Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

  •

  CHAPTER NINE

  •

  “ ‘Dear Miss, Ms., or Whatever,’ ” I dictated to my secretary as I paced my office. “ ‘Although you don’t know me, I feel impelled, as former probation officer for Custer Huppfelt . . .’ ” I shook my head. “Cancel that: the son of a bitch would lie out of it.

  “ ‘Dear Miss. The records of my divorce from my former husband, Custer Huppfelt, are filed’ ”—I paused, thinking—“ ‘under the alias he used at the time. And I am obliged to sign this anonymously, for even yet I fear his revenge . . .’

  “Cancel that. ‘Dear Friend. As retired head of the Vice Squad, most of the city’s sexual degenerates are only too well known to me. I could not live out my declining years without warning you that among the very vilest and most depraved . . .’

  “Never mind the letters,” I said to my secretary, who got up to leave. “Hetty’s so prejudiced she’d never believe them.” I sat down and yanked the phone book toward me. It fell through the hole in my desk, but with the skill of much practice I shot myself far down in my chair and caught it in my lap. I looked up the place Hetty worked at, phoned her, told her I had to see her right away about something terribly important; and after a moment’s hesitation she said she’d meet me right after work.

  Outside her office, just after five, I sat waiting in a cab, and when Hetty got in, I asked her where she’d like to go, and she gave the driver a lower Second Avenue address.

  It was a little neighborhood saloon. We walked in, I stopped short, and stood looking around at the long old-style bar and the booths along one wall. “Good lord,” I said, “this is where I used to come with . . .”

  “With whom?”

  “A girl I used to know. Long ago”—I smiled sadly—“in another world.” There were half a dozen people sitting at the bar, and I nodded at the bartender, said, “Two old-fashioneds, please; one with soda,” then led Hetty to an empty booth.

  “Who’s the old-fashioned with soda for?”

  “You.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Just guessed.” I looked around. “And I can guess why you like this place, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the tables are wood, not plastic. Because the bar is old, the ceiling made of stamped tin, and there’s still a gas fixture sticking out of that wall. Because the place is a little ugly, a little dirty. Because it’s unfaked and it’s been here a long time.” Our drinks arrived.

  Hetty was smiling. “You’re right; how did you guess?”

  “Because I like it, too. And I’ll make another guess.” Her brows rose questioningly. I took a swallow of my drink, then said, “Custer doesn’t like the place at all.”

  She looked at her glass for a few seconds without answering, then looked up at me again. “No,” she said, her voice carefully neutral, “he doesn’t care for it.” She smiled a deliberately polite and perfunctory smile, and said, “What did you want to see me about, Ben?”

  “Well.” I sat working up my nerve, going through the business of sliding my glass around on the table, making wet tracks, a bit of dramatic business I’d learned from movies. “I guess I better just come out with it, Hetty, and hope you won’t get too mad to listen: I don’t think you ought to marry Custer.”

  She took several moments, staring over at the bar, to decide what to do about that, then decided to hear me. “Why not?” she said coldly, the polite smile all gone.

  “Because he doesn’t like this bar.”

  She nodded, then said, “I nodded to show that I know what you mean, not because I agree that it’s of any importance.”

  “Yes, it is, Hetty.” I leaned over the table toward her. “There’s nothing wrong with Custer; I don’t mean to say that. On the other hand . . .” I sat looking at her for a moment, then sat back. “The hell I don’t mean to say that. He’s a self-centered, egotistical, selfish bastard, and if that sounds like I’m repeating myself, I’m not; there are shades of meaning, and I mean them all. He doesn’t love you or anyone, Hetty, except old Cus himself. He’s no good! He just misses being a slob! You can’t marry him. My god, Hetty, you’d die! In ten thousand years that guy would never know anything about you!”

