Proud Flesh (28 page)

He could imagine what doing that must have cost them! To go to the police and admit that they had allowed one of their own to stray so completely out of their ken. To have the name Renshaw—even that of one unworthy of it—on the book of a precinct house, listed among the runaway husbands and amnesia victims and alimony fugitives!

“I don't know why,” said Hazel, “they feel they have to do everything together. If they split up and one did one thing while the other one did something else they would cover twice the territory.”

“The letter goes on: ‘This is where every dead body that is found with no papers on it is brought and they keep them until somebody claims them or not. How long they keep them without anybody claiming them before they dispose of them I don't know but some we saw today had been there too long. Some of them have died of natural causes but many of them of very unnatural causes. I won't go into any details.

“‘As you can see by the letterhead we have changed hotels. This one costs twice as much as the other one. Up here if you want segregation you have got to pay for it.'”

“Well,” said Hazel, “they are never going to find him unless—”

“Boroughs?” Mr. Murphy asked Doc.

“Boroughs,” said Doc. “Five boroughs. And then I heard her say they were never going to find him unless—It was all I could do to keep myself from screaming.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” said Mr. Murphy, whose accent grated upon Doc's ear like chalk dragged across a slate, “that they expected to find one person among nine million without—?”

“No, sir,” said Doc. “They did not expect to ‘find' him. It may come as a surprise to you, but us folks down here have heard of New York City. They never expected to find him. They were doing their duty. Their dying mother wished to see her missing son, and they were looking for him.”

But that was not all. The only evidence they had that New York City was where Kyle was, was a story four years old that somebody from town, up there for the World's Fair, had seen in Times Square a man he thought was Kyle Renshaw and had hailed him. What convinced the man that it was Kyle was that he pretended not to have heard and disappeared into the crowd. That would be like Kyle, all right.

IX

Side Two of Mr. Murphy's tape—before it was erased—began, as did Side One, with talk of Amy Renshaw, but with a difference. With the other side of the tape came another side of Amy, one hitherto unexplored, unseen, like the dark side of the moon.

The tape had reached the end of Side One and must be rewound and turned over. A rest for Doc, a chance for the Sheriff to step outside and take the temperature of the crowd. Please God it had not kept up with the heat of the day! On coming out of the air-conditioned house the Sheriff popped out with sweat like a cold can of beer. The tarred street had come to a slow boil. Shoe soles, whenever a man shifted his stance after a while, pulled away with a sound from it. The Sheriff circulated among the men spreading assurance that Doc was going to be all right. He was telling everything and it was all being taken down. As to whether he had named names, all that the Sheriff could tell them for the time being was, the mystery was being cleared up.

Then the Sheriff heard—he had grown supersensitive to it—had developed an allergic reaction to it—the name he had been hearing all morning long—the one he was keeping to himself right that moment. It was not what he feared. They did not know what he knew. The crowd had been joined only a short while before by the contingent from out the Renshaws' way. A thing of interest and concern to equal the vigil for Doc Metcalf had detained them. Stopping by, as they did every morning, to ask after Mrs. Edwina, they had witnessed the latest misfortune to befall that troubled family. Overnight Edwina Renshaw had died and Amy had had the nervous breakdown Doc had feared. She had locked herself in the storm cellar declaring that she had “killed” her mother, and vowing never again to see the light of day. The Renshaws' neighbors, even the earliest ones upon the scene, had found the house deserted, the door ajar, the family, still in their nightclothes, weeping and wailing around the cellar like a tribe of Indians around their ancestral burial mound.

With so many of their relatives so long in the house even the Renshaws' big kitchen garden had been stripped bare, and Eulalie, pulling her coaster wagon, had gone out to the storm cellar in hopes of finding on its shelves some jars of something left over from last year's canning. She found herself unable to lift the heavy cellar door. She brought her boy Archie down to lift it for her. Archie could not lift it either. He was trying to when Eulalie stopped him. Then Archie heard it, too. Somebody was in there. The door was bolted on the inside and somebody was in there. Not the drunken Jug, as was their first thought, but a woman, and making sounds as though she were unconscious and groaning in pain.

