Black Alice

by Thomas M. ; Sladek Disch; Sladek Disch

  'Who's that, Captain?' Bessy said.

  'You heard me—Harry Dorman.'

  'Oh yes, Harry—bless his heart, I thought he was still in jail. If you find him I hope you remind him he owes me five hundred dollars. I just about done give up on seeing that money again. Been a long time.'

  The man said something else, inaudibly, raising his voice at the end, as though in question.

  'Why, Colonel, you know I wouldn't try to fool you! Why, if it wasn't for the police and the likes of you, I couldn't make a living. Bless you, Captain!'

  Was he, Alice wondered, a captain or a colonel? Or neither perhaps, for Bessy seemed to be using both titles very freely. And why had she said: 'The police and the likes of you'? What was he, if not a policeman?

  The man shifted his weight so that Bessy's face came into view, and Alice let the door close. The wood was as scarred with carving as a desk in a public school. There were names of people, and all the dirty words there are, and initials inside hearts. It seemed an awkward place to carve, since the door could swing freely in both directions and would have backed away under the pressure of a knifeblade unless held in place.

  'Who?' Bessy said.

  'Raleigh,' the man repeated impatiently.

  Then he is looking for me, Alice assured herself. If only there were some way she could let him know she were here without breaking her promise to Bessy!

  'Raleigh?' Bessy said, shaking her head. 'Wilbur Raleigh?'

  'Don't play dumb, lady. We've got it in the files.'

  'I don't doubt you do, Captain. But there's just so many of them, and of course it's not always the same ones. Especially college boys. Soon's they graduate, most of 'em, they stop coming round to Green Pastures. Course I do remember that night you mention—Lord, I can't never forget that—but not no Raleigh. You're talking about fifteen years ago.'

  Alice hadn't quite followed the drift of this, but she had been amused to think that in a strictly grammatical sense Bessy might have been telling the truth, because to remember 'not no Raleigh' was a double negative and meant that she did in fact remember Raleigh.

  'But what,' Dinah asked, 'did she mean by "fifteen years ago"?'

  'You again!' Alice said angrily. 'It ain't nobody else!' Dinah declared. 'I won't talk to you!' Alice warned.

  But Dinah, knowing better, lifted a coy finger and traced along the time-darkened crevices of the largest initials gouged into the door: D.B. Then, beneath that, by the same hand but smaller: K.K.K. 'What do you suppose D.B. stands for?' she asked of Alice. 'Dumbell Buckler, maybe?

  'I told you never to mention. ..'

  'And K.K.K. Would that be Kernel Karmel Korn? Or Karen at Kilkenny?'

  Alice laughed and, doing so, surrendered to the black girl's charm.'What about Krazy Kat Komics?'

  'What about Ku Klux Klan?' the black girl suggested, not quite charmingly.

  Apparently the policeman, if he was a policeman, was going to search the whole house, for he had gone down the downstairs hallway looking into all the bedrooms. There was a little shriek and much splashing about when he looked into the bathroom, where Fay was giving herself and her baby a bath in the long tub.

  As he was going up the stairs, Alice heard him say, 'Mumble, mumble, member of Kappa Kappa Kappa. Still doesn't ring any bells?'

  'Sorry, Captain,' Bessy said.

  'Captain!' Dinah said scornfully. 'Kaptain Korny Krudd.' Alice had no reply to make to this. She seemed to grow more retiring in proportion to Dinah's outspokenness. That had always been the way with them.

  Upstairs Clara put up a big fuss before she let the policeman look into the bathroom. When he came downstairs again, Bessy was saying to him: 'I bet you think this is just the bathingest, perfumiest house that ever was!' And she began telling him the story of Clara's broken cologne bottle.

  The Spengler's Beer man came into the kitchen. By that time Dinah was already sitting at the formica-topped table, sipping her milk, a perfect lamb. He looked about the room with wan interest, only going through the motions of a search. He opened the cupboard doors.

  'Always keep your books here?' he asked.

  Bessy laughed, and even her laughter seemed to be altered for his benefit and implied that she only laughed by his gracious permission. 'Not always, Captain. I just moved 'em out here yesterday on account of little Dinah here coming for a visit. Don't want her reading 'bout no feminine anatomy, do we?'

