Bedelia

by Vera Caspary

  “How’s Bedelia? Is her cold better? What a lot of illness you’ve had in the house this winter.”

  “She’s got a headache. I’m afraid she won’t be down for lunch.”

  “What a shame! Headaches are such a nuisance.” “Are you cold, Nellie? What about a drop of sherry to warm you up?”

  “At this hour!”

  “I’m about to treat myself to a drink of cider brandy. Will you join me?”

  “Charlie Horst, what’s got into you?”

  “I got a bit of a chill this morning shoveling snow.”

  “Well, if you do,” Ellen said.

  This was the first time since he married Bedelia that Ellen had been alone with Charlie. Every minute was precious to her. While he went off to get their drinks, she wandered about the living-room. She felt fiercely alive and impatient as if something tremendous were about to happen. When she was with Charlie and other people were present, she had always to defend her pride. The result was a certain brusqueness which was not attractive. Now this was gone. She was tender, girlish, even a bit flirtatious. When Charlie handed her the sherry, his fingers brushed against hers. She gave him a look of extraordinary boldness, raised her glass and smiled.

  Yet they had nothing to say to each other. Charlie stared as if he were hypnotized by a commonplace piece on the what-not, those three monkeys that dwelt in every curio cabinet. Ellen gave up trying to interest him and played a game. She dressed all the furniture in dust covers, rolled up the rugs, hung muslin bags over the paintings that used to hang on the living-room walls. She saw the room as it had been the last time she was alone here with Charlie, just two hours before he boarded the train that was to take him to New York and Colorado. He was mourning his mother at that time and Ellen had thought this was what prevented him from saying anything definite. She had been certain that all the indefinite things he had said in the past meant that he was counting as much as she upon their marriage. The room had been somber then, the walls covered in grasscloth and hung with Japanese prints, and in the corner where Charlie and Bedelia had their precious what-not, there had been an inlaid curio cabinet. Ellen remembered that Charlie had told her his plans for doing the house over, and to show that he was in earnest had torn off a strip of grasscloth.

  It had been a warm day, the windows had been open, and Ellen had worn a white linen skirt and shirtwaist with eyelet embroidery. She saw it now as she had seen it that morning, saw leaves upon bare trees and grass on the snow-covered earth.

  Mary announced lunch. That pulled Charlie out of his reverie. He looked at Ellen as if he were surprised to find her in the wing chair. She kept up her game and, when they were seated across from each other at the dining-room table, her heart beat so crazily that she held both hands over it in order to guard its secret.

  “Look what we got,” Mary boasted.

  Ellen looked down at the half-grapefruit decorated with a cherry. “How nice,” she said.

  Mary had expected more. She thought grapefruit for lunch—and in January!—the ultimate luxury. “Mrs. Horst thinks it’s good for him. She thinks he ought to have fresh fruit every day.”

  Charlie remembered what Ben had said about the happy husbands. Bedelia was good at her job as a wife, she knew all the tricks that make a home jolly and keep a husband comfortable. To her life with each husband she brought experience gained with his predecessor. Being a wife was her life’s work and she was far more successful at it than those good women who think because they have husbands they are safe and can treat men like servants or household pets. To Bedelia each marriage was a pleasure cruise and she an amiable passenger, always amused and amusing, always happy to share the fun, uninhibited by the fear that any relationship would grow too important, because she knew the cruise would soon be over, the relationship severed, and she would be free to embark on a new journey.

  “You’re not listening,” Ellen said. She had started to tell him about her assignment in Winston. She was to interview a man who was celebrating his ninety-ninth birthday. “Imagine, Charlie, living until you’re that old and seeing your contemporaries all die and your family and friends, and even the people you didn’t like, and then the next generation and the next, the babies you saw christened when you were middle-aged grow old and die.”

  Charlie was still inattentive. Ellen blushed. She could understand his having ceased loving her more readily than she could accept his rudeness. The only excuse she could make for his lack of courtesy was illness. His color was not good, she noticed, and his eyes were dull. Perhaps the attack last week had been more serious than he had said.

  “Charlie!”

  There was nervous appeal in her voice. It caught his attention. “What’s the matter, Nellie?”

  “You. Are you ill, Charlie?”

