The Withdrawing Room (16 page)

“No sense bringing it in, till we find out where she intends to go,” said Mariposa. “Only have to lug it out again.”

“That’s true, and it’ll be safe enough with the outer door locked. At least we shan’t be getting any more of King Kalakaua’s whatnots dragged through the hall. That’s not very kind of me, is it? Poor old Wumps, what an awful way to go!”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Mariposa lifted a soap bubble on her shapely fingers, and blew it away. “He was prob’ly dancing along like he always did, thinking about them chairs, and then, whammo! Quick and easy. I wouldn’t mind something like that for myself. Live it up till I’m ninety-five, then get shot by a jealous wife.”

Sarah wouldn’t have believed she could laugh that morning, but she did. By the time they’d finished the dishes, she felt up to facing Miss Hartler again. She went and tapped on the drawing room door.

“Miss Hartler? It’s Sarah. May I come in?”

“Yes, dear.” The voice seemed to come from very far away.

“I was wondering if I might get you something? Tea and toast, perhaps?”

Miss Hartler struggled to raise herself from the pillows into which she’d been weeping. Her eyes were red, her hair disheveled, her clothes a mess. She wiped a sodden handkerchief across her blotched, terribly aged face.

“Thank you, dear. Perhaps a cup of very weak tea? I never touch stimulants as a. rule, but this—this—I knew I should never have left him. It’s all my fault!”

Her shoulders began to heave again. Sarah said, “I’ll get the tea,” and fled.

As she was fixing a tray, Mr. Bittersohn came up the stairs from the basement “What’s happening?” was his greeting.

“The sister has arrived,” Sarah told him. “She’s in his room crying her eyes out, poor soul. I’m trying to get her to drink a cup of tea. Would you mind terribly just going into the dining room and helping yourself? There’s coffee in the urn and things on the sideboard. Mrs. Sorpende should be down soon.”

“So?”

“Oh, don’t argue!” Sarah picked up the tray and left. He wasn’t arguing, but she had to take it out on somebody. Strange that she should pick Mr. Bittersohn.

Miss Hartler was up off the bed, at any rate. She’d evidently been to the bathroom and tried to do something about her face and hair. Though her eyes were still very red, she was a little more composed. She seated herself at the desk and pushed some of the litter aside.

“Dear Sarah, how kind! But really I don’t think I—”

“Now, Miss Hartler, you mustn’t give way. Your brother wouldn’t have wanted that.” Sarah was dragging out all the clichés she could recall that had been visited upon her during her own recent bereavement. “He was such a cheerful person. We must try to remember him as we knew him.”

“Ah, but nobody knew Wumps as I did.” Miss Hartler poured an inch or so of tea from the pot and added a great deal of milk. She peered at the arrow root biscuits Sarah had put on the tray, then slowly picked one up and took an apologetic nibble. “We were so close, you know, so very close. Not that we lived in each other’s pockets, of course. I had my church work, and Wumps had his own enthusiasms.”

“The Iolani Palace,” said Sarah.

“Ah, yes, that famous Iolani Palace Wumps was a zealot, you know, Sarah. A genuine zealot. I see he’s been collecting again.” She waved the arrowroot biscuit at the bibelots that covered every available space.

“I’m not too sure how much he’d actually collected,” Sarah replied. “He said most of the things he’d got proved not to be genuine and had to be given back. We’ve had people in and out of here—”

“Don’t tell me! I’ve been through it all. Tracking up the rugs and letting their wet umbrellas drip on the floor. And the reason Wumps wanted to move back here was that we weren’t getting enough of them. He thought Boston would be his Happy Hunting Ground. I must confess, Sarah dear, that I positively
quailed
at the mere thought. That was why, when I got this invitation from an old schoolmate to join her in Rome, I packed my bags and
fled.
But Dorothea has changed. Sadly, sadly changed. I suppose I have, too. Ah, me, time flies.”

Making a pathetic attempt to put on a brave face, Miss Hartler picked up her teacup. “Sarah, I’ve been trying to think what to do, and it seems the sensible thing—I’m trying so hard to be sensible, you see. Wumps was always the strong one, but I don’t have him to lean on anymore so I must manage as best I can alone. I thought if you’d let me stay here for just a few days, until we can get the dreadful, dreadful funeral over with—our plot is in Mount Auburn, you know, like yours—perhaps you’d know how to go about making the arrangements—I’ve never had to—when dear Mother and Father—”

She mopped her eyes and took an infinitesimal sip of the cooling tea. “That will give me a chance to find out how I stand and do something about all this stuff Wumps had left. Dear Sarah, you won’t mind, will you? I have nobody else to turn to! If you could just have your man bring in my bags—”

“He’s—not here just now,” Sarah answered, rather stunned by this sudden turn of affairs.

