Mischief

by Charlotte Armstrong

  No, she couldn’t go home quite yet. She’d stay free for a while, even as long as a date might have lasted. Because this was important She knew. It would be hard to explain how and why … embarrassing … maybe impossible. She had to work it out alone.

  Anyhow, she didn’t think Jed would go to her apartment. It would be capitulation. He wasn’t that type. He was pretty proud.

  Was she the type, then, to hang around? All right, she thought stubbornly, I won’t be the huffy female type who, right or wrong, sits and waits for the male to come with his hat in his hand, like the dopey heroines of old romances who huffed and waited their lives away.

  Ah, nobody was a type! This was Jed and Lyn, and this had to be worked out on the basis that they were unique and alive, and it had to be worked out now. Tomorrow, the plane …

  Wherever he was, he’d come back here. He hadn’t checked out. It was all so childish.… She could at least say that much.

  “Dear Jed,” she wrote. “It was all so childish …” She watched a man and a woman cross the lobby. “And I don’t want you to go West thinking that I …”

  Am I doing this, she wondered, because I’m vain? “Thinking that I …” what? How could such bitter words have been spoken between them? Because she’d been riding a high romantic crest of expectation and been dragged rudely off it? Maybe, for him, there’d never been such a crest. No, no. That was a huffy-type thought, a fear to seem vain. She had known that Jed was fond of her. She’d had reason to expect him to say so or say more. Never mind that inside-out kind of vanity.

  She tore up the sheet and wrote again, “Dear Jed: I’ve been trying to find you because—” A tear fell and the ink blurred and she thought, Oh no … not this! Wouldn’t he be amused!

  Would he? Lyn sat a long time with her hands quiet on the desk. She worked it out. It was true. She was in love with Jed Towers … in love enough to lash out at him, to get as mad as that, to have it matter.

  It was true. She had thought he might ask her to marry him tonight. They’d been together, together … until that old man touched this off.

  And it was true. She’d have said “yes.” Gladly, yes. Yes, right or wrong. Yes, just because of his mouth, maybe.

  And they had quarreled.

  But it was not true that she thought him a cheap cynic. He was … wary. Yes, he was. And he talked cynically. Part of it was simple reporting—what he saw around him. Part of it was defensive … or something like that. But it was talk. People don’t always know what they are. They talk at themselves a lot. She thought, but I can really be tough. If I believe, then I must do … or all I said was only talk.

  So Lyn worked it out, painfully. It was also true, whoever began it, whatever it amounted to, she had been the one to walk away, and cut off communication, and she didn’t (she’d always said) believe in that.

  Very well. She clasped her hands. It was important Here was a crest from which she would coast away all her life long. And a huff wouldn’t do.

  But what could she put on a piece of paper? If only he’d come. People crossed the lobby, none of, them he. Tomorrow, that plane … Maybe he’d call her. No, it went so early. She could ask in the note. All her thoughts were splintering. Dawn was such a chilly time.

  She took up the pen. “Dear Jed: I can’t let you go—” But you can’t keep him, Lyn. He isn’t that type. Maybe he was only something charming and exciting flashing through your life, and what you seemed in his, for a little while, you’ll never know. Might have discovered whether there was any meaning but not now—too late. “Misunderstanding,” she wrote desperately. It was too late. She ought to go home.

  What can I say? she wondered. What can I do? How can I go home?

  Get out of here, Towers. Get out, quick. And forget it. Skip it. Jed paid his inner talk to himself no heed. He sat down on a bed. Under the verbalized thought ran uneasy pictures. What if the child were to cry a long time, and he, in his own room, could hear? How was he in a position to be the indignant guest, to protest, to do anything about it? He’d been stupid. Nell, the baby sitter, had already made a complete jackass out of Towers. This rose to word level. He looked into his glass and contemplated this state of affairs.

  When Nell came back carrying the child, he knew her reason. She didn’t trust him not to sneak away. He remained quietly where he was. He was not entirely displeased. He wanted to watch her quiet the child.

  “If you’re scared, that’s silly. Nothing to be scared about,” Nell said impatiently. “Now don’t start to cry any more. Shall I read another story?”

