Laura (Femmes Fatales) (13 page)

Chapter 3

On Saturday I thinned my sedum, trans-planted primroses, and started a new iris bed near the brook. On Sunday I moved the peony plants. They were heavy, the roots so long that I had to dig deep holes in the ground. I had to keep myself occupied with hard physical work; the work soothed me and emptied my mind of Friday’s terror.

When the gardener came on Monday, he said that I had moved the peonies too early, they would surely die now. Twenty times that day I went to look at them. I watered them gently with thin streams of tepid water, but they drooped, and I felt ashamed before the victims of my impatience.

Before the gardener left on Monday, I told him not to tell Shelby that I had killed the peony plants by moving them too early. Shelby would never have mourned the peonies, but he would have had cause to reproach me for doing a man’s work in the garden instead of waiting until he came. It was curious that I should say this to the gardener because I knew that Shelby would never dig and mow and water my garden again. I was still defiant of Shelby; I was trying to irritate him by absent treatment, and provoke imaginary argument so that I could hurt him with sharp answers. Challenging Shelby, I worked in my house, washing and polishing and scrubbing on my hands and knees. He always said that I shouldn’t do menial work, I could afford to hire servants; he could never know the fulfillment of working with your hands in your own house. My people were plain folk; the women went West with their men and none of them found gold. But Shelby came from “gentle” people; they had slaves to comb their hair and put on their shoes. A gentleman cannot see a lady work like a nigger; a gentleman opens the door and pulls out a lady’s chair and brings a whore into her bedroom.

I saw then, working on my knees, the pattern our marriage would have taken, shoddy and deceitful, taut emotion woven with slack threads of pretense.

The fault was mine more than Shelby’s. I had used him as women use men to complete the design of a full life, playing at love for the gratification of my vanity, wearing him proudly as a successful prostitute wears her silver foxes to tell the world she owns a man. Going on thirty and unmarried, I had become alarmed. Pretending to love him and playing the mother game, I bought him an extravagant cigarette case, fourteen-karat gold, as a man might buy his wife an orchid or a diamond to expiate infidelity.

And now that tragedy has wiped away all the glib excuses, I see that our love was as bare of real passion as the mating of two choice vegetables which are to be combined for the purpose of producing a profitable new item for the markets. It was like love in the movies, contrived and opportune. And now it was over.

Two strangers sat at opposite ends of the couch. We tried to find words that had the same meaning for both of us. It was still Thursday evening, before dinner, after Mark and Waldo had left. We spoke softly because Bessie was in the kitchen.

“This will all blow over in a few days,” Shelby said. “If we sit tight and match our stories properly. Who’ll know? That detective is an ass.”

“Why must you keep calling him
that detective
? You know his name.”

“Let’s not be bitter,” Shelby said. “It’ll only make it more difficult for us to go on.”

“What makes you think I want to go on? I don’t hate you and I’m not bitter, but I couldn’t go on. Not now.”

“I tell you, Laura, I only came because she begged me so. She begged me to come and say good-bye to her. She was in love with me; I didn’t care two hoots about her, honestly, but she threatened to do something desperate unless I came here on Friday night.”

I turned my head away.

“We’ve got to stick together now, Laura. We’re in this thing too deeply to fight each other. And I know you love me. If you hadn’t loved me, you couldn’t have come back here on Friday night and . . .”

“Shut up! Shut up!” I said.

“If you weren’t here on Friday night, if you are innocent, then how could you have known about the Bourbon bottle, how could you have responded so instinctively to the need to protect me?”

“Must we go over it all again, Shelby? Again and again and again?”

“You lied to protect me just as I lied to protect you.”

It was all so dreary and so useless. Three Horses had been Shelby’s brand of Bourbon, he had been buying it for himself when he started coming to my house, and then I began buying it so he’d always find a drink when he came. But one day Waldo laughed because I kept such cheap whiskey on my shelves and named a better brand, and I tried to please Shelby with expensive Bourbon. His buying the bottle of Three Horses that night, like his giving Diane the cigarette case, was defiance, Shelby’s defiance of my patronage.

Bessie announced dinner. We washed our hands, we sat at the table, we spread napkins in our laps, we touched water to our lips, we held knives and forks in our hands for Bessie’s sake. With her coming and going, we couldn’t talk. We sat behind steak and French fries, we dipped our spoons ceremoniously into the rum pudding which Bessie had made, good soul, to celebrate my return from death. After she had brought the coffee to the table before the fire and we had the length of the room between us and the kitchen door, Shelby asked where I had hidden the gun.

