“I’ll bring him,” I said.
“Fine.”
Ronnie had crossed to his wife and was looking down at her with that wondering, almost humble adoration which I had noticed at the airport. Suddenly Mrs. Leighton gave a little startled cry. She had been pulling some knitting out of a bag and one of the needles had knocked her brandy glass off the chair arm into her lap. Ronnie ran to her side and started solicitously patting at the stain with his handkerchief.
Mrs. Leighton was pink with embarrassment. “Oh, dear, how clumsy of me!”
“What difference does it make? You won’t be wearing this suit much longer.” Ronnie grinned at her. “I arranged it all on the plane with Basil. He’s given me carte blanche. On Monday I’m going to dress this whole clan to its teeth. Truckloads of finery will pour in from all quarters of the globe. Gone will be the habiliments of woe—deep into the past with Shropshire.”
“Oh, no, Ronnie,” Mrs. Leighton exclaimed. “Don’t be foolish. Of course you mustn’t. After all you’ve done for us!”
I glanced at Basil Leighton who had “kindly” given Ronnie carte blanche to spend a small fortune on his family. The author was merely smiling his modest smile as if a particularly sensitive passage of prose had been praised.
Suddenly I wanted to get away. I told Ronnie I had to leave. He went with me into the hall to see me off the premises. We paused by a table on which was standing an exquisite little Greco-Buddhist female figurine. Ronnie’s face was still shining with enthusiasm, but as he turned to me, the familiar, almost sheepish look of uncertainty showed in his eyes.
“I very nearly cabled you to come over, old boy. But I didn’t. I guess I was scared you wouldn’t approve. You’re such an old disapprover. But they’re wonderful, all of them, wonderful. I’ve never seen anything like them. You do approve, don’t you? Now you’ve met them?”
Now I’d met them? What had I met but a silent little girl and a group of hangers-on who seemed more than adaptable to good fortune? I knew my opinion at that point was worthless and, for all I knew, based on jealousy. I knew, also, that even if I’d had anything constructive to say, it was far too late. It wasn’t going to help Ronnie to tell him that I was completely baffled by the whole deal.
Rather awkwardly, I said, “Jean seems very sweet—and she’s a great beauty.”
“She is, isn’t she?” He’d got my endorsement and instantly the doubt vanished from his eyes. He put his hand on the little statue. It was fluid and graceful, the youthful, faintly smiling profile as much in movement as the rippling folds of the stone robe. “You’ve noticed the resemblance, of course. A dead ringer for the Haddad figure, isn’t she? I noticed it the moment I saw her. It’s too good to be true.”
I saw then, or rather, I thought I saw. Ronnie had been able to resist all types of predatory women with the greatest of ease, but he had never been able to resist any work of art that moved him. Had he, then, mixed up Shropshire with the London art galleries? If that was what had happened, it helped me to understand the phenomenon of the Leightons. But it didn’t, in any way, lessen my forebodings.
CHAPTER THREE
At home I called Peter and Iris, who accepted Ronnie’s invitation. They didn’t know Ronnie very well, but he intrigued them and they were interested about the play. I called Bill, too. I hated doing it and, at the same time, hated my own cowardice. But my son was surprisingly biddable. He was thinking about Rome and Sylvia Rymer, no doubt, and realized that this was not a moment to antagonize me further.
“Okay, Pop. Sure. I’ll be there to salaam.”
I arrived at Fifty-Eighth Street at seven-thirty. The entire family party was assembled in evening clothes. The Leightons, living up to one’s traditional expectations of the British, looked far more distinguished in formal dress—even though their distinction was oddly “period.” Basil Leighton, in an ancient dinner jacket, seemed immensely, almost Edward-ianly the Man of Letters. Mrs. Leighton and the Honorable Phyllis Brent both wore long-skirted, bare-shouldered satin gowns and a great deal of face powder. Mrs. Leighton was somehow touching to me as if she were gallantly trying not to let the side down. Phyllis Brent could have been the ugly, ambitious consort of a governor general or a minister.
But the most marked change was in Ronnie’s wife. As if the natural progression from day to evening had broken some spell of apathy, she had become astonishingly alive. Her eyes were sparkling and her skin seemed lit up from inside. Her dress was the corniest pink chiffon ball gown, almost certainly run up by her mother, but she wore it as if she were a young duchess.
Ronnie’s choice of a bride seemed more understandable. I started to feel less uneasy.
Peter and Iris arrived soon, and so did Bill. Although he knew Ronnie liked his guests to dress, my son was wearing a gray-and-white-check sport coat and slacks, proclaiming, presumably, his new Bohemianism, but his manners were impeccable. To me, who knew him so well, they were almost insultingly perfect. He said all the right things to Ronnie, acknowledged his new godmother and her family with elaborate courtesy, and then bowed out of the picture, sitting down, very young, blond, and scrubbed, next to his aunt Iris to whom he was devoted.
Dinner was a success, due largely to Ronnie, who was dazzlingly happy, and to Iris, one of the few really good actresses I know who is equally fascinating off stage. Almost immediately afterward, the reading of the play was announced.
