I let myself into the apartment. Immediately I heard an all-too-familiar voice. It wasn’t Iris’s voice. It was loud and beautiful and it was booming like surf on a rocky shore.
Iris was sitting on the couch in the living-room, smoking a cigarette. Lottie was pacing up and down the center of the rug. When she saw me, she broke off in midsentence and spun around to me, all the venom of all the asps in the world in her eyes.
“Well!” she said. “The hunter is home from the hills.”
Iris got up. “Lottie dear, run along and leave us.”
“Leave you!” Lottie snorted. “The only person who should be left—quickly and finally with full process of law—is Peter Duluth. That is, unless you want a succession of little girls asleep in your bed every morning and hanging from your chandelier every night.”
She flounced toward me—Oatfields, Wisconsin, warming up for the lynching-bee.
“I don’t mind, of course, Peter dear, that you cause havoc in my household by dragging my maid from police station to police station when she should have been dusting. I don’t mind that in the least. After all, it was most instructive to meet Lucia’s sister. Quite a girl, Mrs. Bruno—with a salty gift for narrative. It cost you ten bucks to keep Lucia from telling me about your cheap little affair, didn’t it? You should have invested another ten bucks in her sister.”
I couldn’t bear the sight of her. Wasn’t she married? Didn’t she have a man of her own? Why couldn’t she use Brian for her emotional setting-up exercises?
“Oh, shut up, Lottie,” I said.
“Shut up? Just try to shut me up. Try to shut the world up! What are you going to do? Gag Colonel McCormick? Smother the whole Hearst chain? Strangle Mr. Sulzberger in his sleep?” She swung back and ran to Iris, enveloping her in her arms. “Iris, my darling Iris, I implore you. I plead with you. For your own sake, don’t let him talk you around. Don’t listen to his dirty, ingenious self-justifications. You’re not a little mole—a little mole of a wife who has to put up with things like this. Get rid of him. Just leave a couple of pairs of your old pajamas around and a noose or two—that’ll be enough to satisfy him.”
“Get out, Lottie,” I said.
She released Iris and swept toward me. “Don’t you worry. I’m getting out of here. To think that I trusted you! To think that I killed myself last night at the theater trying to persuade all those poor, misguided people that you had been grievously wronged! But there’s one thing, Peter. Yes, there’s one thing. So long as I’m playing at that theater, don’t you dare come anywhere near it. Don’t you dare.”
She reached the door. She turned, tossing Iris a butterfly kiss. “Remember, darling. The moment it’s settled, come up to us. Brian agrees with me. He’s dying to have you—for as long as you want to stay. We are your friends.”
She slammed the door. Act one—curtain.
Iris and I looked at each other. It was too horrible not to be a bit funny.
I said, “I’ve finally done what you wanted me to do. I’ve mortally offended Lottie.”
She didn’t smile. I hadn’t expected her to.
She said, “Is it over at the police station?”
“Yes.”
“The suicide’s been established and everything?”
“I guess so. The official autopsy report’s not in yet.”
“Of course Lieutenant Trant knows all this about Lucia and her sister?”
“Of course.” I paused. “That isn’t the half of it.”
I told her about Miss Amberley. I wasn’t as panicked as I had been. I suppose Iris was such a basic part of my life that her presence, even at this of all times, was automatically steadying. Not that she helped me. While I talked, she just sat there on the couch with no visible change of expression. Usually I could tell what she was thinking as if I were thinking it myself. But that day I couldn’t tell.
I realized how hard it was for her. I wasn’t so much of a fool as to imagine she would believe me just because she loved me. Nobody does that outside of the movies. Miss Mills was right. Because she loved me, it was probably tougher for her. When you love someone, there’s always part of you that expects the worst because it dreads the worst.
But she’d want to believe me. That I knew. She’d believe me if she could.
When I finished, she said, “That’s all?”
“Yes.”
“And Lieutenant Trant isn’t going to bother you any more?”
“He would if he could.”
