The Faceless Adversary

by Frances

  “I do not like categories,” Father Higbee said. “We cannot, as children of one Father, set some aside. But—the Briggs Hill Tituses have, I’m afraid, interbred for several generations. The results have been—adverse. Julie’s father is mentally subnormal. Probably, he should be in an institution. Instead, he is often in jail. He has had ten children. The girls—there are four girls—are very pretty. The oldest of them is a prostitute. Two of the others are subnormal. Julie’s eldest brother was—he was convicted of killing a child of six.”

  Father Higbee paused. He shook his head slowly from side to side, and the rosiness seemed to have faded in his round and pleasant face.

  “So much is ugly,” he said. “So much we have made ugly in God’s world.” He sipped from his glass.

  “I realize you must find out about the girl,” he said. “I realize its importance to you. Yet—I cling to the hope that the girl is not Julie Titus. She was a sweet, bright child. Angela rescued her from Briggs Hill, from—from degradation. When she was a pretty little girl of ten and one of her brothers—” He stopped. “We have had enough of those ugly things,” he said. “I hope she is not the girl who was killed. But—”

  He did not finish. He looked at his cocktail glass, which now was empty. He looked at the mixer, which was empty too.

  “I fail as a host,” he said. He looked at John and Barbara. His glasses, John noticed, were far thicker than most. The visible world of Father Higbee, John thought, was probably of brief extent, even when he remembered to wear the proper glasses.

  “No,” Barbara said. “They are very good—but, no.”

  Father Higbee looked at John. John shook his head. Father Higbee looked again at his own empty glass.

  “No doubt you are both right,” he said, a little wistfully. “Was—this girl pretty?”

  “Yes,” John said. “She was a very pretty girl. Although I only saw her dead.”

  “You are wise,” Father Higbee said. “Beauty is in the spirit. Julie was a very pretty child. Dangerously pretty, even at ten.” He smiled faintly. “My eyes were stronger then,” he said. “It was I who told Angela of the girl. Of—her dangerous prettiness. Angela went to see. I do not know actually what—arrangements—she may have made. She took the girl home with her. Brought the girl up. Educated her.”

  He paused again. They waited.

  “After her husband died,” he said, “Angela, for a time, operated a girls’ school. A very good school, I believe. She had theories about education. She taught Julie herself. She said, ‘She is my responsibility. There is much she must be guarded against.’ Angela had given up the school by then. She taught the girl at home. And—kept her at home.”

  They could, he said, see the reason—see, at any rate, Angela Piermont’s reasoning. In rural areas, children are collected in buses and taken to district schools. The buses which would have taken Julie, when she was ten and twelve and fourteen, would also have taken her brothers and sisters from Briggs Hill. But it was precisely from that life that Julie was to be guarded.

  “I do not know,” he said, “how wise that was. We must live in the world we find. Try to better it, to be sure, but live in it.” He paused. “I have not always labored in this quiet vineyard,” he added, but almost as if to himself, “A child, particularly, may be too closely guarded.”

  “You think Julie was?” Barbara asked.

  Father Higbee peered at her through the thick glasses.

  “It may be,” he said—“yes, I think she was. She—” He paused again. Again he looked at his empty glass. He took it from the desk and put it on a shelf behind him. “Since she was ten,” he said, “she has lived with an aged woman. A woman who had come to—rather distant terms with life. Who sought nothing more from life.”

  “The poor child,” Barbara said. “She must have been very lonely.”

  “Yes,” the priest said. “And—unprepared, wouldn’t you think? She is, probably, about your age—in years. And—knows so little of what you, I imagine, know quite well.”

  He looked at Barbara.

  “As another very pretty girl,” he said.

  “Yes,” Barbara said. “Mrs. Piermont should have been—frightened. Even when they were in Florida?”

  “I don’t know how they lived there,” Father Higbee said. “But—yes, my dear. I should think even in Florida. In a quiet hotel. They would stay in a quiet hotel. And Bradenton is, I believe, a quiet town.” He paused again. “Although,” he said, “I seem to remember that the Braves train there.”

