The Hand

by Georges Simenon

  ‘Is it working?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Once more I imagined the men outside, climbing the telephone poles with those strange metal half-circles on their feet that enable them to clamber up like monkeys. I’ve often dreamed of climbing poles like that.

  ‘Where are we sleeping?’ asked Mona.

  ‘The bedrooms will take a while to heat up. We’ll have to wait at least two or three hours.’

  We did not talk much, that Sunday, neither during the day nor in the evening. If I were to write out the string of words we said, it wouldn’t make three pages.

  No one tried to read. It was even more out of the question to play any kind of game. Luckily there were the flames dancing in the fireplace, and we spent most of our time gazing at them.

  We went to bed fully dressed, in the same places as that afternoon, but I did not see Mona’s hand on the floor. At one point, I heard movements around me. I saw Isabel, standing in front of the fireplace, folding a blanket.

  I didn’t need to ask her what was happening. She had read the question in my eyes.

  ‘It’s six o’clock. The bedrooms are warm. It would be better to finish the night in our beds.’

  Mona was kneeling on her mattress, her face flushed, her eyes dazed with sleep.

  I helped Isabel carry Mona’s mattress off to the guest room, where the two women remade the bed. I went to undress in our bedroom, then put on pyjamas and was in bed when my wife arrived.

  ‘She’s taking it quite calmly,’ she said.

  Isabel was speaking calmly herself, as if mentioning something of little importance. Later, she touched my shoulder.

  ‘The telephone, Donald.’

  At first I thought that someone had called us, that the telephone had rung and I thought immediately of Ray. Isabel had simply wanted to indicate that the telephone was working. The old clock on the chest of drawers said 7.30.

  I got up. I went to drink a glass of water in the bathroom and ran a comb through my hair while I was there. Then, sitting on the side of my bed, I called the police in Canaan.

  Busy . . . Still busy . . . Ten times, twenty times, the busy signal . . . Finally, a tired voice . . .

  ‘This is Donald Dodd, in Brentwood . . . Dodd, yes . . . The lawyer . . .’

  ‘I know you, Mister Dodd . . .’

  ‘To whom am I speaking?’

  ‘Sergeant Tomasi . . . What’s wrong at your place?’

  ‘Lieutenant Olsen isn’t there?’

  ‘He spent the night here, like the rest of us . . . Would you like me to put him on the line?’

  ‘Yes, please, Tomasi . . . Hello? . . . Lieutenant Olsen?’

  ‘Olsen here, yes . . .’

  ‘This is Dodd.’

  ‘How are you?’

  Isabel could not see my face, since my back was to her, but I was sure that she was looking at my neck, my shoulders, and that she was reading me as well as if she were facing me.

  ‘I have to inform you about a missing person . . . Yesterday evening . . . No, it was the evening before that one . . .’

  The notion of time had already gone awry.

  ‘Saturday evening, we went with two friends from New York to a party at the Ashbridges’ . . .’

  ‘I know about it.’

  Olsen was a tall, blond man with an impassive face, high colouring, a crew cut. I have never seen him with a speck of dust or a crease wrong on his uniform. I have never seen him tired, either, or impatient.

  ‘On the way home, late that night, we were stopped by the snow a few hundred yards from my house. The flashlight was going out . . . There were four of us, the two women in front, my friend and I behind them, trying to reach the house . . .’

  Silence at the other end of the phone, as if the line had been cut again. It was irritating, and I could still feel Isabel’s eyes on me.

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘I’m listening, Mr Dodd.’

  ‘The two women arrived safely. I finally reached the house as well, and it was only then that I realized that my friend was no longer beside me.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Ray Sanders, of the firm of Miller, Miller and Sanders, the advertising agency on Madison Avenue . . .’

  ‘You haven’t found him?’

  ‘I went out looking for him, basically without any light . . . I floundered around in the snow shouting his name . . .’

