In the Still of the Night: Tales to Lock Your Doors By

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Kitty tried several times to dial Tom Wilding’s number but got it wrong each time. Finally, she simply dialed 911.

  Miles to Go

  LAURA SET HER WEEKEND bag, her purse, and the gifts of chocolate creams—one for her aunt Mattie and one for her father-in-law—by the hall door. She tucked a scarf into the pocket of her reversible jacket where it hung on a hall tree and went to find her husband. You could smell the paint throughout the apartment, and God knows, the whole apartment needed painting. It was in anticipation of a financial gift from her aunt Mattie that they decided to go ahead with the paint job now. Tim wanted to see how much he could do himself while she was away.

  The paint bucket gave a perilous shudder as he came down the ladder. Much better for her nerves, Laura thought, that she was getting out of the house. Tim stooped low and Laura stood on tiptoe to kiss him. He was a tall man and she had to stretch to make five feet two. They were both crowding middle age, married for almost twenty years. No children. Alas! both of them always added. Tim worked variously in the entertainment field, a magician who built his own illusions, a folk singer who improvised modern metaphors on old legends. He made most of his living in summer camps. He was what those with scorn for the race—or so much pride in it they could not abide mere affinity—called a professional Irishman. Laura was a lay teacher of English and music at a convent school just up the Hudson River from New York. The Mallorys owned the apartment on the Upper West Side, partnered to be sure with Chemical Bank. Large and high-ceilinged, it was full of books, the tools of Tim’s trades, and quite a number of things having nothing to do with modern employment, such as a spinning wheel, a loom, and a butter churn streaming now with ivy. Laura would be driving home from Vermont with the grandfather clock that had been in her family for more than a hundred years. It was a trip she cherished. She loved to drive. Tim was barely tolerant of her Honda, a 1993 Accord LX coupe, feeling it was built for Japanese midgets. He liked to say that if they had put the front seat in backward, and he lowered the back of the rear seat so that he could extend his legs into the trunk, it would just about fit him. Otherwise that convenience was great for a Christmas tree or, in the present circumstances, for the grandfather clock.

  “You have the map and a flashlight,” Tim started his usual rundown. “Take the cellular phone. I’ll only get it all paint if you leave it here.”

  “I don’t need it, Tim. Aunt Mattie would say it’s an affectation.”

  “So is a grandfather clock.”

  “Tim …”

  “Okay, okay. Just drive carefully. It’s a car, not a palomino pony you’re driving. If it starts to rain skip the hospital. You can call them when you get to your aunt’s. And call me when you get there. Promise?”

  “On my palomino,” she said.

  When they reached the door he said, “Give Dad my love. I’ll write him soon. And mind you don’t commit us with the hospital people, not yet.”

  “Wasn’t it decent of them to let me come today?” Laura said.

  “They can’t wait to see you,” Tim mocked. “I’ll expect you back Sunday night.”

  Laura had taken that afternoon and Friday off. Friday was St. Patrick’s Day and most of the school was going to the annual parade on Fifth Avenue. She tried not to show how eager she was to get away. “I wish you were coming with me.”

  “To watch the speedometer,” Tim said.

  He waited at the apartment door until the elevator arrived, an ancient carriage of brass and wood paneling. A prickle of anxiety caught at Laura as she touched the lobby button. It passed with the door’s closing and she put it out of her mind.

  Once in the car she was in her element, secure. She made a U-turn out of the parking space and headed for the West Side Highway, accelerating to beat the first traffic light. The car seemed to anticipate her, leaping ahead. “Go for it, baby,” she said, and patted the puffed-up center of the steering wheel, fat thing. It carried its air bag like a pregnancy.

  The river was pewter gray and choppy with only occasional tugboat and barge traffic. Most of the pleasure boats were still in dry-dock. She could remember snow on St. Patrick’s Day. This part of the drive was familiar, her school-day route. Yet she rarely drove it without seeking something new to weave into the pattern of her day’s work. It was not easy to match imaginations with the young.

  When she passed her usual turnoff, her mind went solely to the first stop on her journey. Tim didn’t have to tell her not to commit them to the care and guardianship of his father. Guardianship? He hadn’t used the word but it had occurred in their communication with the hospital. She and Tim had talked for years about the possibility of taking his father into their home when the authorities considered it feasible. When Aunt Mattie decided to give them their inheritance before her demise, they could no longer weigh their finances into the decision. The moment of truth was near. She was not afraid of the old man; nor was Tim. If Tim feared anything, it had to do with being his father’s son. Joseph Mallory had killed a man and had been confined for the past fifteen years in a psychiatric hospital.

  Word would get out that Joseph Mallory was living with them. It had been a well-known case at the time. She had sat in the courtroom among a passionate lot of Mallory partisans. They brought him oranges and cigarettes, and the bailiffs allowed the gifts to be passed along. The courtroom had to be cleared when Mallory was found not guilty by reason of insanity. They had wanted him exonerated.

