The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “I look like him, but I don’t think like him,” I told her.

  She tipped the wine bottle upside down in the bucket. “You want the world,” she said. “Go get it, honey.”

  “That’s what my father doesn’t understand.”

  “He’s a good man,” she answered. She stood up slowly. “And I think Clayton would want me to get you to your hotel.”

  All the fenders of her Mercedes were crushed. She said, “When I’ve had a few drinks, I need a strong car between me and the rest of the cockeyed world.”

  The big car bounced over the moon-white street. “You know what, Buddy? Hugh Doyle gave me my first Mercedes, one morning in Paris. At breakfast. He held the keys out in his hand like a damn daffodil he’d picked in the yard. He gave me this goddamn thing.” She waved her finger with its huge diamond. “This damn thing was tied to my big toe one Christmas morning!” And she smiled up at the stars as if Hugh Doyle were up there tying diamonds on them. “He had a beautiful grin, Buddy, but he was a son of a bitch.”

  The car bumped to a stop on the curb outside my little hotel. “Don’t miss your train tomorrow,” she said. “And you listen to me, don’t go back home; go on to Rome.”

  “I’m not sure I have time.”

  She looked at me. “Take time. Just take it. Don’t get scared, honey.”

  Then she put her hand in my jacket pocket and the moon came around her hair, and my heart panicked crazily, thudding against my shirt, thinking she might kiss me. But her hand went away, and all she said was, “Say hi to Clayton when you get home, all right? Even losing his legs and all, your daddy’s lucky, you know that?”

  I said, “I don’t see how.”

  “Oh, I didn’t either till I was a lot older than you. And had my damn in-laws trying to throw me into the gas chamber. Go to bed. So long, Red Clay.”

  Her silver car floated away. In my pocket, I found a large wad of French money, enough to take me to Rome, and a little ribboned box, clearly a gift she had decided not to give the angry young man in the beautiful suit who’d arrived too late. On black velvet lay a man’s wristwatch, reddish gold.

  It’s an extremely handsome watch, and it still tells me the time.

  I only went home to Thermopylae for the funerals. It was the worst of the August dog days when Papa died in the hospital bed they’d set up next to his and Mama’s big four poster in their bedroom. At his grave, the clots of red clay had already dried to a dusty dull color by the time we shoveled them down upon him, friend after friend taking a turn at the shovel. The petals that fell from roses fell limp to the red earth, wilted like the crowd who stood by the grave while Reverend Ballister told us that Clayton Hayes was “a good man.” Behind a cluster of Mama’s family, I saw a woman in black turn away and walk down the grassy incline to a car, a Mercedes.

  After the services I went driving, but I couldn’t outtravel Papa in Devereux County. The man at the gas pump listed Papa’s virtues as he cleaned my windshield. The woman who sold me the bottle of bourbon said she’d owed Papa $215.00 since 1944, and when she’d paid him back in 1966 he’d forgotten all about it. I drove along the highway where the foundations of tin-roofed shacks were covered now by the parking lots of minimalls; beneath the asphalt, somewhere, was Stella Doyle’s birthplace. Stella Dora Hibble, Papa’s first love.

  Past the white gates, the Red Hills lawn was as parched as the rest of the county. Paint blistered and peeled on the big white columns. I waited a long time before the elderly black man I’d met twenty years before opened the door irritably.

  I heard her voice from the shadowy hall yelling, “Jonas! Let him in.”

  On the white shelves the books were the same. The photos on the piano as young as ever. She frowned so strangely when I came into the room, I thought she must have been expecting someone else and didn’t recognize me.

  “I’m Buddy Hayes, Clayton’s—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “I saw you leaving the cemetery. . . .”

  “I know you did.”

  I held out the bottle.

  Together we finished the bourbon in memory of Papa, while shutters beat back the sun, hid some of the dirty glasses scattered on the floor, hid Stella Doyle in her lilac armchair. Cigarette burns scarred the armrests, left their marks on the oak floor. Behind her the big portrait showed Time up for the heartless bastard he is. Her hair was cropped short, and gray. Only the color of her eyes had stayed the same; they looked as remarkable as ever in the swollen face.

  “I came out here to bring you something.”

