I expected to find Aunt Muriel on the lawn when I got back, hard at work on her drawing, but she had gone in and the easel and stool were gone, too. I looked around for her, but she wasn't in sight, so I let Teddy climb into his box in the dining room and went upstairs for that belated nap.
After all, I couldn't get to sleep. For some irrelevant reason I kept thinking of all those painstaking drawings of the bowl of apples, and I lay on the bed and counted the spots on the wall until dinner time.
The dinner was good, and plentiful. My aunt, however, was definitely snappish. After Amy had cleared away the dishes and my aunt had restored Teddy to his accustomed place on her lap, I found out what the reason was.
"My drawing went badly," she complained. "The wind kept whipping those leaves around until I couldn't get a thing done."
"I didn't notice much wind, Aunt Muriel," I said rather stupidly.
"You just don't notice things!" she flared. "Why, the leaves weren't still a single minute."
I hastened to make amends.
"I can see that a careful craftsman like yourself might be distracted," I placated her. "I'm sorry. I haven't been with artists much." The reference to herself as an artist pleased my aunt.
"Oh, I'm sure you didn't mean to give offense," she said. "It's just that I can't work with anything unless it's absolutely still. That's why I stayed with the apples so long. But I would like to draw that tree. I wonder…She went into a brown study which lasted until she had emptied two cups of coffee.
"Charles," she said finally, "I've been thinking. I want you to chop that tree down for me tomorrow and bring it into the house. I'll put it in one of those two-quart milk bottles. That way I can draw it without the wind bothering me."
"But it's such a nice little tree," I protested. "Besides, it won't last long after it's been cut down."
"Oh, it's only a tree," she replied. "I'll get another from the nursery. And about the withering, Amy is wonderful with flowers. She puts aspirin and sugar in the water, and they last forever. Of course, I'll have to work fast. But if I put in two or three hours in the morning and four or five after lunch, I ought to get something done."
As far as she was concerned, the matter was settled.
Immediately after breakfast next morning, Aunt Muriel led me to the tool shed in the rear of the house and gave me a rusty hatchet. She watched with ghoulish interest while I put an edge on the hatchet and then escorted me to the scene of the execution. Feeling like a murderer, I severed the little sapling from its trunk with a couple of chops and then carried it into the house.
I spent the rest of that day, and the next three or four days, working in the garden. I've always liked gardening, and there were some nice things in the place, though they'd been badly neglected. I divided some perennials and fertilized the earth around them with bone meal. Somebody had stocked up the shed with Red Arrow and nicotine sulphate, and I had a good time spraying for aphids and beetles…
***
Friday morning at breakfast I found a five-dollar bill folded up in my napkin. I raised my eyebrows toward Aunt Muriel. She nodded, yes, it was for me, while a faint flush washed up in her flabby cheeks.
I folded it neatly and put it in my pocket, feeling a warm glow of gratitude for the old girl. It really was extraordinarily decent of her to provide me with cigarette money. I resolved to go shopping for a little present for her that afternoon.
I found that the resources of Downie were limited. After hesitating between a China fawn and a bowl of fan-tailed goldfish, I decided that the goldfish had more verve. I went in after them, and discovered that Drake, the clerk who sold them to me, had been to California, too, and was practically a friend. I made a date with him for a gabfest the following night.
Aunt Muriel seemed genuinely delighted with the fish. She oohed and ahhed over the sinuosity and filminess of their tails and ended by installing the bowl on the little stand beside her easel.
We began to settle into a routine. In the mornings and early afternoons Aunt Muriel drew in the dining room while I worked in the garden. Later in the day I ran errands, walked Teddy, and undertook a bunch of small repairs around the house.
About the middle of my second week with Aunt Muriel, the peach tree withered beyond any hope. She told me at dinner time, with the tone of one announcing a major disaster, that she had had to throw it out. We held a post mortem on the batch of thirty-two drawings she had been able to complete before the catastrophe.
