Флетчер Флора - Wake Up With a Stranger

Sharkey Mulloy was a man who loved his work. Those who saw Sharkey on the streets of St. Louis were never aware that in him existed a glimmer of the glory that had been Greece, a speck of the grandeur that had been Rome. It was true that there were some, even in this enlightened age, who considered his work pagan in practice and sinful in nature, but even Sir Thomas Browne, himself a Christian, was unable to discredit entirely this vestige of Christian idiocy.

Now, this day, Sharkey sat in a vault below a chapel and listened to the sound of a mourning organ. He could hear the organ only faintly, and he wished he could not hear it at all, for he did not like it. He did not, as a matter of fact, like anything about what was now going on in the chapel, for he considered it a sticky business better eliminated. A realist, however, he accepted it as a necessary prelude to his own work, something to be tolerated out of deference to deluded folk who paid the tariff but couldn’t understand the proper way of doing a thing. After the organ was silent and the chapel was empty, when what was left came down on the elevator into his hands, things would be different and better by far. The whole complex and obscure confusion of dogma and display would become, under his definitive ministration, serene and clear, and pure as fire.

In due time he heard the elevator descending and went out to receive his charge from Mr. Fairstead, who always made the delivery himself in what Sharkey had to admit was a nice gesture in the last phase of a last rite. Today, as usual, Mr. Fairstead looked somber below the neck and quite cheerful above, and his voice, when he spoke, agreed with the part above.

“Well, here he is, Sharkey,” he said. “Be sure to give us back our three percent.”

“Net,” Sharkey said.

Mr. Fairstead laughed and went, the elevator groaning upward, and Sharkey took over, warmed as always by the intimate little exchange that had not varied a bit in twenty years, except that the personal pronoun changed its gender to suit the occasion. He worked swiftly and efficiently, and it required only a short while to complete in the vault what had been begun in the chapel, to make in action the grand consignment that had already been made in words. This done, and with a period of waiting now to be endured, Sharkey put on his hat and went around the corner to a tavern.

He returned to his vault after an hour and read an Agatha Christie murder mystery for something over another hour. Finally, the time past, he extracted Mr. Fairstead’s three percent, and extracted with a magnet from the three percent a number of long screws. All screws removed, he put the three percent in a temporary receptacle and sealed it. On the outside of the receptacle, he stuck a gummed label on which he had previously printed in clear block letters: BURNS, AARON — SPLENDID IN ASHES.

He was actually required to print only the name. The added little epitaph, a phrase lifted from Browne’s Hydriotaphia, was Sharkey’s own idea.

The residue of Aaron Burns, the three percent that Mr. Fairstead facetiously claimed and Sharkey Mulloy carefully preserved, really belonged, of course, to Shirley Smith Burns, his widow, who did not linger to claim her property. Arrangements with Mr. Fairstead for a suitable urn and a perpetual-care niche in the chapel of the crematorium had been completed, and there seemed nothing left for her to do. Besides, she was feeling quite ghastly, and she had this odd sensation of her skull’s being packed loosely with sawdust which shifted about in the most peculiar manner every time she moved her head. She was being driven home by Earl Joslin, Aaron’s lawyer, and she thought with resignation, looking out the car window at the remnants of snow, that it was unfortunate that she had been compelled to hurry all the way back from Florida at such an inconvenient time.

Many things in the life of Shirley Smith Burns had been, and were still, unfortunate. Perhaps the single most unfortunate thing — though it is actually impossible ever to pinpoint this — was the diphtheria which she had as a child. This was the only genuinely organic illness she ever had in her life, and she very nearly died of it, but all in all, in the final stages of recovery, she enjoyed it immensely. She was extravagantly loved and coddled and waited upon. She was the significant center of her universe. The romance of the experience, as well as the attention, was not lost upon her, for there is something poetic in the mortality of a child, and no one is more aware of it than children.

For a long time she amused herself by playing imaginative variations on the theme of her death, and it was too bad, in a way, that she could not actually have died. The only reservations she felt in this childish death wish were the knowledge that she would be unable to attend the funeral. She recovered from the diphtheria, but she never recovered from the convalescence. Moreover and worse, neither did her mother. She, having seen her only child imperiled, waged thereafter a continuing terrified battle against all the shadows of death. And Shirley grew up in the shadows. Later, when she was grown, when impatience and indifference succeeded concern, it was too late to come out from these shadows.

This change did not occur until she lost her mother. That intrepid woman, constantly alert to the designs of Death upon her daughter, was careless of his designs upon herself, and she let him steal up on her. She died suddenly one spring, and the following winter her husband died of a bronchial pneumonia he might have survived if he had not learned from his family to despise and avoid doctors.

Shirley was left with a modest income from investments and an endless repertoire of psychosomatic ills, and eventually, by chance or fate or the caprice of the devil, she met and married Aaron Burns. She married him for several reasons, and none of them was love. Most compelling of the reasons was that he was gentle enough to be imposed upon and clever enough to make lots of money. But what she was never capable of learning was that he needed most of all, because of his spiritual desolation, a simple carnal acceptance in the broad meaning of the terms. Unable to give him this in even a narrow sense, let alone a broad one, she left it to someone else.

She was a selfish woman, but she was no fool. She was certainly aware, after she began denying him herself, that he was getting satisfaction elsewhere. She never suspected, however, his actual method before Donna, and it would have been better for her if she had. She thought that he probably kept a mistress, despising him for it as a man too weak for pure devotion, but she never despised herself for her part in it. The irrational thing about her reaction was the really virulent hatred she developed for the woman who was giving and getting what she herself did not care to give or accept, and there was a time when she felt that it was absolutely necessary, if she was to retain her sanity, to know who the woman was. She hired a detective to follow Aaron for one month, but the detective, a reasonable fellow who did not consider a whorehouse and a mistress synonomous, submitted a negative report. After that she did not try to discover the identity of the woman, but she remained convinced that she existed, certain in her own mind that the detective was an incompetent and Aaron a monster of deception. She found solace in suffering, and began going frequently to Florida.

They turned into the drive and stopped beside the house, and Joslin came around to open the door on her side of the car. With one hand lightly on her elbow, he assisted her into the house and upstairs, and waited in the hall outside her room until she called to him to enter. When he went in, she was reclining on a chaise longue, wearing a pale negligee that emphasized the pallor of her skin and the shadows under her eyes. She incited in him a kind of delicate crawling revulsion, a faint unpleasant tickling below the diaphragm. He was here because he was Aaron’s lawyer and because of a genuine liking and regret for Aaron himself. But as soon as he had settled Aaron’s affairs, he never again wanted to see Aaron’s widow.