Shadow of Guilt

by Patrick Quentin

  Copyright © 1959 by Patrick Quentin

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Shadow of Guilt

  ONE

  It was about three in the afternoon when my wife called me at the office to say she had last-minute seats for some benefit at the Met that night. She’d invited the Rysons.

  “I know Thursday’s your late day, dear. But I do hope you can manage it.”

  I knew I’d have to go, but as I promised to get home early, the all-too-familiar depression engulfed me. Another Thursday had to be sacrificed; once again I’d been done out of the few precious hours alone with Eve which now were the only things that got me through the week.

  Eve came in soon with some letters for me to sign, and I told her. She didn’t make any fuss, of course. She was far more patient than I about the whole wretched situation. She had tried even harder than I to keep us from falling in love and, now that we were stuck with it, it was she who insisted that we behave as decently as we could until the time when I could ask Connie for the divorce without causing too much havoc for everybody.

  “Oh, well,” she said, “it can’t be helped, can it? It’s not going to be much longer anyway. As soon as Ala’s married…”

  She broke off with a resigned little shrug. We had laid it down as an unalterable law never to kiss in the office. But as I looked across the desk at her quiet, ordinary face, which had become as essential to me as air, the need to touch her was suddenly far stronger than any admirable intentions. I went to her and took her in my arms.

  “Baby, if you knew how it gets me down, lying, covering up, going home to her every night, acting like the model husband and father…”

  “I know,” she said. “Of course I know. But it’s the lesser of the evils. Oh, George darling…”

  She too gave up her admirable intentions then, clinging to me, kissing me, managing, as always, to make it bearable again.

  The phone rang. It was Lew Parker, my boss at Consolidated Carbide. He wanted me in the Board room. I went…

  When I got home to the house on Sixty-Fourth Street, I found my wife sitting in her slip in front of the dressing table in our huge bedroom. Everything in the house was far too big. It had belonged to Connie’s father, who had built up the vast Corliss coal by-products combine, and, when he died seven years before, we moved in, I had wanted no part of it. Although I’d broken away from being just a courtesy son-in-law in the Corliss empire and had started to make it on my own at Consolidated, it was humiliating to me to live in an establishment which was way beyond my income. But Connie hadn’t seen it that way.

  “Dad wanted us to take it over, dear. And after all, it seems rather absurd not to when we can so easily afford it.”

  She had said “we,” of course. Connie was great on tact.

  As I walked in, my wife raised her eyes to the mirror behind the army of cosmetic jars and bottles. She was looking wonderful. Her cool, clean-boned face never aged. At thirty-five, she could have been twenty-seven. She was far more beautiful than Eve could ever be.

  “Hello, dear. I do hope this isn’t a bore. We’re meeting Mal and Vivien at the Met. Ala’s out with Chuck but they’re dropping in afterwards. It’s all turned into a sort of thing for the wedding.”

  Her face lit up the way it invariably did when she mentioned Ala’s wedding. Chuck Ryson was the son of her beloved older sister who had died in a mental institution when Chuck was a baby, and all her clannish Corliss love was centered on Chuck and his father, Mal. Almost since the first day after my brother and his wife had been killed in a plane crash and my niece had come into our family as a baffled, rebellious little brat of ten, Ala’s wedding to Chuck had been Connie’s passionately pursued goal. And, being Connie, of course she’d pulled it off. My wife was the most dazzlingly competent woman I’d ever met.

  “George dear, I’m wearing Mother’s pearl necklace. What else should I slap on? You know Vivien; she’ll be dressed to the teeth.”

  “What’s wrong with the baroque pearl bracelet?” I said indifferently. I’d had it made for her at Cartier’s seven years before for our fifth wedding anniversary.

  “The baroque pearls?” she said. “You think so? Well, maybe. I’ll figure out something.”

  What she finally figured out was a thick armband of big matching pearls, which, like the necklace, was another Corliss heirloom.

