"Sure you did! Janey says you did and so does Eddie and Duncan and—and Gracie and Petey and everybody I know!" "Good lord, really? Why, that's terrible!"
Trixie giggled. "You're kidding me!"
"No, I'm not kidding you," Vic said seriously, realizing that he had often kidded her in this manner, however. "Now, how do your little friends know this?"
"They heard it."
"From whom?"
"From—their mothers and daddies."
"Who? All of them?"
"Yes," Trixie said, looking at him the way she did on those rare occasions when she told lies, because she didn't believe what she was saying and wasn't at all sure that he would.
"I don't believe it," Vic said."Some of them. Then you kids pass it all around." You shouldn't do that, he wanted to say, but he knew that Trixie wouldn't obey, and he didn't want to sound, either to her or to himself, frightened enough to admonish her about the story.
"They all ask me to tell them how you did it," Trixie said.
Vic leaned over and turned off the water, which was nearly up to Trixie's shoulders. "But I didn't do it, darling. If I'd done it I'd be put in prison. Don't you know that? Don't you know that killing somebody is punishable by death?" He spoke in a whisper, both to impress her and because Melinda might have been able to hear them from the hall, now that the water was turned off.
Trixie stared at him with serious eyes for a moment, then her eyes slurred off, very like Melinda's, in the direction of her sunken diver. She didn't want to believe that he hadn't done it. In that little blond head was no moral standard whatsoever, at least not about a matter as big as murder. She wouldn't so much as steal a piece of chalk from school, Vic knew, but murder was something he saw it or heard of it in the comic books every day, saw it on television at Janey's house, and it was something exciting and even heroic when the good cowboys did it in westerns. She wanted him to be a hero, a good guy, somebody who wasn't afraid. And he had just cut himself down by several inches, he realized.
Trixie lifted her head. "I still think you drowned him. You're just telling me you didn't," she said.
The next afternoon, Vic and Trixie bought a male boxer puppy for $75 from the kennel on the East Lyme road. The puppy had just had his ears clipped, and they were fastened together with a bandage and a piece of adhesive tape that stood up a little above his head. His pedigree name was Roger-of-the-Woods. It pleased Vic very much that Trixie had singled Roger out from the other pups mainly because of the lugubrious expression on his small, monkeylike face, and because of his bandage. At the kennel, he had bumped his ears against something twice, yelped, and his face had looked sadder than ever. Trixie rode home with the puppy in her lap and her arm around his neck, happier than Vic had ever seen her at any Christmas.
Melinda stared at the dog and might have made an unpleasant remark if she had not seen that Trixie was so delighted with him. Vic found a big cardboard box in the kitchen that would do for a bed, cut it down to ten inches deep and cut a door in one side for the puppy to walk through. Then he put a couple of Trixie's baby coverlets in the bottom and set the box in Trixie's room.
Vic had bought packages of dog biscuits and baby cereal and cans of a certain kind of dog food prescribed by the kennel man. The puppy had a good appetite, and after he had eaten that evening he wagged his tail and his expression seemed a little more cheerful. He also played with a rubber ball that Trixie rolled around on the floor for him.
"The house is beginning to take on some life," Vic remarked to Melinda, but there was no answer.
Chapter 18
Vic and Melinda went to another dance at the club in November, the "Leaf Night" dance that yearly celebrated autumn in Little Wesley. Vic had not wanted to go when the club's invitation had arrived, but this attitude had lasted hardly more than fifteen seconds. It was the right thing to do to go, and Vic did usually try to do the right thing in the community. His first negative reaction to the club announcement had been caused by two or three factors, he thought: One was that the relationship between him and Melinda had been so much better at the time of the Fourth of July dance and he did not want to contrast the present with that happier period four months ago. Secondly, he was deep in the perusal of a manuscript in Italian—or rather a Sicilian dialect—which he was devoting all his evenings to and from which he did not wish to be distracted. Thirdly, there was the problem of persuading Melinda to go. She didn't want to go, though she wanted him to go. She wanted to be the crushed, dispirited wife who sat at home and wept, perhaps. Mainly she wanted to show herself—by not showing herself—as an enemy of her husband and not his helpmeet. But with only a couple of matters pointed out to her, Vic got her to go. A fourth minor annoyance, but one that he really couldn't complain about, was that he had to have his evening suit taken in at the waist of both trousers and jacket.
