The Bad Seed (23 page)

That afternoon, Mrs. Penmark bundled up the cases Reginald had lent her and returned them to him. She had not meant to go in; she’d planned to leave them at the door when his houseboy answered the bell, but Reginald saw her and came out to welcome her. He insisted she come in and have a cocktail with him, but she said she’d rather have tea, and the houseboy went to fix
it. Reginald asked how she was getting along with her novel. Had she worked on her characters in detail? Did she have her plot pretty well in hand?

Christine said the book would be about a child who repeats the criminal pattern of her grandmother’s career, and Reginald said, “That explains it. I wondered this morning why you were interested in the heredity-versus-environment theme.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“How about the child’s mother? Is she tarred with the same brush, as the saying goes?”

“No, I don’t think so. I see the mother as an ordinary woman without too much sense; the sort you meet everywhere. She’s helpless, and pretty vulnerable. She’s rather a dull, stodgy woman, I’m afraid.”

“It’ll be nice for contrast,” he said. He sipped his cocktail, and said, “Tell me this: is the stodgy mother sure about her child, or does she only suspect? I mean, has she anything to go on, where her child is concerned?”

“She has something to go on. She has a great deal to go on.”

“Does the conventional mother know about the criminal grandmother?”

“She didn’t at first, but she finds out. It explains to her so many things in her own daughter.”

Reginald nodded and said after a moment, “It sounds all right. But remember one thing: try to keep the tensions high.” Then, as she got up to go, he added, “The old biddies at Monica’s party were interested in your abrupt departure; and if you want to know their verdict, they all think you’re ‘expecting.’ ”

The idea sent Mrs. Penmark into wild, hysterical laughter. She laughed so long that Reginald became a little alarmed, and, handing her a cocktail, he said, “Drink this down, Christine. You need a drink, after all.”

When Mrs. Penmark was home once more, Rhoda practiced
her piano for an hour, and toward nightfall she sat under the lamp memorizing her Sunday school lesson for the next day. When she was letter-perfect, she asked her mother to question her, and Christine did so, thinking:
Rhoda has some strange affinity for the cruelties of the Old Testament. There’s something as terrible and primitive about her, as there is about them.

The child got out the butterfly-starred cards she’d earned on a new prize, and showed them to her mother. She said, “I’m sure to have a perfect lesson tomorrow, too; and that’ll make four cards; and all I’ll need then is eight more. It won’t be long before I get another prize. I hope it’s not another book.”

Mrs. Penmark was ill the next day. She felt faint and dizzy, and after she’d sent her child to Sunday school, she rested her head in her cupped palm, caught up in such a feeling of unreality that for a time she felt she’d never be able to get up again. But Mrs. Breedlove came down later for her usual Sunday morning visit, and, hearing her voice in the hall as she chatted with Mrs. Forsythe, Christine went to the door, determined to ignore her fears. Monica, still concerned about her friend, entered with a resolute cheerfulness. She had rehearsed one of her anecdotes on her way down the stairs, and, seating herself solidly, she began talking about a woman she knew, a woman whose tackiness was a source of laughter among her friends.

She said, “Poor Consuela came to my buffet supper, and I’d particularly wanted you to meet her, but she didn’t show up until later—after you’d gone, as a matter of fact.”

Christine nodded and smiled as best she could, and Mrs. Breedlove went on. “Everybody pities Consuela for her lack of style. Martha David mentioned it this morning when she called to discuss the party with me, but I said, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no indeed. Consuela is nobody’s victim, believe me. There’s something in
Consuela that makes her want to wear what she does. It isn’t ignorance, and heaven knows it isn’t a lack of money to buy the right things with. It isn’t that she takes what the shopkeepers fob off on her as you suggested. Oh, no. Never, my dear. It’s all a part of a very well defined design.’ ”

Mrs. Penmark looked about her in desperation, suddenly sick of her friend’s unending, aggressive cheerfulness. She stirred in her chair, and then looked down at her hands.