  It was in Sherry’s Bar, during the first intermission at the Met, that I noticed the young man. Connie and I and the Rysons were having drinks, Mal looking as elaborately unostentatious as only a bigshot banker can manage to look, Vivien blindingly chic in some of the Dior and diamonds which had been cascading her way ever since the long-widowered Mal had discovered her the year before as an obscure Hollywood starlet in some Toronto resort hotel. It was because I was bored and restless that I noticed the young man who seemed somehow quite different from the typical benefit audience around him. He was unusually good-looking, with very black hair, black eyes and blunt black eyebrows emphasizing the ruggedness of a face which might otherwise have been a little too movie-actorish. But it wasn’t his looks that gave him his individual quality. I was trying to figure out what it was—intelligence? animal vitality?—when he caught my eye and smiled. Then he started toward us, and I realized that the smile wasn’t for me, it was for Connie.

  “Hello,” he said. “This rather spoils my little gesture. Tomorrow morning you’re going to receive a bouquet of yellow roses from a forgotten admirer. I got a raise today after only a month.”

  My wife was looking rather confused. Then, to my astonishment, her face sprang alive with pleasure. I say “astonishment” because I’d never in all the years of our marriage seen Connie show anything but a vague, regal courtesy to young men of any description. On all levels she was Caesar’s wife. That was one of the many reasons why the break was going to be so difficult.

  “Well, that is good news,” she said. “Mr. Saxby, I believe you know Mr. Ryson. This is his wife and this is my husband.”

  The buzzer buzzed then and we broke up, but in the second interval there was Mr. Saxby again. While we chatted, he watched Connie with unabashed admiration, and Connie responded with an exaggerated vivacity which for her was almost coquettish.

  She said, “If you’re not doing anything, Mr. Saxby, why not come back to us for a drink afterwards? You know where we live, don’t you?”

  “I’d love to,” said Mr. Saxby, “but does it have to be Mr. Saxby? I thought we were Don and Connie.”

  A faint flush came into Connie’s cheeks. “Fine, Don.”

  As we went back to our seats, I said, “And who pray is Mr. Saxby, or should I say Don?”

  Connie shrugged her normal remote shrug. “Oh, just a young man I was able to get a job for at the Ellerman Galleries. Mr. Ellerman’s on one of my art committees. I arranged an interview.”

  “But where did you meet him?”

  “Where was it? Oh, yes, at some private view. He’s a Canadian artist and it turned out he’d met Mal on one of Mal’s Toronto trips. He hasn’t been in New York long. I think he may amuse you. He’s very intelligent.”

  “He’s very attractive, too,” I said.

  “Yes.” Connie shot me a quick glance out of the corner of her eye. “He is attractive, isn’t he?”

  As we settled into our seats and Verdi started again, it came to me with a faint shock of surprise that although I slept in the same room with her every night, I had only the haziest notion now of what my wife did with herself during the day.

  Then the nag of being without Eve
returned, obliterating everything else. What was she doing? Nothing, of course. Just sitting in her little apartment, resigned to the situation the way I would never be resigned, worrying about me, hoping I was being nice to Connie.

  My wife was in the seat next to me. Her hand touched mine by accident. Very quickly, she drew it away.

  Mr. Saxby was a huge success at Sixty-Fourth Street. He managed to charm us all, and Connie in particular was positively blossoming by the time Ala and Chuck arrived.

  Chuck Ryson was a good-looking kid who had inherited all his father’s virtues and none, it seemed, of his mother’s instability. He was doing fine in his father’s bank and had been doggedly in love with Ala since his freshman days. He was as sound a potential son-in-law as any parent could hope for, but that didn’t prevent me from finding him rather a bore.

  “Hi, George,” he said. “Can you imagine? They’re sending me to Chicago for two weeks on Monday. How can they do that to a guy who’s being married in less than a month?” I started to say something appropriate, but inevitably he turned away to glance across the room at Ala. My niece had become so pretty these days it was hard for anyone to keep their eyes off her. She’d found Don Saxby and was sitting on the floor with him beside Connie’s chair.

