The Case of the Weird Sisters

by Charlotte Armstrong

  "No, sir," Fred said stolidly.

  For a long time no one spoke, as if the car's plight cast a spell of silence over them. Only Innes cleared his throat from time to time, but he never quite said anything. Alice thought it tactful to ask no questions. She simply sat, and slowly began to wonder what it was he felt he ought to say and couldn't

  It was a curious ten miles, full of reluctance. Not the nightmare quality of trying to get to a place and always failing, but an equally nightmarish feeling of taking much labor and some pain to get to a place where one didn't want to be. Ogaunee was a gash across the smooth face of their plans. Furthermore, it required bracing. One had to brace oneself. Alice felt that.

  When at last they crawled past a house or two, Innes burst into speech. It was his home town, after all.

  "This is iron-mining country, you see. This is the Menominee Range. What they do here is underground. Up on the Mesabi they strip off the earth and take the ore out of an open pit. Makes a mess. But it was pretty here when I was a kid. My father owned the land all around and brought in Eastern captial in the old days. There's a shaft-house; see? That's Briar Hill."

  The wounded car crept aroimd a curve. Ahead, the road dipped and staggered over a kind of earthen bridge. On either side of the built-up causeway the ground fell precipitously into two great deep pits, down the far sides of which was scattered debris, as of shattered houses.

  "Good heavens! It's fallen In!" cried Alice. Innes said carelessly, "Well, you see, when they mine

  underground they honeycomb the place. Where the ore comes out, they prop up the roof with timber and go deeper, down to another level. Of course, later, when the ore's all gone, the timbers rot, I suppose, and collapse."

  "And the earth falls in!" Alice said, awestricken. "The houses, too?"

  ''Same of them were over the mines." "But how terrible!"

  "Oh, no. Nobody gets hurt. It's not like an earthquake, you know. It's slow. It just sinks."

  "I still think it's terrible. It isn't going to fall m any more?"

  "No, no. Although they have to keep filling in this road." She looked at him, horrified. "Oh, it's all over now. Don't worry. These mines were played out long ago. This is what you might call a ghost town." "Is it, really? Like the ones in the West?" "Not so romantic," said Innes. "Why do people stay here?"

  "I do not know." Innes dropped his guidebook manner and was personally vehement. "I wouldn't." Then, with that curious reluctance, ''Of course, my sisters . . ."

  "I don't know if she'll take the hill, sir," Fred said over his shoulder, "but I'll try."

  "Look," Innes said, pointing out his window and up. "That's the house. That's the back of it."

  Alice leaned, almost lying across his lap. "The house where you were born?"

  "Yes." He supported her shoulders tenderly. "It was quite a place once, if you can believe it."

  Alice saw a whitish structure above some rocks which rose out of the side of the pit and went up. She had goodeyes. "What a queer place for a door," she said. "Why, there's a door way up in the wall that just leads right out into space."

  Innes looked, too. His mustache brushed her cheek. "There used to be a back porch. It was torn down years ago. Got pretty shaky. Lord, I'd almost forgotten. I must have been about ten."

  She tried very hard to think of Innes as about ten, to see his much-shaven face soft and hairless, his smudged eyes fresh and naive; to pare away hi her imagination the central paunchiness of his figure, the settled and not un-feminine width of his hips; to take out of him the starch that thirty years had put into his body and mind, to see him lithe and free and about ten. It wasn't easy.

  "You had a rocky backyard to play in," she said, with the best sympathy she had.

  "No, it was a pine woods," Innes said dreamily. "All this land was higher than the road is now. It just sloped off, all trees. I used to know the paths. I used to lie on the ground and hear them blasting, deep under."

  Alice squeezed his hands. For a moment she thought she understood why he was reluctant to revisit Ogaunee.

  "You never grew up in a mining town. You never heard the steam shovels puffing and snorting all night long. Or lived by the whistles. Well it's dead now. I . . ."

  They were across the pit and in the village. Almost immediately they turned sharply to the right and began to climb. Innes forgot his reminiscence. "Look here, Fred, we can get away right after dinner?" He spoke not to a servant, but to a man who knew the answer.

  "Sure we will. Why wouldn't we?" Fred answered boldly, like a man who did know and could reassure another.

