“It was a fortunate suggestion,” she often said; “not that I’m minimizing Doctor Freud’s professional standing in any manner, shape, or form, for I still consider him, in spite of his peculiarities, the great genius of our time; but Doctor Kettlebaum was more—more sympatico, if you know what I mean. Freud was so committed to nineteenth-century materialism that it warped his viewpoint, it seemed to me. Then, too, he loathed American women, particularly the ones who were able to stand on their own feet and slug it out on equal terms with men. Now, Doctor Kettlebaum believed in the power of the individual soul, and he considered sex of only trivial interest. His mind was mystic rather than literal—the same as my own. He did much for me, and when he died several years ago, I cabled flowers and cried for a week.”
She had returned to her husband three years later, and at once began proceedings for a divorce, an action which he made no effort to oppose. When she was free again, she decided it was her duty to make a home for her brother Emory, and she did so. She took pleasure in the analysis of his character, analyses that he endured mostly in silence. Of late, she had come to the conclusion, through a series of her own deductions, that Emory was, as she termed it, a “larvated homosexual”; and once during the preceding spring, at one of her big dinner parties, she seized on the new theme and discussed it so freely that the only unembarrassed person at the table was herself.
“What does ‘larvated’ mean?” asked Emory. “That’s one I haven’t heard so far.”
“It means covered, as with a mask,” said Mrs. Breedlove. “It means concealed.”
“It means something that hasn’t come to the surface as yet,” said Kenneth Penmark.
“You can say that again!” said Emory, laughing weakly.
He was a plump, ruddy man, a few years younger than his sister. His hair had receded far back on his pink, domed forehead. His belly was small and hard; it had a taut, rounded quality, as though designed by nature as a background for the massive watch chain and emblem. Frank Billings, whom Monica always referred to as “Emory’s canasta friend,” said, “Well, where did you get that idea, Monica? What makes you think that?”
“My opinion,” said Mrs. Breedlove, “is based on the evidence of pure association, and that’s the best evidence of all.” She sipped her wine, puffed her lips thoughtfully, and went on in an earnest voice. “To begin with, Emory is fifty-two years old, and he’s never married. I doubt if he’s ever had a serious love affair.” Then, seeing that she was about to be interrupted by Reginald Tasker, “one of Emory’s true-murder-mystery friends,” she raised her hand and said, “Please! Please!” in a placating voice; and then went on quickly. “Now, let’s look at things objectively. What are Emory’s deepest interests in life; what are the things that occupy his psyche? They are fishing, murder mysteries that involve the dismemberment of faithful housewives, canasta, baseball games, and singing in male quartettes.” She paused and then said, “And how does Emory spend his Sundays? He spends them on a boat with other men—fishing. And are there ladies present on such occasions? I can answer that question at once—there are not.”
“You’re damned right there aren’t!” said Emory.
Mrs. Breedlove looked about her, and then realizing for the first time the effect she’d created among her guests, she tossed her head and said in a surprised voice, “I don’t see why the idea shocks you so. A thing so commonplace as that! Actually, homosexuality is triter than incest! Doctor Kettlebaum considered it was all a matter of personal preference.”
But it would be a mistake to think of this obsessed, garrulous old woman as a fool in most matters. She had taken the lump settlement that her husband had so cheerfully given her and invested it in real estate, following a system based both on sexual symbolism and the unalterable fact that if the town continued to grow, as everyone predicted, it had to go in the direction of her holdings. She had been successful from the first. She had written a successful cookbook; she was responsible for the city’s psychiatric clinic; she was thought of as the tireless civic worker, the logical, efficient chairman of the charitable drive for funds.
