Proud Flesh

by William Humphrey

  They, the living, stood for some moments as rigid as the dead woman. Then with a low cry Amy threw herself upon the corpse. To Doc her intention seemed to be to mutilate it. Instead she pried open its jaws and put her mouth to its mouth. She was trying to resuscitate it, to breathe life into it, to breathe her own life into it. Doc succeeded at last in pulling her away. She gave a last groan—or a last growl: impossible to say which, as it was to say whether her last look at her mother’s remains was one of reproach or remorse.

  The corpse slumped against the headboard staring with eyes like bulletholes and howling with wide-open mouth. The reason he did not hear it was, it seemed to Doc, because he had been deafened by it. He closed the jaw and held it closed until—it was not long—it set.

  XI

  “There was one thing,” said Clifford, “that Ma always feared worse than death itself.”

  “What?” said Doc, meaning, not what was it she had feared, but what had he said?

  He had not been listening. His nerves were shattered by all he had been through. He was further agitated—elated—by the prospect of his imminent release—at seeing his poor Kate again—if she was still alive. His bag was packed. He was busy in his mind laying plans for avenging himself upon this family of outlaws. And now he was distracted by a thought just forming in his mind about this one here, Clifford. This thought was, that Clifford might be classifiable as criminally insane, and thus not responsible for what he had done to him, and that this might hold good for them all, and that they might escape his vengeance and go free. Criminally insane. Wouldn’t any judge say so? Wouldn’t he have to? Applying the legal test, M’Naghten’s Rule: whether the accused knew at the time that what he was doing was morally wrong. Morally wrong? Of course Clifford Renshaw had not known that. For Clifford Renshaw it was not only not wrong to have kidnaped the family doctor and held him prisoner in personal attendance upon his dying mother, it would have been criminal of him not to have done it. Oh, Lord! He had said he was no psychiatrist, but had it all been psychotherapy all along? A family that would do what they had done to him. That mad search for their missing brother. One of them forcing herself to eat cowdung. Another one—

  Ah. Would she—Mrs. Metcalf—mind just stepping out for a minute and bringing him a glass of ice water?

  —Another one of them trying to mutilate himself! He had spoken—remember—of a piece of emergency surgery he had had to perform that first day? Self-mutilation—also his first case of that. There had been times when Doc had thought that somebody else had done it to him. There were some with cause. At least, there were stories. But would somebody else have stopped with the job only just begun? It had been self-inflicted. He had been going to lay that as his offering on his mother’s funeral pyre! Shaving accident! Nobody shaved with one of those antiques any more. Not even the oldest man Doc knew. They went out with bustles. Their only use nowadays was as a weapon for drunken Negroes to carve one another up with in barroom brawls on Saturday nights. He ought to know: he had stitched many a one back together. Clyde Renshaw did not even shave with a safety razor. He ought to know. He himself had cured him of a chronic facial rash by switching him onto an electric years ago. Oh, Lord! Very well, instead of put in jail he would have them all committed to the insane asylum. One way or another he would put them all behind bars. All but Amy. She was the only sane one of the lot, and she had just been cured after a lifetime of self-delusion.

  “There was one thing Ma feared worse than death itself.”

  “What? Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, I know all about that. I know what you mean. Listen, set your mind at rest. Your mother is—” He broke off. The man could not endure to hear it said. He looked ready to pounce upon and throttle anybody who said it, as though to say it would make it so, as though the word were the thing itself. Did he suspect Doc of pretending that his mother was dead when she was really still alive so that he could go home? It was possible. With these people anything was possible. They were crazy. They were enough to make you think you were crazy.

  “I could be mistaken, of course,” Doc found himself stammering. “Such things have happened. If it would make you feel any better I could make one last—”

  “I think,” said Clifford, “it would be better if we moved you in here with her. Then at the least little sign … I’ll be right out here in the hall.”

  “You were wondering,” said Doc to the Sheriff, “what became of those three days between the time Edwina Renshaw died and the time I was found and picked up …

  If any additional evidence was needed that that one, Clifford, was mad: that was the night the dogs commenced to howl.

  It began with one of the ones on the place there, one of Clifford’s own coondogs, and just as it was popularly supposed to, at sundown. The most distressful, the most godforsaken, most spine-chilling sound this side of hell or Hollywood. Something to raise the hair on a dead man’s scalp and wring tears from tombstones—almost human, like the grieving of an idiot. You didn’t have to be shut up in a room with a corpse—though that helped. No wonder people had always associated that dismal sound with death!

  “There!” he said—to himself—to his jailer on guard over him out in the hall. “Maybe that will convince you, you—!”

  And had to break off. To take it back. To wonder whether that maniac might not be right. To—Well, he could tell it on himself now, but if anybody had walked into the room he would have denied to their face that what he was doing holding that cadaver’s cold and rigid wrist was feeling it for a pulse beat. What had happened was that the dog had suddenly stopped its howling. Not just stopped. Stopped in a way so blood-curdling it made you long for the howling. A sickening sound, as though, having learned what a dreadful mistake it had made, the dog had bitten off its tongue in remorse. It had made him leap out of his chair and—Just remember, please, she had been thought dead once before, and by a trained nurse, when she was not. Or had she been? There was a possibility that had not occurred to him before. Did Edwina Renshaw possess the power of bringing herself back from death?

