She looked at the license. “Thirty-seven!” She said this with a cry of shocked dismay, and this incongruous age, which Beryl had failed to think about, kept us giggling and bursting out with fresh peals of laughter for fully twenty-five miles.
We needn’t have worried. I stopped at a good motel that boasted of a swimming pool, and the main concern of the clerk was to get his twelve dollars in advance. He didn’t even look at Beryl, who had remained in the car; he merely handed me the key, and pointed out the window. “Number eight. Count down eight cottages, and park your car in the space marked Eight.”
I had a fifth of rum a friend had given me on his return from a weekend in the Bahamas, and the first thing I did was to fix us a drink; half-rum, and half-water from the tap. I figured we needed a drink. We were both shy again, now that we were alone in the motel room. And the double-bed seemed to occupy all of the existing space, in our minds, and in our room.
“I think I’ll take a shower,” I said at last, putting down my empty glass. “Or—maybe you’d like to take yours first?”
“Oh, no! Go ahead!”
I took my shaving kit, my robe, and the pajamas out of the bag, and entered the bathroom. And as I recall, I was so nervous I even locked the door. A second shave wasn’t needed, but I shaved my face again anyway. I showered, and after drying off, plastered almost half of a tube of deodorant paste under my arms. Well brainwashed by advertising, I dreaded the thought of “offending” this sweet young girl with the honest male odor of acrid sweat.
And then it was Beryl’s turn. I put the pajamas back into the suitcase, and paced the room as the shower ran on and on, interminably, it seemed. I smoked a cigarette, and then another. I fixed another drink, a big hooker, which I downed straight because I had failed to put any water in the pitcher. The shower had stopped a long time before—but still no Beryl.
I waited. I smoked another cigarette. I checked my watch, and then I shook it. She had been in the bathroom for more than an hour! The bathrobe I was wearing, plus the rum, had made me warmer than usual, and a light film of perspiration formed on my forehead. I didn’t want to rush the girl; I knew that Beryl was every bit as nervous as I was—but an hour and a half—Jesus!
I rapped gently on the door. “Are you all right, Beryl?”
“In a minute!” she said angrily, so savagely I started.
I backed away, and sat down on the edge of the bed, wondering what was the matter with her, why she had sounded so irritated. After an hour and a half, my question was natural enough—
The door banged open, and out she came. She was nude, defenseless, and bawling. A filmy, black nightgown was draped over her arm. She waved her right hand at me. My sweating stopped with a jar. She tried to talk, but only spluttered, and her face was distorted pitiably with her tears.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, bewildered. And I felt like some kind of a monster, believing that she was crying out of fear of me.
She wiped her streaming face on the nightgown, and then threw the gadget on the floor. She breathed deeply, sighed, and gained some control over herself. “That damned thing!” she said bitterly. “I’ve been trying to put it in for over an hour—and I simply can’t doooooo it!” A freshet of new tears began to flow, accompanied by unintelligible noises.
I put an arm around her heaving shoulders and led her to the bed. She sat down, wiping her eyes childishly with the back of her hand, and I picked up the small contrivance from the floor.
“What’s the matter with it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. And I paid ten dollars for it, too!”
“Well…” I hesitated. “I don’t suppose—do you think I—that we could—” I tried to think of some statistical explanation that would show that conception among the sixty percent of the married couples who indulged in pre-marital intercourse was less than—
“Twelve percent,” Beryl said, her eyes were streaming, “I read that too.” That too, meant that she could read my mind. I remembered something else. Beryl had told me that she was virginal and I knew.
“I read, somewhere—that girls who—who are—”
“Virgins?” Beryl said. I stared at her.
“Yes—a doctor is supposed to do something. Did your doctor?” Beryl turned her wet face away from me. I didn’t see the end of our romance yet. I knew that I would be a free man again if I moved one way…I would be committed right down the aisle with rice and shoes if the other way held a trap in the path. It was hard to think while looking at her…
“Your serve—” she said gravely. She raised her hands high, clasping each knee with her hand, and closed her eyes tightly. She turned her flushed, angry face to one side, and there was a tight quivering line in each cheek as she clenched her teeth together.
