Brass Bed (21 page)
Authors: Fletcher Flora
“Well, there the sneaky little devil is,” Fran said. “There he is, and he’s dead, and I never would have believed it. I always tried to look after him and take care of him and teach him what was right to do, but in spite of that he was always doing something that wasn’t, and now I’m damned if he hasn’t gone off and died and got completely away from me. I guess that was the most wrong thing he ever did among all the others, going off and dying that way, and it was all so useless and had no sense in it whatever. He was pretty hard to understand, I’ll admit that, and lots of times I thought I understood him when I didn’t, and I’ll admit that too, but anyone would have thought there was a limit to his duplicity, and I truly never dreamed that he would carry it this far. You know yourselves that I always thought of him and took him places and made all kinds of sacrifices for him and was heartbroken when I thought erroneously for a little while that he had become an alcoholic behind my back. Could any reasonable person have expected more? Is it fair that he should now have returned my kindness by dying in this foolish manner? Could I have anticipated that he would lie down behind Jolly’s car after drinking too many of Prince Sam’s highballs? Well, there he is in that hole over there, and there is no use in blaming myself or in thinking about it any longer in any way whatever, for he’s dead, that’s certain, and all I know is that I keep wishing and wishing that he wasn’t.”
All in an instant her ugly face crumpled and blurred, and she began to cry, and I couldn’t stand to see it. Turning, I walked across the grass and under a tree and stood by the trunk with my back to the Caddy. Jolly came up behind me and stopped.
“Why is she taking it so hard?” I said.
“Because she loved him,” Jolly said, and her voice sounded quite surprised. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Fran loved Sid?”
“Certainly. Surely it was perfectly apparent.”
“No, it was not. I would never have thought it in the world from the way she talked to him and kept fooling around with Harvey.”
“Oh, well, that didn’t mean anything, of course. She loved Sid, all right, and for that reason it was too bad that he didn’t love her instead of me.”
“I agree with that. It was too bad.”
“Because I love you, naturally, and therefore could not love Sid, and consequently nothing turned out right for either of them.”
“No more for you and me.”
“I don’t see that. Everything is now in a position to turn out right for us from this time on.”
“Now that Sid is out of the way, as well as Kirby? Is that what you mean?”
“Sid? Are you certain that you are feeling well, Felix? What on earth does Sid have to do with it?”
“Never mind. Tell me something, though, Jolly. Fran is your good friend, almost as special as I, and I would like to know what you feel when you see her grieving for Sid and wishing that he were not dead.”
“I feel quite bad. It is exceedingly touching to see her.”
“Touching? Yes, I suppose you could say at least that it is touching.”
“What’s the matter with you, Felix? I must say that you are acting and speaking very strangely, and I am becoming rather disturbed about it.”
“Are you? I am also becoming disturbed, if you want the truth, and perhaps that is why I’m behaving strangely.”
She didn’t respond at once, and I could hear her breathing as I had heard her in the garage where Sid had died, the slow and regular drawing and release of her breath.
“I cannot understand why you should be disturbed,” she said.
“Can’t you? It may be unreasonable of me. If I ask you a question, will you answer it?”
“I’ll try to answer.”
“If you do, you must tell the truth.”
“You will have to judge for yourself whether it is the truth or not.”
“I doubt that I’m a very good judge of the truth. However, I’ll ask the question because it’s necessary. Did you kill Kirby and afterward Sid?”
“Why do you ask such a question?”
“I told you. Because it’s a question that needs asking and answering.”
“Is it your belief that I did?”
“Yes, it is. It’s a belief I don’t want and tried to avoid, but it is one that is reasonable under the circumstances. I believe that you drowned Kirby, though I don’t know how you managed it exactly, and I believe that you killed Sid because he saw you do it from among the trees on the bank. Mostly it’s thinking about Sid that disturbs me. How about you, Jolly? Does it disturb you also? Does it bother you at all to remember how you drove the car yourself into the garage and left him alone on the floor under the exhaust pipe and then went into the house and upstairs to bed? Did you sleep, Jolly? I keep wondering if you slept.”
