“Captain,” Hilda Thayer said, coming up behind him, touching his arm. “Do you really catch murderers?”
III
A pleasant party, Heimrich thought, driving away from the remnants of it at a few minutes before eight—driving toward the setting sun, toward the other side of Westchester County, toward his room at the Old Stone Inn in Van Brunt, which recently he had found a convenient place to live when he was not compelled by circumstances to bunk down in the Troop K barracks. Some of the new and some of the old at the party.
He thought of the Misses Monroe and smiled and shook his head a little. In another few years, he thought, there would be no more Misses Monroe. Not anywhere. And, although the houses might stand for years yet—stand until they burned down, which is the expectable final fate of frame houses—there would be no more of the big white houses, either. It would not matter if the houses stood for a long time yet, some of them—this was particularly true across the line in near Connecticut—with Revolutionary cannon balls embedded in ancient timbers. They would, if they did not burn down first (and if zoning authorities permitted, as after much fussing they usually did) be converted into multiple family dwellings. The old white houses on the many Main Streets.
State troopers rode horses in those days, he thought. The distance he would drive from North Wellwood to Van Brunt in an hour or so must have taken a long time on a horse. On the other hand, there must have been much less need to hurry in those old days—fewer people must have meant fewer crimes. Not, he supposed, that the people in the big white houses were essentially more law-abiding than those in the new, often vari-colored, ranch houses, “contemporary” houses. They might even have been inclined to take things into their own hands; the grandfathers of the Misses Monroe had certainly taken a good deal into theirs, and with fewer restrictions on the taking. Which might, one would suppose, have conditioned them to accept, in general, fewer restrictions on everything.
In another few years, he thought—having nothing else of special interest to think about—there will be no more mixtures of the old and the new such as had made Professor Brinkley’s party gently interesting. (He could not contend that it had been wildly exciting.) The pretty girl with the dark red hair—she and her cousin and her cousin’s husband and the sandyhaired young man she had gone with such innocently revealed eagerness to meet—they and their friends would take over. (Of course, they were not really of the “ranch-house set.” They were Navy, which made a difference. But everybody was something, which made a difference too.)
The Misses Monroe and, no less, the Brinkleys, the Thayers, the other big-white-house people, wouldn’t be around much longer. Which, Heimrich thought, is true everywhere, of course. Except that here, in Northern Westchester, in Northern Fairfield, too, there is a more immediate overlapping than in many places, so that one can see more clearly what is going on—see the old, the rural, dissolving in the strong solvent of the new, the semi-urban. (Well, then, the “exurban.”)
The Misses Monroe, the Mrs. Belsens, did not, he supposed, following the meandering blacktop beyond Katonah, toward Yorktown Heights, realize in any real sense that this final change was going on. (There were still presidents of garden clubs, who still wore hats, usually, and appropriately enough, with flowers on them.) Oh, they knew, of course—by and large, in his considerable experience, they were observant and intelligent people. But they did not feel the change they saw; did not really believe in it.
The Professor Brinkleys, of course, both knew and felt. But there were not many Professor Brinkleys, who were of “the big-white-house set” more or less by chance; who might have come from, lived, anywhere. (Except, as the professor himself would have been the first—very much the first—to point out, for a matter of accent. How he did ride that hobby! And, to be fair, how interesting he made it!) And the Craigs—the Craigs felt it strongly enough, and tried to hold it back. They tried to hold it back not only on the material level—with zoning laws, with stratagems to maintain what they so commonly called the “rural character” of such areas as they preferred to keep to themselves. They tried to hold it back on the more subtle, seldom openly admitted, basis of class.
Heimrich wondered, idly, whether it had not been the presence, at the professor’s party, of so many of the ranch-house set, commuters, which had given that pretty Mrs. Craig her sudden headache. Or—and at this thought he grinned to himself—the presence of so clearly a lower class individual as a policeman.
Craig. Hadn’t he heard something about a Craig? A Paul Craig?