“I’ll have to get dressed,” I said, “and find a drugstore somewhere. Like a fool, when you said you were getting the gadget, I didn’t bring anything.”
“If you think I’m going to stay like this until you run all over town and come back, you’ve got another think coming!” she said grimly, through her clenched teeth. “My nerve won’t hold out much longer. You leave me now, and when you get back I won’t be here!”
There was nothing else I could do. She was brave, as strong-minded and as practical as a Dutch peasant girl, and she had suffered about as much humiliation for one day as she could stand. And I didn’t blame her.
It was that simple, and that basic; and, from time immemorial it has been the only way to break the barrier that prevents a man and a woman from becoming one. But at the same moment, and I sensed it at the time, the biological trap was sprung; and poor little Buddy was conceived at the same instant.
Which meant that we were soon married, despite the careful plans we had made in our young innocence. And all because Beryl’s stupid doctor had failed to mention that you can’t simply buy a diaphragm at a drugstore; they have to be fitted by a physician, and the hymen, when there is one, must be slit surgically before the fitting can take place! But these were the things young couples don’t learn until it’s too late—no wonder gynecologists and obstetricians are rich.…
* * *
To be done with it, I finished the gushy home article first when I got to the office. I wrote the cutlines for six pics, cribbing descriptions from House Beautiful, and turned the completed copy over to Mrs. Mosby, asking her to add a few feminine touches. So much for my turn as Mrs. Frances Worthington.
Over the telephone I got a story about a child bitten by a pet raccoon, an excited version about a drunk throwing a bowl of chile through the window of Charlie’s Chile Bowl, and a poignant tale about an old boy of eighty exposing himself to some elderly ladies at the shuffleboard courts.
I had one visitor, a cute little trick in short shorts and a tight halter. She was highly excited, and she stammered. “What is it, honey?” I asked her. “Take your time.”
“I just got engaged,” she said, “and I want you to put it in the paper!”
“Sure, I’ll put it in,” I said. “Just have your daddy or mother bring me the information.”
“Oh, but they don’t know about it yet!” she wailed.
“And they aren’t going to find out about it by reading it in the paper, either. Now, get on home and tell your folks all about your new engagement.”
Bob Leanard called me and thanked me for the nice review. I was noncommittal but polite. He didn’t mention Beryl’s part in the play and neither did I, so the conversation was quite short.
I ate dinner at Charlie’s Chile Bowl. I also pressed Charlie for details about the drunk’s ire, and listened sympathetically, figuring that if I acted interested enough he would tear up my check. He did. And there was no reason for me to tell him that I had already written the story and turned it in before I left the office.
Belching fire, and with a painful, rumbling growl inside my stomach, I worked until nine P.M. on the draft of my initial article for the suicide series.
Well caught up, I picked
up my car in the lot where Beryl had parked it, and drove to the high school to have a talk with Mr. Paul Hershey, Creative Writing mentor. I wondered what “Creative Writing” was supposed to be, but decided, logically, that it would be better not to really know.
Chapter Eleven
Room 103. First Floor. Lake Springs High. I paused for a moment outside the door, soaking up the reminiscent emptiness of the night-quiet corridor. A million years had passed since I had raced through these halls from one class to another. I had always been in a hurry—too many activities, too many girls, too many ideas—but I had always made it on time to the next class. And I had always made or found the time to squeeze in another club membership, attend another committee meeting, and in my senior year, to write nine-tenths of the weekly school newspaper.
