The bride wore black

by Cornell Woolrich

  “Are you Miss Baker?” Cookie conceded warily.

  “Ho!” She worried the lobe of his ear. “Of course I am, bless you! You know that.”

  “Then why don’t you look like she does?”

  She smiled amusedly at Moran. “I suppose he means the glasses. He’s used to my wearing horn-rimmed glasses when teaching class; I came out without them tonight. There’s a fine point of child psychology involved, too. He’s used to seeing me in the kindergarten and not in his home. I don’t belong here. So—” she spread her hands “—I’m not the same person.”

  Moran was secretly admiring her scientific attitude toward the child and the thorough knowledge it was obviously grounded on, so different from Margaret’s irrational, emotional approach.

  She stood up, evidently not a believer in pressing a contested point too far with a reluctant child at any one given time; rather winning it over to her viewpoint by degrees, a little at a time. He’d heard Margaret say that was the way they handled the youngsters at the kindergarten.

  “Hell forget all about this refusal to recognize me himself in five minutes—watch, you’ll see,” she promised brightly in an undertone.

  “You’ve got to know just how to go about it with kids, don’t you?” he said, impressed.

  ”They’re distinct little entities in their own right, you know, not just half-formed grown-ups. That’s a mistaken old-fashioned notion that we’ve discarded.” She removed her hat and jacket, started toward the ravaged kitchen. “Now, let me see what I can do here to help. How about you yourself, Mr. Moran?”

  “Oh, never mind about me,” he said with insincere self-denial. “I can go out to a cafeteria later—”

  “Nonsense, there’s no need for that at all, HI have something ready before you know it. Now, you just read your evening paper—1 can see by the way it’s still folded over you haven’t had a chance to go near it yet—and just forget everything, as though your wife were here looking after things.”

  She was, thought Moran with a grateful sigh, one of the nicest, most competent, most considerate young women to have around that he’d ever yet had the pleasure of encountering. He strolled out into the living room, rolled down his shirt sleeves and eased back behind his evening box score.

  * * *

  It SEEMED A LONGER RIDE than it had the summer before, when she and Frank had last made the trip up, although Garrison hadn’t moved any at one end. or the city at the other. But that was because she was making it alone, for one thing, she supposed, and under unfavorable auspices, for another.

  Frank had got her a seat by the window, and no one came to claim the one beside her. so she was spared the added discomfort of having to keep up a desultory conversation with some well-meaning seatmate; the penalty for refusal being, as she knew only too well, the even greater discomfort of sitting in strained, hostile awareness of each other after the preliminary snub.

  The countryside spilled past with the rippling motion of overturned earth, as though the bus were plowing a steady furrow through it but carrying its trees, houses, fences along with it intact. She saw it only with the physical surface of her eye, it wasn’t transmitted through the iris. Every twelve minutes, regularly, she remembered something she’d forgotten to tell Frank about Cookie or the house or the milkman or the laundryman. But then—and she realized this herself—even if she had remembered in the first place and told him, he probably would have forgotten it himself by now. That docile nodding outside the bus window hadn’t fooled her; it had been too facile.

  Between the twelve-minute intervals she did a lot of worrying about her mother. The way one does, anyone does.

  But she realized she was only making herself feel worse, borrowing trouble ahead of time, writing an obituary, so to speak, before there was any need to. As Frank said, it would be all right. It had to be. And if—God forbid—it turned out not to be in the end, then rushing to meet it halfway was no help, either.

  She tried to shorten the trip, take her mind off its purpose, by thinking of other things. It was not easy to do. She had not the pictorial eye; inanimate scenery had never meant much to her. And since, on the other hand, she had never taken a passionate interest in the study of human nature in the abstract, what else was there left on a vehicle of this sort? She wondered if it would have helped if she’d bought a book or magazine at the terminal and brought it with her. Probably not; it would have remained opened on her lap at one certain page the whole way. She’d never been any great shakes as a reader.

