Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

Every Wednesday, Mary visited me. This in itself was enough reason to fall in love with St. Anthony’s. Not because she visited me once a week, but because for six days out of every seven I was spared her company. I have spent forty-four years on this planet, and for twenty-one of them I have been married to Mary, and her companionship has grown increasingly less tolerable over the years. Once, several years ago, I looked into the possibility of divorcing her. The cost would have been exorbitant. According to the lawyer I consulted, she would have wound up with house and car and the bulk of my worldly goods, plus monthly alimony sufficient to keep me permanently destitute. So we were never divorced.

As I said, she visited me every Wednesday. I was quite peaceable at those times; indeed, I was peaceable throughout my stay at St. Anthony’s, aside from some minor displays of temper. But my hostility toward her showed through, I’m afraid. Periodically I displayed some paranoid tendencies, accusing her of having me committed for one nefarious motive or other, calling her to task for imagined affairs with my friends (as if any of them would want to bed down with the sloppy old bitch) and otherwise being happily nasty to her. But she kept returning, every Wednesday, like the worst of all possible pennies.

The sessions with my psychiatrist (not mine specifically, but the resident psychiatrist who had charge of my case) were not at all bad. He was a very bright man and quite interested in his work, and I enjoyed spending time with him. For the most part I was quite rational in our discussions. He avoided deep analysis — there was no time for it, really, as he had a tremendous workload as it was — and concentrated instead in trying to determine just what was causing my nervous breakdowns and just how they could be best controlled. We worked things out rather well. I made discernible progress, with just a few minor lapses from time to time. We investigated the causes of my hostility toward Mary. We talked at length.

I remember very clearly the day they released me from St. Anthony’s. I was not pronounced cured — that’s a rather difficult word to apply in cases of this particular nature. They said that I was readjusted, or something of the nature, and that I was in condition to rejoin society. Their terminology was a bit more involved than all that. I don’t recall the precise words and phrases, but that’s the gist of it.

That day, the air was cool and the sky was filled with clouds. There was a pleasant breeze blowing. Mary came to pick me up. She was noticeably nervous, perhaps afraid of me, but I was quite docile and perfectly friendly toward her. I took her arm. We walked out of the door to the car. I got behind the wheel — that gave her pause, as I think she would have preferred to do the driving just then. I drove, however. I drove the car out through the main gate and headed toward our home.

“Oh, darling,” she said. “You’re all better now, aren’t you?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

I was releasedfive months ago. At first it was far more difficult on the outside than it had been within St. Anthony’s heavy stone walls. People did not know how to speak with me. They seemed afraid that I might go berserk at any moment. They wanted to talk normally with me, yet they did not know how to refer to my “trouble.” It was all quite humorous.

People warmed to me, yet at the same time they never entirely relaxed with me. While I was normal in most respects, certain mannerisms of mine were unnerving, to say the least. At times, for instance, I was observed mumbling incoherently to myself. At other times I answered questions before they were asked of me, or ignored questions entirely. Once, at a party, I walked over to the hi-fi, removed a record from the turntable, sailed it out of an open window, and put another record on. These periodic practices of mine were bizarre, and they set people on edge, yet they caused no one any real harm.

The general attitude seemed to be this — I was a little touched, but I was not dangerous, and I seemed to be getting better with the passage of time. Most important, I was able to function in the world at large. I was able to earn a living. I was able to live in peace and harmony with my wife and my friends. I might be quite mad, but it hurt no one.

Saturday night Maryand I are invited to a party. We will go to the home of some dear friends whom we have known for at least fifteen years. There will be eight or ten other couples there, all of them friends of a similar vintage.

It’s time, now. This will be it.

You must realize that it was very difficult at first. The affair with the ten-dollar bills, for example — I’m essentially frugal, and such behavior went very much against the grain. The time when I hurled the typewriter out of the window was even harder. I did not want to hurt my secretary, of whom I have always been very fond, nor did I want to strike all those other people. But I did very well, I think. Very well indeed.

Saturday night, at the party, I will be quite uncommunicative. I will sit in a chair by the fireside and nurse a single drink for an hour or two, and when people talk to me I will stare myopically at them and will not answer them. I will make little involuntary facial movements, nervous twitches of one sort or another.

Then I will rise abruptly and hurl my glass into the mirror over the fireplace, hard enough to shatter either the glass or the mirror or both. Someone will come over in an attempt to subdue me. Whoever it is, I will strike him or her with all my might. Then, cursing violently, I will hurry to the side of the hearth and will pick up the heavy cast-iron poker.

I will smash Mary’s head with it.

The happy thing is that there will be no nonsense about a trial. Temporary insanity may be difficult to plead in some cases, but it should hardly be a problem when the murderer has a past record of psychic instability. I have been in the hospital for a nervous breakdown. I have spent considerable time in a mental institution. The course is quite obvious — I shall be arrested and shall be sent forthwith to St. Anthony’s.

I suspect they’ll keep me there for a year or so. This time, of course, I can let them cure me completely. Why not? I don’t intend to kill anyone else, so there’s nothing to set up. All I have to do is make gradual progress until such time as they pronounce me fit to return to the world at large. But when that happens, Mary will not be there to meet me at the gate. Mary will be quite dead.

Already I can feel the excitement building within me. The tension, the thrill of it all. I can feel myself shifting over into the role of the madman, preparing for the supreme moment. Then the glass crashing into the mirror, and my body moving in perfect synchronization, and the poker in my hand, and Mary’s skull crushed like an eggshell.

You may think I’m quite mad. That’s the beauty of it — that’s what everyone thinks, you see.

Dear Larry,

I’m not sure if there’s a story in this or not.

It happened about a year ago, at a time when I was living in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with a man named Evans Wheeler. New Hope is a small town with a reputation as an artists’ colony. There is a theater there. At the time Evans was its assistant manager. I was doing some promotional work for the theater, which is how we originally met, and I was also briefly managing a spectacularly unsuccessful art gallery.

One afternoon in the late summer I returned to the apartment we shared. Evans was reading a magazine and drinking a beer. “There’s a letter for you on the table,” he said. “From your mother.”

He must have assumed this from the postmark. The envelope was addressed in my mother’s hand, but he wouldn’t have recognized it as we never wrote each other. The city where she lives, and where I was born, is only an inexpensive telephone call away from New Hope. (In other respects, of course, it is much further removed.) My mother and I would speak once or twice a week over the phone.