Alibi for Isabel: And Other Stories

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  By the beginning of the second week only sheer stubbornness kept her in her room. She had been an idiot, she reflected. Her feet felt better, but her mind was running in frantic circles. She lost the pound she had gained, and her trays went down almost untouched. In the kitchen Annie gazed at them and banged the dishes.

  “Worrying about them,” she said.

  “Well, I’m not going to be the one to tell her,” said Sarah.

  But it was not the family by that time. Not entirely, at least. Shut up comfortably in her quiet room Mrs. Ayres was fighting a small battle of her own. It began with her going back over her own life. It had been, she thought, a very American one; her free, easy childhood, her marriage, the births of her children, the years with Herbert. Curiously, Herbert began to loom very large in this new picture. Not Herbert, dying in the very bed in which she lay, and saying: “You’ve been a damned good wife to me, Margaret.” But the Herbert of the last war.

  He had never been quite the same after it. He had taken Joe’s going to France too hard. Nevertheless he had wanted him to go.

  “Got to let the children grow up,” he had said. “And we can’t let those devils get away with murder. If I wasn’t too old I’d go myself. Got to stop the thing somehow.”

  And during that second week she began to see Herbert more and more clearly. He had been very quiet while Joe was overseas. He had even made an attempt later on to get over himself. That was when he found he wasn’t as well a man as he had thought he was. Not that he made a fuss about it.

  “Liver or kidneys or something,” he had told her. “Nothing to worry about. Only there’s a job to be done, or those God-damned Huns will be over here, goose-stepping on our necks. And I can’t do it.”

  What would he have thought now? In his inarticulate way he had been deeply American. He had knocked a man’s hat off one day when he didn’t remove it as the flag passed in a parade. The man had fought back, and they had both been arrested. Even now she smiled when she remembered his furious homecoming that night.

  “Where on earth have you been, Bert?”

  “I’ve been in jail. Where the hell do you think I’ve been?”

  She even found herself, during those last days of her temporary death, defending herself to him.

  “It’s such a dreadful war, Bert,” she would say. “We thought the last one was bad, but this is different. And I’m not young any more. I get tired so easily, and I can’t stand shocks.”

  But other women all over the world were standing shocks. Shocks and horror. While she lay there in her bed death was abroad everywhere. And she could almost hear Herbert’s answer. He had said it about Joe.

  “We can’t let other people’s sons fight this for us, my girl. It’s our job, too.”

  She got up one night and held his picture to the light, but there was no relenting in it. It was as if it asked her what she herself was doing, shut up in her room with a world afire.

  The last night of her temporary death was hot. She could not sleep, although the city was very still: She could never remember it so still. It was as though a great hand had settled over it and smothered it. As though indeed it had died, and she alone remained alive. At midnight she got up in the dark, put on a dressing gown and slippers and went down the stairs. She felt her way to the front door and opened it, to find herself still in darkness. There were no street lights. No cars moved. Even the houses across the street were black shadows, and she drew in her breath sharply.

  A figure moved beside her.

  “Who’s that?” said a familiar voice.

  “Oh, Mike!” she said. “Mike, what is it?”

  She could not see him. He was only a sturdy, reassuring voice out of the dark.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said. “Heard there was an ‘alert’ about a quarter of an hour ago. I thought I’d come over. That roof of yours ain’t too good.”

  “You mean they’re coming?”

  “Well, maybe they are, maybe not,” said Mile. “I got a bucket of sand here, just in case they drop some of these here fire bombs. You feeling better?”

  “I’m feeling like a wicked woman, Mike. I’ve been running away.”

  “I guess we all want to do that sometimes,” said Mike comfortably.

  She sat down on the doorstep. All those children, she thought, asleep in the city, all the tired men and women, and if not tonight perhaps some other night death might fly over them and then drop on them. From far overhead came the droning of planes, but Mike was calm. He cocked an ear at the sky.

