“Look, would you come along with me if I can’t get anybody else?” she asked. “It has to be two officers of the organization, or at least committee members, I gather.”
“If you can’t get anybody else, sure, I don’t mind.”
So at last she had Gertrude in the palm of her hand. But she would not close it. No. She’d ask dear beat-up old Laura Colton. Everyone knew she was sixty-five, and poor Laura no longer cared.
Two days before the deadline set for the registration of the raffle, Jimmy telephoned. His tone was very solicitous, even sympathetic.
“Hello, Tillie. Jimmy here. Look, it’s nothing really. It’s just that I heard you’ve been terribly upset by what Gertrude has been saying. You mustn’t mind her really, she means no harm. And of course you mustn’t discuss your private affairs with anyone so freely.”
“Gertrude—?”
“The nonsense she’s been spreading about your marriage going on the rocks because you spent it trying to make an intellectual out of Pete. Isn’t that his name?” He laughed encouragingly. “You really mustn’t pay any attention to her. She has talent, but she needs an editor. And look. If you haven’t an escort for the ball, maybe you’d care to go with me. I dance rather well, you know.”
“That would be nice, Jimmy. Sure, I’d love to. Thanks.”
“Done and done.”
She had no more than hung up than she called Gertrude, to say she would take her up on her offer to join her at the police station. Laura Colton was a bit under the weather.
Gertrude looked very spruce in a blue suit of nubbed tweed and a matching pillbox hat. Prudent makeup had erased even the few lines remaining from the recent facial. She had clearly expected a newspaper photographer, and she was not disappointed. He snapped them entering headquarters, and then they went in. Tillie looked her age and more, she knew, thanks to a nagging conscience and a poor night’s sleep. It was too late now, though. They lined up at the tribunal.
“Organization?” the bored desk sergeant asked, pulling a form toward him and reaching for a pen.
“Mental Health,” Gertrude said.
“Prize?”
“An all-expense trip to Monaco, and a day’s hospitality with Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace. The round-trip fares for the winning couple are contributed by TWA.”
“Total monetary value?”
The women exchanged shrugs.
“Approximately then. I just have to put something down here.”
“Maybe a thousand dollars.”
“Price per ticket?”
“Twenty dollars. We’re selling two hundred and fifty tickets.”
Having noted this data on the sheet, the sergeant said: “Now I must ask for personal identification, beginning with fingerprinting. I usually say,” he added with a faint grin, “that this can be done in private. Separately? If you know what I mean?”
Gertrude, not sensing disaster, smiled and said, “That won’t be necessary.”
She had a moment of gratification when, after rolling her fingertips on the ink pad and pressing them on the document, the officer said, “Hm. You could lead a life of crime. No ridges, that they need for identification. Very smooth skin. Now I’ve got to ask you to swear to all this identification with the necessary vital statistics.”
Tillie glanced wildly at the door, but it was too late.
“Your name?”
“Mrs. Burt Wilson.”
“Address?”
“Two ten Chestnut Drive.”
“Age?”
The shocked hush that followed was like the silence that succeeds a detonation the source and nature of which are not quite comprehended by those stunned by it. Even Tillie was dazed. Then Gertrude seemed to pitch forward, clutching at the edge of the desk that interrupted her fall. She was white as a sheet.
“Fuh—fuh—fuh—”
“Take your time,” the sergeant said. “We get this all the time, but it can’t be helped. You want to try again to state your age?”
“Fuh—fluh—flug—”
It was no good. Gertrude seemed to be strangling, or drowning. Her voice, normally high-pitched, now trailed upward into a pititful squeal. Then her grip on the desk-edge relaxed, and she dropped to the floor in a heap.
The sergeant bustled around from behind the desk, at the same time calling for help into an adjacent room, perhaps a lounge, judging from the sound of a television set issuing from it. Another officer appeared, and together they carried Gertrude to a bench and laid her on it.
“She’s dead,” said the second cop. “I always knew this would happen.”
The sergeant was not so pessimistic, or at least not as melodramatic. “She’s just in shock,” he said. “She went into shock.” He began to slap Gertrude’s cheeks with both hands, not hard, but briskly. The other cop dashed a paper cup of cold water in her face. Finally her eyes fluttered open, and she asked weakly, “Where am I?”
