Tales for a Stormy Night (24 page)

The expert smiled happily over his second Scotch while Mary told again the story of the fire at the Institute and how she had simply walked home with the painting because she could not find anyone to whom to give it. While she talked, his knowing eyes wandered from her face to the painting, to his glass, to the painting, and back to her face again.

“Oh, I could believe it,” he said when she had finished. “It’s the sort of mad adventure that actually could happen.” He set his glass down carefully where she could see that it was empty. “I suppose you know that there has never been an officially complete catalogue of Monet’s work?”

“No,” she said, and refilled his glass.

“It’s so, unfortunately. And the sad truth is that quite a number of museums today are hanging paintings under his name that are really unauthenticated.”

“And mine?” Mary said, lifting a chin she tried vainly to keep from quivering.

Her guest smiled. “
Must
you know?”

For a time after that Mary tried to avoid looking at the Monet. It was not that she liked it less, but that now she somehow liked herself less in its company. What had happened, she realized, was that, like the experts, she now saw not the painting, but herself.

This was an extraordinary bit of self-discovery for one who had never had to deal severely with her own psyche. Till now, so far as Mary was concerned, the chief function of a mirror had been to determine the angle of a hat. But the discovery of the flaw does not in itself effect a cure; often it aggravates the condition. So with Mary.

She spent less and less time at home, and it was to be said for some of her new-found friends that they thought it only fair to reciprocate for having enjoyed the hospitality of so enigmatically clever a hostess. How often had she as a girl been counseled by parent and teacher to get out more, to see more people. Well, Mary was at last getting out more. And in the homes of people who had felt free to comment on her home and its possessions, she too felt free to comment. The more odd her comment—the nastier, she would once have said of it—the more popular she became. Oh, yes. Mary was seeing more people, lots more people.

In fact, her insurance agent—who was in the habit of just dropping in to make his quarterly collection—had to get up early one Saturday morning to make sure he caught her at home.

It was a clear sharp day, and the hour at which the Monet was most luminous. The man sat staring at it, fascinated. Mary was amused, remembering how hurt he always was that his clients failed to hang his company calendar in prominence. While she was gone from the room to get her checkbook, he got up and touched the surface of the painting.

“Ever think of taking out insurance on that picture?” he asked when she returned. “Do you mind if I ask how much it’s worth?”

“It cost me…a great deal,” Mary said, and was at once annoyed with both him and herself.

“I tell you what,” the agent said. “I have a friend who appraises these objects of art for some of the big galleries, you know? Do you mind if I bring him round and see what he thinks it’s worth?”

“No, I don’t mind,” Mary said in utter resignation.

And so the appraiser came and looked carefully at the painting. He hedged about putting a value on it. He wasn’t the last word on the Nineteenth Century impressionists and he wanted to think it over. But that afternoon he returned just as Mary was about to go out, and with him came a bearded gentleman who spoke not once to Mary or to the appraiser, but chatted constantly with himself while he scrutinized the painting. Then with a “tsk, tsk, tsk,” he took the painting from the wall, examined the back, and rehung it—but reversing it, top to bottom.

Mary felt the old flutter interrupt her heartbeat, but it passed quickly.

Even walking out of her house the bearded gentleman did not speak to her; she might have been invisible. It was the appraiser who murmured his thanks but not a word of explanation. Since the expert had not drunk her whiskey Mary supposed the amenities were not required of him.

She was prepared to forget him as she had the others—it was easy now to forget them all; but when she came home to change between matinee and cocktails, another visitor was waiting. She noticed him in the lobby and realized, seeing the doorman say a word to him just as the elevator door closed off her view, that his business was with her. The next trip of the elevator brought him to her door.

“I’ve come about the painting, Miss Gardner,” he said, and offered his card. She had opened the door only as far as the latch chain permitted. He was representative of the Continental Assurance Company, Limited.

She slipped off the latch chain.

Courteous and formal behind his double-breasted suit, he waited for Mary to seat herself. He sat down neatly opposite her, facing the painting, for she sat beneath it, erect, and she hoped formidable.

