Call After Midnight (20 page)

She walked until she was tired; she sat on a bench in the sun; she walked back to Fifty-seventh, had lunch in a little restaurant, and began to feel out of kilter with the whole busy world. Everybody had something to do; everybody had company and something to talk about. Everybody hurried in, dawdled happily over lunch but hurried out again. She felt curiously rootless, and almost as if she had become invisible.

She went to a movie and didn’t know later what she had seen. When she came out it was still very warm. She picked up her Henri box at the Plaza and walked again along the broad sidewalk beside the park.

When she entered her apartment the telephone sat there in the half-dusk, smug, shiny and silent.

She began to feel uneasy. Surely Peter—no, Cal—would telephone and tell her what progress the police had made, if any and certainly what they were doing. Cal didn’t phone and she began to feel sure that she had forfeited even his friendship.

She was very careful about the bolt. No one could have entered her apartment while she was away, but again a stubborn uneasiness impelled her to search carefully for an empty bottle. Of course there was none.

She looked up her bank statement and found that she had close to five hundred dollars. It would last, if she was careful, until she could get another job. Jobs were scarce though, especially for anyone who had no special training. There was, of course, the settlement Peter had insisted upon making; she had a strong reluctance to use any of it, yet it was there, a backlog. She certainly wouldn’t starve.

Of course if she and Peter married she wouldn’t need a job. Every time she permitted herself to think of Peter and remarriage a kind of mental brake came down hard and stopped her. Yet it was almost impossible, too, to control her thoughts, which shot in this direction and that, came to hurdles which were impossible to surmount, circled around them and dashed off in another direction. Probably Peter and Cal and Blanche were in exactly the same state of emotional shock and confusion.

She wished she had more friends. During her marriage to Peter her only friends were his friends; she had wrapped herself in a cocoon of love for Peter. During the past year she had been wrapped in an even more binding cocoon of preoccupation. She had liked the girls who worked with her but their acquaintance was limited to working hours. There must be some old friend of her mother’s or some old school friends of her own; she could think of no one to whom she might go and say, I’m lonely, a dreadful thing has happened, I can’t live with it alone.

She could only think of the Andersons, an elderly couple with a big house full of grandchildren, who had known her mother, had been kind to her when she was left alone—and at whose house she had met and fallen in love with Peter. But not even the kind Andersons would understand this; murder was as far outside their sound and normal lives as it had been outside her own, until Friday night.

The newspapers came with the usual little thud outside the door. She searched them both; the Vleedam murder was now relegated to a few paragraphs in each, tucked away in the middle pages. She was relieved in one way; in another way she was depressed, for it meant that there had been no break in the case and that the police still had no evidence as to the murderer.

She was eating scrambled eggs, the working girl’s friend, when at last the telephone rang. She couldn’t reach it quickly enough but it was Blanche.

“I’ve been talking to Peter,” she said at once. “He believes the police are about to arrest him for murder.”

Jenny’s heart caught in her throat. “Is there something new?”

“Oh no. It’s the same thing. Collusion. You and he wanted to get rid of Fiora. They say that’s why he sent for you Friday night. You were to swear that he was with you when she was killed.”

“But I was.”

“The point is, just now, that any talk of your marrying Peter again would be like putting a rope around his neck. You must realize that.”

Even then Blanche’s authoritative manner stirred up Jenny’s hackles. “That’s something for me and Peter to decide.”

“OH, NATURALLY,” BLANCHE SAID.
“I was only offering my advice as a friend. But I suppose you’ll be staying in town. That is, you’ll not go back to Peter’s place.”

“No. I’ll be staying in town.”

“That’s wise. I’ve been at the office all day. Work is a help.”

“I haven’t been working. That is, I was fired this morning.”

“Oh,” Blanche said. “Are you going to hunt for another job?”

“Perhaps; not right now.”

“You can’t just sit around your apartment all day.”

“No.”

Blanche waited a moment. There seemed to be nothing else to say. Finally she said, “I’ll let you know if I hear any news. If I were you I wouldn’t telephone to Peter. Good night.”

Jenny had not intended to telephone to Peter. She hung up with a vehement click. Yet again, Blanche made sense; Blanche was right. A rope around Peter’s neck. You can’t tell what a jury will do, Peter had said.

