But a hole that deep takes a lot of filling up. Even sales like that couldn’t do it, and I won’t tell you how much I still owe. To make it worse, now that I have one big property, my creditors, people who for years just let things slide along, now suddenly want to take over. I can’t let them, Ellie—not now, not at my age, not with real freedom, real solvency, right in my grasp for the very last time. All I need is one more big seller, and you’ve got it there for me, and you won’t let me have it. Ellie, I beg you, on my knees I beg you, finish the book!
Brill.
I hate pink, thought deMarcopolo with sudden fury. He controlled the hand which wanted to crush the pink sheet and read—
I have said all I can say. I enclose a copy of it. Read it again.
E.
A telegram—its porous yellow startled him like an explosion.
ONLY TEN DAYS TO CONTRACT TIME FOR HEAVENS SAKE ELLIE AT LEAST LET ME SEE YOU
BRILL MaCIVER
And then, the shortest pink carbon of all—
Read it again.
E.
DeMarcopolo picked up the next one, Office of the Publisher, squinted at it, then set the box down on the floor and stood up. He moved to the window, leaned into the light and spelled out the writing slowly, his lips moving. It was scratched and scrawled, the paper crumpled, speckled with ink-flecks where the pen had dug in and splattered.
I must be crazy, and I wouldn’t wonder. Nothing seems real—you, soft little you, holding out like that for such a thing, I listening to it. No money, no business in the world, is worth a thing like this, I keep telling myself, but I know I’m going to do it. Try
Down at the bottom of the memo sheet was a wavery series of scrawls which at first seemed like the marks one might make to try out a new pen—a letter or two, a series of loops and zigzags. But as he stared at it, it became writing. As nearly as he could make it out, it read—
I did, and he didn’t know why. My blood damns you ellie.
Lance deMarcopolo turned like a sleepwalker and slowly put the crumpled memo down on the pile of papers he had already gone through. He stood still, swaying slightly, then moved unsteadily toward the corner where the telephone squatted on the floor, like a damsel in a hoopskirt. He picked it up, held the receiver to his ear. It was still connected. He dialed carefully. A cheerful female voice said, “Post-Herald.”
“Get me Joe Birns … Joe? Lance here.”
“Hi, y’old bibliophile! Don’t tell me you’re getting’ cold feet, old man. Call the whole thing off and give your old pal a scoop.”
“Knock it off, Joe.”
“Hey! ’Sa matter, Lance?”
“Joe, you can find things out without anybody knowing who’s asking.”
“Shucks, Lance, sure. What’s—”
“Brill—MacIver Brill—I want to know what happened to him.”
“Brill? He’s dead.”
“I know, I know.” It seemed, somehow, hard to breathe. “I mean, I want to know how he died. And somebody else too—hold on.” He put the phone down on the floor and walked back to the box. He pawed through the papers for a moment, then returned to the phone. “Joe?”
“Yuh?”
“Somebody called Hobart Hennigar. I think he’s dead too.”
“Hobart Hennigar,” murmured Joe like a man taking notes. “Who dat?”
“That’s what I want to know. Call me back, will you Joe—fast?” He read the number off the telephone.
“Sure Lance. Hey Lance, are you—is there anything …?”
“Yes, Joe—find me that information.” Lance hung up.
He looked vaguely about the room, everywhere but at the box. Yet, ultimately, he went back to it, inevitably drawn. Slowly, he sat down and picked it up, still not looking at it. His hands found the unread portion and slid over it like a blind man’s. At last he lowered his eyes and looked.
It was only manuscript:
… and threw on the gold hostess gown. When the old man opened the door she stood like a flame, eyes like coals, hair afire in the golden morning. “Maserac, Maserac, he’s killed me!”
And she told him, told him all of it, each syllable torn from her, agonized yet strangely eager, for each syllable brought her closer to the comfort she knew that her dear friend would somehow have for her. And, when at last she had finished, she ran to him, blind with tears, and hid in his arms.
