I had no acquaintance with violence, only this TV stuff. My most fearsome memories were of my father’s friend, Theodore Low, The Dentist Poet, smashing whiskey bottles. That, and scenes of Vietnam on the news. Danny, I thought, who couldn’t kill in a war, had killed in a hardware store for petty cash. How like him to bungle the robbery, to lose his nerve and get caught. How like him to fail: I could say that, finally, of a boy who was once my hero, my dreamboat, my sweetheart. Now he was a Macbeth, who killed for gain and let himself get caught.
And then, almost immediately, I thought: I’m glad he failed. Who wouldn’t lose their nerve after such an event—the taking of a life—except a hardened soul? A Malcolm Madox, for example. Sympathy for Danny overwhelmed me—my poor, weak Danny, who couldn’t kill in cold blood without falling apart. He’s a good boy, I insisted silently to the absent police: he was driven to it.
I would have called someone—my aunt, my mother, Miranda—but whom could I tell it to? That I had loved and married a murderer? And that the police might be coming for me any minute as an accomplice?
By the time the Lambertis got home next day, my self-pitying panic had calmed to a cold, sick dread—like a recurrence of flu. I had spent some agonized time wondering whether to tell Paul and Martha, and decided I’d better. Not the whole truth, of course; my life, I decided, would be forever clouded by that gap in the whole truth, but I couldn’t help it. I had never wanted anything so passionately as I wanted to remain uninvolved in that murder.
“I think I should tell you that my husband is suspected of killing a man,” I said to them that evening after the kids were in bed. “He’s locked up in a mental hospital. He was found at the scene of the crime with a gun in his hand. The police were here yesterday to question me.” I managed to keep my voice as unemotional as if I was reporting a visit from the dry-cleaner’s van. “They’ll probably be back,” I said. “There’s a funny sort of coincidence involved.” And I explained that I had once worked at Madox Hardware.
Martha was startlingly sympathetic, but Paul didn’t like it, I could tell—any of it, from the police at his house to my taste in husbands to the funny sort of coincidence.
“How upsetting for you, Cordelia, the day after Christmas,” Martha said with indignation. “They have a nerve, I think. Why do they have to drag you into this?”
“Well, it is odd,” I said uncomfortably. “That he would rob a place where I used to work. They wanted to know if I’d seen him. I suppose they thought he and I might be working together.”
“But that’s disgusting!” said Martha. Her complete, automatic faith in my honesty touched me, it was so unexpected. I was glad I’d never gone farther than the threshold of her bedroom. “They should be able to take one look at you and see that you couldn’t be involved in anything so horrible. Aren’t they trained to read character?” She threw down the needlepoint canvas she’d been working on and drummed her fingers on the arm of the wing chair. “They are so stupid!” She sat shaking her head. It was the sordidness that bothered her, I realized: murder coming so close. She was rejecting it.
“Let me get this straight,” said Paul. “You knew this guy who was murdered?”
“Vaguely. I used to work for his father.”
“But you never mentioned this place to your husband?”
“I haven’t even seen him in over a year!” You know that, I said to myself. He was looking at me as if he knew nothing, as if I was a stranger.
Paul picked up his pipe and began to fill it, something he normally did only for book business—it gave him confidence, he said. I didn’t know what to make of his lighting it now. “It is an incredible coincidence,” he said slowly, sucking in smoke.
“I can’t help that,” I said. The thought glanced against my mind: sometimes you have to tell lies on behalf of the truth, and recoiled from it. It sounded like Watergate talk, or something Malcolm Madox would say. Was that what I’d come to? “He walked out on me a year ago October. I haven’t seen him since, and I don’t want to. I don’t know what else to say.”
Martha slapped the chair arm suddenly with the flat of her hand. “I don’t see that it’s such a coincidence,” she said. “This hardware store is in Hoskins, didn’t you say? That’s not that far from your home town—Danny’s home town—is it, Cordelia? It’s the same general area, isn’t it? It’s natural he should stick to familiar territory. They’ll probably find other robberies down there that he was responsible for. Or he could even have been watching you, Cordelia. He could have spied on you and on the store. The man’s irrational, obviously. Who knows what he’s capable of?”
