My hand went out to her, but she twisted violently away and dropped down onto the couch.
“Go on,” she said. “Do it. I can’t stop you. He’s your son and Angelica’s son. He’s not mine.”
If it had been anyone else but Betsy, any ordinary, undisciplined, emotionally erratic person, the shrill, near-hysterical tone of her voice would not have been so horrible. And she was right, of course, about Rickie and the trial. I hadn’t thought it through that far.
My throat aching, I said, “Betsy, I’m sorry. I hate to do it. But if it’s the only way to save an innocent woman…”
“Innocent? How do I know she’s innocent?”
“But, baby, I told you. I… My God, you don’t think I’m inventing all this, too, do you?”
She looked up at me. Her face was in control again. It was the cold stone mask.
“I don’t know whether you’re inventing it or not. I don’t think it particularly matters. But I wish you hadn’t lied to me.”
“Lied?”
“I wish you hadn’t said you loved me. For a moment I believed it.” She picked up her Martini glass again and sat staring at it. “Maybe she’s innocent; maybe she isn’t. Maybe you’re inventing this story; maybe you’re not. But one thing’s certain now. I’ve always known it anyway. I tried to kid myself. And sometimes it worked. Oh, yes, you admire me. You think I’m a fine wife and mother and all that, but the woman you love is Angelica.”
She raised her glass to me in an icy little toast.
It was bad enough that she’d said it, but there was something which made it much worse because, now the words had been spoken and we had gone so far into frankness, some obscure inner part of me whose existence I had never really admitted before, asked: Isn’t at least part of what she said true? Of course I admired her; of course I thought she was a wonderful wife and mother. I’d depended on her devotion, used her for my comfort and, once I’d betrayed her, felt shame and guilt and unworthiness and a dozen other virtuous sentiments. But had I ever really given her love? Had I ever, for a moment, given myself to her the way I used to give myself so abundantly and eagerly to Angelica? I listened to myself with the bitter knowledge that I was listening to the truth. I’d lost so much that day. Now I was losing the illusion that I had been a real husband. I hadn’t. I’d been a sham.
As I stood looking at my wife, I remembered what Angelica had said only that morning. I thought I’d hit bottom, but I’m only just beginning to go down the hill. She could have said that about me too. Baring your breast and crying Mea Culpa wasn’t an end in itself as I had so naïvely believed. Confession didn’t mean absolution. It was only the beginning of self-knowledge.
It would take years, I thought, before I could finish paying my debt to Betsy.
Feeling bleak as winter, I sat down on the couch next to her.
“Darling…”
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not your fault. Don’t think I blame you or anything. I’ll get used to it.”
“But Betsy…”
The cook came in then and said, “Dinner’s ready.”
Betsy flashed her a bright, social smile. “Thanks, Mary.” She rose, picked up her Martini and turned the bright social smile on me. “Let’s take our cocktails in with us, shall we?”
chapter 20
Betsy never let the bright social manner drop while the cook served dinner. She’d always been a stickler for keeping up a front. Her pride was one of the many things I admired about her, but that night it only made me more conscious of how much she was suffering.
After dinner, I tried again to explain, but she refused categorically to talk about Angelica. Apart from that, she was perfectly reasonable. There were no recriminations, no threats to leave me. Of her own accord, she announced that of course I would have to take Rickie to Trant. It was my duty. But she spoke about Rickie as if he were some vague abstraction and, when my hand touched hers as I passed her a coffee cup, she flinched. She was as remote from me as if an ice-floe surrounded her.
She wasn’t being that way to punish me. I knew that. She had fled back into herself because the one thing she had always dreaded had—she thought—happened. Betsy Callingham—the Ugly One—the One Given to Good Works—had lost out again. I felt as helpless to comfort her as I felt guilty.
Almost immediately after she had drunk her coffee, she got up and said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve got a boring headache. I think I’ll go to bed.” She even forced herself to smile. “Hadn’t you better call Trant to make sure he’ll be ready for Rickie tomorrow? And don’t worry about the kindergarten. I’ll call up tomorrow and explain that Rickie won’t be in.”
