Strange Sisters (9 page)

The carefully modulated voice across the booth throbbed with fury and venom. "You little fool! You damned treacherous little fool! So you thought you could change yourself by letting some man paw you, is that it? So you let him violate you and ruin you, and now you come crying to me! Is that it? Damn you to hell, is that it?"

"No, Jacqueline! It wasn't that way at all. I couldn't go through with it, you see. That's what I thought all right, and I tried to do it, but at the last minute I couldn't. It was horrible. It made me sick with revulsion."

"Good! Good, good, good, you stupid, bloody little fool!"

By that time Kathy knew, of course, that she had come to the end of her delusion. No cure, no hope. Absolution denied. But having come so far, there was nothing left to do but to continue as she had started, and so she lifted her eyes and said with a sudden, strange feeling of calm, "I killed him, Jacqueline. I killed him, and he's lying dead in his apartment right now, unless someone has found him and taken him away."

The suspension again, all sound and motion in abeyance, terror crouching and ready to spring. A tic, very faint and barely discernible, began to function at one corner of Jacqueline's mouth. She stirred and whispered, "Oh, Christ, what have you done? Do you realize what this will mean? Do you understand what the police will do with you? The things they will make you say?"

"What can I do?"

Jacqueline lifted her cocktail glass and drained it. "Let me think. For Christ's sake, let me think! You could never get away with it. Never in the world. The police will find you in no time, once they begin." She paused, thinking, and very slowly her composure returned. There was about her now a kind of calculating wariness born of awful danger. After a while, she said, "There's only one solution. Are you listening?"

"Yes."

"Very well. You must give yourself up. Go to a police station and tell them that you have killed this man. Tell them that he attacked you and that you killed to defend yourself. Tell them you were terrified and ran away but have decided that the only way to save yourself is to tell the truth. They'll believe you. There will be a mess, of course, a trial, but it will be a mess of your own making, and it will prevent the ruin of people who had nothing to do with it. It will prevent yours, too. If you give the police a case they can accept, they'll do less investigating, and you'll come out of it all right. Women always do in such cases."

Kathy said nothing. She sat looking into her glass, and although she heard Jacqueline's words, they were sounds without special significance, because now nothing seemed significant or worth saving, even if there were still something that
could
be saved, and she wished only that Jacqueline, who had sustained her so long, would go away quickly and forever.

Which is what she did. She slipped out of the booth and looked down and said, "Another thing. Don't mention my name. If you mention my name, you will be sorry. If you mention my name, I'll see that it's known why you really killed this man, and you'll have no chance at all of getting off."

She walked away through the lounge, and it was strange that someone who had been in her turn the center of life, who had come and lingered to a wild, aberrant singing of blood, should now depart, thanks to no more than so many square yards of carpet, without making any sound whatever.

In the course of inevitable events, hardly conscious of her movement at the time, she moved from the booth to the bar. From Sidecars to rye. It was entirely logical that she did so, perfectly in keeping with the character of her life. She was always moving, it seemed, from one thing to another, from landmark to landmark, and though she could never look forward to see the way she was going, having no miraculous power to divine the future, she could look back afterward from the place of her arrival to the point of her departure and comprehend in a hazy way their relationship to her ultimate end. From
a
woman buried in lilies to Stella to Vera to Jacqueline. From Renowski to Brunn. From booth and brandy to bar and rye.

Now where? To what now? Why, to justice, of course. It was really so logical, so beautifully logical, just like mathematics, just like two plus two equals four.
They're taking him to justice for the color of his hair.
Gender again. The damned, confusing gender.
Her
hair.
The nameless and abominable color of her hair.

For the most part, now, she remained in the strange slough of emotional exhaustion, of quiet acceptance of what had gone before and resignation to what would follow, but now and then, pricked by a shard of her shattered hope, she would rise to a higher strata of rebellion and terror, and then she would lift her whisky glass and find it empty and rap with it on the bar for the attention of the bartender. The bartender would bring the bottle and look at her unfocused eyes and would think,
Oh, God, another lousy lush, another drunken tramp,
but he would pour the rye with a resignation equal to her own, though his was compelled by a shallower despair.

