Family Skeletons

by Patrick Quentin

  “You take them to the chute.”

  For a second she glanced down at the buttons in her palm and the dangling zipper. Then she turned to a table and tumbled them into a drawer. She snatched the suit from me and started for the kitchen. I went out into the hall. I’d lost all track of time, and time could be tremendously important. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes to ten.

  If it was the police, what should we say we’d been doing? I’d come home from the office. We’d had drinks and eaten. We’d gone to a movie but we hadn’t been able to get in. What movie?

  The buzzer shrilled again. I stood paralysed.

  “Lewis,” called a voice from outside. “Lewis.”

  The police fantasy disintegrated. I opened the door.

  “Well,” said Aunt Peggy. “Well, well, well.”

  She was wearing a mink coat, no hat, no gloves, no pocket-book even—just the mink coat wrapped irregularly around her. Even then in my swirl of astonishment and relief, I could gauge almost exactly the degree of her drunkenness. It was about two thirds of the way, the fourth day, probably, of the hidden bottle and the nip. It was the excitable stage of the bright eyes, the persistent giggle, the slight puffiness of the cheeks.

  Aunt Peggy was there. For some reason she was there. Do something about her.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello, Lewis.” The giggle came, not changing the fixed brightness of the eyes. “I’m a fugitive from Sheila’s godawful party.”

  The giggle came again. Still clutching the mink coat around her, she started past me into the living-room with slow, deliberate steps, the ankles bulging a trifle over the edge of the stiletto-heeled shoes. Aunt Peggy had always been big, one of those broad-boned, butter-haired blondes turned out annually on the private school chain-belt for distribution in the social marriage mart. At fifty she should have been indistinguishable from all the other hundreds of pampered females who had drifted undeviatingly from a Main Line debut to a seat on the Milk Fund Ball Committee. God alone knew what had gone wrong.

  God alone knew too what she could be doing here. I watched her cautious progress into the living-room, forcing myself to find from somewhere the resilence to cope with her. I was never good at it at the best of times. Unlike Hugo, Uncle Gene, Tanya and Beth, I’d never been able to keep up the elaborate Denham pretence. When she was drunk, I could only see her as drunk. And when my nerves frayed too far, I yelled at her because the whole business humiliated me.

  We met as little as possible.

  She was in the living-room now, standing on the damp edge of the carpet.

  “Lewis, where are you, Lewis?”

  I joined her. My thoughts, disjointed by relief, were skittering all over the place. Why had Uncle Gene been so idiotic as to take her to Sheila’s party in this condition? How had she managed to slip away? And most of all, how the hell was I going to get rid of her? Call Sheila’s? Have them all pouring over here after her? Take her home then? In the car? An image came of the pianist’s body jammed into the luggage compartment. Aunt Peggy became almost as terrible then as the police.

  She had sat down, settling herself rather cumbersomely into a chair, letting the mink coat drop open.

  I said, “Does Uncle Gene know you’re here?”

  When she was like this, Aunt Peggy seldom answered questions directly. Her face, whose girlish prettiness was still almost intact except for a general plumpening of the contours, raised its gaze from contemplation of her knees.

  “Your uncle? Your uncle as usual is slobbering all over Princess Natasha. Sheila has some extraordinary young man. Really, it’s all most peculiar—really.”

  “But how did you get out?” I said.

  “Out?” It was a fatally wrong word. “What do you mean-out? Why shouldn’t I be out?”

  “Aunt Peggy, you know what I mean. Do they know you’re here? That’s all.”

  “How should I know what they know?”

  “But you can’t just walk out of a party at ten o’clock without their knowing.”

  “Oh, can’t you!” Aunt Peggy giggled again. She’d forgotten I’d incurred her displeasure. She leaned conspiratorially towards me. “If a party’s a godawful boring party and you’re bored to distraction, you can say you’re feeling a little unwell, can’t you? You can say you’re going downstairs to lie down for a while, can’t you? Now, Lewis, don’t be boring, Lewis. Where’s this girl Sheila did so much talking about? Have you got her hidden somewhere? That’s perfectly ridiculous. She’s perfectly enchanting, Sheila says. Perfectly enchanting. Why don’t you produce this perfectly enchanting girl?”