“Gun!”

“Don’t talk so loud!” He nodded toward the kitchen door. “My mother’s gun; why do you suppose I drove up there last night?”

“Your mother’s gun is in the walnut chest, just where you saw me put it, Shelby, after we had the fight.”

The fight had started because I refused the gun. I was not nearly so afraid of staying alone in my little house as of having a gun there. But Shelby had called me a coward and insisted upon my keeping it for protection, had laughed me into learning to use it.

“The first fight or the second fight?” he asked.

The second fight had been about his shooting rabbits. I had complained about their eating the iris bulbs and the gladiolus corms, and Shelby had shot a couple of them.

“Why do you lie to me, darling? You know that I’ll stick with you to the end.”

I picked up a cigarette. He hurried to light it. “Don’t do that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“You can’t call me a murderer and light my cigarette.”

Now that I had said the word aloud, I felt freer. I stood up, stretched my legs, blew smoke at the ceiling. I felt that I belonged to myself and could fight my own battles.

“Don’t be so childish,” Shelby said. “Can’t you see that you’re in a tight spot and that I’m trying to help you? Don’t you realize the chances I’ve taken, the lies I’ve told to protect you, and last night, driving up there? That makes me an accomplice; I’m in a rather bad spot myself, and for your sake.”

“I wish I hadn’t phoned you last night,” I said.

“Don’t be petty, Laura. Your instinct was sound. You knew as well as I that they’d go up and search your place as soon as they discovered that you were back.”

“That’s not why I called you.”

Bessie came in to say good night and tell me again that she was happy that I had not died. Tears burned the edges of my eyes.

When the door had closed behind her, Shelby said: “I’d rest easier if I had that gun in my possession now. But how can we get it with detectives on our trail? I tried to shake the fellow, I took the back road, but the cab followed me all the way. If I’d as much as searched the place, I’d have given it away instantly. So I kept up the pretense of sorrow; I stood in the garden and wept for you; I called it a sentimental journey when that detective . . .”

“His name is McPherson,” I said.

“You’re so bitter,” Shelby said. “You’ll have to get over that bitterness, Laura, or you’ll never be able to fight it out. Now, if we stand together, my sweet . . .”

Mark returned. I gave Shelby my hand and we sat on the couch, side by side, like lovers. Mark turned on the light; he looked into my face; he said he was going to speak the truth directly. That was when he brought out the cigarette case and Shelby lost his nerve and Mark’s face became the face of a stranger. It’s hard to deceive Mark; he looks at you as if he wants you to be honest. Shelby was afraid of honesty; he kept losing his temper like a schoolboy, and it was, in the end, Shelby’s fear that told Mark that Shelby believed me guilty.

“Are you going to arrest me?” I asked Mark. But he went to Schwartz’s and got me the sleeping pills, and when he left, although I did not say so to Shelby, I knew he was going to Wilton to search my house.

Chapter 4

Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone. Every little movement has a meaning all its own, Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone. A small black mustache parted in the middle, a voice, the smell of mint, and all of this is an enigma, a rush of words and sense memories as I woke after a hard sleep and two small white pills. Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone . . . I attached the words to a melody . . . I heard music beyond my door and the words were Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone.

The music was the vacuum cleaner outside my bedroom door. Bessie brought coffee and orange juice. The glass was beaded with ice, and as my hand chilled, grasping it, I remembered the dewy silvered vessel, the smell of mint, and the small black mustache crowning a toothpaste smile. It was on the lawn of Auntie Sue’s place at Sands Point; the black mustache had asked if I liked mint juleps and explained that he was young Salsbury of Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone.

Bessie breathed heavily, adjusted her jaw, asked if I would eat a nice poached egg.

“A lawyer,” I said, aloud. “He told me that if I ever needed a lawyer, they’re a very old firm.”

Having worried enough over my failure to settle the poached egg question, Bessie sighed and departed while I, remembering Shelby’s advice, heard myself telling it all to the black mustache.

“And your alibi, Laura? What is your alibi for Friday night, August twentieth?” young Salsbury would ask, tweaking the end, which might or might not be waxed. Then I should have to repeat for the mustache what I had told Mark about Friday night after I left Shelby waving after my taxi on Lexington Avenue.

Mark had asked me while we were having breakfast together—it seems a thousand breakfasts ago—to tell him precisely how I had spent every minute of that Friday night. He had known, of course, that I had let Shelby give the taxi-driver Waldo’s address and that I had then instructed the man to take me to Grand Central.

