Gentle Murderer (13 page)

“A
ND JUST LIKE THAT,
Mama, I got the job.”

Katie Galli was happy. It was in her every movement that evening, her quick smile, her eyes, her sudden huggings of her mother.

“How much money?” Mrs. Galli asked.

She hesitated only an instant. “Fifteen dollars a week. That’s to start.”

“And that’s what you couldn’t wait all evening to tell me about. I thought it was fifty. I don’t know, Katerina. I thought you were going to the city college?”

Katie realized her need for caution. “It can wait a year, Mama. I’m young.”

“Young. When I was your age I was with the first child, your brother that died when he was month old. What do you do for this fifteen dollars a week?”

“Answer the telephone. Typing. Just office work. It’s a paint store.”

“And what am I to do here? I can’t hire somebody for fifteen dollars a week.”

“I’ll do my housework, Mama. I’ll just do it at another time.”

“Oh sure. You’ll make the beds when the boarders are asleep in them. All right. Go to an office. The young ones don’t want to stay home any more. They don’t want family business. Your brother, he can’t live at home. He’s gt to have the room near his work. Four blocks he can’t walk in the morning. And now he wants to give up the bakery. Your father killed himself paying for it. But not your brother. Your uncle will manage it by himself. Very well he will manage it. He’ll make it big. But not Johnny. He wants to play in a band. Never a day’s peace with him since he got the accordion.”

“I thought you’d be pleased,” Katie said.

“Pleased. Sorry. What’s it matter? Did you ask me before you looked for the job?”

“I mightn’t have gotten it. I wanted to see if I could first.”

“Then be happy. You know how to get the job. When another one comes you can snap it. You’re my little girl. I want good things for you.”

That line of persuasion was more than Katie could resist for long. “Please, Mama, I’ll need the experience to get a better one.”

Mrs. Galli looked at her. “How much money will you give me?”

“How much do you think I should, Mama?”

“I’ll buy your clothes. You keep a dollar to spend.”

“A dollar isn’t much.”

“Fifteen dollars isn’t much. When you make more, then you keep more. When do you start?”

“Monday.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Galli turned from the clothes she was dampening and wiped her arms in her apron. “He knows when to pick an apple before it falls. Is he young or old, this owner of a paint store?”

“In-between.”

“The in-between ones are the worst. Do you know how to take care of yourself, Katerina?”

“Of course, Mama. I’ll finish the clothes if you’re going to the movie.”

Yes, of course she knew, Mrs. Galli thought. A girl didn’t reach seventeen in their neighborhood without knowing that. She glanced at the clock.

“Don’t you want to come with me, Katerina?”

“Not tonight. I’ll take the fifty cents, though, Mama. Maybe I’ll get some paper and go over to Nina’s and practice typing.”

“You don’t have to be that good for fifteen dollars a week. If you’re going to dampen those things, use lots of water. I don’t want them dried out before morning.”

She combed her hair then, and took her purse from a cupboard drawer. Opening it, she counted her change. “You can take your fifty cents from the coffee can, Katerina. Maybe I won’t stay for the double feature. It’s so hot when you come out.”

“Thanks, Mama.”

As her mother left the house, Katie began to sing. She flung the water over the clothes and rolled each piece quickly … five shirts for her brother, one for Tim. A silly thing to lose a shirt, she thought, but like Tim. Tim. Even the sound of his name was beautiful. It was like the fading sound of a bell. She laid the dampened clothes in the basket and covered them with a towel, shoving the basket under the table then.

She got a pencil and a scrap of paper from the drawer and wrote down several figures. Fifteen from twenty-two-fifty was seven-fifty and that times four equaled thirty. In a month she would have held out thirty dollars. The amount was frightening. Only for a moment did she permit herself to contemplate the gravity of her deception. The miracle was that she had gotten away with it. Her mother believed that she would start at fifteen dollars. It was not as though she didn’t know that it was wrong. She intended restitution. Not that it was really stealing, anyway. She would earn the money and she would do her housework the same as ever. And her need for the money was so great.

Nevertheless the thought of doing it hurt. Something inside had plagued her since she had first conceived and nurtured the idea. She would never be the same again, having done it. The surge of happiness dissipated into depression, and then rose again because the joy of what the deed might bring was stronger. She crumpled the paper and threw it into the cardboard box under the stove.

