by Leslie Ford
He nodded. “I knew you were.”
Her eyes contracted sharply.
“Then she did tell you?”
“Who?”
“Iris, of course!”
Colonel Primrose raised his eyebrows, and shook his head.
“No, she didn’t. I didn’t know she knew it. I happened to know it myself, because when I saw you leave the Assembly you wore a white coat, and when you came into the library with Mac you had on a red one. I had a man look into it. He found out that you and Mac had come home. Mac stayed down in the car because he had to double-park. Cars were going back and forth so he couldn’t risk leaving it there. He was out there between fifteen and twenty minutes.”
Her face was blanker than ever. Genuinely this time, I thought—not the product of conscious art.
“Oh,” she said.
“I’m supposed to know such things, Lowell—sooner or later. Go on.”
“Maybe you know all the rest of it then.”
“That’s all I know.”
I doubt if Lowell got the ever so slight emphasis on that last word, or realized its significance, coming from a man who was used to filling in large gaps so shrewdly that it was awfully hard most of the time to know what he knew and what he had guessed.
“Well… I went up the steps and remembered my bag with my key in it was still in Mac’s pocket. So I started down again. But I had my hand on the door knob when I thought of that, and it turned, so I didn’t need the key. I thought that was funny, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was too busy trying to keep my heels from making any noise, so I wouldn’t… I mean, disturb my father in… in the library.”
She still wore the perfectly formal stereotyped mask of contemporary youth, but she couldn’t help the sudden guarded look in her eyes.
“Why didn’t you want to see your father, Lowell?” Colonel Primrose cut in as she started on.
The color rose faintly on her high sharply modelled cheekbones. She looked at him, compressing her red lips stubbornly, like a small willful child.
“It’s quite true that your relations with your father hadn’t been as smooth as they might have been, for some time, isn’t it?”
“Then she has been talking to you!” she said furiously.
Colonel Primrose’s black eyes snapped fire.
“Lowell—listen to me! I don’t want to hear that again, do you hear? Iris hasn’t said one word against you… not one single word! If you weren’t such a sickening little egotist you could understand it. Even if you can’t, just get it—it’s true! And get this too: every bit of the mud-slinging that’s been done has been done by Lowell Nash… not by Iris. And every bit of the information I have about you I either had before this began or I’ve got from you, without your knowing how transparent you really are.”
She stared down at the ground. Then she went on, with a kind of sullen meekness.
“Well, it wasn’t my fault. My father hadn’t been himself at all, not since she… not since summer. Nothing anybody could do pleased him. He’d never been very keen about Mac, and when Steve Donaldson first came to the house he said there was the kind of chap he’d like me to marry. Then there was always trouble about Angie. But that has nothing to do with it. I just didn’t want to have to stop and explain that I was with Mac, and going out again. He’d think I ought to be in bed by half-past twelve, not just starting out.”
Colonel Primrose lifted a quizzical brow. “Odd of him,” he said.
“Well, I got upstairs all right, but I was too scared to risk it again, so I sneaked down the back stairs into the kitchen hall.”
She moistened her lips.
“I heard something, scratching at the door. First I thought it was Senator, and then I remembered he was… dead. I… well, I don’t know. I had a funny feeling all of a sudden that maybe he was… cold, out there in the ground, and his ghost was trying to get in where it was warm. I guess it sounds crazy, but…”
She rubbed the tip of her nose with the back of her hand and blinked her eyes.
“No. It doesn’t,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “Go on.”
“I guess it does, but it didn’t then. Well, I ran over and opened the door.”
Her eyes widened.
“It was Lavinia. And before I could slam the door shut and lock it she was inside. And I’m so afraid of her! I’ve always been afraid of her!”
Not all the fashions in faces of a century could have kept the memory of fear from living in her eyes and etching itself on her wide mobile mouth. That scene on Christmas Eve flashed into my mind again with a new and rather terrifying significance.
Colonel Primrose was watching her with puzzled intentness.
“Sit down, Lowell.”
He pushed a chair closer to her. She sat down stiffly, like an obedient child.
