A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  Somewhere in the back of his mind he was afraid, not of what Ford had told him, or what he thought of it, but of something else. He knew perfectly well of what. When you cleaned out an abscess you had to clean out all of it and let it drain. There was some of the infection remaining, that would suppurate still. He didn’t know where or what, but he knew it was there. It was something they could not yet supersede.

  He phoned Maggie, but only to reassure her. He needed time alone. He went up to the “Top of the Mark” and had a few drinks and then he went to bed. But first he looked out over the city. He thought instead of Los Angeles. San Francisco was one small tight city, but Los Angeles was a series of towns. It was still possible, down there, to take your pick. People in a unified city like San Francisco think it is themselves who count, but they are wrong. Only the city counts. Like a fire, a city, once it has caught on, needs only fuel and a prevailing wind. Human breath no longer helps it.

  Which, he supposed, was why he had never liked San Francisco. Its beauty by night was only electricity; and a thousand men hanging by leather straps in mid-air, against poles, automatically repairing frayed wires and then being replaced by other men, who were younger, did not alter the fact that the wires remained. The people who went on fanning the fire blew themselves away. The fire burned on without them.

  All a man could do was to gather his own kindling and set the match. When the fire got too hot you moved away, you didn’t jump into it. And home was a nice cool place like a cave or a bedroom, more likely a bedroom, for a bedroom had a door you could lock. And you walked through the city jangling the keys in your pocket, the only reminder you had that you had any private existence at all. Even then, ten to one, when you got home and unlocked the door there wasn’t anybody there, but just an unmade bed left over from the night before.

  Perhaps that phase was over now. He hoped so. You can never know all the odds, but if you’re going to play at all you have to use your own chips. That left him Maggie.

  He went to sleep and woke up early. People usually don’t like to remember how they feel in the morning. He woke up and could sense his body lying in the bed. It was heavier than it used to be. It was thickening into maturity. Idly he visualized the gymnasium he would go to for six months to keep fit, if he had the time; and the gym instructor in canvas shoes and a woolly T-shirt, looking faintly supercilious with the sadism of the over-muscular, who are getting themselves hunched to give you the works for your own good. It would take about six months. He would start in about a week. If he had the time.

  It was a three-quarter bed. He forgot about the wooly T-shirt and the gymnasium smell. Not quite awake he rolled over on his left side and played with the pillow, pretending Maggie was there, and running his hands caressingly up and down over the sheet, the mattress underneath bumpy and uneven. The hotel advertised an air-foam mattress in every room, but apparently this room was the exception.

  He realized suddenly that he had a heavy body odour that had permeated the bed and was faintly unpleasant. He forced himself to get up and take a shower. He was pleasantly conscious of himself in the shower. Looking down he seemed longer, if not taller, than he was, and he wasn’t in half the bad shape he thought he was in the mornings, waking flaccid in his bed, with his belly against the sheets.

  He was hairy. He soaped all the hairs, playing up the lather against his brown skin; and he knew perfectly well what he was thinking about. The idea made him happy and cheerful, so he began to whistle. Then he got out of the shower and shaved with great care, knicking himself twice in the process. Standing naked at the washbowl he looked into the mirror and made faces at himself, pretending he was somebody else, and even tried a sort of half-sensual swoon. Then, feeling slightly abashed, he threw all his dirty clothes into the laundry basket, got dressed, and went down to breakfast. He hadn’t put on a dark suit, he hadn’t brought a dark suit, and he didn’t care. It wasn’t his town or his funeral. He felt about seventeen years old.

  It was time to get married, anyway. He was on his way up. Marriage was the right thing to do now. But if you had luck, sometimes you even got to marry not only the right person, but the preferable one as well. His luck seemed to be holding out.

  He finished his breakfast. He tipped the waiter. He brushed off his coat flaps. He put on his hat and he walked jauntily out into the street, feeling exactly like a full page colour illustration in the Saturday Evening Post, for those ads showed him just exactly what he wanted to be and how he wanted to feel, and this morning that was exactly how he felt. Los Angeles had many advantages. Taken right, it made everybody six inches taller and a good deal younger in the jaw; and a theatrical tailor also helped. As a couple, he thought, they should really be a wow.

  He did not notice the city at all. What he saw was a portable bar, the good hot sun, and both of them beside the swimming pool, with guests. And why not? Life may as well look like the pictures once in a while: it lends the illusion a pleasant air of verisimilitude.

  By the time he was in a cab he had sobered down. He knew one dream from another very well and made no mistakes about which was whose. It wasn’t time for his own yet.

  He peered anxiously out of the window, glad he would be leaving soon. The trouble with these people was that they thought that the dream and the reality were the same thing. The confusion was instructive. They could keep their city and their pride.

  When he halted in front of the Barnes-Shannon house, paying off the driver, he thought he could quite well understand how Maggie clung to her car. It was the sort of house from which you wanted a ready get-away; and he would be glad when he saw the last of it. People had stopped living in it decades ago. It had the hotel smell.