On the day of the school picnic, Mrs. Breedlove telephoned Christine and asked her to lunch. One of Emory’s fishing friends had sent him a beautiful, seven-pound redfish. Emory himself had just called to say that, since it was Saturday, he was closing the plant at noon and would be home for lunch. He’d asked her to fix redfish Gelpi, which she hadn’t done in a long time, and she said she would. “Emory is inviting his friend Reggie Tasker, that true-crime writer you and Kenneth met last spring in our apartment, and he wants you to help entertain him. Now, why don’t you come up early, say around noon, and I’ll show you how to fix the redfish? It’s in the sauce, mostly.”
Later, Mrs. Breedlove decided to serve lunch not in her gloomy, paneled dining-room, but in the little alcove off her living-room where she kept her ferns and African violets; and when her brother and his guest arrived, the table was set there, and ready. The men were talking about a recent murder, one which was being featured in the local papers. Reginald Tasker, it appeared, was going to do it for one of his murder magazines, and was now gathering his preliminary facts. Mrs. Breedlove, hearing fragments of the talk, laughed, tossed her head, and said, “We’re off to the races again!”
The case concerned a middle-aged hospital nurse, a Mrs. Dennison, who had been indicted for the murder, on May first, of her heavily insured two-year-old niece, Shirley. It was then the town remembered that another niece, a sister of the 1952 victim, had died in 1950, in the same manner, when she had been two years old as well. Nurse Dennison, a woman dedicated to the benefits of insurance, had collected five thousand dollars on the death of the first child; the second niece she had insured for six.
Mrs. Breedlove came into the living-room to welcome her visitor; Christine followed immediately and put a pitcher of Martinis on the coffee table; a moment later they went to the alcove for a final checkup of the luncheon table, and Reggie went on quickly to say that Nurse Dennison’s husband, conventionally true to the family tradition of nausea, burning throat, and convulsions, had passed on in the autumn of 1951, with, of course, the conventional policies on his life.
Christine laughed a little, put her hands over her ears, and said so softly the men could not hear her, that she did not like to listen to such stories. Anything concerning crime, particularly murder, depressed her and made her anxious. She had seen the accounts of the Dennison case, but she could not bring herself to read them; she had merely turned the page, and had gone on to something more cheerful.
“You have a little psychic block there!” said Mrs. Breedlove in an intense, pleased whisper. “Now, if you’ll associate to the situation, maybe we can get at the roots of your anxiety.” She straightened her centerpiece, and when Christine did not answer at once, she went on earnestly. “Tell me the first thing that comes into your mind! Tell me, no matter how silly it seems to you!”
Reginald Tasker went on to say that in the forenoon of May first of that year, Nurse Dennison had visited her sister-in-law’s family. She got there in time for lunch. At once she picked up her niece Shirley and began playing with the child. She had meant to bring Shirley a present, she said, but had forgotten, a thing which distressed her so greatly that she went to the country store near by and bought candy and soda pop for the family.
“Nothing comes into my mind,” said Christine. “It’s entirely blank.”
“Actually, Nurse Dennison had brought her niece a present,” said Reginald Tasker. “It was the ten cents’ worth of arsenic she’d bought on her way to her sister-in-law’s home. In a way it was more a present for herself than for her niece, since she stood to benefit so greatly if she succeeded in administering it.”
“But what’s on your mind at this moment?” insisted Mrs. Breedlove. They returned to the kitchen, and as Mrs. Breedlove agitated the salad in her big wooden bowl, Christine said presently, “I was thinking how much the Fern sisters are impressed by my fa
ther’s reputation. Miss Burgess thinks I look very much like him, although she never saw him in person, and is familiar only with his photographs.”
Mrs. Breedlove said in an uncertain voice, “That’s an unusual association, I must say. I don’t understand it so far.” She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips, and listened absently to the conversation in the living-room. According to Reggie Tasker’s notes, Nurse Dennison returned with her treat and immediately prepared a drink of orange pop for her niece Shirley. For the next hour or so she observed the child’s convulsions with a most flattering concern; later on, perhaps because the child’s stamina seemed about to triumph over her aunt’s intention, Nurse Dennison said that, in her opinion, what little Shirley needed at this point in her illness was another sip or two of orange pop; it was sure to settle her stomach and return her to her customary bouncing health. She tendered the cup, and Shirley, a sweet, obedient child, drank at her aunt’s bidding.
