The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “A million light years.”

  “Of course, darling, but not in the flesh. And I keep thinking that right now maybe you ought to be farther from me.” Edith shrugged and sighed. “For your sake, that is, certainly not for mine. Right now I could be a little too rich for your blood.”

  “No. If not for your sake, then not for mine.”

  Edith had come back to her then, standing with the great cool light at her back, looking down in one of her sudden moods of softness and gravity. “All right, Cal. But think about college for next fall?”

  In agreement more than half sincere, Callista said: “I will—I’ll think about it. You ought to marry, Edith.”

  “Narrow pelvis, distaste for an overpopulated world. I don’t think it’s my dish. I like men. The few that I’ve thought I’d like for keeps turned out to be guys who didn’t want me, or at least not that way.…”

  But as for the reading in psychology, Edith’s opinion remembered was still not quite acceptable. Freud and his successors still seemed to Callista like the best available guides into the nearest and most tormenting section of the jungle. One could rule out those who had fallen into worship of the sofa-pillow god Adjustment, and in doing so lost sight of the individual self or never noticed it. One could also remain critical of any guide, since the self must learn the sound of its own voice and discover its own country.

  Yes—but all that was before Ann Doherty drank poison.

  Once more laboriously, appearing to herself rather like a high school child hungry for a good mark, Callista attempted to review her knowledge of that night last August. Not only as it would be presented when she took the stand (as she must do whether Cecil thought best or not) but as it would be declared to the court of her own intelligence before that court could grant any acquittal. The face of Judge Mann intruded, however, again and once again, when her toiling revery reached the Blank, the lost moment, the miserable blur of amnesia where the crucial thing, the one answer Callista must have, was surely lying hidden. A quiet face, probably wise and certainly not vain, with the small chronic frown, the sense of cleanness and good health, the gentleness that Callista believed no face could wear if it were functioning as a mask—very well then: admit the face of Judge Terence Mann to this lonely privacy and make use of it.

  Let the empty wall beside the barred door dissolve a little. Blur the flat plaster, doubtless reinforced within; it looks like stone and by daylight shows a few sad scribblings of the last tenant, not quite scrubbed away: Why can’t they let me read what the wench wrote and criticize her bit of a drawing that might now be either a baby or a phallus?—blur that, and let the high walnut bench stand there. Give him the gown—black, please!—and the pencil, and the look, startled but not unkind, that he wore when the spiteful child said: “Which is the Clerk?” He would be less ghostly if now and then, there in the foggy opening of the wall, he could move his thin hand in the writing—could it possibly be drawing?—up there in the dignified isolation where even Mr. Delehanty, the Clerk-which-is-the-Clerk, couldn’t watch it. All right now? Go ahead!

  Begin with the talk, the flustered moment when Ann came into the apartment a little fogged up with wondering what it was all about. If she was wondering—hard to be sure, since dewy-eyed confusion was one of Ann’s best faces: look-how-cute-I-am-when-I’m-thinking-about-something. Not that a talk with Nancy could ever decide anything except that she would continue certain of her own placid rightness. Your Honor, it had a bearing on my state of mind—and by the way, my cantankerous cattiness and unfairness are duly noted and admitted. I couldn’t stand her. I never could stand her, even before—before Jim. I can’t stand people who cuddle continually inside one ready-made idea like babies growing old in the crib. Yes—granted—they can’t help it.

  YOU ARE ADMITTING YOU HATED YOUR LOVER’S WIFE?

  No, I’m not. I said I couldn’t stand her. It’s not the same thing. Wasn’t that correct? A difficult point, but not too difficult for Judge Mann—he with his calm face, his busy pencil: without the black robe, in ordinary clothes, what would you take him for? Doctor? Scientist? Teacher? Besides, your Honor, on that night he was no longer my lover. That was the night of the 16th of August, with a hazy moon. He had been my lover from the first of May to the sixth day of July.

  DO YOU WISH TO TESTIFY ABOUT THAT?

  I think I should like to have the hazy moon admitted in evidence.