“In hell, I guess,” said the sergeant, already beginning to recover some of his boredom. He rose from the kneeling position in which he had been conducting his ministrations. “You’ll be all right. Give her some water to drink, and send in a substitute. Or a couple of them. Because I think you’ll have to see her home, lady,” he added to Tillie.
The two women left after a few minutes, walking stiffly side by side toward Tillie’s car, in which they had come. It was parked about a block away.
“You did this deliberately,” Gertrude said, through clenched teeth. “You planned it deliberately.”
“I’ll never forgive you for that.”
“Go right ahead. But it’s true. You’re a bitch.”
They passed somebody they knew, or at least Tillie knew, and she nodded in greeting. Then they resumed their dialogue.
“Who’s a bitch?”
“You.”
“Prove it.”
“I don’t have to prove it. Everybody knows it. It’s like two times two are four. You don’t have to prove it, everyone knows it. You’re a bitch.”
“I won’t have that.”
They had reached a white cottage in the gravel driveway of which smoldered a small heap of autumn leaves, momentarily untended. Beside it lay a bamboo rake and a garden hose, left running against the fire’s possibly getting out of hand, for a faint breeze was blowing. A puff of wind blew smoke into their faces, causing them both to pause, coughing, there on the sidewalk. When it cleared, Tillie saw that Gertrude’s face had lost its pallor, and a dangerous flush suffused her cheeks. “Well, have it or not, you are,” Gertrude said. Then suddenly she swung her pocketbook by the strap and smacked Tillie square on the jaw with the flat of it. Tillie drew back her arm and did the same.
What followed was an exchange of blows, curiously dreamlike in the regularity of their alternations, like the stylized, almost ceremonial retaliations of comics that critics of low humor call reciprocal destruction. It was especially odd since they were both by now Crazy Women. Gertrude bent to pick up the bamboo rake to beat Tillie with, then dropped it in favor of a better idea. She seized the hose and trained it straight on her adversary, playing it across her and up and down till she was drenched from head to foot. Both pocketbooks lay on the sidewalk.
“No wonder your husband left you, you dried up old hag,” Gertrude said, catching Tillie full in the face with the stream of water. She adjusted the nozzle to give it greater force. Tillie brought both arms up to fend off the jet, a thrashing motion which she suddenly converted into a counter-attack. Lunging forward through the spray, she caught hold of the nozzle, by the motivation intrinsic to the nightmare in which they were unfolded, and wrested it from Gertrude’s grasp with a violence that sent them both pitching to the ground. Tillie recovered her balance first, at least enough to rise to her knees, and in this position proceeded to turn the tables and douse Gertrude. They were now both sopping wet. Their hair was plastered to their heads. With Gertrude still down, Tillie managed to climb to her feet. Which was a mistake, because Gertrud
e got to her own knees and tackled Tillie about the legs, bringing her down like a football player. The two were wrestling in the puddles, pulling each other’s hair and clawing at each other’s mud-spattered faces, when a whistle sounded and two cops came galloping up the street and pulled them apart.
Neither woman ever got to the ball. Tillie entered a local sanatarium, while Gertrude was flown for a much-needed rest to an institution in the Bahamas.
Seven
Tillie sat looking out of her window. The sanatarium grounds were pleasantly landscaped, and from her second-story room she had a view of a lawn graced by spruce and balsam, the grass still green in autumn, rolling gently toward the road. Her hands lay motionless in her lap, one palm upturned. She sighed quietly as she followed the passage of a car into the distance.
She turned a little in her chair. Over her shoulder she could see her valise, standing empty on the floor of an open closet. Everything had been removed from it, including some sedatives secreted in a zippered pocket. Now it would be some time before she could start another collection, since a nurse stood by to see that she swallowed the single capsule allotted her every night.
The door was opened after a deferential rap, and Dr. Raymond entered, a short handsome man of forty, dressed in loose tweeds. He smiled as though he had come to invite her on a tramp through the nearby woods. Instead he sat down for his usual chat.
“I gather for one thing you’ve crawled into a kind of shell,” he said.