“Why are you so afraid of Lavinia?”
“My father sent me down to Hofnagel’s once when I was about ten, to take her some money,” she said in quick colorless tones. “She wasn’t there, I had to go to her room. I was afraid to, but I knew he’d be angry if I didn’t. So I went. It was dark, and dirty, going up the stairs, but I went. I was going to put the money under the door and run, but she heard me coming, and looked out and made me come in. I was afraid not to. Then she made me sit down.”
She shuddered suddenly.
“She gave me some candy. It was chocolate, all grey and funny-looking, the way it gets when it’s kept where it’s too hot, but I didn’t know that then. I was afraid not to eat it, and all the time she kept saying ‘You should have been my little girl—I should have been your mother’… over and over again. And then she got a ragged old letter out of a drawer and read it to me. I didn’t understand much of it, but I understood it was from my father. It was about how young and pretty she was and when they were married they’d go to Paris.
“I guess I fainted, I don’t know. I don’t know how I got out, but I ran all the way home. And the door was locked and I couldn’t get in. I kept feeling she was behind me. When they did let me in I tried to tell my father, but he wouldn’t listen… he just lectured me on the poor and needy and said I’d have to take her money to her every week so I’d learn to be kind.”
She rubbed her hand over her forehead with a dazed tired gesture.
“I dreamed about her—all my life I’ve dreamed about beating on that door with her behind me. I’ve tried not to be silly about it, but…”
She raised a pale frightened face. For the first time since I’d been home I saw the child I’d known for fourteen years with the bright lacquer peeled off, the sting gone from the tongue.
“And last night, Lowell?”
She looked down, a slow flush mantling her cheek and creeping up under her short thick black lashes.
“Well, I was scared,” she said sullenly. “I wanted to scream, but I knew my father would come. And then he’d probably make me shake hands with her and tell her I was sorry, the way he did once. I… couldn’t bear it. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any money to give her.”
She looked steadily down at her feet. The dark flush burned deeper in her cheeks.
“I tried to be sensible. I even tried to tell myself what she said, about there but for the grace of God go I. But I couldn’t. And she knew I was afraid of her. Well, I didn’t know what to do—honestly I didn’t. So… well, I did a… an awful thing.”
I stole a bewildered glance at Colonel Primrose, not having the faintest idea, of course, that a very important tangle in the affairs of the yellow house in Beall Street was about to be straightened out.
“I said… ‘If I give you some whiskey, will you go?’ And she nodded right away.—Well, that’s what I did. I’m not proud of it, but I did it. I took an empty milk bottle off the kitchen sink, and I went into the dining room and emptied the decanter in the cellarette into it. I took it back. She wasn’t in the kitchen. That scared me worse. Then I found her, in the pantry. She was eating something out of the small ic
e box in there. She reached for the milk bottle, but I didn’t give it to her, not till I’d got the door opened and her outside. Then I gave it to her and slammed the door shut and locked it.
“Well, I know it was dreadful to give it to her. My father and… A. J. would have killed me if they knew it. They tried to keep her from drinking. That’s one of the chief things my father had against poor Mac. During Prohibition once, when drinking was pretty smart, Mac gave Lavinia a drink, just to be funny. Father caught him and raised hell.”
She stopped abruptly. Neither Colonel Primrose nor I said anything for a moment. He was looking at her with some kind of odd interest that I couldn’t fathom.
When he did speak he changed the subject abruptly.
“Old Annie says there were two letters on the hall table when she went upstairs. Did you see them?”
Lowell nodded. “A. J. picked them up when he came in.”
“There’s only one on his desk now—a bill. Did you see what happened to the other?”
She looked from one of us to the other. “I never thought of that,” she said slowly. “He threw it into the grate and held a match to it.—Would that be the one Wilkins posted… from my father?”
“I suppose so,” Colonel Primrose said. He had just opened his mouth to go on when a general racket outside announced the approach of Captain Lamb and the rest of them. To say nothing of Sergeant Buck. The sight of Lowell, white-faced again and scared, stifled, I imagine what Julius calls the hard-named look he was about to give me. It wasn’t stifled for long. There was a low-voiced conference in the next room, and Colonel Primrose came back.