  CALLISTA, WILL YOU NEVER UNDERSTAND THAT MOST HUMAN CREATURES ARE AFRAID OF LAUGHTER? GET TO THE POINT.

  All right.

  She could skim over the first half-hour of that talk. It had been mere sparring, Ann vaguely friendly on the surface, chattery, perhaps sensing just enough of trouble to want to hold it away. Then Callista had made a stumbling approach of blurted hints, Ann gradually comprehending because she had to, gradually perching nearer the edge of her chair, hands not in their usual flutter but folded and tightening in her lap, her lovely face abnormally attentive; listening—she had to, that once!—watchful and still. Not openly resentful or hating, never entirely distorted out of beauty. Incredible, but it must be that Ann had never guessed, and Jim had been a better actor than Callista dreamed. Ann had not even been hurt, really; not inside. Too secure. And then—“Poor Callie!”

  Your Honor, I then said: “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” and was sick to my stomach.

  She lived again (nearly forgetting the ghostly, not unkindly seated figure in the blurred wall) her blundering rush for the bathroom with a handkerchief at her mouth. Ann had followed, of course. Callista had not quite slammed the door. Ann was out there, bleating, and then inside. “Callie, you mustn’t feel so bad! Don’t you see? God will forgive you. If you’ll only take the right attitude!”

  Yes, your Honor, I retract the word “bleating.” “Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman”—Lear, Act Five, last scene, I forget the number of the scene, do you mind? She also put her arm around me while I was heaving, and—

  “Let me alone!”

  “Poor Callie! It’s all right. Let me get you something.”

  “God damn it, Ann, go away!”

  Ann had not gone away, not then. Callista remembered running from her again, into the bedroom, slamming that door and locking it, dropping on the bed unable for a while to move or cry out. The beginning of the blank, probably. A mental door slammed, but surely not locked. But mind is continuing action: it doesn’t have doors, levels, thresholds. I know, your Honor, I know; I’m tired out, therefore thinking in stupid terms, because I wish I could go back to sleep. The blanket stinks, but I do wish—

  WHY DID YOU ASK HER TO COME AT ALL, MISS BLAKE?

  I believe I thought we might be able to talk of it like adults, but I never even got as far as telling her I was pregnant. When half the truth was out I saw it was no good. I’d forgotten her God had a blueprint for all these little difficulties. I goofed.… This business about doors: admittedly Freudian slanguage is treacherously pictorial, deceptively so, as Edith pointed out once, only, damn it, it FEELS like a slammed door. Not quite locked. Now may I—please—

  Once upon a time there was an orange-gold-brindle kitten named Bonnie who lived (happily ever afterward) at Aunt Cora Winwood’s flat in Greenwich Village, and she was sentimentally tame, small enough to curl up in two human palms. Which Aunt Cora liked to demonstrate, transferring the sleepy morsel to Callista’s hands. They had called it “pouring the kitten.” After Papa died, reason after reason why she mustn’t go visit the Winwoods. Only three subway stops away, and Papa’s own sister. “Tom Winwood drinks, dear, and is not reliable. I do not intend to have My Little Girl exposed to Anything Like That. Nor do I wish to be reminded, Callista, that your father approved of your going there. His judgment was not always—entirely—sound. Mr. Winwood was in fact largely responsible for certain aspects of your father’s Condition. Now I
think I need say no more.” Yes, Mother, and No, Mother. Yes, Mother, now and forever you need say no more.

  Eyes closed, cheek wincing at the blanket—but twitching over to the left side would be no better—Callista resolved not to remember nor count the days since she had last drawn down her lover’s face to her, seen gaunt cheekbones grown large beyond vision above her, accepted the pressure of his desire and her own. And therefore, inevitably, remembered and counted the days. Sometimes his hands sweated and were cold.