She crossed to the bar for a cigarette and lit it. Usually her beauty made me proud and self-assured because she was my wife. Now the beauty and my desire to touch her were blighted by the possibility of losing her.
“Did you really give Lucia ten dollars not to tell Lottie?”
“Yes. I did.”
“Why?”
“God, you know Lottie. If she’d found out I’d given Nanny a key, she’d have plunged into Pinero up to her neckline.”
“You didn’t write to me about it, either.”
“No. I meant to. I guess—well, in the back of my mind, I guess I felt I was being a fool about the whole thing.”
Iris still wasn’t looking at me. “And you don’t have any explanation for why Lucia found her asleep in our bed, wearing my pajamas.”
“Just that she was mad.”
“Even if she’d been mad, she’d have had to have some reason.”
I tried. “She was kind of Cinderella-ish about wealth, comfort, things like that. Maybe she had a whim and wanted to find out how it felt to be in a rather grand bed in rather grand pajamas.” That sounded the thinnest of all my protestations. “She just could have felt that way. And then, after Lucia had caught her, she could have felt foolish, unable to bring herself to explain. Maybe it was that. I know, when I lent her your evening dress—”
Iris looked up then. “When you—what, Peter?”
“Didn’t I tell you? When I took her to the theater? It was the last minute. She didn’t have time to go home and change. I let her put on one of your dresses.”
“I see.”
I don’t think Iris had the slightest realization that she was adopting Lieutenant Trant’s favorite phrase. I began to feel jittery and even more of a heel.
“I seem to have made a mess of it all the way around.”
“Oh, it’s a mess. Of course it’s a mess.” Iris put down her cigarette. “And all the rest, all the stuff the roommate said—you can’t see any explanation for that—except that Nanny Ordway was mad.”
“That’s all, I guess.”
“There are girls like that. Everyone knows. Girls who live in a dream world, who believe their own fantasies, who can do more damage than an armored division.” She broke off. I could see her dilemma with agonizing clarity. It wasn’t just the outside evidence against me. It was my own behavior which seemed so damaging. My idiotic secrecy. Why hadn’t I written to Iris about the key? Why had I given Lucia ten dollars? My inexplicable generosity. Why had I picked Nanny Ordway from all the girls in New York to patronize? Why had I been so crazy as to lend her Iris’s dress?
I said, “Can you believe me? I don’t blame you if you can’t.”
She was studying my face as if, like Lieutenant Trant, she thought she could read the truth there. Maybe she could see more than Lieutenant Trant.
Very quietly, she said, “Last night I realized it wasn’t any good being in the middle, half believing, half not believing. And then, when Lieutenant Trant was so clever and veiled and merciless—I believed you, Peter. I’ve started now. I’m not going to stop yet. She was mad. Of course, she was mad.”
I had grown so used to being kicked around, it was difficult to grasp the fact that the only important thing was going to be all right.
I hurried to her. She put her arms around me and clung to me as if it were she and not I who needed comforting.
“Oh, Peter, I don’t want to be a stinker. I don’t want to be like Lottie. If I can’t trust you, what can I trust?
”
“Baby—”
“It’s all right. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
I kissed her. I kept her in my arms. She was beautiful and good—far too good for me. I felt humble and grateful, but I was stable again.
“Iris, darling—”
“That Lottie!” She turned her face up to mine. Somehow she was managing to smile. “I’d give my last cent to have her find Brian in bed with a set of quintuplets—all five of them wearing her pajamas.”
“The Chinese ones,” I said, “with the pagodas across the bosom.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE FACT that my wife was standing by me should have brought some sort of release from pressure. But this was another miracle that didn’t quite come off. Almost immediately a constraint began to develop between us. Neither of us admitted it, but it was there. We didn’t, for example, mention Nanny Ordway again, which in itself was a proof that we were afraid. Iris’s belief in me was too fragile; my own sense of blamelessness too insecure.