The big round ballroom of the club was decorated with autumn leaves of all kinds and colors, the chandeliers studded richly with pinecones, and here and there in the reddish-brown and yellow leaves hung a baby pumpkin. Once he was there, commencing his usual solitary patrol of the sidelines, Vic began to enjoy himself. He supposed he had momentarily, at home, doubted his own aplomb. He really hadn't known how much to believe of what Trixie had told him. Now he found it very interesting to stroll by or to stand near the same groups of people that he had seen in July. There was Mrs. Podnansky, warmer and friendlier than ever. The MacPhersons—surely no change in them: Mac looked pink-eyed drunk at ten o'clock, though he was going to hold it well all evening probably; and as for his wife, if she betrayed any suspicion of Vic by the long curious look she gave him as she greeted him, it seemed to be canceled out by her remark that he had certainly trimmed down.
"Did you go on a diet?" she asked, with admiration. "I wish you'd tell me about it."
And just for the fun of it, Vic stood with them awhile, telling them about a diet that he made up as he talked. Hamburger and grapefruit, nothing else. The hamburger could be varied with onions or not. But nothing else. "The idea is to get so tired of hamburger and grapefruit that you don't even eat those," Vic said, smiling. "That finally happens."
Mrs. MacPherson was very interested indeed, though Vic knew as surely as he was standing there that she would never lose an inch from her sturdy waistline. And if she happened to mention the diet to Melinda, and Melinda knew nothing about it, that was as usual for Melinda, who, everybody knew, neither cared nor was aware of what her husband did or ate.
Everybody was cordial, and Vic felt that his own manner was after all just about as cheerful as it had been in July. He asked Mary Meller to dance with him not once but twice. Then he danced with Evelyn Cowan. He did not ask Melinda to dance because he did not want to dance with her. He was concerned, however, with whether she had a fairly good time or not. He did not want her to be miserable. The Mellers were kind enough to talk with her for a while, he noticed, and then she danced with a man Vic had never seen before. Vic supposed she would get along, even though most of their friends—including the MacPhersons, he saw—certainly were not smiling upon her tonight. Vic had a drink with Horace at the long curved bar at the side of the room, and he told Horace about the Italian manuscript he had received. It was the diary of a semi-illiterate grandmother, who had come to America with her husband, from Sicily, at the age of twenty-six. Vic thought of cleaning up the manuscript just enough to make it intelligible, cutting it somewhat, and printing it. It covered the Coolidge administration in a most fantastic way, and the whole text, which related mostly to the upbringing of three boys and two girls was interpolated with extremely funny comments on politics and current sports heroes such as Primo Carnera. One of her sons joined the police force, another went back to Italy, a third became a bookie for the illegal numbers games, one of the daughters went through college and married, and the other married and went with her engineer husband to live in South America. The woman's Impressions of South America, from her home on Carmine Street, Manhattan, were alte
rnately funny and hair-raising. Vic made Horace laugh loudly.
"Isn't this a new departure for you?" Horace asked.
Then Vic looked and saw Melinda standing with Ralph Gosden and the man she had danced with a couple of times this evening. "Yes," Vic said. "But it's time I had one. The married daughter in South America sent me the manuscript. It's an absolute fluke, you see. She said she read about the Greenspur Press in some South American publication and learned that I printed things in other languages besides English, so she was sending me her mother's diary, she said, in case I might be interested. It was a charming letter. Very modest and very hopeful at the same time. I'm thinking of printing the book half in Italian and half in English, as I did Xenophon. So 'few' people would be able to understand this dialect."
"How do you manage to read it? Do you know Italian that well?" Horace asked.
"No, but I can read it reasonably well with a dictionary, and I happen to have a dictionary of Italian dialects at home. Picked it up in New York secondhand years ago, God knows why, but now it comes in handy. I can make out nearly everything. The woman's handwriting is very clear, thank God."
Horace shook his head. "The man of many parts."
