Christine Falls: A Novele

by Benjamin Black

  The couples at the edge of the dance floor had noticed him by now, and they had stopped dancing and stood watching his approach, awkwardly together, two by two, like children, he thought contemptuously, in their gaudy party outfits. Unlike the nurse, they knew his reputation, and what he could do, and had done, when provoked. One of the women began tentatively to applaud, then her partner joined in, and then so did the rest of the stalled dancers, and after a few moments the great glass hall was filled with a storm of clapping. It was a sound he hated; it made him think of penguins, or was it seals? He lifted a hand in a limp, papal gesture, nodding acknowledgment to one side and then the other, wishing they would stop this awful racket, in which the band members now joined, rising to their feet and launching with their instruments into a string of farts and whistles that he dimly recognized as a parody of “Hail to the Chief.” At length, when the last, would-be ingratiator had let fall his or her hands, and the band had sat down again, he made an attempt to address the crowd, to wish them the happiness of the season, but of course his voice failed him, and then he began to cough, and soon he was doubled over on himself, almost falling forward out of the chair, gasping and shuddering and dribbling mucus on the blanket covering his knees, and the nurse was fumbling with the stopcock of the oxygen tank that was slung under the chair between the wheels, and then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a voice said:

  “You called, dear?”

  ROSE CRAWFORD WAS A HANDSOME WOMAN, AND SHE KNEW IT. SHE was tall and slim with narrow shoulders and a narrow waist and a panther’s stalking stride. Her eyes were large and black and lustrous and her cheekbones high—it was rumored she had Indian blood—and she looked down upon the world in general with undisguised, sardonic amusement. Josh Crawford liked to boast that she was his most prized possession and joked that he had swapped a Rembrandt for her, though there were some who thought it might not be entirely a joke. She had appeared in his life seemingly out of nowhere, sporting a ring on her wedding finger with a diamond set in it that was surely the size, someone had said, of Josh’s prostate. There had been a previous Mrs. Crawford—two, in fact, the first of whom had died—but she had been bundled away into a fancy nursing home and now no one could remember clearly what she had looked like, the memory of her eclipsed entirely by the far more ritzy Rose. It seemed something out of a fairy tale, or maybe one of those stories out of the Bible, more like, the union of this hard but beautiful woman and the bad old man. People looked at Josh Crawford looking at his so much younger wife and were reconciled for a moment to being not as rich as he was or as good-looking as she.

  Rose took the plastic face mask brusquely from the nurse’s hands and pressed it over Josh’s nose and mouth. The hiss of oxygen in the rubber pipe always made her think of snakes—with brittle affection she often called Josh her old cobra. Today, crouched hugely in the wheelchair with rounded shoulders and gasping into the muzzle of the mask, he resembled more a wounded moose. The interrupted dancers had been gaping at him with anxious interest as he struggled for breath—he was their meal ticket, after all, she reflected, though he certainly did not overfeed them—but at one sweeping glance from those inky eyes of hers they turned hastily away.

  Josh tore the mask from his face and flung it aside. “Get me out of here!” he snarled, gasping. He was furious at being seen like this by the workers. The nurse made to take the handles of the chair but he twisted about and swung a fist at her. “Not you!” There was white froth on his lips. Rose smiled at the nurse in her blithe, bland way and turned the chair about and set off toward the archway that led into the house proper. Josh was scrabbling now with his nails at the leather armrests of the chair and muttering to himself some word that sounded like pipit. Birds, Rose asked herself—why was he talking about birds? From the dropsical caverns of his chest he produced a deep, rolling rumble that she recognized as laughter. When he spoke again she had to lean forward and put her face beside his, as the nurse had done earlier.

  “Not a bird!” he croaked. He had heard what she was thinking, as he so often did; it impressed and alarmed her, in equal measure, this uncanny telepathic knack he had. “A pipette,” he said, “that’s what it is, the thing that chemists use.”

  “Whatever you say, darling,” she answered with a sigh, “whatever you say.”

