Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

I dropped in another quarter. The number I wanted was busy. I wasn't that far away. I decided, keeping the window down and the radio up, to drive out there, the summer-like seventy degrees making me feel younger than I had any right to.

This time there weren't any sheets blowing on the clothesline like sails on racing sloops. In fact, the small tract home looked battened down, garage door closed, curtains drawn. I parked in the drive and went up to the door and knocked and got exactly the response I'd figured on. Nothing.

I stood looking at the scruffy brown lawn and then at the endless row of similar houses stretching to the vanishing point. This was the step up from our fathers we'd been promised. All it showed was how far down our fathers had been in the first place. Uselessly, I knocked again.

Then the door opened abruptly and there stood Susan Roberts pretty as always. She wore a man's blue work shirt and jeans and her hair was pulled back in a soft chignon whose luster could be seen even in the shadows of the doorway. She had been crying, and very recently and very hard.

"Hello, Jack," she said.

"I'm sorry. I seem to have come at a bad time."

"No. . it's just. . you know, the thing with Karen and all."

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

She seemed surprised. "Karen?"

"If you wouldn't mind."

"Did something new happen?"

"I'm not sure."

She smiled a bit. "You always did like being mysterious. Come on in."

Five minutes later we sat at a Formica-topped kitchen table and looked out on a brown backyard and at the redwood veranda of the house on the opposite end of the backyard.

She had made us instant coffee in a small microwave. She set down gray pewter mugs and then sat down across from me. She sipped her coffee and I watched the beautiful life in her hazel eyes, the intelligence of them, the compassion of them. Then she said, "I'm just being selfish."

"How so?"

"I'm not really thinking of Karen. I mean, that's not why I was crying when you came to the door."

"Oh?"

"There's an old Irish saying that the person you really mourn at a funeral is yourself. That's what I was doing. Mourning myself." She had some more coffee and said, "Do you think about dying very often?"

"To the point of being morbid."

"Me, too." She sighed, knitted hands chafed from work but still long and beautiful in form. "Our kids are in high school. Gary still hasn't ever finished a novel. And every day I look in the mirror, I see this odd old lady taking my place there." She stared out the window again. "Karen wasn't so hard to understand, really. She just wanted to be young and beautiful forever." The lopsided smile again, the warm tears still on her perfect cheeks. "Is that too much for a woman to ask?"

I said, "Did you ever know her to hang around anybody named Sonny?"

"Sure. Sonny Howard."

"Right. Sonny Howard. Can you tell me anything about him?"

She narrowed her eyes. "Why bring up Sonny Howard after all these years?"

"It could be important."

"Why?"

"Maybe Karen didn't die of an accidental overdose after all."

"I knew it."

"You did."

"Sure." She snapped her fingers. "That's exactly what I told Gary."

"That she didn't kill herself?"

"Yes. She really didn't have it in her. I mean she tried that once and-"

"What?"

"Yes. Didn't you know that?"

"No."

"It was the summer she hung around with Sonny Howard, as a matter of fact."

"Did you ever know why?"

"Not exactly."

"She didn't give you any hint?"

"Just something happened. In July I went away for a week's vacation with my folks. When I left she was fine. But when I came back she'd gotten into these terrible crying jags. I thought maybe it was over Sonny. She'd been hanging around him a few months, but then I remembered her telling me he was just a friend, so. ." She sighed. "None of it ever made much sense to me."

"Do you ever remember her saying anything about Ted Forester or Larry Price or David Haskins?"

"Just that she was afraid of them."

"You mean physically?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure. One time we were at a party and they came in and she ran out the back door. Literally ran. But that was the strange thing, too."

"What was strange?"

"I can still remember their faces when they came in and saw her there at the party."

"What about it?"

"They looked just as afraid of her as she was of them."

"Where did Sonny fit in all this?"

"He hung around with Forester and the others. He was just here for summer school. Actually he went to St. Matthew's, but they didn't offer the courses he needed, so he came over here. He was just their friend, I guess."

"But she wasn't afraid of Sonny?"

"She never said so." She shook her head. "Doesn't it all seem so long ago, like some old movie?"

I finished my coffee. "I wonder if you'd do me a favor."

"Sure, Jack."

"Let me see the room downstairs where she stayed."

"Of course."

"Thanks."

The basement, like the rest of the house, was furnished in odds and ends, styles and colors that should have clashed, but that Susan's hand had brought together in an uneasy harmony. The basement was five degrees cooler than upstairs. It had red-and-white-tiled flooring, imitation knotty-pine walls, a low white ceiling. There was a furnace to the left, a small bathroom whose open door revealed sink-shower-stool, an overstuffed couch facing a massive relic of other days-a Buddha-like black-and-white 21-inch Motorola console-and finally a new but unpainted door that creaked back to show me a room with a severe little single bed, a bureau covered with expensive perfumes and bottles and jars and vials and vessels of makeup, and then a sturdy piece of rope used as a hanger for more clothes than most department stores would have to offer. The clothes-fawns and pinks and soft blues and yellows, silk and linen and organza and Lamé and velvet-did not belong in the chill rough basement of a working-class family. There was a sense of violation here, a beast holding trapped a fragile beauty.

On the bed lay an old hardback copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's . I went over and picked it up, its burnt-orange cover bright even after all these years, the pen-and-ink sketch of Capote on the back just as calculated now as it was then. I opened the front cover: Karen Lane's name was written in perfect penmanship, but when I flipped to the back I saw that it was a library book checked out the last time on May 3, 1959.

Susan laughed. "I think it was the only book she ever read. She loved it. She'd never give it back."

"Really?"

"They'd send her notices all the time. Virtually threaten her. But she wanted to keep the copy she'd first read. No other copy would do. Finally, she just paid them for it and kept it."

"Mind if I take it?"

"Be my guest."

I looked around. "She was here one month?"

"Just about. But actually she'd been staying overnight here for the past six months." Her mouth tightened. "I suppose if I raise any question about Dr. Evans, I'll sound like a bigot."

"Not to me, you won't."

"Well, I met him twice at lunch with Karen. He has this very calm, polished exterior, but he also has a terrible temper. She came here several times with bruises he'd given her."

I planned to see Dr. Evans tonight. I was fascinated by how easy it would be for a shrink to "accidentally" overdose somebody he lived with.

I studied the front of the book again, as if it were going to tell me something.

She said, "So did I miss anything the other night? I really wish I could have gone."

"You know how you feel about looking in the mirror and seeing this strange old lady there? That's how I felt at the reunion. We're getting to be geezers, Susan. Geezers."