“You can’t reach him!” Bob’s voice blared, cut off by a burst of water against his ear.
“Guy!” Bruno called from the sea, a wail of dying.
Guy cursed. He could reach him. At the tenth stroke, he leapt up again. “Bruno!” But he couldn’t see him now.
“There, Guy!” Anne pointed from the stern of the India.
Guy couldn’t see him, but he threshed toward the memory of his head, and went down at the place, groping with his arms wide, the farthest tips of his fingers searching. The water slowed him. As if he moved in a nightmare, he thought. As on the lawn. He came up under a wave and took a gasp of water. The India was in a different place, and turning. Why didn’t they direct him? They didn’t care, those others!
“Bruno!”
Perhaps behind one of the wallowing mountains. He threshed on, then realized he was directionless. A wave bashed the side of his head. He cursed the gigantic, ugly body of the sea. Where was his friend, his brother?
He went down again, deep as he could, spreading his ridiculous length as wide as he could. But now there seemed nothing but a silent gray vacuum filling all space, in which he was only a tiny point of consciousness. The swift, unbearable loneliness pressed him closer, threatening to swallow his own life. He stretched his eyes desperately. The grayness became a brown, ridged floor.
“Did you find him?” he blurted, raising himself up. “What time is it?”
“Lie still, Guy,” Bob’s voice said.
“He went down, Guy,” Anne said. “We saw him.”
Guy closed his eyes and wept.
He was aware that, one by one, they all went out of the bunkroom and left him, even Anne.
forty-six
Carefully, so as not to awaken Anne, Guy got out of bed and went downstairs to the living room. He drew the drapes together and turned on the light, though he knew there was no shutting out the dawn that slithered now under the Venetian blinds, between the green drapes, like a silvery-mauve and amorphous fish. He had lain upstairs in the darkness awaiting it, knowing it would come for him finally over the foot of the bed, fearing more than ever the grip of the mechanism it set in motion, because he knew now that Bruno had borne half his guilt. If it had been almost unbearable before, how would he bear it now alone? He knew that he couldn’t.
He envied Bruno for having died so suddenly, so quietly, so violently, and so young. And so easily, as Bruno had always done everything. A tremor passed through him. He sat rigidly in the armchair, his body under the thin pajamas as hard and tense as in the first dawns. Then on the spasmic snap that always broke his tension, he got up and went upstairs to the studio before he actually knew what he intended to do. He looked at the big sleek-surfaced sheets of drawing paper on his work table, four or five lying as he had left them after sketching something for Bob. Then he sat down and began to write from the upper left-hand corner across, slowly at first, then more and more rapidly. He wrote of Miriam and of the train, the telephone calls, of Bruno in Metcalf, of the letters, the gun, and his dissolution, and of the Friday night. As if Bruno were still alive, he wrote every detail he knew that might contribute to an understanding of him. His writing blackened three of the big sheets. He folded the sheets, put them into an oversized envelope, and sealed it. For a long while he stared at the envelope, savoring its partial relief, wondering at its separateness now from himself. Many times before he had written passionate, scribbled admissions but, knowing no one would ever see them, they had never really left him. This was for Anne. Anne would touch this envelope. Her hands would hold the sheets of paper, and her eyes would read every word.
Guy put his palms up to his own hot, aching eyes. The hours of writing had tired him almost to a point of sleepiness. His thoughts drifted, resting on nothing, and the people he had been writing about—Bruno, Miriam, Owen Markman, Samuel Bruno, Arthur Gerard, Mrs. McCausland, Anne—the people and the names danced around the edge of his mind. Miriam. Oddly, she was more a person to him now than ever before. He had tried to describe her to Anne, tried to evaluate her. It had forced him to evaluate her to himself. She was not worth a great deal as a person, he thought, by Anne’s standards or by anyone’s. But she had been a human being. Neither had Samuel Bruno been worth a great deal—a grim, greedy maker of money, hated by his son, unloved by his wife. Who had really loved him? Who had really been hurt by either Miriam’s death or Samuel Bruno’s? If there were someone who had been hurt—Miriam’s family, perhaps? Guy remembered her brother on the witness stand at the inquest, the small eyes that had held nothing but malicious, brutal hatred, not grief. And her mother, vindictive, as vicious of spirit as ever, not caring where the blame fell as long as it fell on someone, unbroken, unsoftened by grief. Was there any purpose, even if he wanted to, in going to see them and giving them a target for their hatred? Would it make them feel any better? Or him? He couldn’t see that it would. If anyone had really loved Miriam—Owen Markman.
