The Bad Seed (7 page)

“Now, what’s your
second
association?” insisted Mrs. Breedlove. “Maybe your second association will be clearer.”

“It’s even sillier,” said Christine. For a moment she turned her past over in her mind, then impulsively she said, “I’ve always had a feeling I was an adopted child, that the Bravos weren’t my real
parents. I asked my mother about it once—it was in Chicago, the year I finished high school—but she kept saying, ‘Who have you been talking to? Who’s been putting such ideas in your head?’ The thing upset her so much that I never mentioned it again.”

“Oh, you poor, innocent darling!” said Monica. “Don’t you know that the changeling fantasy is one of the commonest of childhood? I once believed I was a foundling with royal blood—Plantagenet, I think it was. I don’t know how I managed to get on my parents’ doorstep, but I had it worked out well enough when I was five years old. The myths and folklore of all people simply teem with such fantasies.”

Her laughter died suddenly. In the silence, Reginald Tasker’s voice came through once more. After the child had accepted her second dose of arsenic, and it was plain she could not rally again, Nurse Dennison announced that she must hurry back to town in order to take care of a matter of her own. This errand, as it turned out, was a trip to the agent from whom she’d bought the smaller of the two policies she carried on the life of her niece; she’d failed to pay the current premium, and this particular day was her last day of grace. She paid the premium in time, and ate her supper in the knowledge that a good piece of business had been accomplished that day. She was certain the child could not last until midnight, and in this she was correct, for the little girl died about eight, making both policies operative.

Mrs. Breedlove, who had been listening, nodding her head from time to time, said that, in her opinion, Reginald Tasker wasn’t at all bad in his specialty. It was true that she ranked him miles below an inspired psychiatrist like Dr. Wertham. She did not even consider him on a par with men like Bolitho and Roughead; but there was a quality of compassionate irony in his best work that distinguished him and made him stand out in his field; then, their preparations for lunch completed, Mrs. Breedlove and Christine joined the men in the living-room. They
each took a cocktail, and Monica, her competent ankles crossed firmly, said, “Can’t you two find something else to talk about?”

“When she says ‘something else’ she means sex,” said Emory. He turned to Christine as though seeking support, but she only smiled and lowered her eyes, her thoughts turning once more to the past. There were unfocused, shapeless things which had troubled her childhood, even when she had been happiest; there was the half-memory of some dreadful event which she had never understood, even at the time of its occurrence, but these things were so formless and far away that they existed in her mind less as certainty than as a feeling of unreasoning dread. She sighed, pressed back her hair, and thought:
I think I once lived on a farm somewhere, and that I had brothers and sisters I played with.

Monica thrust her jaw forward, and then in a quick, spasmodic movement, she jerked her head to the left, as though there were a pebble balanced on her chin, and she strove to toss it over her shoulder. “My tic is annoying today,” she said. “I don’t know why, I’m sure.” She lit a cigarette and then went on. “I talked to Doctor Kettlebaum about my tic, and how to overcome it; but he looked at me in surprise, and said, ‘But, dear lady, it’s such a young, such an intriguing gesture. Why not leave it the way it is?’ ”

“That Kettlebaum must have been quite a boy,” said Emory.

Monica agreed placidly. Dr. Kettlebaum had been a wise and a most useful man, she said, her brown eyes swimming with light. Certainly he would have instantly understood both her brother’s and Reginald’s attempts to transform their unconscious violence into something more acceptable to society: the odd thing was that neither of them had become a
surgeon,
which would have been far more dramatic than reading and writing murder stories. She had considered these matters thoughtfully in the past, and had come to the conclusion that the greater the impulse, the
greater must be the defense against the impulse, if one were to survive as a social animal.

She got up to change the angle of the Venetian blind, and Reginald, who had known her all his life, leered horribly and pinched her well-stuffed buttocks. Instantly she went into gales of merriment, her laughter resounding through the apartment. She poured him another cocktail, and when he had taken it, he wound up his facts quickly.

