Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  “Suppose you tell me.”

  Vanpelt shrugged. “If you wish me to. Since you already know, it makes no difference. I think you’re here to find Alex Horton.”

  “And why do you think that, Professor Vanpelt?”

  “Because I can put two and two together and come up with four, as any mathematician should. I think you are looking for Mr. Horton and that you have chosen Knicker-bocker University as your starting place. That’s a matter of guesswork, but it’s logical, sensible guesswork. I also think that the knowledge of Mr. Horton’s whereabouts is a matter of great value. That’s an independent conclusion on my part, if you follow me. Let us say that I also am curious about Mr. Horton’s whereabouts because I believe such knowledge would constitute a not inconsiderable financial asset. Suppose that I had some connections, Brother Clancy, with people who might feel that Alex Horton’s secret was to their advantage. Does such a supposition interest you?”

  “I told you before, in a general sense, that I’m interested in your curiosity.”

  “Fine—fine.” Vanpelt finished his drink and called the waiter for another. I refused a second drink and Vanpelt smiled understandingly. “I will presume upon your interest,” he said. His drink came and he took a long sip of it, all the while stuffing himself with handfuls of peanuts from a bowl upon the table.

  “I said I will presume that you are interested. Now let us suppose, Mr. Clancy, that someone were willing to pay a great deal of money for knowing Horton’s secret.”

  “Suppose he has no secret,” I said. “Suppose he’s dead.”

  “We could go on all day with suppositions. However, I make a premise. I make a premise that Professor Horton has a secret and that he is not dead, and I say to you, ‘Suppose that a great deal of money were to be offered for his secret.’”

  “How much money?” I said.

  “An interesting and pointed question. How much money? It would have to be a great deal of money even to interest you. You have all the earmarks of an honest man and it is always far more expensive to appeal to an honest man than to a dishonest man. Do you agree, Mr. Clancy?”

  “It sounds reasonable,” I said.

  “Then suppose we say a round sum—half a million dollars.”

  This time I smiled at Vanpelt and, when he asked me what I was thinking, I told him. “I think you’re a fat, unpleasant fool, who drinks too much. I think, if you had a lot of money, you’d be a drunk. You’d be an unpleasant, overbearing drunk.”

  Vanpelt’s face tightened and his eyes narrowed. “I said half a million dollars,” he whispered.

  “You make me tired, Vanpelt,” I told him. “You’ve been reading too many bad books. You’re also a fool. You also like to play in games that aren’t good for you. I think you also make me sick. I don’t want you to buy me any drinks.” I took five dollars out of my pocket and threw it on the table. “You have a bad effect on me. I’d feel happier if you left me alone. I want to repeat what I said before; you make me sick.”

  Then I got up and left, but it was a little less than the truth. Vanpelt didn’t make me sick, he made me afraid—and I was afraid enough without his. assistance.

  It was raining when I returned to the University plaza. A cold, wet March rain that turned to sleet and then back to rain again, cold and wet and uncomfortable, the sky dark and dreary—as if to assure me that its brief promise of spring was over and forgotten. Within myself it was also over. I felt pinched and tired and filled up with dreariness. The sneering face of Vanpelt danced in front of me like a fat mask. I put my head down and ran for shelter. I was cold and soaking wet when I came to my office, my clothes wrinkled and shapeless. I had intended to stay there for awhile and work, but now all I could think of was to go home, get out of my wet clothes and lie in a hot bath.

  I was sitting there in my office shivering, unable to warm myself, when someone knocked on the door. It was Phyllis. She came in, glanced at me and asked me whether I was ill.

  “No, I’m all right,” I said, “a little tired, but all right.”

  Her face was full of solicitude—the kind of solicitude and anxiety that I had not seen on any woman’s face for a long time.

  “You have to rest,” she said to me. “I know how hard all this is for you.”

  “You do?” I smiled.

  “You’re very nice when you smile,” Phyllis said. “Your whole face changes; you know that.”

  “Nobody knows that. You can’t smile at yourself in the mirror; it doesn’t work.”

