The Listening Walls

by Margaret Millar

  “Do you have a tourist card? They won’t let you on the plane without one.”

  “I’ll get one.”

  “Very well. I’ll leave the message for her. One more thing, Mr. Kellogg. The police were unable to find any next of kin to Mrs. Wyatt. Has she any relatives?”

  “A sister in San Diego.”

  “Name?”

  “Ruth Sullivan.”

  “Address?”

  “I don’t know where she’s living, but her husband is a lieutenant commander attached to the Eleventh Naval District. It shouldn’t be hard to find out his home address. Earl Sullivan.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Kellogg. And if there’s anything the Em­bassy can do for you while you’re down here, let me know. The number is 39-95-00.”

  “Thank you. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Miss Burton appeared in the doorway, slump-shoul­dered and spaniel-eyed, as befitted the gravity of the situ­ation. “I couldn’t help overhearing, people talk so loud over long distance.”

  “Do they?”

  “That’s a terrible thing about Mrs. Wyatt, dying in a foreign country like that. All I can say is, God rest her soul.” It seemed enough. Miss Burton straightened her shoulders, put on her spectacles and said briskly, “I’ll call Western Air Lines right away.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Kellogg?”

  “I—certainly. Certainly.”

  “I’ve got some aspirin.”

  “Take them yourself.”

  Miss Burton knew better than to argue. She merely dropped two aspirins on his desk and went out to the reception room to phone the air lines. Rupert stared at the aspirins for a long time. Then he got up and went over to the water cooler and swallowed them both at once.

  Miss Burton sailed in on a note of elation. “Success. You leave on flight 611. But goodness, the arguing I had to do. Some snip of a clerk kept saying that the people leaving on 611 were already checking in at the airport. And I said, listen, this is an emergency. I spelled it right out for him, e-m-e-r-g-e-n-c-y. . . . Oh, I see you took the pills. Good. How are you fixed for money?”

  “I’ll need some.”

  “O.K., Borowitz can run over to the bank. Now, here’s your schedule. Depart International at 11:50. Lunch on plane. Stopover in L.A. for about an hour. Leave L.A. at 2:30. Dinner on plane. Arrive Mexico City at 10:10, Central Standard Time.”

  Miss Burton might go to pieces over smaller crises, but when the larger ones came along she expanded to meet them. She arranged for money, tourist card, tooth­brush, clean socks and pajamas, care of the Scottie, Mack, and message to Amy’s brother, Gill Brandon. When she finally got Rupert on the plane and he waved good-bye to her from the window, she was moist-eyed but relieved, like a mother sending her son off to school for the first time.

  She drove Rupert’s car back to the city and parked it in the garage of his house on 41st Avenue. Then she let Mack out to run while she washed and dried the dishes Rupert had left in the sink. In all the years she’d worked for him, this was only the second time she’d been inside his house, and it gave her a curious feeling, like watching somebody sleeping.

  After she finished the dishes she wandered through each of the rooms, not snooping really but merely taking mental notes like any good secretary interested in her boss: Mahogany and lace in the dining room, that’s too formal for him, must be her doing . . . I’ll bet he sits in the yellow chair, there are hair oil marks on the back and a good lamp beside it. He loves to read, he’d need a good lamp. ... A grand piano and an organ, fancy that. She must be musical, he can’t whistle a note. . . . I’ll never get used to those colored johns. . . . The maid’s room, I bet. Every bit as nicely furnished as the others, which goes to show how generous he is. Or maybe it’s her. Borowitz says she comes from a very moneyed family. . . . The hall table looks like genuine rosewood, the kind you pol­ish with your bare hands if you’re crazy that way and have lots of time. A post card. I wonder who from. Well, post cards aren’t private. If you’ve got something private to say, say it in a letter.

