An Air That Kills (18 page)

“I don't know much about it yet.” Though he was still pouring sweat, he had begun to shiver, as if a cold wind was blowing through the house up from the basement of the past. “I—I've thought of a good idea.”

“Let's hear it.”

“Perhaps I could leave these folders with you and you can study them for yourself, facts and figures and so on. Then when you decide . . .”

“I've already decided. We'll take one.”

“Which—which model?”

“Any model.”

“But . . .”

“Any model,” Harry said graciously. “All we want is enough soft water for the baby's clothes. I'll probably be doing some of the washing myself, so my motives aren't en­tirely unselfish. Are you married?”

“N-no sir.”

“Ah well, you've plenty of time. I was well over thirty when I got married—took me that long to find the right girl. I found her, though, I found her. And I don't intend to lose her.”

“Well—ah, I'd better be going now.”

“What's your hurry?”

“I—the fact is, I have to get hold of an expert to come and measure—measure things.”

“I can see you're a real eager-beaver. Ever see a beaver dam, by the way?”

“No sir.”

“Highly interesting. You should go out of your way to find one some time.”

“Yes sir. I will.”

“Industrious lot, beavers.”

“They certainly are.” Blake began moving toward the door, breathing heavily, as if he had just completed build­ing a dam entirely by himself with no help from any beavers. “I'll—I'll put your order in right away and see about in­stallation.”

“Oh, there's no great rush about it.” Harry smiled fondly at his wife. “We can't hurry Mother Nature anyway.”

“Harry. Listen to me.”

“Now, dear, don't be embarrassed or upset about a per­fectly natural process.”

“Be quiet.” Thelma watched Blake approach her and she stood squarely in the middle of the doorway, so that he couldn't pass her on either side without pushing her away. “We don't want a water-softener. My husband is merely amusing himself at your expense and mine. He's probably been drinking.”

“Not drinking,” Harry said. “
Thinking.
”

“Drinking,” she repeated to Blake, softly, as if
she were confiding a secret. “And he has a gun.”

“I know, I know, but what the hell am I supposed to do? I want to get out of here.”

“You can't leave me alone with him.”

“You said before you weren't afraid.”

“I didn't know about the gun then.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Blake whispered, and he felt his knees buckle like a sick colt's.
Let me out of here in one piece and I'll go to church every Sunday for a year.

“Thinking,” Harry went on, as if he had not heard the exchange or else considered it too trivial to bother about. “Yes, my dear, that's what I've been doing, a lot of plain, common sense thinking. And I've decided that you're in no condition to make the decisions for the family, now that there are going to be three of us. You're too emotional to be allowed a freedom of choice. It's up to me to take a firm stand, and I will. I'm head of this house, it's time you real­ized that.
I
will decide the future. You hear that, Thelma?”

“Yes,” Thelma said. “I hear.”

“I'm glad you're coming to your senses. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but the fact is, you've always been a little unstable.”

She looked grim. “Have I?”

“So it's up to me to take over, to make all the decisions. Now the first decision I wish to make is about the water-­softener. I want a water-softener and I intend to get one. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“You see how easy your role is going to be from now on? All you have to do is agree.”

“Yes.”

“Actually, it will save you trouble, it will be easier on you if I shoulder the burden of responsibilities. It puts too much of a strain on a woman, making decisions, being boss. It puts a strain on anyone.” He passed the back of his hand across his forehead. “A great strain. I'm—I'm really quite tired. Haven't been sleeping much. Working all day, think­ing all night, thinking . . .”

“You should lie down here, Harry, and get a good rest.” She crossed the room and began arranging the pillows at one end of the davenport. “Lie down, Harry.”

He didn't have to be told. He sank back among the pil­lows, limp with exhaustion. “Lie down with me.”

“I can't right now. I have to go out.”

“Not to the funeral? You're not . . .”

“Of course not. If you don't want me to, I won't. You're the boss, Harry.”

“Where are you going, then?”

“To the store. Now that you're moving back into the house I have to stock up on groceries. What would you like for dinner?”