  In desperation that was almost pathetic she started to tally up her household expenses for the past week, and then for the past two weeks. The figures blurred in her mind, became fantastically senseless. She could not forget the hard little knot of worry that lay hea within her.

  It had grown dark now. and the view became restricted to the midget, tubular world she was confined in. The other people around her in the bus were—the other people usually around in a bus. No sublimation to be found there. Just the backs of heads.

  She sighed and wished she were an Indian or whatever those people were who could leave their bodies and get there ahead of where they were going. Or something like that, anyway; she wasn’t sure of the mechanics of it.

  .Around eight they stopped at Greendale for ten minutes, and she had a cup of coffee at the counter in the bus station. As far as Cookie was concerned, at home, the worst was already over by this time, she realized. Either he had a bad case of stomachache by now or else Frank had fed him the way he should be fed and there was nothing further to worry about.

  It seemed needless to phone ahead to Garrison from here; she was already two-thirds of the way there. And then there was always the thought that if she should get worse news than she’d already had in the telegram, it would make the rest of the trip an unendurable torment. It was better to wait until she got there herself to find out.

  They arrived strictly on schedule, ten-thirty on the dot. She was the first one down, elbowing her way through the other passengers.

  She wasn’t disappointed that there was no one waiting to meet her, because she realized Ada must have her hands full at the house; it couldn’t be expected at such a time.

  Garrison’s brief, foreshortened nightlife was in mid-career immediately outside the bus station. Which meant the movie-theater entrance was still lighted on one side of the way and the drugstore on the other.

  She passed a group of chattering young girls in their late teens and early twenties holding down a section of the board sidewalk just outside the drugstore entrance. One of them turned her head to look after her as she went by, and she heard her say, “Isn’t that Margaret Peabody—now?” -

  She hurried along the plank walk, head lowered, into the surrounding darkness. Luckily they didn’t yoo-hoo after her to try to make sure. She didn’t want to stop and talk to near strangers. They might have news. She didn’t want to hear it from them first. She wanted to go straight home and get it there, good or bad. But that “now,” it hung trembling over her, roaring in her mind. What did it mean, that it was already … ?

  She hurried up the dark tunnellike length of Burgoyne Street, smothered under trees, turned left, continued on for two house lengths (which here meant two city blocks, very nearly), turned in at the well-remembered flagstone walk with its tricky unevenness of edges. Each one went up a fraction of an inch higher than the one adjoining. Many a fall in childhood’s awkward days—

  She caught her breath with a quick little suction as the house swiveled around full face to her. Oh, yes, oh, yes, there were too many lights lit, far too many. Then she curbed her mounting panic, forced it down. Well, even— even if mother was laid up in bed at all with the slightest of attacks, Ada would have more than the usual number of lights lit, wouldn’t she? She’d have to, to be able to look after her.

  But then as she stepped up on the little white-painted porch platform, dread assailed her again. There were too

  many shadows flitting back and forth behind t
he lowered linen shades, you could hear the hum of too many voices coming from inside, as at a time of crisis, when neighbors are called in. There was something wrong in there, there was some sort of commotion going on.

  She reached out and poked the bell button with an icicle for a finger. Instantly the commotion became aggravated. A voice screamed, “I’ll go!” Another shrieked, “No, let me!” She could hear them clearly out where she was. Had one of them been Ada’s, high-pitched and unrecognizable with uncontrollable grief? It seemed to her it had. She must be hysterical, all of them must be.

  Before her heart had time to turn over and drop down through her like a rock, there was a quick shuffle of frenzied footsteps, as though someone was trying to hold someone else back. The door billowed open and a great gush of yellow interior light fanned out all over her. There were two unrecognizable figures silhouetted in it, grotesques with strange shapes on their heads.

  “I got to it first!” the smaller one proclaimed jubilantly. “I was opening doors before you were born—” The music and the welter of hilarious voices streamed out around them into the quiet country night.

