Turret Room

by Charlotte Armstrong

  She started down but he stopped her. “Now, wait. I’ve come all this way—”

  “To find out where the baby is? Well, I’ve told you.”

  Standing on his left foot, feeling dizzy, Harold began to shake his head. “That wasn’t all.”

  “You don’t know a thing about it, do you?” the girl said softly, with compassion in her voice. “I didn’t think you would. Oh please, just get away.”

  “From what?” he said severely.

  She took a deep breath and made a grimace. “Well, you’ve walked right in. Listen, you are supposed to be one of those berserk ex-husbands.” She was still on the stairs, looking down. “The police are looking for you,” she said, as if it broke her heart to tell him so.

  Harold steadied himself. “Why?”

  She ran down and came close to him. She put her hand on his arm and he had to struggle not to lean, not to fall. Her gray eyes were very clear and sad, but her voice was still brisk. “Because somebody got in here last night and beat up Myra Whitman, your ex … step … whatever-she-was mother-in-law. And she is in a coma in the hospital, here. That’s where I thought you’d come from, at first. That’s where they all are. And Cousin Ted is fit to be tied. He is even …” She sucked in her breath. Her hand was strong, now, on his arm. He must be leaning. “I don’t see how you ever got through,” she said, in a worried tone. “Maybe that coat. Why are you wearing a white coat?” She was trying to lead him to the chair.

  “My orderly’s coat,” he said. “To be clean.” He moved out of her grasp, stumbling. He put up his hands and caught hold of the iron balusters. With his back to her, trying to understand the full import of the situation and already understanding it too well, he asked her, “Why do they think I beat up Myra?”

  She answered with a quiet respect, very clearly, “Because you beat up Wendy once. Because you’ve been in a mental hospital. Because you wrote that you were leaving there on Monday. Because the divorce is final and you didn’t want the divorce. You just … fit the pattern, I suppose.”

  He didn’t look around. “Is that all?”

  This time she did not answer.

  So he turned. He made himself able to stand up. “Where is Wendy?”

  “She … she still lives here.”

  “I see.” He swayed. “So it’s going to happen all over again.”

  She caught his arm again and held it, strongly. With her other hand she touched his neck, under the ear. “Are you feverish?”

  “I don’t know. What did Wendy say?”

  “Wendy said she saw you running down the drive last night.”

  Well, there it was. It was so wrong as to be somehow right. He almost laughed.

  After a while, he was in the chair again and the girl was on the ottoman, watching him anxiously. He had the sense that she had gone to look out the front door, that nobody was coming, that they were here, in this cool and somehow sunken room, safe and alone, for a little while more. Before it happened to him, all over again.

  He said calmly, speculatively, “Why does she tell these lies? Why do they always believe her? I understand myself much better now. I had to learn. But I don’t understand these people.”

  “What did they do to you? I’ve always wondered.” Her face was close to his, her skin was very fair. Something about her eyelids kept a secret. “I learned some time ago to watch out for Wendy. Tell me?”

  He might as well tell her while there was time. “I didn’t ever beat up Wendy. Ever. It’s true I didn’t want the divorce, because I wanted to make a family.” (A family that would be a family, as he understood a family should be.) “Out of Wendy and me and the baby,” he went on. “Of course, I was in the service then. I couldn’t send much money.” (But he would have worked. He would have made a family and a home.) “But when they wanted me to, well, stand still for Wendy to sue me.… You know how it’s done. The man has to play that he’s guilty. I said, No, I wasn’t. And I wouldn’t. So that’s when I had to watch her bruise her own arms and claw her own face—because when I tried to stop her, that was worse. Well, so she got the divorce and the baby, too. There wasn’t a way … not a way in the world. How could I call Wendy Whitman a liar, with her folks behind her? I had no folks. I was nineteen years old. She wouldn’t have had to do that. She wanted to be rid of me, she could have been. Without telling such a lie and taking everything … you know … everything away from me.” There was no whine in his voice, he was just telling her.

  The girl said, “And you saw her?”

