What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (22 page)

Soon the taxi reached the area of clearing, and she could see that this was the beginning of a major new project. The taxi continued on to the drive of Hollis Place which marked the end of the clearance for the new buildings. Miriam observed the house and the grounds with the quickness and interest of one who observes changes after a long absence from a once familiar, if not beloved, scene.

As the taxi entered the curve of the drive, Miriam noticed that on the front balcony there was what appeared to be a frazzled, night gowned wraith brandishing a gun. Miriam, with a lift of her eyebrows, got out of the taxi and paid the driver.

Charlotte, from the balcony, turned the full force of her present fury to the taxi, leveling the gun in that direction.

“And you, too!” she shrieked. “Get back in that car and go away! This is private ground. Get off my land!”

Miriam looked up in alarm. “Charlotte!” she cried, “Charlotte, stop that and go inside! It’s Miriam!”

Blessed relief flooded over Charlotte as she lowered her gun and peered more closely down in Miriam’s direction. Suddenly realizing that she needed to dress, she rushed inside. At the same time, Hugh Bayliss came out of the house and headed rapidly down the steps to take Miriam’s bags. He was sorry he wasn’t able to meet Miriam at the airport; he had an emergency. For a moment they stood looking at each other, a moment when the memories of the past collided with the realities of the present.

“You’ve changed,” Hugh said, smiling at last. “You’ve become more beautiful… more beautiful than ever.”

Miriam did not respond to his warmth. “You’ve changed too,” she said bluntly, and then, after the briefest pause, she nodded up toward the balcony, “Is she quite mad?”

Hugh shook his head. “Honestly… I don’t know. But mad or not, she’s clever… even more clever than you may remember.”

“More deceptive, you mean,” Miriam said flatly, “if we’re speaking of how I remember her.”

“I suppose it’s difficult for you… coming back here after all these years.”

“Under the circumstances?” Miriam strode ahead of him up the steps and into the house, empathic with the air of one who had arrived to take charge.

Inside she was greeted by Velma who stood in a slouch at the foot of the stairs, a living affront to everything Miriam herself stood for.

“Miss Charlotte says to show you where your room’s goin’ to be.” She nodded up the stairs. “Up there, next to hers. She’ll be fixed up to see you pretty soon.”

Hugh arrived to make hasty introductions, which Miriam briefly acknowledged with a look that implied her contemptuous disbelief of the appellation “day nurse” for this sorry creature.

The three of them proceeded up the stairs and as they passed Charlotte’s room, the door hurled open and Charlotte, far from dressed, accosted them.

“So you’re here!” She threw the words at Miriam almost as an accusation. “I must say I’m surprised. After the way you left here… how long has it been? Twenty years!”

Miriam observed her coolly. She and Hugh entered the room, Hugh signaling Velma to take Miriam’s bags to her room at the end of the hall. Charlotte looked at Miriam with sharp speculation.

“Hugh kept after me to have you come here. He seems to think I need some sort of keeper. God knows that white trash out there…” Her words faded into silence as she looked at Miriam more sharply. “What are you thinking? Looking at me like that… I never could tell what you were thinking.” Charlotte laughed, “or even if you were thinking…”

“Let me remove your doubt. I’m thinking I was a fool, after
nearly twenty years, to fly three thousand miles to come here to help, just to have you insult me…”

“You’re so easily insulted.”

“Yes, I am, more easily than I once was. And if you really don’t want me here, than I can go just as quickly as I came.”

Miriam moved angrily out the door and down the hallway in pursuit of Velma. But Charlotte rushed to the door and called down the hall after her, “They’re all after me. It’s Jewel, she never lets up. She’s got them all after me… to tear down Daddy’s house…” There were tears in her eyes. “They’re not even laying a finger to Jewel’s place. They’re all after me… Miriam…?”

Miriam stopped and turned back. Recognizing Charlotte’s despair, her expression softened. “You’ve been alone too long,” she observed.

Hugh touched Charlotte’s hand. “You go on with your dressing and let Miriam get settled, why don’t you?”

Charlotte looked at him with a flash of annoyance then back at Miriam, “What do you think of him being my doctor?”

“He is a doctor,” Miriam said with an instantaneous return to coolness, “and you are ill.”

Charlotte’s eyes narrowed, “And he does need the trade.”

