BUtterfield 8

by John O'Hara

  “Where’s your stateroom?”

  “It’s on my key. Where’s yours? I’d rather go to yours.”

  He told her how to get to his. “I’ll go down now,” he said.

  “I’ll be down in five minutes,” she said.

  In his stateroom he thought what an awful place it was to bring her to. Then when she knocked on his door he was embarrassed some more. He sat on the lower berth and she faced him and he put his arms around her at the hips. Here she was, just under her clothes, standing with her hands holding the upper berth and ready for anything he wanted.

  “No!” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you to,” she said.

  “You will,” he said. “Sit down.”

  “No, darling.” She sat down on the berth beside him.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. What is it?”

  She looked half way around the tiny stateroom and then brought her head back to looking straight ahead.

  “Oh,” he said. “But it won’t always be like this.”

  “But I don’t want it ever to be like this, ever again. Not even now.”

  “Then we can go to your room,” he said.

  “No. It isn’t much better. It’s bigger, but not better. It’s still a dirty little stateroom on the City of Essex.”

  “Only for tonight,” he said. “I want you so much. I love you, Gloria.”

  “Yes, and I love you even more. Ah, no. Look. Look at that bed. Those sheets. They weigh a ton. Damp. Cold. And we can’t both stand up at the same time in this room. Oh, the whole thing. Like a traveling salesman and his chippy.”

  “You’re no chippy, and I’m not a traveling salesman. We’re as good as married now. Signing a lot of papers won’t make us more so.”

  “Yes, it will. Not signing the papers, but what the papers imply will. I’m going up to get some air and then to my room. Do you want to come along?”

  “To your room?”

  “No. On deck. I won’t stay with you tonight, on this boat. If you don’t want to come with me, all right, darling. I’ll see you in the morning. When we get off the boat we can go to a hotel and I’ll go right to bed with you. But not here.”

  “Mm.”

  “It isn’t scruples. You know that. It’s just so God-damned—”

  “Cheap and vulgar, I suppose. You’re a fine one to talk.”

  “I know. That’s just it. Good night. If you don’t want to see me in the morning, all right. Good night.”

  He did not answer, and she left. He sat there, hating her for a moment, for the truth was he wanted her in this room almost as much as he wanted her at all. The very smallness of the room would make it good, like being in a box. It would be new.

  And then he began to see what she meant. He was sorry for what he had said (but knew he could make it up). What he wanted to do was to see her before she went to bed, tell her he was sorry, and tell her she was right about the room. She was no common tart, and she had a right to object to lying on this bed. He put on his vest and coat and left the room.

  The sounds that the boat made muffled the heavy thump of his feet on the deck. That was the only way he knew how noisy the boat was. Ordinarily he made a lot of noise walking, but the big pistons that turned the side wheels, and the wheels themselves, and the nose of the City of Essex pushing into the water, and the rather stiff offshore breeze—it wasn’t sail. “Jeep,” he said, when he meant to say Gee. The breeze filled his mouth and made him gulp.

  One deck, two decks, and no Gloria. He saw a sign hanging from a cord, Passengers Not Allowed on Top Deck After 8 P.M. That’s where she would be.

  He climbed over the cord and the sign and walked slowly up the stairs. There was no need to proceed quietly. Apparently every passenger had gone to bed and it was Liggett’s guess that no deckhand would be at work on the City of Essex at this hour.

  At the top of the steps he could see only the outline of the wheelhouse, and the City of Essex’s single stack and some ventilators. There was one short string of light on the shore, and it was all dark otherwise. Then he saw Gloria, he guessed it was Gloria, sitting on the dining-saloon roof. She turned at that moment and saw him, her eyes having become better accustomed to the darkness. She got up and ran forward. Then she stopped and looked around.

  “Oh, all right,” he called, and turned and started down the stairway. Half way down he heard a scream, or thought he heard a scream. He ran down the few remaining steps, and this time he knew he heard a scream. He looked down at the water just in time to see Gloria getting sucked in by the side wheel. Then the boat stopped.

