The Doomsters (27 page)

“Carl was twenty-one on the fourteenth of March, and we were married in Oakland three days later. He moved into the apartment with me, but he thought we should make up for our earlier sins by living in chastity for another year. Carl was so tense about it that I was afraid to argue with him. He was pale, and bright in the eyes. Sometimes he wouldn’t talk for days at a time, and then the floodgates would open and he’d talk all night.

“He’d begun to fail in his studies, but he was full of ideas. We used to discuss reality, appearance and reality. I always thought appearance was the front you put on for
people, and reality was how you really felt. Reality was death and blood and the curse. Reality was hell. Carl told me I had it all wrong, that pain and evil were only appearances. Goodness was reality, and he would prove it to me in his life. Now that he’d discovered Christian existentialism, he saw quite clearly that suffering was only a test, a fire that purified. That was the reason we couldn’t sleep together. It was for the good of our souls.

“Carl had begun to lose a lot of weight. He got so nervous that spring, he couldn’t sit still to work. Sometimes I’d hear him walking in the living-room all night. I thought if I could get him to come to bed with me, it would help him to get some sleep, settle him down. I had some pretty weird ideas of my own. I paraded around in floozie nightgowns, and drenched myself with perfume, and did my best to seduce him. My own husband. One night in May, I served him a candlelight dinner with wine and got him drunk enough.

“It didn’t work, not for either of us. The spirit rose up from me and floated over the bed. I looked down and watched Carl using my body. And I hated him. He didn’t love
me
. He didn’t want to know
me
. I thought that we were both dead, and our corpses were in bed together. Zombies. Our two spirits never met.

“Carl was still in bed when I came home the next night. He hadn’t been to his classes, hadn’t moved all day. I thought at first he was sick, physically sick, and I called a doctor. Carl told him that the light of heaven had gone out. He had done it himself by putting out the light in his own mind. Now there was nothing in his head but darkness.

“Dr. Levin took me into the next room and told me that Carl was mentally disturbed. He should probably be committed. I telephoned Carl’s father, and Dr. Levin talked to him, too. The Senator said that the idea of commitment
was absurd. Carl had simply been hitting the books too hard, and what he needed was some good, hard down-to-earth work.

“Carl’s father came and took him home the next day. I gave up my apartment and my job, and a few days later I followed them. I should have stayed where I was, but I wanted to be with Carl. I didn’t trust his family. And I had a sneaking desire, even under the circumstances, to live on the ranch and be Mrs. Carl Hallman in Purissima. Well, I was, but it was worse than I expected. His family didn’t like me. They blamed me for Carl’s condition. A
good
wife would have been able to keep him healthy and wealthy and wise.

“The only person there who really liked me was Zinnie’s baby. I used to play a game pretending that Martha was
my
baby. That was how I got through those two years. I’d pretend that I was alone with her in the big house. The others had all gone away, or else they’d died, and I was Martha’s mother, doing for her all by myself, bringing her up just right, without any nasty influences. We did have good times, too. Sometimes I really believed that the nightmare in the doctor’s office hadn’t happened at all. Martha was there to prove it, my own baby, going on two.

“But Dr. Grantland was often there to remind me that it had happened. He was looking after Carl and his father, both. The Senator liked him because he didn’t charge much or make expensive suggestions, such as hospitals or psychiatric treatment. Carl’s father was quite a money-saver. We had margarine on the table instead of butter, and nothing but the culled oranges for our own use. I was even expected to pay board, until my money ran out. I didn’t have a new dress for nearly two years. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have killed him.”

Mildred said that quietly, without any change in tone, without apparent feeling. Her face was expressionless.
Only her forefinger moved on her skirted knee, tracing a small pattern: a circle and then a cross inside of the circle; as though she was trying to exorcise bad thoughts.

“I certainly wouldn’t have killed him if he’d died when he was supposed to. Dr. Grantland had said a year, but the year went by, then most of another year. I wasn’t the only one waiting. Jerry and Zinnie were waiting just as hard. They did their best to stir up trouble between Carl and his father, which wasn’t hard to do. Carl was a little better, but still depressed and surly. He wasn’t getting along with his father, and the old man kept threatening to change his will.

