Family Skeletons

by Patrick Quentin

  With a desperately manufactured casualness, I said, “So you know too. I had no idea.”

  That had struck just the right note. Princess Natasha turned back to me, all a-flutter with a mutual sorrow which now could be mutually shared.

  “Oh, the poor, poor things. What a tragedy for them, always to love each other, always to be so sneaky here and there, always to have as a barrier the Peggy, the sad unfortunate Peggy with her bottles of gin and her bottles of whisky. What a beast is this Olsen! What a monster to make from their tragedy his money of the devil.”

  Only part of me was listening then, for something remarkable was happening to me. It was as if all my past were being radically changed. Sheila and Uncle Gene. Ever since I could remember, they had been to me the very symbols of the “civilized” way of life to which it was my duty to aspire. Sheila, the impeccable widowed social arbiter, the faithful family friend! Uncle Gene, the archetype of moral rectitude, the model husband, steadfastly loyal, in spite of every provocation, to a pathetic problem wife! The Denhams, as I had seen them and lived with them, had been an illusion, nothing but an invention of my own.

  The Princess’s hand had settled on my sleeve. Its light pressure made me conscious of her voice again.

  “Oh, Lewis dear, how happy I am now! How fine that all can be spoken plain. But now you see it? Yes? How I must keep from you the truth? You come here, you threaten about this Olsen, you make these crazy statements that he comes for us, to curse at us, to make le chantage for us. What can I say but foolish lies? Can I admit to you, oh no, my friend, it is not for us he comes, it is for Sheila and Eugene?”

  The other hand had come to rest on my sleeve now. She was gazing up at me wistfully, as if the fact that she had been obliged to deceive me, even for the noblest of motives, had caused her inexpressible grief.

  “Of course he comes for the blackmail—that beast of an Olsen. He comes so slimy with the flowers and the smiles. He say, Out I leave from the country. Your good friends make it to toss me out—quick. But you think I go as a little lamb? You like it that I call to the newspapers to tell to them that your Mrs. Potter and your Mr. Denham are in adultery? Oh no, you will give me one thousand dollar, I think.”

  She had me by the hand then and had drawn me down to sit with her on the piano bench. The Princess liked sitting with people on small objects so she could clutch them and pat their knees and be generally cozy.

  “Dear Lewis, give me please a cigarette.”

  I took out my case, lit a cigarette for her and, dropping the case on the piano keys, offered my lighter. Lighting a cigarette for Princess Natasha was always a production.

  “Ah,” she said, puffing smoke. “Ah.” She darted me a melting, sidelong smile. “So think, mon ami. Think how I feel for my poor friends, my dear ones. Such a scandal for them in the newspapers? Mon Dieu! But one thousand dollar! From where do we get a thousand dollar who are poor as the rats of the sewers? Answer me that, I say.”

  She gave a little forlorn shrug and held up her hands for my inspection. For the first time I noticed they were ringless. “You see? Still I had ma bague, ma bague from diamonds and from rubies. How pretty it was, how precious the little heart with its memories of the old times, the good times. But—my dear ones. What of them? So I give my bague and I say to this Olsen, Not a word to the newspapers. Not a word, you hear? And away he goes and c’est ça. Fini. Now all the truth is known.”

  Did I believe it had happened that way? Probably. The Princess loved making the dramatic gesture and such a situation would have given her a splendid opportunity for one. But none of that mattered any more. By now the Prince and Princess had dwindled in interest. They had merely become a means to an end. For, thanks to the Princess, Virginia and I were no longer completely at the mercy of Lieutenant Trant. There was another suspect after all, a far more formidable suspect than Sheila, but surely a far more plausible one too, for Uncle Gene, with the honour (that’s what he would call it) of the Denhams at stake, could have disposed of a whole barrage of blackmailing cocktail pianists without turning a hair. The prospect of confronting him was terrifying. I couldn’t even conceive of myself saying to him the things that would have to be said. But I would do it, of course. Right now before the net could finally close around Virginia, Right now—before I lost my nerve.

  Almost anything in Princess Natasha’s eyes was an excuse for a celebration. Clapping her hands together, she was jumping up from the piano bench.

