The Blunderer (7 page)

“Sunday!”

Walter swallowed. He remembered he had taken a long walk Sunday morning, the morning after he met the girl. “Haven't we got reason enough to end this without dragging in fantasies?”

Clara's mouth trembled. “You won't give me another chance?”

“No.”

“Then I'll take that veronal tonight,” Clara said in a suddenly calm voice.

“No, you won't,” Walter went to the bar, poured a brandy for her and brought it to her.

She took it in her shaking fingers and drained it at once, not even looking to see what it was. “You think I'm joking, don't you, because I didn't the other time. But I will now!”

“That's a threat, darling.”

“Don't call me ‘darling,' you despise me.” She stood up. “Leave me alone! At least give me some privacy!”

Walter felt another start of alarm. She did look insane now with her brown eyes hard and bright as stone, her figure rigid as if an epileptic seizure had caught her and left her standing balanced like a column of rock. “Privacy for what?”

“To kill myself!”

He made an involuntary half turn to go to her dressing-table upstairs where he thought the pills were, then looked back at her.

“You don't know where they are. I've hidden them.”

“Clara, let's not be melodramatic.”

“Then leave me alone!”

“All right, I will.”

He ran upstairs to his study, closed the door, and walked around for a few moments, drawing on a cigarette. He didn't believe she would. It was partly a threat and partly her real terror of being alone with herself. But it would subside again. Tomorrow she would be as hard and self-righteous as ever. And meanwhile was he supposed to play nursemaid to her all her life, be chained to her because of a threat? He yanked the door open and ran downstairs.

She was not in the living-room, and he called to her, then ran up the stairs again. He found her in the bedroom. She turned quickly to him, concealing something in the white dress she carried, or perhaps only holding the dress against her while she waited for him to leave. Then as she shook the dress out and slipped a hanger into it he saw that she had nothing else in her hands. When she walked to the closet Walter saw a brandy inhaler half full of brandy on the windowsill. He looked at it incredulously for a moment.

“Why don't you leave me alone?” she asked. “Why don't you go out and take a long walk?”

Jeff stopped his gay trotting around the room, sat down and looked straight at Walter as if he waited, too, for him to get out.

“All right, I just might do that,” Walter said, and he let the bedroom door slam when he went out.

He went back to his study. He was not staying to protect her, he told himself, he just didn't happen to want to take a walk. He started violently as the door opened behind him.

“I thought I should remind you, to make you feel a little better, that after tonight you can be free to spend
all
your time with Ellie Briess!”

Walter had a glass paperweight in his hand, and for an instant he wanted to throw it at her. He banged the paperweight down on the desk and strode past her out of the room, angry as he had never been before, yet still able to see himself objectively—a furiously angry man, hurling shirts and a pair of trousers into a suitcase, toothbrush, washrag, and as an afterthought the briefcase he would need tomorrow. He snapped the suitcase shut.

“The house is all yours tonight,” he called to her as he passed her in the hall.

Walter got into his car. He was on the North Island Parkway before he realized he did not know where he was going. To New York? He could go to Jon's. But he didn't want to spill out all his troubles to Jon. Walter took the next exit lane and found himself in a little community that he did not recognize. He saw a movie theater close by. Walter parked his car and went in. He sat in the balcony and stared at the screen and smoked. He was going to force himself to sit there until they got around to the animated cartoon that he had come in on. Somewhere near the end of the feature picture, Walter thought, if Clara
had
taken the sleeping pills, it was already too late for a stomach pump to be of much help. A thrust of panic caught him unawares.

He got up and went out.

7

O
n the bed-table stood a greenish bottle that was empty and a glass with a little water in it.

“
Clara
?” He picked her up by her shoulders and shook her.

She didn't stir at all, her mouth hung open. Walter grabbed her wrist. There was a pulse and it felt even, strong and normal, he thought. He went into the bathroom and wet a bath towel with cold water, brought it back and wiped her face with it. There was no reaction. He slapped her face.

