Believe me when I say that I do want, for the sake of our common memory of dear little Tony, to help you and be your staunch friend. But, beyond that, I now realize that there is no place for me in your life. And you are far, far from understanding the kind of man I am.
I shall see you tomorrow afternoon at two-thirty for the service. Don’t hesitate to let me know if you need anything. I shall be hurt if you want my help and do not ask for it.
With all my best,
Sincerely,
ERSKINE
He folded it, stepped into the hallway and slipped it under the sill of her door. A vast weight seemed to lift itself from his tensed muscles, yet, as it did so, he was conscious of a sense of looseness, of desolation, a feeling of having been abandoned upon some rocky ledge of some cold, bleak mountain. He undressed and got into bed, assuring himself that he had done the wisest thing, that he would have gone crazy if he had kept running after that wild girl...She’s just a plain tart...
But he couldn’t sleep. What had he done? What had he solved? Mabel, if she was determined, could still make trouble for him with her story of the “naked feet dangling”...And there were those bloody newspapers...And who was that woman who’d called him? And didn’t he have a duty to let Mabel know somehow just what harm she’d done to little Tony? His mind wrestled with the question of why he was constantly changing his attitude toward her. Why did he love her one moment and hate her the next? Slowly he began to realize that he hadn’t been honest with himself, that his motive in writing that letter was to hurt Mabel, to jolt her loose from whatever men she knew. Would it? Suppose she agreed to what he had said in the letter? The thought distressed him. He tossed restlessly on his bed in the dark, his lips moving soundlessly as they followed his thoughts. Ah, hell, why had he ever dared to talk to her in the first place? If he had kept to himself after Tony had fallen, why everything would have been all right...
The silence of the night hours weighed on him. Had she found the letter? She’d gone to bed, no doubt. The hell with it! He’d go to the police in the morning and tell his story and then he’d leave New York tomorrow night...A good vacation was what he needed; it’d get all of this churning rot out of his system...Yes; a good sea trip...
His phone rang. Ah, she was phoning him...He’d known that she would...He’d bet that she was feeling properly chastened...A tight smile hovered on his lips as he picked up the receiver.
“Hello,” he said.
The line hummed softly and there was no response.
“Hello, hello, hello...“
He heard the receiver click and the line went dead. Erskine stood, sweat coming again on his face. Had that been Mabel or had it been the other woman who’d called him twice before? Then he heard his doorbell ring. He hesitated, debating. He had the sensation that some huge, invisible trap was closing slowly over him. Perhaps it was Mabel...He opened the door and it was Mabel, silent, solemn, her features washed clean of rouge and powder; she was wearing her rose-colored nylon robe.
“I want to talk to you, Erskine.” She snapped out her words.
“Come in,” he said, tying his own robe tighter about his waist.
She entered and he closed the door. She walked slowly down the hallway, looking around. Finally she entered his bedroom. He followed her, sat on the edge of his bed, watched her, waited for her to speak.
“Erskine, what in hell’s the matter with you?” she asked abruptly and in a tone of voice that he’d never heard her use before.
“I think I expressed myself pretty clearly in my letter,” he said. In vain he tried to stifle a sense of dread that was now seizing hold of him.
Mabel took her cigarettes from the pocket of her robe and popped one of them into her mouth and lit it. Inhaling deeply, she let the twin spirals of smoke eddy from her nostrils. He waited, hiding his wounded left hand; several times Mabel seemed on the verge of speaking, but she checked herself. Finally she launched forth in a matter-of-fact tone: “Look here...Yesterday you came to see me of your own free will and offered me your help. I was lost, scared, alone, at my wit’s end and I accepted what you offered me. Then, out of the blue, you floored me by criticizing me, bawling me out, railing me almost a prostitute or something...And you did that when you knew damn well that I was shaky and nervous from what had happened to Tony, and yet you did it...Then when I demanded to know why you dared do it, you told me that you loved me and wanted to marry me...You said that you were sorry and you begged me to forgive you...All I wanted you to do was to get out and leave me alone, but you insisted. Now, all this happens within ten hours. But now, all of a sudden, you are saying that you take it all back, that it was all a mistake...Now, what in hell does all this mean, Erskine? What in hell do you want from me? Why are you bothering me? What have I done to you? What are you so upset about? Why are you hanging around me, all on edge, on pins, watching me like a hawk...?” She filled her lungs to get her breath.
“The way you act—”
“What in hell do you mean?” she flared.
“These men—”
“What in hell’s that to you?” she shot at him. “If you don’t like the way I’m living, then leave me...But stop bothering me!” She sank into a chair.
“I had a right to expect a reasonable response to my declaration—”
“All right,” she snapped. “You didn’t get it. So what? I’m all upset about Tony and you come to me talking about love, love, love...It was Tony I was responsible for, not you...I don’t know what happened to Tony. I’ve been pounding my brains to find out what to do about it, and you start pressing me about loving me...Do you call that responsibility?”
