“Why?”
“She can’t—can’t face things very well. It’s better if she goes away. Her address was in one of the morning papers. That’s bad. She may be hounded by reporters or—well, Kincaid is a small cruel town.”
“I’ll deliver your message. I don’t guarantee that I can persuade her to leave.”
“You can try. Here, I’ll write the address down for you.”
“Don’t bother, I saw the papers,” Meecham said. He remembered the address, not from any newspaper, but from the Railway Express consignment slip that had been pasted across Loftus’ suitcase: From Mrs. Charles E. Loftus, 231 Oak Street, Kincaid, Michigan, to Mr. Earl Duane Loftus, 611 Division Street, Arbana, Michigan. Contents valued at $50.00.
“I know it’s asking a lot, Mr. Meecham. But if you could go sometime today, get to her first—it’s only a hundred miles. . . .”
“I’ll go today.”
“Thank you.” Loftus rose, clumsily, supporting himself by leaning one hand on the card table and the other on the back of the chair. “Thank you very much.”
“Why didn’t you keep her picture, Loftus?”
“I wanted to be alone. Entirely alone, without even a picture. Can you understand that?”
“It isn’t a good thing to be alone. Relatives have a way of standing by in emergencies. Haven’t you got any, except your mother?”
“I had a wife once. She left me, got a divorce. I can’t blame her. She was a big, strong, healthy woman. At least she was then, I haven’t seen her for a long time.”
“Has it occurred to you that your mother might want to come here to see you?”
Loftus shrugged, wearily. “She won’t come. Oh, she’ll want to come, she may even plan to come, have everything arranged, suitcase neatly packed, everything. She may even get as far as the bus depot. Then she’ll take a little drink to calm her nerves. You can guess the rest.”
“Yes.” He recalled the number of books about alcoholism that Loftus kept in his room.
“She was always death against liquor. She never had a drink until she was nearly fifty. My father had run out on her by that time, and one day she went out and bought a bottle of wine to calm her nerves. It happened right away. One drink, and she was a drunk. She’d been a drunk for maybe thirty years and didn’t find it out until then. For her the world vanished in that instant. She has never seen it since. She never will again.”
“Perhaps. There are cures.”
Loftus only shook his head.
“I’ll see to it personally that she comes to visit you, if you want her to.”
“No, thank you,” Loftus said politely. “I don’t want to see anyone.”
The door from the corridor opened and the policeman, Samuels, came in. He had taken his handcuffs from the leather case fastened to his belt and he was playing with them, clicking them from wide to narrow and back again, the way Miss Jennings played with her ring of keys and for the same reason, because he was bored and a little embarrassed.
“All through, Mr. Meecham? We got orders to be on the move.”
Meecham turned to Loftus. “Are we all through?”
“I think so,” Loftus said.
“If something else comes up, let me know. In any case, I’ll be around to see you when I’ve transacted the business we discussed. Perhaps early in the morning.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll see Emmy right away.”
“Tell her not to worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“I will. Good luck.”
Meecham stood in the doorway of the small windowless room and watched the two men go down the corridor, handcuffed together, walking slowly and in step. Then he turned, abruptly, and walked as fast as he could in the other direction and out the rear entrance.
It was noon, but there was no sun. The sky hung close over the smoky city like a sagging tent top that would some day blow away, exposing the vast blackness of space.
Meecham waited for the traffic signal to change. A car went through the yellow light and almost sideswiped another car. Both drivers began to curse, ineffectually through closed windows, like little boys hurling threats from the safety of their own doorsteps. A woman came out of the supermarket across the street, jerking the arm of the crying child staggering along behind her. An old man on crutches inched his way across the icy sidewalk to the curb and stood eyeing the speeding cars with hate and fear.
A column of bitterness rose like mercury in Meecham’s throat. Pig of a world, he thought. Preposterous pig of a world.
11
When he rang the doorbell Emmy Hearst answered it herself, immediately, as if she’d been there at the door watching from behind the lace curtains of the little window for someone who would never come. Her eyes were so swollen that they didn’t look like human eyes at all, but like twin blisters raised by fire. When she spoke she held one hand against her throat as if to ease its aching:
You saw him?”
Mecham nodded. “Yes.”
I tried to. They wouldn’t let me. They said I had no right, no right.” She clung to the door for support, a tall strong woman who had come abruptly, in a single day, to the end of her strength.
They’ve transferred him to the hospital,” Meecham said.
He’ll get good care there. Won’t he?”
“Of course.”
There was a burst of masculine laughter from one of the rooms on the second floor.
Mrs. Hearst glanced nervously at the staircase. “I can’t ask you to come in, I—I’m busy. I have business to attend to.”
Mecham said, “I can’t stay anyway. Loftus asked me to pick up a package of letters that he wants me to take to his mother.”
“His mother,” she said quietly. “Always his mother. She’s a stone around his neck, drowning him, she’s like a . . . Yes, I have the letters. They’re in the kitchen. I’ll get them for you.”
She went down the hall and through the swinging door into the kitchen. Meecham heard her give a little cry of surprise: “Why—why, I thought you were upstairs.”
