by Packer, Vin
“Of course — I suppose poor Amos will be dragged into it now!”
“Well, Maggie, after all! After all! Lou’s been dragged into it, hasn’t he?”
“I’m sorry, honey. I’m just thinking of the newspapers.”
Janice Hart felt like getting up and marching out of the Meakers', but Joseph walked into the room then and said, “Are you going to call the cat, Maggie?”
“No, Joseph, I’m not going to call the cat. The cat can sit out there on the woodpile until next May for all I care!”
“It’s ominous!” said Joseph Meaker.
“Oh, the hell with it!” Maggie said. “Mix yourself a drink! Say, honey,” turning to Janice now, “did you want a drink? I didn’t even ask.”
“I could use one.”
“How about it, Joseph? We could all use a drink.”
“The cat’s one of these strange kind,” Joseph said to Janice. “It’s omnious, that’s all.”
Janice said, “Well,” smiling, detesting Joseph Meaker at that moment, “I’m not very superstitious.”
“Many people are, you know, particularly about cats. Welsh sailors say if the ship’s cat mews constantly it portends a difficult voyage. And in some parts of France the cat was believed to be the devil and — ”
“Thank you, Doctor Folk Lore!” Maggie said. “Next week the Ladies Auxiliary will present another interesting lecture entitled ‘When You Entertain Guests Be Sure To See They Have A Drink In Their Hands Before You Start To Bore Them To Death!’”
Joseph walked out of the room.
While Janice talked, she could hear him rattling the ice-cube trays in the kitchen. She told Maggie of Lou’s meeting with Muriel Duncan, and of Captain Plant’s hammering the desk at one point and shouting at Lou that he was holding something back, and she broke down finally and wept into her handkerchief. Maggie was comforting her when Joseph finally reappeared with a trayful of drinks, and a smile.
“Our host is one up on us, I think,” Maggie said, “or is it two.”
“My apologies to both of you,” Joseph said. “It’s two. I had to calm down. I’m sorry.”
“Lou met Muriel Duncan today, Joseph, at the State Police Barracks.”
“I’m not really antagonistic towards that cat. I think it’s the other way around.” He was smiling again, pulling the hassock up to sit by Janice. “I think Yillah doesn’t like me,” he said.
“Joseph! This is hardly the time to talk about Yillah!”
“No, it’s just the time. Yillah is truth, truth is Yillah!”
Janice Hart fought for control, knotting the wet handkerchief around in her palm, thinking of Lou home alone — and the bottle of Jack Daniels. He had said he was never going to drink again; they would move, he had said, when it was all over; maybe go back to Paris with Tony; a whole new environment, they would find. Throughout the ordeal, Janice had never once asked him if there were any possibility that he did know something about Duncan’s disappearance. But last night she had dreamed of a courtroom, and Lou was on the stand, drunk. He was telling the jury he missed all the old magazines he used to read at home. Janice was sitting far in the back of the courtroom, wanting to scream at him that he was hurting his cause; didn’t he realize he was on trial for his life? She had awakened trembling, grabbing hold of Lou, waking up. Just a dream, she had told him; I don’t even remember it.
“… can tell you one thing,” Joseph was saying now, “this girl Muriel does not have the right kind of frames for her glasses.”
“You’re not funny, Joseph,” Maggie snapped.
“Nor am I trying to be funny. It’s the truth.”
“Janice, what was she like?”
“Lou said she was very pathetic, homely, tired-looking, and tried to be very nice to him. She lost control once and begged him to tell her if he knew anything about her husband. But otherwise, she was as nice as she could be. She told Captain Plant she had never set eyes on Lou, nor heard his name before last Thursday.”
“She’ll probably get married again, even if she is homely. She has a square face though,” Joseph said, “and the rimless glasses emphasize it. Somebody ought to tell her.”
“Joseph just needs a whiff of the cork, Janice. That’s all.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not in the mood for jokes tonight. Anyway, Lou’s home alone. I don’t want to stay long.” Janice put her cigarettes in her purse. “I just wanted to tell you Captain Plant will probably be around asking you questions now.”
“Asking us?” said Joseph. “Why us?”
“Don’t bother going into it again, honey. He won’t remember it, anyway.”
“We have nothing to hide,” said Joseph. “We’ll have him to dinner, this Captain Plant. How about it, Maggie?”