“I don't know,” he said, closing his eyes. “I'm so tired.”

“Fried chicken?”

“I don't know. Kiss me, Thelma.”

Her lips touched his forehead briefly. It felt hot and dry, like something cured in the sun, or slow-baked in an oven. “You rest now, Harry. It's such a strain, all this thinking and being boss, it's given you a fever.”

His eyes snapped open, painfully, as if he had been pierced by a splinter of irony from her voice. “You don't care. You don't care about anything.”

“I do care, very much.”

“No . . . You listen to me, Thelma. I'm the boss. I want fried chicken for dinner tonight. Hear that?”

“Yes.”

“I make all the decisions from now on. Is that clear?”

“Of course.”

With a sound of desolation he turned and buried his face in the pillows.

She stood looking down at him, tight-lipped, cold-eyed. “I'll need the car keys if I'm going to do the shopping. Are they in your pocket?”

He didn't respond. She waited for several minutes, still as a stone, until Harry began to snore. Then she bent over him, and, moving with delicate precision, she took the car keys from one pocket and the gun from the other, and put them both in her purse. Blake watched her from the doorway with the awed expression of a man witnessing the dismantling of an unexploded bomb.

When she turned and saw that Blake was still in the house she seemed surprised and displeased. “I thought you'd left.”

“No.”

“You're free to go any time.” She went into the hall, closing the door behind her, and began putting on her hat, arranging the black veil over her face, tucking in wisps of hair. There was a mirror built into the hall rack but she didn't even glance toward it. “You're free to go,” she re­peated. “You were so anxious to leave a few minutes ago.”

“Naturally. What did you expect me to do, tackle a crazy man?”

“He's not crazy. He's emotionally exhausted.”

“Same difference, as far as I'm concerned. You'd better watch out for yourself, Mrs. Bream.” He appeared reluctant to leave, as if he had misgivings about his behavior and wanted to confess and apologize but didn't know how to go about it. “What are you going to do about the gun?”

“I have no idea. What does anyone do about a gun?”

“Unload it, that's the first thing. Let me see it.”

She opened her purse. She knew nothing about guns but it seemed odd to her that it wasn't heavier, more substantial.

“It's not real,” Blake said, in a high, tinny voice.

“Pardon?”

“It's a toy, a cap pistol.” The color of shame and fury spread across his face. “A cap pistol. And I was taken in. I was . . .”
I was a coward. I was scared by a toy gun and a little man years older than I am. Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat.

“I'm so relieved,” Thelma said. “I should have guessed, of course. Harry just isn't the type to harm anyone even if he wanted to. People can't get away from their own type no matter how hard they try.”

“Can't they?”

“Poor Harry. A toy gun. Well, I suppose we'll all look back on this some day and laugh. I mean, there was I, scared out of my wits, and you—I thought you were going to faint, you looked petrified.”

“I wasn't frightened in the least,” he said, and giving her a look of hatred, he turned and opened the door and ran down the porch steps, fleeing from his own identity, pur­sued by his own shadow.

Thelma started to call after him, to tell him not to bother about the water-softener, but at that moment the telephone began ringing again. This time she answered it promptly because she didn't want Harry to wake up.

“Hello?”

“Thelma, this is Ralph. I've been trying to reach you for hours.”

“I was out.” I don't even have to lie, she thought. I was out. Out of patience. “Is anything wrong?”

“Maybe. Harry came to my office this morning. He looked in terrible shape, as if he'd been on a binge for a week. I know that can't be true, though. He's afraid to drink since he had to pay that two hundred dollar fine after the acci­dent.”

“Why worry about him?”

“He was talking—well, pretty unrealistically. About you, and going home, and how he intended to get a firm hand on the reins, that sort of thing.”

“So?
”

“I thought you should be warned. He's a hell of a good guy, Thelma, it's up to us to keep him out of trouble.”

“Not us,” Thelma said dryly. “You.”

“What does that mean?”

