Lay On, Mac Duff!

by Charlotte Armstrong

  But I’d caught on now. I realized that my arrival wasn’t an Event, as arrivals used to be at home. I’d been expected, and I’d turned up on schedule; and, while it wasn’t flattering to make so little a splash, still it left me free to look around and notice things the way you want to do in a new place but usually can’t because you’re being looked at.

  Hugh brought me a drink of something. I was sure it was alcoholic and only dared touch my lips to it now and then. We sat on a huge leather sofa near the fireplace where a real fire was burning. He didn’t have much to say. Yet I suppose he was sitting there just to keep me company because the other four certainly paid no attention to him, either.

  My uncle’s back was toward me. I noticed that the little finger on his right hand was deformed. It stood out from his other fingers crookedly, and he didn’t use it.

  Mr. Bertram Gaskell was the man at his right. He looked like a frog. He was in his late forties, I guessed, little and hunched up as if he were misshapen, with big pop eyes grotesquely wide apart under whiskery brows. He kept opening and closing his mouth with his lips lax.

  Mr. Hudson Winberry, at uncle’s left, looked like a bishop, but there was something puffy and rotten about his round cheeks and pink and white skin. I guessed him to be nearly sixty. His hair was silver white and was brushed across his rounded forehead in an old-fashioned innocent-looking dip. He wore rimless eyeglasses which he touched often with a hand that had a curiously repulsive flexibility.

  Mr. Guy Maxon was younger than the rest, and I labeled him the sissy. He was perfectly turned out in his clothes, handsome in a way I don’t like, very regular of feature, but with thin and quivering nostrils that gave him a look of being terribly fastidious, if, indeed, he were not sniffing disdainfully at everything around him.

  And then there was my uncle, whose profile, on the side with the dent in it particularly, was piratical, keen, and cruel.

  The Frog, the Bishop, the Sissy, and the Pirate had a game.

  It ought to have been pleasant, sitting there in the warmth with something to drink, with a presentable young man beside me and the four others busy at their game, rattling their dice, counting their spaces. But it wasn’t.

  In the first place, I began to understand what Hugh had meant when he said they played for blood. They played to win, and the devil take the hindmost. Their cries of triumph were real triumph. Their sneers were real sneers. Their malice was real malice. It was absurd and it was dreadful.

  I am not ordinarily a terribly sensitive person. I don’t feel “auras” and “sense” undercurrents any more than most people do. But there was something going on in that room that made me first uneasy and then afraid. It was like pressure in the air when the barometer is low. At first I thought it was because I was a stranger, but then I realized that Hugh had stopped making even a few remarks and I couldn’t break our silence because I felt I had to keep listening, the way you listen in the night when you think you’ve heard a burglar, telling yourself it was the wind but, all the same, tense and braced for trouble.

  I began to wish they’d stop playing.

  “That’ll be a lesson to you,” the Frog said viciously. “Get back home, Charlie. Get back home.”

  “I need a four or an eight,” said the Sissy, “and if I get them …”

  “It’s against your own best interests to ruin me,” said the Bishop with a snarl.

  “Hah! Never mind. I blockade.”

  “Damn you,” said my uncle in a sweet whisper.

  The Frog burst into mean and nagging laughter. “Look. Look, Winberry.”

  “I never saw it!” cried the Bishop in glee. “Aha! I say, Charles is in a bad way, eh, boys?”

  “Raw-ther,” said the Sissy.

  What they were saying could have been banter, but it wasn’t. The horrible thing was that grown men could play a parlor game, and be so mean about it. I realized that my uncle’s guests were drawing together, and not very subtly either, in a confederation against my uncle. Frog rolled the dice.

  “Got a choice there,” said the Bishop eagerly.

  “You’re ahead,” said my uncle.

  “Ah, but he’ll never make it,” said the Frog nastily. “Whereas your other man goes home.”

  “That’s unwise,” my uncle said.

  The Bishop looked worried. “He always gets out of everything,” he said to the Frog.

  “Not this time,” said Sissy. “Now for you, Winberry.” He rolled and swore.

  “I’m going to win!” squealed the Bishop. He rolled. “No.”