“Sure, sure. We’ll have the whole police force to dinner.” Maggie put her hand on Janice’s knee. “I’m sorry, honey. I apologize for him.”
“We’ll have the police and Amos Fenton and the Risestaver Coffee Corporation, and T. S. Eliot and Miriam and Tom, and you can come too, Janice. Bring Louis.”
He was emptying the rest of the martini pitcher as Janice stood up.
“We love the whole world,” he was saying while Maggie saw Janice to the kitchen, “and you can blame it all on gin!”
At the kitchen door Maggie said, “Do you notice how he avoids any serious discussion of Lou or the entire subject?”
“Is he just drunk?”
“Drunk or sober he simply ignores it. Jan, I’m damn worried!”
“I’m sorry,” Janice Hart said, but she was far, far sorrier for Janice Hart.
2
When Maggie returned to the living room she found Joseph holding up a copy of Vogue.
“This is what I mean,” he said, “look here, Maggie.”
“Look at what?”
“At this woman’s face. It’s square, like Muriel Duncan’s. Notice the glasses this woman is wearing! These are the frames Muriel should wear. You see! They de-emphasize the squareness.”
“Sit down, Joseph, and try to listen to me. Will you do that?”
“Certainly.” He sat back down on the hassock, smiling, looking very interested in whatever it was she had to say.
“Joseph, you need help. Lately, you’ve been drinking and it’s put you in a very euphoric mood, but how do you always feel the next day?”
“I have hangovers. Doesn’t everybody?”
“How do you feel about your work?”
“Remember when I did my preliminary paper on the ‘German Sectarians of Provincial Pennsylvania,’ Maggie? Remember you said I worked too rapidly. You said I should take more time submitting my work, because it impresses people more. Remember? Well, you’re right, dear.”
“You’re not working at all, are you?”
“Not much. No.” He grinned at her.
“And what about the stuff you’ve been reading, Joseph? Let me see if I can remember some of the titles. Bury the Hatchet, Blood Money, Dance with the Dead. What about it, Joseph? You never read anything like that before.”
“I don’t mind that you go through my desk. You always did. You used to look for the Varda file too. I know that.” He turned the empty pitcher upside down over his glass. “We’ll make more, hmm?”
“All right, in a minute, if you want to. Just let’s talk a bit.”
“You’re right, Varda was a red. She loved my soul. She had me spotted long before this! You know what she used to write to me, Maggie? She used to write, ‘… and my dear I love your soul, wise, sad, profound and exalted, like a symphony.’ That’s beautiful.”
“Yes, Joseph, that’s beautiful. What about those twenty-five-cent books?”
“Thirty-five, dear. Thirty-five cents’ worth of stupidity! How stupid to make a murderer a drunk, don’t you think? I love people when I’m drunk!”
“And when you’re sober?”
“Oh, you mean all that about the cat tonight, hmm? You see, the cat doesn’t like me. I don’t blame her.”<
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“Joseph, the cat hasn’t had a chance to like you. You were drunk when I brought it home and you were rough with her. The next day when you were sober, you didn’t pay any attention to her.”
“You’re wrong, Maggie. I tried to get her in. I did!”
“She’s a cat, Joseph. She likes it outdoors. She was an outdoor cat.”
“I realize that now. I don’t mind it. She sits out there by the woodpile all the time. ‘There’s nothing to me and nothing to you, we all gotta do what we gotta do.’”
“You keep reciting that, Joseph. Where is it from?”
“Eliot. T. S. Eliot.”
“What’s it about?”
“The same thing those thirty-five-cent books are about, only it’s not so low, you see? This man in Eliot’s poem did a woman in. A man doing a man in isn’t classic.”
Maggie said, “You doing Lou Hart in, for example?”
“I never would have done in Louis, Maggie. Oh, I hated him, dear, because I thought he killed Ishmael, but I was looking for something more subtle to do Louis in with.”
“And it turned out not to be so subtle. It was a fluke, wasn’t it? One of those strange flukes. And now Lou is blamed for something you would have liked to do to him yourself, subconsciously.”
“Say, you’re good, Maggie. You ought to take it up.”
“You admit it, then? All this — this suffering, Joseph, is because you feel responsible for what’s happening to Lou.”
“Well, let’s say, I should feel responsible.”
