It wasn’t at all funny. At least not then. It wasn’t even pathetic because I wouldn’t let it be. I had come there to challenge Uncle Gene. It was desperately important that I remain single-minded.
“Lewis!” she said, and then paused and then said again very loudly, “Lewis. I shall ask your opinion. To stop me on Fifth Avenue is one thing. Why not? One has one’s responsibilities towards one’s classmates, regardless. And to invite me for an apéritif to Schrafft’s … well, that is debatable although Schrafft’s is clearly her sort of place. But to say in Schrafft’s—in Schrafft’s, mind you—over a tremendous double daiquiri which she downed without turning a hair—to say to me, to make a criticism in Schrafft’s of me and my—hat!”
Aunt Peggy made a vestigial move of the hand towards her head.
“Lewis,” she said, “just tell me this. Is a woman of the calibre of Adelaide Himmelford entitled to take it upon herself to say that my hat is too pink? That pink was a colour for debutantes and what not and … I don’t care. But that a woman of that sort should peer at me through those terrible artificial roses and say, Margaret Morrison—she still calls me Margaret Morrison, which is in itself affected-Margaret Morrison, we are both more than thirty years too old for pink!”
That final “pink” came out in an explosion which seemed to take all the air out of her. She sank back into the chair and, quite horribly, tears sprouted in her eyes. Then the eyes closed and her mouth dropped open with a sharp little snoring sound.
Uncle Gene came hurrying in then. I could tell from his harried expression that Miss Coppleby had gone scurrying with the news.
“My dear,” he began. “My dear …”
When he saw her, he broke off. He turned to me, not greeting me, merely registering the fact that I was there and therefore exploitable.
“Lewis, as you see, your aunt is unwell. You will take her home. The limousine is downstairs.”
He turned then and started to leave the room, sublimely assuming that that would be that. This display of arrogance was exactly what I had needed.
I said, “I’m not going to take her home. I’ve come to talk to you.”
He swung back as astonished as if Miss Coppleby had suddenly goosed him.
“But, Lewis, you can see for yourself …”
I said, “I’ve come to speak to you. And then …” Of course. Get it all over at once. Confront them both at the same time. “To you and to Sheila Potter.”
He was no fool. That was enough to give him at least a danger signal. I could tell from an infinitesimal slacking of his jaw.
I said, “But you’re right. Aunt Peggy is obviously ‘unwell’. She’s obviously got to be taken home. Okay. We’ll take her together—and meanwhile I’ll call Sheila.”
There was an un-Japanese phone by the couch. Watching Uncle Gene, keeping the tension going, I went to it and dialled. Aunt Peggy said quite distinctly, “Pink.” It didn’t deflect Uncle Gene’s steady gaze from my face. Sheila answered the phone.
I said, with deliberate rudeness for Uncle Gene’s benefit, “I want you to go to Uncle Gene’s immediately. Uncle Gene and I will meet you there.”
Uncle Gene did make an effort to assert himself then. As I slammed down the receiver, he said, “Lewis, that’s no way to talk to Sheila.”
I said, “Let’s get Aunt Peggy out of here, shall we?”
It was wonderful having the upper hand. I didn’t deceive myself, of course. I knew it was only caution that was keeping him under control. The anger was there all right but he wasn’t going to let it show until he knew just what it was I had up my sleeve.
Together, one armpit each, we lifted Aunt Peggy to her feet. We walked her out of the room and past Miss Coppleby, who quickly averted her gaze. Clearly Uncle Gene had imbued in his staff the Denham philosophy of not seeing what was unfit to be seen. We got Aunt Peggy down the long, lonely elevator ride and out through the stretches of imposing lobby to the limousine. Leon, the driver, opened the rear door and, when we pushed Aunt Peggy inside, stood at attention as if she were the First Lady instead of a sack of potatoes.
Uncle Gene didn’t say a word on the trip uptown. He knew what he was doing. The silence was to give the rebellious nephew time to think better of whatever rash act it was that he was planning to make.
Once when we stopped for a street light, Aunt Peggy sat up, smiled and said brightly, “What a lovely day.”
