Eleven (16 page)

Lucille was rapt by the conversation. “How do you mean different, ma’am?”

“Why, I’ve just told you, my dear. And I refuse to lower your salary because that would be sheer exploitation. In fact, if you ever change your mind and want a raise—”

“Oh, no, ma’am. . . . but I just wish there was something more I could do for you . . . all of you. . . .”

“Lucille! You’re working for us, aren’t you? Taking care of our children. What could be more important than that?”

“But I mean something bigger—I mean more—”

“Nonsense, Lucille,” Mrs. Christiansen interrupted. “Just because the people you were with before were not so—friendly as we are doesn’t mean you have to work your fingers to the bone for us.” She waited for the girl to make some move to go, but she still stood by the desk, her face puzzled. “Mr. Christiansen and I are very well pleased with you, Lucille.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

She went back to the nursery where the children were playing. She had not made Mrs. Christiansen understand. If she could just go back and explain what she felt, tell her about her mother and her fear of herself for so many months, how she had never dared take a drink or even a cigarette . . . and how just being with the family in this beautiful house had made her well again . . . telling her all that might relieve her. She turned toward the door, but the thought of disturbing her or boring her with the story, a servant girl’s story, made
her stop. So during the rest of the day she carried her unexpressed gratitude like a great weight in her breast.

That night she sat in her room with the light on until after twelve o’clock. She had her cigarettes now, and she allowed herself three in the evening, but even those were sufficient to set her blood tingling, to relax her mind, to make her dream heroic dreams. And when the three cigarettes were smoked, and she would have liked another, she rose very light in the head and put the cigarette pack in her top drawer to close away temptation. Just as she slid the drawer she noticed on her handkerchief box the two twenty-dollar bills the Christiansens had given her. She took them now, and sat down again in her chair.

From the book of matches she took a match, struck it, and leaned it, burning end down, against the side of her ashtray. Slowly she struck matches one after another and laid them strategically to make a tiny, flickering, well-controlled fire. When the matches were gone, she tore the pasteboard cover into little bits and dropped them in slowly. Finally she took the twenty-dollar bills and with some effort tore bits from them of the same size. These, too, she meted to the fire.

Mrs. Christiansen did not understand, but if she saw
this
, she might. Still
this
was not enough. Mere faithful service was not enough either. Anyone would give that, for money. She was different. Had not Mrs. Christiansen herself told her that? Then she remembered what else she had said: “Mr. Christiansen and I are very well pleased with you, Lucille.”

The memory of those words brought her up from her chair with an enchanted smile upon her lips. She felt wonderfully strong and secure in her own strength of mind and her position in the household.
Mr. Christiansen and I are very well pleased with you, Lucille
. There
was really only one thing lacking in her happiness. She had to prove herself in crisis.

If only a plague like those she had read of in the Bible . . . “And it came to pass that there was a great plague over all the land.” That was how the Bible would say it. She imagined waters lapping higher against the big house, until they swept almost into the nursery. She would rescue the children and swim with them to safety, wherever that might be.

She moved restlessly about the room.

Or if there came an earthquake. . . . She would rush in among falling walls and drag the children out. Perhaps she would go back for some trifle, like Nicky’s lead soldiers or Heloise’s paint set, and be crushed to death. Then the Christiansens would know her devotion.

Or if there might be a fire. Anyone might have a fire. Fires were common things and needed no wrathful visitations from the upper world. There might be a terrible fire just with the gasoline in the garage and a match.

She went downstairs, through the inside door that opened to the garage. The tank was three feet high and entirely full, so that unless she had been inspired with the necessity and importance of her deed, she would not have been able to lift the thing over the threshold of the garage and of the servants’ house, too. She rolled the tank across the yard in the same manner as she had seen men roll beer barrels and ashcans. It made no noise on the grass and only a brief bump and rumble over one of the flagstone paths, lost in the night.