“Now, what’s your second association?” insisted Mrs. Breedlove. “Maybe your second association will be clearer.”
“It’s even sillier,” said Christine. For a moment she turned her past over in her mind, then impulsively she said, “I’ve always had a feeling I was an adopted child, that the Bravos weren’t my real parents. I asked my mother about it once—it was in Chicago, the year I finished high school—but she kept saying, ‘Who have you been talking to? Who’s been putting such ideas in your head?’ The thing upset her so much that I never mentioned it again.”
“Oh, you poor, innocent darling!” said Monica. “Don’t you know that the changeling fantasy is one of the commonest of childhood? I once believed I was a foundling with royal blood—Plantagenet, I think it was. I don’t know how I managed to get on my parents’ doorstep, but I had it worked out well enough when I was five years old. The myths and folklore of all people simply teem with such fantasies.”
Her laughter died suddenly. In the silence, Reginald Tasker’s voice came through once more. After the child had accepted her second dose of arsenic, and it was plain she could not rally again, Nurse Dennison announced that she must hurry back to town in order to take care of a matter of her own. This errand, as it turned out, was a trip to the agent from whom she’d bought the smaller of the two policies she carried on the life of her niece; she’d failed to pay the current premium, and this particular day was her last day of grace. She paid the premium in time, and ate her supper in the knowledge that a good piece of business had been accomplished that day. She was certain the child could not last until midnight, and in this she was correct, for the little girl died about eight, making both policies operative.
Mrs. Breedlove, who had been listening, nodding her head from time to time, said that, in her opinion, Reginald Tasker wasn’t at all bad in his specialty. It was true that she ranked him miles below an inspired psychiatrist like Dr. Wertham. She did not even consider him on a par with men like Bolitho and Roughead; but there was a quality of compassionate irony in his best work that distinguished him and made him stand out in his field; then, their preparations for lunch completed, Mrs. Breedlove and Christine joined the men in the living-room. They each took a cocktail, and Monica, her competent ankles crossed firmly, said, “Can’t you two find something else to talk about?”
“When she says ‘something else’ she means sex,” said Emory. He turned to Christine as though seeking support, but she only smiled and lowered her eyes, her thoughts turning once more to the past. There were unfocused, shapeless things which had troubled her childhood, even when she had been happiest; there was the half-memory of some dreadful event which she had never understood, even at the time of its occurrence, but these things were so formless and far away that they existed in her mind less as certainty than as a feeling of unreasoning dread. She sighed, pressed back her hair, and thought: I think I once lived on a farm somewhere, and that I had brothers and sisters I played with.
Monica thrust her jaw forward, and then in a quick, spasmodic movement, she jerked her head to the left, as though there were a pebble balanced on her chin, and she strove to toss it over her shoulder. “My tic is annoying today,” she said. “I don’t know why, I’m sure.” She lit a cigarette and then went on. “I talked to Doctor Kettlebaum about my tic, and how to overcome it; but he looked at me in surprise, and said, ‘But, dear lady, it’s such a young, such an intriguing gesture. Why not leave it the way it is?’ ”
“That Kettlebaum must have been quite a boy,” said Emory.
Monica agreed placidly. Dr. Kettlebaum had been a wise and a most useful man, she said, her brown eyes swimming with light. Certainly he would have instantly understood both her brother’s and Reginald’s attempts to transform their unconscious violence into something more acceptable to society: the odd thing was that neither of them had become a surgeon, which would have been far more dramatic than reading and writing murder stories. She had considered these matters thoughtfully in the past, and had come to the conclusion that the greater the impulse, the greater must be the defense against the impulse, if one were to survive as a social animal.
