The Iron Cobweb

by Ursula Curtiss

  Oliver was silent and restless, patrolling rather than walking, stopping abruptly to stare through the drenched panes. Would he like more coffee? No, thank you, he would not. A beer, then? She might have offered him hemlock.

  Elizabeth said edgily at last, “If you’re so bent on walking, couldn’t you make more progress outside?”

  “Thanks, but I feel rotten.”

  “If you’re sick you ought to go to a doctor.”

  Oliver wheeled; he said explosively, “I ought to go to a doctor?” and there was a flaming silence.

  He went on walking, with a pattern of pauses that registered only dimly on Elizabeth’s mind, because she was saying in an off-hand voice she would never have thought she could achieve, “You know, we can’t go on like this, Oliver. Don’t look so astonished—it’s time we brought it into the open, don’t you think?” This was what was known as burning your bridges. It wasn’t planned, but there came a time when you could take no more. Elizabeth said, forcing herself to be quiet and even, “You think I’m a hysterical idiot, all swallowed up in morbid self-pity over the baby, taking too many sedatives, imagining things. And I think—” damn her voice for starting to shake “—that you’re the stair that wasn’t there, so that you let me trip and make a fool of myself. I know better now, and I won’t make the same mistake any more. No more confiding tears, and,” said Elizabeth, steady again, “no more trust. You’re interested elsewhere, you—”

  The telephone rang, shockingly loud. Oliver was across the room before the second peal had stopped. He lifted the receiver and listened a moment. He said disinterestedly, “Afraid you have the wrong number,” and dropped it with a click.

  And the pattern of his walk stood out suddenly clear for Elizabeth.

  The turn, past the phone. The halt—beside the phone. The waiting for a call, with the inevitable, unwelcome fact of her being there because the storm had kept her from her usual Saturday morning shopping. Because she felt that the knowledge must show, and because she couldn’t bear to look at Oliver just then, Elizabeth turned her back abruptly and straightened folds of a striped linen curtain. Behind her, so close that she stiffened, Oliver’s voice said tautly, “Elizabeth, you’ve got to believe me—”

  “Do I? Why, I wonder, when you don’t believe me?” She slipped past him, head bent, seeing in a blur.

  “Elizabeth—where are you going?”

  “Anywhere. For a walk.” That at least came out steadily enough. But she had to face him again to get her raincoat from the closet —and Oliver was suddenly looking at her as though she were a lamp, or a table; all his consciousness was somewhere else. His gaze, narrow and intent, was seeing someone else—at another telephone, furious at being cut off?

  Elizabeth got her raincoat and put it on. Oliver said in a short absent voice, “Don’t get soaked,” and started up the stairs.

  Of course—the extension in their bedroom, put in a week ago. Elizabeth had suddenly wanted it, pleading the possibility of fire, needing to know that there was more than one means of communication in the house. She pulled on her boots now, and listened.

  Oliver had gone into their bedroom, but he hadn’t closed the door. There was a peculiar halted quiet, as though he were standing there, listening, charting the silence. But the bedroom windows looked over the front lawn. . . .

  Rapidly, feeling the pound of her heart, Elizabeth went to the back door, opened it on a violence of wind and sleety rain, slammed it echoingly and waited an instant. Her boots were rubber, and noiseless; she was able to go back to the telephone without a sound, to lift the receiver gently and hear the faint airy wait along the line.

  And then Oliver’s voice, not absent now, but urgent. A Boston number, and the drawl as it rang. Elizabeth did not apologize to herself; her visit to the Hotel Savoia had killed that kind of sensitivity. She listened, hardly breathing, hearing the sound of Oliver’s breath, until there was a rising click and a voice said sleepily, “Hello?”

  Male or female? Elizabeth couldn’t be sure; it sounded muffled and husky. Whichever it was, Oliver identified it at once. He said, startlingly close to her ear, “What the hell’s the idea? I told you not to call me here.”

  The answering voice was lazy. “I told you to come across.”

  “For an envelope. Forgetting that?” Elizabeth hardly recognized Oliver’s tight and ugly tone. She stared ahead of her, memorizing a strip of banister, a pulse of rainy light at the hall window.

