Little Less Than Kind

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “But … Help me?” Her hands were frantic at the clasp of her pearl collar. David stepped back and bent to help her. “But David,” Abby said in a moment, “yes, he does, in a way.”

  “When he was small? When you had to be sure he didn’t kill himself, from ignorance? Then you were, in a sense, his slave and bodyguard.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “But not now.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I won’t leave you,” he repeated.

  “I couldn’t bear it if you did.” Her eyes were brimming. “I suppose it’s hard for him. That I have you, but he—still misses his father. Yet Hob didn’t have time, you know.” Her eyes yawed, begging for comfort. Begging a place to put the blame? “He left so much of the job to me. Hob was busy.”

  David turned away and walked apart.

  “Of course, I know he did it all for us,” she said.

  “It’s a superstition,” said David.

  “What is?”

  David jingled the change in his pocket. “Abby, you are a beloved woman, but you are not responsible, all by yourself, for the whole world.”

  “Poor world,” she said, “if I were.”

  “And neither was Hob.” (And neither am I.) David felt angry. “Just don’t fall for the guff they put out on the woman’s club circuit. The cliche of the businessman father who is guilty. Guilty of what? Of being a man?”

  He was thinking, Why should a man pretend to be a child, and play the games of childhood, if they bore him stiff? Let the little boy play games with his peers and test and affirm himself. Let the man go out, as the cave man went. Let him fight, in the marketplace, the saber-toothed tigers of our time. He meets what he has to meet and it isn’t easy. Why should he be made to feel guilty for doing what he had better do—test and affirm his adult self?

  He said aloud, “Don’t fall for the guff that implies he should do his man’s work on the sly, bootleg it in, between Boy Scout meetings and visits to the zoo. He pays attention.”

  Abby had stopped her tears. She was looking at him with her own mixed expression, part serious, part amused surprise.

  “Attention to your child does not, believe me, equal time-spent-with,” said David. “Attention happens to be a depth dimension, not span.”

  He was thinking. And a man who loves his son does not throw sops, either. Not if he’s honest. A man who loves his son will show him a man.

  He said, “And a mother does her son no favor to pretend that she is not also a woman.”

  Abby loosened the top of her dress. A spark of mischief crossed her face. “I’m not aware of having denied it.” Her hands still, she looked at herself in the glass.

  David returned to stand at her back. His hands moved the fabric and caressed her bare shoulders. Her hands jumped to stop the motion of his. “But where is he? Why did he behave the way he did tonight?”

  “Oh, what way?” said David. “He was rude. Well?” (He wanted to hurt someone, David was thinking, probably me. So he was rude to my friend.) He said aloud, “We can make too much of it, Abby.”

  “He must know better.”

  “Well, then, he’ll be sorry.”

  Abby leaned back against him. “He knows he was naughty,” she said sleepily. “Oh, David, I do need you.”

  Abby was comforted but David felt guilty. “Naughty” was not the word for this boy’s trouble. He felt, and almost for the first time, a true sympathy for the poor kid. With something of Hob in him and something of Abby, and something both more and less, new in the world since the dawn of time, unique—the blend of himself, unknown, unsorted yet. Poor suffering young person and his dis-ease.

  Rafe went home. He put up the hall light and turned off the light in the kitchen. He started up the stairs, that were steep and old-fashioned.

  In the upper hall, he paused to collect his senses. Justin gone. His room now empty for the winter. Yes, silence there. No breathing boy. Rafe tiptoed to his own room and lit it, went back into the hall and toward the front of the house where Felicia was. He struck his knuckles lightly upon her door. “Felicia, dear?”

  “Dad?”

  “Are you all right? May I come in?”

  She stood, the other side of the wood, in her slip. Her sea-green dress was on a chair, badly stained and one sleeve torn. Her back was bruised. Her head hurt. Her right shoulder cap had been skinned. She had been trying to wash the dirt away from the abrasion.

  “How do you feel, love?” her father said.

  She felt so terrible that there was no name for it and no medicine. “I’m all right,” she said, in as strong a voice as she could summon up. “I’m just going to bed.”

