Death by Association

by Frances Lockridge

  “Actually,” MacDonald said to Mary, taking up where he had left off, “I’m a country doctor.”

  She did not believe him; she said so.

  “But I am,” he said. “Outside New Haven. In the country.”

  “And Yale,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Primarily a country doctor,” he insisted. “Unused to the intellectual life.”

  “This?” she said, and indicated.

  “Gentlemen of distinction,” he told her, his voice solemn. “A famous lecturer. A gentleman Up for Confirmation.” His voice provided the capitalization. He indicated Sibley.

  “Is he?” Mary said. “What for?”

  But that Dr. MacDonald had been trying to remember, and had not been successful in remembering. Something big enough to make a committee wrangle over him; probably, therefore, something diplomatic. MacDonald reiterated that he himself lived a secluded life. “Measles,” he told her. “Now and then mumps. Upset tummies.

  “I,” he told her, “am ill at ease with greatness. Did you put something on your sunburn?”

  She told him she tanned, with luck. She looked and said, “Here’s another.”

  The newcomer to the expanding party was a tall, ruddy man, hair crew-cut, powerful shoulders slanting athletically under the fabric of a gray jacket from Brooks Brothers. He had been, fifteen years or so ago, at Princeton or Harvard or Yale or, if not to one of them, at Dartmouth or Cornell or Brown. Why, thought Mary Wister, he’s almost anybody I grew up with, almost everybody. He had been walking by, with the easy air of a man going no place much and in no hurry to get there, and this time—Mary was almost sure—it was Grogan who had signaled him into their harborage. He came in easily, powerful but manageable. He was William Oslen; he was “Bill Oslen, everybody,” since it was no longer practicable that the circle be manoeuvred. He made a casual, friendly gesture, and found lodgement on an ottoman, which he himself pulled to the fringe of the circle.

  “Now there,” Dr. Barclay MacDonald said, for Mary’s ear, “is an anomaly. What would you pick him as?”

  “As?” Mary repeated. “Oh—somebody in Wall Street?”

  “You see?” MacDonald said. “An anomaly. Actually, he’s a concert pianist. I’ve heard him play.”

  “In your native village,” Mary told him.

  “At New Haven,” MacDonald said, “we are very musical. We hold the standards high.”

  Mary looked at the tall, thin doctor; at his long, expressive face; saw the faintest of lines between his brows.

  “You’d think he’d be out concerting at this time of year,” MacDonald said. “However.”

  He dismissed it. He was casual, detached, interested.

  “This is a very lively place,” he told Mary Wister. “If we sit here long enough, we’ll meet everybody. Did you know that former President Hoover comes here to get his hair cut?”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Mary said.

  “Off his yacht,” MacDonald told her. “Mr. Grogan is very pleased.” He paused. “Naturally,” he said. He looked at Heimrich, then, but Heimrich was being talked to by Bronson Wells. Mary looked also. The police captain had his eyes open.

  “Is that the William Oslen?” the slim and reasonably beautiful young woman who was—wait a minute, now—who was Mrs. Paul Shepard, said from Dr. MacDonald’s right. She was there unexpectedly, perched on the arm of someone else’s chair. “The pianist?”

  It was, MacDonald told her, turning toward her; it assuredly was. His voice was grave, polite. He remained turned toward the reasonably beautiful Mrs. Shepard. Mary listened elsewhere; listened, as was easy, to Bronson Wells’s projected voice. She turned toward Heimrich and Bronson Wells, and Heimrich opened his blue eyes briefly, as if to let her in. He closed them, then, and continued to listen.

  “—an aroused citizenry,” Bronson Wells was saying. “That, you will admit, is essential. These are not ordinary times.”

  Heimrich lighted a cigarette and offered one to Wells. Wells refused it with a sharp, rather impatient, movement of his head. “Don’t use them,” Wells said.

  “Possibly,” Heimrich said, “no times ever were. But I see what you mean, naturally.”

  “Apathy,” Bronson Wells said. “A willingness to let things slide. What we face is a conspiracy. I know. Once I was part of it. A conspiracy of fanatics.”

