Murder by Reflection (6 page)

Everyone laughed. Doc's wife often called out after him in the street, “Is this one of your home days or will you be spending it all on the sidewalks?” He'd tumble out of his car, walk a block with her with his arm in hers, and then rush back again to “delivery.” If ever there was an out-of-doors extrovert, a man to whom “privacy” was a close-locked word, Doc was he. Still, like most public-minded men, he was much more discreet than most people guessed. He knew, as all good mixers know, that if you are about all the time and really like human beings and being with them, you must pass on only what is likable. Otherwise, quite soon, people shun you. As he would say to his cronies, “You're not a mixer; you move, like lemon juice in milk, breaking up the milk of human kindness into isolated, sour, suspicious little curds.” So, like all born diplomats, Doc talked all the while and so some people thought he talked all he knew. But under the obvious wisecracking, Doc kept his shrewd observations so much to himself that few people even suspected that he made them. Naturally he saw a lot—whisking suddenly up to people's doors, running across them in side roads, scanning, as he had to, their mail. But only his wife shared any of those confidences which he felt it better that Aumic should not know, and yet on which—to prevent Aumic's prematurely knowing and getting upset over—he felt he ought to have preventive advice.

“Y'know, I've seen young Heron,” he said to her, “couple of times he didn't see me. Both times he was out—at dusk time—with that young nice gal who's just come to the school—a quiet gal, and clever.”

“Well, you yourself said, boy, that the girls should look out. He's due for marriage and it seems a sound choice. Girls that attract unmarried mother-held men. I've found are usually the oversurfaced and under-brained sort.”

“But why should he be so—discreet? Nothing to be ashamed of!”

“You'd never understand a shy man. You told everyone we were engaged before I'd said more than I'd consider the possibility.”

“Oh, but I knew—I'm a diagnostician and a doc doesn't ask whether a patient's heart is right. He listens for himself and lets what the patient says just go by!” They laughed with the easy pleasure of shared successful memories. “Still,” continued Doc after a moment, “I am a diagnostician and that's why I'm consulting with my partner. We've got the good of this grand little city at heart, and you know how often I've come to you when I saw that first little symptom in some social snarl which made me uneasy.”

“You're right,” she answered. “You've a hunch, no doubt. But still, even you may be wrong, specially with a sort so unlike yourself.”

“Well, I've put it on record. I'll keep my eyes open. We'll see.”

Chapter V

Doc was right. Arnoldo was both in a kind of love and a sort of resentful fear—a bad mixture. He and Miss Gayton had met casually. They had both been walking up the canyon looking for the brief, extraordinary outbreak of wild flowers—blossoms springing from the harshest soil and from stems which look like ribs and veins of rock itself and yet with petals of a delicacy no rich garden flower can show. Even the stony-looking succulents and the fierce cactus then produce blooms which in gloss, bloom, and frail gentleness seem to be the outcome of a sudden wish to compensate for the forbidding impression they have made all the rest of the year—as a harsh businessman will suddenly make a gesture of perfect, unstinted generosity.

She was lonely too. The intense brightness of the place, the open friendliness of everyone, made her feel pale and gauche. She had come out West from New England because of a pre-phthisical condition, but she had one ground for hope—the optimism of the full consumptive was certainly not hers. They met several times. No doubt each went to the same place with a certain growing hope. But they made no rendezvous.

He made a psychological bridge for her. He, too, was lonely. He felt no wish to make contacts with Aumic civics, and his grand home was turning for him into no home at all, but a sort of vacant prison. But he had come quickly to love this southern wilderness and gradually, with his help, she learned to see its beauty. About this new interest of his he had no wish to be secretive. In fact, after they had been meeting off and on for a month or so, he remarked to his mother that though the town didn't seem to have anybody in it who'd be much company—at least for people who cared for the past and its culture—he had run across a newcomer whom he thought she might find quite intelligent.

“Where is she from?” Irene had somehow suspected that it was a woman.