I tried to make my mind work as if it were ignorant of the truth. Were Martha’s ideas plausible? Yes—marginally—I decided, and stored them away for the police.
We talked it over a little longer, until the lies I had to keep telling ganged up on me and gave me a splitting headache. I kept wanting to confess, and I feared that if I was ever put on the witness stand I would blurt out everything. The trivet, the back room with Malcolm Madox, the marital wrongs Danny had accused me of, my affair with Paul—it would all come rushing out, no one would be able to shut me up, they’d carry me out shouting and raving, confessing to everything, anything …
“I guess I’ll go to bed,” I said. I looked pleadingly at Paul, but he gazed intently into his pipe.
“Have some hot milk, Cordelia,” Martha said in her maternal voice—the one she doled out so sparingly to the kids—and she shook her head again in disgust. “The stupidity of these people! And on the day after Christmas.”
The same two detectives came back two days later—silent Toscano, nervous Sherman. I felt I knew them intimately. I noticed Toscano had on a new tie, though Sherman’s seemed to be the same as before. They gave me, in a nice way, a thorough grilling, right out of the movies. But, strangely, as they questioned me, I became a little more confident. Miraculously, no one—not Danny, or Juliet—had told about my shoplifting, and my being fired for it. If anyone had, the police wouldn’t be putting me through it so pleasantly.
I had to give them a complete account of my movements since Danny left: where I’d lived, where I’d worked, who my friends were, where I hung out. I did so gladly—there wasn’t much to tell, and none of it could connect me with Danny. No one but Nina knew I had seen him at the fair in New Haven, and Nina was in Vienna.
As they were leaving, I asked them a question that had been bothering me all these months. “How’s Mr. Madox? Does he still have the store, or …?” I didn’t know how to express what I feared—that he had lapsed into depression or madness or senility after Malcolm’s death. “Is he all right?”
Sherman said, “The old man passed away, a month or so after the murder. Heart attack. The store was bought by one of the big chains, I forget which one. They’re remodeling it now, I believe. Gonna have a spring opening. But the old man was just wiped out by the murder.”
It was that statement, I think, that made me break down later that night. I thought about it all afternoon—harmless old Mr. Madox, dead of grief—and, if you followed his death back, around all the corners of the maze, there I was at the beginning, with a trivet in my hand. By evening, I all of a sudden couldn’t stand the weight of it any more, and I began to cry, right in the middle of telling Megan her story. It was a story about a beautiful princess cast away to a snowy wasteland. After many struggles, she carves herself a snow house out of a huge drift and settles down there, eating snow ice cream flavored with the delicious red berries that grow outside her front door. I was trying to decide whether a seal would befriend her there, or a penguin, or a lost husky from a dog-sled team, when I felt the tears begin to come. I couldn’t stop them. I sat on the edge of Megan’s bed and sank my head down on my knees and wept—mostly for Mr. Madox but partly for me.
“Cordelia, it’s not sad,” Megan said tentatively, and then she yelled, “Mommy! Cordelia’s crying!”
Martha came upstairs, and I was led away, with Megan wail
ing behind me, “It’s not a sad story, Cordelia! It’s not fair, you didn’t finish!”
