The day passed as all Sundays did in the Brennan apartment. Eileen had been to early Mass so that she could be ahead with the preparations for the large midday meal they always ate ‒ whatever the temperature was outside. It varied little ‒ roast lamb or roast beef, and a pie of whatever fruit was in season. Mike always got the whisky bottle out after Mass, and Eileen sipped a discreet glass, with a lot of soda, while she cooked. Sometimes they had a guest, but to-day there was only the family ‒ the two unmarried boys, John and Peter, and Sally and Tom. When the Brennans got together, they liked to talk, mostly about themselves, and Sally’s unexpected visit seemed to unleash a whole storm of family news and gossip. Tom said little, but frankly enjoyed listening. They seemed to stimulate each other to greater degrees of exaggeration; as the whisky was passed around, each incident was heightened and coloured, funnier or more pathetic than it had been in the original. Tom realised that each was vying for the centre of the limelight; they were like actors putting on a performance for each other. He listened, fascinated, and knew that Sally carried some of this heightened sense of living wherever she went, and that this, too, was one of the reasons why he loved her.
After lunch, John and Peter left; Mike sat with Tom in the living-room, smoking a pipe mostly in silence, while Sally helped Eileen with the dishes. When Sally came back he straightened in his chair, and the animation returned to his face.
‘Well, darlin’, how’s the book going now? When am I going to get it into my hands to read? When will we be sending a copy to your Uncle Oliver?’
Sally made a face, and dropped heavily into an armchair.
‘It’s going very badly, Dad. I don’t think it’s ever going to be finished.’
He looked at her gravely. ‘Sally, you don’t mean that! With all the talent you have! … With all the great things you used to write at college!’
She sighed. ‘Dad, writing pieces at college is very different from sitting down and thinking out a whole set of characters, and seeing them on their way through a story, and giving it direction and polish … and some meaning. Perhaps I was stupid to ever think I could do it …’
He shook his head. ‘I’m sad to hear you say so. It used not to be this way with you. There was a time when you knew you could do this and just about anything else you wanted to do. You had the world by the tail … why are you willing to let it go?’
She shook her head. ‘But I’m not Uncle Oliver …’
Mike interrupted her. ‘You’re right! You’re not Oliver. You could be much better than Oliver if you don’t waste your gifts.’ He threw out his hands, the pipe smoke swirling about him. ‘After all, Oliver writes Gaelic poetry that no one can read, but you ‒ you have a great audience of people eager to read what’s put before them.’ He thumped the crumpled Sunday papers by his side. ‘Look at that great wad of stuff to read … look at the paper-back racks in the drug store, look at the news-stands crammed with stuff. You know as well as I do that you have your place there, Sally.’
‘But I don’t know. You make it all sound so easy. All I have to do is sit down and write. What about the thousand things that get in the way … I have a home to run … I’m going to have a baby.’
‘Don’t let them get in your way,’ Mike said. ‘You had a thousand things to do at college, but you got through them.’
‘This is different, Dad. I’m living in a place where I’m expected to join in the things that the other wives are doing. I’m on the library committee, and I’m helping raise funds for a new parish auditorium, and we’re organising a dramatic society …’
‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘Get out of these things if they stop you following your own bent. Your friends will respect you more for writing a book than raising a hundred dollars for the library.’
‘It doesn’t work that way,’ Sally said heatedly, colouring and uncomfortable under the first criticism she had heard from her father for years. ‘It would be quite different if I were established … if I had some success to point to. I can’t tell anyone in Burnham Falls that I’m trying to write a novel. If I didn’t get it published, I’d be a laughing stock … and that hurts Tom. You’ve got to remember Tom’s position …’
‘Nothing will hurt Tom so much as an unhappy wife. If you start denying your talent before you even give it a chance, you’ve just shown it the door. Look at Oliver … when he wants to write he goes and writes. Nothing gets in the way.’
‘But Uncle Oliver is a poet ‒ he’s expected to do that!’
