Mrs. White

by Margaret Tracy

  Mrs. White laid down her knitting and smiled. As she turned her head toward the stairs, the rapid music of a news promo came from the set.

  “This is a Channel Five newsbreak,” said the newscaster.

  “Yes?” Mrs. White called up softly.

  “Don’t I get tucked in too?” Paul staged-whispered.

  “Another in the series of gruesome suburban housewife murders …” said the newsman.

  Mrs. White sighed, then smiled. He was not so tired after all.

  “Oh, you might,” she answered.

  “… this is the third grisly killing in the area in two months,” said the newsman.

  “Come on,” Paul White called.

  “Okay, okay,” said Mrs. White, folding up her knitting.

  “… police say they appear to have been committed by the same person …”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming. Be quiet, you’ll wake up the children.”

  “New York City transit workers say they will not be able …”

  “Come on,” said Paul White.

  “I’m coming,” Mrs. White replied.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Friday mornings were especially busy for Mrs. White. She had to start breakfast ahead of schedule because Paul usually left early so he could finish early for the weekend. Then she had to make a second breakfast for the kids. Paul Jr. had his math tutor after school, so she had to remember to give him her money. Mary had a full day at kindergarten and was usually upset about it. Mrs. White herself had to go to the Arbordale Thrift Shop and do her mending there, and then get back before Mary returned from school.

  This Friday morning was as hectic as usual.

  Paul hardly touched his breakfast before rushing out the door, and on his heels the children came barreling down the stairs, sounding like an invading army. Junior needed a shirt ironed and Mary, as always, needed her hair combed and her small shoes tied.

  After all of that was finished, Mrs. White hastily scribbled Mary and Paul on brown lunch bags. Then she waited at the door with them for the bus and car pool.

  As they waited, Mary whispered a whine up to her mother. “Mommy …”

  Mrs. White bent down to hear.

  “I don’t feel good.” Mary pouted and her eyes filled.

  “Well, what’s the matter?”

  Mary shrugged. “Just don’t feel good.”

  “She’s afraid, that’s all,” Junior taunted. “She’s afraid because it’s Full Day Friday.”

  “Am not,” Mary said, blushing.

  “Yes, you are, you’re yellow.”

  “Well, you’re—blue.”

  Mrs. White fought a smile. “All right, the both of you. Mary, if you’re still sick at break, tell Mrs. Jenkins to call me at the thrift shop. But only if you really feel bad.”

  Mary agreed to the deal.

  “And, Paulie, you stop picking on your sister. You’re older and bigger and you ought to know better by now.”

  Soon the bus beeped and the car honked and Mrs. White’s children ran into the morning. She had a few minutes to herself then, to sit in the kitchen and finish her coffee, which had already grown cold.

  As she sipped it and gazed out the window, she saw Jonathan Cornell pass by with his fishing pole and tackle. She raised her cup in greeting and he—waking, it appeared, from yet another daydream—raised his pole back.

  Mrs. White shook her head with a smile. A wife was what that man needed. His pants were even too long; the poor fellow was lucky he didn’t trip on them.

  A woman would have her hands full with him, she thought. He would never be around to help, always be off creating his Mona Lisas. Or fishing. Maybe he could make up for it with his sweetness or his smile. But it would take a very patient woman to think it worth the trouble. She checked the clock and got up to go.

  On her way to the thrift shop she stopped off at the mall. She wanted to drop in at The Yarn Barn and pick up some thread. Before she did, however, she went into the drugstore next door and bought some aspirin and browsed through the novel rack. She had little time for reading, but she did sometimes enjoy a brief romance in which the dark, brooding stranger whom the heroine suspected of evil turned out in the end to be the only man she could ever love. She found one called A Nurse in Singapore, and bought it and then went next door.

  Mrs. White was a regular at The Yarn Barn and all the employees nodded a hello to her. She picked out a few spools of thread and took them to the counter.

  “Thank you, Mrs. White,” the salesgirl said.

  “Thank you.”

  Upon hearing this exchange, a well-dressed woman standing nearby turned to her.