“My dear, my poor little bird,” said Maserac. His arms closed around her. “Try to forget, Furilla. Tonight—tomorrow—this will be a world in which Harald does not exist.” He put her firmly from him, looked for a long time into her eyes, then slowly turned to the door.
“Maserac, Maserac, what are you going to do?”
“Do?” He smiled gently. “Surely there is only one thing to do. How could there be a choice?”
He left her.
In the morning, they found Harald’s tattered body slumped in his cabin. And Maserac, dear Maserac—his fury had crushed, not only Harald, but his own great heart, his dear, dear heart. He lay in an open field, his slack hand still on the horsewhip, his unseeing eyes turned to the sunrise, and Furilla knew that her name lay silent on his dead lips.
“Yeah,” whispered deMarcopolo. The sound was like sighing. “That was the way the thing came out in the book.”
Everything came out for Furilla. All the world loved Furilla, because things always happened the way they should for Furilla.
“Yeah,” he said again, still in a whisper.
Furilla, he reflected, never did anything to make things come her way. She did it just by being soft little, sweet little, innocent little Furilla—being Furilla beyond all flexibility, beyond all belief.
The phone rang.
“Yes, Joe.”
Joe said, “I don’t know just what details you want about Brill. There’s a good deal that wasn’t in the papers, though. He went on a wing-ding and disappeared for two days. They shoveled him up out of a doorway down in the waterfront district. He was full of white lightning, but whether that killed him or his pump was due to quit anyhow is a toss-up. That what you wanted?”
“Close. What about the other one?”
“Took a little digging. Now Hennigar—Hobart Hennigar, thirty-seven, instructor in English lit and creative writing at some Eastern college, thrown out three years ago for making a pass at a housemaid. Fast talker, good looker, fairly harmless. One of these literate bums. Knocked around, one job to another, wound up out at the lake, caretaker on a big estate. Ties in with MacIver, in a way, Lance—MacIver had a place out there too, little lodge. Used to hole up there once in a while.”
“Was he out there during his drunk?”
“If he was, no one could prove it. Off season, pretty lonesome out there. Anyway, this Hennigar got himself plugged through the head. Police report says it was a twenty-five target-type bullet.”
“Fight?”
“Na! Back of the head, from a window in his cabin. He never knew what hit him, not a clue. Lance—”
“Mm?”
“You got a lead on that killing?”
DeMarcopolo looked slowly around the room. The telephone said, “Lance?” and he held it away from him and looked at it as if he had never seen it before.
Then he brought it back and said, “No, I haven’t got a lead on that killing. Joe, do something for me?”
“Shucks.”
“You covering that thing of mine?”
“Statement at the airport, kissin’ picture? Couldn’t keep me away.”
“I—won’t be there,” said deMarcopolo. “Tell her for me, will you?”
“Lance! What’s hap—”
“Thanks, Joe. ’Bye.” He hung up very quietly.
After a time he crossed to the small pile of things by the door and picked up the note she had left him and his picture. He tore up the note and took out the picture and tore it in two. He folded the frame over the torn paper and tossed it over the string marked THROW OUT. That left the new box marked
WIP staring at him.
He recoiled from it with horror and went on out. Shutting the door, he said conversationally, “How innocent can you get?” He said it to MacIver, to Hennigar, to Eloise Michaud and to Lancelot deMarcopolo. But nobody had an answer for him.
And Now the News …
THE MAN’S NAME WAS MACLYLE, which by looking at you can tell wasn’t his real name, but let’s say this is fiction, shall we? MacLyle had a good job in—well—a soap concern. He worked hard and made good money and got married to a girl called Esther. He bought a house in the suburbs and after it was paid for he rented it to some people and bought a home a little farther out and a second car and a freezer and a power mower and a book on landscaping, and settled down to the worthy task of giving his kids all the things he never had.