  Well, not for a second time, at any rate. No more pulse in that stiff wrist than in the bedpost which his other hand held onto to steady himself. Confirmation of his diagnosis came from another dog off in the distance.

  After howling for fully half an hour that dog, too, reconsidered and feel silent. Then before Doc had time to sigh in relief, the one, or another of the ones, there on the place started up again.

  Just when Doc thought he could not stand another minute of it, it stopped as it had the first time with a hideous whimper that made him leap out of his chair and across the floor, only this time he went not to the deathbed but to the window to see if he could see what on earth was going on out there.

  Edwina’s room, at the front of the house, was a corner room with a window on the side. It was from that direction that that ghastly sound had come, and pulling back the windowshade Doc peeked out. Clifford Renshaw came stalking across the yard to the house, to the faucet outside the kitchen door, where he knelt to wash his dirty hands and whatever the thing was that he carried. Before washing his hands he stared at them. Doc stared, too, and sucked in his breath. He let it out with, “You—!” Then changed his curse to, “You poor crazy fool!” For Clifford loved those hounds of his; apart from his mother they were the only creatures he did love, and now his hands, and the long kitchen knife, were red with their blood. And doubtless his sorrow over killing his own had goaded him, and by his reasoning gave him the right, to kill those of others.

  On tiptoe Doc returned to his chair, and he switched on the lamp the better to watch that dead body just in case, as he had been told to do. A character determined enough to dispute death with dumb animals was one to be obeyed.

  XII

  Dead, anybody was to be pitied. Especially anybody who had died believing that she had been murdered by her own child, and perhaps all the more if she were mistaken. Even Edwina Renshaw, who had brought it upon herself. She was no less to be piti
ed for the way she seemed even in death to cling to the misjudgment which had proved fatal to her. The way Doc himself had set her corpse’s jaw gave to it an expression of grim self-conviction as though at last she had proved to a doubtful and disapproving world how right she had been in her suspicions of that hypocrite of a daughter of hers. Pitiful triumph!

  And yet …

  You cannot win an argument with a corpse. The dead are always right. No argument as unanswerable as silence, no silence as deep as death. Try living for two days alone with a corpse in a little room and see if you don’t find yourself being swayed by its air of unknown knowledge and apologizing to it for its accusing silence. Of course, he was not to be trusted. There under duress, set a mad and maddening task, to watch that lifeless body for signs of life—this after all he had already been through: his mind was beginning to be affected. He was ready now to believe anything. He was becoming as mad as a Renshaw himself. But looking at that face—and he had been told to watch it for the least little sign—now as fixed as marble in its expression of knowing what it knew, Doc began to wonder about what he knew.

  He was there. He had seen it all. He had seen all there was to see. He had never seen so much in an exchange of looks as that between Amy and her dying mother. But what was it he had seen? He still was not sure. Not even after thinking about it for two days when he had nothing else to think about and had a desperate need to think about something to keep from thinking about what was happening to him and go completely out of his mind.

  He had said that Amy’s face as she looked at her mother for the last time had been the face of a murderess. He had thought that that murderousness had been born in that moment, born of resentment at long last against being so misunderstood, so unjustly judged. He wondered now whether it had been there all along beneath the cosmetic covering with which Amy made her own face each morning.

  “Even now, looking back on it all from start to finish, I still have to ask myself, what was the truth, and what was my position throughout? There was I, working to keep Edwina Renshaw alive, with all her kin ready to blame me for it if she should die. Was one of them—though just as ready as the rest of them to turn on me when she did die—trying unconsciously all along to kill her? Gentlemen, I am no psychiatrist, and certainly no detective. But all those ‘accidents’… Deciding her mother was dead and pulling that bedsheet over her face when she knew, she better than anybody, how her mother dreaded death, and even more, dreaded being thought dead when she was not. The times she had fallen asleep when she was supposed to be watching, and failing to give the patient her injection. Handing me the wrong medicine out of my bag. Forgetting to reopen the drip-feed tube. I had put down her mistakes and her oversights to inattention brought on by anxiety and overwork and the very fear of making a mistake. I had covered them up so she would not see them and blame herself for them. I didn’t want to distress the poor soul more than she was already. Certainly not to point out to her that two or three of her mistakes might well have proved fatal if I had not caught them in the nick of time. I tried to let her think she was being helpful. I tried not to let her see that she was actually making my job all the harder for me. Had I unconsciously been Amy’s accomplice in what she was unconsciously trying to do? Had I had as my assistant all along someone who was trying to kill my patient—or trying to make me do it—a murderer of the most dangerous kind: one who did not know it herself? Was all her care and concern a covering for the unspeakable thing she deeply desired?”

  There was a curse on Amy, a congenital curse. Born as though in a caul with a curse upon her head. Whether she really did have a murderous hatred for her mother that only her mother could see, and then only as she was dying, or whether her mother’s thinking so was a sickness of her own mind, it made no difference as far as Amy was concerned. The two things came to the same. Either way it was a curse on her.

