Who Killed Blanche DuBois?

by Carole Elizabeth Buggé

  “If you take the later train I could come collect you,” he had said over the phone Friday evening.

  “Oh, it’s not that much of a walk—it’ll do us good,” said Claire.

  “All right, if you’re sure. See you then.”

  Meredith had never taken the Lake Shore Line, and was very impressed with the scenery. It also seemed to have a tranquilizing effect on her; she sat staring out the window almost the whole trip.

  As they walked up the hill from the train, Meredith huffed as noisily as possible to show her displeasure with the steepness of the hill. Meredith did not really like sustained physical exercise; she was kinetic without being athletic.

  “There was a taxi place at the station,” she said when they finally reached the part of Warren Street where the road leveled off.

  “I know, but it’s such a short walk,” said Claire.

  “Short but brutal. All I can say is you must really love him if you’re willing to go through that each time you visit.”

  “Well, sometimes he picks me up.”

  Meredith was silent for a while as they walked along Warren Street. She looked at the calvacade of architecture with minimal interest, but studied any people they passed carefully. A dumpy woman with two small children returned her gaze, her pale eyes blank. The children were bundled in brightly colored snowsuits, but their eyes had the same dull glazed look as their mother’s. When they had passed beyond hearing, Meredith shuddered.

  “The living dead are alive and well in Hudson,” she said.

  When they got to Robert’s house Claire knocked just to make sure he hadn’t arrived early—Robert did not like to be taken by surprise—and then she turned the key in the lock and swung open the heavy green front door. The hall clock, an heirloom from England, struck four.

  “Tea time!” cried Meredith, pulling out the packages of cookies she had stuffed in her bag as they were leaving. Claire had assured her that they sold Pepperidge Farm cookies in Hudson, but Meredith said she wasn’t taking any chances and continued cramming her bag with packets of cookies.

  Claire put on the kettle and then showed Meredith around the house. She seemed taken with it, and was suitably impressed with Robert’s imaginative and quirky decorating style.

  “Wow,” she said, tugging on the heavy wooden sliding doors that separated the front and back parlors, “this place is really something. How did he find it?”

  “It belonged to a painter friend of his who died. Robert bought it at the auction.”

  “Well, he got a good deal,” said Meredith. “I don’t know much about houses, but this one is really cool.”

  Just then the tea kettle split the air with its piercing whistle, and Meredith covered her ears.

  “That kettle doesn’t fool around,” she said, wincing. “I’ll get it.” She moved toward the kitchen, hands still over her ears.

  Claire wandered around the parlor, touching the furniture as she went. As she ran her hand lightly over a rosewood table, she was suddenly reminded of a scene she hadn’t thought about in years: when she was eleven, just two years younger than Meredith, her family had left the big white house at the lake. There was a small grove of pine trees in the side lawn, and just before climbing into the car she had run tearfully to embrace each tree. She remembered grief filling her chest as she hugged each thin tree trunk, sticky with pine rosin, remembered her mother’s sympathetic smile and her brother’s snicker as she got into the car, wedged in between cardboard boxes full of china. Later Claire had written a rather bad and very sentimental poem about trees, which was published in her fifth-grade literary journal. She could still remember the feeling of missing each of those trees as if they were people—sentimental, perhaps, but real enough to her eleven-year-old mind.

  Fifteen years later Claire learned the real meaning of grief when both of her parents died in a car crash. Afterward, she and her brother had drifted apart, stunned by the loss and not sure how to bridge the wall of pain that should have united but instead divided them.

  Meredith emerged from the kitchen, carrying an enormous tea tray.

  “Your tea, madame,” she said, setting it on the rosewood table.

  “Why, thank you,” said Claire, taking a Bordeaux cookie from Meredith’s dizzying assortment. She took a bite: butterscotch, her grandmother’s specialty. She thought of her grandmother, baking, gardening; she was a woman of tremendous grace, which Claire had not inherited. She leaned back in an apricot upholstered wing chair and wondered what was triggering all of these nostalgic thoughts. She looked at Meredith, who was arranging her cookies on a blue flowered plate before devouring them. For Meredith, the past was all wrapped up in her mother’s death, and Claire could feel the anger which simmered beneath the surface.

  Just then Claire heard the front door open and Robert’s voice came booming down the hall.

  “Hello there—anyone home?”

  “In here,” Claire called.

  Robert appeared in the doorway, a camera still slung around his neck.

  “Aha—I see I’m just in time for tea. Hello,” he said, seeing Meredith.

  “Hello,” she answered, her mouth full of cookies, fine crumbs spraying from her lips.

  “You must be Meredith.” Robert took off his camera and put it in the mahogany cabinet where he kept his equipment.

  “And you must be Robert.” Meredith swallowed and wiped the crumbs from her mouth.

  Robert poured himself a cup of tea.

  “Claire says you have quite a talent for detective work.”

  “Well, it would be false modesty if I denied it.”

  “Good for you!” said Robert in his hearty Schoolmaster voice, which always conjured up for Claire pictures of ruddy-cheeked English schoolboys running in for their cold showers after a game or two of rugby.

  “Did Claire tell you what case we’re working on now?” said Meredith.