  “And now, dear Lewis, a little champagne. You think so? Yes, I think so. Champagne. You hear that, Vladimir? I order the downstairs waiter and the champagne.”

  She hurried to the phone.

  “No,” I said. “Thanks, but I’ve got to go.”

  Her hand butterflied off the receiver. “Not for a glass of champagne? Just one. So little. Just to say, We have had our mix-up, but now no mix-up no more?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She pursed up her lips, the little girl who had offered a kiss only to be rejected. “Ah, the Americans. How they rush. All the time. Rush—rush—rush.” She called to the Prince. “Vladimir. The Lewis—he leaves us. You hear?”

  I moved to join her, planning to say good-bye to the Prince. He was asleep. On the television, a very mournful housewife was confiding her very mournful problems to another housewife in colour. But obviously the soap opera had not been effective enough to insulate Prince Vladimir from the painful vulgarity of my intrusion.

  “He sleeps, the poor darling.” Princess Natasha looped her arm through mine and drew me towards the foyer. “It is the American breakfast—the oatmeal, the truite, the omelette aux fines herbes. So heavy the American breakfast.”

  When we were in the foyer, she paused, giving me her most enchantingly conspiratorial smile. “Now, Lewis, you do not tell. This is a promise? To tell poor Sheila or poor Eugene what we do for them? That I give my diamond ring to keep them from scandale? Mon Dieu, if they would know this, my face would become red like the betterave—the beet root.”

  It was then that I remembered I’d left my cigarette case behind. I went back for it past the sleeping Prince Vladimir to the piano. As I picked the case up, something glittering, half hidden beneath the Princess’s gauzy handkerchief, caught my eye. I moved the handkerchief. Suddenly everything about Princess Natasha was different.

  She had made her splendid gesture of friendship, had she? She’d given Olsen her diamond and ruby ring, had she? She had done no such thing. There it was, lying beside the keys, exactly where one would expect a lady of the old school to drop her rings before sitting down to tinkle her Chopin.

  What did that do to her version of the session with Olsen? What indeed? For a moment my thoughts were skittering in many directions, then the urgency of Uncle Gene overtook me. Not that Princess Natasha was far less ingenuous than I had suspected. Leave it there at the moment. Uncle Gene …!

  “Oh, Lewis.” The Princess was pattering back into the living-room. Was it my imagination or did her voice sound false, almost shrill with anxiety? “Lewis, what is it you do?”

  I held up the cigarette case. “Just getting my case. I’m always dropping it some place.”

  “Oh dear.” Her smile was as prettily rueful as it had ever been. “And I think, the Lewis changes his mind. The Lewis stays after all for the glass of champagne. Oh, quel dommage!”

  Downstairs in the lobby of the Pierre, I called Uncle Gene at the bank. Calling Uncle Gene, of course, didn’t involve getting Uncle Gene himself or even his secretary. His secretary’s secretary told me to hold for his secretary, and when I got Miss Coppleby, whose voice always managed to remind me that I was only an adopted Denham, I was told to hold again.

  After at least a minute of silence suggesting the hush of holy ground at the other end of the wire, Miss Coppleby’s voice came back.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Denham, but I’m afraid he’s quite tied up. And there’s a lunch date with Mrs. Denham on the pad for twelve forty-five.”


  “But it’s very important,” I said.

  “Oh, I see,” said Miss Coppleby, as if it were beyond the stretch of her imagination to concede that anything not connected with the highest finance could be important. “Oh dear. In that case, if you were to come around now, if you’re prepared to wait, that is, you might, you just might, be lucky enough to catch him.”

  Through the years I had become so used to condescension from Miss Coppleby that it was only then I realised how much it annoyed me. That was a good beginning for a clash which was going to need every particle of iconoclasm I could muster. As I said, “All right,” and hung up, I found myself thinking of Miss Coppleby’s plump, pussycat face at a quite imaginary breakfast table where she opened her newspaper and read: Eugene Denham arrested for murder of blackmailer. It put me into so good a mood that I almost called Virginia, but I controlled myself. To raise her hopes now when hope was still so tentative would be as damaging to her morale as to have called about Trant and the button.