Going to the cupboard, she took her fifty cents, and then because there was a great deal of change there, she took two more quarters, making a resolve to replace them some day. She gathered six Cola bottles from the pantry and went out. At the delicatessen she turned them in and added twelve cents to her fund. From there she walked to her brother’s bakery. She went into the back room where he was rolling dough.

“Johnny, can I have a dollar?”

“Johnny, can I have a dollar,” he mimicked. “What did you do with the nickel I gave you yesterday?” He grinned and dusted his hands on his apron.

“It always smells so good in here,” she said.

“Yeah. Sweat and sour milk.” He gave her the dollar. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m saving up for a permanent.”

“Give me back my buck. If you ever let them put a curling iron in that hair of yours …”

“They don’t use curling irons any more, silly.”

“Mama does.”

“She’s old-fashioned.”

“You think so? One of these days she’s going to hook herself a nice fat widower with lots of moola. Then I’m going to kiss Uncle Ped and this whole damn bake oven good-bye. I’m going to buy me a little car, and if somebody says the word ‘bread’ to me, boy, am I going to let him have it. Right in the puss. Now get out of here, chicken, and let me go to work.”

“Thanks, Johnny.”

“Yeah. Count your change when you spend it.”

She was almost skipping on her way home, a little dance rhythm fitting itself in her mind to her footsteps. At the corner of Twelfth a few boys loitering whistled. Tom Crosetti was among them. Katie hurried.

“Buy you a Coke, Katie,” one of them called after her.

“No thanks.”

“Got a date?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t call him a date, do you?” That was Tom, she thought, hating him even more.

“Why don’t you get a man, little girl?” another called.

“Why? Just to go to church with?”

Their laughter curled after her like the hissing of a steam engine. What did they know, she thought, what did they know … She almost collided with one of the boarders on the steps. “Watch it, kid. You’ll get in trouble in a hurry like that.”

She waited in the living room until she saw him pass the window on his way down the street. Then she went upstairs and knocked on Tim’s door. He opened it almost the instant she knocked.

“Come down, Tim. There’s no one home and it’s cooler. We can talk and maybe play some records.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“She went to the movies. I’ve got something kind of important to tell you, Tim.”

“And I’ve something to tell you,” he said, permitting her to lead him from the room.

It was Katie who went back and turned out the light in his room. He looked very tired, she thought, glancing at the stack of papers on the card table, but she had never seen him happier or more at ease. His eyes were brimming with pleasure when she returned to him, and she had to rush ahead of him to conceal the response it quickened in her.

“What did you want to tell me, Katie?” he asked as soon as they reached the living room.

“It’s nothing to get excited over. It’s just that I got a job.”

He seemed disappointed at the news. “You mean you’ll be going away to work every day?”

His disappointment pleased her. “Yes. But I’ll be home evenings. I never see you through the day, anyway.”

“No. But it makes such a difference knowing you’re in the house. It’s like … I don’t know what it’s like, a happy bird maybe … that you hear singing off somewhere, and feel glad just to know that it’s in the world with you.”

“I feel that way too, Tim. When I know you’re upstairs, it doesn’t make any difference whether I see you or not. The house just seems different.”

“Then why do you want to go to work?”

She saw then that she could not tell him directly. She would have to make him see the need for it first. “It’s a good job and I’ll be home Saturdays and Sundays, and by five-thirty every night,” she said, attempting indifference. “Now tell me your news, Tim. That’s what’s important. It’s about your work, isn’t it?”

He began to walk back and forth across the room. “Yes. It’s about my work. How can I tell you, Katie? It’s pouring out of me like … like water down a cascade. Only it has shape. Shape as well as substance. Always before I used to get a great blob of color, as it were. Gushing.” He clenched and unclenched his fists to demonstrate the splash. “Now I can contain it without losing it. I can hold it long enough to fashion the structure I want it to fit. And in the reading, it sounds like thunder, like the tumultuous rolling of storm clouds up to the very explosion of the heavens … and then it’s quiet again. I’m doing that part now, and Katie, I can write the quiet parts now. And I’ve never been able to before. Did you ever hear a flower laughing?”