I picked out one of them as having more plastic value than the rest. She admitted it was her favorite, too, and everything was fine.
I could see, though, that she was wondering what she could draw next.
***
The next day she flitted restlessly through the house looking for something to draw. She kept popping out into the yard where 1 was transplanting antirrhinum seedlings, to ask my opinion of this or that as a subject for her pencil. I noticed, when I went in to lunch, that she kept watching the goldfish bowl speculatively, but I didn't make anything of it at the time.
That night when I returned from Drake's house she met me at the door and led me to the kitchen with an air of mysterious triumph.
"I was a little nervous about it," she said, with her hand on the handle of the refrigerator door. "But really, it came out ever so well!" She opened the refrigerator, fumbled in its depths a moment, and pulled out the goldfish bowl. Moisture began to condense on its surface. I stared at it stupidly.
"I knew the fish would never hold still, and yet I was just aching to draw them," she went on. "So I thought and I thought-and really, I do think it was a splendid idea, even if it was my own! I just turned the cold control way down, and put the bowl in, and came back in a couple of hours, and it was frozen solid!
"I was afraid the bowl would crack when it began to freeze, but it didn't. See, the ice is perfectly clear." She picked up a dish towel and rubbed the moisture away until I could see the two goldfish neatly incased in transparent ice. "And now I'll be able to draw them without any trouble. Isn't it wonderful!"
I said yes, it was wonderful and went upstairs as soon as I decently could. The incident left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Not that I held any especial brief for the continued existence of the goldfish, but somehow…
She'd seemed to enjoy watching them swimming about so much, and I'd given them to her, and- Oh, hell!
I woke up the next morning feeling faintly unhappy before I could remember what was disturbing me. When I remembered, I decided that I was acting like a champion chump. To let the demise of two goggle-eyed fish upset me was tops in imbecility. Whistling, I went down to breakfast.
After the meal was over, Aunt Muriel got the bowl out of the refrigerator and set to work. I went out in the shed and messed around with the spray gun for a while.
Looking up at the scaling side of the house, I had an idea. Why not repaint it? I asked my aunt and she approved. Accordingly, after some calculation, I brought home a bucket of paint from the store and started sloshing it on.
The work proceeded slowly. Days went by and I got to be a familiar customer at the paint store. Aunt Muriel had finished her eighty-first study of the frozen goldfish before I'd given the big house its first coat, and the surface was so bad it was going to require at least two.
Spring drifted imperceptibly into early summer, and I was still painting the house and Aunt Muriel was still drawing the goldfish, both of us increasingly absorbed in our tasks.
I was having a pretty good time. Drake had introduced me to his sister, a vivid brunette with just the combination of honey and claws which attracts me most in a woman, and he'd got another girl for himself. We went out together several nights each week. My room in the city with the unpaid rent, the hopeless hunt for a job, and the hunger, seemed a long way off.
I got the painting on the house done the day before Aunt Muriel decided she had exhausted the goldfish. I felt like celebrating. So I mixed soapsuds and nicotine sulphate, stirred up a mess
of Red Arrow, and puttered among the neglected plants to my heart's content.
Aunt Muriel handed me the last of the goldfish studies at dinner the next day and I went over the entire group with her. I was beginning to hate these inquests over the anatomy of whatever she'd been drawing, but I bore up under it as well as I could.
When we'd finished, she said, "Charles, I've been wondering. Do you suppose Teddy would be a good subject for me next?"
I looked down at the little animal where he was lying in her lap and said, yes, I thought he would, but would he hold still enough?
My aunt looked thoughtful.
"I don't know," she said. "I'll have to try to think of something. Perhaps I could give him his dinner right after breakfast. Or…" She went off into one of those periods of meditation of hers and, after a while, I left unobtrusively for my date with Virginia, Drake's sister.
We sat in the porch swing in the dark and held hands while the breeze blew the smell of purple lilacs toward us. It was a sweet, sad, sentimental sort of date.