“Clara! Wake up!”

He sat her up, but she was limp as a rag doll. Hopeless to try to get coffee down her throat, he thought. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth. He ran into the hall to the telephone.

Dr. Pietrich was not in, but his housemaid gave him the number of another doctor. The second doctor said he could be there in fifteen minutes.

Twenty-five minutes went by, and Walter was in terror that she was going to cease breathing before his eyes, but the shallow breathing went on. The doctor arrived and went briskly to work with a stomach pump. Walter poured warm water for him into the funnel at one end of the tube. Nothing came out of her but the water, colored with a little bloody mucous. The doctor gave her two injections, then tried the pump again. Walter watched her half-open eyes, the limp unnatural-looking mouth, for any signs of consciousness. He saw none at all.

“Do you think she'll live?” he asked.

“How do I know?” the doctor said irritably. “She's not waking up. She'll have to go to the hospital.”

Walter disliked the doctor intensely.

A few moments later Walter carried Clara in his arms down the stairs and out to the car.

Some of the doctors, Walter thought, acted as if it were most annoying that they had to bother with a suicide case. Or as if they assumed automatically that he was to blame.

“Ever had any trouble with her heart?” a doctor asked.

“No,” Walter said. “Do you think she'll live?”

The doctors eyebrows went up indifferently, and he continued to write in his tablet. “Depends on her heart,” the doctor said. He led the way down the corridor.

She was lying under a transparent oxygen tent. The nurse was rubbing her arm for another injection, and Walter winced as the big needle slid two inches up her vein. Clara didn't twitch.

“She'll just either sleep it off or not,” the doctor said.

Walter leaned over and studied Clara's face intently. Her mouth was still lifeless, misshapen, lips slightly drawn back from her teeth. It gave her face an expression Walter had never seen before, an expression like that of death, he thought. He believed now that Clara didn't want to live. And instead of her unconscious will working to live as a normal person's would, he imagined her will pulling her towards death, and he felt helpless.

By two in the morning there was no change in her condition, and Walter went home. He called the hospital at intervals, and the message was always “No change.” At about six in the morning he had a cup of coffee and a brandy and drove off to the hospital. Claudia came at seven, and he didn't want to see her because he didn't know what to tell her.

Clara lay in exactly the same position. He thought her eyelids had swollen a little. There was something horribly fetuslike about the swollen eyelids and the expressionless mouth. The doctor told him that her blood pressure had decreased slightly, which was a bad sign, but so far as her heart went, she seemed to be holding her own.

“Do you think she'll live?”

“I just can't answer that question. She took enough to kill her, if you hadn't brought her here. We should know in another forty-eight hours.”

“Forty-eight hours!”

“The coma could last even longer, but if it does I doubt if she'll pull out.”

Around nine o'clock Walter drove to New York. His suitcase was still in the back of the car, and he got his briefcase out of it before he went up to the office. It seemed to him that he had never intended to go to an hotel with the suitcase, that it was only a prop in his real intent to get out of the house in order to let Clara kill herself without his interference. Walter could not escape the fact that he had known she was going to take the pills. He could tell himself that he hadn't really thought she would take them, because she hadn't the other time, but this time had been different—and he knew it. In a sense, he thought, he had killed her—if she died. And therefore he thought he must have wanted to kill her.

Walter skipped lunch and sat at his desk, trying to make sense out of Dick's notes on the Parsons and Sullivan interviews. Walter read one passage over and over, without being able to decide whether a piece was missing or whether his own mind could no longer attach a meaning to the words. Suddenly he reached for the telephone and dialed Jon's number. Walter asked if he could see him right away, in Jon's office.

“Is it about Clara?” Jon asked.

“Yes.” Walter hadn't known his voice would betray him, but only Clara could put him in such a state, and Jon knew it.

Jon had whiskey in his office and offered Walter some, but Walter declined it.

