In fact, Heimrich thought then, he was probably making himself too much at home. He said that, perhaps, he had better be going, although without, immediately, making any move to go. She turned to him then, and looked at him very gravely.
“It’s quite early,” Susan Faye said. “It’s not late at all, my dear.”
The Colonel snored, heavily. But neither of them really heard him.
Cannel coal burned softly in its basket under a marble mantel. Brian Perry had taken his glasses off. She would never, Lynn Ross thought, understand when he had reason to take them off and when to leave them on. Some people put glasses on when they planned to read, and others when they planned to drive. With Brian there did not seem to be any such established order. He’s very different when he isn’t wearing glasses, Lynn thought. He—
“Are you going to sleep?” Brian Perry asked.
“Relaxing,” she said. “There’s a lot to relax from, even after—how long is it? Four days?”
Her apartment was high above the street—so high that the night noises of the street were distant; were no more than components of the surge of sound which is a part of New York—so much a part that it is accepted, barely heard. Across the street, Central Park’s lights were white on snow, and that was all the snow that was left in the city—all that mattered of the snow. In the apartment, one heard no wind. When one touched a light switch, light was inevitable, not a thing to be hoped for.
“You know about such things,” Lynn said. “So—why, Brian? Only for the money?”
She flattered him, Brian Perry told her. But, so far as Kemper was concerned, it probably came to that. He was getting older; getting close to the time when he would no longer be in demand as a charming guest—as the gay young man first thought of when an extra man was needed, paying for the loan of luxury with the interest of ready availability and handiness about the place.
“A man,” Brian Perry said, “has to look ahead. To, say, marrying a woman with a lot of money. But, Margaret didn’t have it. Her husband had it. As simple as that.”
“But,” Lynn said, “they didn’t show it. That they were—” She paused. “In love seems an odd way to put it,” she said.
“Very,” Brian told her, but then he, too, hesitated. “As far as she was concerned,” he said, “perhaps not so odd. As for showing it—it would be rather to the point that they didn’t. Hence, in case anyone might be getting the right impression, his pass at Miss Latham. The carefully stumbling, not to be believed, explanation. Misdirection.”
“Wait,” Lynn said. “Audrey Latham knew about them. It must have been that. I—I was passing her room and heard her talking to Dr. Halley. And she said—‘Don’t think I don’t know about you and—’ And then I went on. It didn’t mean anything, then.”
“Halley undoubtedly knew,” Brian said. “Probably told his—protégée. Her admission that she knew—the fact she had told Margaret she knew—probably was one of the things that frightened her—made her try to run.” He paused for a longer time. “Margaret was in love with Kemper,” he said.
“How can you know?” Lynn asked.
He smiled suddenly, rather widely. He said, “Thanks, my dear. Of course, I don’t know. Any more, I suppose, than our good captain knew. He guessed. I guess. But—that’s part of any diagnosis, my dear. Part of his diagnosis, too, I suppose. It isn’t as simple as adding a column of figures; knowing there’s a right answer, if you add right. If it were, among doctors, one diagnosis would be as good as another, one diagnostician as able as the next. We listen. We prod. We take pictures. We do basics, and make counts, and run chemical tests. And—it still isn’t always a column of figures, with one answer—one answer that’s inevitable. Sometimes you put together what you can find out and you say, ‘Well, it looks like—’ And then, you go on what it looks like. Some of us are better at it than others. I suppose some policemen are better than others are. I think Margaret was in love with Kemper. I don’t suppose she had many illusions about him. She knew that if he was going to marry anyone—and particularly a woman a good bit older than he was—well, he’d want the woman wealthy. So—she tried to arrange it.”
He looked at her, watched her face.
“Don’t let it get you down,” he said.
She shook her head. She said it was that Margaret Halley had always seemed so—“so serene. Able to look at things so clearly.”
He shook his head, then.
“The patient must feel that,” he said. “That there is—certainty. As you say, serenity. Otherwise, it’s no go, of course. But—under that, we’re like the rest of us, my dear. All—higgeldy-piggeldy and every which way.”
