“You weren’t afraid they’d be too unsteady,” Reid said. “You were afraid they’d be too swift and sure.”
“Now—” Shawn drawled appeasingly.
“Why before, anyway?” Reid wanted to know. “I thought they always shaved corpses afterwards. You could have saved yourself the trouble. A mortician would have—”
Shawn pretended not to hear. His thumb on the light switch amputated the sentence, blacking it out.
He raised the other man from the low stool he’d occupied during the process, detached the towel, led him inside to the brightly lighted bedroom.
“I’ve got all your things spread out for you on the bed,” he pointed out. “Think you can get into them yourself? I’ll help you with the studs when I come back. I want to chase in and get dressed myself. We’ll be going down soon.”
“Dinner jacket?” Reid quavered. He made a peculiar sound that would have been a throb of laughter a year before. It wasn’t now any more.
“We’re having a little dinner party, just the three of us,” Shawn said soothingly. “We want to look presentable, you and I. We want to show her that we men can put the dog on too, don’t we? I’ll stop in for you in ten minutes.”
Reid clawed after him with two quickly pouncing hands as he left his side, and missed. “Is the window all right?” he whispered fearfully.
Shawn went over and prodded at the latch. “Tight as a drum,” he said.
He went over to the door and opened it, turned his head inquiringly.
“I’ll be right across the way in my own room. Want me to leave the two doors open, so you can see me from here?”
“No,” Reid said reluctantly. “It’s safe enough—this early yet, I guess.”
“Now—” Shawn said, a trifle mechanically.
“It’s only a little before seven, isn’t it?”
“You mustn’t ask me the time,” Shawn said patiently. “You’re going back on our agreement.”
“What a lovely time seven is! If it would only stay seven all evening.” He wrung his hands imploringly.
“You get to work on that boiled shirt,” Shawn said with professional briskness. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
He closed the door, exerting effort almost as though there were something resistant to his pull on the other side of it. His face changed. It wasn’t sanguine any more, nor amiably grinning. It looked tired all of a sudden, as though a zipper had been let out somewhere along the seams of it; and hopeless. And there was even a faint reflection of horror on it. Horror that comes from without and not from within; horror the beholder has been a witness to; somebody else’s horror.
He even reached up and dragged at his mouth, as though long smiling had wearied its muscles.
In his own room he shaved himself hastily and objectively, almost sight unseen, hardly glancing at the mirror for corroboration. He dug a comb through his hair a few hasty times, sawed a towel across the back of his neck with his two hands, and began getting into the unaccustomed intricacies of a dinner jacket. He’d had one on only about twice before in his life.
He let the tie go, after a couple of halfhearted attempts, came out, crossed back to Reid’s door and looked in. The smile reappeared along with the reflected light from within the room, like a shade going up.
“How’s it coming?” he said. “I’m going to chase down a minute and see if Miss Reid’ll help me with this. All right?”
Reid was seated soddenly on the edge of his bed, his shirt spread across his lap. He’d evidently finished inserting the studs some time before—they were all in place—but had forgotten or was postponing the next step: putting it on. He had been sunk in an abject torpor.
He looked up sharply now, with a little constrictive spasm. A ripple of fear coursed across his ravaged face. Every remark, any remark, bearing on withdrawal, the withdrawal of another away from himself, could do that. They were like pebbles dropped into an oversensitized pool.
“You’re coming right back?”
Shawn had learned not to go too near, except when he was prepared to remain for an indefinite time; Reid would fasten on him, and it was difficult to break the grip without a certain amount of gratuitous cruelty. He remained where he was, body outside the door opening.
“I’m coming right back. I’ll be right down there at the foot of the stairs.”
“Leave the door open this time. You won’t be so near.”
“Sure, Mike.” Shawn gave him a chipper grin. He thought: What good is a smile? A smile on your face doesn’t make the other fellow brave. But I don’t know any other way.
He pasted the door back against the wall. Gave it a little extra pat as if to seal it there.
