Bedelia (17 page)

“Quite a shock, wasn't it, when she heard me use Barrett's name?”

“Was it?” Charlie asked coldly.

“Why did she break that ornament? It slipped out of her hands when she heard me say that Barrett was coming here.”

“Might have been an accident.” Charlie managed a condescending smile.

“Did she say anything about it afterward?”

“Nothing. You're the only one who's ever mentioned Barrett's name around here.” That was literal truth. Bedelia had not mentioned Barrett as her enemy; that was Ben Chaney's role.
He'll hurt us. That's all he cares about, to hurt us and ruin our lives.
Her voice echoed in Charlie's ears and he could see her shadowed eyes and furrowed brow as she leaned over the plate of untasted food.

“When Barrett gets here, he'll identify her if she is Maurine,” Ben said. He went into the hall and took his overcoat off the tree. “I didn't like telling you this, but you asked for it. I'd planned to wait until we were sure.” He put on his mittens and wrapped the scarf around his neck.

Charlie had nothing more to say and Ben left without a farewell. Some impulse sent Charlie to watch his visitor depart. He stood in the living-room window waiting while Ben fastened his snowshoes. It seemed to take him a long time to tie them on. Finally Charlie saw him push off, moving clumsily at first, and then finding his balance and gaining speed. Ben crossed the bridge and climbed the hill on the opposite side of the river. It was not yet four o'clock, but dusk had fallen. There was no wind and the world was utterly still except for Ben's dark shape against the snow. The shape dwindled and disappeared over the top of the hill.

Charlie turned from the window. In the dim room he saw the shapes of things, chairs, tables, the sofa and love-seat, and the spaces between these things, and he remembered how he and Bedelia had moved the furniture again and again until they were satisfied with the arrangement. Bedelia's living in it had changed the old house. Her stamp was on everything, the wallpaper and upholstery fabrics, the mirrors and sconces; her workbasket had been left on the lowboy, and on the dining-room table bloomed the white narcissus she had grown in a pottery bowl.

The silence was torn by a scream. Charlie thought the wind had risen to trumpet the coming of a new storm. In the second shriek he recognized his wife's voice. Had Maurine Barrett cried out when they came to tell her that her husband's body had been caught between the posts of the pier?

He rushed up the stairs. His wife's voice floated toward him through the darkness of the hall. “I had a nightmare, Charlie. I dreamed that you were dead.”

“WHY ARE YOU STARING AT ME LIKE THAT?”

Bedelia sat high against the pillows. She had asked Charlie to bring her the pink bed sacque, and when she had tied the pink bow under her chin, combed her hair and touched up her lips, she was as rosy and pert as a schoolgirl. The room was dry and warm, and the scent of her cosmetics gave it the oversweet atmosphere of a hothouse.

“You're looking at me so strangely, Charlie. Are you angry, dear?”

Charlie walked toward the bed. Bedelia held out her hand. He took it and she drew his hand to her face and rested her cheek against it. Ben's facts receded into the distance. Charlie saw innocence in a pink jacket, heard rosy lips asking for his love, smelled her seductive perfume, touched a warm hand. His senses knew reality. The session with Ben became a dream. This woman was his wife, he knew her intimately, was not
blind to her faults and weaknesses. He had been madly in love with her, dazzled by her charms, but he had not lost his head so completely that he had mistaken a vulgar adventuress for a sincere woman. And the woman Ben described had been far worse than an adventuress, she had been a hideous monster, a siren, a blood-sucker, Lucrezia Borgia and Lady Macbeth, all at once. Charlie was no fool. He might have been oversanguine, more trustful of strangers than a lot of people, but he had his standards of character and expected his friends to live up to these standards. Barrett's wife had been mercenary. Mrs. Jacobs was a cold woman. Annabel McKelvey could not offer affection with such pretty impulsiveness.

“I'm hungry,” Bedelia said.

“I'll fix you some supper. Won't take ten minutes,” Charlie promised.

