Vanish in an Instant (23 page)

“Then
what
? I spent it, of course.”

“All of it?”

“Not all of it,” she said disdainfully. “I'm not a fool. I have twelve dollars left.”

“How far do you think twelve dollars will go toward that big house in the country?”

“Birdie says I'm not to worry. She's taking care of every­thing; Earl asked her to. She knows where the house is. She's going to drive me there tonight. It might be quite a long drive. If I could have another drink, Victor?”

“It would be better not to,” Garino said.

“Just one. Then I'll throw the bottle away. I'm going to quit drinking—did you know? I am. I promised Birdie and I promise you, too.”

Garino brought the bottle out of the kitchen and poured her a drink. While she drank it he stood over her with melancholy patience like a hen brooding over an egg that has gone rotten in its shell.

“Now I'll throw the bottle away, see, as I promised. Give it to me.”

Garino recorked the half-empty bottle and put it in her lap. Then he held out his arm and she pulled herself to her feet by hanging on the sleeve of his old sweater coat. She tottered toward the fireplace, balancing precariously on her new spike-heeled pumps like a child on stilts.

“Didden think I'd keep a promise, eh? Well, you were mistaken, Victor.” With loving care she placed the bottle upright in the center of the grate where the fire had died. Then she returned to the davenport breathing hard and noisily, as if she had walked, not the width of a room, but a great distance across a span of years.

She sat down carefully, her eyes avoiding Garino's. Garino didn't say anything. He went over to the fireplace, removed the bottle and took it out to the kitchen again. The silence in the room was unbearable, the silence of terrible words not yet spoken.

“You shouldn't have done that, Victor,” she said at last.

Garino's face was like wood. “You could blow the place up. It's a fuel. Remember?”

“You have turned against me.”

“I don't want the place blown up.”

“You and Ella both. I've only got one friend left.”

“Birdie was never your friend,” Garino said. “I remember the fighting, fighting all the time the two of you.”

“Things have changed.”

“Where is this big house she's taking you to, with trees and flowers and dogs in the yard?”

“I don't know exactly.”

“Is it a private house?”

“What do you mean, is it private. Of course it's . . . What do you
mean
?”

“I thought it might be some place where they take care of—older people and so on.”

“An asylum.”

“No, I didn't mean . . .”

“You meant an asylum,” she said shrilly. “Earl wouldn't allow it. Do you hear me? He'd never allow it!”

“Earl is dead.”

“But he gave her money to look after me and she prom­ised him she would, she
promised.
”

“Promises breed like fleas in your family.”

“You go away!” she wailed. “I won't listen to you!”

“What if she doesn't show up? What then? You'll be glad enough then to stay here, won't you, even if it's not good enough for you. And me, I'm not good enough either, I'm a dirty foreigner.”

“Please, both of you,” Meecham said. “This arguing isn't accomplishing anything. Mrs. Loftus, are you listen­ing to me?”

The old lady raised her head slowly like a sick animal. “Birdie will come for me, won't she?”

“She'll be here, sure,” Meecham said with conviction. “Are you all packed and ready to leave?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me first, where did you cash that check she sent you?”

“At a—little place down the street.”

“Store? Bar?”

“A—a tavern. I just happened to be passing by and . . .”

“Yes, I know. What is the name of the place?”

“Peterson's. It's not a bad check, is it? I've spent the money. I couldn't pay it back. I don't want to cheat Mr. Peterson. He's helped me out when I—when I've been ill.”

“The check's probably good.”

“It's got to be. He didn't want to cash it at first because I told him it was from my daughter-in-law, and he said, how could it be, it wasn't signed Mrs. Loftus. I had to ex­plain to him that Earl and Birdie were divorced and Birdie took back her maiden name of Falconer.”

“Of
what
?”

He spoke the words so explosively that the old lady shrank back in fear. “Maybe Birdie wouldn't like me to be telling so much.”

“How did she sign that check?”

“J—Jemima Falconer.”

“Jemima Falconer,” Meecham repeated. The name sounded very familiar yet remote, like the echo of a friend's voice.

“She never let anyone call her Jemima. She thought it sounded as if she was colored. We called her Birdie—that was her nickname at school.”

