An Air That Kills (12 page)

“I might do that. And if business gets too heavy I'll send some customers on to you. The experience might improve you.”

“Why, you dirty—you cheap . . .”

“Shut up!” Harry ordered. “Shut up, both of you! Thelma, go and pack your stuff. You, Marian, sit down.”

Thelma disappeared hastily into the bedroom, but Marian stood pat, her hands on her enormous hips. “I don't take orders from any
man
. I will not sit down.”

“All right, you can stand on your head as far as I'm concerned. Just stop shrieking like a fishwife. You have neighbors, neighbors have ears.”

“She insulted me. You heard her, she
insulted
me.”

“You insulted her first.”

“But she deserved it, she asked for it. After what she's done to you, how can you stand there and take her part?”

“She's my wife.”

“Wife. A fine word, but that's all it is, a word. She's used you, deceived you, made a fool of you. And she intended to do the same thing to me. To think I was taken in by that sweet smile of hers and that soft ‘Sit down and have a cup of tea, Marian, it will do you good.' As if she
cared.
Lies, lies. The soft-talkers, they're the worst. I've been taken in by them before. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson.”

Her voice broke and spots of color blotched her face and her neck. In a moment of perception Harry realized that she was not so much angry as disappointed. She had been looking forward to having Thelma around for a while to alleviate her loneliness and lend her life a little excitement. Thelma's visit would have meant a transfusion of vitality; now the transfusion had been stopped almost before it began. Marian had closed the valve herself: she could not accept the blood of a slut, she would prefer to die.

“The girls at the office,” Marian said, “maybe they're silly, yes, even malicious, but there's not one of them bad like her. Not one of them's ever gotten into that kind of trouble.”

Harry found himself saying, without conviction, “Thelma's not bad. She made a mistake.”

“When people make a mistake they're
sorry.
They're not proud of it like her. They don't go around bragging about a trip to California. I want to go to California too, I've dreamed of it for years, but you can bet I'll choose a more respectable way of getting there.”

“I'm sure you will.” The dry irony of his tone added,
I'm sure you'll have to.

“This man she called Ron. Who is he?”

“I'm afraid,” Harry said, “that it's none of your business.”

“News like that gets around. I'll find out.”

“I'm sure of that, too.” Not only would Marian find out. Once Ron's disappearance hit the newsstands, the whole city, the whole country would find out, and Thelma would have to get used to stronger words than bastard and slut. Harry wondered, with weary detachment, if anyone dared print the word cuckold.

Thelma came out of the bedroom wearing the navy blue coat and hat she'd bought for Easter and carrying a rawhide suitcase which had been a wedding present from Ralph and Nancy Turee. She ignored Marian, who was standing tense, braced for the next round, and said to Harry, “I'm ready. We can go now.”

“And good riddance,” Marian said.

“The same to you.”

Harry interrupted quickly, “Come on, Thelma. I'll take you home.”

“I'm not going home. You can drop me at a hotel.”

“The house is yours. You need it more than I do. I won't bother you.”

“I wish you'd stop being
noble.
I can't stand it!”

“I'm not being noble. It's just that I'd feel better if I knew you were looking after yourself properly. Me, I can stay anywhere, with Ralph, or Billy Winslow or Joe Hepburn. I'm used to bumming around. You're not. You have to take care of yourself, now more than ever.”

She bit her lip in indecision, weighing her pride against her common sense and her concern for the baby.

“I won't bother you,” he repeated. “I'll just take you home and pack up some of the things I'll need.”

“All right.” Her voice was tight and squeaky. “Thank you, Harry.”

Harry took her suitcase and opened the door, and she walked out into the hall with quick, impatient steps. Harry hesitated, as if he wanted to say something pleasant to Marian before he left, but Marian had turned her back, and it was like the closing of a steel safe to which he didn't know the combination. No one did.

Outside a spring rain had begun to fall, lightly and steadily. Neither of them seemed to notice. They walked in silence for a time, unaware of any weather but their own, inside.

“Harry?”

“Yes.”

“Where will you stay? In case anything happens and I have to get in touch with you . . .”

“I don't know. I haven't decided yet. With Ralph and Nancy, perhaps.”

“But they have four children.”

“Yes, I know,” Harry said quietly. “I like children.”