  Back of them, to their left, and soon below, the town lay wholly exposed. A block of frame buildings leaned together with a gap here and there, like a tooth gone. Dwellings marched evenly in a few rows, then broke ranks and scattered. A few were lost in the hills. Across the far end, a line of railroad track made a clean edge between town and swamp.

  Alice caught this maplike impression out of the comer of her eye. She had to help will the car up the hill when it shuddered and seemed to fall, when it took heart, then seemed to slip and hang on the brink of backward motion, then coughed and pushed weakly up with scrambling wheels, catching for a hold.

  Once Fred said, "The cottage, sir?"

  "No, no," Innes said, pushing on the floorboards with his suede-shod feet "Go on, don't stop, go on."

  Fred leaned forward and by sheer stubbornness seemed to call out a spurt of power that lifted the car up the last incline and rolled it, dying, to the level drive before the door.

  Innes sighed. "O.K., Fred. Bring Miss Brennan's bag. She'll want to freshen up. Then you can get busy."

  The house was of wood, long painted white. Its facade was like a face. It had eyes, nose, and mouth, if one happened to notice. Alice looked up and saw the upstairs window eyes seeming closed under raised brows and thought the expression on the face was haughty and self-satisfied.

  As they stood on the porch after Innes had turned the metal handle of the old-fashioned bell, she could see through a window to her right the outline of a pair of shoulders, tremendously broad. It was no more than an outline, dim behind the lace; but she knew it wasn't a woman.

  "Are your sisters married?" she asked Innes hastily, ready to revise an unwarranted impression.

  He looked shocked. "No," he said. "Oh, no, none of them." His small mouth under the mustache remained rounded for speech, but again he did not say what more was in his mind, though Alice waited. On this unfinished, even unbegun, communication between them, the door opened.

  The woman who opened the door seemed, at first glance, pop-eyed with surprise. She was big-boned and rather thin, although her face was round and firm and her features melted into one another without any angles. She looked, thought Alice, like a Botticelli woman, but not so fat. There was a convex swelling under her throat, and the pop eyes were permanent. "Why, Mr. Innes!" she said.

  "Hello, Josephine." Innes affected a great joviality, as if he were playing Santa Claus. "Alice, this is Josephine. The car's broken down, Josephine, so I guess we're here for dinner, if you can find anything for us to eat. Are my sisters .. . ?"

  The woman nodded. She made a fumbling motion with her cotton dress as if she were drying her large bright-pink hands.

  "Tell them, will you?" urged Innes. "Come in, Alice.

  Put the bag there, Fred." Innes asserted himself as if he needed to prove that he belonged here. The center hall lay between two arches. He led the way through the velvet-hung opening at the right. The house seemed quiet and deserted. A new-laid fire was burning in the grate, the kindling just caught But there was no one there.

  The room was warm and a little stuffy. It was fuU of furniture and knickknacks with rugs overlying other rugs on the floor. Every table had a velvet cover and a lace cover over that. The place had a stuffed and cluttered elegance. Eveything in it was elegant of itself, to the point of absurdity. A Victorian room, Alice decided, and no imitation, either. Yet, because it was the rea
l thing it impressed her. The conviction that these furnishings were still elegant was hard to resist. Someone so patently thought so.

  "Sit down, my dear.'' Behind them, Fred had vanished. Josephine had gone upstairs. Alice loosened her jacket. "rU ... er . .. just fetch Gertrude." Innes made for a door in the wall opposite the front of the house.The curiosity that had occupied Alice until now was touched with panic.

  "Do I look all right?" she said.

  Innes turned, not his rather too bulky hips, but his head only. His eyes appealed to her as he looked backward over his shoulder. "It doesn't matter," he said, and his reluctance broke like a crust. "My sister Gertrude is blind."

  Alice sat still, feeling the shock ebb out of her nerves. Innes had left her. She was quite alone. She felt submerged in this unfamiliar house, drowned without an i-dentity. Her eyes went to the fire, which at least was familiar and alive.

  Alone, she should be gloating, "Goody, goody, I'm going to marry a million dollars." No wonder she felt strange and out of herself. Nothing to worry about. No living to make. Living's all made. Quick work, Alice.

