Two-Thirds of a Ghost

by Helen McCloy

  As she got out of the taxi, she looked with approval at the quiet residential street, the park at one end, the river at the other. The building itself was large but not too large. The doorman was polite, the carpet soft, and the elevator silent, with an attendant almost as well trained as a manservant in a private house.

  She asked quite brazenly for “Mr. Lepton’s apartment.”

  It was eloquent of the change in manners in the last generation that the man was still deferential and incurious when he answered, “Ten B, madam. To the right.”

  Somehow it was reassuring. Today women of her age and the standing her dress and manner indicated often had purely business friendships with men like Maurice, and visited their apartments quite casually without anyone caring enough to suggest scandal. Of course Tony would probably have pointed out that such women were usually unmarried, but the elevator man had no reason to think of her as anything but a perfectly free unmarried woman so it was all right.

  She found a small pearl button in the doorjamb and pressed it.

  Maurice opened the door himself. He was wearing sandals and slacks and a sport shirt open at the throat. “Phil!” He was greatly surprised.

  She smiled. For a moment she was almost grateful to Vera. Without that disgusting letter, she would have had no excuse for coming to Maurice’s apartment so soon. She was so much in love with him now that she was eager to see and touch and relish everything in his intimate surroundings. Now she would be able to visualize him more vividly at home when they were separated. She moved into the living room, looking about her eagerly, almost greedily.

  It was just the sort of room she had imagined for Maurice. The rug was Chinese, a fascinating design in beige and sang de boeuf. There was oxblood porcelain in exactly the same tone of deep rich red. There was mahogany and teak and book cases with glass doors that locked with keys; cases for treasured rare editions, not those awful, open, modern shelves filled with reprints and a few current novels in cheap-looking paper jackets, eked out with reproductions of modern sculpture and little pots of scentless plants.

  It was a corner room. One row of windows gave on the Park, the other showed the long vista of Fifth Avenue looking south to the fountains in front of the Plaza Hotel. Far beyond and higher, where the atmosphere thickened even on a day like this, the Empire State Building, veiled in thin layers of otherwise invisible mist, looked like a phantom tower in faint watercolors, a gray mirage towering above the solid reality of buildings closer to the ground where the air was clearer.

  Philippa noticed a typewriter on the table in the corner. “This is where you work!” she cried sentimentally.

  “Yes.” Smiling, Leppy ripped a sheet of paper from the roller and laid it on a pile of typescript face down.

  “You don’t have to be sensitive about your writing with me!” cried Philippa.

  “I’m sensitive about my writing with everyone when it’s still in first draft,” said Maurice. “I don’t want anyone to see it before it’s been revised.”

  “Not even me?” She came close to him.

  “Not even you.” His smile softened the words. He took her in his arms and kissed her adequately, but not with the same passion he had shown on other occasions.

  She drew back instantly. “Did you get a letter from Vera this morning?”

  “Yes.” His face sobered. “I understand she sent you one too?”

  Philippa nodded. “Sheer malice, of course. But—what do we do?”

  Maurice frowned. “What would Tony do if she went to him with a story about us?”

  Philippa smiled a little crookedly. “That’s what I’ve been wondering all morning. She doesn’t know about Amos and me, of course. Just about you and me. It would be her word against mine. Tony doesn’t like her, but…”

  “But what?”

  “There’s a streak of cynicism in him. He’s quite ready to believe the worst of anyone. Like all cynics, his one real, fear is of being taken in by somebody and made to feel he’s been naive. The cynicism is his armor against that. They can’t gull him as long as he never believes in anything or anybody. Until now I’ve been lucky or maybe just discreet. I think he believes in me. Or maybe he has been looking the other way subconsciously because deep down inside he didn’t want to find out that he had been deceived in me. But if it’s forced on his attention by someone like Vera, he could be nasty. Even if he pretended to believe me when I denied it, he would certainly be more suspicious of me in future. I’d lose a great deal of the freedom I’ve enjoyed until now, just because he never did suspect me of anything.”