Mrs. Breedlove said, “ ‘If Consuela bought the first things shopkeepers tossed at her, the effect would be quite different,’ I said. ‘Now, in the first place, no stores carry that sort of stuff these days—not even those little cheap stores down by the wharves. Not even the mail-order houses carry high-button shoes, colored veils, and those five-gored skirts. To find them at all, she must search for them with ardor. Oh, you may depend on it that Consuela has dedicated her life to the search for her wardrobe oddities with the same passion a diver brings to his search for the flawless pearl.’ ”

Christine got up suddenly, feeling as though she’d faint, and lay down on the living-room couch. Monica sat beside her, greatly concerned. “I’m not going to argue the point with you, Christine,” she said. “I’m going to call my doctor and have him take a look at you. If you’re sick, and it’s plain you are sick, something must be done.”

She was already dialing as she talked, and the doctor said he’d come at once. He did so, and Mrs. Breedlove met him in the foyer for one of the whispered, preliminary conversations that doctors endure. He found nothing physically wrong with Mrs. Penmark. He advised her not to worry so much; he told her to eat more than she’d been eating, even if she had to force herself to do it. He left a prescription for sleeping tablets for her insomnia. When he’d gone, Christine resolutely got out of bed, determined to think no more of the things that troubled her;
and in the days that followed, she managed as best she could in a routine so strict, so filled with trivial activities, that she had no time to brood over her problems.

She developed an abnormal tenderness for her child. She followed her about with her eyes, placating her, apologizing to her, serving her in humility, as though imploring forgiveness for the inheritance she’d given her. They shared a bond of horror that bound them together, that tied them to a common past, a community of guilt that could never be changed through thought or word. They were fixed together by the life of Bessie Denker. There was no going behind that fact. There was no escape for either of them.

Sometimes, when they were together in the apartment, as though Mrs. Penmark had worked out some wishful illusion which could never be true in reality, and knew, but denied the fact, she would put her arms about the little girl, and draw her to her in a gesture of expiation, as though love itself were strong enough to change the child into the creature she desired her to be—the simple, affectionate child who loved her, too; and as her sick affection increased, she would descend on her without warning, to passionately kiss her forehead or cheek, to embrace her with longing. At such times, Rhoda would endure the caress in astonished silence, smooth down her bangs, straighten her frock, and back away. She avoided her mother as best she could. She read, she practiced the piano, she studied her Sunday school texts, she pursued her lessons in needlecraft, she sat idly under the pomegranate tree and thought her particular thoughts.

Once, in desperation, Mrs. Penmark said to the retreating child, “Don’t you love me at all? Don’t you have any affection for anyone? Are you entirely cold?”

And Rhoda, moving implacably toward the door, not knowing what was expected of her, laughed charmingly, tilted her
neck in the gesture she knew older people found irresistible, and said, “You’re silly! I think you’re silly!”

As the date of her departure came nearer, Mrs. Breedlove wondered if she were justified in going at all—in leaving dear Christine, who was oddly upset, and not at all well, alone. She sought to solve the problem through having Christine and Rhoda come with her to the inn. She was sure, with her influence, she could arrange reservations, even at this late day; but Christine refused. She begged her friend not to worry about her. She’d be perfectly all right. If anything did happen, she’d call Monica at once.

“Oh, very well, if you insist on being stubborn,” said Monica in an exasperated voice. Then, more softly, “But at least you’ll call me if you
need
me. That I insist on. You know where I’ll be. It isn’t far.”

She was leaving the next day, and Christine helped her with her preparations. When everything was ready, Monica parked her car in the driveway, and she and Christine returned to the apartment to see that the gas was turned off, that there were no dripping taps, that the windows were secured. From her back balcony she called to Leroy, telling him to bring her bags down and stow them away in the trunk of her car. He did so, and Rhoda followed him down the back steps. When they were in the courtyard, he winked at the child and said in a voice so soft that the women above could not hear him, “You better ask Mrs. Breedlove to look for that little bloody stick while she’s at the bay. I done told you over and over you better find that stick before I do, but you won’t take stock in what I say.”

“There’s not any stick to find.”

Leroy laughed, held his head to one side, and said in the sly, intense voice of courtship, “Z-z-z-z! Z-z-z-z! You know what that noise means, now don’t you, Miss Rhoda Penmark?”

