Маргарет Миллар - Vanish in an Instant

Then he heard the front door open, and quiet but firm footsteps moved along the thin carpeting. A pause, the click of a doorknob, and then the old lady’s voice, with a sob in it:

“I thought you weren’t coming, Birdie.”

“Of course I was coming.”

“It’s so late.”

“I had some trouble with the car.” The woman’s voice was as quiet and firm as her footsteps. “Is this your suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll take it. Button up your coat, it’s a raw night.” A moment of silence. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Just a nip. You said yourself it’s a raw night.”

“You didn’t tell anyone that you were leaving, or about me?”

“Of course not,” the old lady lied solemnly.

“You burned everything?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, then.”

Footsteps down the hall.

Meecham rose quietly and began to ascend the stairs. At the bend in the staircase he paused. The two women were at the front door, Birdie bent under the weight of the suitcase, and the old lady wrapped like a mummy and clinging to Birdie’s free arm.

“Where are you going?” Meecham said.

They both swerved toward him, and Meecham felt a column of emotion rise thick in his throat, disbelief and then anger and then sadness. In that one brief moment when Birdie turned, three women merged in her and became one, merged inevitably and naturally like atoms forming a molecule.

Her face was as familiar to him as Alice’s: the square forcible jaw, the gentle mouth, and the eyes still blistered from the burning of her tears. He thought back to the last time he’d seen her when she had thrust all the dishes into the sink with a furious sweep of her hand, and the shattered glass had sprayed like water from a fountain.

She was looking down at the old lady with something like pity in her eyes. “You told. You poor fool.”

“I didden, Birdie. I didden tell!”

“It’s all right.”

“You’re mad at me. You won’t take me along.”

“I’m not mad, Clara. I never really expected anything to work out.”

Meecham came up the rest of the steps and Mrs. Loftus watched him, peering at him from her heavy wraps like a mole from a thicket, half-dazed and half-blind.

“You go away! Go on! You’re spoiling our trip. Birdie, tell him to go away. What about our trip, Birdie?”

“I guess we’ll have to postpone it for a while,” Mrs. Hearst said quietly. “Mr. Meecham wants to talk to me.”

“He’s a butterinski.”

“Yes. Yes, I guess he is. Come on, we’d better go back to the apartment.”

With a decisive movement she picked up the suitcase and went back down the hall, the old lady staggering behind her, whimpering.

“I want to live in the country. I want to have dogs in the yard. I want...”

“Sh... Sh, now.”

“You promised.”

“I’ll keep my promise,” Mrs. Hearst said. “But not tonight, Clara.”

She opened the door of the apartment and paused for a moment on the threshold, swaying slightly, as if solid waves of time were beating at her legs.

“I used to live here,” she said to Meecham. “Earl and me. Did you know that?”

“I knew it.”

“I didn’t realize how much you were finding out about me until after supper tonight when you came to see Jim. Then I knew I had to drive over here and cover my tracks somehow.” She crossed the room to the old cherry-wood rocker near the window and touched the headrest with her hand. “This was Earl’s chair. He was just like a baby; rocking soothed him.”

Meecham remembered the rocking chair in the Hearst kitchen and he wondered if Mrs. Hearst had kept it there for Earl to sit in when he came to talk in the evenings.

“We used to fight when we lived here. We were having bad luck. Earl was out of a job and I was trying to support all three of us, working as a waitress. In a small town like this there aren’t many jobs, you take what you can get. Nothing worked out for us. Earl felt like a failure and Clara was drinking all the time, and I couldn’t see anything ahead but hell. I was younger in those days; I thought I knew what hell was like.” She glanced at the old lady who was sitting bolt upright on the davenport with a fixed smile on her face, like a deaf-mute trying to appear interested in a conversation. “Clara knows.”

“What’s that you say, Birdie?”

“Nothing much. Would you like a drink?”

“I’ll get it. We’ll celebrate old times, eh, Birdie? Shelebrate old times.” She started toward the kitchen, arms outstretched like an amateur tightrope walker. “Don’t let me disturb the talking. I love to hear good talk.”

Looking at the two women now it was impossible for Meecham to imagine the “old times” when the two strong personalities had clashed. There was no clash any longer; one of them was too weak to make a sound, like a broken drum.

“Well, I divorced Earl. I borrowed the money from my sister and took a bus to Las Vegas. When I came back to Arbana I was single again. I started a rooming house, and that’s how I met Jim. I was feeling so empty and old and... Anyway, we got married. I guess I’m the kind of woman that don’t know how to live without having a man to please and cook for and look after.”

For the second time that night Meecham thought what a pity it was that such a forceful woman would always choose emotionally or physically weak men like Hearst and Loftus.

The old lady was still moving around the kitchen, rattling dishes and opening and closing cupboard doors.

“Jim and I got along all right. Nothing special, but all right. Then, about a year ago, I met Earl on the street. I hardly recognized him, he’d changed so much. We stood there in front of Kresge’s... It was snowing, and Earl didn’t have a hat on and his hair was soaking wet, and he told me that he was sick. He had just found out what was the matter with him and he’d been walking the streets trying to figure things out. Those were the words he used, figure things out.

“I took him home and we sat in the kitchen and he asked me if I had a room for him to stay in. He moved in the next week. I didn’t tell Jim or anyone who he was. My sister found out and we often fought about it. But to me it was the right thing to do. We didn’t live together as husband and wife, we lived as friends that needed each other. He talked to me when I got upset or lonely, and I looked after him when he was sick, and kept his apartment clean and saw that he got enough to eat. We had a lot of quiet happiness together, Earl and me. There was always in the back of my mind the hope that someday someone would find a miracle cure for his disease. The worse he got, the more I hoped, until it was all I could think about, making him live.”

She was looking out of the window, down at the dark and empty street. “If I hadn’t hoped so hard he would be still alive.”

“I don’t believe I understand,” Meecham said.

“I went to Claude for money.”

“Money for Loftus?”

“Yes, to take him away. I’d read in the paper about a cancer clinic in New York where they were doing research on Earl’s disease, and I thought if I could just get him there, there might be a chance for him. I didn’t have a cent and nothing to sell except an old car, and no one to borrow from. Except Claude. The more I thought about going to Claude, the more reasonable it seemed. We had known each other a long time, long before Lily ever met him, and when we parted there was no final blowup or anything, we just drifted apart. That’s how I thought of it.

“I went to his office a week ago today and waited for him outside. We went and sat in his car and I told him everything. What a terrible mistake I made!” she said bitterly. “If I’d asked him to lend me money for a new house or a trip I’d have gotten it. But Claude was a vain man. He couldn’t believe that I loved another man, and that it was the kind of love he and I never had together. He kept saying how he knew I’d come to him, and I kept trying to tell him how I felt about Earl and how serious his condition was. Claude wouldn’t listen. I got out of the car and walked home. I was burning up inside, and my head was splitting so I felt like it was going to blow up. You can feel more anger for somebody else than you ever can for yourself.”