Stevie gulped the tears back and turned on Jan and said, fiercely, “Stop being a baby!”
Trees to the west of the car swayed dangerously. She looked ahead at the bridge and saw the water was much higher than before. It had spread out on the far bank covering where the road had been. The wind whipped the shallow water, pushing it eastward.
The big man came and forced the door open and got in. He was breathing hard. He nodded at Jean and turned around and grinned at the kids. “Hi,” he said. “We’ve got to do some camping out. My name is Steve. Steve Malden.”
Stevie’s eyes went wide. “I’m Steve too!”
“And that’s Jan,” Jean said. “I’m Jean Dorn and my husband’s name is Hal. How is he?”
“He’s in the house waiting for you. We may be there some time and it may get cold. You better bring some warm stuff if you can manage it.”
Jean crawled back over the seat and pried a suitcase loose and got out sweaters and one of Hal’s jackets. She put the sweaters on the children, put her own on.
“All set?” Malden said. “We better go out your side. You take the boy and I’ll carry Jan. Come on, honey. Climb over here.”
“Stay on this side of the cars,” Malden said to her as she opened the door.
She went ahead holding Stevie by the wrist. Just as they got into the open beyond the rear of their car, a gust hit them and slammed Stevie against her ankles, knocking her down. She kept hold of his wrist and got to her feet and pulled him up. His eyes were wide with shock and fear and surprise. He said something but she could not hear him. He did better from then on. They passed all the cars and climbed over the tree trunk and soon they were in front of the house. The house cut the hard thrust of the wind. Malden moved ahead of her, climbed the three shallow steps and pulled the door open. She followed him in and Malden closed the door. The relative silence was abrupt. The house was shuttered and it was so dark inside that for a few moments she could see nothing. She tried to release Stevie but he clung to her hand.
There were several people talking at once. Their voices were thin with excitement, edged by fear. She began to make them out, and then she saw Hal over in a corner, sitting on the floor. Malden took them over to Hal. He set Jan down.
Jean turned and said, “Thank you so much for …”
“I better go get in on this policy meeting, Mrs. Dorn. Holler if you need me for anything.”
Jan and Stevie had moved close to Hal. Jean sat on her heels and took Hal’s hand. “How do you feel, darling?”
“I’m fine,” he said in a remote voice. “Just fine.”
“Did you hurt your head, Daddy?” Stevie asked.
In the gloom she saw Hal turn and look at Stevie, look at him in a puzzled way. When she realized what that look meant, fear closed tightly on her heart. Hal was looking at the child without the slightest tinge of recognition. She saw him look in the same way at Jan, and then turn and look at her. His lips opened as though he were about to say something, but his eyes clouded again and he looked down at the floor. Jean folded her coat and put it on the floor beside him. She eased herself down onto the coat, her back against the wall. She took Jan in her arms. She looked at the room.
It was a room with a low ceiling, a long room on the northeast corner of the house. It was paneled in a dark rough wood. The room was completely bare and there was a smell of wet rot. The wooden floor was heaved and buckled, and, near one wall, there were holes where the floor boards had rotted away. There was a small brick fireplace set into the south wall and, to the right of the fireplace, a staircase that went up. The walls of the staircase had been plastered, and the plaster had fallen away from the laths and lay like dirty snow on the stairs. There was a door to the left of the fireplace that led to another room, and another doorway in the west wall that led to what had apparently been the kitchen. She could see the edge of an iron sink, and a row of empty shelves, crudely made.
The others were arguing. Over and under the tones of their voices she could hear the voice of the wind. The wind pressed against the house. It found small cracks where it could enter. It entered and stirred the ancient dust. As it came in the small cracks, and as it twisted around the cornices, it made small wild sounds, full of a supersonic shrillness. The shrill sounds ebbed and pulsed with the changes of the wind. She thought that if she had to listen to that long, she would begin to howl like a dog. She thought she could feel a stirring of the hair on the nape of her neck.