  “In a dream, you wonder?” He sat up straighter. “Well, you see, I have been analyzed. Oh, I’ve had hypnosis, drugs. They tried the whole works on me. Oh, they tried, in the worst way, to find some part of me that ‘knew’ I’d done it. But there wasn’t any. I was a strange case, I guess. I’d actually been frustrated. And here I go again.”

  He smiled at the perfection of the wrongness of it. He smiled at the girl, who was looking troubled. “At least I’ll know better, this time, than to hold it all in,” he told her, “until I’m fighting like a wildcat whenever anybody looks cross-eyed at me. That’s how I broke my foot, back in camp, after she started the divorce. And I fought the doctors and the nurses, too. They finally sent me to psychiatry.”

  “And to that hospital, for all this time?” she said delicately.

  He knew she wanted to believe him. “Would you like to call them?” he said, gently. “Then you’d know that I was discharged as a patient months ago. As soon as they got it out of me what had happened, and that it was true. I cried for about a week, but I stopped hitting people. But, see, my foot’s no good for the army. I had nowhere and nobody. There was just this old great-uncle, who died. I had a notice—”

  “There’s no time, now,” she interrupted.

  But he wanted to tell her a little more. “I’m going to be a doctor, I hope. They let me work there. I got fascinated. Now I want the training. Dr. Wesley says I can do it. I’m starting school … I mean, I was.”

  He looked around. The good dream faded. No, first, it was going to happen to him all over again.

  She was tugging at his arm to get him to his feet. “Oh, hurry, please, before they come. Just go away.”

  “Is there any use in that?” he asked her delicately, not wishing to offend. He felt dizzy standing, and his head was very light.

  “Please believe me. You can’t be found in this house. Or in this town, even. Maybe it doesn’t have to happen to you all over again.”

  “How come you believe what I say, miss?” Harold had begun to wonder.

  “Edie,” she said, fiercely. “I’m Edie. Oh, listen, I lived here myself when I was a teen-ager and I knew little Wendy.”

  He wasn’t taking it in. “I’m glad if you do believe me, but I can’t see why.” Isn’t she a member of this family, he was thinking.

  “Then I’ll tell you something,” said Edie. “I came here for a couple of weeks between jobs, just for my own sake to … to see …”

  There was that telepathic flash again. “To see,” said Harold slowly, “whether you could, somehow, for your own sake … now, manage to stand up to them? Or even—forgive them?”

  “I suppose that’s it,” she said impatiently, but with friendliness, too. “That’s something like it. Do you know that you are burning? How are you going to make it to the bus? I wish I had a car.”

  “I’ll have to stand up to them,” he said remotely.

  “No, not now. I’ll tell you what.” She was turning him and guiding him. “Both maids are away. There’s only Mrs. Beck, and she’s busy. Nobody will go into the turret room but me. Please, wait in there. Will you, please? Just let me pave the way for you. Let me break it to them gently that you’ve come.”

  “Why?” he said, stubborn, knowing that she hadn’t told him everything.

  “All right.” She took the challenge. “Because Cousin Ted has cast himself in the role of the heroic defender of his womenfolk and he’s got a loaded gun in his pocket and he is
stupid enough to shoot you. Is there any sense in that?”

  He blinked at her. “Well, not for me” he said, half-humorously. He knew she believed what she had said. He was inclined to believe it too.

  So he went up the stone stairs in his stocking feet, one hand on the rail, her strong hand under his other arm. He was very dizzy. He said, “But I don’t know why you believe me.”

  “Myra’s had her hair dyed red, for a year.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t argue,” Edie said. “You don’t feel well enough to figure that out. You don’t feel well enough to be shot at, either.” She turned him into the turret room and shut the door behind them.

  Chapter Two

  THERE was one thing about the turret room. Once you had closed the small, but heavy, wooden door, you felt sheltered. The door was thick, the walls were thick. The room was cool. Between the ceiling and the beating California sun, there was an attic, a tiled roof, and the heavy shadow of the tree.