“If you’ll take Lowell, and drop me along, Mrs. Latham, Buck can bring Lowell’s car when he’s through here,” he said.
Lowell picked up her ridiculous hat and put it on. She turned to Sergeant Buck, holding the colonel’s coat, his dead pan carved out of some peculiarly rugged marble.
A sudden irrepressible light flashed in her eyes. “It’ll be all right, Sergeant. Don’t worry. I’ll chaperone them.”
I thought I could hear Captain Lamb, or somebody, choking down a guffaw. Colonel Primrose certainly turned a mild peony, and looked around very emphatically at his general manager—functotum, as Sergeant Buck calls it himself. And Sergeant Buck’s lantern-jawed visage turned the color, and about the consistency, of a very tarnished brass bucket. It was one of the few situations of the sort that I ever found amusing.
And when we were out in the crisp cold air, looking down on the misty halo lying along the broad winding ribbon of the Potomac, Lowell demanded abruptly, “What does that pleasant-faced guy think you’re going to do to the Colonel— marry him, for gosh sakes?”
I caught an amused chuckle behind me, and said I guessed she was imagining all of it.
“Oh yes?” she said. “Well, I’d hate to have him get a grudge against me, that’s all. You watch your step.”
18
I let Lowell out where Beall Street comes into Wisconsin Avenue. It was quite time, I decided, to tell Colonel Primrose about my encounter with Lavinia Fawcett at Mr. Myers’s, and about Mr. Hofnagel. He listened intently. I could see him nodding his head, but he said nothing until we’d turned left on M Street at the foot of the hill. Below us, past the C. & O. Canal where Lavinia’s father had made a period of his troubled days, lay the river. It’s odd to think that where there’s nothing but trucks and freight sheds now, and chimneys belching smoke to blacken the white tracery of Georgian fanlights, wild swans once came in flocks of hundreds, and canvas back ducks—called white backs then—fed on the small white celery that grew along the flats and swamps of the Potomac. On dark October nights when ortolan settled to feed on the wild oats, Georgetown hunters kindled fires of lightwood in the prows of their boats, blinding them, taking as many as thirty or forty dozen in one boat. And shad and rockfish were landed by hundreds there. And on Bridge Street, when Washington was still a muddle of taverns and gambling houses, a city of many streets and few buildings, colored peddlers in apron and cap called out their wares—hot corn, English muffins, baked pears, apple butter from Pennsylvania; and what they now call Roosevelt Island was a romantic paradise. Bridge Street is M Street now, dingy and dirty, its glory faded, visible only to the eye that can see the purity of its line behind the barbarous fronts of struggling shops.
We stopped in front of one of them. Across the street was A. J.’s bank, with its big burglar alarm over the window.
“That’s where A. J. nearly got killed a few hours sooner,” I said. “Barging out against a red light. He must have just discovered about Randall’s missing fortune.”
Colonel Primrose glanced at me, shaking his head. “He did?” he said. Then he nodded toward Mr. Hofnagel’s Studio of High-Class Photography.
“Is this fellow a friend of yours?”
“He ought to be,” I said. “My children and I have been practically his only customers for nineteen years.”
We’d come to the dingy window with its rusty black velvet curtain against which were displayed, in cheap grey folders, three photographs of young ladies with tight-crimped permanent waves, hard-faced and self-conscious against a background that looked like the side of a dappled grey with the heaves.
“Devoted as I am to Mr. Hofnagel,” I said, “he’s really a peculiarly rotten photographer.”
The bell over the door clanged as we opened it and stepped into the small reception room with a few pale-faced specimens of the proprietor’s art hanging around it. I was there, and my sons, and A. J., grim-visaged and upright, and Mac, and Lowell in her white graduation dress.
Mr. Hofnagel came out of the back room with an anticipatory professional beam in his big sad eyes that faded when he saw Colonel Primrose and brightened again when he saw me.