“My mother used to collect them,” Tillie answered listlessly. He smiled by way of attesting as humorous what had merely been a—was that what they called a klang association. She had recently read about word salads, and thought that she should perhaps try to supply some of them, to assure the kind doctors that she was nutty enough to be here and deserved all this attention. Possibly Dr. Raymond had divined her thoughts, for he assured her that he had not come to ply his trade.
“I’m not going to talk therapy jargon with you, because I don’t think you need it,” he said.
“I’m not up to it.”
“Not up to what?”
“Therapy.”
When he laughed in open appreciation of that joke, she gave a wan smile of gratitude in return.
“That’s right,” he said. “You may have seen the cartoon about the doctor telling a half-stripped male patient, a Sad Sack, that they would have to get him into shape for a checkup. We’ll have to build you up for that, all right. But seriously, I think that when you leave, which should be soon, you should make an effort to mix with people more. Find a job maybe, get into community activities, anything. Throw yourself into some charity.”
“All right, I will.”
“That’s the stuff. We ourselves need support of that kind to keep going. The town’s lucky to have this place, you know.”
“I know it very well. I’ll remember what you said about volunteer work. It’s a thought for the day that’ll help see me through it.”
She was bundled into her coat and driven off with a dozen other women for compulsory volleyball. It was held in the gymnasium of the local Y. After an hour of it they were put back into the pickup truck, counted, and driven back to the sanatarium. Following lunch, on a tray in her room, Tillie got out her notebook and did some work on a prayer she was drafting, in the manner of Robert Louis Stevenson’s.
“Give us courage for our fears,” she wrote, then sat chewing her pencil for a long time, watching the squirrels at their acrobatics in the maples gold with death. Suddenly she bent over her notebook and wrote out rapidly: “Give us courage for our fears, the wisdom to survive our follies, and charity to bind up the wounds we inflict on one another.” She closed the notebook and set it aside with a smile of satisfaction.
Just then there was another rap on the door, and a nurse thrust her head in.
“You have a visitor, Mrs. Seltzer.”
Jimmy Twitchell took two steps over the threshold, stopped, opened his mouth in a gasp of recognition, as though surprised to find her here, and came forward with his arms out. He held a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a box of candy in the other. The flowers were yellow chrysanthemums, one of which adorned the lapel of his snug blue pinstripe suit.
Tillie’s spirits immediately rose. She suddenly realized how much she had to tell him, including the compulsory volleyball, which alone would make his day. She enjoyed the glance he threw about the room, for there was everything here he could have wished. The gaze of discriminating despair lingered especially on the green walls.
“Must they throw pistachio at you at this hour of the day?” he said. “Couldn’t they wait till evening?” Then he embraced her, smothering her in a scent the flowers themselves would certainly lack. “And I suppose there’s no way of making those draperies shut up? My dear girl, I’m going to get you out of all this if it takes a letter to Washington.”
She told about the compulsory volleyball as she tore open the box of candy, five pounds of Perugino chocolates in which she foraged hungrily, for she had hardly touched her lunch. “This is magnificent, Jimmy,” she said with her mouth full. “Have one.”
“I shall want several. Leave the box open there and let’s sit down on these chairs, if you can call them that. From what mortician were they rented? There. Darling, you look like death warmed over. What exactly happened? But before we get to that, let me tell you a story about candy to cheer you up.”
Jimmy popped a cream into his mouth and composed himself on his chair, sitting quite erect.
“I once flew to Chicago to visit an old aunt of mine. She was nearly ninety then, and has since been torn down. But she was still there at the time, and knowing her passion for sweets I took her a box of Rosemaries, which I bought before going out to the airport. Well, as we approached Chicago we were told in the dearest little announcement that the landing gear wouldn’t go down. You know? We were instructed in the positions to assume for a crash landing. We were to sit on the floor, facing the sides of the plane, our heads between our knees. We were not to peek. Well, my dear, several people prayed, but all I could think of was that box of Rosemarie chocolates going to waste, probably, and why not enjoy them in my possibly last moments. So I tore the box open and began stuffing them into my mouth one after another, gobbling them down as fast as I could. It was a kind of orgy. Tillie, I ate. The whole. Box.”
Tillie was doubled over in her chair. “And what happened? Did the plane land all right?”