No lights shone at any of the windows, but if they had, Lucille would not have been deterred. She would not have been deterred had Mr. Christiansen himself been standing there by the fountain,
for probably she would not have seen him. And if she had, was she not about to do a noble thing? No, she would have seen only the house and the children’s faces in the room upstairs.

She unscrewed the cap and poured some gasoline on a corner of the house, rolled the tank farther, poured more against the white shingles, and so on until she reached the far corner. Then she struck her match and walked back the way she had come, touching off the wet places. Without a backward glance she went to stand at the door of the servants’ house and watch.

The flames were first pale and eager, then they became yellow with touches of red. As Lucille watched, all the tension that was left in her, in body or mind, flowed evenly upward and was lifted from her forever, leaving her muscles and brain free for the voluntary tension of an athlete before a starting gun. She would let the flames leap tall, even to the nursery window, before she rushed in, so that the danger might be at its highest. A smile like that of a saint settled on her mouth, and anyone seeing her there in the doorway, her face glowing in the lambent light, would certainly have thought her a beautiful young woman.

She had lit the fire at five places, and these now crept up the house like the fingers of a hand, warm and flickering, gentle and caressing. Lucille smiled and held herself in check. Then suddenly the gasoline tank, having grown too warm, exploded with a sound like a cannon and lighted the entire scene for an instant.

As though this had been the signal for which she waited, Lucille went confidently forward.

ANOTHER BRIDGE TO CROSS

The top of the car was down, and Merrick saw the man on the bridge from a good mile away. The car in which Merrick rode was speeding toward him, and Merrick thought: “It’s like something in a Bergman film. The man has a gun in his hand now, and when the car gets so near the bridge he can’t miss, he’ll fire it at me, I’ll be hit through the chest, and that’s probably just as well.” Merrick kept looking at the hunched figure on the bridge—the man was leaning on his forearms on the rail—both because he expected catastrophe, and because the man on the bridge was the only human figure in the landscape to look at. They were in Italy on the southern Riviera. The Mediterranean’s serene blueness lay on their left, and on the right powdery green olive fields, that looked in need of water, straggled up the hills until stopped by the rocky feet of mountains. The bridge spanned the road, carried a crossroad, and was at least three stories high.

But the man did not move as Merrick’s car reached the bridge. Merrick saw a breeze stir his dark hair. The danger was over.

Then above the roar of an oncoming truck, Merrick heard a faint thud, as if a sandbag had fallen off the back of the car. He turned around, raising himself slightly. “Stop!” he shouted to his driver.

A dark blob lay on the road under the bridge, and Merrick looked around just in time to see the truck pass over it with the left pairs of its enormous double tires. The truck then screeched to a halt. The driver was getting out. Merrick pulled his hand down his forehead, over his eyes.

“What happened?” asked Merrick’s driver, yanking his sunglasses off, squinting behind him to see. He backed the car.

“A man was killed,” Merrick said.

The driver backed the car neatly to the extreme right-hand side of the road, pulled the handbrake, and jumped out.

For a few moments, the driver and the truck driver had an animated conversation which Merrick could not hear. Merrick did not get out of the car. The truck driver had pulled the body onto the grass at the side of the road. No doubt he was explaining to Merrick’s driver that he could not possibly have stopped, because the man jumped right in front of him.

“
Dio mio
,” Merrick’s driver said, coming back, getting into the car. “A suicide. Not an old man, either.” The driver shook his head.

Merrick said nothing.

They drove on.

After ten minutes, the driver said, “A pity you don’t like Amalfi, sir.”

“Yes. Well—” Merrick was in no mood for talking. His Italian was limited to a basic vocabulary, which however he knew thoroughly and pronounced correctly. Amalfi was where he had had his honeymoon
twenty-five years ago. No use mentioning that to an Italian from Messina who was only about thirty himself.

They stopped at a village Merrick had seen on the map in Palermo and inquired about. The tourist agent had said, “Very pretty, very quiet,” so Merrick intended to try it. He had telephoned from Messina and booked a room and bath. The driver took him to the hotel, and Merrick paid him off, tipping him so well the driver broke into a big smile.