  The moment she saw us looking at her she waved us over. “Chuck, you’ve got to meet this perfectly wonderful man. He knows all the big jazz performers and he’s going to a party for Spike Tankerville next Tuesday. Imagine. The greatest trumpeter since Satchmo. There’s going to be a jam session.” Don Saxby’s handsome, indulgent smile moved from Ala to me. “Spike’s an old friend from Toronto, Mr. Hadley. Maybe since Ala’s such a jazz fan, she’d like to come along.”

  “You mean it?” Ala jumped up. “Honestly? How wonderful. And Chuck’s off to Chicago, too. I was planning to die of boredom.”

  Her face was radiant, but at that moment Connie got up, too. She had on what Ala called her boss-lady look. “It’s very kind of you, Don,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s quite the right sort of thing for Ala.”

  I might have known that would happen. For several years now there had been a constant conflict between Ala’s reckless Hadley exuberance and Connie’s rigid Corliss standards of what was and wasn’t suitable for a “well-brought-up” young girl. But as I noticed the faint, almost unattractive pinkness under my wife’s cheekbones, I wasn’t at all sure this was merely another manifestation of her mother-knows-best routine. I felt surprised and exasperated. Was she, like a woman in a “sophisticated” movie, scared that Ala was going to grab her young admirer away from her?

  Ala was glaring at her. Then she swung around to Chuck. “Chuck doesn’t mind, do you, Chuck? You’re not so square as to imagine meeting Spike Tankerville’s going to corrupt my youth or something?”

  Chuck looked very embarrassed. “Gee, Ala, of course not, but if Connie objects…”

  “I’m afraid she does object,” said Connie. “Very definitely. So let’s leave it at that, shall we?”

  That broke up the party. Ala marched out of the room leaving behind her an embarrassed silence, and in a few moments they had all gone, and Connie and I were alone together in the huge, feudal Corliss living room.

  Connie said, “Well, dear, shall we go on up?”

  As usual, whenever I got to be alone with her, I seemed suddenly to feel that neither of us existed. I said, “I guess I’ll have a nightcap first,” and after she’d gone I made myself the drink and sat with the old familiar mixture of emotions—boredom, guilt, and my goading need for Eve. In a few moments Ala came in. She hesitated, hovering by the door, and I could tell she felt as awkward as I. In the past we’d been indissoluble allies, but recently we’d seemed to have lost track of each other.

  “George, I’m so sorry I made a fuss. Sometimes, though, I feel if she doesn’t stop bullying me I’ll go out of my mind.”

  Impulsively she sat down on the arm of my chair. “What’s the matter with her, anyway? I’m marrying Chuck, aren’t I? I’m doing all the right things. Why does she treat me as if I was a juvenile delinquent? Oh, George dear, I’m mad to go to that party. Couldn’t you fix it with her? Please!”

  As her hand moved, shamelessly coaxing, over my hair, I remembered the blossoming look on my wife’s face when Don Saxby had been sitting at her feet, and along with the desire to make Ala happy came a perverse impulse to punish Connie for doing me out of my few priceless hours with Eve.

  “I’ll fix it,” I said.

  “Oh, George, you are an angel.”

  Ala kissed me enthusiastically and was off in a cloud of white taffeta. I turned out the lights and went upstairs to my wife.

  Connie was in bed. She’d left the reading light on, and her face under the gleamingly brushed hair looked pale and young. As I took off my jacket, I felt a great disinclination to start a scene but I forced myself to speak.

  “I told Ala she could go to that party.”

  My wife sat up. She was wearing a sexy black nightgown. It was all wrong for a Corliss. “Oh, George.” Her voice was tight with exasperation. “Won’t you ever learn I’m not an ogre? When I keep her from doing something there’s always a reason.”

  I sat down on the edge of my bed and started to take off a shoe. “For heaven’s sake, she’s nineteen. She’ll be married in a month. What possible harm can it do?”

  “For one thing there’s Mr. Saxby. I hardly know him.”

  “Hardly know him?” I felt the jump of irritation. “When you got him a job? When you appear to have been seeing him day in day out for months?”

  “But that isn’t true. I helped him because I always try to help people when I can. But I’ve only seen him three or four times.”

  “It didn’t look that way to me. It looked as if you had your head in a gas oven over him.”