He took a cigarette. He said, “Damn,” and offered a cigarette to Lynn. But then he lighted his cigarette and threw the match into the fireplace. He looked at her unlighted cigarette and said, “I’m hopeless.” He lighted it.
“Nothing will happen to her?” Lynn said. “I mean—prison?”
“I don’t know,” Brian said, and drew on his cigarette, and looked at her. “She will get older. Very rapidly, now, she will get older. By herself.”
He drew deeply on his cigarette. Then he snapped it into the fireplace. He leaned toward her.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Captain Heimrich Mysteries
I
Walter Brinkley, professor emeritus of English Literature at Dyckman University, typed to the bottom of page three hundred and fifty-two of “A Note on American Regional Accents” and decided that it devolved upon him to give a small party for Paul Craig and the new Mrs. Craig. The decision was so sudden, so apparently unmotivated, that Mr. Brinkley blinked slightly and re-read what he had just written, hoping to find explanation in typescript.
He was at once successful. He had been discussing—briefly, for four pages only—the subtle, and to so many nonexistent, difference in the pronunciation of the words “marry” and “Mary” and advancing, with appropriate reticence, certain theories as to regional customs in this connection. Mr. Brinkley was reticent because this was, after all, not actually his field. His field was Milton. His Milton’s Boyhood: Twelve to Sixteen was, he did not doubt, a book which would stand. On regional accents he was, at best, an informed amateur. It was this fact which had led him to add “A Note on” to his earlier and tentative title which, standing brazenly as “American Regional Accents,” might have seemed presumptuous.
The word “marry” was, of course, the key word. Paul Craig had married, for the second time, almost a year before. But it was only now—only a week ago, at any rate—that he had brought his new wife home to the big Craig house in North Wellwood—the house which had been closed for so long that many of North Wellwood’s newcomers regarded it rather as a monument to the past than as a residence of the present.
His young friend Craig was going to find things greatly changed, Walter Brinkley thought, separating the ribbon and carbon copies of page three hundred and fifty-two and placing them in their respective piles. Craig would not, probably, be pleased. His young friend Craig—
He must, Brinkley decided, quit thinking of Craig in that fashion. Paul Craig was—Brinkley made a quick computation—upward of fifty. Some years upward of fifty. And I, Walter Brinkley thought with that faint disbelief, that momentarily shadowing disappointment, which never failed to accompany such thoughts—I am sixty-seven. A doddering old man; a man turned out to pasture. Nevertheless, I will give a small cocktail party to welcome young Craig and his new wife.
Walter Brinkley thereupon bounced up from his typewriter—a rather short, comfortably round, noticeably brisk man, with thick and shining white hair and a little-lined pink face. He bounced out of his study, which was on the second floor of his white house on Hayride Lane, and bounced to the head of the stairs and said, down them, “Harry?”
Harry had been doing something—dusting, possibly—in the living room. He came out into the hall and looked up the stairs and said, “Yassuh. Yassuh, professor?”
Ho
w he loves the rôle, Walter Brinkley thought, crinkling inside but showing nothing—except good humor—in his face. The old family retainer; the faithful servant from the deepest South. What a game Harry Washington makes of it, without too much burlesque; without, Walter Brinkley thought, bitterness of any kind; how he plays a part for his amusement and—yes, that too—for mine. And he knows perfectly well that I know perfectly well he was born in New Jersey—South Jersey, admittedly—and went to public school there, and speaks, when he chooses to step out of character—as, for example, at meetings of the N.A.A.C.P.—precisely like anyone else born and educated in South Jersey. An interesting variant, the South Jersey accent—
“Yassuh?” Harry Washington repeated, tolerantly. He was tall and lean and middling brown. He knew perfectly well what the professor was thinking. Every now and then the professor stopped, right in the middle of things, and thought. A very interesting man, the professor.
“Harry,” Walter Brinkley said, “I’ve decided to give a party.”
“A party?” Harry said, in honest astonishment. He corrected himself quickly. “A pahty?” he said.
That was a new one. Two or three people in to dinner—yes. A party, no. Not in the five years during which Harry had been Walter Brinkley’s houseman. When Mrs. Brinkley had been alive—no doubt. But that was before his time.