“Apparently,” he answered drily. “But I nearly died of indigestion, I spent nearly an hour in the men’s bog, upchucking.”
That preliminary tidbit delivered, Jimmy paused and looked at Tillie reproachfully.
“Well, darling, this is going to give Mental Health a black eye,” he said.
“I’ve got two.”
“Whatever in God’s name happened?”
“You know very well,” Tillie said, contritely. “The shock proved too much for her. I honestly never dreamed it would be all that bad. Honestly. I swear to God.”
“Well, you might have guessed.” He pouted reprovingly, turning his head to look at her askance. “You are a breed.”
“And it was all for nothing. Because she never got it out. She just turned deathly pale and choked and gasped. I’m so sorry.” Tillie shook her head as the tears rolled down her cheeks. “She lost her voice, the way you do in a terrible fright? Till we got outside. Then pow!” She shook her head again, as though momentarily dazed by even the memory of the blows rained on her. “I never did find out how old she is.”
“She’s fifty-three,” Jimmy answered matter-of-factly.
“How do you know?”
“I read it in the Traffic Column. You know, that I told you about in the Blade? As I say, I never miss it. The day before she and Burt took off for Grand Bahama, poor Gertrude failed to yield right of way as she was pulling out of the shopping center. Lucky for her she’s gone now, and will never see it, poor thing.”
So much for that. Jimmy
had already lost interest in the subject. On to other things.
“We’ve got to get you sprung.” He glanced around again with his expression of exquisite distaste. “Do they say how long you’ll be in here?”
“At least till after the ball. I’ll see to that myself. I could never go now.”
Jimmy seemed genuinely disappointed. “Damn, I was looking forward to it. Well, maybe I can take Oceana Bailey. She’s agreed to be raffle chairman, so you’ll have to turn over all your records to her. You must give me the key to your house and tell me where they are. I shan’t snoop, I promise.”
He seemed quite honest about all this. His expression changed, and he took Tillie in soberly for a few moments.
“You’ll forgive me for prying about one thing, darling, because I’m interested,” he said, changing his tone as he took a new tack. “But your marriage is definitely over, isn’t it? To that snark who talks double talk? What’s his name—Pete?”
“Yes, I guess it is.”
“Right. Now I shall proceed to astonish myself. Why don’t you take a whack at it with me? You could do worse. Indeed you already have.” He turned his head again to give her his sidewise, how-could-you pout, and instantly resumed. “I’ve never married, for fear of becoming a real person. Not for lack of opportunities. I’ve had several proposals in my time. I’m exactly your age, to dispose of that, and ready to settle down. I’m healthy, solvent, and amusing. I shall never beat you—I’m not that interested in women. I’m domestic as a plate. Yes, that’s from Millay, as I’m sure you know. My conversation is studded with literary allusions of that sort, but I’ll never identify another for you. You’ll be strictly on your own as to that. A sort of game between us, you on your mettle, me on mine. Mainly I’ll be your protectress, not just provider. Because I’m a match for any woman you can name, and it’s what you need, because you’re not. You don’t bat in this league, darling, and Gertrude’s faction will be laying for you after this. You don’t know what sensitive claws women have. Or at least you don’t know how to defend yourself. I do. They’ll be out to get you. They’ll hound you out of town, unless you leave it on your own and go back to the city, where you’ll find them even deadlier. And chicer. And that’s the thing. I shall make you chic. You’ll find me a good Pygmalion, because they respect me, knowing I’m better at their own game than they are. They need me and they know it. They need me to decorate their silly houses and to run their silly balls. You need me. I’ll dress you from head to foot, do something with your hair. I’ll make you over, because you do have possibilities. Yes, you can be chic, if you’ll but say the word. We’ll see all the shows, read all the poets, we’ll spend a lifetime together trying to identify each other’s literary allusions. Because you see my slant on all this sex war business is this. Men and women should be rivals, not enemies. There’ll never be a dull moment. I want to build a new house on some hill acreage I already own, a snug little place where we can sit by the fire and watch the Traffic Column for everyone’s age, meanwhile not driving our own Mercedes over twenty-five miles an hour. What else? Travel.”
The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels Page 24
