An Air That Kills

by Margaret Millar

  As a compromise she tried to get in touch with Harry at his office. She was informed that Harry had left the country a week previously and his present location was unknown since the head office in Detroit handled all transfers to the United States.

  The following afternoon she received a badly typed letter from him, postmarked Kansas City, Missouri.

  Dear Esther:

  I tried to say good-bye to you but I was told you were ill. I hope you are feeling better by this time and bearing up under the terrible strain. As you probably know by now, Thelma and I decided to separate, and I applied for a transfer and landed here, of all places. It’s a lot like home, even the climate, though I guess it’s warmer here because there’s no lake.

  I feel the way I did when I first left home for boarding school, like a mass of jelly inside from sheer homesickness. The nights are the worst. In the daytime I keep busy. I have to. This is a big city and I have to get to know it the way I know Toronto, if I’m to be any good to the company. They’ve given me a company car to drive, by the way, and everyone is very nice, so I’ve really nothing to complain of, jobwise. If I could only get over this sick, empty feeling inside.

  I have just reread the first page of this letter, and for a guy who has nothing to complain of, I certainly complain! Forgive me, Esther. You have your own sorrows, I’m a dog to add to them.

  I’ve sent Thelma three special-delivery letters but she hasn’t answered. I know you two aren’t likely to go out of your way to meet each other, but if you hear any news of her through Ralph or Billy Winslow or Joe Hepburn, please let me know.

  I have so many things to say to you but somehow I can’t say them. I want you to know one thing, though­—I accept full responsibility for what happened. It was entirely my fault, I should have been more alert, more suspicious, more everything, I guess. I can’t go into the details, they are too personal, but I repeat—it was all my fault and mine alone. Ron would be alive today if it weren’t for my weakness and vanity. Last night I dreamed I was a murderer, so I guess this is how I really feel inside.

  I will try to be more cheerful next time I write. Meanwhile, take care of yourself, Esther.

  Love,

  Harry

  It was the second time within a week that the word mur­der had come up.

  She reread the last part of the letter, thinking how simple­minded Harry was to believe that a catastrophe could be caused by any one person. A lot of people were involved, not just the leading characters, but the bit players, the prop man, the stagehands, waiting in the wings.

  In the same mail a letter, with an imposing letterhead of six names and the address of a law firm, contained an in­congruously informal message:

  Dear Esther:

  I’d like to drop in early Friday morning. No papers to sign, but a few matters to discuss.

  Yours,

  Charles

  Charles Birmingham was a tall, austere man in his early sixties with a strong British accent which he had picked up at Oxford and managed to retain for forty years, intact. His too-formal manner of dressing gave the impression that he was always on his way to a wedding or a funeral, and his cold fishy eyes indicated that it didn’t matter which.

  Esther didn’t like him, and he considered her a fool, so there was little room for a meeting of minds.

  He came to the point of his visit without any preliminary niceties. “Mrs. Bream has retained an attorney.”

  “Yes, I just had a letter from Harry yesterday telling me he and Thelma have separated.”

  “I’m afraid you miss the point.” Women always do, his tone implied. “This has no bearing on the separation. It con­cerns Mrs. Bream’s unborn child. If Ron hadn’t been so idiotic as to write that letter and you hadn’t been so precipi­tate about handing it over to the police, we’d have an ex­cellent chance of winning our case.”

  “Winning our case? You intend to fight?”

  “To the best of my ability. As your attorney, it is my job to protect your financial interests.”

  “Have I any say in the matter?”

  “Naturally, but it’s customary for clients to take the advice of their attorney.”

  “Is it, indeed?” Esther’s smile was chilly. “Well, I don’t always do the customary thing.”

  “I’m sure you don’t. However, in this case, I do hope your negativistic attitude toward me personally won’t inter­fere with your better judgment.”

  “I don’t like the idea of going into court, not one bit.”

  “If you’re sued, you’ll have to.”

  “Well, fix it so I won’t be sued. Why can’t the whole thing be handled in a friendly, civilized manner?”

  Birmingham’s lifted brows indicated his low opinion of this suggestion. “My dear Esther . . .”

  “I don’t want any scandal or fuss.”

  “There already is scandal.”

  “I know that.” She remembered the soft, queer voice on the telephone, and her own terror, so paralyzing that she couldn’t answer, couldn’t even hang up. “It’s got to be stopped. I’m afraid to go out, afraid to send the boys to school. I have this feeling that we’re being watched.”

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you propose we do about it?”

  “Offer Thelma money to leave town. Once she’s gone, the rumors will die down, people will forget, I can begin to live again.”

  “How much money?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars. It would be worth that much to me to see the end of her.”

  “Suppose she refuses?”

  “I don’t see why she should. She has nothing to gain by staying here, except shame and humiliation and ridicule.”

  “Perhaps that’s what she wants, self-punishment, self­-debasement.”

