“But when I’m very bad…”
Suddenly remembering the line that had escaped her, she placed her hands flatly on her hips, spread her feet wide apart to achieve a stance of aggressive tomboy belligerence. Her voice was lowered to a strained and unconvincing bass.
“An’ I answer back and sass…”
Her sagging, child’s face took on an expression of frowning, contracted evil. She wagged her head back and forth in a show of pert defiance, and the twin wattles of her jowls loosely echoed the absurd motion, as did the preposterous bow nested in her garish curls.
“Then Ma says I’m a devil…”
Holding out one blunt, pointing finger, she shook it in a demonstration of a child’s impression of stern parental remonstrance.
“Pa says I’ve got my brass…”
Dropping her hands and folding them before her in a gesture of angelic composure, she took a precise step forward, as to a row of footlights, and addressed her mirrored self with a look of round-eyed enquiry.
“Now I wish you’d please to tell me, Since I’m much too young to know…”
The sound of a buzzer gritted into the room from the direction of the hallway outside, and she broke off. She frowned, and in the mirror her reflected self frowned back. Making no further move, she remained perfectly still where she was, listening. There followed a prolonged interval of silence and then, like the sound of some angry and determined insect, the buzzer sounded again. At that, she whirled about. Yanking the ribbon from her hair, scowling, she hurled it across the room where it struck the curved side of the piano and dropped to the floor.
Crossing to the door, she hurled it open and glared out into the dim enclosure of the hallway. To her right, in the direction of the kitchen, the buzzer sounded again. After a brief pause, she turned back into the room, crossed swiftly to the piano, lifted the protective lid on the keyboard. Quite deliberately and with all the petulant force she could muster she slammed it closed again. The resultant sound, a discordant crash, radiated noisomely out into the hallway and beyond into the other parts of the house.
Jane turned her gaze upward, listening as the discord fell away into silence. The buzzer did not sound again. Looking back into the mirror, tilting her head into an attitude of arch coquetry, she affected a smile of vapid prettiness. Then, with a brief bobbing curtsy, she let the smile drop quickly away. Turning, she left the room, entered the hallway and moved in the direction of the kitchen. As she did so, her eyes again lifted toward the ceiling in the direction of Blanche’s room, catching the light, it seemed, with a kind of hard brightness.
A few minutes later, when she re-entered the hallway, she was carrying a large lacquered lunch tray covered with a spotless white napkin. Moving briskly past the door to the rehearsal room, she entered the living room, a large, long room with a high vaulted ceiling and faced along the west wall with a stairway leading up to a shallow hanging gallery. Opposite the stairway was a tall, ornate fireplace of pink Italian marble. The front wall of the room was punctuated closely with tall French windows arched at the top, and at one end by the front door, a heavy, intricately paneled slab of dark mahogany. Through the windows could be seen a narrow concrete terrace with a marble balustrade from the center of which a set of steep steps descended to the innermost curve of a circular drive.
The room was furnished with a conglomerate mixture of colors and styles. Before the fireplace stood an enormous, gaping divan of faded green velvet, the front surfaces of the arms decorated with rectangles of elaborately carved wood. Adjacent to this was a matching chair, and between the two crouched a coffee table of gleaming blond wood. Against the inner wall of the stairway stood a heavy, carved library table, and next to that a matching chair with a leather seat. Breaking the tall opening of one of the French windows was a television set, of white plastic smaller than the one in Blanche’s room. The drapes, bunched thickly between the windows, were of a gaudy rose-splashed fabric which was painfully at war with the rug, a large, intricately patterned oblong of rich Oriental reds and blues. From within the boundaries of a gleaming silver frame on the mantel, the blonde girl with the lovely sooty eyes smiled down upon the scene with an expression of fixed emptiness.