  “No,” said Bunny. She wasn’t quite crying at the moment, but she was shaken by an aftermath of shuddering. It was a reaction not subject to her control.

  Nell set her down on her bare feet. Three strangely assorted people looked rather helplessly at each other.

  “You know, you nearly scared the life out of me,” Jed said to the child in a friendly tone. “And Nell, too. That’s why Nell was cross.”

  “She was … too … cross,” said Bunny as well as she could.

  “That she was,” he agreed grimly.

  Nell looked as if she would flare up defensively, but she did not “You O.K. now?” Her voice was edgy. “You’re not going to cry any more?”

  Bunny wasn’t sure enough to say. Her eyes turned from one to the other.

  “I’m a friend of Nell’s, stopped by to see her a minute,” Jed said, feeling his face flush. Why he should be trying to explain himself to this half-pint creature he didn’t quite know. “You ought to be asleep, I guess,” he went on awkwardly. “How old are you?”

  “Nine.”

  Nine. What was it to be nine? Jed couldn’t remember. The drinks were beginning to blur his concern a little. He began to feel these events less shattering, as if his ego went somewhere and lay down.

  “I’m too hot,” said Bunny. “I’m all sticky.”

  “Come over here, then.” Nell went to the windows. “We’ll let some cool air blow on you. Then you’ll be cooler. Then you can go back to sleep.” She nodded wisely. She pulled up the blind. She pushed up the sash.

  Jed jumped quickly out of the line of vision through those windows. His back felt for the head board. He poured another drink. The ice was all the way over there. So, no ice. Because he wouldn’t cross in front of the windows. Place like a goldfish bowl. He knew. And that was where you made your mistake, Towers.

  “See the lady, Bunny?”

  Sob and shudder answered.

  “I see a man, down there. He’s playing cards.”

  Jed’s warm drink was nauseating.

  “I think,” Nell went on, “there’s a kitten under the table.”

  “What,” sob, “table?”

  “Down there. The card table.”

  “I don’t see …”

  “Maybe it isn’t a kitten. But it looks like a kitten.”

  “I’ve got a cat,” Bunny said. “Is the kitten stripe-ed?”

  “No.”

  “Is it gray?”

  “Maybe.”

  Miss Eva Ballew wrote, on the Hotel Majestic stationery, in her flowing script …“seems to be a child crying in this hotel and I am so distracted, I hope you can understand what I am writing, since I seem to have two predicates and no subject in my previous sentence! My dear, this trip has really …”

  Her pen paused. The child had stopped crying. Thank goodness, thought Miss Ballew. But now the night seemed hollow. She ducked her head enough to glance briefly out, under her blind.

  The pen resumed, “been a treat for all us teachers to have visited so many historical sites here in the East …” It was not a sentence.

  She put down her pen suddenly and ducked again to look out, across the dark well of the inner court.

  “I don’t see any kitten,” Bunny said, “at all.” Her pigtails hung down in front, swinging.

  “Well, you’re not looking …” Nell said softly. “But you won’t cry any more, will you?”

  Jed glanc
ed across at the bowl of ice. He rose. Why did she have to put the damn blind up? Dare he cross over? Was there anybody taking all this in? He’d just as soon get out of here without some guest having seen …

  When he turned his head over his shoulder, the question dropped out of his mind. He stood quite still, puzzling about what was wrong. It seemed to him, definitely, that something was wrong. Bunny was kneeling on that radiator top. And Nell sat there, beside her. Nell’s hand was flat on the little rump in the pink sprigged muslin—

  Her hand was flat!

  And there was some wild throbbing in this room.

  Miss Eva Ballew, peering out, exclaimed. Nobody heard her, for she was alone. “No!” she said. Then, whimpering, “Oh, no! Please!”

  The back of Jed’s neck prickled. Must be his own pulse, doing that throbbing. Just the same, it was intolerable. He began to move, silently, with the speed and grace of the young and strong.

  “Way down under the table?” Bunny asked.

  “Way down …” crooned Nell. “Way, way down. Are you going to be quiet, I wonder?”

