by Irwin Shaw
“Like sand through the fingers,” Linda said. Then she giggled, and Martin’s face began to open up again.
“But it is important,” Linda said, grave once more. “It’s so easy for the good-looking ones to wind up bums. Especially in France.”
“I don’t know enough French to wind up as a bum,” Martin said cheerfully. He got up and touched the top of his sister’s hair and then went over to the low table in front of the window which they used as a bar, to put some ice into his drink.
“The idea was, Martin,” Linda said, “just to give you a carefully modulated warning. We don’t want to …”
“Say,” Martin said, staring out the window, “are you expecting guests?”
“Guests?” Willard asked, surprised. “At this hour?”
“There’s a man out there, looking in,” Martin said. He twisted his neck to look toward the corner of the house. “And there’s a ladder up against the balcony.… Now he’s gone.…”
“A ladder!” Linda sprang up. “The children!” She ran out of the room and up the staircase, with the two men racing after her.
There was a lamp in the hall outside the children’s bedroom and by its light Martin could see the two small boys sleeping quietly in their beds, ranged against the walls on opposite sides of the room. Through the half-opened door which led into the next room came the steady snoring of the maid. While Linda and Willard reassured themselves about the children, Martin went to the windows. They were open, but the room was closed off from the balcony by full-length shutters, still hooked in place. Martin undid the shutters and stepped out onto the balcony, which ran along the front of the floor of the house, supported by the porch columns. The night was raw and dark and the mist had grown thicker and the light from the downstairs windows reflected back confusingly. Martin went to the edge of the balcony and peered down. He heard a sound to his left, off to the side of the house, and looked in that direction. He got a glimpse of a patch of white moving swiftly against the dark background of tree trunks and he turned and ran back through the boys’ room, whispering to Willard, “He’s down there. On that side.”
Willard came after him as he took the steps four at a time and flung open the front door and ran across the driveway gravel, and around the side of the house, past the ladder. Willard had picked up a flashlight in the front hall, but it wasn’t a strong one, and its beam flickered meaninglessly across the sloping, overgrown wet lawn and the tangled mass of shrubs and trees into which the intruder had disappeared.
Without much hope of success, Martin and Willard pushed their way some distance through the woods, scratching themselves on bushes and ploughing through drifts of soaked dead leaves, flickering the searchlight beam around them in sudden, prying movements. They were silent and angry and if they had found the man he would have had to be armed and ready to use his weapon to get away from them. But they saw nothing, heard nothing.
After five minutes, Willard gave up. “Ah, it’s no use,” he said. “Let’s get back.”
They walked back to the house in silence. When they reached the edge of the lawn they saw Linda out on the corner of the balcony with the light from the now opened shutters of the children’s room outlining her form in the darkness. She was leaning over and pushing at the ladder and finally it teetered and fell to the ground.
“Did you find him?” she called to Martin and Willard.
“No,” Willard said.
“Nothing’s been touched in any of the rooms,” Linda said. “He never got in. It’s our ladder. The gardener was using it this afternoon and he must have left it out.”
“Get inside,” Willard called to her. “You’ll freeze up there.”
Martin and Willard took one last look at the dark lawn and the looming black wall of the woods. They waited until Linda had stepped back into the children’s room and locked the shutters. Then they went into the house. Martin stayed downstairs while Willard went up to look at the children once more. The living room didn’t look as gay and pleasant to Martin as it had before.
When Willard and Linda came down again Martin was standing at the window from which he had seen the man on the lawn outside, and the ladder.
“What an idiot,” he said. “‘Are you expecting guests?’” He shook his head ruefully. “At this hour of the morning.”
“Well, remember,” Linda said, “you’ve just come from California.”
They laughed then and everybody felt better and Willard poured them some more whiskey.
“What I should’ve done,” Martin said, “was pretend I hadn’t seen him and just acted natural and gone out a side door.…”
“People are only as clever as that in the movies,” Willard said. “In real life they say, ‘Are you expecting guests?’”
“You know something,” Martin said, remembering, “I think I’d recognize that fellow if I saw him again. After all, he was only five feet away from me and the light from the window was right on him.”
“Did he look like a criminal?” Linda asked.
“Everybody looks like a criminal at one o’clock in the morning,” Martin said.
“I’m going to call the police and report this,” Willard said and got up and started toward the telephone, which was in the hall.
“Oh, Johnny,” Linda said, putting out her hand and stopping him. “Wait till morning. If you call, they’ll just come over and keep us up all night.”
“Well, you can’t let people climb all over your house and try to break in and do nothing about it, can you?” Willard said.
“It won’t do any good. They’ll never find him out there tonight,” Linda said.
“That’s true enough,” said Martin.
“And they’ll want to go up and look at the children’s room and they’ll wake them up and scare them.…” Linda was talking rapidly and nervously. She had been calm enough before but the reaction had set in and she didn’t seem to be able to sit still or talk at a normal speed now. “What’s the sense in it? Don’t be pig-headed.”
“Who’s being pig-headed?” Willard asked, surprised. “All I said was that I thought we ought to call the police. Did I sound pig-headed to you, Martin?”