  “It works,” she said. “I smiled at myself in the mirror today. Do you know I told my mother about you. Does that sound silly—for a woman of my age to say that I told my mother about you?”

  “It doesn’t sound silly,” I said. “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her that you were very nice and kind and gentle and thoughtful.”

  “All of those things?”

  “More. I told her you were good-looking, too. And now she’s worried about me and she told me to ask you to come home with me tomorrow night to dinner.”

  “Because she’s worried about you?”

  “That’s right,” Phyllis said. “Can you come?”

  “Of course I can come,” I said. “I’ll be happy to come.”

  So I arranged to meet her the following afternoon and to drive her home. Then I went downtown. I didn’t have my car at school that day and it was still raining. I walked through the rain to the subway and through more rain from the subway to my apartment. I was too wet for the rain to matter now, soaked to the skin when I opened my door.

  The place had no welcome or warmth for me. It was not the place I had left. Someone had been there, looking for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They had looked well. The furniture was ripped open, the cushions on the couch were slashed, their insides torn out. Every drawer in the apartment had been removed and the contents dumped on the floor. The book cases were emptied, the books flung around as if they in themselves constituted an object and reason for savage hatred. In my bedroom the same thing—every drawer empty, the bed stripped, the mattress slashed and ripped. The pictures on the wall were down, smashed, plucked out of their frames. Here and there a knife blade had plowed through the wallpaper and pieces of wallpaper were hanging crazily. The drapes were ripped down, the shades pulled off their rollers.

  In stunned silence I walked among the ruins of what had once been my own small world. Here and there I made an effort to pick something up—to put this or that to rights. But the motion was more symbolic than practical. My whole body and mind hurt as I assessed what had happened, thinking to myself how much easier it would have been if a fire had consumed whatever I owned and destroyed it. That way it’s clean and easy and simple and it’s done with and you start over; but this way nothing was done with—only torn and broken.

  I got out of my clothes, filled the tub with hot water and sank into it gratefully. I suppose I lay in the tub for better than an hour, adding hot water whenever it showed signs of cooling. I lay there and I tried to think. I tried to think about an oversized, overweight hoodlum called Jackie and his partner, Mr. Brown, who had one hundred and fifty thousand dollars as a retainer for future efforts, and I tried to think about a professor named John Vanpelt, who talked even larger figures of half a million dollars. I tried to put this and that together and to make it come out reasonable and logical, but none of my thinking was too successful, and nothing was reasonable or logical.

  I was very tired. After the bath I took fresh sheets and patched up and covered the mattress on my bed as well as I could. Then I lay down and pulled the blankets up around my chin. It was only nine o’clock but I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept through for almost twelve hours without stirring or waking.

  In the morning I was able to face the wreckage and set about putting it to rights.

  part seven ANNA GOLDMARK

  DRIVING UPTOWN with me from the University to West 174th Street, Phyllis talked about her mother an
d about herself. These were not easy things for her to talk about. She was fighting her own battle just as I was fighting mine and we both of us lived in our separate shadow worlds. I don’t know exactly what connected us then at that time but it was stronger than either of us dreamed; and if our coming together was not made out of the romantic love that a man and a woman should find in each other—according to all the books and the way they tell it—it was understandable, for we were not young and we were not bright with all the pleasure of being young. Perhaps we clung to each other because it was a moment of desperation for each of us. At least we needed each other and slowly, bit by bit, we were coming to value each other.

  Phyllis told me about her mother. Often enough when she spoke she would clasp her hands in her lap and look down. The words would begin slowly and then the intensity would increase. She told me of a woman who had come to this country from Europe and had made little of it. There was no pot of honey, only work that went on and on, and never lessened and never ended.

  “I look at her,” Phyllis said, “and then I try to understand her, and then I’m filled with doubt as to whether I understand myself. I mean that I begin by thinking of how much I love her and how, more than anything else in the world, I would want her to have some peace and happiness; and then it always ends with the love turning to pity and with my asking myself whether there is any more in it than guilt. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

  “I think I know,” I nodded. “I think I can understand what you’re trying to say. My own mother came from somewhere else, but it wasn’t so different.”