Uncle Gene turned to her, smiling patiently, putting his hand on her knee. “Yes, dear,” he said. “Yes, it’s a lovely day.”
“Your hand,” said Aunt Peggy crossly, “is on my knee.”
That more than anything else undermined me because it vividly brought alive to me the stultifying ordeal of Uncle Gene’s married life. Who else could have stood it all those years? Who was I to blame him for turning to Sheila? I stopped that train of thought. I wasn’t blaming him for Sheila. That was his own affair. I was blaming him for killing Olsen and pinning the murder on Virginia.
Uncle Gene had sold the house on 70th Street when Hugo and I grew up. They were living now in an apartment on Sutton Place. When we arrived, we got Aunt Peggy out of the limousine and past the doorman, to whom she must have been a familiar sight, and up in the elevator.
Uncle Gene let us into the apartment. There was no sign of Sheila. Was it possible she was defying me? With great gentleness, Uncle Gene led Aunt Peggy away from the foyer towards her bedroom.
“Now, my dear, a little rest and you’ll be as right as rain.”
As right as rain! In her pink, ruffled bedroom? Did Uncle Gene still refuse to admit to himself that there was a gin bottle hidden in the window seat or in the laundry basket in the bathroom? Or had he, through the interminable years, just lost his will to fight?
I went into the living-room. It was huge and commanded the inevitable panorama of the East River. Oddly enough, in spite of its splendours, it didn’t intimidate me the way Sheila’s apartment did. They had moved there too recently. It held no youthful associations. But as I gazed down at the traffic swarming over the 59th Street bridge, Lieutenant Trant seemed horribly present. I had been away from Virginia for four hours now, and Lieutenant Trant could make better use of four hours than anyone I knew. What was he up to? I thought of the buttons and again I was plagued by his baffling delay in inspecting the apartment, the carpet, the car. If he’d been waiting for lack of evidence, wasn’t the button evidence enough? What if he were there right now? What if he’d shown up with a search warrant?
Anxiety for Virginia hit me like a karate blow. Why had I left her alone? What was I doing here?
“Now, Lewis.” Uncle Gene’s voice sounded behind me. I turned to see him entering the room and closing the double doors behind him. Without Aunt Peggy, he was himself again. The eyes, under the lion’s eyebrows, were glittering with an icy alertness. He moved to the window and stood so that his back was to the light. He was even taking that small advantage.
“All right,” he said. “You have come to me about Virginia Harwood. I am perfectly aware of the situation. A police officer came to see me this morning. He was quite explicit. Well, what do you expect me to do for you?”
So that was the way he had chosen to play it! I had never mentioned Sheila. All that was to be ignored like Aunt Peggy’s “seediness”. He had launched his counterattack before I had attacked at all.
“Do for me!” I exclaimed. “Have I asked you to do anything for me?”
He decided to consider that question rhetorical. “Now, Lewis, I am sure you are intelligent enough to realise that before I agree to help you, you must agree to help yourself. I know how stubborn you are. I have always known it and done my best to handle you with this in mind. You will admit, I think, that I took the news of this extraordinary marriage very well. On the theory that what was done could not be undone, I was prepared to make the best of it, as indeed were Hugo and Tanya. There is always the chance that in the right environment Virginia Harwood might rehabilitate herself. Women
of that sort can be very adaptable. But when in less than a week we find that she is involved in a murder, and not merely any murder, but the murder of a former husband, a man apparently of the most criminal character …”
“For God’s sake!” I said. It was all I could get out in my anger.
“Before this marriage,” continued Uncle Gene as if I were something incapable of answering back like a tape recorder, “you might have thought for a moment about the obligations you owe to your family, to the people who have accepted you as part of their lives. Since you obviously didn’t and obviously do not intend to now, I can only suggest that you think a little about yourself. The lieutenant tells me that all the evidence points to your wife. This Olsen had more than enough information about her to threaten her with blackmail, and judging from what little I myself found out about her this does not surprise me in the least. He was shot with a gun similar to the gun you own. There is even every indication that he was planning to meet her before he was killed. There is, in fact, nothing to prevent the police from arresting her—except for one thing.”
