by Evelyn Piper
Looking into the gray-black mouth, she began to retch again, but was that worse than seeing herself as the hypnotized guinea pig in the biology lab, when the teacher had stroked its soft belly and it lay tranced on its back with its legs in the air?
He had put his hands on her and had stroked her and that was how she had lain on his bed, like the guinea pig. And she had wanted him to. He had made her lie there. She sobbed and released the safety catch and put the gun to her forehead, shivering with nausea.
Darling, the school director had said, I’ve been waiting for you.
Blanche put the safety catch back on and thrust the revolver back into the purse, grabbed up her blue jacket again, thrust her arms into it, and then went to the chair where he had kissed her. “Yes, that chair,” she said to herself. “Sit right there!” Because she had been the guinea pig, but that didn’t mean she had to die a guinea pig. Blanche bent and picked up the shoes he had shaken off. She pulled the moccasins on over her ripped stockings, gritting her teeth because her hands were so clumsy and she wanted to hurry.
He wasn’t there yet or else she wouldn’t have said, Darling, I’ve been waiting. If she could get her moccasins on and get there and hide in the shadows under the stairs, he would come, and when he did . . . Before he was safely inside with her, to report, gloating, to give an imitation of her, of himself humbly on his knees before this chair while he efficiently made a tranced guinea pig out of her, to report mission accomplished, guinea pig hypnotized, kill him!
She would kill him. She would make sure that he didn’t go up there with her. (Miss Benton, I love you, he would say.) “Trust me,” he would say to her. “I handled it fine. The little fool finally caught on, but I managed her all right. Trust me and she won’t make any trouble for you.”
But he wasn’t going to gloat because she would kill him. And then herself. And if that woman went unpunished . . . How could she go unpunished? She would be losing him!
Blanche stood up, stamping her feet into the moccasins. “She’ll suffer, all right. She’ll suffer. She’ll pay!”
39
As always, when she hadn’t eaten, she felt the cold, and now, as she stood propped against the rough brick of the school building, her teeth were chattering so badly that she was afraid that when he came he would hear them and be warned. If only she could get inside the building, if she could only hide somewhere inside and wait there until he was with her, until the two of them were together. Two birds with one stone, two of them with one bullet. That was silly. Two bullets; she could shoot quickly enough for two bullets, and it would be the two of them together because she did not know which one she hated the most. No, she thought, rubbing her right wrist to supple it; it was the two of them together that she hated most.
But if, as the policeman had done this afternoon, she went to the house next door and woke them up and asked to be let through to the backyard and climbed into the school building that way, the people next door might guess. They would see that the director’s light was on and ask why she didn’t ring the bell and be let in that way, and then they would telephone the director, who would then warn him.
“Darling,” she would say, “she isn’t as stupid as you thought. The hypnotism didn’t last as long as you thought it would. She came to,” she would say (darling), “and realized that you and I are in this together. She realized that you helped me work this out from the beginning. Tell the police that she is crazy and have her locked up and then you and I will have the rest of our lives together.”
And now she was warm, hot, searing all through her. Her teeth had stopped chattering. (Her teeth gritted.) She could wait.
Blanche listened impatiently for his steps, but the street was quiet, and then she remembered how he had come up behind her when she tried to get in here earlier and how his arm had reached out and how he had rung a special ring. She threw her left arm over her face and made it dark inside her eyes to bring it back. Dum-dum-dum-di! The Fifth Symphony. Oh, yes, she thought, that’s it! If it had not been the Fifth and familiar to her, the rhythm wouldn’t have registered; it would just have been many rings.
Blanche slipped her gun back into her purse and rubbed her fingers together briskly in a pianist’s way, as if she were going to play Beethoven, and walked quickly up the stone steps. When her fingers felt elastic enough, she pressed the bell, firmly, dum-dum-dum-di, doing it staccato, with assurance, and then stepped into the shadow in case, even with the signal, Miss Benton should want to make sure, but immediately she heard the ticking, and, biting her lip, because this showed how hard she was waiting for him, Blanche opened the door and stepped inside.
“Oh, Dennis!” the ladylike Boston voice said in a fervent Bostonian. “Oh, darling, I’m so glad you’ve come!”
So that she need not answer, Blanche slammed the door as hard as she could. She stayed on the right-hand side of the stairs where the shadows were deepest.
“You are still angry! Talk to me, Dennis!”
40
They found Eddie in the storage room in the back of the store. He was stretched out on two sacks of potatoes, and when George saw how many bananas he had eaten, he forgot for a minute why they were there and began to give Eddie hell about the bananas.
The cops didn’t forget. They went on out in back and they turned the storeroom inside out. Even though George said Eddie couldn’t have moved the hundred-pound sacks out of the way to open the cellar door, the cop and George got the door open. “You’d be surprised what a person can do when they feel the rope around their neck,” the fat cop said. Then they went down in the cellar.
Eddie asked what they were looking for.
Eddie said they were out of their mind. He hadn’t kidnapped no little girl. What would he want to do a thing like that for?
