Assuming I had copied the address incorrectly, I followed his directions, but 304 Walnut Street proved to be a large bank, and not an apartment house. Madge had described her home as being of yellow brick; there was nothing remotely like that in sight, and I was thrown into confusion.
Hunting up a policeman, I presented my problem. He regarded me doubtfully, but thumbed conscientiously through a worn Red Book guide before positively denying the existence of a Walnut Avenue.
“But . . . how about a Walnut Boulevard?” I asked desperately. “Or a Walnut Parkway or a Walnut Road?”
“Naw, nothing like that, mister,” he said, shaking his head. “Walnut Street is all we got.”
I thanked him and wandered off in a daze. Though I could have been wrong about the avenue part of it, I was certain she had said “Walnut.” For an instant I wondered if I had the right city. Might she have told me Washington, or Baltimore perhaps? Was this possible? No, I decided quickly. She had more than once mentioned that she came from Philadelphia. It was here or nowhere.
Obtaining a guide of my own, as well as a good-sized map, I sat on a bench on Indepedence Mall and pored over both of them. I discovered only that the policeman had been right; Walnut Street was all Philadelphia had to offer.
Still hopeful, I found a telephone booth and checked through the directory. No one named Clerisy was listed, however. I realized bitterly, then, that I’d been a fool not to have had a phone installed in my own house, now that I could again afford one. A single long-distance call, and the mystery would have been solved in a trice. I cursed my stupidity.
Locating a Western Union office, I sent a telegram to Madge in Brookline, and told the clerk I’d return later for the answer. With that out of the way, I had lunch, got a room at the Hotel Madison near Washington Square, ordered a drink to be sent up and relaxed for a couple of hours in a deep chair with a paperback book of Donne’s poetry. Toward five o’clock, I telephoned the Western Union office, only to learn that they had received no reply. Annoyed, but not completely discouraged, I sent a second wire and gave the clerk the telephone number of the hotel and my extension.
That night I received no call, nor was there a response of any kind awaiting me in the morning. By this time, I was baffled and vaguely uneasy, but there remained one last chance. I phoned the University of Philadelphia and explained my dilemma. A sweet-voiced receptionist regretfully informed me that she couldn’t possibly divulge the address of a member of a faculty, as it was against the rules. I entreated, but to no avail. I was beaten. All my options exhausted by this final blow, I packed my bag, and checked out of the hotel, climbed into the Mercedes and started back.
Hard as it might be to imagine, my return trip to Boston was far worse than the one down. Disturbed to begin with, I was rendered infinitely more so by what I encountered on those damnable highways. I was hemmed in from start to finish by sports cars, gigantic trucks, weaving motorcycles, boats on trailers, buses, scooters, mobile homes and a variety of other vehicles less easily described. Even though I slept over in Connecticut, the same chaotic conditions greeted me the next morning.
No polar explorer, on reaching Spitsbergen, ever breathed a deeper sigh of relief than did I when at last I pulled into the haven of my own garage. Shouting Madge’s name, I rushed up the stairs and into the library. She wasn’t there. Through the window, I could see the backyard and the Burying Ground, but she wasn’t there either. Hurriedly, though without any real hope, I searched the house from top to bottom. All I found were the two unopened telegrams on the front-door sill.
Madge was gone—and had been for two days at least.
29
IDYLL’S END
The errand, of course, had been a wild-goose chase. I’d been duped. A few moments of reflection was all that I needed to grasp the entire scheme. Madge had located Great-grampy. I wasn’t too surprised; for days I’d had a vague suspicion that she knew a good deal more than she let on. And because I had forbidden her to do any further digging, she had cunningly arranged my excursion to Philadelphia to get me out of the way. It was as simple as that. Doubtlessly, too, she had wanted whatever discoveries she made to be hers and hers alone.
I rushed out to the Burying Ground, and like a lunatic ran from one plot to the next, but there were no signs of disturbance anywhere—no loose earth, no spade marks, no bare patches in the sod. Nor was there evidence of recent digging in the backyard or along the side of the house. Unwilling to abandon my theory, I carried my investigations out to the public park and to the terrain around the tennis courts—again I found nothing. My fruitless, bootless search even included the basement, the ground under the porch, and the garage. I was totally mystified. Whatever that devil of a woman had done in my absence, whatever depredations she had inflicted on my great-grandfather’s tomb, she had concealed all trace of her knavery with an extraordinary ingenuity.