“Why does it please you to abuse me?”
“It doesn’t please me to abuse you. I am only telling you what I believe, as you asked me to, and I will tell you that Jason believes it also. In some details, however, he is mistaken. He thinks that I may be an accessory, which is not true, and he thinks that Sid was killed because he tried to blackmail you for money, which is also not true. He was killed, as I am certain, because he tried through his knowledge of the drowning of Kirby to make a place for himself in your fine brass bed.”
“I can see now from the way you are talking to me that you do not love me after all.”
“On the contrary, I do love you after all, and it is enlightening and not pleasant to learn what one can love and continue to love in spite of everything.”
“In that case, it’s all right. If you continue to love me, it’s all right.”
“It’s not all right. It’s all wrong, and I would rather be as dead as Kirby and Sid than ever to assume the place in the brass bed that you intended me to have.”
“Are you deserting me, then?”
“If that is the way you care to put it.”
“If you desert me now, it will be the end of me.”
“Go away, Jolly. This time for good. Go get into the car with Fran and go away.”
“I refuse to do it. How would you get back to town?”
“That’s a minor problem.”
“Don’t you care what happens to me?”
“I care, but I can no longer do anything about it.”
“I love you, Felix.”
“I doubt it.”
“It’s true. I will love you all the rest of my life, but that will only be a short while because I will soon die without you.”
“I doubt that too.”
“Would you believe me if I said I didn’t do the things you say I did?”
“I don’t know.”
“You see? It is clear to me now that you have made up your mind, and nothing I could say would change it in the least, and so there is absolutely no use in my answering your question. Perhaps after a while, when I have died because of you, you’ll begin to wonder if you were wrong, and it will be something you’ll always have to wonder about.”
I started to walk then, and I intended to walk right away without looking back, but I couldn’t do it. I stopped and turned and looked back at her over the small white stones, and she stood without moving beside the tree in a pattern of sun and shade, slender and suffering and somehow betrayed, about her still the air of fragile dignity.
I
WENT
on up into the hills to the cabin on the Blue River. It was one of a group that was called the Blue River Camp, and I had been there about two weeks when I got the letter from Jolly. It was addressed to me in care of the camp, and the owner brought it out one evening from the postoffice in the town where he went for supplies. I took it down to the river and opened it and read it, and this is what it said:
Felix darling:
I am in my fine brass bed, which is what you called it, but you are not here with me and will never be, and the house is very quiet, and on the little table beside the bed is this bottle of bright green pills. There are quite a few of them, over a dozen, and when I have finished this letter and sent it by the maid to be posted on her way home, I will take them all. It is my understanding that you go to sleep and do not ever wake up if you take so many at once, and this seems to me a simple and satisfactory thing.
The truth is, now that you have deserted me and will not have me, I cannot seem to care about anything. Besides, I am frightened, and this is because that policeman Jason has been to see me twice since you left, and it is apparent that he does not believe anything I tell him and is determined to cause me trouble. I do not think that I would be frightened if you were here, and I would also still care about things, and I simply cannot understand why you felt compelled to spoil everything at the last moment, and I wish you hadn’t. As it is, there seems to me to be absolutely no sense in anything that has happened or can happen from now on.
Do you truly believe that I killed Kirby and Sid? Do you believe it beyond question? If you do, there is no point in my confessing it or denying it. If you don’t, I will not confess it or deny it either, and then you will always wonder and think about me and never forget me.
Goodbye, Felix. I hope the goliard goes well and earns you some money.
I didn’t think she’d go through with it, but she did — or at least she tried to, and she ended up being a good deal worse off than if she’d succeeded with the pills.