  Maurice smiled at her unconscious egoism. “And what would he do to me?”

  She looked startled as if she had not considered that aspect of the situation. Even now she did not seem greatly disturbed by it. “Nothing violent. Tony is really quite well brought up. It’s always hard to predict how jealousy will affect anyone, bat my guess would be that, if we both denied everything, Tony wouldn’t even think of getting a divorce. He’d make a great show of still being friends with you, but he wouldn’t really be your friend underneath. He’d always be quarreling with you for some other reason that had nothing to do with me and, in the end, he wouldn’t see any more of you at all and neither could I unless I took great risks and saw you secretly.

  “Of course, I suppose Vera is hoping for something completely Hollywood—Tony shooting you or knocking you down and me weeping and all of us heaving our chests and batting our eyelashes and talking in broken sentences according to the latest fashion in dialogue. Of course it wouldn’t be at all like that. It would be worse in a way. We’d all keep up appearances and pretend to believe in each other and, underneath, my marriage would die and your friendship with Tony, to say nothing of our love for each other.”

  Maurice nodded agreement. “You’re an acute psychologist. I think that’s just the way it would be.”

  “Unless…” She paused.

  “Unless what?” he demanded sharply.

  “Unless I asked Tony for a divorce.”

  Maurice was visibly shaken. “What on earth would you do that for?” He was almost shouting.

  But even the most sordid love is blind. Philippa missed the look of utter horror in his eyes, as she said, “Then I could marry you.”

  Maurice’s face congealed and he stood, speechless. As the pause lengthened, color came into Philippa’s usually pale face. There was calculation in Maurice’s eyes now—the calculation of a surgeon selecting the most effective instrument with care. He chose brutality. His voice was savage as he said, curtly, “Wait till you’re asked!”

  Philippa was like a man wounded in the heat of battle who cannot feel the pain of his wound in his highly strung condition. She simply rejected the meaning of the words. “Maurice…” She came toward him, arms outstretched.

  He caught her wrists in his hands and held off her embrace by force. “Philippa, be your age. I’m not a callow boy and you’re not a dewy-eyed young girl. We know these things don’t last. We’ve been there before. We’ve had fun, but we’re not going to mess up our lives for something like this. You haven’t a penny but what Tony gives you, and I haven’t anything like the kind of money you’re used to.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “But I do. Why do you think I have never married all these years? I don’t want a wife. I want to be free I want to live alone with my work and my ideas. I want to come and go as I please and not be answerable to anyone. I’m not an emotional parasite on other people. I don’t need wife or child or even dog or cat or canary. I’m me—Maurice Lepton—and all I ask of the rest of the human race is that they leave me alone. You used the word love just now. I’ve never loved anyone in my life and I never will. Don’t you know what it is to lead a really intellectual life? One is always alone. One has to be. If you married me, I couldn’t stand it. I’d go mad!”

  She stepped back and he let her wrists go. Her face was pale now. “I never loved anyone till I met you.”

  “
More fool you to pick me, of all people! You should have had more sense. I’m the male version of a born old maid. I can’t bear to share a room or an apartment with anybody even for a few days. And another thing: I don’t want my relations with Tony messed up. He’s a very useful friend to a critic.”

  “You should have thought of that before,” said Philippa.

  “I had more respect for your common sense. I thought you had been around a lot of men a long time. I didn’t think you’d go overboard for any one man. Look, Philippa! There’s just one thing to do. Our association ends right here and now. Then it doesn’t matter what Vera tells Tony. He’ll never really believe it.”

  “Suppose I told him that what Vera said was true.”

  Maurice looked at her with something close to hatred. He spoke quietly. “I’d kill you. I really believe I would.”

  Before she could respond, the doorbell rang.