The answer, “Somewhere in New England,” which he thought might please, he now saw was also a piece of unwelcome news.

“I'd rather not see anyone from back East.”

“But the woman's quite lonely …” He paused; that too was wrong, more wrong. You can't use for another the plea of loneliness to awake compassion in a woman who herself is feeling that you are failing in your full duty to make her feel un-lonely.

Irene saw, however, even more quickly than he, that she was making a mistake in making him feel that she was wanting to be unfriendly. She compelled her voice, though not her tone, to say, “She will be very welcome any time she would like to call,” and then, letting her suspicions explode obliquely, “I expect she is pretty wretched in a miserable, upstart little town like this, a pathetic little piece of pretentious stucco standing in this gaunt desolation!”

Certainly it would have been wiser to let the matter drop. But Arnoldo had no intention of dropping his new friend. She was a fresh interest for him, different from the girls he had known, and of course very different from the woman to whose company it now seemed he might be confined. He saw, further, that if he did not drop Miss Gayton and if she did not meet Mrs. Heron, then the affair would grow, would have to grow, unpleasantly underhand. He knew he would find that too exhausting to continue. Sometimes he told deliberate lies, quite carefully constructed ones; but he always had to have quite a number of good reasons for taking so much trouble and as the reasons were apt to change, he found it very hard to keep up a consistent mendacity.

Besides, he had no intention of marrying. He knew that marriage would create a frightful storm and cut him off from all those luxuries which were, of course, already almost necessities. His mother gave him everything he asked. He didn't mind—indeed, he rather liked—going to her like a boy who does not think about money but only about getting the particular thing he wants; and she apparently seemed to like paying for all he wished, like a devoted mother. She never gave him a lump sum, but took a vivid interest in everything he wanted and often went with him to see him buy it and to advise him about it. Still less did she ever suggest settling any money on him and, from the mixed motives of the childish wish to be dependent and not to be bothered with money and the fear that if he did ask she would refuse, he never brought up the question. His letting her even see about his clothes and come to the tailor with him, pick the cloth and discuss the cut, had indeed led largely to their present silly but sharp little difficulty. It was the occasion, if not the cause, of their growing tension.

Meanwhile he still liked drifting, enjoyed the sense of filial dependence, and the fact that he was a kind of perpetual guest in her house. So he disliked very strongly the thought, about which he had no doubt, that she would say “No” to any attempt he might make to have a life which she did not control. Marriage must mean that, and therefore it was out of the question. But he did not see why it should come into the question. He could continue to see both women and, if possible, see whether they could get to like each other, and then see, further, what might come of that. So he rationalized his drifting. Drifting, however, is one of the surest ways of doing what is not intended—in Arnoldo's case, of falling into deep love.

Miss Gayton was intelligent, sensitive, sympathetic. She listened while he talked, and her answers and questions were really contributive. They stimulated his mind. He was ready to face the fact that he had found a charming companion and someone he could enjoy all by himself, for she seemed quite unable to make friends in Aumic itself.

“Perhaps it's knowing most of the people as parents,” she explained, when she came to tea and she and Mrs. Heron had made a fair Opening by sharing their joint inability to make themselves part of the town life.

The elder woman was soothed by the younger's quiet deference. On entering she had come over to where the lady of the house sat, making it quite clear that she did not expect the chatelaine to rise to greet her. But this remark was not happy and the sky of converse became overcast.

“How do you mean?” the putative mother inquired.

“Well …” She was just going to say, “you see so much of the parents reflected in the children,” when she saw that this would be taken ill here. She hesitated, and her hostess read the silence almost as though she had spoken the repressed words.

She turned the subject and spoke of how she had disliked the place when she first came—these hard azures and dense yellows, so different from the soft greens and grays of the North; and then the monotonous lack of seasons. Mrs. Heron agreed. But to the further attempt to show how this more highly pitched beauty might become likable, there was no response.