TWELVE

The private day school which the two Galloway boys attended had been closed for two weeks because of an epidemic of measles. One of the ways Esther had devised to keep them busy, and presumably out of mischief, was to give them certain duties and responsibilities previously assigned only to adults. The particular duty the boys enjoyed most, since it involved a rare freedom, was that of collecting the mail. They were allowed to walk all the way down to the end of the driveway, unescorted except by the little dachshund, Petey, and wait at the gate for the postman.

When the postman handed them the day's mail, they assumed it was a gift, and so they usually took him a gift in return, a cookie coaxed out of the housekeeper, Mrs. Browning, or a new drawing by Marvin or the prize from a box of cereal. On Monday they had a special gift for him, the first angleworm of the season, a scrawny specimen elon­gated by considerable handling and rather dried out after a time spent in Greg's shirt pocket.

The boys arrived early and the postman was late, so they had plenty of opportunity to indulge in the usual arguments and fights about who was to present the gift, who was to carry the mail into the house and who was to occupy the place of honor at the top of the iron gate. But on this particular morning neither of the boys seemed inclined to fight. Their energies were directed not against each other but against the mysterious tensions which now seemed to domi­nate the household. The boys had not been told, or allowed to overhear, anything about their father's absence. They had no means of understanding their mother's strange preoccupa­tion, Mrs. Browning's snappishness, Annie's sudden lapses into silence, or the unusual permissiveness of old Rudolph, the gardener who lived over the garage. Rudolph, the most continuous male contact the boys had, loomed large in their lives. When the holes Petey, the dachshund, had dug in the rose bed on Sunday afternoon were filled quietly and without comment, both of the boys realized that something was the matter.

Their reaction was instinctive. Instead of remaining brothers, each jockeying for position in the household, they became friends, joined together against the world of adults. They climbed to the top of the iron gate and stuck out their tongues in the direction of the house and chanted derisive insults.

“I'm the king of the castle,” Greg sang, and named in­dividually the people who were dirty rascals: Annie, Mother, old Rudolph, Mrs. Browning. Marvin was all for including Daddy, but Greg reminded him sharply that Daddy had promised to bring them a new dog when he came home, and shouldn't be listed among the dirty rascals.

“What if he forgets?” Marv said. “He'll be a dirty rascal, then can we sing him in it too?”

“He won't forget. He'll bring something. He always does.”

“A cat maybe, huh? I wouldn't say no to a cat.”

“Petey would. Petey hates cats. Petey's a real cat-killer.”

Petey, who had never seen a cat, responded to his new, unearned distinction with a happy yelp. This settled the matter as far as the boys were concerned. They couldn't possibly keep a cat, and if Ron brought one home by mistake they would simply hand it over to old Rudolph to trade in on a dog. Until the previous day they'd been willing to settle for any kind of dog, but now, sensing that a very large one would be more annoying to the adults, they decided on a Saint Bernard.

“We can teach it to bite Annie,” Greg said. “When she makes us go to bed we'll say sic 'em, and then
boiiing,
Annie gets bit.”

Marv laughed so hard at this delightful picture that he nearly fell off the gate.
“Boiiing,
Annie gets bit.
Boiiing, boiiing,
Mrs. Browning gets bit.
Boiiing, boiiing,
everybody gets bit.”

“ 'Cepting us.”

“ 'Cepting us.”

They screamed with laughter and the gate shook and Petey broke into excited yelps. By the time the postman ar­rived, the boys' faces were red as tomatoes and Marv had started to hiccough as he always did after a laughing fit.

“Mr. Postman! Hi, Mr. Postman!”

“Hello boys.” The postman was long and lean, with a weather-cracked smile. “How come you're not in school this morning?”

“Measles.”

“You shouldn't be out here if you got measles.”

“We
don't got measles,” Marv explained. “The other kids got them.”

“Well, I declare. I was never that lucky when I was a boy. The whole town could be dying of plague but they never closed the school, no sir.” He put down the heavy mail ­sack, propped it against the fence, and stretched his arms high in the air. “That's how I got an education. Force. I didn't want one.”

“What's a plague?” Greg asked, climbing down from the gate.

“Like measles, only worse.”

“You got something for us in your bag?”

“Sure thing.”

“We got something for you, too.”

“Well, how about that.”

“You want to guess what it is?”

“I guess it's a cookie.”

“No.”

“An apple.”

“No. You can't eat it. A human bean can't eat it, I mean.”

“What does a human bean do with it?”

“Keep it as a pet.”

“Oh. Well, I'm just about ready to give up. What is it?”