Later the child had been taken to a hospital, but only to die there. The doctors, seeing her condition, asked for an autopsy, and the arsenic was quickly found. Again Christine put her hands over her ears. She thought:
I’m very vulnerable. I have no strength of character at all.
She laughed nervously and said, “Oh, please! Please!”

Reginald laughed with her, patted her shoulder in sympathy, and said that, in his opinion, the case was destined to become one of the classics of its kind. For one thing, there was the thrifty reasoning of Nurse Dennison about payment of the lapsed policy, a circumstance which gave the dreadful affair the wholesome, ordinary note it needed; for another, there was one of those unconsciously humorous asides which seem to distinguish the classic from the lesser crime, for after the autopsy, when her guilt had been established and confessed, Nurse Dennison, in a moment of contrition, said that she regretted the poisoning of her niece far more than she could ever say; she wept and said that she would never have done such a terrible thing, either, if she’d known in advance that such a little bitty old pinch of arsenic could be found later.…

At half past two, when lunch had been eaten, Reginald said that he had to go, and while the women straightened up the kitchen, Emory turned on the radio to get the three-o’clock news. The commentator spoke briskly of world conditions for a time, then lowering his voice, he continued gravely. “I have been
asked to announce that one of the children on the annual outing of the Fern Grammar School was accidentally drowned in the bay this afternoon. The name of the victim has been withheld until the parents are first notified. More news of the tragic affair is expected momentarily.”

Mrs. Breedlove and Christine came into the living-room at once, and stood anxiously beside the radio. “It was not Rhoda,” said Mrs. Breedlove in a positive voice. “Rhoda is too self-reliant a child.” She put her arm around Christine’s waist and continued. “It was somebody more like myself when I was a child. It was some timid, confused child who was afraid of its own shadow, as I was, and had no self-confidence at all. That does not sound like Rhoda.”

A little later, toward the end of the broadcast, the announcer returned to the local tragedy; he was now authorized to say that the little victim was Claude Daigle, the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Dwight Daigle of 126 Willow Street. He added details to the story; there was an old wharf on the Fern property, a wharf which had not been used for a long time. It was a mystery how the little boy got on the wharf, for the children had been explicitly told not to go there; but apparently he had managed somehow, for his body had been found there, after the routine check at lunchtime had shown him missing, wedged among the old pilings. The discovery had been made by one of the guards who brought the body ashore, and applied artificial respiration. One mysterious element of the affair was the fact that there were bruises on the forehead and hands of the boy, but these bruises, it was assumed, were caused by the body washing against the pilings.

Christine said, “Poor child! Poor little boy!”

The announcer continued. “Only a few days before, the little Daigle boy won a gold medal at the closing exercises of the Fern School. He was wearing the medal when last seen, but when his
body was discovered, the medal was not found. It was thought the medal had become detached in some manner from his shirt; but although the bottom was searched at that place, the medal had not been located.”

Christine went to her own apartment immediately. She hoped her child had neither seen the boy brought to shore, nor had watched the efforts of the guards to revive him. If the child were frightened or upset emotionally, she wanted to be there at the door to comfort her. Rhoda was not a sensitive child—certainly, she was not an imaginative one—but the inevitableness of death, she felt, if knowledge came too suddenly, without a proper preparation, could make an impression on even the calmest person; but when Rhoda came in at length, she was as placid, as unruffled, as she had been that morning. She entered so coolly, she asked for a glass of milk and a peanut-butter sandwich with such unconcern, that her mother wondered if she fully understood what had happened. She asked the question in her gentle, serene voice, and Rhoda said yes, she knew all about it, in fact, it was she who suggested that the guards look among the pilings. She had been present when the body was taken from the water; she had seen it laid out on the lawn.

Christine put her arms about the stolid child, and said, “You must try to get these pictures out of your mind. I don’t want you to be frightened or bothered at all. These things happen, and we accept them.”

Rhoda, enduring her mother’s embrace, said in a surprised voice that she wasn’t disturbed in the least. She had found the discovery exciting, and the efforts at resuscitation, since she’d never seen such a thing before, had interested her greatly. Christine thought:
She’s so cool, so impersonal about things that bother others.
It was the thing she’d never been able to understand; it was the thing she and Kenneth had once smiled about and called “the Rhoda reaction” between themselves; but this time she felt
uneasiness, a depression she could neither define nor fit into any pattern of reality that she knew.