  Could a person teach another to murder her? Wish it upon her? He was ready to believe anything. Suspect a person long enough and that person will become what she is suspected of being. He was ready now to believe that by suspecting Amy of harboring the wish to kill her, her mother had taught her the wish. He was just as ready to believe the reverse of that. Which was, that Edwina had never had to teach Amy anything. That Amy was born hating her mother and had spent a lifetime hiding that horrifying sentiment from herself, her would-be victim, and the world. That Edwina had known to shun and fear the most adoring of all her children because she and she only saw that beneath that growth of mother Amy was all vinegar. That her anxiety to still her mother’s fears of her was proof of her guilt. That the more anxious she was, the more Edwina had cause to fear her. After what had happened to him—and what was yet to come!—he was ready to believe anything. Including that Amy was as innocent as he had always believed she was and that even from beyond the grave her mother’s motiveless animosity still pursued her, and had now driven her into a living grave of her own. He was ready to absolve all parties of blame and to say that the cause remained unknown: heredity? environment? psychological predisposition? some as-yet-undiscovered virus?—but the symptoms were unmistakable. As in that most dread disease of the body, an organ enlarged itself through gross reproduction of its own cells and became malignant. This was what had happened to Amy’s love for her mother: through overenlargement of itself that vital organ had become malignant.

  Then he would look again at that dead face with its injured and self-righteous set.

  “I had always thought of Amy’s love for her mother as a jewel. A diamond. Clear, flawless, indestructible. Proof even against her mother’s attempts to smash it. Was it instead a pearl, spun in her entrails around an abrasive grain of hatred? I know this: Edwina Renshaw died believing that Amy had killed her, and Amy knew it. Was that the final misunderstanding of a lifetime of misunderstanding? Or was that—finally—after a lifetime—understanding? Had the worm turned? Or had the worm been shown to have been a snake in disguise? I don’t know. I saw a mother and her child look at each other in mortal terror and mortal hatred, and I shall carry the sight with me to my grave. And maybe there I’ll understand what it meant.”

  By the afternoon of the second day decomposition had set in. The bluishness around Edwina’s nails, caused by poor circulation to the extremities, had disappeared with the disappearance of all circulation. The waxiness characteristic of death had made the skin translucent and now a certain puffiness, the first stage of corruption, had tightened the skin and smoothed the facial wrinkles out. Rigor mortis had stiffened the corpse. But try telling that to the fanatic guarding his door. Just try telling him his mother was commencing to stink. Bring him in to sniff the air himself and he would not have smelled it.

  Under those circumstances he defied anybody to say he would not have done the same as he did. Spend two days locked in a room alone with a corpse watching it for life and you too will want reassurance now and again that it really is dead. He felt like a fool each time he did it, but that did not keep him more than once from feeling that now unbending wrist to make sure there was no beat of a pulse.

  By then he was ready to believe anything—the more unlikely it seemed to be, the more likely it was. If Amy Renshaw, the best daughter a mother ever had, was in reality a secret matricide, anything was likely. If he could be kidnaped and held incommunicado to watch over one of his patients, and be still watching over her two days after she was dead, this while they searched for one member of the family among the nine-million-odd inhabitants of New York City without a clue to his whereabouts nor anything but the wildest of rumors now four years old that they were even close to his zip code, anything could happen.

  His own reason was beginning to totter. The spell cast by that old witch was taking hold of him. Surrounded as she was by that band of believers in her divinity, she herself had sometimes seemed to wonder whether she might not have been chosen to be the one exemption from the common fate. Virgin birth was rare, too; but there was a case on record. Shut up alone in the room w
ith that corpse and told to watch it in case it should come back to life, he began to do it! What was more, after he had watched it long enough the opposite happened to him of what had happened to Amy: it did!

  XIII

  That was when he made his break for freedom. Not when he finally found the courage to do so. When he had been scared by a fear greater than the fear that had kept him there. When he saw that corpse come to life. He had said they were crazy enough to make you think you were crazy. They were crazier than that. They could drive you crazy.

  Perhaps, in fact surely, he would have been released in another day, perhaps even before that day was over. How much did it take to convince that maniac that his mother was mortal? But he could not wait another minute.

  He had opened the door a crack and peered into the hall and found it empty, his jailer off duty. Off killing more dogs, probably, just in case they might want to howl that night. Carrying his bag, he sneaked down the hall and down the stairs encountering no one, hearing nothing. Was the house abandoned? Had he sat alone in it with the dead woman these past two days?

  When he stepped outdoors it had seemed almost as if he were leaving his own home. He had been there so long and been so immersed in the life of that house that to leave it and come out into the light of day gave him a feeling of dislocation like leaving a picture-show in the middle of the afternoon. The mad intensity inside made the quiet reality outside seem unreal. He had skulked out of that madhouse feeling that he was betraying his Hippocratic oath, when what he was running out on was a two-day-old corpse already stinking—that was the extent to which he had been brainwashed by that band of believers!