A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  They passed through the gate lodge and up among the trees, planted too close together and somehow dwarfed, to give the impression of a wood. The cypresses here were planted not by immigrant Italians but by the holding company. They were less slim, of a paler green, and much less tall.

  It was a long zigzag up the hill and over it to where, just on the other side, the ground rolled down into what had once been a gully where the grass was softer and spongy underfoot. Small vaults were scattered under the trees, in imitation of Greek temples, or even less compromising than that. The Barnes vault was of the same size as the rest, but somewhat older. They had previously been buried in Pioneer Park and had been moved farther into the country as the city grew. The cypresses here were of a darker hue and the roof of the building was of cuprous tile. It was about the size of a large doll’s house in a back yard, and one of its gilt gates stood open.

  The cars parked below and the mourners started up the hill to where a priest awaited them. Because of the incline of the hill, it took a while to get the coffin up. Lily, slightly apart from the others, twitched her fingers impatiently. Luke saw her doing it. He took Maggie’s arm and they trudged up the hill, also standing slightly apart, but Lily on the opposite side of the group. She looked at them both with a mixture of impatience and apprehension. The sun came out briefly.

  There were only about twelve people and Luke wondered who they were. They were too well dressed to have been hired for show. Foster was there, of course. He moved closer to Lily. The others he did not know. For the appearance of things he, too, moved closer to Lily, pulling Maggie with him. The distance between them was publicly obvious, even so.

  He did not hear what the priest said. He did not attempt to listen. Perhaps the priest did not concentrate either, but Lily followed every gesture. She was facing the vault and seemed to be watching the open door. Maggie did not look at it. She looked down the slope.

  Family vaults, thought Luke, were a mistake. They were so seldom ever completed, even by Medici. Dynasties are soon over and in America they only last a generation.

  There was some awkwardness about the coffin. After the prayer, and it was short, was over, the pallbearers stooped to lift it. They were union men. The priest impatiently yanked open the other gilt gate. Since it was rusty he looked at his hands afterwards. The pallbearers edged into the vault whose entrance was not quite wide enough to admit them head on.

  Luke felt Maggie tug at his arm.

  “Over there,” she whispered.

  He looked to the left of the tomb and saw the woman who had been at the trial. She was standing slightly up the hill, leaning on her cane, her hand partially covered by the paws of a fox stole. Her face was white, especially as she was wearing dark lipstick, and her head was bare. In her other hand she held the cat. She held it too tightly and it snarled. It had, he noticed, only one fang, and that gave it the look of always drooling. Against the fox fur, because of the colour, it was scarcely noticeable, but as the sun emerged again there was a reflection from the lavender eyes.

  Luke did not stir. And as she saw that she had at last been seen, the woman eased her cane and half smiled. Maggie’s pressure on his arm was hurting him. With a nod the woman turned and, poking her cane ahead of her, moved into the trees.

  “Well,” said Luke. “Now we know.” He looked around him and then loosened Maggie’s fingers and took her arm. As he did so he caught a glimpse of Lily. For some reason she also nodded.

  “But who is she?” Maggie’s voice was half lost in the noise of the vault doors closing.

  “Come on,” he said. “She wants us to follow her.”

  Above them, hidden in the trees, he heard a car motor turning over.

  “No,” said Maggie. “I’m afraid.”

  “We have to find out some time,” he said. “It may as well be now.”

  He walked down the hillside to their car. So, unfortunately, did the others. Snarled in the cars he thought he had lost her. But he had not lost her. She was idling ahead and he could see what she had done with the cat. She had put it on the rear shelf of the car and it was sitting there, looking out of the wide-angle window at them. Then the car pulled ahead.

  Maggie sat far over to her side of the car and did not speak. It was just as well. He did not want to speak himself. They followed the car all the way to town. Sometimes it pulled far ahead, but they never lost it. It did not want to be lost. He did not want to catch up with it either.

  It did not stop in town. It swept down to the approach of the Bay Bridge and up on to the ramps. He followed it. There was not much traffic and he kept the car to a steady forty-five. Far ahead of them and over the slightly rising surface of the bridge highway, like the camber of the earth, he could see the other car. Then it vanished into the Yerba Buena tunnel. The weather was better up here, but moist, so that everything was sharply etched. He slowed down. He did not want to catch up with her at the tollhouse on the other side.

  They came out of the tunnel, leaving the city behind them. Maggie involuntarily turned to look at it. It rose white and dirty from its fret of wharves, in an untidy jumble over its hills, with almost nowhere a touch of green. And yet from across the water it gleamed like a magic city. They ran into a military convoy, headed for Yerba Buena and its military establishment. It did not impede them. The woman ahead never looked back, but she slowed down a little while he paid the toll to the uniformed guard. They went through the flat suburbs and began to climb the hills.

  It was a steep, twisting climb and they came out above the houses on the ridge route, in different air. The car ahead drew into a garage. He stopped Maggie’s car and looked for a moment at the view.

  The whole bay and city spread out before them. They could look into the city and see the other, bright red bridge, and, on the far side of it, Mount Tamalpais, yellow and green. On the other side of that was Bolinas.

