Chapter Seven
McGinnis’s was at the edge of the business block on Highway 10. It boasted a semi-circular bar, booths on two sides and a space fifteen foot square with three young couples dancing. The waiter brought ham-on-ryes with plenty of dill pickles and ten ounce glasses of beer, red checkered cloths made the booth tables cozy.
“Look.” Said Miller when he’d finished half his sandwich, “that girl,” she was a bright and vivacious youngster with a long slender neck and bangs of dark straight hair. She was whirling, chatting taking her turns with light carefree charm. “She seems to be having a good time.” Sally said mildly.
“That was Albert Smith’s nurse, her name’s Margret Reed.”
“Oh! The way she took their finding Albert, you’d have thought she’d never get over it.” He could say things to Sally; speak them aloud instead of keeping them close without outlet within him. “She seems to have forgotten it.”
Miller smiled, reflectively, “not that you’d expect anybody to go about brooding all the time.” He felt Sally watching him, “where did you meet Albert?” She asked.
He tried to be completely casual, “we went to school together.”
“Oh! Where?”
“Cincinnati.” Could she think of nothing else to talk about except the past he wanted to forget?”
“The university there, what did you study?”
“Oh, the usual things,” she knew he was being evasive, “Let’s talk about you,” He went on, “you’re not from New York, you don’t talk like anyone from the east.”
“You’ve changed the subject.” She pointed out, “you’re annoyed at my asking about you!”
He was aware of the silence, the tension he was surprised by her sudden laugh that swept away the impasse. “There really isn’t very much to tell about myself, “she said. “Do you really want to hear it?” She paused thoughtfully as if arranging facts in her mind. “You’ve told me I don’t sound like New York, well I came from Ohio too, and I was born there, while dad was doing shipping on the Great Lakes. Mother died when I was very small, her family had been against her marrying a sailor, so when she died they went to the courts to take me away from my father. I was brought up by two maiden aunts. It was a small pottery town, life was narrow. You were always watched, so when I was seventeen I ran away to Chicago. I wanted to find people I could understand, I wanted to find life the way I thought life was supposed to be.
He understood her striving, seeing himself reflecting in her, or was he only imagining he saw kinship? Every time a girl caught his eye he thought the same thing wondering if she were for him.
He heard her saying, “I guess there isn’t very much more to tell. I worked in a mail order house by day, and went to school at night, I thought I might do fashion art.”
“In New York?”
“Yes,” she explained, “I hadn’t seen dad since mother’s funeral, almost fifteen years before, so I decided to try to find him through the Seamen’s Institute. I went to New York to live and because dad was shipping out from there. Yes, he shipped out even after, after he was hurt. Then that telegram came saying we were heirs and should come up here. I couldn’t understand, at first why dad didn’t think it was wonderful.”
What had been Daniel’s role? He had discussed the affair as if he had played only a minor part in it. “What did your father do on that South American trip?” Miller asked.
“He ran the ship, ran or steered or whatever you do to a ship. If the money didn’t mean much, she was wistful, plaintive. “Does it mean so much?”
She smiled, and her near sighted eyes were most, that near sightedness was one of the most endearing things about her, Miller thought had it not been for this, she might never have bumped into him at the station.
“Oh, I don’t want a lot of money, “she explained, “but I’ve always lived so close it would be nice to be able to be just a bit extravagant, to have my hair done once a week. And to splurge on just a few little things, stockings and underwear the nice kind, even handkerchiefs.”
“Those are a queer bunch at the house.” He said. “I was afraid of them at first, after the stories dad told, but they don’t look like murders, do they?”
“Murderers!” Miller replied.
“Maybe we have the wrong notion about murders.” He spoke what he had often previously mulled in his mind. “Some murders may have ideals too. They may kill only because their sense of justice is outraged, and they may kill to ease suffering.” Miller added. “Are ones the world and society are better off without and all killers you know may love their wives and children and pet the family dog.”
She wanted him to speak of something else. He turned the glass of beer on its base, revolved it slowly. “That poor Miss Parker,” Sally said. “I’m sorry for her.”
There was pause, and then suddenly Miller said, “Do you feel for Paul Davis?”
“A woman must have hurt him once.”
“Just once?” He was thinking of Albert and the girl who had broken up with him. He was thinking of Julie, as he might break off from her.
“Davis can be pleasant, or unpleasant.” He heard Sally say. “Women pay his way; he told me women have always supported him.”
“He strikes me as being sensitive.” Miller said, “As being softer than he seems.”
“That Spanish fellow, the South American Mendez he’s sinister but he has a sense of humor.” It was clear that Sally was escaping the topic of killing, she was running from it.
Miller sat back on his booth seat watched Sally opposite him. “You know the old idea that if you went into anyone’s background, you could never really blame anyone for anything he did.”
He was getting back to the subject she wanted to avoid. “I guess there’s no end to contradictions, now take Alvin Rodgers, he’s supposed to be a sort of saint, Allen’s one friend. I guess that should make him a likely candidate as the murderer we’re looking for.”