  Her heart didn’t drop, her overnight bag did instead— with a slap to the porch floor. “Mother,” she gasped soundlessly.

  The other figure in the paper party cap was Ada. “Margaret, you darling! How did you remember it was my birthday? Oh, what a dandy surprise, I couldn’t have asked for anything—”

  They were talking at cross-purposes, the three of them. “Oh, but Ada—” Margaret Moran was remonstrating in a shaky, smothered voice, still unmanageable from the unexpected shock. “How could you do it that way! If you knew what I went through on the way up

  here! No, mother’s health is one thing I don’t think you have any right to joke about. Frank won’t like it a bit when he hears it!”

  A puzzled silence had fallen over the two standing in the doorway. They turned to look after her. She was inside in the crepe-paper-lighted hallway now. The vivacious old lady asked Ada with a birdlike, quizzical cock of her head, “What does she mean?”

  Ada asked at the same time, “What on earth is she talking about?”

  “I got a telegram from you at one this afternoon. You told me mother’d had another of her attacks, and to come at once. You even mentioned Dr. Bixby’s name in it—” Margaret Moran had begun to cry a little with indignation, a natural reaction from the long strain she had been under.

  The mother said, “Dr. Bixby’s in there now; I was just dancing a cakewalk with him, wasn’t I, Ada?”

  Her sister’s face had gone white under the flush of the party excitement. She took a step backward. “I never in the world sent you any telegram!” she gasped.

  Moran surreptitiously stuck a thumb under the waistband of his trousers to gain a little additional slack. “Margaret couldn’t have done any better herself,” he said wholeheartedly, “and when I say that, I’m giving you all the praise I know how.

  “It’ll make her your friend for life when I tell her how you walked in here and saved the day. You must come over and have dinner with the two of us—I mean without working for it—when she gets back.”

  She eyed the empty plates with a cook’s instinctive approval, flattered to see that her eff’orts have not been sUghted. “Thank you,” she said, “I’d love to. I don’t get as much home cooking as I might myself. I’ve had a room at the Women’s Club since I’ve had this school job.

  and there are no facilities. Before then, of course, at home, we all took turns in the kitchen.”

  She rose slowly, stacked the dishes together. “Now you just sit there and take it easy, Mr. Moran, or inside in the next room or wherever you please. I’ll get through these in no time.”

  “You could leave them in there,” he remonstrated. “Margaret’s cleaning lady comes tomorrow, and shell do them.”

  “Oh, well,” she shrugged deprecatingly, “it’s not much trouble, and one thing I can’t bear to see left lying around is dirty dishes, in my own or anybody else’s kitchen. I’ll be all finished before you know it.”

  She was going to make some lucky stiff a mighty fine little wife one of these days, Moran thought, watching her bustle back and forth; the wonder of it was she hadn’t already. What was the matter with the young fellows around these parts, didn’t they have eyes in their heads?

  He went into the living room, turned on the double-globed reading lamp and sat down with his paper, to give it a second and more exhaustive going-over. It was just as good as though Margaret were home, really; you could hardly tell the difference. Except maybe that she didn’t say, “Don’t” to Cookie quite so often. Maybe too much of that wasn’t good for a kid. She was a teacher, she ought to know.

  She came out to the dining-room door one time and spoke to him, drying a large dish between her hands with a cloth. “Nearly through now,” she announced cheerfully. “How’re you two getting along in here?”

  “Fine,” said Moran, looking back across his shoulder at her from the semireclining slope the chair gave him. “I’m waiting to hear from my wife; she promised to call as soon as she gets up there and let me know how things are.”

  “That won’t be for some time yet, will it?”

  He glanced at the clock across the room. “Not much before ten-thirty or eleven, I guess.”

  She said, “I’m going to squeeze out some orange juice for the two of you, for the morning, as soon as I finish putting the last of these away. I’ll leave it in a glass inside the Frigidaire.”

