The Stand (Original Edition) (23 page)

Larry didn’t want to sit there anymore. He got up and began to walk aimlessly down toward the mall with its large bandshell. He had heard the monster-shouter some fifteen minutes ago, very far away, but now the only sound in the park seemed to be his own heels clicking on the cement and the twitter of the birds. Birds apparently didn’t catch the flu. Good for them.

When he neared the bandshell, he saw that a woman was sitting on one of the benches in front of it. She was maybe fifty, but had taken great pains to look younger. She was dressed in expensive-looking gray-green slacks and a silk off-the-shoulder peasant blouse ... except, Larry thought, as far as he knew, peasant’s can’t afford silk. She looked around at the sound of Larry’s footsteps. She held a pill in one hand and tossed it casually into her mouth like a peanut.

“Hi,” Larry said. Her face was calm, her eyes blue. Sharp intelligence gleamed in them. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses, and her pocketbook was trimmed with something that certainly looked like mink. There were four rings on her fingers: a wedding band, two diamonds, and a cat’s-eye emerald.

“Uh, I’m not dangerous,” he said. It was a ridiculous thing to say, he supposed, but she looked like she might be wearing about $20,000 on her fingers. Of course, they might be fakes, but she didn’t look like a woman who would have much use for zircons.

“No,” she said, “you don’t look dangerous. You’re not sick, either.” Her voice rose a little on the last word, making her statement into a polite half-question. She wasn’t as calm as she looked at first glance; there' was a little tic working on the side of her neck, and behind the light of intelligence in the blue eyes was the same dull shock that Larry had seen in his own eyes this morning as he shaved.

“No, I don’t think I am. Are you?”

“Not at all. Did you know you have an ice cream wrapper on your shoe?”

He looked down and saw that he did. It made him blush because he suspected that she would have informed him that his fly was open in that same tone. He stood on one leg and tried to pull it off.

“You look like a stork,” she said. “Sit down and try it. My name is Rita Blakemoor.”

“Pleased to know you. I’m Larry Underwood.”

He sat down. She offered her hand and he shook it lightly, his fingers pressing against her rings. Then he gingerly removed the ice cream wrapper from his shoe and dropped it primly into a can beside the bench that said IT’S
YOUR
PARK SO KEEP IT CLEAN! It struck him funny, the whole operation. He threw his head back and laughed. It was the first real laugh since the day he had come home to find his mother lying on the floor of her apartment, and he was enormously relieved to find that the good feel of laughing hadn’t changed.

Rita Blakemoor was smiling both at him and with him, and he was struck again by her casual yet elegant handsomeness. She looked like a woman from an Irwin Shaw novel,
Nightwork,
maybe, or the one they had made for TV some years ago.

“When I heard you coming, I almost hid,” she said. “I thought you were probably the man with the broken glasses and the queer philosophy.”

“The monster-shouter?”

“Is that what you call him or what he calls himself?”

“What I call him.”

“Very apt,” she said, opening her mink-trimmed (maybe) bag and taking out a package of menthol cigarettes. “He reminds me of an insane Diogenes.”

“Yeah, just lookin for an honest monster,” Larry said, and laughed again.

She lit her cigarette and chuffed out smoke.

“He’s not sick, either,” Larry said. “But most of the others are.” “The doorman at my building seems very well,” Rita said. “He’s still on duty. I tipped him five dollars when I came out this morning. I don’t know if I tipped him for being very well or for being on duty. What do you think?”

“I really don’t know you well enough to say.”

“No, of course you don’t.” She put her cigarettes back in her bag and he saw that there was a revolver in there. She followed his gaze. “It was my husband’s. He was a career executive with a major New York bank. That’s just how he put it when anyone asked what he did to keep himself in cocktail onions. I-am-a-career-executive-with-a-major-New-York-bank. He died two years ago. He was at a luncheon with one of those Arabs who always look as if they have rubbed all the visible areas of their skin with Brylcreem. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.”

A finch landed in front of them and pecked the ground.

“He was insanely afraid of burglars, so he had this gun. Do guns really kick and make a loud, noise when they go off, Larry?”

