The Listening Walls (5 page)

“Come now, Mrs. Kellogg,” Escobar said smoothly. “This isn't such a terrible place. We'd like to keep you here for a few days of observation.”

“No, I won't stay!”

“For a day or two . . .”

“No! Let me go! Rupert, get me out of here. Take me home!”

“I will,” Rupert said.

“All the way home? To my own home and Mack and everything?”

“All the way, I promise.”

It was a promise which, at the moment, he intended to keep.

5.

Gill Brandon came
downstairs wearing his composite morning expression: anticipation over what the day would bring and suspicion that something was bound to spoil it.

He was a short, stocky, vigorous man with a forceful manner of speaking that made even his most innocuous re­mark seem compelling, and his most far-fetched theory sound like a self-evident truth. To heighten this effect he also used his hands when he talked, not in any dramati­cally loose European style, but severely, geometrically, to indicate an exact angle of thought, a precise degree of emotion. He liked to think of himself as mathematical and meticulous. He was neither.

Gill kissed his wife, who was already at the table with the morning paper in front of her opened to the lovelorn column. “Any phone calls?”

“No.”

“It's damned peculiar.”

“What is?” Helene said, knowing perfectly well what was, since Gill had talked of nothing else for a week. Thank God it was Monday and he had to go into the city to work. If the stock market was fluttery, so much the bet­ter. It would take his mind off other things. “Here's a terribly funny letter from some woman in Atherton. I wonder if it's anyone we know. It could be Betty Spears. Listen. ‘Dear Abby: My problem is my husband is so stingy that he even snitches my green stamps.' I know for a fact Johnny Spears saves green stamps. . . .”

“Will you
listen
to me?”

“Of course, dear. I didn't know you were saying any­thing.”

“Rupert's been down there for a week now and I haven't heard a word since that first phone call from his secretary. Not a word about how Amy is and what's going on, when they'll be back, nothing.”

“He may be busy.”

Gill scowled at her across the table. “Busy doing what, may I ask?”

“How should I know?”

“Then stop making up nonsensical excuses for him. Nobody's too busy to pick up a phone. He's damned in­considerate. And what Amy ever saw in him I'll never know.”

“He's very good-looking. And very nice.”

“Good-looking. Nice. Great Scott, is that what women marry men for?”

“You're hungry, dear. I'll ring for breakfast.”

Helene pressed the buzzer under the table, feeling a mild surge of power. She had been born and raised in an Oakland slum, and never, in all her twenty years of mar­riage, had she become accustomed to the miracle of ring­ing for anything she wanted. Breakfast, martinis, choco­late creams, tea, magazines, cigarettes—you pressed a button, and bingo, whatever you wanted, there it was. Sometimes Helene just sat and thought of things to want so she would have the pleasure of pulling the tasseled bell cord or pressing the buzzer underneath the table.

Occasionally she visited Oakland but more frequently her parents came down the Peninsula to see her, Mrs. Maloney wearing her teeth and Sunday clothes, Mr. Maloney sober as a judge and dry as a herring. After the ini­tial greetings of genuine pleasure, both parents stiffened into silence, too stunned by the luxurious surroundings to do much of anything except sit and stare. Back home they were affectionately voluble about their daughter Helene, who had gone to Mills College on a scholarship and lived in a fine house in Atherton with her wealthy husband and three beautiful children.

Face to face with her, they became mute and embar­rassed, and their visits were a nightmare, especially to Gill, who tried harder than Helene did to make the Maloneys feel at home. His tactics were peculiar: he sought to minimize his wealth by calling attention to some of his economies, by talking forcefully of having his thirteen- year-old son take a paper route and his seventeen-year-old daughter work her way through college. The result of this stratagem was more confusion on the part of the Maloneys and complete frustration for Gill, who meant, as usual, only to do the right thing. No one had ever been able to figure out why such good intentions as Gill's often had such disturbing consequences.

“Amy's association with the Wyatt woman,” Gill said, “has meant nothing but trouble. She was obviously un­balanced. Anyone but Amy would have seen that and avoided her.”

Helene mentally crossed herself. “Now Gill.
De mortuis
. . . Besides, they were friends. You don't go back on a friend because she's having, well, a few emo­tional problems. Wilma could be a very charming and entertaining person when she wanted to. That's the way I prefer to remember her.”

“You have a very simple and convenient memory.”

“And I intend to keep it that way. Eat your breakfast.”

“I'm not hungry,” Gill said irritably. “Personally, I'm inclined to blame Rupert for this whole business. He should have vetoed the trip as soon as the subject was broached. Two women wandering alone around a foreign, uncivilized country—why, it's preposterous.”

It sounded rather pleasant to Helene whose traveling was confined to shopping trips to the city and summers at Tahoe. She munched on a piece of crisp bacon, listening to Gill the way one listens to waves breaking on a beach, knowing the noise will always be the same, only varying in volume now and then with the tides and the weather.

So often the noise was about Amy, and Helene lis­tened out of habit, without interest. In her opinion, Amy was a dull little creature, invested with wit by her brother and beauty by her husband, and having, in fact, neither. Helene, too, had often wondered about the re­lationship between Amy and Wilma, but she wondered from quite a different point of view from Gill's: why should such an intense and energetic person as Wilma have wasted so much time on a mouse like Amy?

Gill turned up his volume. “I still think the American Embassy should have called me about this unfortunate affair.”

“Why?”

“Amy's my kid sister.”

“She is also a grown woman with a husband. If she needs looking after, let Rupert do it.”