“And how about something wet? I’ll shake them up while I’m down there. What’ll it be? Martini, Manhattan, Cuba Libre?”
Reid began to laugh. It was soundless, a pantomime, just the lips and gums and teeth. It wasn’t very good pantomime. It rapidly veered off into a tearful grimace, the accompanying mask for a whimpering sound that never came.
Shawn turned away abruptly, as though feeling himself unable to cope with it at the moment and hence taking refuge in pretending not to have seen it. He clattered down the stairs a little more noisily than was strictly necessary. Almighty God! exploded in his harassed mind, on the way down. This is going to be hell, tonight, and it’s only just beginning.
He found her in the kitchen, after traversing the lighted and readied dining room and the corridorlike butler’s pantry beyond. She was standing over a table energetically beating up something in a bowl. She must have dressed a good deal earlier than either Reid or himself. She was in evening dress. Some sort of silver fabric. He could only tell for sure from the back. She had on a voluminous smock coat over the front of it, that must have belonged to their cook and was far too big.
“How is he?” she asked.
“Bad,” he said. “We’re going to have to do plenty about it.” He glanced around him. “Did you do all this?”
“They left all the basic material ready to go in. I told them I wanted to do most of it myself. And these ovens nowadays are wonderful. You set them like clocks. I did all the last-minute trimmings. Thank God for them, too; they took my mind up.” She tasted something on the tip of her finger. “How did you like the table?”
“I didn’t notice,” he admitted.
“I worked over it for more than half an hour. I couldn’t use either candles or flowers; I was afraid of—their connotations.”
“I thought I’d run down ahead, a minute, and set the mood with you. We mayn’t have a chance to compare notes for the rest of the evening. It’s got to keep up like this.” He snapped his fingers in crackling succession. “He mustn’t have time to think. Giddy, featherbrained; wisecracks; everything snappy from you and me.”
“I know, I know,” she said, biting her lip in excruciation and letting her eyelids drop shut for a moment.
“Will you be able to go through with it? It’s important. See, the thing’s coming closer now. It’s that much closer than it was at last night’s dinner. By tomorrow, the curse’ll be off. Let’s hope we’ll have him already on the mend. It’s this meal tonight that counts. It can be horrible or it can be—”
“Are you sure we’re not overreaching ourselves? Maybe by emphasizing it so much, we’re pointing up the fact that it’s the last meal before—”
“He’d remember that anyway, even if we kept it plain. If we can drive the thought out of his mind at all, it’s only with the help of these trappings that we’ll be able to do so. Don’t forget, we’re fighting death, fighting death itself. I don’t mean what he thinks, but death in him, already in himself. Try, Jean, try. Will you try?”
She nodded mutely. He was afraid she was going to cry, her eyes looked suspiciously wet.
“I’m going in and mix some cocktails now, and I think we both ought to have a good stiff one by ourselves before I go up and get him. We’re going to need it.”
“And bef
ore you do, go down to the cellar a minute. Here’s the key. I want you to bring up— Do you know anything about brands?”
“No,” he admitted candidly.
“Well, memorize this, then. Look for it. You’ll see a case that’s already been opened. ‘Veuve Clicquot. 1928. Fine champagne,’ you’ll see on it.”
“Feen?”
“It’s spelled the same as fine. Bring up about three bottles.”
“Three? Isn’t that kind of heavy?”
“No, it’s buoyant. If gaiety’s going to have any chance at all, it’s only on this stuff that you can float it.”
He stopped in the doorway, came back again. “What’re his favorite records? I want to have them ready on the machine, so that—”
“He’s been playing the ‘Danse Macabre’ by Saint-Saens a good deal lately, but I threw it away yesterday. Be careful. Just dance pieces, for you and me, is safer. Because anything that he likes too much brings up the thought that he’ll never hear it again, that he’s leaving it behind. And that’ll undo what we’re trying to accomplish.”
After he’d filled the shaker, and brought up the champagne bottles and cradled them in an ice pail, he looked in on her again.