  By the time she turned off the Taconic Parkway the sky had grown lumpy with clouds too swift for the rain, too heavy for the sun to part. The hills were a tawny stubble, patched with the brown of early plowing, the green of winter wheat. Greening willow trees hung over the reservoirs. It was almost spring.

  The hospital gates were closed. On regular visiting days they were open, a larger staff perhaps. The gatekeeper came out of his shelter and checked her identification. She signed his register and tried to fix in her mind his direction to the Administration Building, where she was expected. Groundsmen were raking leaves. Traffic was sparse, mostly delivery trucks. Signs pointed to Laundry, Rehabilitation, Workshop, Drug Center, a Children’s Unit. It always surprised her that there was a children’s facility in a place like this. Their building was like the rest, dusty yellow brick. Not a swing or a jungle gym in sight. She drove into the Administration lot and parked the Honda among cars more expensive than itself, most with MD license plates.

  It was not until she was waiting alone in the reception office that she remembered the chocolates she had brought her father-in-law. She had left them in the car. The question of whether to go back for them was settled when the attendant said Dr. Burns’s secretary would be right along. Dr. Burns was superintendent of the hospital. When the attendant turned his back she could see the outline of a gun and holster beneath his uniform jacket. She looked up quickly to the one picture on the wall, a huge golden eagle with the American flag clutched in its talons. This was a terrible place, she thought, to call a hospital.

  Dr. Burns’s secretary was male, all male to judge by his size and the shoulders that shaped him like a triangle. He did try to accommodate his step to hers as they clattered down the corridor. She could hear the broken rhythm of her own footfalls. “Do you know Mr. Mallory?” she inquired.

  “Uncle Joe? Oh, sure. Everybody knows Uncle Joe. He’s a card.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. “I brought him some candy and then left it in the car.”

  “He’s not much for sweets as I remember.”

  “What could I bring him that he’d like?”

  “A songbook maybe. He’s taken up music lately.”

  Dr. Burns, too, spoke of Joe Mallory’s turn to music. “We got him a violin and he’s taught himself to play it. He’s very good—I’m something of an amateur musician myself.” The hospital superintendent took her from his office to a small adjoining sitting room—plastic chairs, ceiling light, one window, and a small round table with a white chrysanthemum
in its center. Burns was a rumpled-looking man with tired eyes and a mustache that needed trimming. Laura thought a violin would become him. “I’ve sent for Mr. Mallory. You’ll be comfortable in here and you and I can talk afterwards. I wouldn’t mention to him what you wrote me. Unless you already have?”

  “No.”

  “Time enough.”

  Laura was looking out the window when two men came in view, one wearing a white hospital uniform, the other a heavy sweater that looked to weigh him down, Joe Mallory. He had to skip a step now and then to keep up with the orderly. She waved when they were near, and the old man saw her. He pulled himself up and saluted, military fashion.

  He was even more jaunty when he came into the room and held out his arms to her. She said it to herself every time: If she had not been at the trial, she wouldn’t believe this man could commit murder. They pulled up two chairs to the table. Mallory took the white chrysanthemum to the window. The sill was too narrow. He set it on the floor. “Flowers should come in colors,” he said, and pulled his chair closer to hers. “I’ve never got over the Easter lily they gave me to carry on Holy Thursday. The smell of it made me sick and I threw up right in the middle of the procession. You came alone again, did you?”

  “Tim sends you all his love.”

  “There must be more of it than I’m getting,” the old man said, “or it wouldn’t be worth sending.” He blinked his very blue but rather cold eyes at her. “Is he ashamed of me? It’s far too late for that. I get letters to this day from people saying they’re proud to have known me. And me with no recollection of them at all.” He glanced at the office door and leaned toward her. “I think they’re intercepting any letters I get now. I’ll tell you why in a minute. And listening in on everything. If we was to turn up this table, do you think we’d find one of them listening gadgets? Or in the blossom I took from the table? Oh, I’m serious. If you was to look on the other side of that door, you’d see Leroy sitting there, his chair tilted to the wall, and his ear bent to the crack. He’s the one brought me over. His name isn’t Leroy, but I call him that. You have to feel superior to somebody in this place that isn’t in a worse state than yourself. Do you think Tim’s afraid of me—my bucking boy who pretends he’s an Irishman when it suits him? I don’t like a man who denies his blood.”

  “But he doesn’t deny it, Joe. He was born in this country, remember.”

  “Will I ever forget it, the death of his darling mother.”

  “That’s not fair,” Laura said softly. Tim was hard enough on himself for all the sadness in his life.

  “Then I’m the blame!”

  “Must there be blame?”

  Mallory sat back in his chair. He puckered his lips thoughtfully. “You’re a soft woman, Laura. He’s lucky. I wish I’d seen you first myself.”

  Laura was straining to be natural. “Is it true, everybody calls you Uncle Joe?”

  The old man chortled, more at her clumsiness, she thought, than at the benevolence of institution and residents. “Somebody must have started it and the rest picked it up and passed it around. You know I’ve been studying the law. Did they tell you that?”

  “And the violin,” she said.