  “You see all this, do you?” she said, smiling with exaggerated politeness. “I don’t; I’ve been going out with him for nearly a year, but things that have escaped me completely in all that time are crystal-clear to you in only—”

  “Het, cut it out. You haven’t missed seeing them; you’ve just denied them. There’s a place somewhere inside your head where you know damn well I’m right, if you’ll just look at it. I’ve known this guy since fourth grade, when he cheated in tests and lied to get out of things. I knew him—”

  She was gathering up her purse and gloves. Then, ready to slide out of the booth, she looked at me and said, “I won’t tell Custer about this, because I have to accept, I suppose, that you meant well: the excuse that covers so much. But you ought to be able to see that I can’t sit here and listen to you slander him. Can’t, and don’t want to.” She slid across the bench, about to rise.

  “I love you,” I said. The words weren’t hard to say now; I wanted to say them again.

  Hetty was staring at me, astonished. For just an instant—at least I thought so—there was a response in her eyes and almost imperceptibly she leaned toward me. But even as it happened and before she realized it herself, I think, the feeling was shut off, and she said angrily, “I hardly know you. And you hardly know me. I think you’re out of your mind.”

  “Hetty, I love you,” I said helplessly.

  “Are you telling me you want to divorce your wife and marry me?”

  I knew it was angry sarcasm, no answer expected, but I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. That wasn’t something I could possibly do to Tess even if Hetty had been serious.

  “You’re insane,” Hetty said coldly, “you really are,” and she put her hand on the table top, starting to rise.

  “Hetty . . .” I laid my hand on hers, leaning far across the table toward her. Nearly whispering it, I said, “He’ll never notice that you’re scared of lightning and won’t admit it. That you half believe the daily horoscope. And that you count the steps when you’re climbing stairs . . .”

  But now, her eyes rounding, she was frightened; she stood abruptly and hurried out. After a moment or two I set my glass on top of a few dollar bills to pay for our drinks; then I left, too.

  I don’t much want to talk about the next few weeks. Tess didn’t know what was wrong with me; she noticed I was quiet and subdued, of course, with a tendency toward wan smiles, but I said I was working hard, under strain, and she believed it. When the wedding invitation came from Custer, she was all excited when I got home, eager to talk over what to get them for a wedding present. I mixed drinks, and while I sat back on the davenport, Tess suggested ideas. They were the usual things people give as wedding gifts, and I sat sipping my drink, watching Custer in a little cloud over my head as he used them.

  “What about a pair of very handsome silver candlesticks?” she said.

  “That’d be nice,” I murmured, watching Cus just overhead as he lit the cleverly wax-coated sticks of dynamite.

  “Or an electric toaster?”

  “Sounds great,” I said, nodding as Custer plugged in the specially wired, 13,000-volt model.

  “He still smokes. So maybe one of those big table-model cigarette lighters.”

  “Might be best of all,” I said, and smiled as the foot-long jet of blue flame shot down Custer’s throat.

  But I wasn’t smiling the day of the wedding. Like a condemned man who can’t believe they’re really going to do it, and then one day finds himself being strapped into the chair, I found myself standing in the church with Tessie, while Hetty walked up the aisle in a wedding gown to the horrible organ throbbing of you-know-what, toward the grinning face of Custer Huppfelt. And when presently the minister said, “If any m
an can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak . . .” my cry rang through the church. Because she’s my WIFE! I shouted silently, but it didn’t help. Incredulous as the man strapped in the chair watching the switch actually being pulled, I heard the minister say, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” And as they walked down the aisle, I saw the woman next to me nudge her neighbor. “First time in my life,” I heard her whisper, glancing at me, “that I ever saw a man cry at a wedding.”

  On the church steps I aimed pretty well with a double handful of rice, catching Custer right in the mouth as he turned to say something to Hetty, and he had to gulp and swallow hard to get rid of it. I figured he’d swallowed a good third of a cupful, and tried to believe it would swell in his stomach till it burst through that night, early that night, killing Custer on his honeymoon in an absolutely unique way.

  It was a noon wedding, and I had to go back to the office and work, or at least go through the motions. When I got there I had a phone call from the chairman of the board. He was all excited about a new promotion idea of mine, a series of ads in show-biz publications offering to chorus girls and nightclub entertainers, for a limited time only, a free navel-size zircon with a trial box of Navel-O-No. He raised my salary and gave me a stock option.