  “You’d better stay in the car,” he said. Maggie nodded. It occurred to him that from up here you could see everything, and clearly, precisely because this part of the region was above the rest. Only spectators would live here.

  He put his hand on the door handle. “Luke,” she said.

  “Uh?”

  “Please kiss me.”

  “I’m coming right back,” he said. He looked each way to see if the road was empty. It was.

  “Please.” He leaned over and kissed her and let his arm slide round her. He could feel that she was shaking. There was nothing he could do about that. He was almost shaking himself. But he was glad he had touched her. It reminded him of certain important things. He flicked on the radio.

  “I’ll try not to be long. Have a cigarette and listen to some music.”

  He got out of the car and walked the short distance to the woman’s house, and when he looked back she was watching him. He heard the radio, warming up, as it became audible. She reached over quickly and turned it down. He waved and went to the front door.

  The house was older than the other houses on the way up and had a vacant lot next door to it, on the car side. The ground fell steeply away. Like so many California houses built on that sort of ground, it would have the living-room on the top floor. The house was shabby. The wood was oiled, not painted, but even so it was sun-blistered and splintering at the joins. There was no garden but only a blank wall facing the road. There was a card under the bell. The script was cursive. It said Marie O’Neill. Well, at least we know her name, he thought, and rang the bell.

  XXI

  HE WAS NOT KEPT WAITING LONG. Clearly she was expecting him and she answered the door herself. He had not been prepared for that. He stood on the threshold looking at her.

  “You’re the lawyer,” she said. Her voice was non-committal. She stepped aside to make way for him with a sort of mock politeness.

  With a glance down the street towards Maggie he entered and the woman shut the door behind him. She gave him a cursory, half-disapproving glance, as though she thought he was not much, and walked ahea
d of him, planting her cane firmly on the rugs. They were old rugs, worn and frayed, but very good ones. The whole house somehow had a patched-up look.

  She went ahead of him into the living-room. It was a long room with two panelled walls and two walls of glass that gave on an open slat balcony. Even though it was flooded with light and had that magisterial view, it was still an oddly chaotic and dishevelled room. There was a piano, closed and locked, and a couple of worn-out sofas before the fireplace, near a wing chair, in which she sat. She allowed him to look round the room.

  On either side of the fireplace, which apparently she had just had time to light, were crowded bookcases, but the books did not look particularly recent. On one wall hung a frayed but gorgeous Spanish ecclesiastical cope, and by it some etchings by John Marin of Venetian palaces all falling over in their lagoons in the scratchy technique of fifty years ago. The pictures were mostly line engravings. There was an undusted desk. It was the sort of room where everything was once of the best quality, stylelessly, and nothing is ever replaced and, though it gets chipped or cracked, is never broken.

  “I call it home,” she said drily. “Sit down.”

  He sat. The sofa was too big for him. She leaned forward from her chair. “There’s a decanter beside you,” she said. “You’d better have a drink.”

  Watching her he unstoppered the decanter, which was unwashed cut crystal, and poured himself one. It was sherry and he poured too much. He detested sherry, though this was good.

  “Well,” he said, after a sip. “Who are you?”

  “My name is on the bell, I suppose you read it. The O’Neills are a little older than the Barnes.” She shrugged. “The only difference being, I suppose, that the insurance company wouldn’t pay up after the Fire.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Nothing. Only an irony. But you’re too young for irony.”

  She smiled and he saw that she was unexpectedly beautiful, with a distinction Lily lacked, but though her face was delicate, she did not look soft. It made him marvel at the consistency of women, that she was so well made-up and yet so old. Probably not even that white hair that lay in a row of curls all pointing the same way across her forehead, to lower it, was all rooted in her head. He wondered for whom all that care was expended, not realizing that women dress for themselves.

  “I know all about you, you know,” she said, as though saying: “Make yourself at home.” He was sure of it. He was not surprised. Los Angeles had taught him that as you move up through the social pyramid the number of people who knew each other grows smaller and smaller until, presumably, at the top, wreathed in clouds, like a public monument to a god unknown, is somebody who knows everybody but whom nobody ever meets. There were also women like this, who are nobody but who know everybody. You see them sitting patiently at parties, sometimes with their legs crossed, not talking very much, with no obvious power, but always listening. They were usually demons on the telephone. They liked to get their own way.

  “I’m sure of it,” he said, as drily as she had.

  “That’s the girl out in the car, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He looked at her warily. By the sherry was a dish of biscuits, an old maid’s hospitality, and he took one. He was too much at his ease in this room. Perhaps it was the off-hand way she had welcomed him, as though he was late for a familiar appointment. Perhaps it was the resemblance the room had, in some way, to Senator Ford’s house, a resemblance that was not much altered by an impatient woman’s touch, an inefficient attempt to dust and a bowl of badly arranged pale white tulips over by the windows. Looking at her more closely he realized for the first time that she was really extremely angry, but with a restrained, probably permanent anger that squeezed down to find an outlet and found only scorn.

  “Why did you want us here?” he asked.

