She handed me one of the carbon copies she was holding. The time had passed now when I could be surprised or shocked by any Ronnie revelation. I glanced at the letter. There it all
was—in Ronnie’s inimitable style, tender, amusing, sensitive, utterly sincere—the direct proposal of marriage.
Maggie was saying: “And she went wild, Jake. She wrote back overwhelmed with gratitude, with love, with God knows what. She’d started on the book again. Her whole life was illuminated. How was she ever going to get through the six months of his absence? So you see, when he came back married, he was really in a spot. He’d shirked writing to her from England. I guess he was still determined to get the book finished. He even shirked telling her when he was in Georgia. And then she came up to New York with him. He knew, somehow, he would have to break the news. But … he was killed. Jake, isn’t there something there? If she’d found out he was married—and she could have found out in a million ways once she’d come out of her ivory tower and hit New York—couldn’t she have killed him? Isn’t that a motive for murder?”
A motive? Of course it was a motive. I got up. I said: “I’ll go to her.”
Maggie hovered. “But be careful, Jake. I mean, if she didn’t do it, if you accuse her, that’s the end of her as a Sheldon and Duluth client.”
“To hell with her as a Sheldon and Duluth client,” I said.
Arlene looked shocked. “I guess it was okay to tell you?”
I said: “Yes, it was okay. Thanks, girls.”
I left them. I took a taxi to the apartment where Gwendolyn Sneighley was staying. I shouldn’t have been hoping, because there was the alibi. Angie’s alibi—the alibi of the only other poor jerk, like me, who had thought Ronnie worth the sacrifice of a whole life. Angie would never shield her brother’s murderer. I knew that. But, because I had to hope, I hoped. And I felt no pity. Later, maybe when there was time to change and to get used to hating Ronnie, I would find that Gwendolyn Sneighley was just as much of a pathetic victim as Sylvia Rymer. But to hell now with that too.
I reached the apartment. The doorman told me that Gwendolyn Sneighley had gone out about half an hour ago. He didn’t know where she had gone.
I was keyed up to confronting her. The maddening accident of her absence deflated me. At least there were Peter and Iris. Maybe they had got somewhere; maybe they were back by now. I returned to my apartment.
As I passed my mail box, I saw a folded letter stuck into the slit. There was mall in the box too. I pulled out the folded letter and got out the other mail. The letter that had been in the slit had no address on it—not even my name. It must have been delivered by hand. I opened it as I went up in the self-service lift. Inside there was another envelope. It was an airmail letter and it was open. It was addressed to me at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Hollywood and it had been re-directed to the apartment. I took in those facts only dimly, with a sort of automatism, because, as I looked at the letter, I felt as if the lift, instead of wheezing upward, was plunging down … down …
For the writing on the envelope was Felicia’s writing.
The lift reached my floor. I let myself into the apartment. The letter in my hand was like a bomb. I called Leora. I thought: If Leora’s here, I can’t read it. I can’t have anyone here. But no one was there. I went into the living-room. I sat down. Suddenly Felicia was in the chair opposite me, not Felicia as I remembered her, but a nightmare, decomposed Felicia from the grave.
I took the letter out of the envelope. There were three sheets of paper—blue paper. I remembered it. Felicia had bought it one Christmas. I felt myself shivering. I read the letter.
It said:
Jake, dear:
What am I going to say? I know I can never make you understand. I can’t understand myself—except that I’m rotten, the way I’ve always thought, and that rottenness sooner or later eats right through to the bone. You never knew, did you, that when we first met I was in love with Ronnie. I thought he was the most charming, the most fascinating man in the world. Oh, hopelessly inaccessible, of course. It wasn’t a practical feeling, but it was real, horribly real, and every minute of the day I was suffering from it like a wound that would never heal.
And then, when I met you, I thought: Here’s my salvation. And you were, Jake, darling; you must believe that. If anyone could have saved me, it was you. You are kind and sweet and good—everything that a man should be. And it was fine. I forgot Ronnie. I loved you. I was happy. No one could have been happier than me with you and Bill and our life. It was ideal. And I thanked God a million times that you had been sent to me.
I did forget Ronnie, Jake. That’s what makes it a nightmare. There were weeks, months, years when I hardly thought of him or, if I did, it was only to match him against you and see how badly he showed up—how conceited, how spoiled, how—well, empty, really. That’s what I saw. And that’s what I thought. So why? Jake, how could it have happened? After seventeen years, after seventeen perfect years? I had everything to lose—nothing to gain. I knew it. All the time I knew it, but when he came to me … My God, was it only last week? Was it only Thursday, the day I’d put you on the plane? I drove home from the airport, Jake. I was just the way I always was. I was thinking of you having to sweat it out in California. I thought of Bill off at the shore. I thought—well, in a way, it was good to have you both out of the house because now I could get the carpets cleaned. And I went home. I made myself dinner alone and then—then Ronnie came …
How can I tell you? How can I even think of it now? How can I believe that I listened to him? Oh, I suppose he did it well. Mustn’t he have done it well? Letting me know, oh, so quietly at first, that there had never been anyone but me, that all these years seeing me married to his best, his only friend had been a constant torment, how he’d struggled, done everything to get me out of his system, how he’d cursed himself that he’d never let me know, never tried before you came and it was too late. And he sat there, there in the lavender chair, just looking at me sheepishly, like a little boy, as if all his soul was in his eyes—as if he hadn’t dreamed of confessing the truth to me, as if it had been dragged out of him by a power much too strong for him.
