The rain had stopped but still held leaves and twigs and grass in tiny cool envelopes. Like an Easterner rejoicing in a flawless spring day, Eve stood inside the gate and enjoyed the chill, unfamiliar moisture on her skin; she did not even remonstrate when Ambrose plumped himself down on the lawn and rendered himself barefoot.
Ned Saxon was proceeding to the tool shed as she rounded the comer of the house, and she was inspired to call, “Could you wait while Ambrose goes in with you for a minute, Mr. Saxon? He thinks he left something in there.” To Ambrose’s upturned and wide-eyed face she added, “Hurry up—now’s your chance.”
The kitchen was full of a warm cinnamon smell and Iris Saxon’s face was oven-flushed; as usual after snapping at Ambrose she had made him some confection. The high color accentuated her clear eyes and gave her a disarmingly girlish look. “Have a nice time?” she asked, rinsing a mixing bowl.
“Very. Ambrose was as good as gold,” said Eve. It was, after all, ninety per cent true. (As though, she thought wryly, anything less than the truth were anathema.) “Whatever that is smells wonderful.”
“Well, I didn’t think you’d mind if I rummaged around for this and that. They’re only cinnamon buns with raisins but I thought the little boy might like them for dessert tonight. And before I forget, Jennifer phoned. Jennifer Morley,” Iris said as Eve looked blankly back at her.
“Did she leave a message?”
“No, she said she’d call later.” If Iris was at all curious it didn’t show. “And a man—wait, I wrote it down . . .”
It was no surprise at all when she produced the pad on which she kept punctilious notes of calls and the man was Henry Conlon. Eve felt a wave of illogical anger at having her own folly thus made concrete and handed to her. “Will he call back too?” she inquired edgedly.
Iris looked mildly surprised at her tone. “He didn’t say. The mail came, I put it in on that little table in the living room.”
Both the Saxons had a rooted conviction that mail left in a box for more than sixty seconds would be stolen by villains in search of social security or other checks. Eve thanked her and went distractedly into the living room. A rose-scented advertisement which she dropped into the wastebasket unopened, her telephone bill, a thick letter from a friend in Baltimore with whom she maintained a curiously undying, once-a-year correspondence, and a postcard for Ambrose from Celia—printed, ridiculously, as though Ambrose, who could not read at all, would have a little less trouble with printing.
Motherhood, the great leveler, thought Eve with irritation. On the other side of a view of a duck pond in Central Park Celia had written fatuously, “Hi, darling, we miss you! Mama is getting better every day and Daddy sends his love.” And who wrote this thing anyway, wondered Eve blackly—one of the ducks? “Tell Aunt Eve I will call around eight p.m. on the nineteenth. Hugs and kisses.” Well, really. On the whole, in Eve’s present mood, the telephone bill made more civilized reading.
It was a long afternoon. Iris Saxon explained in her scrupulous way that Ned had come at all because the bathroom window, difficult in any weather, had swollen in the rain and refused to close, so Ned had planed it. “Water was coming in all over the floor and I didn’t know what to do.”
The rattling old car departed, to return at five. Ambrose came in beaming and muddily barefoot to exhibit an old spark plug. “Saxon gave me,” he said proudly, turning it on his palm with admiration.
It now seemed safe to ask, so Eve did, “The rockles weren’t there?”
Ambrose gave her a brief look of fright before his face cleared. “All gone,” he told her reassuringly, and nodded his silky head for emphasis. “All gone.”
Eve was pleasantly surprised at Ned Saxon’s masterful use of psychology. Somehow he had convinced Ambrose that he was well rid of the unknown treasure—which of course could not have been there in the first place—and supplanted it with a new one. She was also relieved that there would be no further exhortations to enter the shed.
Spidery places were unattractive at best, and her determined avoidance of this one for the past few days had turned it from a shabby little outbuilding to the repository of some kind of triumphant evil. It was almost as though the tool shed knew it had gotten the better of her, and might make use of this knowledge if she were so unwary as to undo the padlock and step inside . . .