The maid — I’m told that personal maids are sometimes not to be trusted, particularly when personal mail is involved, and even more particularly when the mail is going from a female to a male, or vice-versa. Anyhow, Jolly’s maid was not one to let a letter get out of her hands before she’d conducted an investigation into its contents, and she did just that downstairs in the kitchen while Jolly was climbing into her brass bed with the bottle of green pills.
And so the maid saved Jolly’s life — for a time, anyway. The maid telephoned the police who in turn telephoned for an ambulance. The maid went back upstairs and fiddled around for ten minutes, thus preventing Jolly from commencing with the pills and at the same time plunging Jolly into something of a rage.
The newspapers had it right on page one, and they made quite a bit of it, partly because of its happening right after Kirby and Sid in such a peculiar way and partly because of the uproar which Jolly caused when the police arrived.
Jason bounded up the stairs, followed by assorted detectives and doctors, and the instant Jolly saw him she snatched a long nail file from the night table and screamed at him not to come any closer.
It must have been quite a fracas, because the newspaper photographers were outside the house by the time Jason was able to take Jolly away. The pictures were pretty grim, and judging by her torn clothing and the hysterical expression on her face, Jolly had put up a terrific fight.
The way Jason told it, there was a lot of trouble getting at Jolly because they couldn’t back her into a corner. She just crouched, on her knees, on the brass bed and slashed out with the file in every direction. She wouldn’t get out of the bed.
Even after they’d got hold of the weapon and pinned her arms, she didn’t want to get out of that damned brass bed. They had to drag her out of it and she screamed for it all the way to wherever it was that they took her.
But they’ll never really get Jolly out of that brass bed. She’s in it for good.
She’ll even take it to hell with her.
If you liked The Brass Bed check out:
The Seducer
B
RADLEY
C
ANNON
, professor of mathematics at Peermont College, stood at a west window of his classroom, his hands folded behind him at the base of his spine, and looked out upon a bright October day.
In this position, he could look either down a gentle slope of browning grass to a small grove of fruitful walnut trees or, by the simple maneuver of shifting slightly the focus of his eyes, at his class behind him in the reflective pane.
The room was caught and held in concentrated silence, for Brad had sprung upon his students in the last quarter hour of this particular session one of the terrifying pop quizzes for which he was justly infamous.
He found pop quizzes to be amusingly deceptive. You put one problem on the blackboard for solution, two at the most, and if a student missed a point or two, the penalty was, after all, quite slight, say three points deducted from a maximum of ten, and often the student would go on in this way until the end of the term, happy and comfortable in the delusion that he was doing well, and never realize until it was too late that three from ten on a basis of one hundred is seventy, which is damn near failing in any respectable class. Brad had seen many strong young characters disintegrate under the impact of this tardy and terrible understanding.
On he blackboard today, Brad had copied the following problem, not original, which he had extracted from a supplementary text to which his students did not have access:
The Great Pyramid of Gizeh, Egypt, has a square base. Its faces are isosceles triangles that intersect in the four edges. Before vandals removed the outer limestone casing and the top 31 feet of the pyramid, each edge was 719 feet 2.6 inches long and made an angle of 42 degrees 0.6 minutes with the horizontal. Find the original height and the length of a side of the base
.
To the solution of this problem his students, for a maximum of fifteen minutes, were now dedicated, thus setting the professor free in the identical period for lazy reflection and discreet observation.
There was a red squirrel frisking among the walnut trees. Beyond the trees and a little above, a white cloud scudded across a hard blue sky. Brad sighed and glanced at his wrist watch, bringing one arm from behind him for the purpose.
Five minutes remained until the bell would ring and bring the session to a close. There was now, he noticed, an intermittent stirring in the room behind him, and he began to watch the shadow of matters in the glass. The stirring was created by students who had solved their problem and were leaving the room.
Each, upon completion, would fold his paper, sign his name on the outside, leave the paper on Brad’s desk, and quietly depart according to established procedure. Brad watched this orderly thinning of the population until, with one minute to go, there was no one left in the room except Miss Margaret McCall, more commonly called Maggie in the informal rapport of peers.
