The Case of the Weird Sisters (3 page)

A woman sees her husband's lawyer sometimes.

"I am looking," Alice said to herself solemnly, "into what the French call an abyss!" Muscles at the comers of her mouth flattened involuntarily. Well, if she could smile she must be getting better. Or was it wild hope running like a weed to spring up though she'd cut it down?

She had heard no sound, but she lifted her eyes and saw a man in the room. He was enormous. His great fat thighs strained in a pair of filthy dark trousers. A green flannel shirt, torn at the armhole, was open at his bullish neck, showing a stretch of dirty underwear. His hair was lank, black, and long enough to show below his ears. His skin was brown, and his face glistened as if it had been oiled. His eyes were a sharp black, without brown or yellow. He stood in the middle of the room, looking at her without much curiosity. She could have screamed.

Then she saw that he carried a hod of coal. She shrank back in her chair and said nothing. Soon he walked silently to the grate, knelt, and began to pour coal upon the fire. She saw the muscles of his broad shoulders working under the fat. He was not a Negro. His features were thick, but the mouth was firm, and there was a flaring line from his nostrils to the tip of his nose that was both foreign and familiar, though she couldn't name him. She couldn't tell what he was. He knelt not two feet from her, and she became gradually aware of an odor and was nearly sick. The man put forth a scent, like an animal.

In a moment he had finished with the fire. He rose and was gone as indifferently as he had come. But before he left, be poked his dirty fingers into a box of candy that lay among the many trifles on the mantel and casually took two.

Alice sat still, her heart pounding in her throat.

In a moment or two the door in the back wall opened, and Innes led forth a straw-colored lady. "Gertrude," he said with anxious social sweetness, a tone that poured soothing oil upon this meeting and begged them both to be kind for his sake, "this is Alice Brennan. Alice, this is my oldest sister.''

"How do you do. Miss Whitlock," said Alice, rising.

The woman turned her face toward the voice. She was somewhere between fifty and sixty years old. Her hair was a pile of pale straw, severely drawn back from her thin, bloodless face. The eyes were as pale as the rest of her, and even her brows and lashes made no easily discernible marks, so that the face was blank, as if eyes had been left out of it altogether. Her lips, too, were unreddened by blood or anything else. Yet there was a certain haughtiness about her tall, stiff figure and the impact of a personality.

"I am glad to make your acquaintance, Miss Brennan," she said in a rather high voice that was however, not thin, but rich in flute tones. It held a deliberate sweetness, faintly affected. "Innes tells me you have had trouble with the car."

"Can you give us dinner, Gertrude?" Innes said with a combination of humility and demand. "If not, I suppose we can . . ."

"Certainly, we shall be glad to give you dinner," Gertrude said proudly, almost as if she were offended. "Speak to Josephine."

"Well I have, but I will again. . . ." Innes was awkward. This pale sister seemed to unbalance him, as if he saw himself in two lights, once as her young and somehow humbled brother, once as Innes Whitlock, the successful man, and he couldn't make the images blend.

Gertrude dismissed the domestic problem as if it didn't concern her. She moved forward to find a chair. Alice sent a questioning look to her fiance.

limes began to chuckle. "Gertrude is pretty marvelous," he said heartily. "Gertrude, I can see her wondering how on earth you find your way so well."

Alice, who had been wondering nothing of the sort, saw with surprise that the woman's thin lips smiled, almost triumphantly. "But I know my way perfectly in this house," she said. "Never worry about that." She seemed to unbend a little as if this topic were welcome. "I have been totally bluid for many years, but I do not let my affliction prevent me from moving about this house with complete confidence."

"Why, that's wonderful!" breathed Alice. "I do think that's wonderful. Miss Whitlock."

Innes beamed. Alice knew she'd caught on quickly, that this was what she ought to be saying.

"I simply resolved," Gertrude said and Alice recognized a worn quality in the phrase, "that I would never be a burden. Nor have I been." The blind woman sat down in a chair near the fire. She picked up an elegant box lying close to her hand. "Do you smoke, Miss Brennan?" she said pleasantly, holding the box quite accurately in Alice's direction.

"I do, thank you." Alice reached out her hand. Then she saw with dismay that the box was empty. The blind woman was showing off, and she had made a mistake.