She went out of the room. I longed to be able to run after her, take her in my arms and say: To hell with Angelica. I won’t drag Rickie into this. Let it all ride. But I knew I couldn’t, of course. And I knew too that Betsy would be the first person to veto it. My choice had been made; there was no turning back now.
I called Centre Street. Trant wasn’t there and they suggested the precinct house. He wasn’t there, either. But, when I told them my name, they gave me his private number. It seemed wildly improbable somehow that Trant should have an apartment, a private life like everyone else. He answered the phone himself. I told him about Rickie. He didn’t interrupt me at all. When I had finished, he merely said, “You realize what you’re doing, Mr. Harding? If the D. A. decides to go ahead anyway, your son will have to testify in court.”
“Sure. I realize that.”
He paused. I thought he was going to say something else. But in a voice that sounded tired, he merely said, “Okay. Bring him down to Centre Street tomorrow morning. Around nine-thirty?”
“All right.”
“Good night, Mr. Harding.”
For a while I lounged around the living room, dreading the prospect of going to bed. But soon the pointless loafing became unendurable and I went into the bedroom. Betsy had left the light on at my side of the bed. She was lying on her side, her eyes closed. But I knew she wasn’t asleep. The sight of her pale, gaunt face touched me to the quick. I undressed in the bathroom, turned out the light and got into bed with her. The tension in her was like something tangible in the bed between us. Impulsively, even though I knew that the gulf between us was unbridgeable, I put out my arms toward her.
The moment I touched her, she jumped.
“No, Bill. No.”
Her voice was fierce and her hands were pushing me away. For a while I lay there beside her as tense and, maybe, as miserable as she. Then I got up and went to the guest bedroom. I didn’t sleep for a long time. I tried to tell myself that it would all be all right eventually. Once the thing with Rickie was done and it had justified itself, I would he able to make Betsy happy again. I would get a new job. Ellen would have been fired. We’d move into a small apartment. The new life, in which I gave Betsy as much as I took from her, would happen. This was only interim suffering.
But I was haunted by an image of Rickie, perched on the witness stand while his mother sat opposite him in the dock. And when I fell asleep, it was of Angelica I dreamed. She was coming toward me, her face radiant, her arms outstretched. I wasn’t such a fool to love you, after all. She clutched my arms and, gradually, her hands and arms changed into obscene, greenish-gray tentacles and the tentacles were dragging me down into the darkness.
I awoke at eight and, from some absurd desire to keep up pretenses, made the bed. Betsy was already out of our room and invisible. I dressed and went to the nursery. I had planned to tell Ellen to leave me alone with Rickie. But it wasn’t necessary. The moment I entered the room, she scuttled out. Rickie had finished his breakfast and was sitting alt the table, swinging his legs. I felt like an executioner.
“Hi,” I said. “You and I are going to see a man and tell him about your other mother.”
“Why?”
“Because he wants to know.”
“When are we going?”
“Right now.”
“Not this morning. It’ll be fun to skip school for once, won’t it?”
“No,” he said.
But with the unquestioning acceptance of childhood, he was perfectly calm about it. I helped him put on his coat. As we went toward the front door, he said, “Is Mummy coming too?”
“No, just you and me.”
“Why?”
“She’s got other things to do.”
“So have I. I’ve got to go to school. But I’m going. Can I take my llama?”
“Sure,” I said.
He ran back to the nursery and rejoined me, carrying the llama.
In the taxi to Centre Street, I asked him about Angelica again and he repeated the whole story just as he’d told it to me the night before. He understood that there was a man who wanted to ask him questions. He wasn’t really interested in why, and when we reached Centre Street, he wasn’t even interested in where we were.
“There are hundreds of policemen, Pop.”
“Yes.”
“It must be safe here.”
“I guess it is.”
