Well, sir, down the hill fair-to-flying, her hair streaming out in the wind, came Clara to meet us. She never hesitated, throwing herself straight at Matt. It was instinct made him put his arms out to catch her and she dove into them and flung her own arms around his neck, hugging him and holding him, and saying things like, “Darling Matt…wonderful Matt. I love Matt.” I heard her say that.
You’d have thought to see Matt, he’d turned to stone. Weber was staring at them, a mighty puzzled look on his face.
“Miss Clara,” I said, “behave yourself.”
She looked at me—I swear she was smiling—and said, “You hush, old Hank, or we won’t let you play the fiddle at our wedding.”
It was Prouty said, hoisting his basket up on his shoulder, “Let’s take one thing at a time.”
That got us started on our way again. Clara skipping along at Matt’s side, trying to catch his hand. Luke Weber didn’t say a word.
I’m not going into the details now of what we saw. It was just about like Matt had told it in my office. I was sick a couple of times. I don’t think Matt had anything left in him to be sick with. When it came to telling what had happened first, Clara was called on to corroborate. And Weber asked her, “Where’s Reuben now, Miss Clara?”
“Gone,” she said, “and I don’t care.”
“Didn’t care much about your sister either, did you?” Weber drawled, and I began to see how really bad a spot old Matt was in. There was no accounting Clara’s change of heart about him—except he’d killed her sister. The corroborating witness we needed right then was Reuben White.
Prouty got Weber’s go-ahead on the job he had to do. I couldn’t help him though I tried. What I did when he asked it, was go up to Maudie’s well to draw him a pail of water so’s he could wash his hands when he was done. Well, sir, I’d have been better off helping him direct. I couldn’t get the bucket down to where it would draw the water.
After trying a couple of times, I called out to Weber asking if he had a flashlight. He brought it and threw the beam of light down into the well. Just about the water level a pair of size-twelve shoes were staring up at us—the soles of them like Orphan Annie’s eyes.
There wasn’t any doubt in our minds that what was holding them up like that was Reuben White, headfirst in the well.
The constable called Clara to him and took a short-cut in his questioning.
“How’d it happen, girl?”
“I guess I pushed him,” Clara said, almost casual.
“It took a heap of pushing,” Weber said.
“No, it didn’t. I just got him to look down and then I tumbled him in.”
“Why?”
“Matt,” she said, and smiled like a Christmas cherub.
Matt groaned, and I did too inside.
“Leastways, it come to that,” Clara explained. Then in that quick-changing way of hers, she turned deep serious. “Mr. Weber, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what Reuben White wanted me to do with him—in the sheepcote this afternoon.”
“I might,” Luke Weber said.
I looked at Prouty and drew my first half-easy breath. I could see he felt the same. We’re both old-fashioned enough to take warmly to a girl’s defending her virtue.
But Weber didn’t bat an eye. “And where does Matt here come in on it?” he said.
“I figure he won’t ever want me to do a thing like that,” Clara said, and gazed up at old stoneface with a look of pure adoration.
“Where was Matt when you…tumbled Reuben in?” Weber asked, and I could tell he was well on his way to believing her.
“He’d gone down the hill to tell you what’d happened to Sister Maudie.”
“And when was it Reuben made this—this proposal to you?” Weber said. I could see he was getting at the question of premeditation. Luke Weber’s a pretty fair policeman.
“It was Matt proposed to me,” Clara said. “That’s why I’m going to marry him. Reuben just wanted…”
Weber interrupted. “Why, if he wasn’t molesting you just then, and if you’d decided to marry Matt Sawyer, why did you have to kill him? You must’ve known a well’s no place for diving.”
Clara shrugged her pretty shoulders. “By then I was feeling kind of sorry for him. He’d have been mighty lonesome after I went to live with Matt.”
Well, there isn’t much more to tell. We sort of disengaged Matt, you might say. His story of how Maudie died stood up with the coroner, Prouty and I vouching for the kind of man he was. I haven’t seen him since.
Clara—she’ll be getting out soon, coming home to the hills, and maybe opening up The Red Lantern again. I defended her at the trial, pleading temporary insanity. Nobody was willing to say she was insane exactly. We don’t like saying such things about one another up here. But the jury agreed she was a temporary sort of woman. Twenty years to life, she got, with time off for good behavior.
You come around some time next spring. I’ll introduce you.
1963
The Purple Is Everything
YOU ARE LIKELY TO say, reading about Mary Gardner, that you knew her, or that you once knew someone like her. And well you may have, for while her kind is not legion it endures and sometimes against great popular odds.
You will see Mary Gardner—or someone like her—at the symphony, in the art galleries, at the theater, always well-dressed if not quite fashionable, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other women all of whom have an aura, not of sameness, but of mutuality. Each of them has made—well, if not a good life for herself, at least the best possible life it was in her power to make.