For the space of half a second, Alice hesitated. Then she fumbled in her jacket pocket with her left hand. "I don't like to take the last one," she said with an apologetic and rather timid laugh. She dipped her hand into the box, letting the woman feel its pressure.

Innes leaped forward with a match and lit the cigarette Alice had pulled from her own pocket. "Let me," he said gallantly. "Gertrude is marvelous, really, isn't she?" His eyes congratulated Alice and thanked her, too.

Alice leaned back with a little glow in her heart. She was pleased with herself for having thought so quickly how to save the blind woman's pride and still warn her not to make the same mistake again. Having done Gertrude a service, in a way, Alice felt warmer toward her.

But Gertrude said, rather petulantly, "It ought to be full. Josephine is not quite all there is to be desired in a servant. It is very difficult, you can imagine . . ."

"Yes, indeed," murmured Alice.

"The girls who are willing to go into domestic service are quite untrained," Gertrude went on, "and quite im-trainable, I'm afraid."

Alice murmured again. The conversation seemed to her to have taken a queer turn. It was peculiar to sit here and discuss Gertrude's servant problem when the news of the moment was surely Innes's unexpected arrival and Alice's introduction to this house. But, she told herself, Gertrude Whidock's world was dark and limited.

"Josephine does very well, Gertrude," Innes said soothingly. "The house looks well. Just as it always did."

Gertrude sighed. "Innes," she said, "I wish you would speak to Maud and Isabel. I do not understand it. I, alone, am maintaining the house again. I am perfectly willing to do so. You realize that."

"I know," Innes said angrily. "I know aU about it." Faint pink came up under his skin and his eyes looked sullen.

"Yet I seem to have less and less," Gertrude went on, scarcely heeding; "and really, we cannot do without servants. Even if it would look well, which it would not."

"Good heavens, of course you can't do without servants," Innes cried. "Tell me—the same old thing, I suppose?"

"They say they cannot share," Gertrude shrugged. "I haven't doubted them. I don't care to discuss it, naturally."

"You haven't gone into your capital?"

"The bank will know. I know nothing about that sort of thing." Gertrude Implied that no lady would.

Innes clicked his tongue.

"But how sordid," Gertrude said suddenly. "Forgive me, Miss Brennan. This must come under the head of business and you do imderstand business, I suppose. I don't see Innes often. I must snatch a moment."

"Tm a bad boy," Innes said with his pout. He had a way of being whimsical about his own shortcomings.

The blind woman pursed her dry lips. "Of course, Innes is Stephen's son but not Sophia's," she said, as if this explained something. "That is Sophia, hanging over the mantel."

Startled, AKce looked up. Sophia was, indeed, hanging on the wall but looking as if she had never been alive at all. A pale oval face, stiffly done by a bad artist, it had a kind of crookedness to it, as if the artist had lost control of what little skill he had and gotten the perspective wrong. One eye looked insolently at the beholder, as eyes do in such portraits, but the other rolled a little wUdly, as if it looked elsewhere. No, not elsewhere, but inward, as if half the woman dreamed.

"An excellent likeness of my mother," Gertrude said complacently.

There was sound on the stairs of feet plopping flat on each step and a dumpy figure appeared in the arch. Innes stepped quickly forth, took the newcomer's hand and swung it, making a little bow at the same time. "My sister, Maud."

The dumpy one chuckled. "Surprise, eh, Innes?" she said in a rasping voice, a queerly masculine voice, harsh and unpleasant and toneless. "You don't drop in like this so often."

Alice thought immediately of the Duchess in Through the Looking Glass, or was it Wonderland? Her nose was an untidy pug. Her hair was a rat's nest. Alice found a moment to wonder how anyone could deliberately go to work and arrange a head of hair like that. It was snarled and twisted into a pagoda full of hairpins, and there was no logic in it. Maud's skin was gray and hung on her face in folds. She wore a black dress embellished with tags of lace as illogical and haphazard as the arrangement of her hair. Her fat ankles were bound into high white shoes which, Alice saw, not without shock, were dirty and yellowish. She came closer, and her lively little gray eyes peered curiously at the girl.

"How ja do?" said Maud and stuck out a slab of a hand. The puffy flesh ended in dirty fingernails. Alice winced. Her nostrils twitched, then she stopped breathing; for from sister Maud arose an odor, definitely an odor; and, although fainter, it was the same rank animal smell she had noticed before.