Idly, for want of anything better to do, Heimrich flipped the cards of that mental filing cabinet all good policemen maintain. “Craig.” No, no Craig. Not anything, then, with which he had had to do directly. Something he had heard about. Therefore, not in the filing cabinet. If anywhere, in the catchall of loose ends.
It remained vague, without outlines. He did not worry it; it was not worth worrying. Something—wasn’t it?—about the rather unforgiving attitude Craig had taken toward someone—an employee?—who had done some small thing another man might have passed over, not called the cops about. “There’s a mean bastard for you”—hadn’t someone said that about a man named Craig, after quite correctly listening to Craig, quite properly taking the steps indicated? Possibly—something like that. The outlines did not appear. No problem of mine, Heimrich thought; no problem then or now.
He had a late dinner at the Old Stone Inn. He walked, in the evening’s coolness, for a time in Van Brunt Center. He went back to the Old Stone Inn and went to bed.
“I,” Lieutenant Alan Kelley—USN, but momentarily in sports jacket and slacks—said across the table, “should very much like to marry for money. In fact, I was brought up to expect it. It is an old Annapolis tradition and I am an old Annapolis grad, steeped in tradition.”
“‘Grad’ indeed,” Dorcas said.
They had reached coffee and cigarettes. To celebrate, they had also reached tiny glasses of cognac. They were at a table for two under a bust of, Dorcas thought, Hermes. But, perhaps, Apollo; one Greek god looks very like another. They were in a restaurant in Ridgefield.
“Then,” Dorcas said, “you will have to look farther. Much farther.”
“Don’t think I haven’t,” Alan told her. “Over and above the call of.”
“I’m sure of it,” she said. “I don’t doubt it for a moment. It’s really ‘proceed and report’? And ‘to count as leave’?”
“Commander, Atlantic Fleet, for service aboard DD 197. 15 July. To count as leave. You keep changing the subject.”
“For how long?”
He touched her hand. He shook his head. He said, “Now baby.” He said, “You keep changing the subject.”
“Money,” she said. “I still haven’t got any.”
He managed to look extremely sad. He shook his head very sadly.
“And otherwise,” he said, “you’d do nicely. Very nicely. It’s rather a pity.”
“I know,” she said, and managed to sound sad. Two weeks, she thought, two weeks, two whole weeks—“We would have made such an attractive couple, too.”
“But,” he said, “think how red haired they all would have been. Perhaps it’s just as well.”
“All?” she said. “What do you mean, all?”
“Now,” he said, “take Brady. Take the commander. Marries into the same family and—look at them. Rolling in the stuff.”
“Well,” she said, “not really rolling.”
“I’d consider it rolling. Rolling is as rolling does.”
“My uncle the admiral,” Dorcas said, “married it. Not for it—at least I don’t think so. My mother the admiral’s sister—” She sobered suddenly. She thought of her parents, who had died almost together, as if by—almost as if by—some deep agreement that neither would live without the other.
He touched her hand again. He was quick to follow. The touch said, We quit playing now. The touch said, It wasn’t much of a game—just a little game.
“I wish,” Alan Kelley said, “I’d known your father. I wish I’d known you when you were a very small girl, and remembered the teachers you remember. I wish I’d been in the seventh grade of the Horace Mann School when you were in the third grade.”
“The Longfellow,” she said. “And—you wouldn’t have come within blocks of me. You’d have said, ‘Girls!’ No—more like ‘Gu—rrls!’ With a growl in it.”
He told her that she must have known very unpleasant little boys. He told her that he had been a very pleasant little boy, polite and considerate always. Especially to little girls who had red hair. He said, “Since you haven’t got money, it’s very fortunate you have red hair, isn’t it?”
“I,” she said, “am terribly sorry about the money, Alan.”
“Well,” he said, “when we get to be admirals, we’ll have a limousine with an enlisted driver. We’ll have a Navy house. We’ll buy food at commissary rates. We’ll buy drinks at half price at the officers’ club.”