The Saxons’ car arrived punctually at five o’clock. Eve had to listen for it, as Ned Saxon would never do anything so peremptory as sound his horn and Iris would certainly not start glancing at the clock as the afternoon drew on; if anything, she commenced on entirely fresh tasks at that point.
Eve said now, “Your car’s here,” and Iris replied serenely, “just let me finish this button,” and did. Moments later Eve slipped the folded check into her hand—a check seemed somehow less like a naked exchange of money— and said as always, “Thanks, Iris. Now we’ll be presentable again for a week.”
“And we can eat, which is even nicer,” said Iris, laughing, and put on her coat and departed with a wave into the unfamiliarly early twilight. Eve, waving back and closing the door, felt a pang: would she herself, no longer young, take extreme adversity so well?
Ambrose was flushed with the excitements of the day, and could be depended upon to create some noisy scene if he were not fed and put to bed early. He presaged this by announcing belligerently that he would not take a bath and Eve couldn’t make him. “All right, no bath,” said Eve equably, and set about preparing his dinner. A portion of her attention waited for the telephone to ring, but apparently whatever Jennifer Morley or Henry Conlon had wanted to say to her was not very imperative.
Good, said Eve to herself, crumbling well-drained bacon into macaroni and cheese sauce for Ambrose’s favorite meal. Nobody wanted a landlord on the premises, and Mrs. Morley could only be calling in connection with the incident of last night. Firmly, Eve wanted no further part of that.
She had brought Ambrose his fruit gelatin and more milk when it was borne in on her that she was taking a ridiculously high moral tone; sitting in judgment, in fact. She had liked Jennifer Morley on sight, and, if she were to be humiliatingly honest with herself, she would not have felt that barely curbed anger all day if Henry Conlon were old or fat or even a supple and dazzling Romeo.
It was not a pleasant revelation about herself, and to mitigate it at least she would return Mrs. Morley’s call. Eve was delayed by the shattering crash of Ambrose’s dessert plate; while she was picking up the pieces the silent telephone came to life.
But it was neither of her previous callers. “Sorry to bother you,” said Ned Saxon’s voice against a background of bustle and pinging cash registers, “but Iris didn’t leave her glasses there by any chance, did she?”
“Just a minute, I’ll look . . The couch where Iris sat when she sewed, the tabletops, the kitchen counters— “They don’t seem to be here, but I’ll keep an eye out,” said Eve, returning to the phone, and hung up.
Ambrose, still barefoot, could not be allowed to climb off his chair and into the needle-like splinters into which the plate had burst: even the thought of his outcry at such an injury was insupportable. The slippery dessert, with its banana slices, would hardly make an adornment for the rest of the house either. Eve cleaned it up laboriously and said to Ambrose with only passing terseness, “Yes, you may turn on television. Please do.”
So that it might have been six o’clock or even a little later when she dialed the Morleys’ number, half-hoping that it would be unanswering or busy. But Jennifer Morley’s voice said immeditately, “Hello?”
“Eve Quinn, Mrs. Morley. Iris Saxon told me you called today while I was out.”
“Yes, I did. A guardian of my morals saw fit to call my husband about seeing my car in your driveway last night. I did use your name, and I apologize for that, but I wanted to explain that you weren’t conniving at something wrong. The fact is that Henry Conlon and I—”
At that point Jennifer Morley’s attention was abruptly
withdrawn. Her voice came back an instant later, saying rapidly, “Someone at the door, but I’ll get rid of whoever it is. Could you possibly hold on, because I do want to talk to you?”
“I’ll hold on,” said Eve, and the receiver was placed delicately down on wood. Airiness after that, the special hollow quality of a listening mechanism, so that she heard the sound of a door, a distant, “Really? Are you sure . . . ?” from Jennifer, and then airiness again.
Eve lit a cigarette and waited, more out of politeness than curiosity; as far as she was concerned the conversation had already accomplished its purpose. The car that had paused in the road while Mrs. Morley was inside the house next door had obviously contained “the guardian of her morals”—but why assume her whereabouts so accurately, when it was in fact a shared driveway?