  “Mrs. White?” she asked.

  Mrs. White faced her. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry—Mrs. Paul White?”

  Mrs. White only nodded.

  “Oh, I’m so glad to meet you. We spoke on the phone. Your husband is doing some work on my garage.” She extended her hand. “I’m Emily Sutter.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Mrs. Sutter was a small handsome woman about the same age as Mrs. White. She was fashionably trim and fashionably tan and her salt-and-pepper hair framed a pleasant but regal face. She was wearing a spring suit Mrs. White had seen in Vogue, and as she approached she held out a delicate white hand with long, red, perfectly manicured nails.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” said Mrs. White softly.

  “Oh, the pleasure is mine,” said Mrs. Sutter. “I just wanted to tell you how pleased I am with your husband’s work. He’s doing such a fine, fine job.”

  Mrs. White blushed a bit but still smiled.

  “I’m glad.”

  “And he’s so pleasant. And so hardworking. But of course I don’t have to tell you.”

  “No.” Mrs. White’s smile became a trifle uncomfortable and she glanced at the door. “No, you don’t.”

  “And so quick,” Mrs. Sutter went on. “Why, the other day I was making my cheesecake—my famous cheesecake—and I was just finished pouring the filling when I looked out the window and saw your husband redoing the back walls.”

  Mrs. Sutter reached out and held Mrs. White’s arm in a warm, strong grip.

  “Well, when I took the cake out of the oven—twenty-five, thirty minutes later—I looked out again and he was more than halfway done. I was astonished. There he was, taking a break—a well-earned break—smoking a cigarette. I just shook my head.”

  Mrs. White smiled even more uneasily. Paul had told her he was cutting down on the cigarettes.

  “Well, I’m so glad everything is working out so well,” she said.

  “Yes, it is, indeed. I can’t wait till my husband sees it. No place is too good for his cars, let me tell you. With some men it’s women, with other men it’s cars. I think he’d keep me in the garage and the Mercedes in the house if he could.” Mrs. Sutter laughed. “Come to think of it, maybe that’s why he’s having the whole thing redone.”

  She bent forward now, and laughed for a long time.

  “Well,” Mrs. White said, pulling away a bit. “I really couldn’t be happier.”

  “I should think not,” said Mrs. Sutter. “You’re a lucky woman.”

  “No,” Mrs. White said. “I meant, for you.”

  When Mrs. White got back into her car to drive to the thrift shop, she found she was perspiring heavily. Hearing Paul praised had been a pleasure, but she wished Paul had been there with her. Mrs. White had always been shy around women like Mrs. Sutter. They seemed to her like inhabitants of another world, a world both foreign and bizarre. They were so cool, so self-assured. They were so sleek and fashionable. They never had a hair out of place. And, while they always seemed to be rushing off into some whirl of exciting activity, they never seemed to be accomplishing any of the simple tasks that made up much of Mrs. White’s life.

  She confessed—somewhere deep inside—to a feeling of inferiority around them. What’s more, she confessed that that feeling, that clums
iness that it brought out in her, made her feel a little angry at them. She found herself chastising Mrs. Sutter and all her kind in her mind for not “doing their jobs,” for not taking proper care of their homes and their husbands and their families. She knew that was silly. Probably, Mrs. Sutter was a perfectly decent woman with a perfectly decent home life.

  She just wished that Paul had been there to talk to her personally. She was so awkward around these women. Paul knew how to handle them.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mrs. White sat in the small, cluttered back room of the Arbordale Thrift Shop, a worn gingham dress on her knee. With neat, easy stitches, she sewed tight a fallen hem by the light of the window. The light, coming in over the railroad tracks and the station parking lot beyond, seemed to dissipate once inside the room, lost in the maze of coatracks and tables, a jungle of discarded clothes.

  Mrs. White sat in a small pink sewing chair. Across from her sat one of her better friends, Dorothy Howell. Dorothy’s husband was a mechanic at the Mobil station up on Route 47, and they lived right near the garage in Arbordale. Dorothy was sewing, too, and the women sat in positions so similar to each other that, had they not been so different in appearance, they would have seemed like reflections of a single image. Where Mrs. White was round and pale-skinned and red-haired, Dorothy was short and skinny, birdlike, with a thin, pinched face and short-cropped blond hair with the black roots.

