Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“The kids?” Her smile was bleak. “You forget.”

“They’re old enough now, they’ll be all right. It’s only for a couple of hours. Mrs. Silvano next door can look in on them now and then.”

“The movies,” she said. Suddenly she laughed. It wasn’t a good sound. “Oh, you’re too good to me. You’re spoiling me!”

“Don’t,” he said.

The days and weeks of pent-up discontent, the years of it, seemed to brim over all at once. She sat down heavily at the cleared table, began to pound it at spaced intervals with her clenched fist, to underscore the torrent of words that suddenly poured from her.

“She gets night clubs, I get the movies. She gets lobster Newburg, I get meat balls. She gets champagne, I get Seven Up. She has charge accounts in all the swellest stores in town, I go to Woolworth’s. She was up here a couple weeks ago — you should have seen how she was dressed. A mink. A diamond on her finger as big as — pearls around her neck.”

“You told me, you told me,” he mumbled wearily. “How often.”

“She felt sorry for me. I could tell it, she didn’t have to say so. When she left, I found a hundred dollars hiding under the coffee pot She didn’t want to hurt my pride.” And then in tragic summation: “Oh, why did I throw away my life this way!”

“Here,” he said. “Here.” He handed the paper to her.

“What’s this for, something to keep me quiet?” She stared at him as if she couldn’t make up her mind for a moment whether he was making fun of her or was serious. “Now it’s the paper I get for my evening’s recreation. A big five-cent tabloid to keep me amused.”

“Open it,” he said quietly. “Read the second page.”

Her face was suddenly one big scar of shock, and just as white as such a scar is. A great gust of breath was drawn from her.

“Beatrice Barrett,” she gasped, almost voiceless. “That’s Bessie, that’s the name she used in her career.”

For a long time there was silence in the room. He just sat there holding his head, like the failures in life who’ve tried to do their best but are failures just the same. Then after a while she moved over toward him, softly, quietly. Almost like a kiss.

She sank to her knees beside him.

“What’re you doing?” he asked her. But not abruptly, in that same quiet way he always had with her.

“Thanking God.” And he saw that her eyes were moist.

When she’d finished weeping, she raised her head and smiled at him.

“Does that offer to go to the movies still hold?”

He smiled back, nodding his head.

“Just one more thing,” she said, like a little girl coaxing.

“Anything.”

“No, not anything. Just one more thing. Just a bag of popcorn. That’ll make my evening.”

And as they went out together, arm in arm, like the sweethearts they’d been ten years before, they passed the fallen newspaper.

She looked up at him, not down at it.

“I’ll settle for this,” she said. “The two kids, and a guy like you; and if I have to spend all the rest of my life cleaning and shopping for groceries and fixing meals and washing clothes, I won’t complain — not any more.”

The delivery truck drove up and parked at exactly 9:29 P.M.

The driver said, “Any returns?”

Mom said, “Twanny-four.”

The headline said BLONDE BEAUTY SLAIN.

Mom sat back, propped her elbows up, and waited.

A woman came along walking quickly. She had red hair, and mistrustful hazel eyes that darted wary little glances to the left and right. Many people look both ways in crossing through traffic, but she was already on the sidewalk, had finished crossing. She stepped up to the stand, snapped open her handbag, and fumbled in it for change. But while she fumbled she still found time to look to the right, look to the left. She came up with a quarter, put it down, and took the uppermost paper from the pile.

Long before she had finished folding it and wedging it under her arm, Mom had two dimes waiting for her on the next one under.

The woman scooped them up, and one dime escaped her, fell to the sidewalk with a little tink.

She glanced down just once, but didn’t bend over and look for it. She snapped her handbag shut on the rest of the change.

“I see it,” Mom said, trying to be helpful. “There it is, over there.”

“Never mind, let it go,” the woman answered in a muffled voice, and walked away at the same quick gait with which she had approached, looking to the right, looking to the left.

Mom gazed after her and shrugged. If it had been a penny, maybe; but a dime? Then she darted out to pick up the coin.

The woman—

The woman, still wary-eyed, went chip-chopping up a violet-black side street studded with glaring white disks like outsize polka dots. They came at wide-spaced intervals though — the ground-pools of brightness from the street lights. She went around the outside of each, instead of cutting straight through as ordinary walkers would have. The whole block was one long row of brownstone, compartmented into furnished rooms. She either missed the one she wanted, or else knew it only too well when she saw it. She strolled past it, four or five houses past it, then turned unhesitatingly and came back. The way she turned unhesitatingly, you knew she’d seen it the first time.

She hurried up the stoop and darted in, looking to the right, looking to the left. She keyed the inner door, then ran up the inside stairs which were linoleum-matted. She stopped in front of the door she wanted, and the way she knocked you could tell it was a signal. Two taps, then one, then two again. Very quietly, almost impossible to hear — unless it was being waited for.

A bolt slid back, a chain went off, and the door opened. A man was standing there. He didn’t look at her — he looked past her to where she’d just come from. She didn’t look at him either — she too looked back to where she’d just come from. They didn’t say hello.

She squeezed past him, and he rebolted and rechained the door.

He was unkempt. He hadn’t shaved, and his hair was on end from being ground into a pillow. His shirt was off; he just had trousers and undershirt on him. He would have been handsome — apparently he once had been — if he hadn’t been so incredibly vicious-looking. Everything about him bespoke viciousness — the eyes, the mouth, down to a vicious scar like a Band-Aid, diagonally across one cheek. Some women like their men vicious.

He followed her into the depths of the room, to get as far away from the door as possible, before either said a word.

There was a bottle of whiskey on a table and two glasses, one empty, one with about an inch of tan in it. Riffed about on the floor, as though it had been feverishly searched through, was an ancestor of the tabloid she had just brought in — a much earlier edition, almost a full day earlier, and with a different headline.

“Get it?” he said. His lips scarcely moved when he spoke. They say that men learn that in jail.

“It’s in,” she said. Her own voice was shaky. And now that she was indoors under light, it could be seen how white she was, almost gloweringly white with fright. “This time it hit. It hit finally. I knew it wouldn’t stay out much longer.”

He took it from her, looked. “Hoddaya know that’s it? Je stop and look at it on the street?”

“No, I didn’t dare stop. I didn’t have to. It hit me in the eye right as I picked it off the stand.” She was beginning to shake noticeably now.

He seemed to see her do it, even though his eyes were riveted on the paper. “Cut that out,” he said.

“I can’t help it, Al,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

“Take a drink.”