“All set? I’ll go up and get him now.”
“Your tie.”
“Oh, I forgot. Never mind, that was just a stall. I’m one of those rare guys that can really tie a bow.”
“I’ll do it anyway.”
Their faces were brought close for a moment.
She stepped back, looked at him approvingly. Then she asked, “And how about me? Do I look all right?” Without coquetry; with anxiety and poignancy.
“You look just the way you should for what we’re trying to do. Here, drink this. It’s practically straight. It’ll steady you.”
She looked at it. Then she sighted it toward the one he was holding. “To our job.”
“To the job,” he assented.
They put their glasses down.
Suddenly she said, “Tom, don’t misunderstand. But kiss me a moment. I have to have someone kiss me a moment, before this begins. To give me courage. And I have no one. I can’t ask him. I have to have the kiss of someone stronger than I am.”
“I wish I were,” he said softly.
Only their lips touched.
“To the job ahead,” she murmured.
“To the job ahead of us.”
She opened her eyes again. They were a little too bright. But she smiled confidently. “Now go up and get him,” she said.
She was in the dining room waiting for them. The encumbering kitchen smock had been discarded now, and she was slim and dazzling in festive silver, a garnet velvet bowknot at her shoulder, a garnet velvet bowknot at her hip. She was smiling one of Shawn’s smiles, but better than he could ever have hoped to smile it, and warmer, and truer.
She was nibbling a salted almond through her smile, as any frivolous woman might, waiting by a supper table for a party. The light bathed her, and she was lovely. She was bad for their intentions, for it would have wrung anyone’s heart to think that he must leave behind the sight of her, would never see her again after tonight.
They came down the stairs slowly, a step at a time. Shawn was supporting him by one arm, holding it both at elbow and at wrist. He had the railing on the other side of him, to lend him its immovable support.
They lost her to view, then retraced their steps along the floor at base of stairs and had her back again.
She hadn’t moved. She’d flooded the room with light; there wasn’t a shadow left in it.
Shawn’s breath tripped, and he caught himself thinking: I’d die too, if I could only look at you like this just once before I— Then he kicked it out of his mind, like something that has a nerve showing up in the first place.
She curtsied with mock elaborateness.
“Gentlemen,” she said.
She came toward them. She kissed Reid on the cheek. “Good evening, you,” she said. Then she pretended she was going to kiss Shawn likewise. “And good evening you, as well.” She averted her face teasingly at the last moment. “Tchk, tchk,” she lamented ironically. “How confusing.”
“You look lovely,” Reid said.
“And from the other you, any comment?”
“Bingo,” Shawn said.
“I must look that up.” She gave her father a little private wink. “Wouldn’t it be disconcerting if some evening some gentleman were to come up to some sweet young thing beside just such a dinner table as this and blurt out: ‘You look like the devil!’?”
“I bet many a husband has already,” Shawn contributed. “And I also bet whoever it was got a black eye.”
“Depending on whose party he found her at, don’t you think?” she came back at him.
Reid’s lips had stretched into a grin without his knowing it. A little wisp of disfigured laughter emerged from them.
The point of her shoe touched the point of Shawn’s unobtrusively. He knew what she meant. Anyone else would know they were overdoing it, but it was good, so far. Keep it up. We’re succeeding already.
“Shall we have our cocktails in here?” he asked.
“Yes, bring the shaker in. That way we won’t have to walk out to the other room and back again.” And as they broke up their grouping and shifted about, she managed to convey to him out of the side of her mouth, “There’s a clock in there.”
Shawn shook and poured them.
They stood grouped about the shaker now. She had one arm half around Reid’s waist. Shawn was on the other side, hand resting on the slope of his shoulder. They were holding the tiny, triangular, pink-filled glasses.
She peered at the light through hers. “A toast, somebody?”
Shawn said: “Here’s how!”
They clicked glasses. The pink went halfway down the triangles.