“Clara's in the hospital in a coma. She may die,” Walter said. “She took sleeping pills last night. Every pill in the house. She must have had about thirty.” Walter told Jon about their talk of a divorce, her threatening to kill herself, and his leaving the house.

“This was the first time you talked about a divorce, was it?” Jon asked.

“No.” Walter had told Jon months ago that he was considering a divorce, but he hadn't told Jon that he had talked to Clara. “She threatened to kill herself the first time I asked her for a divorce. That's why I didn't believe her yesterday.”

“And that's why you patched it up the first time, because she threatened?”

“I suppose so,” Walter said. “One of the reasons.”

“I know.” Jon stood up and looked out of the window. “And you reach a point finally, don't you—as you did yesterday?”

“What do you mean?”

“You reach a point where you say, ‘All right, I'll damn well let her kill herself. I've had enough.'”

Walter stared at the large brass penholder on Jon's desk that he had given to Jon on the first anniversary of his magazine. “Yes. That's it.” Walter put his hands over his face. “That's a kind of murder, isn't it?”

“No one would say it's murder who knows the facts. You don't have to tell anyone about it, anyone who doesn't know the facts. Stop turning it over and over in your mind, the fact that you walked out.”

“All right,” Walter said.

“She'll probably pull through. She's got a tough constitution, Walt.”

Walter looked at his friend. Jon was smiling, and Walter gave a little smile in return. He felt suddenly better.

“The real problem is, what happens when she wakes up? Do you still want your divorce?”

Walter had to force himself to imagine Clara well again. His mind was obsessed with remorse, with pity for her. “Yes,” he said.

“Then get it. There are ways. Even if you have to go to Reno. Don't let yourself be paralyzed by a pint-sized Medusa any more.”

Walter felt a rise of resentment, and then he thought of Jon, paralyzed by his love for his wife when she was having the affair with the man called Brinton. Walter had sat with Jon almost every night for two months, but finally Jon had got over it, and got his divorce. “All right,” Walter said.

Walter drove by the hospital on the way home that evening. Now her fingernails were bluish. Her face looked puffier. But the doctor said she was holding her own. Walter didn't believe it. He felt she was going to die.

He went home, intending to take a hot bath and shave and try to eat something. He fell asleep in the bath-tub, which he had never done before in his life. He only awakened when Claudia called him to tell him his dinner was nearly ready.

“You'd better get some rest, Mr. Stackhouse, or you'll be good and sick again yourself,” Claudia said to him.

Walter had told her that Clara was in the hospital with a bad case of flu.

The telephone rang while he was eating, and Walter ran for it, thinking it was the hospital.

“Hello, Mr. Stackhouse. This is Ellie Briess. Are you all over the flu?”

“Oh yes—thanks.”

“Does your wife like bulbs?”

“Bulbs?”

“Tulip bulbs. I've got two dozen of them. I just had dinner with a supervisor over at Harridge, and she insisted that I take them, but I've no place to plant them. They're very special bulbs. I thought you might be able to use them.”

“Oh—thanks for thinking of us.”

“I can drop them by now, if you're going to be home for the next twenty minutes.”

“All right. Do that,” Walter said clumsily.

He felt very strange as he turned from the telephone. He remembered Clara's accusations. He imagined her numbed lips moving as she said it again. Like a prophecy from the dying.

A few minutes later, Ellie Briess was at the door. She had a cardboard carton in her hands. “Here they are. If you're busy, I won't come in.”

“I'm not busy. Do come in.” He held the door for her. “Would you care for some coffee?”

“Yes. Thank you.” She took a folded paper from her handbag and laid it on the coffee table. “Here's the instructions for the bulbs.”

Walter looked at her. She looked older and more sophisticated, and he realized suddenly she was wearing a chic black dress and high-heeled black suede pumps that made her taller and slimmer. “Do you get the Harridge job?” he asked.

“Yes. Today: That's who I was having dinner with—my future boss.”