The Door (2 page)

Poor Sarah! I can still see her in her starched white uniform, with its skirts which just cleared the ground, moving among our various households, with us but not entirely of us; watching nervously over the stair rail while Judy, Katherine’s daughter, made her début; slapping Laura’s newest baby between the shoulders to make it breathe, or bending over me to give me a daily massage, her heavy body clumsy enough but her hands light and gentle.

She was not a clever woman. Or maybe I am wrong. Perhaps in a family which prides itself on a sort of superficial cleverness, she was merely silenced.

It was Wallie Somers, Katherine’s stepson, who claimed that when he told her Hoover was nominated, she said:

“Really! That ought to be good business for the vacuum cleaner.”

Not a romantic figure, Sarah, or a mysterious one. All of us thought of her as a fixture, growing older but more or less always to be with us. I remember Howard Somers, Katherine’s husband, telling her one day that he had remembered her in his will.

“Not a lot, Sarah,” he said. “But you’ll never have to go to the Old Ladies’ Home!”

I don’t know why we were so astonished to see her burst into tears. I dare say she had been worried about the future; about getting old, and the children growing up and forgetting her. Anyhow she cried, and Howard was greatly embarrassed.

She had her peculiarities, of course. In Katherine’s house, what with guests in and out all the time, she had developed the habit of taking her meals in her room on a tray, and this habit persisted.

“I like to read while I eat,” she said. “And I’m up early, and I don’t like late dinners.”

She had some sort of stomach trouble, poor thing.

But in my simpler household she ate with me unless there was some one there. Then, to Joseph’s secret fury, she retired to her room and had her tray there.

She had come down from Katherine’s a month or so before, not so much because I needed her as that Katherine thought she needed a change. Howard had had a bad heart for some time, and Sarah had been nursing him.

“Just let her putter around,” Katherine wrote. “She’ll want to work, being Sarah, so if you can stand a daily massage—”

And of course I could, and did.

I have drawn Sarah as well as I can, and the family rather sketchily; Howard and Katherine in their handsome duplex apartment in New York on Park Avenue, bringing out Judy at nineteen; Laura in Kansas City, raising a noisy young family; and myself in my old-fashioned house with its grounds and shrubbery, its loneliness and its memories. Dependent on a few friends, a small dinner party now and then, a little bridge; and on my servants, on Joseph and Norah and Clara and Robert, and on the Mary Martins who came and went, intelligent young women who used me as a stop-gap in their progress toward marriage or a career. A staid household, dependent for its youth on Judy’s occasional visits, on secretaries whose minds were elsewhere, and on Wallie Somers, Howard’s son by his first wife, whose ostensible business was bonds and whose relaxation, when he could not find some one to play with, was old furniture. Than which, as Judy once said, I have nothing else but.

As it happened, Judy was with me when Sarah disappeared that night in April of last year. She was staging her annual revolt.

“I get a trifle fed up with Katherine now and then,” she would say, arriving without notice. “She’s too intense. Now you are restful. You’re really a frivolous person, you know, Elizabeth Jane, for all your clothes and airs.”

“Frivolity is all I have left,” I would say meekly. Judy has a habit of first names. Katherine had carefully taught her to call me Cousin Elizabeth, but Judy had discarded that with her stockings, which now she wore as seldom as possible and under protest. Although I doubt if she ever called her mother Katherine to her face.

Katherine was a good mother but a repressed one. Also she was still passionately in love with Howard; one of those profound absorbing loves which one finds sometimes in women who are apparently cold, and which makes them better wives than mothers. I rather think that she was even a little jealous of Judy, and that Judy knew it.

Judy would arrive, and as if by a miracle the telephone would commence to ring and shining sports cars would be parked for hours in front of the house. Joseph would assume a resigned expression, empty cigarette trays by the dozen, and report to me in his melancholy voice.

“Some one has burned a hole on the top of your Queen Anne desk, madam.”

I was never anything to him but “madam.” It got on my nerves sometimes.

“Never mind, Joseph. We have to pay a price for youth.”