“It might if he weren’t laid up somewhere on account of an accident.” The juke box whirled out its melody Margret Reed’s feet chafed a staccato beat on the floor, her skirt undulating, her young partner danced beautifully, his loose leather jacket flopping with his sharp turns. Miller watched their feet, the shirt looking at Sally, she smiled shyly, silently. “What kind of a man was Albert, the doctor?” She asked him.
Miller looked toward the semi circle of the bar and he could almost see Albert lean and lanky, he smiled, but Sally did not understand the smile. “What’s the matter?” She asked.
“Just thinking of my life story.” he told her, “my own life story.” The gloom, the depression was settling again. Sally had been honest with him, open but he had been evasive he had told her nothing about himself.
Being in the tavern was suddenly intolerable. “Shall we go?” He asked. She didn’t understand, “of course, lets.” Her voice was no longer pleasant, soft. She was hurt, when she moved her head was brassy hair flouncing, why was she hurt? When he’d first met her in Grand Central he hadn’t known her capacity for hurt, for love, for recognition for anything it took to make a person.
He paid the check, helped her into her coat. Silence was between them as they walked up the street. And then it happened…
He gripped Sally’s arm, dragged her back from the walk, in the shelter of a dark doorway, she turned terrified eyes on him. “Keep quiet!” His fingers bit deep into her arms, as she twisted to escape, then she saw his face, his staring eyes. He was not looking at her, he did not mean to harm her, and he’d pulled her back to safety.
Footsteps sounded on the sidewalk; a tall broad man with the gone to softness bulk of a onetime athlete passed by. “Did you see him?” Miller’s whisper was urgent.
“Who was it?
“That man who just went by,” his finger clamped her wrist. “I know that man, he mustn’t see me here, I can’t let him see me.”
His fingers released her, she stared into his face. “I don’t understand what has this to do wi
th whatever’s been going on here? Why mustn’t he see you?”
“I can’t tell you.” He clutched her arm again.
“John,” she said, “what’s wrong? You’re acting so strangely, you didn’t murder Albert, did you?” A hand flew to her mouth to block what she’d already said. “MURDER ALBERT, ARE YOU KIDDING! FOR GOD”S SAKE SALLY!” Her face was white, “I don’t understand.” She moaned, “I don’t know what I am saying. Who was that man? What were you going to tell me back there in the tavern? I’ve got to know.” “Yes,” he admitted, “You’ve got to know.” they walked together up the street.
Chapter Eight
I used to be a doctor,” Miller began. “I went to medical school in Cincinnati; it was my mother’s ambition, as well as mine. She was used to poverty as it’s possible to get. When I was a kid selling papers, she saved my money for me, she took in big, wicker baskets of laundry, and put away crumpled dollar bills, so that our ambition might be realized.”
He had never been able to tell this without torture indeed, he had told it only once before to Julie, who had not understood.
“My mother died the year I graduated,” he went on, “she never saw anything come of all she had been working for, when she died I didn’t even have the cash to open up an office, or set up a practice. So I took a job in an institution, a mental hospital in Virginia. That’s where I met my wife. Julie was on the office staff and that is where I met Thomas Younger, the man you saw just now; Younger was a doctor at Allendale.”
“Oh, I didn’t know.” Sally said.
He felt her hand on his arm, but he did not want to look at her. He wanted to finish; this was an intensity of relief. “Allendale was not run well; there should have been an attendant for every six patients. There was one for every forty or fifty; patients were beaten, sometimes with wet towels, sometimes with bare fists. Often they were imprisoned in cells, without adequate diet. Strip cells, they called them; that meant patients were stripped of their clothing and shackled.”
He sighed then continued, “I made enemies, I wanted to do something about conditions there, and people saw the beautiful buildings and wouldn’t believe it was rotten inside. But when you want to do something about conditions, you make enemies. But you make friends also; Albert Smith was there too, Albert hadn’t had the money to open an office either, so Albert and I began to gather evidence that would force an investigation.” He again paused before continuing, “Then I made a mistake, I wrote ounces instead of grams on a prescription, ounces instead or grams. One and then another of the patients was taken ill, three of them died, three, two men and a women named Jill Fellows. They died in agony.” He felt his words droning, “The institution authorities brought me up on charges; I didn’t remember writing the prescription, they turned that against me. They said I was pathological psychotic; they said anything that would help get me out of there. They had to protect themselves; they said I’d purposely written the wrong prescription.”
“Oh, no John!”
“That shows how trumped up it was! They hushed the whole affair up. You’ve been affected too much by the suffering you’ve seen, they had said. You had an uncontrollable urge to end the misery. You may not have been aware of it, but you had it.”
Sally might not believe him; she might think that he did have pathological urges and given the right circumstances they might come out again. She must not think that even if it were true.
“My license was revoked, malpractice; Albert swore that I’d been framed, and Younger hated me, not only because he was part of the corrupt administration, but also because he’d been in love with Julie before I’d come to the hospital and she’d thrown him over for me. Albert Smith’s insistence that it was a frame up was the only thing that saved my sanity. Maybe I could have brought the charges out into the open and fought them if I had written ounces instead of grams; it was only an error, nothing more.”