And—Jake, what did I feel? I felt guilty somehow for having forgotten him, for having had all this happiness with you when my first love had been suffering year after year with his secret sealed up inside. And I felt—Jake, was it pity? He was so helpless, so much in need and you’d always been so strong, strong enough for the two of us. Although you loved me, you’d never really needed me— not my strength. Yes, it was pity. But it was pride, too. I thought: To think of it! Ronnie Sheldon who could have had anyone! Ronnie Sheldon all these years pining for me! It was that—the pity, the pride—and the old excitement which all the time must have been festering in me— festering …
Jake, I don’t want you to understand. I don’t want you to pity me. I only want you to listen. Somehow it happened. Somehow, incredibly, we were lovers, and the rottenness, the years of corroding rottenness were suddenly on the surface. Oh, I was like a wild thing with him … Nothing mattered. Nothing but seeing him again. And I saw him again—and again … and then … Jake, if I didn’t love you I couldn’t write this, could I? I couldn’t want you to know the shame, the horror, the utter humiliation. Because that’s how it ended.
It was the fourth night. I was to meet him at his apartment. At eleven. He’d given me a key. Jake, Jake, don’t be sorry for me, don’t feel anything but contempt. I went there. Exactly at eleven. I let myself in and he knew I was coming. I went into the living-room and he was there on the couch—with a girl, with a young girl in his arms and he looked up at me and he said: “Hello, my dear, I’d forgotten this was our night. This is rather embarrassing, isn’t it? But you’re a woman of the world. You …”
And I saw then. I knew. I saw it had all been a terrible perverted hoax. He hadn’t loved me; he’d hated you. All those years he’d hated you for your strength; he’d hated me too for my
happiness with you and Bill. And that’s what it was. The excitement of destroying me, of destroying you, of proving that by lifting a little finger he could topple the most virtuous wife … Jake, that was last night. I’ve been here, all night, alone. And I’ve known for hours now what I have to do. I can’t come back to you. I couldn’t even look at you—or Bill. You loved me, both of you, for something I wasn’t—for something that was strong and good, something that helped you, maybe, to be better yourselves.
Oh, Jake, dear, you’d forgive me. I know that. But I can’t ever forgive myself. I can’t ever live with myself, not with this body, not with this corrupted heart.
Jake, remember I love you. Try to make Bill see.
Jake, dear, try to make Bill see.
Good-bye, my darling,
Felicia.
21
I sat with the letter in my hand. I knew that, to absorb its full impact, I should read it again. But I couldn’t read it again—not now. I had grasped enough already to illuminate what had for three years been dark, to throw a blazing light on the real horror that had lurked behind the imagined horrors my mind had created.
And I had never imagined this! Now that the day had brought so many other revelations, from Sylvia Rymer, from Maggie, from Arlene, this last, this infinitely worst episode seemed almost inevitable, as if I should have realized that the woman in the doorway, whom Sylvia Rymer’s shortsightedness had blurred, the woman calling “Ronnie” could only have been my wife.
“Her voice was the most terrible thing I’d ever heard—as if she were being choked to death! ”
But I hadn’t guessed it. I had absolutely no preparation for this, and I sat there racked by the anguish of pity for my wife and a terrible, belated understanding of Ronnie Sheldon. That insecurity, which I had glimpsed so often and found so endearing, had been, in fact, an appalling disease. His friendship, his pretended need of me had been as much of a deceit as everything else about him. He had needed friends, lovers, only to betray them—only to prove to himself, over and over again, the extent of his power. All these years he had been living, like a succubus, on the blood of us all. And then, just as he had collected a brand-new quartet of victims in the Laceys, the tables had been turned. Through Bill and Bill’s love and Bill’s youth, Ronnie had become a victim himself. No wonder that, in the scene with Jean which I had so grotesquely misinterpreted, the protective veneer of sweetness had been cracked at last and Ronnie had revealed himself to me for the first time as he had actually been.
Felicia wasn’t really good enough for you! That casual remark of a few weeks ago came back to me, loathsome now in the context which full understanding brought. That—and Ronnie’s patient, gentle solicitude after Felicia had jumped!
Hatred for Ronnie Sheldon, which was to be as eternally frustrated as my longing to help my wife, engulfed me.
That he could be alive again! I thought. So that I could kill him again.