“That’s nice,” Dorcas said. “Of course, we’ll be about—about what? About a hundred?”
“Little faith,” he said. “That’s what you’ve got. Little faith as well as no money. Only red hair. Probably, since I’m so unusually polite and considerate, I’ll be an admiral by the time I’m—oh, forty-five or fifty. A small admiral, of course. But an—” He stopped. “You know,” he said, “you’re very lovely. I love you very much.”
“Even if I haven’t—” she began, and caught herself and was, oddly and for an instant, ashamed that she had not quite made the turn with him, since they went hand in hand. (Although now their physical hands no longer touched.) Not the game at this instant; not any of their games. “I know you do,” she said, quietly. Then, for seconds, they said nothing. Then he looked around the restaurant and, when their waiter saw him, scribbled in the air ….
It was a little after midnight when he stopped the Ford outside the Maples Inn in North Wellwood.
“Why,” he said, “do they name so many inns after trees?”
“There really is a guest room,” she said. “Not a very big guest room, but—”
He shook his head.
“Brady and Caroline are there.”
“I,” Alan Kelley said, “am a polite and considerate Navy lieutenant, steeped in tradition. I am also allergic to—chaperonage.”
“I wish it were—next Saturday,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “But—we’ll never wish days away, will we? Even waiting days.”
He kissed her. He moved very suddenly, very resolutely, out of the little car.
“‘Get thee to a nunnery,’” he said, and she slid across the seat, behind the wheel, moving as quickly, as determinedly, as had he.
“Yah!” Dorcas Cameron said, and drove away—drove, for a block or two, rather more rapidly than was really necessary because she so little wanted to drive away at all.
Caroline Wilkins wakened very gently and lay awake, not surprised at wakefulness, although she supposed it was still the middle of the night, feeling at first no urgency of any kind. She wakened and listened. She heard, from the other bed, his slow, deep sleep-breathing. The bed isn’t empty, she thought. It isn’t empty.
She lay quietly, so as not to waken Brady. He woke easily—she supposed always, but knew only that when they were together he wakened so. If she turned in bed he would waken. It sometimes seemed to her—although of course that was absurd—that if she thought “loud” thoughts, even that wakened him. She did not want to waken him now; she did not want things in any way other than, in this gentle moment, they were. She wanted only to listen to his slow breathing and know that—for these cradled moments—the other bed was not empty. She would not think—did not think—that the bed would be empty again so soon; that, by Monday night—do not count the hours until Monday night—she would not hear Brady’s sleep-breathing, could turn all she pleased and disturb no one; could think any thoughts she chose, and waken no one.
Awaken no one, worry no one. She had managed the last for hours now—held the little worry in her own mind, willed it to diminish. And—it had diminished; so greatly diminished that not even Brady, who seemed (she sometimes thought) to live in her mind as immediately as in his own, had sensed the shadow there. The little shadow—the immaterial shadow. The shadow from the past, bringing back, with a sudden flicker of darkness, those months not to be counted, not to be remembered.
Yet, she had remembered. When the telephone had rung the afternoon before, only minutes after Dorcas had left her to go to the party, and she had hurried to it, thinking it Brady again and heard the other voice—she had remembered. Not wanting to remember; thinking it almost forgotten.
Not forgotten. It could not, of course, be that, nor was there any real reason it should be. But a thing relegated to the past, where it belonged—to the life of another girl; a silly girl who had thought herself wise, long ago in a place far away. A thing fenced away there, isolated; a small aggregate of ancient facts, moldering, no longer having color or poignancy. “Forget it,” Brady told her patiently, tenderly; had told her often. “It hasn’t anything to do with us.” And, gradually, that had come to be accepted, to be true.
And it was true. Not even a remembered voice—not, surely, the fact that the voice was remembered—could change that truth. It had nothing to do with them; had never had.