Arnoldo sat uneasily at hand. He feared that Miss Gayton might say that he had made her see this unfamiliar loveliness. She was, however, too intelligent, and, after a few more cautious exchanges, the women parted without the elder's even making a general proposal that they might meet again. He felt his heart harden against his mother when, as soon as he returned, she remarked, “I don't think that girl showed much sense in choosing teaching as her profession. She hasn't a taste for it.” He felt that the remark was meant to draw him, so he kept silence; but it was the unfriendly silence of declined battle.

And when he next met Miss Gayton (after the call they had parted in silence, both sensing that to be heard talking in the hall would be undesirable), she was as helpful as Irene Ibis (as he found himself thinking of her) was unfriendly.

“Your mother quite naturally didn't feel very much at home with me. I'm thoroughly a New Englander and realize her feeling. She felt there was no need for us to meet just because we are both out here and feel a little stranded, when back in the East she would not feel that she had to ask me to her house.”

He protested that his mother was tired, not very well, and had become something of a recluse. But he knew, and Miss Gayton knew, that henceforth it was pretty certain that they would have to meet, if they met at all, unofficially, if not clandestinely. Miss Gayton, too, was frank about her feelings. She told him—and this surprised him more than a little—that she didn't like the house.

“I've no doubt it's in perfect taste but it's really too perfectly done. I suppose that's again my New England conscience which dreads not only all extravagance but perhaps even more …” She paused for a word, or rather, to examine the word which she had intended to use. Then she decided she had better say it. “Any sort of acting. The house with Mrs. Heron seated in it in formal state, gives me an uncanny sense of a theater stage-scene set for some play that is about to begin. The lights will go out and all that will be visible, the only persons visible, will be the costumed actors playing out a plot. Today will have disappeared. And I can't help feeling that not only is it a piece of make-believe that is being performed but that it is somehow an uncanny drama that is staged. I know that sounds, in itself, a bit theatrical. But I think I'd better say what I feel.”

Her remark stirred the conflict in his mind, and he was not sorry that of his two lives, the one with this new friend and the one with his mother, the one should be completely out of doors and the other in its chosen setting. He realized that he had always known that Irene would never let him have another woman friend. Just because their relationship had been platonic, parental-filial, all the more would she be suspicious of any other friendship. Secrecy has this disadvantage, however, at least for those who like a quiet life—it heightens excitement and makes, like hide-and-seek, the most ordinary passerby someone to be shunned. Arnoldo
had
tried to avoid Doc the mailman. Trying to avoid a public person made him feel that he was doing something guilty; feeling the sense of guilt moved him to find an inner reason for the outer reaction. Miss Gayton began to seem not a quiet relaxation, a gently affectionate relationship, but a romance. Once that happened the days of quiet, casual conversation were numbered.

She was far too intelligent not to sense the change and far too lonely not to wish not to notice it. She carefully avoided mentioning Mrs. Heron again. They stuck to natural history; but, as he had found in his silver-reflective intimacies with Irene, now with Marian Gayton it was the same. They talked of the desert wild flowers and the successful struggle they made to carry out their inner wish to express beauty—of course they meant themselves. They speculated on why as some species of animals have aged they have become helpless and malignant—all snakes, he told her, had limbs until the close of the Eocene; no snake was poisonous before the Miocene—but they were not thinking of forty to sixty million years ago but of today.

But “today” lasted for months—into another year; the wild flowers came again. Mrs. Heron was in better physical health.

Dr. Hertz remarked, “I give you newcomers a year. The first couple of months you feel that you would like to sleep all day and wonder whether you haven't lethargica encephalitis; the next quarter you're out in rashes and queer little urticarias and we're asking, ‘Do you know poison oak when you see it, or are you allergic to limes?' The next half-year you can run a pretty little scale of undulant fever, and we question the milkman (though of course he's safe), and then wonder whether a Rocky Mountain tick could really have managed on its feeble feet to cover all that distance, find you, and bite you. And, then, after a year, you get up and say it's the finest climate in the world and tastes as good as it looks.”