  WHEN CLAIRE GOT ANDY ONTO THE FLOOR HE WOULD NOT DANCE, could not, he was that drunk. The room was spinning around him and everywhere he looked there were faces shiny and red from laughing. Claire, worried at what he might do—the expression in his half-closed eyes was truly scary now—drew him by the hand back to their table, making sure to keep on smiling so no one around her would see how she was really feeling. Little Christine had woken up and the woman at the next table had her on her knee and was talking to her. The baby was dressed in the white satin christening robe that a young nun at St. Mary’s had made for her; she had nearly grown out of it by now, but it was long in the skirt and hung down sideways like, Claire thought, the tail of a star. She took her, her little shooting star, her little angel, and sat down with her on her own knees, and thanked the woman for minding her, and then felt bad, for she guessed from the look the couple exchanged, smiling but sad, that they were childless themselves, and she knew how that felt. She pretended not to notice Andy standing over her, breathing heavily and swaying a little and glaring, she was sure, at the child, as he always did when he had drunk too much. He grabbed a beer bottle by the neck and threw back his head and poured the beer into his open mouth; the look of him as he swallowed made her think this time not of being in bed with him but of a mule her father had on the farm that used to hold up its head like that and hee-haw, because it was lonesome for love, or so her brother Matty told her with a leer, Matty who years later was to die in a helicopter crash in Korea. Poor Andy, she thought, lonesome, too, because no one had loved him until she came along, to which although she tried not to she heard herself adding, too late.

  Somebody Andy knew, one of the drivers he worked with, had promised them a ride back to town. They went to look for him, Claire moving ahead quickly with the baby in her arms and Andy slouching after her in a beer sulk, belching and muttering to himself and lugging the empty bassinet. They had to go through the double doors that led out of the Crystal Gallery into a high, stone hall with a huge fireplace with a bearskin in front of it and animal heads and old brown paintings on the walls. The place was noisy and crowded with people putting on storm coats and galoshes and calling good-bye and wishing each other a merry Christmas. Claire, looking back to make sure Andy was still following her, bumped into someone who had stepped backwards into her path, and gave a little cry, afraid she would let the baby fall, which she might have done had the other person not put out a strong hand to steady her. Claire recognized Mr. Crawford’s nurse. She had a real Irish face, wide and friendly, from which her reddish hair was pulled back in two shells that covered her ears and were pinned under her cap at either side. She had been talking to one of the young truckers, flirting with him, by the look of it, for there were spots of color on her cheekbones and she was still smiling when she turned and put a hand instinctively under Claire’s arm that was holding the baby. Oh, sorry! both women said at the same time, and both looked down at little Christine, who was watching them in her puzzled, inquisitive way out of the folds of the pink blanket she was wrapped in. The nurse was about to say something more but Andy pushed forward, breathing his beer breath, and the trucker the nurse had been talking to moved aside, seeing that Andy was drunk and not caring to be in his way, for Andy had a reputation, and Claire said thanks to the nurse and they smiled at each other and Claire and Andy moved on, Andy squeezing Claire’s arm hard to make her move faster. When they had gone past, Brenda Ruttledge stood frowning to herself a moment, then shook her head and turned back to look for the trucker, but he had disappeared into the crowd.

  CLAIRE HAD NOT KNOWN SHE WAS ASLEEP UNTIL THE CRYING FROM the baby’s room wakened her. She had been dreaming she was still
at the party and the dream had been so real it had seemed she was really there and not here, at home, in her own bed, in glimmering snow-light, with nothing to disturb the huge hush coming in from the snowy streets all around except the baby’s familiar, coughing cry that always made her heart beat faster the way she knew it was only supposed to do if she was the natural mother. Natural! What could be more natural than the love she lavished on her little Christine? She put out a hand and felt only a warm but already cooling space beside her where Andy should have been. He must have heard the baby before she had and got up to see to her. She could hear his voice, talking, and saying, Ssh, ssh! She must have fallen back to sleep then for a minute. When she woke again it was the silence that awakened her, a silence that had something wrong with it. She did not leap up straightaway, as she knew she should, but lay there motionless, fully alert, all senses atingle. She thought afterward that she must have known, known without knowing, that these were the last few moments of innocence and peace that she would have on earth.