The storm cellar—in fall and winter, after harvest and the canning season, the root cellar—was located fifty yards behind the house—about the limit for safety, as tornadoes, or “twisters,” often sprang up with scant forewarning. The Renshaws' was big for a storm cellar, having been dug for a big family: a mound twenty feet in diameter and rising to a height of twelve feet, shaped like an igloo. The mound was solid earth; the cellar itself lay entirely underground. At the base of the side nearest the house, slanted so slightly as to lie nearly level, was the door to the steps by which the cellar was reached. It was of thick hand-hewn oak petrified by sun and wind, and hung on heavy hand-forged hinges. With that door lowered and bolted behind them, and covered by that mound of earth, the Renshaws were safe from the fiercest cyclone's wrath. A three-foot-wide culvert pipe of corrugated sheet-iron rising from the center of the mound supplied air.

To talk to Amy in the cellar it was necessary to climb the mound and speak down the pipe, on the knees, as the pipe rose only a foot and a half. Ira had gone first.

“Amy? Are you listening? It's me. Ira. Your husband.” Ira had spoken low but inside the pipe his voice boomed. But in the vault below it was instantly muffled. He might have spoken into his pillow.

“What does she say, Ira?” Gladys called up to him. “What does our poor dear sister say?”

Ira shook his head. He seemed unable or unwilling to believe that his wife was there in the ground beneath him. Sticking his head inside the pipe (the wire screen that covered it to keep out animals had been removed) he said, “Amy? Amy? Amy? Can you hear me? It's me. Ira. Speak to me, Amy.”

From the depths below had arisen a long-drawn hollow groan which drew from the women an echoing chorus of wails. Ira jerked his head out of the hole and gripped the pipe. Her voice, though unnaturally deep, was clear, and while it came out fairly loud, all sensed that she had actually spoken low. Indeed, that she had barely spoken aloud, that she had spoken not to Ira but to herself. It was the effect of that close and all but sealed-up subterranean vault: as if her inner thoughts were audible in that silence, amplified by those narrow walls and channeled up the pipe on that still air. Putting down a visible urge to rise and run, Ira again stuck his head inside the pipe. “Amy,” he pleaded. “Amy, don't torment yourself this way. Your mother wouldn't want you to carry on like this. Be sensible, Amy. This is not going to help anything.”

Gladys had been for forcing the door, breaking it in if necessary, and carrying their sister out. “I don't know what we're waiting for,” she declared. “She's had a breakdown, a nervous breakdown. Gone out of her mind with exhaustion and grief. This had been too much for her. We've got to get her out of there. Get her to a doctor. To a hospital. Nurse her back to her right mind.”

Hazel had disagreed. Amy had not gone crazy. They all knew how she felt about Ma. They might have expected something like this. Leave her alone and after a while she would calm down and come up on her own. For the time being she was where she wanted to be and until she worked off some of her feelings that was the best place for her.

Lois had sided with Hazel, though for reasons of her own. She feared Amy might do something desperate if they tried force. None of them knew but what she might have something with her down there, a gun or a rope or a bottle of poison. While they were trying to batter down that thick door …

“I know just how you feel, Amy, hon,” said Lois in a tearful voice, and at the groan that arose from the pipe she nodded her head. “I know. I know. Without Ma life just doesn't seem worth living. I know. But at a time like this we ought to be all together. Come on out now, Amy, dear, and let us all be together.”

Stout Gladys, when with the aid of a boost from her sisters she had gained the top of the mound and lowered herself to her knees, tried a different tack, saying, “You know how we all depend on you. Sister. You've been a second mother to us all. We need you more than ever now.”