While Basil Leighton went upstairs to get his manuscript, Ronnie turned to his wife and said, “My dearest, your father has vetoed the younger generation at this reading. Why don’t you take your godson and entertain him in the library? Get to know Bill Duluth, and you will be on your way to understanding that alarming phenomenon, the Young American Male.”
Jean flushed. So, unexpectedly, did Bill. But they both got up and left the room. Basil arrived soon afterward with the manuscript. Ronnie gave a little briefing speech, and the play reading began.
Oddly enough, it was the Honorable Phyllis Brent rather than Mrs. Leighton who sat herself possessively at Basil Leighton’s side. Whatever her anomalous position in the household, it seemed the established fact that it was she and not Mrs. Leighton who was the Genius’s Muse. Mrs. Leighton, looking a little lost, as if she longed for her knitting, chose a chair in a corner.
The play was called Death’s Dateless Night. Quotations from Shakespeare as titles always annoy me as being, if nothing worse, presumptuous. But, although Ronnie’s enthusiasms and mine almost always differed, I was prepared to like the play. For some time, as Basil Leighton’s high, pedagoguish voice read on, I remained in uneasy doubt, then my doubt turned to perplexity, then I was quite at sea.
The plot, if there was one, concerned a group of people in an English country house who talked interminably about their own rather rarefied depressions and, in the middle of act two, began to realize that they were all dead. It was an Outward Bound idea, decorated with elaborate rhetoric and a defiant poetic obscurity. It might have been a work of considerable literary merit. I was no judge on a first hearing. But certainly it was hopeless for a commercial Broadway production. It was interminable, too. By the time Basil had finished reading, it was after one.
Ronnie, for all his enthusiasm, had flawless manners. He didn’t put Peter or Iris or me on the spot. He brought us all drinks and talked himself with rapid delight, discussing various points with Basil and drawing Phyllis Brent, who was fanatically admiring, into a conversation which, on the surface, made it seem as if the reading had been a triumph. Peter and Iris ventured a few unconvincing words of praise, but Ronnie stopped them long before there was any awkwardness.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want any of you to make a snap judgment. It’s not an ordinary script. I want you to think about it. That’s all. We’ll get together in a couple of days.”
From then on, deftly, he veered the conversation to something else. Soon it was time to leave. I went off to the library to find Bill.
The door was shut, but, since Ro
nnie’s house was almost like home to me, it never occurred to me to knock. I opened the door and went in. Bill and Jean Sheldon were sitting at the far end of the room on a long couch. Jean had her legs tucked up under her. They were both in profile to me. They were looking straight into each other’s eyes.
There was nothing clandestine, nothing even remotely guilty about their pose. Their hands, for example, weren’t even within a yard of each other. But their concentration and the very set position of their young bodies were unusual enough to charge the whole big, rather bleak room with a kind of charmed intimacy that was somehow shocking.
I said, far louder than necessary, “Hey, Bill, time to go.”
To my astonishment and dismay, neither of them moved. They just hadn’t heard me.
“Bill,” I called again.
Then both of them, very slowly, turned so that they were facing me. I say “facing me” rather than “looking at me” because I am sure that, for several moments at least, they were not even seeing me at all.
And their faces were terrible to me because they were enraptured. That was the only word for it. Their eyes were shining. Their lips were half parted. It was how Romeo and Juliet must have looked after their first meeting at the Capulets’ ball.
I remember my feeling of hopelessness and doom. I’d never seen young love so naked, so completely innocent of shame or embarrassment. And I thought: There’s nothing worse than this that could happen.
All this, of course, lasted only a few seconds. Before I could say anything more, Ronnie came in behind me. He put his hand on my arm.
“Time to get our children up to their respective nurseries, old boy.”
I remember thinking: My God, all’s lost now. But Bill and Jean had more or less recovered themselves. At least Bill had the self-control to get up and come toward us.
“Good night, Ronnie. A fine party. It’s good to have you back.”
From Ronnie’s friendly smile I was sure he had noticed nothing. Bill went with me out into the hall where Peter and Iris were waiting. We all left together. Peter and Iris invited us back to their place for a nightcap. I refused. So did Bill.
As they got into their car, Iris said, “My God, Jake, what a script!” She turned to her husband. “Peter, darling, did it make any sense to you? You’re the clever one; you understand highbrow plays.”
“I suspect, my dear, that it’s the biggest bluff since the invention of falsies.” My brother shrugged at me. “You and Ronnie can publish it if you want to as a great work of art, but doesn’t he have enough sense to know there isn’t a producer on Broadway who’d give it houseroom in his scrap-basket?”
“Ronnie gets carried away,” I said.
“Straight up into the wide blue yonder this time,” said Iris. “I suppose it’s because he married the daughter. Jake, dear, you’ll have to cope with him. I couldn’t face it, neither could Peter. Tell him we’re terribly impressed and all that, but—really! Oh, dear, can’t anyone write a good straight-forward play with a great fat part for a lovely, aging actress? What strange people! That Phyllis—who on earth is she? The wife seems like a charming little girl, though. But why so young, Jake? I didn’t think Ronnie was of that ilk.”