Making her way across the room, Jane started up the stairs, propelling her stocky body upward with separate, angry, forward thrusts. Now the great, glamorous movie star wanted her lunch—the great star of the silver screen who thought that just because her silly old pictures were showing on television she could start shoving people around again.…
At the sound of Jane’s footsteps on the stairs, Blanche turned her chair quickly toward the open doorway. She would have to be very careful. She would have to consider everything she said very carefully. Once Jane was allowed to take a position on the matter of selling the house, there would be no budging her. She had always been stubborn in her notions, absolutely unmovable. Blanche’s hand gripped the arm of her chair as Jane neared the doorway.
With no glance in Blanche’s direction, Jane carried the tray into the room and put it down on the desk with a deliberate abruptness, so as to produce a small angry clattering of china and silver. Immediately, she turned and started out again, but Blanche, moving forward, held out a hand to detain her.
“Jane…” Even to herself her voice sounded thin and unnatural. “Jane, I wasn’t ringing for lunch—thank you for bringing it—but there’s something I want to—to discuss with you.”
At the doorway Jane turned and looked back, her eyes dull now and unrevealing. For a moment Blanche could only stare at her, at the dumpy, defeated figure in the shapeless dress, at the preposterous dyed hair with its hard reddish sheen, and at the childish face seamed with age and bitterness. Seeing all this—compelled somehow at this moment to see it—Blanche was filled with a curious mixture of fear and pity. She turned her gaze downward to her hands.
“Jane, I’m afraid I’ve had some bad news. There have been certain reverses lately—financial reverses, you understand, and—according to Bert Hanley we’re going to have to give up this house. I’ve already——” She paused, aware of a subtle quickening in Jane’s attitude. “I should have told you sooner, I know that, but Bert kept thinking that things might change and——”
“When did you talk to Bert Hanley?”
Startled Blanche glanced up to find the dark eyes full upon her, level, alive, waiting, and she felt a sudden breathlessness.
“Why—it was last week, it seems to me.…”
Jane, staring at her unblinkingly, just perceptibly shook her head. “Bert Hanley didn’t call here last week. And you didn’t call him. I know.”
“I—well, no, we didn’t talk on the phone,” Blanche fumbled. “He wrote me a letter, actually. But that doesn’t make any difference.…”
Again Jane shook her head. “He didn’t write any letter, either. There hasn’t been a letter from his office since——”
“Yes, Jane, yes, there was!”
“I bring in the mail,” Jane said with maddening evenness. “I guess I’d know.”
Blanche’s face, by now, was hot with embarrassment. She moistened her lips nervously. “Then it must have come sometime before. He sent it with our allowance check.”
“That was nearly a month ago. This month’s check is almost due. Why——?”
“Jane,” Blanche broke in desperately, “it doesn’t matter when or how I heard from Bert. That’s not what we’re talking about. The point is…”
Before Jane’s merciless gaze, her voice fell weakly away into silence. A faint smile, it seemed, tugged at the corners of Jane’s mouth like a fleeting shadow.
“You’re lying,” she said calmly, flatly. “You’re just a liar, Blanche.”
Blanche started forward in her chair, but then the telephone shrilled and she looked around in a quick, convulsive movement toward the desk. The sound came so suddenly and so shockingly that she was unable even to get her chair into motion before Jane came back into the room and snatched up the
telephone.
“Jane!”
Undeterred, Jane carried the phone from the room out into the hallway. With the briefest backward glance, she picked up the receiver. “Hello?” she enquired.
Too astonished to make any further protest Blanche listened in numb helplessness.
“Oh?… No.… No, she’s not here right now.… Oh, no, that’s not so at all.… Well, she’s mistaken; she isn’t interested at all.… Oh, yes, I’m sure.… Of course I am.… Well, then she’s changed her mind, so you can just forget it.… Oh, yes, I will if you want me to.… Oh, I’m sure all right, I’m positive.… Yes… Yes, I will.… All right, if you want—but… Yes.… All right, then.… Good-bye.”
Replacing the receiver, she put the instrument back on the stand from which Blanche had first taken it. Turning, she started toward the gallery and the stairs.
“Jane!”