A cop took us through all the passages again to the same dreary room. Rickie hugged the llama and sat down on a wooden chair. Trant came in very soon, quiet, unsmiling and unusually brisk. He seemed embarrassed with Rickie as if he didn’t know how to handle children. I had thought there was nothing he couldn’t handle and his awkwardness gave me a dim satisfaction.
“Your father has told you why we asked you to come here?”
“Yes,” said Rickie.
“I want you to answer a few questions.”
“I know you do.”
“Did your father bring a woman in to see you one night when you were in bed?”
“Yes, he did. She was the other mother I used to have.”
“Were you asleep when they came in?”
“Oh, yes. But I woke up, didn’t I, Pop?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re sure that it wasn’t a dream?”
“A dream?” echoed Rickie. “Oh, I don’t dream about things like that. I dream about elephants and llamas—and sometimes about squirrels.”
Trant looked slightly flustered. “And you know what time your father and this woman came into the bedroom?”
“It was two o’clock. I never in my life was awake at two o’clock. Never. Practically no children ever have. And it was two because the cuckoo said so and the cuckoo came out twice. It’s red and the clock’s green and there’s windows and a door, aren’t there, Pop?”
“Yes,” I said, “my eyes fixed on Trant’s face.
“And what was the day when this happened?”
“The day I got my tooth pulled.” Rickie watched Trant solemnly over the head of the llama. “It was a great big tooth and I told my other mother. I said, ‘I had a tooth pulled today,’ but she wasn’t interested. She just went out of the room, didn’t she, Pop?”
“Yes,” I said; And turning to Trant, “You can call the dentist and check Rickie’s appointment. It’s the day all right.”
He just sat there, looking at Rickie. “Did you tell anyone about this?”
“Oh, yes,” said Rickie. “I told Ellen. I said since she used to be my mother why wasn’t she still my mother and why didn’t she live with us. And Ellen said I had another much better mother and you only need one.”
He had even told Ellen. I hadn’t known that. Surely that clinched it and exposed Ellen once and for all as a false witness. I glanced at Trant. His face was as unrevealing as ever.
He said, “If you saw this woman again, would you know her?”
“Of course,” said Rickie. “Wouldn’t you?”
Abruptly Trant rose and lifted Rickie down from the chair. “Come along with me.” Without looking at me, he said, “You can come too if you want to, Mr. Harding.”
We went to another larger room. A cop was there. Trant said, “Okay” and the cop went away. Soon he came back with four women and Angelica. Trant had done a good job. The other women were all dark, all about Angelica’s height and age and all dressed about the same way. The cop lined them up against the wall. Angelica didn’t look at me or at Rickie.
Trant said, “Now, Rickie, do you see the woman there?”
Without any hesitation, Rickie went right up to Angelica. “Hello,” he said.
Angelica bent and picked him up. “Hello, Rickie.”
Rickie showed her his llama. “This is a llama. It comes from Peru. It spits right in your eye. Not this one but the real llama.”
I turned to Trant, savoring a bitter triumph. “So,” I said.
He merely nodded to the cop and the women started trooping out. Angelica put Rickie down.
He said, “Are you going now?”
“Yes.”
“Well—see you around.”
Angelica left with the other women. Trant and Rickie and I went down the corridor to a room where a lot of detectives were sitting behind desks. Trant said to Rickie, “You stick around here a couple of minutes. I’ve got to talk to your father.”
He took me back to the original room and sat down behind the bare wooden table. It had all gone off so much better than I’d expected that I was beginning to hope. A positive identification had been made before witnesses. Surely that would be enough to justify Angelica’s release. Rickie’s appearance in court, which Betsy so much dreaded and which was one at least of the stumbling blocks between us, would not be necessary.
Trant was looking at me. His mouth moved in a faint smile.
“Well, Mr. Harding, I apologize.”
“You believe me now?”
“I believe that Miss Roberts was at your apartment at two o’clock on the night of the murder, yes.”