Did it matter, though? Whether she had discovered her sensational papyrus or not, what difference did it make to me? She was gone—gone forever. Everyone was gone.
Sitting on the porch steps that morning, I thought of the future. A cold hand seized my heart.
30
THE LADY’S TRUE OPINION
Days passed. That fine old thoroughbred, Time, galloped around the dusty track hugging the rail, his hooves pounding. I cut the grass with my power mower; I washed and painted the kitchen walls and ceiling; I clipped the hedges with my new electric trimmer; I drove the Mercedes hither and yon. Sometimes I argued with the philodendrons, but not often, because they were irrationally dogmatic. As to the dandelions, they had gone for the season—thank goodness!
One evening, while opening the glass door of a low bookcase in the library, I heard a sliding, slithering noise. Peering behind the cabinet, I saw Madge’s missing handbag lying against the wainscoting. I retrieved it and opened it. Camphor perfume filled my nostrils, bringing her back to me with the greatest acuity. I closed my eyes and drank it in, regaling my mind with reveries. When this moment of nostalgia was over, I turned my attention to the contents of the pocketbook, unashamedly emptying everything onto the refectory table. There wasn’t much. An embroidered handkerchief, a little money, an identity card from the university, three keys, an odd earring, cosmetics, a ballpoint pen, and an unfinished letter to someone named Jerry comprised the lot.
Having already shattered the social code by going through the handbag, I saw no reason not to read the note as well. On such decisions does misery flourish. My lovely Madge had written as follows:
Dear Jerry,
How marvelous that you’ve received an appointment to Warwick! I’ve never been there, but everyone swears it’s an excellent school. You’ll love it, you lucky boy! Now, wasn’t I right when I said there was nothing to worry about? And in a year or two, Oxford and Cambridge will be pounding on your door. Oh yes—just wait and see!
Margaret wrote to say that Tommy is off to Sicily with the Volkenbergs. Agrigentum again! How do they stand it, year after year? Poor Tom will be bored silly. Aren’t you glad you’re not a mole like the rest of us?
For me the summer is proving quite interesting. I came up to Boston to look at some terracottas at the Fogg, and by the merest chance stumbled onto something far more intriguing. I’ve met a descendant of a 19th Century Egyptian explorer! This old bird (the explorer) left a ton of unpublished papers and I’ve been poring over them. He was a real pith-helmeted pukka sahib—the kind that fumbled through the pyramids in those days, bitching up everything they touched. Sound exciting, my boy? Well, it is! I’ve got material for a whole book, at least.
That’s not all, either. There’s good reason to think that the sahib made an important discovery of some sort, and I’m hot on its trail. Who knows? I might just come up with that grand coup I’ve been hungering for all these bloody years.
The descendant is a creepy individual—weak in the head from an old war wound. Though he’s a prize booby, he does what I tell him because I’ve got something on
him. The one problem is that he’s a randy old son-of-a-bitch, and I have to watch my step or he comes leaping out of dark corners at me, panting like a basset hound.
But it’s much too good a story to relate piecemeal, Jerry boy, so you’ll have to wait to hear the rest of it, which I’ll tell you at Margaret’s at Christmastime. I might be famous by then. Would you mind that? No, I’m sure you’d be happy for me.
There the missive ended—in midstream, as they say in storybooks.
Groaning, I sat down on the velour sofa. Creepy, a prize booby, a randy old son-of-a-bitch, a basset hound—that was how Madge had thought of me. What a mean woman she was! What a vicious creature! Why did she have to say such things about me? I’d never done her any harm. On the contrary, it was she who had injured me.
A treach’rous woman—what a curse!
The holds of Hell hide nothing worse.
31
THE CROCODILE
In the extremity of my sorrow I began to drink, and when I did, queer things happened. My mother would come down the stairs and walk by me to the kitchen, or I would see Great-grampy and Mr. Piero playing euchre in the dining room. One afternoon I heard my sister Clarice call to me from the driveway. Her taunting voice chanted:
“Algy saw a bear,
The bear saw Algy.
The bear was bulgy,
The bulge was Algy.”