As Blanche moved her chair forward, Jane reappeared in the doorway, her eyes enormous with innocent enquiry.
“That was Bert on the phone, wasn’t it?”
For a long moment Jane simply stood there. Then, finally, she shook her head. “It was one of those women who advertise on the phone. Something about having the furniture reupholstered. I said you weren’t interested.”
“But you said I had changed my mind. Jane, I know you’re not——”
“She said you were on their interested list,” Jane explained blandly, “but of course she was lying.” Again the faintest shadow of a smile touched the corners of her mouth. “If I were you, I wouldn’t wear myself out talking to people on the phone.”
“Jane…”
“Any other calls—I’ll take them downstairs—so you won’t have to talk to anyone.”
“Jane, please…”
But Jane had already moved off into the dimness, and Blanche knew she would not turn back.
Rolling her chair to the doorway, she sat looking out at the phone. It was Bert who had called. There wasn’t the least bit of doubt in her mind about that. And there wasn’t any doubt, either, that Jane had warned her not to try to call Bert back. But suppose she defied her and called anyway? What would Jane do? Blanche’s gaze fell briefly to her withered legs and then moved away again. The silence there in the old house seemed almost to congeal and contract around her. With a feeling of sudden panic, she turned back into her room.
She spent a long moment reasoning with herself, scolding herself back into a state of calmness. How silly to be upset by Jane’s shenanigans. At this late date! Nothing so terrible had happened. Jane had always been like this, always trying to worry her and frighten her. When they were little girls, Jane had repeatedly taken her toys from her and withheld them—just as she had taken the phone from her now by threat.
She was simply allowing herself to get into a nervous state over nothing. And she knew what she must do—she would wait for a bit and then, when she was fully composed and sure of herself, she would call Bert and tell him what had happened. And Jane—well, let her do her worst.
She turned her chair toward the window, stopping it in mid-turn as her eye was caught by the sight of the lunch tray on the desk. Lunch. Yes, that was a good idea. First, she would have her lunch. She would eat slowly and calmly and get herself completely under control. She would relax as she ate and forget all about the incident with the phone—and her abortive attempt to “explain” to Jane about selling the house. And afterward, allowing the proper interval for digestion, she would go straight to the phone and call.
In a mood of self-congratulation she moved her chair toward the desk. She was being very sensible, keeping her emotions admirably in check. And the more she thought of it, too, the more she began to see that this morning’s upset was at least partly due to yesterday’s discussion with Mrs. Stitt. Well, she would just let that be a lesson to her. Henceforth, she would turn a deaf ear to the alarms of others; she would refuse absolutely to give audience to tales out of school.
With the beginning of a smile on her lips, Blanche reached out to the tray, picked up the cloth and pulled it away. Instantly the smile fell from her face, and her hand froze in mid-air. Her eyes stared from a face white with shock. She darted a hand to her mouth, to stifle the scream that was already rising in her throat.
It seemed ages that she sat there staring at the dreadful thing on the plate, at the bird stiff with death that lay there before her, returning her gaze of horror from empty eye sockets. It had been a small bird, a sparrow or robin and it had lain so long in death that it had gone even beyond the state of putrefaction. All that remained, really, were a few matted feathers, some of the thin parchmentlike skin and the delicate white bones. This, with macabre deliberation, had been placed at the center of a carefully arranged ring of lettuce, and upon the back of the corpse had been obscenely spattered a thick dab of mayonnaise. Beside the plate, resting on a napkin bearing Blanche’s initials, were a precisely placed knife and fork.
4
The shadows of evening had begun to gather thickly around her, and on the carpet the patterned oblong of light from the window had started to lengthen and fade. The worst of her terror had passed now, but only the worst of it, only the cold, white sting of panic. She was still unable to hold her gaze for long away from the dreadful tray on the desk no matter how much the sight of it sickened her.
