Dark Tales Page 6

  The subway train was going downtown. Mr. Beresford, who was now racking his brains for detective tricks, for mystery-story dodges, thought of one that seemed foolproof. He stayed docilely on the train, as it went downtown, and got a seat at Twenty-third Street. At Fourteenth he got off, the light hat following, and went up the stairs and into the street. As he had expected, the large department store ahead of him advertised OPEN TILL 9 TONIGHT, and the doors swung wide, back and forth, with people going constantly in and out. Mr. Beresford went in. The store bewildered him at first—counters stretching away in all directions, the lights much brighter than anywhere else, the voices clamoring. Mr. Beresford moved slowly along beside a counter; it was stockings first, thin and tan and black and gauzy, and then it was handbags, piles on sale, neat solitary ones in the cases, and then it was medical supplies, with huge almost-human figures wearing obscene trusses, standing right there on the counter, and people coming embarrassedly to buy. Mr. Beresford turned the corner and came to a counter of odds and ends. Scarves too cheap to be at the scarf counter, postcards, a bin marked ANY ITEM 25¢, dark glasses. Uncomfortably, Mr. Beresford bought a pair of dark glasses and put them on.

  He went out of the store at an entrance far away from the one he had used to come in; he could have chosen any of eight or nine entrances, but this seemed complicated enough. There was no sign of the light hat, no one tried to hinder Mr. Beresford as he stepped up to the taxi stand, and, although he debated taking the second or third car, he finally took the one in front and gave his home address.

  *

  He reached his apartment building without mishap, and stole cautiously out of the taxi and into the lobby. There was no light hat, no odd person watching for Mr. Beresford. In the elevator, alone, with no one to see which floor button he pressed, Mr. Beresford took a long breath and began to wonder if he had dreamed his wild trip home. He rang his apartment bell and waited; then his wife came to the door, and Mr. Beresford, suddenly tired out, went into his home.

  “You’re terribly late, darling,” his wife said affectionately, and then, “But what’s the matter?”

  He looked at her; she was wearing her blue dress, and that meant she knew it was her birthday and expected him to take her out; he handed her the box of candy limply and she took it, hardly noticing it in her anxiety over him. “What on earth has happened?” she asked. “Darling, come in here and sit down. You look terrible.”

  He let her lead him into the living room, into his own chair, where it was comfortable, and he lay back.

  “Is there something wrong?” she was asking anxiously, fussing over him, loosening his tie, smoothing his hair. “Are you sick? Were you in an accident? What has happened?”

  He realized that he seemed more tired than he really was, and was glorying in all this attention. He sighed deeply and said, “Nothing. Nothing wrong. Tell you in a minute.”

  “Wait,” she said. “I’ll get you a drink.”

  He put his head back against the soft chair as she went out. Never knew that door had a key, his mind registered dimly as he heard it turn. Then he was on his feet with his head against the door listening to her at the telephone in the hall.

  She dialed and waited. Then: “Listen,” she said, “listen, he came here after all. I’ve got him.”

  The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith

  When she came into the grocery she obviously interrupted a conversation about herself and her husband. The grocer leaning across the counter to speak confidentially to a customer straightened up abruptly and signaled at her with his eyes, so that the customer, in a fairly obvious attempt at dissimulation, looked stubbornly in the opposite direction for almost a minute before turning quickly to take one swift, eager look.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “What’ll it be for you this morning?” he asked, his eyes moving to the right and left to insure that all present observed him speaking boldly to Mrs. Smith.

  “I don’t need very much,” she said. “I may be going away over the weekend.”

  A long sigh swept through the store; she had a clear sense of people moving closer, as though the dozen other customers, the grocer, the butcher, the clerks, were pressing against her, listening avidly.

  “A small loaf of bread,” she said clearly. “A pint of milk. The smallest possible can of peas.”

  “Not laying in much for the weekend,” the grocer said with satisfaction.