“Well, I’m not upstairs. How do you like that, eh?”
The door stopped swinging and settled into place, entombing the sound waves in its heavy oak. But the woman’s little cry of surprise hung in the air for a moment like a question mark of smoke and then disintegrated.
Meecham waited, uneasy and depressed. The front door was still open and he didn’t close it; he felt that she had left it open deliberately. The wind blew down the hall and up the stairs, agitating the lace curtains and the coats and sweaters hanging on the old-fashioned hall rack. On the floor beside the rack there was a pile of rubbers and galoshes and a pair of battered tube skates and one gym shoe with the name Kryboski inked on each side.
Meecham looked at his watch and then coughed, a long purposeful cough. A minute later the swinging door opened again and Mrs. Hearst came toward him with a brown package under her arm. She was lurching slightly, as if she was carrying either inside the package or inside herself something heavy that threw her off balance.
She thrust the package at him. It was very light. “Here. Please go. Please.”
“Certainly,” Meecham said. But he was a little too late. A man had come out of the kitchen, a big ruddy-faced man with fair hair. A hall-length away he looked quite distinguished and physically powerful. But as he came nearer, the shaft of light from the open door exposed the fraud like an efficient camera. His body was running to fat, and his face was disfigured by lines of indecision and self-doubt, ambition gone sour and life gone sour. His pale eyes moved constantly, back and forth, like birds at sea looking for a piece of kelp to rest on. He was one of those men Meecham recognized as a common type; the big boy whose mind and emotions had never been able to keep up with his maturing body
. With the years the gap widened and the personality narrowed. He was, perhaps, forty-five.
Mrs. Hearst deliberately turned her head away as he approached. When she spoke she didn’t look at either of the men, she seemed to be addressing the grease-darkened lilies that climbed the wall:
“This is my husband, Jim.”
“Say, what is all this anyhow?” Hearst said. “Just what is it? Mysterious packages, cops in the house, Emmy bawling all over the joint. A guy has a right to know, don’t he?”
He tugged, self-consciously, at his tie. The checked suit he wore was a little too tight around the hips, and the sleeves were too short, so that his wrists stuck out, not the vulnerable pipe-stem wrists of a growing boy, but thick wrists covered with coarse gold hairs. His manner, his clothes, his expression, they all added to his air of chronic failure . . . the air of a man who has tried and quit a hundred jobs in a hundred places, always out of step and off-beat.
“Well? Ain’t anybody going to say anything but me? Not that I can’t do the talking. I’ve got plenty to say and plenty to ask too.”
“Shut up, Jim,” Mrs. Heart said, without turning.
“Now she tells me, shut up. Mind my own business, she says. Maybe that’s my trouble, I have minded my own business. I’ve winked an eye at things.” He looked at his wife. “Some pretty funny things, eh, Emmy?”
“Shut up,” she repeated listlessly. “He’s not a cop, he’s a lawyer. And the package . . . Oh, you tell him, Mr. Meecham. Tell him what’s in the package since he won’t believe me.”
“They’re letters,” Meecham said. “Written to Loftus by his mother. I’m returning them to her at his request.”
Hearst looked disappointed. “Just a bunch of old letters, eh?”
“That’s right.”
“You mean all the value they’ve got is just sentimental?”
“Yes.” Meecham didn’t mention the money in one of the envelopes. He had the notion that if Hearst knew there was money involved he would put up a fight to keep it; a not unreasonable fight, since the package had been left in his own kitchen, and he, Meecham, had no power of attorney for Loftus, and, in fact, no proof that the package even belonged to Loftus.
But Hearst had already lost interest in the package. He was watching his wife, his eyes moving constantly in their sockets but keeping her within range. “He’s quite a sentimental guy, Loftus is. Too bad I don’t have that sentimental stuff, the ladies are crazy for it. And manners he’s got too, real fancy manners that makes an ordinary guy feel like a bum. I’m not a bum. I’m a rough diamond, sure, but I don’t go around carving people up either. Eh, Emmy?”
“I don’t know what you do when you’re out of town,” she said distinctly. “And I don’t care.”
“I work. That’s what I do. I work.” The word seemed to stimulate him. He turned to Meecham, suddenly animated: “Right now I’m pushing a new product we got out, a soapless suds. Best thing on the market, Noscrub it’s called. I’m in charge of out-of-town advertising.”
“You distribute free samples from door to door,” his wife said, still speaking in the same clear and distinct way, like a teacher correcting the repeated lies of a small boy.
“That’s right, build me up. That’s great. Funny how you could get so mealy-mouthed over Loftus because he read books instead of doing a man’s work. Books and soft talk . . .”
“A man’s work. A two-year-old could be taught to deliver samples from door to door.”
His face purpled and he seemed ready to strike her. He looked, for the first time, decisive, sure of his ground and his rights. But the moment passed. His anger, like his other emotions, was not quite fully developed; it turned against himself so that he was his own victim.
“Wait till the product catches on,” he said. “Just wait.”
“Yes, Jim.”
“I’ll be advertising manager, I’ve got Weber’s word for it.”
“Yes, Jim.”