Mercifully it was covered, though she had no recollection of having replaced the cloth. The moment following the one in which she had first seen the horror on the tray had passed in a sick, tumultuous blur. It was as if that small space of time had been completely lost to her; the next thing she remembered she was out in the hallway at the phone frantically dialing Dr. Shelby’s number.
Instinct, perhaps, had prompted her to call the doctor, or she may have recalled Mrs. Stitt’s insistence that she consult the doctor about Jane. She had not stopped, though, to consider her motives. Dialing the number, she had pressed the receiver to her ear and breathlessly waited.
Had she not been so nearly in a state of shock, she would have known instantly that something was wrong. As it was, fully half a minute passed before she realized that the phone was dead.
At first she simply couldn’t believe it; it was impossible that the instrument should fail her just when she needed it so desperately. And then, with a new start of panic, she understood what had happened; Jane had taken the phone downstairs off the hook to prevent her calling out. At the same moment that this disquieting bit of knowledge came into her mind, she became aware, as before, of the soft sound of breathing on the line.
A moment passed, two. The breathing continued, marking Jane’s listening presence there at the phone in the lower hallway. Blanche shook her head in frightened disbelief. It was insane. As insane, nearly as—as making a salad of a dead bird.
“Jane!” she cried out suddenly. “Jane——!”
The sound of her voice struck sharply against the silence there in the hallway, broke and shattered it. She fell back aghast at what she had done. Quickly, thrusting the receiver from her, she dropped it into its cradle and turned away. She looked back into her room and it was then that she saw, with an audible sigh of relief, that she had covered the tray with the cloth.
The afternoon had passed as an unreal, sunlit nightmare, and Blanche, shrinking from the crystalline brightness that poured in at the window, had cowered in the false safety of the shadows by her bed. Forced upon her was the realization that Jane, having terrorized her, had also made her a helpless prisoner.
But why? Blanche asked herself. For what possible purpose? That was the worst of it, not knowing what dark inspiration lay behind this strange program of terror. Did Jane mean only to frighten her? Was this her way to voice a protest against selling the house? Or was it meant as a warning? These questions, no matter how they repeated themselves over and over in her mind, remained unanswered.
Jane wouldn’t hurt her, wouldn’t do her physical violence; Blanche felt certain of that. Jane would never do anything, surely, to increase
the awful burden of guilt she had borne all these years since the accident. There was nothing, Blanche told herself, really to fear.
There in the shadows, she kept a book in her lap so that she could pretend to be calmly reading if Jane should suddenly appear. Knowing full well that she hadn’t the courage yet to confront Jane openly and demand the meaning of this horror, she had decided that when Jane did come into the room, it would be best to pretend not to have lifted the cloth at all, not to have seen the odious display beneath. If Jane should ask, she would simply say she hadn’t been hungry. Tomorrow when she was feeling more collected, she would insist that they discuss the matter fully and openly.
Mercifully, through the afternoon Jane had not come near the room, or even upstairs to the second floor. There had been occasional sounds of movement from down below, but nothing in any way extraordinary or alarming. Now, however, with the coming of twilight, the sounds grew louder and more frequent. And then, almost exactly at the moment when the last faint traces of daylight faded from the room, Jane’s footsteps approached with sudden briskness through the lower hallway and across the living room to the stairs.
Blanche reached out quickly to the bedside lamp and switched it on, commanding herself at the same time to be calm and composed. She watched shudderingly as the circle of light dashed itself out into the room, reaching, it seemed, with soft fingers for the desk and the repugnant tray.
She could not guess what Jane’s attitude might be, what she might say or do. Taking up the book from her lap, she propped it firmly against the arm of her chair in an effort to hold it steady.
When Jane came into the room, Blanche kept her eyes rigidly lowered to the book. Even so, she felt the panic rise again within her, suddenly, sharply. In an effort to hold it back, she told herself that she must not let herself be hysterical. There was nothing, really, to be frightened about. Nonetheless her hands tightened their hold upon the book, as if in an effort to brace her entire being against the assault of any word or gesture that might come from Jane’s direction.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Page 5
