Voyage into Violence (26 page)

Mr. Prentori was not; Mr. Prentori came most carefully on his hour, which was three o'clock of the afternoon of Wednesday, November thirteenth. The doorbell rang twice, shortly, and Martini, last of her tribe (who had been comfortable on a chair, watching Amanda Towne with a hard blue gaze), vanished, more rapidly than any Cheshire Cat. Thinks it's the vet again, poor baby, Pam thought, and went to the door, where Mr. Prentori waited with buckets. “You're right on time,” Pam said, keeping the astonishment out of her voice, and Mr. Prentori said, “Sure, why not?”, to which there was no answer. (Except that painters never are, which would have been unkind.)

Mr. Prentori came into the living room of the apartment and regarded it. “Flattener streaked through last time, didn't it?” Mr. Prentori said, rather darkly. “You want the same color, I guess?” With this, a kind of eager cheerfulness invaded his voice.

“No,” Pam said. “I'm afraid not, Mr. Prentori.”

“Oh,” Mr. Prentori said. He sighed, rather ostentatiously. He said, “Well.” He said, “The whole apartment, the man said. Same colors in the other rooms?”

“No,” Pam said. “I'm afraid not, Mr. Prentori.” Mr. Prentori, boss painter, had large brown eyes. Sadness dripped from them.

“Everything different?” he said, hoping against hope.

“I'm afraid so,” Pam said.

“You've got ideas what you want?”

It was hard to break it to Mr. Prentori. Pam steeled herself. She said, “Yes,” and the word hung in the room, like the last sad peal of a dirge of bells.

“In here,” Pam said, “we thought—a kind of warm gray? With just a touch of something? Green? But not a green green, if you know what I mean?”

“No,” Mr. Prentori said. “How would I know what you mean, Mrs. North? A warm
green?
”

It was, Pam thought, going to be as it always was, as every two years it was. This would be one for that Amanda Towne, full of helpful hints for housewives, knowing easier ways to do almost everything. One had only to look at Amanda Towne, bright and clear on television, mistress of everything, to know that boss painters would be malleable in her expert hands. Malleable as, for example, putty, which seemed appropriate.

“Have to put on a sizing coat,” Mr. Prentori said. “Streaked the way it is with flattener. Green isn't a warm color, Mrs. North.” He looked around the room again. “Your husband do this himself last time?” he asked, his voice as lacking in warmth as the color green.

“My husband,” Pam said, “can't stand the smell of paint. It makes him sick.”

“Makes me sick too,” Mr. Prentori said. “But there you are.”

It was not clear to Pamela North quite where they were. Painters, Pam thought, do slip through your fingers somehow. Because there are no words for colors, as there are no words for the sound of music, a kind of evasiveness, deriving from the medium, pervades the character; because—

“Well,” Mr. Prentori said, “we may as well try. Start with gray and see.” He spread a paint-spattered canvas. He grouped buckets and cans. He said, “Personally, I'd say an off-white. Room's sort of dark and—”

“Gray,” Pam North said. “A soft gray, with a little green, but as warm as—”

“Too much like butter—” Pam said, much later, in another room. “No, not so pink. Hardly pink at all,” she said, some time after that. “A little more something,” she said, at a quarter after four in the last room, slightly ill from the smell of paint, colors swimming meaninglessly behind her eyes—green only another gray, pink (but not
really
pink) hardly to be told from magenta; all decisiveness lost and all assurance and, in some mysterious fashion achieved, a spot of paint (pink? warm gray?) on the very tip of her nose.

It was so, collapsed in a chair, Martini on her lap, that Jerry found her at five, home early from the office. Jerry opened the door and put his head in and said, “Oh-my-God-no!” and pulled his head out again, and breathed deeply of the corridor air (not in itself anything to send blood coursing through veins) and went in, holding his breath as long as he could. Martini left Pam's lap to greet, aggrievedly, with protest in a penetrating Siamese voice. Pam continued to stare at a wall streaked with paint in slightly different intensities. She said, “Hello, Jerry,” in a small and distant voice. He leaned over the chair and kissed her. “You taste of paint,” he said.

“Everything does,” Pam said.

“I'd forgotten,” Jerry said. “I know you told me, but—Freud, I suppose.”