  “I merely said,” Heimrich told him, speaking still with his eyes closed, “that we have policemen. Of one kind and another, for one special purpose and another. We have laws. Naturally, I’m not without prejudice—prejudice in favor of law.” He opened his eyes. “And in favor of policemen,” he added, and smiled.

  Bronson Wells did not smile. Fleetingly, Mary Wister wondered if he ever did; if he ever had.

  “You are like the rest,” Wells said. “We’ve lived soft; we’ve always lived soft. They’re right in saying that. We temporize, give everybody his say, fritter away the little time we have. What we have to do first, before anything, is to save our way of life. I tell you, I know!”

  Heimrich closed his eyes again, and nodded. But then he opened his eyes again.

  “Only,” he said, “that is our way of life, isn’t it, Mr. Wells? To let everybody have his say, hold him responsible for his actions? Police his actions, under law? Isn’t that how we differ from them?” He turned toward Mary, slowly, his eyes still open. “I’m afraid Mr. Wells thinks I’m apathetic,” he told her.

  “It’s not personal,” Wells said. “I merely wonder whether you, and men like you, are able to face reality. If I have a mission, it is to wake up people like you.”

  There was, Mary thought, something strange, obscurely worrying, in Wells’s use, in so matter of fact a fashion, of the word “mission.” It was such a heavy word; it was too heavy for everyday; certainly too heavy for a casual drinking group in a resort hotel, in a place where it was warm in February.

  “Well,” said Heimrich, “I’m just a policeman, you know. I just try to help enforce the laws we’ve got.” His manner ended it and Wells, after a moment of scrutiny, accepted an ending. He said, across Heimrich, “You mustn’t think I’m a man of one idea, Miss Wister.” He regarded her. “Although perhaps I am,” he said. “I—”

  But there was a stir, then, and he did not try, against it, to continue. Grogan, who had been talking to Shepard and, beyond him, to the dignified Mrs. Sibley, looked at his watch and announced, generally, that he had to get to work. It was, he said, sometimes hard to remember that he worked there; nevertheless, he did. He stood up and there was that slight uncertainty through the group, that sympathetic consultation of watches, which heralds disintegration. Mary looked at her own watch; it was not yet seven o’clock, hence half an hour, at least, from dinner.

  But Grogan, standing, was taking care of things. A waiter trotted across the lounge and was told that it would be the same around for everybody, on Grogan. Mrs. Sibley looked doubtfully at her half-empty glass; William Oslen, on the other hand, looked with interest at his empty one. Mary shared Mrs. Sibley’s doubt, being midway of her second. But, she thought, I worked all day.

  “Do you good,” Dr. MacDonald said from beside her. “Dry work, listening.”

  The premonitory fidgeting died out; relaxed, they watched Mr. Grogan go toward his managerial chores, stopping from time to time along the way to greet. The waiter jotted notations and departed for the bar. Captain Heimrich appeared to fall asleep; Bronson Wells turned to Paul Shepard on his left. It seemed to Mary that he turned with decision, as if he had been waiting for the time to come.

  “Do you like turtles?” Dr. MacDonald asked, with his air of detached interest.

  Mary repeated, “Turtles?”

  “There’s a marine museum in town,” he told her. “Went there this afternoon, while the frivolous swam and tennised. Very instructive.”

  She looked at him.

  “Well,” he said, “the turtles were large. They have barracudas, too. Very savage-looking.” He considered. “I’m a
gainst barracudas,” he said. “For turtles, in a mild way, but against barracudas.” He looked, so far as she could tell, absently, toward Bronson Wells. He looked back toward her. “I’m beginning to feel better,” he said, “Makes me silly, probably, but all the same—” He finished his drink. He looked at the empty glass. “I’m afraid this is very bad for me,” he told her. “Have you been in town yet?”

  She shook her head, watching his face. Without in any sense leaving her, withdrawing from her, he was still very evidently conscious of the others around them—of the sleepy Heimrich, of Robert Sihley, who was talking with dignity to Oslen, who looked so little like a pianist; of Paul Shepard, who had turned partly away from his wife—who had joined him on the long sofa—and was listening to Bronson Wells, his face expressionless. Mrs. Shepard was talking to Mrs. Sibley. Everybody was accounted for, taken care of. The waiter arrived, and took further care of everybody. Mary hesitated momentarily, but let him leave a fresh martini in front of her.