  “Forgetting nothing. You had your instructions. If it’s too much trouble, I can always get in touch with Mrs.—”

  “Damn you to hell!” It was the first time Elizabeth had ever heard it said like an obscenity. This was Oliver, the Oliver she didn’t know, that three months’ courtship, five years of marriage hadn’t ever permitted her to see. Different—appallingly so. Dangerous, because of his very control. Was it because he had never been so seriously crossed before?

  Elizabeth listened to the silence following Oliver’s curse; it was enigmatic. Oliver said roughly, “Okay, let’s get it over with. Where —when?” and she put down the receiver as quietly as she could, unable to listen to more, swept by a cold sick reaction.

  She closed the front door carefully behind her. The rain, at any rate, was clean.

  She had not been alone in her watching of Oliver at the Savoia. Someone else knew, someone with a voice that held a faint, disguised familiarity, and Oliver was paying blackmail. Angrily, dangerously—but paying it.

  Wind and cold and sleet-needled rain were therapy only so long. Elizabeth walked blindly and furiously away from the house, and became gradually aware that she was nearing the town and that she was chilled through. That, and a faint warning mistiness in her head, made her walk past the toy shop, the jeweler’s, the police station, to the neon nakedness of the drug store. She found an empty phone booth, she heard herself saying floatily, “This is Mrs. Oliver March. I’m at Corbett’s—can I get a cab right away?”

  In the drug store proper, a black-coated woman, seal-shaped, said earnestly to a clerk, “But I’m quite sure I bought this same size bottle a month or two ago for two-forty-nine, and the other man, the red-haired fellow, charged me two-seventy-five.”

  Her small head wove, peering, doubtless, for the perfidious red-haired fellow. Elizabeth watched in a mist: the clerk murmured and slid away behind a high counter, the seal-shaped woman snapped her purse open and shut in a nervous tattoo and sidled along to another display. It was a bank of hairdyes, capped by the enormous cardboard head of a blonde.

  The bank was chartreuse and silver. Elizabeth walked closer, knowing that this was important, trying to think through the sudden blazing furriness in her brain. She was sick, suddenly and bewilderedly sick; that was why she had waked so raw and shaken. But this was important, this chartreuse and silver. She mustn’t lose sight of it, because it meant something, it was like a face calling out for identification. It was Jeep, with a hand clenched solemnly behind him. . . .

  Elizabeth went directly up to the display. In spite of her wet hands, her faintly dizzy head, the shells of heat that went peeling and pulsating away from her body, she could still be quite sure of what she was seeing, fully aware of its meaning. The fragment of chartreuse and silver Jeep had found became magically whole, on the top of the bank at the right. It said, “Halo-Hue,” and under that, “Pink Honey.”

  And Steven Brent said, in the memory of a chance encounter, “You ought to sue, it’s your color.”

  She had been amused then, but she wasn’t now. She thought in a sudden merciless wave of clarity: The checks. The driving license. The hair dye.

  Someone else able, at will, to become Elizabeth March.

  Fifteen

  OUT OF THE WEEK that slid by, while she recovered from grippe and pleurisy, Elizabeth was able to isolate certain sharp moments that stood up like barbs along the strung strained wire of her fear.

  There was the moment when she awoke from a deep flushed sleep to hear her own voice whisp
ering, “Why are you staring at me?” She whispered it to the clear image of Constance’s face, bent close and intent just above her own, frighteningly expressionless.

  “Staring?” Constance’s mild echo came from across the room. When Elizabeth lifted her head, her heart still beating confusedly, she saw that her cousin was standing in the open doorway to the bathroom, a glass in her hand. “You’ve been asleep nearly an hour,” said Constance. “How do you feel?”

  “Better . . .” It had been a dream, then. Had to have been, because no one would crouch over a bed like that, just—staring at a sleeping face.

  There was the day Lucy Brent came, shedding her sharpness and her lorgnette, warmly concerned. “You poor thing. There’s grippe all over town, if that’s any consolation. I won’t ask how you feel, because I know you’re wretched, but I’m just on my way to town and there must be something I can get you. Books? Here, better write me a list . . .”

