by Paul Gallico
'Oh yes,' broke in Jane Shelby, 'I thought so.'
'Yes, ma'am,' Rogo agreed, 'that's what you said. Her stage name was Linda Lane, but her right one was Cosasko. Her old man was a bum and a drunk and her mother worked both sides of the street. They come from Sandusky, Ohio. When she was eleven, her father broke her in. They never had a dime except for what the old woman made on her back. When she was fourteen, the kids on the block dragged her down behind the signboard on a vacant lot and took turns. At sixteen she was put on the street with the old lady pimping for her.' He added, 'You never heard no story like that before, I guess.'
No one said anything. They were thinking of the doll figure with the spear through her heart.
'But she had guts. She wasn't going to be like them. She ran away to L.A. and got a job as a car hop. She was getting real pretty by then. She had the figure and the legs in them short skirts. Some bum gave her the one about getting her in pictures, knocked her up and blew. She was lucky. She miscarried. Then she wasn't so lucky. She got in with a bad bunch around Hollywood and Vine. When they stole some big daddy's Caddie, she was in the car with the thief when they made the collar. She got eighteen months, with four off for good behaviour. When she came out she changed her name to Linda Lane, signed up with Central Casting and did some extra work. Then she got a break. Or maybe it wasn't. An assistant director picked her up out of the mob and set her up in an apartment in the Garden of Allah.'
They were remembering Linda now, the pouting lips, the china blue eyes, the ridiculous curls piled up on to her head and the bristling aggressiveness.
Rogo went on, but his voice was again becoming the flat monotone of the police officer giving a charge. 'So this assistant director becomes a director and he makes Linda a starlet, see? They've got all these kids on the lot they use for publicity, or dressing up a scene and they're supposed to become stars someday, but most of 'em wind up in the ash can. So then one day, drunk, driving home by himself to wifey, this director wraps his Thunderbird around a lamppost. Linda moves on to a nuts and bolts manufacturer who's had his eye on her. But now the publicity department has got her fixed up with a fake family and fake home town and Linda Lane is the girl next door. She might have made it maybe if she'd let it go at that, but she was crazy to go on the stage. They'd taught her to sing and dance a little. This nuts and bolts guy buys her into a musical that is being put on on Broadway, called Hello Sailor . Hello Sailor is the bomb of all time and the critics crucify Linda. The nuts and bolts guy is yellow and takes a powder back to L.A. I'm around to pick up the pieces.'
Manny Rosen corroborated, 'I remember your coming into the store and saying you were crazy about this kid.'
Muller asked, 'Did you know all this about her?'
Rogo's voice became even flatter. He replied, 'See, when somebody from out of town comes into our district, say like in show business, we check up a little on the background in case they got connections and there's any trouble later, or some hood tries to move in and we can put the fire out before it gets going. The L.A. Detective Bureau lets us have a look at the book.'
Martin said, 'Ouch!'
Nonnie said, 'I did hate her, but I wish she was back again with us now.'
Jane asserted, 'But you never let her know that you knew, did you?'
Rogo replied, 'What for? It made her happy to think I didn't. It wasn't easy for her at any time, always afraid she'd run into someone from the coast who'd know she'd been in stir. It puts a chip on your shoulder, don't it?'
The question remained hanging in the stifling air. Susan Shelby was reviewing in her mind: Incest, rape, whoring, thieving, failure and death. Was that what life was like outside the boundaries within which she had been sheltered? And how secure were these now, since her mother had opened the closet door? She saw Linda impaled again and thought that in a way, too, a spear had been driven through her own person. She still did not want to die.
It was growihg hotter. Drawing a full breath no longer seemed to satisfy the lungs. And from one of them there in the dark, breathing was audibly laboured. Martin turned on his lantern for an instant. It was Belle Rosen. Her husband was sitting with his back against the side of the tunnel with her head pillowed in his lap. Even by the yellowish rays of the fading battery he could see that her skin had turned the shade of clay. He thought she looked like one of those grotesque modern sculptures one kept seeing in the papers. He shut off the light and speculated upon how much time had passed since they had reached the top. He wondered, too, about the air supply. There was no way of knowing whether what they were breathing was part of the whole that was keeping the ship from sinking, or whether they were in a little pocket trapped in the stern, which was on the verge of giving out.
