This Sweet Sickness (15 page)

And what was she doing tomorrow evening? He wanted to know only so he could think of her doing it. “All right, then. I'll call you Saturday. As soon as I've found a house. Would you mind that?”

She said she wouldn't mind it. They exchanged good-byes, the deadly clichés that put an end to voices. David sat there, trying to breathe slowly before he went out and possibly had another encounter with Wes.

Wes sat with one elbow jutting out, one hand on a thigh, nodding as if he had heard and understood everything. “Well, is she going to marry you? Is she even going to see you?”

Helen laughed emptily.

Because he had not a positive thing to say back, David's frustration rose like a black cloud before his face. Wes reached out to grab his wrist, and David recoiled. “Don't touch me!”

He walked to the door and banged it open with the side of his fist.

When he got back to Mrs. McCartney's, there was a message that Effie Brennan had called and wanted him to call back. David wadded it up and threw it in his wastebasket.

20

T
hough it might have been suspected at Mrs. McCartney's that he went to New York to see a girl, Effie Brennan within twenty-four hours had assured Mrs. McCartney that he was in love with a certain girl who lived way up in New England, in fact she thought the girl was going to school in Maine, “so much in love he won't look at another girl.” Witness herself, David supposed, attractive and willing and not even honored by a movie invitation from David Kelsey. Effie called David again to tell him what she had told Mrs. McCartney, and to ask him if she had not said the right thing. She said that Mrs. McCartney had called her to poke about and ask if she knew what he did on his weekends in New York.

“Thank you. You did say the right thing,” David said, for the first time grateful to Effie, grateful to her for not disclosing Annabelle to the people in the house.

What pained David most, even tortured him, was that Mrs. Beecham knew now that he had no mother, and that the bedjackets she had knitted, the potted plants, the crocheted doilies, and the box of stationery Christmas before last had had no recipient. David had gone to her and apologized, tried to explain, and it had been one of the few times since the age of fourteen that tears had come in his eyes, and all in all with his getting down on one knee to her, he supposed he had made a fool of himself, but Mrs. Beecham was the only one in the house who counted, and he had tried to tell her that. She hadn't said much, just looked bewildered and disappointed. But on the other hand, David thought with some amusement, his nonexistent mother had sent Mrs. Beecham quite a few presents, too.

The talk of a girl had caused a startling change in the attitude of the people in the house. David knew what they were thinking: not that he had done anything specifically wrong or evil, but that he was a man with clay feet like all the rest, a man in love with a woman whom for some reason he had not yet been able to marry and evidently didn't even see very often, a man like most others and not a sexless saint. Now their eyes wavered when they looked at his face. They were like children for whom some legend had exploded.

On Saturday morning, David had a letter from Annabelle in the ten o'clock mail. He hoped she had changed her mind about going with him to look for a house, but the letter did not even mention that. Standing in the downstairs hall, he read it quickly, suffered a sense of shame like a slap in the face in public, though no one saw him, stuffed the letter into his pocket, and went out to his car. He had his route planned, and he concentrated on that for a few minutes as he drove. On the dull throughway north, the letter returned to reproach him. Annabelle had said she wished he would not be insistent about seeing her at this time, when she had her hands so full with the child and things to settle up around the house. It was worse than that, and he could not bear to recall the very phrases. Nothing about being questioned by the police. Yet the very coolness of the letter suggested to David that she had been questioned, that she might have told them about his having a house, might have told them about all his letters: Annabelle was not the kind of girl who would write all that out in a letter. Yet wouldn't the police have tried to see him immediately, if she had told them all that? Wasn't it more likely that Annabelle would try to hide or minimize those facts in order to make Gerald appear less a killer? David simply didn't know. But he made a mighty resolution to change his attitude toward Annabelle, to be less importunate, more thoughtful, more patient. He would mail her the little present, a handwoven stole he had found in a store on Main Street, and also the diamond clip, and in Troy he would look for some music books for her, Mozart and Schubert and Chopin and whatever else he could find that she might like.

