The Drowner

by John D. MacDonald

  “Wow!” the girl said. “Isn’t it fantastic?” She hitched around and rolled her window down. “Smell!” she commanded. “The whole world is scrubbed.” She opened the door and ducked out into the dwindling rain, scrambled back in with a half handful of melting hail. She slammed the door, and nibbled the hail out of the palm of her small hand. “Lousy sensualist,” she said.

  “Guess we can be on our way, Shirley.”

  “It’s too nice out to go smell fried food, Mr. Stanial. There’s a little state picnic thing up ahead about a quarter mile. Let’s stop there.”

  He found it and parked. The rain had stopped. Fat drops fell from the trees. She sat on the concrete picnic table, her feet on the bench, and commanded him to look up. Half the sky was black and the other half was bright with stars. The storm was moving west and they could hear it grumbling into the distance.

  “What I feel toward Kelsey, as I was saying before, is affection,” Shirley Feldman said. “I guess it isn’t a very complicated emotion. Somebody said he is an empty man but it isn’t that simple, is it?”

  “Then what was wrong with the diagnosis?”

  “Awareness. That’s what’s wrong. I’m not a philosophy major. But I know that one of the things that troubles a lot of people is this phenomenon of the hollow man in western culture. Reisman talks about the outer-directed man who gets his only feeling of substance from conforming to group standards. So the pathetic guy, the real victim, isn’t the one who can go merrily along with the whole deal, just because he’s been taught to be so damn flexible. The pathetic one is the guy like Kelse who constantly experiences this sort of … emptiness. I mean he wonders if he shouldn’t go sign up with Schweitzer. It’s sort of like the architect in that Graham Greene book who goes to the leper colony, but he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing there. Of course, the architect is on a higher level of development than Kelse. Poor Kelse isn’t really a thinking animal. He can follow things up to a point, and then they get all murky for him and he loses patience with the whole thing. Does it sound too impossible for me to say I have a much better mind?”

  “I imagine you have.”

  “So I guess he turned into a sort of project for me. You could say I inherited him from one of my dearest friends. She gave up on him, completely. I mean she’s very sweet but she decided that he was faking everything. And he isn’t, of course. Oh, he fakes a lot, but underneath there is this terrible concern. And she misunderstood the sexual urgency. She thought she was just being used. But her own sexual attitudes are very involved and self-conscious. She thinks she is utterly objective, but the proof is the way she’ll go into screaming fits of rage if you even look dubious when she gives one of her lectures. Kelsey has been a sort of a project because when you find somebody who holds themself absolutely valueless, it’s a symptom of a lot of things wrong with our culture, don’t you think? I guess it’s like a scientist finding an absolutely pure strain of some virus. And he lumbers around with this terrible guilt. I feel much older when I’m with him. And what I was beginning to learn, I guess, is that you can’t try to cure the guilt in anybody. You have to go after their necessity to feel guilt. That wife of his was a guilt symbol. Really, I don’t think he ever loved her. I don’t think Kelsey can genuinely love anybody because he doesn’t love himself enough. But she was a symbol of failure.”

  “Do you think he could have wanted to destroy her, as a symbol?”

  “I don’t know. It would have been an indication of progress, wouldn’t it? I mean he would have been trying to eradicate the necessity to feel guilt. What I was trying to do, mostly, was to prove to him he is quite a nice person underneath, and would be perfectly all right if he stopped moaning and tried to utilize himself. He made himself feel guilty and wretched about my girl friend, and he tried to feel guilty about me too. He could not seem to get it through his head that if two people feel affectionate toward each other, they have the right and the responsibility to give each other pleasure. In spite of his apparent sophistication he has a truly sick attitude about sex. My God, most of the heartbreak in the world comes from thinking it’s so damned important. No, I guess he wouldn’t have wanted to destroy her. Maybe subconsciously, but it would be buried so deep he’d never be able to get at it. He would be a lot more likely to destroy himself. And that’s what he’s doing of course, in all the slow ways. If he gets in touch with me again, I wouldn’t want to hurt him, but really I feel sort of finished with him. I guess I’ve outgrown him.”