No one seemed disposed to further talk when Rogo had finished. Martin felt he ought to keep them going by distracting them down to the last moment. He began, 'You said you thought we were all very important, Miss Kinsale, what about you?'
They heard movement from the quarter where she had settled herself close to Jane Shelby. 'Oh,' came her reply, 'I meant all of you. I'm not at all important.' And after a moment's hesitation, 'Though actually, ours is a very good family. My mother's sister married a Brigadier on Alexander's staff. He was one of the famous Desert Rats in Cyprus, Brigadier Catesby. I'm sure you've heard of him. He was one of the Lincolnshire Catesbys.'
Muller thought to himself: I hope Rogo is impressed , and then wondered why she had placed the redoubtable Brigadier in Cyprus if he had been a Desert Rat, instead of with Montgomery at Alamein.
'But our side come from Norfolk,' Miss Kinsale continued, 'near Thetford. Such a beautiful property. I remember it from my childhood, the gardens and the servants and our old nanny. She must be almost eighty now. There were two iron stags on the gateposts, and our head gardener used to make up stories about them. Oh, and then the pheasants. So beautiful. The Earl of Waldringham, who lived near by, used to have permission to shoot over our property.'
'Oh,' said Muller, 'I know it. That must have been Telford House. Bumbles Waldringham was at Harvard with me and I went to stay with them at Greatgreys whenever I was in England. I remember the iron stags because I passed the place in the car on the way to Bumbles'.'
They could hear Miss Kinsale's long drawn out exhalation before she spoke again. 'I think Norfolk is such a beautiful county, though Lincolnshire is lovely too; the Brigadier would often ask us there. Dahlias were his hobby. . . .'
Something niggled at Muller's mind and he spoke before he thought, 'Why, then you must be a Cokington.'
Miss Kinsale said, 'A what?'
'One of the Cokingtons of Norfolk. Old family. Telford House was one of their places in the country.'
Then he wished he had never opened his mouth. What was a Cokington doing clerking in a bank in a suburb like Camberley? The wait for her reply seemed endless. He tried to think of some way to change the subject.
Miss Kinsale finally spoke, 'Well, you know, relations .' Then she added, 'Of course, things change so. Death duties, and things. But I'm quite happy in my little -- in our little property in Frimley and from my window I can see a corner of Sandhurst -- to keep my memory of Gerald alive. He was my fiancé.'
Muller had a compulsive feeling of déjŕ vu. With people like Miss Kinsale there was always that young dream fiancé killed in the war. It was either at the very beginning or just in the last days before peace was declared.
The lines followed almost as he might have imagined them:
'Gerald passed out from there. Graduated, I suppose you Americans would say, and was killed at Nijmegen. We used to go walking together down to Frimley and back in the evenings.'
Nonnie said, 'Oh dear, I'm so sorry.'
The spinster sighed, 'First Gerald and now Frank. It's almost too much to bear.'
It was only in Muller that the coupling of the two names set up a faint alarm bell. What on earth could she have meant by it? A Gerald was possible, but Frank Scott? And what was all that hoc
us-pocus about Telford House? Of course, she might have been one of those distant cousins who sometimes arrive for a few days' visit and then are never seen there again.
Rosen asked suddenly, 'What kind of a minister was this fellow anyway? First he prays and then he curses God, like in the New Testament Christ gives it to the fig tree.'
Martin said, 'Well, for one thing he believed in action.'
'But did he really believe in God?' Muller queried and then added, 'Does anybody? Actually?'
'Oh yes,' breathed Miss Kinsale, 'I do. With my heart and soul. There is God watching over us. He sent Dr Scott to give his life so that we might be saved.'
