He came and sat down.
He looked at his feet, at his hands, at his wife, at the ceiling, at his wife again. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, an expression on her face of courteous concern. At last he took the plunge.
“Mason is dead,” he announced.
Mrs. MacDonald allowed her eyes to widen by a genteel fraction of an inch. “Really? How astonishing. I’d have thought his heart was good for another ten years, at least.” Her husband looked at her, tried to make words, and failed. She added helpfully, “Very fortunate for you, of course.”
“My God, Henrietta, don’t say that!” he cried.
For an instant the eyes widened again, as much in inquiry as in surprise.
He answered her: “He was murdered. Not accidentally killed, not killed by somebody who was trying to rob him.” His voice shook. “Deliberately murdered.”
Not the faintest trace of emotion disturbed Henrietta MacDonald’s face. She looked at her husband without astonishment, without horror, but with great intentness; she favored him with a still, unblinking gaze for perhaps ten seconds, and her silence froze even his nervous hands into temporary immobility. “Not so fortunate for you,” she remarked at last.
He couldn’t help himself; he laughed. “My dear, you are the most unflappable creature! I suppose it’s just as well, it exercises a calming effect on me. But not so fortunate for me, indeed!”
“You have this on good authority?”
“That phone call was from the police. Mason was found dead—ah, stabbed—on the grounds of St. Margaret’s Church, last night. Found by Jamie Newman’s wife, oddly enough.”
“How unpleasant for Tracy.”
“Oh. Yes. At any rate, the police have asked me to notify everybody on the faculty, and ask them to be in the Department offices at nine o’clock for—ah, questioning.” He smiled weakly. “Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose it must. It’s especially bothersome for you, because Mason’s job now falls to you, and everyone must know that you would be glad of that. However, we must hope that the police will soon see, when they meet you, that however much you may have wanted Mason’s job, you are not the sort of person who would do anything like that to get it.”
His response was enthusiastic, and his gestures became more definite. Of course he wasn’t that sort of person! The idea was preposterous, utterly preposterous, of course the police wouldn’t suspect him! Such an idea would never occur to them. His wife recognized his lecture voice—or an attempt at it. It wasn’t quite right, he stumbled over a word every now and then.
And she wondered that he did not perceive the inconsistency in affirming that a certain idea would never occur to the police, while exhibiting not the slightest hint of surprise that the idea had occurred to his wife. Poor dear. So transparent. He was going to need help.
“But I don’t know who on earth could have done it,” he was fretting. “It’s—it’s just incredible. Mason! Who on earth—?”
His wife gazed thoughtfully at a philodendron on the table by his chair. “Mason is not popular,” she pointed out.
“Of course not. But you don’t murder a man just because you don’t like him.”
“Well, no, not because you don’t like him. But it’s not a simple case of dislike, here.”
“For God’s sake, Henry! People kill people so that they can inherit fortunes from them, and that sort of thing; you don’t murder somebody just to become chairman of a department. Hell, there isn’t even any money in it. Much.”
Really, it was astonishing how obtuse—“I know that, John, and when I said it wasn’t a case of simple dislike, I didn’t mean you.” She abandoned her perusal of the philodendron and looked, carefully, into her husband’s face. “You will enjoy being Chairman of the Department, yes. You will get a raise of perhaps seven thousand dollars a year. I’m sure the police will look the matter over and leave you out of it almost at once. You would have become Chairman on Mason’s retirement, anyway. And in any case, John”—the placid gaze focused into a long, unblinking stare—“Mason has never been any threat to you.”
“Mason’s never been any threat to anybody! Pompous old ass, and alcoholic to boot!” He pushed the philodendron aside and reached for the cigarette box on the other side of it. Two of the cigarettes fell to the floor; he made an annoyed sound and picked them up.
Henrietta, who never directly disagreed with her husband, did not do so now; she watched him light one cigarette and restore the other to the box, then endorsed his opinion of the late Chairman, merely adding that it was a pity that someone like that should be in a position where he had so much power.
