by Jill Dawson
And if Pat had replied, if she’d said what she longed to – Why don’t you leave him? You know you hate him. Nearly forty years you’ve been telling me this crap, how much more do I have to take? – what would happen? But she didn’t. Mary sucked all the words out of her. Look, there they were now: fleeing from the typewriter, flitting up to the ceiling, like black flecks from a fire.
The expectation of – what? Her mother’s response. A stinging humiliation, shame, a slap, the buzzing in her ears, the arrival of flickering pains, flickering little movements, the little man. The ache of that time when Pat had thought her mother had left Stanley, for good, when she had believed it would just be them, allowing herself a little surge of hope. Maybe it would be calm between them. Maybe they would have some good times together, as she’d promised. And then her sudden about-turn, the day Mary had dumped Pat at Granny Mae’s in Fort Worth and turned on her heel with a smacking kiss and gone on back to him. Since then, her talk of Stanley felled Pat with a misery and dumbness like no other. Impossible to untangle who was right or wrong, which one of them had committed the greater sin against the other. Childhood constantly reshaped itself and Pat was unable to decide. Sure, he had a violent temper, though he was on a long fuse. But Mary cursed him daily, loved to sneer and turn her face away from anyone who loved her; there was something cruel in her, too. She’d never leave him.
Having her at Bridge Cottage felt contaminating. Pat glanced helplessly at her desk, anguished by the nakedness of her work, the ghastly vulnerability of her words there. Would her mother pick up the pages, glance at them, do that thing she did, reading out a line and mocking it? ‘Such a cruel imagination you have, Patsy . . .’
One time, that night after she’d thrown Stanley’s dinner in the sink when he’d come home later – perhaps as little as ten minutes later – than they’d agreed. And in her fury Mary had scooped up everything else around to throw in the garbage – his tobacco, his letters, his magazines – and her haul had included two notebooks of Pat’s. The inclusion was undiscovered until it was too late: the notebooks were soggy with coffee grounds, beyond rescue. Mary had screamed at her when Pat mentioned the notebooks; all very well for Patsy to express herself all over the goddamn place, didn’t she care about her?
If it had been affairs, other women, drink, other men even . . . But no. For Mother it revolved around how bone idle Stanley was: the shelf that needed fixing; the back door that still squeaked after she’d told him a hundred times, a million minor misdemeanours, like the kind she despised in her daughter too. She just seemed to enjoy having something to beef about. She thrived on it. She absolutely shone, twitched with a feral excitement once she started about ‘that damn fool husband of mine’. Everything about Stanley was despicable to her. She was never happier than when she was baiting him and then enjoying the full battle that ensued.
‘That man is a goddamn pig!’ she’d say, showing Patsy the hairs he’d left in the basin after a shave, how he hadn’t rinsed them down.
And while she spoke of him Pat would think of all the things she would like to do to him. How they would get rid of him, she and Mother together, be left alone, in peace, just the two of them. Then Mary would shift, a volte-face. It usually happened if Pat uttered a word, if she tried to appease her by agreeing with her. Mary would come over all coy and say, ‘Of course, you can’t help that you have no i-de-a what a woman feels for a husband. You know, I’ve always preferred men myself. You’re so clearly going to be playing for the other side, Pats,’ and somehow, then, rather pleased with this observation, Stanley would begin his transformation in her eyes, from shiftless ne’er-do-well to devoted stepfather and tireless champion of his delinquent stepdaughter . . .
‘Well, I guess I’m luckier than some women because I have a husband I really adore, who took on this little one as if she was his own,’ she’d say to anyone in the vicinity, as if the rest of her words had never been spoken.
And for the first time – was it the first time, really, perhaps the first time she remembered? – Pat snapped.
‘Stanley! I happen to know you’re never going to leave him – and what’s the idea of boring me with this crap?’
And Mary was up, leaping from the sofa, knocking her wine glass over, instantly in tears.
‘You’re so cruel. I can’t believe it! You always were mean, selfish, wicked – that man gave you everything, he took you on as if you were his own.’ She took a little kick at the glass, tried to move it away from her.