***
The next day was Saturday. After breakfast my aunt told me to take Teddy for a walk, and to get him thoroughly tired out. She was going to feed him when I got back and she hoped that the exercise, plus the food, might make him comatose enough to serve as a model.
Obediently, we started out. Teddy and I assessed every lamp post in Downie at least twice, and if he wasn't tired out when I brought him back, he should have been. My aunt took the lead from his collar and led him to the pantry where his food dish was waiting, piled high with hamburger.
Teddy ate like a little pig. When he had finished he lay down on the floor of the pantry with a resolute air. My aunt had to carry him into the dining room and deposit him in a sunny spot near her easel. He was asleep and snoring before I left the room.
We had lunch late that day, almost two-thirty in the afternoon, so Aunt Muriel would be able to take full advantage of Teddy's lethargy. I was hungry, and Amy had prepared a really snazzy meal, centering around fried chicken Southern style. As a result, it wasn't until I had finished with the fresh peach mousse that I paid much attention to my aunt. Then I saw that she was looking distracted and morose.
"Didn't the drawing go well this morning, Aunt Muriel?" I asked.
She shook her head until the pendants of her bright earrings jangled violently.
"No, Charles, it did not. Teddy-" She halted, looking very sad.
"What was the matter? Wouldn't he stay asleep?"
If my aunt had been a different type of woman she would have laughed sardonically. As it was, she gave a tiny, delicate snort.
"Oh, he slept," she replied. "Yes, he slept. But he kept twitching and jumping and panting in his sleep until-well, really, Charles, it was quite impossible. Like trying to draw an aspen in a high wind!"
"That's too bad. I guess you'll have to find another subject."
For a moment my aunt did not answer. Looking at her, I thought I caught the glint of tears in her eyes.
"Yes," she replied slowly, "I guess I will… I think, Charles,
I'll go into town this afternoon and buy a few little things for Teddy."
For a moment something cold slid up and down my spine. Then it was gone, and I was thinking it was nice of the old girl, considering how much store she set by her drawing, not to be annoyed at the little dog…
She came up to my room just before dinner and showed me what she'd bought for Teddy. There was a bright red collar with a little bell, a chocolate-flavored rubber bone, and a box of some weird confection called "Dog Treet," which, according to the label, was a wholesome sweetmeat for pets.
She put the collar on Teddy while I watched and then gave him two of the dark brown lozenges out of the "Dog Treet" box. He ate them with a flurry of little growls, and seemed to relish them…
***
Sunday morning I sat around, nursing the old bones until my watch told me it was time to get going if I didn't want to be late for the all-day hike Drake and I had planned with the girls.
We had a fine time in the country. Drake wandered into a thicket of poison oak, and Virginia, giggling, dropped a woolly caterpillar down my neck.
***
It was quite dark when I returned to the house. Even before I got inside I noticed that all the lights were on and that there was a general air of confusion.
When I opened the door I found Aunt Muriel standing in the hallway, having what looked like a fit. Amy was standing before her waving a bottle of smelling salts.
"It's Teddy!" my aunt gasped when she saw me. "Oh, Charles, he's-"
I put my arm around her comfortingly, and my aunt dissolved into tears. They began to trickle over the coating of talcum powder on her cheeks and drop on the high net collar around her neck.
"It's Teddy," she whimpered. "Oh, Charles, he's dead!"
I'd been expecting it subconsciously, but all the same I jumped.
"What happened?" I asked.
"I let him out in the yard for a little run about three hours ago. He was gone a long time, and at last I went out to look for him. I called and called and finally I found him out under the rhododendron. He was awfully sick. So I came right in and called the doctor, but when he got here, poor little Teddy-was-was gone. Somebody must have poisoned him." She began to cry again.
I stroked my aunt's shoulder and murmured reassuring words while my mind was busy. Some one of the neighbors? Teddy had been a quiet little beast, but he did bark once in a while, and some people just don't like dogs.