“You do, Joseph! Oh my God, it’s hard to reach someone who isn’t on the qui vive about psychology! You do feel responsible, face it!”
“Over a drink?” He got up and reached for her glass, the same vacant grin on his face — but she was getting somewhere, wasn’t she? “Okay, over a drink.”
“And then I’ll propose a toast, Maggie. You know who I’m going to toast?”
Maggie felt as though she were on the precipice of a break-through, but she was not going to spoil the moment by saying Lou’s name herself. Joseph had to say it.
“Do you know who I’m going to toast, Maggie?”
“Who?” She hung suspended — sure — waiting.
“Because it’s Saturday night and nearly midnight,” Joseph said, “I’m going to toast the other Joseph, upstairs in his study, listening to every word of our conversation!”
Chapter Seventeen
Sunday, life went on while Joseph stayed in bed. “Life” was Maggie on the telephone, and the television playing across the room from Joseph. Joseph watched two Swedish sopranos sing duets from Rossini and Dvorak, while downstairs Maggie’s conversation with Amos Fenton drifted up piecemeal. There were a lot of “miGods!” and “don’t worrys,” and she was no sooner finished with that call than she was jiggling the tone button for the long distance operator again. Her call to Tom Spencer lasted through “U.N. In Action,” and the second half of a two-part discussion on Mr. Lincoln and the Bible. Joseph caught very little of the conversation, since Maggie was practically whispering (which was anyone else’s normal conversational pitch) and the cat had removed herself from the top of the television set where the speaker was, increasing the volume.
Joseph was suffering from palpitations; his heart seemed about to tear through his chest, and everytime he took his eyes off the television screen, he saw the eyes of the cat studying him. He had tossed a pillow at her just as Mark Van Doren started a poem about Lincoln. Now she was sitting on the bureau looking at him. He shut his eyes and saw her eyes there in the dark. It had been his own idea to keep the cat in all day. He knew dogs dug things up from the ground and he was taking no chances with this cat. He took a long breath, opened his eyes, and looked straight into hers.
“Get out of here!” he shouted. The cat did not even blink, and the effort cost him a clear head. The ache began by his temples and then encompassed his head like a bandeau. When Maggie shouted from downstairs, “Anything wrong up there?” he could only manage a resigned, “No.”
He heard her say, “I know it’s the cat bothering him,” and he supposed now Tom Spencer was giving her some sage advice about what to do next. Somehow he slept through the “Bell Telephone Hour” and half of a programme called “Celebrity Golf.” He had dreamed, They were together in the same hide-a-bed she had ten or fifteen years ago when Joseph was dating her. He had told her in the dream that several days ago he had been listening to Christ Lag in Todesbanden and that afterwards he had killed a deer. “You would not kill a fly,” she had laughed. He had run to get the fly-swatter from his kitchen to show her that he would most certainly kill a fly, but she had only laughed harder. “Es war ein Traum,” she had told him. “It was a dream, Joseph.” He had awakened at that point, and there was the cat. He imagined that the cat was smiling at him now, a lopsided, insinuating smile. When Maggie brought his supper tray, he told her he wanted the cat out of his sight. Maggie was doing everything he asked her to do today, treating him as though he were a heart case, or some sort of certifiable psychotic who would go to pieces if his coffee was over-sugared.
“Ed Sullivan,” and “G. E. Theatre,” “Jack Benny” and “Candid Camera.” Palpitations and the headache, much worse now. At eleven o’clock he took two strong sleeping pills. It was raining out. Just as Joseph was straightening the bed sheets he heard a man’s voice come over the television.
“Do you want to tell us about it, Mrs. Duncan?”
Joseph turned around and looked at the set. A slim fellow holding a microphone was kneeling by the old davenport with the antimacassars, and there was Muriel. The lights from the television camera caught the reflection of the glasses, so that her face seemed to give off sunrays, and on her lap, a child, who could be no older than two, also wore glasses, causing more sunrays.
“… believe. So that’s the way it is,” she was saying.
“You don’t know what to believe?”
“No.” Her voice broke at that point, and she put her hand up near her glasses, while the baby in her lap pulled up her skirt. She smoothed it down and the reporter turned around in his squatting position and faced the camera. He said, “If any of you can offer any information about the whereabouts of this man, please call your local police.” Then there was a gruesome likeness of Billy Duncan on the screen. Joseph walked across the room and turned off the set.