Professor MacDonald considered this statement for a couple of drags, and was about to reply when his wife transferred her attention to the Ficus benjamina in the corner behind him and asked, in a tone too diffident to hold any hint of admonition, if he had indeed notified the people the police had asked him to call.
“Oh, God, what time is it? Eight-fifteen. Forty-five minutes. Yes, I’d better get on it.” He moved toward the phone at the other end of the room.
He nearly dropped it in the middle of dialing the first number when Henrietta asked, without looking up from the knitting she had resumed, “Have they asked to see Charles Caldwell?”
In thirty years it had never dawned on John MacDonald that his wife’s air of old-fashioned fragility was deceptive. He had chivalrously refrained from sullying Henry’s ears with the choicer bits of departmental gossip, and he continued to be unfashionably attracted to what he believed to be her prim naïveté. Henrietta, for her part, would not have dreamed of disillusioning him; so when he harrumphed and coughed and fumbled with the phone and asked why on earth the police should want to talk to Charles Caldwell, she replied, after a second’s hesitation, that she really didn’t know, it was a silly question.
She worked her needles, and he stood looking at her for a moment. Then he said calmly, “It’s just faculty members they want to talk to, dear, not their husbands or wives. Nothing important, I’m sure. Just to get an idea of who saw him last, that sort of thing.”
“Of course, John, that’s very reasonable.”
“It’s all just a matter of routine, you know, this kind of thing.”
She agreed with him.
He abandoned the telephone to come back across the room to his wife and pat her on the shoulder. “Everything’s going to be all right,” he assured her. “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”
She said she was certain he was right, and he was so kind to be concerned about her.
The ring of the kitchen telephone produced something like a snarl from Charles Caldwell. “Oh, damn! Not now!”
“Very poor timing,” his wife agreed promptly, rising from the breakfast table. “Just when we were settling down to a nice cozy fight.”
“We’re not fighting!” Charles yelled.
“That’s correct. We are not fighting. But you are trying to, and believe me, if you badger me into cooperating with you on that particular venture, you will be sorry indeed!” She effectively silenced any rebuttal by picking up the phone. “Oh, hi, John. What’s up?”
Her thwarted spouse glowered at her, but the glower first wrinkled into curiosity, then melted into concern, as Ellen’s face went blank with horror, and she began to whisper protests into the phone: “Oh, John, no! No! It’s—it’s impossible!” Then she listened in silence, her head bent, her free hand over her eyes. She had effectively hidden her face from her husband, but her whole posture was eloquent of misery, and he moved over to her and rested a comforting hand on her shoulder. Finally she said, “Yes, sure, John. I’ll be there. At nine.” She lowered the receiver slowly to its cradle, but she did not raise her head, or lower her hand from her eyes.
“Honey, what is it? What’s the matter?” Charles Caldwell turned her to face him, and gripped her shoulders, but she only brought up the other hand to cover her face, and kept her head bowed. “Honey, tell me!�
�� he cried. “Something dreadful’s happened—has somebody died? Is it your mother? Answer me!” He began to shake her, and with an angry gesture she broke his hold and turned her back on him. Standing behind her, he took her shoulders again, very gently, and whispered, “Someone’s died?” She nodded. “Who is it, baby?”
She replied in a small, hard voice: “Mason.”
He released her instantly, almost threw her away from him. “Of course I can see that you’d be heartbroken,” he sneered. “Pardon me if I don’t dry your tears.”
“I’m not crying!” She turned on him furiously, as though to exhibit her dry cheeks as proof. “But of course I’m upset. He was—He was a friend of mine.” She enunciated the word “friend” perhaps a shade too carefully.
“That much we had established! What has your ‘friend’ gone and done to himself? Cardiac arrest while humping his latest mistress?”
“He was murdered!” she cried angrily.
“Let me guess,” he said, dripping acid. “Your replacement has a husband less tolerant than I am?”