Meecham remembered the descriptions of Birdie that he'd heard from various people. From Garino: “Birdie they called her. Such a silly name. She wasn't anything like a bird. She was a big woman, older than Earl and quite pleasant unless you crossed her—she had a terrible tem­per.” From Mrs. Loftus, the night he had found her at the bus depot: “Didn't say a word about her till the day he brought her home and said, this is my wife. And there she stood, with that hennaed hair and that hard look, forty if she was a day, forty, and him just a boy.” From Loesser, at Lily Margolis' house: “My impression is that she's a highly respectable woman. I knew Lily had been thinking for some time that Claude had a steady mistress, but I couldn't believe it was this Falconer woman.” From Gurton at the restaurant: “Loftus used to come in here two or three years ago with his girlfriend, a tall bright-looking redhead.” And from Gill, the orderly who had spent the last night with Loftus, listening to him talk: “Birdie this, Birdie that. He must have been crazy about that woman.”

On that last night, with his own death molded and cast and waiting for him like an iron maiden, Loftus had tried to protect Birdie with the only weapons that were left to him, lies. He had invented her death in the auto accident in the West so that no one would look for her or discover where and who she really was. He had covered her with lies as the snow covers walkers on a winter night and ob­scures their footprints behind them.

Now, from out of this white ambush Birdie had stepped clear and sharp and real, with blood in her veins and money in her hand and promises on her lips. A big house with trees, and a new life with hope; Birdie said and Birdie says. Why? Why did she come back to say anything? Meecham looked at the old lady. . . . She was intent on fitting a new cigarette into the silver holder, her whole mind and body intent on this small task which would be so easy for anyone else, and he realized the futility of ask­ing her questions.

“I'll do that for you,” he said.

“Leave me alone. I can do it. Whyn't you go away?”

“That might be a good idea.”

“It's an exshellent idea. Ex—cell—ent.”

Meecham rose and went to the door. “I hope you'll send your new address to Mr. Garino.”

“Maybe I will and maybe I won't.”

“Come on, Garino.”

Garino stood where he was. “We can't leave now. I'm going to stay and see that things are all right. I don't trust. . .”

“Things will be all right. Let's go.”

“But . . .”

“I can look after myself, Victor,” the old lady said firmly. “I'm a woman of ex—pe—rience.”

“Good night, then.”

She didn't answer. She was peering at the little clock on the mantel, her eyes narrowed to slits to make them focus. It was eleven o'clock. Or perhaps it was twelve. Or ten? The hands of the clock wavered, this way, that way. Ten, twelve, eleven, ten.

“Make up your mind,” she said to the clock.

25

Eleven-thirty
by
Meecham's watch. For nearly half an hour he had been waiting in the dark on the bottom step of the basement stairs, his shoulder pressed against the old wooden banister. He couldn't see the front door from this position because there was a turn in the stairs, but he could hear what went on in the hall above. He could even hear, very faintly, Mrs. Loftus walking around in her apartment, making last-minute preparations for the trip. Meecham's shoulder and the back of his neck felt stiff and sore where the draft struck him. He looked at his watch again. Another minute had crawled by, as slow and labori­ous as a sloth. She's not coming, he thought. Perhaps Birdie had been scared away, or perhaps the whole thing was what he had believed at first, the wish-fantasy of a drunken mind.

Then he heard the front door open, and quiet but firm footsteps moved along the thin carpeting. A pause, the click of a doorknob, and then the old lady's voice, with a sob in it:

“I thought you weren't coming, Birdie.”

“Of course I was coming.”

“It's so late.”

“I had some trouble with the car.” The woman's voice was as quiet and firm as her footsteps. “Is this your suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“I'll take it. Button up your coat, it's a raw night.” A mo­ment of silence. “You've been drinking.”

“Just a nip. You said yourself it's a raw night.”

“You didn't tell anyone that you were leaving, or about me?”

“Of course not,” the old lady lied solemnly.

“You burned everything?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, then.”

Footsteps down the hall.

Meecham rose quietly and began to ascend the stairs. At the bend in the staircase he paused. The two women were at the front door, Birdie bent under the weight of the suitcase, and the old lady wrapped like a mummy and clinging to Birdie's free arm.

“Where are you going?” Meecham said.

They both swerved toward him, and Meecham felt a column of emotion rise thick in his throat, disbelief and then anger and then sadness. In that one brief moment when Birdie turned, three women merged in her and be­came one, merged inevitably and naturally like atoms forming a molecule.

Her face was as familiar to him as Alice's: the square forcible jaw, the gentle mouth, and the eyes still blistered from the burning of her tears. He thought back to the last time he'd seen her when she had thrust all the dishes into the sink with a furious sweep of her hand, and the shat­tered glass had sprayed like water from a fountain.

She was looking down at the old lady with something like pity in her eyes. “You told. You poor fool.”

“I didden, Birdie. I didden tell!”

“It's all right.”

“You're mad at me. You won't take me along.”

“I'm not mad, Clara. I never really expected anything to work out.”