There were cracks in the old shutters. Thin gray bands of light shafted into the house, diffused by dust. She felt the stir of the bones of the old house when the wind swerved and smote it strongly. Over the wind sound there were other sounds from the outside world. Remote and inexplicable thuddings, rattlings, crashings. Something cracked sharply against the back of the house, silencing for a moment the voices of argument. And then they began again.
She moved closer to Hal and took his hand. He did not look at her. His thin brown hand lay slack in hers. She sensed the imminent fulfillment of her premonitions. At some other time perhaps a thing like this could have been a game, something to remember and talk about and laugh about. But not now. Not in a world newly soured by defeat. This was the end of something. An end far more specific and final than their decision to leave Florida.
She sat beside her husband and thought of marriage. You did not think of the big things, the epochal, the stirring. You thought instead of the trivia of marriage. The ludicrous. The absurd. Your mind was cluttered with little things. Like the time that Hal, that afternoon in Central Park, for no reason other than high spirits, had sprung up from the path and grasped a low limb and hung there, grinning down at her, then cautiously hung from one hand, made a face and scratched his ribs with the other hand, then dropped lightly beside her and kissed her in full view of the weary bench-sitters, not one of whom even smiled, but sat there looking at them with what Hal always called “the subway glaze.”
The little tragic things too. Turning off the Merritt Parkway in that first new car they had ever owned, and hitting the small brown dog. They had run back and the dog had dragged himself off onto the shoulder. Whining, the dog had bitten his own flank with great ferocity and, quite soon, had died. They had asked at a dozen houses and then given up trying to find who owned it. There was no tag, no collar. She remembered how quickly the flies had gathered. Hal had dug a hole with the tire iron and they had buried the small brown dog. It had saddened the day and the weekend for them.
And the time Stevie, sitting on the kitchen floor, had stared up at them, eyes bulging, face slowly turning blue. She had held him by the heels and Hal had thumped his back and then finally dug into his throat with his finger and loosened the small wooden wheel Stevie had swallowed. She remembered how weak they had both been after it was over.
And the morning when Hal had started out the front door and neither of them had known that the rain at dawn had frozen into an utterly transparent film over the walk. She remembered the way he had gone down, a wild flailing like a comedy sequence, and then the sickening crash onto hip and elbow, how he had looked back at her, face distorted with pain, then the humor fighting with the pain, overcoming it, until they both laughed like fools. But it had been a month before his arm was right again.
Trivia of marriage. Like the lurid pajamas he had bought himself for the first night of their marriage. And the wound he had inflicted on her. He swore that he had taken eleven pins out of the new pajamas, but he had missed the twelfth, the crucial one. The shocking stab of the pin had made her leap and yelp, and in that moment of confusion he had thought her an exceedingly apprehensive bride, rather than someone cruelly and ludicrously stabbed. She blamed his sense of decorum that had made him start with pajamas. And he had said that all he had expected was ten minutes of use out of them anyway, and he asked if there had been any pins in the gossamer nightgown of hers, and who was she to lecture about decorum after whooping and plunging like a singed heifer. She said that she would be grateful
for a more kindly simile, so he changed it to spooked mare, but by that time they were beyond the point where the conversation could be continued with any coherence.
You remember little things most of all. She sat and listened to the eldritch whimper of the wind, and the tears ran down her cheeks, heavily, slowly, and she kept her head turned so that the children would not see that she was crying.
11
Bunny Hollis had driven the Mercedes-Benz with the casual co-ordinated grace with which he performed all physical movement. She sat in the seat beside his, and she would look at his hands resting lightly on the wheel and she would say, over and over to herself—Betty Hollis Betty Hollis BettyHollisBettyHollis.
Not Betty Oldbern any longer. Never Betty Oldbern again.
