She was sitting up in bed reading, and when I told her I was going to sleep now she looked surprised. “So early, Richard?” she said, and when I said I felt awfully tired, she said, “Are you sure that’s all? You look queer. You’re not coming down with something, are you?”
I said, no, I was all right, and we kissed good night, and then I went back to my room and closed the door hard. I waited a couple of minutes, then turned the light out and tiptoed out, this time closing the door very quietly.
I was prepared to wait a long time in Miss Ballou’s house, but I found that sitting in the dark there got on my nerves. When I looked at my watch, what I would have judged to be a couple of hours I had been waiting turned out to be about half an hour. So I turned on a little reading lamp in the living room there, and I walked around trying to make out the pictures on the wall in the half-darkness.
That was when I heard the bell suddenly ring, and while my first thought was that Miss Ballou had come home I immediately realized she wouldn’t be ringing her own bell. I went out to the kitchen and keeping my back against the wall I went down the couple of steps to the door, but couldn’t make out who it was. There was a quick fear in my mind that it might be my father, and to make sure about that I put my face next to the curtain to see. Then I pulled away because it was only Bob Macek.
He pressed the bell again, and then tried to look through the curtains to see me, but I pushed myself back against the wall out of sight. He disappeared for a couple of minutes, and just as I was about to go back to the living room he was there again and pushed something, a piece of paper, into the door. Then he went away for good, and I could hear his feet shuffling down the driveway.
It was a long wait after that, and most of it I spent walking around and around that living room until I knew everything in it by heart. The few times I tried to sit down and relax I found I couldn’t. I was wound up so tight that there was one moment when I was almost tempted to yell as loud as I could just so that I would know there was something alive in that house.
Then I heard the car in the driveway, and I knew from the sound it was hers. In the room I could see the reflection of the headlights on the window shades, and they stayed like that for a long time. There was someone with her, I could hear talk going on, and I hadn’t reckoned on anyone being with her. It left me empty and uncertain inside, and that’s how it was when she came in and saw me standing there in the kitchen waiting for her.
She was alone, I saw, and that made me feel better, but the first words she spoke there in the shadows set loose all the anger in me.
“Harry?” she said sharply. “Is that you?”
“No,” I said, “it’s Dick. Dick Ayres,” and I could hear her draw a long breath. Then she moved forward with those sharp little steps of hers and pulled the cord to the kitchen light so that we stood there blinking at each other.
“You look so much like your father,” she said, and then put her hand up to her heart. “What are you doing here, anyhow? There’s nothing wrong, is there?”
“I just wanted to talk to you,” I said.
“How did you get in?”
“I used Junie’s key. I had to see you as soon as you got home.”
“It must be pretty important.”
“It is,” I said. “You’ll know when I tell you.”
“Oh?” She looked at me curiously, and I looked back at her and saw that somehow she was not as young and pretty as I had always seen her. Her hair was tangled and blown about, and under the glare of the light her skin looked very pale and there were black shadows under her eyes. She caught the way I was looking at her, and laughed. “I must look a mess. But if you’ll excuse me a second …” She tossed her pocketbook onto the kitchen table, and took a chamois jewel bag from her pocket and laid that next to the pocketbook. Then she opened a slip of paper she had in her hand and read it, just glancing through it.
“Bob Macek was here,” she said with some surprise. “Didn’t you see him?”
“Yes. But I didn’t want him to see me.”
She had thrown the note on the table and was pulling a comb from her pocketbook, but the way I spoke pulled her up short. She looked at me, frowning.
“What is this, Dick? Coming here at this hour, the way you talk, this whole thing. Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No,” I said, “you are. You and my father.”
“Oh.” She sucked in her lower lip and nodded thoughtfully. “I see.”
“Is that all you can say?”
“No, I can also say that it’s pretty late for children to be wandering away from their beds. If you see what I mean, Dick.”
“I didn’t come here for you to laugh at me!”
She said wearily, “I’m not laughing at you, Dick. Believe me, I’ve got damn little to laugh about lately. But if what you want me to do is say I’m sorry because your father and I have done something to hurt you, all right then, I’m sorry.”
“Then you don’t understand,” I said. “Because you’re not hurting me at all. You’re hurting my mother, and it’s got to stop. Right here and now it’s got to be finished!”
“Your mother!” she said, and suddenly her eyes were bright with anger. “Was she the one who told you about—about your father and me?”
“Nobody told me anything. They were talking about it in their room, and I heard them.”