  There was also the distinguishing fact that, while Mrs. White sat sewing contentedly and quietly for the most part, Dorothy hardly ever stopped talking. She had been going on steadily for the past hour now, and though Mrs. White, smiling serenely, nodded every once in a while, she wasn’t lending her friend much more than half an ear. Instead, she let her mind drift over myriad subjects and plans and thoughts—including, at the moment, the fairly inexhaustible subject of what she should have said to Mrs. Sutter.

  Mrs. White could picture herself now—now, of course, when it was too late—saying in the most cultured tones: “Why, thank you so much, Mrs. Sutter, Paul is rather handy, isn’t he?” Instead, she’d blushed and smiled like a schoolgirl. She must have made a terrible impression.

  Thinking this, she was blushing again, her lips tightening to the point of disappearing altogether, when Dorothy said, “Don’t you think it’s terrible?”

  Mrs. White glanced up at her friend.

  “Terrible?” she said quietly.

  “I—the latest Housewife Murder. I mean, her own husband couldn’t even identify her remains.” She clucked. She had a high, rather grating voice, like an unoiled hinge. “I saw the poor man on television, and he was crying like a baby. Like a baby. They had to send to New York for her dental records so they could identify her.”

  Mrs. White said, “Oh, how awful.”

  “Number three,” said Dorothy portentously. “Really, we’re not safe anymore, not even in our own homes.”

  Mrs. White shook her head. Almost automatically, she murmured: “What would make a person do such a thing?”

  “If you ask me,” said Dorothy, “some people are just bad—plain bad.”

  Mrs. White said nothing.

  “I think it’s—it’s in the genes or something. Something scientific. They’re just born evil and they do evil things and they stay evil.”

  “Do you really think so?” said Mrs. White vaguely.

  “Well, what else could it be?” said Dorothy. “People decide to do whatever they do, don’t they?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose …”

  “So some people just decide to do the bad things.” Dorothy nodded in agreement with herself. “Because they’re bad. Bad and black and evil clear through.”

  Mrs. White peered at her sewing, her hands still. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “They have hell in them, and they should be …” Dorothy groped for words strong enough to convey her meaning. “Well, they should be … stopped. Somehow. Anyhow. They should be—stopped.”

  There was a long, long silence.

  “Oh, well,” said Mrs. White. Then, trying to fasten her thoughts on what Mrs. Sutter had said again, she added, “I think you probably have a better chance of getting hit by a car than of getting killed by a man like that. It’s the papers that make such a fuss over it.”

  “I don’t know,” said Dorothy grudgingly. “I’m locking my doors, I can tell you that. Do you know what the doctors said?”

  “What doctors?” said Mrs. White.

  “The doctors on TV, about the murders?”

  Mrs. White shook her head and bowed her face to her sewing again. She did not really want to know what the doctors on TV said. When she watched the news herself, she tried her best not to pay attention to things like that.

  “They said she was alive through the whole thing,” said Dorothy.

  Mrs. White glanced up and shook her head again, but said nothing.

  Dorothy laid down her needle and leaned forward in her chair. “They said he kept them alive through the whole thing. On purpose.”

  Once more Mrs. White looked up. “What?”

  “So they’d feel it,” said Dorothy.

  “Oh—” said Mrs. White. This time the shake of her head was one long motion from left to right. “Oh, it is terrible,” she had to admit.

  “And then,” said Dorothy, still leaning toward her, “they had this expert on?”

  Mrs. White lifted the hem of the gingham dress almost up to her nose and sewed intently. She wished Dorothy would stop. It would just make her nervous, give her nightmares, make her silly. News of the murders was all you could see on the front pages of the newspapers. On the radio they kept interrupting the music to talk about it. Some of the mothers were keeping their children home from school to be sure they were safe, but Mrs. White wouldn’t do that. If the murderer should come to her house … It was utterly ridiculous, and she wouldn’t think about it. But if he should, she wanted her children safe in school. Of course, there was the disadvantage that the children told each other horror stories about it. The boys told them to Junior and then of course Junior came home and scared Mary with them.