Rhoda pulled away from her mother. She went into her room and began working on her jigsaw puzzle. Later Christine came into the room and put the sandwich and milk on the table. Her face was still puzzled, her brows puckered a little. She said, “Just the same, it was an unfortunate thing to see and remember.” She kissed the child on the top of her head, and continued. “I understand how you really feel, my darling.”

Rhoda moved a bit of her puzzle into its proper place on the board; then, looking up, she said in a surprised voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mother. I don’t feel any way at all.”

Christine sighed and went back to the living-room. She tried to read, but she could not concentrate; then Rhoda, as though feeling, if dimly, that she had somehow erred, had done something which, though incomprehensible to her, had strongly displeased her mother, abandoned her puzzle, and approaching the chair where Christine was sitting, she smiled her charming, hesitant smile, her single dimple appearing suddenly. She rubbed her cheek against her mother’s in a calculated simulation of affection, laughed coquettishly, and moved away.

She’s done something naughty,
thought Christine;
something very naughty indeed to make her go to such trouble to please me.

It seemed to her then that her child, as though sensing for the first time that some factor of body or spirit separated her from those around her, tried to conceal the difference by aping the values of others; but since there was nothing spontaneous in her heart to instruct her, she must, instead, consider, debate, experiment, and feel her way cautiously through the values and minds of her models.

She approached her mother once more, made an eager sound with her mouth, and kissed Christine on the lips, a thing she had
not voluntarily done for a long time. Then, her eyes narrowed, her head thrown back as though for a final glance of affection, she said, “What will you give me, if I give you a basket of kisses?” It was a game the child had sometimes played with her father, and Christine, knowing the rules so well, feeling a rush of both tenderness and pity, took the little girl in her arms and gave the expected answer: “I’ll give you a basket of hugs.”

Later on, when she was bored with her puzzle, Rhoda got out her skates and said she’d like to go to the park. Her mother said she could, and not long afterward, hearing Leroy’s scolding, illiterate voice, she went at once to her kitchen window. The man was saying, “How come you go skating and enjoying yourself when your poor little schoolmate is still damp from drowning in the bay? Looks to me like you’d be in the house crying your eyes out; either that, or be in church burning a candle in a blue cup.”

Rhoda stared at the man, but she did not answer. She moved in the direction of the park, and stood there fumbling at the heavy iron gates; but Leroy would not leave her alone. He followed her and said, “Ask me, and I’ll say you don’t even feel sorry about what happened to that little boy.” Rhoda, surprised for a moment out of her perpetual calmness, swung her skates from side to side, and said, “Why should I feel sorry? It was Claude Daigle that got drowned, not me.”

Leroy shook his head, smiled with a wry appreciation, and walked away. It was now close to quitting time, and mechanically he began to do those small chores that were required of him before he left for the day, the child’s words echoing in his brain. He swept the courtyard and made sure that the basement door was locked securely, and as he did so, he kept repeating to himself, mimicking the child’s voice as best he could, “Why should I feel sorry? It was Claude Daigle that got drowned, not me.” That Rhoda was really
something
! That little Rhoda didn’t care nothing about nobody that lived, not even her good-looking mamma!
That Rhoda was a mean little girl if he ever seen one! That little Rhoda was like him in a lot of ways; nobody could put nothing over on her, and nobody could put nothing over on him, either! That was sure. That was something you could bet on.…

He lived on General Jackson Street, a good two miles from where he worked, in an unpainted frame house, with his wife, Thelma, and his three gaunt, whining children. The building was on a lot a little lower than the street, and when it rained water stood undrained in a shallow pool under the house. Against the porch, Thelma had made flower beds of beer bottles driven into the earth, but the ground was too damp, and there was too much shade from the big sycamore and the flowering althea bush at the end of the porch, and nothing seemed to grow very well.