  “May I?”

  “Please, Dad. I’m not ill. I’m tired.” She was desperate to save something. He must not know. He must not see.

  “But what happened?” Rafe knew that the young were not tired for no reason.

  “Daddy, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m just a little bit upset because Ladd and I had a kind of quarrel, that’s all.”

  “Oh? He was waiting around for you, was he?”

  She said “I guess so” in a fainting voice. (Oh, please, let me alone. I can’t tell you. You’ll get all indignant and go blustering around and I don’t want it known. It’s bad enough … it’s bad enough.) She said, “I don’t imagine we’ll have anything more to do with each other. It’s nothing to worry about. I want to go to sleep. I don’t like having to be mean. Daddy, please?”

  Rafe’s face, in the hall, was shrewd and Felicia suddenly seemed to be able to see it through the wood. She knew the way his imagination was turning. She couldn’t help it.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” her father said. “All right, darling. I think perhaps it’s just as well and just as wise.” (He was not at all sorry. He was rather pleased.)

  “I think so too,” said Felicia, in loud despair. “Good night, Dad.”

  “Good night, love.”

  So Rafe made his way to his own bedchamber with a fond twist upon his lips. It did not cross his mind at first that the “quarrel” had been anything but verbal. Well, his intuition had made the diagnosis days ago. Ladd was painfully in love. Hmm. But Felicia, it seemed, did not want him for a suitor. Well! And just as well. For one thing, they were cousins. Oh, remote. Rafe himself was a distant cousin to Abigail Ladd. Rafe thought. But that is a point. Perhaps if it were to be explained to the boy, gently. He thinks his heart is broken. If he got up his nerve, in spite of his mother—Abby would not have liked it That was a part of the poor boy’s trouble, of course. Neither would I like it, Rafe resolved. He must be a poor thing to have got himself into such a state over a puppy sort of love. Twenty and seventeen. Rafe sighed. He remembered his own youth and its innocence and turmoil. But Felicia, his little girl, must not be bothered or upset. Not any more. She was too young, too young for the problems of the flesh. Oh, Rafe knew about them. And that was it! Now, his intuition told him. Well, no more of that!

  He undressed and climbed into his lonely bed where (the fact was) had his wife Sylvia miraculously appeared, in her flesh, Rafe would have been perfectly miserable and very much frightened.

  In her darkened room, Felicia crept under her blanket. She buried her head but could not cry. You are supposed to understand and to forgive. But she was beaten and sick at heart, having ridden, for a brief moment, on wings, fancying herself perfect in loving goodness … whence she had been dashed down into hell.

  They were sitting on an old-fashioned lawn swing in the Fenwicks’ backyard. Gary did the yard work here, since his folks both went to business. He clipped and he mowed, but he never bothered to move the swing, so tall weeds had grown up through the slats of the footpiece. The tall stiff grasses could be annoying, so Ladd was cross-legged on one slatted seat and Gary cross-legged upon the other. They kept their voices low, although there was no one to hear them. The neighborhood was abed.

  “You’re sure he is coming to Sunday dinner? Tomorrow?”

&nb
sp; “Well, he’s invited,” Gary said. “My mom thinks her brother never gets a decent meal, so she pretty near always does invite him. He’ll show up, okay. He pretty near always does. Unless—I mean, the Police Department—sometimes they get emergencies.”

  “Nothing we can do about that,” said Ladd with a brisk and intelligent effect. “But your uncle is pretty high brass, right?”

  “Well, he is supposed to be second in command in the Detective Bureau. He’s been there—”

  “Yes, but what I want to know … Now wait, let me lay this out. I call up and ask for Walter Douglas. Then I tell him—”

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  “I’m going to give him an anonymous tip-off. Don’t worry. He won’t know who’s calling.”

  “Yes, but I don’t know if I get it, Ladd,” said Gary. “I mean, the point.”

  “Listen, sure you do. But what I want to know, now—Will your uncle just amble into headquarters like, say, on Monday morning and report the call? Or, will, he start investigating on his own, right away?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gary dully.