  “I may be going away,” she said, and again there was that long breath of satisfaction. She thought: how silly of all of us—I’m not sure any more than they are, we all of us only suspect, and of course there won’t be any way of knowing for sure . . . but still it would be a shame to have all that food in the kitchen, and let it go to waste, just rotting there while . . .

  “Coffee?” the grocer said. “Tea?”

  “I’m going to get a pound of coffee,” she said, smiling at him. “After all, I like coffee. I can probably drink up a pound before . . .”

  The anticipatory pause made her say quickly, “And I’ll want a quarter-pound of butter, and I guess two lamb chops.”

  The butcher, although he had been trying to pretend indifference, turned immediately to get the lamb chops, and he came the width of the store and set the small package on the counter before the grocer had finished adding up her order.

  One good thing, she was thinking about all this—I never have to wait anywhere. It’s as though everyone knew I was in a hurry to get small things done. And I suppose no one really wants me around for very long, not after they’ve had their good look at me and gotten something to talk about.

  When her groceries were all in a bag and the grocer was ready to hand it to her across the counter, he hesitated, as he had done several times before, as though he tried to gather courage to say something to her; she was aware of this, and knew fairly well what he wanted to say—listen, Mrs. Smith, it would start, we don’t want to make any trouble or anything, and of course it isn’t as though anyone around here was sure, but I guess you must know by now that it all looks mighty suspicious, and we just figured—with an inclusive glance around, for support from the butcher and the clerks—we all got talking, and we figured—well, we figured someone ought to say something to you about it. I guess people must have made this mistake before about you? Or your husband? Because of course no one likes to come right out and say a thing like that, when they could so easily be wrong. And of course the more everyone talks about this kind of thing, the harder it is to know whether you’re right or not . . .

  The man in the liquor store had said substantially that to her, fumbling and letting his voice die away under her cool, inquiring stare. The man in the drugstore had begun to say it, and then, blushing, had concluded, “Well, it’s not my business, anyway.” The woman in the lending library, the landlady, had given her the nervous, appraising look, wondering if she knew, if anyone had told her, wondering if they dared, and had ended by treating her with extreme gentleness and a sweet forbearance, as they would have treated some uncomplaining, incurable invalid. She was different in their eyes, she was marked; if the dreadful fact were not true (and they all hoped it was), she was in a position of such incredible, extreme embarrassment that their solicitude was even more deserved. If the dreadful fact were true (and they all hoped it was), they had none of them, the landlady, the grocer, the clerks, the druggist, lived in vain, gone through their days without the supreme excitement of being close to and yet secure from an unbearable situation. If the dreadful fact were true (and they all hoped it was), Mrs. Smith was, for them, a salvation and a heroine, a fragile, lovely creature whose preservation was in hands other than theirs.

  Some of this Mrs. Smith realized dimly as she walked back to her apartment with the bag of groceries. She, at least, was almost not in doubt; she had known almost certainly that the dreadful fact was true for three weeks and six days, since she had met it face to face on a bench fa
cing the ocean.

  “I hope you won’t think I’m rude,” Mr. Smith had said at that moment, “if I open a conversation by saying that it’s a lovely day.”

  She thought he was incredibly daring, she thought he was unbelievably vulgar, but she did not think he was rude; it was a word ridiculous when applied to him.

  “No,” she had said, recognizing him, “I don’t think you’re rude.”

  If she had ever tried to phrase it to herself—it would hardly be possible to describe it to anyone else—she might have said, in the faintly clerical idiom she had learned so thoroughly, that she had been chosen for this, or that it was like being carried unresisting on the surface of a river which took her on inevitably into the sea. Or she might have said that, just as in her whole life before she had not questioned the decisions of her father but had done quietly as she was told, so it was a relief to know that there was now someone again to decide for her, and that her life, inevitable as it had been before, was now clear as well. Or she might have said—with a blush for a possible double meaning, that they, like all other married couples, were two halves of what was essentially one natural act.

