The Irrepressible Peccadillo

by Fletcher Flora

  I was lucky then, in high school, for Beth took a fancy to me that was somewhat greater than, if not exclusive of, the fancies she had in varying degrees for others. Well, you can’t ask for everything. If I didn’t get all of what then passed for love, I at least got more than my share, and it was in this early period of ancient history, along toward the end of it, that we stopped now and again, while passing through Dreamer’s Park, for the modest frolics in the old bandstand which I had mentioned in telecon, and to which I was now headed by shank’s mare.

  Soon after that we entered the middle period of this ancient era, and this period lasted for nine years and was characterized mainly by my absence from town. I spent most of seven of the nine at the state university in pre-law and law, which made me twenty-five, and then I worked two more for the Adjutant-General, which made me twenty-seven. I was released, as they say, under honorable conditions, and came home. End of middle period.

  I had seen Beth now and then during this time, of course, but not often and never for long, and in the final eighteen months of it, not at all. Now I was home to stay, honorable but undistinguished, never even having met the Adjutant-General, and there was Beth still. If she was not exactly waiting for me, still she was there. She was more or less engaged, in fact, to Sherman Pike, who was about my age and who had become editor of the Record, the local daily, during my absence. Sherm had a good brain and considerable talent, a fine and sensitive fellow, and it was generally conceded that he had a fair prospect of becoming important. I admit that I had been anticipating more of Beth, having learned, as I aged, a lot more about the interesting things you can do with women, even to marrying them, but I was prepared, after I discovered how matters had developed with her and Sherm, to concede and withdraw all claims and look elsewhere for diversion.

  But Beth wouldn’t have it that way. Her fancy for Gideon Jones was still strong, although not exclusive, and pretty soon we had taken up what we had never quite put down, and it was better than ever and kept getting better than that. It didn’t last long, not quite a year, which was the time of the third and final pre-Thatcher period, but it was hot while it lasted, and I began to think about marriage just as soon as my infant practice became able to toddle, and we even tried a few samples that we both liked fine. It was too bad about Sherm, but as things turned out, it didn’t make much difference to him, anyhow, for it wasn’t more than four or five months after my return when he went home one evening and died. He had had rheumatic fever as a boy, and the doctor said that it was an impaired heart that caused it. He was buried on a Wednesday afternoon, having had no time to become important after all, in the cemetery on the east edge of town. I went and Beth went, but we didn’t go together.

  I had no reason to think that things would be different between us, and they weren’t. Not, that is, until the very end of that brief and final period. Everything was satisfactory, even intense and exciting. Beth went out a couple of times with Wilson Thatcher, and I raised a mild sort of hell about it, but she said it was only for a little variety and to help him spend a little money, of which I was short constantly and he never. Then, to get it over with, there was the night when they got married, and that was the end of it. For seven years at least.

  I won’t go into those seven years, except to say that they were rather distressing in the beginning, and I wished that it had been I who died of an impaired heart instead of Sherman Pike. My own was impaired, I felt, but I didn’t die of it, and when Sid came along I was glad I hadn’t. We were married after a while, and it was a good marriage, and I thought of Beth only now and then.

  Until tonight, that is, when I tried to think of her exclusively in the evasion of my conscience. This sad summer night of gin and cicadas at the end of seven years. Walking through the night across the town in spite of common sense and Sid.

  CHAPTER 5

  In your own town, if it is a town of a certain size and character, you probably have a Dreamer’s Park. It is not a large park, occupying only a square block, and it is thickly planted with indigenous trees, possibly oaks and maples and elms and sycamores. Gravel paths, bordered with red bricks set edgewise in the earth, cross the park diagonally from corner to corner, and various gravel tributaries branch off less geometrically from these. Wooden benches with cast-iron legs and arms, the seats and backs constructed of heavy slats, are scattered over the grass beneath the trees, and in one corner, where two streets join, there are a couple of clay tennis courts that are usually not in very good condition. The grass is cut once in a while, but it never has the neat, clipped appearance of golf courses and modern cemeteries. In the center of the park, so that the two diagonal paths must coincide briefly to make their ways around it in a circle, is a wooden bandstand needing paint and repair.

  The park is old, as age is reckoned in your town, and not so much use is made of it now as used to be. A few children play there on warm, dry days. A few families or other groups have picnics under the trees on summer evenings. The tennis courts are used occasionally by poor players who are not particular, but there are better courts for better players other places. The green benches under the trees are mostly occupied by old men who have nothing much to do, and who walk there slowly to sit and rest and doze and dream before walking slowly home again. At night, sometimes, lovers stop by.