  Bunny screamed.

  Jed, with his fingers tight around the little brown ankle, caught her forward pitch with one arm and said, on a rush of breath, “Excuse me. Shouldn’t lean out like that, for Lord’s sakes. I had to grab.”

  Nell’s face turned, tipped back and up. She looked drowsy and unstartled. “What?” she murmured. “What’s the matter?”

  Jed had the child. “Better come away,” he said to her. “You’ll catch cold, anyhow.” He could feel little twitches the whole length of the arm that held Bunny. He squeezed her as gently as he could manage. “I’m sorry, honey, if I scared you. Trouble is, you scared me again. Sure did. Awful long ways down—kind of tough landing.”

  Bunny, having screamed once in her surprise, did not begin to cry. Her face was pale. Her big dark eyes seemed to turn and keep some wisdom of her own.

  Jed said, “You’re chilly. You’re shivering. Aren’t you sleepy now?”

  Bunny nodded. She wiggled out of his arm. Her feet hit the carpet. She looked at him gravely. “I can go to bed myself,” said Bunny O. Jones,

  Miss Ballew straightened her cramped body. Her heart still lurched with that old devil of hers, that hair-trigger onset of the physical sickness of fear. She felt her throbbing throat. But what was going on, over there? Her pale lips tightened. She’d heard the man say, “Put that blind down!”

  So, it was to be secret, and it was male, and it was, perhaps, evil? She focused on her letter. “And even in this wicked city,” her pen wrote, at last, too shakily.

  “Put that blind down!”

  Nell was still sitting by the window, still looking dreamy. She stretched to obey and Jed thought there was something snakelike in the smooth uncoiling of her arching back and her reaching arm.

  He stood at the door of 809, through which Bunny had marched herself. 809 was quiet … dim and quiet in there. So he closed the door, gently.

  Bunny’s rigid neck muscles let go a little. The head began to dent the pillow. The eyes were wide open. The hand reached for the little stuffed dog and tucked it under the stiff chin. The throat moved, against the fluffy toy, in a great and difficult swallow.

  Jed swung around. You’re nuts, Towers, he said to himself, angrily, using the words, in his mind, to knock out the pictures. You must be nuts. Where’d you get such a nutty idea? Nobody shoves kids out of eighth-story windows, so they won’t cry any more! Made his hair curl, the mere idea, even now. Where had he got it?

  He began to fish ice out of the bowl.

  It crossed the level of his mind where slang was not the language that there is something wild about total immersion in the present tense. What if the restraint of the future didn’t exist? What if you never said to yourself, “I’d better not. I’ll be in trouble if I do”? You’d be wild, all right. Capricious, unpredictable … absolutely wild.

  He looked at the girl. She was leaning beside him, watching the ice chunk into her glass, with a look of placid pleasure. She glanced up. “You’ve had more than me,” she stated.

  “That’s right,” Jed said. He felt perfectly sober. The slight buzz was gone. He didn’t bother to put ice into his own glass, after all. He wasn’t going to have any more liquor, not for a while.

  He gave her the drink. He sat down, nursing his warm glass.

  He couldn’t get rid of the shimmer on his nerves of narrowly missed horror. Nuts, Towers. Forget it. She was careless. Nobody’s going to have an idea like that one. She just wasn’t thinking what she was doing.

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking,” Nell said, with a delicate shrug.

  “Are you a mind reader?” He sagged back on his elbow. “That’s a couple of times you’ve said what I had in my mouth, practically.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “But you sure should have put a good hitch on the seat of her pants or something. Don’t you know that’s dangerous?” If the future didn’t operate in your thinking, you wouldn’t even know that word, he thought. Danger wouldn’t have a meaning. Would it? He shivered. His mind veered.

  If there was such a thing as telepathy, why, it would work both ways. If she could catch an idea out of his mind, then he might catch one of hers. Couldn’t he? Hadn’t he? Listen, Towers, don’t be any nuttier than you have to be! Mind reading, yet! Fold your tent … fade away.

  But he was hunting for comfort. He remembered something. He said, “So you couldn’t go dancing with me on account of the kid?” (So, you did feel responsible?)