“You means a real pahty, professor?” Harry said, partly to make sure and partly to get firmly back into the character from which, momentarily and in surprise, he had slipped.
“Cocktail party,” Brinkley said. “For Mr. and Mrs. Craig. They’ve opened the big house.”
“Sho nuff?” Harry said, rather overdoing it.
Harry knew quite well that Mr. Paul Craig had reopened the enormous brown-shingle house, with turrets no less, on Craig Lane. He knew that Mr. Craig had been married for about a year, and that he and his new wife had spent the ensuing time in journeying around the world; he knew that the new Mrs. Craig was a good many years—twenty, and more—younger than her husband, and that she was tall and slender and had black hair in tight curls (a real knockout, they said) and that she and her husband had brought a male cook (white) up with them and two maids, also white, and that Ellen White (who wasn’t) was employed five days a week, six hours a day at a dollar seventy-five an hour, to do general cleaning, but that Joe Parks was being kept on as outdoor man and that Mrs. Joe Parks was expected to lend a hand as needed.
“You means that big brown house up toward Brewster?” Harry Washington said. “Great big old place? That’s the place you means, professor?”
I must learn to be more exact, Walter Brinkley thought, and crinkled again inside.
“That’s the place, Harry,” he said, gravely. “The old Craig house.”
“Oh,” Harry said. “That house.”
It’s probably, Brinkley thought, because he slipped up on “party.” He waited.
“When?” Harry said, and crinkled inside, also. And was externally grave, also.
“Let’s see,” Brinkley said. “Today’s Tuesday.”
“Nosuh,” Harry said. “Wednesday, professor. Wednesday the eighteenth.” He paused. “Of June,” he added.
Walter Brinkley said, “Oh,” not questioning it—Harry was always right in such matters. “Then—next Sunday?”
“Whatever you sez, professor.”
So—not the next Sunday. Brinkley suggested Saturday, but without conviction. It was still whatever he said.
“All right, Harry,” Walter Brinkley said. “When shall we give the party?”
“Whenever you sez, suh. Week from Saturday would be ’bout right. Time to invite people. Get me somebody to help—be twenty-thirty people likely—”
“Oh,” Brinkley said, “I don’t—”
“No suh,” Harry said. “Thirty-five, probably.”
Walter Brinkley had, a little vaguely, thought of a dozen or so. But, no doubt, Harry was right—he was always right in such matters, also. Brinkley remembered that in the old days—how saddening, yet, obscurely, how warming to think of the old days—parties had always turned out to be much larger than he, innocently, had expected. When one came—when Grace had come—to make a list— The warm sadness flowed over Walter Brinkley, who had loved his wife. He turned, without saying anything, and started to go back to his study, and now he did not bounce.
“Ice in the glass, professor,” Harry said, and spoke very gently, so that the gentleness in his voice flowed too over Walter Brinkley. Brinkley swallowed and turned back.
“It’s pretty near one o’clock, professor,” Harry said. “Want I should mix it now? And’s all right with you, suh, I thought maybe an omelet like. With creamed mushrooms? Cut a nice head of romaine this morning and it’s good and crisp now, suh.”
As gentle with me, Walter Brinkley thought, as if I were a child, not an old man, lonely in a house too large. He started down the stairs and for a moment Harry stood there, and looked up at him. Then Harry nodded his head once, as if he were satisfied, and Walter Brinkley nodded back, also once. Harry went off, then, to the kitchen, and Professor Brinkley—who much preferred to be called “Mr. Brinkley” but almost never was—went on down the stairs and across the hall and through the living room to the shady terrace beyond, and by the time he reached the terrace he was bouncing again.
Harry brought a martini in a little pitcher, with much ice, and a long-stemmed fragile glass, still frosty from the freezer for all the warmth of the early summer day, and poured into the glass quickly while the frost still held.
“Thank you, Harry,” Brinkley said and Harry said, “Yassuh, professor. You makes yuh list, suh.”
“Who,” Margo Craig said, and held an invitation card in sight, “is Walter Brinkley? He wants us for cocktails on—” she looked at the card again—“a week from today.”