  “Thelma’s too sensible for that.”

  “My dear Esther, one of the things you learn early in my profession is that you can’t tell from the outside who’s sen­sible and who’s not, and a great deal of the time you can’t tell for certain what’s sense and what’s not. As far as I was able to gather, Mrs. Bream is not the usual femme fatale with a string of extramarital affairs behind her. She’s an or­dinary virtuous woman who has committed the kind of sin which ordinary virtuous women don’t permit themselves to commit. If they do, they suffer. Mrs. Bream is suffering, suffering doubly because of the drastic consequences of her infidelity. In such a frame of mind she’d be unlikely, I think, to accept the kind of pay-off you suggest.”

  “Why?”

  “It might seem to her a reward for having done something she loathes herself for.”

  “You read too much psychology.”

  Birmingham permitted himself a small tight smile. “Not at all. I practice it.”

  “I still think you’re wrong about Thelma.”

  “Quite possibly. I talked to her only once, yesterday, in the presence of her attorney. She said very little, seemed un­interested, detached. Finally she complained of feeling ill, stomach cramps, dizziness, and so on. Purely psychosomatic, of course.”

  “Have you ever,” Esther asked coldly, “been pregnant, Mr. Birmingham?”

  “Fortunately, no. When I left, Mrs. Bream was trying to get in touch with the doctor, and her attorney was hopping around the office like a nervous stork. I deplore such excite­ments. Her attorney, by the way, hinted delicately at a small monthly stipend from the estate until the baby is born. This is impossible, naturally.”

  “Why?”

  “Any payment—including the one you suggested—would be a virtual admission that your husband was responsible for the child. Then, later, when the child is born, we wouldn’t have any grounds to fight the case. Mrs. Bream, or rather, her attorney, who will probably receive twenty-five percent of any settlement, would be in a position to make some pre
tty stiff demands.” He added on a note of cheer, “Of course there’s always the possibility that Mrs. Bream won’t carry the child to term, or that it will be born dead, in which case our responsibility ends.”

  “What an inhuman remark to make.” Esther had turned white with anger and her hands trembled as she lit a cigarette.

  “It wasn’t intended as such. You have an unfortunate ten­dency to over-emotionalize the issue. A natural womanly reac­tion, of course, but it increases the difficulty of my position.”

  “What is your position, to distort the facts?”

  “My dear Esther . . .”

  “You know the truth and so do I. Let’s face it.”

  “Facing the truth,” Birmingham said bluntly, “is going to cost you a heap of money.”

  “All right. I’ve got a heap of money, haven’t I?”

  “Considerable, yes. You also have two arms, but that’s hardly a reason for discarding one of them.”

  “A very poor analogy. Look, Mr. Birmingham, let’s get this straight. I hold no brief for Thelma. I don’t like her and never have. But I feel a certain obligation toward her because I . . .” She hesitated, coloring slightly. “Because I understand her position. It could happen—has happened—to other—other women. I don’t intend to fight any claims she makes on the estate. My conscience wouldn’t allow it.”

  Birmingham had not been Galloway’s lawyer at the time of his divorce, but he remembered the case and Esther’s role in it and be began to realize that it was futile to argue with her. Whether or not she liked or approved of Thelma Bream, she had made a very strong identification with her: There went I. Only I was luckier.

  “Very well,” he said. “We’ll let the matter ride for the present.”

  You will, I won’t, she thought. But aloud she said cordially, “Of course. I’ll see you to the door.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “It will be a pleasure.”

  She stood at the door watching his departure. He walked stiffly down the broad stone steps of the veranda and crossed the driveway to his car with ponderous dignity, like a penguin crossing an Antarctic waste, never missing the warm places of the world because he did not know they existed.

  Though she had disliked Birmingham for years, she had never before openly opposed him. Now, like a child who has suddenly issued a declaration of independence, she felt a new power and vitality, as if some secret well of energy had been tapped. She ordered old Rudolph to check her car and bring it around to the front of the house. Then she went upstairs to dress for town. For the first time in a month she passed the closed door of Ron’s room without the increased heartbeat of fear and guilt.

  “You’re out of practice,” Rudolph said. “You better let me drive you, Mrs. Galloway.”

  “No thanks. You can stay and help Annie with the boys. Tell them,” she added, “tell them they’ll be going back to school tomorrow.”

  Usually, when Esther drove downtown, she avoided the heaviest flow of traffic. Today she deliberately sought it out, feeling a pleasant, reassuring sense of anonymity. She was a woman in a car among hundreds of other women in cars. There was nothing special about her to attract attention. No one would bother watching her. No one but some crank on a telephone would believe she murdered her husband.

  At the Bank of Commerce, on the corner of King and Yonge, she withdrew from her checking account two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, sealed them in an envelope and addressed it to Thelma. It was not an act of kindness or of pity, but one of compulsion, and the emotions behind it were deeper and stronger than kindness or pity.