  “Reckon they’re our fellows,” he said. “They sure keep a watch. No trouble while they’re around.”

  This was what Andy wanted to do, she thought; to see that all over the world tired children, and men and women too, had the right to sleep; to live and work and sleep in safety and freedom.

  “I’ve been blind and selfish,” she said to herself. “I’ve held him back. I’ve tried to hold them all. Herbert was right. I’ve played God long enough. Now it’s in His hands. I suppose it always was.”

  All at once the city lights began to come on. She stood up and looked at them. Never before had light seemed so beautiful. So rare and beautiful. She drew a long breath. Beside her Mike was grinning. He had picked up his bucket.

  “Well, I guess that’s that,” he said. “Wouldn’t want this sand to build castles with, would you?”

  “I’ve been building castles on sand all my life, Mike. That’s over.”

  She watched him down the street, his sturdy shoulders, his heavy muscular body. He had fought in the last war. He might still fight in this. But he had done the thing that came to hand. He had brought sand for her roof and stood by for trouble. There must be things that even she could do…

  She gave what Joe called her Lazarus dinner the next night. Up to the last minute she kept her rule of silence, and when she started down the staircase they were waiting in the hall below, their faces turned up to her. What a handsome lot they were, she thought. It was like a miracle. They were holding flowers and little parcels, and her heart swelled with pride.

  “How are you, mother?”

  “I feel wonderful.”

  That was when she saw Andy’s uniform. She clutched dizzily at the stair-rail. This was the test, she knew. The last two weeks had been really a preparation for it. She steadied her voice.

  “So I have another soldier son,” she said. “I’m very proud, Andy.”

  They crowded around her then. They had missed her frightfully, they said. And they had news of all sorts. Paul had got his job in Washington and his blood pressure was down. Joe’s contract had come through. The grandchildren were well. And when she had a chance Edna—without her uniform and looking pretty and rather chastened—made her a handsome apology.

  “I suppose,” she ended, “I hadn’t realized what an anchor you are.”

  Mrs. Ayres met it gallantly.

  “Only an anchor shouldn’t try to run a ship,” she said.

  But the sense of strangeness persisted through the dinner. They were excited and noisy. They had work, plans, even hopes. Apparently the future did not worry them. They shrieked with laughter when Sarah produced a hideous sugar shaker which allowed them only a spoonful at a time. Beulah was learning to ride a bicycle, so she could get around Washington streets, and she found Joe’s check for what he had borrowed from her under her napkin.

  Yes, it was their world, she thought. They loved her, but they did not need her. They hadn’t really needed her for years. She felt rather empty as she smiled at them.

  Andy held her for a moment before they left.

  “It’s all right, mother, isn’t it?”

  “Of course, darling.”

  There were no cars at the door when she saw them out, but they did not seem to mind. She stood watching as long as she could see them: Andy’s uniform under the street lights, Joe’s big solid shoulders, Beulah’s bright hair. Then they were out of sight, and she made a queer little gesture of renuncia
tion. As though they were gone—as indeed they were.

  The city was quiet. Overhead a plane droned, keeping its watch over the sleeping town. When at last she went inside she felt that one phase of her life was over and another one beginning. But she was not sleepy. Upstairs in her room she stood for a minute in front of Herbert’s picture, and it seemed to her that it looked gentler, and not at all that of the Herbert who had been peevish about his dress studs and for God’s sake to send them at once by airmail.

  “They’ve gone, Bert,” she said. “It’s all right, even about Andy. Only what am I to do? There must be something.”

  She put out the light, but she did not sleep. She felt strong and rested, as she had not felt for years, and at last she got up and dressed. When she reached the front door again the street was empty. It was hard to believe that bloody war was all over the earth, and that she was finally and at last alone. She felt like a ghost, making signs that nobody answered.

  She was still there when the air warden came along. She hailed him with a sort of desperation.

  “Can you stop a minute?” she asked.