  A delegation from The Skin Game, trade paper of the cosmetic industry, was waiting when I hung up the phone. They were here to present me with a “Helena,” a silver statue very much like the hood ornament of a Rolls-Royce, except that it was three and a half feet high, for his contribution, the citation read, to the well-rounded woman, by filling a gap in her life.

  When they left, with my thanks and a check for a full-page ad, I read a phone-call memo, a call earlier that morning from Custer himself: a large safety-pin manufacturer had offered to buy the zipper for two hundred and fifty thou.

  It should have been a great day, but somehow all I could think of when I left the building that night was that my wife was on her honeymoon. Turning from the lobby of the Doc Pepper Building toward the corner just ahead, I wondered how I was going to get through an evening of smiling, nodding, and talking to Tessie just as though nothing had happened. I knew I couldn’t do it, and I stopped dead on the sidewalk as I realized, too, that I couldn’t get through a lifetime of it, knowing all the time that Custer and Hetty . . . I shook my head rapidly, not wanting to even finish that thought.

  People were bumping into me, cursing me in friendly New York fashion; a small dog bit me in the leg, and I had to move on, habit taking over. Just as though this weren’t the worst night of my life, I walked on toward the newsstand, my hand bringing out some change; two or three pennies, a nickel, a couple dimes. Then once again I stopped dead, directly before the stand, people bumping into me again, Herman snarling at me to get the hell out of the way of the customers, a silvery-haired executive, trying to reach a Wall Street Journal, biting me on the shoulder. But I didn’t move. For there on my palm lay a Woodrow Wilson dime, that sharp-cut profile staring sternly off at Kaiser Bill, I suppose . . . and beside it lay another dime that seemed to grow—to the size of a quarter, the size of a half, the size of a silver dollar—until finally it filled the entire screen of my vision.

  Carried here somehow from another alternate world, there lay a Roosevelt dime, and as I stood staring down at it—a magnificently dressed society matron reaching past me for a copy of Vogue gave me a judo chop in the neck with the other, gloved, hand—I was struggling with the most important decision of my life: which dime to choose.

  There beside the little newsstand which somehow stood at a point where two alternate worlds intersected, existing simultaneously in both of them, I hesitated. Spend a dime of this world at the little stand, a Woodrow Wilson dime, and you were of this world, receiving the paper that belonged in it. But lay down a dime belonging to the other world, a Roosevelt dime, and you were of that world. I stood staring at the two dimes on the palm of my hand, trying to make my decision.

  Then I made it. I slapped the dime on the counter, took the folded paper that Herman humorously thrust at me like a sword to the throat, and walked a few paces off, my eyes on the walk. At the curb I opened the paper, skipping past the headline which had something to do with weapons for peace, and looked at the paper’s masthead. New York Post, it said, and I whirled around to look back the way I’d come—and then up, up, up, and up to the needle point of the marvelous gray familiarity of the Chrysler Building. Then, dodging at the intersections around the fronts of Saabs, Nissans, Björks, and Subarus, I ran all the way to Twenty-eighth Street . . . to home! To Hetty! To my wife.

  •

  CHAPTER TEN

  •

  I ran across the sleazy, bug-infested, fine old lobby of my ancient, rat-ridden, splendid old apartment building and, without breaking stride, kissed the skid-row alcoholic in threadbare uniform who posed as doorman, leaped into the deathtrap elevator, and almost punched button 4 through the wall. As the doors began sliding shut, the white-faced old lady crouched in the corner, who had just come down, seized her chance and scuttled into the lobby just before they nipped closed.

  Fingers snapping in Latin rhythm, I danced all the way up, entrechated out into the hallway and down to my apartment door, which stood slightly ajar, and floated in. “I’m HOME!” I shouted. “Home, home, home! Hetty, darling, where are you!?” Then I heard her dear, dear steps hurrying across the kitchen floor, and I raced for the doorway to fling my arms tight around her just as she stepped through—except that, used to Tessie’s height, I missed, clasping empty air just over her head, mussing her hair with my coat sleeves, both hands clapping hard against my ears.