  “There was nothing I could do,” said Liggett to nobody.

  TEN

  There is not much room between the blades of the side wheels and the housing that covers each wheel. It was half an hour before they got what was left of Gloria out from between the blade and the housing, and nobody wanted to do it then. If she had fallen overboard abaft the housing she would have been shot away from the City of Essex by the force of the wheel, but where she fell was just forward of the housing, and there is a tremendous suck there. The City of Essex is always pulling in floating timber and dead dogs and orange peel, and sometimes when the wheel makes its turn the stuff is kicked out again. Sometimes not. The men in the wheelhouse heard the second scream and signaled to stop. By that time Gloria was caught by the blades and was pulled up into the housing, counterclockwise, in one long crush. She probably was killed the first time a blade batted her on the skull, by the same blade that pulled her up into the housing. There was no place in her body where there was a length of bone unbroken more than five inches. One A. B. fainted when he saw what he was going to have to do. The captain of the City of Essex, Anthony W. Parker, had only seen one thing like it before in his life, and that was a man in the black gang of the old Erma when the Erma’s boiler burst off Nantucket in 1911. Captain Parker directed the removal of the woman’s body from the wheel. He and two A. B.’s entered the housing from inside the boat. The A. B.’s carried an ordinary army blanket. One of the A. B.’s accepted a slug of brandy from the captain’s flask; the other man was going to take one, but he decided he could work better without it. They put the blanket over the body first, then gently rolled the body over and into the blanket. Captain Parker helped them carry the body inside the hull. “Go on back and see if you can find the other hand,” said Captain Parker. “She may have been wearing a ring. Have to find out who she is.” The search for the other hand was unsuccessful.

  “Keep that covered up,” said Captain Parker, when the blanket fell open. “Go on back with you,” he said, to the engine room crew who had collected.

  The chief steward was called and he sent for one of the stewardesses, a middle-aged Negress. She screamed and was hard to manage, and it took five minutes for them to persuade her to examine just the girl’s clothing, which they showed her by lifting a corner of the blanket. It took ten more minutes to get some answer out of her, and then she said yes, she recognized the dress, and gave the number of Gloria’s stateroom. The captain sent someone there, and the someone returned, saying it must be her, her bed hadn’t been slept in and the room didn’t look occupied.

  “She only come aboard to do the Dutch act,” said Captain Parker. It was a hell of a thing. A young girl. Probably in the family way. The thought never crossed his mind that it was anything but suicide. A young girl, maybe eighteen, maybe twenty-one, according to the stewardess, who came on board alone, ate alone, according to the chief steward (who remembered her come to think of it, after hearing the stewardess describe her; and was corroborated by the purser), and was not seen talking to anyone. Captain Parker had to make a complete report for the owners and for the port authorities in New York and Massachusetts. Some assistant district attorney that wanted to
get his name in the paper probably would be down snooping around and trying to make something of it. But here was one case of premeditated suicide and no two ways about it. It was too bad she didn’t jump off the stern, but if you wanted to die that much it probably didn’t make much difference which way you did it. Captain Parker hoped for her sake she got one on the skull when she was drawn in, otherwise it was a terrible death, judging from the looks of her. A terrible death. Well, girls got themselves in the family way these days irregardless of all the ways they had now that they didn’t use to have to keep from getting that way. Captain Parker wondered whether he ought to say the Lord’s Prayer over the body, but he looked around at his officers and men, and no, no Lord’s Prayer in front of them. Fanchette, one of the A. B.’s, from Pawtucket, had crossed himself when he saw the body. That was enough. If the girl’s family wanted to, they could have a service and all the prayers they wanted.

  The City of Essex resumed her trip, and the next morning in port the passengers were asked to give their names and addresses before leaving the ship. Otherwise to most of the passengers the trip was as usual, and many left the boat unaware of what had occurred. Liggett had one awful moment when he almost forgot to write Walter Little instead of his real name. He took a taxi from the pier to the railroad station and from there took the first train to New York.