She giggled. “I’ve seen them laughing.”

He smiled, looking at her and then away again as though at some picture he had conjured up. “How could you hear them in the bellowing of car horns and the choking of buses? Some day you’ll hear them. I’ll see to that.”

“I want to, Tim. Very much.”

“When I was a boy I used to sit in a field of daisies and I’d watch them rock back and forth, and if I’d listen very hard, I’d hear them chuckling. And the wind would come up a little stronger, and they would just seem to roll with laughter.” He cocked his head, listening again for the sound. He turned to her. “I’m getting all that now, Katie. If only I can go on this way. I keep feeling that I must hurry before the storm breaks again.”

“Don’t hurry, Tim,” she said very gently. “You don’t have to hurry now.”

“Bless you, my dear. If this is what I think it is, please God, it’s you that it belongs to more than it does to me. You know that you’re the flowers, don’t you?”

“I hoped I was. I wanted to be part of it, I mean. I didn’t dare to hope really.”

“Always dare to hope, Katie. It’s the least we can dare. There was an expression my mother used to use: we’ll live in hope if we die in despair.”

“That isn’t very hopeful,” she said.

“No, it isn’t,” he said thoughtfully. “It just happens to have the word hope in it.”

“Did you love your mother very much, Tim?”

“No, I didn’t,” he said slowly. “She crushed me like a flower she was trying to save. She sucked all the life out of me. Why?”

“No reason especially. I was thinking of mama. She’s like that too. When she’s feeling affectionate she just loves you to death. Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to be like that some day.”

“Women are like elephants,” he said for no reason she understood. He began to move about the room.

“Tim, listen to me for a minute. Sit down and rest.”

He hesitated.

“Please, Tim. This is such a good evening for us.”

He did as she asked.

“Tim, you said that I’m the flowers. I’m very glad. It’s more important to me than anything in the world. I’m not ashamed to say that. I’ve never been so happy in all my life. But if I’m the flowers, the way I see it, mama’s the storm …”

His head jerked up, but she was studying her fingers as though the words she was trying to find were written on them.

“I mean, mama’s a practical woman. She likes you, but she likes her rent and board money, too. We can coax her along for a while maybe. She likes music, and poetry is kind of like music. She’d like it if she knew. But she’s got a quick temper. She’s liable to flare up and say something nasty. Then it won’t be quiet any more for you …”

His sudden tension eased off. “Just a few more days, Katie. Then I’ll go out and look for work.”

“That isn’t what I mean, Tim. You ought to have all the time you need. It isn’t right that you shouldn’t. Tim, that’s why I got a job. Don’t say anything. Just listen to me. I’ll be able to give you eight dollars and fifty cents a week. I’ve got it all figured out. If you gave that to mama she’d be satisfied. I’m sure she would. It’s just the idea of paying something. And you don’t eat much. Then some day, if you wanted to, you could give it back without anyone ever knowing.”

“Dear, dear Katie,” he whispered after a moment, unable to speak aloud. The tears welled up in his eyes.

“Don’t cry, Tim. Please don’t. I don’t ever want to see you cry again. This is fun. It isn’t sad.”

He sat where he was, his hands knotted in his pockets.

“There’s always a way if you try hard enough. We’re just lucky,” she went on, tumbling over the words in her eagerness to get them out. “And I’ve got over two dollars now. Take them and tell her you’ll make the rest up for this week some time.”

“If all my lifetime were spent in it,” he said then, “it wouldn’t make up the rest for this week, Katie.”

She got up and moved about the room, busy with ash trays and doilies and the curtains. “Oh gosh,” she said. “These last few days have been wonderful.”

“Good days, Katie. Nothing dies but something lives …” his voice trailed off with the words.

“What are you thinking, Tim?” she asked from the window.

It was a few seconds before he answered. “I almost went away that day when you came up at night and asked me to the party. I had enough money in my hand that night. But I knew it was money I could never touch. And I knew there must be no more of it—ever again.” He smiled. “Don’t look so serious, Katie. There are things that must be done. Evil that must be destroyed, for it corrupts the world. I know now, seeing how beautiful you are, that I was right.”