Since she had never struck him, never so much as made a motion to do so, he was caught completely unawares. A ringing slap across his face stunned him, and he barely flung up an arm in time to save himself from the backhand that followed it. He caught her wrists, and in a fury greater than hers, gasped, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
She glared at him a moment; then she saw that the expression on his face was new to her; she had never seen it in any of their fights. He was shocked. No other word for it. He was shocked. Then she understood what she had done. She told him. “Getting even. That’s what I’m doing. Finally. I’ve finally done it. For eight years you have used your tongue on me like a club. You have beaten me, with words, for your pleasure—”
“You’re hysterical! That’s the stupidest—” It was his standard response, but this time he didn’t get to finish it; she overrode him.
“Yes, damn it, for your pleasure! You enjoy yelling. Getting mad for you is like some sort of neurotic recreation. And you will not listen to me when I tell you that I cannot endure being verbally beaten like that! Well, finally it looks as though I’ve done something that outrages you as much as your yelling outrages me. Which hurts you as much, which distresses you as much, as your yelling hurts and distresses me. I think I have just made you hear me for the first time in eight years.”
“That’s childish,” he said, releasing her wrists in a gesture of contempt, and trying to talk through a mouth tightly controlled. The tight mouth was his version of dignity; it made him look petulant. “You’re being childish and stupid and I’m not going to talk to you.” He turned on his heel and stalked out of the kitchen.
For a minute she stared grimly at the door, which was still swinging, then she followed him to the bedroom. He was putting on his shirt, and he did not look at her when she came in.
“All right, Charles,” she said in a voice of ominous quiet, “now you listen.”
He turned his back on her, and tucked in his shirttail.
Ellen stood rigid, her arms at her sides and her fists clenched, trying to keep her voice steady. “You abuse me—verbally—any time you damn well want to. You insult me in the grossest way. You choose to think the worst of me in every possible situation. You try your damndest to make me feel as though I’m a terrible wife, and you’re the long-suffering perfect husband. And because you’re perfect and I’m so terrible, that gives you the right to bawl me out all the time, and now you’ve gotten to making up absurd and insulting fantasies so you’ll have something else to bawl me out for, and let me tell you I have had it.”
He buckled his belt with shaking hands.
“You yell at me,” she continued with suffocated fury, “and bitch at me, and when I apologize for the things that aren’t my fault, and confess to sins I haven’t committed, and say whatever you want me to say, and try to soothe you, you don’t stop yelling.”
His face was flushed, and in uncharacteristic silence he examined the tie rack. He still had not looked at her.
“And when I beg you to stop beating me like that”—against her will, her voice was getting louder. “When I say I don’t want to fight, why are you hounding me, why are you doing this to me, you still go on yelling and bitching and you’re never satisfied till you make me break down and cry, and then you fall all over me and say you’re sorry, and you never stop before I cry, because the whole object of a fight as far as you’re concerned is to make me cry, you don’t care about making a point, you don’t care about who’s right and who’s wrong and what’s true and what’s not, the whole object of the exercise is to break me down into a whimpering lump so you can play big strong man and comfort me.” The tears were streaming down her face, but she had never been further from whimpering; she felt filled with an omnipotent rage, and she berated him in a tone as vicious as any he had ever used on her. “And you won’t allow me to stop these—these hideous one-sided arguments the only way I can which is by physically leaving them, you have literally stood in the door to keep me from leaving the room, you will not permit me to simply exit one of these bloody scenes—”
Charles chose a tie he couldn’t see, draped it around his neck, and began to work it under the collar of his shirt.