  Only last Saturday morning Alice had sat in her office with no dowry, nothing to swap in the marriage market, no money, prestige, influence, nothing to bring to her wedding but the bride. Now, on Thursday, slie'd swapped just that for a million dollars. Show him. Show Art Killeen. Two could play.

  Quick work since Saturday morning when he'd come in-

  to her office and sat on her desk with his leg swinging and said, "I'm courting a North Side debutante these days, you know. I'm really working at it." Said it in laughter, given the message kmdly, lightly, in laughter: "Better give it up, Alice. It wUl never be." She was ashamed to think he'd known she thought . . .

  Oh nonsense! Why shouldn't she have thought they were going to be married, she and Art Killeen? They were in love. She'd been so dumb she hadn't known. No percentage in love. A silly, unprofitable thing, so often an economic or political mistake. Leading, however, in her case to a million dollars. Had it not? Would she have come from New York to Chicago if Art Killeen hadn't thought it such a fine idea that he'd got her the job with his pet, his wealthiest client?

  A woman sees her husband's lawyer sometimes.

  "I am looking," Alice said to herself solemnly, "into what the French call an abyss!" Muscles at the comers of her mouth flattened involuntarily. Well, if she could smile she must be getting better. Or was it wild hope running like a weed to spring up though she'd cut it down?

  She had heard no sound, but she lifted her eyes and saw a man in the room. He was enormous. His great fat thighs strained in a pair of filthy dark trousers. A green flannel shirt, torn at the armhole, was open at his bullish neck, showing a stretch of dirty underwear. His hair was lank, black, and long enough to show below his ears. His skin was brown, and his face glistened as if it had been oiled. His eyes were a sharp black, without brown or yellow. He stood in the middle of the room, looking at her without much curiosity. She could have screamed.

  Then she saw that he carried a hod of coal. She shrank back in her chair and said nothing. Soon he walked silently to the grate, knelt, and began to pour coal upon the fire. She saw the muscles of his broad shoulders working under the fat. He was not a Negro. His features were thick, but the mouth was firm, and there was a flaring line from his nostrils to the tip of his nose that was both foreign and familiar, though she couldn't name him. She couldn't tell what he was. He knelt not two feet from her, and she became gradually aware of an odor and was nearly sick. The man put forth a scent, like an animal.

  In a moment he had finished with the fire. He rose and was gone as indifferently as he had come. But before he left, be poked his dirty fingers into a box of candy that lay among the many trifles on the mantel and casually took two.

  Alice sat still, her heart pounding in her throat.

  In a moment or two the door in the back wall opened, and Innes led forth a straw-colored lady. "Gertrude," he said with anxious social sweetness, a tone that poured soothing oil upon this meeting and begged them both to be kind for his sake, "this is Alice Brennan. Alice, this is my oldest sister.''

  "How do you do. Miss Whitlock," said Alice, rising.

  The woman turned her face toward the voice. She was somewhere between fifty and sixty years old. Her hair was a pile of pale straw, severely drawn back from her thin, bloodless face. The eyes were as pale as the rest of her, and even her brows and lashes made no easily discernible marks, so that the face was blank, as if eyes had been left out of it altogether. Her lips, too, were unreddened by blood or anything else. Yet there was a certain haughtiness about her tall, stiff figure and the impact of a personality.

  "I am glad to make your acquaintance, Miss Brennan," she said in a rather high voice that was however, not thin, but rich in flute tones. It held a deliberate sweetness, faintly affected. "Innes tells me you have had trouble with the car."

  "Can you give us dinner, Gertrude?" Innes said with a combination of humility and demand. "If not, I suppose we can . . ."

  "Certainly, we shall be glad to give you dinner," Gertrude said proudly, almost as if she were offended. "Speak to Josephine."

  "Well I have, but I will again. . . ." Innes was awkward. This pale sister seemed to unbalance him, as if he saw himself in two lights, once as her young and somehow humbled brother, once as Innes Whitlock, the successful man, and he couldn't make the images blend.

  Gertrude dismissed the domestic problem as if it didn't concern her. She moved forward to find a chair. Alice sent a questioning look to her fiance.

  limes began to chuckle. "Gertrude is pretty marvelous," he said heartily. "Gertrude, I can see her wondering how on earth you find your way so well."