He was sitting there in the lavender chair, looking at me sheepishly like a little boy as if his whole soul was in his eyes. The scene was so vivid to me that it was as if I had actually been there. Felicia with her girl’s crush on the great Ronald Sheldon, Felicia who had turned to me for protection, Felicia who had loved me, Felicia whom I had condemned through ignorance but whom I could not condemn any more—Felicia who had thought of herself as a monster of rottenness but had in fact just been a victim, the victim of a madman who had been able to live only by destroying and who had achieved that night his greatest and most abominable triumph!
Now, more painfully than ever before, I saw my wife sitting on the window-sill, once again smoking the cigarette, getting up, straightening her skirt … She was hurtling down, down, and now I was hurtling with her, for her mind was opened to me at last. I could feel the despair, the sense of degradation, the love which, for all its strength, hadn’t been strong enough. I knew you would forgive me—but I could never live with myself, not with this body, this corrupted heart.
The jump …
There was an ashtray on the table beside me. Before I fully realized what I was doing, I had picked it up and hurled it across the room. The sound of it splintering against the wall shocked me a little back to my senses. However demanding might be my need to come to terms with the memory of my wife, this wasn’t the time. By the irony of Fate, my problems, even for myself, could only now be a side-issue. Because there was Bill.
Somehow the letter had been put in my mail-box. How that could have happened, I had no idea. But there was one thing I had known almost before I had read the letter. When it came back from California, someone had intercepted it, opened it, read it and kept it from me. Who could that have been but Bill? Bill who had been forced to take the shock of the suicide head on, Bill who had worshipped his mother and whose grief had been tainted by the added shock that there had been no explanation, no note. Bill had seen the letter, realized what it was and …
Bill, at fifteen, reading that letter!
Jake, dear, try to make Bill see. Even Felicia in her despair had realized how difficult it would be to make Bill understand without damaging him. Someone far wiser, with far more insight than I, could well have failed. But he hadn’t even had my support. He had swallowed the poison straight. How could a boy of fifteen have faced up to that? I didn’t have to wonder any more why my son had hated Ronnie with that implacable bitterness, why his whole life had gone awry from that moment, why his relations with me had been so hopelessly confused and ambivalent. What did you do, at fifteen, with a father as humiliatingly situated as I?
So this was to be for me the moment of recognition—when the pattern of the Duluth family in its full horror fitted into place. In my mind I was back again in that drab little police room with my son. If l could have understood, I wouldn’t have hated you. I didn’t want to hate you. It was just that with Mother … Bill hadn’t wanted to hate me! If he could have understood! But how could he possibly have understood? He had kept the letter from me, partly, perhaps, to shield me, but more probably because it had been much too horrible for his fifteen-year-old world. It had become his secret, the dreadful, shameful knowledge that must, forever, be kept hidden and festering in his mind. Of course he could never have understood me. He could never have had a moment with me free from grueling self-consciousness, pity and—contempt.
I saw then that Felicia and I had not been the main Duluth victims of Ronnie Sheldon. The main victim had been Bill. And Ronnie had realized it. The will proved that. With satanic malevolence, he had left all his money to the boy whose mother he had destroyed, the boy whom he had insultingly planned to pay off after death.
It was terrible to be hating so much and to no purpose. My temptation was to yield to the hatred, to crawl away to some dark corner and lick my wounds. But I knew that more than ever now Bill needed me. I had to keep fixed to my purpose, and that meant thinking only of what could be helpful.
Bill had kept the letter—and the letter had got into my mailbox. Obviously Bill couldn’t have put it there. What then had he done with it? I thought of Sylvia Rymer’s reference to Bill’s “precious thing” which had been kept in a box by his bed. Certainly that “memento of his mother” had been the letter. Sylvia had said the box was empty after Bill had gone for the first visit to 58th Street. I remembered phrases from Bill’s original broken confession. “I knew I had to make Jean understand … I had to try to make her see … And then, only that morning, he had said to me: “Did Jean tell you?” I had been terrified that he was about to admit he had gone back to the house for the third time. But when I had asked: “Tell me what?” he had fobbed me off with: “Tell you the way she feels.”
It was pitifully clear now. What Bill had been wondering was whether Jean had told me about the letter. At the beginning, when he had fallen in love with her, he had hoped to be able to rescue her from Ronnie by the sheer force of his love. He had known all along that, in the letter, he had a weapon which surely would cut through her sense of marital loyalt
y. But that letter was his secret, the shame which must be kept from everyone else forever. He couldn’t bring himself to use it even with Jean until, when all else failed, he saw that the letter was his only hope.
He had taken the letter to Jean. And, of course, he hadn’t mentioned it to Barnes. Not merely to shield me and his mother’s memory, but from a sheer instinct of self-preservation. It was easy enough to guess what Barnes would do with the knowledge that Bill had gone with a gun to face his mother’s seducer.
More than anything in the world then, I wanted to see my son, to try to help lift part of that burden from his shoulders. For I could do it. I was sure of that now. Our days of sterile misunderstanding could be over. Now that there were no more secrets between us, we could find our way back to each other. Our love could be healthy again. But to go to Bill now would be a self-indulgence. Jean was more important. I must go to Jean.
My Son, the Murderer Page 18