  “Oh, you mean that poor woman, her author friend? Yes, I know about it, but aren’t the police working on that one?”

  “Well, yes, but . . . well, you know how blind the police can be.”

  “Can they? I always thought they were rather clever over here. You know, like on television.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing like on television,” said Meredith.

  “So you’re going to show them how, are you?” said Robert, and Claire wondered if Meredith noticed the faint condescension in his voice.

  “Well, someone has to help them,” Meredith replied.

  “Well, there you are,” Robert said cheerfully. He turned to Claire. “What do you want to do tonight?”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought about it, really.”

  “Well, I’m going to go up and shower and you have a look through the local rag and let me know what you decide,” he said, and went upstairs. That was Robert: exits and entrances, not staying long anywhere, never wearing out his welcome, even in his own house.

  “He didn’t finish his tea,” Meredith noted when he had gone.

  In the end they decided to go to a small cinema in town playing second-run movies. The building, built around the turn of the century, was once a vaudeville theatre. The owner was slowly restoring it; in the meantime he had installed a little electric organ in the front of the theatre, and on weekends a local woman gave organ recitals before the film.

  “Oh, we must go to the organ recital,” Robert said. “It’s too much, really. You have to see it.”

  They were the first to arrive, and Robert said he wanted to go across the street to get some coffee (the theatre didn’t yet have a full concession service). Meredith insisted on accompanying him, so Claire sat by herself in the darkened theatre. She sat silently, her knees pulled up to her chest, imagining what it would be like to be enormously gifted, driven, and ambitious. She wasn’t sure that it would be altogether pleasant, but it would be exciting, and she couldn’t help feeling regret for a life she would never have. Only a few people could be stars, and the rest would orbit around them like plan
ets in a solar system, grateful for the glow of their reflected light. Meredith was one of these stars, and Claire just hoped that she would not burn out before her time.

  Looking around the empty theatre, Claire felt her body relax. She grew up in the country, but had quickly become accustomed to city life. It was only in stepping away from it that she realized how complicated the smallest things could be in New York. Life was so much easier in Hudson. Simple errands, such as a trip to the post office, were no longer ordeals. Instead of a half-mile walk followed by waiting in line for forty minutes, you just got in the car, drove to the post office, delivered your package, and went home. After living in New York City, Claire no longer took anything for granted. She enjoyed doing errands in Hudson, marveling at the ease of everything up here, the privacy of driving everywhere, the pleasure of simply loading groceries into a car instead of carting them home several blocks. In Hudson, she relished the opportunity to run small errands: she loved to wander around the cavernous, uncrowded aisles of the A&P, the shelves packed with consumer goods. There was even enough room in the aisles for two shopping carts to pass side by side, while in the city she often stood interminably behind a slow moving cart waiting to pass. Claire liked New York—the city had resonance for her—but the crowded quality of life there tapped into her claustrophobia. She sometimes felt as though she were constantly pushing through throngs of people in order to get anywhere, and then she would experience her old fear of entrapment.

  Robert and Meredith returned just in time for the organist’s entrance. She was an elderly woman and wore a blue sequined blouse over a red cotton skirt, silver lamé belt, all topped off with a rhinestone necklace. Her playing was uneven, with some numbers being better than others. Her third selection, “This Land Is Your Land,” was not one of her better numbers. She kept having to slow down to accomplish the various ornamentations and runs in this particular arrangement. The effect was one of a phonograph record playing on a turntable whose motor was turning slowly and unevenly, and Claire found herself leaning forward every time the woman slowed down, as if by doing so she could push her back onto the tempo.

  In New York the woman would not even have been a rehearsal pianist for an Off-Off-Broadway company, but here in Hudson she had a job, and Claire was glad for her. She even enjoyed the performance for its flaws and inconsistencies, because the very imperfection of the woman’s playing testified to the difficulty of her task: unpolished, raw, she still loved the music enough to sit in front of strangers and make mistakes. Of course, she may have thought she was better than she was, but Claire forgave her that, and even admired her hubris, because Claire had little of it herself. She admired qualities in others that she herself lacked: Amelia’s saintliness, Sarah’s stoicism, Meredith’s breathless ambition, Marshall’s wicked wit. Claire sometimes thought that she herself was so perfectly ordinary, so lacking in qualities that would set her apart, that she wondered what someone like Robert saw in her. She wouldn’t have thought she was his type, really, and yet . . . Well, there was no accounting for taste.

  The movie playing that night was Forrest Gump. As they were walking out Meredith said, “Well, I guess it’s good to be stupid if you’re going to be a real American hero.”

  Robert laughed so loudly that all the other patrons looked at him. Claire felt her face heat up, glad for the darkness so that no one could see her blush.

  That night in bed, she said, “Well, what do you think of her?”

  “She’s a force of nature,” Robert said, and then he bit her ear. “Speaking of nature . . .”

  Claire rolled over and met his lips. For a moment she imagined that it was Wallace Jackson she was kissing, then felt so guilty she kissed Robert with more ardor.

  “Mmm . . .” he said, “what’s gotten into you?”