  ‘With the blizzard, he would have had to be very close to you to hear you.’

  ‘Yes . . . When I felt my strength going, I went back inside . . . Yesterday morning . . . Yes, on Sunday, yesterday, we tried to go outside, my wife and I, but the snow was too deep.’

  ‘Have you phoned your closest neighbours?’

  ‘Not yet . . . I assume that if he were with any of them, he would already have called me.’

  ‘That’s likely. Listen, I’ll try to send a crew over to you . . . It isn’t snowploughs we need, but bulldozers . . . Only one section of the road is more or less clear. Call me if there’s anything new . . .’

  In short, we had done what we could. I’d put myself in a good position with the authorities.

  ‘They’re coming?’ asked my wife evenly.

  ‘Only one section of the road is clear. He says that snowploughs are not what are needed, but bulldozers . . . He’s going to try to send us a crew, he doesn’t know when . . .’

  She went to the kitchen to make coffee, while I took a shower and put on the same clothes as the day before, my grey flannel pants and my old brown sweater.

  Isabel had made some bacon and eggs for the two of us, and, since Mona’s place was still empty, she told me:

  ‘She’s sleeping.’

  I think she was a little surprised, though, by Mona’s reactions, or, rather, her lack of reactions. Would Isabel have behaved differently if I had been the one to get lost in the snow?

  Incidentally, I suddenly understood the strange emptiness I’d been feeling ever since my wife had touched my shoulder to awaken me: the wind had stopped blowing. The universe had fallen silent, with a silence that seemed unnatural after the hours of horrific noise we had just experienced.

  I turned on the television. I saw shredded roofs, cars entombed in snow, trees knocked down and a bus turned over, in the middle of the street, in Hartford. I also saw New York, where men were trying to clear the streets, and a few dark figures were getting bogged down in the sidewalk snowdrifts.

  There had been no news from several ships at sea. One house blown away by the wind. Another leaning crookedly, held up by a mountain of snow.

  Snow: we had more than three feet of it at our own door and could do nothing but wait.

  I made three telephone calls: to Lancaster, the electrician, whose house is a half a mile as the crow flies from ours; to Glendale, the chartered accountant; and lastly to a fellow I don’t like, named Cameron, who is involved somehow in real estate.

  ‘It’s Donald Dodd . . . Sorry to bother you . . . One of my friends wouldn’t happen to have taken shelter with you, by any chance?’

  None of the three had seen Ray. Only Cameron asked, ‘What’s he look like?’ before replying.

  ‘Tall, brown hair, about forty . . .’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘Ray Sanders . . . Have you seen him?’

  ‘No . . . I haven’t seen anyone.’

  When I returned to the kitchen, Mona was eating there. Unlike Isabel, she had not washed her face or brushed her hair, which was falling over her eyes. She smelled of bed. Isabel never smelled of bed; as my mother used to say, she smells clean. Mona’s sloppiness and slightly animal casualness unsettled me, as did the questioning, indifferent look she gave me before asking in an artificial tone:

  ‘When will they come?’

  ‘As soon as they can. They’re already on the way, but will have to wait for the road to be cleared . . .’

  Isabel looked back and forth between us, and I cannot say what she was thinking. Although she could di
vine the thoughts of others, it was impossible to divine her own.

  And yet, she had the most open countenance imaginable. She inspired confidence in everyone. In the projects she worked on, she was the one to whom the boring or delicate tasks were entrusted, which she accepted with her everlasting smile.

  ‘Isabel is always there when you need her . . .’

  To advise, console, assist . . . Outside of a cleaning woman, who came three hours a day and one full day a week, she took care of the house and the cooking. She was also the one who looked after our daughters until they went off to Adams, the boarding school in Litchfield, since there was no good school for them in Brentwood.

  There was perhaps a certain snobbery in that. Isabel had also gone to Adams, considered one of the most exclusive institutions in Connecticut. Isabel was not a snob, however. I have lived seventeen years with her. For seventeen years, we have slept in the same bedroom. I suppose we have made love several thousand times. Yet I still cannot form a precise image of her.