  “Certainly. Need any help?”

  “No,” she said, rather breathlessly. “I just wondered—I thought maybe I could do something. You see,” she added, “in a way I’ve been dead for two weeks, and I can’t sleep. There must be something.”

  He eyed her. She did not look crazy. She looked small and sane and somehow appealing. He took off his helmet, which was painted white so it could be seen in a blackout, and rubbed his hand over his hair.

  “You mean tonight?” he asked incredulously.

  “Right now. This minute. If I could even walk with you it would help.”

  He was puzzled. He had seen hysteria of all kinds, the terror that walks at night in war. But she did not seem hysterical. She seemed merely lonely.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a girl on duty at the air raid post around the corner. Telephone, you know. She’s worked in a factory all day, and her relief hasn’t come. You might sit there while she gets a bit of sleep. Or isn’t that what you mean?”

  “It sounds wonderful,” said Mrs. Ayres.

  She felt happier than she had felt for a long time as she waited for him to make the arrangements. It wasn’t much, she thought. But after all wasn’t that what this war was about? That weary people, men and women and children, could sleep in peace; could live and work and sleep.

  Above her the sky was filled with stars. Some day Andy would be up there. But perhaps Herbert was there too, and maybe God and all his angels.

  She waited serenely, while she put her family and the beaten weary world into their hands.

  The Butler’s Christmas Eve

  WILLIAM STOOD IN THE rain waiting for the bus. In the fading daylight he looked rather like a freshly washed eighty-year-old and beardless Santa Claus, and underneath his raincoat he clutched a parcel which contained a much-worn nightshirt, an extra pair of socks, a fresh shirt and a brand-new celluloid collar. It also contained a pint flask of the best Scotch whisky.

  Not that William drank, or at least not to speak of. The whisky was a gift, and in more than one way it was definitely contraband. It was whisky which had caused his trouble.

  The Christmas Eve crowd around him was wet but amiable.

  “Look, mama, what have you done with the suitcase?”

  “What do you think you’re sitting on? A bird cage?”

  The crowd laughed. The rain poured down. The excited children were restless. They darted about, were lost and found again. Women scolded.

  “You stand right here, Johnny. Keep under this umbrella. That’s your new suit.”

  When the bus came along one of them knocked William’s package into the gutter, and he found himself shaking with anxiety. But the bottle was all right. He could feel it, still intact. The Old Man would have it, all right, Miss Sally or no Miss Sally; the Old Man, left sitting in a wheelchair with one side of his big body dead and nothing warm in his stomach to comfort him. Just a year ago tonight on Christmas Eve William had slipped him a small drink to help him sleep, and Miss Sally had caught him at it.

  She had not said anything. She had kissed her grandfather good-night and walked out of the room. But the next morning she had come into the pantry where William was fixing the Old Man’s breakfast tray and dismissed him, after fifty years.

  “I’m sorry, William. But you know he is forbidden liquor.”

  William put down the Old Man’s heated egg cup and looked at her.

  “It was only because it was Christmas Eve, Miss Sally. He was kind of low, with Mr. Tony gone and everything.”

  She went white at that, but her voice was even.

  “I am trying to be fair,” she said. “But even without this—You have worked a long time, and grandfather is too heavy for you to handle. I need a younger man, now that—”

  She did not finish. She did not say that her young husband had enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, and that she had fought tooth and nail against it. Or that she suspected both her grandfather and William of supporting him.

  William gazed at her incredulously.

  “I’ve handled him, one way and another, for fifty years, Miss Sally.”

  “I know all that. But I’ve talked to the doctor. He agrees with me.”

  He stood very still. She couldn’t do this to him, this girl he had raised, and her father before her. She couldn’t send him out at his age to make a life for himself, after living a vicarious one in this house for half a century. But he saw helplessly that she could and that she meant to.

  “When am I to go?” he asked.

  “It would be kinder not to see him again, wouldn’t it?”