“Yes Jim, yes Jim, yes Jim.” He shook his head, in a new anger and an old despair. “Goddam it, build me up, Emmy. Like a real wife, build me up.”
“The higher you’re built the sooner you’ll fall.”
“You built him up. Earl this, Earl that, Earl you’re wonderful.”
“I never said he was wonderful.”
“You did. I heard you.”
“People who spy at doors will hear anything, and what they don’t hear they’ll make up.”
“I didn’t have to spy at doors. It was here, all over the place, right under my nose.” His eyes shifted to Meecham. “How about that, eh? You take a guy into your home, you treat him right, treat him like your own . . .”
“You never said a civil word to him in your life.” She was examining the wallpaper again. “Not a civil word.”
“You said enough for both of us, didn’t you? What do you think, I should of shook his hand for making me feel like an old bum?”
“I haven’t had a friend since I left school, man or woman, not a friend. That’s what Earl is to me, a friend.”
“I’ve kicked around in my life, and one thing I know, there’s no such thing as a man and woman being friends. It’s not in the books. It’s against nature.”
“Your nature, maybe. Not . . .”
“Anybody’s nature!”
“Keep your voice down. The boys might hear you.”
“Let them. Maybe they’ll learn a thing or two.”
“If you don’t mind,” Meecham said, “I’d better be going.”
Neither of them paid the slightest attention. They were absorbed in each other, like boxers in a ring, each of them intent only on the other’s weak spots and unguarded moments.
She had crossed her arms on her chest, as if protecting a vulnerable place. “What are you accusing me of? Say it.”
“I will.”
“Well, go on. Say it in front of Mr. Meecham here. He’s a lawyer.”
“Sure, I’ll say it. I don’t care if he’s President Truman.”
“Well, what’s stopping you? Go on, go on.”
“He was your lover,” Hearst said. “That piddling little shrimp was your lover.”
“You fool,” she whispered. “You terrible fool.” She began to cry, very quietly, her forehead pressing against the wall. Tears fell from her swollen eyes and splattered the greasy lilies of the wallpaper. Her head moved, from one side to another, in misery and denial.
“Emmy?”
“Go away.”
“It’s not true then, eh, Emmy?”
“What do you think? A sick man—a dying man—what—do—you—think?”
“I—well . . .”
He looked with pathetic uncertainty at Meecham, like a small boy who had made his mother cry and sought reassurance that eventually she would stop and everything would be all right again.
“Emmy?” He touched her shoulder tentatively. “I didn’t mean nothing, Emmy. You know me, I shoot off at the mouth, sure, but I wouldn’t hurt a hair of your head. If you was only honest with me, Emmy. If you was only honest.”
Meecham went out the door with the package under his arm. Neither of them noticed or cared.
Outside, the wind was fresh, but he had a sensation of suffocating heaviness in his throat and chest, as if the slices of life he had seen in the course of the morning were too sharp and fibrous to be swallowed.
12
Highway 12 ran due west from Arbana to Kincaid, just over fifty miles of straight road through flat countryside. Under better circumstances it might have been an hour drive. But heavy trucks and heavy weather had pocked and dented the road, and beyond Jackson the snow began to fall in huge wet flakes that clung to the windshield like glue. Every few minutes Meecham had to slow down to give the windshield wipers more
power and speed.
When he reached Kincaid it was five, and the street lights were on. Here and there a few houses were already decorated for Christmas, with strings of colored lights along the porches, clusters of pine branches and cones attached to the doors. The shops and the streets were crowded, and the crowds looked gay as if freshened by the new snow.
He had no trouble finding Oak Street. It crossed the main highway at a traffic signal in the center of town.
Two Hundred Thirty-one was a two-story, white-brick apartment house in a neighborhood that derived its brash but decaying air from nearby slums. Meecham parked his car and crossed the street with the brown package under his arm. The building itself was well kept, and nailed to the front door there was a Christmas wreath, a red cellophane bell surrounded by artificial spruce boughs and red wax berries. The snow made the spruce and the berries look quite real.
Inside the small lobby there was a row of locked mailboxes and on the wall a black arrow pointing to the basement, and a sign, Manager’s Office. The third mailbox belonged to Loftus’ mother: Mrs. C. E. Loftus, Apartment Five.
Meecham walked down the hall. The carpeting was worn but clean, and the air smelled pungently of paint. Someone in the building obviously had a flair for lettering. All over the walls there were elaborately executed instructions: Apartments One—Five, This way ®®. No Smoking in Corridors. Keep your Radio Low after Eleven O’Clock Please. No Soliciting. Please Use Night Bell Only When Necessary. Night Bell ®®.
Number Five had a fire extinguisher fastened to the wall just outside the door. Meecham pressed the buzzer, waited half a minute, and pressed it again, twice. There was no response. He went back to the lobby and down the steps to the basement following the Manager’s Office arrow.
A small man past middle age, in a peaked painting cap and splattered overalls, was squatting in a full knee bend outside the door, putting masking tape around the knob. He turned when he heard Meecham’s footsteps, turned without rising and without losing his balance even for a moment. His back was straight as a board.
Vanish in an Instant Page 10