  “I’m feeling splendid. What’s on your mind?”

  “You never did tell me exactly what was wrong with you last week.”

  “Indigestion. I happened to faint, that’s why everyone thought it was serious.”

  “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  “Are you worrying, Nellie?” he asked indulgently.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” she said, and looked down at her plate so that he should not notice the color flooding her cheeks.

  Mary came in with pancakes and sausage. She served them with unnecessary ritual, hovering over the table, waiting for praise. At last she left, saying, “Well, ring the bell if you want anything. I’ll be right there,” as if they didn’t know how to behave without Mrs. Horst.

  They did not talk much. But their friendship was old and silence no burden. Ellen took out the packet of cigarettes, but Charlie had to be asked for a match before he noticed that she wanted to smoke.

  She had to talk about it, to show off, as if the cheap cigarettes were compensation. “Aren’t you surprised?”

  Charlie laughed. “What’s wrong about it if you enjoy it?”

  Ellen laughed, too. “I shall have to write Abbie and tell her you’re not a prig after all.”

  Two men were coming down the hill on snowshoes. Charlie’s back was toward the window.

  “If you think smoking makes you seem less feminine, you’re wrong,” he said. “You’re always trying to make gestures, Nellie, and there’s no reason for it. You’re an independent woman because you go out and earn your living. And without acting as if you were bearing a cross.”

  “I have no reason to complain. I enjoy it.” She watched a cloud of smoke drift toward the ceiling. “But men don’t like a girl to be to independent, do they? They don’t feel that she’s really female unless she needs a man to take care of her. Abbie and I talked it over quite a lot while she was here. The secret of Bedelia’s charm, Abbie says . . .”

  The doorbell rang. Charlie did not stop to hear Abbie’s opinion of Bedelia. He was in the hall and opening the front door before Mary came out of the kitchen.

  “Something’s got into ’em today. Her, too,” Mary told Ellen.

  Charlie opened the door to Ben Chaney and a stout man.

  “Mr. Barrett, Mr. Horst.”

  Charlie nodded jerkily.

  “Glad to know you,” muttered Barrett. His sagging cheeks were like deflated balloons, his mouth, the mouth Bedelia had imitated, a pocketbook with a strong clasp. Barrett’s eyes took in all the fittings of the house as he estimated the income of the owner.

  Charlie said that he was having lunch and asked if they would join him.

  “Thanks, but we’ve had ours.”

  They followed Charlie into the hall. He noticed that Ben glanced toward the dining-room, saw Bedelia’s narcissus on the table and Ellen at Bedelia’s place.

  “Perhaps you’d like a cup of coffee. You must be cold after that walk.”

  “Not me,” Barrett said. “Where I come from it’s a lot colder than this. Matter of fact, I’m all heated up from the exercise.”

  At the hall mirror Ben straightened his tie and smoothed his hair. “Barrett isn’t stayi
ng long. He’s got to leave again this afternoon, but he’s an old friend of Mrs. Horst’s and thought he’d like to say hello.”

  “My wife has a headache. She’s lying down.”

  Just then Ellen took it into her head to greet Ben. Remembering Abbie’s news, she stared boldly, trying to penetrate his disguise and find something of the detective in him.

  “Won’t you go upstairs and see if Mrs. Horst will come down? Mr. Barrett is anxious to see her again.”

  “What about your interview?” Charlie asked Ellen. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll be late?”

  She looked at the big round watch strapped to her wrist, sighed and finished her coffee.

  “Perhaps she’d prefer to have Barrett come up,” Ben suggested, glancing sideways at Ellen.

  “I’ll go and see,” Charlie said. “Good-bye, Nellie. Don’t wait for me.”

  He walked up the stairs lightly, his shoulders thrown back, his head high.

  “That’s Charlie all over,” Ellen said as she came out of the dining-room. “Worries about my appointment for me. Never missed a train in his life, not even a streetcar. Will you excuse me?” She was annoyed because Ben had interrupted her conversation with Charlie and disappointed because Charlie had dismissed her so curtly. She went to the first-floor bedroom, washed her hands and put on her hat.