We went out to lunch together. We weren’t bothered much by the goldfish treatment. After lunch, we went back to the apartment. The press called all the time. So did a lot of people I knew in the theater. Their commiserations didn’t help. They thought they were being friendly but they were really being nosy. The afternoon papers came out with Miss Amberley’s statement. It wasn’t quite as bad as I had expected. Most of her vindictive bitterness had been blue-penciled. But the essential fact was there. Nanny Ordway’s Roommate Tells Of Thwarted Love. There were still no photographs of Nanny which made it easier for the copy writers. Now she wasn’t only a “brilliant young writer,” she was also an “exotic brunette.” It was all suggestive enough to satisfy the most respectable of readers.
Alec Ryder called up and invited us to dinner. We accepted because, oddly enough, we didn’t know what else to do. While we were waiting for him to pick us up, Brian came down from upstairs. He looked very unhappy.
“Lottie’s gone to the theater. I thought—Heck, I just wanted to tell you not to worry about Lottie, Peter. You know her. She flies off the handle. But she’ll come around when she’s got it out of her system. That policeman was around this morning, you know, checking. She could have blown her top to him. But she didn’t. She clammed right up. Lottie’s okay, really.”
He grinned shyly at Iris. “As for me, I say to hell with Nanny Ordway. Iris, if you were a man and had been around, you’d have known kids like that. They come a dime a dozen. Nuts—nuttier than a fruitcake. The roommate, too. Both of them—” He put his hand on her arm. “Don’t take it out on Peter, uh?”
That was decent of him. We invited him in for drink, but he had to go to the theater. Lottie always did the London Times crossword puzzle in her dressing-room. She’d called to say she’d forgotten it. Brian had to tote it.
When Alec arrived, he turned out to be just the right person. He was English enough and smooth enough to act as if he’d never heard of Nanny Ordway and, although I knew he was itching to sell Iris on the London trip, he didn’t bring it up once. He spent most of dinner talking about his wife’s success in a new play that had just opened in the West End. He was a nice guy, too.
But nothing could have saved the evening. We’d drunk a few cocktails before dinner and brandy afterward. By the time we got home it was around eleven o’clock. The drink had only aggravated my nervous tension. The apartment, indelibly marked now with the memory of Nanny Ordway, seemed gloomy as a funeral parlor. As we entered it, I glanced at Iris. She had been silent ever since we left Alec. She looked pale and rather severe.
In my oversensitive state, it seemed to me she was being martyrish and I snapped, “There’s no need to be noble and forgiving. I’m not the Great Sinner—remember?”
It was an unattractive thing to have said. I knew it. I wished I hadn’t said it, but I hadn’t been able to stop myself.
She sat down wearily on the couch. “I’m not being forgiving, Peter.”
I felt ashamed. I sat down next to her. “I’m sorry, baby. It’s just that—I feel like hell.”
“I don’t feel any too radiant myself.”
I thought of mixing us a drink and decided not to. “You do believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes, dear.”
“If you don’t, I wish you’d say so. I’d much rather—”
“Peter, please.”
“But I mean it. I can’t stand thinking of you as a sort of elaborate Penelope—”
“Shut up, Peter.” She looked at me fiercely. “Don’t you see you’re only making it harder?”
“Then you don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say so.”
“But you think so. You’re just being large-scale and sophisticated and mellow. Poor Peter had his little fling. Maybe it was more or less innocent. Maybe the girl was just a teensy bit crazy. But men are men. It’s their nature to make fools of themselves. Let’s just forget about it. After all, the girl’s cut down from the chandelier now. She won’t get in the way when we cross to the closet.”
I got up again. I didn’t have much control over what I was saying. I didn’t know what had hit me.
Iris got up, too. “Peter, really!”
I swung around to her. The perverse desire to hurt and be hurt had me completely in its grip. “Why don’t you bawl me out? Why don’t you ask me what right I had messing around with a girl young enough to be my own daughter? Why don’t you rub it in that you came all the way back from Jamaica, that you walked into your own bedroom and you found—Isn’t it about time?”