“Lovely,” he said, gazing at the Monet. Then he wrenched his eyes from it. “But I’m not an expert,” he added and gently cleared his throat. He was chagrined, she thought, to have allowed himself even so brief a luxury of the heart.

“But is it authenticated?” She said it much as she would once have thought but not said, Fie on you!

“Sufficient to my company’s requirements,” he said. “But don’t misunderstand—we are not proposing to make any inquiries. We are always satisfied in such delicate negotiations just to have the painting back.”

Mary did not misunderstand, but she certainly did not understand either.

He took from his inside pocket a piece of paper which he placed on the coffee table and with the tapering fingers of an artist—or a banker—or a pickpocket—he gently maneuvered it to where Mary could see that he was proffering a certified check.

He did not look at her and therefore missed the spasm she felt contorting her mouth. “The day of the fire,” she thought, but the words never passed her lips.

She took the check in her hand: $20,000.

“May I use your phone, Miss Gardner?”

Mary nodded and went into the kitchen where she again looked at the check. It was a great deal of money, she thought wryly, to be offered in compensation for a few months’ care of a friend.

She heard her visitor’s voice as he spoke into the telephone—an expert now, to judge by his tone. A few minutes later she heard the front door close. When she went back into the living room both her visitor and the Monet were gone…

Some time later Mary attended the opening of the new wing of the Institute. She recognized a number of people she had not known before and whom, she supposed, she was not likely to know much longer.

They had hung the Monet upside down again.

Mary thought of it after she got home, and as though two rights must surely right a possible wrong, she turned the check upside down while she burned it over the kitchen sink.

1963

T
HE SCHOOL BOARD HAD
sustained the teacher. The vote was four to three, but the majority made it clear they were not voting for the man. They voted the way they had because otherwise the state would have stepped in and settled the appeal, ruling against the town…

Tom and Andy, coming from the west of town, waited for the others at the War Memorial. The October frost had silvered the cannon, and the moonlight was so clear you could read the words
FOR GOD AND COUNTRY
on the monument. The slack in the flagpole cord allowed the metal clips to clank against the pole. That and the wind made the only sounds.

Then Andy said, “His wife’s all right. She came up to Mary after it was over and said she wished he’d teach like other teachers and leave politics alone.”

“Politics,” Tom said. “Is that what she calls it?”

“She’s okay just the same. I don’t want anything happening to her—or to their kid.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to them,” Tom said.

“The kid’s a funny little guy. He don’t say much, but then he don’t miss much either,” Andy said.

Tom said nothing. He knocked one foot against the other.

“It’s funny, ain’t it, how one man—you know?” Andy said.

“One rotten apple,” Tom said. “Damn, it’s getting cold. I put anti-freeze in half the cars in town today, but not my own. In his even.”

“The kid—he’s just a kid, you know,” Andy said.

Tom wiped the moisture from beneath his nose. “I told you nothing’s going to happen to him.”

“I know, I know, but sometimes things go wrong.”

The others came, Frankie and Murph, walking along the railroad tracks that weren’t used any more except by the children taking a short cut on their way to and from school. You could smell the creosote in the smoke from the chimneys of the houses alongside the tracks. One by one the railroad ties were coming loose and disappearing.

The four men climbed the road in back of what had once been the Schroeders’ chicken coops. The Schroeders had sold their chickens and moved down the hill when the new people took over, house by house, that part of town. One of the men remarked you could still smell the chicken droppings.

“That ain’t what you smell,” Tom said. “That coop’s been integrated.”

Frankie gave a bark of laughter that ricocheted along the empty street.

“Watch it, will you?” Tom said.

“What’s the matter? They ain’t coming out this time of night.”

“They can look out windows, can’t they? It’s full moon.”

“I’d like to see it. I’d like to see just one head pop out a window.” Frankie whistled the sound of speed and patted the pocket of his jacket.

