The Cannibal Heart

by Margaret Millar

  “Oh, yes. But better in some ways for Luisa. She doesn’t like boarding at my sister’s during the school months. And here, in the summer, it is too quiet for her.” He nodded his head. “Yes, it is time for a change.”

  “Why?”

  “You have looked after us too well, like children.”

  “It hasn’t been a soft life.”

  “We have always been secure,” he said gravely. “Good food and a nice place to live, not like the shacks in town where most of the colored people live.”

  “I would like to ask you to come with me, but I don’t know where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing.”

  She looked out across the sea. The sun was going down, the sky was greying, and the water gleamed silver like the skin of a fish.

  “I may go back to Mexico,” she said. “There’s a little place on the coast where Billy and I stayed, Manzanilla. We came back by boat. It was terribly hot. Even at night it didn’t cool off, and I’d lie there with the portholes open, listening to the sea and wondering what was going to happen to Billy. Sometimes I couldn’t manage him anymore, he’d gotten so big, nearly a hundred pounds.”

  Mr. Roma nodded. He knew from experience how powerful Billy could be. Though he had tired easily, he’d had, at times, a tremendous strength.

  “You remember how he liked to see things move?” Mrs. Wakefield said. “Well, he never got tired of watching the sea and the gulls. We found a little place near the stern where no one else ever went, and I’d sing to him or read aloud. He didn’t understand all the words perhaps, but he understood that he was my son and I loved him.”

  When they came to the cypress hedge, the wind veered and brought with it the supper smells from the kitchen.

  Mrs. Wakefield said, “You’d better call the little girl.”

  Hanging on a rusty nail in the shed was an old cowbell. Mr. Roma had found the cowbell years ago by the side of the road, but he had never been able to think of a use for it until Jessie came.

  He brought the bell out and rang it loud enough to summon Jessie and to wake the dead.

  5

  “We’d have to ask her to have her meals with us,” Evelyn said.

  Mark finished buttoning his shirt and reached for the tweed jacket Evelyn had put out on the bed for him. “Why?”

  “Well, we’re sort of obliged to, aren’t we? It’d be very ungracious not to.”

  Mark looked at her, rather irritably. “To be perfectly frank, I’ve never felt so ungra­cious in my whole life.”

  “But you like her all right, don’t you?”

  “I only exchanged two words with her. I don’t know whether I like her or not.”

  “I actually thought you’d like company for a change. Instead of just Jessie and me.”

  “It depends on the company. Under the circumstances you can hardly expect her to scintillate.”

  “At least she’s under control, no matter what she’s feeling inside. Your collar’s sticking up at the back.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll fix it.”

  Standing on tiptoe she smoothed the collar down and ran her hand along the back of his neck.

  “You need a haircut,” she said. “We can drive into town some time on Monday.”

  He turned around and gave her a long careful look. “First this jacket business and now a haircut. For Mrs. Wakefield’s benefit, I suppose?”

  “Don’t be silly. You’ve been getting haircuts all your life, why should you suddenly balk at getting another one?”

  “I’m not balking. I’m merely thinking that some of the female vanities are amusing, if inconvenient.”

  “Vanity. Honestly, Mark!”

  “That’s what I call it,” he said. “Enter Mrs. Wakefield and immediately you start dusting out corners and getting Jessie’s ears washed and arranging a haircut for me.”

  “That’s not vanity,” she protested. “It’s perfectly natural. All women do it.”

  “My point, exactly.”

  “Anyway, we’re off the subject,” Evelyn said, a little coldly. “Do we invite her to have her meals with us, or don’t we?”

  “Her plan was to eat with the Romas.”

  “But he’s a—a —”

  “Listen, these people have been living together for years. They’ve established their relationship, maybe a pretty subtle one. We’d better keep out of it. If Mrs. Wakefield wants to eat with the Romas, let her.”

  “But it would seem terribly funny. I’d feel funny about it.”