  “Go on, count them,” said Sissy.

  “By God, there it is!” cried the Bishop. “I never saw it! A four, all right. By God!” And he won.

  I thanked goodness. But the game went on. It seemed there had to be a second best and a third best and a final loser. I wished they’d stop, but they weren’t going to stop until a bitter end, Hugh sat with his chin down on his chest, swishing the liquid in the bottom of his glass to and fro. I could hardly sit still, so unbearable the whole scene seemed to me. Now the other two were out to beat my uncle, and Winberry was cheering them on. They seemed to want to beat him so very intensely. They seemed to care so much about it.

  “Don’t do that,” cried Winberry to the Sissy. “You break your blockade, man, and he’ll nip around you.”

  Uncle threw the dice in a dead silence. His face, in profile, looked sullen and thoughtful. Who hated him so much? Or was he the angry one? He had the force to give a room its atmosphere. Weren’t the others like little mean dogs yapping around a lion when they thought they were safe from him? I ran my hand around my throat, and it was hot and my hand was icy.

  “Oh, why don’t they stop it!” I murmured.

  Hugh looked at me startled. I saw that his forehead was wet with perspiration. “What’s the matter?” he said, a little wildly as if he were coming out of an uneasy dream.

  “I don’t like … the way they hate each other,” I whispered.

  He sat up straighter, and a queer look, almost of wonder, came over his face. “Do you feel that too?” he said, in just a breath.

  “Do you?” I said.

  “Yes. It’s … not good.” He took out his handkerchief and fumbled nervously with it.

  “Haha!” the Frog shouted, pounding the arm of his chair. “You’ll never get out of it now. And I’m out, Maxon, but you don’t care. You get your man in now and Charlie’s dished. Yessir, dished, for once.”

  “For once in his life!” the Bishop said.

  “Shut up,” said the Sissy, “I’m not out yet.”

  “Not yet,” my uncle said.

  “Is it always like this?” I whispered to Hugh.

  “Not … quite. Your uncle seems to be losing tonight. He never does, you know. They say he never loses.”

  “Throw a one,” the Frog said.

  “Throw a one and a two,” the Bishop said.

  The dice fell from the Sissy’s box, and my uncle stood up from the table. Nobody said anything. My uncle crossed the room.

  “Have a drink, Hudson?” he said softly. “You, Guy?”

  “I will,” said the Frog. “You lost, by God!”

  As if his bluntness had let loose a flood, the Bishop began to babble. “Look at that. Three men still at home. Only one man out. He couldn’t throw a five to save his neck. No, sir. That I lived to see the day.…” My uncle, across the room, threw him a look. “And the saying goes that Cathcart never loses,” said the white-haired pink-faced man. “But he lost this time, eh? Didn’t he?”

  In the silence that followed this gloating, there was a sound of someone coming in downstairs. “There’s Lina,” said Maxon, the Sissy, the youngest of them, and his face lit and changed.

  “Ah.” The Frog shifted his chair. The Bishop touched his eyeglasses. My uncle drained his drink to the bottom and set the tumbler down.

  In a moment she stood in the doorway, and I, halfway out of my seat for my manners, fell back in again and scrambled out
all arms and legs, boneless with surprise.

  She wore evening clothes. She stood a little taller than I do. She had a flower in her hair. Her red cloak fell from her bare shoulders into Guy Maxon’s expert and waiting arms. She wore a white gown. She was the loveliest, most radiant, most beautiful girl I had ever seen out of the movies. She was about twenty five years old. She was my Aunt Lina.

  Chapter Three

  After Lina came in that night, time began to be important. I mean the time at which each person did what he did. From now on, I will just put the times down as I go along according to the figures we worked out later.

  It was five minutes before twelve when she came in.

  She came straight to me. “This is Elizabeth?” she said eagerly. “I’m Lina Cathcart.” She took my hands and pulled me down beside her on the sofa. “I’m glad you’re here safely. Do they call you Betty?”

  “They call me Bessie,” I said, “up home.”

  “Bessie.” She put her head a little on one side. “I like that. I’ll call you Bessie, and you’ll call me Lina. Is your room comfortable? Did they give you anything to eat?”