Exciting days. Useless. Meaningless. Dead. I got a drink at the water fountain across the hall from Room 103. There was no monitor sitting next to the fountain to ask me for my hall pass. In the night Adult Education program, I supposed that the mature students could leave their room for a drink of water or a trip to the can without permission. I was amused by the thought of a middleaged real estate broker, for instance, taking an evening course in Business Law—and learning, to his astonishment, that for the first four weeks he was a hall monitor. In my mind I pictured him in a metal chair beside the drinking fountain.…
“Excuse me, sir,” he said apologetically, “but do you have a hall pass from your teacher?”
“Why, no!”
“Well, I don’t mean anything personal, but…” He blushed, and continued embarrassedly, “I—I—I’m the hall monitor, and they told me that if a student didn’t have a hall pass he wasn’t allowed to have a drink of water.”
“That’s a hard rule. You know, a man being thirsty, he just—”
“Yes, I think it is too. But what am I supposed to do? I signed up for Business Law, and the course cost me eight-fifty. I didn’t ask to be a hall monitor.”
“Sure, sure. I guess I can wait, even if I’m not a student.”
“You’re not a student?”
“No, I’m a reporter, and I’m here to interview Mr. Hershey.”
“Gosh!” The paunchy broker’s red face beamed as he searched frantically through his mimeographed list of rules. “You’re okay! Go ahead and have a drink. There isn’t anything in here about restricting visitors.”
…Too bad. No monitor. Just an empty hallway, and a light shining through the dusty transom of Room 103. Old Mrs. Dietzmann—she of the red-red wig—had given me a C in American History in that room, and as I remembered, it was a better grade than I had deserved.
A woman was talking as I entered, directing her remarks to the instructor behind the desk, but speaking loudly enough for the others to hear her too well. I sidled along the wall and sat down at a desk in the last row. There was another half-hour to go, but I could stick with them for that long, I thought. The old girl droned away, giving the class her opinion of the plot of a short-short story that had been read aloud. She couldn’t exactly isolate it, she kept repeating, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but there was something that struck her as unconvincing in the motivation, at least to her, etc.
I shut her voice away, silently counting the members of the class. Twelve. The youngest was a male of twenty-two or -three with shaggy black hair, and the oldest was a grandma in her sixties, if not more. There were more women than men, and I guessed the average age of the class to be closer to forty than to thirty. The instructor, Mr. Hershey, was surprisingly old. A tall, stooped, skeleton of a man, with deep folds of wrinkles in his neck, and a thick shock of graphite-colored hair. The collar of his white shirt was much too large, and he wore a black string tie with a cream-colored Palm Beach suit. As he listened to the woman talking, he reminded me of an old cowboy, deep in thought, trying to remember the name of the first horse he had ever ridden. When the student sat down he cleared his throat.
“Did you want to enroll?” He looked at me. “If so, you can fill in a card after class.”
“No, sir,” I said quickly, “but I would like to talk to you after class, Mr. Hershey.”
He nodded curtly, and then addressed his remarks to the shaggy-haired young man in the first row. “You can take Mrs. Schoell’s remarks for what they are worth to you, Mr. Hass, but I also have a comment of my own to make. In your story you have three named characters: Smith…Jones…Green. These are common names, granted, but I suggest, Mr. Hass, that you spend some time with a telephone book, and some better names than these ordinary ones can be found.”
“I can’t use the names of real people, can I?” Hass said, as he scrambled to his feet. “Why they could sue me!”
“Names picked at random from a phone book would hardly resemble your characters,” Mr. Hershey said patiently. “But if you’re worried about being sued, you can also change the first names. The first names in your story, John, Tom and Mary, are not very imaginative either, particularly when combined with Smith, Jones and Green.”
“But Mary Green is a symbolic name!” Hass protested. “She’s only seventeen, and already married! Don’t any of you people recognize symbolism when you see it?” He whipped his fingers through his hair, and I eased myself out of the room via the back door as unobtrusively as I could.
Creative Writing. Jesus. For the remainder of the period I waited outside in the hall by the drinking fountain, smoking cigarettes, and feeling guilty about smoking on the school grounds. But there wasn’t any hall monitor to catch me at it. The bell rang, and I counted the students out the door to make certain they were all gone before I re-entered. Mr. Hershey was cramming his beat-up brief case with manuscripts at the desk.