  The man laughed good-naturedly and took a book down. He read the title aloud: 'School for Sinners! He set it down on top of the copy of Just-So Stories that was lying face up on the kitchen counter.

  He left the kitchen, and a moment later she could hear Bessy letting him out through the front door. From under her cheap sunglasses tears were streaming down her brown cheeks, and though she stared at the swinging door she could no longer see the initials carved there. When she heard the motor of the truck starting up, she tore off the detested sunglasses and, cradling her head in her arms, she began uncontrollably to cry.

  'There, there,' said Bessy. 'There, there, there! That's all right, honey. That's all right. You're a good little actress, and I'm proud of you. You saved my life, and don't think I ain't grateful.'

  'That's a double negative,' Alice wailed disconsolately.

  'It sure enough was, honey, and I was scared every minute, believe me.'

  The phone rang.

  'You gonna be all right now?' Bessy asked, stroking her curls. Alice nodded yes.

  Bessy went to the phone, which was on a wall in the living-room. 'Hello,' she said, mildly enough, and then, with a quick flare of anger: 'You goddam stupid sonofabitch, what are you calling up here for?' There was a pause, after which she spoke more softly. Though she strained to listen, Alice could only catch her last words—'Are you drunk?'

  She tiptoed to stand behind the swinging door again.

  Bessy said, 'If you and Harry is having difficulties, you just leave me out of them. I ain't taking sides, understand? He don't take me into his confidence no more than you do, and I likes it that way. I'm just the baby-sitter—that's all I am.'

  'She is undoubtedly,' Dinah noted, 'talking to one of your kidnappers. And not to Harry Dorman.'

  Bessy said, 'Donald Bogan? What you expect me to know about him ...? Well, I don't love him either, honey, and you of all people should know that ... I don't see what difference it makes today, but I've got an idea he's dead... About two years ago, but I can't remember who told me. Maybe I read it in the papers. Where you calling me from anyhow?'

  There was a long pause, during which Alice could just barely hear the mouse-squeaks of Bessy's caller issuing from the receiver.

  Donald Bogan, Alices thought. Donald Bogan—where had she heard that name before? That she had heard it somewhere, sometime, she was certain. If she could but recall the tone of voice in which she had first heard that name pronounced: her uncle's tinder-dry wisp of a voice? Or Miss Godwin's silken-smooth contralto? No, it was more a sort of ... whining voice.'

  If I'd married Donald Bogan, when I had the chance ... Her mother? Her own mother?

  Bessy said, 'Don't hand me that! You're a damn fool, calling up this number. The F.B.I, was just here, and they was asking about you! Yes, they was ... and they looked right at little Goldilocks here three, four times. Funny? I thought I'd die. But what if they got somebody listening in on this phone? If they got suspicions enough to come calling ...' A long pause; then, 'It was about that night back in 'fifty. I told him one fraternity boy is just the same as another... He never mentioned the kidnapping, but I don't think...'

  Dinah whispered: 'I know who it is on the phone.'

  Alice said, 'No.' She backed away from the door. She went to the table and stared at the half-full glass of milk.

  'Oh yes,' Dinah insisted. 'Oh yes.'

  Reluctantly Alice lifted her eyes to the initials carved on the door.

  'What do you suppose D.B. stands for?' Dinah insisted. 'Donald Bogan,' Alice admitted. 'And K.K.K.?'
>
  'Ku Klux Klan?' Alice ventured weakly. Dinah deigned no reply to that, but continued her interrogation. 'And who do you suppose is R.R.?' 'No,' said Alice.

  The Spengler Beer man said Raleigh, but Bessy said he didn't mention the kidnapping. He didn't mention you. He mentioned another Raleigh therefore, one that was here fifteen years ago.'

  'Maybe the other kidnapper is Donald Bogan?' Alice said, shooting wild.

  'Not if he's dead. Didn't you hear her say he was dead?' 'She said she didn't know for certain.'

  'I know for certain.'

  'No. No. No.'

  'Your father was in Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity. He still has the tie pin from those days with the three letters on it. K.K.K.'

  'I won't ever talk to you again,' Alice warned. 'Ever, ever.'