"How do you do. Miss . . . Miss Maud," Alice foundered, looking desperately to Innes. "Is that proper?" She heard herself giving a very nervous litde laugh. "I can't

very well call you both Miss Whitlock. I . . ."

But Maud was looking at Innes, and her harsh, unlovely voice cut through Alice's sentence and stopped it.

"Who's the girl?" she said. "Where'd you find her?"

Blood rose in Alice's face. The blind woman said quietly, ''My sister Maud is quite deaf. Miss Brennan. She doesn't hear you at all."

Alice had trouble to draw her breath smoothly. "Thank you," she panted. "I didn't know."

"She is really rather helpless," said Gertrude contemptuously.

Innes had been spelling on his fingers. Maud's little eyes turned to the girl. They were bright and peered from folds of her grayish flesh.

"Secretary, eh?" she said bluntly. She waddled over to the chair in which Alice had been sitting. She collapsed into it. Her fat little body simply melted its bones and fell down. She stretched her ugly legs out and looked up at the mantel. Innes reached for the candy box. He did this automatically and handed it down. Maud dipped her fingers in.

"Have some candy?" she said to Alice, who shuddered "No." The woman stuffed three pieces into her mouth and grinned at the same time.

"Look here, Maud . . . Excuse me, Alice." Innes snatched a pad of paper from the incomprehensible folds of the woman's dress and produced a pencil. He scribbled.

"What's that?" Maud said, regarding what he had written without much interest. "Oh, financial, eh?" She grinned. "My financial position. Innes, you're a card."

He tapped the paper with his forefinger, impatiently. He was quite ready to dominate this sister.

"I've still got the two Liberty Bonds," Maud said. "Isabel hid them on me. " She went into rusty laughter.

Innes pantomined.

"Oh, I dunno," Maud said. "Spent it, I guess. Eh?" She took another chocolate. "It goes," she said slobbering and sucking in the overflow with a loud slupp, "Isabel's the one. She never spent an easy cent in her life, and it goes just the same." Maud heaved with mirth. "Makes her pretty mad. Should think it would."

"This," said Gertrude with an air of confidence to

Alice, "is extremely distasteful to me."

"And to me," limes said, rather grimly. His gaze was fixed on the deaf woman. "I warned you the last time. I'll make up no more deficiencies. Fll expect all your papers and accounts within the week."

Gertrude stiffened. "I'd prefer to go on with the bank, as usual," she said icily.

"Don't know what you say," rumbled Maud. "Write it down."

Innes gnawed his mustache. "Later," he said with a worried glance at Alice. "Gertrude, you must see it's to protect you."

She lifted her pale chin. "I am no one's burden."

"Innes . . ."

The third sister stood in the archway. She was not as short as Maud nor as thin as Gertrude, but medium tall with a plmnp breast like a pigeon. Her hair was a litde darker than straw and ballooned aroxmd her face like an inverted umbrella, then subsided in a round mound on top of her head. Her complexion was mottled, but she had a kind of meaty color. Her features were sharp, but because they were embedded in a roimd-jowled face, die effect was not sharp. Her eyes, Alice noticed with a shock, were like the eyes in the portrait. One watched and one dreamed.

"Isabel, how are you?" Innes was faintly hostile. "This is Alice Breiman, who's with me. My secretary. Alice, come meet my youngest sister."

Isabel smiled with her lips together. Impulsively, on ac-coimt of the smile, Alice held out her hand. Quick, but not quicker than the veiled dismay in the woman's eyes, Innes ran his arm through Alice's and drew hers down.

"I was saying, Isabel," he said sternly, "that I shall have to do what I threatened to do and take over aU your business matters. I understand you are in a financial mess again.''

He was ready to dominate this sister, also, but she was slippery. Isabel's eyes slid sidewise and down. She didn't answer. Instead she said, "You're always welcome, of course," in a kind of brisk whme; "but I do wish we had known, Innes ..."

"We couldn't very well warn you," Innes defended himself haughtily. "The car went wrong. That wasn't our fault."

"Well, I do hope you won't mind having just what we were about to have ourselves." Her thin smile turned to Alice. "You see, I think dinner is actually ready. And it's so late, you know . . ."

"Please don't trouble about anything," said Alice a lit-de coldly.

"Give us pot luck, Isabel," Innes said, "for heaven's sake."