He was glad to leave the bedroom. In her presence it was not possible to think clearly. He stamped down the stairs, telling himself in sound sentences that Ben Chaney had made a hideous mistake, that the black pearl was what Bedelia claimed, a five-dollar imitation. Last week Ben had made melodrama out of a case of common indigestion; now he was magnifying a molehill of coincidence into a mountain of evidence. A detective! Had Charlie known this at the start, he would never have become intimate with Ben Chaney. Perhaps he was a snob; the Philbricks had always been snobs, but they had successfully protected themselves against the humiliation suffered as a result of intimacy with inferiors. Would his mother have asked a detective to dinner? He could hear her answer, “One might as well dine with a burglar.” Let Barrett come! At the first glance the man from St. Paul would destroy Ben's fine theories.

While Charlie was slaying dragons on the staircase, a miracle took place. Light! Light after darkness! Could there have been a clearer symbol of hope? Of course, if he were to quarrel with Providence and seek scientific explanation of the miracle, it could be attributed to the workings of the Connecticut Light and Power Company whose linesmen had restrung the wires
which the blizzard had disconnected. The sudden burst of light in the dark hall was due to Charlie's own negligence in forgetting to turn back the switches which he had thoughtlessly turned on while the power was off.

In his present mood Charlie preferred the miracle. Faith is nourished not by intelligence but by emotion, and emotion is the product of desire. By wishing hard enough you can make yourself believe almost anything. The Kodak had fallen off the cliff by accident. Charlie had a most reassuring vision, could see himself leaving it carelessly at the edge.

He set about making tea. The kitchen reflected his wife's soundest qualities. In every copper pot its bright miniature was repeated. Charlie sang as he made toast in Bedelia's new electric machine, cooked a rarebit in her chafing dish. He felt superior to Ben's nonsense, aloof as a god. His voice seemed to him only slightly inferior to Caruso's. All at one time he had to keep his mind on the toast in the electric machine, the melting cheese in the chafing dish, the water in the kettle.

The kitchen floor was spread with newspapers. Charlie had laid them there when he finished scrubbing the linoleum. That was Charlie all over, an architect, successful in his field, making good money, but not too proud to scrub the kitchen and spread newspapers on the floor. As he crossed from stove to table, the kettle in his hand, an item attracted him. He bent down to read it, forgot everything else, and there was havoc in the kitchen. The kettle tipped, the cover slid off, hot water spilled, the toast burned, and the rarebit thickened in the chafing dish.

The newspaper item told of the conviction of a bachelor, forty-seven years old, elder in a New Hampshire church, for the murder of his spinster sister. Witnesses said the sister had tried to separate him from the piano teacher with whom he had been having an illicit affair for seventeen years. Charlie seldom read such stories. The sort of people who committed murder, or allowed themselves to become victims of murder, were to him as incomprehensible as savage Igorotes, and such crime as remote from his understandings as hara-kiri or child marriage.
A medicine man who painted his skin and danced to exorcise devils seemed no farther off than a New Hampshire elder who could suffocate his sister with a green silk sofa pillow.

Boiling water spread and darkened the newspaper. From the toaster came a charred smell. The cheese sauce bubbled angrily. There were switches to be turned off, plugs to be pulled, the floor to be mopped, fresh bread to be cut, new water boiled, cheese to be grated. Charlie worked defiantly. He sang loudly, rattled dishes, banged away with the pots. The medicine men dance to exorcise civil spirits. Charlie Horst tried to imitate Caruso. In fear of excess he spared the tea, shut off the current before the toast was brown, made a watery rarebit. Yet he continued to sing loudly as though the courage of his voice could thicken sauce, brown toast, strengthen tea, disperse the shadows on the stairs, and revive the faith that had seemed so firm when he started work in the bright kitchen.