Guy took his hands down from his eyes. The name had swum into his mind mechanically. He hadn’t thought of Owen at all until he wrote the letter. Owen had been a dim figure in the background. Guy had held him of less value than Miriam. But Owen must have loved her. He had been going to marry her. She had been carrying his child. Suppose Owen had staked all his happiness on Miriam. Suppose he had known the grief in the months afterward that Guy himself had known when Miriam died to him in Chicago. Guy tried to recall every detail of Owen Markman at the inquest. He remembered his hangdog manner, his calm, straightforward answers until his accusation of jealousy. Impossible to tell what really might have been going on in his head.
“Owen,” Guy said.
Slowly, he stood up. An idea was taking form in his mind even as he tried to weigh his memories of the long, dark face and tall, slouching figure that was Owen Markman. He would go and see Markman and talk with him, tell him everything. If he owed it to anyone, he owed it to Markman. Let Markman kill him if he would, call the police in, anything. But he would have told him, honestly, and face to face. Suddenly it was an urgent necessity. Of course. It was the only step and the next step. After that, after his personal debt, he would shoulder whatever the law put upon him. He would be ready then. He could catch a train today, after the questions they were supposed to answer about Bruno. The police had told him to be at the station with Anne this morning. He could even catch a plane this afternoon, if he was lucky. Where was it? Houston. If Owen was still there. He mustn’t let Anne go with him to the airport. She must think he was going to Canada as he had planned. He didn’t want Anne to know yet. The appointment with Owen was more urgent. It seemed to transform him. Or perhaps it was like the shedding of an old and worn-out coat. He felt naked now, but not afraid any longer.
forty-seven
Guy sat on a jumpseat in the aisle of a plane bound for Houston. He felt miserable and nervous, as out of place and wrong, somehow, as the little lump of the seat itself that clogged the aisle and spoilt the symmetry of the plane’s interior. Wrong, unnecessary, and yet he was convinced that what he was doing was necessary. The difficulties he had hurdled in getting this far had put him in a mood of stubborn determination.
Gerard had been at the police station to hear the questioning on Bruno’s death. He had flown over from Iowa, he said. It was too bad, Charles’ end, but Charles had never been cautious about anything. It was too bad it had had to happen on Guy’s boat. Guy had been able to answer the questions without any emotion whatever. It had seemed so insignificant, the details of the disappearance of his body. Guy had been more disturbed by Gerard’s presence. He didn’t want Gerard to follow him down to Texas. To be doubly safe, he had not even canceled his ticket on the plane to Canada, which had left earlier in the afternoon. Then he had waited nearly four hours at the airport for this plane. But he was safe. Gerard had said he was going back to Iowa by train this afternoon.
Nevertheless, Guy took another look around him at the passengers, a slower and more careful look than he had dared take the first time. There
was not one who seemed the least interested in him.
The thick letter in his inside pocket crackled as he bent over the papers in his lap. The papers were sectional reports of the Alberta work, which Bob had given him. Guy couldn’t have read a magazine, he didn’t want to look out the window, but he knew he could memorize, mechanically and efficiently, the items in the reports that had to be memorized. He found a page from an English architectural magazine torn out and stuck between the mimeographed sheets. Bob had circled a paragraph in red pencil:
Guy Daniel Haines is the most significant architect yet to emerge from the American South. With his first independent work at the age of twenty-seven, a simple, two-story building which has become famous as “The Pittsburgh Store,” Haines set forth principles of grace and function to which he has steadfastly held, and through which his art has grown to its present stature. If we seek to define Haines’ peculiar genius, we must depend chiefly upon that elusive and aery term, “grace,” which until Haines has never distinguished modern architecture. It is Haines’ achievement to have made classic in our age his own concept of grace. His main building of the widely known Palmyra group in Palm Beach, Florida, has been called “The American Parthenon” . . .