  Maggie was waiting for him in the library. There was some sunlight to-day, so she had opened the windows. A breeze through the room made it seem dustier than ever. She had opened the doors, too, as though to clear out the house, and the room was cold. She did not seem to mind. She was sitting, alert and waiting, on the sofa, smoking a cigarette and looking self-possessed. He was glad of that. It was as though she were catching up with lost time.

  “Lily went down early,” she said. “She’s changed, Luke. I can’t make it out.”

  “I know.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked round the room, the way you look round a hotel room before leaving it, to see if you have forgotten anything. It looked about as impersonal as a hotel room and he wondered if Lily would sell the house or just board it up. It wasn’t a room to settle back and be comfortable in. To try that out he sat down on the sofa beside her, took her hand, leaned his head back and put his feet up on the coffee table, looking thoughtfully at his shoes. They were well polished.

  “It’s like going to a play,” she said.

  He frowned. “Well. Maybe.” He didn’t want to talk to her now. He thought she was too keyed up. Yet he might as well know the truth some time, now that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. That was the way truth was: by the time you found it out it very seldom did.

  He looked at his watch. “We’d better go,” he said, and leaned over to kiss her. She drew away and glanced towards the door.

  “Not here,” she said. He stood up, disappointed, but she was quite right. Not there.

  They went through the house to the garage and she got out her car. She felt like driving this morning and she drove with an efficient, self-satisfied self-confidence. But she was also biting one of her nails.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Is it really over?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I should think so. Anyhow, we’ll go away.”

  “That’s what I mean. Can we? I mean, it’s a scandal and you’re a lawyer.”

  “People forget,” he said, but it was what had been at the back of his mind and he knew it. “We’ll go away.”

  “To Los Angeles?” She watched him briefly.

  “Yes,” he said, but it made him thoughtful. “Yes. Where else would we go?” He glanced at her out of the sides
of his eyes and realized he should have sounded more cheerful. It was the side of it he hadn’t wanted to face.

  “I don’t want to trap anybody,” she said. “I never did.”

  “We can talk about it later,” he said warily.

  “Yes.” There was an acuity in her tone he was not expecting. “But we have to think about it now.”

  He Watched the traffic.

  The funeral parlour was in a valley between hills, or what had been a valley once. Now it was built up with hotels and a garage. She parked the car. The car was blue. Most of the cars parked along the street on that side were black. She had been driving bare-handed, but now she slipped into her gloves as though they afforded her some sort of protection. Infections from the dead could be dangerous.

  He got out and held the door open for her and they walked towards the building. The reception hall was soundproof, finished in mocha of the shade of a Siamese cat. Lily was sitting on a round ottoman. She did not notice them. She was wearing a black astrachan coat that was heavy and stiff, and which did not suit her at all. Maggie was wearing a little round black hat. Now she lowered her veil, not like a visor, but like a wire cage. She did this automatically as soon as she saw her mother.

  Lily looked like an old woman. She would have been more attractive if she had not always tried to appear young. This morning she had made herself up that way from habit, and it gave her two faces, neither of them flattering or kind. She did not speak to them. She just stood up and led them into the mortuary chapel. They were scarcely a unified family, but they pretended to be one, for the sake of the press, except that the press hadn’t bothered to come; and for the sake of their friends, except that they didn’t have any.

  The chapel, in that plaster Georgian which smart funeral directors seemed to prefer, leaving Tudor and stained glass to fellow-operators with a less expensive clientele, had a heavy, faintly disagreeable odour of vacuumed carpetting and scented air-conditioned air. The coffin was placed on a trestle, head on to the aisle. The three of them sat in one row and listened to a few inappropriate words. It seemed to take a long time. He could see, through her veil, that Maggie had her eyes closed, but Lily watched everything with a chipmunk furtiveness. For her, he supposed, it was the end of something. Or perhaps she was counting the house, for she watched the guests rather than the coffin.

  Soon enough they passed up the aisle towards the cars. As he looked back he saw the coffin sinking through the floor on an hydraulic lift. The mourners were clumped in the reception room.

  “Get out your handkerchief and play faint,” he said to Maggie. “Lily can handle them.”

  Maggie gave him a startled glance and uncurled her fingers, in which a handkerchief lay already crumpled. He looked down at it. It was stiff and dry. He took her arm and got her outside into the street and the car.

  They sat in the car, waiting. One or two streetcars went by, clanging their bells. It was a busy intersection. She did not say anything. She hid behind her veil. He saw the coffin carried out and slid on to the grooves of the hearse. Then everybody, like a theatre crowd leaving a not very good show, got into the other cars and he swung Maggie’s out into the procession. The blue car was all too noticeable. It was like one false bead on a string. Once they were away from traffic the cars spaced out. He wondered which one contained Lily. Then, at a stop light, several of them pulled up abreast, and he saw her, two cars over, sitting comfortably alone in the back of one of them, behind the chauffeur. She was powdering her nose.

  Then they drove on again. He turned and looked at Maggie.

  “How did you find out about Jerome?” he asked.

  She lifted her veil and stared at him blankly. Then she left the veil up over the brim of her hat and looked down at her finger-nails.