  Whatever the reasons, it was, for Esther, the first step back into the flow of life. Others followed, as spring passed into summer. She met friends for lunch at the King Edward or the Royal York or the Plaza. She and Nancy took their combined brood of six to Sunnyside for a day of rides. She wrote to Harry, cheerful, impersonal letters which he answered in the same vein. She went to dinner at the Winslows’ house and to several outdoor concerts with Joe Hepburn, who was tone-deaf but liked fresh air and crowds. The first week in July she drove the two boys and Annie up to the lodge near Wiarton, and promised them a return trip before school started again in September.

  Aside from sending the money to Thelma once a month she had no contact with her, but she heard from Turee that Thelma was having a difficult time during her pregnancy. She had rented her house in Weston and taken a small apart­ment in town to be nearer her doctor in case of emergency. Esther wrote down Thelma’s new address in her address book, and the following day, a stifling morning in early August, she drove slowly past the apartment house on Spadina, trying to find enough courage to stop and ring the bell. But the car kept right on going as if of its own volition, and Esther thought, There was no parking space anyway. And it’s so hot. And early—she might not even be up. Besides, I have nothing special to say to her, no comfort to offer her, no special formula, no guarantee.

  Throughout the summer she had been making similar ex­cuses to herself, and while they oiled the surface of her mind, they did not seep down and touch the grit and gravel underneath. She was stoned by dreams of identification in which she became Thelma, harassed and trying to defend herself, accused and trying to justify herself, continually at the mercy of some cold-eyed stranger or some false friend. The accusing figures in the dreams varied—Birmingham, Turee, an un­known policeman who resembled her father, a schoolteacher she had once hated—but the accused was always the same, Thelma-Esther, like a double exposure, one image super­imposed on the other.

  She took the two boys back up to the lodge again for the final week in August, and on returning she began outfitting them for the school year ahead.

  The meeting which she had both anticipated and dreaded for a long time took place in Eaton’s College Street. She had just started up the escalator to the children’s wear department when some woman stumbled getting off at the top. There was a little flurry of excitement by the time Esther reached the scene—the escalator attendant had propelled the woman to a chair, a floorwalker was waving his hand­kerchief in front of her face in the vague hope of whipping up more oxygen, and a clerk had been sent for some water.

  The woman, heavy with child, seemed embarrassed at all the fuss, and when the clerk returned with a paper cup full of water she refused it. Instead, she rose with awkward dignity, made her way to the nearest counter and stood there a moment to steady herself.

  Esther approached the counter and said, “Thelma?” and the woman turned, squinting, as if she’d been summoned from some dark world into sunlight.

  “Are you all right, Thelma?”

  “Yes. I’m fine.” Her face was puffy, like rising dough, and her legs distorted by swelling. Her maternity dress, soiled around the collar, clung in wet patches between her shoulder blades and under her arms. Perspiration and oil had seeped through her make-up and stood out in droplets along her forehead.

  “It’s good to see you,” Esther said. “I’ve thought of you so often.”

  “Have you?” Thelma smiled dryly. “Thanks.”

  “I—look, couldn’t we go some place for a cup of tea? We can’t talk here.”

  “I have nothing to say. Besides, my intake of fluids is very limited. Thanks all the same.”

  “I’ll admit I felt bitter toward you at first, but not any more. I wish we could be friends.”

  “Do you?” Thelma turned back to the counter which was filled with infants’ toys, rattles and teethers and rubber dolls and stuffed animals. “I’ve gone this far alone. I think I can manage the rest of the way.”

  “How much longer do you have to wait?”

  “Why all the sudden interest?”

  “It’s not sudden. Listen, we could go over to the Honey Dew for some toasted scones. Or some butter cakes at Child’s.”

  “I’m on a diet.”

 
“All right then, a leaf of lettuce and a dab of cottage cheese.”

  “Why are you being so persistent?”

  “I want to talk to you,” Esther said truthfully. “I’ve wanted to all summer, actually, but didn’t have the nerve.”

  “Nerve?”

  “Well, whatever you want to call it. I was—embarrassed, I guess.”

  “That’s a word I’m beginning to understand quite well.”

  “Have things—has it been hard for you?”

  Tears appeared in Thelma’s eyes. She blinked them away, obstinately. “Why should you care?”

  “I don’t know why, exactly, but I do.”

  “It’s been hell.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t, don’t be sympathetic. It’s the one thing I can’t stand. Oh, for God’s sake, let’s get out of here, people are staring, I think I’m going to cry.”

  She didn’t cry, though. By the time they reached the nearest Child’s she seemed to have herself under good control. The coffee-break crowd had left and the early lunchers

  hadn’t arrived, so the place was nearly deserted. They chose a table in the corner farthest from the windows, and Esther ordered butter cakes and black tea, and Thelma a chicken salad which she looked at ravenously but barely touched, as if she knew too well the penalties of such a splurge.