  “I know what it’s done to me,” Phyllis went on. “I know how my life has shaped itself to her life.”

  “It’s only natural,” I said. “It’s not anything to brood about.”

  “I didn’t brood about it until I met you, Clancy. I keep calling you Clancy instead of Tom—do you mind that?”

  “I don’t mind it,” I said.

  “But when I met you—would you believe what was the first thing I said to myself when I met you? I shouldn’t tell you, but then it seems to me that it won’t make any difference and I’ll feel better if I tell you. The first thing I said to myself was, ‘Oh my God, Phyllis, don’t spoil it this time.’ Do you understand, Clancy? I wanted so desperately for you to like me. I just looked at you and then all I knew was how desperately I wanted for you to like me. And then after that I came home and I looked at my mother and I found myself telling myself that I hated her. Can you imagine what a terrible thing that was, Clancy? She’s not someone you can hate. She’s a sweet, good, kind, and self-sacrificing woman. Everything in her life added up to me. She would try to tell me sometimes that without me nothing in her life made any sense or reason. She once said to me that without me she would have lost her faith, she would have cursed God, she would have thrown her whole life back into God’s face. I mean that sounds very dramatic and strange when you say it in English, but the way she said it, it wasn’t dramatic or strange. It was just her way of trying to make me understand what I meant to her.”

  “We all live by what we mean to someone else,” I said. “You’re not any different, your mother’s not any different either.”

  “But my God, Clancy, suddenly I looked at her and hated her.”

  “You didn’t go on hating her,” I said.

  “No, no, that’s true. It went away, but it didn’t leave me the same. I was all mixed up then, and the next day I could only think of one thing.”

  “I suppose the next day you decided to resign from the University.”

  “How did you know?” she whispered.

  “I know you a little,” I said to her. “It didn’t start exactly the same way for me. I had a job to do at the University. Then I began to know you.”

  “So quickly. It’s all too quick, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know whether its being quick has anything to do with it—whether it makes it any better or any worse.”

  “But then I talked to her about it, Clancy, I stopped hating her and I talked to her about it. I told her about you—as much as I knew about you—and I told her what I thought about you, that it would be all right, that everything would be all right, and then she wanted to know you and to see you. So that’s why I’m bringing you home with me. I want you to understand her because I think that if you understand her, you’ll like her.”

  “I’ll like her,” I said. “Don’t worry about that, Phyllis.”

  “I worry about it, Clancy. I guess I’m too old to be in love with a man for the first time in my life—really in love—and because of that I’m full of all kinds of fears and worries. There’s no certainty and there’s no security, but I don’t want to ask you to give me any of that. I have to find it my own way, don’t I?”

  “I think so, Phyllis,” I agreed. “That’s not something I can give you. You have to find it your own way.”

  “I mean this is something that I’m doing—not you. You didn’t ask me to marry you—I have no right to even expect you to ask me to marry you. I’ve created all this myself. I’ve built it up the way a silly little girl builds up a fairy tale and now I’m living on it. Don’t you see how bad that can be?”

  “I don’t think it’s bad. People work out that kind of thing and, if you don’t dream about it, what validity has it? Anyway, I’m hungry. Is your mother a good cook?”

  “She’s a good cook,” Phyllis smiled. “A wonderful cook, Clancy, and tonight she’ll cook everything that she’s best at.”

  We were almost there by then. Following Phyllis’s directions, I turned left off Broadway to Fort Washington Avenue and then drove slowly, looking for a place to park. I didn’t find one until 176th Street. We left the car there and walked back. The house itself was a gray, shapeless, characterless apartment building. Once, perhaps twenty-five or thirty years ago, it might have had touches of elegance about it. Now the building was run down, dirty, and poorly kept. The hallway was full of a rank odor, the self-service elevator was a cheap contraption of thin metal, and inside it was scratched and mutilated with the senselessness of frustrated kids who have no other way of throwing their defiance at the world than to chip at whatever part of the world is closest to them at the moment. We went up to the third floor and then down a hall.