“One night Jerry baited Carl into a terrible argument about the Japanese people who used to own part of the valley. The Senator jumped into it, of course, as he was supposed to. Carl told him he didn’t want any part of the ranch. If he ever did inherit any share of it, he’d give it back to the people who’d been sold up. I never saw the old man so angry. He said Carl was in no danger of inheriting anything. This time he meant it, too. He asked Jerry to make an appointment with his lawyer in the morning.

“I telephoned Dr. Grantland and he came out, ostensibly to see the Senator. Afterwards I talked to him outside. He took a very dim view. It wasn’t that he was greedy, but he was thousands of dollars out of pocket. It was the first time he told me about the other man, this Rickey or Rica who’d been blackmailing him ever since Alicia’s death. The same man who escaped with Carl last night.”

“Grantland had never mentioned him to you?”

“No, he said he’d been trying to protect me. But now he was just about bled white, and something had to be done. He didn’t tell me outright that I had to kill the Senator. I didn’t have to be told. I didn’t even have to think about it. I simply let myself forget who I was, and went through the whole thing like clockwork.”

Her forefinger was active on her knee, repeating the symbol of the cross in the circle. She said, as if in answer to a question:

“You’d think I’d been planning it for years, all my life, ever since—”

She broke off, and covered the invisible device on her knee with her whole hand. She rose like a sleepwalker and went to the window. An oak tree in the backyard was outlined like a black paper cutout against the whitening sky.

“Ever since what?” I said to her still back.

“I was just remembering. When my father went away, afterwards, I used to think of funny things when I was in bed before I went to sleep. I wanted to track him down, and find him, and—”

“Kill him?”

“Oh no!” she cried. “I wanted to tell him how much we missed him and bring him back to Mother, so that we could be a happy family again. But if he wouldn’t come—”

“What if he wouldn’t come?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t remember.” She struck the window where her reflection had been, not quite hard enough to break it.

      D
AWN
was coming on over the trees, like fluorescent lights in an operating room. Mildred turned away from the white agony of the light. Her outburst of feeling had passed, leaving her face smooth and
her voice unshaken. Only her eyes had changed. They were heavy, and the color of ripe plums.

“It wasn’t like the first time. This time I felt nothing. It’s strange to kill someone and have no feeling about it. I wasn’t even afraid while I was waiting for him in his bathroom closet. He always took a warm bath at night to help him sleep. I had an old ball-peen hammer I’d found on Jerry’s workbench in the greenhouse. When he was in the bathtub, I slipped out of the closet and hit him on the back of the head with the hammer. I held his face under the water until the bubbles stopped.

“It only took a few seconds. I unlocked the bathroom door and locked it again on the outside and wiped the key and pushed it back under the door. Then I put the hammer where I found it, with Jerry’s things. I hoped it would be taken for an accident, but if it wasn’t I wanted Jerry to be blamed. It was really his fault, egging Carl on to quarrel with his father.

“But Carl was the one they blamed, as you well know. He seemed to
want
to be blamed. I think for a while he convinced himself that he had actually done it, and everyone else went along with it. The sheriff didn’t even investigate.”

“Was he protecting you?”

“No. If he was, he didn’t know it. Jerry made some kind of a deal with him to save the county money and save the family’s face. He didn’t want a murder trial in his distinguished family. Neither did I. I didn’t try to interfere when Jerry arranged to send Carl to the hospital. I signed the papers without a word.

“Jerry knew what he was doing. He was trained in the law, and he arranged it so that he was Carl’s legal guardian. It meant that he controlled everything. I had no rights at all, as far as the family estate was concerned. The day after Carl was committed, Jerry hinted politely that I
might as well move out. I believe that Jerry suspected me, but he was a cagey individual. It suited him better to blame it all on Carl, and keep his own cards face down.