  “All right then, I’m going to tell you what you’ve got to do.”

  “Me?”

  “Right. What I want is for your uncle to come to my house on Sunday afternoon, when dear David is there and I am there to watch him get the news.”

  “Huh?”

  “When he finds out that the police have had a tip, he’s got to react. Can’t you see that I have got to be there, watching him? So your uncle has got to come over.” Ladd felt clearheaded and ready for intricate planning, for the use of the power of the sly and cunning brain. Oh, he saw everything very clearly and he would cause these puppets all to dance.

  “Uncle Walt might start checking around,” said Gary, “but I don’t know if he’d come over. I mean, he’d check around for evidence.”

  “There’s more than one kind of evidence.”

  “What’d you expect David to do?”

  “I don’t know, but whatever he does, then I’ll know.” A shaft of darkness, unexpected and uncontrollable, cut his inner light. “And so will my mother, if she doesn’t know already.”

  “I still don’t see … Hey, your dad had cancer, didn’t he?”

  “They could have waited,” said Ladd and his voice was flat, unresonant. “Mercy is one thing. But if they couldn’t wait to get to bed—” He hadn’t meant to say that. He went on, furiously, “That’s murder in my book. And in your uncle’s, too, if you want to know. That happens to be against the law.”

  “Uncle Walt knows the law. And what to do,” said Gary, a trifle sulkily.

  “He’s going to do what I want him to do. And you are going to make him do it.” Ladd’s temper had slipped. He caught for bright reason. “What time do you have dinner?”

  “On Sunday? Oh, around one. One o’clock.”

  “What time will he get there?”

  “Oh, twelve-thirty. Or quarter-of. After church.”

  “He goes to church!”

  “Yeah, he does,” said Gary apologetically.

  “Okay,” said Ladd impatiently. “How long does dinner take?”

  “I dunno. Say till two o’clock, maybe?”

  “Then what?”

  “Then? Well, Uncle Walt’s not married, so he usually kinda hangs around. He and my dad go in the den. If there’s a ball game on, they watch. Or maybe they play gin. He hangs around. Sometimes he even stays for supper.”

  “Right after dinner is the time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your mom isn’t going to let him out of the house before he eats. You know that.”

  “Sure do.”

  “So—The phone’s in the den? Right?”

  “Yeah—the downstairs phone.”

  “So we’ll synchronize our watches, like they say, and right on the dot of two-thirty you go in there and you start as if to use the phone. As if you’re going to call me, for instance. What’s up? And all that.”

  “Okay.”

  “If everything is set on my end, if they haven’t gone out or got company, I mean, then I’ll ask for Walter Douglas. So you call him to the phone.”

  “Okay. What if he doesn’t come tomorrow?”

  “Then you tell me that, stupid! Now, if he is there, and he takes the call, you stand right by the phone. Because you are supposed to be wanting to use it as soon as he hangs up.”

  “Sure.”

  “Now, when he does hang up, or I do—Maybe you’re going to have to put on a little act, Gare.”

  “I dunno.”

  “I’m going to tell you exactly what to do.”

  “Okay. What?”

  “Pretend you could hear the name Cunningham. Maybe you pretend you could hear the whole thing. So you say … ‘Hey, I know the Cunninghams. Ladd Cunningham is my best friend,’ you say. ‘What’s all this?’ you say.”

  “Well, Uncle Walt though … he doesn’t talk too much about police business.”

  “That’s why you’re going to be right there, pretending you heard it. So he won’t have to tell you. So then you say that the Cunninghams live only two blocks away.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you ask him what he’s going to do. Is he going to the Cunninghams’?”

  “And what if he says he’s not going to do anything?” said Gary, in sudden rebellion.

  “Okay,” said Ladd. “Maybe so. But that’s when you’ve got to say that you’re going right over to tell us about it. And you just do that. You do that, Gare. You go over to my house and you say there’s been this phone call. And if dear David doesn’t want to believe it, he can check with your uncle. Your uncle is going to have to say yes, he got the call. So it will work out, either way. Neat?”

  Gary said nothing.