Hollow groans, strangled cries, hoarse guttural growls as though she were gagging on self-disgust, whimpers and grunts as of a wounded animal in its lair biting itself to allay a greater pain: these were all they could get out of her. Every effort they made to soothe her seemed only to worsen her self-torment. So they redoubled their efforts. Worn out by all they had been through, and now distraught at this latest turn of events, the Renshaw women wailed and shrieked around the mound, wept on one another's bosoms and tore their hair, while the Renshaw men stood around helpless and sullen, embarrassed at having this latest misfortune to befall them witnessed by the neighbors.

Frightened by Lois's fears, the Renshaws had decided not to force the cellar door. For the time being Archie and Jug were posted on the mound, instructed to keep both ears to the pipe and at the least suspicious sound below to ring the cowbell left with them along with axes and a crowbar for use in case of dire emergency.

It was when this had been reported to him that Doc produced the image of that other Amy. It was a reverse image, but perhaps it was the one from which the first had come—as in photography the print comes from the negative. It was an Amy the opposite of that one he himself had depicted on the other side of the same tape as a model—almost a monster—of daughterly devotion. Well, he had said he was no psychiatrist and no detective; but this Amy was different from the one the whole world knew. She had fooled everybody, beginning with herself. Everybody but one. The one the world had thought was so cruelly mistaken about her all along.

The rest of them she had fooled so completely that now when she wanted to unfool them they themselves would not believe her. Poor Amy! There really was a curse upon that woman. A worse one than this would be hard to imagine. It was as bad as being falsely accused and finding nobody to believe in your innocence. She might be able to convince them that she was guilty of some other crime—any other crime—but that. Never. She could say it till her tongue lolled out and they would think it meant the same as when one of them said it. “Killed my mother”—why, they all said that. It was their way of saying how much they had loved her. Their way of saying that, much as it was, they had not loved her nearly enough. Amy had done her work too well. Talk about chickens coming home to roost! A lifetime Amy had spent trying to prove her love to her doubting and distrustful mother, and all the world had felt for her. Now her mother had proved right and shown Amy's real self to her at last. And now she was the only one who could see her real self while the rest held up to her gaze the mocking image of that old false self of hers. Photography? More like an X-ray. “See? Here are my insides, and here is the diseased part. See?” “But here is your photograph and you look just the same as ever.” What a fate! To be falsely accused of a crime and unjustly punished must be one of the bitterest things in life, but to be falsely forgiven, to want to confess and to find no one among those you have wronged who will listen, that must be a torment even worse. “I killed our mother.” “Yes, dear, we know.” If she wasn't crazy when she went into that storm cellar, much more of that and she would be!

Was he saying then—?

Accidentally? One of those near-accidents of hers that he had been telling them about? One of her oversights—a moment's dereliction of duty—which he had managed up to then to catch in the nick of time and prevent—one of those had finally slipped by him and had caused—hastened—her mother's death?

Nothing had slipped by him. He was there right through it all. When, at the kitchen door that night, he had learned that things were not as he thought but even worse, from that time on he had not left Edwina Renshaw's side while Amy was there. Nothing had slipped by him. However, you might put it that way: “hastened.” If she had been murdered then that would certainly have hastened her death.

Oh, it was not a case for the Sheriff. He was a witness—the only one. He had seen it all—all that there was to see. In the time his back was turned you could not have counted to three. And when he turned back Amy had not moved from her spot. She had not blinked an eye. She was paralyzed. Paralyzed by—whatever was passing through her mind at that moment. Besides, she was unarmed. No, the Sheriff would not have to swear out a warrant, go arrest her, gather evidence. There was no evidence to gather. No jury would convict her, no grand jury would indict her. An autopsy on the dead woman would show no violence. If this was murder it was an unusual case—without precedence—unique: one without a weapon. They had heard the expression “if looks could kill.” He had always wondered at that. The most killing thing in the world sometimes was a look. Hearts could be broken forever, lives could be wrecked by a look. Some he had gotten in his time had made him just wish he was dead!
If
looks could kill? They could—deadlier than bullets, more painful than poison. He had seen one do it.

But—not to dispute his word—but if Edwina Renshaw had died just last night, and he had been asleep since—