Hangsaman

by Shirley Jackson

  Thus, at nine-thirty of a Sunday morning the Waites had breakfasted together. Mr. Waite felt with complacence the touch of the sunlight on his head; Bud, stirring in his chair, sighed with the deep resignation of a boy fifteen years old who is going back to high school in fourteen more days; Mrs. Waite, looking deeply into her coffee cup, spoke with the soft, faintly wistful intonation she kept for her husband. “Cocktail olives,” she said. It was as though she were deliberately setting him off, because Mr. Waite stared for a minute and then said emphatically, “You mean I have to make cocktails for that crew? Cocktails for twenty people? Cocktails?”

  “You couldn’t very well ask them to drink tea,” Mrs. Waite said. “Not them.”

  Natalie, fascinated, was listening to the secret voice which followed her. It was the police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice. “How,” he asked pointedly, “Miss Waite, how do you account for the gap in time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body?”

  “I can’t tell,” Natalie said back to him in her mind, her lips not moving, her dropped eyes concealing from her family the terror she hid also from the detective. “I refuse to say,” she told him.

  Mr. Waite spoke patiently. “You serve cocktails,” he said, “you’re always making them. With ordinary highballs everyone can make his own. They will anyway,” he added, driving home his point.

  “I didn’t invite them,” Mrs. Waite said.

  “I didn’t invite them,” Mr. Waite said.

  “I called them,” Mrs. Waite said, “but you made out the list.”

  “You realize,” the detective said silently, “that this discrepancy in time may have very serious consequences for you?”

  “I realize,” Natalie said. Confess, she thought, if I confess I might go free.

  Mr. Waite shifted his ground again; by now he and his wife knew one another well enough to substitute half-hearted disagreement for a more taxing marital relationship, and an aimless, constant argument where either one took any side was to them a familiarity as affectionate as the ponderous sympathy of a Victorian household. “God,” Mr. Waite said, “I wish they weren’t coming.”

  “I can cancel it,” his wife said, as she always did.

  “I could get some work done for a change,” Mr. Waite said. He looked around the table, at his wife gazing into her coffee cup, at Natalie regarding her plate, at Bud watching out the window some presumably enrapturing adolescent dream. “No one ever looks at anyone else in this house,” Mr. Waite said irritably. “Do you realize I’m two weeks behind in my work?” he demanded of his wife. He enumerated on his fingers. “I’ve got to review four books by Monday; four books no one in this house has read but myself. Then there’s the article on Robin Hood—that should have been finished three days ago. And my reading, and today’s paper, and yesterday’s. Not to mention,” Mr. Waite added ponderously, “not to mention the book.”

  At the mention of the book, his family glanced at him briefly, in chorus, and then away, back to the less choleric plates and cups on the table.

  “I wish I could help you, dear,” Mrs. Waite said artificially.

  “Are you aware,” the detective demanded sarcastically of Natalie, “that you are retarding the course of this investigation by your stubborn silence?”

  “Listen,” Bud said abruptly, “I don’t have to come to this thing, do I?”

  His father frowned, and then laughed rudely. “What were you planning to do instead?” he asked; if there was a note of thunder in his voice his family ignored it through long familiarity.

  “Something,” Bud said insolently. “Anything.”

  Mr. Waite looked down the table at his wife. “This son of mine,” he explained elaborately, “has such a distaste for the literary life that he prefers doing ‘something—anything’ to attending a literary cocktail party.” An epigram obviously occurred to him and he tried it out cautiously. “A literary cocktail party holds few attractions for one,” he began slowly, feeling his way, “who is at the same time too untaught for literature and too young for drink.”

  The family considered; Mrs. Waite shook her head.

  “Adolescence is a time when—” she suggested finally, and Mr. Waite took it up: “When one is too untaught for literature and too young for drink.”

  “Too old for literature?” Natalie asked.

  Bud laughed. “Too smart to get anywhere near it,” he said.

  They all laughed, and the sudden family gesture was so pleasant to them that they immediately took steps to separate themselves from one another. Mr. Waite left first; still laughing, he slid his napkin into the ring which was composed of two snakes curiously and obscenely entwined (“nothing to sit at table with,” Mrs. Waite called it) and rose, saying, “Excuse me,” to his wife as he did so. A moment later Bud eased himself from his chair and was, by a typical sliding grace, able to reach the door ahead of his father. “After you, sir,” Bud said grandly as he held the door for his father, and Mr. Waite bowed formally and said, “Thank you, young man.” They went down the hall together, and Natalie and Mrs. Waite could hear Bud saying, “As a matter of fact, I’m going swimming.”

  Terror lest she be left alone with her mother made Natalie almost speechless; as her mother opened her mouth to speak (perhaps to say, “Excuse me,” to Natalie; perhaps she was as much troubled by being left alone with Natalie) Natalie said quickly, “Busy now,” and went with little dignity out of the French doors behind her chair and down the flat steps into the garden.