Larry, who had never fired a gun in his life, said, “I don’t think one that size would kick much. Is it a .38?”

“A .32.” She took it out of her bag and he saw that there were also a good many small pill-bottles in there. This time she didn’t follow his gaze; she was looking at a small chinaberry tree about fifteen paces away. “I believe I’ll try it. Do you think I can hit that tree?”

“I don’t know,” he said apprehensively. “I don’t really think—”

She pulled the trigger and the gun went off with a fairly impressive bang. A small hole appeared in the chinaberry tree. “Bullseye,” she said, and blew smoke from the pistol barrel like a gunfighter.

“Real good,” Larry said, and when she put the gun back in her purse, his heart resumed something like its normal rhythm.

“I couldn’t shoot a person with it. I’m quite sure of that. And soon there won’t be anyone to shoot, will there?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“You were looking at my rings. Would you like one?”

“Huh? No!” He began to blush again.

“As a banker, my husband believed in diamonds. He believed in them the way the Baptists believe in Revelations. I have a great many diamonds, and they are all insured. We not only owned a piece of the rock, my Harry and I, I sometimes believed we held a lien on the whole goddam thing. But if someone should want my diamonds, I would hand them over. After all, they’re only rocks again, aren’t they?”

“I guess that’s right.”

“Of course,” she said, and the tic on the side of her neck jumped again. “And if a stick-up man wanted them, I’d not only hand them over, I would give him the address of Cartier’s. Their selection of rocks is much better than my own.”

“What are you going to do now?” Larry asked her.

“What would you suggest?”

“I just don’t know,” Larry said, and sighed.

“My answer exactly.”

“You know something? I saw a guy this morning who said he was going out to Yankee Stadium and je . . . and masturbate on home plate. Can you imagine?” He could feel himself blushing again.

“What an awful walk for him,” she said. “Why didn’t you suggest something closer?” She sighed, and the sigh turned into a shudder. She opened her purse, took out a bottle of pills, and popped a gel capsule into her mouth.

“What’s that?” Larry asked.

“Vitamin E,” she said with a glittering, false smile. The tic in her neck jumped once or twice and then stopped. She became serene again.

“There’s nobody in the bars,” Larry said suddenly. “I went into Pat’s on Forty-third and it was totally empty. They have that great big mahogany bar and I went behind it and poured myself a water glass full of Johnnie Walker. Then I didn’t even want to be there. So I left it sitting on the bar and got out.”

They sighed together, like a chorus.

“You’re very pleasant,” she said. “I like you very much.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Blakemoor.” He was surprised and pleased. “Rita. I’m Rita.”

“Okay.”

“Are you hungry, Larry?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

“Perhaps you’d take the lady to lunch.”

“That would be a pleasure.”

She stood up and offered him her arm with a slightly deprecatory smile. As he linked his through it, he caught a whiff of her sachet, a smell that was at once comforting and disquietingly adult in its associations for him, almost old. His mother had worn sachet on their many trips to the movies together.

Then he forgot about it as they walked out of the park and up Fifth Avenue, away from the dead monkey, the monster-shouter, and the dark sweet treat sitting endlessly inside the comfort station on Transverse Number One. She chattered incessantly, and later he could remember no one thing she had chattered about (yes, just one: she had always dreamed, she said, of strolling up Fifth Avenue on the arm of a handsome young man, a young man who could have been her own son but who wasn’t), but he recalled the walk often just the same, especially after she began to jitter apart like some indifferently made toy. Her beautiful smile, her light, cynical, casual chatter, the whisper of her slacks.

They went into a steak house and Larry cooked, a trifle clumsily, but she applauded each course: the steak, the french fries, the instant coffee, the strawberry-rhubarb pie.

There was a strawberry pie in the fridge. It was covered with Saran Wrap and after looking at it for a long time with dull and bemused eyes, Frannie took it out. She set it on the counter and cut a wedge. A strawberry fell to the counter with a fat plop as she was transferring the piece of pie to a small plate. She picked the berry up and ate it. She wiped up the small splotch of juice on the counter with a dishrag. She put the Saran Wrap back over the remains of the pie and stuck it back in the refrigerator.

