John D. MacDonald

by All These Condemned

  Right when we’d been having such fun, this had to happen to Wilma, the best friend I’ve ever had on earth or ever will have. I thought of her, floating around under that black water, and the tears came right up. They were wrenched right up out of me, thinking of her like that. It was worse, even, than when my sister died so sudden. They didn’t even know she was real sick. She went to bed with a headache and in the morning she was right there dead. It’s like Wilma said once. We’ve both had hardships and that’s why we’re so much alike. It is funny, being so much alike that we could almost wear the same clothes. Hers were just a little bit loose around the hips and bust on me. But then, she’s older. You got to expect that a little when you’re older. But she isn’t fat. Just firm. And honest, you’d have thought she was younger than I am that day we were giggling around and I was trying on her clothes that time.

  It’s like I said, I’ll never have a better, truer friend in all the world.

  I stood there like my heart was going to break and pretty soon Paul had to come down and start ordering people around. It’s like he gets some kind of a big boot out of that. They went out in a boat with Randy holding a light and the three of them, Paul, Steve, and Gil, started diving for her, as if that would do any good. It had been too long and I knew she was down there and I knew she was dead. I said it over a lot of times. Dead, dead, dead. I couldn’t make it fit Wilma. She was the most alive person.

  The sirens came and the people who know about such things came and they made Paul stop all that silly diving business. By the time there were a lot of boats there all going around in circles dragging things and trying to hook onto her, I just couldn’t stand it any more. Anyway, I was getting cold. Crying like that cuts down your resistance, I guess. I went to the wonderful room she had given us and when I walked in it made me remember how she had been, so sweet, when she had shown it to Paul and me, and it started the big tears all over again. I had got down to little tears, but it brought the big ones on again. I just dropped across my bed like some kind of a dishrag and the tears made me sort of roll back and forth and for a time it was like I stood beside the bed and watched myself rolling back and forth in agony.

  It took a long time to work the tears back down to little ones. Then I went over and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was a mess. I opened the robe and looked at my hip where I’d scraped it getting out of the water. My skin is very sensitive. Everything makes a bruise. There were three little parallel scratches, like a cat had done it, and a big bruise was getting dark all around the scratches. I even wished for a minute that it was much worse, so I’d have some kind of a scar on my body to remember by, but that was silly because I certainly wouldn’t ever forget it. Or her.

  I was the only one she really liked. Out of the whole bunch of them. They never knew her. Gosh, what was I before I met her? Just a nothing. Just a dumb girl. She taught me how to be myself. I used to dream all the time. Real crazy stuff. Ever since I was a kid. Always pretending things. I used to have regular parties with my dolls. Little dishes and real food, but I had to eat it all myself. I used to play by myself a lot. I guess I started pretending because I didn’t like the way things were. I mean that neighborhood, with every single house just alike, and six kids so I never did get to have a room of my own. If they’d known I was going to do better than any of them, maybe they would have given me a room of my own. Look at that bum Harriet married. He looked good in uniform, but after he took it off, he was just another bum. I used to pretend so much that I’d forget to do things I was supposed to do. I’d walk to the store and then have to walk all the way back and find out again what I was supposed to get. We never had a phone. So they used to be at me all the time. Mary this. Mary that. None of them can order me around any more. But there’s just four of us now, and the old man. I knew all the time that I was going to have a wonderful life. Better than the others. ’Way better.

  I got out of there just as soon as I could, believe me. I got out of business school one day and the next day I had a job and an apartment of my own. Not really an apartment. More like two furnished rooms, and sharing the bath with three other girls who just took hours and hours in there in the morning until I was almost frantic every morning.

  But I was out of that mean little house in that street I grew up on, and I certainly wasn’t going back, not after changing my name to Mavis. I left Mary Gort right back on that street where she belonged. I told them if they wanted to see me they had to come to my place. I wasn’t going back there, and the only one who ever did come more than once or twice was Mom, and she came regularly until she died.

