Manhattan Love Song

by Cornell Woolrich

  “If you want me to take the stand,” I said wearily, “I’ll take the stand. But when Westman asks me if I killed her, and he will, I’m going to say yes. That’s all I’ve got left now, the determination to die. I’m going to hang on to it.”

  I heard him swearing at me then; making all kinds of noise. I almost thought he was going to hit me in the jaw, he was so furious. I’m positive he would have liked to. I simply didn’t listen, shut all the crannies of my mind and didn’t hear him. Then, after a while, he was gone, and I was by myself again. Glad of it, too. I did what I did every other night — ate my meal when it was brought in to me, and then took a cigarette out of the flattened, crumpled pack I kept in my back pocket, that the turnkey used to buy for me two or three times a week. I gave him a quarter each time — fifteen cents for the thirteen-cent package and ten cents for himself for doing me the favor of getting it. When I was through smoking it, I took off my coat and vest and shoes and pants and went to sleep on the cot in my shirt, tie, socks, and underwear. I didn’t bother taking my tie off ever, because I had a good, even knot in it (from the time I’d first come in here) and I didn’t imagine there was much chance of getting it that accurate a second time without a mirror or anything. Not that it would have mattered, but I was tired of tying neckties around myself all my life long, like I was of everything else.

  The next day in court. Berenson had me take the stand — maybe to call my bluff, or maybe because there was nothing else left for him to do any more. He gave me a long, long look, and then he said in a low voice, “Tell your story, Wade,” and then he didn’t look at me any more but just sat there looking down at the floor. I couldn’t even tell if he was listening or not.

  I told it briefly, I wanted to get it over with; began abruptly at what had been practically the end of it.

  “We were going to California. She wanted to go to California because it was far from New York, and she didn’t like New York any more. I bought the tickets and went home and packed my valise—” At this point, I saw Maxine sitting at the back of the room, the very end seat, on the aisle. “Poor kid,” I thought remorsefully, “just today she had to come here! I told him to tell her to stay away.” Her face was just like a little round white golf-ball at that distance. “So small an area,” I thought, “to suffer so much.”

  “When I got there, the doorman insisted he hadn’t called me up and given me any message. I went upstairs anyway, and found her there—”

  I stopped a minute, with stage fright or something. If Berenson had shut up, maybe I would have told it the way he wanted me to, the way it had — I suppose — really been.

  “Alive or dead?” he said, without looking up from the floor.

  “Alive,” I said.

  He didn’t bat an eyelash, although for him it probably meant five or ten thousand a year income from now on instead of fifty or seventy-five or a hundred.

  Maxine didn’t move, either. I could still see her way over there in the corner, but there was something whiter than her face now in front of it — a handkerchief, I suppose.

  “She told me she wasn’t going with me after all. I asked her why. She said I didn’t have enough money. I caught hold of her by the neck, and after awhile we both fell to the floor and she was dead. I went downstairs without any one seeing me and got into a taxi. Then I came back again—”

  “Your defendant,” Berenson said dismally, the minute I had stopped speaking.

  “You admit you killed her, Mr. Wade?” Westman said as soon as he stood up. The “Mr. Wade” was my reward, I guess, for being the admirable defendant I was.

  “I’m no doctor, Mr. Prosecuting Attorney,” I said. “I choked her, and she didn’t move any more. I guess she died then.”

  “Would you like us to believe.” he sneered, “that you didn’t intend her to die? That the strangulation was unpremeditated?”

  Something blew up inside me, and I sprang to my feet with smarting eyes that blurred out all the faces before me. “You don’t think I wanted to kill her, do you!” I shouted in the direction I’d last seen his face a moment ago. “That much I’ll never admit! How could I want to kill her, damn you, when she was the only thing I had!” And I flopped back in the chair again and brushed my sleeve across my face.

  A few minutes later I was out of the box, back where I always sat. I can’t remember if he asked me any more questions after that or not. The deepening fog that had begun to settle over me from that point on didn’t lift any more. All I knew was, she was gone! gone! gone! Why did they keep this up, months afterward, week in and week out? Why didn’t they let me go too!

  Maxine came up to me for a minute when I was being led out that day. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done?” I forced my mind to come back to where I was standing, looking at her. “Wade, if they do this thing to you, I want to go too.”

  I felt my mouth smiling the way I told it to, and said to her: “Isn’t one of us being here better than none of us being here?”

  And I was even going to reach out and touch her on the face to try to make her feel better, but while I was thinking about it, she and the courtroom moved slowly away and I discovered I was back in the cell again holding a thick mug of milk and coffee to my mouth. So I knew I couldn’t do it any more because she was no longer with me.

  The next day, I think it was, they both summed up their cases — Westman and Berenson — so I knew it must at last be about over. Oh, God, I was sick of having loved her, of having killed her or not killed her, of having known her at all! I wanted the nothingness that was coming to come even quicker — when there would be no Bernice, no Wade, no New York.

  Right after those thirteen that had been there all along went out, I was taken out too. And when I was brought in again, they filed in too. And when the one on the end stood up, I cared less than any one in the room what he was going to say. Then the word “Guilty” came floating toward me like a golden balloon in the air, the reward for all I had been through.

  And it grew dark, and it grew light again, and it grew dark and light again. Maybe six times, or maybe sixteen times or maybe sixty. And they kept bringing me back to that place, and bringing me back to that place, and bringing me back to that place. And the last time they brought me back, the judge spoke for a long time, and ended up by saying, “and may God have mercy on your soul.” Then I heard a loud cry in a corner of the room, and turned that way, and saw Maxine lying on the floor. And while the world rolled on without her, I wondered if she had died then or was still living. But some day soon, soon now, the world won’t have to wonder that about me.