement and then—she wasn’t sure why—he dropped them. If the rain had stopped, if this had turned into a normal summer, he might have let this idea go the way of the others. But that had not happened, and during the last month he had harped on about the scheme as if it were perfectly feasible. The question was how much money to ask for. Too little and the woman might not take them seriously; she might think they were bluffing. Too much might get her back up and she might become stubborn.
Carla had stopped pretending she thought he was joking. Instead, she told him that it wouldn’t work. She said that, for one thing, people expected poets to behave that way. So it wouldn’t be worth paying out money to cover it up.
“How do you know?” Clark said.
He said that it would work if it was done right. Carla was to break down and tell Mrs. Jamieson the whole story. Then Clark would move in, as if it had all been a surprise to him, he had just found out. He would be outraged; he would talk about telling the world. He would let Mrs. Jamieson be the one who first mentioned money.
“You were injured. You were molested and humiliated and I was injured and humiliated because you are my wife. It’s a question of respect.”
Over and over again he talked to her in this way. She tried to deflect him, but he insisted.
“Promise,” he said. “Promise.”