He raised a minatory hand. “Now, Lewis, do not interrupt. This Olsen was killed around five-thirty; the body was kept somewhere until later that night, when it was transferred to Wall Street. But all through this period, it seems, you claim that your wife was with you. Now this is it, Lewis. This is what you must tell me as a man would tell his own father. Have you been lying to protect her? If you’ve been willing to incriminate yourself to protect a woman who is clearly little more than a common … a common … you are more an idiot than I imagined you to be. But if that is what you have been doing, this is the time to admit it, and I shall use whatever influence I possess to see that you are dealt with as leniently as possible.”
I had read many times about “speechless rage,” but I had not known that the phrase could be literally true. All the time he had been talking, my tongue seemed to have swollen, filling my mouth, choking me. The two of them! Uncle Gene and Lieutenant Trant, sitting there in his goddam skyscraper office, calmly considering me, the imbecile adopted orphan who had to be saved from myself and my criminal enslavement to a common … a common …! I had never before hated Uncle Gene. Even in the most browbeaten moments of my childhood, I had respected him as much as I had resented him. But now, when I thought of what I suspected he was doing … no, what I knew he was doing—for hadn’t everything he’d said been exactly what he would have said if he’d killed Olsen and was pinning the murder on Virginia?—I felt sheer, unadulterated hatred.
He was looking at me now with the celestially resigned patience of St. Peter on the job at the gates of heaven. I knew that at any moment he was going to ask, “Well, Lewis, what do you have to say for yourself?”
That brought my voice back.
I said, “I’m glad to hear your opinion of me and of Virginia. And, of course, I can understand your reluctance to accept another scandal in the family. After all, you and Sheila Potter are about all the Denham traffic can bear.”
“Lewis.”
I had known what would happen to him and in my fury I had thought I was going to welcome it, but the sudden crumbling of a face which I had never before seen without its dignity was painful to watch.
“Lewis,” he said again.
I said, “Didn’t you know that’s why I came to see you? To let you know that I’ve found out? It’s been years, hasn’t it? You’ve been sleeping with Sheila for years.”
It was while I was saying it that the double doors opened and Sheila Potter came in. She had heard what I said. It stopped her dead in her tracks beside a blue wing chair. She put her hand on to its back to steady her as she glanced from me to Uncle Gene.
It was to Uncle Gene she went. She gently touched his arm.
“It’s all right, Gene. It doesn’t really matter.” She turned back to me then. “So you’ve found out. I was almost sure of it when you called me in that truly ominous fashion. But how did you do it, Lewis? At least I think I’m entitled to know that.”
She was quite unruffled again. Her smile was her normal, gracious smile—the smile for dear Lewis of whom, after all, she was rather fond. Why did nothing ever come easily? Why could I save Virginia only at the cost of smashing all the relationships which, before I knew her, had been for better or worse in my life?
Should I tell her that Princess Natasha had betrayed her? No. Why? Why let them know anything they didn’t have to know.
I said, “I just found out, that’s all.” And then, because I might as well make a clean sweep, I added, “And I asked you here to let you know that I’m going to tell Lieutenant Trant. There’s nothing you can do to stop me. You can tell him anything you like about Virginia and the cigarette case. It’s gone far, too far, for that to matter any more.”
Uncle Gene, in a state of what seemed to be total collapse, had sunk down into a couch. She sat down beside him, taking his big, bony hands in hers. I had never thought about her being the stronger of the two. That, of course, was because I had only known Uncle Gene in his public character.
She looked at me, not at all rattled, it seemed.
“You think,” she said, “that telling the lieutenant about us will somehow help Virginia?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You realise what a scandal would do for your Aunt Peggy—for all of us?”
“Yes,” I said.
Uncle Gene raised his head then. His face was still nakedly exposed. It was difficult to look at.
“Lewis, I beg you …”
Uncle Gene begging!
“No, Gene.” Sheila patted his shoulder and stood up. “I think this is something for me.”