Hugh looked at her with a quick repressed anger. “Now, Charlotte,” he said.

“I’ll get dressed,” Charlotte snapped, ignoring him, “and we’ll have a nice tea, won’t we… out in the garden like we used to.” Then she remembered the garden was no longer presentable. “Or somewhere…”

“Or somewhere…” Miriam echoed and watched impassively as Charlotte, smiling now, stepped back into her room and closed the door.

“Any professional opinions?” Hugh asked as Miriam walked with him downstairs to the front door.

Miriam shook her head. “I don’t know. Where is the dividing line between madness and quaint down-South eccentricity? You tell me.” She paused to look at the old house, at its moldering grandeur, its proliferation of furnishings. “You’ll get someone to sort and pack all this stuff?”

“Yes,” Hugh agreed. He went to a table in the hallway, opened a drawer and took out a revolver. Miriam frowned as he held it out to her.

“You may need it,” he told her. “Feelings are pretty high. All the old trouble has been stirred up again… all the old feelings. And now with the way she’s acting… they burned down one of the outbuildings last week. The whole house could have gone.”

Miriam took the gun. “It’s all so melodramatic.”

“Just in case. Velma’s only here during the day.”

“More’s the blessing from the look of her. Everything will be all right. Don’t worry.”

At the door Hugh stopped and turned back. “Miriam, ever since that awful night when we said goodbye…”

“Goodbye, Hugh,” Miriam said firmly. “I’ll call you tomorrow…”

Sadly, Hugh turned and left the house.

That evening Miriam and Charlotte were finishing dinner in the oppressive shadows of the old dining room and walked out onto the terrace for liquor, some air and some talk.

“Think what wonderful days we had here when we were girls,” Charlotte recalled.

“Did we?” Miriam asked. “You did, I’m sure.”

Charlotte looked at her in astonishment. “You weren’t happy here? But surely after…”

“After where I came from?” replied Miriam. “At least I wasn’t a charity case, an orphan given shelter from the storm…”

Charlotte considered this. “You were always ambitious. I sensed
it even then. And you’ve done very well, traveling around the world, mingling with all the famous people. You’re a survivor. You’ve done well.”

“Yes…,” Miriam said hoping to leave it at that. “Yes, I have.” And she thought,
and I mean to continue to do well.

“How is it, by the way, that Hugh has become your doctor?”

“In a way, I suppose,” Charlotte replied as if it were a question she expected, “I felt I owed it to him. He might have done very well if… if it hadn’t happened the way it did. But there’s another way to look at it. He hitched his wagon to the wrong star.”

“To me,” Miriam said. “That was something of a trailer hitch, wasn’t it? If he couldn’t get the heiress, he could get the orphan cousin. But then he got unhitched fast enough when things went wrong. He used to plan what it would be like when he had his society practice and we used to…”

“You were right to leave him,” Charlotte interrupted.

Miriam smiled very dryly. “That’s probably the most tactful remark you’ve ever made in your entire life.”

The talk turned quickly to the matter of Charlotte leaving the house and moving out, and Charlotte and the ghosts of the past were momentarily forgotten.

“They’ll never drive me out… never… not Jewel Mayhew… not any of them. I don’t care what they do. They mean to start by tearing down the house. They’ve given me notice and they brought in these frightful machines. But I stood there… right up there on that balcony, and I declared to all of them that I would not move, even if they killed me!”

Miriam observed the performance without visible warmth. “It must have been an electrifying moment for everyone.”

“I promised Daddy that I’d stay right here and face them down… and face Jewel down… until they cleared my name.”

“Do you think that’s going happen by Tuesday morning?” Miriam asked.

Charlotte turned on her furious, threatening for a moment to
dash the bit of liquor in her glass in Miriam’s face. “You’re in this with them, aren’t you?” she demanded to know. “You want to see them win over me after all these years!”

“I want to see you stop wasting your life… though heaven knows why I should care.”

“You haven’t cared in all these years. You haven’t come back to see me once—you only came to see him. And after all Daddy did for you… deserting me…”

“I’m a survivor,” Miriam said calmly. “You said it yourself.”

“You never did like me,” accused Charlotte.

“Not with any overwhelming affection, no. But we were very young then,” replied Miriam, her voice like icy steel.

