Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

“Anyway, I killed her. I don’t remember driving home, but I must have. I was still drunk on pentothal; I hardly knew what I was doing. Mother put me to bed and did what she could for me, which wasn’t much. I couldn’t go to sleep. I couldn’t understand why the police didn’t come and get me. Next day, Sunday, I went back to the doctor. He frightened me, but I was even more frightened not to go.

“He was gentle with me. I was surprised how gentle. I almost loved him when he told me what he’d done for me, making it look like a suicide. They’d already recovered her body from the sea, and nobody even asked me a question about it. Carl came back on Monday. We went to the funeral together. It was a closed-coffin funeral, and I could nearly believe that the official story of suicide was true, that the rest was just a bad dream.

“Carl thought she’d drowned herself. He took it better than I expected, but it had a strange effect on him. He said he’d been in the desert for almost a week, thinking and praying for guidance. He was coming back from Death Valley when a highway patrolman stopped him and told him his family was looking for him, and why. That was on Sunday, just before sunset.

“Carl said he looked up at the Sierra, and saw an unearthly light behind it in the west toward Purissima. It streamed, like milk, from the heavens, and it made him realize that life was a precious gift which had to be justified. He saw an Indian herding sheep on the hillside, and took it for a sign. He decided then and there to study medicine and devote his life to healing, perhaps on the Indian reservations, or in Africa like Schweitzer.

“I was carried away myself. That glorious light of Carl’s seemed like an answer to the darkness I’d been in since Saturday night. I told Carl I’d go along with him if he still wanted me. Carl said that he would need a worthy helpmeet, but we couldn’t get married yet. He wasn’t twenty-one. It was too soon after his mother’s death. His father was opposed to early marriages, anyway, and we mustn’t do anything to upset an old man with a heart condition. In the meantime we should live as friends, as brother and sister, to prepare ourselves for the sacrament of marriage.

“Carl was becoming more and more idealistic. He took up theology that fall, on top of his premed courses. My own little spurt of idealism, or whatever you want to call it, didn’t last very long. Dr. Grantland came to see me one day that summer. He said that he was a businessman, and he understood that I was a businesswoman. He certainly hoped I was. Because if I played my cards right, with him kibitzing for me, I would be worth a lot of money with very little effort.

“Dr. Grantland had changed, too. He was very smiley and businesslike, but he didn’t look like a doctor any more. He didn’t talk like one – more like a ventriloquist’s dummy moving his lips in time to somebody else’s lines. He told me the Senator’s heart and arteries were deteriorating, he was due to die before long. When he did, Carl and Jerry would divide the estate between them. If I was married to Carl, I’d be in a position to repay my friends for any help they’d given me.

“He considered us good friends, but it would sort of set the seal on our friendship if we went to bed together. He’d been told that he was very good in bed. I let him. It made no difference to me, one way or the other. I even liked being with him, in a way. He was the only one who knew about me. When I was in Purissima after that, I used to go and visit him in his office. Until I married Carl, I mean. I quit seeing Grantland then. It wouldn’t have been right.

“Carl was twenty-one on the fourteenth of March, and we were married in Oakland three days later. He moved into the apartment with me, but he thought we should make up for our earlier sins by living in chastity for another year. Carl was so tense about it that I was afraid to argue with him. He was pale, and bright in the eyes. Sometimes he wouldn’t talk for days at a time, and then the floodgates would open and he’d talk all night.

“He’d begun to fail in his studies, but he was full of ideas. We used to discuss reality, appearance and reality. I always thought appearance was the front you put on for people, and reality was how you really felt. Reality was death and blood and the curse. Reality was hell. Carl told me I had it all wrong, that pain and evil were only appearances. Goodness was reality, and he would prove it to me in his life. Now that he’d discovered Christian existentialism, he saw quite clearly that suffering was only a test, a fire that purified. That was the reason we couldn’t sleep together. It was for the good of our souls.

“Carl had begun to lose a lot of weight. He got so nervous that spring, he couldn’t sit still to work. Sometimes I’d hear him walking in the living-room all night. I thought if I could get him to come to bed with me, it would help him to get some sleep, settle him down. I had some pretty weird ideas of my own. I paraded around in floozie nightgowns, and drenched myself with perfume, and did my best to seduce him. My own husband. One night in May, I served him a candlelight dinner with wine and got him drunk enough.

“It didn’t work, not for either of us. The spirit rose up from me and floated over the bed. I looked down and watched Carl using my body. And I hated him. He didn’t love me. He didn’t want to know me. I thought that we were both dead, and our corpses were in bed together. Zombies. Our two spirits never met.

“Carl was still in bed when I came home the next night. He hadn’t been to his classes, hadn’t moved all day. I thought at first he was sick, physically sick, and I called a doctor. Carl told him that the light of heaven had gone out. He had done it himself by putting out the light in his own mind. Now there was nothing in his head but darkness.

“Dr. Levin took me into the next room and told me that Carl was mentally disturbed. He should probably be committed. I telephoned Carl’s father, and Dr. Levin talked to him, too. The Senator said that the idea of commitment was absurd. Carl had simply been hitting the books too hard, and what he needed was some good, hard down-to-earth work.

“Carl’s father came and took him home the next day. I gave up my apartment and my job, and a few days later I followed them. I should have stayed where I was, but I wanted to be with Carl. I didn’t trust his family. And I had a sneaking desire, even under the circumstances, to live on the ranch and be Mrs. Carl Hallman in Purissima. Well, I was, but it was worse than I expected. His family didn’t like me. They blamed me for Carl’s condition. A good wife would have been able to keep him healthy and wealthy and wise.

“The only person there who really liked me was Zinnie’s baby. I used to play a game pretending that Martha was my baby. That was how I got through those two years. I’d pretend that I was alone with her in the big house. The others had all gone away, or else they’d died, and I was Martha’s mother, doing for her all by myself, bringing her up just right, without any nasty influences. We did have good times, too. Sometimes I really believed that the nightmare in the doctor’s office hadn’t happened at all. Martha was there to prove it, my own baby, going on two.

“But Dr. Grantland was often there to remind me that it had happened. He was looking after Carl and his father, both. The Senator liked him because he didn’t charge much or make expensive suggestions, such as hospitals or psychiatric treatment. Carl’s father was quite a money-saver. We had margarine on the table instead of butter, and nothing but the culled oranges for our own use. I was even expected to pay board, until my money ran out. I didn’t have a new dress for nearly two years. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have killed him.”