  Mary was in the dining-room, clearing the table. She called a greeting to Ben, too, hoping that he would start a conversation and that she could tell him about her engagement. He said, “Hello, Mary,” and closed the dining-room door.

  Charlie hurried down the stairs.

  Ellen was coming out of the dining-room, pulling on her gloves. She stopped and watched while he joined the two men in the living-room.

  Ben hurried toward him. Barrett shoved his bulk out of a low chair. Sunlight poured in through all the windows. It lay in gold patches on the rugs. In that clear light Charlie’s face was like damp clay.

  He tried to say something, but his voice died in his throat. He swallowed painfully and stood there, a pitiful figure with his arms hanging limp, his shoulders sagging, his Adam’s apple working up and down.

  “How is your wife?”

  Charlie turned to Ben. A flush rose about his collar and the clayey hue of his face gradually changed to a strange purplered. A network of blue and red veins stood out against the glazed white of his protruding eyeballs. When at last he spoke, his voice was a steel file.

  “My wife’s dead.”

  His anger mounted. He raised both fists as if to strike Ben, and then he let them fall again and his hands dangled impotently from his sleeves. The moment was silent and frozen as if everything would stay as it was then, the furniture fixed forever in the same positions, the colors never fading, dust never gathering, the sunshine never quite falling in oblique panels from the windows, the curtains never to be drawn, Charlie and Ben, Barrett and Ellen, to keep these postures always, like figures carved out of marble or metal. The house rang with a silence that had more life to it than any sound. It was as if the clock had stopped and the river ceased flowing over the rocks.

  Charlie’s shoulders drooped, the lids fell over his eyes, and he took a couple of steps forward, moving cautiously like a blind man. He held out his hand to Ben Chaney. As if that had been a signal, the others began to breathe again. Barrett’s head rolled on his wide collar like a joint rolling in a socket. Ben took something from Charlie’s hand and looked down at it.

  Ellen said, “But she wasn’t ill. She had a headache.”

  Charlie stumbled to the love-seat. His body caved into it. Ben followed and stood in an erect and vigilant position beside him.

  “Suicide?” Ben asked, looking down at the pillbox which Charlie had given him.

  Ellen seized the word and threw it back at Ben indignantly. “Suicide! How can you say such a thing? What makes you think it?”

  Barrett started to speak, but Ben shook his head and raised his hand for silence.

  “You must be crazy!” Ellen shouted at Ben.

  “I’m not surprised,” was all he had to say. He went into the hall and closed the door before he used the telephone.

  In the kitchen Mary sang as she washed the dishes. Barrett took a cigar out of his pocket, looked at it, looked at Charlie, and put it back. Ellen went to Charlie, crossing the room softly, stopping only on the rugs and avoiding the spaces between them. She did not speak nor touch him, but stood there with her head bent and her right hand in the fur-lined glove resting on the printed linen that Bedelia had chosen for the love-seat when she came from Colorado as Mrs. Charles Horst.

  THE END

  AFTERWORD

  ALL MY LIVES: VERA CASPARY’S

  LIFE, TIMES, AND FICTION

  In November of 1899 Vera Caspary was, as she liked to say, “born in the nineteenth century by accident.” Her mother was in her forties, and Vera was eighteen years younger than her oldest sibling. A simultaneously spoiled and intimidated “baby,” she grew up on the south side of Chicago in a family of Portuguese-descended Jews. Her father, who was a buyer in women’s hats, wanted her to attend the University of Chicago, but shy and bookish Caspary thought she lacked the feminine wiles for co-ed life. Eager to write and be independent, Caspary got her foot in the door as an ad-agency stenographer. She pestered her bosses for writing assignments and answered job openings for writers with her initials, only to be turned down when she appeared. The year American women got the right to vote, Caspary began writing ads.

  Caspary wrote her first headline—“Rat Bites Sleeping Child”—for an exterminator. In the early twenties she left full-time copywriting to freelance and begin her first novel draft (Caspary 1979, 3, 6, 26–27, 51, 71–74).