The last person I would have chosen to collapse on—except maybe for Detectives Sherman and Toscano—was Martha, but I did. I sat with her on the sofa downstairs and broke down thoroughly, Juliettishly, while she rocked me in her arms. Paul was in the shop with a client—thank God, because I told her everything. I couldn’t control myself. It all poured out, the whole story of Danny and Malcolm and Mr. Madox and me, a tale of theft and blackmail and perversion and lies and guilt and death that probably shocked her to the marrow of her fine bones, but she never let on, she just kept her arms around me and let me cry and rant, and never said a word, except words of comfort. She was so nice about it, I wanted to go on—I had a mad impulse to go on—and tell her about Paul and me, as if I were a penitent Catholic and she a ladylike priest in a neat blond bun. I was really going to do it (I’ll pack my stuff and get out of here in the morning, I thought, I’ll go home to my parents the way Juliet did) when Paul came in, smoking his pipe and smiling. I could tell he’d just made a fat deal, and when I saw him there, looking pleased and then surprised and then concerned and then, almost invisibly, antagonistic, the urge to tell left me, and so, in fact, did my tears. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose while Martha explained to Paul, with a reassuring look at me, that Cordelia was upset by the police visit. I apologized to Martha for my loss of control.
“We all have to break down sometimes,” she said—it was a truism she believed in theoretically but which was not, in her case, true. I was grateful to her, though, for her sympathy. I knew she would keep mum about what I’d told her, and would defend me to the death, because I was her cook, she had chosen me, I was part of the world of the yellow house. I trudged up to my room, without looking directly at Paul, feeling enormous double relief: that I’d gotten so much off my chest, and that I hadn’t said anything to Martha about Paul and me. I had a clear intimation that our love for each other was nearly used up, that there weren’t many drops left in the bottle—not nearly enough to carry us through. I cried myself to sleep.
The police left me alone after that. Detective Sherman called up once to thank me, and to reassure me that I wouldn’t be called as a witness. I asked him what the probable sentence would be if Danny was found guilty, and he said twenty-five years to life for felony murder, but in practice—his disapproval echoed loudly around his words—he might be eligible for parole after eighteen years. “But he could get off,” Sherman said. “There’s gonna be a lot of medical testimony, and these psychiatrists never agree.”
“What happens if they prove he’s insane?”
“He goes to the state hospital until he’s—what do you call it, cured? Sometimes these guys are out in ninety days.”
I asked Sherman when the trial would be, and he said probably not until summer, maybe fall. He told me about motions and counter-motions, but I lost him. I kept wondering how Danny, formerly my adored husband, had changed into one of “these guys,” a murderer who might or might not be insane.
The defense never got in touch with me, and I had to conclude that Danny hadn’t mentioned me to his lawyer. I wished I could thank him, and it occurred to me that I might do so by voluntarily testifying for the defense that I had seen him before the murder and had thought him unbalanced. But I was unwilling to climb to those heights of altruism. I imagined the prosecuting attorney and me.
“In what way did he act irrational, Mrs. Frontenac? Can’t you do better than that? Can we really take it as proof of insanity that your husband took a few dollars from your wallet? If we could, I’m afraid many of us would have to declare our wives insane.” (Laughter.) That’s the way they do it on television.
And I had to admit, along with the prosecuting attorney, that it did look as if Danny was sane at the time of the murder: he had picked out Madox Hardware because he knew the proprietor was a defenseless old man. He hadn’t counted on Malcolm Madox being there. He had gone to Hoskins, armed, in a stolen car. (I could see, now, the string of crimes stretching out behind him north from the point where May and her boyfriend had dropped him off.) And he had shot Malcolm Madox, point-blank, through the heart. If his mind had given way, that was when it happened, when he saw what he had done.
I phoned Humphrey a few weeks later, and he said the police had been in to see him. “I gave them an earful, you better believe. I told them they’d be better off going after the Pope than my little Delia,” he chuckled, and then we talked about cooking. “You learn all you can up there,” he advised me, “and then you move on. If you want to open your own place, you’ve got to rev up to cooking for a crowd. That’s a whole new can of tomatoes.”
I began to think, all that winter and early spring, about getting a real job as a cook. I wouldn’t have, quite so soon, if all had been well between Paul and me. Before Christmas, we’d been talking, aimlessly but with excitement, of what we might do. He had a book-dealer friend out in Portland, Oregon, whom he thought of going into partnership with. Paul had been to Oregon and liked it; the crime rate, and the pollution levels, and the apathy quotient were among the lowest in the nation.