  “… but at least it cleared up that mystery,” Dorothy was saying.

  Mrs. White came out of her reverie. “What?” she said.

  “Well, I mean the killer must’ve taken the gag away with him the other times, because this time, when the woman swallowed it, they found it still in her throat—but, I mean, that explains why no one heard them screaming.”

  CHAPTER NINTEEN

  At a little before two Mrs. White said good-bye to Dorothy and left the thrift shop.

  She walked around to the station parking lot, her face set and her eyes thoughtful. Her mind was wandering vaguely. It settled on nothing in particular, but a series of images seemed to float through it, like ghosts on the night air. There were the horrific images Dorothy had set before her; there was her desire to get home before Mary did; there was something that made that desire suddenly, oddly, urgent; strangely important; there was Mrs. Sutter, too, and all her bothersome feelings about her; there was Mrs. Sutter talking, Mrs. Sutter’s words.…

  She got into her Pinto and turned the key. The car coughed to life and started up Route 45 back toward home. The moment she was in motion again, she lapsed into the dreamlike state that naturally accompanied her driving. She reached out for the radio, but her hand went back again to the steering wheel before she’d turned it on.

  “That Dorothy,” she said aloud, shaking her head.

  Well, Dorothy might be a little … She might talk a little too much, especially about such gruesome things, but she and her husband were both good, straightforward working folks. Not like the Mrs. Sutters of the world. It was really the Mrs. Sutters of the world who found themselves in bad situations, like—like with that awful man, that awful murderer.…

  Maybe that’s what it was—the thought flashed across her mind involuntarily: Maybe the murderer was some sort of punishment for women like Mrs. Sutter, women who didn�
��t pull their weight, who didn’t act the way women should.

  She shook the thought off immediately. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all.

  “That Dorothy,” she said again.

  Mrs. Sutter might have her strange ways, she thought, but she seemed like a nice enough woman really. She’d certainly had enough nice things to say about Paul, and that was the kind of thing that could really be good for business. Word-of-mouth advertising.

  If Mrs. Sutter would just tell other people how much she liked Paul. If she would tell her other rich friends. She could tell them how Paul did the back wall of the garage while she was baking her “famous” cheesecake. That could be just the sort of advertising they needed.

  She could picture Mrs. Sutter—a painted, bejeweled caricature of Mrs. Sutter—having tea and crumpets with her rich friends and making sweeping, grandiose hand gestures as she said, “… and I looked out the kitchen window, and, well, my deahs! There the nice little man had almost finished the back wall—”

  A yellow school bus coming toward her in the opposite lane stopped, its red light flashing. It took Mrs. White by surprise and she had to step quickly on the brake.

  She sat in the car staring up at the flashing red light as the children ran across the street in front of her. The red light faded from her mind. She saw, instead, her caricature of Mrs. Sutter, flitting about her kitchen, making her famous cheesecake. She saw Mrs. Sutter glancing out the window over the kitchen counter, across the yard into the barn. Paul was there, at the very back, finishing up the back wall. Mrs. Sutter could see him there, and smiled condescendingly as she made her cheesecake.

  The red light on the school bus flashed and Mrs. White gazed at it dreamily. Her thoughts shifted and she saw, now, Mrs. Sutter as she had been when Mrs. White had called her to ask for Paul. Mrs. Sutter had been cooking noodles then—her famous noodles, no doubt. Mrs. White saw Mrs. Sutter with her famous noodles, looking out the window into the back of the barn and saying into the phone: “No, I don’t see him, I think he left awhile ago.”

  The red light of the school bus flashed, and as Mrs. White stared and stared and stared, her vision seemed to fill with it and empty of it over and over. It was as if a drop of blood were being splashed over her pupil with an eyedropper, then sucked away, then splashed over her again as she stared and stared, helpless.