The Cannibal Heart

by Margaret Millar

  “I don’t think you’re a stinker,” Jessie said.

  11

  Back and forth Luisa swung and the topaz necklace swung, too, against her throat.

  She couldn’t keep her hands off it; she fingered it like a rosary, and by its divine power she became a beautiful girl with yellow hair singing into a microphone. All the men crowded around her, and even the orchestra stopped playing to hear her better. The throbbing voice went on alone. Among the men was one in particular, the richest handsomest man in the world, swooning at her feet: Luisa, look at me, Luisa, just a glance, don’t be cold to me, Luisa! Slowly, contemptuously, she turned her head . . .

  “You look funny,” Jessie said. “Why are you going like that for?”

  “Stop interrupting me.”

  “You weren’t doing anything much.”

  “I was, I was!” She closed her eyes, but the rich handsome man couldn’t be resurrected. “I never have a minute’s peace.”

  “Luisa . . .”

  “Now what do you want?”

  “I could trade you something for the necklace.”

  “You haven’t got anything valuable enough.”

  “I have so. It’s a secret. No one knows but me.”

  “How much did it cost?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s gold. It’s real gold. Probably cost a million dollars,” Jessie said recklessly.

  “Then why don’t you sell it and buy a hundred necklaces?”

  “Maybe not a million dollars.”

  “Let me see it if it’s so valuable.”

  Jessie hesitated. “Promise on your brother’s blood not to tell anybody?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s in my room.”

  “I wouldn’t trade the necklace for anything, but I’ll look at your whatever-it-is.” There was always the faintest, vaguest possibility that Jessie was telling the truth and that she had found something worth a million dollars. Not gold, but maybe radium.

  Of course it was radium. What else? Jessie had been prying into things as usual and, by a miraculous accident, she’d found a piece of radium on the ground.

  On the track of the radium Luisa became quite animated. She skipped along the path behind Jessie, a rich girl, an heiress, courted by dukes, riding to hounds, flying her own plane . . .

  “Oh, my God,” Luisa said bleakly, and dropped onto Jessie’s bed as if she’d been struck from behind. “It’s only a watch.”

  An ordinary man’s pocket watch with the crystal smashed and the gold chain clogged with dirt.

  “But it’s gold,” Jessie said, “and it really works. It tells the time.”

  She wound the watch, and sure enough it told the time quite loudly, tick-tick-tick. It was difficult to see the hands through the shattered crystal, but it was enough for Jessie to know that they were there. What time the hands told didn’t matter; it was time itself ticking

  away that was important. Jessie held in her palm the minutes and the years.

  Luisa groaned and rolled her eyes. “A lousy old watch. Honestly. Where’d you get it?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “Maybe you stole it, for all I know.”

  “I never did,” Jessie said. “I found it. Finders keepers.”

  “Let me hold it a minute.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to look at it, is all. I wouldn’t trade for a billion dollars, but I can at least look at it, can’t I?”

  “It’s my secretest treasure and your hands are dirty.” She was reluctant to let Luisa take the watch, not because of the dirty hands, but because the watch wasn’t entirely her own. She had found it, certainly, and finders were keepers, but her possession of it was, she knew, temporary; it hadn’t been ratified by any grown-ups. She had no real hold on the watch, it could be taken away from her at any time and for all sorts of reasons.

  Luisa said, cunningly, “Imagine finding a watch on the road.”

  “Not on the road.”

  “Where then?”

  “You’d tell.”

  “On my brother’s blood I wouldn’t tell.”

  They heard footsteps in the hall and Evelyn came into the room carrying a pile of Jessie’s freshly ironed clothes.

  “Hi, baby,” Evelyn said. She smiled at Jessie and there was a coaxing and uncertain quality in the smile as if she wanted to make something up to her but wasn’t sure what it was. Jessie’s clothes over her arm were still warm from the iron. The clothes, without Jessie in them, were somehow very sweet; they conjured up a Jessie without faults, a sleeping child, innocent as heaven. It was a shock to come unexpectedly on the real Jessie, looking a little sullen, holding her hands behind her back, her eyes brooding with secrets.

  “Open the second drawer, will you, Jess?” she said pleasantly.

  Luisa rolled herself off the bed. “I got to be going.”

  “Don’t let me interrupt your plans. I’ll just put the clothes away and vanish.”

  “I got to be going anyway.”

  With Luisa gone the minutes and the years were very loud in passing. They couldn’t be ignored.

  “What’s the big secret, Jessie?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I hear a clock ticking.”

  “It’s only a watch,” Jessie said.

  “Daddy’s?”

  “No one’s. Just mine.”

  “Where would you get a watch?”

  “Found it.”

  “You’d better show it to me, don’t you think?”

  The moment had come, as she knew it would. That was the terrible part about finding important things—someone else had to lose them first.

  She handed the watch to her mother, suddenly feeling almost relieved to be rid of it because it was, in a misty way, connected with the dead man in the woods and the drowned boy.

  “It looks quite valuable,” Evelyn said. “Where on earth did you find it?”