Well, if I took a beautiful photograph I wouldn’t mind so much, I was thinking; and then I thought again… and— because nothing I could ever do to Colonel Primrose would in any way approximate what Sergeant Buck has done to me—I said, brightly, “This is Colonel Primrose, Mr. Hofnagel. He wants his picture taken. Four dozen of the largest size, and a dozen of them tinted—didn’t you say? Or was it two dozen?”
I think Colonel Primrose may be conservatively described as rocked back on his heels, and by the time he had recovered his wind sufficiently to deny this monstrous proposition the glory in Mr. Hofnagel’s sad-eyed, sunken-cheeked face had filled the room and was just too luminously bright for him to withstand. He cleared his throat and moistened his lips, and smiled savagely at me.
“Certainly,” he said. “Of course. I… I want them all tinted.”
Mr. Hofnagel bowed, and bowed again, trying vainly to find words, beaming with speechless joy. He backed through the old monks’ cloth curtain and held it up for us to enter… and Colonel Primrose, led by a silken strand of Fate, entered the room where he was to come upon a major clue in the problem of the violent death of two old men. It was a clue so vitally important that he’s regarded me ever since as the ancients regarded the village idiot—a special instrument in the hands of God.
I didn’t, of course, know that then. All I knew was that Colonel Primrose, looking steadily at me with a green apoplectic malignity, was sitting under the purplish glare of Mr. Hofnagel’s mercury lamp, and Mr. Hofnagel was saying, “Look bleasant, bleese! Looka at dot bretty lady, dot vill bleasant doughts gif you, sir! You stand ofer dere, Mis’ Ladam!”
He pushed me over in front of the open door of his dark room, and spread out his hands.
“So, so! Now your fader can see you!”
For a moment I thought Colonel Primrose was going to die.
“I do so wish Sergeant Buck was here, Colonel Primrose,” I said sweetly… and then my heart sank. For there in the doorway behind Mr. Hofnagel’s moist bald dome stood that granite mountain of appalled disapproval in person. I put my hand over my mouth the way Lilac does, and turned away. Lowell’s words “I’d hate to have that guy down on me,” or something to that effect, and the Serg
eant’s own saying that many a true word was spoke in jest, were twin warnings written in acid on my brain.
Fortunately Sergeant Buck is a man of few words. I only heard one come out of the corner of his iron-ribbed jaw. It sounded like something no one would say in front of a lady. I looked anxiously at Colonel Primrose. He had completely regained his amiable composure.
“That will be splendid, Mr. Hofnagel,” he said. “And tomorrow I want you to do my friend Sergeant Buck here.”
We both stared at him. He had taken out his billfold and was handing a twenty dollar bill over. Mr. Hofnagel’s great eyes were popping out of his head.
I stole a glance at Sergeant Buck. No words could describe the look on that face. And then as his glance rested for an instant on Mr. Hofnagel’s pathetically beaming countenance, his face changed suddenly, and—I could scarcely credit my ears—it seemed to me I was hearing Sergeant Buck say, “Sure. Nine o’clock’s Okay for me, mister.”
I turned quickly to Colonel Primrose. He was as blandfaced as the Buddha on my garden wall.
“I’ve been waiting for a long time to get this done,” he was saying affably to Mr. Hofnagel, who was bobbing up and down like an apple in a tub of water, still speechless with delight. He seized Colonel Primrose’s coat, but Sergeant Buck quietly took it away from him and held it himself. I went out, with something of the unpleasant feeling I’d had once when I was a child and got caught breaking the pink sugar rosebuds off the Bishop’s birthday cake and was made to break off and eat all the rest of them.
The cool air of M Street was grateful to my burning face.
“It’s straight in front, sir,” Sergeant Buck said.
I was walking beside the colonel, Sergeant Buck about two steps behind us. People kept turning and looking at us. I know they thought he was taking us to jail. I glanced up at Colonel Primrose. He had an infuriating smile on his face.
“Are we going somewhere?” I inquired icily. The situation was obviously out of my hands.