“He's here now. Sleeping. After making a delightful scene in front of a total stranger. It's the last straw. If he's going to be kept out of trouble you'll have to do it, you and Bill Winslow or Joe Hepburn. You're his friends.
I'm not.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“I'm going out now, to Ron's funeral—and you can start raving and ranting about bad form or anything else, but it won't do any good. I'm going. And when I get back, I want Harry out of here, out of this house. If he's still here when I come back, I'm going to phone the police and have him arrested for threatening me with a gun.

“A gun?”

“Oh, just a cap pistol, as it turned out. But the threat was real and I have a witness. Harry can be arrested.”

“You wouldn't . . .”

“Wouldn't I? Listen, I'm fed up. I'm sick and tired and fed up. These scenes are tearing me apart. I have my health to consider, and my baby. I need peace and quiet, relaxation. How can I get any, with him barging around like a maniac? I would do anything to get rid of him. And I will, if you don't prevent it.”

“I'll do my best.”

“He won't be here when I come back?”

“No.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I should thank you in advance, only—well, whatever you do will be for Harry's sake, not mine. I ask no favors from anyone.”

“I understand that. Go-it-alone Thelma, as usual.”

“I'm not quite alone.” She hung up.

In the living room Harry lay crushed among the pillows, dreaming of triumphs and defeats, the rhythm of his gentle snoring broken now and then by a catch of his breath, a pause, a sigh.

What long eyelashes he has, Thelma thought. Then she said softly, “Good-bye, Harry.”

EIGHTEEN

Harry remained at home and slept through the funeral, partly from a desire to escape it, partly from genuine weariness. By the time Turee and Bill Winslow arrived at the house, he was awake and sitting up on the davenport, though still dazed.

“How did you fellows get here?”

“Thelma left the door unlocked,” Turee said.

“No, I mean, what brought . . . ?”

“Action now, explanations later. Come on, Harry.”

“Come on where?”

“To my house.”

“I don't want to go to your house. I'm staying here. I'm waiting for Thelma.”

“Thelma's not coming back until you leave.”

“But she has to. She promised to make me fried chicken for dinner. I
commanded
her to.”

“Oh, great, great,” Winslow said. After the funeral, he'd had three quick, long martinis which had submerged his sorrow but left a lump of anger sticking in his throat like an olive pit. “You
commanded
her to. Fine. With a toy gun. Even better. What makes you pull such damnfool stunts?”

“I was only trying to prove . . .”

“What you were trying to prove and what you proved are a couple of light-years apart. You threaten a woman and she gets frightened. But after the fright goes away, what's left? Revenge.”

“Not Thelma.”

“Exactly Thelma. Get it through your thick skull that she wants you to get lost, or else. All these damnfool antics of yours, I don't blame her. Now let's hurry up and shove out of here. I need a drink.”

“Well, gee whiz,” Harry said plaintively. “What's every­body so sore about?”

“Who's sore?”

“You are.”

“The hell I am.”

“Quiet, both of you,” Turee said. “Come on, Harry. Bill has his car, he'll drive us over to my house.”

“Where's my car?”

“Thelma said she'd leave it at the house for you. Nancy's expecting us, let's get going.”

“I don't want to go. I'm not a child. I can't be ordered around.”

“You are and you can.”

“I thought you were my friends!”

“If we weren't your friends, we'd both be home having a nice quiet dinner. Now let's go.”

“All right,
all right.”

Harry got up and went out the door, muttering to him­self. He paused at the bottom of the veranda steps and glanced back at the door as if he had an irrational hope that Thelma was going to appear and ask him not to leave.

Mrs. Malverson was out on her front lawn watering a bed of daffodils. She spotted Harry and waved the hose playfully by way of greeting.

“Hello there, Mr. Bream.”

“Hello, Mrs. Malverson.”

“Beautiful weather for daffodils, isn't it?”

“I guess so.” He hung back while the other two men ap­proached the car parked at the curb. “Mrs. Malverson, I'm—well, I won't be around for a while. Business, you know how it is. I was wondering perhaps if you could drop in on Thelma now and then, cheer her up a bit. She hasn't been well lately.”