“Rupert is incapable of handling certain situations.”

“What's to handle?” Helene said blandly.

“There are probably decisions to be made, actions to be taken. Rupert's too soft. Now if I were down there I'd be firm with those foreigners.”

“If you were down there, dear, you'd
be
the foreigner.”

“I suppose you think that's terribly clever?”

“It's just the truth.”

“You seem,” he said with a dry little smile, “to be hit­ting on a great many truths these days.”

“Oh, I am. Some large, some small.”

“Tell me a few of them.”

“Another time. You'd better hurry if you're going to take El Camino instead of Bayshore.” She smiled at her husband across the table. In spite of his manner of talking she knew him for a gentle man, more like Amy than he would ever realize. “You'll drive carefully, won't you, Gilly?”

“I wish you wouldn't call me that. It sounds absurd.”

“You don't object when Amy calls you . . .”

“It was my nickname when we were children. She uses it unconsciously. And I do object. Remind me to speak to her about it when she comes home.”

Helene's expression didn't change, but she felt a sud­den sick feeling in her stomach and the coffee she was drinking seemed to have turned sour.
I don't want her to come home. She is two thousand miles away. I like it this way.

David, the thirteen-year-old, bounced into the room, wearing the uniform of the military day school he attended. “Morning, all.”

“What on earth,” Helene asked, “is the matter with your face?”

“Poison oak,” he said cheerfully. “Roger and Bill got it, too, when we were out on maneuvers. Boy, the sergeant was mad. He said the Russians could have landed while the whole bloody bunch of us were chasing around after poison oak.”

“I'll call for you after school and take you to the doc­tor.”

“I don't want to go to any bloody doctor.”

“Stop saying that word. It's not very nice.”

“The sergeant uses it all the time. He's an English­man. They always say bloody. Oh, I forgot to tell you, Uncle Rupert's home. He phoned last night when you were out.”

“You might,” his father said, “have told me before.”

“How could I, when you were out?”

“Is Amy all right?”

“I don't know. He didn't say anything about her.”

“Well, what
did
he say?”

“Just that he was going to be home all day today and would like to see you about something important.”

“I'll call right . . .”

“He said not to call. It's a very private matter. He wants to talk to you in person.”

Gill was already on his feet.

The two men shook hands and Gill said immediately, “Amy's all right?”

“Yes.”

“Where is she? Still in bed?”

“She's—we can't talk out here. You'd better come in.”

The house was dark and quiet and musty, as if the peo­ple who lived there had been away for a long time. No sun filtered through the drawn blinds, no sound crept past the closed windows. Only in the den, at the end of the long, narrow hall, had the drapes been pulled open, and the morning sun hung dusty in the air. On the tiled coffee ta­ble was a half-empty highball glass smudged with lipstick, and beside it, an unstamped envelope with the name “Gilly” written across the front in Amy's boarding-school script.

Gill stared at it. The letter was wrong; the silent man at the window, the too-quiet house, the half-empty glass, all seemed ominous. He cleared his throat. “The letter—it's from Amy, of course.”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why a letter, I mean.”

“She preferred to do it that way,” Rupert said, without turning.

“Do what?”

“Explain why she went away.”

“Went away? Where?”

“I don't know where. She refused to tell me.”

“But this is preposterous, it's impossible.”

Rupert turned to face him. “All right, have it your way. It's preposterous and impossible. It happened, though. Some things
can
happen without your knowledge or per­mission.”

They glared at each other across the sunny room. When Amy was around to smooth things over, the two men had been civil to each other and observed the amenities. Now, without her presence, the unspoken gibes and un­voiced criticisms that had accumulated through the years seemed to hang between them, ready to be plucked out of the air and used as strings to either bow.

“She took her clothes,” Rupert said, “and her dog, and left.”

“The dog, too?”

“It was hers. She had a right to.”

“Taking the dog, that means . . .”

“I know what it means.”

They both knew. If Amy had intended to come back, she wouldn't have taken the dog with her.

“You'd better read your letter,” Rupert said.

Gill picked it up and held it in his hands for a moment, very carefully, as if it were a bomb that might detonate at any sudden movement. “Do you know—what's in it?”

“It's sealed and addressed to you. How should I know?” He did know, though. He remembered every word in the letter. He'd gone over it a dozen times looking for flaws. He'd found some, but only after it was too late.

Gill read slowly, mouthing the words
like a beginning reader.

 

Dear Gilly:

 

I have told Rupert to give you this letter, rather than mailing it, because I know you will want to ask him questions. Some he'll be able to answer, some he won't. Some even
I
can't answer, so how can I make you understand the reasons why I am going away for a while? The main thing is, I am. It is a very big de­cision for me. I can't phone you to say good-bye be­cause I know you'd argue with me and I'm afraid my decision might not be strong enough to stand up under an argument from you.

 

It is a week now since Wilma died, a week of regret and grief, but also one of reexamination of my­self. I didn't come out very well. I am thirty-three, and it seems that I've been living like a child, always leaning on other people. I didn't enjoy it, I just could never get around to not leaning. I never will, if I simply stay here and sink back into the same old rut. I must get the feeling of being alone and being my­self. I know that if I had been a mature, responsible person, used to making decisions and acting on them, I would have been able to prevent Wilma's death. If I had not been drinking myself, I could have stopped Wilma from drinking to the point of depres­sion. . . .

 

“She'd been drinking,” Gill said in surprise. “How much?”

“A lot.”