by Howard Engel
I knocked on the front door. I could hear an immediate response from inside, probably from the front room, but the door wasn’t answered for nearly a minute. When the door opened, and then only seven or eight inches, the woman with frightened green eyes asked me to name my business.
“Mrs. Blake,” I was guessing, “I’d like to speak to Hilda, if I may. Is she here?” I gave her the best of the Cooperman smile, and let the sunlight catch all my dimples.
“What made you think you’d find her here?” She wasn’t openly unhelpful. She was being unhelpful in a helpful-seeming way. I smiled again.
“I think you’ll find that she’s expecting me. The name is Cooperman. Ben Cooperman.”
“Why don’t you leave the girl alone?” the old woman asked. She was solid and short, with gray hair going a little yellow in its tight curls. She wore an apron over a flowered dress. A brooch, in the shape of a thistle, sparkled on the neat lapel of her collar. “Haven’t we suffered enough?”
“I wish I could answer that, Mrs. Blake. I don’t know all the answers. I hope that Hilda might help me to find some. I need her help, Mrs. Blake.” She looked at me, made what appeared to be half a pout, and then stood back from the door allowing me to pass her stout figure.
The room was full of caged birds of all colours. I counted at least twenty cages, some suspended from ornamental stands, and others set on tables and suspended from wires. The birds were the usual birds, with the usual bright colours that caged birds run to. There were blues and greens and yellows, an occasional glimpse of red, black, pink, and even white. There wasn’t a song bird in the lot. Not a cheerful note in over fifty little feathered breasts. The space in the room not devoted to livestock was taken by a couple of comfortable chairs and an overstuffed sofa with a picture above it of cheerful song birds. On the mantelpiece of an imitation fireplace stood two Dresden birds in china, on each side of a group of stuffed cardinals in a bell jar. It was the sort of living-room that had probably never seen a barrel of Kentucky-fried chicken.
“You’re admiring my birds,” she said. It wasn’t a question. I nodded a lie. “I have more than fifteen different varieties, not all here in the living-room, of course. That black one with the short bright beak is a minah bird, of the eastern passerine type. Some of them can be made to talk, but I don’t hold with teaching animals to do tricks. Some people see no harm in it, but I find it disgusting and degrading. It degrades both the animal and the teacher, if you want my opinion.” I stopped trying to feign interest in her exotic birds, hoping that she might come down and perch somewhere close to my reason for being here. She stopped leading me from cage to cage and said, “You really have to see her, Mr.…? I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Cooperman. Ben Cooperman. If you could tell her I’m here. I think you’ll find that in a way she has been expecting me.”
“Well, if you say that she knows you’re coming, I guess that will be all right. I hate to see her upset. She’s been so brave since she came back home.”
“Brave? In what way?” I guess I turned on her a little more directly than I’d intended. She blinked her eyes a couple of times before trying to answer.
“We’ve had a lot of grief in this family off and on, Mr. Cooperman, and Hilda has kept her little head held high right through the worst of it. At times things looked black for the whole family, but Hilda kept us going, like a little jenny wren fighting off a bluejay. Who would have thought that the cost would be so high? And how I missed her when they’d all gone. First Elizabeth, then Morris, that was my husband—the shock of Elizabeth’s death killed the lamb in less than a year. Then Hilda became sick, but how she fought back. I was very nearly distracted myself, I’m telling you. If it wasn’t for my little friends here, I should have miscarried in my head, I’m sure.” She paused, and looked over my shoulder, as though she could see through the wall at my back. “She’s out in the garden, Mr.… There! I’ve forgotten it again. I’m getting on in years, and my memory isn’t what it was. I used to be able to remember all of ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ by Mr. Longfellow, the poet. Nowadays I can’t remember my own name, so please don’t take offence.” She led me through the house, our way lined by more bird cages, to the kitchen. Through the window I could see her, seated in a lawn chair, looking out over the view from the heights.