Looking toward Melinda, Vic caught the eye of the heavyset man she had been dancing with, who was just then staring at him. Even from far across the room Vic saw that the man's stare was naïvely curious. Perhaps Melinda had just been pointing him out to the man. Ralph was standing and talking to Melinda, his hands crossed in front of him, his limber body making a slight arc. Insubstantiality personified. Mr. Gosden was not looking his way. Surely most of the people in the room knew that Ralph had been Melinda's lover, Vic thought. Now Ralph was laughing. He was behaving quite bravely tonight. Then Vic saw the stocky man spread his arms in an invitation to Melinda to dance, and they moved gracefully onto the floor. And Ralph Gosden watched them, or perhaps watched only Melinda, with his old fatuous smile. Vic saw that Horace had followed his eyes and he looked down at his drink again.
"Is that Ralph Gosden?" Horace asked.
"Yes. Dear old Ralph," Vic said.
Horace began to talk about the lobotomized brain of an epileptic that had come into his laboratory for analysis, about the irregularity of the lesions because during the operation, which had been under a local anesthetic, the patient had moved. Horace was particularly interested in brain injury, brain surgery, and brain diseases, and so was Vic. It had always been their favorite subject of discussion. They were still talking about the behavior report of the frontal lobotomy case, when Melinda walked up with the man she had been dancing with.
"Vic," she said, "I'd like you to meet Mr. Anthony Cameron. Mr. Cameron, my husband."
Mr. Cameron stuck out a big hand. "How do you do?" "How do you do?" Vic said, shaking his hand.
"And Mr. Meller?"
Horace and Mr. Cameron also exchanged a "How do you do?"
"Mr. Cameron's a contractor. He's up here to look for some land to build a house on. I thought you might like to talk to him," Melinda said, with a faint singsong in her delivery that told Vic this was not the main reason she had introduced Mr. Cameron to I hem.
Mr. Cameron had staring, pale-blue eyes whose smallness contrasted with the bulk of the rest of him. He was not very tall and his head looked square and huge, as if it were made of something other than the usual flesh and bone. When he paused to listen to someone else speak, his mouth hung a little open. Horace was telling him about the pocket of land with a hill on it between northern Little Wesley and the bulge of the midtown section. The hill had a view of Bear Lake, Horace said.
"I've looked at it and it's not high enough," Mr. Cameron said, smiling at Melinda afterwards as if he had uttered a bon mot.
"There's not much high land around here unless you actually take to the mountains," Vic said.
"Well, we may do that!" Mr. Cameron rubbed his heavy hands together. His wavy, dark-brown hair looked greasy and as if it smelled unpleasantly sweet.
Then they got into the fishing possibilities of the region. Mr. Cameron said he was a great fisherman and boasted of always coming home with a full creel. Vic discovered he had never heard of a quite commonplace fly for brook fishing. Still, he demonstrated his technique with a couple of full swings of his arms. Horace was beginning to eye him with distaste.
"Can I offer you a drink?" Vic asked.
"No, no, thanks. Never touch it!" Mr. Cameron said in the loud voice of the outdoor man, beaming. He had small regular teeth, each one like the other. "Well, this is a great party tonight, isn't it?" He looked at Melinda. "Want to dance again?"
"Delighted," Melinda said, lifting her arms.
"So long, Mr. Van Allen, Mr. Meller," Cameron said as he danced away. "Nice to meet you."
"So long," Vic said. Then he exchanged a look with Horace, but each of them was a little too polite to smile or make any comment.
He and Horace talked about something else.
Ralph Gosden did not dance with Melinda all the evening, and Mr. Cameron claimed most of Melinda's dances. Melinda became rather high around two in the morning and began dancing more or less by herself, waving the very long, bright green scarf that in the earlier part of the evening she had worn around her shoulders as a stole. Her dress was of pink satin—really an old dress, and he thought she had chosen it for this evening with a kind of martyrdom in mind—and with the green scarf it suggested the colors of a dainty, virginal apple blossom, though her face above the dress looked neither dainty nor virginal. Her hair had a wild charm, Vic supposed, streaked with lighter blond strands from the summer sun, and waving loose as she moved. It would appeal to a man like Cameron, and so would her strong, supple body and her face that had lost much of its makeup now and was just a slightly drunken, down-to-earth, happy-looking face. At least Mr. Cameron would think it happy. Vic could see the defiance in her dancing, in the wildly waving scarf which twice circled another couple around the necks. It was a defiance of everybody in the room. First, she had wanted to show herself to the community as a martyr, and in no time at all she had reversed to a pretense of devil-may-care revelry, equally determined to show everybody that she was having a better time than anybody else. Vic sighed, pondering the oscillations of Melinda's mind.
