by Philip Wylie
That move Minerva partly checked. She had no wish to be immortalized over the doorway—not to mention on the bedpans and diapers—of a “darkie infirmary.” But even as she graciously declined the offer and the vote of children, she found herself that much more enmeshed in Alice Groves’s toils. Her very refusal of the use of her name had wedded her person to the charity, which was what the administrator had wanted.
Their relations thenceforward were cordial but, on Minerva’s part, guarded. No white woman in River city or Green Prairie had ever managed to “take” her against her will, so thoroughly. . . .
On a Wednesday, as usual, Willis drove across town to the Infirmary punctually at three.
Alice Groves, as usual, stood at the head of the stairs within the dingy building. She was dressed in powder blue, which, Minerva noted, became her. Behind Alice were the usual starched bevies of nurses, drawn up like a company for inspection.
Minerva made panting, reluctant rounds—baby wards and the new operating room (which was a sickening display of shiny things best not thought about, Minerva felt). She drew the line at visiting the adult wards, and there were no private rooms.
“Right after Christmas,” Alice Groves said pleasantly, as they finished the tour and started toward the bright, chintz-draped room where the ‘Wednesday ladies” sewed, “we’re going to start a drive among our own people for fifty thousand dollars.”
“Good heavens! Can you raise anything like that?”
“Perhaps not. It’s the amount we need to buy a little building in the country, for chronics.
There are so many!”
Minerva, headed for the white ladies, was beginning to think other thoughts. “That’s really very enterprising and wonderful—”
“I’m delighted you approve. I was sure you would. In fact, I’ve told the press—”
“What have you told the press?”
“That you approved. In fact, I said it was your idea.”
“No harm in that,” Minerva murmured.
“You’re always so kind, Mrs. Sloan!”
Minerva thought grimly that beyond doubt this “chronic home” drive would cost her the uncontributed balance of its quota. She had to admit Alice Groves was a good operator. It might, she thought, pay to take Alice into her camp. Then she saw the hat—the sprouted fright—that Netta Bailey was wearing, and she went through the chatting, peanut-eating, one-day seamstresses with a booming, “Afternoon, everybody! Afternoon, Netta! So glad you’re here. I wanted to have a private chat with you— church matters—before you left.”
It was recognition that both delighted and alarmed Netta. Minerva seldom did more than nod to her, at a distance.
The two women were ideally suited to the “little talk” that took place in the “visitors’
powder room,” some half hour later. They were suited in the sense that each knew what she wanted and what the other wanted and each knew what she had of value to the other. It wasn’t even a very long talk, considering that it proposed to settle the lives of a son and a daughter.
Minerva explained her position, rapidly. “You see,” she wound up, “my boy loves Lenore. Crazy about her. Charming girl. I’m crazy about her myself. So unfortunate, dear, old Beau would make a slip at such a time! I have no sympathy with crookedness, Mrs. Bailey. . . .”
“Of course not!”
Minerva squinted, but she could not prove irony in the response. She made a thin, tight mouth, a formidable mouth, and then let it relax into a smile. “However, it was only a slip, a little slip, and his first. It must, of course, be his last. I can hardly send my son’s future father-in-law packing off to prison—”
“God forbid!” There was, at least, no irony in that.
“On the other hand,” Minerva went on, changing her tone to one of intimacy, intimacy tinged with potential regret and the potential withdrawal of intimacy, “we mothers understand things our children don’t. Kit tells me Lenore doesn’t seem to reciprocate his feelings . . .”
“Oh! I’m sure she does!” Netta was alarmed, but not as much as she appeared to be.
“I can understand it. Kit’s rather a—shall we say, frightening young man, from the standpoint of an innocent young thing.”
“Innocent as driven snow,” Mrs. Bailey murmured.
“Kit’s peremptory, bullheaded, reckless and foolish. I wouldn’t have it any other way,”
Mrs. Sloan said sharply. “But you know and I know how love grows in marriage—”
“Indeed, I do!”
“—so I feel, a word from you, Mrs. Bailey—I must call you Netta, and you must call me Minerva—the right word ...”
“I understand perfectly,” Netta gulped. “Minerva.”
“I’m sure you do!”
As soon as she decently could, Netta left the Infirmary and drove home at rocket speed.
The first thing she had to do was to sober up Beau, who’d been drinking like a fish since coming home from the bank. Lenore could be tackled after that. Beau would sober up fast enough when she got through the fog with the news of reprieve. Lenore would be a more difficult subject.
But Minerva stayed on quite a while, even sewed a little. When Willis drove her away, she waved from the window of the Rolls to a contented, gracious Alice Groves on the Infirmary steps.
4
Henry Conner was in jail.
He could hardly believe it.
Two uniformed cops had escorted him up the steps and taken him into a room and closed a door. The door had been locked and Henry saw bars on the windows. They hadn’t let him talk, and they’d ignored his shout, “Call Lawyer Balcomb!”