She was angry, too, infected with the same excited, unreal anger as mine. “All right, Peter. If you want it that way. I don’t see why the hell you lent her my dress.”
“Your dress?”
“You’ve already forgotten, haven’t you? That’s how insensitive you are.”
“But—”
“I suppose you’d like it if you came back and discovered I’d dressed some little boy up in your Bronzini bathrobe.”
“I wouldn’t give a damn.”
“And I’m not saying anything about my pajamas. I’m not saying anything about that. Or about the ten dollars to Lucia. Or—”
“Now it’s coming out,” I broke in. “Now you’ve proved you don’t believe me.”
We stood looking at each other. Now that I’d triumphed and forced things to go my way, I felt bleak as February.
“Iris, I’m sorry.”
“Peter.”
“Baby, I’m sorry.”
We went to bed. I pretended not to care about the chandelier looming above us, but I did. There was a kind of reconciliation, but the Fury was still stalking.
Long afterward we were both pretending to be asleep when we were really wide awake.
When I woke up next morning, Iris wasn’t in the bed. I had a sudden unreasonable fear that it was all over and she had left me. I put on my robe and ran out of the bedroom. I found her. She was in the kitchen, fixing breakfast. My relief was as exaggerated as my earlier anxiety. Seeing her opening the icebox took me back to the time before my breakfasts with Lottie and Brian, to that dim period when a day had been nothing more complicated than a pleasant succession of twenty-four hours.
“Good morning, Peter.”
“Good morning.”
I kissed her. Normally I would have told her of my absurd delusion, but, although her kiss felt no different, my instinct warned me against it. That was when I remembered again the delicate balance of confidence between us.
“Take your shower, darling,” she said. “Then we’ll be ready.”
I went to the bathroom and showered. I tried to think about the day ahead of us. Should I treat it as just an ordinary day? Should I go to the office and Miss Mills and continue with plans for Let Live as if nothing had happened? What did one do about an episode which had been officially closed by the police? Wasn’t it best to try to close it, too, in my mind, even though none of it, least of all the role I had played, was understa
ndable at all? Hadn’t Nanny Ordway taken the place of Lieutenant Trant as The Enemy? Wasn’t the best way to defeat her to forget her? There would be reporters, of course, and Lottie with her melodramatic veto on my entering the Star Rising theater. But all of that was on the outside.
It depended on Iris, I decided. I would do whatever made it easier for her.
I dried myself, put on my robe again, and went out into the living-room.
Iris was standing by the window. The elevator man must have brought up the mail. She had a bunch of letters in one hand. In the other, she had an opened letter which she was reading. She didn’t hear me come in. She was completely absorbed with what she was reading.
I said, “Is breakfast ready?”
She looked up suddenly. I was shocked at the expression on her face. She looked as if a doctor had just told her she was suffering from an incurable disease.
Her mother, I thought. Bad news from her mother.
“Baby, what is it?”
She didn’t reply. She looked down again at the letter and then held it out to me.
“What is it?”
She took an opened envelope from her other hand and held it out, too. I accepted them both. I looked first at the envelope. It had her name and her Jamaica address typed on it. The Jamaica address had been scratched out and the letter had been forwarded back to her in New York.
I let the envelope drop on the floor. I read the letter. It was typed, too. It was very long. It said:
My dear Iris:
It seems all right to call you Iris. I hope you don’t mind. Please, please, don’t mind, because it’s so important for me that you shouldn’t mind anything connected with me. I know this is going to be hard for you. Heaven knows, it’s hard for me. Lots of people, I guess, would say it was wrong of me to write at all. Certainly, that would be the easy thing. But, Iris, I can’t do it that way. Always, ever since I was a kid, I’ve believed that it’s honesty that matters. Somehow I have the feeling that you’re the same—and that, in the long run, you stand a better chance of being happy with Peter if you know and understand and forgive than if I’d “protected” you and thereby, in a way, made a fool of you.
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