The next afternoon, while Vic was in the garage cleaning his snail aquaria, Mr. Cameron walked up in shirt sleeves.
"Anybody home?" Mr. Cameron asked cheerfully.
Vic was a bit startled, not having heard a car arrive. "Well, I am," he said. "My wife's still asleep, I think."
"Oh," said Mr. Cameron. "Well, I was just passing by your road, and your wife said any time I was in the neighborhood to drop in. So here I am!"
Vic didn't know what to say for a moment.
"What've you got there?"
"Snails," Vic said, wondering if Melinda were possibly awake o take the man off his hands. "Just a minute. I'll see if my wife's lip." Vic went into the house from the garage.
Melinda's door was still closed.
"Melinda?" he called. Then he knocked firmly. When there was still no answer, he opened the door. "Melinda."
She was lying on her side with her back to him. She slowly straightened and turned, with one stretching movement, like an animal.
"You've a gentleman caller," Vic said.
She jerked her head up from the pillow. "Who?"
"Mr. Cameron, I believe it is? I wish you'd come out and take care of him. Or ask him in. He's outside."
Melinda frowned, reaching for her slippers. "Why don't you ask him in?"
"I don't 'want' to ask him in," Vic said, and Melinda glanced at him, surprised but unconcerned. He went out to Mr. Cameron, who was bouncing on his heels in the middle of the driveway, whistling, and said, "My wife'll be out in a minute or so. Would you like to wait in the living room?"
"Oh, no. I'll take the air. Is that where you live?" he asked, nodding toward the projecting wing off the far side of the garage.
"Yes," Vic said, pull
ing the corners of his mouth into a smile. He went back to his snail cleaning. It was an unattractive aspect of snail raising, cleaning their mess off the glass sides of the tank with a razor blade, and he loathed it when Mr. Cameron strolled over to watch him, still whistling. To Vic's surprise, he was whistling part of a Mozart concerto.
"Where'd you get all those?" he asked.
"Oh—most of them were born here. Hatched."
"How do they breed? In the water?"
"No, they lay eggs. In the ground." Vic was washing the inside of a tank with a rag and soap and water. Delicately, he detached a young snail that had crawled up on the part of the glass he was washing, and set it down on the earth inside the tank.
"Look like they'd be good to eat," Mr. Cameron remarked. "Oh, they are. Delicious."
"Reminds me of New Orleans. Ever been to New Orleans?"
"Yes," Vic said, with finality. He began on another tank, first detaching with his hands or the razor blade the snails of all sizes that were sleeping on the sides of the glass. He looked over at Mr. Cameron and said, "I wish you wouldn't take the screen off, if you don't mind. They crawl out very easily.'
Mr. Cameron straightened up and slid the screen top back with a carelessness that made Vic wince, because he felt sure that a baby snail or two must have been crushed. Mr. Cameron probably hadn't even seen the tiny baby snails. His eyes didn't focus that small. He was coming toward Vic in an aimless way with his affable little smile when Melinda opened the door from the hall, and he turned to her.
"Hello, Tony! Good afternoon! How nice of you to stop by!" "Hope you folks don't mind," he said, walking slowly toward her. "I was just cycling around, thought I'd drop in."
"Drop in here and have a drink!" Melinda said gaily, opening the door wider.
"I'll have a beer, if you got it."
Mr. Cameron stayed for brunch at about four o'clock, and then for dinner at nine, both of which meals Vic prepared almost single-handed. He drank nine cans of beer. At six o'clock, when Vic had returned to the living room from his own room to get some of the Sunday paper, Cameron had been sitting with Melinda on the sofa, bellowing out a story about how he acquired his name.
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