She went back to her scrambled eggs, which by then were cold and soggy. There was nothing new in what Blanche had told her; the possibility of Peter’s arrest on a murder charge and Jenny’s arrest as an accessory before the fact only seemed more imminent.

Its imminence spurred belated caution. She went through her desk, every drawer, every pigeonhole, and found three of Peter’s cards, with gay little messages scrawled upon them, all ending, love, Peter. He had written “love” airily, only as an accepted term of affection, but what would a prosecuting attorney make of it?

She tore up the cards hurriedly as if someone were looking over her shoulder. Not satisfied with that, she burned the bits in an ashtray. Nothing could change the fact that the moment Peter had asked her to come to the house on the Sound she had gone there. Cal couldn’t stop her. Nothing could have stopped her.

At ten o’clock Cal’s housekeeper telephoned. “This is Mrs. Cunningham. Mr. Cal just phoned me, Mrs. Vleedam. He thought you were staying here. He asked me to call you and tell you that he thinks it better for you to stay here.”

So Cal hadn’t entirely washed his hands of her, Jenny thought. She longed to get herself in a taxi and go to Cal’s house as fast as she could and take refuge in Mrs. Cunningham’s calm and good sense. Instead she said, “Thank you. But tell him, if he talks to you again, that I have a new lock.”

“New—” Mrs. Cunningham cleared her throat. “Why, surely—” She seemed to think for a moment and then said sensibly, “Of course I’ve read about the murder, Mrs. Vleedam. You shouldn’t be alone there, thinking about it.”

Jenny thanked her again, refused her again and when she had hung up wished she had accepted. The telephone did not ring again. Gradually the street sounds subsided. The apartment house settled itself down for the night and music from some distant phonograph was shut off. The clock on Jenny’s bedside table ticked and except for an occasional late taxi was the only sound.

The next day Jenny decided to walk again, as long as she could, and tire herself physically, as she had done the day before. It was again an unseasonably warm day, with the sun bright and hot and the air already sultry. There was nothing further about the Vleedam murder in the morning paper.

Jenny pulled out another last summer’s dress and jacket, which happened to be a bright orange linen. When she emerged from the apartment house it was like coming into a midsummer’s day. It seemed odd that the leaves on the trees were still small and a tender, young green. A taxicab stood at the corner but when she approached him the driver said he was hired. She crossed Madison, walked over to Fifth and took a bus, trying to think of errands, small shopping chores, anything to keep her busy.

When she got out of the bus at the corner of Fifty-eighth a taxi came up close behind her. Something about the driver seemed vaguely familiar; the thought crossed her mind that it was the taxidriver she had hailed a few moments before. She went into Bergdorf’s and bought stockings which she did not need. She walked to Bonwit’s and bought gloves which she did need.

She strolled down to Saks and crossed the street to look at the Easter lilies at Rockefeller Center. She sat down on one of the benches in the sun, couldn’t sit still and decided to take a bus back uptown to the Metropolitan Museum. Because a taxi came first she took the taxi.

She was oppressed with a sense of waiting. Nothing seemed quite natural to her; it was as if she viewed the world through distorted lenses. Magnolias were in bloom in front of the huge gray mass that was the museum. The trees still had little foliage; the pink and white blossoms flaunted themselves like ballet dancers against a rather dreary stage setting. She paid the driver and without looking back went slowly up the long flight of steps and past the guards.

She was instantly caught with a recognition of the past, not only the long-ago past, with paintings and sculptures which had been born in some long dead artist’s mind and would never die themselves, but with her own immediate past. Too many times she had done exactly what she was doing then, walked over to the Museum and sought to lose herself and her own longing for Peter.

It was a good morning to visit the Museum; it wasn’t empty, it was never empty, but that morning of unexpected release from winter and cold spring most people with time on their hands preferred to stroll in the park or sit in the sun. She went up the long flight of stairs as she had done many times to find some of her favorite paintings, a Cézanne where the blue sea seemed to ripple and move before her very eyes, a sun-drenched Van Gogh; old friends lined the walls. The big rooms were almost deserted. She strolled slowly north to the American rooms: Mary Cassatt and John Copley. She stopped before a huge Sargent and the young woman of the portrait with her long skirt and tiny waistline seemed about to step out of the frame. Jenny wondered what thoughts had been in her mind—aside from her tight corsets—and what secrets of living her gaze withheld.