Mary Gardner was living at the time in a large East Coast city. In her late thirties, she was a tall lean woman, unmarried, quietly feminine, gentle, even a little hesitant in manner but definite in her tastes. Mary was a designer in a well-known wallpaper house. Her salary allowed her to buy good clothes, to live alone in a pleasant apartment within walking distance of her work, and to go regularly to the theater and the Philharmonic. As often as she went to the successful plays, she attended little theater and the experimental stage. She was not among those who believed that a play had to say something. She was interested in “the submerged values.” This taste prevailed also in her approach to the visual arts—a boon surely in the wallpaper business whose customers for the most part prefer their walls to be seen but not heard.
In those days Mary was in the habit of going during her lunch hour—or sometimes when she needed to get away from the drawing board—to the Institute of Modern Art which was less than a city block from her office. She had fallen in love with a small, early Monet titled “Trees Near Le Havre,” and when in love Mary was a person of searching devotion. Almost daily she discovered new voices in the woodland scene, trees and sky reflected in a shimmering pool—with more depths in the sky, she felt, than in the water.
The more she thought about this observation the more convinced she became that the gallery had hung the picture upside down. She evolved a theory about the signature: it was hastily done by the artist, she decided, long after he had finished the painting and perhaps at a time when the light of day was fading. She would have spoken to a museum authority about it—if she had known a museum authority.
Mary received permission from the Institute to sketch within its halls and often stood before the Monet for an hour, sketchbook in hand. By putting a few strokes on paper she felt herself conspicuously inconspicuous among the transient viewers and the guards. She would not for anything have presumed to copy the painting and she was fiercely resentful of the occasional art student who did.
So deep was Mary in her contemplation of Claude Monet’s wooded scene that on the morning of the famous museum fire, when she first smelled the smoke, she thought it came from inside the picture itself. She was instantly furious, and by an old association she indicted a whole genre of people—the careless American tourist in a foreign land. She was not so far away from reality, however, that she did not realize almost at
once there was actually a fire in the building.
Voices cried out alarms in the corridors and men suddenly were running. Guards dragged limp hoses along the floor and dropped them—where they lay like great withered snakes over which people leaped as in some tribal rite. Blue smoke layered the ceiling and then began to fall in angled swatches—like theatrical scrims gone awry. In the far distance fire sirens wailed.
Mary Gardner watched, rooted and muted, as men and women, visitors like herself, hastened past bearing framed pictures in their arms; and in one case two men carried between them a huge Chagall night scene in which the little creatures seemed to be jumping on and off the canvas, having an uproarious time in transit. A woman took the Rouault from the wall beside the Monet and hurried with it after the bearers of the Chagall.
Still Mary hesitated. That duty should compel her to touch where conscience had so long forbidden it—this conflict increased her confusion. Another thrust of smoke into the room made the issue plainly the picture’s survival, if not indeed her own. In desperate haste she tried to lift the Monet from the wall, but it would not yield.
She strove, pulling with her full strength—such strength that when the wire broke, she was catapulted backward and fell over the viewer’s bench, crashing her head into the painting. Since the canvas was mounted on board, the only misfortune—aside from her bruised head which mattered not at all—was that the picture had jarred loose from its frame. By then Mary cared little for the frame. She caught up the painting, hugged it to her, and groped her way to the gallery door.
She reached the smoke-bogged corridor at the instant the water pressure brought the hoses violently to life. Jets of water spurted from every connection. Mary shielded the picture with her body until she could edge it within the raincoat she had worn against the morning drizzle.
She hurried along the corridor, the last apparently of the volunteer rescuers. The guards were sealing off the wing of the building, closing the fire prevention door. They showed little patience with her protests, shunting her down the stairs. By the time she reached the lobby the police had cordoned off civilians. Imperious as well as impervious, a policeman escorted her into the crowd, and in the crowd, having no use of her arms—they were still locked around the picture—she was shoved and jostled toward the door and there pitilessly jettisoned into the street. On the sidewalk she had no hope at all of finding anyone in that surging, gaping mob on whom she could safely bestow her art treasure.
People screamed and shouted that they could see the flames. Mary did not look back. She hastened homeward, walking proud and fierce, thinking that the city was after all a jungle. She hugged the picture to her, her raincoat its only shield but her life a ready forfeit for its safety.
It has been in her mind to telephone the Institute office at once. But in her own apartment, the painting propped up against cushions on the sofa, she reasoned that until the fire was extinguished she had no hope of talking with anyone there. She called her own office and pleaded a sudden illness—something she had eaten at lunch though she had not had a bite since breakfast.
The walls of her apartment were hung with what she called her “potpourri”: costume prints and color lithographs—all, she had been proud to say, limited editions or artists’ prints. She had sometimes thought of buying paintings, but plainly she could not afford her own tastes. On impulse now, she took down an Italian lithograph and removed the glass and mat from the wooden frame. The Monet fit quite well. And to her particular delight she could now hang it right side up. As though with a will of its own, the painting claimed the place on her wall most favored by the light of day.