  “You can’t manage alone, Miss Sally,” he said stubbornly. But she merely made a little gesture with her hands.

  “I’m sorry, William. I’ve already arranged for someone else.”

  He took the breakfast tray to the Old Man’s door and gave it to the nurse. Then he went upstairs to his room and standing inside looked around him. This had been his room for most of his life. On the dresser was the faded snapshot of the Old Man as a Major in the Rough Riders during the Spanish War. There was a picture of Miss Sally’s father, his only son, who had not come home from France in 1918. There was a very new one of Mr. Tony, young and good-looking and slightly defiant, taken in his new Navy uniform. And of course there were pictures of Miss Sally herself, ranging from her baby days to the one of her, smiling and lovely, in her wedding dress.

  William had helped to rear her. Standing there he remembered the day when she was born. The Major—he was Major Bennett then, not the Old Man—had sent for him when he heard the baby’s mother was dead.

  “Well,” he said heavily, “it looks as though we’ve got a child to raise. A girl at that! Think we can do it?”

  “We’ve done harder things, sir,” said William.

  “All right,” said the Major. “But get this, William, I want no spoiled brat around the place. If I find you spoiling her, by the Lord Harry I’ll fire you.”

  “I won’t spoil her,” William had said sturdily. “But she’ll probably be as stubborn as a mule.”

  “Now why the hell do you say that?” the Major had roared.

  But William had only smiled.

  So she had grown up. She was lovable, but she was wild as a March wind and as stubborn as the Bennetts had always been. Then—it seemed almost no time to William—she met Mr. Tony, and one day she was walking down a church aisle on her grandfather’s arm, looking beautiful and sedate, and when she walked out again she was a married woman.

  The old house had been gay after that. It was filled with youth and laughter. Then one day Miss Sally had gone to the hospital to have her baby, and her grandfather, gray of face, had waited for the news. William had tried to comfort him.

  “I understand it’s a perfectly normal process, sir,” he said. “They are born every day. Millions of them.”

  “Get y
our smug face out of here,” roared the Major. “You and your millions! What the hell do I care about them? It’s my girl who’s in trouble.”

  He was all right then. He was even all right when the message came that it was over, and Miss Sally and Mr. Tony had a ten-minute-old son. But going out of the hospital he had staggered and fallen, and he had never walked again. That was when the household began to call him the Old Man. Behind his back, of course.

  It was tragic, because Miss Sally had had no trouble at all. She wakened at the hospital to learn that she had borne a man-child, asked if he had the proper number of fingers and toes, stated flatly that she had no intention of raising him for purposes of war, and then asked for a cigarette.

  That had been two years ago, and she had come home on Christmas Eve. Mr. Tony had a little tree for the baby in the Old Man’s bedroom, with Miss Sally’s battered wax angel on the top, and the Old Man lay in his bed and looked at it.

  “I suppose this kind of thing will save us, in the end,” he said to William. “Damn it, man, people will go on having babies, and the babies will have Christmas trees, long after Hitler is dead and rotted.”

  The baby of course had not noticed the tree, and there was nothing to indicate that a year later William would be about to be dismissed, or that Mr. Tony, feverishly shaking a rattle before his sleeping offspring, would be in his country’s uniform and somewhere on the high seas.

  It was a bad year, in a way. It had told on Miss Sally, William thought. Her grandfather had taken his stroke badly. He would lie for hours, willing that stubborn will of his to move an arm, a leg, even a finger, on the stricken side. Nothing happened, of course, and at last he had accepted it, wheelchair and all. William had helped to care for him, turning his big body when the nurse changed the sheets, bathing him, when he roared that he would be eternally damned if he would allow any woman to wash him. And during the long hours of the night it had been William who sat with him while he could not sleep.

  Yet Miss Sally had taken it bravely.

  “He cared for me all my life,” she said. “Now I can care for him. William and I.”