  So that was how she’d got away from 79th Street and that was why she was here. She’d found out about Virginia. Not from Uncle Gene and Hugo, of course, who’d be rigidly suppressing the unsuitable news of my second marriage. Sheila, in her anxiety to make Ray Callender seem as unsensational as possible, had made a point of “breaking the ice” for us all around. I might have guessed it.

  The slightest of sounds made me look beyond Aunt Peggy to the kitchen door. Virginia was standing there tautly. For a moment I thought: Oh God, something’s gone wrong about the chute. Then I realised she was merely waiting for me to make some signal. Bring her in. Get it over with. What else was there to do?

  With a dreadful false cheerfulness, I said, “Oh, there you are, Virginia. Come and meet Aunt Peggy.”

  Aunt Peggy tried to get up but not very hard. Virginia came to her and held out her hand.

  “Hello, Mrs. Denham,” she said, “I’m Virginia Harwood.”

  “Well,” said Aunt Peggy. “Well, well, well.”

  The meaninglessly bright eyes focused on Virginia with no inquisitiveness, with no malice either; they just focused.

  “Charming,” she said. “Perfectly charming. Perfectly …”

  The words drifted off. A fatuous smile came. Then she went blank. She hadn’t passed out or gone to sleep. She was just sitting there—a vegetable.

  I knew what had happened, of course. There’d been the effort of the party, the boredom—always the boredom—and then the artificial stimulus of “sneaking off to see Lewis’s new girl”. Now that Virginia had been seen and was just as boring as anything else, there was nothing to stave off the withdrawal into that world of alcoholic apathy which had become her only reality and which, for all I knew, had some weird secret compensations of its own. I’d seen this dozens of times before and, as always, I felt a kind of despairing rage. Only now it was immensely stronger.

  “Aunt Peggy,” I shouted.

  Virginia shot me a look, blank, bewildered.

  I grabbed my aunt’s arms and shook her. “Aunt Peggy.”

  “Charming,” she said. “Quite, quite charming.”

  Her voice tilting, Virginia said, “What’ll we do?”

  “Coffee,” I said. “It might help.”

  She dashed back into the kitchen.

  “Aunt Peggy,” I said again and the phone rang. It rang again. I ran and picked it up.

  “Lew, for Christ’s sake, is Mother there?” Hugo’s voice, under emotional stress, always receded to a schoolboy alto.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Thank God. I was certain that’s what she’d do. Has she been there long?”

  “Just a couple of minutes.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you call us?”

  “She’s …”

  “Never mind, never mind. We’ll be right over.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “We can take …”

  I stopped because Hugo had hung up.

  Virginia came out of the kitchen.

  “Who was it?”

  “Hugo. They’re coming for her.”

  “They? All of them?”

  “I don’t know. But I couldn’t stop them. He hung up.”

  “But …”

  “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. They’ll take her home and then … How’s the coffee?”

  “I’m making it. But …”


  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve told you. It’s all right.”

  Virginia went back into the kitchen. Aunt Peggy gave a sigh. I turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide open. A tiny bubble of saliva had formed at the corner of her mouth. I turned my back. In my mind I was saying over and over again what I’d said to Virginia and didn’t even begin to believe.

  It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. It’s all perfectly all right …

  They came, dozens of them it seemed—although in fact it was only Uncle Gene and Tanya. They brought as always their own individual atmosphere of dazzling condescension. The Denhams made every room they walked into seem not quite good enough for them, feudal lords stopping off for a moment to bring bowls of soup to the cottagers. Aunt Peggy was better. The coffee and the bustle of arrival had pulled her around until she was almost sober—more than sober enough for the family to pretend there was nothing the matter at all. As it happened, that only made it worse, because now there was no longer an “emergency,” they were turning the whole thing into a social event, their formal introduction to Virginia.