  I know her features, the colour of her skin, the blonde highlights of her slightly reddish hair, her broad shoulders that are becoming somewhat heavy, her placid movements, her bearing.

  She wears a lot of pale blue, but the colour she prefers is a light mauve.

  I know her smile, never too wide, a slightly fixed smile that still brightens up her already naturally open face.

  But what does she think about, for example, all day long? What does she think of me, her husband and the father of her daughters? What are her real feelings towards me?

  What does she think, at that very moment, of Mona, who is finishing her eggs?

  She can’t love Mona, who is too different from her and who represents slovenliness, disorder and God knows what else.

  Mona’s past is not simple and straightforward like her own. Some of it is rather dubious: the Broadway nights, backstage at the theatres, the actors’ and actresses’ dressing rooms, and her father, who saw nothing wrong with entrusting his daughter to one mistress or another.

  Mona had not shed tears. She was not crushed. Instead she seemed like someone who feels that time is beginning to drag.

  Her husband was out in the snow somewhere, one or two hundred yards from the house, a house that was not her home, which she wasn’t used to and where she must have felt like a prisoner.

  Now that the blizzard was over, that the snow had stopped falling, that the lights were back on, that we could communicate by phone and see the world live again on the television screen, we still had to wait for a crew to arrive from Canaan to begin moving thousands of cubic yards of snow.

  ‘I’m out of cigarettes,’ Mona announced, pushing back her plate.

  I went to get her a pack from the liquor cabinet. It suddenly struck me that we had eaten in the kitchen, whereas when we have friends visiting, we always have our meals, including breakfast, in the dining room.

  Even on our own, Isabel and I eat our lunch and dinner in the dining room as well.

  We’d carried the girls’ mattresses upstairs to the bedrooms, and the dirty glasses had disappeared.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand . . .’

  Mona was wearing her black slacks, her canary-yellow sweater. She was helping my wife do the dishes, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was thinking too much. I was asking myself too many upsetting questions.

  Those questions could not all have sprung from the time I’d spent on the bench in the barn. Seventeen years had not passed without me asking myself some of them.

  How was it possible that, until now, they hadn’t troubled me? I must have answered them, automatically, with the appropriate responses, the ones you learn starting in school. Father. Mother. Children. Love. Marriage. Fidelity. Goodness. Kindness. Devotion . . .

  It’s true that I had lived like that. Even as a citizen, I took my duties as seriously as Isabel did.

  Is it possible that I never realized that I was lying to myself and that in my heart I never believed in those edifying images?

  In our office, it’s my associate, Higgins (whom I always call old Higgins, even though he’s only sixty), who takes care of the buying and selling of property, the mortgages, the company incorporations and, in general, all the technical business.

  He’s a chubby, crafty fellow who in other times could have sold quack medicines at country fairs. He’s sort of grubby and untidy, and I suspect him of exaggerating the vulgarity of his behaviour the better to fool those around him.

  He doesn’t believe in anything or anybody and often shocks me with his cynicism.

  As for me, my domain is more personal, because I deal with wills, inheritances and divorces. I have taken care of hundreds of them, because our clientele extends rather far beyond Brentwood, and many rich people live in the area.

  I am not talking about criminal cases. I don’t think I’ve had to appear before a jury more than ten times. I ought to know men. Men and women. I thought I knew them and yet, in my private life, I was behaving and thinking the way they do in what are called edifying books.

  Basically, I was still a Boy Scout.

  It’s on the bench that . . .

  I don’t know where the two women are; probably in the guest room, and I’m wandering around alone in the living room and library, brooding over thoughts I’m not proud of.

  And I had considered myself someone with a precise mind! The sight of a man and woman making love in a bathroom had been enough . . .