How simple it was to say it, how pretty it made it sound. What he left out his own mental breakdown, his fears and uncertainty was a vast, black hole in his story. “I got a job a small job in a laboratory, I was through as a doctor, but Julie thought I’d make a comeback at it and I married her. I shouldn’t have married her, and she shouldn’t have married me, but I needed something to hold to. Compounding pills! I was crazy at the thought of it, I was a doctor, I could do things but I was sick too, I knew I was sick.”
“And Albert Smith?” Sally asked.
“Albert kept in touch with me, he was good to me.” Another pang of torture came to Miller as he thought again of Albert and his violin, the violin that made him momentarily forget the knife wounds of his conscience, the things he had poisoned. “We’d go away and fish.” He said. “And I could sit, doing nothing but think, straightening things out.”
They were at the bridge now, below them were the railroad tracks and beyond the platform of the Millersburg Station.
“Is that all? Sally said “That’s all.” She must think I’m crazy in the head.
To the west, the Allen mansion reared black against the trees, black against the reflecting surface of the river; the night wind blew from the north. “You could have told me right away.” Sally said, “It’s nothing to conceal.”You had me frightened; I imagined you had done something really bad. Anybody could see it was none of your fault, you only wanted to do good.”
The cold air filled Miller’s lungs; they walked in silence till they reached the house, where they said goodnight. John climbed to his third floor room two steps at a time. Sally knew, Sally had understood knowing made people closer, understanding made them closer of course, there was still much that she did not know, but understanding had begun. Now at least she knew a little more of what he was a person of the peculiar workings of his personality. Miller felt like a different man as he closed the door behind him, even the rooms character seemed to have changed before the empire bed with its carved figures had seemed to tower massively around him. The chests, the antique chairs had seemed forbidding like the bottles on Liebermann’s shelves, like regulator, the clock now they seemed shrunken, to have receded.
He took off his shoes and lay down on the bed, perhaps from relief, he now felt utterly tired out. He switched off a night table lamp and lay in the dark listening for the voices of his mind. But now he heard only the noises of the house, the restlessness of the animal yard; the rasping flutter of a bird’s wing, a short chopping bark from one of the cages in the zoo.
The next thing he knew, it was three o’ clock, and he had dozed laying there on the bed, sleeping when he should be working, and finding out about this house, about Allen, about Albert, about Thomas Younger and what the man was doing in Millersburg. He swung his legs to the sandalwood floor, looked at his stocking feet. Gnawing at a raw fingertip, he went to the door and out into the hallway went down the stairs to the second floor, down the marble staircase.
He turned back toward the rear of the house, groping along a hall; paneling was shoulder high, with stiff straight chairs backed against it. The 1890’s, the 1900’s had died, but their ghost lived on here, as a dead person lived on in cloths that had been his, in his pen, his watch, his books. This was the sort of house Julie would have built, a monument to vanity, a futile extension of individual insignificance.
He passed the gala ballroom, bare and meaningless now, and entered the large paneled library he’d discovered the day before. He struck a match, found the light switch; he closed the room’s double door. Miller confronted the large, full length portrait on the wall. Paul J. Allen ever waiting there with his double chins, his glasses on a ribbon, his half smoked cigar; Miller walked along the bookshelves. He took out a volume and blew at dust along its top edge, but there was no dust. There were recent volumes, new editions of classic works on religion, prayer, and ethics…he glanced back at the book collection, his fingers traced across the book backs, stopped. The nature of peace Thorstein Veblen halfway down its back strip a whole gasped in it, as if it had been skewered.
The door opened behind Miller, in reflex motion his fist clenched the slug, and the book dropped to the floor, was it Jose Mendez? Paul Davis? Attorney Godley…? But it was Sally Daniels who was standing motionless in the doorway when he turned, she came forward.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Her blue flowered negligee skimmed the carpet, “I heard you coming down.”
He crossed behind her and closed the library’s double door. “You say you heard me?”
Her lowered gaze saw his stocking feet, “No, no I didn’t.”
“But didn’t you just say you did?”
“I was afraid for dad and myself. I stretched a thread across the hall near our door, leading into our room, so that if anyone passed, it woke me.” It was like a trick a child might play, a comic reading child. “Attached to your big toe?” He asked smiling.
She looked at the book lying on the floor and then at his clenched hand. She picked the book up; the bullet groove in it was a plain declaration. Miller said, “Paul Allen seems to have been doing a lot of studying. Mendez spoke of it yesterday. Maybe Allen really had forgiven the people who had cheated him.”
“What happened to this book?” She asked. “A bullet happened to it; Miller opened his clenched hand, “the same thing that may have happened to Allen.
But Sally was not looking at his hand. She walked suddenly toward the desk; her eyes were on the back of the desk. “John, look here, yes I know I see the bullet in your hand, that’s why I’m wondering.”
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