  They were both slightly surprised.

  “Even a clergyman,” he said mildly, “can be interested in baseball. I have an excellent television set.” He looked at John. “To which, as you are thinking,” he said, “I must sit very close. However—”

  He hesitated, as if considering.

  “Last summer,” he said, “late last summer, Julie met a man. I do not know how, or whether Angela knew about it. I—” He paused again. “It was a little odd,” he said. Then he stood up behind his desk.

  “If you have not had dinner,” he said, “I should like very much to take you to the Walpole Inn.” They looked at him, puzzled. “They have good food,” he said. “It is a quiet place.”

  “But,” John said, “you were about to tell us about some man.”

  “I have not forgotten,” Father Higbee said. “I am not particularly forgetful.” But then he smiled. “Only,” he said, “how can one say that? Because, of course, one could so easily forget forgetting. I saw Julie and this young man at the inn. Last October. The leaves were just at their best. But—I should like to show you.”

  A Corvette is built for two, but three are possible. Father Higbee sat between them, and wore a soft black hat firmly on his head. (Now, Barbara thought, we must look as if we were kidnaping a priest.) It was not far to the inn, which was low and pleasantly dim and, when they arrived, empty. A waiter lighted candles on the tables.

  “I think,” Father Higbee said, “that we might permit ourselves another drink.”

  They permitted themselves. They did not try to hurry the pleasant, round-faced clergyman. They sipped very slowly, interrupting themselves to order dinner. Then, Father Higbee said that he was selfish.

  “I dislike eating alone,” he said. “So often, now, I eat alone. I was alone the evening I saw this man of Julie’s. But I need not have brought you here. No doubt you had other plans.”

  “No,” John said. “It’s pleasant here.”

  “Yes,” Father Higbee said. “Over week ends it is quite crowded. But during the week— It is not unusual to find it empty. I thought it was that evening. But then I saw a couple. Over there.” He pointed. He pointed toward a corner table—a table especially secluded, on which, now, a single candle burned steadily, but very softly. “I—” He paused. “I am afraid they were only shadows to me,” he said. “I do not see at any distance. But I nodded to them, as pleasantly as I could.” He paused again. “Because, of course,” he said, “they might very well have been parishioners. I find it well to be on the safe side. People so often are.”

  He sipped again.

  “The man talked to the girl,” he said. “Then she stood up— I think she shook her head first—but then stood up. It was as if he had persuaded her. She came over to my table and the man came with her. He was a man of about your height, John. He was wearing a sports jacket—a rather showy jacket. The girl said she was Julie Titus. She asked if I remembered her. She seemed—a little breathless. As if she had made up her mind to do something, and was doing it quickly. You know what I mean, my dear?”

  This was to Barbara. “Yes,” Barbara said.

  “Yes,” Father Higbee said. “She said good evening. Then, all in a breath, she said she wanted me to meet a friend of hers. She said, ‘Father, I want you to meet John Hayward.’”

  IX

  At first there was nothing to say, and they said nothing. They had taken Father Higbee back to his pleasant little house and he had said he
was sorry it had come to this. “Yes,” John had said, and added, forced himself to add, that Father Higbee had done all he could do. Now John drove the little car toward the west, toward the city, with the lights on against the pale darkness of twilight. And there was nothing to say—nothing for either of them to say. John Hayward looked only at the road. He drove automatically.

  I am a puppet, he thought—string-dangled, without the power of decision; with only, at moments, the illusion I decide. I am beaten, he thought and, with that, there came again, the frightening darkness of self-doubt. The puppet master—is he really another man, quite another man, who happens enough to resemble me, who has prepared, long in advance, this dance he leads me? Or—is he something in myself? A self, I am, but have forgotten?