  ELEVEN

  The trip to New York was old, old scenery for Liggett—the years in prep school and college and at Harvard and on leave during the war and visiting Emily at Hyannisport. But he never took his eyes off the scenery, old or not. There comes one time in a man’s life, if he is unlucky and leads a full life, when he has a secret so dirty that he knows he never will get rid of it. (Shakespeare knew this and tried to say it, but he said it just as badly as anyone ever said it. “All the perfumes of Arabia” makes you think of all the perfumes of Arabia and nothing more. It is the trouble with all metaphors where human behavior is concerned. People are not ships, chess men, flowers, race horses, oil paintings, bottles of champagne, excrement, musical instruments, or anything else but people. Metaphors are all right to give you an idea.)

  Liggett thought he knew what had happened, and he called himself a murderer. Then he stopped calling himself a murderer, because he began to like it, and this was no time to like what you were calling yourself. A murderer is a man in an opera box with a black cape and a dirk; a man with a .38 automatic and an unfaithful wife; a man in leather chaparejos with many conchos, and a Marlin rifle. It is a hard thing to get away from the thinking you do as a boy, when you learn that a murderer is a noble criminal. You have to unlearn it. Liggett had seen one murder in his life. In France. He had seen many men killed, and some in hand-to-hand fighting, but only one murder. One of his men was fighting a German and getting the best of the German, with the German beginning to bend over backward against the trench. The American could easily have taken care of the German, but one of Liggett’s sergeants, taking his time about it, came up and fired his pistol twice into the German’s ear. That was murder. And in his way the sergeant was a murderer. He belonged to the long line of murderers and not of warriors. Gang killings were murder.

  It was a reprehensible thing, but murderers bore some relation to history. What he had done bore no relation to history, and never would. He hoped it never would. He didn’t want it to. He hated having this secret but he wanted no one else to have it—and knew that he was leaning forward in his seat so that the train would hurry and he could spill it all to Emily.

  Now there was Emily. Always before there had been Emily and always would be. He thought away from that, the way on a train you think away from things. A good thought comes and is the big thing in your mind, but it sticks there and the click of the car wheels over the joints, especially on lines that use 90-pound and other light rail, lulls you to sleep with your eyes open, the thought sticking in your mind, then forgotten, supplanted by another thought.

  Thus the thought of Emily, giving way to the thought of what had happened last night. He could see it all, including what he had missed. When Gloria ran and he called to her, he believed she could hear his voice, the angry tone, but not the words; and so she ran again when he called, “Oh, all right.” She was headed for the stairway on the port side, behind the wheelhouse but pretty far forward, hoping to get away from him by running down the stairs. But in the darkness and on account of the motion of the ship she ran smack into the rail, which is extremely low on the top deck of the City of Essex. She most likely hit the rail just below or just about at her knees. The forward throw of the upper part of her body—and she fell into the water. The scream, and then the second scream, and he knew he could not save her, knew it the fraction of a second after he comprehended what was happening. Well, he could have died with her.

  He would tell it all to Emily. Yes, he knew he was afraid not to tell her. If she told him to go to the police and tell what happened, he would do it. But he would not tell them without being told to do it. Yes, he knew he hoped she would tell him not to go to the police.

  At Grand Central he went through the passage and up the steps to the Biltmore, got his key, went to his room, came down and paid his bill. Back to the Grand Central, he gave the bag to a Red Cap (he did not want anyone to see him carrying it). He told the Red Cap to check the bag and bring him the check. He bought the afternoon papers. The story was on the front pages of the Journal and the Telegram—the World-Telegram, they were calling it now, and it looked like something they got out during a printer’s strike. There was nothing in the Evening Post, the paper Emily read. The Journal had a headline: MYSTERY DEATH N. Y. GIRL IN L. I. SOUND. The story was to the effect that mystery surrounded the death of Gloria Wandrous, 18, brunette, pretty, and her leap to death from the City of Essex. She was identified by her clothing!