Meecham came up the rest of the steps and Mrs. Loftus watched him, peering at him from her heavy wraps like a mole from a thicket, half-dazed and half-blind.

“You go away! Go on! You're spoiling our trip. Birdie, tell him to go away. What about our trip, Birdie?”

“I guess we'll have to postpone it for a while,” Mrs. Hearst said quietly. “Mr. Meecham wants to talk to me.”

“He's a butterinski.”

“Yes. Yes, I guess he is. Come on, we'd better go back to the apartment.”

With a decisive movement she picked up the suitcase and went back down the hall, the old lady staggering be­hind her, whimpering.

“I want to live in the country. I want to have dogs in the yard. I want ...”

“Sh... Sh, now.”

“You promised.”

“I'll keep my promise,” Mrs. Hearst said. “But not to­night, Clara.”

She opened the door of the apartment and paused for a moment on the threshold, swaying slightly, as if solid waves of time were beating at her legs.

“I used to live here,” she said to Meecham. “Earl and me. Did you know that?”

“I knew it.”

“I didn't realize how much you were finding out about me until after supper tonight when you came to see Jim. Then I knew I had to drive over here and cover my tracks somehow.” She crossed the room to the old cherry-wood rocker near the window and touched the headrest with her hand. “This was Earl's chair. He was just like a baby; rock­ing soothed him.”

Meecham remembered the rocking chair in the Hearst kitchen and he wondered if Mrs. Hearst had kept it there for Earl to sit in when he came to talk in the eve­nings.

“We used to fight when we lived here. We were having bad luck. Earl was out of a job and I was trying to support all three of us, working as a waitress. In a small town like this there aren't many jobs, you take what you can get. Nothing worked out for us. Earl felt like a failure and Clara was drinking all the time, and I couldn't see any­thing ahead but hell. I was younger in those days; I thought I knew what hell was like.” She glanced at the old lady who was sitting bolt upright on the davenport with a fixed smile on her face, like a deaf-mute trying to appear inter­ested in a conversation. “Clara knows.”

“What's that you say, Birdie?”

“Nothing much. Would you like a drink?”

“I'll get it. We'll celebrate old times, eh, Birdie? Shelebrate old times.” She started toward the kitchen, arms out­stretched like an amateur tightrope walker. “Don't let me disturb the talking. I love to hear good talk.”

Looking at the two women now it was impossible for Meecham to imagine the “old times” when the two strong personalities had clashed. There was no clash any longer; one of them was too weak to make a sound, like a broken drum.

“Well, I divorced Earl. I borrowed the money from my sister and took a bus to Las Vegas. When I came back to Arbana I was single again. I started a rooming house, and that's how I met Jim. I was feeling so empty and old and . . . Anyway, we got married. I guess I'm the kind of woman that don't know how to live without having a man to please and cook for and look after.”

For the second time that night Meecham thought what a pity it was that such a forceful woman would always choose emotionally or physically weak men like Hearst and Loftus.

The old lady was still moving around the kitchen, rat­tling dishes and opening and closing cupboard doors.

“Jim and I got along all right. Nothing special, but all right. Then, about a year ago, I met Earl on the street. I hardly recognized him, he'd changed so much. We stood there in front of Kresge's. . . . It was snowing, and Earl didn't have a hat on and his hair was soaking wet, and he told me that he was sick. He had just found out what was the matter with him and he'd been walking the streets try­ing to figure things out. Those were the words he used, figure things out.

“I took him home and we sat in the kitchen and he asked me if I had a room for him to stay in. He moved in the next week. I didn't tell Jim or anyone who he was. My sis­ter found out and we often fought about it. But to me it was the right thing to do. We didn't live together as hus­band and wife, we lived as friends that needed each other. He talked to me when I got upset or lonely, and I looked after him when he was sick, and kept his apartment clean and saw that he got enough to eat. We had a lot of quiet happiness together, Earl and me. There was always in the back of my mind the hope that someday someone would find a miracle cure for his disease. The worse he got, the more I hoped, until it was all I could think about, making him live.”

She was looking out of the window, down at the dark and empty street. “If I hadn't hoped so hard he would be still alive.”

“I don't believe I understand,” Meecham said.

“I went to Claude for money.”

“Money for Loftus?”

“Yes, to take him away. I'd read in the paper about a cancer clinic in New York where they were doing research on Earl's disease, and I thought if I could just get him there, there might be a chance for him. I didn't have a cent and nothing to sell except an old car, and no one to borrow from. Except Claude. The more I thought about going to Claude, the more reasonable it seemed. We had known each other a long time, long before Lily ever met him, and when we parted there was no final blowup or anything, we just drifted apart. That's how I thought of it.