He had habits and he had hobbies, like everybody else, and (like everybody else) his were a little different from anybody’s. The one that annoyed his wife the most, until she got used to it, was the news habit, or maybe hobby. MacLyle read a morning paper on the 8:14 and an evening paper on the 6:10, and the local paper his suburb used for its lost dogs and auction sales took up forty after-dinner minutes. And when he read a paper he read it, he didn’t mess with it. He read Page 1 first and Page 2 next, and so on all the way through. He didn’t care too much for books but he respected them in a mystical sort of way, and he used to say a newspaper was a kind of book, and so would raise particular hell if a section was missing or in upside down, or if the pages were out of line. He also heard the news on the radio. There were three stations in town with hourly broadcasts, one on the hour, one on the half-hour, and one five minutes before the hour, and he was usually able to catch them all. During these five-minute periods he would look you right in the eye while you talked to him and you’d swear he was listening to you, but he wasn’t. This was a particular trial to his wife, but only for five years or so. Then she stopped trying to be heard while the radio talked about floods and murders and scandal and suicide. Five more years, and she went back to talking right through the broadcasts, but by the time people are married ten years, things like that don’t matter; they talk in code anyway, and nine-tenths of their speech can be picked up anytime like ticker-tape. He also caught the 7:30 news on Channel 2 and the 7:45 news on Channel 4 on television.
Now it might be imagined from all this that MacLyle was a crotchety character with fixed habits and a neurotic neatness, but this was far from the case. MacLyle was basically a reasonable guy who loved his wife and children and liked his work and pretty much enjoyed being alive. He laughed easily and talked well and paid his bills. He justified his preoccupation with the news in a number of ways. He would quote Donne: “… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind …” which is pretty solid stuff and hard to argue down. He would point out that he made his trains and his trains made him punctual, but that because of them he saw the same faces at the same time day after endless day, before, during, and after he rode those trains, so that his immediate world was pretty circumscribed, and only a constant awareness of what was happening all over the earth kept him conscious of the fact that he lived in a bigger place than a thin straight universe with his house at one end, his office at the other, and a railway track in between.
It’s hard to say just when MacLyle started to go to pieces, or even why, though it obviously had something to do with all that news he exposed himself to. He began to react, very slightly at first; that is, you could tell he was listening. He’d shh! you, and if you tried to finish what you were saying he’d run and stick his head in the speaker grille. His wife and kids learned to shut up when the news came on, five minutes before the hour until five after (with MacLyle switching stations) and every hour on the half-hour, and from 7:30 to 8:00 for the TV, and during the forty minutes it took him to read the local paper. He was not so obvious about it when he read his paper, because all he did was freeze over the pages like a catatonic, gripping the top corners until the sheets shivered, knotting his jaw and breathing from his nostrils with a strangled whistle.
Naturally all this was a weight on his wife Esther, who tried her best to reason with him. At first he answered her, saying mildly that a man has to keep in touch, you know; but very quickly he stopped responding altogether, giving her the treatment a practiced suburbanite gets so expert in, as when someone mentions a lawnmower just too damn early on Sunday morning. You don’t say yes and you don’t say no, you don’t even grunt, and you don’t move your head or even your eyebrows. After a while your interlocutor goes away. Pretty soon you don’t hear these ill-timed annoyances any more than you appear to.
It needs to be said again here that MacLyle was, outside his peculiarity, a friendly and easy-going character. He liked people and invited them and visited them, and he was one of those adults who can really listen to a first-grade child’s interminable adventures and really care. He never forgot things like the slow leak in the spare tire or antifreeze or anniversaries, and he always got the storm windows up in time, but he didn’t rub anyone’s nose in his reliability. The first thing in his whole life he didn’t take as a matter of course was this news thing that started so small and grew so quickly.
So after a few weeks of it his wife took the bull by the horns and spent the afternoon hamstringing every receiver in the house. There were three radios and two TV sets, and she didn’t understand the first thing about them, but she had a good head and she went to work with a will and the can-opening limb of a pocket knife. From each receiver she removed one tube, and one at a time, so as not to get them mixed up, she carried them into the kitchen and meticulously banged their bases against the edge of the sink, being careful to crack no glass and bend no pins, until she could see the guts of the tube rolling around loose inside. Then she replaced them and got the back panels on the sets again.