“What’s an apathy quotient?” I asked him.
“It’s a measure of whether anybody would come to help you if you got mugged on the street.”
“I thought there weren’t any muggers in Portland, Oregon,” I said, but it wasn’t a subject he could joke about. He held on to my shoulders and looked at me and said, “Delia, will you go with me? Leave your family and everything, and go to Oregon with me to live?”
I didn’t want to move to Oregon, but I wanted to be with Paul, so I answered, “Let’s get our lives straightened out first, Paul, so we can be together, and then we can decide where to live.”
“You’re right, you’re right,” he said. “First things first.” But his gaze went over my head, far away. He was thinking of the safe streets and clean air of Oregon, while I wasn’t thinking any further than the divorce court.
But that was before Christmas. After the police visits, things changed between Paul and me—subtly changed. It wasn’t that he believed I was guilty of anything. He knew me better than to think I could really be implicated in murder and armed robbery. The trouble was that he knew I was keeping something back. I suppose he assumed it was something that affected us—some clandestine contact with Danny, or a lingering affection for him that was making me shield him from the police—but he knew, at any rate, that I wasn’t telling him the whole truth. I kept wondering why I didn’t, and I remembered seeing him, the night we met, make a conscious decision to trust me, and to tell me about the firing-squad incident. I couldn’t do the same. I didn’t know why I held back the truth from the man I loved, but I did, and it altered our relationship, and as spring came we both knew the stuffing had been knocked out of our love, and that our time left together was short.
There had never been any desperation in our affair when it had only Paul’s marriage to Martha to blight it; we rose above that joyfully because we loved each other. But when we saw that our love wasn’t, after all, limitless, a kind of troubled frenzy became part of our lovemaking. There wasn’t much lazy talking, even when we had the time. We pounded our bodies together, and scratched and bit each other, and sometimes the sounds we made were more sorrowful than ecstatic. It was, in a way, horrible, and yet we kept seeking each other out. We couldn’t get enough of each other.
I made a list, one day when an unexpected late snowstorm pushed spring back a week or two. I was up in my room, the snow struck sharp against the windows, and in a mood that was half misery, half anticipation, I wrote:
List of Regrets
1. marriage
2. love
3. honesty
4. small expectations
I studied that list for a while, especially the last item. Before me, in my bookcase, was the copy of Great Expectations my father had given me years ago—dark green, with the title in gold on the spine. That’s the ticket,
I said to myself. Maybe I should read it—knowing I wouldn’t. But I’d make my expectations great.
Bits of another list drifted through my head, but I wasn’t yet ready to write it down. I looked again at the “List of Regrets”; it was also, I knew, a “Good-bye List.”
When the snow began to melt, Paul took me out for driving lessons. Martha thought I should learn; it was inconvenient that I always had to be driven to the market for groceries. Besides, she said, if I intended someday to be a successful chef with my own place, I should know how to drive a car—I couldn’t very well hire a chauffeur to drive me to the fish market every morning. I thought this was a good point, and though I’d never much thought about it before, I became eager to learn to drive.
I took to it as readily as I took to cooking. Behind the wheel of the Volvo, with the world spread out before me, I felt as if I could do anything. The gears made perfect sense to me, and changed easily under my hand. Instinctively, I knew you watch the road and not the front of the car—the thing both Paul and Martha had told me was the hardest part for them to catch on to. It wasn’t until I learned to drive that I saw how deprived I’d been all those years, how you’re almost an amputee without a car. Even short trips, places in Gresham I used to walk to, I drove to in the Volvo, for the sheer exhilaration of it, the glamor of leaning your elbow on the windowsill and putting the radio on loud and feeling your hair blow in your face. I loved making turns, the way I’d lean to one side and the car would follow me. And the special satisfaction of successful parallel parking could put me in a good mood all day. I think I must have got out of driving what I used to get out of loving Paul—speed, excitement, risk—but in the car I had the extra advantage of control.
Chez Cordelia Page 29