‘And aren’t you expected to use the talents God gave you ‒ in the best way you can use them?’ Again he thumped the papers. ‘There are thousands of people getting books published. Your name should be there among them. Just give up your afternoon tea parties, or whatever it is you women do, and sit down with a pen and paper and get on with it.’ He had leaned forward towards her to stress his words, and now he slumped back in the chair, as if he had reached a finality.
‘Dad, if I could …’ she began softly. The words were spoken tentatively, but there was already the sound of purpose in them.
After that Sally and Mike spent an hour talking about the book, talking around and through it, building pictures for each other of the time when it would be published, of what Oliver would say about it, of the chances of reaching the best-seller list, and the mass-circulation paper-backs. It was a happy world of fantasy in which Tom did not belong. He found himself quietly drinking tea with Eileen in the kitchen. But he did not in the least mind his exclusion because from Sally’s face had vanished the look of fear and hurt that had so tormented him that morning.
II
There hadn’t been a Sunday in Burnham Falls like this one for a long time. In a sense it reminded Clif a little of the Sunday of Pearl Harbour. He didn’t go to church ‒ he rarely went to church after Dorothy died ‒ but he watched the usual crowds gathering to the three churches along Main Street and it seemed there was a tension in them, almost an excitement; they stayed much longer to talk after the services. Three times that morning cars belonging to the State Police passed along Main Street, and everyone stared after them as if they expected to see Patrino and Reitch in the back seat. Mrs. Martin returned from church, and stood and talked to Clif for twenty minutes on the porch before going in to get lunch. The talk was all about Jeannie Talbot, of course, but it wasn’t anything fresh, nothing he hadn’t known by nine o’clock that morning. Clif endured it because he knew Mrs. Martin wouldn’t do anything about lunch until she’d been through it all once again.
He had five phone calls that morning from people he hadn’t seen for months, and who hadn’t bothered to call him for much longer than that. None of them said so specifically, but it was obvious they were all hoping he had been in touch with Ted Talbot and might be prepared to gossip a little in exchange for their pleasantries.
Late in the afternoon he finally decided to call the Talbots. He had so far hesitated because he couldn’t appear to be asking for legal business, and because he knew the invasion of privacy the Talbots would already have suffered that day. But Ted had worked for him for more than twenty years, and he had never asked for any kind of help. It occurred to Clif that he might not know how to ask for it now.
It was Selma who answered, and she told him Ted was at the hospital. Jeannie wasn’t badly hurt, she said. There was a dull, frozen sound to her voice, as if she didn’t fully realise the words she was saying, or know their meaning. To Clif it suggested that she was fighting hysteria.
‘Ted knows he’s only to ask me if he needs any help. You understand that, Mrs. Talbot?’
‘Yes, Mr. Burrell,’ she said mechanically. ‘Thank you.’ And then hung up.
III
Phil Conrad didn’t stay for the end of the golf tournament at the country club that Sunday afternoon. Ed Peters was to present the cup for Amtec when it was over, so he couldn’t leave when his guest did. Laura drove him back to the house to pick up his bag and the car in which he had driven to Burnham Falls.
Conrad didn’t give any reason or excuses for leaving early. But as he shook hands with Ed, he spoke the words Ed had been hoping to hear all through the week-end.
‘It looks as if we’ll only need one or two more meetings with your people to iron out the last wrinkles, and then we’ll be set to sign the contract. We’re thinking of the first show for November …’
As soon as Conrad had driven away with Laura in the Cadillac, Ed went to the phone and called E. J. Harrison in New York. He knew that up to this point Conrad had given no definite commitment on the series of shows for Amtec, and he wanted E. J. to know that the decision had been reached during this week-end.
He listened to E. J.’s words of pleasure, but it was a distinct shock to suddenly hear the other’s tone change as E. J. launched into a discussion of Jeannie Talbot’s rape, and Amtec’s implication in the affair. E. J. gave his advice crisply and with great sureness, and left Ed dumbly wondering how he had found out so quickly, and whom his informant had been. Ed had intended to send in a routine report, and to minimise its importance, but someone had reached E. J. before him. He came out of the phone booth, his face tight with fury. Who, he wondered, had slipped the word along the chain of command to get to E. J.? … Sommers? … Harvey? … Taylor? … None of them would have dared to go directly over his head, but there were any number of ways of relaying the message with seeming innocence. At the eighteenth green he watched the faces of the men about him. Was it Sullivan or Andrews … or was it Dexter? Neither Steve nor Harriet Dexter had appeared to-day for the tournament.