  They took off their coats and sat down. They expected drinks as if that was their reason for being there. After I’d brought the drinks they concentrated on Virginia, handling her with their most platinum charm. There was nothing to reveal the faintest hint of the fact that only a few hours before Tanya’s husband had been spluttering, “You can’t possibly marry a woman like that,” while Uncle Gene, upstairs at the Club, had been waiting for the word that the “adventuress” had finally been put to rout.

  Tanya, at least, had the grace to look a little uncomfortable, but Uncle Gene was shameless. I was absolutely certain that Hugo had told him about the marriage and just as certain that he was shaken to the core. But he was treating Virginia with the polish of a diplomat handling a foreign potentate. Did he have anything up his sleeve? I wondered. Some weapon which, of course, it would be unthinkable to use now in front of Aunt Peggy? Possibly. But possibly too this was just another demonstration of the Denham hypocrisy which they called breeding. Whatever it was, now that it was running parallel with their own dreadful need for dissimulation, its smoothness was quite unendurable. I stood with a strong drink, next to Aunt Peggy, watching Virginia and marvelling at the skill with which she was parrying them.

  As minute ticked by after minute, I struggled against the turmoil of my nerves, telling myself this didn’t really matter. It wasn’t much past eleven. It was still too early to get rid of the body; this awful family party wasn’t making the thing jammed in the back of the car any more dangerous; in fact, for all I knew, it might even later be a help. But the tension in me—almost like an actual physical pain—grew more and more acute.

  At one point I glanced at Aunt Peggy. She was sitting up quite straight in the chair beside me, smiling a gracious smile, turning her head from one talker to the next, nodding occasionally to indicate that she agreed with or at least was taking in the conversation. Oh God, I thought, any minute now she’s going to get interested and talk and talk and talk. That meant that Uncle Gene, with his blind, unflagging courtesy to her, would see to it that we all listened until the talking jag had worn off. When? An hour from now? Two hours from now?

  It was in the same second of my looking at her that she looked at me. Or rather, she didn’t look at me, she looked at the drink in my hand which hovered only a foot or so away from her. In a flash the idea came. Tanya was chattering on about something. I half turned away from Aunt Peggy and took out a cigarette. I put my drink down on the table next to her so that I could light the cigarette. Then, as if I’d forgotten the drink, I pretended to listen to Tanya.

  Thirty seconds or so later when I picked up the glass it was empty. And only thirty or so seconds after that, I heard Aunt Peggy give a little grunt. Then she half fell out of the chair.

  I sprang to her, supporting her, easing her back against the cushions.

  I said, instinctively slipping into Denhamese, “Uncle Gene, I think Aunt Peggy’s overtaxed herself a bit. Hadn’t you better take her home?”

  It worked. Instantly Uncle Gene and Tanya were scurrying around Aunt Peggy. Tanya was helping her out of the chair. Uncle Gene, hovering, looking a little flustered, was murmuring to Virginia.

  “She’s not at all strong, you know. Not strong at all, I’m afraid.”

  They were helping her to the hall. She wasn’t completely out. That is, she could walk. One leg could move forward and then the other. But that was about all. They were in the hall. They were putting on their coats. Uncle Gene was opening the door.

  “Well, good night, good night. No, Lewis, don’t come to the elevator. We can manager.”

  I stood on the threshold for a moment, watching Aunt Peggy’s bulky back as they coaxed her down the corridor. I closed the door. I turned to Virginia. She smiled a pale, despairing smile.

  “Well, they’ve gone.”

  “Yes,” I said. “They’ve gone.”

  We went into the living-room. The relief I’d been expecting didn’t come. Eleven-fifteen. The wait still stretching ahead of us seemed interminable. There were, I knew, dozens of details we should have been thinking about and discussing, but my mind was no longer working that way. The moment I thought now of the body in the car, I could feel panic uncoiling like a snake in my stomach. Don’t think then. Wait. When it has to be done, do it.

  Virginia was moving about the room picking up glasses and dirty ashtrays. From the steely conscientiousness with which she was doing it, I could tell that it was her way of keeping herself in control. And why not? What could be more sensible? Go on pretending it was just an ordinary evening, that people had come in, that glasses had to be washed. She went into the kitchen. I followed her.