Pat unclenched her fists and took a step back. She was thinking of nothing, nothing at all, trying to keep her mind as blank as a sheet of paper. But onto it floated a picture of Sam as she had been in Pat’s imagination – face down, dark hair fanning out, the white upturned heels of her feet on the sofa. And a feeling, a seizing feeling, of such piercing, cork-screwing pain arrived that it left her reeling. A startling, clear thought: Sam is not dead. But I’ve killed her.
‘Cuckoo, you are! Nuts! Oh, yes, your little friends have told me all about you. The things you’ve been saying. You shoulda been locked up years ago and I’ve a mind to organise it while I’m here. You’ve finally lost the plot. You have so many shameful little secrets – you’re seething with them. Your own friends – quite frankly, they’re afraid for your sanity. Betty says she heard you on some radio programme and, holy crap, you think you’re Dostoesvky!’ She was spitting out her words now, in her old style, and she’d stayed on her feet, her head lowered, the way an animal – a bull – drops its head before a charge.
‘I haven’t been well.’
And then Mary was launching herself at Pat, grimacing, baring her teeth like a dog, screwing up her nose – it would have been funny if it wasn’t so familiar to Pat and blood-curdling – and she was reaching for the nearest thing to her on the sofa and snatching at one of the coat-hangers and she’s poking it at Pat, trying to bat her head with it, or poke her eye out with it, and Pat screaming, ‘Those letters made my life hell’ (or one of them is screaming, someone is screaming) because neither woman hears the bike arrive or the kitchen door open but here is Ronnie – suddenly Ronnie – and he’s wedging himself between them and he’s saying, ‘Calm down, calm down,’ and all Pat feels is the stinging, piercing blows from Mary on her shoulder, her cheek, the metal jabbing, aiming for her eyes, and some blood above one eye where Mary hits her mark. Pat’s hands fly up to her face and, despite the fear and the foolishness, there might be a place where she’s enjoying it, where a voice inside her is saying: Why don’t you get rid of me like you always meant to and put us both out of our misery? Bring it on, Mother, I’ve nothing left. Why don’t you go out and finish the job?
So, it turns out it was Ronnie who called the doctor, and it was the sedation that Dr Lynn – a small, kindly man, with round glasses and strands of hair drifting from his bald patch – the injection he gave Pat and drugs that he prescribed that wiped out most of the days that followed, the rest of Mother’s visit. Amusing to Pat to think that she was the one who had to be sedated. Mother was assumed to be – by the time Dr Lynn arrived – in perfect control of herself; she was the one considered to be sane. Pat was ranting, Ronnie told her, later. Some very queer, troubled things about ‘murdering’ Gerald, and Sam too. Ronnie thought Gerald’s suicide had affected Pat more than anyone had realised and he kept reassuring her: ‘Sam’s not dead, darling.’ Dr Lynn said Pat had been hitting the whisky too hard for too long. He’d like to see her ‘exercise some restraint’. The three of them put Pat to bed and, as Ronnie told her, Mary nursed her for the rest of that week before returning to Fort Worth. The only signs that she had been there are her letter, innocent, handwritten, not a letter from Brother Death after all, the bent coat-hanger and the snails relocated outside.
It seems I confessed, then, but was not believed, Pat thought.
Mary never knew that Pat had met up with her real father when she was seventeen, for dinner. Oh, she knew he’d come to the boarding-house at West Daggett Av
enue, when Pat was twelve, a brief visit, organised by her cousin Dan, their first official meeting and nothing great. So, he came, she saw him, he drank some lemonade on the stoop, he went. This time, five years later, was different.
Pat organised it herself, looking him up in the Yellow Pages: Jay Bernard Plangman. The name Plangman was still on her birth certificate and made her shiver, reading it. Mother and Stanley and Pat lived in New York by then. She had left Fort Worth at six years old, but of course she visited. Matter of fact, she was just visiting Granny Mae in Fort Worth and happened to notice he lived just a block away.
Her father – Pat couldn’t think of him as that and in her mind called him Jay B – was a little surprised to hear from her. Yes, you schmuck, you’ve had years to fix up to see me. She didn’t say that, of course. He suggested they meet in the Stockyards as he had a little business there. What business he had Pat could only guess at, since he was an illustrator, like her mother and Stanley, and teaching art at the Fort Worth public school. But the Stockyards had the bars and the whorehouses; Pat wasn’t naïve.