TWENTY-SEVEN
She was wearing a soft blue cotton dress with buttons and a collar. The brilliant sunlight caught it, and her long red hair, hanging loose; she seemed to glow as she leaned back in the old-fashioned canvas lawn chair. Beside her on a white wicker table was a full crystal pitcher of lemonade, with the condensation forming droplets which ran down the sides. Around her, the garden was blooming with the enthusiasm of early spring. I don’t know the names of the flowers; irises, maybe, and crocuses. They were all there, in spite of the marauding shadow of the water tower which once a day must brood over these flowerbeds. At this hour, the great green shadow was elsewhere, and the picture in front of me could not have been more idyllic if it was in some English garden in a painting. Except for the far end of the yard. There, the escarpment dropped away suddenly. At my eye level, I could see a hawk turning, a hundred feet above the rooftops of the city below.
I walked around and stood in her light. She lifted her hand to her face. “You’re blocking the sun, Mr. Cooper-man. Come over here and sit beside me so that we can both enjoy it.” I settled into another lawn chair, and brought it closer to Hilda Blake. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said. “I thought that you’d come this morning.” I grinned, helplessly. “You met my mother?”
“Yes, I just saw her.”
“She’s been very good to me.”
“Does she know, then?”
“Oh, of course not. Her support was of a general kind. I’m surprised if you thought, even for a moment, that I could have shared my task with anyone, even Mother. She’s really a very strong person, though, complex and special like the rest of the family. Can you imagine anyone named Blake keeping birds in cages?” I tried to match the smile she tossed me. “He said ‘Everything that lives is holy.’ Do you believe that, Mr. Cooperman?”
“I guess I do, in a way,” I said, a little out of my depth.
“I used to believe it with all my heart.” She looked at me with her green eyes very round. The sun had illuminated the golden flecks in them and the blue vein in her forehead was throbbing. “Yes,” she said, looking out away from me. “I used to believe that and a hundred other beautiful things that I have had to put behind me. I’m cut off from fine sentiments now, but I feel the wound.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Oh yes, I will. And you are going to tell me things as well. But first, may I pour you something cool?”
“Thank you very much.” She filled two of the tall glasses on the tray from the pitcher, the ice cubes protesting like distant chimes, and handed one of the glasses to me. I let her sip her drink before I began to drink mine, a delay that she noticed and smiled at.
“Please give me a little credit, Mr. Cooperman. I’m not that sort of person. Do you really think I intend to poison you?” I felt like a schoolboy caught cheating in an exam.
“Well, you must admit that I might have reason to be cautious.”
“I wouldn’t do anything now that would spoil what I’ve done. You are not part of my mission, Mr. Cooper-man.” She looked at me like she was explaining why she’d failed to castle early in a simple king’s pawn game. Her mission. I had to concentrate on the men she’d put in the cemetery.
“Tell me, I said. “Tell me about before you had a mission.” She looked over the edge of the escarpment; for a moment I thought she hadn’t heard me. There were two hawks wheeling now, slowly in great circles.
“It began such a long time ago. Try to imagine it, sitting here in this garden where we spent so much of our time. My grandfather built the brick shed over there. He used to raise mink. The old house on the property belonged to hi
s father’s farm. It was one hundred and fifty years old, but it had to be destroyed when the land was subdivided. My sister told me stories of the old house, how she’d played in the rafters under the roof, or crept from one bedroom to another through two closets that joined. Granddad worked, when he was younger, for the canal company as a lock-keeper. He filled Elizabeth with canal lore, and she passed it on to me. One time he showed her where an abandoned railway tunnel, nearly a quarter of a mile long, ran under a basin between two locks on the old canal. This morning I caught myself thinking that now I’ll be free to look for that place. It’s fascinated me since I first heard of it as a child. I was forgetting your visit, Mr. Cooperman.” The smile that nearly didn’t make it at all faded quickly from her eyes. She went on with the story.