  “BEN!” she shrieked.

  “Yes! Oh, YES, darling, it’s me!” I yelled, staggering from the blows on the ears. Then I located her again and, aiming a couple feet lower, tried to grab her once more. But she stepped back, swung hard, and caught me smack on the side of the head with a tremendous slap, and the ringing in my ears became a mighty carillon. “Hetty, what’s wrong!” I yelled through the tintinnabulation of the ringing of the bells.

  “Wrong? What in the hell are you doing here?”

  “What do you mean, what am I do—” I stopped and clapped a hand to my forehead, memories of the life I’d been living in this world flooding my mind. “Oh, my god,” I said, “I forgot. We’ve been divorced!”

  “Well, if it slips your mind again”—she lifted her slapping arm—“I’ll remind you!”

  “And I live”—I was rapidly tapping my forehead—“oh, lord help me, in a four-by-eight airshaft room at the YMCA!”

  “Who knows? Who cares where you live—just so you get back there. Fast.”

  “But, Het, baby, I hate that room! And I don’t like the fellows. I want to come home! To you! I’ve realized that I love you, only you, in all the worlds. So let’s forget this divorce nonsense, cutie: I forgive you.”

  She looked at me for five long seconds. “You’re not drunk,” she said thoughtfully. “Alcohol alone couldn’t explain this. You must be simultaneously drunk, drugged, and insane. Years of neglect, long evenings of silence punctuated by fits of irascibility, nights filled with music and snores, and now you forgive me. OUT!”

  “Honey, this divorce is only a lover’s spat; let me help you to understand that—”

  “OUT!!”

  “What’s the hurry? Why can’t we—”

  “I’m expecting company for dinner!”

  “Who?”

  “My fiancé!”

  The doorbell rang. A voice in the hall said, “Hi, there! May I come in?” The door pushed open, and—I was already nodding; I knew it—in stepped Custer. In this world, of course, he wasn’t blond. Here his hair was black, his eyes were brown, but just the same this was this world’s Custer. “Hi,” he said to me coldly, suspiciously; then, to Hetty, “What’s he doing here?”

  “He left something!” Hetty said quickly. “He just now came for it!” She opened an ornamental box on an
end table, filled with half-used book matches and other similar valuables, poked through it quickly, whipped out an old Sherlock Holmes-type pipe I’d once bought, and shoved it wildly into my mouth, chipping a tooth. “Here you are, Ben! Goodbye, goodbye!”

  “Thanks.” I puffed on the empty pipe, shaking my head to express keen enjoyment. “Helps pass the lonely evenings,” I said wistfully, looking deep into Hetty’s eyes, but the gleam in her eyes, staring back into mine, was the shine of a naked blade.

  I walked out, pulling the door closed, but just before the latch clicked I turned, pushed the door open, and stuck my head back in. “In fourth grade,” I said to Hetty, pointing at Custer with the stem of my calabash, “he used to eat worms.” Then, remembering that I was in the semifinals of the Ping-Pong contest, I headed home to the Y.

  I won’t say that my room at the Y was small; I merely state that it’s the only room I’ve ever seen in which a six-foot bed was bent at a right angle in the middle, like an L, so it would fit into the room. I had either to lie down with my knees bent back in kneeling posture, or in a sort of horizontal sitting-down position. Where they got L-shaped sheets and the one thin L-shaped blanket I don’t know. But it was certainly a bed that took some getting used to, and in the mornings, a little stiff, I often had to walk down the hall to the communal bathroom on my knees.

  Right now, snug in my room after leaving Hetty’s, I lay on my back for quite a long time, legs up the wall, careful not to scuff the rather low ceiling with my feet: I was trying to “think things out.” After a time it occurred to me that one of the first things to think out was how to survive on the money I made in this world, and I opened my top dresser drawer to get a pencil and a scrap of paper.