  “Well, when you feel funny everybody else usually ends up feeling funny, too, so do what you like.”

  She would have liked to challenge the statement, but she closed her lips firmly and pretended to be engrossed in straightening the scarf on the bureau and arranging Mark’s brushes in perfect alignment. In the past week Mark had become less nervous and tense, but at the same time increasingly critical of her. She blamed it partly on herself and partly on the circumstance of their isolation. Mark had always been surrounded by people—his parents, and his sisters and the agents and writers and advertising men who streamed into his office wanting money or sympathy or reassurance or better contracts. Whatever they wanted Mark always tried to give them, but eventually he reached the point where his nerves began to crack and he had to get away for a while by himself. Once he was away from people, though, he began almost immediately to miss them. It seemed to Evelyn that she was expected to make up the loss and she couldn’t do it. She didn’t have the satiric intelligence Mark’s sisters had, nor the neurotic wit of some of the writers and the agents Mark brought home for dinner. In comparison, she thought of herself as a rather colorless, phlegmatic creature, and she was always a little surprised when Mark found her amusing.

  She glanced at him rather shyly, trying to estimate his mood and to see if he’d be interested in what she’d found out. “She’s upstairs now, unpacking, in the room the nurse used to have.”

  “What nurse?”

  “The one who lived with her. She was a real nurse, too, not just a nursemaid.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She left some things in the cupboard—a broken hypodermic syringe, for one.”

  “That isn’t proof.”

  “There were other things, too. The room itself is odd. I mean, it’s so impersonal and bare, as if the person who lived in it had deliberately kept her personality out of it. It’s a—well, a sort of purposeful room.”

  “You’re a great little snooper,” Mark said dryly. “So the nurse was a nurse. What of it?”

  Evelyn looked faintly indignant. “I don’t call it snooping. Naturally, when you rent a house you’re curious about the people who own it and who used to live there.”

  “So that’s why you’re inviting Mrs. Wakefield to eat with us. You’re going to pump her, eh?”

  “That’s a nasty thing to say. I have no intention of asking her a single question.”

  Mark moved across the room, half-smiling. “I think I’ll go for a walk. I’ll take Jess along if she wants to go.”

  “I don’t think she will. She’s helping Mrs. Wakefield unpack.”

  “I warned Jessie —”

  “I know, but Mrs. Wakefield asked her to help. She seems fond of children.”

  “All right, I’ll go alone. Unless you want to come along?”

  She knew it irked him to have to slow his walk down to her speed, so she said, “No, thanks. I’m going to set the table.”

  Every night before supper Mark used to climb down the cliff to the beach below the walk along the sand, or sit quietly by himself with the house and Jessie and Evelyn out of sight and out of mind.

  There were two paths down the cliff. One was a hundred yards north of the house, where Mr. Roma had arranged a series of rough stone steps with a single guard rail of iron pipe. The othe
r path was directly in front of the house and this was the one that Jessie and Luisa and, sometimes, Mark, used. It was almost perpendicular, and the only way anyone could descend was by half- sitting, half-sliding down, clutching at the chaparral or jutting pieces of rock.

  At the bottom of this path lay a heap of rubble and boulders left by landslides. A little to the south there was a giant overhanging rock, where Mr. Roma kept the rowboat that he used for fishing. The high tides had worn away the bowels of the rock to make a cave whose walls were alive with scuttling crabs and mussels and baby abalones like little brown buttons glued to the walls of the cave.

  It was on this rock that Mark liked to sit and listen to the gurgle of the water underneath and watch the cormorants that lived further along the cliff. There, the cliff was sheer rock, pitted with holes and ledges which housed the colony of sleek dark birds. Ceaselessly hungry, they clung to the ledges, their sharp eyes searching the sea for the splash of a fish.

  By the time Mark reached the rock it was too dark to see the cormorants. The tide was out, and the sea seemed as quiet and thick as oil.