  “A man gets very lonesome, I think,” he had told her at dinner that night, in a restaurant near the sea, where even the napkins smelled of fish and the bare wood of the table had an indefinable salty grain, “a man alone needs to find himself some kind of company.” And then, as though the words had perhaps not been complimentary enough, he added hastily, “Except not everyone is lucky enough to meet a charming young lady like yourself.” She had smiled and simpered, by then fully aware of these preliminaries to her destiny.

  Three weeks and six days later, turning to go in through the door of the shabby apartment house, she wondered briefly about the weekend ahead; she had been naturally reluctant to buy too much food, but then, if it turned out that she should be there, there would be no way to buy more food on Sunday; a restaurant, she thought, we will have to go to a restaurant—although they had not been together to a restaurant since that first dinner together since, even though they did not actually have to economize, they both felt soberly that the fairly large mutual bank account they now had ought not to be squandered unnecessarily, but should be kept as nearly intact as possible; they had not discussed this, but Mrs. Smith’s instinctive tactful respect for her husband’s methods led her to fall in with him silently in his routine of economy.

  The three flights of stairs were narrow and high, and Mrs. Smith, with the immediate recognition of symbols she had inherited, had always had, potentially, and was now using almost exclusively, saw the eternal steps going up and up as an irrevocable design for her life; she had really no choice but to go up, wearily if she chose; if she turned and went down again, retracing laboriously the small progress she had made, she would merely have to go up another way, beginning, as she now almost realized, beginning again a search which could only, for her, have but one ending. “It happens to everybody,” she told herself consolingly as she climbed.

  Pride would not allow her to make any concessions to her position, so she did not try particularly to walk silently on the second-floor landing; for a minute, going on up the next flight, she thought she had got safely past, but then, almost as she reached her own door, the door on the second landing opened and Mrs. Jones called, piercingly and as though she had run from some back recess of her apartment to the door when she heard footsteps.

  “Mrs. Smith, is that you?”

  “Hello,” Mrs. Smith called back down the stairs.

  “Wait a minute, I’m coming up.” The lock on Mrs. Jones’s door snapped, and the door closed. Mrs. Jones came hurriedly, still a little out of breath, down the landing and up the stairs to the third floor. “Thought I’d missed you,” she said on the stairs, and, “Good heavens, you look tired.”

  It was part of the attitude that treated Mrs. Smith as a precious vessel. Her slightest deviation from the normal, in the course of more than a week, was noted and passed from gossip to gossip, a faint paling of her cheeks became the subject of nervous speculation, any change in her voice, a dullness of her eye, a disarrangement in her dress—these were what her neighbors lived on. Mrs. Smith had thought early in the week that a loud crash from her apartment would be the sweetest thing she could do for Mrs. Jones, but by now it no longer seemed important: Mrs. Jones could live as well on the most minute crumbs.

  “Thought you’d never get home,” Mrs. Jones said. She followed Mrs. Smith into the bare little room which, with a small bedroom, a dirty kitchen, and a bath, was the honeymoon home of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Jones took the package of groceries into the kitchen while Mrs. Smith hung up her coat in the closet; she had not bothered to unpack many things and the closet looked empty; there were two or three dresses and a light overcoat and extra suit of Mr. Smith’s; this was so obviously only a temporary home for them both, a stopping-place. Mrs. Smith did not regard her three dresses with regret, nor did she particularly admire the suits of Mr. Smith, although they were still a little unfamiliar to her, hung up next to her own clothes (as his underwear in the dresser, lying quietly beside her own); neither Mr. nor Mrs. Smith were of the abandoned sort who indulge recklessly in trousseaus or other loving detail for a preliminary purification.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Jones, coming out of the kitchen, “you certainly aren’t planning to do much cooking this weekend.”

  Privacy was not one of the blessings of Mrs. Smith’s position. “I thought I might be going away,” she said.