Yet—she would have to tell Brady about it—now that telling him would no longer mar the perfection of first rejoining. Tell him the fact—the fact of a telephone call out of long ago; tell him (which would, in a sense, be harder) that the voice, long stilled to her ears and she had thought to her mind, had been, from its first (interrogatory) mention of her name, recognized, familiar.
“So what?” Brady would say, when she told him. “You remember a voice.”
(But he would say that, brush it off like that, only to brush it from her mind, because he would know it a shadow on her mind.)
So what? indeed, she told herself, lying quietly in bed, listening to the quiet sleep-breathing of a loved man in the other bed. He would be right when she told him; right to dismiss it. And, she did not doubt, in his own mind he would dismiss it, since he had an ability to live now, in the immediate moment of living. An ability, she thought (her mind digressing) I had always believed more a woman’s than a man’s. But, it seems, an ability not mine.
She willed her mind steady, willed “loud” thoughts out of it. Send those months back to the—the segregation ward. Nothing—and surely not this trivial thing—can bring them into now. I made a mistake. Long ago I made a mistake. Everybody does, Brady says, and Brady is right. When one is nineteen and certain—so very certain, so pathetically certain—one is entitled to make mistakes. And the mistakes made then do not really corrode, really blemish. They only—leave a little smudge; a smudge that fades slowly, that time erases.
It is because I am still too young, she thought; young enough to want past and present alike perfect, the whole thing of one perfect piece. Well, things aren’t that way, and now is fine—the now of my life perfect. It is only because of that, she thought, because moments can shine so, that I fear shadows. It is the mind’s wariness; the mind’s instinctive knocking on wood.
I should go to sleep, she thought, and thought then of her father and thought, Thank you, father; thank you very much for what you did—for everything, for taking the quick (but quickly passing) fury of a child you loved, and not being swayed by it. And, most of all, for being right. I must write him tomorrow, Caroline thought; it’s been two weeks since I wrote him.
Very softly, she reached out toward the watch on the table between the beds. She did not think she made any sound, and looked at the glowing dial and saw that it was a little after two, and Brady Wilkins said, “Carry? You all right?”
“I’m here,” she said, very gently.
“I’m fine, Brade. Go to sleep.”
She did not herself return to sleep until once more she had heard the soft sleep-breathing from the bed beside her own.
“Very tall,” Margo Craig said, and sipped breakfast coffee. “Very large altogether. But with the smallest possible voice.”
“Oh,” Paul Craig said. “Mrs. Belsen. The big house at the corner of Parley Street.”
“We’ll see her?” Margo said. She lighted a cigarette. She said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Paul,” to a husband who could not stand cigarette smoke—anybody’s—until he had entirely finished breakfast. She put the cigarette out.
“Probably,” Craig said. “From time to time.”
“And the cute little old ladies? The Misses Something?”
“Monroe,” he said. “Cute, Margo?”
“Perhaps that isn’t the word,” she said. “Perhaps the word is ‘quaint’”.
“I doubt we’ll see a great deal of them,” Craig said. He smiled, faintly. “They’re not exactly contemporaries of mine, my dear.”
She was quick to say of course not; to add, that she had not meant anything so absurd. She said that she was only trying to sort people out; that he must remember they were all new to her, and met in quick succession. “And,” she added, “when I already had a headache coming on. I’m so sorry about that, Paul.”
“Sorry?” he said. “Nobody chooses to have a headache, my dear.”
“All the same,” Margo said and now, since Craig had finished, was himself shaking a cigarette from a pack—was, indeed, holding the pack out to her—lighted a cigarette. “A new wife among old friends. And, she—conks out.” She used the alien word with just enough hesitancy to show her appreciation of its foreignness.
He nodded. He understood—even her use of the slangy word.
“Probably,” he said, “we’ll run into—oh—the Thayers. Jas Knight. At the country club. Not the Misses Monroe, I imagine. Or Mrs. Belsen, come to that. Although I’ve seen her lunching there.”
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