  Whistling softly, he boosted himself up to the top of the rock. It was then that he saw Luisa. She was sitting cross-legged in the sand and in one hand, very elegantly, she held a cigarette.

  First Luisa blew all the smoke out of her mouth, and then out of her nose. Then, by way of experiment, she held one nostril closed and let the smoke pour out of the other. After a violent attack of coughing she crushed out the cigarette in the sand and put the butt in the pocket of her blouse.

  “Hello,” Mark said.

  Luisa gave a wild little shriek.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You scared me to death.” Luisa cried. “You shouldn’t scare people with bad hearts like I’ve got.” Luisa could conjure up a fatal disease at the drop of a hat, and she frequently did, in the interests of drama. “I’ll probably die young.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I inherited it.”

  Mark said soberly, “Perhaps if you’ve got a bad heart you shouldn’t smoke.”

  Luisa got up and brushed the sand off her skirt, watching Mark slyly out of the corner of her eye. “Are you going to tell on me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Mark hesitated. “Well, I don’t know why not. I suppose it’s because I wouldn’t like to get you in trouble. It might be a good idea if you didn’t smoke until you’re older, though.”

  “I don’t smoke much. Only when I’m miserable and hate everyone. I ran away once. Two years ago.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Just to my aunt’s house in San Diego. She married a white man. I was going to start my life all over, change my hair and my name. I was going to have a real English-sounding name like Jane Alice Fitzsimmons, something like that.”

  “Fitzsimmons is Irish, isn’t it?”

  Luisa shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, Irish would be good enough. Anyway my aunt sent me back. Did you ever run away?”

  “No,” Mark said, smiling. “I wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting far. I have five sisters.”

  “Five? Oh, I’d hate that. I hate women. Are they all married?”

  “Three of them are. The other two work with me. We have sort of a family company.”

  “Mr. Wakefield didn’t work at all,” Luisa said. “He had money. Not her. She didn’t have a cent. She was an ordinary schoolteacher before she got married. When he died, though, she got the money.”

  “I didn’t even know he was dead.”

  “He is, he died almost on this very spot.” She leaned her elbows on the rock and stared up at Mark. “It’s funny you’re Jessie’s father.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re not like a father. You’re more like, well, maybe a bandleader.”

  “Thanks,” Mark said wryly. “Perhaps you don’t know much about bandleaders.”

  Luisa’s face indicated reproach. “It’s my specialty in life. That’s what I’m going to be some day, a singer with a band. First I wanted to be a nurse, like Miss Lewis. She was Billy’s nurse. She was just wonderful, she knew everything. I’d like to know everything and go around saving people’s lives, etcetera, and helping people. But I can’t.”

  “You could try.”

  “It isn’t just trying that counts. Nursing schools don’t want people like me. Miss Lewis said that being colored doesn’t matter, but she was wrong. It matters all the time, and everywhere, except right here.”

  “Why not here?”

  “Mrs. Wakefield is different from other people.”

  In spite of the fact that the words sounded complimentary, Mark noticed the expression of repugnance on Luisa’s face.

  He said, “We’d better go back now, it’s getting pretty dark.”

  “No, thanks,” Luisa’s voice was polite but firm. “I want to stay here.”

  “Come on. Your parents will be worried about you.”

  “No, they won’t.” She stood up straight again, rubbing one of her elbows where the skin was chafed from contact with the rock. “They’ll be fussing around Mrs. Wakefield.”

  With a half-muffled snort of exasperation, Mark jumped down from the rock. “Okay. Stay here if you like.”

  He began walking briskly along the damp sand toward the stone steps, but he hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards before he heard Luisa calling him:

  “Mr. Banner! Wait, Mr. Banner!”

  He turned around and waited, frowning, until she caught up with him.

  “What changed your mind?”

  “My matches are wet. They wouldn’t light.”

  “That’s just too bad.”

  “I was going to stay down here practically all night so I wouldn’t have to be nice to Mrs. Wakefield.”