“I know you’re a silly man. That’s all I know.”

“That’s the way mean children sound when they’re frying up in that little blue chair.”

“You said it was a pink chair before.”

“They got two chairs. You’d know that by this time if you didn’t talk so much, and not listen to what other folks try to tell you. They got a blue chair for mean little boys, and a pink chair for mean little girls.” He put his hands on his hips, swayed voluptuously from side to side. “You don’t know much, do you? I used to say you was smart, but I don’t say so any more. Now I think you’re real dumb.”

The two women came down the steps, and as the car pulled away from the curb, and Christine turned up the path toward the front of the house, Leroy laughed silently, put his forefinger against his nose, and said, “Z-z-z-z! Z-z-z-z! You know what that noise means as well as I do. You know, all right. But if you don’t know right now, you’ll find out soon enough.”

Mrs. Penmark, without turning her head, called her daughter, and Rhoda joined her on the walk. Leroy stood watching them as they walked away. That corn-fed Christine wasn’t looking so well these days, he thought. She sure had got thin and tired-looking. Her skin was sort of stretched-like and pale, too. And then there were them circles under her eyes. That one looked ten years older than she did a month ago. He wondered what the cause was.… That trough-fed Christine must be suffering from what they used to call “battle fatigue” in the last war. No, that one wasn’t suffering from no battle fatigue; that one was suffering from
bed
fatigue!

The cleverness of his thoughts so overpowered him that he sat on the back steps and laughed silently, glancing from side to side. Somebody was putting it to her, all right! Somebody must be climbing up that back porch when everybody was asleep, and giving her plenty of it. And that Christine just stood there in a
nightgown, if she wore even that, to let him in. He wondered who it could be. It couldn’t be Mr. Emory Wages—he was too old. He couldn’t climb a porch, anyway. It couldn’t be that little Reggie Tasker who wrote them crime pieces. That one would jump out of the window if a woman made a pass at him. He thought a long time, trying to figure it out, but all he could see was a vague figure without a name, somebody who looked remarkably like himself.

“That one’s not suffering from
battle
fatigue,” he repeated. “That one’s suffering from
bed
fatigue!”

He laughed again, his head bobbing up and down in approval of both his wit and his discernment.

One source of the town’s pride was the Amanda B. Trellis Memorial Library, a building of brick and stone that covered almost a city block. Its site was once the site of Old Yellow Fever Cemetery, but the graves had been leveled, and the ancient bones of the victims moved. A garden had been created behind the library itself, and there the crumbling walls which had shielded the graves from the curious eye, shielded the garden as well. There were pathways through the shrubbery; there were summerhouses fitted out with rustic benches and tables; there were pergolas smothered in jasmine and coral vine.

A few of the gravestones, with their authentic dates and affirmations of a quainter morality than our own, had been left as they were, as though they, too, were shrubs of a sort; as though they could put the earnest reader into that mood of sadness, that
sense of the transience of life, which is the reason of the philosopher’s reading.

Often in the morning, after the postman had come, and Christine knew whether or not she’d get a letter from her husband that day, she’d go to the library and dig more deeply into the appalling life of Bessie Denker. She found that a specialized literature of legend had grown about her mother’s name. She was better known for the evil she’d created than the most compassionate people of her day were known for the good deeds they’d done; and as she read on and on, she made notes in a blankbook she carried, a book which lent credence to the story she’d told the librarian who helped her in her researches: that she was making notes now for a novel she hoped to write later.

Usually when she went to the library she left Rhoda with Mrs. Forsythe, but occasionally she took the child with her. At such times, Rhoda would sit, not beside her mother, but nearby, and read one of the books she’d taken from the shelves for her own amusement, or continue the needlework she and her teacher found so fascinating, while Mrs. Penmark rested in the summerhouse and read the Bravo articles on the Denker case. The sense of guilty tenderness she felt for the child had worn itself out. She regarded her daughter now with uncomprehending, chilly distaste. They rarely spoke when they were alone, an arrangement which seemed more satisfactory to Rhoda than any she’d had with her mother in the past.