  I got a taxi on Madison Avenue and gave the address in Wall Street. We passed Constance Spry and that seemed an omen. Suddenly—is that what happens when your capacity for enduring disaster has been taxed too far?—I felt almost light-hearted. Uncle Gene no longer seemed the unassailable Jehovah of my childhood. He was just a person like anyone else. No, not just a person. More, much more than that. Once I had defeated him, he would become our deliverer, because he could have killed Olsen just as he could with the ruthlessness for which he was celebrated, have used Virginia as his scapegoat. Why not?

  It seemed as clear to me now as a floor plan on my drawing board. It went back to Antigua after all. Fifteen months ago. Sheila had established that. No Beth, of course. Once and for all my neurotic fantasies about Beth could be forgotten. But fifteen months ago in St. John, Olsen had found out about Sheila and Uncle Gene. First he had tried to blackmail Sheila. She had refused to pay him, with “disastrous results”. Of course! The disastrous results! Olsen had gone to Uncle Gene and blackmailed him as well. And Uncle Gene—hit in his most vulnerable spot, his fear of scandal—had started to pay. And he’d gone on paying until … until … what? Until, of course, fate or rather I had given him the opportunity he had been waiting for. Uncle Gene, who had at his disposal the bank’s international web of information service which equalled if not surpassed that of the police, could easly have unearthed the marriage in Paris. Once that was done, he had found his ideal cover. And not only that. Uncle Gene, being Uncle Gene, would have realised a secondary benefit. Two birds, as it were. Not only had he found in Virginia his ideal cover, he could also dispose at the same time of that most unwelcome addition to the Denham clan—the Byword of Rome.

  We were passing through lower Fifth Avenue now. That was it. Why not? Uncle Gene could have got one of the keys Beth had spread around for dog-sitters. It had been Uncle Gene who had given her the gun. Hadn’t it also been Uncle Gene who had made a point that morning not only of telling Trant about the gun but of drawing his attention to Virginia’s “notorious” reputation in Europe as well?

  Of course! This could be a far stronger case than the case against Sheila, far stronger even than Trant’s case against Virginia. Without any doubt …

  Suddenly it all collapsed. Ray Callender! Callender had called Olsen’s bluff. That had to be true, didn’t it? There was not only his word, there was the Princess’s corroborative evidence of Olsen’s admitting to her that he had to get out of the country at once. Sheila had neutralised Olsen. He had no longer been a threat. Then why wouldn’t she have called Uncle Gene and let him know? Why wouldn’t Uncle Gene have realised that there was no reason in the world any more for Olsen to be murdered at all?

  Doubts tumbled through me and with them all my built-in awe of Uncle Gene came landsliding back. Was I mad? Had my desperate anxiety for Virginia driven me quite out of my wits? Sitting here? In this taxi? Driving it to the bank to accuse Uncle Gene of murder?

  It was all I could do to restrain myself from asking the cabbie to stop. When I reached the towering skyscraper building which currently housed the bank’s headquarters (they seemed to build a new one every year), I was little Lew Denham again, fourteen years old, in the black mourning suit for my parents, fidgeting in the great Denham library while Uncle Gene’s leonine brows bushed at me from over his desk.

  “Now, my boy, I know you will be happy with us, but to be happy with us you must learn to be one of us.”

  An elevator took me to the fortieth floor. On the theory that the higher up you are the higher up you’re put, Uncle Gene was installed in the penthouse. All the trivia of vaults and grilles and tellers and homeowners’ loans were left way, way below. There was nothing here to suggest anything so vulgar as the public. The atmosphere, with Chippendale instead of leather chairs and Renoirs instead of military prints, was identical to the atmosphere of the Club on Fifth Avenue—except, of course, that there were women, female underlings whose priestess-like effect was slightly more decorative than the decrepit old waiters at the other club.

  A receptionist passed me on to an anonymous girl who took me to Miss Coppleby’s secretary who took me to Miss Coppleby, who, swelling imposingly through a black cashmere sweater, sat at her desk beneath a Dufy, no less.

  “Oh yes. Mr. Lewis Denham, isn’t it?”

  She had, after all, only known me for fifteen years.

  I said, “When will he be free?”

  Miss Coppleby said, “Oh, that. That, I’m afraid I couldn’t say.”