“Well,” Martin began judicially, wanting to placate his sister. “I think …”
But Linda interrupted. “He didn’t do anything, anyway, did he? After all, he just looked in the window. There’s no sense in losing a night’s sleep just because a man happened to look in the window. I bet he wasn’t a robber, at all.…”
“What do you mean?” Willard asked sharply.
“Well, what’ve we got to rob here? I don’t have any jewels and the one fur coat I own is seven years old and any thief in his right mind …”
“Then what was he doing here with his damn ladder?” Willard asked.
“Maybe he was just a peeping Tom,” Linda said.
“Just!” Willard gulped down his drink. “If you wouldn’t walk around naked with all the blinds up all the time …”
“Oh, don’t be such a prude.” Linda said. “Who’s going to see me in this house? The chipmunks?”
“Not only this house,” Willard said. “Wherever we live. Women these days.” He turned bitterly toward Martin. “When you get married you’ll find you’re spending half your time pulling down blinds to keep the American public from admiring your wife dressing and undressing.”
“Don’t be stuffy, John,” Linda said, her voice rising. “Who’d ever think in the middle of the woods like this …”
“I’d think,” Willard said. “And that guy with the ladder obviously thought, didn’t he?”
“Who knows what he thought?” Linda said. “All right, you win. From now on, I’ll pull every blind in the house. But it’s so awful. To have to live like that in your own house. All closed in.”
“It’s not being all closed in to put on a bathrobe once in a while,” Willard said.
“John,” Linda said, her voice sharp, “you have a terrible tendency to turn stuffy in a cri
sis.”
“Boys, boys,” Martin said. “I’m here on a holiday.”
“Sorry,” Willard said shortly, and Linda laughed, strainedly.
“You ought to buy a dog,” Martin said.
“He hates dogs,” said Linda, starting to turn the lamps out. “He prefers to live in a vault.”
They left it at that and went up to bed, leaving an extra light on in the downstairs hall, for security, although it was certain that the prowler, whoever he was, and for whatever reason he had come, would not come back that night, at least.
Willard called the police in the morning and they promised to come over. Linda had to invent an elaborate reason to take the children away until lunch-time, because she didn’t want them to see the policeman and ask questions and begin to feel insecure in their own house. It was difficult to get the children out of the house because they wanted to spend the morning with their uncle and they couldn’t understand why Martin wouldn’t come with them and he couldn’t tell them that he had to stay and try to give the police a description of a man who had prowled outside their window while they slept.
The children were out of the way when the police car drove up. The two policemen walked soberly over the grounds, looking professionally at the ladder and the balcony and the woods and taking notes. When they asked Martin what the man looked like he was a little embarrassed by the vagueness of the description he could offer and had the feeling that the policemen were disappointed in him.
“I’m pretty sure I could recognize him, if I saw him again,” Martin said, “but there wasn’t anything particularly special about him to latch onto. I mean, he didn’t have a big scar or a patch over one eye or a broken nose or anything like that.”
“How old was he?” Madden, the older of the policemen, asked.
“Sort of middle-aged, Sergeant,” Martin said. “Somewhere between thirty and forty-five, I guess.”
Willard smiled and Martin saw that Madden was trying not to smile.
“You know what I mean,” Martin said. “In between.”
“What kind of complexion did he have, Mr. Brackett?” Madden asked.
“Well, in that light, in the mist …” Martin hesitated, digging into his memory. “He looked pale.”
“Was he bald?” Madden made an entry in his book. “Did he have a lot of hair?”
Again Martin hesitated. “I guess he was wearing a kind of hat,” he said.
“What kind of hat?”
Martin shrugged. “A hat.”
“A cap, would you say?” Madden suggested.
“No, I guess not. Just a hat.”
“What sort of shape was he, would you say?” Madden went on methodically, putting everything down. “Tall, stocky, what?”
Martin shook his head embarrassedly. “I’m afraid I’m not much help,” he said. “He was standing there with the light just hitting his head, below the window, and I … I really couldn’t say. He looked … well, if I had to make up my mind about it … solid.”
“Have you any notions about who it might be, Sergeant?” Willard asked.
The two policemen looked at each other judiciously. “Well, Mr. Willard,” Madden said, “there’re bound to be two or three cases of people walking around at night in any town. We’ll check. They’re building that new shopping center near the bank and there’re a lot of workmen in from New Haven. All sorts of people,” he said, making a heavy judgment on foreigners from New Haven. He closed his book and put it in his pocket. “We’ll let you know if anything comes up.”
“I’m pretty sure I’d know him if I saw him,” Martin repeated, trying to reestablish himself with the policemen.
“If we get any ideas,” said Madden, “maybe we’ll ask you to come with us and look over a suspect or two.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow night,” Martin said. “For France.”
The two policemen exchanged glances again, bleakly eloquent about the civic attitude of Americans who witnessed crimes and then fled to France.
“Well,” Madden said heavily, without optimism, “we’ll see what we can do.”
Martin and Willard watched the police car drive off. “Isn’t it funny,” Willard said, “how easy it is for a policeman to make you feel guilty?”