  “Where the birds live in the cliff. I climbed up to see if I could see any baby birds. Not to scare them or take eggs away or anything, just to pat them.”

  “Now don’t get off the track, angel, please. All I want is a straight plain story.”

  But to Jessie there was no such thing as a straight plain story. All the details were equally important. How could she describe finding the watch without telling about the baby birds she was looking for, and why, and whether she found them, and how the cormorants kept house?

  “They live on fish,” Jessie said. “Like eagles. There’s a story in a book at school about eagles and their nests weighing a thousand pounds. But not these birds. They just have holes to live in. I didn’t find any eggs or babies but I found the watch. There was bird-stuff all over the cliff and on the watch, too. Only I polished it off.” She added thoughtfully, “Maybe someone hid it there.”

  “I don’t think so. Don’t start imagining things. Someone probably lost it, from the top of the cliff.”

  “They can’t have. I often drop little stones over and they always land at the bottom, on the beach.”

  Evelyn hesitated, knowing Jessie was right, that the cliff, at the spot where the cormorants lived, was slightly concave. It would be impossible for an object dropped from the top to be caught on one of the ledges.

  “I could ask Daddy,” Jessie said. “Or Mrs. Wakefield.”

  “A watch?” Mrs. Wakefield said. “That’s odd. No, I know nothing about any watch, nothing . . .”

  “What’s that in the trunk?”

  “Billy’s toys and some of his clothes.” A linen picture book, a doll with a wooly yellow wig, a teddy bear with one eye and one ear, a striped jersey, a pair of pajamas without a string—Billy’s. “I haven’t quite decided what to do with them.”

  You could give them to me, Jessie thought. I could play with them and dress up for fun
. But the words remained unspoken; death lay in the folds of the clothes like mothballs.

  The trunk gaped at her and suddenly closed its mouth with a click of teeth. She jumped back, as if the teeth had barely missed catching her hand or her foot.

  “I could give some of them to you,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “Would you like that?”

  “No, thank you,” she said faintly. “I give some of my own things away all the time to the people in Europe.” She edged away toward the door. “I’ve got to go now. My mother’s waiting.”

  Mrs. Wakefield locked the trunk. “You tell her—tell her I don’t know anything about the watch. As far as I’m concerned you can keep it.”

  I hate lying to a child, she thought. And yet it’s for her sake that I’m lying.

  With a sound of mourning she leaned against the trunk. The beat of her heart was loud and hard, as if the heart itself had become an external organ suspended on a chain between her skin and her clothes. She felt weak from the strain of lying, and the sudden shock of seeing the watch again, not in John’s pocket, but dangling from Jessie’s hand and still ticking. Still ticking after all this time, after the wind and the weather, the sea fogs, the malignant sun.

  John had kept it in his pocket, and sometimes Billy sat on his knee and held the watch against his ear, listening to the mystery of the hours, the passing of the minutes that would never pass again.

  Billy sat, quiet and heavy, wearing the watch like a golden earring. He had a watch of his own, a fat silver one, and its sound was louder than that of his father’s watch, but cold. It was nicer to lean against his father’s chest and hear, besides the ticking, the rise and fall of a heart, the faint rumble of a stomach; to smell tobacco and sweat and shaving lotion; to feel tiny wire whiskers that stung when they were touched.

  “You’d better get down now, Billy. You’re getting awfully heavy. Wait now. Be careful of the watch.”

  He did not want to leave the warm moving womb of his father’s lap, but he was thrust out, into birth. He looked with hate at the hands that pushed him. These hands with the fuzzy yellow hair were hostile. They had pulled him into the jaws of the sea, and now they pushed him away, they tore the watch from his ear. Hate, hate.

  “Get down now, Billy. That’s a good boy. No, Billy, no! Get down . . . Janet,” he said. “Janet help me.”

  She helped him. The bites on his wrist weren’t deep, but they bled inside like a mortal wound.

  “John . . .”

  “No, I’m all right. I—you’d better take him to his room.” She picked Billy up, and he hung in her arms like a sack.

  “He didn’t mean it, John. You know he didn’t mean it.”

  “Please. Take him away.”

  She carried him to his room, shielding him with her strong arms. Her baby; a big boy, too heavy to be carried, but still a baby, not knowing what damage he could do.

  When she returned she saw the watch lying face down on the rug, still ticking.

  “He just doesn’t know his own strength, John,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Perhaps it’s a new phase, part of the improvement Miss Lewis talks about. He could be—well, asserting his independence. He doesn’t need us so much any longer.”

  She thought of a dozen explanations, but she never thought that Billy hated to be born. Brought, reluctant, out of the womb, he could only find his satisfactions in an approximation of it. And, as he grew older, there were less and less of these satisfactions. He was too big to be carried, to sleep with Miss Lewis, to be held long in a lap. More was expected of him and less was given. Time was his enemy. He was eight years old, further and further away from the warm safety, the gentle rocking.

  “He could be plain bored,” she said. “After all, other children get that way when they’re ready to take a new step forward.”

  “What’s the use of talking, of trying to explain things?”

  “I only want . . .”