  I really worked hard at my job because I couldn’t afford to lose it. I got sort of control over the pretending and dreaming during working time, but afterward I would really let myself go. For a time there I was spending all my money on Oriental stuff for one of my rooms. I bought a kimono with a dragon on it. There was incense and I’d sit cross-legged and read that book of Chinese poems until my legs went to sleep. I finally gave it up. I can’t remember why. Oh, yes, I do. It was on account of the Affair. I think of it as having a capital A. I thought it was all so wonderful, and then that funny little woman came and called me all those names and told me to leave her husband alone. The next time I saw him he was all changed. He’d been glamorous and all of a sudden he was just a sort of funny-looking man. It all went poof. That can happen from doing too much dreaming. Like Wilma said, you don’t see things the way they really are.

  Anyway, he was the only man in my life before my marriage, because nobody in his sane mind would count that Beecher boy back in the neighborhood and the day his family was away. That was only like kids do all the time.

  I fell hard for Paul. All the girls were after him and I was the one who got him. We used to talk in the girls’ room about how he looked like Randolph Scott, sort of. That seems funny now. Just a couple of weeks ago a woman said that to me again. I’d almost forgotten it. I can’t see it. He looks like Paul Dockerty and that’s all he looks like. Nobody in his sane mind would say he looks like anybody else.

  After I got married and we came back to New York, I guess I thought I was happy. Wilma said I only thought I was, because the proof of it was that I’d kept right on dreaming silly stuff. She said that if I was genuinely happy I would be so contented with what I was that I wouldn’t have to pretend I was somebody else. Anyway, he used to laugh at me. He doesn’t any more. Like we would be walking somewhere and I would pretend we were rich South Americans who had fled to New York to escape a revolution and then I would say something with an accent and he would laugh at me. Sometimes he would try to play my games, but he would always spoil them. That’s because he has to be a big wheel all the time.

  When he took the better job I thought it would just mean living a little better and saving a lot more, because he has always been one for saving. But then Wilma started being nice to me. At first I couldn’t hardly believe it. What did she see in me? A woman like that. But being alone, not having much to do with Paul working all day, I got so I saw a lot of her. She would talk to me. I’ll never forget some of the things she would say to me.

  “I don’t believe Paul wants you to express yourself, Mavis. He seems to have a Victorian concept of womanhood. You have a distinct personality, and it is up to you to express it and not be satisfied with being a satellite of your husband with your whole world revolving around him.”

  That made a lot of sense. He’d been keeping me shut up. I began to express myself, all right. And we began to have a decent standard of living.

  “That figure of yours is a deadly weapon, Mavis. You must use it as such. You must display it properly, give it good care, use it as a weapon, both offensive and defensive.”

  And that made it easier to get the nice things I wanted Paul to buy me. It was a lot better game than all that pretending.

  “I hope you don’t mind, dear, if I do some intensive work on you. I want to correct your way of speaking and your voice level. And the way you
walk, and the way you get in and out of chairs. And I’m going to introduce you to a really fine beautician.”

  I didn’t mind. It didn’t hurt my feelings. A girl should improve herself, and I’d been sort of blind to myself. I saw right away how I could be improved a lot.

  “Mavis, dear, a lot of your ideas are so dreadfully provincial. There’s more to you than someone’s sodden, dull little housewife. Your instinct was right about children. They would be the final trap, of course. But you still have a soap-opera attitude toward unfaithfulness. Darling, it isn’t a tragedy. It’s entertainment. Of course, some people, like poor dear Randy, get too terribly morbid about it. I wish you could be more Continental in your attitude. Goodness, the bloom must be off your marriage by this time. A lover would give you more self-confidence. Make you feel much more alive.”