“I know. I told her that myself only last Sunday. Child, I said, you look as if you've been up all night, and crying too. I'm sure it was Sunday. Yes, it was, because I remember now I asked her to go to church with me for the reading of the flowers. She dropped a bottle of milk, she was that nervous. And all this week she's been avoiding me. Me, her friend. Of course that's what you can expect from a woman at certain times.”

“Certain times?”

“Oh, come now, Mr. Bream. Surely you've suspected that a little stranger is coming into your life?”

“Stranger? Yes. Yes, that's the right word.” He turned so abruptly that he almost lost his balance, and walked toward the waiting car.

Mrs. Malverson stared after him, her mouth open in sur­prise.
Now what does that mean? Maybe I shouldn't have blurted it out like that, but my goodness, these are modern times. People don't hide things like a baby, they go around shouting it from the housetops as soon as they're sure. Un­less . . .

“Oh, that's ridiculous,” she said aloud, with a violent tug on the hose. “Never have I seen a more devoted wife than Thelma Bream. Keeps the house spotless, airs the mattresses every second Thursday. And never a cross word between the two of them. She's always quoting Harry, Harry this, Harry that, as if he was some kind of god instead of an ordinary little man that sells pills, and some of them no darn good either. And every morning when he leaves for work out she traipses to the car to kiss him good-bye. A real womanly woman, if I ever saw one.”

Unless . . .

“Absolutely ridiculous,” Mrs. Malverson repeated weakly. “I ought to be downright ashamed of myself.”

When they reached Turee's old three-story house on Woodlawn, Nancy came to the door to greet them. Though she looked red-eyed and worn, she spoke cheerfully: “Hello Harry—Ralph . . . Where's Billy? Isn't he coming in for a drink?”

“Not tonight,” Turee said. “His wife has a cold and he wants to go home and catch it, so he'll have an excuse to cry.”

“What a time to try to be funny.”

“I'm quite serious.”

“Well shush, anyway. Harry, where's your suitcase?”

“In my car. Wherever that is.”

“Thelma left it for you in the driveway. Here are the keys. Now go get your suitcase.”

“I can't stay here. I've been enough bother . . .”

“Nonsense. You're perfectly welcome to sleep on the sun porch. This is practically the only time of year it's usable. You won't freeze and you won't stifle. Now how's that for an offer?”

“Well . . .”

“Of course you'll stay. It'll be just like old times, before you were marrie—”

Nancy's tactlessness was sometimes as overwhelming as her hospitality, and Harry stood silent and embarrassed in the face of both, looking down at the carpet which was muddy with the tracks of children and worn in places right through to the padding.

Nancy touched his arm in gentle apology. “I'm always saying the wrong thing. Without meaning to. Come on, I've got dinner ready for you. Ralph will get your suitcase later.”

The children had already been fed and sent upstairs with instructions to amuse themselves, no holds barred, and the two men were left alone at the round oak table in the big old-fashioned kitchen. They were both preoccupied and hungry and the meal was disturbed only by the sounds from upstairs, sometimes loud, sometimes muffled, running feet, squeals and giggles, stifled screams, an occasional howl.

There was a hectic quality in the children's playing, as if they knew something secret and strange and terrifying had happened and they were combating the knowledge with hysterical denial. “Uncle Ron is dead,” Nancy had told them calmly. “Now if you have any questions I'll answer them as best I can.” It was like asking a roomful of grade-schoolers if they had any questions about the mechanism of a hydrogen bomb. No questions were asked, out loud.

Death. A sacred word, yet an evil one, a beginning and a finality, heaven and hell, streets of gold and pits of fire, angels and demons, bliss and brimstone.
If you have any questions . . .

The din from the second floor grew louder and more frantic. Nancy's voice plunged into it, sharp as a scalpel. “What are you four doing up there? Avis? Sandra? You hear me?”

Sudden and complete silence, as if all four, simultaneously, had been anesthetized.

“I want an answer. What are you doing?”

A girl's voice, brassy with defiance, “Nothing.”

“It doesn't sound like nothing.”