Then one of Sullivan’s assistant’s sank his putt, and the applause of the crowd acknowledged him the winner. His face fixed in a congratulatory smile, Ed strode across the green to shake his hand.
Back at the house Laura mixed a martini for Phil before he left. Her movements were perfectly calm and steady, but she was battling with the knowledge that she would have to speak plainly to him, that she couldn’t let him go without asking for some reassurance. Her tongue felt stiff and awkward, but she was frightened to trust to the only weapon she had ever needed to use on a man before. For Phil Conrad, beauty was not unique; he was surrounded by beauty. She had to be more than that. For the first time in her life she had to hope and believe desperately that she was the particular kind of woman a man like Phil wanted. For the first time she came to hope that there was something in her beyond beauty that a man would want. She was possessed by a sickening feeling of poverty.
‘Phil, will I be seeing you ‒ soon?’
He sipped his drink, and nodded, but it could have been just to approve its dryness and chill. ‘That’s up to you, isn’t it, Laura? I mean’ ‒ he paused to sip again ‒ ‘you have to make the opportunities. We can hardly arrange a rendezvous in the woods at Burnham Falls, can we?’
It was cruel, she thought. And she wondered if he had done it deliberately because he had liked Larry, and had known that she had not even tried with Larry, and now it amused him to see her have to try so hard with him.
She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t mind what I have to do,’ she said faintly.
And then later she stood in the driveway and watched him go, and she whispered after him, ‘I’ll do anything at all ‒ anything I have to do! Because if I don’t have you ‒ if I can’t fill my nights and days with you ‒ I think I’ll die! Because there isn’t anything else for me now.’
She drank two more martinis before Ed came home, just sitting and staring at Phil’s empty glass on the table before her.
IV
Tom and Sally waited until it was dark to drive back from Brooklyn to Burnham Falls. Tom let the top down on the car, and above them the stars were near and friendly. The warm evening air fanned around them gently as they drove. Sally sat close to Tom, sometimes touching his arm and knee with a soft gesture that was a vague indication of gratitude and pleasure. A few times she lighted a cigarette for him. Again their side of the highway was almost empty as the returning cars streamed back to the city. Sally no longer minded their apartness from the other people, the knowledge that they were going in a different direction.
V
Jeannie licked her dry lips, staring mindlessly into the darkness and stillness of the small room they had put her into at the Kempton General. The sedative they had given her hadn’t worked ‒ probably because she had slept all through Sunday morning after the shot they’d given her earlier. In the afternoon her father and mother had come to see her, separately, because they had not wanted to bring Chrissie to the hospital. Jerry had not come. Her mother had said it was because the doctor had refused visitors ‒ but Jeannie had only half-believed that.
The three-quarter moon had risen high, and was now on the wane. Vaguely she remembered the moon of last night. That was all that was safe to remember. The rest must be kept away until she was able to face it. One part of her mind had to remember because of the questions they asked; but the deeper part, the knowledge of injury and terror, must be kept down, away out of sight.
The night nurse looked in, and was aware of her wakefulness. ‘I’ll get you something, Jeannie,’ she said softly. She spoke the words as if Jeannie were a child who needed comfort. She had been on duty last night when Jeannie had been admitted. Jeannie couldn’t remember having seen her in Burnham Falls.
She returned soon with a mug of hot chocolate. ‘Sometimes something hot in the stomach’s better than a pill,’ she said. Jeannie drank it through the glass straw, because her mouth was too swollen to shape to the rim of the mug. The nurse straightened the bedclothes and plumped the pillows; she didn’t say anything again until she took the empty mug from Jeannie. ‘Yes ‒ that’ll be better. Sometimes you just need something for the stomach.’
