Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

As the afternoon changed into evening Bret sank further into depression. It was a grim task he had set himself, spying on Paula’s house like a detective or a jealous husband, waiting for the worst to happen. During the months he had been rebuilding his mind from its wreckage, it was Paula who had given him hope and energy to work against the inertia and boredom that oppressed him. She had provided the central meaning for the jerry-built thing he had made. His mind retreated in panic from the edge of the ruin he foresaw if Paula should be lost to him, the desert of dry ashes where he had lain once for an eternity bound hand and foot by paralysis of the will, in the undawning twilight of a mood too weak and cold to be called despair, prostrate in the chilly grip of self-disgust, obscurely plagued by little stillborn motivations, without reaction even to the memory of terror.

In those first months at the hospital, which telescoped in his mind into one gray undeviating day, he had been worse than dead, a useless shape of organic matter too feeble and sick to bear the psychic burden of humanity. From such unpromising material, time and the doctors and Paula’s love had made him into a man again. Still he carried the memory of the ruin within him like the seed of a melancholy perennial. He had suffered enough to know his strength and weakness, and he knew that without Paula his world would turn gray again and bleed away to dust.

Yet he didn’t see how he could help himself. He had to know the truth, and he had to see justice done. If he believed, as Paula said she did, that there was no justice anywhere, he wouldn’t be able to go on. Without justice, human decency, human life itself, could not exist; and it seemed to him that his belief in justice depended on the outcome of this case. It was the one event in his life that presented the problem of justice in uncompromising terms, in spite of the fact that he himself wasn’t entirely guiltless. If he had gone straight home and stayed there on that unremembered May night, still blank in his memory with the utter and tantalizing blankness of the empty frame that once enclosed the familiar portrait of a forgotten face, if he had stayed at home and waited for Lorraine, there would have been no murder, or he would have died preventing it. Failing that, he had to bring her murderer to justice, no matter what suffering ensued to Paula or to him. If Paula had conspired with Milne against his wife he had to know about it. He cursed his obsession and the ironic luck that had made him what he was and wedged him in this dilemma. But he stayed where he was, watching Paula’s house.

The twilight was like a color blindness that leached off the colors of the roofs and windows and removed the third dimension that made the buildings real. The sky was still flamboyant in pink and yellow deepening into green, but night was lodging in the shrubbery and trees, in the corners of the houses, and under the eaves. A car appeared at the end of the block and came toward him, pausing twice before it stopped in front of Paula’s house. It was an old, battered coupé, with a middle-aged woman at the wheel. When she left the car he could see that she was decently dressed but in some way dowdy looking, perhaps because the skirt of her dark suit was too long or her hat was too straight on her head.

Walking a little uncertainly on her thin legs, the woman crossed the sidewalk and approached the glassed porch. She glanced short-sightedly in the direction of the water spray and made an unnecessary and fussy detour. He was too far away to see her well, and the light was failing, but Bret felt sure he knew her. He knew in advance how she would climb the steps to the porch, her back straight and her head high, but with an awkwardness that came from fear of falling.

Paula came to the door before the woman reached it, and greeted her on the steps. They shook hands formally. The woman held herself a little shyly, as she always did. As always, Bret felt vaguely sorry for her. When the two women went into the house, it was not Paula but the other woman whom he followed with his eyes. Yet he had no idea who she could be.

In the back seat of the cab in the gathering darkness he wrestled with the dread that his memory was leaving him again. His head throbbed where the bottle had struck him. Perhaps his brain had been physically injured, his memory centers knocked out for good. The thought that had oppressed him throughout his convalescence came back and weighed on him heavily. The mind was tethered to the body like a sinful spirit cursed to spend a lifetime in a beast, absolutely dependent on such perishable stuff as human flesh.

In spite of her rather unfortunate experiences with Professor Taylor, her first husband, and a bookish man if ever there was one, Mrs. Swanscutt had never ceased to be a lover of books. Anything between two covers, she freely admitted to her customers, was simply fascinating to her. It was this passion of hers for the printed word that had originally given her the idea of opening a lending library. It was a sort of literary thing to do, and it was a ladylike occupation. With her fine taste in books and her subtle tact in handling people, she hoped it would be profitable. God knew that after Frank was unjustly fired and they lost their house, they needed the money.

She didn’t make a mint of money from the library, but to the secret surprise of a woman who had never before quite succeeded in anything, she made enough for the two of them to live on. When the war came, her business increased still further, and she became quite prosperous. Of course money wasn’t worth as much as it used to be, but Frank had to admit that his scatterbrained little wife was making more money every week than he himself ever had. But he wasn’t the sort of man to sit in his tent and sulk about it; he was too much of a man for that. Since he couldn’t very well go out and take another regular job – his asthma was still troubling him awfully, no matter what they said about the California climate – he came into the shop nearly every day to help her with her work. He was especially good at keeping the books in strict alphabetical order according to authors’ names, and at counting the money.

In spite of all his illnesses and disappointments, the poor dear always kept himself beautifully well groomed too, and Mrs. Swanscutt was proud to have him in the shop. She knew that many of her female customers took real pleasure in being advised in their choice of books by such a distinguished appearing man. A lesser woman might have been jealous on occasion, but not she, not she. In every word Frank said to her, in every look that passed between them, it was so beautifully evident that he loved her as ardently now as he had in the beginning. She still felt, after twenty-five years, that her world had been well lost for love. Good name, husband, and son – she had given them all up for Frank Swanscutt, and he had not failed her, he had not been unworthy of the sacrifice.

Still, she sometimes permitted herself to wish, in no complaining spirit, that Frank could manage to come in more regularly, and perhaps a little earlier in the afternoon. After the noontime flurry, business became very quiet during the first half of the afternoon, and Mrs. Swanscutt was suffering increasingly from boredom. Six days a week for five years she had sat flanked by books from nine in the morning till six in the evening. Until recently she had tried to keep up with all the best sellers in order to have an informed opinion, but the last few months she had to admit that something was happening to her feeling for books. Sometimes she had to literally force herself to open up the front of a new book and read the first sentence on the first page. More and more she tended to rely on the publisher’s blurbs and the thumbnail reviews in the Retail Bookseller . She was like a person with a sweet tooth who has taken a position in a confectionery shop and ruined her stomach.