“It's
nothing.”

“Well, please do it more quietly.”

Whispers. A gasp. A frightened giggle. Then the muted chant of children:

 

“Galloway was laid to rest

In his Sunday pants and vest.

Galloway was laid to rest . . .”

 

The sounds floated down into the kitchen and Harry shivered and turned white. “I missed it.”

“Missed what?”

“Ron's funeral.”

“That doesn't matter. Barbaric custom, anyway.”

“Thelma, she was there?”

“Yes.”

“There wasn't any scene, any trouble? I mean, with Esther?”

“The ladies,” Turee said with some irony, “are ladies, and don't make scenes at funerals.”

“I was just wondering.”

“You wonder too much.”

“Yes.”

“You've got to stop it.”

“I know.”

“Start thinking on the positive side. You're young, healthy, competent, you've got a future.”

“I can't see it.”

“Not with your eyes closed and pictures of Thelma pasted inside the lids. Start looking around. The sky hasn't fallen. The city is still here. The blood is still bouncing around in your veins. Here, have some of this port. An uncle of mine sent me a dozen bottles. He had to choose between his wine cellar and his ulcer.”

Harry eyed the glass of port with suspicion, then shook his head gravely. “No thanks. I haven't had a drink since Mon­day.”

“Why not?”

“I was afraid it might interfere with my thinking.”

“Something should have.” Turee sipped at his port and made a wry face. “No wonder the old boy developed ulcers. This stuff's god-awful. Try it.”

Harry tried it. “It's not so bad.”

Nancy came into the kitchen to ask Turee to go upstairs immediately and discipline the children.

Turee seemed unperturbed at the request, as if it was a very familiar one. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don't know. Something, anyway.”

“Be more explicit.”

“I can't. All I know is, if I'm expected to do all the disciplining in the family, the children will grow up thinking I'm an ogre. They'll have complexes.”

“Ogress. And they'll have complexes anyway.”

“Sandra's the instigator of this whole thing. I feel like spanking the daylights out of her.”

“Go ahead and do it, then.”

“You're no help at all!”

Turee rose, kissed her on the left cheek, and pushed her gently toward the doorway.

The wine, the warmth of the kitchen, the playing-out of the little domestic scene, all combined to cast a flush across Harry's face. He fidgeted with his empty glass, rolling the stem back and forth between his palms, and a glint of moisture shone in his eyes. “I can't stay here, Ralph. I wish I could. But seeing you and Nancy—and the kids—well, I guess I couldn't stand it. You understand.”

Turee was grave. “Make your own decision. I was only trying to help.”

“No one can help me. I've got to go it alone.”

It was the same sentiment Turee had heard Thelma ex­press, and he wondered how deeply either of them meant it and how far either of them would go alone. Together, lean­ing on each other, entwined in marriage, they'd been able to remain upright, as cornstalks in a field can withstand a high wind.

“What you suggested on Monday,” Harry continued, “about leaving town, applying for a transfer, it's beginning to make sense to me now.”

“Good.”

“I'm sure they'll give me a transfer. I'm a good salesman and there's nothing in the record against me, except that business on Monday. Maybe if I go away
for a while Thelma will actually miss me, eh?”

“Maybe.”

“She might even change her mind. I could always send for her then, her and the baby, couldn't I? I mean, it's not impossible, is it?”

“Not at all.”

“She's always wanted to leave this town anyway.”

Not with you, Turee thought, refilling Harry's glass. “I realize that.”

“Say, you know something, Ralph? For the first time in days I'm beginning to feel that things are making sense again. Don't you feel that, Ralph? Things will work out?”

“Certainly.”

“I guess I was practically going off my rocker for a while there, staying up all night, thinking, trying to figure things out, not eating, not seeing anybody. I feel quite different now. Almost
hopeful,
you know?” He paused to sip at his wine and wipe the beads of moisture from his face with the back of his hand. “Now why did I say
almost?
I don't mean it. I mean very. Very hopeful. You were right, Ralph. I've got a future. I've really got a future, haven't I?”