Her attack was so frontal that his feelings shriveled. My God, what a hell cat! If his emotions could have been represented by an image of reality, that image would have been of a pile of hunched muscles crouched in self-defense, ready to spring and attack that which was seeking to destroy it. Mabel’s words made leap to life in him two opposing sets of bars, as it were: bars that had kept him propped to a stance of religious rectitude, and bars that had shut out all the past that his love and need of religion had been designed to deny.
“Mabel, I’m jealous,” he confessed in a confused, weak voice.
“But you don’t know me, so how can you be jealous?” she asked him. “You don’t know my friends, and when you meet them, you don’t like them. Tonight you sat like a lump on a log, itching to get away—”
“I wasn’t so much jealous of them,” he muttered.
“Then what are you jealous of?”
“You!”
“But what have I done?” she cried. “Ask me anything you want to...I’ll tell you. I’m no angel, but I’m not what you seem to be thinking. Oh, hell! I don’t understand you.”
“It’s you,” he told her again, his eyes fastened upon her face.
“You don’t want me to speak to my friends over the phone? You want me to remain in your sight every minute of the day or night? Why? Don’t you have any trust at all in anybody?” she asked.
He did not reply. He stared guiltily at the floor. There was silence. The air became charged. Each seemed to be waiting for the other to speak. And each passing moment made the tension all the greater. Erskine perhaps could have sat for eternity without feeling sure enough of what he felt to say a word. And if that silence could have prevailed, Erskine eventually would have been able to find another sort of prison in which to live, another set of duties to fill his life, to keep him from that vast, complex world which resided in his body and which he called himself and which he’d never met and didn’t want to meet. If silence could have reigned, he’d have mastered himself again by being his own jailer, his judge, his own warden...But Erskine was being called to meet himself.
“Erskine, just why did you come to me?” she asked. “We’ve lived next door to each other for three years. You’ve said good morning and good evening, but you never so much as looked at me. Why now?”
“Hunh?” Erskine grun
ted; he felt cornered.
“What do you want from me?” she insisted.
“I’ve told you—”
“No; no...You’re fighting me in some strange way. What have I done to you to make you fight me? There’s something back of all this. Something’s worrying you, something you want to tell me...What is it?”
“Why do you ask me that?” he asked; his hands were trembling.
“I feel it—”
“What makes you feel that?” he asked quietly.
He dared not look at her and his nerves were taut as he waited for her to answer.
“It’s in everything you say and do...When you’re with me, you’re not thinking of me...What are you thinking of?”
Panic rose in him. How much did she know or suspect? Did she have someone waiting outside the door? Or was she alone in this attack? The more she tried to get at his heart, the more he hated and feared her.
“Mabel, what are you getting at?” he tried to fence her off.
She rose and stood looking down at him.
“Erskine, do you want to confess something to me?” she asked gently, quietly.
His head jerked up and he stared at her, his lips moving soundlessly.
“Confess? What?” he asked finally.
“If you want to confess, then only you would know what—”
“What do you think I want to say, Mabel?” he asked her in a breathless sort of way. He knew that there was but one thing that she could be thinking of, and that was Tony. Really, he was wanting her to bring it up; he was hungry for her to ask him. Her asking him would release him from this nightmare...
She sighed; her face was concentrated; she sat on the bed beside him. He could detect no anger in her and it baffled him. She caught hold of his shoulder and turned him round.
“Is it about Tony? It’s about Tony, isn’t it?” she asked, nodding her head affirmatively.
He did not, could not answer; he could scarcely breathe.
“What about Tony?” she kept at him. “You know something; I can feel it...”
He leaped to his feet and pointed an accusing finger at her, determined to blast her for her dirty sensuality; he wanted to hurl his charge at her but, when his words came out, they were mild, defensive, and deflected from their target.
“You called me just now, didn’t you? And you hung up the phone without saying anything...Isn’t that true?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. She didn’t take her eyes off him.
Oh, God! She knows; she knows! He could see it in her face. But he was certain that she had no real proof. He couldn’t exactly explain how, but he was positive that she’d called him those other two times also...
“Why did you hang up the phone?”
“I wanted to talk to you face to face,” she said.
Again he wanted to come straight to the point, but he could not. He was dying to know for certain if it was she who’d called him twice before.
“What were you asking me about Tony?” he asked her, avoiding her eyes, hating himself, wondering how he could ever tell her.
Mabel looked at him out of the comers of her eyes and gave a silent laugh. She crushed out the stub of her cigarette and lit another.
“I wish to God I could make you out,” she mumbled, shaking her head. “You’ve been tracking me down like a detective. All right, Erskine...Listen, I know that you know I didn’t love Tony. I didn’t want ‘im. You knew that, didn’t you?” she asked him quietly. “But why in hell does it mean so much to you?”
He was thunderstruck; she was naming her own crime!
“I felt it; yes...But why didn’t you love him, want him? He was your own son, your child,” he stammered.