Brad now watched Maggie exclusively, and he found the watching a pleasure. He was aware, in fact, of a kind of excitement that expressed itself in mildly salacious prickliness.
She was sitting erect in her stiff desk-chair, applying pencil to paper assiduously, her ankles touching and her bare knees, still brown from summer sun, exposed delightfully below the hem of her short brown skirt. She seemed to be engaged in a furious race against time, the ringing of the bell. But it was clear from the movement of her pencil across her paper that she was writing, not computing. She had just finished, apparently, when the bell rang, for she immediately folded her paper and wrote her name and walked forward to Brad’s desk.
Turning away from the window, Brad met her there. He extended a hand for the paper, and she delivered it up to him with a grave smile that gave her small face a kind of inner light, a sorrowful translucence that seemed at once an appeal for clemency and an invitation to intimacy.
She was, he thought, a damnably insidious little charmer with her deceptive air of gravity and her soft pink mouth and her alluring brown knees — a paradox of sex and someone’s sister. Her head, capped by a calculated shag of brown hair, Italian cut, was cocked a little to one side. In its simple sweater and skirt, her body by some subtle trickery, possibly deliberate, was a slender incitement. Feeling suddenly short of breath, Brad concealed his temporary affliction behind a rather grim examination of her paper.
She had copied the problem dutifully from the blackboard, and there it was, neatly written on her paper in a small round hand, but there was no solution, not even an abortive attempt at a solution. After a line left blank — a hiatus to show clearly where trigonometry left off and something else began — the rest of the sheet was filled with a warm little communication of a personal nature directed to him, Brad, dear Professor Cannon.
He did not read the communication at this moment, refolding the paper instead and tapping it with an implication of restraint against the fingers of his left hand. He smiled at her faintly, yet making the smile broad enough to form the dimples in his cheeks of which he was invariably conscious.
“Well, Miss McCall,” he said with an effect of wry humor, “I see that you have failed again to find a solution.”
“That’s true,” she said. “I knew at once, when you wrote the problem on the board, that it was simply no use.”
“I see also, however,” he said, “that you have wasted your time entirely. You have, I believe, been employed for the past fifteen minutes in writing me another of your charming notes.”
“Yes, I have. Are you angry? I surely hope not, for it will make me feel bad if I have done anything to make you angry. There is always the fifteen minutes to put in, you see, and I never seem to know anything about the problem, or even how to begin solving it, and so I got the idea of using the time to write these notes to you, instead of wasting it. When you didn’t object after the first one or the second one, I thought it would be all right if I just kept on, and so I have.”
He looked at her sharply to see if he could detect in her expression the note of mockery that was incredibly absent from the tone of her voice. But she was looking at him gravely, in all apparent simplicity, and he felt, noting somewhat parenthetically the delightful thrust of her small breasts against her sweater, an acceleration of prickliness.
“No,” he said, “I’m not in the least angry. However, I think you have posed a problem, quite outside the area of trigonometry, to the solution of which we must now apply ourselves. Two heads, in this case will be better than one, I’m sure. Not now, though. You have another class coming up, and I mustn’t detain you any longer. I shall be free after three o’clock this afternoon, and I shall expect you to come to see me as soon thereafter as possible. Do you understand?”
“Oh, yes. Perfectly.” Her mobile face of lights and shadows expressed such delight that he thought for a moment she was going to jump up and down and clap her hand like a small girl. “Three o’clock. I’ll be here right on time. You can depend on it. You must not forget and go off yourself, either. I’d be rather disappointed if you did.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll be here. And now you had better run along to your next class. I trust that you will be better prepared there than you were here.”