It was an antic world. The world moved, and everything in it moved. At first the movement was random and uncoordinated, everything acting independently, but pretty soon there was unison of speed and direction, and the world was a giant, multi-colored spiral in which there was no distinction of parts. She stood at the large end of the spiral and looked down the diminishing hollow interior created by the law of centrifugal action, and far, far off, almost at the small end of the spiral, which was the end of everything, was the small, receding figure of Jacqueline. Jacqueline was leaving her. Jacqueline would never come back. Even as she stood looking down the whirling spiral, the tiny figure was absorbed by emptiness and there was no one there. She tried to cry out, stricken by a terrible loneliness and desolation, but she could make no sound. She felt, of a sudden, a great self-pity. Tears formed on the lower lashes of her eyes and crept without sound down her thin face.

The bartender saw the tears and thought bitterly,
Oh, God, she's going to bawl. All I need to make it a perfect day is a maudlin lush.

His fear was short-lived. She was not going to cry. She thought of Stella, and the tears dried on her cheeks. How could she have forgotten Stella? How could she have forgotten that all things come in the end to their beginning, come by the "curvature of time* and space to the point of origin? Stella was the beginning. It was natural that she should return to Stella now in the end, or the threatened end, and Stella would fix everything. Stella would look at her with a secret laughter in her eyes, and the overflow of the laughter would run through her voice, and life would at once be sweetened and reduced to simplicity. One drink, one drink more, and then back to Stella. Jacqueline had failed her, but Stella would not.

Then she remembered that Stella was dead.

She remembered everything.

She was in her own room in Stella's house, for she had by that time moved back into a room of her own, and it was very late, almost midnight, and Stella was out with one of her many men. Actually, however, there weren't so many men now. They had thinned out recently, leaving this one, the one she was out with now, in almost full possession of the field. Not that Stella was any the less attractive. She seemed not to age at all, to lose none of the vibrance and sheen of her loveliness. It was merely that there was something special about this man, and Stella responded to him with a particular intensity that was obvious and discouraging to competitors. The night of his first appearance at the house, after he was gone, she had come upstairs and into Kathy's room, and she had sat on the edge of Kathy's bed with the moonlight falling through die open window and across the lower part of her body and her hands folded in her lap in a posture of unusual quietude. Her voice, issuing from upper shadow, embodied wonder and speculation.

"He's like Lonnie," she said, "and I never thought to find the like of Lonnie on this earth. His voice, his eyes, the way his lips draw back from his teeth when he smiles. More than all this, though, it's the way he looks at things. At life, I mean. I'm afraid he's not very good, not good in the way people expect a man to be good, and neither was Lonnie. Maybe I have an affinity to men who are not very good. If I fall in love with this man, he will make me very happy, and through no fault of his own he will probably make me very unhappy, and that will be like Lonnie, too."

Lying in darkness, out of the moonlight, Kathy said nothing. She lay there and suffered and said nothing, and after a while Stella got up and went away.

So here was danger, real danger, an invasion of the center of life. In the face of it, Kathy felt impotent, without weapons to defend her position or to repel the invader, and she was sustained only by a virulent, corrosive hatred of the man who was the threat. His name was Felix Brannon, and he was, in fact, a man whom many women might have loved. He was not tall, exceeding Stella's height by less than an inch when she was in high heels, but there was a lean grace in his body that made him seem taller than he was, an easy coordination of flat muscles. He wore suits that were conservative in cut and pattern, and there was in his personality something restrained and modulated, something held back, an overt subjection to law or lawless elements. His hair was a shade lighter than copper, cut very short, almost cropped. His skin was dark, retaining faintly the mark of shallow pocks, but his eyes were, rather startlingly, pale and brilliant blue. He had money, apparently a great deal of it that came from sources he never mentioned, and he drove down from the city, over a hundred miles north, in a black Cadillac trimmed with much glittering chrome. How he and Stella had met was something Kathy never learned. Nor did she care, now that the meeting had occurred and could not be prevented. Now she was Interested only in how they might part, and she was disturbed, actually made ill, by the pervasive fear that they would not part at all.