  “Us?” She seemed amused at that. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve made up my mind yet.”

  “You waited long enough.”

  “I thought perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary,” she said. “I’ve no desire to see any of you.”

  “That’s frank, anyhow.”

  Miss Marie shrugged, but he thought that as well as being angry she was also amused, being one of those people who can stand outside themselves without losing their personality. If he had not had so much to lose, he realized, he would have liked her. She had some kind of personal resource that made it easier for her to play the grande dame than it was, for example, for Lily to do so. All the same he remembered Maggie in the car and grew cautious.

  “Who are you?” he asked again.

  She shifted her cane with amusement. “Not anybody these days,” she said. “Ford might remember the family.”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  “Of course you don’t.” She eyed him easily and did not seem entirely displeased with what she saw. “You’re too young for us. You don’t belong here.”

  “I’m glad I don’t.”

  “Oh.” She shrugged. “You’re just starting. You belong down there. This isn’t your sort of puzzle at all, is it? I shouldn’t think it was. It has roots. And you don’t have any roots, at least not here.”

  He did not so much care for that turn of the conversation.

  “That’s better,” she said, seeing his discomfort. “I suppose you think you love the girl?”

  “Maybe.”

  “She looks simple and insipid enough,” said Miss Marie. “And probably pleasant. That isn’t the point.”

  “What is?” he asked slowly, watching her.

  She looked down at her fingers and waggled them. “I brought Charles up,” she said. “I grant you he wasn’t commendable. Very few people are, really. But I made him. He probably wouldn’t admit it. He preferred to use people and then forget them. But somehow I don’t think he found it so easy to forget me. I didn’t let him.” She smiled firmly.

  “I enjoyed both comedies. The inquest was so well done. Ford always did have a certain cleverness of that wire-pulling sort. And the funeral was about what one would expect. But I don’t like to see brains put away in a box. Not my brains. They were my brains.”

  “Charles was clever.”

  “Oh, yes, he was clever. But he wasn’t intelligent. He was only shrewd. It took me a long time to find that out. A long time. I met him when he was fourteen, you see. I have never married. I never wanted children. But when you get to be my age and something you have made is destroyed you don’t like it. Nobody ever forgives you for smashing the best china.”

  “And so?”

  “I thought perhaps Lily Barnes would take care of that,” she went on. “But she didn’t. Perhaps I know why. The Smiths were nothing: she’s not as clever as she thinks. She has a very special kind of stupidity.”

  He let her talk. What interested him was not her anger or her contempt, but the calm with which she spoke, even though she was angry, even though she had no part in all this, but was some judge of a secret court, elected late in life, who enters the courtroom for the first time.

  There was no clock in her living-room and no movement. There was not even a mirror. Time must pass slowly here, he thought, sifting down like dust on a table of unanswered letters. It was not that these people were too old; but they were old in another way that did not have anything to do with years. And the young can only live in their own world. The air is too thin for them to breathe in any other.

  “I met him by accident,” she said, “if Charles ever did anything by accident. Perhaps he picked me out in advance….”

  He did not comment. He had almost finished his sherry and he did not want any more. Despite all the windows the room was shadowy. He supposed it was cheerful only at night. He eyed the woman’s cane.

  “You were at the Bolinas house,” he asked, “weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was in the picture frame?”

  “Nothing of any importance,” she said hesitatingly. Her eyes lit up fo
r a moment with something like mischief, as though she had read his mind. “No, she didn’t kill him,” she said. “She didn’t have the time. The point is that she meant to. And suppose I said that she had? That’s what I’ve been wondering. Suppose I did say that.”

  “It would prove nothing.”

  “But I don’t want to prove anything,” she said. She seemed suddenly sad and wistful. She was one of those old women who have kept their sex in a fragile, porcelain, contrived way that is none the less genuine for showing art. She had avoided that confluence of the sexes that makes the elderly as merciless and malicious as eunuchs. It meant also that she had retained her feminine logic. And of feminine logic he was afraid. Its conclusions were always as unpredictable as its methods were untraceable. A boyish woman like Maggie, already slightly old-fashioned, and so clearly of the 1930’s, though born out of place in that sequence of time, but with some understanding of men; or a woman as domineering as Lily and with as openly tortuous a dishonest mind, was elementary and comprehensible. Women like Miss Marie were more difficult. Their other side of the fence was never left unmended and ran down the years to the original Adamic property line.

  “I haven’t made up my mind,” she said suddenly. “I wanted to see you first.”

  “You’ve seen me.”

  She frowned slightly. “What are you going to do with the girl?”

  “Marry her,” he said, the first time he had admitted that even to himself. Apparently that showed.

  “You aren’t certain, are you?” she asked. Again she smiled and stretched out in the chair, leaning her head on one elbow and watching him. “I still know some people,” she told him. “And you are a lawyer. It’s amazing how soon people forget scandals like this, but they don’t really forget them. They save them up for when they may be needed. And then, with a little reminding or a word here or there … well, a good many careers have been finished that way and you are not really very well established yet. Also I understand the girl can be difficult and odd. Which is another fulcrum, in a way.”