She got up to change the angle of the Venetian blind, and Reginald, who had known her all his life, leered horribly and pinched her well-stuffed buttocks. Instantly she went into gales of merriment, her laughter resounding through the apartment. She poured him another cocktail, and when he had taken it, he wound up his facts quickly.
Later the child had been taken to a hospital, but only to die there. The doctors, seeing her condition, asked for an autopsy, and the arsenic was quickly found. Again Christine put her hands over her ears. She thought: I’m very vulnerable. I have no strength of character at all. She laughed nervously and said, “Oh, please! Please!”
Reginald laughed with her, patted her shoulder in sympathy, and said that, in his opinion, the case was destined to become one of the classics of its kind. For one thing, there was the thrifty reasoning of Nurse Dennison about payment of the lapsed policy, a circumstance which gave the dreadful affair the wholesome, ordinary note it needed; for another, there was one of those unconsciously humorous asides which seem to distinguish the classic from the lesser crime, for after the autopsy, when her guilt had been established and confessed, Nurse Dennison, in a moment of contrition, said that she regretted the poisoning of her niece far more than she could ever say; she wept and said that she would never have done such a terrible thing, either, if she’d known in advance that such a little bitty old pinch of arsenic could be found later.…
At half past two, when lunch had been eaten, Reginald said that he had to go, and while the women straightened up the kitchen, Emory turned on the radio to get the three-o’clock news. The commentator spoke briskly of world conditions for a time, then lowering his voice, he continued gravely. “I have been asked to announce that one of the children on the annual outing of the Fern Grammar School was accidentally drowned in the bay this afternoon. The name of the victim has been withheld until the parents are first notified. More news of the tragic affair is expected momentarily.”
Mrs. Breedlove and Christine came into the living-room at once, and stood anxiously beside the radio. “It was not Rhoda,” said Mrs. Breedlove in a positive voice. “Rhoda is too self-reliant a child.” She put her arm around Christine’s waist and continued. “It was somebody more like myself when I was a child. It was some timid, confused child who was afraid of its own shadow, as I was, and had no self-confidence at all. That does not sound like Rhoda.”
A little later, toward the end of the broadcast, the announcer returned to the local tragedy; he was now authorized to say that the little victim was Claude Daigle, the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Dwight Daigle of 126 Willow Street. He added details to the story; there was an old wharf on the Fern property, a wharf which had not been used for a long time. It was a mystery how the little boy got on the wharf, for the children had been explicitly told not to go there; but apparently he had managed somehow, for his body had been found there, after the routine check at lunchtim
e had shown him missing, wedged among the old pilings. The discovery had been made by one of the guards who brought the body ashore, and applied artificial respiration. One mysterious element of the affair was the fact that there were bruises on the forehead and hands of the boy, but these bruises, it was assumed, were caused by the body washing against the pilings.
Christine said, “Poor child! Poor little boy!”
The announcer continued. “Only a few days before, the little Daigle boy won a gold medal at the closing exercises of the Fern School. He was wearing the medal when last seen, but when his body was discovered, the medal was not found. It was thought the medal had become detached in some manner from his shirt; but although the bottom was searched at that place, the medal had not been located.”
Christine went to her own apartment immediately. She hoped her child had neither seen the boy brought to shore, nor had watched the efforts of the guards to revive him. If the child were frightened or upset emotionally, she wanted to be there at the door to comfort her. Rhoda was not a sensitive child—certainly, she was not an imaginative one—but the inevitableness of death, she felt, if knowledge came too suddenly, without a proper preparation, could make an impression on even the calmest person; but when Rhoda came in at length, she was as placid, as unruffled, as she had been that morning. She entered so coolly, she asked for a glass of milk and a peanut-butter sandwich with such unconcern, that her mother wondered if she fully understood what had happened. She asked the question in her gentle, serene voice, and Rhoda said yes, she knew all about it, in fact, it was she who suggested that the guards look among the pilings. She had been present when the body was taken from the water; she had seen it laid out on the lawn.
The Bad Seed Page 5