  Suddenly it had all gone wrong. We weren’t arguing about Ala any more. We had slid onto far more unfamiliar and dangerous ground.

  For a moment she sat looking at me. Then in the tight voice she said, “Would it make any difference to you if I did have my head in a gas oven about Mr. Saxby?”

  “Well—do you?”

  Her hands caught at the edge of the sheets. “You hated the whole evening, didn’t you?”

  “Please, for pity’s sake…”

  “All you wanted was to be back sitting there in your office reading reports. I saw the whole evening going to pieces. So when Mr. Saxby showed up, I—I thought he might help.”

  “Help? Help—how?”

  “My God, just by being there. By being somebody new.” Her voice came as a cry from the heart. “What is it, George? I try. You can’t accuse me of not trying. What’s happened to us? I don’t understand.”

  I realized I could use that moment as a springboard to talk about incompatibility and lay the groundwork for the divorce. But I knew in the same instant that I couldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t just the feeling of guilt. It wasn’t even cowardice. Almost for the first time in years she’d given me a glimpse of what went on inside and with it a crippling realization of the vacuum of loneliness into which, in spite of all her virtues, efficiencies and good intentions, she had managed to drift. Whether she knew it or not, she was as anchorless as I had been before I met Eve—and she had no one.

  I made myself go over to her, and as I sat down on the edge of her bed, an utterly unwelcome memory came of how it had used to feel years ago to be sitting on her bed; the excitement, the pride, the—what? The triumphant astonishment that I, just a hick New England junior-junior executive in the Corliss combine, had been looked upon with favor by the boss’s beautiful daughter?

  At that time, she and everything surrounding her had all seemed a dazzle of wonder to me—a dazzle which I had naively, youthfully, misinterpreted as love?

  “Connie ...” I put my arms around her and kissed her, trying not to think of Eve. For a moment she let me hold her, then she drew almost briskly away.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine wh
at got into me. It’s terribly late, dear. We’d better get some sleep.” Her hand was pushing me gently off the bed. “And, George, it’s all right about Ala. I’ll tell her in the morning.”

  I hated her capitulation to be as total as that. “But if you really think…”

  “No, it’ll be all right. I guess I’m too strict with her sometimes. Good night, George.”

  Next morning at breakfast a huge box of yellow roses arrived for my wife. When I left for the office, she was arranging them with expert efficiency in a large white vase.

  TWO

  Ala went to the party. Connie was all graciousness about it but then spoiled everything by waiting up for her and letting me know next morning that she hadn’t got back until after three. “And almost drunk,” she said. Since anyone under twenty who took more than one Dubonnet was “drunk” to Connie, I paid little attention. Besides, everything about my life at Sixty-Fourth Street had become blurred into unreality. All I lived for was the thought of Thursday, and finally it arrived. Around six, after Eve had already left the office, I walked up Madison and across town in the Forties to her little apartment between Lexington and Third.

  Eve lived in the shabbiest of brownstones, but she didn’t give a damn about luxury. After a poverty-stricken California childhood, shackled by ailing parents and a delinquent kid brother, followed by an even drearier marriage to a peevish invalid in Bakersfield who had lingered on for four grueling years, it was still an enormous thrill for her to be independent. Oliver Lord, her husband, had left her twenty-five thousand dollars insurance money, and with that safely in the bank and her salary from Consolidated she felt secure, which was all that mattered to her. The difference between her way of life and the Corliss one was as extreme as anything could be. Maybe that was one of the many reasons why, when I found her, I knew I had finally found myself.

  Usually, for reasons of discretion, we’d eat a makeshift supper in her little apartment, but that night both of us were seized with a feeling of recklessness and Eve suggested we should go around the comer to a French restaurant. I was feeling an almost drunken exhilaration, and by the time we’d got to coffee a huge contentment had spread through me. As soon as Ala was married, I could ask for the divorce. It would be a tough time for all of us, but it would work. Nothing could stop it now. Improbably, at thirty-seven I had found my love—simple love for a simple woman who had nothing to offer but the astounding fact of herself.