  “Uncle Eddie’s on the elevator.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’d have caught me, going out,” she said placidly. “He never lets me.”

  “Your Uncle? Uncle Eddie runs an elevator? In this hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Jed turned this information over. “Maybe he got you the job, eh?”

  “Yeah,” she said with weary scorn, “my wonderful job.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “What’s there to like?” she said. And he saw the answer come into her head. He saw it! He read it! “There’s you, though,” Nell was thinking.

  He closed his eyes and shook his own head. None of that. But he considered, and on the whole he thought he felt relieved. The future tense had operated. Hadn’t it? If she thought ahead of her, to Eddie on the elevator?

  His mind skipped to his own future. Tomorrow morning on the airplane. By tomorrow night, a continent away, looking back on a weird evening, which was about over, he judged. Time to go.

  His anger was gone. He was operating in the future tense, looking back, saying to somebody, “And what a sitter! What a dame she turned out to be! Nutty as a fruitcake!” he would say. If he ever said anything.

  “Well,” he spoke. “Nell, I’ll tell you. It might have been fun. We’ll never know. So here’s to the evening. Bottoms up and then good-by. See you in South America, sometime?”

  He grinned. Her eyes were too blue, not in the quality of the blue, but in the quantity. Strange eyes …

  “You’re not going,” she said, with no rising inflection at all. It wasn’t even a protest. She just said this, as if it were so.

  CHAPTER 8

  The unwritten law that links green peas to roast chicken had not been flouted tonight. Peter pointed with his fork and winked. He wasn’t really eating.

  Ruth could eat no more than he. They picked and pretended. But nobody, she thought, was there for the sake of nourishment. The food marched by, as it were, in a sedate order, perfectly conventional, with no surprises, so that nothing about it should interrupt the real business of the banquet. Be seen, buzz, bow … Preen yourself, flatter your neighbor. Oh, it was fun!

  But now they were nearly past the ice cream. They were at the coffee … the end of the line. Peter’s conversation with his neighbors had been slowly lessening. Fewer and fewer words came out of him.

  Ruth’s nerves tightened right along with his. She let a little
ice cream melt in her dry mouth. Peter was taking tiny sips of water, oftener now.

  Every once in a while, the buzzing and the bending-to-chat got a little unreal for Ruth—whenever Bunny came into her mind. It was a little distressing that her vision of Bunny in her bed was shaky and unreal, too. Bunny, she told herself, making words, as if the words had power, was sound asleep. As sound asleep as if she were in her bed at home. Oh, Bunny was real! Warm and beloved, Bunny was there. But those hotel rooms, those formulas, did not wrap her around with the safe sense of being home.

  But of course not! Ruth said to herself.

  Still, it was a great city, vast and unknown, and the West Side seemed divorced from the East Side, where they were … seemed far.

  “I’d like to call back to the hotel pretty soon,” she murmured to Peter. “Where are the phones?”

  “Saw them as we came through,” Peter said. “Around the corner, past those mirrors …” He dabbled in his ice cream. The toastmaster was still chatting peacefully.

  “Have I time, do you think?” breathed Ruth. They, at the speakers’ table, were as far as it was possible to be, away from the double doors to the mirrored place beyond which were the telephones. Parade, in my pink, thought Ruth. Conspicuous. Peter could not go, now.

  The toastmaster shifted in his chair. He sipped his coffee. Ruth felt all Peter’s muscles wince. For the toast-master glanced their way and made a tiny nod. His eyes nodded deeper than his head did.

  Imperceptibly, Peter responded. The toastmaster shoved with his hips and his chair began to move backward.

  Not now! No time, now! Ruth would call, afterward. After the man had said whatever he was going to say. Later than that, for without intermission, it would then be Peter’s turn!

  It would be good to call, later, with this tension gone. And all clear. Oh yes, it would be much better.

  There was no doubt that Bunny was sound asleep, anyway. Ruth must now lift her chin and turn her head and listen sweetly to the Speaker of the Evening. (Oh, what was he going to say! Oh, Peter!)

  Bunny was nine and surely had fallen sound asleep by this time.