  Phyllis was in front of me. She rang the bell but not before she had her key out and then she didn’t wait for her mother to answer it, but opened the door with her key and called out, her voice suddenly bright and youthful,

  “Mom, I’m home!”

  She shouldered the door open and said, “Come in, Tom. Come on in.” She had remembered not to call me Clancy. I stepped into a small, rather stuffy hallway, waited there a moment while Phyllis, unbuttoning her coat, walked past me into what I subsequently learned was the kitchen. She was saying something as she stepped into that room and then the words broke off and died. A part of her world died with them. She screamed—not a loud or shrill scream—but a scream lowpitched like a moan of unbearable pain, and when I rushed in after her I saw what she had seen—the body of her mother lying on the kitchen floor.

  I pulled her out of the room into the living room of the apartment and held her while she trembled and whimpered and begged me to let her go and help her mother.

  “You can’t help her, Phyllis, your mother is dead. Try to understand me. Your mother is dead. I don’t want you to go in there again.”

  “How do you know she’s dead? I can’t leave her like that, lying on the floor. How do you know she’s dead?”

  I knew. The thought came to me then and there and suddenly that many years of my life had been devoted to occupations in which people died and the proof of their death was written on them. I convinced Phyllis that she should stay there and I went back into the kitchen and looked at what had been her mother. I have seen a lot of death in a variety of shapes and forms, and the horror of it and the pity of it and the waste of it; but I had never before seen a woman in
her middle fifties beaten to death in a manner like this—senselessly and insanely beaten; her neck broken; her body covered with lacerations and bruises; her skin ripped by brass knuckles. It was a brutal and inhuman definition of the horror that lived inside of someone who walked as a man among other men. I looked at her, touched her, felt her pulse when there was no need to feel her pulse, and then went out and closed the door behind me.

  Phyllis sat where I had left her, and as I entered she turned her white face to me and asked all the questions wordlessly. I nodded.

  “Phyllis, your mother is dead,” I said. “You have to accept that. There’s no use in going inside and looking at her. Just believe me; your mother is dead; someone killed her.”

  “Why would anyone kill my mother?”

  Then I lied to her and said I didn’t know—when I knew it as surely as I had ever known anything.

  “Tell me, Clancy, why would anyone kill my mother? Please tell me.”

  “I don’t know, Phyllis. It happened. You have to accept the fact that it happened. Can you do that?”

  “No one would want to kill her, Clancy. No one in the whole world. I hated her for a little while, but then I stopped. Clancy, no one else ever hated her—no one!”

  Then she began to cry. I walked through a doorway into a bedroom. It was Phyllis’s bedroom. A small room, but bright and cheerful, the windows hung with organdy curtains, a colorful patterned spread upon the bed. Without analyzing what I was seeing, I saw her life beginning and ending in that room—a few dolls and stuffed animals that she had treasured through all the years, her books, her things of value which had no other value than their relationship to her and their meaning to her. I saw it only briefly and in passing as I picked up the phone and called Centre Street. This time I asked for Comaday, got through to him, and told him what had happened. He said to wait for him there—not to touch anything but to wait for him. Then I went back to Phyllis. Until Comaday came I sat with Phyllis and talked to her sometimes—but most of the time only sat with her while she let grief sink into her and tried to understand why someone would kill her mother. My own grief was of a different sort and I held a longer conversation with myself than I did with Phyllis. Whether the necessity would forgive me or not, I had managed the murder. The murder was presented not as a deed of hatred or malignancy, but as an object lesson. It was brought home to me that I was not playing ball, that I was not producing what I was supposed to produce, that I was not moving in directions I was supposed to move in and, after all, what was the life of an old woman when the game was played for millions of dollars and millions of lives? So I talked to myself and debated with myself and tried to comfort Phyllis until at last Comaday came and with him Fredericks of the Justice Department and with them the whole paraphernalia of Homicide—the uniformed officers and the officers in plain clothes, the fingerprint men and the photographers and all the other specialists in the world of murder—including the neighbors, who said they wanted to help and fell over each other in their desire to see the body.