  “We can’t handle him anymore, Janet. He’ll have to be sent away to a school.”

  “No, no! You promised me!”

  “It’s a promise I can’t keep,” he said heavily. “We’ve lived here for a long time now, without friends. I’m beginning to feel—more than lonely, almost a little queer . . . I can’t tell you . . .”

  “He’s our son, we can’t send him away. They couldn’t understand him as I do. They might be cruel to him.”

  “Perhaps we’re the ones that are cruel.” The toothmarks on his wrist were vivid against his bloodless skin. “He seems to hate me lately. And sometimes I feel that—that I’m beginning to hate him in return.”

  She couldn’t breathe for pain. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “Worse to feel,” he said. “Much worse.” He stooped and picked up the unbroken watch.

  “You need a change, John. You could take a trip. A cruise, perhaps.”

  But he didn’t take a cruise. His departure was a final voyage on an unreturning ship.

  Leaning against the trunk she saw, for a moment, the pattern of her life, with the black patches of death sewn in with steel by a steel hand. Though she called it fate, the steel hand was her own.

  Outside, Mr. Roma rang the bells for lunch, the silver sleigh bell first, and then the cowbell to summon Jessie and Luisa from the woods.

  Mrs. Wakefield dragged herself upright, dreading the questions she might be asked about the watch, already planning answers that seemed reasonable.

  But the subject was carefully avoided during the meal, and she wasn’t sure whether her lie had been accepted as the truth, or as an excusable lapse in taste, like a belch.

  12

  Outside Mark’s window the swallows fussed in the live oak tree.

  “After all, as civilized people we’re supposed to be a little tolerant,” Mark said. “So she told a lie. What of it?”

  “Honestly, darling. I didn’t say anything of it. I merely mentioned the fact that she was a liar and I wished she’d go away. We don’t owe her anything.”

  “Except the house.”

  “We’re paying for that,” Evelyn said. “What’s more, I’m not civilized. I’d like to march right up to her and say, come on, cookie, explain yourself.”

  “You’d like to but you won’t.”

  “Well . . .”

  “And maybe she can’t explain herself. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “She can. Everyone can, up to a point.”

  “All right. You explain yourself to me up to a point.”

  Evelyn raised one eyebrow. “I don’t consider that very funny.”

  “I was completely serious.”

  “I can explain myself very easily, as a matter of fact. It’s other people who are complicated. You,” she said gloomily, “and Jessie and Mr. Roma, everyone, practically.”

  Mark smiled. “Me’s a little queer. Righto.”

  “That reminds me, if you’re going to go out in that silly rubber raft, you’d better use some suntan oil.”

  “What’s silly about it? It was a bargain. War surplus. Complete with two paddles, twenty-five bucks.”

  “I thought you bought it for Jessie’s birthday.”

  “I’ll get her something else.” He stepped into his swimming trunks and pulled the drawstring tight and automatically drew in his stomach.

  “You have quite nice legs,” Evelyn said thoughtfully.

  “All the better to . . .”

  “And a vulgar mind.”

  “Righto again, little mother.”

  She glanced at him, half-pleased, half-suspicious of his mood. “What’s behind all this fine fettle?”

  “You.” He lifted her off the floor and pressed a kiss on her throat. “You, angel.”

  “Me and who else?”

  “God, here we go again. Hand me the oil, will you?�
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  “I’ll put it on for you.”

  She smoothed the oil on his shoulders and back. His skin was still peeling a little from his last sunburn, and she touched it very gently.

  “Change your mind and come with me,” he said.

  “No, thanks. You only want me to help with the paddling. Remember last time I went out in a boat with you—at Fire Island? All you did was snarl out orders like Captain Bligh.”

  “It was windy and we were drifting. Nor did I snarl.”

  “And Captain Bligh was just a sweet old man, right.” She paused. “Why don’t you take someone else with you?”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, Mrs. Wakefield would probably enjoy it.” Evelyn’s voice was as bland as the oil on her fingertips. “She’s a good swimmer, too. You wouldn’t have to worry about drifting. She could just take the rope between her teeth and swim the boat in.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I think so.”

  “What would you do if I really did ask her?”

  “I don’t know. Try me.”

  “I will.”

  Evelyn’s smile was shaky as she screwed the top back on the bottle of oil. “Go ahead.”

  “I wish I understood you. I know you’re jealous of the woman—why needle me into taking her out in a boat?”

  “Because I know you want to. I might as well be the one to suggest it, it’s easier on my pride.”

  “I don’t want to. I’d rather take you and Jess.”

  She ignored that. “I feel noble as hell, sending my husband off on the high seas with another woman.”

  “Listen, Evelyn. If it’s going to bother you, I won’t go. Let’s skip the whole thing.”

  “I’m not bothered in the least. Honestly.” She turned at the doorway. “If you see a hot jealous little face peering at you from the window, it won’t be mine.”

  “Won’t it?”

  “Have fun.”

  She went downstairs and sat for a long time in the living room with the drapes closed, wondering why, when she talked to Mark, she used superficial frivolous words that never indicated the storm of passion in her heart.