Muller thought he felt the ship quiver beneath him again and added to himself, 'Or so that He might amuse Himself playing cat and mouse until He got ready to swallow us.'
Rogo said bitterly, 'What did Linda give her life for? What kind of a life and death did she get?'
Miss Kinsale reprimanded, 'Oh, Mr Rogo! Aren't you a Catholic? Don't you go to Mass?'
'Yeah. I was brought up one. But it don't answer about Linda or what was done to her. What if Scott was sent to get her knocked off? If we hadn't followed him, she'd be alive still.'
'Or we'd all be dead,' Muller concluded.
Nonnie said, 'I don't know what I believe, but I say my prayers every night.'
Susan added, 'I do, too.' But her mother said, 'I haven't said mine in years.'
Muller declared, 'I'm an agnostic. You're a good Baptist, Martin, what exactly do you believe?'
Martin cleared his dry throat. He was glad that they had hit upon a subject that seemed to get them all going again. He replied, 'Not a good Baptist, just a scared one. All my old man and our preachers ever put into me was the fear of God. Now my son's never been to church in his life. I never made him and he never went. He's all right. I never scared him like my folks scared me.'
' You're a churchgoer, aren't you, Mrs Shelby?' said Miss Kinsale.
'Yes,' Jane replied, 'we go regularly when we're at home. But I'm afraid it's strictly social.'
Shelby said, 'Jane, how can you?'
She turned on him, 'You know it's so! I'm afraid I'm on Mr Rogo's side: Why? Why? Why?'
Caught up in their own fears, fatigue and discomforts they had forgotten that her son was missing. She savaged her husband with, 'What goes on inside you when you sit up straight and sanctimonious on the snob side of the aisle in St Matthews? What do you expect when you say, "My God" or "God help me"? A breakdown service?'
Shelby's answer was so lame that Muller felt a sudden compassion for him. He was little-boy-lost. 'I don't know. I guess maybe I never thought about it.'
Manny Rosen said, 'If there wasn't our God, there wouldn't be a Jew alive today.'
Martin wanted to say, 'If there is, he sure managed to thin you out a lot,' but refrained. To him the Jewish God was a policeman quite different from the Baptist God, with a different set of rules for punishing. Rosen's God was as remote to him as the Manitou of a Red Indian, or the Allah of the Arabs. He, himself, was going to catch it in the neck for adultery and no mistake. But Rosen would hear the roll of thunder if he ate a ham sandwich. Anyway, in these days, God was not the Jew's problem any more. It was their capacity to irritate people.
'Papa,' Belle Rosen said, 'hold my hand. I ain't feeling so good.'
Rogo's angry voice burst out of his angry thoughts. 'Your God, my God, what's He got against us; what's He got against me? What have I done? Why doesn't He act like God? Sure I was a louse when I was a kid, but I took plenty punishment. We went to Mass and confession, Linda and me, regular. Okay, I killed some guys, but they were rats. What about all the guys who get killed in wars? The fellers that killed them come home with medals and are heroes. What did He have to trun down Linda like that for to die like an animal? She never done nothing to anybody, but He had it in for her from the word go.'
Muller thought to himself: Why can't people think clearly when they get God on the brain? If Linda hadn't disobeyed Scott, she'd still be with us and bitching at him. But if I told Rogo that, he'd hit me. Aloud he said, 'What I would like to know is which God image was in Scott's mind: Gran'daddy in the sky? Or a sort of glorified coach sending him out on to the field to win the big game?'
When no one replied he continued, 'I am amongst the mystified. When I call myself an agnostic, I merely mean that unlike most Christians I do not consider myself the centre of a Universe conducted on wholly inexplicable lines, by a Father and Son. The animistic Gods who dwelt in trees, stones, brooks and deep places in the forest were much more attractive, as were the Pagan Gods of the Greeks or the politically practical Gods of the Romans. When modern man finally settled upon a Creator made into his own image, he endowed Him with most of his own worst characteristics: vain, vengeful, cruel, capricious, capable either of being bribed with trinkets or conned by flattery. There must be something somewhat more impressive behind the galaxies.'