  “You were with him that day.”

  “Yes. He came to the library in the morning and I had an eleven o’clock, but I cut the class. My uncle had sent me some wonderful cheese. We went to the boat house and we got there before noon. We had the cheese and crackers and we drank a lot of wonderful Mexican wine. We talked and we made love and then we went out in the sun and fell asleep, up on the top deck. Then Korody came and told him about the phone call. Kelse went darting off and after he was gone, Korody said he thought the wife was dead. Somehow it’s made me feel strange ever since. I mean I’ve felt sort of stupid and middle-class. I’m certainly not ashamed of the relationship with Kelsey. When you’re honest about something, you can’t be ashamed. I wasn’t seduced, certainly. And I wasn’t martyring myself. It gave me pleasure too. But it makes me feel odd. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t say very much do you?”

  “As I told you, Shirley, the thing I keep wondering about is whether Mrs. Hanson killed herself. And I wondered if Kelsey had ever said anything to you which might sound as if she was capable of doing that.”

  “Absolutely no! That woman was entirely satisfied with herself, believe me. God, how I despise those paragons! I don’t believe there was a crumb of honesty in her. She married for money, and she wanted to keep poor Kelse in absolute bondage. He could approach the shrine once in a while if he was properly humble. And then she would sort of endure his horrid animal appetites. And when poor Kelse went to somebody a little more willing and a little more honest, Lucille got full of outraged virtue and left him. Those monsters never kill themselves, Mr. Stanial. People kill them, and good riddance, but they never do themselves in.”

  “Would you think somebody killed her?”

  “I’d like to think so. She had it all worked out. A nice chunk of alimony or a settlement or something, and then she would marry that Mr. Kimber. But I guess she just happened to drown somehow.”

  “Have you seen Kelsey since?”

  “Just for a moment at the funeral to tell him I was sorry. And he looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. I guess he’s gone back to his buddies. He hasn’t come near the College. He’s probably stoned all day long. Poor guy. Now you can take me downtown and feed me, Mr. Stanial. I’m absolutely famished. You know, ever since I began to feel odd about Kelsey, I’ve been hungry all the time, and I’m getting immense. It might be some sort of compensation, but I can’t figure out what it is. I’ll have to really think about it. Everything is really the pursuit of self-knowledge, don’t you think? My God, if this is a guilt reaction, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  The sky was brighter and his eyes were adjusted to the faint light. Under the big dark hairdo and the tousle of bangs, her small face peered out at him like some cautious creature under a bush. At the moment she looked heartbreakingly young, and her voice was uncertain. But that same light of the sky touched the bare mature legs, their compact and sinewy curvatures. They send you up in those things, he thought, before you have a license to fly.

  There were an even dozen people at the Keaver party, including the Keavers, and Barbara observed that sometimes it seemed like a great deal more and sometimes it seemed like a great deal less. At the Keaver’s lakefront house the ubiquitous screened cage had its long dimension parallel to the lake shore, forming a link between an ornate garden house of Chinese motif and the older boat house. A good half of the floor area of the cage was taken up by a rather shallow swimming pool.


  She was able to re-identify the ones she had met, the ones Lucille had mentioned most often in her letters, the Keavers, the Yates, the Bryes. There was an older couple, George and Nina Furrbritt, and another couple the same age as the inner circle, named Coop and Sis Toombs.

  The party had a curious resonance, a cyclical swing. It began sedately enough, and with all the polite words of sympathy she had anticipated. But in much less than an hour the weight and the velocity of the drinks had fragmented it into a noisy, hippety-hoppety carnival of pet tricks, interruptions, imitations, inside jokes and meandering slapstick, with twelve people sounding like fifty. Barbara soon realized she had lost her chance to steer the general conversation into speculation about murder. There was no general conversation. You exchanged loud fragments with people who swooped by. And so, when she was handed an exceptionally virulent drink apparently meant for someone else, a vast martini in a tall water glass, she gave an inward shrug and told herself it could be used as a prop. A girl who had sipped her way through one of these could be forgiven for a certain lack of tact. Were she to wobble up to people one at a time and ask them if they thought her sister had been murdered, people would humor the poor creature. And the wobble would be half contrived and, with this drink, half genuine.