The house he liked best out of five on Saturday was overshadowed by one he found Sunday afternoon, a two-story house of red and white brick, mottled and weathered to a rough texture, with a gray stone chimney at either end. Inside, the floors and several of the walls were made of planks ten inches broad and six inches thick, according to the agent who showed him the house. Two of the rooms upstairs had sloping ceilings and embrasured windows. It was a twenty-minute drive from the Dickson-Rand Laboratories, and the nearest house was a quarter of a mile distant and not visible. The house had been occupied until two months ago, so everything was in working order, and the price asked was $18,000, but the dealer confided that he thought it could be had for $15,000.

“Then get it for fifteen thousand,” David said. “I want it.”

“Just like that?” the man asked. “You don't want to sleep on it?”

David shook his head, smiling, happy. Twenty minutes before, he had been discouraged, thinking he would have to settle for something he was not enthusiastic about. If the agent had not had his office in his home, so that he could be reached on Sunday, he might never have found the house. David said he could make the down payment right away, and that the check would be in the mail that night.

Then he started in a general direction southward, undecided whether to telephone Annabelle, drive to Hartford to see her, or to get his things moved into the house before he told her. The image of the house with woods flanking one side and a fairly well-tended lawn on the other side backgrounded his thoughts, a concrete thing, home, an anchor. Why
wouldn't
Annabelle like it? He had not found a single flaw. Wide staircases, generous closets, high ceilings. Thirty years old, and maybe a bastard style, if one wanted to be an architectural snob, but it was unpretentious, it looked more American than English, it was neither formal nor informal.

He decided to tell her on the phone. He would be cheerful but careful not to be too cheerful or too anything. The main thing was not to appear to assume she would live with him there, nor to appear she wouldn't. After he called her, he would stop at the best restaurant he could find on the road and have a good dinner, preceded by a martini or two martinis, one for Annabelle.

It was around 5
P.M.
when he stopped at a filling station, ordered gas, and went into the office to call her. There was no answer, though he had the operator ring more than twenty times.

She was still not home by nine, when he reached Froudsburg, and he gave it up. He had decided by then that he might do better writing her a letter.

He wrote to Annabelle, describing the house in some detail, and then in a cheerful mood typed a letter to his aunt.

. . . I don't know why you are all so gloomy out there. Can't you absorb any California sunshine? I talk to Annabelle quite often and see her too. Naturally, she's a bit low because of Gerald, but grief passes in normal people. The grandmother you mentioned must have been a psychotic if she spent a lifetime grieving . . . I am moving to a wonderful house I bought today, a bargain at any price, as they say. This because I'm at last changing my job. From now on I continue my school in a sense, though I'll be paid for it. I am going to be working at Dickson-Rand Laboratories. This is the lab that reports California's earthquakes before California knows it has had them. My immediate superior will be Dr. Wilbur Osbourne, of whom you may not have heard, but he is world renowned as a geophysicist and quite an eccentric, I hear. Since I am told I am too, perhaps we'll get along. . . .

Then he wrote a letter to the Red Arrow storage company of Poughkeepsie, asking that the articles deposited in the name of David Kelsey be delivered to the house outside of Troy, and he enclosed a little map that the real estate agent had given him. Reluctantly, he signed the letter William Neumeister, and he hoped it would be the last time he would have to write that name.

He waited until the following Wednesday at noon, two-and-a-half creeping days, before he telephoned Annabelle. She sounded very cheerful, congratulated him on finding a house so soon, but when he tried to set a date when she might drive up with him to see it—and it could have been any one of eight glorious days starting Saturday, because Dickson-Rand was giving him a week's leave to get settled—Annabelle hedged and postponed. She even said she was considering going to La Jolla.

“I really was going three weeks ago, Dave, but the baby had a fever and I didn't dare leave with him. I didn't mention it, because I know you're not interested in babies, but I have to be. Then I wanted to see Mr. Neumeister, if I possibly could.”

“Have you seen him?” he asked.

“They still can't reach him. The man who's handling his house said he told him he was going to be traveling, but he hasn't left this country, because one of the police in Beck's Brook has checked with the passport—the passport something or other. Now they're checking the references he gave the real estate agent. That should lead to something.”

David's guilt created a feeling much like anger. “Have they put anything in the papers about it? Maybe they should do that.”

