The Case of the Weird Sisters

by Charlotte Armstrong; Internet Archive

  "An excellent likeness of my mother," Gertrude said complacently.

  There was sound on the stairs of feet plopping flat on each step and a dumpy figure appeared in the arch. Innes stepped quickly forth, took the newcomer's hand and swung it, making a little bow at the same time. "My sister, Maud."

  The dumpy one chuckled. "Surprise, eh, Innes?" she said in a rasping voice, a queerly masculine voice, harsh and unpleasant and toneless. "You don't drop in like this so often."

  Alice thought immediately of the Duchess in Through the Looking Glass, or was it Wonderland? Her nose was an untidy pug. Her hair was a rat's nest. Alice found a moment to wonder how anyone could deliberately go to work and arrange a head of hair like that. It was snarled and twisted into a pagoda full of hairpins, and there was no logic in it. Maud's skin was gray and hung on her face in folds. She wore a black dress embellished with tags of lace as illogical and haphazard as the arrangement of her hair. Her fat ankles were bound into high white shoes which, Alice saw, not without shock, were dirty and yellowish. She came closer, and her lively little gray eyes peered curiously at the girl.

  "How ja do?" said Maud and stuck out a slab of a hand. The puffy flesh ended in dirty fingernails. Alice winced. Her nostrils twitched, then she stopped breathing; for from sister Maud arose an odor, definitely an odor; and, although fainter, it was the same rank animal smell she had noticed before.

  "How do you do. Miss . . . Miss Maud," Alice foundered, looking desperately to Innes. "Is that proper?" She heard herself giving a very nervous litde laugh. "I can't

  very well call you both Miss Whitlock. I . . ."

  But Maud was looking at Innes, and her harsh, unlovely voice cut through Alice's sentence and stopped it.

  "Who's the girl?" she said. "Where'd you find her?"

  Blood rose in Alice's face. The blind woman said quietly, ''My sister Maud is quite deaf. Miss Brennan. She doesn't hear you at all."

  Alice had trouble to draw her breath smoothly. "Thank you," she panted. "I didn't know."

  "She is really rather helpless," said Gertrude contemptuously.

  Innes had been spelling on his fingers. Maud's little eyes turned to the girl. They were bright and peered from folds of her grayish flesh.

  "Secretary, eh?" she said bluntly. She waddled over to the chair in which Alice had been sitting. She collapsed into it. Her fat little body simply melted its bones and fell down. She stretched her ugly legs out and looked up at the mantel. Innes reached for the candy box. He did this automatically and handed it down. Maud dipped her fingers in.

  "Have some candy?" she said to Alice, who shuddered "No." The woman stuffed three pieces into her mouth and grinned at the same time.

  "Look here, Maud . . . Excuse me, Alice." Innes snatched a pad of paper from the incomprehensible folds of the woman's dress and produced a pencil. He scribbled.

  "What's that?" Maud said, regarding what he had written without much interest. "Oh, financial, eh?" She grinned. "My financial position. Innes, you're a card."

  He tapped the paper with his forefinger, impatiently. He was quite ready to dominate this sister.

  "I've still got the two Liberty Bonds," Maud said. "Isabel hid them on me. " She went into rusty laughter.

  Innes pantomined.

  "Oh, I dunno," Maud said. "Spent it, I guess. Eh?" She took another chocolate. "It goes," she said slobbering and sucking in the overflow with a loud slupp, "Isabel's the one. She never spent an easy cent in her life, and it goes just the same." Maud heaved with mirth. "Makes her pretty mad. Should think it would."

  "This," said Gertrude with an air of confidence to

  Alice, "is extremely distasteful to me."

  "And to me," limes said, rather grimly. His gaze was fixed on the deaf woman. "I warned you the last time. I'll make up no more deficiencies. Fll expect all your papers and accounts within the week."

  Gertrude stiffened. "I'd prefer to go on with the bank, as usual," she said icily.

  "Don't know what you say," rumbled Maud. "Write it down."

  Innes gnawed his mustache. "Later," he said with a worried glance at Alice. "Gertrude, you must see it's to protect you."

  She lifted her pale chin. "I am no one's burden."

  "Innes . . ."