“Hudson,” I said, holding out a hand, “from the Morning News. And Mrs. Mosby at the office, by the way, asked me to say hello for her.”
“Oh, yes, I remember Mrs. Mosby well. You said you did not want to enroll in the class, Mr. Hudson?”
“No, sir. I want to talk about one of your former students; Mrs. Huneker.”
“That name is familiar and it isn’t familiar. And I’ve never had so many students that I—”
“She’s the woman who killed herself and her two children last Monday evening.”
“Of course. I read about it in the paper. For just a moment there I didn’t connect the two names. She was enrolled as Marion Casselli, you see, but she hasn’t been to class in three or four weeks.”
“Casselli was her maiden name.”
“Yes, it was in the paper. A nice girl, I thought. I had her pegged as a divorcee, but I was wrong. She was married and had two children?”
“Yes, sir. And now she’s dead.”
“That’s right. Now she’s dead.”
“You don’t seem to be too concerned about the tragedy, Mr. Hershey.”
“My arrangement with the school is this: so long as I have ten or more students I keep my class. When I drop below ten I have to either build it up or lose it. And I have fifteen students signed for the semester. Mrs. Huneker is paid up, and I can still count her as present.” He smiled then, exposing blue-gray false dentures. “I’m just talking nonsense, Mr. Hudson. Of course I’m concerned about Miss Casselli’s death, but at seventy-six a man isn’t easily shocked.”
“Can you tell me anything about her? Why she took this course, what kind of a person she was?”
“Why should I?”
“I’m writing some follow-up articles about her case. I should’ve told you why in the first place.”
“Right now, I’ve got to catch my bus home.”
“I’ll drive you home, Mr. Hershey.”
“Are you a careful driver?” he asked anxiously.
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, then, but if you drive too fast I’ll have to get out of the car.”
“Not over twenty-five,” I promised.
After we got into the car he gave me an address in the exclusive Sea Pines residential district. I raised my eyeb
rows. “Teaching creative writing must pay very well,” I commented.
“No need for sarcasm, Mr. Hudson. I’m paid five dollars a night, two evenings a week. The owners rent me the gate-keeper’s cottage for a token rent, in order to have someone on the premises all year ’round. They’re away all the summer, and even during the Season they spend most of their time at Hobe Sound and Palm Beach.”
“I didn’t intend to sound sarcastic,” I said. “What kind of stories did Mrs. Huneker write? I’m curious.”
“So far as I know she only wrote one.”
“What was it about?”
“I’m not certain, or at least I’m not positive.”
“You don’t happen to still have a copy of it do you?”
“Yes, I have the original.”
“Would you mind if I read it?”
“Yes, under the circumstances, I would mind.”
“I’m not a morbid curiosity seeker, Mr. Hershey. The story Mrs. Huneker wrote wouldn’t be published in the paper, not even any quotes from it. All I want to do is to find some kind of clue as to why she killed herself and two children. And if she wrote anything that might throw a little light on the subject, it would help to give me a lead to further investigations.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
For the rest of the way we rode in silence. I wanted him to think about it so I kept my mouth shut.
Mr. Hershey’s small one-room fieldstone cottage was set well back from the gate, and surrounded by stands of coconut and monkey palms in their first or second year of growth. A large poinciana tree beside the patio in front of the house would provide ample shade in the daytime, I noted, and the patio was bordered by thickly planted multi-colored croton. A person in a hurry, driving through the gate toward the big house two hundred yards up the yellow gravel road, would probably pass the cottage without noticing it.
“I suppose you do a lot of your writing out on the patio,” I said, as I followed the old man into his house.
“No, but I sit out there a lot. Sometimes I have a little wine on hand, Mr. Hudson, but not tonight. But if you’d like some instant coffee—?”
Understudy for Death Page 15