Rose said, “Her little girl, Eddie.” Even with the light so bad, you could see how Eddie turned red. George noticed it, too, and he shoved Rose aside from where she was standing in between him and Eddie, and grabbed Eddie by the neck. All George was thinking about was to choke out of Eddie where he had put the little girl, and because Eddie couldn’t get loose from George, he didn’t watch him. It was Rose who pulled the knife out of Eddie’s hand before he could get the blade out.
When she held the knife in front of George so he could see it, he let go of Eddie. Rose said, crying, “You see?”
Two cops grabbed Eddie and held him.
“I’ll kill him!” Eddie said.
“Never mind about killing him. What about the little girl?”
Eddie said he never touched the little girl. Eddie said he never had nothing to do with a little girl. Sure, he said, he had been around the chick’s house in the morning. “There’s no law against that, is there?” Eddie said he didn’t know what he was hanging around the house for. He didn’t know what he had in mind, he only knew what he did. He was there and he saw the chick come out with this old lady, carrying her suitcase. He had looked at her. “And there’s no law against that that I know of, either.” He hadn’t done anything or said anything, just stood there and watched until the old lady got a cab and gave the address and went away. He never kidnapped any little girl. “What the hell for?” He didn’t know until they told him that she had any little girl. The chick didn’t wear any wedding ring and he didn’t know she was married, even.
The cops started looking at each other and asking Eddie questions; didn’t he really see the little girl, didn’t he really know she had a little girl? Rose could tell there was something funny the way they kept asking didn’t Eddie never see any little girl and then looking at each other.
Of course they weren’t going to let Eddie go on his say-so or because the little girl wasn’t here. Eddie could have dumped her somewhere else. It was no good Rose begging them to let her take Eddie back home; they began hauling him off. Rose forgot all about the girl and the little girl, but one thing she would never forget to her dying day, she thought, was the look Eddie gave her when they began hauling him of
f and she stayed in the store with George to help him clean up so they could open for business in the morning.
41
Wilson wondered whether it was smarter to stay right where he was, nursing the hot feeling behind his eyes and the tendency of his thoughts to shift from sense to nonsense, which indicated sleepiness, or to take the chance of losing it by trotting himself up to the bedroom and having to start the whole process over again. He groaned and pushed up out of the chair because even that much indecision had completely roused him. He decided to go up to the bedroom so that if Morpheus beckoned again there would be no question of moving in order to embrace him.
He had tucked the bed sheets Blanche had climbed down on behind the post at the foot of the stairs and, as he moved wearily past, he grabbed them to take them up with him and stick them into the hamper. There was no question, no uncertainty about whether he would make up the bed. Marta wasn’t around to be scandalized, so he would just lie on the bare mattress. He thrust the sheets under his arm and began to climb the stairs.
If the sheets, dragging behind him, had not caught on the nail at the head of the stairs, left there and overlooked when he had removed the gate they had put up when the kids were young enough to tumble downstairs, he would not have remembered the gun, but the ripping sound the sheets made cracked like a pistol shot. “Oh, Jesus!” Wilson said because now he recalled his clean shirt that had been hanging over the bed rail when he had unlocked the bedroom to let her out, and fitting the shirt into its proper place, which was in his chest of drawers, knowing that it had been she who had taken it (although he did not know why), it had occurred to Wilson that it was more than possible that she had discovered the revolver . . . And if she had . . .
He dropped the sheets and ran toward his room. If she had . . .
What had been keeping him awake down there was the attempt to convince himself that Blanche must be, as Dennis insisted, insane. Dennis was a competent man, a careful man (too careful!), and if Dennis said she didn’t have all her marbles, then she didn’t. No matter how she seemed to him, she didn’t have ’em. It was important to convince himself because if she wasn’t insane then it was just too bloody awful. She had to be insane. Dennis was a competent man. That was how it had gone, round and round, and each time the uncertainty, no, the stubborn refusal to believe it, hit him in the guts. He pulled the second drawer of his chest of drawers open and felt in the paisley pajamas. Once he had discovered that it was not a trick Mademoiselle Blanche and Marta had decided to play on him, he had been sick, gutsick, realizing (sane or insane) that she had come to him as her only friend in the city and he had thrown her out on her ear. She could have killed herself for all the friend he had been. He would never forget, Wilson thought, her face pressed against the window of the Wurstgescheft. He threw the paisley pajamas on the floor and then, one by one, the other things in the drawers and then the things in the rest of the drawer because he could have been wrong about just where he had tucked the revolver, because, he told himself, knowing now that the nightmare she had been put through, fantasy or no, was real enough to her, if she had his gun, wouldn’t she use it?
The gun was gone.
Wilson sat on the bed and tried to remember whether he knew where she lived. He closed his eyes and banged his fist down on his knees, rocking back and forward while he banged, a mnemonic habit of his, but nothing came. That it was close to Henderson Place, yes, in the neighborhood, of course; not a small romantic house like this; an apartment, she had said, but that was reasoning and not remembering and he couldn’t reason his route to her that way. Wilson sat banging his knees and then jumped up. Dennis would know. (Wilson just saved himself from being entangled in the clothes he had dropped on the floor. “With her luck,” he thought, “I should have tripped and been knocked unconscious until it was too late.”) He could see her dead with a neat hole in the front of her head and a not so neat one to mark the egress. He could see only her dead face and not the preposterously small print of the telephone directory. Newhouse A . . . Newhouse C . . .