  “I didn’t … I wasn’t hungry,” I said. But I liked her. She had the right instincts. In our house, the first thing we did for any traveler was feed him.

  Uncle’s guests were swarming around us. The effect Lina had on them was almost funny, yet rather horrible. Guy Maxon posted himself behind the sofa where he could look, in his haughty way, down upon her lovely head. The Bishop warmed his coat tails at the fire and leered. He really did. He used a caressing (I suppose he thought it was fatherly) tone when he spoke to her, but all the time his eyes were running busily up and down on errands of their own. Mr. Gaskell lit a cigar, and never took his gaze off her, or blinked, even, though he opened and closed his mouth from time to time in his froggy way.

  But my Uncle Charles sat in a chair and looked at the dying fire. He said nothing. He seemed to have seceded from the whole gathering. And Hugh, who had gone into a corner and appeared to be glancing through a magazine, was watching my uncle over the top of it. Was my uncle sulking, or was he bored, or was he being rude because he was angry? I couldn’t tell.

  Then, if that disgusting old Mr. Winberry didn’t begin to tell Lina all about the parcheesi game! He told it just as if she would find it the most fascinating story in the world. He told it with relish. He told it with details. He described the run of luck against my uncle as if it had been a flaw in my uncle’s character. He stood there and gloated out loud. He was mean and childish and nasty, and he went on and on until I thought I would be the one to scream. But Lina listened as if she were frozen in a beautiful pose, like a photograph, and my uncle looked into the fire.

  It was Hugh who stopped him. He got up, as if he couldn’t stand it another minute, and said harshly, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll be going along.”

  “Eh?” said Winberry. “Wait and come up with me in a cab if you want to.”

  “Are you going straight home, sir?” said Hugh, looking as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.

  “No, no. I’ve told you. Have to stop at the club for an envelope.”

  “Is it anything I can do for you?” said Hugh, and I remembered that, in some way, he was this man’s servant.

  “Nope,” said the Bishop. Adding no thanks.

  “Then, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll take a bus up now.”

  Hugh’s eyes shifted to me for just a second, and I understood that he had been hanging around more or less as a matter of duty. The Bishop waved a careless permission, and Hugh began to say his good nights. I answered rather coolly when he got around to me. He smiled, though, and said he hoped to see me again as if he really meant it, and his handclasp was quite friendly. I didn’t quite know what to make of Hugh Miller. But I felt that his interest in Lina Cathcart was just about zero, too, which was remarkable.

  It was ten minutes after twelve when Hugh left us.

  Mr. Winberry didn’t take up where he had left off. He fell quiet, and from time to time he glanced uneasily at my uncle as if my uncle’s silence had begun to weigh on him. Lina and Guy Maxon talked a rapid kind of shorthand.

  He said, “Good show?”

  She said, “Fair.”

  “Third act let you down?”

  “Badly.”

  “I heard.”

  “But worse.”

  “Really?”

  I didn’t know what they were talking about. But I thought, then and there, that he must be in love with her, and I hoped she didn’t like him, but I was afraid she did.

  They left, shortly, and all at once. Mr. Winberry wasn’t happy any more. He offered Guy Maxon a lift through the park, but Guy said he’d walk. Mr. Gaskell said he’d take a lift through the park. My uncle stirred and rose, lazily, and he and Lina went downstairs with them.

  It was then twelve-thirty.

  Left alone in the library, I walked over to look at the parcheesi table. I had never seen anything like it. Even the dice were made of something that looked precious, and the men were unusually large, made out of some glowing plastic in vivid jewel colors. My uncle, I noticed, had played with the red. There they lay, three of them still in his home starting place, and only one red man safe in the center goal. I turned away quickly and went back to sit where they’d left me, feeling as if that corner of the leather sofa was my prison.

  I could hear voices from below. Yet, suddenly my uncle swung into the library, walking lightly and swiftly for so large a man, and went directly to the alcove. He stood looking down at the parcheesi table. I thought by the expression on his face that he had forgotten I lived. It wasn’t exactly bitter, but it was thoughtful and in-drawn and ominous. I didn’t dare stir.