  “Oh, they’d tell you that all right, but not about me informing myself of the law in as rare a case as mine—as the law was fifteen years ago and is today. I learned the ins and outs of it pretty damn well. Then I wrote the governor a masterful petition for retrial. I pointed out that the insanity plea on which I was acquitted would not stand up today. Whereas if I’d been convicted of murder in the second degree I’d have been eligible for parole two years ago. I was a pawn of the politicians. I had a court-appointed lawyer with a brogue as thick as you’d hear in County Mayo. He thought himself a genius getting me put in here instead of the brig. And me a hero. Oh, yes! The blow I struck was for Ireland when I cleaved his skull in two. He was on the docks and supposed to be handing off the occasional crate of rifles marked for Arabia to them who’d see them transported to Ireland….”

  Laura had heard him tell the story before. He told it often, filling in more and more details that were utterly blank to him at the time. Certified by three psychiatrists. The transport worker he killed had betrayed the very men to whom he was handing off the munitions: he was that dread character in Irish lore, an informer.

  “So what does the governor say?” Laura eased the question in.

  “I’ve not heard a word, and my informant in the bureaucracy here tells me the bastards never sent him the petition at all. That’s enough. I’ll not spoil your visit. Time is no longer of the essence to me as it must be to you. It was grand of you to come. Is it the same little car you have?”

  “It’s my love,” she said.

  “I can understand that. Where is it again you’re going?”

  Laura explained.

  The old man pushed away from the table. “I’m going to ask Leroy to run back for my fiddle. I’d play you a tune before you go.” He pulled open the office door without knocking. The orderly was sitting, his chair tilted against the doorframe, even as Mallory had foretold of him. “So you see, I’m not paranoid,” the old man said, returning to the table. “We’re supposed to stay close as Siamese, him and me, but there are privileges to be had if you know when to behave and when to act up. Do you follow the news, Laura?”

  “Not as closely as I’d like to.”

  “Come on, girl. If you wanted to follow it closely, you would.”

  Laura nodded.

  “Do you believe there’s going to be peace in Ireland now?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Would you rather peace or justice?”

  “Why can’t there be both?”

  “Well, they’ve sent a fellow over here now who’d say you’re right, and he’s getting a hero’s welcome—a new fashion in heroes.” He looked about as though for a place to spit.

  A few minutes later the orderly returned and handed in the violin case with the admonition “You don’t have much time, Uncle Joe.”

  “As though I have anything else,” the old man said, and took the violin from the case as tenderly as he might a baby from its cradle. He tuned the strings to a pitch pipe he put back in the case.

  The orderly returned to his tilted chair and closed the office door three quarters this time.

  Mallory tightened the bow and started to play. The tunes were out of a beginner’s manual—“Humoresque,” “The Old Refrain.” Laura was moved that he had wanted to play for her and pondered again what it would be like if he came to live with Tim and her.

  Mallory tuned one of the strings while Laura said how good he was. He winked at her then, tapped a martial beat with his foot, and sawed the strings in a wild lament that was more a wail than a melody. Bagpipes could not have screeched worse.

  Both the orderly and Dr. Burns burst in from the office. The old man, a gleam in his eyes, kept playing until the orderly confronted him, hands half clutched. Mallory waited till the last minute and then handed over fiddle and bow.

  “They’ll be waiting for you, Uncle Joe,” the orderly said. He put the instrument in its case.

  Laura’s father-in-law came to her, his hands outstretched. He pulled her to her feet and kissed her on the mouth. “I’d go to the gate with you, darling, if they weren’t waiting for me in Babel.” At the hall door he imperiously motioned Leroy out ahead of him. He turned and threw Laura a kiss.

  She remembered the chocolates again. Again too late.

  Dr. Burns joined Laura in the sitting room as soon as Mallory and the orderly had gone. He closed the hall door. “Would you rather talk here or in my office, Mrs. Mallory? People come and go in there. Better here perhaps. How did you find the old gentleman? He looks well, doesn’t he?”

  “Is he not, Doctor?”

  “Not my meaning. He takes good care of himself. With our help, of course.” While he spoke he retrieved the chrysanthemum from where Mallory had set it on the floor and put it on the table again. Laura won
dered at the possibility of a listening device. Surely not. Once again she sat at the little table. The doctor straddled a chair. “You didn’t mention to your father-in-law your inquiry about his possible release?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder what his reaction would have been. He likes it here, you know.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” Laura said.

  “Well, for one thing, he’s top banana.” Dr. Burns laughed a little. Not easy for him. “He taught me the expression—top banana. He talks about his son being in show business. Says he taught him all he knows. And he is clever. I’m not sure what to say to you, Mrs. Mallory. There are times—” He broke off when his secretary came in bringing two mugs of coffee. “Here we are. Sugar and something like milk can be provided …”

  “Just black,” Laura said.

  “Not exactly down home. You’ve met Tony? Yes, of course, when you arrived. Thank you, Tony. I’ll be available in a few minutes, tell them if they’re waiting for me.”