"Dr. Jones was ever so nice and sympathetic about it. He took poor little Teddy away in a bag. He's going to take him to a man he knows and have him stuffed."
Stuffed? I felt sweat break out along my shoulder blades and under my arms. Mechanically I pulled the handkerchief out of my hip pocket and handed it to my aunt.
She took it and began to blot her eyes. "It's such a comfort to me, anyway," she said, blowing her nose, "to think that he did-enjoy his -last day-on earth."
I took her up to her room and mixed her a bromide. I stood over her while she drank and talked to her soothingly and patted her hand. After a while I got her calm enough so I could go to my room.
I lay down on the bed and stared up at the spots on the ceiling for a while. My heart was beating hard and quick. Pretty soon I reached in my coat pocket for cigarettes and began to smoke.
I emptied the pack while I lay there, looking at the ceiling, not thinking about anything, keeping my mind back, with an effort that was barely conscious, from the edge of something I didn't want to explore. About twelve I undressed and went to bed.
***
I felt soggy the next day. I'd slept, but it hadn't done me any good. Aunt Muriel came in later after I'd pushed aside my toast. She was red-eyed. I said good morning and went out into the garden.
The day was muggy and overcast, and I didn't feel like doing much, anyhow. I disbudded peonies for a while and clipped off seed pods; then I decided to give the Oriental cherries a light going-over with the pruning shears. It ought to have been done earlier. When I'd finished, I went into the shed for some linseed oil and bordeaux to mix a poultice for their wounds.
Reaching for the can of bordeaux, an unfamiliar gleam in the comer behind it caught my eyes. It was a can of arsenate of lead. The label bore the usual skull and crossbones. I opened the can. About a quarter of an inch of the poison was gone.
It might have been in the shed before, of course; I wasn't sure it hadn't been. I held on to that idea: I wasn't sure.
I don't know what I did the rest of the day. I must have pottered around in the garden, trying not to think, until dinner time. Aunt Muriel came to the window once and asked me if I didn't want any lunch, and I said I wasn't hungry.
I guess she spent the day looking at Teddy's box in the living room.
Well, I got over it. Two or three days later, when Teddy came back from the taxidermist's, I'd pushed the whole thing back so far in my mind that my reaction had begun
to seem slightly comic as well as inexplicable.
Even when Aunt Muriel got her pencils and started on an endless series of sketches of the little stuffed animal, it was all right with me. If anyone had asked me, I'd have said it was only natural for her to want to draw the pet of which she'd been so fond.
While she drew Teddy over and over again, I started reroofing the house. It was a rough job because it was full of old-fashioned turrets and cupolas, and the summer was well along before I finished.
Aunt Muriel kept urging me to relax, but I just couldn't be quiet.
After the roof, I started a lath house in back for seedlings. Virginia and I were dating almost every night, and I told myself I was feeling fine. I did notice a slight, steady loss of weight, but I pretended it was due to my smoking too much.
One hot night toward the end of August, my aunt got out the packet of drawings she'd made of Teddy, and I went over them with her.
"I think I'll try a few more," she said when I'd laid the last sketch aside. "And then-well, I must get something else." She looked sad.
"Yes," I said noncommittally. The subject made me uneasy, somehow. But so thoroughly had I repressed my awareness, I had no idea why.
"Charles," she said after a minute. She was looking more depressed than ever. "You've made an old woman very happy. This Virginia you've been going around with so much-are you fond of her?"
"Why-uhh-yes. Yes, I am."
"Well, I've been thinking. Would you like it, Charles, if-if I were to advance you the money to set up a little nursery business here in Downie? You seem to have a real talent for that sort of thing. I'd miss you, of course, but if you wanted to-I'm sure you'd be happy with Virginia, and-" She choked up and couldn't go on.
The old darling! I went around to her side of the table and gave her a hug and kiss. I managed to tell her how happy it would make me and how much I'd been wanting to do just what she suggested. A business of my own, and Virginia for a wife! She was better than a fairy godmother!
12 Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV Page 5