  Claire came downstairs the next morning to find Meredith sitting on the living room floor with Robert’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare on her lap.

  “What are you reading?” said Claire.

  “Othello.”

  Claire leaned down and looked over Meredith’s shoulder. The page was turned to the moment in the play where Othello resolves to murder Desdemona.

  Like to the Pontic sea,

  Whose icy current and compulsive course

  Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

  To the Propontic and the Hellespont,

  Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,

  Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,

  Till that a capable and wide revenge swallow them up.

  “In college I had an English professor who said Shakespeare must have been drunk when he wrote those lines,” Claire remarked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm,” said Meredith.

  “The odd thing was that he said it with admiration, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.”

  Just then Robert walked into the room.

  “And why not get drunk?” he said. “What does it mean, to get drunk? To forget for a few moments the everyday anxieties and fears we all carry around with us, the fears that lurk around us when we go to bed and are there again when we wake up. Why not get drunk indeed? To live with the awareness that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. The gift of the grape is right up there with faith and hope and charity. So it diminishes judgment—well, look where our judgment has brought us so far. I say to hell with our judgment, because it is fatally flawed anyway. I say that we should be allowed our forgetfulness for a while, a waking forgetfulness in which the world around us loses its terror, and we allow ourselves to imagine that there is a possibility of redemption after all. If Shakespeare wasn’t drunk when he wrote those lines, he should have been.”

  Meredith stared at Claire, who felt like she should applaud or something.

  “Well, well,” she said. “What’s that from?”

  Robert shrugged modestly. “Oh, a play I wrote when I was a foolish, callow youth. I played the hero, who delivered that speech in the second act. Kind of makes you appreciate Shakespeare, doesn’t it?” he said to Meredith, smiling.

  “Well, at least you wrote it,” Meredith said with uncharacteristic diplomacy. She lay on the floor, her thin legs waving back and forth in the air, ankles crossing and uncrossing. Something about the motion reminded Claire of the flicking of a cat’s tail.

  Claire laughed. “Well, my professor was fired shortly afterward for alcoholism. He made an impression on me, though, and I always wondered what became of him.”

  “Well,” said Robert, “are we ready to go out for our little sojourn?”

  “Sure!” said Meredith, jumping up from the floor.

  The three of them spent the day on a tour of Olana, the home of Hudson school painter Frederick Church. Robert loved the place, and as they wandered around the spacious rooms, with their Turkish-fantasy-palace decor, Meredith talked about Othello.

  “How come he believes Iago?”

  “Well, people are gullible . . . and his thing is that he’s jealous.”

  “You mean it’s his ‘tragic flaw’?”

  “Yeah.”

  Just then Robert came up behind them and put his hands around Claire’s waist.

  “Whose tragic flaw?”

  “Othello,” Meredith said. “We’re talking about his jealousy.”

  “Ah, yes . . .

  “‘It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock

  the meat it feeds on; that cuckold lives in bliss

  Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger;

  But, O! what damned minutes tells he o’er

  Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet soundly loves!’”

  “Very impressive,” said Claire.

  Robert shrugged. “The result of an English public-school education—more rote learning than wisdom, I’m afraid.”

  “What’s a cuckold?” said Meredith.

  Robert cocked his head to the side. “Hmm . . .
I don’t think she’s old enough for that, do you?” he said to Claire.

  “In Elizabethan times it was a man whose wife had been unfaithful,” said Claire. Just at that moment one of the museum curators passed. He was a thin, ascetic-looking man with a long bloodless face, and he raised a disapproving eyebrow at their conversation. Robert chuckled when the man was out of earshot.

  “Maybe he’s not old enough for it, either.”

  Claire laughed.

  “Hmm,” said Meredith. “The Elizabethans were really into that, I guess, huh?”

  “Into cuckoldry? Hmm . . . that’s an interesting notion,” said Robert, giving Claire a squeeze.

  “No, I mean they thought that was a really big deal,” said Meredith.

  “Some people still do think it’s a big deal,” said Robert.

  “But not as much, not anymore.”

  “It depends on who you talk to.”

  As they approached the front door of the mansion, Claire looked at her watch.

  “It’s lunchtime. I’m starving.”

  “All right,” said Robert. “Lunch is on me. Come on,” he said to Meredith. “I’ll race you to the car.”

  Meredith stopped walking. “I’m not really very physically inclined,” she said.

  “Too bad.” He started off in the direction of the parking lot.

  “Oh, go ahead,” said Claire, “be a kid for once. It won’t kill you, you know.”

  “All right,” said Meredith, as if doing her a big favor, “if you insist.” She started after Robert unenthusiastically, running in an ungainly trot.

  “Come on,” Robert called over his shoulder, “don’t let an old man beat you.”

  Meredith ran a little faster, loping awkwardly on her long thin legs. Claire stood and watched as the wind picked up her fluffy orange hair and tossed it behind her like a banner.

  That night Claire had trouble sleeping. She awoke from a dream and lay for a while looking at the ceiling. Robert slept serenely beside her, breathing in the slow, easy rhythms of peaceful slumber. She couldn’t remember what she had been dreaming about, except that the lines from “The Erl King” once again roamed through her head.