  But she actually brought herself to move her fat butt off her swivel chair and precede me to a door, which she opened.

  “This is the best we can do.” Who were “we”? Miss Coppleby and her big fat butt? “I will try to let Mr. Denham know you are here.”

  She closed the door behind me with the finality of a jailer slamming shut forever the door of an oubliette on a minor but irritating revolutionary.

  The waiting room was Japanese. It went with a formal Japanese garden that stretched on the roof outside. It was new to me, but then in Uncle Gene’s bank a few months was more than enough to have obsolescence set in. Probably they had acquired an affiliate in Japan who had flown them a garden as a gesture.

  Japanese décor is supposed to bring serenity. It didn’t work that way for me. The couch on which I sat was much too low, it pressed my knees up almost to eye-level. The walls, papered with what seemed to be pages from ancient and doubtless holy oriental books, rejected me coolly. The nervousness which had started in the taxi accelerated its invasion of me. How was I going to begin? When Uncle Gene came through that door—abstractedly, turning back to finalise some instruction to Miss Coppleby—what was I going to say? “Look, Uncle …” or “Listen, Uncle Gene, let’s get one thing straight. If you think you can frame my wife …”?

  The ridiculousness of those phrases turned my anger against myself. Goddamnit, I was an adult, wasn’t I? I was thirty-two years old. Just because Uncle Gene had adopted me and educated me and set me up in my profession, that didn’t mean he owned me, did it? Hadn’t I been indicating my gratitude for years? Hadn’t I almost slavishly tried to make myself do what he’d wanted me to do? Hadn’t I even married Beth?

  I got up from the couch. That helped. The door opened and I swung around to face it like a prizefighter reacting to the clang of a bell.

  Aunt Peggy walked into the room. Or rather, I suppose one could call it walking. At any rate, she disengaged her elbow from the supporting hand of an invisible Miss Coppleby, saying, “This will be all, thank you, Miss er …” Carefully closing the door behind her, she swayed a few steps into the room, saw me, blinked and stopped.

  “Well,” she said. “Well, well, well.”

  I had been warned of her lunch date with Uncle Gene. It didn’t surprise me to see her, but it did surprise me to see her drunk because it was only on thoroughly screened occasions that Uncle Gene risked a downtown lunch engagement. She was wearing her mink and a rather unexpected pink bowler hat which
had tilted to an angle which surely was not intentional. The embarrassment which I always felt in her presence when she was drunk was there, but it was much more acute than usual because of what I now knew about Uncle Gene and Sheila. With a tautening of anxiety, I thought: What the hell am I going to do with this complication?

  She hadn’t blinked because she’d seen me, it seemed. She had just blinked, for now, ignoring me completely, she started to manœuvre herself on the high-heeled, bulged-over shoes towards a black silk hassock. She sat down on it. Actually she didn’t, because she missed it and sat down instead upon the rush carpeting. It didn’t appear to bother her at all. She merely remained there, smiling in front of her, until I offered an arm and helped her to her feet.

  I must have registered with her then because she said, “That’s a very low chair, Lewis.”

  “It’s a Japanese hassock,” I said.

  “That is as may be, but that chair is a very low chair.”

  The drunkenness was quite farcical, quite unlike her normal, slow-motion muzziness. She must have stopped the limousine on her way and belted down a trio of medicinal martinis. I looked wildly around for any object of furniture into which she could suitably be manipulated. There was a wicker chair by the window. I settled her into it. She started to pull off her gloves. It was an immensely complicated undertaking, involving infinite little tugs at the finger tips.

  Finally she gave it up and, darting me a look of the fiercest malice, she said, “I would have said that my sense of colour was impeccable. Quite impeccable.”

  The look was so ferociously demanding that it could not be ignored.

  I said, “Of course it is, Aunt Peggy.”

  She leaned towards me, clinging to one of the chair arms for balance. “Adelaide Himmelford,” she said very clearly and emphatically, “is an extremely common woman. Miss Draper’s Academy? Perhaps. A classmate? Perhaps. I am willing to grant you that. But to marry a dentist and in Newark to boot merely proves what I was always totally aware and conscious of—that she was a person of no standing whatsoever, socially speaking, financially speaking, or spiritually speaking.”