She came to stand in front of me. She was wearing no makeup at all and her face, in showing its age, suggested the rejection of all pretence. Had that been deliberate? I wondered. Had she, after I’d called, carefully thought out the appearance and attitude most likely to disarm me?
“Lewis dear, I know how much you love Virginia. I can imagine how you are suffering for her, and if you think she’s innocent, I for one am more than prepared to believe you’re right. Of course I can see why you’d be desperately eager to find out anything—anything at all to make things easier for her. But, Lewis, my dear Lewis … some things, once they’re broken, are beyond repair. So I wish you’d listen to me for a moment, just for a moment before you …”
There was a sudden little puckering under her eyes and a catch had come in her voice. I would have been certain the catch was genuine if I had been able any longer to believe that anyone’s reactions were genuine.
“Lewis dear, your Uncle Gene and I have been in love for twenty-three years. I met him a week after I’d married Edward Potter. You never knew Beth’s father, did you? So you’ll never realise how pathetically dependent … Well, I suppose there may be some women who could have done it to him but I was not one of them. You see, strange as it may seem nowadays, your uncle and I were both trying to be civilized human beings. So that was that. The great renunciation! Your uncle married your Aunt Peggy, and virtue was triumphant. But virtue, Lewis dear, never seems to triumph for very long. We tried but it happened and it went on happening and …”
She put her hand on my arm. It seemed to me that the last few days had been a succession of feminine Denham hands—Sheila’s, Tanya’s, Princess Natasha’s—all tugging at my sleeve, offering comfort, reminding me of obligation, pleading for my sympathy. What the hell did I care about the spiritual struggles and tribulations of Uncle Gene and Sheila Potter in their Ladies’ Home Journal dilemma of twenty-three years ago?
“Lewis, I’m not asking for your pity. I don’t suppose we deserve it, although, through the years, we’ve punished ourselves thoroughly enough by a ridiculous Puritan sense of guilt. But think of your aunt. At least we’ve kept her from even suspecting. Think what it would do to her if she had this to face too.”
“Yes.” That came almost inaudibly from Uncle Gene. “Yes, Lewis, I beg you for the sake of your au
nt!”
“And why?” broke in Sheila. “What can you gain for Virginia by killing Peggy, because that’s what it’ll do and you know it will. Lewis, can’t you believe me? Whatever you may think, your Uncle Gene and I had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Quentin Olsen’s death.”
I had been waiting for a false note to be struck and there it was, revealing once and for all the phoniness of this emotional onslaught upon my loyalties. All vestiges of sympathy for them were routed.
“Nothing to do with Olsen’s death?” I said. “When he’d been blackmailing you both to a fare-thee-well for the past fifteen months?”
“Blackmailing us?” Uncle Gene jumped up. There had been something in that which had restored his normal bullying vitality. “Lewis, that is preposterous. This Olsen blackmailing us? How dare you make such an accusation!”
The sheer gall of that statement threw me momentarily off my guard.
I said, “You mean you can stand there and …”
“But it’s true.” Sheila’s voice broke in, deflecting me from Uncle Gene. “Your uncle knows nothing about this, nothing at all. At first when I tried to call Olsen’s bluff, he threatened to go to Peggy. I knew that would be disastrous, so when I gave in I paid him exactly double what he asked for, just for that very reason—to keep him from tormenting Peggy or Gene. At least I could stop that. It was better to have only one of us suffer.”
“Sheila!” Uncle Gene went to her, hovering solicitously over her. “Then all this time …?”
“Why should I have brought you into it?” she said. “What good would it have done?”
It was only then, as I looked at Uncle Gene, seeing his astonishment, sure, quite sure that it wasn’t a pretence, that I remembered the one flaw in my theory of his guilt. I had put it out of my mind for the very reason that it had been damaging enough to nullify everything. But now as I remembered it, I saw that Sheila had swept it away. If she had let Uncle Gene know that Ray Callender had stymied Olsen, there would have been no motive for him to kill Olsen. But she hadn’t told him—because to stall off the “disaster” of anything getting to Aunt Peggy’s ears, she had kept Uncle Gene from knowing anything about the blackmail at all.
Family Skeletons Page 18