  Liggett read no more. What about Emily’s coat? Where in God’s name was that coat? If Gloria had kept it at home it would be easy to identify it. The police never had any trouble identifying a thing like that, an expensive mink coat. They would go right to Emily. It was all right for her, but where was her husband that night? What was her coat doing in Miss Wandrous’s apartment or house? Did she know Miss Wandrous? Did she know of her husband’s relations with Miss Wandrous? Was she shielding her husband? Where was her husband that night? Then that cop in the speakeasy. He would make a report. The bartender would see it in the papers and he would comment on it to the cop, and the cop would report that the girl had had trouble with a man’s attentions the Tuesday before she killed herself—if she killed herself. Then the people in the speakeasy the night he introduced himself to Gloria. They were the kind of people who reveled in anything like inside information when there was a scandal. “Did you read about poor Gloria? Gloria Wandrous? Yes. Why, yes. Why, we were with her and what’s his name, Weston Liggett, at Duilio’s the other night. Isn’t it awful? The poor kid. I thought Liggett had taken quite a shine to her.” Then there was that kid, Brunner. Just a friend, Gloria had said, but a friend would be worse now than a lover. All her lovers were checking their alibis for last night, and they would be only too glad to keep out of the whole thing, but not a friend. Liggett went home.

  He still had his key and he let himself in. The maid answered his questions: No, there had been no callers or telephone messages; yes, Mrs. Liggett was out and would be back around three o’clock. She was shopping, the maid said.

  Liggett chain-smoked cigarettes and poured himself a drink but could not drink anything but water. Then he sat down and wrote Emily a note. “Emily,” he wrote. “Please meet me at ‘21’ at four o’clock. This is terribly important and I beg of you to come. W.” Then he called Lockheed, next in charge at the office, and told Lockheed he had been ill—“confidentially I’ve been on my semiannual bender”—and Lockheed said everything was under control, no messages of any importance, he would send up bids on the Brooklyn job for Liggett’s approval, but it didn’t look like they would get the contract as
old John McCooey was sore about something. . . .

  Liggett had had an idea. He would go to Brunner and ask him quite frankly whether he knew anything about the fur coat. He was sure Brunner did know about the coat. It was the kind of thing Gloria would regret doing, and she would discuss it with a friend. And Liggett believed it possible for Gloria to have a friend. He believed Brunner was her friend. He had had a girl the other night. Not bad, either; and a man who was having an affair with Gloria wouldn’t be likely to bring along an attractive girl. Anyway, Liggett’s plan was to tell Brunner he had read about Gloria, how sorry he was, how much he loved Gloria. He might even go so far as to say he and Gloria planned to get married, but he would have to be careful how he did that. He would have to be ready to say that now that she was dead, there was no use having a lot of trouble—two young girls—the coat. If he knew how to get the coat or where it was, he was sure that was what Gloria would want done.

  Liggett found the address in the telephone book, and went there by subway and on foot. Brunner, thank God, was in. He recognized Liggett, which encouraged Liggett but also put some worry in reserve.

  “Mr. Brunner, I don’t know whether you remember me,” said Liggett.

  “Yes. Mr. Liggett. What can I do for you?”

  “Well—no, thanks. I’ve been smoking too much all day. I guess you know why I came.”

  “I imagine something about Gloria. You knew she—”

  “I just saw it in the afternoon papers,” said Liggett. “I don’t know how to start. You were her best friend, she told me.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Did she tell you about us, about our plans?”

  “Well, I knew you were having an affair,” said Eddie. Eddie stood up. “Listen, did you come here about that God damn coat? Because if you did, there it is. Take it and stick it. I don’t want you coming here with a long face and all you’re worried about is are you going to get mixed up in a public scandal. You want the coat, so take it. I’m sure I don’t want it. She didn’t want it either. The only reason she took the God damn thing was because you tore the clothes off her. Guys like you put her where she is today. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were the real—” The doorbell rang.