“Dr. Grantland turned against me, too. He said he was through with me, after the mess I’d made of things. He said that he was through protecting me. For all he cared, the man he’d been paying off could go to the police and tell them all about me. And I mustn’t think that I could get back at him by talking him into trouble. It would be my word against his, and I was as schitzy as hell, and he could prove it. He slapped me and ordered me out of his house. He said if I didn’t like it, he’d call the police right then.

“I’ve spent the last six months waiting for them,” she said. “Waiting for the knock on the door. Some nights I’d wish for them to come,
will
them to come, and get it over with. Some nights I wouldn’t care one way or the other. Some nights—they were the worst—I’d lie burning up with cold and watch the clock and count its ticks, one by one, all night. The clock would tick like doom, louder and louder, like doomsters knocking on the door and clumping up the stairs.

“I got so I was afraid to go to sleep at night. I haven’t slept for the last four nights, since I found out about Carl’s friend on the ward. It was this man, Rica, the one who knew all about me. I could imagine him telling Carl. Carl would turn against me. There’d be nobody left in the world who even liked me. When they phoned me yesterday morning that Carl had escaped with him, I knew that this had to be it.” She looked at me quite calmly. “You know the rest. You were here.”

“I saw it from the outside.”

“That’s all there was, the outside. There wasn’t any inside, at least for me. It was like a ritual which I made up as I went along. Every step I took had a meaning at the
time, but I can’t remember any of the meanings now.”

“Tell me what you did, from the time that you decided to kill Jerry.”

“It decided itself,” she said. “I had no decision to make, no choice. Dr. Grantland phoned me at the office a little while before you got to town. It was the first I’d heard from him in six months. He said that Carl had got hold of a loaded gun. If Carl shot Jerry with it, it would solve a lot of problems. Money would be available, in case this man Rica tried to make more trouble for us. Also, Grantland would be able to use his influence with Zinnie to head off investigation of the other deaths. I’d even have a chance at my share of the property. If Carl didn’t shoot Jerry, the whole thing would blow up in our faces.

“Well, Carl had no intention of shooting anybody. I found that out when I talked to him in the orange grove. The gun he had was his mother’s gun, which Dr. Grantland had given him. Carl wanted to ask Jerry some questions about it—about her death. Apparently Grantland told him that Jerry killed her.

“I didn’t know for certain that Jerry suspected me, but I was afraid of what he would say to Carl. This was on top of all the other reasons I had to kill him, all the little snubs and sneers I’d had to take from him. I said I’d talk to Jerry instead, and I persuaded Carl to hand over the gun to me. If he was found armed, they might shoot him without asking questions. I told him to stay out of sight, and come here after dark if he could make it. That I would hide him.

“I hid the gun away, inside my girdle—it hurt so much I fainted, there on the lawn. When I was alone, I switched it to my bag. Later, when Jerry was alone, I went into the greenhouse and shot him twice in the back. I wiped the gun and left it there beside him. I had no more use for it.”

She sighed, with the deep bone-tiredness that takes
years to come to. Even the engine of her guilt was running down. But there was one more death in her cycle of killings.

And still the questions kept rising behind my teeth, always the questions, with the taste of their answers, salt as sea or tears, bitter as iron or fear, sweet-sour as folding money that has passed through many hands:

“Why did you kill Zinnie? Did you actually believe that you could get away with it, collect the money and live happily ever after?”

“I never thought of the money,” she said, “or Zinnie, for that matter. I went there to see Dr. Grantland.”

“You took a knife along.”

“For him,” she said. “I was thinking about him when I took that knife out of the drawer. Zinnie happened to be the one who was there. I killed her, I hardly know why. I felt ashamed for her, lying naked like that in his bed. It was almost like killing myself. Then I heard the radio going in the front room. It said that Carl had been seen at Pelican Beach.

“It seemed like a special message intended for me. I thought that there was hope for us yet, if only I could reach Carl. We could go away together and start a new life, in Africa or on the Indian reservations. It sounds ridiculous now, but that’s what I thought on the way down to Pelican Beach. That somehow everything could be made good yet.”

“So you walked in front of a truck.”