“How about another? I’ll give it this time. I like just a speck of soot on my toasts. I’m telling you, I’m bad tonight.”
“And when you’re bad, you’re good,” Shawn quoted softly.
“But when I’m good, I’m lonely. All right, up she goes.”
They clicked glasses again.
Something happened. Shawn and she were still holding the little pink-lined glasses. Reid was holding just the stem. Several small wisps of glass lay on the floor in a moist patch down by his feet.
A look of consternation, quickly obliterated, fled from her eyes to Shawn’s, from his to hers.
She blurted out, so quickly that it stumbled in her throat and half of it was swallowed, “—’posed to be a good sign.”
Shawn’s thumb flexed, there was a twiglike snap, and he was holding only a denuded stem too. The bowl of his glass, however, lay intact on the floor; it hadn’t shattered.
She gulped her drink, knocked hers deliberately against the rim of the buffet. It disintegrated. “Now we’re all even.”
Fear of fear possessed the two of them, Shawn and herself.
Shawn’s foot slid out, executed a curving sweep. The crumbs of glass disappeared.
There was no expression on Reid’s face. His eyes were like painted eyes on a canvas face; only the painter had made them too large. He turned to Shawn.
“You broke yours,” he said quietly. “Mine broke itself.”
She moved quickly away from them, turning with a sort of spin of her skirts, that sucked up attention, drew it after herself, as if by some kind of centripetal air current.
“Let’s begin now. We’ve been standing long enough.” She waltzed behind a chair, touched it in passing. “You here.” She touched another. “And you in your regular place, father. Gretchen’s going in to get the soup.”
“I’ll help you,” Shawn offered.
Her eyes flicked him a quick signal not to leave the other man alone, scarcely executed yet somehow perfectly conveyed. Its gravity was adroitly veiled behind the frivolous smile brimming from her brightly reddened lips. “A dinner party at which everyone’s a waiter is simply a bucket
brigade. Someone has to stay on the receiving end.” She made a face at him and flounced out backward through the swinging pantry door.
“I’ve been hit,” Shawn complained to Reid, sitting down, “but I don’t know where. Does anything show?”
She came in backward, just as she’d gone out, forcing the door behind her and carrying the soup before her.
“A bustle would be most convenient at this point.”
“At which point, did you say?” Shawn wanted to know.
She drew herself up haughtily. “Really, Mr. Shawn, I don’t follow you.”
“I didn’t go anywhere.”
“Your mind did. And I’ll thank you to keep it on a leash hereafter.”
“That’s the trouble; I can’t get a collar small enough to fit it,” Shawn admitted.
They both glanced at Reid, in an optical aside, as if to see what success they were having.
His eyes, for a moment, looked like real eyes. Sick but real ones. He was even shaking a little at the shoulders, as if with submerged laughter too weak to force itself out.
Shawn stood and guided her chair in.
“No, don’t come near me,” she said pettishly. “Particularly from behind.”
Reid shook his head. A guttural sound of enjoyment pierced the silence of his constricted throat.
The lights were bright. There were no shadows on the table. It was like eating over an expanse of sun-drenched snow. Silver gleamed mirrorlike and crystal sparkled, and there was a pleasant flurry of white as they unfurled and flaunted napkins. A diamond on Jean’s finger was like a solar focus, haloed with imaginary and fleeting sheets of green and red.
“Good soup,” Shawn approved.
“It’s called crême de la crême de la crême.”
“There’s one de la crême too many in there.”
“As a matter of fact I abbreviated it. There’s one too few, if you’re so smart.”
A brief silence fell. Such as there might be at any table; nothing ominous, nothing prolonged. Yet it treacherously allowed an outside sound to filter through, to become present before they had time to guard against it. It was very faint, inoffensive: the ticking of a heavy clock in another room. Perversely blown up to audibility and carried in when they least wanted it, by some momentary freak of acoustics, or perhaps because their ears were so acutely sensitized. Fearing to hear anything, they heard the thing they wanted most to avoid hearing.
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