Another time I listened for about an hour to the Victrola playing the records of my youth—Paul Whiteman, Rudy Vallee, Ruth Etting, Russ Colombo—though the Victrola had been gone from the house for more than twenty years.
I found myself wondering if I really was “weak in the head,” as Madge had written in her scurrilous letter.
Beyond a doubt, the worst such episode occurred the night I drank the absinthe. Oh, that absinthe! Why had I touched the venom? Because I was awfully low, I guess. I’d come upon the bottles in my room, brought one down and prepared a drink in exactly the same manner as Norbie had done. Indeed, I prepared many more than one. I guzzled a dozen, at the very least.
I slumped in my chair, having unkind thoughts about Madge Clerisy. In my imagination I traveled back to Philadelphia, presented myself at the university there and denounced the woman to the president and the directors. She is a thief, I informed them in ringing tones, a liar, a ghoul, a calumniator and a swindler! Why, she even connived at murder—yes, murder, gentlemen—to further her villainous ambition! I have the proof!
Strangely enough, this vengeful fantasy provided me with no satisfaction at all. I knew that I would never be able to do such a thing, and even if I had I’d be discredited—glib and shrewd as the woman was—before I had spoken a score of words. She was too much for me.
So, disconsolate, I made more drinks. Drip, drip, drip—the pitcher would shed its icy tears on the sugar cube, and the sugar cube would greedily suck them up. From white to leaden gray the crystals would turn; then saturated, they would leak the sweetened moisture into the pool of emerald spirits at the bottom of the goblet. Drip, drip, drip, drip—and the rich green fluid, swirling and curling like something in agony, would evanesce into smoky yellow. And I’d take the drink back to my chair and polish it off, and recommence my imaginary conversations.
In this way, hours wandered by unnoticed. At a point in their passage, however, my thoughts fastened on Eulalia and I began to cry. In a fit of remorse I threw myself down on the floor, where I groveled and thrashed, grinding my face into the carpet as swine grind their snouts into the earth.
For how long did I behave in this insane fashion? I have no idea. Everything around me had dissolved in a mass of indefinable forms; I seemed to be swimming in an oleograph. Finally I regained control of myself, ceased weeping and struggled to my feet. I had decided that there was only one thing to do, and that was to kill my disgusting, stupid, wretched body. With this in mind I dragged the footlocker from the pantry and dumped everything out on the floor. But if the .45 was there, it eluded me. I grew angry, frenzied. The school yearbooks, the campaign ribbons, the hotel ashtrays, the navigation manuals, the goalpost splinters, the dog tags were soon all flying about the parlor—still, I failed to find the gun.
How I swore! What threats and maledictions I bellowed!
Then I made myself another drink, and in doing so, drenched the front of my trousers with ice water. The shock stimulated my intellect. “It’s in my room!” I announced. “It’s in my room!”
Taking a swig of my exotic highball, I lumbered back to the wing chair and sat ponderously down.
“It’s in my room! In my room, in my room!” I exclaimed, delighted with the keenness of my memory.
A while later I was still repeating these revelatory remarks, though I no longer had the least idea of what it was that was in my room, or why in the world I had ever wanted it.
Oh, I was drunk, all right. I jabbered, sang, groaned, laughed and whispered: I clapped my hands, whistled and stamped my feet; I knocked over the cloisonné lamp; I kicked a hole in the porch screen door; I flung an ashtray at the Venetian chandelier; I tore the buttons from my shirt.
What happened next, I’m not sure. There is a hiatus in my recollections. I guess I went for a walk out in the park because when my head cleared a bit, I was seated on a fallen tree trunk at the edge of Hall’s Pond. The toes of my shoes were half in the water. I looked at them, amused. They resembled two small rodents quenching their thirst.
Opposite me, where the ducks were nestling on the bush-shrouded shore, a faint susurration—barely audible—marred the otherwise total tranquility of the night. Beyond that far bank, a parking-lot floodlight on Carlton Street shone like a tongue of flame. I breathed the mild, damp air, watching the mist writhe over the water and wind among the tilted willow trees, whose lanceolate leaves all pointed earthward, as if they were the sharp thumbs of a merciless Roman mob at the Circus Maximus. It was long, long after midnight!
As I lit a cigarette I heard the deep sepulchral croak of a frog. It rumbled in my ears for a second, and then was gone.