Of course it made sense for Miss Hartler to use her brother’s room. His rent was paid till the end of the week, and she had nowhere else to go, except a hotel or the YWCA. Somebody had to sift through this welter and decide what to do with it, and who could be better qualified than his own sister? But to have Miss Hartler around oozing gloom and respectability on top of everything else was going to be plain ghastly.

Well, it wouldn’t be for long. If Mr. Porter-Smith’s dinner jacket and Miss LaValliere’s hairdo didn’t drive the woman out, Mariposa and Charles, in their own adroit ways, would manage.

N
EVERTHELESS, SARAH DIDN’T GIVE
in without a struggle. “But—but we’d have to clean the room first. I couldn’t let you move in here with the place in such a state.”

“Oh, I can do that. Please let me. I’m so used to cleaning up after Wumps, you see. It would be like having him back, just for a little, little, precious while. Just have your maid bring in the vacuum cleaner and a duster, and I’ll have everything spotless in no time. This will be the last chance I’ll ever—” Her voice quavered and she hid her face again.

What could one say to that? Anyway, there were all those breakable objects belonging to heaven only knew whom, and it would be better for Miss Hartler to undertake the responsibility. Sarah went and got the cleaning materials, and left Miss Hartler to it.

Or thought she did. Miss Hartler couldn’t figure out how to turn on the vacuum cleaner. Miss Hartler needed a sponge, a scrubbing brush, disinfectant, fresh linens, glass polish, brass polish, silver polish, a mop, a wall brush, a reviving glass of cranberry juice. Miss Hartler, in one way or another, took up Sarah’s entire day.

There was the dreadful trip to the morgue to make her formal identification of darling Wumps. Luckily he’d had an old triangular scar on his right wrist that made the experience a degree less harrowing than it might have been but still bad enough for Miss Hartler to need another glass of cranberry juice before she felt up to facing the vicar concerning dead Wump’s last rites. She was astonished to learn Sarah wasn’t personally acquainted with the dear vicar. Sarah was rude enough to reply that she at least knew the undertaker.

“Yes, yes, we must see the undertaker. How terrible! But dear Wumps wouldn’t want old Bumps to let him down, would he? I always called him Wumps because when I was a baby I couldn’t say William. And he retaliated by calling me Bumps because I kept falling down when I tried to walk. I’m afraid a lot of the bumps were Wump’s own doing. He had such an impish sense of humor, even as a little boy. You must have adored having him here.”

“He was with us such a short time,” Sarah murmured.

It wasn’t pleasant to recall the blasting-out she’d given him so soon before he’d gone out to his death, even more painful to think that if she’d kept her mouth shut he might have had the chairs brought to him and still be alive. Nevertheless, Sarah couldn’t be hypocritical enough to pretend Mr. Hartler had been an unmixed blessing, and she couldn’t really believe his sister had always found him so, either.

But she herself had got furious with Alexander sometimes, and that didn’t make the hurt any less when she lost him. She hadn’t ducked the fact that he’d been murdered, though, as Miss Hartler was doing. The police were naturally pressing her to search among the papers for anything that might reveal if he had an enemy, an article of exceptional value, and particularly if there was any information as to whom the man with the chairs had been, if in fact such a person existed. The sister was putting all that out of her mind, not reading the papers but just stacking them neatly and waxing the desk; fussing about the stately high-church service, about whether Wumps would have preferred a gray or a mahogany casket, about what music he would have preferred and what flowers to choose. Sarah thought of suggesting they fly in a ukulele band and a hibiscus lei from Honolulu because by that time she was getting thoroughly fed up with Miss Hartler, but she couldn’t because she was cursed with too decent a nature.

Late in the afternoon she managed to get Miss Hartler back into the fresh-cleaned drawing room for a rest and herself rushed to the kitchen, trying to cram a day’s work into two hours. Uncle Jem phoned to ask if she wanted him to rally around and she yelped back, “No, for God’s sake, don’t!” Dolph didn’t bother to call, he just came, taking it for granted that his presence would be required on so grave an occasion.

