Alice

by Howard Fast

  “Please come in, Mr. Angie,” she repeated. “I am Mrs. Camber. You do want to talk to us?”

  I got up. “I will go to the door,” I said to myself. “What am I? In God’s name, what sort of man am I?”

  “My name’s Angie,” his voice came. “My first name. That’s my first name, Mrs. Camber. My last name’s Cambosia.”

  I stood there and made an assessment of my wife, and believe me, I faced the fact that I knew her very little indeed. That was the first fact I had actually faced since the man in the subway grabbed my arm—or maybe since a long time before then.

  “It sounds almost like our name,” Alice said sweetly. “I mean—Camber and then Cambosia. It’s a very interesting coincidence, don’t you think?”

  Silence again, and I could imagine Angie standing there at the open door, trying to fit this solid, freckled, blue-eyed woman, with her curious and pronounced English accent, into his set of categories. Such a man lives by fixed categories, and a woman was a broad, a pig, a hooker, or outpriced, which meant not in any market at the moment. He couldn’t tag Alice.

  “Please do come in, Mr. Cambosia,” she urged him. “My husband’s waiting. You do want to talk to both of us, don’t you?”

  Then I heard the door close. I walked into the living room, and Angie was there. He was puzzled. He looked from me to Alice, warily and calculatingly.

  “Do you like the afternoon sun?” Alice asked him.

  It poured into the living room through our picture window, which I had once regarded so proudly and which had come to be the seal on my bondage.

  “Some people,” she went on, “keep telling me that it will bleach all the color out of our rugs and furniture, but what’s the use of color in the furniture if there’s none in your life? I mean, I just could not close out the sun. Where I grew up, Mr. Cambosia, sunlight was so precious! You have no idea. But I’m not trying to persuade you, believe me. I sound like a wretched hostess, but I do have people here as guests who can’t tolerate the sun, and when I do, why I draw the drapes.”

  Angie looked at her blankly.

  “Should I draw the drapes?” she asked.

  Angie pulled himself together. “Look lady,” he said, “I don’t give a damn if you got sunshine or klieg lights. All I want is the key.”

  “Of course.” Alice smiled. “But you will have a cup of coffee. It won’t take five minutes to make. We’re a complicated household. I drink tea, but Johnny must have his coffee and my daughter, Polly, her hot chocolate. But you can have either. It’s no trouble. Which would you prefer?”

  “I don’t want no coffee, lady,” Angie replied. “I don’t want no coffee, I don’t want no tea. I just want the key. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Good,” Alice nodded. “You know, my mother used to tell me, ‘You know, Alice, it’s bad manners to leave a person hungry, but so much worse to force him to eat.’ Do you agree with that, Mr. Cambosia?”

  “Look, lady—” he began.

  “I know. You want the key. Then please sit down,” Alice said sprightly. “We’ll talk about the key.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about, lady.” He seemed to have forgotten me, that I existed, that I had anything to do with the key.

  “I think there is, and I think we’ll all be more comfortable if we sit down. You, too, Johnny.”

  She seated herself. I sat down, feeling that I had stepped through the kitchen door into a place of total unreality. Angie glanced from Alice to me and then back to Alice, and then he too sat down. He took a deep breath, and then he lit a cigarette. I lit a cigarette too and dragged in the smoke gratefully. Alice took an ashtray, and before Angie could move to stop her, she had balanced it neatly on his lap. He stared at it, touched it warily, and then let it remain there.

  “About the key—” Alice began.

  “Where is it?”

  “We will come to that, Mr. Cambosia—”

  “Oh no!” he snapped. “Now look, lady—I want that key. I don’t want no more crap about it. I want that key. That’s what I’m here for, not to listen to any fairy tales.”

  “I know you want the key,” she replied gently. “It’s a very valuable key, a very important key, and of course you want it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “You keep saying that, Mr. Cambosia,” Alice chided him. “I intend to tell you where it is, but you must listen to me first.”