When he arrived she was sitting in the lobby of the Stockyards Hotel, pretending to read the Fort Worth Star, her thoughts coming in stabs – Look, the great lunk didn’t want to see you, why fool around with him? – as she leafed through the comic section. The fan overhead flicked the smell of horse-dung, cattle urine and tobacco onto the steaming hot street outside towards Leddy’s store, the White Elephant Saloon . . . Through an open door she heard the periodic crack of whips and soft whistles of the ranchers, the tinkling of bells as the longhorns were driven down the bar-lined streets towards the pens. To Pat’s eyes this hotel – Jay B’s suggestion – was a swanky one: six huge fans overhead, giant potted plants, candelabra, red velvet walls, huge Oriental-style lamps painted with birds and flowers, gilded mirrors.
She had a moment to observe him before he saw her. That black, oiled hair and the round glasses. The money-like features. Black moustache. She had always despised moustaches.
And his first remark to her, his opener, was a nod to the newspaper in her lap: ‘Did you read that confession by the Mad Sculptor? That’s some confession, huh?’
He meant the murder of Veronica Gedeon, Vonny. Even the Fort Worth Star had finally caught up with it: the slayer’s confession had mesmerised the nation, and the joy was, the naked photographs of Vonny just kept on coming. In this one, here she was, a nightgown just slipping over one shoulder to expose a breast. ‘She always had a smile for the receptionist; she never “ritzed” the office boy,’ Pat read.
Jay B snapped his fingers at the girl in the wooden reception booth. He asked Pat what she wanted to drink and she said, ‘Lemonade,’ then quickly changed it to ‘Beer.’ She didn’t like beer but guessed it would be what Jay B drank. As he sank down heavily next to her on the leather sofa she could smell that he’d already had a skinful and was feeling his drink. This pleased her. That he had to get drunk to meet his daughter; yes, that felt good.
He leaned over and grabbed the paper off her, read some choice bits out loud. She was shy. This wasn’t the conversation she’d expected to have. She had been hoping to practise her German phrases on Jay B, since his was the German side of the family. She knew he’d been to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and hoped they might discuss art, and perhaps – only if he asked – she might show him some of her drawings, tell him about her dilemma between becoming an artist or a writer. In fact, she had a sketchbook with her, inside a leather satchel, which suddenly felt pretty schoolgirlish. She tucked it a little further under her feet as the beers were brought and the two bottles placed on a round marble table in front of them with a clunk.
Jay B was saying: ‘She’s a honey, isn’t she? A knockout! You read what he did? It took him two long hours to kill her. Imagine that. His hands at her throat for two hours – wheeee. What was the rest of him doing?’
He stared into her eyes. His were dark, goggled behind the round lenses, and – a horrible jolt this – unmistakably familiar. Like hers. Like Pat’s. And she could see he was excited by Veronica, like her, too. She had often wondered about this. If the world is full of pictures of girls specifically arranged to arouse, how come the world expects only half of the population to respond? Wouldn’t it get to the girls, too, in the end?
He was staring at her appraisingly. She put a hand to her bangs and brushed them away from her eyes a little.
‘You got you a boyfriend yet?’ he asked.
‘No.’
Jay B stretched out his legs on the sofa, his eyes skirting the room, his boots the predictable Justins with the pointy toes. It was mainly full of other men – stockmen, railroad workers, ranchers in Stetsons – and the odd girl in a frill-bottomed dress. The fans whirred noisily. She suddenly felt self-conscious in her blue jeans and blouse. But one thing she knew already, she understood, with a sinking despair. Jay B was not looking at her the way a father looks at a daughter.
‘I got better pictures than those,’ he said suddenly. ‘You want to see them?’
He glanced around the room and stood up. She stood up too. This was the moment to run, to give up the fantasy. Jay B was not cultured. He was not going to offer any respite from the little hell that was Mother and Stanley.
Curiosity, fear, devilment, what?