In her room, she sat and waited for them to return.

The room was dark, and she sat in a chair by the window and looked out into the soft night. She was seventeen then, and she had just finished high school, and it was a night when a pretty girl of seventeen who had just finished high school should have had in her mind something far different from the aberrant fear and corrosive hatred that were in hers. On the trellis below her window, the Paul's Scarlet roses, flowers of brief life, still bloomed like bright blood in the darkness. On the air that stirred came the sigh, the restless rustling of young leaves. At a distance, someone laughed.

A car turned the corner and came down the street along the curb. From her position at the window, she followed its progress until her span of vision was cut off by the house. Out front, a powerful engine revved briefly and died. She heard laughter and language and footsteps and a key in the door. The center of life was in peril.

The Negro woman had long ago quit staying nights, Kathy being old enough to stay alone, and now there would be no intervening sound of her departure before the other familiar sounds of a man and woman entertaining themselves. Kathy sat and waited for them to begin, but tonight they didn't. Instead there was the sound of Stella on the stairs and in the hall, of her voice, light and errant and a little intoxicated, in the doorway to the room.

"Kathy?"

"Yes. I'm here, Stella."

"Have you been in bed?"

"No."

"Are you dressed?"

"Yes."

"Good. I'd like you to come down for a minute, darling."

"I don't want to come down, Stella."

Stella came into the room behind the significant scent and stood behind Kathy's chair. "Why not? Only for a minute. Won't you do such a small thing for me?"

"I'm sorry, Stella. I don't feel well. I have a headache."

This was true enough. She frequently had headaches, and the frequency had increased since the appearance of Felix Brannon. But she would have claimed the headache even if there had been none.

Stella said, "I'm sorry you have a headache, darling, but this time I'm going to insist. Just this once, just for a minute. If it weren't so important to me, I wouldn't have asked."

The peril came closer, breathed its cold breath into her heart. She stood up and said, "All right, Stella. If you insist."

They went out into the hall and down into the big living room where Felix Brannon stood with his legs apart and his burnished, handsome head cocked a little to one side as he watched them approach. He was holding a highball in one hand. He lifted the glass and drank and set the glass down on a table at the end of the sofa. He smiled a little, watching them.

Kathy kept her eyes averted. She refused to look at him. She thought that if she looked at him she would be deathly sick. She looked instead at the radio-phonograph beyond his shoulder.

"Hello, Kathy," Felix Brannon said.

"Hello, Mr. Brannon."

"Oh, come, now. Skip the formality. Just call me Felix."

"Felix, then."

"As a matter of fact, there's another name you can call me after tonight."

The peril was monstrous now, swollen and terrible and panting. Her heart was a block of ice. She continued to look at the radio-phonograph and said, "I don't know what you mean."

Beside her, Stella laughed her errant, intoxicated laugh and put an arm around her shoulders. "Darling, Felix is asking you to accept him as a father. Or would it be uncle? Anyhow, it's a kind of secondary proposal, and you're supposed to feel flattered. You're supposed to say yes, thank you, and let him kiss your cheek."

He picked up his cue and stepped toward her, and it was a repetition, only worse, of the evening incident by the muddy creek in the shadows of scrub timber. She was aware of sudden darkness and frenzy and violent confusion of sound and action, and when the proximate items of earth sorted and fixed themselves in the return of sanity, her wrists were captured in his strong fingers and she was staring up into glittering pale eyes in a stony, closed face.

Stella's voice sliced between them. "Kathy! For God's sake, Kathy, what's the matter with you?"