Hanno’s Doll (5 page)

Yes, he had told himself that if he ever had to explain it to the police, he would ask them whether they could, with all the means of hiding the body handy, have passed up the opportunity. “I couldn't undo what had happened. The boy was dead … I couldn't change that.” He would make a Hanno face, shrug a Hanno shrug. “I couldn't pass it up that night,” he would say. “Be honest, be honest now, gentlemen, could you?”

He had told himself that if he changed his mind in the morning, the beauty of the funk hole included being able to change his mind. Irresistible!

He had moved away from the telephone and opened the front door carefully and closed it softly after him, then had needed to return for his flashlight because, although the terrace light, still on, showed the body, it did not extend to the end of the grounds where the funk hole was.

But if someone should come along when nobody ever did and see him? Well, he had decided, that was up to the Fates. Shading the light, he had gone down the path to the gardener's shed. (“Cultivate your garden,” Voltaire said.) He had taken the spade Felix had used. He had pried up the edge of the wooden tray-door, seeing the plants black and burned by the first frosts. (This had been much easier for him than for the frail Felix. Easy had done it.)

He had laid the door lid back on the ground carefully, with as little damage as possible to the dead autumnal plants, and had then let himself into the vault. Felix had showed him how it was stocked with supplies. Felix, breathless, had sat on that army cot in the corner and exhibited the periscope he had arranged to let in sufficient air. (That, though, would not be necessary, he had noted. Nor the food. Like an Egyptian burial it would look, he had decided, with this food for the departed soul.)

He had pulled himself out of the vault, his flesh creeping with the cold and damp and had gone back to the front door to open it a little, so that the light from the living room would help him see farther across the grounds, since he could not train the flashlight while he carried the boy. He had warned himself that he must not slip. In case this burial wasn't to be temporary. (He must remember to tell the police that what he had done on that night had been accomplished more easily because he kept reminding himself that it wasn't irrevocable. That he might still go into the house and pick up the telephone. Yes, that had been a real part of it.)

He had warned himself—just in case he did not change his mind and tell the police—that he must not leave signs which could talk. Yes, wash the terrace stones of the blood, he had warned himself, for the blood could speak. But if the blood spilled in accidents cried out, then the whole world would resound.

He had told himself, One thing at a time. Oh, God, what a one thing it had been, though!

He had tucked the stained bathrobe around the body in a travesty of the way he tucked Puppchen in each evening. “Good night, my darling.” And that body, not stiff, but cold, cold! He had hoisted it over his shoulder and, bending under the weight, had started down the path. It was only a hundred yards to the funk hole, but it had seemed a thousand. (It had been as if he had only been able to think in clichés—a hundred yards that felt a thousand was a cliché—because he had not felt. What he had been able to feel that night was Puppchen's body, cold, cold as this boy's if he allowed the police to come and punish him and leave her alone again.)

Then there had been a sound which had been only a cat, only a cliché cat from the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. “
Silent be! It was the cat!
” Yes, he had felt from the beginning that it wasn't real, was theatre. This was what he had tried to explain to the K.K.K. He wasn't there. It had never happened. But, nevertheless, he had not put the body down on the ground where it might leave traces, but leaning his back against the oak tree, the oak tree from which little acorns grew, had waited there until he could do the other fifty yards.

If he could get the boy into the funk hole, if he could pull the trap door over him, then, he had told himself, the best way would be to preserve this feeling that it never had happened, that it wasn't real. A truck had gone by. “I'm going to catch a hitch back to New York on a truck,” the boy had said. The sound of the truck had set him into motion again.

He had not permitted himself to feel how the boy must look in his arms. This, too, must remain a cliché, a movie cliché, for he had carried many bodies before, on celluloid. Always the dead hand flopping out of the covering, always that pathetic shot of the sole of one shoe, a flash of dead eyes, a lolling head.

It was not the body of a boy he was carrying, he had told himself, merely one more story line.