As she went out, he watched the delightful play of contiguous nates. Then, seating himself at his desk with a free period to spend, he spent a brief part of it wondering how old she was, guessing twenty and giving her, actually, the benefit of five years and, not actually but in a valid sense, the immensely greater benefit of immeasurable eons, for she was, in this latter valid sense, as old as any age one would care to select from a geological table.
After a couple of minutes, he unfolded her paper again and began to read the note she had written while the rest of the trigonometry class had been attempting to discover the height and the length of a side of the base of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, Egypt. Before vandals, that is.
Dear Professor Cannon
, he read,
I find it remarkable and interesting that vandals would actually steal the top 31 feet of a pyramid, and I can’t understand why they would have wanted to do something like this, which doesn’t seem to make much sense. But I suppose there have always been certain people, even away back then, who would go to any trouble to do something that someone else wouldn’t want them to do
.
I understand that pyramids are built of great blocks of stone that weigh tons and tons apiece, and I must say that taking off the top 31 feet seems to me to be even a greater waste of time and effort than putting them up in the first place
.
I’m sorry that I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I hope you don’t feel that it is your fault, that you weren’t a good teacher or anything like that, because it is my own fault entirely in that I don’t seem to be able to care much about trigonometry or how big a pyramid was
.
The truth is, you are the very best teacher I’ve ever had in anything, and it is a pleasure to listen to you talk and watch you show how to do things on the blackboard, even though I don’t quite understand what you are saying or showing
.
I suppose I shall be put out of the class at the end of the term for not having learned anything, but I hope you will let me stay until then, at least, because I enjoy it so much for the reasons I have mentioned. Sincerely, Margaret McCall
.
Refolding the paper, he leaned back and smiled, making a little tent of fingers tip to tip above his chest, elbows braced on the arms of his chair.
He conceded that Maggie McCall was nothing short of a remarkable phenomenon — altogether the most interesting specimen of college life that he had uncovered as a pedagogue. Or, for that matter, as anything else. And this covered a considerable area, to tell the truth, for Brad was especially sensitive to the enchantment of female students, as well as females in other categories, and it was one of his secret regrets that his particular forte was mathematics, inasmuch as enrollment in his classes was thereby rather severely limited. If he were teaching in another department, say English or Education, his sensitivity would have been exposed to a much more numerous and varied collection of stimulants.
This brought him, in his reflections, to one of the more curious matters relative to Miss Maggie McCall. How the hell, he wondered, had she ever managed to get into his trigonometry class?
It was assumed, naturally, that anyone enrolled in trig had satisfied certain essential prerequisites, such as algebra and geometry, but there was not the slightest evidence that Miss McCall knew any more about the latter than the former, which was about as much as you could teach a cat in three easy lessons. It was certain that her record had been checked upon enrollment, however, which indicated that these essential subjects were on her transcript, if not in her head.
Brad, who possessed his share of professional cynicism, was reasonably certain how this had come to pass, and it could be safely deduced from the evidence that Miss McCall, although abysmally ignorant in certain areas, was by no means stupid, and that she was, on the contrary, master of a technique for acquiring unearned credits that was palpably admirable and probably exciting.
Feeling again the pleasant prickliness, Brad got up and walked over to the windows and assumed his former position, hands holding each other at the base of his spine.
Using a short focus, he examined briefly his own reflection, taking note of the thick brown hair parted cleanly at the side and worn rather long over the ears in order to display the dusting of gray that made such an intriguing contrast with his boyish face.
He was a handsome man, no question about that. He had, in fact, often been compared in appearance with the late Ronald Coleman, and there was indeed a genuine resemblance, except that he, Brad, wore no mustache and had the added attraction of dimples. He looked a good ten years younger that he was, and he felt in certain respects ten years younger than he looked.
Lengthening his focus, he sought the red squirrel among the walnut trees and could not find him.
Releasing his right hand from his left, he looked at his watch for no good reason except that he was restless and rather bored with the prospect of classes until three o’clock, which was, suddenly, an hour of the day that he was impatient to have arrive.