“Many thanks, sir. May you enjoy your holiday here!” Then he was gone, back to Messina.

The Hotel Paradiso was very pretty, but not what Merrick wanted. He knew this after two minutes’ inspection of its main hall with its inner court of little fruit trees and a sixteenth-century well, open to the sky. The tiles of the floors were lovely, the view from his window of the Mediterranean as commanding as that from the bridge of a ship, but it was not what he wanted. Nevertheless, Merrick stayed the night, and the next morning hired a car to go on. While he waited in the hotel for the car to arrive, he looked in the small local newspaper for anything about the man who had jumped from the bridge.

It was a short one-column item on the second page. His name was Dino Bartucci, 32, unemployed mason, with a wife and five children (their names and ages were given, all were under ten); his wife was in poor health, and Bartucci had been extremely depressed and anxious for many months. He had twice said to friends, “If I were dead, the State would at least give my wife and children a small pension.”

Merrick knew how small that pension must be. There was the extreme, Merrick thought, of human anxiety: poverty, a sick wife, hungry children, and no work. And he found it mysterious that he
had correctly anticipated death as soon as he saw the man, but that he had imagined it turned against himself.

Merrick got into the car with the new driver. At one, they reached Amalfi, and stopped for lunch. The driver went off by himself with the thousand lire Merrick gave him for his meal, and Merrick lunched at a hotel whose dining terrace overlooked the sea. He had been here for lunch or dinner a couple of times with Helena, but he did not dwell on that as he slowly ate the good meal. He found that being in Amalfi did not trouble him. Why should it? The very hotel where he and she had stayed had been destroyed one winter in a landslide caused by heavy rains. They had built it back, of course, and in the former style, Merrick had heard, but he was sure this was not quite true. There would have been a few changes, probably in the direction of enlargement, and they could not have recovered every rock and stone and tree. But if the hotel had remained exactly the same, Merrick would not have gone to it now. He knew that his own memory in twenty-five years must have undergone slow changes, and that reality would be a shock, useless and depressing.

Merrick lingered over his lunch, then had a leisurely coffee and brandy down on the main plaza. It was nearly five before they went on.

The next town of any size was Positano. It was the end of the day, and a huge orange sun was just dropping into the sea beyond the purple hump of Capri. Merrick imagined that he heard the sun hiss as it touched the water, but the hiss was the lappings of waves against the rocky cliffs below. Positano, though objectively beautiful set in its curve of mountains—like the banked benches of an
amphitheatre whose stage was the flat sea in front—looked no more inviting to Merrick than a half dozen other villages he had seen. Still, he told the driver that he would stay here for the night. The driver was quite surprised, because Merrick had told him they might drive to Naples and even to Rome. Merrick said he would pay him what he would have paid him to go to Rome, and this pleased the driver.

“I know the best hotel here, sir. Shall I take you there?”

Merrick did not want to come to a decision so soon. “No. Drive through the town first. Please.”

The road took them above the town, round the semicircle of the amphitheatre. There were no roads in the town proper, only steps and slanting footpaths.

“What about this?” Merrick said, indicating a hotel on their left. Its wrought-iron sign said Hotel Orlando, flat and black against its white front.

“Very well.” The driver pulled into the parking area in front of the hotel.

A bellboy came out.

It was probably a very ordinary hotel, Merrick thought, but it looked rather expensive, so he supposed it would be clean and the service good. Merrick paid the driver and tipped him.

Merrick undressed in his room and had a slow, hot bath. Then he put on his dressing-gown and ordered a half bottle of Champagne to be sent to his room. With the cheer of the Champagne, he forced himself to write a postcard to his sister in New York and to his daughter-in-law, both of whom were worried about him. To both he wrote the same thing:

Having a very enjoyable time, resting as prescribed. Joining the Denises in Munich soon. Hope you are well. Don’t worry. Much love,