  She did not really prefer the garden to several other spots in the world; she would rather, for instance, have been alone in her room with the door locked, or sitting on the grass by a brook at midnight, or, given an absolutely free choice, standing motionless against a pillar in a Greek temple or on a tumbril in Paris or on a great lonely rock over the sea, but the garden was closest, and it pleased her father to see her wandering morning-wise among the roses.

  “And your age?” said the detective. “Occupation? Sex?”

  It was a beautiful morning, and the garden seemed to be enjoying it. The grass had exerted itself to be unusually green just beyond Natalie’s feet, the roses were heavy and sweet and suitable for giving to any number of lovers, the sky was blue and serene, as though it had never known a tear. Natalie smiled secretly, moving her shoulders stiffly under her thin white shirt, agreeably conscious of herself going from the flat line of her shoulders all the way down to her feet far below, so that she was, leaning back with her shoulders against the solid intangible of the air, a thin thing, a graceful thing, a thing of steel and subtle padding. She breathed deeply, satisfied.

  “Will you talk now?” the detective demanded, his voice rising a little, although he kept it still under iron control. “Do you think that you alone can stand against the force of the police, the might and weight of duly constituted authority, against me?”

  A lovely little shiver went down Natalie’s back. “I may be in danger every moment of my life,” she told the detective, “but I am strong within myself.”

  “Is that an answer?” the detective said. “What if I told you that you were seen?”

  Natalie lifted her head, looking proudly off into the sky.

  “The housekeeper,” the detective said, dropping his voice into a vicious, slapping murmur. “She has testified—under oath, mind you, Miss Waite, under oath—that she saw you enter the house fully fifteen minutes before your screams summoned the household to the study where you stood over the murdered body of your lover. Well, Miss Waite, well?”

  “I have nothing to say,” Natalie said, barely able to form the words.

  “What becomes of your story now?” the detective went on ruthlessly. “Miss Waite, what becomes of your precious statement that you were alone in the garden?”

  “I have nothing to say,” Natalie sai
d.

  “Tell me, Miss Waite,” the detective continued remorselessly, his cruel face closer to Natalie’s, his voice soft and evil, “tell me, do you doubt the word of the housekeeper? Do you dare to say that she lies? Do you believe that she is unable to estimate time?”

  “Ten o’clock, Natalie,” Mrs. Waite called from the French doors.

  “Coming,” Natalie called back. Because she almost always ran instead of walking she cleared the steps with one long bound—like a deer, she thought in mid-air—and went in through the French doors. “Where’s my notebook?” she asked her mother as she passed, and did not stay for an answer; her notebook was on the hall table where she had left it that morning when she came down to breakfast. With her notebook in her hand, she knocked on the study door.

  “Come in, my dear,” her father said.

  He looked up, smiling at her across the desk as she came in. “Good morning, Natalie,” he said formally, and Natalie said, “Good morning, Dad.” It was a fiction of theirs that these little meetings began the day for both of them, although before meeting in the study they usually breakfasted together, and pursued privately their personal morning occupations; Natalie watching the morning from her bedroom window and making hasty notes about it on her desk pad, combing her hair so that it fell carelessly along her shoulders, putting on the secret little locket she always wore; her father awakening and looking at himself in the mirror and smoking his first cigarette of the day and, presumably, somehow dressing himself.

  “You look very fresh this morning, my dear,” Mr. Waite said, and Natalie said to him solemnly, “I’ve been thinking a lot today,” and he nodded.

  “Of course,” he said. “Brilliant sunshine, seventeen years behind you, the infinite sorrows of growing up on your shoulders—one must think.”

  Sometimes, these mornings in the study, Natalie was uncertain whether or not to laugh at her father’s statements. It was difficult, usually, to tell if his remark was a joke because it was a point of conduct with him not to laugh at his own jokes, and with herself the only audience Natalie had only her own reactions to depend on. She was serious this time, because, although her father’s expectant air seemed to indicate that this had been a joke, his pointing out that she had seventeen years behind her had given her a sudden sense of the immensity of time; seventeen years was a very long time to have been alive, if you took it into proportion by the thought that in seventeen years more—or as long as she had wasted being a child, and a small girl, silly and probably playing—she would be thirty-four, and old. Married, probably. Perhaps—and the thought was nauseating—senselessly afflicted with children of her own. Worn, and tired. She brought herself away from the disagreebly clinging thought by her usual method—imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive—and turned expectantly to her father.

  “Well,” he said. He was looking down at the papers on his desk. “Have you brought your notebook?”

  Silently Natalie passed it across the desk to him. There was always this moment of dismay, when the words she had written crossed her mind remorselessly and the thought of her father reading them made her hesitate with an urgent desire to be off, out of the study, anywhere. Then the moment passed, and she said as she handed him the notebook, “I did it last night. After you were all in bed.”

  “Up all night writing again?” her father asked indulgently. He began to turn the pages of the notebook slowly, savoring them.

  “I went to sleep about three,” Natalie said. Her father was bitter about people who moistened their thumbs as they read, and used such vulgarity as a symbol for much of the reading public, but he was probably unaware that as he turned the pages of Natalie’s notebook he wet his lips slightly with his tongue, although he kept his fingers away from his mouth as he always did.