“And after that?” Mark had said.

“I took the train.”

“It was crowded?”

“Terribly.”

“Did you see anyone you know? Or anyone who might be able to identify you?”

“Why do you ask me these questions?”

“Routine,” he said, and handed me his empty cup. “You make excellent coffee, Laura.”

“You ought to come up sometime when I bake a cake.”

We laughed. The kitchen was cozy with the checked cloth and my blue Danish cups. I poured cream and put two lumps of sugar into his coffee.

“How did you know?” he said.

“I watched you before. Now when you come here, you will get so much cream and two lumps.”

“I’ll come often,” he said.

He asked about my arrival in Wilton, and I told him about getting off the train at South Norwalk and of walking quickly alone down that deserted street to the garage back of Andrew Frost’s house for my car. Mark wanted to know if there weren’t any public garages near the station, and I said I saved two dollars a month this way. That made him laugh again. “So you do have some thrift in you.” There was little of the detective in him and much of the admiring male, so that I laughed, throwing back my head and searching his eyes. He asked if Andrew Frost or any of his family had seen me, and when I told him that Mr. Frost is a misogynist of seventy-four who sees me only the first Saturday of the month when I give him two dollars, Mark laughed uproariously and said, “That’s a hell of an alibi.”

I told him about driving to Norwalk on Saturday for my groceries, and he asked if anyone there would remember. But I told him I had saved money again, going to the Super-Market and trundling a basket through aisles filled with the working people of Norwalk and the summer crowd from the surrounding countryside. I could not remember whether it had been the red-headed cashier who took my money or the man with the cast in his eye. After I left the market, I told him, I had driven home, worked in the garden again, cooked myself a light dinner, and read until bedtime.

He said, “Is that all, Laura?”

Safe and friendly in my warm kitchen, I shuddered. Mark’s eyes were fixed on my face. I seized the coffee pot and ran with it to the stove, turning my back to him and chattering swiftly of irrelevant things, wanting to cleanse my mind. There, at the stove, the coffee pot in my hand, I felt his eyes burning through me, piercing flesh and bone, seeing me as he had seen Diane’s face, with all the pain and prettiness gone and only blood and membrane and hideous shattered bone.

He said: “And you stayed alone for the rest of the time you were there, Laura? You didn’t see anyone who might have heard the radio or read the newspaper and come to tell you that you were dead?”

I repeated what I had told him the night before, that my radio was broken, and that the only people I had seen were the gardener and the Polish farmer from whom I had bought some corn and lettuce and farm fresh eggs.

Mark shook his head.

“You don’t believe me,” I said.

“It doesn’t sound like . . . like your sort of woman.”

“What do you mean, my sort of woman?”

“You have so many friends, your life is so full, you’re always surrounded by people.”

“It’s when you have friends that you can afford to be lonely. When you know a lot of people, loneliness becomes a luxury. It’s only when you’re forced to be lonely that it’s bad,” I said.

Thin fingers drummed the table. I set the coffee pot upon the blue tile and my hand ached to stretch out and touch the wrist that protruded bonily from his white cuff. Mark’s loneliness had not been luxury. He did not say this aloud, for he was a strong man and would never be wistful.

As I thought about this, lying in bed with the breakfast tray balanced on my legs, I knew I could never speak so easily to the black mustache of young Salsbury. A hell of an alibi, he would say, too, but it would be without the humor or tolerance that were in Mark’s eyes and his voice.

Bessie brought the poached egg. “He’s a man,” Bessie said abruptly. Bessie’s attitudes are high Tenth Avenue; she is off the sidewalks of New York and as unrelenting as any snob that came out of Murray Hill’s stone mansions. I had met her brothers, outspoken and opinionated workingmen whose black-and-white rules of virtue my intellectuals and advertising executives could never satisfy.

“A man,” Bessie said. “Most of them that comes here are big babies or old women. For once, even if he’s a dick, you’ve met a man.” And then, completely in the groove of man-worship, added, “Guess I’ll bake a chocolate cake.”

I bathed and dressed slowly, and said to Bessie, “I’ll wear my new suit on account of claustrophobia.” In spite of the rain, I had decided to leave the house, looking so calmly adjusted to my own importance—like a model in Vogue—that the officer at the door would never dare question my leaving. I pulled on my best gloves and tucked my alligator bag under my arm. At the door, my courage failed. So long as I made no move that showed the desire to leave, this was my home; but it needed only a word from the man at the door to make it a prison.