In any case her own indignation at being used had abated under the forthright tone of the other woman’s voice. She finished her cigarette, however, in mild annoyance at people who laid receivers down and forgot about them, although she had done it herself more than once under the pressure of a last-minute, scrap-everything burst of work at the office. She was about to hang up—only preoccupation had kept her from doing it earlier—when she heard the other phone come alive against wood.
As Mrs. Morley did not say, “Sorry to have kept you,” or anything else, Eve said crisply, “Hello? You’re obviously busy right now, Mrs. Mor—”
Gently, with no emphasis, the receiver clicked into place. Eve listened in amazement to the dial tone before she hung up: this was something that rarely happened between rational adults. And then she realized what must have happened: Jennifer had not been able to get rid of her caller; her husband had arrived and, finding the phone off the hook, replaced it without even lifting it to his ear.
It wasn’t important. Eve was relieved merely at having made the gesture, even if she had made it for the sake of her own conscience. Any further move would have to come from Mrs. Morley, and somehow, the awkwardness dissolved even without explanation, she did not believe there would be one.
In this she was quite right. Jennifer Morley would never speak to anyone, about anything, again.
10
EVEN Iris Saxon would have been astonished at the speed with which her bulky husband could move. Replacing the telephone receiver with his gloved hands, holding the record of Eve Quinn’s voice even through the intoxicating pound in his ears, Ned Saxon slipped rapidly through the front door, stepped into his shoes, crossed the gravel, was into his old car and away.
Another one, he said about dead Jennifer to his blood, Another one of the easy-living women whose deepest worry in life was weight-watching, and who handed his wife—his wife!—their broken slip-straps to mend, their laundry to wash, their idly expensive clothes to iron. “Oh, thank you, Iris. I don’t know what we’d do without you, Iris. And by the way, if you get a chance, Iris . . .”
And for all their handsome homes and their fine manners they were so stupid. They looked upon him as an adjunct of their nicely brought-up servant, and never saw him as a man at all. Molly Pulliam, for example, had assumed that he had come to fix the bracket under her kitchen shelf; why else would lowly Ned Saxon presume to knock even at her back door?
And yet it was Molly Pulliam who had shown him the pattern that had undoubtedly been there all along, the pattern laid down in his very blood. He would have seen it for himself quite soon, but the matter of the blouse had hastened things.
Two weeks ago—or three? Time had assumed a curious elasticity lately, and Ned could not be sure—Iris’s eyelids had been pink and swollen when he picked her up at the Pulliam house. “One of my allergies,” she had said lightly to his anxious question, but later that evening when she thought him fully absorbed in the newspaper she had drawn something from the depths of her knitting bag and gone to work over it at the towel-padded kitchen table that served as an ironing board. It was a white blouse of some delicate fabric, with an odd-shaped cutout in front and the beginnings of a wedge-shaped scorch which all Iris’s frantic spongings were not remedying in the least.
In the account which she could no longer avoid, the picture became so clear that Ned clenched his hands as he listened: Molly lying down with one of her rare bad headaches, Iris answering the telephone so that it would not disturb her and returning to the ironing board to find too late that the iron had somehow overheated; Molly wailing when Iris showed her the blouse, as she did instantly, “Oh, Iris, I wanted especially to wear that tonight with my black dinner skirt.”
My black dinner skirt—for some reason that alone brought the bile to Ned Saxon’s throat so that he had to turn away.
He chose not to believe in the headache—why should comfortable waited-upon Mrs. Pulliam have a headache? —and to ignore his wife’s “It made me feel even worse, the way she kept trying to make up for it all afternoon. She’s always so sweet, and you couldn’t blame her really because it is a lovely blouse. I thought maybe scalded milk—” But nothing availed against the scorch. Iris sadly threw the blouse away; Ned retrieved it secretly, took twenty-five dollars from their tiny savings and went to the shop where it had been bought.