Presently, as he paced in the room, the door was unlocked and different officers, men he knew only by sight, said, “This way.”
Then he faced Lieutenant Lacey, who had his feet on his desk and was grinning.
“Evening, Hank.”
Henry Conner had not sworn much in years. He now turned the lieutenant’s office blue.
“Just what,” he finally managed to ask, “is the idea of picking me up and hauling me into the hoosegow?”
“Don’t get riled, Henry. You’ll be home in time for a good night’s sleep.”
“You won’t sleep, by God, Lacey, unless you can explain what in the name of jumped-up
. . . !” The square, homely face was brick-red and the gray hair frizzed in sweat. Righteous wrath exploded in Henry’s every syllable.
“Things,” Lacey answered, his Irish grin undisturbed, “were really in a mess here, Henry, a few minutes ago. A call came in from a right upset person, known to us, a Mrs. Agnes Heer, of twenty-six twenty-eight Pine Street—”
“What the hell has that busybody of an Aggie Fleer got to do with me being grabbed by cops?”
“—saying that a dead body had fallen out of the rear end of a car. She got the car’s number. We radioed. They picked you up.”
Henry said, “Oh.” He sat down. “A dead body, eh? Fell out of my car, eh?” His voice rose, “Did that old cheese-butt examine the body?”
“Not closely. She said it was lying in the gutter, hideously disfigured, face bloody, an arm sawed off—”
“She did, eh?” Henry’s voice was tense.
“She did. And naturally we sent out a red flash for the car with the number she gave us.
We told her not to touch the body,” Lacey said earnestly. “What the hell was it, Henry? When Jones and Billings came in here and said they’d picked you up, I knew—”
“It was Minnie,” Henry answered in a peculiar tone.
“Minnie?” Lacey shook his head. “Anyone we know?”
Henry took a deep breath. He stood up. “Look, Lacey,” he explained with control.
“Minnie is a dummy, one of six the department-store people contributed to Civil Defense.
Minnie was made up months since, over at Jenkins hospital by some imaginative young interns, to look like an atom-bomb casualty.”
“I thought it was something of t
he sort!”
“Thanks,” Henry said. “And good night! And the next time you want me for murder, don’t send a couple of prowl cops after me. They might get hurt.”
“Just a sec. “
Henry kept on going.
He had ample appreciation of the humorousness of his predicament. But he was anxious to finish his evening’s duties. The dummy that had led to his arrest was realistic. But they’d used realistic dummies in Civil Defense drills all over the country for years. The tizzie which the mere sight of it had started in Aggie Fleer was evidence of how the general public would react. There ought, he thought, to be more such “wounded” dummies for the public to see. Nowadays Americans whisked out of sight, in ambulances, every injury, every accident case. They hastily wiped up blood when it was spilled. Only doctors and nurses knew, any more, what wounds were. God alone could guess how half a million Aggie Fleers would act if real bombs started bursting over American streets. Take one look at the casualties and blow their tops, he felt sure.
He’d have to emphasize the point in future CD meetings. Do something about it.
Lacey called, “Just a sec.”
Henry spoke his thoughts. “Never did realize how much education folks need. Matter of fact, I hide those dummies myself. Wonder if I should? Maybe there ought to be a permanent display in a downtown department-store window, so people wouldn’t faint if the real thing ever came along. Fat chance of getting a display!” He started through the door.
“I’ve got more to say.” Henry stopped and looked back gloweringly. Lacey said, “I told you, your ‘Minnie’ fell out of your car—”
“Damn it, I was on the way to a rescue drill. I keep Minnie, and two others, in my garage.”
“Yeah. Well, when Billings radioed in they had you, without knowing at the moment who you were, I got another call.”
Henry groaned. “What’d Minnie do? Grave-walk?”
“Some kids found her. And about fifteen minutes ago, Albert Higgley answered his doorbell and saw something in his barberry bushes. He switched on his porch light and took a good look and fell down six steps. They think his collarbone’s broken.”
“Too bad,” Henry said. “You don’t feel any—liability in the matter? A judge might think differently.”
“I said, by cracking godalmighty, it’s Civil Defense business! Some of us still stick to duty. If a couple of boys played a prank with poor old Minnie, get the boys.”
“We did. One was your boy. Ted.”
He considered. He chuckled slightly. “Ted, eh?”
“They’re bringing him here.”
“Ted never did care much for Albert Higgley,” Henry mused. “The old squirt owns a vacant lot near our place, has grape arbors on it. Nobody picks the grapes, unless kids like Ted do. One year-oh-maybe seven . . . eight years back—my hoy Ted and a couple of other nippers were having grapes. Old Higgley ambushed ‘em. Swung with a heavy cane, no warning, just whammed out of the bushes. Broke Ted’s nose first crack. He wasn’t more’n eight-nine, maybe. .
. .”