He would go out again, depressed but dignified. In his own way he was as unsocial as Sarah, as mysterious and self-obliterating as are all good servants.

So on that last night of Sarah’s life, Judy was with me. She had just arrived, looking a trifle defiant, and at dinner she stated her grievance. Mary Martin was out for the evening, and the two of us were alone at the table.

“Really, Katherine is
too
outrageous,” she said.

“She’s probably saying the same thing about you.”

“But it is silly. Truly. She wants me not to see Wallie. I don’t think Wallie is anything to lie awake at night about, but after all he’s my half-brother.”

I said nothing. It was an old difficulty in the family, Katherine’s dislike of Howard’s son by his first marriage. It was a part of her jealousy of Howard, her resentment of that early unfortunate marriage of his. She loathed Wallie and all he stood for; not that he stood for a great deal. He was the usual rich man’s son, rather charming in his own way but neurotic since the war. But he looked like Margaret, the first wife, and Katherine could not forgive him for that.

“You like Wallie,” Judy accused me.

“Of course I do.”

“And he had a wonderful war record.”

“Certainly he had. What are you trying to do, Judy? Justify yourself?”

“I think he’s had a rotten deal,” she said. “From all of us. A bit of allowance from father, and now I’m not to see him!”

“But you are going to see him,” I told her. “You’re going to see him tonight. He wants to look over an old ormolu cabinet Laura has sent me.”

She forgot her irritation in her delight.

“Lovely! Has it got any secret drawers? I adore looking for secret drawers,” she said, and went on eating a substantial meal. These young things, with their slender waists and healthy appetites!

She had already rushed up to the third floor to greet Sarah, and while we were eating I heard Sarah on the way down. This was nothing unusual. She would go out sometimes at night, either to the movies or to take Jock and Isabel for a walk, and I could sit at my place at the table and watch her coming down the stairs. The fireplace in the music room is set at an angle, and in the mirror over it I would see Sarah; first her soft-soled low-heeled shoes, then the bottom of her white skirt, and then her gray coat, until finally all of Sarah emerged into view.

This evening however I saw that she had taken off her uniform, and I called to her.

“Going to the movies, Sarah?”

“No.” She had no small amenities of speech.

“Don’t you want the dogs? They haven’t been out today.”

She seemed to hesitate. I could see her in the mirror, and I surprised an odd expression on her face. Then the dogs themselves discovered her and began to leap about her.

“Do take them, Sarah,” Judy called.

“I suppose I can,” she agreed rather grudgingly. “What time is it?”

Judy looked at her wrist watch and told her.

“And do behave yourself, Sarah!” she called.

But Sarah did not answer. She snapped the leashes on the dogs and went out. That was at five minutes after seven. She went out and never came back.

Judy and I loitered over the meal, or rather I loitered; Judy ate and answered the telephone. One call was from a youth named Dick, and there was a subtle change in Judy’s voice which made me suspicious. Another, however, she answered coldly.

“I don’t see why,” she said. “She knew quite well where I was going … Well, I’m all right. If I want to go wrong I don’t need to come here to do it … No, she’s gone out.”

I have recorded this conversation because it became highly important later on. To the best of my knowledge it came soon after Sarah left; at seven-fifteen or thereabouts.

Judy came back to the table with her head in the air.

“Uncle Jim,” she said. “Wouldn’t you know mother would sic him on me? The old goose!”

By which she referred not to Katherine, but to Katherine’s brother, Jim Blake. Judy had chosen to affect a dislike for him, not because of any inherent qualities in Jim himself, but because Katherine was apt to make him her agent when Judy visited me.

Personally I was fond of Jim, perhaps because he paid me the small attentions a woman of my age finds gratifying, and certainly Katherine adored him.

“He asked for Sarah, but I told him she had gone out. What in the world does he want with Sarah?”

“He may have had some message from your mother for her.”

“Probably to keep an eye on me,” said Judy, drily.

I think all this is accurate. So many things happened that evening that I find it difficult to go back to that quiet meal. Quiet, that is, up to the time when Joseph brought in our coffee.