  “All right,” Angie decided. “Make it short.”

  “As short as I can,” Alice nodded. “The point is, Mr. Cambosia, that the key itself is nothing. It would cost twenty-five cents, perhaps, to replace—so it is not the key that we are basically interested in, but what the key will open. That is the purpose of keys, you know, to open doors. In this case, the door of a safe-deposit box. You want what is in that box, and you cannot open it without a key, and you are willing to go to great lengths to get the key. In fact, your Mr. Montez saw fit to offer my husband ten thousand dollars for the key to the box. That is a great deal of money, Mr. Cambosia—and it’s almost like a written statement of how much the contents of that box are worth. You did not cut us in—I believe that’s the expression—for half of its worth, or a quarter of its worth, or even for ten per cent. Instead, you threatened my husband—yes, you threatened him, Mr. Cambosia—and then threw him a crumb.”

  “Who threatened him?” Angie cried.

  “You did, Mr. Cambosia.”

  “And ten grand is no crumb, lady.”

  “That depends on how you look at it, Mr. Cambosia. If the contents of that box are worth only twenty thousand dollars, then you are perfectly right, and ten thousand dollars is a very princely sum. But if the contents are worth a million or two million or five million, then ten thousand dollars is a very paltry sum, as you certainly know—”

  “God-damn it, lady,” Angie burst out, “I come here for the key—you understand me, for the key! I don’t come here to have no argument with you. Camber here made his deal with the fat man. I ain’t making no deals.” He swung to me. “Who in hell cut her in on this, Camber?”

  “She’s my wife,” I said hopelessly.

  “I don’t care if this here tomato’s the Queen of Sheba. I want the key!”

  “Just one moment, Mr. Cambosia,” Alice said icily. “You are here as a guest in my house. I was very polite to you. I offered you tea or coffee—”

  “Lady, I don’t want any God-damned coffee!”

  “Please, and I think that as a guest you have certain obligations on your part. I don’t enjoy being called a tomato or any other obscene term. I think you owe me an apology.”

  “Camber, is she nuts?”

  “No, I’m perfectly sane,” Alice said. “And since you keep shouting about the key, suppose we talk about the key. But I’d like to feel that you apologized first.”

  “O.K., lady—whatever you say. Just produce the key.”

  “Thank you.” Alice nodded. “You can have the key. We don’t want it. But ten thousand dollars is not enough. We want twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “What!” If not for the ashtray balanced precariously on his knee, I think Angie would have exploded.

  My heart was hammering, and I had to fight back an impulse to cry out, Alice, tell him the truth. Tell him that we don’t have the key. Tell him that we lost it. I had to fight that impulse down, and I did, swallowing the words with the feeling that she had tipped us over the edge of a dangerous pit. All I could ask myself was why I ever let her talk to him at all.

  “I don’t think that’s an extraordinary sum,” Alice said calmly. “You know what’s in the box, and you know that it’s well worth a commission of twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “Camber,” Angie said to me, biting his words, “Camber, you’re playing footsie with the wrong party. I have had all I can stand of this dish. I don’t want to do business with no pigs or argue with them—”

  “How dare you!” Alice cried.

  “But, so help me, if you don’t ha
nd over that key, I will take you apart. You won’t want to look at yourself for six months, Camber, and you won’t want to look at that tomato either when I finish with her.”

  “Well, of all the things I ever heard!” Alice snapped. “Do you think I’m a fool, Mr. Cambosia? It is now five minutes to four o’clock. I left the key with a friend. Do you suppose I would be stupid enough to keep it here in this house? If I don’t call her by four o’clock, she will turn the key over to the police. If I do call her and tell her to bring the key here, she will also turn it over to the police. And if anyone but Johnny and I come to her house, the two of us alone, she will call the police immediately. I do think you’re stupid, Mr. Cambosia—with your medieval brass knuckles and beer-can openers and childish, brutal threats and your inability to speak five intelligent words in an approximation of the king’s English. I find you quite disgusting, and when I tell Mr. Montez how you have botched this job, I imagine he too will be somewhat annoyed.”