  “What?”

  I gave her the thin, cheap, yellowed envelope I’d found in Papa’s desk with his special letters and papers. It was addressed in neat, cursive pencil to “Clayton.” Inside was a silly Valentine card. Betty Boop popping bonbons in her pouty lips, exclaiming “Ooooh, I’m sweet on you.” It was childish and lascivious at the same time, and it was signed with a lipstick blot, now brown with age, and with the name “Stella,” surrounded by a heart.

  I said, “He must have kept this since the seventh grade.”

  She nodded. “Clayton was a good man.” Her cigarette fell from her ashtray onto the floor. When I came over to pick it up, she said, “Goodness is luck; like money, like looks. Clayton was lucky that way.” She went to the piano and took more ice from the bucket there; one piece she rubbed around the back of her neck, then dropped into her glass. She turned, the eyes wet, like lilac stars. “You know, in Hollywood, they said, ‘Hibble?! What kind of hick name is that, we can’t use that!’ So I said, ‘Use Doyle, then.’ I mean, I took Hugh’s name six years before he ever came out to get me. Because I knew he’d come. The day I left Thermopylae he kept yelling at me, ‘You can’t have both!’ He kept yelling it while the bus was pulling out. ‘You can’t have me and it both!’ He wanted to rip my heart out for leaving, for wanting to go.” Stella moved along the curve of the white piano to a photograph of Hugh Doyle in a white open shirt, grinning straight out at the sun. She said, “But I could have both. There were only two things I had to have in this little world, and one was the lead in a movie called Fever, and the other one was Hugh Doyle.” She put the photograph down carefully. “I didn’t know about the cancer till my lawyers found out he’d been to see that doctor in Atlanta. Then it was easy to get the jury to go for suicide.” She smiled at me. “Well, not easy. But we turned them around. I think your papa was the only man in town who never thought I was guilty.”

  It took me a while to take it in. “Well, he sure convinced me,” I said.

  “I expect he convinced a lot of people. Everybody thought so much of Clayton.”

  “You killed your husband.”

  We looked at each other. I shook my head. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “We had a fight. We were drunk. He was sleeping with my fucking maid. I was crazy. Lots of reasons, no reason. I sure didn’t plan it.”

  “You sure didn’t confess it either.”

  “What good would that have done? Hugh was dead. I wasn’t about to let his snooty-assed mother shove me in the gas chamber and pocket the money.”

  I shook my head. “Jesus. And you’ve never felt a day’s guilt, have you?”

  Her head tilted back, smoothing her throat. The shuttered sun had fallen down the room onto the floor, and evening light did a movie fade and turned Stella Doyle into the star in the painting behind her. “Ah, baby, don’t believe it,” she said. The room stayed quiet.

  I stood up and dropped the empty bottle in the wastebasket. I said, “Papa told me how he was in love with you.”

  Her laugh came warmly through the shuttered dusk. “Yes, and I guess I was sweet on him, too, boop boop dedoo.”

  “Yeah, Papa said no man could say he’d been alive if he’d seen you and not felt that way. I just wanted to tell you I know what he meant.” I raised my hand to wave good-bye.

  “Come over here,” she said, and I went to her chair and she reached up and brought my head down to her and ki
ssed me full and long on the mouth. “So long, Buddy.” Slowly her hand moved down my face, the huge diamond radiant.

  News came over the wire. The tabloids played with it for a few days on back pages. They had some pictures. They dug up the Hugh Doyle trial photos to put beside the old studio glossies. The dramatic death of an old movie star was worth sending a news camera down to Thermopylae, North Carolina, to get a shot of the charred ruin that had once been Red Hills. A shot of the funeral parlor and the flowers on the casket.

  My sister phoned me that there was even a crowd at the coroner’s inquest at the courthouse. They said Stella Doyle had died in her sleep after a cigarette set fire to her mattress. But rumors started that her body had been found at the foot of the stairs, as if she’d been trying to escape the fire, but had fallen. They said she was drunk. They buried her beside Hugh Doyle in the family plot, the fanciest tomb in the Methodist cemetery, not far from where my parents were buried. Not long after she died, one of the cable networks did a night of her movies. I stayed up to watch Fever again.