This is a fear which has always lived in me. I leave my doors open because I am not so frightened of intruders as of being locked in. I thought of a movie I had once seen with Sylvia Sidney’s pale, frightened face behind bars. “Bessie,” I said, “I’d better stay home today. After all, the world still thinks I am dead.”

My name was at that moment being shouted by hundreds of newsboys. When Bessie came from the market, she brought the papers.
Laura Hunt Alive!
streamed across all the front pages. On one tabloid my face was blown up to page proportions and looked like a relief map of Asia Minor. What, I asked myself, would tomorrow’s pages scream?

Laura Hunt Guilty?

I read that I was staying at an unnamed hotel. This was to fool the newspapermen and my friends and keep me safe from intrusion, Aunt Sue said when she came with red roses in her hand. She had not learned about me from the newspapers, but from Mark, who had awakened her that morning to bring the news.

“How thoughtful he is!” said Aunt Sue.

She had brought the roses to show that she was glad that I had not died, but she could do nothing except condemn me for having lent Diane my apartment. “I always said you’d get into trouble, being so easy with people.”

Mark had not told her of the later developments. She knew nothing of the cigarette case nor of Shelby’s suspicions. Shelby, who had been staying at her house, had not come home last night.

We talked about my funeral. “It was lovely,” Aunt Sue said. “You couldn’t expect a great attendance at this time of the year, too many people out of town, but most of them wired flowers. I was just about to write the thank you notes. Now you can do it yourself.”

“I wish I had seen the flowers,” I said.

“You’ll have to outlive them all. Nobody could take a second funeral seriously.”

Bessie said there were people coming to the door in spite of the fact that I was supposed to be hidden in an unnamed hotel. But there were now two detectives on my doorstep and the bell did not ring. I kept looking at the clock, wondering why I had not heard from Mark.

“I’m sure he can’t make more than eighteen hundred a year, two thousand at the most,” Auntie Sue said suddenly.

I laughed. It was psychic, like Bessie’s suddenly saying, “He’s a man.”

“Some men,” said Auntie Sue, “are bigger than their incomes. It’s not often that you find one like that.”

“From you, Auntie Sue, that’s heresy.”

“Once I was crazy about a grip,” she said. “Of course it was impossible. I had become a star and I was young. How would it have looked to the chorus girls? Natural selection is the bunk, darling, except in jungles.”

Auntie Sue is always nicer when there are no men around. She is one of those women who must flirt with every taxi-driver and waiter. And then she is horrid because she must punish men for not desiring her. I love Auntie Sue, but when I am with her I am glad that I was never a famous beauty.

She said, “Are you in love with him, Laura?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve only known him . . .”

I couldn’t count the hours.

She said: “You’ve been watching the clock and cocking your ear toward the door ever since I came. You don’t hear half that I say . . .”

“There may be other things on my mind, Auntie Sue. Certain things about this murder,” I said, knowing I should have asked about Salsbury, Haskins, Warder, and Bone.

“You’re preoccupied, Laura. Your mind is filled with the man.” She came across the room; she touched me with her soft, boneless hand. Through the varnish, I saw a young girl’s face. “Don’t fight yourself too hard, Laura. Not this time. I’ve seen you give yourself too easily to all the wrong people; don’t hold out against the right one.”

That was strange advice from Auntie Sue, but in it I saw the design of her discontent. After she had gone, I sat for a long time uncomfortably on the arm of a chair, thinking.

I thought of my mother and how she had talked of a girl’s giving herself too easily. Never give yourself, Laura, she’d say, never give yourself to a man. I must have been very young when she first said it to me, for the phrase had become deeply part of my nature, like rhymes and songs I heard when I was too small to fasten my own buttons. That is why I have given so much of everything else; myself I have always withheld. A woman may yield without giving, as Auntie Sue had yielded to Uncle Horace when she had wanted to give herself to a grip in the theatre.

I was ashamed; I kept thinking of my own life that had seemed so honest; I hid my face from daylight; I thought of the way we proud moderns have twisted and perverted love, making arguments for this and that substitute, just as I make arguments for Jix and Lady Lilith when I write advertisements. Natural selection, Auntie Sue had said, was the bunk, except in jungles.

Someone had passed the detectives at the threshold. Feet ascended to my door. I hurried to open it.

And there was Waldo.