  Miss Burton picked up the post card. It bore a colored photograph of the Old Faithful geyser on one side and a penciled message on the other.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kel­logg:

  I am having a real good time on my holiday. I saw Old Faithful already six times. It is a site. It gets cold here at nite, blankets needed. There is a swimming pool that smells bad owing to minrals in the water. The smell don’t come off on you fortunately. No more room on the card. Hello to Mack.

  Yours truly,

  Gerda Lundquist.

  Yellowstone yet, Miss Burton thought. And I can’t even afford Sequoia. Not that I want to. People are always say­ing how small you feel under the big trees, which isn’t my idea of fun at five foot one-half inch.

  Having finished her unofficial tour of the house and mail, Miss Burton let the Scottie in at the back door and fed him several dog biscuits. Then she walked over to Fulton Street to catch a bus back to town.

  She had no premonition of disaster. The day was sunny and her horoscope that morning had been exceptionally favorable. So had Rupert’s, which she always looked up even before her own: This is a wonderful day for you Leos and Librans.

  Wonderful day, Miss Burton thought, and skipped along the sidewalk, quite forgetting that Mrs. Kellogg was in a hospital and Mrs. Wyatt was dead.

  The plane was on schedule. Rupert called the A.B.C. Hospital from the airport and made arrangements to see his wife in spite of the lateness of the hour.

  He arrived at the hospital shortly before midnight and was met at the main desk by a dark young man who iden­tified himself as Dr. Escobar.

  “She’s alseep,” Escobar said. “But I think, under the circumstances, it would do her good to see you. She has called for you several times.”

  “How is she?”

  “That’s difficult to say. She’s been crying a great deal, whenever she wakes up, in fact.”

  “Is she in pain?”

  “Her head may hurt a bit, but I think the crying is ex­plained more by emotional reasons than physical ones. It is not merely the death of her friend that has disturbed her, though that certainly is bad enough in itself. There were additional circumstances, the fact that the two women were alone in a strange city without friends, that they’d been drinking a good deal . . . .”

  “Drinking? Amy has never taken more than a cocktail before dinner.”

  Escobar looked a little embarrassed. “There is con­siderable evidence that both your wife and Mrs. Wyatt had been drinking tequila with an American barfly named O’Donnell. The women had a loud argument.”

  “They were very good friends,” Rupert said stiffly. “Ever since childhood.”

  “Very good friends sometimes argue together, some­times drink together. What I am trying to tell you is that Mrs. Kellogg feels extremely guilty, guilty about the drinking, guilty about the argument, guilty, most of all, because she was unable to prevent her friend’s suicide.”

  “Did she try?”

  “Anyone would try, naturally.”

  “Has she told you what . . .”

  “She’s told me very little. She has very little to tell. Tequila is a formidable concoction if one is not used to it.” Escobar turned to the elevators. “Come along, we’ll see her now. We’ve moved her from Emergency to a pri­vate room on the third floor.”

  She was asleep with the night light on. Her left eye was black and swollen, and there was a bandage over her tem­ple. Crumpled pieces of Kleenex littered the floor be­side her bed.

  “Amy.” Rupert bent over his sleeping wife and touched her shoulder. “Amy, dear, it’s me.”

  She was hardly awake before she began to cry, holding her fists against her eyes.

 
; “Amy, don’t. Stop that, please. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “No—no . . .”

  “Yes, it is. I’m here to take care of you.”

  “Wilma’s dead.” Her voice began to rise. “Wilma’s dead!”

  Escobar stepped swiftly over to the side of the bed and grasped her hand. “Now, Mrs. Kellogg, no more hysterics. The other patients on the floor are sleeping.”

  “Wilma’s dead.”

  “I know,” Rupert said. “But you must think of your­self now.”

  “Take me home, take me out of this terrible place.”

  “I will, dearest. Just as soon as they let me.”

  “Come now, Mrs. Kellogg,” Escobar said smoothly. “This isn’t such a terrible place. We’d like to keep you here for a few days of observation.”