“Let
me
tell him!” Marv shouted. “Let
me!
It's an angle­worm!”

The postman took off his cap and scratched his head. “An angleworm, eh? Let's see it.”

The angleworm, now fairly moribund, was duly produced from Greg's pocket and placed carefully in the postman's hand.

“Well, now, isn't he cute? I must admit no one's ever thought of giving me an angleworm before.”

“You'll take good care of him?” Greg said anxiously.

“You bet I will. I think I'll put him in my garden where he'll find other angleworms to play with. There's nothing worse than a lonesome angleworm, so I've been told.”

“How do you know he'll meet the kind of angleworms he likes to play with?”

“They're not fussy.” The postman opened his sack and distributed the mail as impartially as possible to the two boys. “Well, I've got to be on my way now.”

“Someday,” Greg said, “can we come with you and carry the sack?”

“Someday, sure. So long, fellows.”

“So long.”

They watched him until he turned the corner, then they set out for the house. Usually they hurried at this point. It made them feel important to hand over the mail to their mother or Mrs. Browning. But this morning their feet lagged and they kept glancing back at the gate as if they half expected the postman to reappear and offer to take them along on his rounds.

Their mother was waiting for them at the front door. “What a lot of mail. It must be heavy.”

“I could carry the whole sack,” Greg said, “if I wanted to. Someday I will, he said I could.”

Marv put up an immediate protest. “He said both of us, me too.”

“That will be very nice, I'm sure,” Esther said and began glancing through the mail, putting the bills in one pile on the hall table and the circulars in another. There was only one letter.

For a long time Esther stood staring down at the hand­writing on the envelope. Then she said in a cold, quiet voice, “You boys had better go to Annie.”

They were afraid of this voice, but they couldn't admit it, to each other or to themselves.

“I hate Annie,” Marv shouted. “I don't want . . .”

“Do as I say, Marvin.”

“No! I won't! I hate Annie!”

“I hate her too,” Greg said. “We're going to teach the new dog to bite her.”

“Boiiing!”

“Boiiing, boiiing, Annie gets bit.”

“Boiiing, boiiing, old Rudolph gets bit.”

“Stop it,” Esther said.
“Please
. Please be good boys.”

“Boiiing, boiiing, everybody gets bit.”

“ 'Cepting us.”

“Boiiing . . .”

“Oh God,” Esther said and turned and ran across the hall into the library.

Her sudden flight and the loud shutting of the door stunned the boys for a minute. Then Marv said, tentatively, “Boiiing?”

“Oh, shut up. You're such a baby. Shut up.”

Marv began to cry. “I want Mummy. I want my Mummy.”

The letter postmarked Collingwood, was addressed to Esther in Ron's handwriting.

She knew in advance that it would contain bad news and she tried to prepare herself for it by imagining the worst, that he'd left her for another woman and wasn't coming back.

She was only half right.

 

Dear Esther:

By this time you may know the truth, that Thelma is carrying my child. I won't try to excuse myself or explain,

I can't. It happened, that's all I can say. I didn't know about the child until tonight. It was a terrible surprise, too terrible for me to face. My God, what I've done to you and Harry.

I don't ask your forgiveness. I give you instead my promise that I will never hurt you or anyone ever again. I'm not fit to live. I'm sick in mind and body and soul. God help me.

  Ron

 

She did not faint, or cry out, or weep. She stood like a stone; only her eyes moved, reading and rereading the words on the page.

She was not aware of the door opening and when she looked up and saw Annie her eyes wouldn't focus properly. Annie seemed misty and remote as if she were surrounded by ectoplasm.

“Mrs. Galloway?”

“Please don't—don't bother me right—right now.”

“But I can't do a thing with the boys. They've both gone wild, screaming and laughing and carrying on. And Marvin just bit me.” Annie exhibited her wounded wrist. “I'm not sure but what they're coming down with something. Do you think I should phone the doctor?”

“All right.”

“You don't look so good yourself, Mrs. Galloway. Maybe you're coming down with the same thing. Can I do anything for you?”

“Yes,” Esther said. “Call the police.”

“The police?”

“I've had a letter. From my husband. I think he's killed himself.”

Marvin came bouncing into the room, screaming, “Boiiing! Boiiing, boiiing!”

Esther turned with a sob and picked him up in her arms and held him tight. Too tight. There seemed to Marvin only one logical thing to do and Marvin did it. He bit her.