Then they went into the house and Willard used the telephone to call Linda and tell her it was all right to bring the children home, the police had gone.
They had been invited to a friend’s house for cocktails that evening and after that to another friend’s for dinner and at first Linda said she wouldn’t go, she couldn’t dream of leaving the children alone in the house after what had happened. But Willard asked her what she intended to do—stay home every night until the children were twenty years old? Anyway, Willard said, whoever it was had had a real scare and would keep as far away from the house as possible. Then Linda decided that he was right, but now she’d have to tell the maid. It wouldn’t be moral, she said, to go out and leave the maid in ignorance. But, she warned her husband, there was a good chance that the maid would pack her bags and leave. The maid had only been with them for six weeks and was getting on in years and was not a calm type. So Linda went into the kitchen while Willard paced the living room jumpily, saying to Martin, “One thing I couldn’t stand is going through finding a new maid. We’ve had five since we moved in here.”
But Linda came out of the kitchen smiling and saying the maid was a calmer type than she appeared and was taking the news placidly. “She’s too old to be raped,” Linda said, “and she loves the children, so she’ll stay.”
Willard put the ladder in the garage and locked the garage and made sure the shutters were hooked from the inside in the children’s room and in Linda’s bedroom and in his own bedroom and in the bathroom in between, because all those rooms gave on the balcony against which the ladder had been propped the night before.
At the cocktail party, which was a replica of a thousand other cocktail parties being given on that particular Saturday night within a radius of one hundred miles from New York City, Willard and Linda told about the prowler and Martin had to describe what he looked like, feeling once more, as he had with the policemen, that it was a sign of low intelligence on his part that he couldn’t be more accurate. “He had this hat over his eyes and he didn’t have any expression on his face and he was rather pale, as I told the sergeant, and intense-looking.…” Even as he spoke, Martin realized that he was adding to the portrait of the man on the other side of the window in the misty night, that the intensity of the man’s expression was a new discovery, dredged from his memory, that the remembered face was being simplified, intensified, becoming heraldic, symbolic, a racial, dangerous apparition staring out of dark and dripping forests at the frail safety of the sheltered circle of light.
The Willards’ visitor started everyone off on their own stories of burglars, prowlers, kidnappers.
“… so there was this fellow suddenly staring down the skylight, it was summer and the skylight was open, on West 23rd Street, and my friend ran up to the roof and chased him across the roofs and cornered him and the fellow whipped out a knife and it took five transfusions before he was out of danger. Of course, the police never found him.”
“… a loaded .45. Right next to my bed, at all times. These days, with all these crazy kids. Anybody who tries anything in my house is in for a hot welcome. And don’t think I wouldn’t shoot to kill.”
“… the chain on the door and everything from every single drawer and cupboard piled in a heap on the rug. And I can’t tell you what else they did, in mixed company, but you can imagine. The police told them it was quite common. especially when they were disappointed in their haul. But of course, they were asking for it, living surrounded by all those Puerto Ricans.”
“… this was a long time ago, of course, when he had this Great Dane kennel, but the day after the Lindbergh kidnapping he sold every single dog he had in the place. At three times what he’d been asking before.”
Glass in hand, Mar
tin listened politely, realizing with some surprise that all these solid, comfortable people, in their cosy and orderly community, shared a general fear, a widespread uneasiness, and that the face outside the Willard window had made them all remember that there were obscure and unpredictable forces always ready to descend upon them in their warm homes and that, with all their locked doors and all their police and all their loaded .45’s, they were exposed and vulnerable to attack.
“You’ve sent a delicious shiver down every spine,” Linda said, coming over to Martin.
“Not so delicious,” he said thoughtfully, looking around him at the serious home-owning faces. Linda, he saw, had made up her mind to take the whole thing lightly, after the rattled nerves of the night before and the fuss about the police. He admired her for it, but it worried him, and he didn’t like the idea of leaving her out there in that pillared, echoing house surrounded by acres of wilderness, especially since Willard worked late in the city several times a week and didn’t get home until midnight. After all, uncaught and unsuspected, there was nothing to stop the man from coming back a week from now, a month, two months.… On another rainy night, with no moon.
“We’d better be going now,” Linda said. “We’re expected for dinner at eight-thirty.” She glanced slyly around the room. “Anybody you want to take? The Charles’s said if you wanted to bring anybody, it’s only a buffet supper, really.…”
“No, thanks,” Martin said, smiling. “They’re all very nice, but …” Then he stopped. A tall, blond woman in a blue dress had just come into the room and was making her excuses to the hostess for being late. Her hair was done in a low bun on the back of her neck, making her look stately and old-fashioned. Her voice, as she made her explanations to the hostess, was murmuring and melodious, and she was by far the prettiest woman in the place. “Well,” Martin said to Linda, grinning, “maybe that one. Give me ten minutes.”
Linda shook her head. “No go, Brother,” she said. “Her name is Anne Bowman, and she’s married. And there’s her husband at the door.”
Linda gestured with her glass toward the door and Martin saw a tall man in a well-tailored dark suit, with his back to him, talking to Willard and the host.