His hands were square and brown with pronounced cords on the backs of them, with long fingers splayed at the tips, with heavy ridged nails that he kept closely clipped. On his left hand was the gold ring, heavily ribbed, a masculine variation of the daintier band on her finger.
Just the way he would open a door, climb stairs, reach to pick up something. It was controlled grace, taut and completely masculine. Finely and perfectly balanced. Not like that one who had been Stella’s friend. That ballet one. His grace had been muscular, but of a different breed. There had been a simper in it.
All the days of her childhood and her young girlhood seemed to be compressed into one unending scene—where she walked alone down a street while all the others watched from steps and porches. She walked in painful consciousness of too soft hips, her knees brushing awkwardly together, her head too heavy for her throat, her arms refusing to swing in any rhythm to her walk. There goes that Oldbern girl.
Almost from the very beginning she had known that she was not what Daddy had wanted. Not at all the sort of girl he had hoped for. He had wanted a brown sunny laughing girl. A girl like Stella or Janie or Sue or Cindy. A girl who could do things, and talk to anybody in that bright pert way that she had never been able to manage. When she had tried to talk that way people had looked at her in an odd way.
That was why Daddy had sent her away, of course. To all those schools so far away. It was something you had to accept. You weren’t what was wanted, what had been expected, and so you had to go away. And she had sent back the very best marks she could get. And the medals given for those marks. It was a small gift, but the only one she had to give.
Eating so much was part of it too. But she had never clearly understood how that was so much a part of it until lately. Eating had been just about the only fun. And in a sense it had been scary fun. Gobbling all those heavy pastries and thinking that each new pound put you a little bit further from any possibility of being ever wanted by any man. And that was a relief, because it was a problem you’d never have to face if you were too fat. And she had really been terribly fat that day she had first seen Bunny Hollis. About a hundred and sixty-five. And for a small-boned girl only five foot four, that was really gross. Mirrors had always been the enemy, and being that heavy had been sort of a way of getting back at the mirrors.
She knew she would never forget that day. She had been bored and restless and she had driven over to Oswando Club, a place she usually avoided. She had sat alone at a table under an umbrella and ordered a sundae and ate it there and wondered about ordering another and watched the man who was teaching tennis to two brown towheaded boys of about thirteen. The day was still and hot and she could hear his instructions clearly. “Billy, the reason he keeps passing you is because you wait to see where your ball is going. As soon as the ball leaves the racket, you should be on your way back to position. And you’re trying too hard to hit ’em where he ain’t. Just concentrate on getting it back smoothly and moving back to center court. Let’s try again.”
She decided he was quite a nice man. He seemed so patient and so anxious to have the kids do well. He stood by the net post and watched the kids. She was aware of him, but not specifically aware. Then, as she watched casually, he put both the boys in one court and he took the other side of the net and began to volley with them. She watched him. She saw the shape of his shoulders, the long straight line of his back, the way he moved with style and precision, the way his head was set on the round strong column of the neck.
She watched him and she felt a rising of warmth within her, a slow stirring that brought a hot flush to her cheeks. For the first time in her life she felt strong, specific, physical desire—desire that had an immediate target. She had had crushes, but they were not like this. It was as though for the first time her femininity had a focus and a purpose. She had thought of men and of physical love and wondered often how it would be. Her anatomical knowledge was sound and specific. But her wonderings had always made her feel faintly queasy. The actual act seemed to be so ludicrous, so animal, so intimately degrading. And suddenly she had seen a perfect stranger and the act, which had been so appalling, seemed all at once to be logical and necessary. Yet even as she drew mental pictures that shamed her, she realized the absurdity of her position. Fat girl in the umbrella shade going all sticky over the tennis instructor at the club. He was so old. He must be nearly thirty.
She could not get him out of her mind. She learned that he was Bunny Hollis and he was well liked at the club. The next week she made an appointment with him and showed up with tennis equipment to take lessons. It was by far the bravest and boldest thing she had ever done. He had been polite and distant. They had played a few games so that he could find out how well she played. Then he had called her up to the net and she had come up close to him, ashamed of the way she was panting and sweating and trembling from the unaccustomed exertion.