“And we can prove through Rickie that Ellen’s lying, can’t we?”
“Yes, Mr. Harding, you can probably do that.”
“So that’s it, isn’t it? You can let Angelica go.”
His smile faded. “The D. A. called me this morning. He’s set the date of the trial for a week from today.”
I glared at him. “But you’ve got this evidence now and it changes everything. My God, are you as scared of them as all that? Has Mr. Callingham been at them again?”
“Mr. Callingham has called the Commissioner at least a dozen times. He’s called the D. A. too. He’s told them that you’re a dangerous neurotic who is insanely vindictive because he had to fire you for incompetence. He is prepared to produce psychiatrists who will swear that nothing you may say is to be given any kind of credence. Oh, yes, Mr. Callingham’s been at them again. But…” he paused—“that isn’t the reason. It has nothing to do with Mr. Callingham. It’s something I happened to find out last night just after you called.”
His face was totally devoid of expression. “When the M. E. estimated the time of death at between one-thirty and two-thirty he was taking into consideration the fact that the body was slumped by the steam radiator in the hall and the radiator was on full blast. Last night, after you’d called, I realized your story might give Miss Roberts an alibi for two o’clock. Then, suddenly, it occurred to me that it was strange for the heat in an apartment house like that to be full on at four o’clock in the morning.”
Once again he paused. “I checked and found that no one had got around to interviewing the janitor. So I went and saw him. It’s just as well I did. On the night of the murder he’d been at his daughter’s house. He’d got pretty high and hadn’t left until almost three. When he got home, it was after three-thirty and he found the furnace had been out for hours. Unlike many janitors, he was conscientious and right then he built up the furnace again. That’s why it was going full blast when the police found the body. But the radiator had been hot less than half an hour. Before that, the radiator and the apartment had been stone cold which, of course, changed the picture. When I called the M. E. and told him, he set the time of the murder back from one to two hours. Mr. Lumb must have been killed, he said
, between eleven-thirty at the earliest and one at the latest. The D. A. has, of course, read both your statement and Miss Roberts’. In the light of the new medical evidence, he’s decided, naturally enough, that the statements don’t affect the position, even if they happen to be true. An alibi at two o’clock is no longer an alibi for the time of the murder.”
As I listened, I felt as if the walls were closing in on me. “But Angelica called me from a drugstore near my apartment at twelve. Before that she’d walked over forty blocks uptown. She couldn’t possibly have been anywhere near Jaimie’s apartment at eleven-thirty.”
“That’s what you say, Mr. Harding. And that may even be what Miss Roberts told you. But how do you know she didn’t take a taxi? Surely you must see that your evidence has practically no value whatever any more. I’m sorry. You’ve done your best, but…” He looked down at his hands again with that pointless concentration which I had noticed the first time I’d met him. “There’s something that I have to discuss with you. The D. A. and the Commissioner have put it up to me and I’m flattered that they have so much trust in me. As it’s turned out, the entire handling of the trial now depends on you and you can do one of two things. It’s up to you to make your choice.”
His eyes, shifting to my face, were as unyielding as gray steel. “In the first place, you can go ahead with this effort to save Miss Roberts. No one can stop you. But at least I can point out to you what it will involve. We’ll have to give up any attempt to shield Miss Callingham, of course. The whole story will have to come out, let the chips fall where they may, with a three-ring circus in the newspapers. The trial will begin as scheduled. You and your son will be the star witnesses for the defense. I know how damaging it will be for a child of your son’s age to endure his own mother’s murder trial, but as he is your only corroborative witness, even though he isn’t enough to establish an alibi, it seems to me you’ll have to use his testimony. Then, of course, there will be your own testimony. You will claim that Miss Roberts arrived at your apartment soon after twelve, having walked all the way from West Tenth Street with a suitcase. You will have no evidence but your own word. It will be up to you to convince the jury by your powers of persuasion alone.”
The Man with Two Wives Page 16