  “I found the commitment papers,” she said quietly. “I think now he wanted me to find them. He was very angry.”

  “Is that why you wanted to kill him?”

  “I didn’t want to kill him.” She was quite matter of fact about it, to his relief. “I wanted to hurt him. What good would killing him do? He must have engineered the whole mess. He wanted me to know it, I think.” She watched the cars ahead of them and gave a queer half smile. “It’s a pity you don’t really trust me.”

  “I trust you.” It was the truth, but trust had nothing to do with belief.

  “People make a mystery of things,” she said. “I always knew what was wrong with Daddy. I think I always did. Ethel told me. But I loved him. He was the only person I had. The only one. I didn’t want to see him if he really had gone. I thought he had gone, you see. And Lily said maybe that … well, I might have inherited it. It took me a long time to find out she was lying. I could have found out, I suppose, but I never did. Of course for the marriage I had to have a blood test whether I wanted to or not.”

  “You went to Napa that Saturday, didn’t you?”

  She hesitated. “Yes, I did. Oh, Luke, I didn’t even recognize him. They gave him good care. They had him in a bungalow. He’d had the same nurse for ten years. A male nurse. He just sat around and he couldn’t talk at all. He mumbled like a man with his teeth out, but it didn’t make any sense. And he got horribly excited. I had to leave while they quieted him. So at least he remembered me still. And then I talked to the nurse….”

  “And?” he asked. The car in front abruptly halted and he had to draw up with a jerk.

  She looked away from him. “He’s only been that way for three years. Before that he was more or less normal,” she said. “He was my father. I could have had him all that time.” She toyed with her gloves. “They all live in little imitation houses up there, with lawns and window-boxes and everything. Each place has a sort of living-room and a bedroom with a bath. There were stacks and stacks of magazines in the living-room, old ones. The National Geographic, and Look, and Life, and Colliers, and Ken. Ken isn’t even published any more. They said he used to read a lot. Now he tears the pictures out. He hides them under the bed.”

  “Oh,” he said. He thought of Lily in the car ahead, calmly powdering her nose.

  “I didn’t go back to San Francisco at all,” she said. “I drove round and round the hills until it was late and then I went right to Bolinas. I guess I wasn’t thinking very clearly.”

  “Ford went up there, too,” he said. “To Napa, I mean.”

  She looked at the cars ahead. They seemed to fascinate her as they wound through the suburbs towards the hills.

  “I wouldn’t be Lily”, she said, “for anything in this world. But I don’t want to see her ever again either.”

  He looked at her with grateful surprise. She carried it so calmly and so well.

  XX

  ON THE SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO was bounded by a high and complex mountain, but the mountain did not extend all the way across the peninsula. Beyond the gap so made the cemeteries had been laid out, pushing up the mountain and over the sprawling, rolling hills that eventually led to the sea.

  This place, because of the configuration of the ground, was usually foggy and damp, so it had once been farming land. There were still one or two farms abutting on the cemeteries. Mostly they raised poultry. Originally, also, there had been an Italian shanty town here. And everywhere the Italians go they plant cypress trees. Long after they have moved on the solitary green flames of their trees lick up into the sky. There was also the city of Colma. It was still more or less a shanty town where gangsters hung out and the cheaper sorts of vice found a refuge, and where nobody looked very happy. The stoneyards were full of spun sugar angels brought over from Italy, some with the crating still around them. There were florist shops and one or two garden nurseries under the eucalyptus trees. Surely the eucalyptus is one of the noisiest and most restless of trees. The effect of all this was of a mortuary jumble shop. From the rise of ground they could see the competing cemeteries; the one with a lake and a columbarium resembling the Tombs in New York; the one with floral clocks and emblems; the one with the white ducks and Swiss
chalet; and several that had no special advantage. They could also see the rows of cheap marble stones crowded together beyond the landscaping of the more expensive private tombs, so that the whole area was like a living suburb, with rich avenues in the middle, the ground growing less valuable farther out and imposing structures on the corners. To make matters worse it was not a foggy or overcast day, but one of those gusty days when clouds alternate with the sun in a concerted guerilla attack, so that just when the sun seemed to help it was wiped off by a wet shadow and the sun came out somewhere elusively else, and not where one was at all.

  Charles, he remembered, was to be buried in the Barnes vault. There was to be only a short service. If masses were to be said for his soul, they would be said somewhere else. That duty, he suspected, was now what Lily had left to do. It made him uneasy to think of such masses being said. He had fallen away himself and his faith never went any deeper than the momentary anxiety of prayer when liquor failed. He preferred to think that the dead were permanently dead.

  If anything will happen, he thought, it will happen now. Get him in the ground and we’ll be safe. The clouds had passed over the sun. It gave him sudden discomfort. Certainty failed and he was ill at ease.

  The short procession turned uncertainly down the ridge and into the grounds of one of the cemeteries, ornamented in a false Scots baronial style, with miniature buildings that looked like toys. They had pink roofs. The sward, though not immemorial, was certainly a smooth Gaelic green, and the flowers in their beds looked stiffly metallic.