  Not the first time, that May-Day afternoon in the woods—why, then (at first) Jim had been almost pagan, natural, free, coming on her suddenly in the damp green hollow where spring growth was riotous. Startled and—yes, temporarily set free. He must have been, or he could not have acted with such quick certainty, tenderness and aggression blended for once in a most invincible rightness. In the very first moment, when he pushed aside the hemlock branch and saw her, his face had been comically legible as his mind abruptly discovered a woman in place of Homely-Blake-Girl-Who-Used-to-Live-Next-Door. To the best of her memory, Callista had not smiled; only sat waiting where spring sunlight lay scattered, random gold; waiting and looking up, needing words no more than a grown-up Bonnie would have needed them at the first cruel-kind approach of a yellow-eyed lover across a back fence. Still she had used words, a few, standing up, leaning back against the rough gray body of an oak, something foolish: “Oh—I’m afraid you’ve started up a dryad.” He might not even have heard that, his hands pressing the tree on either side of her face, his growing need as obvious as the sunlight. I think he never so desired Ann. Such hungers (I know he thought this) are not for good women.

  His first kiss had fallen in the thin hollow of her shoulder. He had carried her to a softness of hemlock needles. I think I helped him a little with my shorts. Pain of course, the wrench of the torn hymen a required crash of dissonance in the symphonic flow. I suppose I screamed—had my teeth in his shoulder for a minute—he understood that. Drowsy exhaustion afterward deeper than his—

  Soles occidere et redire possunt:

  Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,

  Nox est perpetua una dormienda.…

  “What, Cal? What did you say? Was that Italian?”

  “Latin. Thing—happened to remember.”

  “Oh.”

  She had come wide awake then: no Kotex of course, tiresome clinical necessity of a handkerchief for the unimportant bleeding—and had presently given him some sort of English translation that stumbled along on two left feet: “Suns may set and rise, but when our brief light is gone, the night is an eternal sleep.” Jim hadn’t liked any of that, much. The Latin, or the bleeding. That must have been the first time that the worry-wart crinkle appeared between his thick black eyebrows, the first time the poor guy had said: “Cal, darling, what the devil are we going to do?” I think I laughed at him, a bit. Not inside me of course.

  SHOULDN’T WE (MY DEAR) GET BACK TO THE PEOPLE VS. BLAKE?

  Very well, Your Honor, but I don’t admit that the episode of adultery (terminology by T. J. Hunter) is irrelevant.

  NOT IRRELEVANT (MY DEAR)—BUT WEREN’T WE DISCUSSING THE DEATH BY VIOLENCE OF ANN PIERCE DOHERTY?

  All right. I lay frozen in my bedroom wishing the good little bitch would go away, and I DO NOT KNOW whether or not I heard what she was up to in the kitchenette. You’re not helping, Judge. You’re not helping me remember.

  Eyes wide, she saw the dull wall had grown a little brighter with dawn, and wished that the man on the bench might appear as a genuine visual hallucination: it would be interesting. But he lived in the brain only; her outer eyes would not create him. I did hear her knock on my bedroom door, call my name, say something else stupid, go away with a tap of little high heels. Get it, Judge? This is the Blank, this is the thing you’re not helping me remember:

  If I did hear her take that brandy bottle out, if I wasn’t too hysterical to remember what was in it and why, then—

  (Spot of soup on Cecil’s coat sleeve. Old, half-sick, drinking too much, his wife dead long ago and nobody to look after him—when he’s dead who’ll even remember what he was, the courage and the kindness? Cesspool known as the world—people are already forgetting Darrow, aren’t they? and every other who’s tried to clean it out, dig channels to drain away the filth of human stupidity?)

  If I heard her and remembered what was in the bottle, then I murdered her. If I didn’t, then as a potential but incompetent suicide I was merely maintaining a public nuisance. As a good man well known to you would say, it’s that simple. But that is the Blank, Judge, and you’re not helping me.

  I therefore address my closing remarks to other gentlemen of Winchester County, specifically District Attorney Lamson and his subordinate Talbot Jesus-wept Hunter. I wish to apologize to them for laughing, being convinced that the noise just heard in my apartment was laughter and not rats. I have no wish to laugh and hurt your feelings, but it IS funny. Honest, isn’t it funny how the judge and jury inside me (with some inconsequential imaginary help from that rather nice joe Judge Mann) can make me squirm and whimper like a gut-shot rabbit, while YOU CAN’T?