  Noreen Delaney had just set down Elizabeth’s lunch tray. Elizabeth watched and wondered over the lift of the girl’s eyes to Lucy before she went silently out.

  A dream, a glance . . . at times, during that week, Elizabeth felt like a suggestible child at the mercy of a malicious elder. Were Oliver and Constance and Lucy right after all—was she a victim of her own nerves, subconsciously putting off adjustment to the fact of a still-born child? The odd new peace, the difference in Oliver, the serenity with which the household ran without her argued that she was.

  And she might have believed it, if it were not for the envelope of hair-coloring that stood like a montage over every face around her. That was not nerves, but physical fact. Jeep, whose fingers were everywhere, must have torn it from a packet in a woman’s purse.

  Why, when payment on the checks had been stopped, would another woman want to assume the name of Elizabeth March?

  But payment could not be stopped at hotels, or stores.

  Had she an understudy?

  The bed that had seemed so blissful became all at once intolerable, in spite of the damp ache of grippe, the stab of pain just under her right shoulder blade. She must have waked a hundred times, out of thought or out of sleep, to a panicky listening for the children.

  It didn’t help to realize that the logical tools of imposture bore no relation to the romping malice that had gone before: the wrenching apart of the roses, the sickening of the children on Jeep’s birthday, the sardonic transposing of her Christmas presents.

  Because it was, it must be, the same concentrated brain at work; so honeycombed with hatred of her that it was hardly, by now, a functioning brain at all.

  “. . . Perhaps tomorrow,” said Dr. Halloway, disapprovingly.

  Tomorrow turned out to be a day of thaw, blue and windy, with the lawn as soaked and springy as it was in April and the lilacs black and moist and hopeful. Elizabeth put on a housecoat, out of deference to Oliver’s reluctance that she get up at all that morning, and a faint touch of rouge, out of deference to herself, because her face looked so starkly white in the bathroom mirror.

  Oliver, worried and still angry at himself for having let her go out into the storm on that critical Saturday, said, “Don’t go feeling your oats.”

  “I won’t.”

  “What you’d better do,” said Oliver, looking at her earnestly, “is go back to bed and then get up for lunch and go back to bed and so forth.”

  “I’ll see . . .” She felt stumblingly new in this relationship, not knowing how far to trust the warmth, the normalcy.

  “Whatever you do,” Oliver downed his coffee, looked at his watch and stood, “don’t go up to the studio. That’s probably where you caught cold in the first place . . . is Constance ready, do you think?”

  “Whenever you are,” said Constance from the doorway. Her arms were laden with rental library books; she over-rode Elizabeth’s protests. “Nonsense, it’s a beautiful day and the walk back will do me good. And these books really ought to be returned. Is there anything else you’d like me to get you while I’m there?”

  Elizabeth said no and watched them drive away, wondering, as she had wondered every morning during the past week, if today were the day of Oliver’s appointment with the sleepily vicious voice on the telephone. Or perhaps he had already taken care of that—until the demand for more money should come again.

  She was alone in the house. Noreen had taken the children for an after-breakfast walk, clearly doubtful about leaving Elizabeth. She had said in a low voice, for Elizabeth’s ears alone, “Are you sure you’ll be all right, Mrs. March?” and for an instant, meeting the shadowed eyes, Elizabeth sensed the same recognition she had felt in Maire’s room on the night the child cried out. It put them both on an oddly different basis. She said without smiling, “I don’t know why I shouldn’t be, Noreen—do you?”

  The girl’s eyelids dropped; Elizabeth, watching, thought she saw a faint rise of color in the thin face. But when Noreen glanced up again the oddness, the other meanings might have been imagined. She said in a defensive tone, “Mr. March is very anxious that you shouldn’t get over-tired on your first day up, and I just thought . . .”

  Well, that was all right, thought Elizabeth now, going back to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. And if Oliver had also spoken to Constance, that was all right too, and only normal anxiety. It didn’t mean that she was being . . . watched in another sense, and it was foolish to connect it with Oliver’s warning her away from the studio.