An asterisked paragraph at the bottom of the page said:
Since the writing of this article, Mr. Haines has been appointed a member of the Advisory Committee of the Alberta Dam project in Canada. Bridges have always interested him, he says. He estimates that this work will occupy him happily for the next three years.
“Happily,” he said. How had they happened to use such a word?
A clock was striking 9 as Guy’s taxi crossed the main street of Houston. Guy had found Owen Markman’s name in a telephone book at the airport, had checked his bags and gotten into a taxi. It won’t be so simple, he thought. You can’t just arrive at 9 in the evening and find him at home, and alone, and willing to sit in a chair and listen to a stranger. He won’t be home, or he won’t be living there anymore, or he won’t even be in Houston anymore. It might take days.
“Pull up at this hotel,” Guy said.
Guy got out and reserved a room. The trivial, provident gesture made him feel better.
Owen Markman was not living at the address in Cleburne Street. It was a small apartment building. The people in the hall downstairs, among them the superintendent, looked at him very suspiciously and gave him as little information as possible. No one knew where Owen Markman was.
“You’re not the police, are you?” asked the superintendent finally.
Despite himself, he smiled. “No.”
Guy was on his way out when a man stopped him on the steps and, with the same air of cautious reluctance, told him that he might be able to find Markman at a certain café in the center of town.
Finally, Guy found him in a drugstore, sitting at the counter with two women whom he did not introduce. Owen Markman simply slid off his stool and stood up straight, his brown eyes a little wide. His long face looked heavier and less handsome than Guy remembered it. He slid his big hands warily into the slash pockets of his short leather jacket.
“You remember me,” Guy said.
“Reckon I do.”
“Would you mind if I had a talk with you? Just for a little while.” Guy looked around him. The best thing was to invite him to his hotel room, he supposed. “I’ve got a room here at the Rice Hotel.”
Markman looked Guy slowly up and down once more, and after a long silence said, “All right.”
Passing the cashier’s desk, Guy saw the shelves of liquor bottles. It might be hospitable to offer Markman a drink. “Do you like Scotch?”
Markman loosened up a bit as Guy bought it. “Coke’s fine, but it tastes better with a little something in it.”
Guy bought some bottles of Coca-Cola, too.
They rode to the hotel in silence, rode up in the elevator and entered the room in silence. How would he begin, Guy wondered. There were a dozen beginnings. Guy discarded them all.
Owen sat down in the armchair, and divided his time between eying Guy with insouciant suspicion, and savoring the long glass of Scotch and Coca-Cola.
Guy began stammeringly, “What—”
“What?” asked Owen.
“What would you do if you knew who murdered Miriam?”
Markman’s foot thudded down to the floor, and he sat up. His frowning brows made a black, intense line above his eyes. “Did you?”
“No, but I know the man who did.”
“Who?”
What was he feeling as he sat there frowning, Guy wondered. Hatred? Resentment? Anger? “I know, and so will the police very soon.” Guy hesitated. “It was a man from New York whose name was Charles Bruno. He died yesterday. He was drowned.”
Owen sat back a little. He took a sip of his drink. “How do you know? Confessed?”
“I know. I’ve known for some time. That’s why I’ve felt it was my fault. For not betraying him.” He moistened his lips. It was difficult every syllable of the way. And why did he uncover himself so cautiously, inch by inch? Where were all his fantasies, the imagined pleasure and relief of blurting it all out? “That’s why I blame myself. I—” Owen’s shrug stopped him. He watched Owen finish his glass, then automatically, Guy went and mixed another for him. “That’s why I blame myself,” he repeated. “I have to tell you the circumstances. It was very complex. You see, I met Charles Bruno on a train, coming down to Metcalf. The train in June, just before she was killed. I was coming down to get my divorce.” He swallowed. There it was, the words he had never said to anyone before, said of his own will, and it felt so ordinary now, so ignominious even. He had a huskiness in his throat he could not get rid of. Guy studied Owen’s long, dark attentive face. There was less of a frown now. Owen’s leg was crossed again, and Guy remembered suddenly the gray buckskin work shoes Owen had worn at the inquest. These were plain brown shoes with elastic sidepieces. “And—”
“Yeah,” Owen prompted.