She was turning back to get her pie when she happened to glance at the knife-rack beside the cupboards. Her father had made it. It was two magnetized runners. The knives hung from them, blades down. The early afternoon sun was gleaming on them. She stared at the knives for a long time, the dull, half-curious cast of her eyes never changing, her hands working restlessly in the folds of the apron tied around her waist.

At last, some fifteen minutes later, she remembered that she had been in the middle of something. What? A line of scripture, a paraphrase, occurred to her for no good reason:
Before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye, attend the beam in thine own.
She considered it. Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered her. What sort of beam? Sunbeam? Moonbeam? Roofbeam? There were also flashlight beams and beaming faces and there had been a New York mayor named Abe Beame, and—

—before removing the mote in thy neighbor’s eye
—

But it wasn’t an eye; it was a pie. She turned to it and saw there was a fly crawling on her pie. She waved a hand at it. Bye-bye, Mr. Fly, say so long to Frannie’s pie.

She regarded the piece of pie for a long time. Her mother and father were both dead, she knew. Her mother had died in the Sanford

Hospital and her father, who had once made a little girl feel welcome in his shop, was lying dead in bed above her head. Why did everything have to keep coming in rhymes? Coming and going in such dreadful cheap jingles and jangles, like the idiot mnemonics that recur in fevers?
My dog has fleas, they bite his knees
—

She sat there for almost an hour, her plate before her, the dull, half-questioning expression on her face. Little by little another thought began to surface in her mind—two thoughts, actually, that seemed at once connected and totally unrelated. Were they maybe interlocking parts of a bigger thought? Keeping an ear open for the sound of dropping icecubes inside the refrigerator’s ice-making gadget, she examined them. The first thought was that her father was dead; he had died at home, and he might have liked that. The second thought had to do with the day. It was a beautiful summer’s day, flawless, the kind that the tourists came to the Maine seacoast for. You don’t come to swim because the water’s never really warm enough for that; you come to be knocked out by the day.

The sun was bright and Frannie could read the thermometer outside the back kitchen window. The mercury stood just under 80°. It was a beautiful day and her father was dead. Was there any connection, other than the obvious tear-jerky one?

She frowned over it, her eyes confused and apathetic. Her mind circled the problem, then drifted away to think of other things. But it always drifted back.

It was a beautiful
warm
day and her father was dead.

It came home to her all at once and her eyes squeezed shut, as if from a blow.

At the same time her hands jerked involuntarily on the tablecloth, yanking her plate off onto the floor. It shattered like a bomb and Frannie screamed, her hands going to her cheeks, digging furrows there. The wandering, apathetic vagueness disappeared from her eyes, which were suddenly sharp and direct. It was as if she had been slapped hard or had an open bottle of ammonia waved under her nose.

You can’t keep a corpse in the house. Not in high summer. 

The apathy began to creep back in, blurring the outlines of the thought. The full horror of it began to be obscured, cushioned. She began to listen for the clunk and drop of the icecubes again—

She fought it off. She got up, went to the sink, ran the cold water on full, and then splatted cupped handfuls against her cheeks, shocking her lightly perspiring skin.

She could drift away all she wanted, but first this thing had to be solved. It
had
to be. She couldn’t just let him lie in bed up there as June melted into July. It was too much like that Faulkner story that was in all the college anthologies, “A Rose for Emily.” The town fathers hadn’t known what that terrible smell was, but after a while it had gone away. It . . . it . . .

“No!” she cried out loud to the sunny kitchen. She began to pace, thinking about it. Her first thought was the local funeral home. But who would . . . would . . .

“Stop backing away from it!” she shouted furiously into the empty kitchen. “Who’s going to
bury
him?”

And at the sound of her voice, the answer came. It was perfectly clear. She was, of course. Who else? She was.

It was two-thirty in the afternoon when she heard the car turn into the driveway, its heavy motor purring complacently, low with power. Frannie put the spade down on the edge of the hole—she was digging in the garden, between the tomatoes and the lettuce—and turned around, a little afraid.