  “Aw, you don’t have to bother doing that—”

  “Doesn’t take a minute; Cookie really should have it daily, you know. It’s the best thing for them.” She returned to the kitchen again.

  Moran shook his head to himself. What a paragon.

  Cookie was in there with him just then, playing around. Then a minute or so later he got up and went to the hall door, stood there looking out, talking to her. She’d evidently wandered out there herself, from the kitchen door at the other end of it, while she finished drying the last of the utensils. Margaret had that habit, too, of perambulating around when she was in the last stages of drying.

  Cookie was standing perfectly still, watching her. He heard him say, “What’re you doing that for?”

  “To dry it off, dear,” she answered with cheery forthrightness.

  Moran heard it only subconsciously, so to speak, with the fraction of those faculties not absorbed in his paper.

  She came in a moment later, painstakingly wiping the blade of a small sharp-edge fruit knife that she’d evidently just used to cut and prepare the oranges.

  Cookie’s eyes followed the deft motions of her hands with that hypnotic concentration children can bring to bear on the most trivial actions at times. Once he turned his head and glanced back into the hallway, somewhere beyond the radius of the door, where she had been just now, with equally rapt absorption. Then back to her again.

  “There, all through,” she said to him playfully, flicking the end of the dishcloth toward him. “Now HI play with you for five or ten minutes, and then we’ll see about putting you to bed.”

  Moran looked up at this point, out of sheer sense of duty. “Sure there’s nothing I can do to help?” he asked, hoping against hope the answer would be no.

  It was. “You go right back to your paper,” she said with friendly authoritativeness. “This young man and I are going to have a little game of hide-and-seek.”

  She was certainly a godsend. Why, when it came to getting your paper read without distraction, she was even better to have around than Margaret. Margaret seemed to think you could read your paper and carry on a conversation with her at one and the same time. So either you had to be a surly bear or you had to read each paragraph twice, and slowly, once as a gentle hint and once for the meaning.

  Not that he was being disloyal about it; rather have Margaret, bless her, conversational interruptions or not.

  Ada tried to silence the buzzing party guests. “Shh! Be quiet
just a minute, everybody. Margaret’s out in the hall, trying to call her husband in the city and tell him about it.” She took the added precaution of drawing the two sliding parlor doors together.

  “From here?” one of the younger girls piped up incredulously. “For heaven’s sake, that costs money!”

  “I know, but she’s all upset about it, and 1 don’t blame her. Who could have done such a thing? Why, that’s a horrible trick to play on anyone!”

  One of the matrons said with unshakable local pride, “I know nobody up here in our community would be capable of it. We all think too much of Delia Peabody and her girls.” Then immediately spoiled it by adding, “Not even Cora Hopkins…”

  “And they signed my name to it!” Ada protested dramatically. “It must be somebody that knows the family.”

  “And mine, too, isn’t that what she said?” Dr. Bixby added. “Where’d they hear about me?”

  Half-frightened little glances were exchanged here and there about the room, as though somebody had just told a chilling ghost story. One of the giris, perched on the windowsill, looked behind her into the dark, then stood up and furtively moved deeper into the room. “It’s like a poison-pen tellygram,” somebody breathed in a husky stage whisper.

  Ada had reopened the sliding doors a foot, overcome by her own curiosity. “Did you get him yet?” she asked through them. “What does he say?”

  Margaret Moran appeared in the opening, widened it and then stayed in it undecidedly. “She said our house doesn’t answer. He could be out, but—look at the time. And if he is, what’s he done with Cookie? He wouldn’t have him out with him at this hour. And the last thing he said was he wouldn’t budge out of the house. There ought to be someone there with Cookie to watch him…”

  She looked helplessly from Ada to her mother to the doctor, who were the three nearest to her. “I don’t like it. Don’t you think I ought to start back—”