  Ladd said, “It’s not too tough, to put on an act. All you have to do is think to yourself what you would do ‘if.’ Just put it out of your mind that you know who’s calling. Just think what you would do if you happened to be standing there, and somebody was telling your uncle that Hob Cunningham was murdered.”

  “Yeah,” said Gary with sudden enlightenment.

  “All right. You’d tell your uncle that you knew us. You’d ask him what he was going to do. You’d come barreling over to tell me.”

  “Sure.”

  Ladd brooded. “It would be better, though, if your uncle came himself.”

  Gary said, “What if the line is busy?”

  “What? Your line? My line? I’ll just call the first second that I can, after two thirty.” Ladd felt there was nothing he could not explain. “Anything else bother you?”

  Gary said, “It might cause a lot of trouble. You know that.”

  “I know that,” Ladd said impatiently and then in a moment, “What’s the matter?”

  Gary said, “I don’t know if you know this. They could get an exhumation order. Uncle Walt did that, one time. I remember, it turned out suicide.”

  Ladd sat still as stone. He was frightened. Dark shafts danced. Then he said, “My father never quit. He never did. He never would. I saw him on Thanksgiving. He told me. ‘You’ve got to stick it out, the whole way,’ he said, ‘and that’s all there is to it. It’s that simple,’ he said to me.” Ladd put his head down and began to mutter rapidly, “Listen, you can laugh. The whole rotten world can laugh. Maybe there isn’t anybody who wouldn’t laugh. Because it is pretty simple. If I opened my stupid mouth and said the word, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I’d be a fool to open my mouth …”

  Gary, a lap or two behind, said, “He had guts, eh?”

  Ladd bent over. “That, too.”

  “I liked him real well.”

  “You saw him about twice in your whole life,” snarled Ladd.

  “What’s the difference?” Gary said. “And I saw him more than that. You forget.”

  But Ladd, who could not forget, or totally remember, now wept in silence for his father. Whom he had jailed. Wept for
his failure. When he had flown back to school that. Thanksgiving night, putting away from him hard thoughts of death, of pain, and (what was even harder to bear) thoughts of courage. Or guts. Or honor! The plane had been full of young people. They would have laughed. Oh, not because his Dad was dying, but because—you didn’t even use a word like ‘courage.’ You said ‘guts.’ You did not say ‘honor.’ Ever. Yes, but … but … but … but—He shook out of chaos to remembrance.

  So the next day, back to classes, the jolly old routine. Not for one moment (while he wept—cross-legged in the swing, in the night—remembering) did he allow himself to remember plain the brief lightness that had come to him when, knowing that his father was going to die, he had gone off, laughing. No, what he writhed for was remorse. Remorse, of course, a horse, of course, remorse. He hadn’t paid enough attention. Oh, not that he hadn’t just sat there by the hospital bed. It was that he had not thought enough about his father. Or his mother. Or David Crown. But how could I have known? he asked himself, for comfort. I honestly didn’t know. How vile! How rotten! They had no honor. They gave him no honor. They wouldn’t even let him die, in his own way, his honorable death. And so I’ll kill David Crown. He’ll never die an honorable death in my mother’s house, my father’s bed. I’ll kill him. I have to. Oh, he’s a bird! A cuckoo bird, old David! Rotten and old and pretty sly … but a cuckoo bird and what is that? Oh, Something, listen? I have to. Don’t I?

  Gary had been chewing on nothing, in his puzzled way. He spoke. “Maybe you should’ve finished up at Stanford. I mean, didn’t he say you should ‘stick it out’?”

  Ladd unfolded and sprang up. “Listen, you bastard, he was killed! And David Crown is a lousy stinking murderer! And what do you want?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t say …”

  “If you’re not my buddy, buddy, then I’ll get a gun some place—and don’t think I can’t. And I’ll shoot dear David in his head and myself, too. I’d just as soon. It would be a lot simpler. You’re the one keeps talking about evidence and this terrific uncle you’ve got in the police department.”

  “I’m going to do what you want,” said Gary. “Don’t get so excited.”