I know we discussed Jim, Judy and I, and Judy with the contempt of her youth for the man in his late forties who takes no active part in the world. Yet Jim had organized his life as best he could. He was a bachelor, who went everywhere for a reason which I surmised but Judy could not understand; the fear of the lonely of being alone.

“Uncle Jim and his parties!” said Judy. “How in the world does he pay for them?”

“He has a little from his mother.”

“And more probably from my mother!”

Well, that might have been, so I said nothing, and as money meant nothing in Judy’s lavish young life she was immediately cheerful again.

It is hard to remember Jim as he was in those days; as he must have been when he left his house that night. A tall man, still very erect, and with graying hair carefully brushed to hide its thinness, he was always urbane and well dressed. He was popular too. He had never let business, which in his case was a dilettante interest in real estate, interfere with a golf game or bridge, and by way of keeping up his social end he gave innumerable little tea parties and dinners. He had a colored servant named Amos who was a quick change artist, and so people dined with Jim on food cooked by Amos, to be served by Amos in a dinner jacket, and then went outside to find Amos in a uniform and puttees, standing by the car with the rug neatly folded over his arm.

There are some people to whom all colored men look alike, and to these no doubt Jim Blake appeared to be served by a retinue of servants.

“The Deb’s delight!” was Judy’s closing and scathing comment, and then Joseph brought in the coffee.

That was, according to Joseph’s statement to the police and later before the Grand Jury, at seven-thirty or seven-thirty-five.

Judy had lighted a cigarette. I remember thinking how pretty she looked in the candle light, and how the house brightened when she was there. Joseph was moving about the pantry, and in the silence I could hear distant voices from the servants’ hall beyond the kitchen.

Judy had lapsed into silence. The initial excitement of her arrival was over, and I thought now that she looked dispirited and rather tired. Then I happened to raise my eyes, and they fell on the mirror.

There was a man on the staircase.

H
E SEEMED TO BE
crouching there. I could see only his legs, in darkish trousers, and he had no idea that I could see him at all. He was apparently listening, listening and calculating. Should he make a dash to get out, or retreat? The door from the dining room to the hall was wide open. I would surely see him; was it worth the trying?

Evidently he decided that it was not, for without turning he backed soundlessly up the stairs.

“Judy,” I said quietly. “Don’t move or raise your voice. There’s a burglar upstairs. I’ve just seen him.”

“What shall I do? I can close the library door and call the police.”

“Do that, then, and I’ll tell Joseph. He can’t get out by the back stairs without going through the kitchen, and the servants would see him.”

I rang for Joseph, feeling calm and rather pleased at my calmness. Such few jewels as I keep out of the bank were on me, and if he wanted my gold toilet set he was welcome. It was insured. But while I waited for Joseph I took off my rings and dropped them into the flower vase on the table.

Joseph took the news quietly. He said that Robert was still in the garage, and that he would station him at the foot of the back stairs, but that to wait for the police was nonsense.

“He’d jump out a window, madam. But if I go up, as though I didn’t know he was about, I might surprise him.”

“You’re not armed.”

“I have a revolver in the pantry, madam.”

That did not surprise me. There had been some burglaries in the neighborhood recently—I believe the bootlegger had had the tables turned on him, a matter which I considered a sort of poetic justice—and I stood in the doorway watching the stairs until Joseph reappeared.

“If he gets past me,” he said, “stand out of his way, madam. These cat burglars are dangerous.”

He went up the front staircase, leaving me in the lower hall. I could hear Judy at the telephone, patiently explaining in a low voice, and I could hear Joseph overhead, moving about systematically: the second floor, the third, opening room doors and closet doors, moving with his dignified unhurried tread, but doing the thing thoroughly.

He was still moving majestically along the third floor hall when I heard a slight noise near at hand. I could neither describe it nor locate it. Something fairly near me had made a sound, a small sharp report. It appeared to have come from the back hallway, where there is a small lavatory. When Judy emerged I told her, and against my protests she marched back and threw open the door.

It was quite empty and soon after Joseph came down to say that he had found nobody, but that some one might be hiding on the roof, and as by that time a policeman had arrived on a motorcycle, I sent him out to look.