  My wife said, “Buddy, I’m sorry, but this is the biggest bunch of sentimental slop I ever saw. The whore’ll sell her jewels and get the medicine and they’ll beat the epidemic but she’ll die to pay for her past and then the town’ll see she was really a saint. Am I right?”

  “You’re right.”

  She sat down to watch a while. “You know, I can’t decide if she’s a really lousy actress or a really good one. It’s weird.”

  I said, “Actually, I think she was a much better actress than anyone gave her credit for.”

  My wife went to bed, but I watched through the night. I sat in Papa’s old rocking chair that I’d brought north with me after his death. Finally at dawn I turned off the set, and Stella’s face disappeared into a star, and went out. The reception was awful and the screen too small. Besides, the last movie was in black and white; I couldn’t see her eyes as well as I could remember the shock of their color, when she first turned toward me at the foot of the courthouse steps, that hot August day when I was ten, when my father stepped forward out of the crowd to take her hand, when her eyes were lilacs turned up to his face, and his straw hat in the summer sun was shining like a knight’s helmet.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Faithless

  FROM Kenyon Review

  1

  THE LAST TIME my mother Cornelia Nissenbaum and her sister Constance saw their mother was the day before she vanished from their lives forever, April 11, 1923.

  It was a rainy-misty morning. They’d been searching for their mother because something was wrong in the household; she hadn’t come downstairs to prepare breakfast so there wasn’t anything for them except what their father gave them, glutinous oatmeal from the previous morning hastily reheated on the stove sticking to the bottom of the pan and tasting of scorch. Their father had seemed strange to them, smiling but not-seeing in that way of his like Reverend Dieckman too fierce in his pulpit Sunday mornings, intoning the Word of God. His eyes were threaded with blood and his face was still pale from the winter but flushed, mottled. In those days he was a handsome man but stern-looking and severe. Gray-grizzled side-whiskers and a spade-shaped beard, coarse and grizzled too with gray, but thick springy-sleek black hair brushed back from his forehead in a crest. The sisters were fearful of their father without their mother to mediate among them, it was as if none of them knew who they were without her.

  Connie chewed her lip and worked up her nerve to ask where was Momma? and their father said, hitching up his suspenders, on his way outside, “Your mothers where you’ll find her.”

  The sisters watched their father cross the mud-puddled yard to where a crew of hired men was waiting in the doorway of the big barn. It was rye-planting season and always in spring in the Chautauqua Valley there was worry about rain: too much rain and the seed would be washed away or rot in the soil before it could sprout. My mother Cornelia would grow to adulthood thinking how blessings and curses fell from the sky with equal authority, like hard-pelting rain. There was God, who set the world in motion, and who intervened sometimes in the affairs of men, for reasons no one could know. If you lived on a farm there was weather, always weather, every morning was weather and every evening at sundown calculating the next day’s, the sky’s moods meant too much. Always casting your glance upward, outward, your heart set to quicken.

  That morning. The sisters would never forget that morning. We knew something was wrong, we thought Momma was sick. The night before having heard—what, exactly? Voices. Voices mixed with dreams, and the wind. On that farm, at the brink of a ten-mile descent to the Chautauqua River, it was always windy—on the worst days the wind could literally suck your breath away!—like a ghost, a goblin. An invisible being pushing up close beside you, sometimes even inside the house, even in your bed, pushing his mouth (or muzzle) to yours and sucking out the breath.

  Connie thought Nelia was silly, a silly-baby, to believe such. She was eight years old and skeptical-minded. Yet maybe she believed it, too? Liked to scare herself, the way you could almost tickle yourself, with such wild thoughts.

  Connie, who was always famished, and after that morning would be famished for years, sat at the oilcloth-covered table and ate the oatmeal her father had spooned out for her, devoured it, scorch-clots and all, her head of fair-frizzy braids lowered and her jaws working quickly. Oatmeal sweetened with top-milk on the very edge of turning sour, and coarse brown sugar. Nelia, who was fretting, wasn’t able to swallow down more than a spoon or two of hers so Connie devoured that, too. She would remember that part of the oatmeal was hot enough to burn her tongue and other parts were icebox-cold. She would remember that it was all delicious.

