Росс Макдональд: The Wycherly Woman

“Isn’t that fabulous? Maybe you can tell me. Is it the parents or the children who are responsible for j.d.? I can’t make up my quote mind unquote.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that about your quote mind unquote.”

“Is it boring? My apologies. Do you blame the parents or the children?”

“I don’t blame anybody, if you want an honest answer. I think blame is one of the things we have to get rid of. When children blame their parents for what’s happened to them, or parents blame their children for what they’ve done, it’s part of the problem, and it makes the problem worse. People should take a close look at themselves. Blaming is the opposite of doing that.”

“That’s good,” she said enthusiastically. “If I can only get it into the right language.” She twisted her mouth around. “ ‘The punitive attitudes of the familial group’ – how does that sound?”

“Lousy. I hate sociological jargon. But I didn’t come here to talk to you about that, Miss Lang. Mr. Wycherly asked me to come and see you.”

Her mouth formed a round O, and then pronounced it. A grey clayey color showed itself under her skin. It made her look years older.

“It’s no wonder I can’t concentrate my mind,” she said. “When you think of that silly girl going off by herself. I haven’t thought of anything else, really , for two months. I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, imagining what’s happened.”

“What do you imagine happened?”

“Terrible things. The things you think about in the middle of the night. Like in that Eliot play about Sweeney Agonistes.” She grimaced. “I had to read it for English 31. ‘Everybody’s got to do a girl in.’ ”

She looked up at me as if I were Sweeney himself, about to do her in. Disentangling her legs from the chair she trotted across the room, a small bouncing white and blue blob. She flung herself on a studio couch where she ended up immobile, back against the wall, knees up, chin on her knees, watching me over them. Her eyes reflected the lamplight like new dimes.

I turned the chair around and sat down with my back to the lamp: “Do you have any reason to think she was done in?”

“No,” she said in a squeaky voice. “It’s just what I’m afraid of. Mrs. Doncaster and everybody else thinks Phoebe went away deliberately. I thought so too for a while. But now I think she meant to come back. I’m practically sure of it.”

“What makes you sure?”

“A lot of things. She only took her overnight bag, with enough clothes for the weekend.”

“Did she plan to stay in San Francisco for the weekend?”

“I think so. She told me she’d see me Monday, anyway. She had a nine o’clock class on Monday morning, and she was planning to be there. She mentioned it.”

“Did she confide in you, Miss Lang?”

She nodded her head. Its movement was restricted by her knees. Her eyes changed from silver to black in the changing reflection of the lamplight, and back again to silver.

“I didn’t know Phoebe long,” she said, “just since she moved here in September. But we got close in a hurry. She was – she’s a good head, and she helped me with some of my courses. She was a senior” – the past tense kept slipping in – “and I’m only a sophomore. Besides, we had some of the same experiences in our background.”

“What experiences?”

“Parent trouble. I won’t go into mine – it’s between me and them – but Phoebe had a ghastly family background, perfectly ghastly. Her mother and father didn’t get along, and finally they got divorced, last summer I think it was. Phoebe felt pretty bitter about the divorce. She felt she had no home to go home to, you know?”

“Whose side was she on, in the divorce?”

“Her father’s. Apparently her mother took him for a lot of money. But she blamed both of them, for acting like children.” She caught herself up short. “There’s that blame idea again – maybe you have something, Mister–? I don’t think you told me your name.”

I told her my name. “Did she talk about her mother very much?”

“No, she hardly even mentioned her.”

“Did she ever hear from her mother?”

“Not that I know of. I doubt it.”

“Did she know where her mother lives, at the present time?”

“If she did, she never told me.”

“So there’s no indication that she may be with her mother?”

“It doesn’t seem very likely. She had a real down on her mother. She had good reason.”

“Did she ever discuss the reason with you?”

“Not right out.” Dolly screwed up her mouth again, as if she was searching for the right words. “She hinted around about it. I remember one night, when we were talking in the dark, she told me about some letters that came to her house. Crank letters. They came last year before the divorce, when Phoebe was home from Stanford for Easter vac. She opened the first one herself. It said some awful things about her mother.”

“What things?”

The girl said solemnly: “That she had committed adultery. The way Phee talked, she seemed to believe what the letters said. She said another thing that I didn’t understand. She said the letters were her fault, and they were what broke up her parents’ marriage.”

“She didn’t mean that she wrote them herself?”

“She couldn’t have meant that. I don’t know what she meant. I tried to get her to talk about it some more, but she went into a tizzy. I brought up the subject again in the morning, and she pretended that she hadn’t said anything.” A queer expression crossed her face. “I don’t know if I should be telling you all this.”

“If you don’t, Dolly, who will? When did this conversation occur?”

“The week before she took off. I remember she was talking about her father’s trip the same night.”

“How did she feel about her father’s trip?”

“She resented it. She wanted to go along, but not with him.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s simple enough. She wanted to take a slow boat to China, all by herself alone. But she didn’t.”

“How do you know she didn’t?”

“Because she planned to come back and finish her senior year. It was very important to her, to get a degree and get a job and stand on her own two feet and not have to take money from anybody.”

“Anybody like her father, you mean?”

“Yes. Besides, a girl doesn’t go away for a long trip and leave all her best clothes behind – her formats, and her Italian sweaters and simply piles of shoes and bags and coats. She even left her blond sheared beaver coat, and it’s worth a fortune.”

“Where is it?”

“With the rest of her things, in the basement. I didn’t want them put there, but Mrs. Doncaster said it would be all right.” Dolly twisted uncomfortably, wrestling with her knees. “It seemed so heartless, moving her things out. But what could I do? After Phoebe’s rent ran out, I couldn’t afford to pay the rent for both of us. I had to find myself another roommate. And Mrs. Doncaster had me convinced for a while that Phoebe had simply pulled up stakes and gone away with her father. I didn’t really know different until yesterday.”

“Where did Mrs. Doncaster get that idea?”

The girl hesitated. “She just had it, I guess.”

“It must have come from somewhere.”

After further hesitation, she said: “I suppose it was wish-fulfillment. She didn’t really want Phoebe to– No,” Dolly broke in on herself. “I don’t mean that the way it sounds.”

“You don’t mean that Mrs. Doncaster didn’t want Phoebe to come back?”

“No. I mean, she didn’t want anything to happen to her. But she was just as satisfied when she didn’t come back. She wanted to think that Phoebe had gone for good. I mean, she kept telling me that one of these days we’d hear from Phoebe. She’d send for her things, from New Zealand or Hong Kong or who knows where, and that would be that. But it isn’t, is it?”