  The third sister stood in the archway. She was not as short as Maud nor as thin as Gertrude, but medium tall with a plmnp breast like a pigeon. Her hair was a litde darker than straw and ballooned aroxmd her face like an inverted umbrella, then subsided in a round mound on top of her head. Her complexion was mottled, but she had a kind of meaty color. Her features were sharp, but because they were embedded in a roimd-jowled face, die effect was not sharp. Her eyes, Alice noticed with a shock, were like the eyes in the portrait. One watched and one dreamed.

  "Isabel, how are you?" Innes was faintly hostile. "This is Alice Breiman, who's with me. My secretary. Alice, come meet my youngest sister."

  Isabel smiled with her lips together. Impulsively, on ac-coimt of the smile, Alice held out her hand. Quick, but not quicker than the veiled dismay in the woman's eyes, Innes ran his arm through Alice's and drew hers down.

  "I was saying, Isabel," he said sternly, "that I shall have to do what I threatened to do and take over aU your business matters. I understand you are in a financial mess again.''

  He was ready to dominate this sister, also, but she was slippery. Isabel's eyes slid sidewise and down. She didn't answer. Instead she said, "You're always welcome, of course," in a kind of brisk whme; "but I do wish we had known, Innes ..."

  "We couldn't very well warn you," Innes defended himself haughtily. "The car went wrong. That wasn't our fault."

  "Well, I do hope you won't mind having just what we were about to have ourselves." Her thin smile turned to Alice. "You see, I think dinner is actually ready. And it's so late, you know . . ."

  "Please don't trouble about anything," said Alice a lit-de coldly.

  "Give us pot luck, Isabel," Innes said, "for heaven's sake."

  Isabel's smile remained much the same. "Of course we are very glad to see you both." Her voice had no range. "Perhaps Miss Brennan would care to wash?" Isabel put her left hand, which was small and nervously strong, on Alice's arm. "Is this your bag? I'll call Mr. Johnson."

  "Please don't trouble."

  The naUs on the hand were very long. The fingers tightened. Alice stood still in the woman's grasp. Her heart began to pound again.

  Isabel let her go suddenly and turned away with a quick and somewhat crooked motion of the body.

  Innes said, in a low voice, "Isabel's lost her right arm. I ought to have told you."

  Then Alice saw the gray kid glove covering stiff artificial fingers on the hand that hung at Isabel's side as she moved crabwise across the hall.

  "Yes, you ought to have told me," she said quiedy. "You really ought. Why didn't you, Innes?"

  He looked as if he would melt when she raised her reproachful eyes. Alice saw his lower lip push out. With sudden insight, she knew that in a moment he would feel the punishment to be greater than the crime. She looked at this petulant millionaire, the man she was goijig to marry, and she saw her cross of gold.

  "Never mind," she said breathlessly. "I only hope I didn't offend her. Oh, Innes"—she made her eyes round—"do you think I have?"

  "No, no, of course not," he said fondly. "Of course not, my dear."

  It didn't matter much, Alice saw, if Isabel was offended, as long as Inncs needn't feel uncomfortable about it

  "Will you take the yoiing lady's bag upstairs, Mr. Johnson?" Isabel whined.

  Mr. Johnson was the gross man in the dirty flannel shirt. He followed her into the hall and scooped up Alice's bag as i£ it had been a ping-pong baU. "Sure. Where do you want it?" His inflections were pure American. His teeth, some of them, were gold. His black eyes rested on Alice briefly.

  "In the little guest room," Isabel said, in her tone of perpetual worry. "The heat's not on in Papa's room." She put her claw on Alice's arm aga
in. "Mr. Johnson will show you."

  Alice wanted to talk and scream like a frightened child. She did not want to go off upstairs with that outlandish creature named, of all incongruous names in the world, Mr. Johnson. Innes saved her.

  "Wait a minute, Alice. Come in here, Isabel. For just a minute. I have something to tell you. All three of you. This is news, my dears, really news," Innes was being Santa Claus again, with the same loud, false, hearty good will with which he had entered this house. Gertrude cocked her pale head. Isabel drew within the room with her sidewise step; and Maud, as he tapped her shoulder, turned her shrewd eyes up at him.

  "Alice and I are engaged to be married," he said. And then, without sound, he mouthed the words again for the deaf woman.