  Philippa’s face underwent a subtle change. A moment before it had seemed as if it were broken down into its component parts, ravaged and chaotic. But now her many years of presenting an enameled façade to the world came to her rescue. It was a composed and integrated mask once more, beautiful, impenetrable. Even her voice was quite colorless again as she said, “Expecting someone?”

  “No.” Maurice walked down the room and threw open the door. On the threshold stood Basil Willing.

  “I…” He saw Philippa and paused.

  “I was just leaving.” Philippa began to draw on her gloves with studied languor.

  “Do come in!” Maurice’s self-control was as magnificent as hers. “T his is a most unexpected pleasure. Let me take your coat.”

  By the time Basil was seated, both Philippa’s hands were gloved, but she made no move to go. She called Basil’s attention to the charming view of the city beyond the windows and the sparkle of glass and chromium on the toy cars far below. “Manhattan at its best. Don’t you think so?”

  Basil took his cue from her. “Perhaps you can spare me a few minutes, Mrs. Kane…”

  “Philippa, please.” She smiled.

  “You can both help me.” His glance included Maurice. “I’ve come because I need informed opinions of Amos Cottle’s ability as a writer. I’ve already listened to the prosecution—Emmett Avery. Now I’d like to hear the case for the defense.”

  “Leppy can be more help to you than I.” It was the first time she had ever called him “Leppy.”

  “It’s his job to assay the gold in the nugget. I’m merely the wife of a publisher.”

  “I think he was a very great man,” said Maurice simply. “It was perhaps the utter detachment of his point of view that gave his writing its peculiar distinction. That quality in his work intrigued and puzzled me from the first. Now I believe it is explained by his amnesia. Here was a mature man, obviously a well-educated man, whose brain had retained all the intellectual fruits of his training, but the emotional memory, the conditioning, the prejudice and bias that infects all of us was wiped clean from Amos’s mind. It was like a lens of flawless white crystal perfectly cut and polished and through it he saw things as they really are down to the minutest detail. The rest of us have minds of variously curved and tinted glass that color and distort everything we see. Avery once called Amos inhuman but it would be nearer the truth to say he was superhuman.”

  “Then why did critics like Avery and Kitteridge treat him so much less kindly than you did?”

  Maurice grinned. “It’s a compulsion with most of them. You see, some men become critics because they’re sadistic and others become sadistic because they’re critics. It works both ways. Critical sadism is an occupational disease, like miners’ silicosis.”

  “But you’re a critic yourself,” remarked Basil.

  “Should that keep me from being as objective about criticism as I am about other forms of writing?” Lepton laughed.

  “You make the psychology of the critic sound like the psychology of the murderer,” went on Basil.

  The word murderer brought a little chill into the pause that followed. Then Lepton smiled, like a chess player who sees several moves ahead of his opponent.

  “Psychologically, a critic is more like a vitriol thrower. He doesn’t just kill; he disfigures and tortures. And for the same reason—he’s a sick man.”

  “Why, Maurice!” cried Philippa. “You’re serious!”

  His smile twisted. “Haven’t you ever understood the morbidity of criticism, Philippa? A critic is always a sick man, because he is a literary man who lives by destroying literature, a bird that fouls his own nest, and this is perversion. If he’s honest, like me, he’ll admit he’d much rather create, but—he can’t. So he transmutes his frustration into aggression, but in the book world aggression is called criticism and people get paid for it.

  “Even when a critic praises a book, he is destroying it, for he must tear it to pieces in order to see what makes it tick. Analysis is always the inversion of synthesis—death against life. Biologists are beginning to study animal tissue under the microscope, while it is kept alive artificially, but a book is such a delicately balanced organism that the critic still has to kill the parts as well as the whole, before he can put a book under his microscope for examination. No nutrient fluids will keep alive a paragraph torn out of context. So, as even the worst critics have a certain love for books, we are like animal lovers forced to practice vivisection in order to earn our living.”

  “Surely you perform a useful function as literary scavengers?” suggested Basil.