  I sort of agreed with her, but it scared me a little. It sounded as if it would make things so complicated. And anyway, it is a sort of private matter, and I was seeing so much of Wilma whenever I could, whenever she wasn’t busy, that it just didn’t seem as if I had time to make ad arrangement like that. Enough men liked me, but I didn’t think much of them. I decided it couldn’t be so sort of coldblooded with me, the way it was with her. Maybe in that way we were a little different. It would just have to sort of happen, and when it did happen I was going to let it happen, because, like she said, who wants to be provincial and sodden?

  Paul would make a big gloomy fuss about going to her parties. He’s just dull. He doesn’t like all those interesting people, writers and poets and musicians and people who are put in the real live world, not shut up in a dreary office over in Jersey. He can’t ever get interested in anything outside himself. Like when those people brought all those drums to her party, the kind you beat on with your hands, and we danced. He acted like it was something disgusting. Like Wilma says, he has a typical Rotarian-type mind.

  Well, it finally happened and it wasn’t at all the way I thought it was going to happen. It was scary and kind of messy. She told me on the phone she would be in. I went to the apartment and went up and Gil opened the door and he told me she was gone for the rest of the afternoon. He told me after I got inside. I hadn’t liked him. Except when I had danced with him a few times, he had always looked on me like I was dirt or something. But I guess he looks at everybody that way. He’s a famous painter, Wilma says. He started kissing me, and I guess, without thinking, I started acting provincial. Then he stopped and I had time to remember what Wilma had told me and then I told him Wilma wouldn’t like this and he said if I thought she wouldn’t like it or would even give a damn, then I didn’t know Wilma very well. He took me back to a bedroom and I got provincial again and he acted bored with me. I couldn’t imagine anybody getting bored with Wilma. So I tried to be Continental again, and then it happened. But it wasn’t like love. It wasn’t like people loving each other. It was just people doing something as if they were sort of cross with each other.

  I told myself I was getting some experience of the world. He was certainly awful strong. He hurt me. Then I got dressed and he yawned and he told me to go home, he was going to take a nap. He shut his eyes. I stood there and looked at him and then I went home. Wilma told me the next morning I could come over. I had to tell her about it She was rubbing some kind of a new cream into her face. She just kept rubbing away and half-smiling. I told her I was sorry.

  She told me not to fret about it because Gilman Hayes was sort of like one of those toys you wind up and put down on the rug. It just goes and that’s all. She said he would go after anything in a skirt and she used some pretty rough language talking about him. She said she was getting tired of him anyway and she was about to get rid of him. She rubbed the cream off her face and told me that there was nothing to forgive. She stood up and kissed me to prove it. She kissed me in a funny way. It made me feel all flushed and silly. Then she told me to run along.

  I went like she said, even though I’d wanted to ask her about something. About why, on my way home the day before, after being with Gil, I’d started to cry on the street like a ninny. But I guess I knew what her answer would be, anyway. That provincial thing again. The next time I saw Gil he looked at me as if he didn’t know me. And I guess maybe he didn’t. I didn’t feel as if he did.

  But going home that time I didn’t cry the way I’ve been crying now. After a while Paul came in. It started me off again. He stood over the bed and just said in a disgusted voice, “Oh, for God’s sake.” Then he went and got a different jacket and went out again. Like he was a big wheel. Like he hadn’t got so filthy drunk that same day that Judy Jonah had to practically carry him to bed. None of them knew Wilma. They didn’t like her. Maybe Randy is the only one who did, but that isn’t like liking her. Not the way he felt about her.

  Now she’s dead and I can’t face thinking of how boring my life is going to be.

  I sat up then and stopped crying because I thought of what I would do. It was what Wilma would have done. If I stayed with Paul, I’d be trapped. I couldn’t stay with him. Not any more. Wilma would want me to leave him. Since she changed me, an awful lot more men have been interested in me. And Paul makes good money. So he can darn well afford the divorce and some decent support for me. I’ll go where people are alive. Someplace like Miami or Las Vegas or Paris. There won’t be a single darn provincial thing about me. Not any more. I came off that crumby street out of that crumby neighborhood and I knew right from the beginning that my life was going to be wonderful. I guess I will look back and be grateful to Paul for being the one who got me in touch with Wilma. But that’s all I’m grateful for.