“Not that I know of. I guess it isn't that important. It's just important to me.”

“Well, what do you think he can tell you, Annabelle, that he didn't tell the police?”

She didn't answer. “Dave, Sergeant Terry called me last week. He's the one in Beck's Brook.”

“Yes? What about?”

“Mostly you. He asked if there was anything between us. I told him no, Dave. I didn't see it would do a bit of good to—I mean, I told them Gerald was a very jealous type, but he had no reason to be where you were concerned, because whatever there'd been between us was over a long time ago. That's essentially the truth, and I thought it was better for Gerald and you
and
me. Don't you agree?”

“Yes,” David murmured.

“I told them Gerald had been drinking—which they knew. I didn't tell them about your letters. That would only complicate things and make the situation sound more serious than it was.”

The Situation, the Situation. David asked, “Do you think they believed you?”

“Why shouldn't they?”

“That's right. Why shouldn't they?”

“Dave, don't be angry about
this
. It's absurd.”

“I'm not angry.” And yet he was.

“They said you told them you were in New York that Sunday. Is that true, Dave?”

“Yes. I was.”

“And that you always went to New York on your weekends. That's not true, is it?” she asked. “Didn't you spend most of them at your house?”

“Yes,” said David. Every question was like a driven nail.

“Why did you lie? Why do you lie, Dave?”

“That house was yours. And it's gone now. I don't want to discuss it. With anybody. I've bought a new house and I—My things're going to arrive Saturday, so the house'll be a mess then, but I wish you could see it, darling, even with the things not arranged. I've got a piano, you know. I don't think I ever told you that, did I? It's a Steinway baby grand.”

“Really, Dave? Do you play now?”

“I play Chopsticks—chords,” he said, “just so it gets a little exercise. I have it for you, Annabelle.”

Silence.

With a lump in his throat, he went on. “I want you to see where I'm going to work too. We could drive up there in twenty minutes from the house. You've got to let me bring you out this weekend, Annabelle.” He waited. “Annabelle, do you ever think of us together? Do you ever think we might—”

“I guess sometimes—I think of it.”

She promised to send him a postcard in regard to the weekend, and David left the telephone booth radiant. He felt optimistic for perhaps five minutes, until the Neumeister business began to prod at his brain. So they were checking Neumeister's references. Would he never be done with Neumeister? David wanted to forget him, like a silly game, like a bad dream, like a self-indulgence that made him ashamed of himself. And now they were checking his references, all because of a whim of Annabelle's to talk to him! They wouldn't be able to find his references either, and what then? John Atherley, or had it been Asherley? And Richard Patterson. David began to whistle loudly. Like a scared boy in a dark cemetery, he thought.

On Friday he said good-bye to twenty or thirty people at Cheswick, some of them a little jealous, David thought, because he was doing what they wished they could do or wished they had the courage to do. Some of them, too, had heard that David had been fostering a curious lie about an invalid mother. It was inevitable: Mr. Lewissohn's secretary had checked his questionnaire for the police, she had told someone else about the police call, and finally a few who had asked him, as Wes Carmichael had, to their homes on weekends and been refused on the grounds that he had to see his mother—these few heard the story and remembered it. David could see behind Wes's joking remarks and smiles that he was a little worried because the thing had come out in the open.

“Listen, Dave,” Wes whispered to him in David's office, “you weren't by any chance seeing Delaney's wife—ever. I mean in that house.”

“What house?”

“Newmester's,” Wes said, pronouncing it in that manner that always made David think for an instant that people were talking about someone else.

“I told you I didn't know him,” David said, frowning.

“All right, Dave, it crossed my mind, that's all. We're good enough friends for you to tell me, aren't we? If it were true and I knew it—Well, I haven't any ax to grind about it,” he added, retreating before David's frown. “I'm sorry I brought it up.”

“I never met Delaney's wife. I never met Delaney,” David said, his voice cracking.

“Well, where did you go weekends, Dave?”

“I just don't care to answer that. I went to New York most of the time. What I do weekends ought to be my own business.”

“Okay, Dave,” Wes said in a placating tone, but he was angry.

David knew he had sounded angry too, but he didn't care.

“Let's go back and join the boys,” Wes said.