  There are no concerts in the bandstand nowadays, but once, a number of years ago, there was one every Friday night of the warm months from May to September. The concert was played by the town band under the direction of the high school music teacher, who was paid extra for this extra service, and he was glad to have the job because he needed the money. People came from all over town to hear the concerts, sitting on the benches and the grass and in parked cars along the four bounding streets, and quite a thing was made of them. The program was printed in the newspaper Thursday evening, so that everyone might know exactly what he could expect to hear, and temporary refreshment stands were erected for the sale of ice cream cones and candy bars and soda pop. The kids ran around the park and sometimes became noisy enough to interfere with the listening pleasure of their elders, but this was not a serious problem and was generally tolerated with reasonably good grace. The program varied somewhat from week to week, but there were several favorites that reappeared regularly, and almost every concert ended with a stirring rendition, heavy on trumpets and trombones, of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Once each season, near Memorial Day, there was a tenor in the band who laid aside his instrument long enough to sing “My Buddy.”

  Nights are long since you went away,

  I dream about you all through the day,

  My buddy,

  My buddy,

  Your buddy misses you.

  Something like that. The tenor was usually not very true, and the amplifiers didn’t help any in that respect, but the song was appreciated especially by the veterans, which may even have included then, if you are old enough now, someone from Shiloh or Antietam or Gettysburg.

  This was Dreamer’s Park, to which I was going, and after a while I got there. I entered the park at its southeast corner, passing between clumps of pfitzers onto the diagonal gravel walk, and it was dark in there under the trees on the walk leading to the heart of the darkness. My heels made crunching sounds on the gravel, and I kept listening for other sounds around me, breathing or whispering or the breathless laughing of lovers, but I couldn’t hear a thing, or see a thing except the trunks of trees and the deeper shadow of the bandstand ahead of me, and then after a few seconds I became aware of a soft and sibilant sound, a kind of hissing, and it was me whistling through my teeth for company.

  Arriving at the bandstand, I went a quarter of a turn around the circle and up rickety steps. The stand was also circular, with a shingled peaked roof, and all around the perimeter was a built-in bench that was no more than a hard seat braced at intervals from the floor with two-by-fours, open space between the seat and the floor. I sat
down on the bench and began to wait, looking out into the park and listening for the sound of Beth’s feet on the gravel walk, but the only sounds I heard came from the four streets beyond, where cars and pedestrians passed sparsely in four directions. I wondered why Beth was so late, for the hotel from which she would come was much nearer than my house in Hoolihan’s Addition, but then I realized that she had probably delayed deliberately in order to avoid doing what I was doing instead, which was waiting alone in this dark park. It was pretty creepy there, as a matter of fact, and I wanted to light a cigarette but decided that maybe I better hadn’t, and then, having decided against it, I was immediately beset by the strongest longing to smoke imaginable, although I am an undedicated smoker who can ordinarily take or leave a cigarette without the slightest trauma.

  Time passed. So, on the four streets, did the sparse cars, the sparse pedestrians. And so, in the bandstand, did the expectations of Gideon Jones, who had been tricked and traduced in the tradition of the past into recurrent jackassery. Not, I believed sincerely, that Beth had done this, then or now, in deliberate malice or cruelty or even indifference. She had merely submitted on impulse to circumstances that had arisen without her contriving. She had merely met someone else and gone another place, just as she had once met and married another man and gone to California. It was all done with a kind of pathological innocence in the most amiable way.

  I stood up and walked across the bandstand to the other side, my steps a truncated series of hollow sounds on rotting boards. The last step brought the toe of my right foot into the space beneath the circular bench, and it made contact suddenly with something soft but substantial down there on the floor. I stood for a moment with breath and motion suspended, and then I breathed and backed away a step and bent down. There was something down there, all right, under the bench, and I touched reluctantly what felt like flesh. Soft flesh beneath my fingertips. Nose, eyes, mouth. Sinking down all the way onto my knees, I struck a match and looked at Beth beneath the bench, Beth’s face with open, empty eyes, and somehow I was not in the least surprised. The match burned my fingers, and I let it fall.

  What did I think? Well, I thought that it was just like Beth, by God, to come to such a sticky end, and that she had surely come in amiable innocence to die with utter wonder that anyone on earth would wish her dead. I thought that it was too bad to kill her, and that whoever had done it should be ashamed of himself. I thought that now I would never have the chance to say good-by to her properly, never in this world. I thought that I had better get the hell away from there if I knew what was good for me.

  I stood and turned and went, leaving her lying where she was, a long way in the end from Miami and Rio and Acapulco and places like that. I walked directly home, the precise route in reverse that I had come, and the cicadas were silent in the trees, and the sad summer night was sour. The house was dark, which signified that Sid was still involved with Rose Pogue and Zoroaster, unless she had returned and gone to bed already, which was unlikely. Going to bed was something I had in mind for myself, although it would be impossible to sleep, for I wanted to be there when Sid got back in order to practice the simple deception of being what I was not, an innocent husband at rest, and I might, by keeping my eyes closed and my breathing deep, avoid the ordeal of casual conversation or the now impossible demands of an interesting time.