There is no way of describing Mary’s pleasure in the company she kept that afternoon. She would not have taken her eyes from the picture at all except for the joy that was renewed at each returning. Reluctantly she turned on the radio at five o’clock so that she might learn more of the fire at the Institute. It had been extensive and destructive—an entire wing of the building was gutted.
She listened with the remote and somewhat smug solicitude that one bestows on other people’s tragedies to the enumeration of the paintings which had been destroyed. The mention of “Trees Near Le Havre” startled her. A full moment later she realized the explicit meaning of the announcer’s words. She turned off the radio and sat a long time in the flood of silence.
Then she said aloud tentatively, “You are a thief, Mary Gardner,” and after a bit repeated, “Oh, yes. You are a thief.” But she did not mind at all. Nothing so portentous had ever been said about her before, even by herself.
She ate her dinner from a tray before the painting, having with it a bottle of French wine. Many times that night she went from her bed to the living-room door until she seemed to have slept between so many wakenings. At last she did sleep.
But the first light of morning fell on Mary’s conscience as early as upon the painting. After one brief visit to the living room she made her plans with the care of a religious novice well aware of the devil’s constancy. She dressed more severely than was her fashion, needing herringbone for backbone—the ridiculous phrase kept running through her mind at breakfast. In final appraisal of herself in the hall mirror she thought she looked like the headmistress of an English girls’ school, which she supposed satisfactory to the task before her.
Just before she left the apartment, she spent one last moment alone with the Monet. Afterward, wherever, however the Institute chose to hang it, she might hope to feel that a little part of it was forever hers.
On the street she bought a newspaper and confirmed the listing of “Trees Near Le Havre.” Although that wing of the Institute had been destroyed, many of its paintings had been carried to safety by way of the second-floor corridor.
Part of the street in front of the Institute was still cordoned off when she reached it, congesting the flow of morning traffic. The police on duty were no less brusque than those whom Mary had encountered the day before. She was seized by the impulse to postpone her mission—an almost irresistible temptation, especially when she was barred from entering the museum unless she could show a pass such as had been issued to all authorized personnel.
“Of course I’m not authorized.” she exclaimed. “If I were I shouldn’t be out here.”
The policeman directed her to the sergeant in charge. He was at the moment disputing with the fire insurance representative how much of the street could be used for the salvage operation. “The business of this street is business,” the sergeant said, “and that’s my business.”
Mary waited until the insurance man stalked into the building. He did not need a pass, she noticed. “Excuse me, officer, I have a painting—”
“Lady…” He drew the long breath of patience. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Yesterday during the fire a painting was supposedly destroyed—a lovely, small Monet called—”
“Was there now?” the sergeant interrupted. Lovely small Monets really touched him.
Mary was becoming flustered in spite of herself. “It’s listed in this morning’s paper as having been destroyed. But it wasn’t. I have it at home.”
The policeman looked at her for the first time with a certain compassion. “On your living-room wall, no doubt,” he said with deep knowingness.
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
He took her gently but firmly by the arm. “I tell you what you do. You go along to police headquarters on Fifty-seventh Street. You know where that is, don’t you? Just tell them all about it like a good girl.” He propelled her into the crowd and there released her. Then he raised his voice: “Keep moving! You’ll see it all on the television.”
Mary had no intention of going to police headquarters where, she presumed, men concerned with armed robbery, mayhem, and worse were even less likely to understand the subtlety of her problem. She went to her office and throughout the morning tried periodically to reach the museum curator’s office by telephone. On each of her calls either the switchboard was tied up o
r his line was busy for longer than she could wait.
Finally she hit on the idea of asking for the Institute’s Public Relations Department, and to someone there, obviously distracted—Mary could hear parts of three conversations going on at the same time—she explained how during the fire she had saved Monet’s “Trees Near Le Havre.”
“Near where, madam?” the voice asked.
“Le Havre.” Mary spelled it. “By Monet,” she added:
“Is that two words or one?” the voice asked.
“Please transfer me to the curator’s office,” Mary said and ran her fingers up and down the lapel of her herringbone suit.
Mary thought it a wise precaution to meet the Institute’s representative in the apartment lobby where she first asked to see his credentials. He identified himself as the man to whom she had given her name and address on the phone. Mary signaled for the elevator and thought about his identification: Robert Attlebury III. She had seen his name on the museum roster: Curator of…she could not remember.
He looked every inch the curator, standing erect and remote while the elevator bore them slowly upward. A curator perhaps, but she would not have called him a connoisseur. One with his face and disposition would always taste and spit out, she thought. She could imagine his scorn of things he found distasteful, and instinctively she knew herself to be distasteful to him.
Not that it really mattered what he felt about her. She was nobody. But how must the young unknown artist feel standing with his work before such superciliousness? Or had he a different mien and manner for people of his own kind? In that case she would have given a great deal for the commonest of courtesies.
“Everything seems so extraordinary—in retrospect,” Mary said to brook the silence of their seemingly endless ascent.
“How fortunate for you,” he said, and Mary thought, perhaps it was.
Tales for a Stormy Night: Fifteen Crime Stories Page 18