MacLyle came home and put the car away and kissed her and turned on the living room radio and then went to hang up his hat. When he returned the radio should have been warmed up but it wasn’t. He twisted the knobs a while and bumped it and rocked it back and forth a little, grunting, and then noticed the time. He began to feel a little frantic, and raced back to the kitchen and turned on the little ivory radio on the shelf. It warmed up quickly and cheerfully and gave him a clear 60-cycle hum, but that was all. He behaved badly from then on, roaring out the information that the sets didn’t work, either of them, as if that wasn’t pretty evident by that time, and flew upstairs to the boys’ room, waking them explosively. He turned on their radio and got another 60-cycle note, this time with a shattering microphonic when he rapped the case, which he did four times, whereupon the set went dead altogether.
Esther had planned the thing up to this point, but no further, which was the way her mind worked. She figured she could handle it, but she figured wrong. MacLyle came downstairs like a pallbearer, and he was silent and shaken until 7:30, time for the news on TV. The living room set wouldn’t peep, so up he went to the boys’ room again, waking them just as they were nodding off again, and this time the little guy started to cry. MacLyle didn’t care. When he found out there was no picture on the set, he almost started to cry too, but then he heard the sound come in. A TV set has an awful lot of tubes in it and Esther didn’t know audio from video. MacLyle sat down in front of the dark screen and listened to the news. “Everything seemed to be under control in the riot-ridden border country in India,” said the TV set. Crowd noises and a background of Beethoven’s “Turkish March.” “And then—” Cut music. Crowd noise up: gabble-wurra and a scream. Announcer over: “Six hours later, this was the scene.” Dead silence, going on so long that MacLyle reached out and thumped the TV set with the heel of his hand. Then, slow swell, Ketelbey’s “In a Monastery Garden.” “On a more cheerful note, here are the six finalists in the Miss Continuum contest.” Background music, “Blue Room,” interminably, interrupted only once, when the announcer said through a childish chuckle, “… and she meant it!” MacLyle pounded himself on the
temples. The little guy continued to sob. Esther stood at the foot of the stairs wringing her hands. It went on for thirty minutes like this. All MacLyle said when he came downstairs was that he wanted the paper—that would be the local one. So Esther faced the great unknown and told him frankly she hadn’t ordered it and wouldn’t again, which of course led to a full and righteous confession of her activities of the afternoon.
Only a woman married better than fourteen years can know a man well enough to handle him so badly. She was aware that she was wrong but that was quite overridden by the fact that she was logical. It would not be logical to continue her patience, so patience was at an end. “That which offendeth thee, cast it out, yea, even thine eye and thy right hand.” She realized too late that the news was so inextricably part of her husband that in casting it out she cast him out too. And out he went, while whitely she listened to the rumble of the garage door, the car door speaking its sharp syllables, clear as Exit in a play script; the keen of a starter, the mourn of a motor. She said she was glad and went in the kitchen and tipped the useless ivory radio off the shelf and retired, weeping.
And yet, because true life offers few clean cuts, she saw him once more. At seven minutes to 3:00 in the morning she became aware of faint music from somewhere; unaccountably it frightened her, and she tiptoed about the house looking for it. It wasn’t in the house, so she pulled on MacLyle’s trench coat and crept down the steps into the garage. And there, just outside in the driveway, where steel beams couldn’t interfere with radio reception, the car stood where it had been all along, and MacLyle was in the driver’s seat dozing over the wheel. The music came from the car radio. She drew the coat tighter around her and went to the car and opened the door and spoke his name. At just that moment the radio said “… and now the news” and MacLyle sat bolt upright and shh’d furiously. She fell back and stood a moment in a strange transition from unconditional surrender to total defeat. Then he shut the car door and bent forward, his hand on the volume control, and she went back into the house.
And Now the News Page 27