As Wilson dialed, he counted long enough, he thought, to wake the dead in case that damned unimaginative fool of a psychiatrist had been able to sleep, but there was no answer. (“And the dead don’t wake,” he told himself, seeing her dead face again.) If he didn’t get to her, there wouldn’t be any waking her. This time she had pointed the thirty-two to where she believed her heart was and the blood, dyed purple-black by the time he reached her, made a macabre cummerbund under her young breasts. He had always been curious about suicides (“Morbid,” Marta said. “All the world loves a lover, not a suicide.”), always wondering what could be decisive enough to make them do it, because low as he could sink (a nothing since not a good writer; a nothing because surely not a good man), he couldn’t do it. But this time, he thought, she needn’t write an explanatory note. This time he knew why.
This time he could write the note himself because he understood, this time, for surely no one could ever have felt more brutally used than that poor girl. If she shot him, Wilson thought, he couldn’t blame her.
If she shot . . . suppose not herself, not only herself, but Louise Benton first? If she shot Benton, Wilson thought, finding the Manhattan Directory again, it would be his doing. He had put the Paris Exposition story into Mademoiselle’s poor head. Why would Benton have pretended she had never seen Bunny, he had asked. Think about that, he had advised!
Had he known about the gun, he might have been more careful with his advice, but as it was he had given her Benton to chew on with about as much thought as when he gave Sandy a picture puzzle to do on a rainy afternoon. He tried to tell himself, his hand trembling as he leafed the Directory, that Mademoiselle Blanche was incapable of thinking that straight, but it didn’t go down. She was quite capable of it. She had invented the Italian boy, which was more difficult surely . . . All she had to do here was substitute. Her child had died like the mother in the story, somehow her child had died (or been killed) and for the French hotel manager, there was Louise Benton all set up to be used. To save her investment, Benton had played the same ghastly game with Mademoiselle Blanche, using her child as a pawn. Wilson found the Benton school.
If Mademoiselle had substituted along those lines, if she had come up with the substitute villain . . . since she had his gun . . . He dialed the number.
"DON’T ANSWER THAT,” Blanche said. “Stay exactly where you are. Let it ring!”
42
It was time to wake her up, Dennis thought. He had every reason now to go back and wake her up. He frowned into the yawning face of the cab driver as he paid him because he had to recognize how happy he was to have sound reasons so that he might indulge his desire to hurry back to his apartment, to tiptoe into his bedroom, to bend over her on his bed. (Because he was so all-fired anxious to get back to her on his bed, he over-tipped the driver. Very well. He was aware of it. All right!)
The two good reasons for waking her, Dennis thought, returning to them (to reason!) with relief, were that if she slept too long she would feel too much guilt, and that it was necessary to question her about her mother. He told the police lieutenant that he would ask her whether she could explain why, as far as the local police could ascertain by questioning neighbors, her mother had not appeared in Providence at all. The local police had questioned the real-estate people who handled her mother’s house, and they stated that they had not written to her mother that they had a firm offer. What he had to find out from Blanche, if he could, was whether she thought she was telling the truth about her mother’s trip back home. If Blanche believed her mother had gone home, then was it a fantastic belief, or had her mother told her she was returning to Providence? If her mother told her she was going to Providence, then why wasn’t she there? The police apparently thought the mother business required immediate investigation. (“It smells,” was the way Lieutenant Duff had put it.) It was only after solemn professional warning from him of the damage they might do if they went over and qu
estioned Blanche themselves that he had been able to convince them to stay out of it and let him talk to her. He couldn’t go along with the police that the mother business was of any great importance, but then he wasn’t a detective. “Psychiatrist, stick to your last,” Dennis thought, but felt rather more adequate when he reminded himself that it was a psychiatrist and not a policeman that Blanche really needed. Whatever she thought! He would use his training and his time, everything he had, to help her, and perhaps he could. Eventually, Dennis thought. Someday. Darling, darling Blanche, he thought. White. Blanche. Her white skin, he thought, the dark net of her hair, he thought, and pushed the elevator button hard.
When he discovered that he had forgotten his key—although he couldn’t help knowing that this had significance, great significance since he so rarely did forget anything, probably symbolizing his natural desire to take this new and infinitely disturbing emotion Blanche had aroused in him and lock it away—he could have kicked himself because it meant that he had to ring the doorbell and awaken her that way. When she did not answer the doorbell, Dennis thought of her white eyelids with the blue veins closed in sleep and wasn’t alarmed, but it meant going down and getting the passkey from the super. The super’s surprise at being knocked-up by Dr. Newhouse pointed to how rarely he did forget anything. He gave the super a five-dollar bill for his trouble and calmed him down and hurried back upstairs with the passkey.