  “We laud as many bad books as we condemn good ones,” retorted Lepton. “We’re too sensitive to literary fashions to escape that. Besides, who loves a vulture? No, Willing, a critic is not a scavenger. A critic is a person who rationalizes his likes and dislikes in such impressive language that the layman thinks he is reasoning instead of rationalizing. Emmett Avery would never admit that, but I’m as sincere in my insincerity as Sainte-Beuve…. I wonder if Emmett’s review really got under Amos’s skin? It would be easier to tell if we knew who Amos really was and now—we never will!”

  “Oh, but we shall,” answered Basil quietly.

  Maurice bent a keen glance on him. “What makes you think so?”

  “We already know that he was a doctor and a Westerner, that his initials were A.S., that he was an alcoholic, that he was married to a woman of Scottish descent with light brown hair who died about five years ago, who was fond of sewing, whose initials were G.M. and whose first name was Girzel.”

  “Emmett told me about the thimble and the hair and the wedding ring,” said Maurice. “But how do you know he was a doctor?”

  “Several things suggested that from the first. A doctor or a medical student is about the only person likely to identify the Islets of Langerhans as promptly and accurately as he did when we were playing Two-Thirds of a Ghost. When I was introduced to him that evening, he said he had read my book Psychopathology of Politics when it came out. I believe that was a true memory because it was intellectual, not personal, and his amnesia was personal. The book was required supplementary reading in several medical schools a few years ago and, as Tony will tell you, it did not have a big sale elsewhere.”

  “Seems a pretty selective kind of amnesia,” said Maurice. “Could he have been faking it all these years because he wanted to hide something shameful in his past?”

  “I think not. Amnesia is always selective even when it has a physical cause. Some brain injuries produce muteness—amnesia of speech—and there is one form so selective it discriminates among the various parts of speech, forgetting verbs but remembering nouns and so forth. The Amos Cottle you knew was not a fake. He was just emotionally dead but otherwise entirely normal.”

  Basil smiled sadly. “How I wish he had been sober the one time I met him. His alcoholism blurs my mental picture of his real personality. It’s almost as if I had never met him at all, for all men are pretty much the same when they’re drunk. But it’s different with you. One of you knew him very well p
ersonally.”

  Philippa’s eyes shimmered for a moment as if she suspected a double meaning.

  Basil went on: “The other made a careful study of his work as a writer. Between you, it does seem as if you should be able to give me a clearer picture of him as a man and as a writer. Did it ever occur to either of you that he had once been a doctor?”

  “Not to me,” said Maurice quickly.

  Philippa was less positive. “Not at the time but now you’ve brought it up—I remember several little things. For one, he warned me against the abuse of sleeping pills the way a doctor would. For another, he did seem to know a great deal about the physiological effect of drugs and he had a great contempt for patent medicines. He made a remarkably neat bandage once when Tony cut his hand rather badly. It was just like the picture in the Red Cross book. I couldn’t have done it though I have taken first aid. I wonder why a doctor would run away from his past?”

  “I can think of a lot of reasons,” said Maurice. “But I don’t believe we’ll ever know which one it was in his case. You’ve so little to go on, Willing. The wife’s first name, the color of her hair, the date of her wedding and her initials. The bridegroom’s initials and a guess at his profession. You’ll never identify Amos.”

  “If he was a doctor in New York I shall,” insisted Basil. “There cannot be many doctors in New York with wives named Girzel.”

  “Even if you do find out who he was, you’ll never find out what he was running away from!” exclaimed Maurice. “Medical scandals are hushed up very carefully. Just finding out what Amos’s real name was won’t bring you a step nearer finding out who killed him or why.”

  The telephone rang. “Excuse me…” Maurice went through an archway into the hall. “Hello…Lepton speaking…Yes, he’s here.”

  Basil rose. “I took the liberty of telling the police I could be reached here this afternoon.”

  “The police?” said Philippa a trifle breathlessly. “Yes.”

  Basil cast her a probing side glance. “This is still an unsolved murder.”