  “This has always been a favorite of mine, Natalie,” he said, stopping at a page. “This one about the trees. ‘Lined up against the sky’ is good, very good. And the one on your mother.” He chuckled, and turned another page. “I hope she never sees it,” he said, and looked up at Natalie with a smile like a child’s.

  “She’s never interested in my notebooks,” Natalie said.

  “I know,” said Mr. Waite. “Nor is she interested in my articles.” He laughed and said, as though in compensation, “I never could have found anyone else so unsympathetic as your mother, and so helpful.”

  This time Natalie laughed with certainty. It was a statement very true of her mother.

  “Now,” her father said. He stopped at the current page in the notebook, and deliberately hesitant, looked up at Natalie and smiled, turned to select a cigarette from the package on the desk, and made an elaborate ceremony of lighting it. “I’m a little bit worried,” he said. “I’m not really sure I dare read it.”

  “It was the hardest thing I had to do yet,” Natalie said. Her father looked at her with a quick frown, and she thought and then said, “It was the hardest thing I have had to do, so far.”

  “Can’t be too careful,” her father said. He braced his shoulders, and bent his head down to the notebook.

  While he read, Natalie, her initial nervousness over (once she had given him the notebook each morning her step was taken; it was irrecoverable then, and she had only to wait for it to be returned to her), surveyed the study freshly, as she did every morning. It was a deeply satisfying place. The books which stood expectantly on the shelves around the room had the fulfilled look of books which have been read, although not necessarily by Mr. Waite; the leather chair still held the marks of Mr. Waite’s ample bottom, the ashtray beside it already this morning touched with ash. The room was used, perhaps worn, and had nothing of abandon about it; it was relaxed, as though nothing now could surprise it, once Mr. Waite had given into it the care of his own alarming self.

  “This is good,” Mr. Waite said abruptly. He laughed aloud, and said again, “This is good. Here, where it says, ‘He seems perpetually surprised at the world’s never being quite so intelligent as he is, although he would be even more surprised if he found out that perhaps he is himself not so intelligent as he thinks.’ Too many words, Natalie, and I think you became intoxicated with the first half of the sentence, and only tacked the second half on to make it come down the way it went up. It could be said more neatly, I believe. But it’s sound, very sound. And I like, ‘He has a great reputation for generosity, although no one has ever known him to give anything to the poor.’ You’ve really extended yourself.” He sat back and looked at her cheerfully, as she had known that he would. “I am more than pleased,” he declared. He fell again to reading, laughing occasionally. “Of course,” he said after a minute, “you realize—in fact, I believe I told you this when I gave you the assignment—that I cannot afford to quarrel with anything you have written here.”

  Natalie said, “Maybe I took advantage of that.”

  He shook his head. “I know you did,” he said.

  He read again, and Natalie looked around the study; the corpse would be over there, of course, between the bookcase with the books on demonology and the window, which had heavy drapes that could be pulled to hide any nefarious work. She would be found at the desk, not five feet away from the corpse, leaning one hand on the corner to support herself, her face white and distorted with screaming. She would be unable to account for the blood on her hands, on the front of her dress, on her shoes, the blood soaking through the carpet at her feet, the blood under her hand on the desk, leaving a smeared mark on the papers there.

  “Oh, no,” her father said. “Not handsome, Natalie. That I absolutely disclaim.”

  “But it’s modified,” Natalie said. She chose her words with mischief. “I particularly say that the handsomeness is largely arrogance; that so few people are really arrogant these days that such a person gives the impression of beauty. I liked that idea.”

  “It’s an unusual thought,” her father said consideringly. “I’m
not sure but that you’re too young for it, though.” He gave the notebook a little push, to get it away from the edge of the desk so he could put his elbows down. “Now,” he said.

  Natalie settled herself, watching him.

  “In the first place,” Mr. Waite said, choosing his words carefully, “I’m going to quarrel with your whole attack in regard to the problem of description. No description can be said to describe anything—and I’ve told you this before—if it’s in mid-air, so to speak, unattached. It’s got to be tied on to something, to be useful. You have apparently neglected this in today’s work.”

  “But I thought you said—” Natalie began, but her father held up his hand; he disliked being interrupted.

  “Apparently, I say,” he went on. “I don’t think that you yourself quite realize the work you have given to this little sketch. Under any other circumstances your weighting of it would be meaningless, but I gave you this on purpose to try you out, and you did exactly as I expected.” He paused, thinking. “Understand,” he said finally, “I am not finding fault with your interpretation. You are of course completely free to write whatever you please about me or anything else. I am interested in seeing you write what you please, and in encouraging you to write more. But you must, if you are ever to be a good writer, understand your own motives.”

  He stopped, and made again his elaborate ceremony of lighting a cigarette. Then he folded his hands on the notebook and looked frankly at Natalie, the cigarette burning handsomely in the ashtray, the line of smoke framing his head on one side, and the squareness of the window shaping nicely on the other side.