  'I didn't say anything,' said Dinah. 'I didn't name his name. And I won't.'

  'But it can't be anybody else, can it?'

  'No,' said Dinah sadly.

  'It has to be my father.'

  'Yes,' Dinah agreed,'... Roderick Raleigh.'

  Chapter 11

  Roderick Raleigh first set out to drive his daughter insane shortly after that young lady's fifth birthday. It was not, admittedly, a course one entered upon with enthusiasm. Indeed, he had hesitated long and thought deeply before adopting it, and even then his initial efforts along these lines were half-hearted, bare, unserviceable gestures. Never could he escape feeling—if not regretful—poignant about the whole matter, for his Alice was such a bright little tyke and might have deserved so much better of him. But there had been—there was—there could be no alternative. It was certain beyond all doubt that Morgan Duquesne's will was never going to be broken.

  That will had left almost the whole of the old man's estate to his grand-daughter Alice, passing over the intervening generation with scarcely a how-do-you-do—a fixed annuity of $10,000 a year. The residence in which Roderick and Delphinia were domiciled, the furniture in it, the servants who worked there: all these things were paid for out of Alice's trust fund and belonged to her. Even the food they ate was, so to speak, but the droppings from her high chair. It was degrading, it was intolerable, and it was (should such thought ever occur to one or another of her parents) impossible to murder the child. Morgan Duquesne had maliciously seen to it that in the event of Alice's death before reaching her majority, the estate (including the house, the furniture, the servants, everything but the piddling annuity) trusted to Alice was to be divided among half a dozen irreproachable charities. Though it would have been inadvisable to contest too strongly this provision of the will (one's motive might be called into question), Roderick had received the same advice from all his lawyers: that this provision would stand up as well in court as all the rest had.

  A man of ordinary resources and imagination might have desisted at this point, might have settled back ignobly in a borrowed armchair in his middle-middle-class house on Gwynn River Falls Drive (his, only in the sense that he lived there), and commenced his decay. Not Roderick Raleigh, for he was no ordinary man.

  He set about his self-appointed task with no more exact knowledge of the science of psychology than was to be found laying around loose in the popular novels and movies of the time (though he considered himself a cultured man, he felt a rather donnish contempt for dry-as-dust science, a field of study he regarded as suitable only for garage mechanics), but he made quick progress through a number of paperbacks by Freud and his followers. On the subject of childhood psychoses he found Bruno Bettelheim and Anna Freud to be of immense utility—but really, if he had wanted to, he could have got along with nothing more than Dr. Spock.

  The important thing to keep in mind when leading a child towards psychosis is that it should not feel loved. Nor should it feel, to any large degree, hated. It should feel, in general, as little as possible. Under the circumstances, it seemed to Roderick that this could be accomplished. Delphinia's feelings towards her daughter had never—at least since Morgan Duquesne's death—been other than ambivalent. She loved her daughter dutifully—but she envied her bitterly. She had, moreover, a natural talent for selfishness that Roderick had often envied, selfishness being a cardinal virtue in Roderick's rather utilitarian ethic. Had not his favourite philosopher (Roderick really did read philosophy) written: 'Selfishness is blessed—the wholesome, healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul'? He had, and Roderick's conduct was guided by that high principle.

  The important thing was for the child to feel unloved, and so Roderick accordingly had set about not to love her. There are a hundred ways not-loving can be evidenced, but the underlying principles are two: unjust and arbitrary punishments and indifference. The first principle must be exercised with restraint to allow the second, and more important, principle to operate. Also, he was ingenious in inventing little ways to keep her 'off balance'. Thus, frequently when he was alone with her, he would praise her for doing things she had not done, call her by names not her own, and in general insist that what was not so, what she knew with a certainty was not so, was so, was so, was so. He was very mean to her but never, he prided himself, out of any native meanness on his part, only programmatically. His meanness was, in a sense, altruistic.

  It was slow work—he had known from the first that it would be—and set-backs were not infrequent. She showed astonishing resilience. Blood, he had thought proudly, will tell.

  His hardest problem was with the servants, for in proportion as Alice felt neglected by her parents she turned to the servants for friendship and a bit of consolation. They could not be expected to realise that this was not to be allowed, and it was sometimes hard to find cause for dismissing them. But eventually a suitable staff was assembled.