Then he had reached the funk hole and knew by the buzzing in his ears that it was good he had reached it. But, even then, he had carefully lowered the body into the pit. Why not have dropped it, simply let it fall? He had shoved the boy with all his strength when he had been real, but then it had turned to celluloid, and he had needed to lower the body carefully, to treat it reverently, because he was not playing a “murderer.” His role was that of an unfortunate victim of fate with whom the audience must be made to sympathize; therefore, he had composed the limbs decently and reverently closed the eyes.

His breath had been like a bellows doing these preposterous things—He remembered his bellowing breath like an accompanying wind, like a hot wind from hell. And then he had climbed out and let the lid down gently, treading to make sure it was flat again. He had believed that with the fallen leaves, the general disrepair of autumn, nobody would know. Unless he chose to tell them. Unless he changed his mind.

There had been a dizziness inside his head. The lung bellows no longer worked automatically; he had had to pull for each breath because there seemed to be an impediment between his lungs and the night air. He remembered the effort it had been to put the spade back in the shed and close it, then to open it again and take out the rusty water can and find where the faucet was, to which, in the summer, Felix attached his hose, to fill the can with water. With two cans full, he had sluiced the stones, removing the scant traces of blood which remained. (If any search was made, he would have told them the story. How could he have known they would come when he was in the hospital and, not hearing what had happened from him, treat it as a murder?)

Lights out. Door locked. Fire screen up. He had creaked and pounded his exhausted way up the stairs. Once in his bedroom, it wouldn't have mattered if he awakened Puppchen again. If he did, she would call to him and he would answer. It was only so, that if she ever called him, he would be there to answer, that he had just hidden the boy.

He had stood under the shower and let the water, first hot, then cold, wash every trace of it away, mold, leaves, sweat and fear. Then he had listened at Puppchen's door to make sure she was still asleep, and then, then, had dropped into bed.

In the morning he would go over what he had done. If, by daylight, it looked unsubstantial, garish, theatrical, he would contact the police.

There he was, the K.K.K.

He closed the door behind him. “Your wife is with her lawyers, Mr. Dietrich. I talked to Dr. Leopold and Mrs. Leopold. I t-t-told them wh-wh-what you told m-m-me. They'll t-t-tell your w-w-wife wh-when she comes back f-from the l-lawyers.”

Her lawyers from New York City. The carrion birds had smelled the blood.

“The l-l-lawyers didn't w-want to m-meet at your house because if th-there's a l-leak, the reporters w-would be on their n-necks in a minute.”

The carrion birds and the talking birds, the vultures and the parrots. “Did you say I must see my wife as soon as possible?”

The K.K.K. nodded.

The K.K.K. would not be looking at him the way he was looking if he had not made as good a case as possible for him with the Ernest and Anni. “What did Dr. Leopold say when you explained how this had happened?”

“He s-s-said he knew it w-was something like that. He s-s-said to t-tell you they all kn-knew it was s-something l-like that.”

He thanked the K.K.K. and closed his eyes as if he wanted to sleep, and the K.K.K. softly went to take up his sentinel post outside. A kind young man. If he and the Ernest understood, so would the others.

And Puppchen? Did Puppchen remember and therefore understand already? Did she, knowing now when it had happened, remember the next morning? Did she remember coming into his room that morning after, creeping into his bed, so that after that detached and floating moment between sleep and waking, when you are no one, when the day to come could be anybody's day and the moment when it became that particular day coming only to him, himself after the night he had had, and he lay, an oversized man in a narrow bed contemplating it, she was there with him? Did she now recall the country breeze that had come through his open window and played with the fine hairs on her forehead, raised them up and laid them down, and how she had smiled at the touch and said lazily, “I'm so glad we came here, Hanno. I just love it here.”

Did she now remember that he hadn't answered, and how she had taken his hand and pressed it to her breast and told him again that this was where she wanted to have their baby; this was where she wanted to stay with the baby and with him?