  Edie Thompson made the boy stretch out on the double bed. She found some aspirin in the medicine cabinet and made him take it. There was a flowered quilt, kept folded at the foot of the bed. She pulled it over his ankles for the sake of the sense of shelter it would add. All the while, she spoke soothingly. She would talk to the Whitmans. She would fend for him. She would try to make them see that they were mistaken, or at least that they might be mistaken, before the sight of him could shock them into doing something foolish. It made more sense, she said. And he needed rest.

  He rested quietly. He was a good-looking boy. Naturally, thought Edie. Wendy would never have taken up with anyone who wasn’t. He was medium tall, on the slim side, brown-haired, brown-eyed, and his face was saved from prettiness by some rugged carving of his long thin nose. But a boy, very young—maybe a country boy. Just an ordinary nice kid, a little naïve. One without defenses, who had suffered in a way that the tougher kind of young male animal, the city kids, the gang kids (whom Edie knew), might not. She had worked with some of them, the very young ones. Of course, he was running a fever. Maybe that made him seem in need. Gave him his air of helplessness. She wanted to help him.

  Edie was a social worker and she knew better than to call her judgment infallible or her belief the guarantee of truth. But after all, she had been conducting interviews, for a year and a half now, in the grubbiest sections of a great city, and she thought her chances were fair to spot a phony, a loony, or a criminal. Edie was a girl with firm opinions, and a good deal of self-confidence these days. She was energetic and sometimes impatient with people who were not. This was a bit of handicap in her profession. Sometimes Edie was not altogether sure that she had chosen the right profession, but its practice had given her some skills. A kind of intuition, for instance, based on experience.

  If this boy was what the newspapers call “berserk,” she would be very much surprised. She thought he was, if anything, too innocently sentimental. She could not sense in him the devious cleverness he would have to have to toss out that mention of Myra’s coloring—if he had quarreled with a redheaded Myra here, last night. “Berserk” people were not clever. It was a contradiction. Of course, he might have two personalities. It could be Jekyll lying there, weary and gentle and sad. Hyde could have burst in last night. She didn’t believe that. She believed what he had told her—all of it.

  The fact was, she didn’t believe Wendy.

  Edie had moved to one of the narrow windows and was looking down at the driveway and the gates. They would be back soon. Then she must be the go-between. That was it. Be a buffer. Try to steady the situation. There was a certain amount of hysteria in it. Assumptions had been made. The Whitmans were perfectly convinced that Harold Page had done it. Edie must try to crack open their minds and insert enough doubt so that the poor kid might not be hurt too much. Not again.

  There was that. She thought, If what he says is true (and I believe him), then he is tender to unjust suspicions. For him it opens an old wound, it hurts more. Oh, there was some physical danger. If the boy had been greeted by Cousin Ted in that gentleman’s present agitated state, Edie thought it quite possible that Cousin Ted would have shot, at least at him. But there are worse wounds than a bullet makes.

  Edie leaned on the wall and felt power curling her fingers. She was the go-between. She knew both sides. She had lived here herself and knew the regime. She had been brought up in a frugal household, however, by parents both loving and high-minded, and she had seen the seamy side besides, in her work. It seemed to Edie that the duty fell upon her with a click of fitness, and she accepted it, not without joy. It was a joy for which she had thirsted, and had not found yet. Maybe her new job … with a heavier load, more cases. Maybe. Meanwhile, she believed in Harold Page, and her joy was the joy of battle. She would fight for him.

  Edie had a dim notion that somewhere along the line she was merrily rationalizing. But didn’t everyone? She believed him when he said that Wendy had cheated and lied. That much was easy. Did she believe that he had walked so far?

  Yes, she believed that too. For one thing, it was too fantastic not to be true. Truth was the most fantastic thing in the world. Sometimes she thought that people knocked themselves out, split their human brains, trying to make order in a world that was really and incorrigibly fantastic. He said he had walked seventy-five miles. It was possible. Human beings could walk, the motorcar notwithstanding. And there was his fatigue, his limp … his shoes!

  She saw a car turn into the drive and after it, another, and yet another. Three carloads of people arriving? Fantastic—But what about his shoes?