Nine
On Monday morning Sally saw Tom off to the Laboratories almost with a feeling of relief and impatience. When he was gone she washed the dishes quickly and left them to drain; then she made the bed and flicked a duster through the living-room. At the back of her mind she was aware of the report she had promised Father James at the parish church on the campaign for raising money for the auditorium, and she had also told Susan Watts that she would start phoning around to canvas support for the dramatic society. But now she did neither of these things. She went to the kitchen drawer and took out the manuscript. She carried it into the living-room, and settled herself at the desk there, half-closing the Venetian blind so that Marcia Webster would not see her from her own living-room, wave, and perhaps stroll over later for a cup of coffee, and to discuss the news about Jeannie Talbot. For the moment Sally wanted neither Jeannie, nor Burnham Falls, nor Amtec. By ten-thirty she had a page written. The phone rang three times that morning, and she didn’t answer it.
II
After lunch that Monday Clif Burrell walked slowly down Main Street to Vanesco’s, the barber shop. One of the four chairs was vacant, and he went to it immediately, tossing his hat on to the bench that stretched along one wall. Rather wearily he acknowledged the small chorus of greetings; the heat and sun that bounced back off the concrete pavements seemed to grow worse each summer. And yet he could not give in to driving the car that short distance from his house.
‘How are you, John?’ he said, as Vanesco tucked the towels about his neck.
‘Fine, Mr. Burrell. And yourself?’
‘Great,’ Clif replied. He leaned far back in the chair. John went to work at once with the scissors; he had been cutting Clif’s hair for more than fifteen years. He always started rapidly with the scissors before he started to talk.
‘Well, Mr. Burrell ‒ what do you make of this Jeannie Talbot business?’
In the mirror, Clif looked at him without pleasure. ‘What should I make of it? Damn’ shame.’
‘That’s what I said myself. I’ve known Jeannie since she was a little toddler waiting over on that bench while her dad got a trim ‒ and that’s exactly what I said myself when I heard it.’ He knew his mention of Jeannie Talbot had caught the attention of the whole room, an
d he raised his voice a little. ‘Though I think myself that Jeannie could’ve been a bit more careful. Since these construction crews moved in you never know who’s about …’
‘That ain’t the way I heard it.’ The man who had spoken was seated in the chair nearest the window. Clif had seen him around but didn’t know his name, and it irked him to think how Burnham Falls was slipping away from him. The man twisted to face the room. Close to Clif’s ear, John’s scissors stopped their snipping motion.
‘Seems she was real friendly with these two guys … she was drinking with them before it happened. The wife of one of the guys ‒ you know, she was left behind at the camp ‒ she’s real sore at Jeannie. Says she egged them on … looks like Jeannie must’ve been all set for a little fun and it got kinda out of hand …’
‘Story I heard was that she was selling some face cream to Mrs. Reitch, and Patrino and Reitch were with her. Jeannie finished off work about then, and they all went out together. Heard it from Wally Carter …’
John started vigorously with the scissors again as he observed Clif’s frowning face in the mirror. ‘Did you know Jeannie, Mr. Burrell?’ he said.
Clif nodded. Then he said, ‘Hurry it up, will you, John? I’ve got an appointment.’ He supposed that John knew almost as well as he did that there was no pressing appointment, but the lie didn’t matter.
He spoke again, clearly, so that his voice carried through the room. ‘The law,’ he said, ‘has a wonderful way of clarifying these things. These two men, Patrino and Reitch, will be caught, and there will be a trial. That will be the time to make judgments.’
‘Hell, I wouldn’t be in their shoes!’ one of the men commented. ‘Way these things go, the jury’s always got sympathy for the girl. It always comes out that none of it was her fault. She couldn’t help wagging her fanny and being cute … and then when a guy reaches out for what’s offered, she gets mad and acts all offended. Women is mostly cheats … and the juries’ll go on letting ’em be. There wouldn’t be half the rapes if women didn’t act so damn’ come-on.’
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