  “Why don’t you want to be nice to her?”

  “Because they are,” Luisa said scornfully. “My parents, I mean. They’re always making such a fuss over her. I’ll be glad when she leaves.”

  He paused at the bottom of the steps for Luisa to go up ahead of him. He saw that she was shivering, and the skin of her bare arms was tinged with mauve in the twilight.

  “Mr. Banner, do you believe that a person can be terribly nice on the surface and still have bad things inside them that come out in their children?”

  “No,” Mark said. “Come on now, make it fast. You’re getting cold.”

  When they reached the top of the steps they saw that most of the lights in the house were on, and the Japanese lanterns in the patio had been lit.

  “I was supposed to help with supper,” Luisa said bitterly. “Now everybody’ll be mad at me, everybody.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “You sounded mad, down there,” Luisa said. “Kind of like James Mason.”

  Mark didn’t know who James Mason was, but he felt vaguely uncomfortable under Luisa’s stare. He was glad when they reached the house and she ducked away, around the side of it, bent double to avoid the patio lights.

  Evelyn was sitting on the stone half-wall, smoking cigarette. Her slight delicate figure, and the fluff of bangs over her forehead made her look more childish and virginal than Luisa. At his approach she stood up and threw away the cigarette. She had put on a fresh dress, a

  blue-and-white printed silk that brought out the blue in her eyes and showed off her new tan.

  “Have a nice walk?”

  “No.”

  “I thought I saw Luisa with you,” Evelyn said. “Everyone’s been looking for her.”

  “I bumped into her down by the rock.”

  “That must have been fun.”

  She smiled, but she had a sudden sick feeling at the pit of her stomach. In all their twelve years of marriage, she had never been able to get over these quick spasm
s of jealousy. She had always prided herself on being a reasonable woman. Her jealousy worried her because it was so capricious and unjust, and it had no relation to the facts. It was impossible to be jealous of Mark talking to a fifteen-year-old girl; but the feeling was there, a lost helpless sensation.

  Holding on tight to her smile, she said, “What did you talk about? There are some martinis in the pitcher on the table.”

  “I’ll have one,” Mark said. “She talked, I stooged. She can be rather interesting when she forgets to put on those adolescent histrionics.”

  “Such as?” Evelyn said brightly. “What’d she say?”

  “This and that. You don’t seriously want to know, do you?”

  “Well, we haven’t got anything else much to talk about right now, have we? We might as well talk about Luisa. Or a good book. Have you read any good books lately?”

  Mark shook his head. “No. Have a martini?”

  “Thanks.”

  He brought the drink over to her. “Now let’s have it. What’s on your mind?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing!”

  “Cross your heart?”

  “And hope to die.”

  “That’s fine.” Balancing his own glass and hers, he leaned down and kissed the tip of her ear. “Sometimes you get some peculiar ideas.”

  She flashed him a bright, empty smile.

  “Don’t I just,” she said cheerfully.

  Mrs. Wakefield came out from the living room. She was still wearing the yellow knit dress but she had put on a topaz necklace, and her hair was combed straight back from her forehead and caught in a barrette at the nape of her neck.

  There was a certain new buoyancy in her walk as she crossed the patio holding Jessie by the hand. Under the soft lights of the lanterns her hair glowed, rich and velvety, and her face was quite animated, as if the contact with old friends and the excitement of meeting new people had stimulated her, and restored her youth.

  “It looks like a party,” she said. “You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble, Mrs. Banner.”

  Though she addressed Evelyn, it was Mark she looked at. He had paid little attention to her when they first met in the afternoon, and he was surprised now to see how tall she was—nearly as tall as he—and how full of energy her body looked. No—more than energy. Challenge. She herself seemed ignorant of the challenge; she was friendly, impersonal. But he felt a little thrill of interest run through his veins, and he looked away deliberately when their eyes met, aware that Evelyn was watching him and could see the invisible.