  Roderick's hardest task had been to find the right governess for Alice, for governesses will, as a rule, show a certain interest in their charge, and even affection can creep in. This difficulty was aggravated by the fact that not Roderick but Jason, as executor of the will, hired the governesses. One after another, Roderick worked at eliminating these good women, usually by stage-managing a quarrel between the governess in question and his wife, which was settled, in the interests of family concord, by the dismissal of the former. At one time Roderick had hoped that Miss Stupp (or Stuck-Up, as Alice had nicknamed her) would work out, but alas, she tippled on such a scale and so brazenly that Delphinia, even she, had found it necessary to call her to account.

  Then, with the advent of Mrs. Buckler, in 1960, Roderick knew that the search was over. Mrs. Buckler was in every sense a magnificent woman—fat, overbearing, crochety, secretly cruel, a congenital liar, a hypocrite, a snob, and a fake. She was everything that Roderick could have asked for in a governess.

  Alice's response was immediate: she withdrew. But however far she might withdraw Mrs. Buckler would be there nagging at her to withdraw yet a little farther. There was no one she might turn to, no one who could listen to her little woes—and even if there had been, how was she, at age eight, to explain that for all Buckler's outward sweetness, the woman was a monster of cruelty? No one: she had no friends. When her grandfather had established the house on Gwynn River Falls Drive in her name, he had not taken into account that there would be few children in the neighbourhood. There was scarcely, this far out, any neighbourhood. The one child she had known best had been Dinah Watts, the daughter of Mrs. Watts, a former cook. Mrs. Watts had been fired shortly after Alice's fifth birthday, when it was discovered that she was stealing food from the Raleigh freezer for her own family. Mrs. Watts had denied this, but Delphinia had been able to prove it against her, and so Alice had seen no more of Dinah Watts.

  Now Alice began to see Dinah Watts again. She would find her, at first, in the most unlikely places—under beds, inside closets, even, once, inside the automatic washer. Sometimes she was just the way she had always been, but sometimes she was a kitten—the kitten her Uncle Jason had given her for an unbirthday present. She was always sympathetic. She would say such things about Mrs. Buckler that Al
ice would be breaking into giggles over them the rest of the day—and Mrs. Buckler would never know that it was the grey kitten purring in Alice's lap that was causing the whole commotion.

  Then, unaccountably (for the girl it was unaccountable; Roderick, who was torturing the kitten every night after Alice had gone to bed, could account for it very well), Dinah began to develop a mean streak. Her meanness progressed steadily until it was the equal of Buckler's, at which point Dinah bit Buckler (who had been pulling her tail), and she (Dinah) had to be sent off to the Humane Society. Her father explained to Alice what the Humane Society would do to Dinah. That was in September. From September to Christmas Roderick stepped up the pressure a little more each day. He was certain now of success. The child would spend entire hours talking to herself in corners. She had a very poor sense of what was going on around her. She grew indifferent to her lessons. She even stopped reading books. It was a matter, now that she stood at the brink of full psychosis, of waiting for the moment in which she would tip over into it and be lost from view.

  Should Roderick achieve this goal, he had every reason to hope that Alice would not recover. Psychoses acquired between ages five and twelve are notoriously resistant to therapy. She would be committed to a good hospital, where her vegetable body could be kept in good health for decades. Jason was an old man and would soon die, and Roderick could then seek to be appointed trustee of his daughter's estate. Morgan Duquesne, oddly enough, had not provided explicitly against this possibility, and Roderick's lawyers had assured him that such an appointment was not without the bounds of probability. Entire fortunes have been squeezed through smaller loopholes.

  He was, however, thwarted. On the Christmas before last, Jason had come snooping around, discovered his niece's condition, discharged Mrs. Buckler on the spot, and, in general, dashed Roderick's hopes. Miss Godwin was brought down from New York, and she stayed on with Alice despite Delphinia's and Roderick's most vehement protests. After eight months of therapy-cum-tutoring, Alice had wholly recovered the lost ground, and Miss Godwin recommended St. Arnobia's. From that day forth Alice was to be more than a transient guest at the house on Gwynn River Falls Drive.