For that, Sarah was grateful. Miss Hartler knew Dolph, and his pompous solemnity struck just the right note with her when she emerged from her seclusion in a high-necked, long-sleeved gown of some lank material and some dark color, smelling faintly of mold and moth balls. As Dolph mouthed the correct phrases, Sarah couldn’t help thinking that if he had by some wild chance been the instrument of William Hartler’s demise, he was showing either remarkable self-possession or a degree of loopiness to which not even Great-uncle Frederick had ever attained. She found herself eying him as a mouse might watch a crouching cat. Was he dangerous, or was he only asleep. What would she do if she found out her familiar bumbler of a cousin had become a criminal lunatic? Go stark raving herself, most likely.

The lodgers were gathering. Mrs. Sorpende was first down, and Sarah was interested to see that she had, in respect to the demised, filled in her low-cut dinner gown with an elegant jabot of rich ivory-colored satin that just might, not long before, have been the legs of a pair of Aunt Caroline’s step-ins. However it had been achieved, the effect was so flattering that Dolph suddenly ran out of platitudes on the subject of family bereavement and sidled over toward the sofa on which Mrs. Sorpende liked best to sit.

Miss Hartler then settled into an attitude of gentle melancholy. Sarah presented each of the others as he or she arrived, each offered condolences, then each settled down to enjoy the customary period of relaxation before dinner. However, it was not so easy to enjoy an innocent glass of preprandial sherry with Miss Hartler recoiling from the tray as from a striking cobra every time Charles passed within recoiling distance.

Mr. Porter-Smith’s well-meant urging that she take a glass with him as medical studies had proven that moderate amounts of alcohol taken before a meal could be a valuable aid to general health and well-being earned him nothing but a stiff-lipped, “Thank you, I never touch spirits.”

Miss LaValliere’s attempts to cheer Miss Hartler up with an account of the senior Mrs. LaValliere’s most recent attack of shingles did strike a responsive chord since Miss Hartler had once served on the altar guild with Miss LaValliere’s grandmother; but both the granddaughter and her topic were soon exhausted.

Professor Ormsby didn’t even try. Once he’d been coerced into shaking hands and grunting some obligatory word of sympathy, he took the other end of Mrs. Sorpende’s sofa and glowered across her jabot at Dolph. Mr. Bittersohn, again the last to arrive, was more compassionate. He drew a chair close to Miss Hartler’s, shook his head when Charles offered him a drink, and began talking to her in a low, concerned voice.

At first, Miss Hartler appeared to respond. Then for no reason that Sarah could see, she became monosyllabic and at last so totally withdrawn that it was a relief when Charles announced dinner and she said piteously that she really didn’t think she could face it and mightn’t she please just have a little something on a tray in her room?

That meant extra work for the staff and a quick reshuffling of the table, but Sarah couldn’t have cared less. She was so relieved to get out from under this wet blanket that she didn’t even try to change the subject when Mr. Porter-Smith began explaining what the capital gains tax meant to her, although in fact it meant nothing at all since she wasn’t having any gains these days, only losses.

By degrees, the group relaxed. With Dolph present the atmosphere was bound to be a trifle on the stuffy side anyway; but he, with his duty to Miss Hartler behind him, Mrs. Sorpende beside him, and a good dinner in front of him, waxed as genial as Dolph knew how to wax.

Mr. Bittersohn’s thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. Surely he couldn’t have taken offense at Miss Hartler’s sudden cooling-off in the library. An elderly woman who’d come straight from an overseas flight to find her beloved brother murdered and herself at the morgue having to identify his battered corpse could hardly be expected to keep a stiff upper lip for any extended length of time. Sarah dropped a gentle hint to that effect, and Bittersohn gave her a look that puzzled her a good deal.

After dinner, she told Charles to serve the rest of Mr. Hartler’s benedictine. She wasn’t sure why. Was the gesture in tribute to his memory, or was it an expression of a wish to get rid of everything pertaining to the Hartlers as quickly as possible? Anyway, they all had some; then Dolph announced with blowing of horns and fanfare of trumpets that he was late for an important meeting, and took his departure. Mrs. Sorpende went upstairs, perhaps to remodel another item of lingerie. Professor Ormsby had papers to correct. Mr. Bittersohn said he had to work on his book, which was surely a lie. Miss LaValliere, in desperation, asked Mr. Porter-Smith to help her with her bookkeeping homework.