  As she was convinced the party was going to disintegrate entirely, the great storm came tumbling down upon them and all essential gear was clumsily manhandled into the garden house. The cooperative efforts induced a simulated sobriety. Bonny Yates gave a vivid scream of terror at each flash of lightning. The big grill was partially protected by the roofed portion of the cage, and soon they were all in the garden house, eating mounds of garlic salad out of individual teak bowls, and ravenously devouring the tender slabs of semi-raw beef, amid a half dozen simultaneous conversations conducted in loud voices over the din of the storm. By then Barbara had used her gambit on four or five people, without any discernible effect, not even surprise, much less the expected shock and consternation. It seemed as though she was asking about some historical figure who had come to grief in the fifth century. As the rain began to dwindle and a torpor of filled bellies began to reduce the volume and the number of the conflicting conversations, there came one spectacularly savage flash-bang which added several screams to Bonny’s, and the lights dimmed and went out. All the lights—cage lights, pool lights, landscape lights, garden-house lights, boat-house lights. Amid the renewed whistling of the wind was a primitive, night-charged excitement, a stirring and hooting of the people, and when Barbara started to get up from a footstool, someone moving rapidly by bumped her solidly and sent her floundering into the arms of someone else. The someone else took her commandingly by the arm and led her out of the confusion to the roofed part of the cage and over to one side, into a leafy corner semi-screened by the broad wet leaves of monstera and dwarf banana. The someone put his hands on her shoulders and said, “Out of the paths of restless natives, my dear, and into a bower of total conservatism.”

  There was just enough faint light to confirm her memory of the voice. George Furrbritt, the older man, a mannered, neat-boned man, with curly cap of gray, yacht-basin tan, and a look of humorous, self-effacing slyness. His wife was Nina, the rangy busty redhead with the macaw voice and the exaggerated mouth mannerisms of one who speaks only for lip-readers.

  Barbara wanted to say words of thanks to match the ornateness of his remark, but heard herself say, in a tone of complaint, “Nobody will talk about my sister being murdered.” She knew she was drunk, and afflicted with the single-minded purpose of a drunk.

  “I will talk about anything in the world you wish to talk about, my dear.” He held her by the upper arms and kissed her on the mouth, not long enough to make her object, and with a quiet and casual authority which would have made objection seem inane. “Let us examine it as a reasonable conjecture.”

  “You think it is? Reasonable?”

  “We start with the assumption the world of Sam Kimber is more violent and primitive than this one. And that’s the world she was in.” He kissed her again, with a more masterful insistence, and she felt that the kisses were the price of this talk in the rainy darkness.

  “Why is it more violent?” she asked when her mouth was free, and she had the feeling her voice had come loose somehow, come adrift, separate and murmurous. And she thought that the darkness things do not count because no one can see.

  “Oh, because of money and deals, and maybe the kind of people in Kimber’s world. Does it matter so much?” And with a dancer’s deftness, he pivoted her around, bumped her softly back against the redwood wall, held her more intimately and worked at her mouth with a curiously indifferent insistence, and a gourmet precision.

  She realized vaguely that she should have said no, but somehow the place for no had been too quickly passed, like turning two pages at once in a book and losing track. She was bemused, remote, half-dreaming, yet making her responses to him as she wondered mildly who could have guessed that he would be so good and so absolutely sure and knowing about these little good-feeling things and ways, turning it into a kind of a joke you are playing on the world, because really things do not start this way, and soon it will have to be stopped, but how do you stop it when it seems as if it would be some sort of strange social error to end it with less social grace than he is making it happen with. More knowing than Roger, even, and so absolutely certain.…

  Mingled in the growing blood-roar in her ears she heard the meaningless festival of darkness around her, the yelps and laughings, a rip of fabric, slap of flesh, coy squeal of a faked indignation. She felt as if she were slowly being opened outward, and now his mouth was tracing her throat, while her head lolled and smiled to the increased chuffing of her breath, and she was so suffused in recurrent waves of bonelessness she felt herself sagging, and was but remotely, unimportantly, mildly astonished to feel that he had somehow and cleverly bared her left breast, lifting it to a knowing caress.