  “No, I won’t stay!”

  “For a day or two . . .”

  “No! Let me go! Rupert, get me out of here. Take me home!”

  “I will,” Rupert said.

  “All the way home? To my own home and Mack and everything?”

  “All the way, I promise.”

  It was a promise which, at the moment, he intended to keep.

  5.

  Gill Brandon came downstairs wearing his composite morning expression: anticipation over what the day would bring and suspicion that something was bound to spoil it.

  He was a short, stocky, vigorous man with a forceful manner of speaking that made even his most innocuous re­mark seem compelling, and his most far-fetched theory sound like a self-evident truth. To heighten this effect he also used his hands when he talked, not in any dramati­cally loose European style, but severely, geometrically, to indicate an exact angle of thought, a precise degree of emotion. He liked to think of himself as mathematical and meticulous. He was neither.

  Gill kissed his wife, who was already at the table with the morning paper in front of her opened to the lovelorn column. “Any phone calls?”

  “No.”

  “It’s damned peculiar.”

  “What is?” Helene said, knowing perfectly well what was, since Gill had talked of nothing else for a week. Thank God it was Monday and he had to go into the city to work. If the stock market was fluttery, so much the bet­ter. It would take his mind off other things. “Here’s a terribly funny letter from some woman in Atherton. I wonder if it’s anyone we know. It could be Betty Spears. Listen. ‘Dear Abby: My problem is my husband is so stingy that he even snitches my green stamps.’ I know for a fact Johnny Spears saves green stamps. . . .”

  “Will you listen to me?”

  “Of course, dear. I didn’t know you were saying any­thing.”

  “Rupert’s been down there for a week now and I haven’t heard a word since that first phone call from his secretary. Not a word about how Amy is and what’s going on, when they’ll be back, nothing.”

  “He may be busy.”

  Gill scowled at her across the table. “Busy doing what, may I ask?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Then stop making up nonsensical excuses for him. Nobody’s too busy to pick up a phone. He’s damned in­considerate. And what Amy ever saw in him I’ll never know.”

  “He’s very good-looking. And very nice.”

  “Good-looking. Nice. Great Scott, is that what women marry men for?”

  “You’re hungry, dear. I’ll ring for breakfast.”

  Helene pressed the buzzer under the table, feeling a mild surge of power. She had been born and raised in an Oakland slum, and never, in all her twenty years of mar­riage, had she become accustomed to the miracle of ring­ing for anything she wanted. Breakfast, martinis, choco­late creams, tea, magazines, cigarettes—you pressed a button, and bingo, whatever you wanted, there it was. Sometimes Helene just sat and thought of things to want so she would have the pleasure of pulling the tasseled bell cord or pressing the buzzer underneath the table.

  Occasionally she visited Oakland but more frequently her parents came down the Peninsula to see her, Mrs. Maloney wearing her teeth and Sunday clothes, Mr. Maloney sober as a judge and dry as a herring. After the ini­tial greetings of genuine pleasure, both parents stiffened into silence, too stunned by the luxurious surroundings to do much of anything except sit and stare. Back home they were affectionately voluble about their daughter Helene, who had gone to Mills College on a scholarship and lived in a fine house in Atherton with her wealthy husband and three beautiful children.

  Face to face with her, they became mute and embar­rassed, and their visits were a nightmare, especially to Gill, who tried harder than Helene did to make the Maloneys feel at home. His tactics were peculiar: he sought to minimize his wealth by calling attention to some of his economies, by talking forcefully of having his thirteen- year-old son take a paper route and his seventeen-year-old daughter work her way through college. The result of this stratagem was more confusion on the part of the Maloneys and complete frustration for Gill, who meant, as usual, only to do the right thing. No one had ever been able to figure out why such good intentions as Gill’s often had such disturbing consequences.

  “Amy’s association with the Wyatt woman,” Gill said, “has meant nothing but trouble. She was obviously un­balanced. Anyone but Amy would have seen that and avoided her.”