  II

  Edith Nolan watched the cherries wobbling on Maud Welsh’s hat as the woman perched in the witness chair, a sparrow ready for flight. T. J. Hunter purred and soothed. “Your occupation, Miss Welsh?”

  “Guess you could say housekeeper.” The voice was dry, brittle as the woman’s skin. Merciless morning light played on Maud’s wrinkles; bad judgment had tricked her into using dabs of make-up.

  On her two visits to the Shanesville house, Edith had been aware of Maud as not much more than a background flutter and squeak; Callista had filled Edith in on the family history that explained her. Long ago, long before Herb Chalmers and Callista’s mother were married and while Herb’s father Malachi Chalmers was still alive, Cousin Maud had been asked to come and keep house. She stayed. Father Malachi had been a Full Professor, also a sort of fin de siècle Great Man who wrote a book (or something) and whose memory, Edith gathered, served as a squashy but invincible paperweight holding down the remainder of Herb’s polite life. Maud Welsh had evidently done much to keep that memory functional. By the power of the meek, and because she was useful and a cousin, she just stayed, a small household tyrant given to vigorous church attendance and good works, enlarging on the time when the Professor was alive as a golden age to keep his degenerate son in line, dusting and sweeping intensely at unseasonable hours, putting up interminable preserves, and carrying on a picayune war with Victoria Chalmers, a war of sniffles and grievances which (Callista said) both of them enjoyed so much that there was never any serious question of sending Maud on her way. In the cellar, said Callista, there were five six-foot shelves of plum jam alone—Maud’s atomic reserve. Anyhow, she raised quiet Presbyterian hell if any of it was used. And Callista in the studio had drawn a pen-and-ink of Maud lurking all alone underground in a desolated world, grown obese (in garments meant for a thin woman) on a thick diet of plum jam. Edith had said: “Oh, damn it, Cal, after all!” and kept the sketch.

  “Where are you employed at present, Miss Welsh?”

  “Well, see, I’m kin to—”

  T. J. Hunter showed half-amused worry wrinkles. “Just my question, please. You know, limit your answers to the question.”

  “Oh, you did tell me that, didn’t you? Well, I live in with the Chalmerses, I mean Dr. and Mrs. Herbert Chalmers of Shanesville.”

  “Doctor—that’s an academic degree, isn’t it?”

  “Uh—oh yes. A Ph. D.” Her voice made it an ailment.

  Hunter’s morning sleekness annoyed Edith, who felt dowdy and unkempt after a bad night. Aspirin, insomnia, a dripping faucet in the bathroom, meaningless noises in the studio—probably mice.

  “Is there a street number on the Chalmers house?”

  “N
o, just Walton Road. Same’s when The Professor was alive and we lived in Winchester, all you had to say—”

  “Yes, I understand. Just limit your answers, please.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll try.”

  Judge Mann also was dark under the eyes, as if his sleep had been poor. He was not busy with his pencil. His ignoring of Hunter’s wry glance was perhaps a way of saying: She’s your chicken. Callista, drooping and still-faced, was again partly hidden by Cecil Warner, who looked a little better this morning with a fresh shave. The flowers last night, the rather elaborate too-expensive dining out, the antique gallantry—very sweet of him, Edith thought, and in his idiom not at all strange. He had wanted of course to talk about Callista, but at dinner and later, after toiling upstairs to the studio for drinks and quiet, he had hardly been able to, seeming happier when Edith carried the conversation away to more impersonal regions.

  Edith twisted in her seat, winning a timid nod from Herb Chalmers, a calm glare from Victoria. Back of them was Jim Doherty, again with Father Bland. Jim did not acknowledge her glance either, but probably because he didn’t see it, a man alone on an island and hurt, trying to interpret contradictory voices in the wind. Edith twitched her skirt back into place and settled herself to endure the first day of testimony.

  “Are your duties as housekeeper fairly general, Miss Welsh?”

  “Might say so. I do everything but heavy cleaning, we have a woman on Tuesdays for that. I cook, see to things.”