  Caspary’s nineteen books, including the Edgar award-winning autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, sold well and were widely reviewed. Twenty-four movies were made from Caspary’s scripts, screen stories, and novels. The directors of these movies included Dorothy Arzner (Working Girls, 1931), Joseph Mankiewicz (Letter to Three Wives, 1949, which won two Academy Awards), Fritz Lang (The Blue Gardenia, 1953), and George Cukor, whose film, Les Girls (1957) earned Caspary a Screen Writers Guild award. Nominally single, in 1949 Caspary married a man of whom her family would have approved, though they would not have sanctioned her long affair with him. The Viennese-born producer Isadore Goldsmith, or “Igee,” became the love of Caspary’s life until his death in 1964. This was the life Caspary dramatized in her fiction, centered in women characters’ struggles to exercise the freedom of choice that jobs provided.

  In many of her novels, Caspary effectively merged women’s quest for identity and love with murder plots. She declared openly that she was not a “real” mystery writer, meaning she didn’t like crime fiction, and had no interest in private eyes and police procedures. She preferred character studies more than intricate plots that finally reveal “the sweet old aunt or a bird-watcher who ruthlessly kills half a dozen people to get hold of the cigarette case with a false bottom that conceals a hundred-thousand-dollar postage stamp” (1979, 104). After completing a trio of forties murder mysteries—Laura (1942), Bedelia (1945), and Stranger Than Truth (1946)—she declared herself “on holiday from murder. The fact is,” she said, “I’m not nearly as interested in writing about crime as I am in the actions of normal people under high tension” (Caspary 1950). Her novels revolve around women who are menaced, but who turn out to be neither merely victimized dames nor rescued damsels. Independence is the key to the survival of such protagonists as Laura; lack of choice engineers the downfall of her villains, among whom Bedelia is paramount.

  Since Caspary wrote her mysteries from the forties to the seventies, before the widespread development of female detectives, her reading of “detective” throughout her writing career was gendered as unattractively male. She wasn’t impressed by the tough private eyes of the thirties or by the male protagonists emerging in forties noir fiction and film—cynical loners manipulated by women and/or manipulators of wom
en. Caspary pointed out that Mark McPherson, her police detective in Laura, was not hard-boiled, but sensitive and imaginative. When Otto Penzler asked for an essay on McPherson for The Great Detectives, Caspary chose to discuss Laura’s condemnation of detectives as the moment Mark came alive. Shortly after her reappearance in the novel, Laura tells Mark that detective stories contain two types of characters, “the hard-boiled ones who are always drunk and talk out of the corners of their mouths and do it all by instinct; and the cold, dry, scientific kind who split hairs under a microscope”(77). In her article for Penzler Caspary echoes Laura that both types are “detestable,” which was why, until Laura, she “had never glorified a detective” (Caspary 1978, 144-45).1

  Yet murder, as Caspary said in a 1970s working draft of her autobiography, was “another matter.” “I see now,” she mused, “that my [screen] stories were the extension of a long series of murder fantasies, not that I’ve ever pulled a trigger or wielded a knife, nor identified myself with the detective. Like Laura, I hate detectives.” But she liked to make up plots as an “observer” and “witness” (“Discards,” 577), a stance she would later apply to creating multiple narrators and viewpoints in many of her novels and scripts. Caspary made murder a context in which both male and female characters resolve their own mysterious lives, as though the crime itself were a metaphor for the conundrum of relationships versus independence.

  “A Flaming Thing” in the 1920s

  Jane S. Bakerman discusses at length the lives of Caspary’s working girls in Chicago rent districts, offices, and speakeasy settings. She notes, “Much of the frustration [of Caspary’s characters] arises from the duality of their concept of the American dream, for while struggling to establish identities for themselves as wage earners, they believe, simultaneously, that they will have no identity at all unless they are indispensably desirable to the man” (1984, 83). Caspary similarly recalls the heady mix of wage-earning and flirting she experienced. “Working among men,” she says candidly in Secrets, “I had discovered that a girl need not be beautiful, not even particularly pretty. She had only to be a girl.” Caspary had grown up seeing herself as clever but unattractive. She quotes her somewhat competitive mother as having frequently said, “You wouldn’t be so bad looking if it weren’t for your nose.” Vera herself called this the “harsh Caspary bone structure.” Though she turned out to be a striking woman, it was a revelation to her that “The compliments of accountants and macaroni salesmen assured me that I had feminine power” (1979, 27, 44).