  “It’s quite a mixture,” MacDonald said. He tasted his new drink. “The town, I mean. Several honky-tonks. Do you like honky-tonks?”

  “Not terribly,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “One of them,” he said, “has twenty beautiful girls under twenty. It says so in lights. Don’t you want to look at twenty beautiful girls under twenty?”

  “Not terribly,” she said again. “Should I?”

  “I can’t think of any reason why,” he said. “I remember now about Sibley. It’s some kind of a U.N. job. He’s under suspicion of not believing in Chiang Kai-shek. He—” But then Dr. MacDonald stopped, and shrugged.

  It was as if there had been a signal, but there had been none. With MacDonald’s sudden silence, there was a general silence in the circle—a silence which one voice broke. Characteristically, Mary Wister thought, the voice was Bronson Wells’s.

  “I’d advise you to think about it again, Shepard,” Wells said. “I’d advise it most seriously.”

  Paul Shepard merely looked at him. If he answered, it was by an expression in his eyes.

  III

  That was thefirst of the incidents, if one could call it an incident. Words broke clear in a sudden, accidental silence; words which probably meant nothing in particular. No doubt Bronson Wells, so evidently a serious man, frequently admonished even chance acquaintances to think again about something, to seek to bring their ideas into accord with his, which was to say in accord with the truth. No doubt he often so advised in a tone which lacked little, if it lacked anything, of warning. It was, after all, his career to warn. Perhaps Paul Shepard had, in some fashion, displayed apathy.

  The general talk resumed; it seemed to Mary that it was resumed quickly, almost nervously. Mrs. Shepard spoke first, her voice a little raised, to Mrs. Sibley, and she spoke of a shop she had found on Duval Street—a small and charming shop, a shop of blouses and gay Guatemalan skirts, of the most delightfully impossible of summery hats. They, she and Mrs. Sibley, must go tomorrow. They—

  “—how closely they actually listen, I can’t say, of course,” William Oslen said. “What it means to them, I don’t know. What they really hear—who knows? All I can say is—’’

  That was another snatch. Now there were snatches everywhere. “So keyed-up I have to take two every night,” Penny Shepard told Mrs. Sibley, who said, “Oh—my dear!” Then Barclay MacDonald said, “I have the greatest trouble getting women to listen to me. They always wander off.”

  She turned to him, said she was sorry. He smiled and shook his head.

  “Of course,” he said, “it is quite possible that I am not an interesting man. I’ve often speculated about that.”

  He looked as if he expected comment.

  “Oh,” Mary said. “I’m sure—”

  “Don’t say you’re sure I am,” he told her. “You have no data. The chances are very high that I would, on further acquaintance, bore you excessively. I have, for example, an almost irresistible inclination to discuss cation reactions and many people find them dull. Would you be interested in cation reactions?”

  She hadn’t, she said, the faintest idea. He regarded her with attention and shook his head. He told her he doubted it very much.

  “I can’t,” he said, “even interest the captain, although I told him something to watch out for. A way of poisoning. He considered it too involved.” He regarded Heimrich. “Although he is, actually, an imaginative man.”

  Heimrich gave no indication of hearing this. His eyes were, however, open. He was regarding William Oslen, but there was nothing in his face to indicate to what purpose, Mary looked at Oslen, who was listening to Sibley and now and then nodding in agreement. She turned back to MacDonald and said, “Tell me about—what is it?—cations?”

  “I shall be—” MacDonald began, and stopped. William Oslen stood up suddenly, apparently in a middle of one of Sibley’s sentences, and looked with evident surprise at a slight, dark girl who was coming along the aisle left down the center of the lounge. She was a blackhaired young woman, untanned and almost pale; her mouth bright against the pallor of her face; her dark eyes very wide apart. I never, Mary Wister thought, saw anyone so vivid.

  “Rachel!” Oslen said. “Of all people—Rachel!”

  She smiled at him.