  The swish of her housecoat was loud in the silence. She finished her coffee and wandered idly into the living-room with a cigarette Gradually a small uneasiness grew, a deepening of the feeling she had had once before: that the walls and chairs and mirrors, hidden from her for a week, held a touch, an imprint, a reflection she would have given almost anything to identify.

  Whose?

  The cigarette turned suddenly bitter. Elizabeth rose in a rustle and went to the windows, not wanting to let the thought take possession. It was always there in her mind, of course; it was like a lens through which she saw everything else. But if she lingered over it, if she let it grow, it swelled until it occupied her entire brain and there was nothing in her but a black blind fear.

  . . . It had almost happened now. Elizabeth, at the window, became slowly aware that she had been curling her fingers in and out of her palms in a quickening, tightening tempo, and that the palms themselves were damp. She flattened them hard against the cold glass; she thought wonderingly, Anyone seeing me now would think . . .

  Far down at the end of the road, half-screened by intervening branches, the nose of a black car pulled into view and halted. A man got out of the car, and then a woman. Something about the man’s build, or posture, seemed half-familiar. . . and the woman was her cousin. The man was holding her outstretched hand; when he turned to enter the car again the sun caught a wink of light from his glasses. There was the distant race of a motor and the black nose withdrew. Constance began to walk briskly up the road toward the house.

  “Elizabeth? Oh, there you are, I thought you might have gone upstairs to lie down.” Her cousin, coming in, wore a blown and almost young-girlish look that should have sat awkwardly on her big-boned efficient frame but was oddly attractive instead. Constance set about immediately to rectify it, tightening her rolled-back hair with severe fingers, removing the scarf that the wind had flung over one shoulder. She couldn’t do anything about the pink look of—was it exhilaration?

  She said, putting away her gloves, “It’s a pity you can’t get out today, Elizabeth, it’s more like April than January. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a walk more.”

  Elizabeth glanced across the room. She said casually, “Oh, did you walk?”

  “Yes. I believe Oliver said it was almost a mile from town— but so pleasant on a day like this. Now—” Constance settled her glasses with a thoughtful expression “—I thought, for lunch . . .”

  Elizabeth listened and didn’t hear. She was jolted not so much by the gratuitous lie as by the briskl
y off-hand air with which Constance delivered it. It occurred to her for the first time that, out of appearance and manner and scraps of background, she had built a character for a woman she had never really known. . . .

  Constance had evidently mentioned omelette and asparagus, because that was what appeared at lunch. Elizabeth ate obediently under her cousin’s admonitions. “You must get your strength back, Elizabeth, and you can’t do it on black coffee. It’s not only for your own sake, you owe it to Oliver and the children. After all,” said Constance, giving her keen attention to a roll, “you never know when you might need it.”

  The house quieted for Jeep’s nap. Constance tiptoed upstairs for buttons to sew on a blouse; Noreen washed the dishes while Maire sat at the kitchen table and drew queer tripod-like creatures on yellow copy paper. Elizabeth took a shower and washed her hair. She was brushing it dry when she heard Maire’s long, mounting, infinitely chilling scream.

  It caught her in a second’s paralysis, locking her muscles, stopping her heart, striking her as incapable of movement as though it had been a bullet finding its mark. It echoed again, and sense and motion returned to Elizabeth. She dropped the hairbrush with a clatter and flung her bedroom door open and ran down the stairs. Like lightning against the dark she thought disconnectedly of Oliver saying, “Someday you’ll trip, and break your neck . . .

  She reached the foot of the stairs and a peculiarly empty silence. She thrust open the door to the kitchen and looked in, her breath still catching harshly in her throat—at a scene of perfect serenity.

  Noreen was drying the dishes, just visible through the narrow entrance to the pantry. Maire stood at the door, her back solemn with attention, her hands flattened against the panes. She was watching something, but nothing about her suggested fear. And yet, that dreadful long-drawn sound—

  Elizabeth went quietly up to Maire and looked out the back door. On the sodden lawn at the foot of the steps, not ten inches apart, two cats faced each other in immemorial attitudes of fury. The gray one with scarred jowls shifted a trifle; his yellow adversary flattened its ears and howled.