  She went swiftly to the door. The boy did not stir. Edie shut him in, alone, and ran down the lower flight of the stairs. The dusty empty pathetic shoes were near the chair. Edie made a swipe across the carpet with her foot and swept them under the chair as the outer door opened, and she heard Cousin Ted’s voice.

  He had a high voice with an irritating nasal quality. “I want to talk to Charles, Mother, and these other people.”

  “All right, Ted. All right. All right,” said old Mrs. Whitman. She entered and the house became her house, the kingdom was her kingdom.

  She was a spry little woman of seventy-five, dressed elegantly, if uncomfortably for the hot day, in a gray silk suit, a costume complete with small flowered hat, with gloves, with neat gray shoes. She came nimbly down into the big room and did not greet, but waited to be greeted.

  “Hi, Granny,” said Edie, feeling her heart give a great guilty leap. “How is Myra?”

  Granny began to chatter in her clear, light, well-articulated manner. “Oh, mercy! Oh, my! I am very sorry that I went.” She proceeded to the sofa and seated herself with good control, without, in any way, collapsing. “Myra is just lying there, looking a perfect fright, by the way. I can’t help thinking it was rude to go and stare at her. Especially since her mouth is open.” The old lady began to remove her gloves, and Edie, watching her, felt the same old bewilderment. She never had been able to tell whether Granny meant to be funny, meant to be tart, or simply meant what she said.

  “But what does the doctor say?” she asked.

  “Oh, he is very calm about the whole thing, the doctor is. They are making tests. Maybe they’ll operate. Maybe, mind you. Or, as far as I can understand it, maybe Myra will simply open her eyes and come to.” Granny removed her hat.

  “Then she can tell us what happened, I suppose,” said Edie with a sense of solution.

  “You can suppose all you like, Edie, my dear,” said Granny, “but it seems that a blow on the head joggles the cells or whatever is in there …”

  “Oh?”

  “And if Myra doesn’t remember, that will seem odd, don’t you think?” said old Mrs. Whitman, putting her white head to one side. She had blue eyes that somehow never seemed connected with what Granny was saying. The eyes kept moving, as if something very wary hid inside and did not much care what was being said or done, but watched out for itself. “Suppose one were minding one’
s own business and woke up in a hospital, two or three days later, people having been staring …”

  But Edie had caught sight of the water glass, in the corner of her eye. It seemed to shine like a star. Without thought, her mind occupied with dismay at the idea that Myra might never remember, and guilt for her own equivocal position, Edie moved out of the range of Granny’s eyes, snatched up the glass from which Harold Page had drunk, and slipped away to the far end of the high mantelpiece, where she tucked the glass behind an ornament.

  “I do hope,” Granny was saying, “that it never happens to me. Where are you? Where is Mrs. Beck? I want a cup of tea. Ted had to go and see those grubby people and haul me about with him. I don’t know what possessed me. I had presumed that I had reached a stage of life … Edie?”

  “I’m here,” said Edie. Her heart was racing. I have got to get over this panicking, she thought. What I propose to do, I had better do well. And soon. I had better consider how I am going to talk to Granny.

  “… when I need not be troubled,” Granny rippled on, “by any miserable notions of duty. For pity’s sake, doesn’t one reach a point when one has done it? Iced tea, I think.”

  Edie said, soothingly, “Mrs. Beck is lying down. She had such a bad night—”

  “So did we all,” Granny cut in. “Ambulance, commotion, police. It was quite stimulating.”

  And again, Edie was not sure whether this was supposed to be sarcastic or just fact.

  This old lady was not really Edie’s grandmother. She was her great-aunt. Edie had fallen into the way of calling her Granny (Wendy did) when she had lived here, seven or eight years ago. At that time Granny had been Authority, whimsical and powerful, and naturally resented. Now Edith Thompson was a person who had been in the world, and Lila Whitman had no real authority over her. But somehow, she was just as powerful and just as whimsical as ever.

  Edie sat down on the edge of the sofa, beside her, and said earnestly, “Granny, did you hear anything last night, when it happened?”