Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“It depends on the person,” I said, “and the circumstances.”

“I suppose so.” He inverted the hat in his lap and gazed down into it. “Now that I come to think of it, Mother’s breakdown occurred when she was in her thirties. I wonder, could Maude be simply reverting to type, impelled by something unstable in her genes?”

“Did Mother have blue genes?”

Harlan smiled his tortured smile. “Indeed she did. You put it very aptly. But we won’t go into the case of Mother. It’s my sister I’m concerned with.”

“What did she do? Elope?”

“Yes, in the most scandalous and disrupting way, with a man she scarcely knew, a dreadful sort of man.”

“Tell me about him.”

He looked down into his hat again, as if its invisible contents fascinated and horrified him. “There’s very little to tell. I don’t even know his name. I saw him only once, last Friday – a week ago tomorrow. He drove up to the school in a battered old car, right in the midst of our Commencement exercises. Maude didn’t even introduce him to me. She introduced him to no one, and if you saw him you would understand why. He was an obvious roughneck, a big hairy brute of a fellow with a red beard, in filthy old slacks and a beret and a turtleneck sweater. She walked up to him in front of all the parents and took his arm and strolled away with him under the elms, completely hypnotized.”

“You mean she never came back?”

“Oh, she came back that night for a time, long enough to pack. I was out myself – I had a number of social duties to perform, Commencement night. When I got in, she was gone. She left me a brief note, and that was all.”

“You have it with you?”

His hand went into his breast pocket and tossed a sheet of folded stationery onto the desk. Its copybook handwriting said:

“Dear Reginald:

“I am going to be married. My total despair of making you understand forces me to leave as I am leaving. Do not worry about me, and above all do not try to interfere. If this seems cruel, bear in mind that I am fighting for life itself. My husband-to-be is a great and warm personality who has suffered in his time as I have suffered. He is waiting outside for me now.

“Be assured, dear Reginald, that a part of my affection will remain with you and the school. But I shall never return to either.

“Your sister.”

I pushed the note across the desk to Harlan. “Were you and your sister on good terms?”

“I’d always thought so. We had our little differences over the years, in carrying on Father’s work and interpreting the tradition of the School. But there was a deep mutual respect between Maude and me. You can see it in the note.”

“Yes.” I could see other things there, too. “What’s the suffering she refers to?”

“I have no idea.” He gave a cruel yank to the purple tie. “We’ve had a good life together, Maude and I, a rich life full of service to girlhood and young womanhood. We’ve been prosperous and happy. To have her turn on me like this – out of a clear sky! Suddenly, after eleven years of devotion, the School meant nothing to her. I meant nothing to her. Father’s memory meant nothing. I tell you, that brute has bewitched her. Her entire system of values has been subverted.”

“Maybe she’s just fallen in love. The older they are when it happens, the harder it hits them. Hell, maybe he’s even lovable.”

Harlan sniffed. “He’s a lewd rascal. I know a lewd rascal when I see one. He’s a womanizer and a drinker and probably worse.”

I glanced at my liquor cabinet. It was closed and innocent-looking. “Aren’t you a little prejudiced?”

“I know whereof I speak. The man’s a ruffian. Maude is a woman of sensibility who requires the gentlest conditions of life. He’ll pulverize her spirit, brutalize her body, waste her money. It’s Mother’s situation all over again, only worse, much worse. Maude is infinitely more vulnerable than Mother ever was.”

“What happened to your mother?”

“She divorced Father and ran away with a man, an art teacher at the School. He led her a merry life, I assure you, until he died of drink.” This seemed to give Harlan a certain satisfaction. “Mother is living in Los Angeles now. I haven’t seen her for nearly thirty years, but Maude came out to visit her during the Easter recesses. Against my expressed wishes, I may add.”

“And Maude came back to Los Angeles with her husband?”

“Yes. She wired me yesterday from here. I caught the first possible plane.”

“Let me see the telegram.”

“I don’t have it. It was read to me on the telephone.” He added waspishly: “She might have used a less public means of communicating her disgrace.”

“What did she say?”

“That she was very happy. Turning the knife in the wound, of course.” His face darkened, and through his eyes I caught a glimpse of the red fires banked inside him. “She warned me not to try and follow her, and apologized for taking the money.”

“What money?”

“She wrote a check last Friday before she left, which nearly exhausted our joint checking account. A check for a thousand dollars.”

“But it belonged to her?”

“In the legal sense, not morally. It’s always been understood that I disburse the money.” A doleful whine entered his voice. “The man is clearly after our money, and the deuce of it is, there’s nothing to prevent Maude from drawing on our capital. She might even sell the School!”

“She owns it?”

“I’m afraid she does, legally. Father left her the School. I – my administrative ability was a little slow in developing – a gradual growth, you know. Poor Father didn’t live to see me mature.” He coughed, choking on his own unction. “The buildings alone are worth nearly two hundred thousand. The added value of our prestige is incalculable.”

He paused in a listening attitude, as though he could hear the unholy gurgle of money going down the drain. I put on my coat.

“You want them traced, is that it? To see that the marriage is regular, and make sure that he isn’t a confidence man?”

“I want to see my sister. If I could just talk to her – well, something might be saved. She may have lost her mind. I can’t permit her to wreck her life, and mine, as Mother wrecked Father’s and her own.”

“Where does your mother live in Los Angeles?”

“She has a house in a place called Westwood, I believe. I’ve never been there.”

“I think we ought to visit her. You haven’t been in touch with her?”

“Certainly not. And I have no wish to see her now.”

“I think you should. If Maude was out here with her at Easter, your mother may know the man. It doesn’t sound as though your sister eloped on the spur of the moment.”

“You may be right,” he said slowly. “It hadn’t occurred to me that she may have met him out here. And then he followed her to Chicago, eh? Of course. It’s the logical hypothesis.”

We had a short talk about money. Harlan endorsed a fifty-dollar traveler’s check to me, and we went downstairs to my car.

It wasn’t far to Westwood, as distances go in Los Angeles. We joined the early evening traffic rushing like lemmings towards the sea and the suburbs. Shielding his eyes with his hand against the sun’s horizontal rays, Harlan told me a little about his mother. Enough for me to know what to expect.

She lived in a frame cottage on a hillside overlooking the distant campus. The front yard was choked with a dozen varieties of cactus, some of which speared as high as the roof. The house needed paint and it hung on the slope a little off balance, like its tenant.

She opened the screen door, blinking against the sun. Her face was gouged and eroded by years and trouble. Black hair, shot with gray, hung in straight limp bangs over her forehead. Large tarnished metal rings depended from her earlobes. Several gold chains hung around her withered neck, and tinkled when she moved. She was dressed in sandals and a brown homespun robe which looked like sacking, cinched in by a rope at the waist.