Someone came through the long corridor. The rooms were so empty that a footstep, even her own, seemed loud and echoing. Indeed it struck her that an echo had seemed softly to follow her or to go just ahead wherever she went, yet when she started back through the long galleries, through the Rembrandts, there was no one just ahead and no one just behind. She hunted out a Gainsborough head of a child; it had been moved from the gallery in which she remembered it; she made a kind of chore of finding it and did in a corner gallery. She stood before it so long, admiring the magic delicacy of the faint blue shadows at the child’s temples that, this time, she heard quite distinctly footsteps which seemed to approach the wide doorway, pause, and fall back. She turned, merely inquisitive as to the visitor who seemed to share her own affections, and an art student wearing wooden-soled sandals came clattering along through the adjoining gallery, set up her easel and opened her paint box. Jenny wandered along to the little lounge where there were sofas, a few pictures, a wide view of the park, and smoking was permitted. She sat down and lighted a cigarette.

The feeling of the past was also a strong feeling of permanence. Wars came and went but these things all around her remained. Kings died, governments changed, crowded men lived crowded lives, yet a small golden dish created by Cellini’s hands never changed.

Marriage was of course permanent, one of the few permanent things of life. A young couple came in, sat in the sofa opposite her, smoked, giggled and chattered. Jenny only wished that they would go away for she was making up her mind to remarry Peter. That would be later, of course, when he came to her soberly, not in a state of strain; later when his second marriage and its tragic ending were things of the past; later when it would be the natural and dignified way to recapture the happiness they had once had. It would be a different kind of happiness. There would be scars and memories; it could be a more mature, perhaps a deeper kind of happiness, though.

Yes, she had made up her mind. She felt as if at least one urgent question had been answered. Footsteps approached the doorway and she noted them absently and only because there was a certain odd repetition in the way the footsteps hesitated and then seemed to withdraw. Again she looked from the young greens of the park toward an empty doorway. The young couple opposite giggled and rose. Jenny put out her cigarette and followed them, as they went hand in hand, both in slacks, both in sweaters, the girl’s hair twisted in a tight knot on her head, down the long stairway and out.

The sun was so bright that it blinded her for a moment. She looked for a taxi, saw one at the curb and the driver said, not looking at her, that he was engaged.

“Why—” Jenny said, startled. “It
was
you! Behind the bus. And there at the corner early this morning. You said the same thing—”

He looked at her then. His eyes took her in, up and down, and narrowed. A queer kind of expression came into his face; she couldn’t say what it was except that it was friendly and a little angry at the same time. He said, “Girl like you. Not right.”

She didn’t know what to make of that. She said, “Never mind, I’ll get a bus.”

“Lady, wait.” He glanced once around him, leaned across the seat and said low, “Don’t wear a dress like that. Too bright. Too easy to follow.”

She couldn’t have heard him correctly. “
What
—”

“No, no, I don’t want any trouble with the police. That’s all I have to say.” His cab shot away. A bus loomed up directly behind it. In a matter of seconds she couldn’t have told the color of the taxi, certainly not its license number, nothing about it.

His meaning, though, was utterly preposterous and utterly certain. She stood there in the full light of the sun with buses and taxis and automobiles flowing past her along the avenue, people strolling up and down the wide sidewalk, the magnolias in early bloom, an ice cream wagon instead of a chestnut vendor beside her, and didn’t believe the taxidriver and, completely, wholly believed him at the same time.

His taxi had followed the bus she had taken to Fifty-eighth Street; she had had that brief glimpse of him and the vague notion that she had seen him only a few moments before. Footsteps had echoed along the nearly empty galleries of the Museum, withdrawing whenever she turned—and withdrawing when the art student had clattered in and set up her easel and given her, Jenny, protection! Withdrawing because a young couple sat in the sofa opposite her and chattered and giggled and smoked and she had gone down the stairs with them!