She sighed. With her eyes closed she ran her fingers slowly back and forth across her forehead as if there were a pain there she was trying to find.
“So you heard them,” she said. She held her hands out wide in a gesture of futility and then let them drop limp at her side. “And you found out. And it hurts you. And I’m sorry.”
“That isn’t enough. That’s just talk, that being sorry stuff. I want you to quit having anything to do with him! I want you to go away and not see him again!”
“You want!” She looked at me as though I were crazy, and then suddenly she slammed her fist down on top of the kitchen table so hard that everything on it jumped. “How dare you talk like that to me!”
“I’ve got every right!”
“Oh, you have?” Abruptly, she walked across the kitchen and down the three steps to the side door, and stood there facing me with her hand on the handle of the screen door. “If it comes down to rights, Reverend Davidson, I’ll tell you where I stand. I own this house, and you’re a trespasser, and I want you out. Out quick.”
I was wild with rage, but it was bottled in. I went across the kitchen, down the three steps, and I was close to her.
“I wasn’t talking about sin,” I said. “I wasn’t talking about doing wrong like that. My mother is the one who’s having the wrong done to her, and it’s got to stop!”
“Get out,” she said. “If you don’t I’ll raise a noise that’ll bring the whole neighborhood in here, and then you’ll have something to be really sorry about. So get out!”
She meant it. I could see she meant it, and I could see it happening. Everyone running up, and my trying to explain, but not able to because I couldn’t tell them what was really going on. I caught her around the shoulders to pull her away from the door before she could get it open, but her hand caught in the handle and when I dragged at her arm I could hear the wood crack on the door. She tried to scream, and I clapped my other hand over her mouth quick, and it was then I realized that in some crazy way I was fighting with her, that I didn’t want to, but I was trapped there like that.
“Listen to me!” I said into her ear. “Listen to me!” and all I could think of was that I had to get her away from that door, away from where somebody might hear us. I wrenched at her like that, one hand on her wrist, and one arm around her neck with my hand over her mouth, and suddenly she went limp. One minute her body had been thrust against mine, everything in it tensed and furious; the next minute she was sagging toward the floor as limp as a rag doll. I let my hands fall away from her, and then as I stood there and watched, driven into the floor like a dead stick
, she leaned forward very slowly like someone in his sleep, and fell headfirst down the cellar steps.
CHAPTER THREE
I told it to them with my eyes closed and with my voice flat and even, and all the while I was talking nobody moved or made a sound. Only when I was finished my mother made a moaning sound, and Bettina looked around as if she were waking up from a dream.
“Junie!” she said. “She went down to the police station when she heard Bob was picked up again! She must be half-crazy down there. And Bob …! I’ve got to call up!”
She was halfway to the door when my mother cried out, “Bettina!” and she stopped dead in her tracks. “You’re not to move a step out of here. All this nonsense! The way the boy’s been beaten up till he’s out of his mind and doesn’t even realize what he’s saying. And you running right out …!”
Bettina looked at my mother strangely. “You know he’s telling the truth. You know every word of it was true. And those poor kids down at the police station with everyone hammering at them! How do you think they must feel …!”
The way she was talking scared me.
“Matt!” I said. “Don’t let her! You promised! You said you wouldn’t go to the police, so you can’t let her go either!”
“Thank God for that,” my mother said.
Bettina turned to Matt incredulously. “You promised? What right did you have to promise anything like that?”
You could almost see the waves of feeling rising in the air between them. It was as if Bettina were trying to beat him down with her anger and was getting more furious each second because she was unable to get through his armor.
“I promised,” he said at last, and watching her I knew she would listen to him. “It doesn’t matter why, but I promised, and you’re bound to it as much as I am.”
Bettina said, so that you could hardly hear her, “And Bob and Junie? And this whole horrible business? You think you can just bury it this way?”
“I don’t think anything like this can be buried. But I’m not going to do anything about it, and neither are you! Dick,” he said to me, “don’t you see there’s only one answer? Don’t you see that it’s up to you and nobody else?”
I was in a whirlpool now, spinning around and going down, and all I had to hang on to was that promise. And he was trying to trick me out of it, pull it out of my hands.
“No!” I said. “You can’t make me!”
“You’ve got to go to the police—to Ten Eyck. Just tell him what you told us here. Not with anybody dragging you there, but because you know you have to do it!”
“No!” I said. “It was an accident, but they won’t believe me. They won’t understand!”