  Again there was that soft, anticipatory moment; Mrs. Jones looked quickly, and then away, and then, sitting herself down firmly upon the meager couch, obviously decided to come to the point.

  “Now, look, Mrs. Smith,” she began, and then interrupted herself. “Look, why this ‘Mrs.’ all the time? You call me Polly, and from now on I’ll call you Helen. All right?” She smiled, and Mrs. Smith, smiling back, thought, how do they find out your first name? “Well, now, look here, Helen,” Mrs. Jones went on, determined to establish her new familiarity immediately, “I think it’s time someone sat down and talked sensibly to you. I mean, you must know by now pretty well what people are saying.”

  Here we are, Helen Smith was thinking, two women of the singular type woman, one standing uneasily and embarrassed in front of a window, wearing a brown dress and brown hair and brown shoes and differing in no essential respect from the other, sitting solidly and earnestly, wearing a green and pink flowered housedress and bedroom slippers—differing, actually in no essential, although we would both deny indignantly that we were the same person, seeking the same destiny. And we are about to enter into a conversation upon a fantastic subject.

  “I’ve noticed,” Mrs. Smith said carefully, “that there’s a lot of unusual interest in us. I’ve never been on a honeymoon before, of course, so I can’t really tell whether it’s only that.” She laughed weakly, but Mrs. Jones was not to be put off by sentiment.

  “I think you must know better than that,” she said. “You’re not that wrapped up in your husband.”

  “Well . . . no,” Mrs. Smith had to say.

  “And furthermore,” Mrs. Jones went on, looking cynically at Mrs. Smith, “you’re not any blushing eighteen-year-old girl, you know, and Mr. Smith isn’t any young man. You’re both people of a reasonably mature age.” Mrs. Jones seemed to feel that she had made a point here, and she said it again. “You are both people who have outlived their youth,” she said, “and naturally no one expects that you’re going to go around billing and cooing. And furthermore you yourself are old enough to show some intelligence about this terrible business.”

  “I don’t know what kind of intelligence I ought to show,” Mrs. Smith said meekly.

  “Well, good heavens!” Mrs. Jones spread her hands helplessly. “Don’t you realize your position? Everyone knows it. Look.” She settled back, prepared to demonstrate reasonably. “You came here a week ago, ne
wly married, and moved into this apartment with your husband. The very first day you were here, people thought there was something funny. In the first place, you two didn’t act like you were the types for each other at all. You know what I mean—you so sort of refined and ladylike, and him . . .”

  Rude, Mrs. Smith thought, wanting to laugh; he said he was rude. Mrs. Jones shrugged. “In the second place,” she said, “you didn’t look like you belonged in this house, or in this neighborhood, because you always had plenty of money, which, believe me, the rest of us don’t, and you always acted sort of as though you ought to be in a better kind of situation. And in the third place,” Mrs. Jones said, hurrying on to her climax, “it wasn’t two days before people began to think they recognized your husband from the pictures in the paper.”

  “I see what you mean,” Mrs. Smith said. “But a picture in the paper—”

  “That’s just what started us really thinking,” Mrs. Jones said. She enumerated on her fingers. “New bride. Cheap apartment. You made a will in his favor? Insurance?”

  “Yes, but that is only natural—” said Mrs. Smith.

  “Natural? And him looking just like the man in the paper who mur—” She stopped abruptly. “I don’t want to frighten you,” she said. “But you should know all about him.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” Mrs. Smith said in her turn, coming away from the window, to stand in front of Mrs. Jones so that Mrs. Jones had to look up from her seat on the couch. “I know all these things. But how many newly married couples are there who make wills in each other’s favor? Or take out insurance? And how many women over thirty get married to men over forty? And maybe sometimes the men look like pictures in the paper? And with all this talk and gossip about us all around the neighborhood, you notice no one’s been even sure enough to say anything?”

  “I wanted to call the police two, three days ago,” Mrs. Jones said sullenly. “Ed wouldn’t let me.”