  Quite absurdly, not saying anything to each other, we stood at the sink. Virginia handed the washed glasses to me; I wiped them and put them away in the closet.

  Then the phone in the living-room rang. I looked at Virginia. She looked at me. The phone rang again. I went to answer it.

  I picked up the receiver, feeling the sweat slippery on my palm.

  “Mr. Denham?” It was a man’s voice, rough, dimly familiar.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “This is Ben, the night man down at the garage.”

  It seemed to me that the floor under my feet was teetering very slightly to and fro.

  “Mr. Denham, I just stepped out for a moment and I figure I should tell you, seeing you was planning to use the Chevy later on. George says the doorman called down for him to bring it out front. Seems your uncle called for it. Seems your aunt wasn’t feeling too well and they couldn’t get a taxi so your uncle said to use the Chevy. If I’d been there, I’d of called you first to check, but the doorman just told George to bring it round front and he done it. That’s okay, I guess, isn’t it, Mr. Denham?”

  He’d stopped talking. I knew it. I was supposed to say something. I knew that too. But my tongue seemed to be made of sponge.

  “That’s okay, isn’t it, Mr. Denham?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s okay.”

  “Just thought I’d call and check. Okay then, Mr. Denham. See you later, maybe.”

  I put down the phone and stood looking at the damp impression of my palm on the black plastic of the receiver. I could hear Virginia in the kitchen. I knew I must keep the snake from stirring. Uncle Gene had taken the car. That was reasonable. He’d wanted to get Aunt Peggy home as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. When he got home he’d call, or if he didn’t I’d call him and go pick up the car again. Nothing that mattered was changed. Why should he look in the luggage compartment? What conceivable chain of circumstances could bring that about?

  It would be all right.

  There it was, the feeble, solitary straw to which I had clung so many times that evening.

  It would be all right.

  I went into the kitchen. Virginia was standing with her back to the sink.

  I said, “You mustn’t wor
ry, because it’s going to be all right. But Uncle Gene’s taken the car.”

  She put the back of her hand up to her mouth. I could see the knuckles pressing against her teeth. Her terror was more nakedly evident than if she’d screamed.

  I took her arms. “Virginia, it doesn’t matter. He won’t find it. There’s no reason on earth why he should. We’ll wait for him to call. If he doesn’t, I’ll call him and go pick it up again.”

  “No!” she said.

  “No?”

  “Not you—not just you. The two of us. This is because of me. Whatever we’ve got to do, I’m going to do it too.”

  Her arms were around my neck. Her lips were clinging to mine and then moving stumblingly over my face.

  “Lew,” she said, “Oh, Lew.”

  She had started to sob. I slipped my arm around her and drew her into the living-room and down on to the couch. Still sobbing, she was clutching me to her, and as I kissed her and murmured incoherent comfort, I began to realise that her instinctive feminine capitulation to the horror was more effective than my rigid attempts at self-control. Gradually in the warmth of physical contact, I could feel the nervous tension slackening out of me.

  When the phone rang ten minutes later, I was almost calm.

  It wasn’t Uncle Gene. It was Tanya.

  “Lew darling, I hope you’re not furious. We took your car.”

  “I know,” I said. “The garage man told me.”

  “We simply had to. As you can imagine, it was rather awful with Mother and not a taxi anywhere. I drove them back and I’ve just got home. What shall we do with the car? Do you want us to bring it back?”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll come and get it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course.”

  I heard her murmuring to Hugo. Then she said, “That’s lovely. Then you’ll stop in for a drink, won’t you? And please, Hugo says, do bring Virginia.” She gave a little laugh. “He told me, you know. About the wedding. You are a beast not to have said anything yesterday. He’s simply dying to meet her. I told him how charming she is—how impressed I was.”

  So she was impressed, was she? I thought of her dark Slavic frown in the restaurant and her appalled “But … Beth!” Were the Denhams changing the party line?