  She was not conscious of running, of her legs carrying her, of her feet striking the floor, but only of moving, effortlessly and unhindered—like the wind, those were the very words that came to her—across the bedroom, and the passage outside, and into the open doorway of the baby’s room, where she stopped. The light was not switched on in the room, yet she saw the scene as if lit like the film sets there were sometimes pictures of in movie magazines, with a harsh, unreal brightness. Andy was standing beside the baby’s crib, motionless, his shoulders hunched, knees bent, his eyes shut and eyebrows lifted, as if, she thought, as if he were waiting for a sneeze to arrive. What he was holding in his hands might have been a wadded-up sheet, but she knew, of course, that it was not. They remained like that for an impossibly long time, she in the doorway and he by the crib, and then, hearing her, or maybe just sensing her there, he opened his eyes and blinked two or three times like a hypnotized person coming out of a trance and gave her a guilty, furtive look, frowning, trying, she could see, to think of something to say.

  It was all so strangely calm. She walked to him and he handed her the bundle he had been holding, pushed it into her arms almost as if it were a gift he was presenting her with, a bunch of flowers, say, that he had grown tired of holding while he waited for her. The baby was in her sleep-suit, a limp, warm weight lying in her hands. Claire cradled the head in her palm, feeling the familiar texture of the skin, like a patch of velvet, loose over the skull.

  “Oh, Andy,” she said, as if he and not what she was holding were the child. “What have you done?”

  An accident, he said it was. An accident. He kept saying it over and over; it might have been something he had been set to learn by heart. They were in their own room now, and she was sitting on the side of the bed, upright, her back very straight, with the baby laid out unmoving across her knees. Andy was pacing in front of her, running a hand repeatedly through his hair from his forehead all the way to the back of his neck. He was in his jeans and undershirt—when they came home he had started to undress and then, too drunk to finish, had collapsed into bed in his clothes—and a pair of white, ankle-high socks. She could smell the stale beer on his breath. Yet he seemed so young, in that undershirt and the little socks. She stopped looking at him; she wished, in a weary, wistful way, that she might never have to look at him again. The baby’s eyelids were not quite closed, she noticed, and something glittered between them. Dead. She spoke the word to herself as if it were a word in a foreign language.

  “She was crying,” Andy was saying. “She was crying and I shook her.” He spoke in a low, urgent voice, not to her but not to himself, either; he was like an actor desperately trying to memorize the lines that presently, when the curtain went up, he would have to deliver with such force and sincerity that the whole house would be convinced. “It was an accident. A terrible accident.”

  She felt a prickle of impatience. “Phone St. Mary’s,” she said.

  He stopped, stared. “What?”

  She was so tired, suddenly; so tired. “Sister Stephanus,” she said, speaking again in a slow, distinct voice, again as if to a child; perhaps, she thought, from now on she would never be able to talk any other way, to anyone. “At St. Mary’s. Phone her.”

  He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, as if suspecting a trick. “What will I tell her?”

  She shrugged, and at the movement little Christine’s lifeless arm lolled sideways, her tiny fat hand upturned, as if she too were about to ask a question, demand guidance, plead for help.

  “Tell her,” Claire said, in a tone of sudden, harsh sarcasm, “tell her it was an accident.”

  Then something broke in her, she felt it like the snapping of a bone, and she began to weep.

  He left her there, sitting on the bed in her cotton nightdress with the baby lifeless on her splayed knees and the tears running down her face. There was something about her that scared him. She looked like a stone figure some red Indian or Chinaman might worship. He threw a coat over his shoulders and hurried down the outside stairs. Ridges of frozen snow on the steps were glass-hard under his bare feet. The storm had cleared and the sky was high and clear and hung all over with glistening stars. Cora Bennett was awake—did she ever sleep?—and let him in at the back door. The telephone, he told her before she could speak, he needed to use the telephone. She had thought he had come for something else but when she saw his face and heard the way he spoke she just nodded and gestured toward the front hall, where the telephone was. He hesitated. She wore a slip and nothing else. He could see the goose bumps on her forearms.