“And I didn’t like you!” Charlotte stormed back, “I didn’t like you at all.”

Charlotte tore off into the house and up the stairs. Miriam followed her for a moment but just to the balcony. Then, turning away, she went to the drawing room door and looked inside. The slanting light from the doorway picked up the portrait of Charlotte painted in the year of her coming out. She was very pretty, in what might then have been called “a high strung” sort of way.

Miriam closed the door and, thinking she might have heard something from outside, she made her way to the terrace. But there was nothing. She picked up the tray with the glasses and started back inside when a bottle, with a sudden explosive crash, smashed against the wall, thrown from somewhere out into the night. She whirled about and then, frightened, moved quickly inside and closed and locked the door.

She stood for a moment collecting her wits, and then as the house and the night outside remained silent, she moved down the hallway to the table where Hugh had shown her the gun. Miriam removed the gun slowly and with a new determination, carried it upstairs.

The next day Miriam had set Velma at the task of packing bric-a-brac and other light movable objects around the house—totally against Velma’s will. Velma asked sullenly, “Does Miss Charlotte know you got me doin’ this?”

“No,” replied Miriam.

“She’s goin’ to raise righteous time when she finds out,” Velma snarled. “She’s goin’ to have a proper cat fit!”

“She may,” said Miriam. “But it’s got to get done all the same.”

“She ain’t never goin’ to leave this house,” Velma said darkly, “and if you like to hear me say it or not, I reckon she’s got her own reasons besides her promise to her Daddy. And I’m not the only one to think so.”

“Evidently, you’re not,” said Miriam, “and you can take down Charlotte’s portrait from over the mantel.”

In full rebellion Velma banged back, “No, sir. I ain’t goin’ to lay a hand on to that picture. Not with her in the house, I’m not. I seen her… she talks to that picture. Like she was talkin’ to a whole ’nother person. ’Bout what happened back then, like she’s tryin’ to explain it away to somebody…

“I ain’t suppose to do this kind of heavy work. When I come here it was just to nursemaid her and to do a little light cookin’. That was the understanding,” Velma continued to rant.

Hugh arrived at the moment of impasse and took over Velma’s packing. Together he and Miriam removed the portrait, discussing how to get Charlotte to leave the house. Suddenly, Miriam lost her hold on the picture and it fell to the floor, damaging the frame, but sparing the picture itself. Miriam surveyed the scene with a kind of unemotional detachment and set about carrying the portrait into the hall when they heard Charlotte scream from the balcony upstairs.

“You put that back, you hear. You put it back on the wall where it belongs.”

And the ranting continued as Hugh and Miriam rushed to her just as she collapsed. Hugh put her to bed and gave her a sedative. To keep the peace, for the moment, they put the portrait back on the wall.

From behind them, Hugh and Miriam heard Velma, soft voiced and just loud enough for them to hear, “You ask me, she outa be put away in a nut house.”

Hugh left the room as Miriam stood in thoughtful silence.

Charlotte was settled and left in the care of Velma, as Hugh drove Miriam into town where she set about the business of getting help to dismantle and pack the things in the house. As she rushed down the street she saw none other than Jewel Mayhew. For a moment she was not certain it was Jewel, she was so changed since she last saw her, grown old and looking sickly. But then Jewel saw Miriam and seemed close to collapse in shock and surprise and then she quickly turned and walked in a different direction.

“Poor Jewel,” Hugh remarked. “She been in poor health for a long time now.”

“I didn’t know,” said Miriam.

As Miriam went about the town shopping for necessary supplies, she noticed the coldness of the locals. They obviously recognized her but turned away as she approached, deliberately snubbing her. When she returned to the car she found on the seat a copy of a cheap tabloid, and there emblazoned on the front was a picture of the Hollis house and of Charlotte as she was as a girl at the time of her coming out, overlaid by the figure of a ghost—a male figure without a head or hands. THE HOLLIS HOUSE MYSTERY blazed the headline… and in smaller letters, it continued: “About To Be Razed. What Is Hidden Within Those Walls?”

As Miriam started to hurl the paper from her in disgust, a young man approached the car, giving Miriam a start. “Hi, I’m Paul Selvin. I am on assignment from a paper up North.” He was
brash, quick and too sharply dressed—and certainly without a way with the ladies.