“I told him Miriam’s name. I told him I hated her. Bruno had an idea for a murder. A double murder.”
“Jesus!” Owen whispered.
The “Jesus” reminded him of Bruno, and Guy had a horrible, an utterly horrible thought all at once, that he might ensnare Owen in the same trap that Bruno had used for him, that Owen in turn would capture another stranger who would capture another, and so on in infinite progression of the trapped and the hunted. Guy shuddered and clenched his hands. “My mistake was in speaking to him. My mistake was in telling a stranger my private business.”
“He told you he was going to kill her?”
“No, of course not. It was an idea he had. He was insane. He was a psychopath. I told him to shut up and to go to hell. I got rid of him!” He was back in the compartment. He was leaving it to go onto the platform. He heard the bang of the train’s heavy door. Got rid of him, he had thought!
“You didn’t tell him to do it.”
“No. He didn’t say he was going to do it.”
“Why don’t you have a straight shot? Why don’t you sit down?” Owen’s slow, rasping voice made the room steady again. His voice was like an ugly rock, solidly lodged in dry ground.
He didn’t want to sit down, and he didn’t want to drink. He had drunk Scotch like this in Bruno’s compartment. This was the end and he didn’t want it to be like the beginning. He touched the glass of Scotch and water that he had fixed for himself only for politeness’ sake. When he turned around, Owen was pouring more liquor into his glass, continued to pour it, as if to show Guy that he hadn’t been trying to do it behind his back.
“Well,” Owen drawled, “if the fellow was a nut like you say—That was the court’s opinion finally, too, wasn’t it, that it must have been a madman?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, sure I can understand how you felt afterwards, but if it was just a conversation like you say, I don’t see where you should blame yourself so awful much.”
Guy was staring at him
incredulously. Didn’t it matter to Owen more than this? Maybe he didn’t entirely understand. “But you see—”
“When did you find out about it?” Owen’s brown eyes looked slurry.
“About three months after it happened. But you see, if not for me, Miriam would be alive now.” Guy watched Owen lower his lips to the glass again. He could taste the sickening mess of Coca-Cola and Scotch sliding into Owen’s wide mouth. What was Owen going to do? Leap up suddenly and fling the glass down, throttle him as Bruno had throttled Miriam? He couldn’t imagine that Owen would continue to sit there, but the seconds went by and Owen did not move. “You see, I had to tell you,” Guy persisted. “I considered you the one person I might have hurt, the one person who suffered. Her child had been yours. You were going to marry her. You loved her. It was you—”
“Hell, I didn’t love her.” Owen looked at Guy with no change whatever in his face.
Guy stared back at him. Didn’t love her, didn’t love her, Guy thought. His mind staggered back, trying to realign all the past equations that no longer balanced. “Didn’t love her?” he said.
“No. Well, not the way you seem to think. I certainly didn’t want her to die—and understand, I’d have done anything to prevent it, but I was glad enough not to have to marry her. Getting married was her idea. That’s why she had the child. That’s not a man’s fault, I wouldn’t say. Would you?” Owen was looking at him with a tipsy earnestness, waiting, his wide mouth the same firm, irregular line it had been on the witness stand, waiting for Guy to say something, to pass judgment on his conduct with Miriam.
Guy turned away with a vaguely impatient gesture. He couldn’t make the equations balance. He couldn’t make any sense to it, except an ironic sense. There was no reason for his being here now, except for an ironic reason. There was no reason for his sweating, painful self-torture in a hotel room for the benefit of a stranger who didn’t care, except for an ironic reason.
“Do you think so?” Owen kept on, reaching for the bottle on the table beside him.
Strangers on a Train Page 27