  Abruptly all the lights came on and her dazed eye caught a photographic image of the pool people, saw it all in a moment of subjective frozen silence, saw naked Nina Furrbritt on the apron of the pool, teetering off balance, all naked pipestem legs and schoolboy hips and great implausible sallow melony breasts, saw the satyr bareness of Coop Toombs who had just pushed her, saw the abandoned party clothing in damp heaps, saw the great bobble and thrash of breasts and bellies and buttocks and wet grimacing faces in the wrestling game in the shallows of the pool. Time began again and the woman fell, and Coop Toombs dived after her, and there were yelps of dismay and derision at the sudden exposure. The hostess eeled quickly out of the pool and headed in a nude, awkward run toward the control panel for the lighting. Barbara shoved Mr. Furrbritt away from her and hitched her sheath top back up onto her left shoulder. The lights began to go out as the hostess tweaked the panel controls, amid cheers of approval.

  Furrbritt moved in upon her again and she knocked him back with her forearm across his throat.

  “The boat house!” he said irritably.

  “What?” she asked blankly.

  “The boat house! The loft, my dear child!” he cried irritably and grabbed her wrist. She snatched it away. In the faint light of the faraway outside floods the hostess had left burning, Mr. Furrbritt seemed to be doing a small, nervous, hoppity dance, all his casual authority forgotten. He snatched her wrist with greater strength and began dragging her along, and suddenly she was terrified.

  With her free hand she hit George Furrbritt solidly on the nape of the neck. He spun and hissed at her and slapped her sharply across the face. Suddenly Kelsey Hanson loomed between them, clothed and sullen. He turned a broad back toward Barbara and made a small pivoting motion. There was a quick wet sound, not loud, but inexpressibly ugly. All the tidy, neat-boned confidence of Mr. Furrbritt dropped into the soaked peat moss of a planting area, and on the way down his head rang the reflector of a stake light like a gong. Hanson turned and grabbed her arm and yanked her away, led her around the b
usy pool, out a screened door, across an area of wet grass and into the mouth of a narrow wet woodsy path. She fought him, but he did not even seem to realize she was struggling. Wet leaves soaked her clothing. “You were right, Lucille,” Kelsey Hanson said. “Oh you were so damn right, Lu, honey. They’re lousy people and I should have listened to you. We’re going home where you belong, sweetheart.”

  Eight

  The league was scheduled at eight o’clock. Angie Powell arrived so late that by the time she had changed her shoes, she had time for just one practice ball. She was anchor man on the girls’ Kimberland team, with a 178 average. They were scheduled on lanes eleven and twelve. It annoyed her. She never did well on eleven. It was slightly tacky, just enough to pull her into a fat hit and too many baby splits.

  She smiled and nodded and spoke to all the friends who greeted her. She wore white elk-hide shoes, white wool ankle socks, a short white pleated tennis skirt, a sleeveless white blouse with Kimberland written across the back in blue embroidered script. She had embroidered it herself, making it at the same time larger and more ornate than the stenciled ones. She wished she could write Kimberland on everything she wore.

  The ball she owned was white. Inside the finger holes it was Chinese red. It was as heavy as most men used. She had worked carefully on her style to take maximum advantage of her height and strength. She took four steps and a long slide, starting the delivery with a slow push-away. At the end of the delivery she brought her right hand up sharply. It was a fast ball with a small quick hook into the pocket at the end of it. As she delivered the ball, she felt fleet and strong and precise. It had pleased her to be told she bowled like a man. But several months ago a friend had taken movies of her delivery, and she had been disappointed to see how she looked. There was far too much bounce of golden curls and girlish undulation of hip on the way to the line and, in the profile shots, too much flounce of breasts. So she had taken to binding her hair with a white ribbon, wearing a sturdier bra, consciously controlling her hip movement.