  It seemed to Alice that sound disappeared from the world. The shattering stillness and Innes's mouth working silently seemed to prove that her own ears had failed her. Gertrude, sitting with her head cocked, did not move. Isabel put her left hand out and drew it back. Alice thought she must have cried out, yet because of her own sudden deafness, she had not heard the cry. Not until the fire muttered was she sure it was a real silence that enclosed them.

  Maud broke it. "Married?" she croaked. "You and her, eh? Is that so!"

  "No, no." Isabel reached with frantic haste for the

  paper pad. "Not yet. Engaged." She said it furiously and she wrote it furiously, with her left hand, pressing hard. The smile on her face was a frozen thing.

  "How very interesting." The blind woman's voice tinkled coolly. "Well, Innes, you have my best wishes, of

  course."

  "It's pretty good for an old bachelor like me, isn't it?" Innes said, rocking on his heels. Alice bit her lip.

  "Engaged, eh? High time." Maud was accidentally apropos. Her eyes had a light of lewd speculation in them. Alice looked away, anywhere, looked at Isabel.

  "Such a surprise," said Isabel, still plaintive. "My dear, we have quite despaired of Innes. Now we shall have to call you Alice. Isn't that nice?"

  Her ideas seemed disconnected, as if her mind were elsewhere. But her smile was blooming.

  "Brennan," said Gertrude delicately, as if she tasted it. "B,r, e, double n?"

  "A,n," finished Alice. It seemed absurd that her first and only remark should be two letters of the alphabet. But they fell from her lips, and nothing else came.

  Maud said gratingly, "Innes, you old devil," and slapped her thigh.

  "We think we're going to be very happy," said Innes, foolishly loud. "Don't we, darling?"

  Alice's shoulders were stiff and unyielding under the curve of his arm. She could not meet that mood. Could not, and no graceful phrase would come.

  "Beg your pardon." Fred, the chaufeur, spoke from the hall. He must have come through the back of the house. He touched his forehead to the sisters. "Thought I'd better tell you. I'm going to take her down the hill, sir, and have them put in a couple o' quarts of oil."

  "You mean it's running!" cried Innes.

  "I think she'll be all right now," Fred said stolidly.

  "Good work. That's fine. Fine."

  Alice drew out of Innes's arm and found she was trembling.

  "Tell your man," said Gertrude, "that Josephine will find him something to eat in the kitchen."

  "Thank you, ma'am," Fred said. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

  He left the way he had come, not having looked at Alice even once.

  Innes took her upstairs in rather a hurry, after that.

  The servant, Josephine, came hesitantly to the parlor, looking backward and up toward their disappearing feet.

  ''Well, Josephine, what is it?" Isabel spied her..

  "Excuse me," Josephine said in a hushed voice, "but there's veal in the meat loaf, Miss Isabel."

  "Yes," she said, "yes . . ."

  "And you know Mr. Innes. So I wondered."

  "Oh, dear," Isabel said. "There's nothing else m the house. I really don't know . .. Perhaps he's outgrown ..."

  "Don't you think," Gertrude said gently, "it was always his imagination? I should venture to say that if one simply didn't mention . . ."

  "There's very little veal," Isabel said. "It's nearly all beef."

  Josephine looked from one to the other.

  Maud roused herself. "Why don't we have dinner?" she shouted. "What are we waiting for?"

  Josephine grimaced and pointed upstairs.

  "Don't know what you mean," Maud said stubbornly. "Where's dinner? Why ain't it on the table? Write it down."

  Alice closed the bathroom door upon herself vnth sagging relief. Innes had kissed her in the hall. "You're so pretty," he said. "Well go on right after dinner. Right after dinner." He was in his spirits, but this was meant for comfort and as comfort she took it. Nevertheless, the bathroom was sanctuary. Here, for a few moments at least, she would be alone and away from any members of the Whitiock family. Perhaps she could get in touch with Alice Brennan, that independent young woman with such firm ideas of her own, who seemed to have evaporated, who seemed to have been for many hours a mere echo, an echoing mirror, a copy of something called a young lady.

  As she splashed cold water on her face, she heard the whir of a starter, pulled the bliad aside, and saw the big gray car slip around a segment of the drive visible from this side window. It was running all right. The tail light winked at her.

  Thank God, she thought, this is only for an hour or so more. Only for dinner. Right after dinner, Innes said, they'd be away. They would push on north. It would be dark, of course. She and Innes would sit side by side in the dark. They would come to the bad road in the dark and then at the end of it. . .