  Because that was really the starting point. Apparently, at least. There must have been other causes, earlier ones, which I would discover only later on. It was on the red bench, in the barn where the door was banging, that a truth occurred to me and changed everything.

  ‘I hate him . . .’

  I hate him and I let him die. I hate him and I kill him. I hate him because he is stronger than I am, because he has a wife more desirable than mine, because he lives a life like the one I would have liked to lead, because he goes through life without bothering about those he bumps aside as he goes by . . .

  I am not a weakling. I am not a failure, either. My life? I am the one who chose it, as I chose Isabel.

  For example, had I known Mona at the time, it would never have occurred to me to marry her. Or to join a Madison Avenue ad agency.

  Such choices I made through neither cowardice nor laziness.

  All that is becoming much more complicated. I’m reaching an area where I suspect I will make unpleasant discoveries.

  Let’s take Isabel. I met her at a dance, in Litchfield, as it happens, where she lived with her parents. Her father was Irving Whitaker, a surgeon who was often called to Boston and elsewhere for difficult cases. As for her mother, she was a Clayburn, of the Mayflower Clayburns.

  It was neither her father’s reputation nor her mother’s family name that influenced me. It was not her beauty, either, or her physical attractiveness.

  I wanted other girls much more than I wanted her.

  Her calm, that kind of serenity she already possessed? Her gentleness? Her forbearance?

  But why would I have been seeking forbearance when I was doing nothing wrong?

  In short, I’d needed to have things all compatible and well organized around me.

  Whereas I feel raging desire for a woman like Mona, who is the complete opposite!

  ‘The important thing,’ my father used to say, ‘is to make the right choice to begin with . . .’

  He was talking about choosing not only a wife but a profession, a way of life, a way of thinking.

  I thought I had chosen. I have done my best. I have worn myself out doing my best.

  And, little by little, I have wound up hoping to see approval in Isabel’s eyes.

  What I had chosen, in the end, was a witness, a benevolent witness, someone who, with a glance, would let me understand that I was keeping myself on the right path.

  All that had just cracked apart in one night. What I was envying in Ray, as in an Ashbridge, was their having
need of no one, of no one’s approval.

  Ashbridge did not care if people mocked him because three wives in a row had cheated on him. He picked them young, beautiful, sensual, and he knew in advance what to expect.

  Did he really not care at all?

  And did Ray love Mona? Was it all the same to him that before he knew her she had been in the arms of so many men?

  Were they the strong men and I the weak one, because I had chosen to live in peace with myself?

  Well, that peace, I had not found it. I had pretended. I had spent seventeen years of my life pretending.

  I could hear a rumble still in the distance, and when I opened the door, it grew louder. I realized that the snow-removal machines were approaching and I even thought I faintly heard men’s voices.

  Would they find Ray today? That was unlikely. Mona would be spending at least one more night with us, and I was sorry that it would not be, as on the first night, on a mattress in the living room.

  I could see her hand again on the floor, that hand I had so longed to touch, as if it had become a symbol.

  I was trying to escape. But to escape what?

  For just over twenty-four hours now I had known that in reality I was cruel, capable of taking pleasure in the death of a man I had always considered my best friend and capable, if necessary, of provoking that death.

  ‘You’re going to freeze us . . .’

  I swiftly closed the door and saw that the two women had got dressed. Mona was in a red dress, my wife in a pale blue one. They looked as if they were trying to get back to everyday life.

  All that was still only a sham.

  3.

  Towards four o’clock that afternoon, we noticed through the window that the machines were slowly attacking the snow, cutting a trench there with walls as crisp as cliffs. It was fascinating. We said nothing. We watched without thinking. I wasn’t thinking, in any case. Ever since Saturday evening, I had been outside my ordinary life and as if outside of life itself.

  What I remember best was the presence of a female in the house. You would have thought that I could smell her, like a dog, that I went looking for her as soon as she left my sight, that I prowled around her, awaiting an occasion to touch her.