She went with him up the red-lined walls, the soft-carpeted stairs. He had a room in the hotel. That was why he’d suggested it for the meeting place. She went with him to his room. From somewhere came the smell of hickory smoke; food. The room was number twenty-six. She let him close the door. She sat on the bed – a slightly dirty pale blue counterpane – while he showed her some pictures, and he watched her face with a little sweat appearing on his brow. The pictures were lurid, strange and ugly, and there could be no doubt about their purpose, or his. He moved in to kiss her and she allowed it, curious again as to what she might feel. His tongue was very hot, and rather fat. He tasted of beer and sweat and strong tobacco. He put a hand on her breast inside her blouse, his fingers coarse at the ends, and she watched him for a moment, then edged away, as politely as she could, and he said, a little sadly: ‘Doesn’t do it for you, huh?’
She shook her head; didn’t care to pretend. She couldn’t tell him that it was Veronica who did. She couldn’t tell him that she had already lost her virginity to a boy and it had been rather . . . scientific. They moved a little further apart on the bed, and Jay B suggested dinner.
‘You look just like me, Patsy,’ he said, over dinner in Riscky’s steakhouse. ‘Like I would look – if I was a girl.’ They had kapusta soup – Polish – at a bar and then steaks, with the curved horns of an enormous longhorn steer guarding the doorway. She liked the stockyard smells and flavours and felt at home there. She drank J&B Scotch for the first time until the room swam (it seemed to have his name on it: the red letters on the yellow background for ever spelled Jay B to her) and he leaned in and said, ‘God’s gifted you with some good looks – it’s OK to appreciate that,’ and she pretended to be flattered, placing a napkin under her glass of whisky so it wouldn’t slide off the wooden table. She knew it was true, sordid and terrifying, that she was like him. An overwhelming sense of self-loathing settled in her. Growing-up was now complete, her character formed, she felt.
That would have been the end of it – she never made an effort to see him again, and never wrote about it, not even in her diaries – but the other thing, the troubling thing, was the arrival that day, in the hotel room, of the little man with the whispering voice and the heavy Justin boots. She saw him as Jay B kissed her, when she opened her eyes. He was standing by the door and laughing at them, of course, and she started a little. Jay B jumped too, breaking away from her and glancing guiltily at the door in case someone had knocked on it. Pat said nothing. She knew Jay B saw no one there. She knew the little man was not real, and yet he was. She had once asked the little man why others couldn’t see him and he’d assured her that she was special, there were not many who could, and
that thought gave her comfort.
Her birthday dawned, and as she was ‘brighter’, Ronnie proposed a walk to the Martello tower in Aldeburgh. She wondered whether he thought she was all right in the head. He was polite and would never have given any indication of doubting her, she knew. The day was chilly enough to make their noses pink and their fingertips tingle, and they walked at a lick to try to keep warm. They were discussing writing, as they always did, but Pat longed to return to the discussion of Gerald, to feel again that cleansing relief of trying it out, of saying, ‘I killed him.’
Ronnie said: ‘That’s the funny thing about writing of any sort, the worst or the best. It can’t ever say exactly . . .’
‘What if the fantasy life is the real one? What if – well, what’s that Virginia Woolf quote about us living two lives at any time and one of them being the life of the mind, the imagination? Who is to say that isn’t the most valid, the most real . . . At any rate I can never find that Woolf quote when I look for it, but I know I read it somewhere.’
Pat was breathless and a little frightened, a feeling she had on the rare occasions when she expressed an opinion that she believed in, that mattered to her.
‘In the end novelists are either about forgiveness or revenge. I do suspect your talents lie in the revenge department, darling,’ Ronnie said.
She laughed; somehow remarks like that, when they came from Ronnie, never wounded her.
‘I’ve been thinking of selling Bridge Cottage,’ she told him. ‘Switzerland again, perhaps. I mean, now that Sam . . . and my novel is nearly finished. I’m just wrestling with the ending. How would the murderer be found out, was there a witness or nosy snooper who finds out something . . .’
‘Does it have to end like that? Couldn’t the murderer simply get away with it?’
‘Oh, no. The reading public is not pleased with criminals who go free at the end. You rather have to get them to prison.’