  Helene mentally crossed herself. “Now Gill. De mortuis . . . Besides, they were friends. You don’t go back on a friend because she’s having, well, a few emo­tional problems. Wilma could be a very charming and entertaining person when she wanted to. That’s the way I prefer to remember her.”

  “You have a very simple and convenient memory.”

  “And I intend to keep it that way. Eat your breakfast.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Gill said irritably. “Personally, I’m inclined to blame Rupert for this whole business. He should have vetoed the trip as soon as the subject was broached. Two women wandering alone around a foreign, uncivilized country—why, it’s preposterous.”

  It sounded rather pleasant to Helene whose traveling was confined to shopping trips to the city and summers at Tahoe. She munched on a piece of crisp bacon, listening to Gill the way one listens to waves breaking on a beach, knowing the noise will always be the same, only varying in volume now and then with the tides and the weather.

  So often the noise was about Amy, and Helene lis­tened out of habit, without interest. In her opinion, Amy was a dull little creature, invested with wit by her brother and beauty by her husband, and having, in fact, neither. Helene, too, had often wondered about the re­lationship between Amy and Wilma, but she wondered from quite a different point of view from Gill’s: why should such an intense and energetic person as Wilma have wasted so much time on a mouse like Amy?

  Gill turned up his volume. “I still think the American Embassy should have called me about this unfortunate affair.”

  “Why?”

  “Amy’s my kid sister.”

  “She is also a grown woman with a husband. If she needs looking after, let Rupert do it.”

  “Rupert is incapable of handling certain situations.”

  “What’s to handle?” Helene said blandly.

  “There are probably decisions to be made, actions to be taken. Rupert’s too soft. Now if I were down there I’d be firm with those foreigners.”

  “If you were down there, dear, you’d be the foreigner.”

  “I suppose you think that’s terribly clever?”

  “It’s just the truth.”

  “You seem,” he said with a dry little smile, “to be hit­ting on a great many truths these days.”

  “Oh, I am. Some large, some small.”

  “Tell me a few of them.”

  “Another time. You’d better hurry if you’re going to take El Camino instead of Bayshore.” She smiled at
her husband across the table. In spite of his manner of talking she knew him for a gentle man, more like Amy than he would ever realize. “You’ll drive carefully, won’t you, Gilly?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. It sounds absurd.”

  “You don’t object when Amy calls you . . .”

  “It was my nickname when we were children. She uses it unconsciously. And I do object. Remind me to speak to her about it when she comes home.”

  Helene’s expression didn’t change, but she felt a sud­den sick feeling in her stomach and the coffee she was drinking seemed to have turned sour. I don’t want her to come home. She is two thousand miles away. I like it this way.

  David, the thirteen-year-old, bounced into the room, wearing the uniform of the military day school he attended. “Morning, all.”

  “What on earth,” Helene asked, “is the matter with your face?”

  “Poison oak,” he said cheerfully. “Roger and Bill got it, too, when we were out on maneuvers. Boy, the sergeant was mad. He said the Russians could have landed while the whole bloody bunch of us were chasing around after poison oak.”

  “I’ll call for you after school and take you to the doc­tor.”

  “I don’t want to go to any bloody doctor.”

  “Stop saying that word. It’s not very nice.”

  “The sergeant uses it all the time. He’s an English­man. They always say bloody. Oh, I forgot to tell you, Uncle Rupert’s home. He phoned last night when you were out.”

  “You might,” his father said, “have told me before.”

  “How could I, when you were out?”

  “Is Amy all right?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about her.”

  “Well, what did he say?”

  “Just that he was going to be home all day today and would like to see you about something important.”

  “I’ll call right . . .”

  “He said not to call. It’s a very private matter. He wants to talk to you in person.”

  Gill was already on his feet.

  The two men shook hands and Gill said immediately, “Amy’s all right?”