  The girls washed their dishes in the cold-water sink and let the oatmeal pan soak in scummy soapsuds. It was time for Connie to leave for school but both knew she could not go, not today. She could not leave to walk two miles to the school with that feeling something is wrong, nor could she leave her little sister behind. Though when Nelia snuffled and wiped her nose on both her hands Connie cuffed her on the shoulder and scolded, “Piggy-piggy.”

  This, a habit of their mother’s when they did something that was only mildly disgusting.

  Connie led the way upstairs to the big bedroom at the front of the house that was Momma and Pappa’s room and that they were forbidden to enter unless specifically invited; for instance if the door was open and Momma was cleaning inside, changing bedclothes so she’d call out Come in, girls! smiling in her happy mood so it was all right and they would not be scolded. Come in, give me a hand, which turned into a game shaking out sheets, fluffing out pillowcases to stuff heavy goose-feather pillows inside, Momma and Connie and Nelia laughing together. But this morning the door was shut. There was no sound of Momma inside. Connie dared to turn the doorknob, push the door open slowly, and they saw, yes, to their surprise there was their mother lying on top of the unmade bed, partly dressed, wrapped in an afghan. My God, it was scary to see Momma like that, lying down at such an hour of the morning! Momma, who was so brisk and capable and who routed them out of bed if they lingered, Momma with little patience for Connie’s lazy-tricks as she called them or for Nelia’s sniffles, tummyaches, and baby-fears.

  “Momma?”—Connie’s voice was cracked.

  “Mom-ma?”—Nelia whimpered.

  Their mother groaned and flung an arm across one of the pillows lying crooked beside her. She was breathing hard, like a winded horse, her chest rising and falling so you could see it and her head was flung back on a pillow and she’d placed a wetted cloth across her eyes mask-like so half her face was hidden. Her dark-blond hair was disheveled, unplaited, coarse and lusterless as a horses mane, unwashed for days. That rich rank smell of Momma’s hair when it needed washing. You remember such smells, the sisters would say, some of them not-so-nice smells, all your life. And the smell in their parents’ forbidden room of—was it talcum powder, sweaty armpits, a sourish-sweet fragrance of bedclothes that no
matter how frequently laundered with detergent and bleach were never truly fresh. A smell of bodies. Adult bodies. Yeasty, stale. Pappa’s tobacco (he rolled his own crude paper cigarettes, he chewed tobacco in a thick tarry-black wad) and Pappa’s hair oil and that special smell of Pappa’s shoes, the black Sunday shoes always kept polished. (His work boots, etc., he kept downstairs in the closed-in porch by the rear door called the “entry.”) In the step-in closet close by the bed, behind an unhemmed length of chintz, was a blue-speckled porcelain chamber pot with a detachable lid and a rim that curled neatly under it, like a lip.

  The sisters had their own chamber pot—their potty, as it was called. There was no indoor plumbing in John Nissenbaum’s farmhouse as in any farmhouse in the Chautauqua Valley well into the 1930s and in poorer homes well into the 1940s, and even beyond. One hundred yards behind the house, beyond the silo, was the outhouse, the latrine, the “privy.” But you would not want to make that trip in cold weather or in rain or in the pitch-black of night, not if you could help it.

  Of course the smell of urine and a fainter smell of excrement must have been everywhere, the sisters conceded, years later. As adults, reminiscing. But it was masked by the barnyard smell, probably. Nothing worse than pig manure, after all!

  At least, we weren’t pigs.

  Anyway, there was Momma, on the bed. The bed that was so high from the floor you had to raise a knee to slide up on it, and grab on to whatever you could. And the horsehair mattress, so hard and ungiving. The cloth over Momma’s eyes she hadn’t removed and beside Momma in the rumpled bedclothes her Bible. Face-down. Pages bent. That Bible her mother-in-law Grandma Nissenbaum had given her for a wedding present, seeing she hadn’t one of her own. It was smaller than the heavy black family Bible and it was made of limp ivory-leather covers and had onionskin pages the girls were allowed to examine but not to turn without Momma’s supervision; the Bible that would disappear with Gretel Nissenbaum, forever.