  Alice leaned against the marble washbowl and looked at her fear in the glass. This was strange. Why must she tell herself these future steps, one by one? Because she could not see them. She couldn't imagine. Always, almost always, there persisted in her mind a view ahead, an outline of what was going to happen next. Vague, perhaps, but with clearly imagined spots in it. Arrival at a destination. Pieces of a plan. Pictures.

  Only once before had she felt this blankness, this loss of the previewing sense, this chopping off of the antennae of her mind as they went forward into the future. That had been when she had been driving home from a dance with a gang, and she could not see herself getting home. The picture wasn't there. As now, she couldn't imagine it. It remained imimagined, an empty plan, without images, without faith.

  That night the car had hit a tree and turned over.

  Maybe I'm going to die, this time, she thought. Then, with a rush of her misery and her bitterness, "What the hell difference would it make?" she said aloud. And what difference would it make, indeed, when she was going to marry Innes Whitlock and not Art Killeen, ever?

  In the long hall, on her way back, she met the chaufeur.

  "Miss Brennan?"

  "Yes." She kept her scrubbed face turned away.

  ''Congratulations." She turned her head angrily. His hand with the long thin fingers was held out to her.

  "It's not proper to congratulate the girl," she said rudely. "Don't you know any better? Congratulate the man, but wish her happiness."

  "Is that so?" he murmured mildly.

  "Yes, of com'se," she said. It was not until she had closed the door of her room that she recognized his innocent mildness for the sham it was, and what he had said and meant came back to her like an echo.

  He had meant to congratulate her.

  Alice set firm and defiant feet on the stairs, going down, but there was a carpet. She could hear their voices in the parlor.

  Gertrude's flute: "Of course Innes is Susan's son so it can't matter as much, you know. And indeed, it's possible that quite nice girls go into business these modem days.''

  Isabel's monotone: "You know very little about it. She's very young. Much too young for Lmes. Innes ought...

  Maud, crashing in: "Say, Innes'll have twins before the year is out. Litde heirs. Little sons and heirs. I think she's pregnant." Maud's laughter
.

  Isabel said, "Oh, be quiet!"

  Gertrude, a soft soprano ripple: "Someone is on the stairs."

  Maud, harshly: "Getting touchy, Innes is. And you won't get any . . . Eh? What?"

  Isabel, in the archway: "Come in. Miss Brennan. My dear, I meant to say Alice, of course. Come in, my dear. Dinner will be served in a few minutes now. As soon as ' Innes is down. Did you find what you needed?"

  "Yes, indeed." Smiling, her head high, Alice walked into then: parlor. They turned toward her. Their heads on their necks were three stalks in the same wind.

  "And when do you plan to be manied?" said Isabel.

  "Yes," said Gertrude, ''we are so interested. Have you set a day?"

  "Say, Alice Brennan," said Maud, "that's your name, ain't it? When is the wedding? How soon, eh?"

  "Oh, quite soon," said Alice carelessly. "There's no reason to wait." She took Maud's pad.

  "Very soon," she wrote firmly.

  About an hour after dinner, Alice pushed open the sliding doors of the second parlor, the room on the left of the hall, called the sitting room, and let herself through into the hall. Fred was just coming in by the front door. "Fred . . ."

  He touched his forehead. "If your bag's ready, Miss Brennan . . ."

  "Wait," she said.

  "Mr. Whitlock wants to start."

  "He's not going to start," she said belligerently. "Do you know who's the doctor here?"

  "No, I don't, Miss Brennan."

  "I'm worried," Alice said. She appealed to him with a little smile. "I really am. I never saw anybody as sick as that, just over the wrong food. I don't think we ought to let him go on." Fred was listening respectfully. "Do you?" she demanded.

  "I couldn't say. Miss Brennan."

  Alice stamped her foot. "Oh, stop it!" she cried. "This is no time for revenge."

  Fred grinned. He suddenly stopped being remote and stood at ease, although he scarcely moved. "O.K." he said. "You put me in my place and now you want me to pop out again. Well, what's the matter?"

  "Suppose we get him miles off in the car some place and then he collapses? I don't want the responsibility."

  "Yeah, but he wants to go."