  He never looked the least damn bit like Randolph Scott.

  I don’t think I want to marry again. They want to put you in a box and turn the lock. They want you always doing things. Where did you put this? Hey, find that for me. Hey, clean up the place. Hey, come to bed. Like a slave. If you’re a provincial type, that’s all right. Maybe you can even get to like that sort of thing. But I’m not going to get trapped again. Look at how Noel is trapped. In a different kind of a way, she’s a sort of pretty little thing. But I’d say she was pretty shallow. I bet there’s never anything going on in her head the way things are always going on in mine. She just sits and sort of watches the world going by. She probably doesn’t even know that Randy had more than one way of earning the salary Wilma paid him. She’s that stupid, I bet. But what Wilma ever saw in Randy, I’ll never know. He’s so jumpy and skinny and nervous and kind of sloppy. The only man here with any dignity is that nice Wallace Dorn. He speaks so nice. He wouldn’t be cruel and snotty like Gilman Hayes. But I liked dancing with Gil. While they played their silly games.

  No, sir, Paul Dockerty, last night was the last time you’re ever going to touch me. That was the end, even if you don’t know it yet. It’s silly, when you think of it, a little piece of paper giving a man the right to do that to you until you’re such an old hag he doesn’t want to any more.

  I got dressed and I stopped by the door and thought about her real hard. I thought about her until I started crying again. And then I went out. It was pretty dark in the living room. Noel was there talking to a big trooper. They didn’t see me. I turned around and went out through the back. I was sort of looking for Wallace Dorn. Then I saw the cigarette light in our car so I went over. Paul was sitting in there alone. He jumped when he saw me. I guess I startled him. He said, “I want to talk to you.”

  I was going to say that, but he said it first, so I just gave him a look and turned around and walked away. There wasn’t anything he could say to me. Nothing. I was going around the house when I stepped on something that rolled under my foot so I nearly sat down. I felt around and picked it up and took it over to a light coming from a window to see what it was. It felt like some kind of a smooth stick. It was the striped stick from one end of the croquet game, the stick you have to make the ball hit after you roll it down through the hoops. But the end you stick in the ground was gone, broken rig
ht off. I guess somebody fell over it in the dark and broke it off and got mad and threw it. I threw it back over onto the court.

  I was restless. I went to my room again and then I wandered around some more and then there was yelling and people running toward the lake and I heard somebody say something that sounded like “Got her.”

  I didn’t want to go down there, but I had to. I’m always doing things like that. I have to see things. Once on Madison Avenue there was a crowd of people looking at something and dumb me, I had to push my way through so I could see too, and what it was was a fat female person who had fallen out of a window. I nearly lost my lunch.

  I had to go down and see, but I walked slow. I wasn’t going to run like the rest of them. Even so, I was in plenty of time. They had her in a boat all covered over with a duty canvas. They lifted her out and they dropped her. I was crying again. I hated to see them drop her. I wished there was some way I could make her come alive again. Some magic words to say, like in the stories.

  I thought if I could make her come alive again, I would devote my whole life to her. There would be just the two of us. We would go away somewhere and there would be just the two of us forever and ever. And there wouldn’t be any men around us.

  Then I stopped and wondered why on earth I had thought a dumb thing like that. Well, if all the men were like Gil, I certainly wouldn’t want any around. Afterward it was sort of by accident that I saw Steve pull Noel Hess into his room and shut the door and I heard the lock go click. Still waters certainly run deep, I thought. I had her all figured out for being provincial. It just goes to show you. Never judge a book by its cover. I wanted to listen by the door but I was afraid somebody would catch me.