“I should’ve picked the men I wanted,” Tom said, meaning only Andy to hear. “This drawing lots is for the birds.”

“You could’ve said so on the range.” The town’s ten policemen met for target practice once a week. They had met that afternoon. After practice they had talked about the school-board meeting they expected to attend that night. They joked about it, only Andy among them having ever attended such a meeting before.

“I’d still’ve picked you, Andy,” Tom said.

“Thanks.”

Frankie said, “I heard what you said, Tom. I’m going to remember it too.”

Andy said, “You might know he’d live in this part of town. It all adds up, don’t it?”

No one answered him. No one spoke until at the top of the street Murph said, “There’s a light on in the hallway. What does that mean?”

“It means we’re lucky. We can see him coming to the door.”

Tom gave the signal and they broke formation, each man moving into the shadow of a tree, except Tom who went up to the house.

The child was looking out the window. It was what his father made him do when he’d wake up from having a bad dream. The trouble was, he sometimes dreamed awake and couldn’t go back to sleep because there were a lot of people in his room, all whispering. What kind of people, his father wanted to know. Men or women? Old people or young? And was there anyone he knew?

Funny-looking people. They didn’t have any faces. Only eyes—which of course was why they whispered.

His father told him: Next time you tell them if they don’t go away you’ll call your dad. Or better still, look out the window for a while and think of all the things you did outdoors today. Then see if the funny people aren’t gone when you look around the room again.

So at night he often did get up. The window was near his bed and the people never tried to stop him. Looking out, he would think about the places he could hide and how easy it would be to climb out from the bottom of his bed. He had a dugout under the mock-orange bushes, and under the old cellar doors propped together like a pup tent in the back of the garage; down the street were the sewer pipes they hadn’t used yet, and what used to be the pumphouse next to Mrs. Malcolm’s well, which was the best hiding place of all; the big boys sometimes played there.

Tom passed so close that the boy could have reached out and touched him.

The doorbell rang once, twice, three times.

The man, awakened from his sleep, came pulling on his bathrobe. He flung open the door at the same time he switched on the porch light.

A fusillade of shots rang out. The man seemed frozen like a picture of himself, his hand stretched out and so much light around him. Then he crumpled up and fell.

Twenty minutes later Andy was sitting on his bed at home when the ambulance siren sounded somewhere up the hill. His wife put out her hand to see if he was there. “Andy?”

“Yes?”

She went back to sleep until the town alarm sounded, four long blasts for a police emergency.

Andy dressed again and once more took his revolver from the bureau drawer.

“What time is it?” His wife turned over at the clicking sound as he refilled the chamber of the gun.

“Almost half-past three.”

“It isn’t right, a man your age.”

“Someone has to go.” In the hall he phoned the police station for instructions.

This time Andy drove, as did the other deputies. Cars clogged the street where lights were on in all the houses, and people stood outdoors, their coats over their nightclothes, and watched the ambulance drive off. They told one another of the shots they took for granted to have been the backfires of a car.

Doc Harrington drove up. Black bag in hand, he went into the house. Andy followed on his heels. Both men stepped carefully around the bloodstains in the front hall.

The woman was hysterical. “They took our little boy. They killed his father and they took our little boy.” She kept crying out for someone to help her; anyone. The Chief of Police and Tom, who was in the room with them, tried to calm her down. She couldn’t say who “they” were.

When Doc appeared and commanded that someone get a neighbor woman in to help him, Tom started to leave. Andy caught his arm.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Tom said. “She says the boy’s been kidnapped. More like a neighbor’s got him, but I’m going to organize a search. If we don’t find him it’ll be the State Police, and after that the F.B.I.”

“The kid’s not here?”

“Maybe you can find him. I’ve been from basement to roof.”

Room by room Andy searched the house. The child’s bed had not been slept in much that night. You couldn’t really tell, the things a youngster took in bed with him. The window was open just a little and it was hard to raise it higher. The back door to the house was open and Andy would have said the kid had gone that way because on the back steps was a woolen monkey, its ears still frosty damp with spittle.