“The city made Father sell off the mink Granddad left. They tried to force him to take down the shed, but he convinced them that it had historical interest.”
“Your sister was special, wasn’t she?”
“Oh, yes. But that doesn’t really tell half of it. We were close, of course. Even though I was younger, I tried to keep up with her. Elizabeth was a first-class student all her life. I think she was a genius. She was always right up there with the top three. And then, suddenly, without any warning, she wasn’t there any more. She was only twenty, Mr. Cooperman. She had so much to give to life, and they spoiled it. They murdered her.” Her face had coloured during the last part of this. She paused thoughtfully, forgetting that she had company, and sipped from her glass.
“You knew that she was taking drugs, didn’t you?” I asked, trying to bring the real Elizabeth Blake back again.
“Yes, but she was never an addict. Youthful experiment, maybe. Everybody was doing it then. It seemed natural, a part of growing up. Don’t you see?”
“Oh, I see all right. But I also see that she was more than an innocent victim of the pushers. She was one of the pushers herself.”
“Elizabeth was good, and honest, not a bit like what you are thinking. If you’d known her …”
“Hilda, you knew she was involved in that drug ring. She knew who was making the drugs; she helped distribute them. She was there when the security guard was wounded. With the gun you gave me.”
“I remember that night.” She was leaning forward with her hands on her cheeks. “I was doing homework in my dressing-gown with the roses. She came into my room; I could see from her face that something was terribly wrong. She rushed over and held me for a long time.” Hilda stopped speaking like she’d suddenly caught a high note in her ear and she couldn’t go on until the vibration ended.
“Hilda? Tell me about the gun.”
“The gun?”
“The one Elizabeth brought home. The one you got me to take to Ward’s house.” She was frowning at me slightly, as though she’d just suddenly noticed that I was selling magazine subscriptions. When I asked a question, I got a vague response. We danced around that way for a while, and then the note, or vibration, or whatever it was, must have gone away. She picked up the story again with a half apologetic smile.
“She cried and cried in my arms. We’d never been so close. She’d never needed me before. For a while it was as if she was me and I was her. All the while, she was babbling. Most of it I didn’t catch. But I recognized names: Joe, Bill and Chester. I heard about a gun that went off, that someone was hurt. Elizabeth went back for the gun. Bill Ward had dropped it. She was bone-white with fright. I held her close until morning.” Hilda looked little and crushed in her chair.
“But, Hilda, the gun?”
“The gun?” She looked away from my face. “Oh, I just kept it.”
“Was Elizabeth in love with Joe Corso?”
“Joe was the only one who did anything. The rest was sordid business. Joe had discovered how to make things in the lab. He could do anything. He was brilliant.”
“And Elizabeth worked with him?”
“Yes. That was why she stayed in residence that term. She wanted to be near Joe. She told me how they were often up all night waiting for the results of a group of tests. You don’t believe me, do you? You’re like all the others.”
“Hilda, I have difficulty accepting the hero status you’re trying to give both of them. They were in it either for the kicks or the money. Can’t you see it for what it was, a dirty piece of business at best? If they’d been caught, there would have been jail terms for both of them.”
“You don’t understand how what happened next wiped all of that away.”
“The security guard was shot a few months before your sister died. They came within an ace of killing that man, but they kept on making and pushing the stuff.”
“Haven’t you ever seen pictures on television or in the papers showing the wives of accused men walking to or from the courtroom? Have you studied the faces of those women as I have? They shout hatred at the cameras with their eyes, and defiance to the world. Questions of right and wrong are for courts and strangers. They have no place under the roof of the accused.”
“When did you see your sister last?” The question sounded like a parody of something just out of my reach. Hilda Blake smiled at me. It was a smile that could almost make me forget why I was there.