It was Saturday afternoon, and the mail had just come, just been brought up from the rural-route box on Craig Lane, where the long, winding driveway from the big brown house—the big brown-shingled house, with turrets—joined the side road named after some generations of Craigs. The mail came late because the house was near the end of the mail driver’s long route from the North Wellwood postoffice.
Margo Craig spoke with clarity, each word softly distinct—it was as if she found pleasure in the perfect formation of each word. But, as she sat on the awninged terrace of the big house—when she first saw the house two weeks ago she had thought, unexpectedly, of a great brown bear; ungainly, to some degree monstrous, but yet shaggily appealing—there was clarity in all of Margo Craig. A kind of special distinctness, Paul Craig thought, watching her.
Tall, slender, with long and stockingless legs, brown—a special brown where an intruding splinter of light touched them—from winter in the sun, she was very pleasant to look at. Paul Craig looked at her with approval, and he was a man who did not give approval lightly. Sitting in so low a chair, he thought, most women would seem to sprawl. Margo did not. Breeding, he thought, and that he had chosen wisely. It was appropriate that this young woman, immaculate of body and of mind, should, in a sense, have been appointed Craig.
“A professor of English,” Paul Craig said. “Retired now, I think. The Brinkleys have been around here since the Revolution. Almost, indeed, as long as the Craigs. He spoke to me about the party the other day—yesterday or the day before—in the village. I gather that we are—rather the subjects of his party, my dear.”
She said, “Oh?”
“A welcome back,” Craig said. He was a tall, spare man, gray-haired; he wore slacks and a polo shirt, yet he seemed more formally clothed. He sat in a chair which, while certainly comfortable, was not essentially a terrace chair. It is difficult to achieve austerity on a shaded terrace on a summer afternoon, particularly while sharing the terrace with a wife whose slim legs—revealed without indiscretion in walking shorts—are of quite disturbing symmetry, but Paul Craig did retain a certain austerity. He was not unconscious of Margo’s pretty legs nor, indeed, of the
rest of her—of her wide-eyed face, the delicate rise of her breasts under the (properly) loosely fitted shirt, of the delicate perfection of the fingers which held the invitation to cocktails at Walter Brinkley’s house. He was proud of her; really, quite proud of her. He had been fortunate to find a second wife so suitable. She was more suitable, actually, than poor Helen had been. Helen, it had to be admitted, had been somewhat emotional; at times, even moody.
“I take it then,” Margo Craig said, “that we go to Professor Brinkley’s party?”
“I think so,” Craig said. “It is, on the whole, thoughtful of Walter. A thoughtful gesture.”
“I suppose,” she said, “a rather—intellectual party?”
Craig smiled slightly, and sipped his drink and shook his head.
“I gather,” he said, “people from around here, for the most part. Some of the people who’ve always been here—the Sands, the Farnleys, no doubt—and quite possibly some of the—new arrivals.”
“The ranch-house set?”
He smiled again, again slightly, and said that that, too, was quite possible. “Walter,” he said, “is rather the gregarious type. He always was. Tolerant is perhaps the word. Or—unworldly.”
She nodded and for a time neither said anything. Then she said, “I suppose the community has changed a great deal from—in recent years.”
She had started to say “from the old days” and decided not to. Paul was not unduly sensitive about the difference in their ages—at least, he gave no indication of being—but he might find a certain connotation in “the old days.”
He did not appear to notice that she had changed the wording of her sentence. He nodded; he said that the community had indeed. He said that the change was, he supposed, characteristic of all such communities as that which sprawled around North Wellwood Center.
“When I was growing up here,” he said, “there were only the big houses. Like this one.” He paused. “Well,” he said, “perhaps not exactly like this one. Grandfather rather—let himself go when the old house burned down. Twenty acres—that was more or less the minimum, probably. Now—two-acre plots. And—ranch types. Since it is possible—just possible, I’d be inclined to think—to commute by way of Brewster.” He lighted a cigarette. “Progress, I imagine they call it,” Paul Craig said, with rather marked detachment.
Let Dead Enough Alone Page 17