  I went upstairs and undressed in the dark and got into my side of the bed and lay there under a sheet thinking. My thinking, however, was not very clear or coherent, and the truth is that I didn’t know what to do, or if I had been smart or stupid in doing what I had already done. I knew that I should have reported Beth’s death to the police, of course, but anyone can see that this would have involved tricky explanations that I preferred to avoid if possible. I felt guilty about going off and leaving her alone on the hard floor of the bandstand in the darkness of Dreamer’s Park, and there was a thin little voice in my brain that kept saying I could at least have seen to it that she was taken somewhere and made comfortable for the night, but this was sentiment unrelated to circumstances or sense. It could hardly be expected that Beth would ever know or care that I had or hadn’t, and besides, considered from a particular point of view, it was a land of dirty trick she had pulled on me, anyhow. And not the first, either, although the last.

  What I was in, plainly, was a mess. Someone had killed her, and I had walked into it full of gin and nostalgia with nothing more on my mind than a minor infidelity, and who had done it, for whatever reason, was something that might never be known if I became involved and placed at the scene, for it might be decided that I was as logical as anyone else could be, besides being convenient. If this developed, as it might, it would certainly be advisable to have some alternate suggestions in mind, and I tried to think of some alternates to suggest, but the best I could do on short notice was Wilson Thatcher, who wasn’t very convincing in the part.

  More likely, I thought, it was someone with a good reason who had followed Beth here from wherever she had been, or most likely of all, it was a local glandular nut who had followed her to the park or had simply discovered her there by accident in the dark bandstand. Still, as I remembered her in the brief and tiny flare of the match, she had shown no signs of struggle or abuse. No bruises or abrasions or torn clothing. Neither had her face in its final expression shown any of the agony or distortions that are supposed to be left by strangulation, which would have been a reasonable technique in a murder that no one had particularly anticipated or planned. There had been only the expression of wonder that this was actually happening to Beth Webb Thatcher, who had lately been living well in various pleasant places.

  It occurred to me then that I had no acceptable evidence, aside from her being dead, that she had been killed at all. And being dead is really no evidence of having been killed, for it is possible to be dead from merely having died. Remembering as clearly as I could as many details as I had seen, I could recall no blood, no wound, not even any bumps. Was it possible that Beth had simply and suddenly died? Some kind of attack or something? This theory, unlikely as it might seem, had a convincing quality as applied to Beth, for it was exactly the land of innocent imposition I wouldn’t have put past her. Nevertheless, I rejected the theory. The odds against it, I thought, were far too great to discount for even so unpredictable a long-shot as she. She had been lying on her back, under the bench where she must have been pushed, and somewhere on her backside, where I couldn’t see it, there was surely the mark of whatever had killed her.

  I wished Sid would come home. I was in no mood for conversation or entertainment, but I was more than ready to welcome a warm and sympathetic presence. Just someone around. Someone I could watch covertly, pretending sleep, as she went about the delightful business of preparing herself for her half of the bed. Someone to lie lightly and breathe softly and sleep sweetly beside me. Not just someone, either. Sid or no one. Specifically Sid, and here she came.

  I heard the car in the drive and the steps on the stairs, and I was thinking realistically when she came into the room that she would surely be neither warm nor sympathetic if the events of the night became known. After lighting a small lamp on her dressing table, she stood with her hands on her hips looking at me. I had turned my head to a position to see her, and I could see her fuzzily through slits and lashes.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.

  She walked over to the bed and bent over and examined me thoroughly. She bent nearer and sniffed.

  “Stoned,” she said. “After giving me every reason to expect something special, he’s drunk himself into an absolute stupor in which nothing can be expected of him at all.”

  She went away into the bathroom, and I could hear water running in there, and a brisk, bristly little sound that was caused, I guessed, by the brushing of her teeth. Pretty soon she came back barefooted, having lacked off her white flats, and got out of what she was in, and into what passed for a nightgown. In t
he gown, a blue shortie with tiny white rosebuds here and there, she returned to the bed and sat down on the edge and again examined me critically.

  “It’s simply an intolerable disappointment,” she said, “and I’ve a good mind to waken him.”

  She considered this for a minute, whether to waken me or not, and then she decided that she would. She shook me by the shoulder pretty hard, but I kept my eyes closed in simulation of the stupor she had charged me with, and after several seconds she stopped shaking. I kept on lying there with my eyes closed, thinking that I had convinced her, but then there was a small and painful explosion on my left cheek which was repeated instantly on my right cheek, and I knew that she had merely stepped up her attack, God only knowing what she would resort to next if necessary. It seemed to me that simulation had become entirely too risky to sustain, and so I groaned and opened my eyes and groaned again.

  “What the hell’s the matter with yon, sugar?” she said. “Why have you gone to bed and to sleep in spite of all our plans?”

  “I’m sick,” I said.

  She laced her hands around a knee and rocked back on her pretty pivot with a derisive expression.

  “Sick? You’re loaded, sugar. That’s what you are.”

  “Nothing of the sort. I had a few more gimlets, I admit, but I’m not loaded.”

  “Where are you sick?”

  “It’s my stomach. Something terrific is going on down there.”