  Downstairs, the door closed. My uncle drew his mouth down in the oddest way and picked up his three lost men. Then with his left hand he gave the window a little touch. It rolled up smoothly and easily, and he threw the parcheesi men out—right out of the window as if they were rubbish.

  I gasped, and he saw me, but his face didn’t change. In a moment, he slid the window down with an easy turn of his wrist and began to pick up the men and the dice and the dice boxes and put them away. He said nothing. I found out then what I ever afterward found to be true, that my uncle never explained until he had to.

  Lina stood in the door, hesitating, lovely, thoughtful. “Let’s go up, shall we?” I suddenly realized she had spoken to me, and I floundered across the room. Then they went through an odd little ceremony, my uncle and my aunt. She walked to where he was and stood meekly before him with her head bent. “Good night, Charles,” she said. My uncle let her stand there just a little too long before he bent and touched her forehead with his lips.

  “Good night, my dear,” he said, and I didn’t know whether she was his dear or whether he was playing, again, some game of his own that made him shriek inside with hidden laughter.

  But she came away serenely, and we went up to the third floor together, leaving him below. As we rounded the curve (there was a statue in the niche at this level) Effans came behind us bearing a tray with sandwiches and a thermos bottle on it. “Come to my room,” Lina said, so we went toward the front of the house and Effans left the tray with us, said good night, and went on upward.

  “I told Ellen I shouldn’t want her,” said Lina. “She’s abed, I suppose.”

  It was then twelve-forty.

  Lina’s room was lovely, all helter-skelter with beautiful trifles, and yet it had a kind of clean simplicity. It looked like a young girl’s room. It puzzled me. In our house, my father and mother had a room which was half bare and neat, like Daddy, and half fussy and comfortably untidy, like Mother. There had been a double bed in it with a feather pillow for Mother and a hair one for Dad, so that even when it was made up it looked lopsided. In Lina’s room there was a double bed, to be sure, but not one stick of furniture in the place looked as if it belonged to anyone but Lina herself.

  She got out of her dress
and into a negligee so quickly that I scarcely knew it happened. “Have a sandwich,” she said. “Do you like milk? I do. Tell me about Baker’s Bridge. I wonder if you’ll like the city? What do you think you’ll do?”

  She warmed my heart. She talked all about me. She made me feel as if I were somebody in my own right. I stopped wondering, as I had been wondering all evening, what I was doing there. It was wonderful to talk about me.

  But I soon found out that Lina wasn’t going to take me by the hand and lead me around. In our house, Mother had always managed Daddy, and he had managed Mother, right back, and both of them managed me all over the place, but Lina just assumed I had plans of my own and would carry them out by myself. She was interested, and all that, but she didn’t “advise” anything. She just encouraged me.

  She said, “Charles thinks you had better have an allowance. What do you think of fifty dollars a week?” When I gasped that Daddy’d never had that income in all his life, she said, looking puzzled, “But you’ll need it. For clothes and lunches out when you like … and …”

  “I know my clothes aren’t so very smart,” I began miserably, but she stopped me.

  “No no. But clothes wear out, silly. And it would be so much better for you not to have to ask for things when you need them. After all, you’re going to live with us, now, and that includes clothes and ice cream and candy and movies and chewing gum,” she laughed. “Don’t you see?”

  “Uncle Charles must be a millionaire!”

  “I believe he is,” she said indifferently. Her wedding ring, I saw, was set all around with diamonds.

  “How old are you?” I blurted.

  “Twenty-five in April,” she said. “And you?”

  “Twenty in June.”

  “My goodness,” said my Aunt Lina and changed the subject. She thought it was a good idea for me to get a job if I wanted to. But she said, of course, I needn’t get a job. I could go to a school and study first if I would like that. She said I’d meet people either way, and of course I wanted to meet people. She as much as told me that she and Uncle Charles had no friends that would do for me. It seemed that, surrounded by every luxury, it was up to me to do exactly what I liked, find what I wanted, make my own decisions. It seemed a wonderful prospect when finally I got to my own room and chose the right-hand bed … but it was a responsibility, too.