  Barbara sat beside him, looked at the same road under the lights of the car, was silent as he was silent. Yet, John thought, I am alone. It was this way before, he thought. A long time ago it was this way—

  (I wake in a center of loneliness. There are men around me, but they cannot see me, cannot reach me. They say my name. And they say, “Lieutenant! Do you hear me, lieutenant?” but they are too distant to be answered; even the air between me and those others has become a barrier. I say, “Yes, I hear you, doctor,” but they cannot hear me speak. I—)

  “John,” Barbara said. “Do you hear me, John? Listen to me, John.”

  (“Hayward,” the doctor says. “Listen to me, Hayward. Do you hear me, lieutenant?”

  “I hear you,” John Hayward said. “Don’t you hear me answer, doctor?”

  But he did not hear the doctor, who was too far away, who was behind air turned impervious to sound, and the doctor did not hear him. “—be all right,” the doctor said. “Just a question of time,” he said. “Bad shaking up,” he said. “That’s all it is.” But he spoke to someone who was not there. “I’m not here any more,” John said, but the doctor did not hear him. “I don’t live here any more.”)

  “John,” Barbara said. “Snap out of it! Listen to me—snap out of it!”

  “I’m all right,” he said. He spoke dully. It was as if he spoke to the road the lights brightened. “It was a mortar shell.”

  For a moment she was silent. There was a kind of tenseness about her silence; it was as if she snatched a moment of quiet in which to draw her thoughts together. Then she said, again, “John. Listen to me,” and then, “Where have you gone, John?”

  He did not answer immediately.

  “You mean—what Father Higbee said?” she asked him, and spoke very carefully. “About this man who was with the Titus girl. The man she thought was—” She hesitated. “Was John Hayward?”

  “I was talking about a real mortar shell,” he said. “But—partly that. Yes. It was rather like one.”

  “He doesn’t think it was you,” she said. “He is quite certain it wasn’t.”

  “In his own mind,” John said. “The benefit of the doubt. And, he can’t be sure it wasn’t. Can’t swear it wasn’t.” He spoke slowly, with long intervals between words. “How could he? He sees very little. The room was dark. It was months ago. If he testified, if he talked to the police, he’d have to say the girl told him that the man was John Hayward. He’d have to say the man wore what he called a ‘showy’ sports jacket—like the one the police will say they found in my apartment.”

  “Listen,” she said. “Stop somewhere. Pull off somewhere. We can’t talk this way. I can’t hear half you say.”

  He drove a little way farther, pulled off where the shoulder widened. He cut the motor. He turned to face Barbara. He managed to smile at her, but at the same time he shook his head. He said it didn’t, he was afraid, make much difference what they said. And, in spite of himself, he spoke from a distance, dully.

  “He started it,” she said. “Forced it. Insisted Julie introduce him as—as you. It was part of the plan.”

  “He,” John said. “Yes, I suppose so, Barbara—I don’t remember ever being there. At the inn. I mean before today.”

  “Remember?” she said. “What do you mean, remember? You never were.” She waited. He merely looked at her. “What can I do with you?” she said, and there was a great anxiety in her voice. “Whatever can I do with you?”

  “No,” he said, in the same dull voice. “I was never there. I never saw the girl. I didn’t kill her. I say that over and over, don’t I?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Over and over. You needn’t. I know. Do you hear me? I know.”

  He touched her cheek with the knuckles of his loosely clenched right hand. He drew the knuckles down the softness of her cheek, and ran them, tenderly, along the slender, fragile bone of her jaw. She took the hand and held it, slim fingers twined around it.

  “About the mortar shell,” she said. “There was really a shell? In Korea?”

  It had been in Korea, he told her. They had got, or nearly enough got, the range of his battery. A shell had exploded on it, or near enough on it. He had been buried, they told him. It was some time before they could dig him out. He had been unconscious for a time—they told him. He remembered opening his eyes in a field hospital, and of trying to answer a doctor who was talking to him.

  “It was like being two people,” he said. “One—still buried somewhere. Deep down. Trying to answer; thinking he had answered; not being heard. The other—the other somewhere else. Watching. As if from outside.”

  She merely nodded, and waited.