“Because it’s not in my nature to be a mother,” she told him with stark simplicity. “I met Tony’s father just before he went overseas. The last night I spent with him, which was the night we married, he said he wanted to come back to a child of his...It was crazy. I let him do it. Then he went and got himself killed. What the hell! I didn’t even get any fun out of it. Suddenly a baby is dropped in my lap, and I’ve got to work—”
“But that’s no excuse for neglecting him!” he arraigned her.
“I did the best I could for Tony,” she said, but there was no sorrow in her voice. “I worked nights, slept days...What could I do?”
He felt words on the tip of his tongue; he wanted to know definitely that it was she who’d called him those other two times. He felt that it was foolish and wild of him to be so centered upon that, but he was compelled to ask, even if his asking incriminated him.
“Mabel, you called me twice before, didn’t you? You called once and hung up...Then you called again and said—“ He broke off in confusion.
“Yes, I called both times,” she said with satisfaction. “I was wondering when you were going to ask me about that...”
“But why did you call me?”
“I felt you knew something. I was trying to bluff you into telling me—”
Was she trying to trick him into admitting something? She hadn’t been in her apartment...And her television had been going...
“But you didn’t call me from your room, did you?”
“No,” she said and smiled. “But how do you know that? I called from the outside...I left my television set going...I was worried sick, I went for a walk...I called once from a newsstand. The second time I called from a bar. I knew you were worrying about that. But how could you know that I wasn’t in my room when I called?”
He didn’t answer; he couldn’t tell her that he’d been spying into her room. He’d trapped himself. She knew now that he knew something about how Tony had died! What a cold monster of a woman! She’s been watching and studying me all along...
“Erskine?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to Tony?” she begged, pleaded.
“What do you mean?” he snarled; his body was hot as fire.
“How did he die? Did he fall? Did someone push him?” She touched his shoulder. “I ask you that because you’ve asked me if I thought that; you’ve asked me that twice...How did blood get on my newspaper? Did that have anything to do with Tony? Did you see what happened?”
“Why do you ask me? How should I know?” he tried to stall her off.
“Was that you, your naked feet, I saw dangling on that balcony?” she asked him directly at last.
Heat flooded his brain. It was out in the open between them. But why had she waited so long to accuse him?
“You saw—?”
“Not what really happened; no...Not all of it. I knew that something was happening, but I didn’t think it was serious...And I didn’t think you were involved in it...I went back to sleep. I didn’t see Tony fall...I thought he was still on the balcony. I was standing and looking out of my kitchen window. I was afraid that Tony’s drum would keep people awake. I waved at him to keep quiet; he nodded to let me know that he’d obey...He kept so quiet that a little later I went out into the hallway to see about ‘im; he was all right...But the next time I looked, I didn’t see him; I was about to leave the window when I saw two feet, naked feet, dangling in air and they went up, up and out of sight...I’d swear that it was your balcony. Erskine, what on earth was that? Do you know?”
Erskine buried his face in his hands. Yes; he should have told his story before now. But, yes...Only one person had seen him, only one person had phoned him, only one person had known about that bloody newspaper...And that person was Mabel, and she sat six inches from him...
“Why do you think I had anything to do with it?” he asked her, lifting his head and speaking in a whisper. He had hoped that his question would be defiant but, as he spoke, he realized that it was almost a confession.
“Because nobody else wants to speak to me about it,” she said promptly. “They accepted the police story; they think that Tony just fell, that I neglected him...Only you kept hanging around me, accusing me...” She frowned. “Did that person whose feet I saw...?
Did he go into your apartment, Erskine? What was happening?”
“Are you trying to say that I killed Tony?” he asked with rough anger.
“I’m asking you to tell me what happened, if you know,” she insisted. “And I think you do know...If you don’t tell me, then what am I to think? I’m not accusing you; I’m not threatening...Erskine, I’m asking...I thought of telling the police and asking them to ask you, but that Mrs. Westerman was going to be a witness against me, talk about me...Then suddenly you came to me of your own accord...”
Erskine knew now that he was in danger; Mabel’s mentioning the police made him leap to his feet and confront her.
“It was you who killed your own child!” he shouted in fury.
Mabel stared, blinked. She bit her lips in concentrated thought.
“Are you crazy?” she gasped. “What are you talking about? You’re hiding something...A man as wealthy as you are, why do you stoop to this?” She looked nervously about the room. “I want a drink...”
“There’s a bottle on the shelf in the kitchen,” he said. “I keep it there for others; I don’t drink.”
She kept her eyes on him until she went out of the door. He heard her getting the bottle, opening it, and pouring herself some whiskey.
“Do you want a drink?” she called to him.
“Hunh?” He licked his lips nervously. “Yes,” he whispered in despair.
He needed one. She brought him a tumbler half full and placed it in his hand. She was watching him closely. He lifted the glass and drained it. She sat the bottle of whiskey on the floor.
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