Farrar’s was all thick pale gray carpeting, with scarves and costume jewelry tossed carelessly over pieces of driftwood, and saleswomen who looked like young dowagers. In Ned Saxon’s mood of grim rage it was almost pleasurable, and by the time he had persuaded a particularly haughty woman to take his money, all of it, and write out an order, the pattern of what he had to do was beginning to emerge. It was helped along by the preliminary, “Will this be cash, sir?” Farrar’s obviously would not trust a check from him although they would have bowed and scraped over Molly Pulliam’s.
Iris’s swollen eyes, and distress at the mere recounting. If she had tried to keep this from him, what other private humiliations had she suffered at the hands of people protected from all harm by a checkbook? And how they probably talked about her, Iris, and said, “I have this marvelous woman who comes once a week, she can do everything. She’s not the kind of person you’d expect to find doing this kind of work, but her husband’s out of a job and they’re really up against it.”
Kind and patronizing, from a safe distance, and Iris really liking these people, in her innocence, and not suspecting their mockery at all. She was like a child exposed to vicious adults, and Ned Saxon was exposed too.
He could not have said at what point wish became intent. He was dazzled by the springing up of the pattern, which seemed his alone, something new and bold and as urgent as vaccine against a crippling disease.
He said nothing to Iris about the purchase of the blouse—unnecessary, he saw that now—but explained the expenditure of the twenty-five dollars as a garage bill. (Some day he could tell Iris what he had done on her behalf, but not yet. She was a woman, after all, and emotional.) He continued driving her to the homes where she was degraded and demeaned, and he listened more attentively to her naive reports, such as, “Molly’s going to a cocktail party at the Fletchers’.” He had a kind of hugging delight, worth more than any money in the world, in abasing himself before these three women, because he thought, Soon . . . soon.
He had almost had Molly Pulliam on that first occasion when he had waited in the lilac, just as he had almost had Jennifer Morley yesterday when she turned her back on him in the empty Pulliam house and Iris had chosen that exact moment to call. For a blind second then he could have destroyed Iris herself, who was primarily Mrs. Ned Saxon—
But tonight had been simplicity itself. Iris had genuinely misplaced her glasses, something she often did, and the timing of the call to Eve Quinn had struck Ned as obscurely useful in some way. Leaving Iris with her barely begun shopping and search for “specials” he had said, “I’ll get the eggs, shall I?” because since one malodorous egg they never bought them at the Maxi-Mart. “If you would,” said Iris, peering nearsightedly at applesauce, and Ned was off.
He had bought the eggs on his way to collect Iris—they were on the
floor of the back seat concealed by a sweater—and he took the ditch road, something not many people would have attempted in that particular car, so that he arrived at the Morley house a good ten minutes earlier than if he had taken the conventional route.
There was no house opposite; only a tacked-up For Sale sign on land for which, in this area, an exorbitant price was asked. Nor was there any immediate worry about Richard Morley arriving, even if it had not been his firm’s weekly sales meeting night; he was often late and there was no finger pointed to intimate knowledge there.
And if on the off-chance that he came in just this small space of time, Ned Saxon was simply passing by in humble pursuit of his wife’s glasses; Eve Quinn could bear that out.
To Jennifer Morley, who opened the door with an air of impatient haste, he said with his usual air of geniality, “Say, I happened to be driving past and I wondered if you have a workman here or something?”
“No, why?”
“Well, someone just dodged around the corner of your house, and it seemed to me—” It did not matter what he said, as she would never repeat it.
“Really? Are you sure . . . ?” Dauntless because she had a man with her, as arrogantly militant as all her kind, Jennifer Morley rounded the house with him, peered into dripping darkness, said, “Do you think you could take a look for me? I’m on the phone—”
It was too late by then to abandon this opportunity, because she had turned and looked at his face. With his hands, because of that intrusive child in the tool shed, Ned Saxon killed her.
She was enormously strong, much stronger than her sister; at one point in that very brief struggle she struck at him with a piece of stiff wire she had seized up in the second of realization. The near miss made his hands jump reflexively on her throat, so that she was able to gasp out of a darkening face queerly lit by the light from the kitchen, “You killed—”
She could not seem to get her sister’s name from her contorted mouth.
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