David Markson - Epitaph For A Tramp

I had to twist around and go back to the other method to get through the door. Estelle was watching me. “Keeps me in shape,” I said. “The rolling Fannin gathers no moss.”

I was being the lightheaded lad again. So lightheaded I hadn’t realized it until I’d said it. Moss. Adam Moss. I snaked my way into the kitchen thinking that Mr. Moss was next on the agenda.

No, next was a blade. I was going to have some case getting to one if Estelle was a compulsive housekeeper. I was lucky. I saw the point of a fruit knife extending over the edge of the drain on the sink. I slithered over there.

The sink was just low enough. I swung up and around into something which approximated a sitting position, then wedged my hands under myself and lifted like an automobile jack until I was able to catch the point between my teeth. I let it drop to the linoleum.

The rest was a snap. It didn’t take me more than fifteen minutes and I only cut myself four times.

I stopped for a second in the bathroom, throwing some water on my face and then gritting my teeth like Mike Hammer while I bathed the gashes in iodine. Coming out I glanced into the bedrooms. Duke had given the place a quick ransacking before he’d left.

Estelle sat up numbly when I cut her free. She rubbed her hands, not saying anything. I gave her a cigarette. She took the first couple of drags as if no one might make it back down into that caved-in mineshaft again.

“I suppose you understood part of all that?”

She nodded uncertainly.

“Estelle, Cathy got mixed up in something that I’m afraid— well, it isn’t very pretty.”

She looked at me. All I’d been doing was telling people about it. Dan and Helen Abraham, Sally Kline, now the sister. I could start a service to go with that drunk’s suicide plan. Why leave a note when Smiling Fannin can break the news for you? I was glad her mother wasn’t there.

“Cathy’s dead, Estelle.”

“She—”

I could actually feel her go rigid next to me. After the first gasp she didn’t make another sound. Her eyes were wide and she was staring at me but nothing came out. A kick in the stomach might have brought on roughly the same initial reaction.

I put my hand on her arm when the sobbing began. It was broken and harsh. It was the sort of thing that comes without any tears. It was all inside, which is the rottenest kind.

“I’m sorry, Estelle—”

A while passed. Her cigarette was in a tray. Finally she fumbled in her pocket and came up with a handkerchief.

“How?” she said then. “Oh, Harry, did one of those men—?”

“Somebody. With a knife.”

She gasped, clenching her fists. I stood there and watched the faint curl of smoke.

“Who? Why? Oh, God, why?”

“I don’t know. Until I found him here I thought it was our boy with the cannon. He was… Cathy’d been involved in something with him. I don’t think she understood how serious it was. It was armed robbery, Estelle. What Duke wanted was the money, which seems to be missing. That’s what she was killed for. She’d been… well, running around a lot.”

I didn’t know how you were supposed to tell it to someone like Estelle. You can be doddering, bald and approaching senility and still feel awkward in front of an old-maid school teacher. She and Cathy had been only a dozen years apart, but when I’d been in the family I’d always thought of her more like an aunt than a sister-in-law. I had wondered more than once if she were a virgin.

She looked up at me from no more than two feet away, but her voice might have been coming from a shut closet. “Mother,” she said. “Mother will—”

She made a choking pitiful sound deep in her throat, and then she was running toward the bathroom. The door closed and I could hear her sobbing behind it.

I stood there for a minute, feeling rotten, then I flicked on the TV without the sound. A morning-program MC gave me what was probably a very famous grin. I turned him off.

She was more composed when she came back. She had dried her eyes. She sat down, not close to me.

“Tell me, Harry,” she said. “I… I want to know.”

“It’s nothing more than I’ve already said. Really, Estelle. She got involved with this fellow Duke somehow, and one thing led to another.”

“No,” she said. She was not looking at me. “I want to know about her, Harry. This… running around, you called it. That was it all the time, wasn’t it? When you and she broke up?”

“Estelle, it’s a messy story. She was your sister — you know as much about the kind of girl she was as I do.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know.” She was chewing her lip. “That’s why when I think about telling mother, or trying to hide it from her, I… Oh, Harry, I’ve been hiding things about Cathy from mother for so long. Oh, God, and now this! Now I’ll have to hide this, too! Because I always did it. I always did it and I used to hate myself for it. Oh, Harry, it’s such a terrible thing to say, but I’ve always thought of her as such a—”

She cut herself off but you could guess the word easily enough. Tramp would do. Someone like Estelle could not think of a girl like Cathy in any other way, and I supposed you could not criticize her too much. But now she was being hurt because of it.

She had started to cry again, and her body began to shake like a child’s. I got up and walked across the room and stood by the windows. There was an air-conditioning unit in one of them but it was off. It was almost 6:30. Traffic was loosening up down below. In another couple of hours it would be something to hide from.

“But I know one of the reasons,” she said behind me.

“What?”

She was not looking at me. “Why she was that way.”

“I don’t get you.”

She still did not look up. ‘She must have told you about the time she was lost in the mountains up beyond Lake George. When she was six.”

“Sure.”

“She didn’t get lost, Harry. Someone… a man… attacked her. Criminally.”

“Oh, damn, Estelle.”

“He… they sent him to jail for it. But that isn’t the point. The point is that Catherine somehow forgot about it, Harry. Or she deliberately put it out of her mind. Sublimated it, that’s the word. I heard her talk about it afterward a dozen times, and all she ever remembered was wandering in the woods and being cold. She talked about it like some marvelous childhood adventure she’d had, and the… the other part of it was out of her mind completely. I wanted to tell her about it but I never could.

I never could say anything. But that must have been part of it, I’m sure. She buried the memory of what happened because it was such a shock, but there was some kind of inverse reaction, as if she were unconsciously trying to prove to herself that it hadn’t hurt her, or… I don’t know. But she should have been under analysis. I did tell her that once, two or three years ago, but she merely laughed at me. Maybe I’m making too much of the whole thing, maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference anyhow. But now she’s…”

Estelle had been staring at the rug all the time she was telling it. It was not simply that she was upset. I had to wonder how a woman could grow to thirty-six or thirty-seven and still be embarrassed by something like that.

I didn’t have much idea what the story was worth. Psychology was another one of those things I’d missed because of wind-sprints and signal practice at Ann Arbor. Not that it mattered much now anyhow. I went across to her.

Her head was still down. I put my fist under her chin. “Look, will you be all right? I have to check in with the law. I haven’t seen them yet, Estelle.”

She started to get up and I helped her. For a moment she stood there with my hand on her wrist. She started to say something and then her face twisted up again. After that I was holding her with her face on my shoulder.