Behind him, Maggie in her nightgown said, “I suppose the police will be coming around here soon.”
In the night, the rain had turned to snow. Maggie’s ride tooted for her shortly after seven-thirty, and vaguely, Joseph recalled her exclaiming over the snow, over the fact the cat had been out all night. Joseph must have rolled over and gone back to sleep, for when he woke up a second time, the sun was very bright in the bed room, and there was a strange stillness, broken only by a crunching sound. Joseph sat up in bed. A car was coming down the drive, was that it? He went to the window, and then he saw them. They had pulled up outside the garage. They wore dark blue uniforms with light blue patches, caps, holsters with guns in them. Guns? Routine, Joseph’s brain went over and over the word monotonously, routine, just routine, routine business, only routine.
The window in the bedroom was still open from the night, and Joseph knelt down under it, out of sight, listening.
“Side door,” one said.
“Real crust on this stuff.”
The noise of their footsteps in the snow was like strips of canvas being ripped down the middle; then there was the sound of stomping on the wooden porch. Knocking. Pounding. Joseph stood up and went and sat on the bed, pulling the robe around him.
Of course he had expected them; it was inevitable. He would only have to go down and let them in, tell them yes, Louis Hart was here the Friday before last; yes, there had been a little scuffle; yes, he had given Louis a book called The Unknown Murderer because he had thought Louis had killed his cat. Routine, routine; yes, to everything. Easy. He pulled the robe tighter around him, sat perfectly sti
ll. The pounding seemed more insistent.
“Tracks on the driveway, Paul. Maybe they’re gone.”
“Yeah.”
More pounding. “Try them tonight?” “Yeah.”
More strips of canvas being ripped, then, “Lookit!” “Yeah. Rabbit.”
“Naw, a cat! Goddam cat! Lookit it leap!”
Joseph got up and sneaked to the side of the window. He could see the men standing, facing the barn. Then he saw Yillah chasing around behind the barn. Her legs sunk down into the snow, surprising her, so that she jumped even higher. The police officers stood there chuckling.
“What is it, Paul, one of those Minx or Manx cats?”
“Siamese! Siamese — this Meaker’s supposed to be some kind of cat nut.”
“Siamese, huh? Looks like a rabbit. Get itself killed in small game season, bet.”
“Not around here. You get a load of those signs he’s got under the No Gunning ones?”
“No.”
“Oh, this you got to see! Look, one on the barn. C’mon.”
Joseph watched while they tramped back towards the barn. Then they stood directly under the sign Billy Duncan had stood under; one with his hands on his hips peering up at the sign through his sunglasses; the other standing beside him, shoving his hands into large gloves. For a while, they stood back there talking. Joseph watched them, his heart worse now than it had been yesterday, knocking, knocking, just the way those two had been knocking moments ago on his back door. Joseph saw Yillah again, jumping past the police, running around the barn like a crazy thing, and they were calling her. Then they went behind the barn, out of Joseph’s sight.
Joseph knew a dog could dig up the hard ground, but not a cat. Not a cat! He felt perspiration break out under his pyjamas, and he was breathless now. He had no idea how much of the woodpile had been covered by the snow; and his next thought was that of a strange dog (never mind the cat) entering the yard at some point, doing exactly what Joseph was sure a cat would not do. He imagined some of the wood toppled over where the dog had started the digging; he imagined a hand. A hand sticking out of the ground. His knees felt as though they would give under him, and he held on to the sides of the bureau, and he told himself one slight giving-in to the panic could ruin him. All sorts of things occurred to him, a series of mad impulses which all logic and control made him squelch; but they were on his mind; he could stick his head out of the window and shout, “I knew a man once did a man in!” He could walk calmly down, put on his overcoat over his pyjamas, go out and get in their car, then drive it straight back and into the woodpile. “Let’s get to the bottom of things,” he might say as he stepped out of the car. “Shovels, gentlemen?” Or — he could just begin screaming, the way he felt like screaming, just start screaming as though the top were off his head and the noise inside was let go. They were coming from around behind the barn now. Joseph studied their faces, their gaits, looking for a sign of something unusual. There was nothing. But would they show it? They would, Joseph thought — wouldn’t they?