“A frog? No, no. Impossible,” I muttered. “No frogs on Hall’s Pond—not a one. Never have been . . . and never will.”
“Ragged!” came the vibrant reply from the shadows on my left. “Ragged! Ragged!”
“Oh? You may persist, if you like—that doesn’t make you an actuality, though. Not at all!” I said, resisting an urge to peer into the gloom. “Auditory hallucination—that’s what you are! Go away, and take your ragged conversation with you.”
Two soft cloops sounded then, and suddenly—whether I liked it or not—the frog materialized on a twisted, slimy twig that jutted from the water not a dozen feet away. He was the size of a teacup. In the floodlight’s glow, I could distinguish the black freckles on his back, the thin line of his mouth, and the steady throbbing of his pale throat. The twig swayed gently, while he perched upon it as sedately as a judge on a bench.
I gave a giddy laugh. “You saucy devil! Hah! Not only do you talk, but you . . . you physically appear as well. All right . . . very good . . . a clever trick. Speak some more, then, and tell me where you came from.”
“Egypt!” said the little fellow. “Egypt! Egypt!”
“Egypt, you say? So that’s it! Egypt, indeed!” I blew a stream of smoke in his direction, but it lost itself in the mist before reaching him. “You prove my point, frog. Egypt is inside my mind. Yes, it fills my thoughts—Egypt. And, therefore, you are an hallucination—do you see? You, poor soul, are only the echo and reflection of my . . . my . . . my weak-mindedness. Still, I’ll be civil . . . and pretend. What brought you here, good sir?”
“Hazard—ragged hazard,” was his answer.
“Ah! The circumstances were casual, and not causal, eh?” said I, leaning back on the bole of the tree, while extracting my well-moistened toes from the water.
The amphibian surveyed me with heavy-lidded, tumescent eyes. “In Luxor . . . Luxor—on the margin of the Nile we lived,” he said distinctly.
I sat bo
lt upright. “Oh my, you really do speak, don’t you?” I shook my head, baffled. “What—what are you, frog? A transmigrant? An entity from another sphere? But it doesn’t seem possible. It must be all that poisonous absinthe I’ve drunk. Yes, that’s what it is.” Having reached this conclusion, I relaxed a little and laughed. “You’re an hallucination, as my friend Madge used to say.”
“Egypt!” croaked the frog, unheeding. “We were thousands—thousands of thousands—on the margin of the mighty Nile. The sun was warm and the water tepid, and we were numerous as the night sky’s stars. Joy and contentment were ours. The water lilies and the singing reeds surrounded us, and the marshes abounded in food. Sweet was the water, warm the sun, gentle the wind. Joy and contentment were ours.”
The little beast gulped, nodded almost imperceptibly and continued in an even more somber tone than before. “The ill-omened morning came. Then came the dismal, dismal day that brought us tragedy. Then came destruction and murder and the madness of panic. Then came the crocodile.”
“Ah!” I breathed. “The crocodile. Of course, there’s always a crocodile. But go on—tell the rest.”
I heard strange laughter—high-pitched, wild—and realized with a start that it had originated in my own throat.
“Many were the crocodiles on the river Nile,” said my companion severely, “many, many—yet they did us no harm. They, like we, bathed in the tepid water, basked in the heat of the glorious sun and lived the life of joy and contentment. Then came the dismal day, the black and wicked morning when the river churned and bubbled, and the unnatural crocodile, the one-eyed corcodile—”
“Ah!”
“—rose suddenly in our midst, opened his jaws and devoured multitudes. Cries of terror, shrieks of fear. Egypt! Egypt! Egypt!” the eldritch creature intoned as beads of dark water, like opals, depended from his fat cheeks. “From that day, the world was another place. Joy and contentment died. Happiness became misery. Life became a tale of death. Each morning the one-eyed crocodile appeared and ate his fill of luckless frogs. Cries of terror, screams of fear. Murder! Murder! Our thousands of thousands dwindled. No longer did the sun warm us, and the river Nile was a sea of menace and sudden horror. Some said we should flee to the cataract or cross to the west bank. Others said we should float down to the delta. They spoke much but did little. Unable, they were, to flee. Unable! Unable! Unable as the lotus or the tall papyrus plants. And the monster came and ate his fill.”
The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton Page 16