My mother said angrily to Matt, “Of course, they won’t. Those stupid police, the way they carry on, never listening to a word you say to them. God knows what they’d make out of it!”
“Stay out of this!” he told her. “Dick,” he pleaded, “listen to me. You can’t walk around with this kind of thing locked up inside you. Sooner or later it’ll tie you up in knots, it’ll drive you crazy. Tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, it gets worse and worse in you like a cancer. You can’t live with yourself like that.”
“He can!” my mother shouted. “He can if nobody knows! And if you hadn’t bullied him and tortured him like you did you wouldn’t even have known!” She caught his arm and shook it savagely. “Well, would you!”
He pulled away as if her touch sickened him. “That’s right,” he said to her, “the only sin in your book is being caught. The old Spartan code brought right up to date on Nicholas Street. Being caught, that’s the wicked thing, that’s the crime they hang you for!
“You knew all along about Harry and Kate Ballou, but your only fear was that someone who passed you on the street would know. You know what your son did and what it means, but all you worry about is that your neighbors might know. You kept building up a problem for your husband and your son until it became a crime, a murder—that’s the word for it, murder—but as long as only you can know, and no one else, there isn’t any problem!”
My mother’s face was gray, the color of death itself, and her fingers were knotted in the front of her dress as if she would crush it to a pulp in her hands.
“Yes,” she said, and she gasped out the words, “it’s what I would expect from you! Out of the slums! Dirty, miserable, without breeding like all the rest of them there in their stinking houses! Never even dreaming what respectability is!”
“Mother!” Bettina cried, but Matt cut her short.
“Respectability,” he said to my mother. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s not what other people think of you, but what you think of yourself! But there’s a catch to it,” he said, turning suddenly to me. “You have to be honest with yourself. Deep-down honest with yourself, Dick. You must understand that. It’s the most important thing in the world to you right now that you understand that.”
“And there’s Bob,” my father said to me. “You can’t let that boy go through hell. Even if they fail to make a case against him …”
“Harry,” my mother said, “it’s your son. Do you know what you’re asking him to do?”
My father said helplessly, “I’m asking him to do what’s right. That’s all. Only what’s right.”
“Then I’ll tell you something, Harry,” my mother said, and there seemed no life in her any more, “if this comes out we’re through. You’ve wanted that a long time, Harry, and if my son is made a public disgrace you’ll have your chance. But there won’t be anyone else waiting for you. You’ll be all alone to think of what you made of yourself and of him. The day my son stands with handcuffs on and tells the world what he did, and why, that’s the day I’m done with you. Done with both of you.”
“Lucille,” my father said, “to talk about the boy like that!”
She flung out an arm toward him, and her face was twisted with pain. “They say, like father like son,” she cried out, “and you’re a fit pair! All right, Harry, if that’s the way you want it you know where I stand.”
I couldn’t understand it, the way she was pulling away from me, the way she was leaving me there alone.
“But I went to see Miss Ballou because of you!” I said. “I was doing it for you!”
She clapped a hand to her breast. “Oh, I see!” she said. “I understand now! Somehow, I’m to blame for everything! Somehow, it’s all my fault!”
She had talked like that, used that tone of voice so many times before, but now it was the first time in my life I was really hearing it, really listening to the sound and the words and what they meant. But I didn’t say anything. It was Bettina who looked at her and whispered, “Yes, maybe it is,” and they stood facing each other like that. Then Bettina took my hand. “Let’s go downstairs, Dick,” she said. “You can use the phone there.”
So we went downstairs, Bettina holding my hand like she did when we were kids crossing the street together, and my father and Matt behind me, and only my mother left there in the room watching us with her hand over her mouth, but never moving.
I had the phone in my hand like a dead thing waiting to come alive when I spoke into it, and then I saw Matt was at the front door, opening it. He was going to go away like that, his face all cut and bruised even with the blood washed off, and that little rag of shirt dirty and stained as it was. It was like having the big prop, the one I needed most, kicked from under me, and suddently I felt I was all alone, and falling, and afraid.
“Matt!” I called. “Matt! Don’t go away!”
He stopped, but his hand was still on the door as he turned, not toward me, but toward Bettina. And then I saw Bettina was standing there rigid, her hands tight against her sides, her head high, and she was looking at him.
“Matt,” she said, and she was crying. “Matt, don’t go away.”
And I knew he wouldn’t.
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Copyright © 1952 by Stanley Ellin
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ISBN: 978-1-4976-5034-3
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The Key to Nicholas Street Page 18