  She glanced at her watch. “I have exactly two minutes left to call my friend. Do you want me to call her? Or would you prefer to return to Mr. Montez and tell him that the key is gone forever?”

  I thought Angie would choke, the way the veins in his throat bulged, the flush of blood blackening his dark skin. He was trembling as he whispered, “Pick up the phone and call your friend.”

  “When you have left my house, Mr. Cambosia. You know what our terms are, and I have seen quite enough of you. You have a minute and ten seconds now.”

  He got up, and Alice went to the door and held it open for him. After he left, she bolted the door behind him. Then she came back, shivered a little, began to giggle, and through her giggles, said to me, “Johnny, would you bring me something cold to drink, please. I think I am going to be hysterical, and my throat hurts. It’s so dry.”

  We sat in the living room, Alice sipping her drink, and myself watching her, until she asked me not to look at her that way. She said she was very conscious at this point of how people looked at her. “He has eyes like a snake,” she said. “He really has eyes like a snake, Johnny. He’s every bit as horrible as you made him out to be. Did you ever see such a head—so long and narrow, there’s practically no room between the ears for any brains, unless they’re all shoved up into the top of his skull. I do like to think the best of people, Johnny, but it’s very hard to think the best of someone like that, don’t you think?”

  I nodded, still staring at her.

  “And his eyes—there is something wrong with his eyes, you know, Johnny. What is it they say about people who take dope? It does something to their eyes, doesn’t it? I mean it makes them either smaller or larger—which is it, Johnny?”

  “Not the eyes, the pupils.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “Larger, I think. How long are we married, Alice?”

  “Eight years,” she replied.

  “Eight years.” I nodded thoughtfully. “That ought to be long enough to know something about your wife.”

  “Oh, Johnny—I was so terribly frightened.”

  “No, you weren’t,” I said. “I don’t think you were frightened at all. You were just provoked with him.”

  “Well he called me a pig. Can you imagine a nastier thing to say? I don’t like to think I’m compulsive about cleanliness, but there isn’t a house on this street that’s cleaner or neater than mine. You know that, John Camber.”

  “I know, but—”

  “And myself. I may not be as beautiful as that nymphomaniac virgin of yours—”

  “She’s not mine. I told you.”

  “But I do try to keep my own appearance pleasant. You won’t find me shuffling around the place in slippers and a housecoat, and I don’t throw your money away in beauty parlors. I do it myself—”

  “I don’t think he meant that, Alice. When he says pig, he means a woman. In his world, it’s a sort of generic term. Slang.”

  “Then your American slang leaves a good deal to be desired.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand it. We sit here and argue about what he called you just as if it’s all over.”

  “Well, it is, Johnny. For a few hours, at least, and that will give us time to think about something.”

  “It won’t get us the key.”

  “You can be thankful for that,” she nodded. “The last thing in the world I would want to have right now is that key.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you see, Johnny? We told him that we’d give him the key for twenty-five thousand dollars. Suppose he took us up on that—your fat man, I mean. Well, then we’d be in it neck deep. You know, I still think we ought to call the police. Right now.”

  “We’ve been all through that.”

  “Very well, Johnny. But I think you’re making a mistake.”

  “Maybe. But tell me one thing, Alice. You say, suppose the fat man accepts your deal for twenty-five thousand dollars and we have the key. But suppose he accepts and we don’t have the key.”

  “I never thought of that,” she sighed.

  It is not easy for me to describe Alice in more than surface terms, or to look at her very objectively, as if she were someone else’s wife instead of mine. Women differ from men in several thousand ways, and among these differences is that fact that they labor under no compulsion to perform in terms of heroics. Since heroism has been most often equated with butchery, and since women have been historically denied the trade of butcher, either as amateur or enlisted soldier, they are content to take courage in their stride and to be afraid when it’s the intelligent thing to be. When they are very brave and resourceful, which, I suspect, is frequently the case, they tend to be apologetic. In a country like ours, no one is ever given a medal for having a baby.