“I went to his office a week ago today and waited for him outside. We went and sat in his car and I told him every­thing. What a terrible mistake I made!” she said bitterly. “If I'd asked him to lend me money for a new house or a trip I'd have gotten it. But Claude was a vain man. He couldn't believe that I loved another man, and that it was the kind of love he and I never had together. He kept saying how he knew I'd come to him, and I kept trying to tell him how I felt about Earl and how serious his condition was. Claude wouldn't listen. I got out of the car and walked home. I was burning up inside, and my head was splitting so I felt like it was going to blow up. You can feel more anger for somebody else than you ever can for yourself.”

Meecham knew that she was right. Listening to her, he experienced inside his own head a corresponding pres­sure of anger and resentment, against Margolis, and against all the tyrannies and tyrants that harass the weak.

“For the next two days I went around as usual. I guess I did all the ordinary things, but I couldn't stop thinking of the money and how easily Claude could have lent it to me if he wanted to, and how much it might mean to Earl. On Saturday night Jim came home after a bad week on the road. He started an argument about me paying too much attention to Earl. I had to get out of the house so I went to the hockey game by myself. That much of what I told you before is true. After the game I was driving through town on my way home when I saw Claude. He was just getting out of his car in front of the Top Hat. There was a girl with him that I didn't know, all dressed up like a Christ­mas tree. I stopped my car. I had no plan or anything in mind. I think I stopped mostly because I didn't want to go home anyway and because I was curious. At first that was all, I was curious.

“They went into the Top Hat together, and I waited. A long time I waited, picturing the two of them inside, drinking and laughing and dancing like only people can that have their health and some money. I tried to picture Earl and me in there having a good time and I almost laughed, it was so funny.

“I thought of all kinds of crazy things when I was sitting there. I thought of going in and facing up to Claude, de­manding money right in front of his new girlfriend. Claude's car was parked across the road, and I even thought of getting behind the wheel and driving it away and selling it some place. Imagine thinking of stealing! Never did I think of stealing before, even when I was a kid, but I thought of it then. Everything began to get very sharp and separated in my mind, so I felt anything I could do for Earl was good and what anyone did against him was bad.

“Maybe I would have stolen the car, I don't know. But I didn't, because the girl came out of the Top Hat. She was alone and I could see when she passed me that she was drunk. She was staggering around and talking to herself. She went on up the street into another bar and I followed her. She was standing at the counter when I got there, talk­ing to the man beside her. I heard her say that she wanted a beer and that she'd left her purse behind, and what a terrible place the bar was.”

“That it stank, in fact,” Meecham added.

“Yes, those were her words.”

“And that's how Loftus knew exactly what happened in that bar, not because he was there but because you told him.”

“I told him,” she said, painfully. “He made me. He planned everything as soon as he found out what I'd done.”

“Margolis came into the bar?”

“Yes. He didn't stay, but took the girl by the arm and steered her outside. It was nearly closing time. A lot of people were leaving and I left too. When I got outside, I saw Claude trying to lift the girl into his car. She had folded up completely and she was hard to handle because she wasn't little, like Clara. I wondered who the girl was. I thought, she must have someone, parents or relatives or maybe a husband, who wouldn't want to see her like that with a man like Claude. And then the idea occurred to me that I should follow them, that maybe the situation might have money in it somewhere, money for Earl.”

She went on talking, quietly and earnestly, as if it was very important to her to explain everything and clarify her motives. It seemed to Meecham that the explanation was not for him or for herself but for Earl.

“They went to Claude's cottage on the river. I walked right in. The girl was on the couch asleep and Claude was starting a fire in the grate. Claude said, how the hell did you get here? I didn't answer that. I just told him again I wanted some money and if he didn't give it to me I would phone Lily and the police and the girl's parents, everyone I could think of. He laughed at me. He said the police wouldn't be interested and the girl had no parents and Lily was in South America. When I heard that, I felt that I had nothing left, no hope, no chance, nothing. The whole world was against me and Earl, the whole world, laughing at us, like Claude. I went over to the fireplace. Claude had turned away from me and was poking at the fire again.
You're showing your age, Emmy
, he said.
You'd better start dyeing your hair
. Those were the last words he ever spoke. When I stabbed him he sort of twisted around and nearly fell on top of the girl. Blood spurted all over her dress and coat but she didn't wake up. I stabbed him again, three or four times more, and I stood there and watched him die. I wasn't sorry for him or scared for myself. I just felt kind of relieved, like some awful pressure was gone from inside me.”