  “The last person,” Oslen said, his voice a little raised. “I thought you were—” He stopped and shook his head, while he took a step toward the small, vivid girl and held out a hand. He did not say where he had thought her to be, if that was what he had planned to say.

  “Hello, William,” the girl said, and took his hand. “I hadn’t the faintest idea you were here. Not the faintest.”

  And her voice, also, was a little raised as if, Mary thought, she spoke not only to Oslen, but to all around, sharing with them all her surprise at this, evidently, most improbable of chance meetings. Involuntarily, Mary looked at Barclay MacDonald, and saw his eyebrows rise, just perceptibly. It was only as she saw the lifted brows that Mary realized why she had, as if for confirmation, turned to the thin, tall man beside her. Sharing, without words, his suggested question whether the pianist and the girl were not both, somehow, a little overdoing astonishment, Mary realized for the first time the question in her own mind.

  But then the men were pushing aside tables, and standing while Oslen brought the dark, vivid girl into the circle, reiterating his astonishment that she should be there at all. Introducing her, he managed to get back into the character he had, to Mary at any rate, temporarily stepped out of. He was, again, the maturing graduate of a good Eastern school; he was at once assured, yet modest, almost diffident. He turned out, also, to have an extraordinarily good memory for names. The girl was Rachel Jones. She was poised, assured, smiling, repeating names as they were offered her. She was light and graceful then, on an ottoman between William Oslen and Robert Sibley.

  “You could,” MacDonald said, for Mary’s ear only, “have knocked him over with a feather.” He regarded her. “Sometimes,” he said, “I notice a lack in myself. I would have been less surprised by—by a zebra. I mean, a zebra dropping in for cocktails. Have I lost my sense of wonder?”

  “It did seem rather dramatic,” Mary said.

  “Yes,” MacDonald said. “Or—dramatized?” He looked at Heimrich and, this time, Heimrich turned toward them.

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “Why would they do that, do you think?”

  MacDonald shook his head.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I don’t either. Although, you may be right, I think.” He paused. “Or half right, naturally.”

  The conversation was general again; it was possible again for two or three to draw a small, enclosing circle around themselves. Mary found that she was in such a circle with Barclay MacDonald and, momentarily, with Heimrich. But then Heimrich closed his eyes again and merely sat, comfortably enough, apparently quite contented, and Barclay MacDonald told her that the reaction was an exchange of ions, under controlled conditions,
in elements. She listened and did not understand a word of it, and sipped her drink and did not wonder about anything, except, mildly, about cations, which this long drink of water, this pleasant man, was not really trying to explain to her, but was merely talking about, with a kind of detached happiness. It was, she thought, surprising how interested one could become in something about which one did not understand a word.

  “—because of the positive charge,” Barclay MacDonald said.

  “Oh yes,” Mary said, “I understand that,” but did not.

  “With the exchange reaction set up—” MacDonald said, and Mary Wister listened to the end of the sentence, and nodded to show that she understood, which was not in the slightest degree the case. The long, thin face of the country doctor from outside New Haven took on animation as he talked of cautions. Mary found herself thinking of them as soft furred, with paws, although she assumed that this was not the case with them.

  Then, suddenly, relaxation was again broken in upon, as it had been first when Wells had spoken to Paul Shepard in what was so nearly a tone of warning and, for a second time, when the concert pianist who looked like a stockbroker had greeted the vivid Rachel Jones with such surprise. This time it was broken by a sudden, high giggle from, incongruously, Mrs. Robert Sibley. The giggle had an almost shattering quality. Mrs. Robert Sibley, dignified wife of, presumably, a potential diplomat, had much too evidently had much too much to drink. The situation was unnerving.

  Mrs. Sibley still sat erect in her chair; her gray hair remained in dignified order. But Mrs. Sibley’s face was unbecomingly red and her giggle was embarrassing. She looked across the circle at Bronson Wells and said, in a high, clear voice, “You’re a funny man. A funny, funny, funny man.” Then she giggled again. “Everybody thinks you’re a funny man,” she told Bronson Wells, for everybody to hear. Wells looked at her, his face unchanged, his eyes intent.