  Alice said to me once, “The difference between you and me, Johnny, is not so much in our backgrounds as in our expectations. When we were kids, we were both very poor, but I accepted that as a perfectly normal thing. You were led to believe that it was a mistake, and you go through life thinking that everything that happens to us is a mistake.”

  There was more truth in that than I cared to think about.

  “Anyway,” I said to her, “it’s time to get Polly, isn’t it?”

  She glanced at her watch and nodded.

  “Suppose you get her. I’ll wait here.”

  Alice shook her head. “We both get her, Johnny. For a little while now, let’s do everything together, the two of us. I don’t want to be alone and I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “What about tomorrow? I still have a job, you know.”

  “We’ll deal with tomorrow when it comes. Meanwhile, I think we ought to stay together and get into the habit of locking doors, too.”

  She locked the door pointedly as we left. Jenny Harris from next door came over to the car and asked Alice whether there was anything wrong or anything she could do.

  Alice said, “That depends on how you look at it. I promise to tell you the whole story someday.”

  “Going to get Polly?”

  “We’ll be late,” Alice said.

  “Well, on your way back, stop at the supermarket. They’re demonstrating detergents, and if they pick you to hold up a towel and wave it in front of the camera, that’s twenty dollars and a whole case of the detergent. You know, they want people to say a few words—you don’t even have to memorize it, they hold it up on a card—and they’ll love your English accent.”

  As I was backing out the car, Alice said, “I get so tired of comments about my accent. Doesn’t it ever occur to anyone here that perhaps you have the accents and I speak normally?”

  “That kind of thing doesn’t occur to people. You’re not going to tell her about this, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, why did you promise?”

  “That’s not a promise, it’s a gesture of affection. Jenny is very nice. You said they have a black Cadillac? I don’t see it anywhere, thank heavens.”

&n
bsp; It was less than a mile to the school. I parked in front. Then we went in to get Polly. The extra kindergarten hours are taken by two retired teachers, Miss Pruitt and Miss Clementine, both of them very nice ladies in their seventies and both of them pleased as punch to get a few hours of extra work two or three times a month. Since we had stretched the time to its limit, only two kids were left, neither of them Polly. Miss Clementine came over to us, an expression of surprise on her face, and asked Alice whether anything was wrong.

  “No,” Alice replied. “Where’s Polly?”

  “Isn’t she home, Mrs. Camber?”

  “Home?” Alice went white, and in myself that sickness was back, the sickness of fear and horror. “You didn’t let her go home alone?”

  “Of course not. You know I wouldn’t do anything like that, Mrs. Camber. But when Mr. Camber’s sister came to call for her, I thought it perfectly proper to let her go.”

  “Mr. Camber’s sister?”

  I was about to blurt out that I had no sister—to rage and shout at this stupid and silly old woman, but Alice’s fingers tightened on my arm, biting into my flesh.

  Alice continued, evenly enough, “Which sister, I wonder? What was she like, Miss Clementine?”

  Seeing my face, Miss Clementine began to stutter, but Alice managed to calm her.

  “I do hope I didn’t do anything wrong—”

  “Mr. Camber has two sisters,” Alice said. “Please, Miss Clementine, don’t be nervous. But I must know which sister it was. What did she look like?”

  “She was a lovely lady, Mrs. Camber. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have let Polly go with her, I assure you.”

  “What did she look like, Miss Clementine?”

  “She was quite dark, dark eyes, dark hair, and very pretty. She was just as sweet and nice as you could want, very young. I must say you don’t favor her very much, Mr. Camber.”

  “And Polly went with her willingly?” I asked.

  “She told Polly you had sent her to take her home, and she had this doll. Such a wonderful doll. Once Polly saw that doll, she had no eyes for anything else—there is nothing wrong, I do hope?”