Maurine Barrett had been a good housekeeper, she had equipped her kitchen with all the latest conveniences, her egg-beaters and can-openers had been the most recent inventions, and when she went away, she had stored them carefully in her brother-in-law's attic.

“Charlie, dear, it's delicious,” Bedelia said of the rarebit. “You're a much better cook than I am.”

“It's a bad supper and you're a gallant liar.”

“No, you mustn't say it's bad. It's delicious.” Bedelia smiled, dimpled; her dark eyes worshiped her husband, and the room was sweet with the scent of her perfume.

THAT EVENING A bell rang. Charlie and Bedelia were startled. They had forgotten about the telephone. “We must be connected,” Charlie said.

Bedelia nodded. She had a crochet hook in her mouth and could not speak.

The operator was calling to see if their line worked. The trunk wire had been disconnected, she said, and the telephone company was glad to inform its subscribers that service had been restored.

Charlie was not as happy about the restoration of the telephone wire as he had been about the electric light. This was not a miracle but an omen. His house was again part of the world from which it had been separated by the storm. Next the snow shovels would come, and then there would never be peace in his home again.

“So the phone's connected,” Bedelia said.

“Yes.” His voice was brusque. More than four hours had passed since Ben had left the house, and nothing had been said of his visit.

Charlie pulled a chair close to the bedroom fire. Bedelia went on with her crocheting. From time to time she measured the unfinished slipper against the finished one.

“When will the snow be cleared away?”

He scraped his throat, tried to soften the hard tones. “I don't know. Why are you worrying about it so much?”

“It's such fun to be alone with you, dear. I don't want us ever to be rescued.”

“We'd starve to death.”

“We'll live on biscuit. There's plenty of flour. I'd rather live on biscuit with you, Charlie, than roast goose and oysters with anyone else.”

He stared into the fire. A sudden wave of anger had risen in him, resentment at her airs and graces, the guilelessness and girlish prattle. His anger was futile, of course. When he turned and saw her, rosy in the lamplight, the pink bow tied under her chin, his resentment turned upon himself for allowing his faith to be shaken.

“Don't you believe me, Charlie?”

“Believe what?”

“That I love you better than anything in the world?”

“Don't be foolish.”

“I don't know what you mean by that. I don't know whether you mean that I ought to know that you believe I love you and am foolish to be asking about it, or whether you don't believe I love you more than anything else in the world.”

How was it possible for a small woman to have drowned a
man who had been boating and swimming all his life? If Will Barrett had drunk too much beer, he might not have known it was she who pushed him off the pier, but he should have been restored to his senses by the shock of the cold water.

Thinking of it, Charlie experienced all the sensations. He lost his balance, fell, shuddered as the water closed over him, floundered about, held his breath, struggled and tried to reach the surface. His arms flailed about in the effort to swim blindly toward the posts that held up the pier. Drunk or sober, he would not have allowed himself to drown, he thought. But if he had been drugged, if he were not wholly conscious, the water might not have revived him.

“Great God, I'm getting morbid.”

“Did you say something, dear?”

“No.”

“Why are you so cross with me?”

“Am I cross? I'm sorry.”

“Perhaps you're bored being stuck in the house without any company but me. I know I'm not very intellectual, but I try not to be a bore.”

“My dear, you're not the slightest bit of a bore.”

The telephone rang. Charlie was glad that he had an excuse to run down the stairs.

Ellen was calling. “Hello, Charlie, are you all right?”

“Hello, how are you? Dug out yet?”

“Good gracious, yes. We were only snowed in a day down here, worse luck. I've had to go to work as usual. It's pretty bad out there, isn't it?”

“We're comfortable,” Charlie said.

“It's been terribly exciting in town, everybody dug and shoveled, not only the poor who were getting paid for it, but the Mayor and City Council and all the storekeepers and bankers. The poor were angry because other people were doing the work that's rightfully theirs, taking away their chance to make a little money, but there was so much snow that there'll be work for them for days to come. They're coming out your way tomorrow.”