“She was busy with her final exams, so she hadn’t been home for more than a week. Of course, she telephoned nearly every day. She was full of talk about the papers she was working on, and Joe, and her plans for the summer. She was full of life, and brimming over with enthusiasm. Two days later she was dead. The inquest was a farce. They say the coroner was drunk. He called it suicide, but I knew they were all lying. I tried to say so, but the doctor gave me something to make me go to sleep.
“Mother wasn’t well enough to go to the funeral. I went. I tried to tell the people what happened, but I was taken away. I can’t remember by whom. Isn’t that odd? I just remember a strong hand on my arm. But I remember vowing over her coffin that I wouldn’t let Chester Yates and Bill Ward get away with what they had done. I knew that I would live long enough to send both of them to hell.”
“And you would do it the way they did: make their deaths look like suicide.”
“They murdered my sister, Mr. Cooperman. I saw them escape any shadow of blame. I knew that they wouldn’t escape me.” We sat quietly for a minute. I thought of lighting a cigarette, but there was something about this garden and this afternoon that frowned on such an idea. I took another sip of lemonade.
The sun had moved a little since we began talking. I was aware of shadows in the garden, but the warm spring afternoon continued. In her sun-drenched dress Hilda talked as simply as though we’d been discussing the plot of a novel, or the exploits of somebody who’d lived three centuries ago. I had to keep reminding myself that until recently we executed murderers like Hilda Blake.
“After Elizabeth died, Joe tried to get in touch with me. We talked on the telephone once.”
“Did he tell you what had happened?”
“He didn’t have to. He sounded frightened, and it could only be Ward and Yates that he was afraid of. They killed him too. I should have guessed that they would try to kill Joe. Then, a month later, Father had a stroke. He didn’t die right away, but he couldn’t speak any more. From his hospital bed, he looked at me the way he used to look at Elizabeth, and he told me things that he’d never been able to say before. I can’t describe those wordless conversations. There was an ecstasy about his eyes. I felt for the first time worthy. And I could take responsibility for what I knew he was telling me to do.
“The time after that is confusing. I’m not sure what happened next. I remember dropping out of school. I remember another funeral. I remember doctors and nurses and drugs. In the calm times I can remember hearing voices. Nothing to do with me, just people talking about their cats and dogs and family. I remember hearing two doctors talk about a nurse as though I wasn’t in the room. They were saying terrible, private things, as though I wasn’t able to hear. Then I can remember long corridors, and sunlight on
balconies. I remember sitting in a garden watching the flowers. I think I could actually see them growing. The buds were slowly unfolding as I watched them.”
“Was it then that you met Liz Tilford?”
“Oh, I forgot. Yes, of course, you’d know about her, wouldn’t you?”
“I’ve had to keep my eyes open.”
“I’m glad it was you, Mr. Cooperman. What’s your Christian name?”
“My first name is Ben. But I’m Jewish.”
“Ben. I like that name. Ben. It suits you. You are a Ben. Liz Tilford would have liked you. She was my friend. I was closer to her than to anyone after Elizabeth, my sister. Funny, their both having the same name. It was a good omen.”
“She found you in the hospital on Queen Street, while she was still on staff, am I right? She took an interest in you, didn’t talk to people as though you weren’t in the room. She remembered things you told her, and later, when you began to get better, she brought you things.”
“Yes, we spent long afternoons taking society apart and putting it together again. I didn’t realize to what a degree I was occupying her time until later. She seemed to know that I was special right from the beginning. It was as though we’d known one another all our lives. It was like having an older sister again.
“I forced myself to stop walking around in a daze. I stopped worrying about things I could never quite fit together, things glimpsed at the corner of my eye, that always disappeared when I turned my head. I paid attention more. Tried not to think of Elizabeth or about Bill Ward and Chester Yates. I think they reduced the number of drugs they were giving me to keep me going. I started liking some of the doctors. We even had our own jokes. My bad dreams began to go, I was getting well, and I liked the idea of being well again.”
“At the beginning of last year, did Liz tell you that she would be leaving the hospital?”