Lacey rubbed his chin. “I see. You didn’t charge him?”
“Heck, no! Everybody has one or two mean neighbors.”
“He’s charging you. His wife is anyhow. Lewd and obscene exhibition—”
“What?”
Lacey nodded. “That store dummy was pretty realistic, wasn’t it?”
“Was,” Henry said. “And is. The interns went to some trouble to make it more so. Hair, and like that. Point is, if you’re going to have personnel trained to stand the shock of human beings burned and hurt, you gotta train them with something that looks human.”
“I suppose you do.” Lacey gazed at the ceiling. “Point is, there’s a city ordinance about lewd exhibition. That dummy was female—and naked—”
“Dam’ right! So would bomb casualties be! Clothes burned off ‘em, and naked as the day they were born, and bumed—like Minnie.”
“Guess I can let you go, Hank. I’ll talk to your kid—scare him good—and let him go, too. But I think you may have to answer in court, someday soon—if Higgley’s collarbone is really broken—for this ‘lewd’ business.”
In alternations of rage and laughter, Henry told Beth. When he finished, like most excited persons, he went back to the beginning. ‘‘There I was, tooling along to CD headquarters to drill the rescue gang! Wham! There they came, sirens yowling. ‘Pull over!’ they hollered, and so help me God, when I got out, they had drawn their guns!”
He slapped his thigh and chortled.
His wife smiled, but not with his hilarity.
“It’s funny,” she said quietly, “but I don’t recall ever seeing Minnie.”
He shot her a quick glance, his smile gone. “Minnie’s an ugly sight,” he replied. “Kept her in that locked closet, with the others. Didn’t see any call to show you our chamber of horrors.”
“Why, Henry?”
“Well. . . .”
“Isn’t that what they’re for?”
“Sure. I suppose, though—that is, I always figured, why upset Beth. She can stand what she has to. A lot of people passed out or puked the first time we used those things—and not all women, by any means.”
“I think I ought to look.”
Henry’s amusement, as well as his indignation, were gone, now. “Hell, Mom!” he protested.
She beckoned with her head.
They went to the garage. Henry switched on the light. He unlocked a closet. Inside, standing, leaning against the walls, were two figures of human beings-a man and a child—
horribly mutilated. Beth Conner touched the back of her hand to her mouth. She said, almost in a whisper, “All right, Hank. Shut the door.”
He followed her, around the Oldsmobile and into the yard, wondering what she was thinking. She whispered something finally, and he thought she said, “The beasts!” He guessed, presently, she had said that, referring to the Reds, maybe, or maybe to scientists, or maybe just to humanity at large. But when she faced him she was calm and she took his arm by its crook.
“Hank,” she murmured, “don’t you ever quit Civil Defense!”
5
Lenore said, “I won’t!”
Netta ate another pecan. The Applebys had sent them from Florida—too late for Thanksgiving but too early for Christmas. The Applebys had never before sent a gift to the Baileys. The Applebys lived on Crystal Lake and went to Miami every year. Word, Netta thought, must be seeping around, the way it always does, ahead of the fact. The pecans were therefore a delicious token of a bounteous Hood to come.
“I think you will,” Netta said, “simply because I know you haven’t lost your mind.”
“Nevertheless, I will not marry Kit.”
“Why?”
“How’d you like to?”
“I’ve had worse,” Netta said, and then catching herself, she added, “all my life.”
Lenore’s eyes were savage. “You’ve had worse all your life! Poor Dad!”
“It’s so plain it hurts,” Netta said. “You refuse Kit. Okay. Your father’s in jail-five to ten years. Kill him sure.”
“Maybe it would—what’s left of Dad!”
“The house goes. Both cars. All the furniture. Probably even our clothes, forced sales and repossession. Then we have nothing.”
“But self-respect.”
Netta said quietly, “You’ve never been poor. Flat. Stony. Broke. Without a friend or a dime—unless you hustle a friend and he gives you a dime. Maybe even a few dollars.”
Lenore thought that over. “I doubt it. People would tide you and me over—”
“Who?”
Lenore looked through a window. “The Conners.”
“The Conners—the Conners!—the Conners! I’ve heard it all my life. I’m sick to death of it. Who are the Conners? An accountant, that’s who! And a crazy young kid who thinks he’ll be an architect in maybe ten years when you’ve got bags under your eyes and a bridge.”
Lenore took a
pecan. She looked at it, halved it, threw the paper-thin middle husk onto the hearth and shook her head. She felt frightened, cold, sick. She was trapped and she knew it as well as her mother. If it were just disgrace, as such, and poverty, that would be thinkable. But she couldn’t face the image of her father in prison, marching in a line to eat, going out on the roads in stripes, cold and miserable and rejected. She knew he was weak. But she knew, also, that he was kind. Kind and rather gentle and, in his way, loving. Which her mother was not, unless, in some twisted way, she too cared for Beau.