“—And now when I at last have made you so mad that you feel the way I have felt all those times, so mad you can’t endure it, now you try to run away from the fight!” She wrenched the tie out of his grasp and mangled it in her hands, and he fought her for it. “Well you’re not going to get out of it!” she gasped as they struggled. “You’re going to know how I felt all these years, you’re going to know what it’s like to have somebody’s anger beating you over the head all the time like a sledgehammer, and you can’t escape, it just keeps coming and coming—”
In a burst of angry power he flung her up against the wall and pinned her there. “Shut up!” he bellowed in her face. His own face was scarlet, and he was trembling. They glared at each other for a minute, both too furious to speak. Then she took stock of his speechless rage, and saw to her astonishment that she had won. She had never won before, but now she had done it, she had turned the tables, she had made him powerless. She had done it by presenting him with a fury that was greater than anything he could do to express it, a fury in the grip of which he was helpless. And as she looked at her husband, made baffled and impotent by his own rage, Ellen Caldwell began to smile. Charles colored more deeply; his mouth twisted; she achieved a small, quiet laugh.
Suddenly his hands were on her throat. “Stop it!” he cried, trembling so violently, he could hardly tighten his grip. “Stop it!”
Her look of smug triumph vanished; her face began to darken, and she fought for breath, clawing at the iron fingers on her neck. At first anger and breathlessness together contorted her face, but after a few seconds the anger flickered and turned to astonishment, and then, suddenly, to unmistakable terror.
Seeing it, he froze, then willed his hands to relax their grip. Making an effort to control his breathing, he took a step back from her, dropped his hands to his sides, and folded them into careful fists. She remained backed against the wall, her eyes wide with fear. “Oh, come on,” he said contemptuously. “Don’t pretend you thought I was going to hurt you.”
She whispered, “You killed him.”
He stared at her for a long minute. The color entirely faded from his face. “You’re crazy,” he said. It was an observation. Then he said it again, and it was a command: “Ellen, you’re crazy.”
She swallowed. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.” She waved a hand before her eyes, as though to clear away an entire scene. “Sorry. I’m upset.” She started to move around him, toward the bathroom. “I’ve got to fix my hair, I’ve got to be at the department at—”
He grabbed her arm as she passed. “Ellen, you can’t think I had anything to do—My God, that’s absurd.”
“Yes, of course, I said so, I was upset, now please Charl
es, I’ve got to pull myself together and get over to—”
He took her shoulders in his hands and gripped hard. “Look at me! Just because you were for some stupid reason acting like a goddamn shrew and attacking me physically and I had to stop you, doesn’t mean I would do anything to Mason Blaine and you know it, and it’s stupid and childish”—he shook her on each word—“of you to say things like that, and if you go around saying things like that—”
She ought to have been able to fight back. She had been a tower of strength only minutes previously. But the unprecedented physical attack had frightened her, and she was emotionally exhausted. So instead she bowed her head, and flung her hands up to ward off the vicious words as if they were blows. “Oh, stop!” she cried, as the tears started coming again, and her breath began to catch.
“—then what the hell do you think is gonna happen, huh? Yeah? Do you ever think before you say anything? No, Bigmouth of the Year, you do not, you just blurt out whatever childish, stupid, spiteful thing comes into your head, it never occurs to you to give a thought to other people for a change, no, you just say whatever you damn well want to—”
A sob broke from her. “Oh, please! Please! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it!”
“—because you just have to get your kicks out of making other people feel bad, don’t you? Have you ever tried a little thoughtfulness?”
“Oh, please, st-stop!” She sank to her knees, and huddled in a defeated heap on the floor.
He had done it again. Her golden, unprecedented victory was shattered, and there was no reclaiming it. She gave in to great, wracking sobs.
He was on the floor beside her, bundling her into his arms, rocking her back and forth. “There, there, baby, it’s all right,” he crooned. “Don’t cry, honey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry; it’s all right, baby, it’s all right…”
He had done it to her again.
In the Drews’ house the time between 8:00 and 8:30 in the morning was a period of maximum chaos. Debbie had been hustled off to the bus stop at 8:15, and at 8:30 the carpool would take Meg to the day-care center—provided she was ready. If she wasn’t ready, the carpool would leave without her, and her mother would have to take her later, on her way to work.
Familiar Friend Page 5