“Who knows of what ilk who is?” I said.
“Well, you’ve got something there. Jake, dear, you’re sure you won’t come for a drink?”
“I guess not, thanks. I’m all in.”
“Who wouldn’t be, after that script? Well, good night, sweetie, see you soon. Good night, Bill, darling. Why don’t you ever come and see us, you little monster?”
Peter and Iris drove off. I was left standing on the sidewalk with Bill. His hands were in his pants pockets. His blond hair gleamed in the light from Ronnie’s hall fanlight. I’d never felt more at a loss, more tongue-tied with him.
I said, “About Rome, Bill. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”
“What, Pop?”
“About Rome.” Almost before I realized what I was doing, I said, “I guess it’ll be all right for you to go, but I’ll call you soon.”
“Rome? Oh, yes, sure. Okay. Well, good night, Pop.”
He didn’t look back at Ronnie’s house. He didn’t look at me. He just went off down the street like a sleepwalker.
When I got home to bed, I didn’t sleep for a long time, thinking about what I had seen in Ronnie’s library, trying to make myself believe that I had exaggerated its importance and worrying in general about my failure as a father. Inevitably, that led to my old and dreaded night pursuit of considering my failure as a husband.
For months I had been relatively free of Felicia, but that night the waking nightmare returned in full force. As always, it began with the image of my wife sitting on the window sill, smoking the cigarette. One of the witnesses at the police precinct house had said: She seemed quite calm, as if she were sitting in a beach chair at the shore, enjoying the sun. Then she flicked the cigarette away, stood up, still quite calm, straightened her skirt, and jumped. Of all the testimony, that was the part which haunted me. And, as once again I saw her in my mind, standing up, straightening her skirt and plunging off the sill, the same corroding questions came rushing back. Why? What had gone wrong? How had I managed to fail her without even glimpsing the fact that anything had been wrong between us?
And there, stretched out like a map, were the seventeen years of our married life. Somewhere, if only I could find it, there must be a clue. But in countless nights I had never been able to track it down.
For, from the beginning, our romance had seemed such a simple, such an idyllic affair. I knew it had been so for me. I had fallen in love with Felicia the first day I saw her. I had only been working for Ronnie a few months and he had taken me back to Fifty-Eighth Street for drinks. Felicia had been there with Angie. They had both belonged to some literary club and Felicia had dropped in to discuss something or other. I had thought her the loveliest and the most gentle girl I had ever met.
She was three years older than I and was living alone in New York. Her parents had died leaving her a bit of money. At twenty-two, full of the idea that a man should support his woman, the money had intimidated me. But, since we were both, it seemed, so obviously in love, the money issue somehow faded out of the picture. We were married in a month, and a year later Bill was born.
We were neither of us particularly sociable and settled down to a life of almost complete self-sufficiency. We saw no more even of Ronnie and Angie than was necessary, and Peter and Iris found us immeasurably dull. Peter always called us the “indissolubly weds.” And that’s what I thought we were.
Felicia, of course, had never been a demonstrative person. Her quietness, her refusal, in spite of her beauty and intelligence, to push herself forward, was taken by some people for coldness. But to me her unassuming strength was the rock on which our relationship was founded. I not only loved her; I respected what had seemed to me her immense integrity. So did Bill. Ever since he was a baby, he had worshiped her. There had never been a quarrel; never even a misunderstanding. And then, after seventeen years, the jump.
The day was long past when I used to tell myself that something terrible must have happened to her from outside, something so bad that even she couldn’t face it. For I knew, as surely as I knew anything, that if something from outside had happened she would have confided in me. She knew there was nothing I wouldn’t understand and want to share. But she hadn’t confided in me. She hadn’t even left me a note. She had killed herself without bothering to let me know why—and that could only mean that the failure had been in me.
Had I somehow expected too much of her strength? Had I somehow crushed her under the weight of my love and trust? As I lay in bed, those same old barren questions challenged each other.
I turned on the light and lit a cigarette. It didn’t help. All that happened was that I found myself worrying again about Bill. If Felicia had been alive, if the jump had never happened, Felicia would have known how to handle this potenti
al catastrophe between Bill and Ronnie’s wife. If Felicia had been alive and Bill had not lost his bearings, he could probably have solved the situation himself.
But now it was up to me—and what was I going to do? Send Bill off to Rome? Wasn’t that the safest way? But, if I let him go to Rome, that meant I would lose him for good and I hadn’t yet learned to love anyone else.
Maybe it’ll be all right, I told myself, and an exhausted desire to avoid any decision stole insidiously through me. After all, nothing had actually happened. If I did nothing—If I waited awhile—
I turned out the light and, on this ignoble level, finally went to sleep.
About the Author
Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick, and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912–1987), Richard Wilson Webb (1901–1966), Martha Mott Kelley (1906–2005), and Mary Louise White Aswell (1902–1984) wrote detective fiction. Most of the stories were written together by Webb and Wheeler, or by Wheeler alone. Their best-known creation is amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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