  “Apparently,” he said, “it was merely a bad concussion—oh, a few things cracked here and there, but nothing that worried them. I tried to explain afterward about being—well, in two parts—and they weren’t particularly interested. Said there were all sorts of possible results from a concussion, and that I was lucky. Lucky and, after a couple of months, fit for duty. But then the whole thing stopped. With the armistice.”

  “John,” she said. “Why did you remember that, just now? Why do you tell me about that? Just now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought of it. Wondered if—” He did not finish. He looked at her. His eyes were no longer dull. He looked at her intently.

  “All right,” she said. “You wondered whether—how should I put it? Whether you ever came back together again? Whether one of these—these two people—could have lived a different life? John—do you really wonder that?”

  He looked at her very carefully.

  “Not when you say it,” he said. “Perhaps—never. But there’s a kind of shadow.”

  “I never,” Barbara Phillips said, in a quiet voice, “heard anything so ridiculous in my life. Never in all my life.” She looked at him; there was something like anger in her eyes. “You think I wouldn’t know?” she asked him.

  “I—” he said, and did not go on.

  “Well?”

  She waited for him to answer. He did not answer in words. He drew her to him. He kissed her lips and held his own on them, hard.

  “All right,” she said, when she could. “All right. Now let’s go find this damn’ tree by the tennis court.”

  “If we do,” John said, “we’ll find this other Hayward in the branches. Wearing a showy sports jacket.”

  “Now at that,” Barbara said, “I wouldn’t be surprised. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”

  He started the little car.

  Detective Shapiro had talked to Miller. He had talked to Grady. He had talked to the desk sergeant at the barracks of Troop K, New York State Police. Miller—which probably would mean Grady—would talk to the police at Danbury, Connecticut, seeking co-operation. Shapiro had had a dinner, of sorts. Now he drove the small black sedan out of Brewster, and along a road he had followed before, and up a narrow winding road. Although things were going well enough, Shapiro felt dispirited. But I’m a sad man, he thought; everybody says so.

  The chain across the Piermont driveway had been released. It lay, now, across the entrance to the drive. Shapiro found this interesting, and drove over the chain. When he had rounded a curve and so br
ought the house clearly in view, he discovered that there were several lights burning in it. Then he stopped the car abruptly, since a tall man had appeared in the headlight beam. The tall man carried a shotgun. Shapiro leaned out of the window and looked at the man, and the man came toward him, holding the shotgun ready.

  “Going some place?” the man said. He was not, Shapiro decided, an amiable man. There were many unamiable people in the world, which was one of the causes of Detective Shapiro’s sadness. “Mr. Piermont at home?” Shapiro said. He hoped the man knew how to handle shotguns.

  “Mister?” the man said. “Ain’t no mister, mister. Died thirty years ago. Thought everybody—” He stopped, apparently stricken by a new idea. “You trying to sell something?” he said. “If you are, we don’t want it.”

  Unamiable people, and negative people—the world is full of them, Shapiro thought. He sighed at the thought.

  “No,” he said. “I’m a policeman. Is there a Mrs. Piermont?”

  “What if there is?” the man said. But he lowered the gun to a position where, if he happened to pull the trigger, he would probably shoot off his own right foot.

  “Couple of hours ago,” Shapiro said, “there was a young couple. They talked to a man who was clipping trees.”

  “Pruning,” the man said. “Talked to me. So?”

  “I’m a policeman,” Shapiro said.

  He was told he had said that.

  “What did they ask you?” he said. He was patient, as well as sad.

  “About the Titus girl,” the man said. “Is it any of your business?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I’m afraid it is. What did you tell them?”

  “What you think? That she isn’t here. In Florida, with the old lady.” He paused; he moved a step closer. He asked Shapiro if he was sure he was a policeman. Shapiro said he was quite sure. He held out his badge. He flicked a lighter so the man could see the badge.

  “Looks like it,” the man said. “Well—seems she ain’t. On account of, the old lady’s here. Just came back alone.” He looked at the badge again, very carefully. “Tell you,” he said, “whyn’t you go talk to the old lady? If it’s about the girl?”