  Alice, who had been wondering nothing of the sort, saw with surprise that the woman's thin lips smiled, almost triumphantly. "But I know my way perfectly in this house," she said. "Never worry about that." She seemed to unbend a little as if this topic were welcome. "I have been totally bluid for many years, but I do not let my affliction prevent me from moving about this house with complete confidence."

  "Why, that's wonderful!" breathed Alice. "I do think that's wonderful. Miss Whitlock."

  Innes beamed. Alice knew she'd caught on quickly, that this was what she ought to be saying.

  "I simply resolved," Gertrude said and Alice recognized a worn quality in the phrase, "that I would never be a burden. Nor have I been." The blind woman sat down in a chair near the fire. She picked up an elegant box lying close to her hand. "Do you smoke, Miss Brennan?" she said pleasantly, holding the box quite accurately in Alice's direction.

  "I do, thank you." Alice reached out her hand. Then she saw with dismay that the box was empty. The blind woman was showing off, and she had made a mistake.

  For the space of half a second, Alice hesitated. Then she fumbled in her jacket pocket with her left hand. "I don't like to take the last one," she said with an apologetic and rather timid laugh. She dipped her hand into the box, letting the woman feel its pressure.

  Innes leaped forward with a match and lit the cigarette Alice had pulled from her own pocket. "Let me," he said gallantly. "Gertrude is marvelous, really, isn't she?" His eyes congratulated Alice and thanked her, too.

  Alice leaned back with a little glow in her heart. She was pleased with herself for having thought so quickly how to save the blind woman's pride and still warn her not to make the same mistake again. Having done Gertrude a service, in a way, Alice felt warmer toward her.

  But Gertrude said, rather petulantly, "It ought to be full. Josephine is not quite all there is to be desired in a servant. It is very difficult, you can imagine . . ."

  "Yes, indeed," murmured Alice.

  "The girls who are willing to go into domestic service are quite untrained," Gertrude went on, "and quite im-trainable, I'm afraid."

  Alice murmured again. The conversation seemed to her to have taken a queer turn. It was peculiar to sit here and discuss Gertrude's servant problem wh
en the news of the moment was surely Innes's unexpected arrival and Alice's introduction to this house. But, she told herself, Gertrude Whidock's world was dark and limited.

  "Josephine does very well, Gertrude," Innes said soothingly. "The house looks well. Just as it always did."

  Gertrude sighed. "Innes," she said, "I wish you would speak to Maud and Isabel. I do not understand it. I, alone, am maintaining the house again. I am perfectly willing to do so. You realize that."

  "I know," Innes said angrily. "I know aU about it." Faint pink came up under his skin and his eyes looked sullen.

  "Yet I seem to have less and less," Gertrude went on, scarcely heeding; "and really, we cannot do without servants. Even if it would look well, which it would not."

  "Good heavens, of course you can't do without servants," Innes cried. "Tell me—the same old thing, I suppose?"

  "They say they cannot share," Gertrude shrugged. "I haven't doubted them. I don't care to discuss it, naturally."

  "You haven't gone into your capital?"

  "The bank will know. I know nothing about that sort of thing." Gertrude Implied that no lady would.

  Innes clicked his tongue.

  "But how sordid," Gertrude said suddenly. "Forgive me, Miss Brennan. This must come under the head of business and you do imderstand business, I suppose. I don't see Innes often. I must snatch a moment."

  "Tm a bad boy," Innes said with his pout. He had a way of being whimsical about his own shortcomings.

  The blind woman pursed her dry lips. "Of course, Innes is Stephen's son but not Sophia's," she said, as if this explained something. "That is Sophia, hanging over the mantel."

  Startled, AKce looked up. Sophia was, indeed, hanging on the wall but looking as if she had never been alive at all. A pale oval face, stiffly done by a bad artist, it had a kind of crookedness to it, as if the artist had lost control of what little skill he had and gotten the perspective wrong. One eye looked insolently at the beholder, as eyes do in such portraits, but the other rolled a little wUdly, as if it looked elsewhere. No, not elsewhere, but inward, as if half the woman dreamed.