Did she now remember that because he did not answer her immediately his hesitation had puzzled her. (Faced with this particular day after that terrible evening, he was wondering whether he shouldn't tell her then, and then go down and inform the police.) Did she remember that his hesitation had alarmed her, because with them there never was a pause between something asked and something granted. Did she remember that she had pressed his hand to her little breast and that he had pulled his hand away, pulled himself away, had gone to the window and stood in that country breeze on his suddenly sweating body, not knowing what to say, knowing that he must say now, that now was the moment or never?

She had called out, “What is it, Hanno?”

Puppchen did not know, of course, that he had just seen the dog outside and had taken it for an omen. (“How superstitious you are, Hanno,” Anni said scornfully. “You're like the peasant women in the market.”) The dog had been down there nosing about in the flower beds, as far as he could make out from the window, just above where the funk hole was. The dog had nosed awhile and then, as he watched, begun to dig.

“Hanno, what are you looking at?” Puppchen asked.

He had remained silent and watched the dog. If he had panicked—if it was to be a series of frights, dogs, cats, alarms, he would have turned around and told her then. If that dog had known what was underneath, then others would know what was underneath. But he had not seriously believed that the dog could know what lay beneath the soil and wood and was encased in cement any more than he believed the stories about dogs left thousands of miles away who somehow found their way back to their owners.

“Hanno!” Puppchen called and came barefoot to his side, just as the dog was leaving to sniff and dig in some other spot for reasons known only to itself and other dogs. “Hanno!” Puppchen said.

“What is it, Puppchen?”

“What? I said I wanted to stay here because … Didn't you hear me, Hanno?”

He turned away from the window and held out his arms to her. He said, “We will stay, my darling.”

He remembered that on that morning Philip Scott had come to breakfast to talk over cuts in the third act of the Christmas play. Philip had been Felix's assistant, just not talented enough on his own, just too much a copy to make a success on his own, or, more simply, just not aggressive enough. Not Broadway, Philip, and with sense enough to want to stay where he belonged; but with the gift, the great gift, of enjoying what others had without covetousness. (Philip had enjoyed his success without envying it; Philip had enjoyed Puppchen without coveting her.)

That morning Puppchen, in her new role of mother-to-be, of woman-to-be, was downstairs before him, ordering French toast all round. (Usually it was he who told Mrs. Brown, their
daily
, what to cook and what to order and even what she had left dirty.) Puppchen had been dressed and down on that morning before he could be; stiff he had been. By the time he came out on the balcony, Puppchen and Philip Scott had finished their breakfasts.

He had called down, “Good morning, Philip,” and Philip and Puppchen both looked up at the balcony, both smiling up at him as if a fat man in a gaudy flannel shirt and workman's trousers was a lovely sight.

Philip had been telling Puppchen some story about him, Puppchen said, giggling. It had been, as usual, an old Wien story of Felix's in which he was the buffoon-hero, a combination which Felix had liked, perhaps which Felix had invented. Philip remembered Felix's anecdotes and kept telling them to Puppchen.

Philip had been prepared by Felix to hero-worship him on sight because of these very stories. When Philip heard that they had bought Felix's house, he had been in seventh heaven. Yet, if he hadn't come, the college might have made Philip head of the department; good directing heads weren't easy to come by. (Forget Philip's goodness!)

That morning, after breakfast, the day shining and clean after the rain of the evening before, he had settled down to work with Philip. (It had not happened was the idea. Nothing had happened.) Puppchen remarked happily that in New York Hanno had never stayed home to work. She liked his staying home to work.

“You do like it here, then, Puppchen?” Unlike the students Philip had been permitted to call her by the pet name.

“I love it here. I was just telling Hanno I did.”

“We love you here,” Philip said. He had a thin, blushing skin. “Puppchen, why don't you make Hanno stay here? Work on him. We're not that far from Broadway. I mean when Hanno has a play, he could be in New York and stay here the rest of the time. If he'd be some kind of honorary staff member … Boy … the dean and the Executive Committee would be out of their minds with joy. Make him, Puppchen; this would be where he could work out ideas. Some of the kids are wonderful to work with.”