  “What happened?” she said.

  He told her there had been an accident and she nodded. How come, he wondered, women never seemed surprised when things went wrong? Then he saw something in her eyes, a light, an eager flash, and he realized she thought it was Claire the accident had happened to.

  He had to look up the number of the orphanage in the phone book. There were dozens of churches, convents, schools, all called St. Mary’s. The telephone was the old-fashioned kind, a spindle with a dial and mouthpiece, and a receiver slung on a hook at the side. Again he hesitated. It was the middle of the night—would anyone be awake there to answer his call? And even if there was, what chance was there that he would be put through to the Mother so goddamned Superior? He began to dial the number, then stopped, and stood with his finger resting in the little hole, feeling with vague satisfaction how tensely the sprung dial pressed itself against the side of his nail. Cora came up silently and stood beside him. He had never noticed before how much taller than him she was. He never minded when women were taller, even liked it, in fact. She asked whom he was calling but he did not answer. The coat had slipped from one of his shoulders and she lifted it and set it tenderly back in place. Her fingers brushed his neck. He closed his eyes. He could not remember picking up the kid from her crib. She had been crying, and would not stop. He had not shaken her hard, he knew that, but how hard was hard? There must have been something wrong with her, some weakness in her head, it would have shown up sooner or later. It had been an accident. It was not his fault. He put the receiver back on the hook and turned to Cora wordlessly with his head bowed and she took him in her arms, pressing his face to her cold breast, as if he was her child.

  21

  AFTERWARDS QUIRKE TRIED TO PUT IT ALL BACK TOGETHER IN HIS mind like a jigsaw puzzle. It would never be complete. The bits he remembered most clearly were the least significant, such as the smell of the drenched laurel behind the railings in the square, a streetlamp’s rain-pocked reflection in a puddle, the cold, greasy feel of the area steps under his desperately scrabbling fingers. There was, throughout, a sense of deep embarrassment—that must have been the reason he did not cry out for help. Embarrassment, and a kind of incredulity. Such things simply did not happen, yet this one did, he had the wounds to prove it. He had thought, when he reached the bottom of those steps, in the wet, glistening darkness there, that he was going to die. An image had fla
shed before him of his pallid corpse laid out on the dissecting table under merciless lights and Sinclair, his assistant, standing over him in his green apron, flexing his rubber-gloved hands like a virtuoso about to set to at the piano. Pain had come flying at him from all directions, sharp, black, angular, and he thought of another image, of rooks at nightfall wheeling and spinning above bare trees against a winter sky. Or no, that was what he thought of afterwards, when he was reassembling the bits and pieces of what had happened. At the time he was not aware of his mind working at all, except to register trivial things: wet laurel leaves, the lamp’s reflection, the slimed steps.

  It had seemed at first an absurd instance of events repeating themselves, and in the confusion of the initial moments he had thought a joke was being played on him. It was the end of twilight and he was walking homewards along the square. There had been a Christmas drinks party at the hospital in the afternoon, a staid and wearying affair which Malachy had presided over with uneasy bonhomie, and although Quirke had drunk no more than a few glasses of wine he felt blurred and heavy-limbed. A halfhearted wind was blowing, and it was raining in a desultory way, and smoke from chimneys was flying this way and that in the sky above the square. Just as they had done the previous time, and at just the same place, the two appeared as silently as shadows out of the gloom and fell easily into step on either side of him. They were bareheaded and wore cheap, transparent plastic raincoats. The thin one, Mr. Punch himself, gave him a regretfully reproving smile. “Compliments of the season, Captain,” he said. “Out in the damp and the dark again, are you? Didn’t we warn you about that?”