“How old are you, Miss Oldbern?”
“Nineteen.”
“I think I can help your game, but you have to cooperate. I’ll be frank with you. If it offends you, I’m sorry. You’re much too heavy. The first exercise you better practice is pushing yourself away from the table.” He grinned to take the sting out of the words.
A week later when she fainted during a lesson it was because she was weakened by hunger. She came out of it after he had carried her into the shade. She opened her eyes. He was rubbing her wrist and looking down at her with a strange intentness.
“How much have you been eating, Betty?”
“Practically … nothing.”
“Do you want that badly to be good at tennis?”
“No … I mean I guess I do.”
After that she sensed the change in his attitude. He seemed thoughtful, and quite aware of her. Lots of times they would talk instead of practice. She told him about the schools, about how she had lived for nineteen years. And he told her how he had lived for thirty-three years. Fourteen years’ difference in age didn’t seem so much if you said it quickly. And when she was fifty, he’d only be sixty-four.
When it turned cold they moved the lessons to the indoor courts. That was all there was in her days. The lessons. There was nothing else worth thinking about. There was a lesson on a gray day in November. When it was done he turned out the court lights. Gray light came down through high windows. They walked toward the doorway. She clumsily dropped her racket and it clattered on the floor. They both bent to pick it up. They straightened up, close together. She had the racket. He looked at her and put his hands gently on her shoulders and pulled her closer to him and then put his mouth on hers and kissed her hard. She had been kissed before. But it had never done anything like this to her. From far away she heard the racket fall again. He kissed her twice and then held her close. She was down to a hundred and forty-four by then.
He released her and turned away and said, “I didn’t mean to do that, Betty.”
“I love you,” she said. It was the only thing she could think of to say—the only thing that was indisputable and explanatory.
“You don’t mean that. I shouldn’t have kissed you.”
“You can do anything you want to me, Bunny.”
But he wouldn’t take her on that basis. With
in the next month they began to talk cautiously of marriage. She was not a fool. She was accustomed to rejection. She was quite aware that the world was full of men who would be delighted to pretend love in order to marry all that money. And she sensed that Bunny was one of those. She was certain that Bunny was one of those. By then she had learned enough about him so that she could not blame him too much for being one of those. He had never had money. She tested him by pleading with him to run away with her when she was twenty. It alarmed him. She could see that. He didn’t want the applecart upset. Nor would he make love to her. She took that as a tribute to her unattractiveness, and as a sample of his caution. She knew what a fool she was making of herself, and yet she decided to go ahead with it, to wait and to marry him, knowing that she was merely buying something important to her, and could never buy the truly precious thing, a return of the love she felt for him. For despite her awareness of his greed and his design, she could not help loving him.
And, of course, it was the only way that the money would ever be of any use to her.
The family—her father and all the elderly relatives—raised absolute bloody hell when she made her plans known. But she was twenty-one and there wasn’t a single thing they could do about it. There was no way they could turn her against Bunny.
She weighed a hundred and thirty-seven on her wedding day. The flesh was stubborn, clinging. The softness was gone and the remaining excess was firm and too durable.
After the ceremony she began to be afraid. She had had two years in which to anticipate climax. Soon she would be taken by him. It was the penalty he would have to pay for his carefulness and his greed. She hoped he wouldn’t be rough. He was so terribly strong. His strength frightened her.
It was absolutely no good. He had been gentle, almost tender, but it was no good. It had been strange and awkward and it had hurt, but not badly, and if this was what the world was all about then a lot of people had been kidding a lot of people in a lot of different ways for thousands of years. It was no good at all. And then it was bearable. It became something you could do without it bothering you too much if you didn’t think too much about it. If you made a sort of passive acceptance.
Murder in the Wind Page 14