'How unhappy you must be, Mr Muller,' Miss Kinsale said.
Muller gave way to a momentary flash of irritation. He said, 'The stars don't know their names and I doubt very much whether God even knows what He is like.'
Miss Kinsale looked shocked and Nonnie bewildered. The latter said, 'But the stars have names, haven't they?'
Muller did not reply and left Nonnie vaguely disturbed. Her God happened to like being sung to loudly on Sundays, but there was nothing wrong in that, and perhaps when she introduced Muller to Him in their little church at Fareham Cross just outside Bristol, he might come to feel as comfortable as she. This was followed by a moment of panic. Muller, man of the world, gent, standing outside Fareham Cross Parish Church with Mum and Dad, being patronized by Mr Stopworth, the Vicar. Mr Stopworth was patronizing. Even Dad said so. Why was this man wanting to marry her? Would she be able to keep him happy? In a moment's agony of doubt she wished that the ship had gone down while they were coupled as one.
Muller felt the slight shudder that had run through her and pulled her closer to his side and placed an arm about her shoulder. He said, 'If you ask me, Scott had his head turned by all that yelling and cheering and publicity.'
'If you ask me,' Rogo said, 'Scott was a faggot.'
'A what?' The query was torn simultaneously from Shelby and Martin.
'A panzola! Queer as a coot. Linda tried to kid herself he had a letch for her, but when she went for his pants in the dark, he yelled bloody murder. Look, nobody's kiddin' anybody any more. Don't you think I know what went on down there in that engine room, when he threatened to break her arm. He didn't like dames. Scared stiff of them. He could hide out behind that turned-around collar and nobody would ever suspect, would they? A lot of those tough, bust-'em-up guys, whether they're hoods, or football players are half-ass panzolas only they don't know it. The more scared they are of women the more they throw their weight around and make with the hairy chest. Scott was one of 'em.'
'Oh no!' The exclamation came from Miss Kinsale, but breathed with such horror that for a moment it seemed to them that another person had spoken. 'Oh no!' she repeated. 'You mustn't say such a thing, Mr Rogo. He wasn't at all like that. Not at all.'
They were all stunned to silence by the intensity of her denial until Rogo said, 'Excuse me, ma'am, I wasn't meaning to give any offence. I was only saying . . .'
'Anyway, he couldn't have been,' Miss Kinsale then continued as though he had not spoken. 'You see, I know . I . . . we were going to be married. He was going to send for me to come over to the United States.'
The shock waves sent out by her statement reacted differently upon all of them. Martin controlled a sudden desire to laugh until he remembered the animal howl of pain that had come from the mousy little spinster at Scott's suicide. Shelby thought: God, have I been floating upside-down throughout this whole voyage? Maybe all my life?
Miss Kinsale had been sitting up close to the Shelbys. Now she leaned down to whisper to Jane. She said, 'Since we are going to die, I can tell you.' Her sibilation dropp
ed lower, 'We were intimate during the voyage.'
Muller heard it and was moved once more to compassion, as was Jane, but her emotion was mingled with anger.
'Oh, my dear,' she said and could bring herself to do no more than repeat it and Miss Kinsale was not asking for pity. Inwardly she was raging against the dead clergyman: how dared he amuse himself during the voyage with this poor, cast-off-by-life and passed-by woman? What was he accomplishing by making an outrageous offer of marriage to a woman old enough to be his mother? Was that it then, that he was the little games-playing boy who never grew up and wanted his mummy? Did he think it was a gesture of charity to let her once warm her cold hands at the fires of love? Or had he been one of those monstrous psychopaths who under the guise of religion sneak under a woman's skirts like an incubus to bring them personalized contact with the Deity or the Devil? She was glad Miss Kinsale could not see her disgust.
'Oh, Hubie,' Nonnie whispered, 'how awful for her, the poor thing. They were going to be married and she saw him throw himself away.'