“It was time,” Pam said, disconsolately. “It's been two years. Mr. Prentori said the streaks are flattener, whatever that is. He says maybe by Saturday night, except that will mean overtime and it's up to the man, whoever he is, so probably it won't be until Monday. And I can't tell one color from another any more. Do you want—?”

“No,” Jerry said. “Whatever you've decided. When?”

“Eight o'clock tomorrow morning,” Pam said. “Of course we could—the way we did last time—only it means—because Martini's the only one now and all by herself—and anyway—do you think we ought to?”

It is sometimes contended, by the inexperienced, that Pamela North is not always lucid in speech; she has even, by some, been accused of ellipsis.

“Have you tried?” Jerry asked her. She nodded.

“Most of them don't like cats,” she said. “The Breckenridge says, only if it's a suite, and we're responsible for chairs and things.”

“How much?” Jerry said.

“Well,” Pam said, “thirty-five, actually.”

Gerald North said, “Ouch.”

“Paint makes her sick, too,” Pam said. “And that means the vet.”

Jerry shuddered slightly.

“Of course,” Pam said, “nobody ever said we had to have a cat.”

Martini said something like “Oo-wow-oo!” on a protracted note, dismissing this nonsense.

“Martha doesn't mind coming down early to let them in,” Pam said. “And it might be only until late Saturday and—”

“Pam,” Jerry said, “did you reserve?”

“Well,” Pam said, “it's you the paint makes sick mostly, and they want to start in the bedroom and everything will taste of it, including cocktails, but of course—” She stopped, being looked at. “Yes,” Pam said.

“And pack?”

“Well—”

“Stately” is perhaps the word for the Hotel Breckenridge, just off Fifth in Manhattan's Fifties, although the term “spacious” also is employed, particularly by the management. The lobbies are extensive, and dignity prevails, and the restaurant most frequented is wood paneled, with small, red-shaded, lamps on tables. It is not always possible to see precisely what one is eating, but the flavors are gratifying. Spaciousness extends to the upper floors; the suite provided the Norths, complete with the cat named Martini, who spoke harshly through the grating of the traveling box she detests, would have been more than ample for a much larger family. Even Martini, who is assiduous, tired after she had smelled only the living room, left bedroom and bath for the future, and curled under a chair—under it, just in case, having lived a dozen years by taking thought in such matters. In strange places, a cat never knows.

The living room was long, with windows at the end which opened on a court. The living room was also extravagantly wide; the bedroom was only a little smaller, and the two beds were double beds. The bathroom, which opened from the entrance hall, had a tub in which Jerry could—if he chose, as he did not, being a man for showers—lie full length, and in which Pam could, briefly at any rate, have swum. In two words, Pam summarized the amplitude of the Hotel Breckenridge. “My goodness!” Pam said, with conviction.

It was six when they checked in—the reservation ready, a cat (providing compensation was guaranteed for clawed fabrics or other nuisances) acceptable. It was a little after seven when they went out to dinner, bathed and fortified by martinis, those also spacious, brought to the room.

It was a quarter of eleven when they returned, having dined pleasantly, although not in the paneled restaurant of the Breckenridge—“It makes me feel like the last century,” Pam explained and added, after a moment's thought, and to clarify, “any last century.” They had seen the latter two-thirds of a movie, those being, Pam feels, the two-thirds most worth seeing, since during them, if ever, things happen.

Lights burned softly in the living room when they went into it and, when called, Martini came out from under a sofa, stretched and commented briefly, but with profanity—with profanity of a certain kind. “Oh dear!” Pam North said, “we
couldn't
have!” and turned back to look toward the bathroom. “Damn!” Pam said, and walked to the bathroom and opened the closed door. “Yah!” Martini said, with bitterness, and went into the bathroom, her rear end wagging indignation. The sound of a cat scratching torn newspaper emerged from the bathroom; the sound was violent, being occasioned by a cat whose patience had been tried almost—the Norths hoped not quite—to the breaking point.

“Which of us?” Pam said, and Jerry shook his head, and thought neither, which was momentarily mysterious. He had—he was very sure he had—checked on the bathroom door as they went out, made sure it was open for Martini's needs.

“Of course,” Pam said, “she could have closed it herself, I suppose, although it's hard to see why, and if she did, she'd be inside. Unless—” She did not finish, but walked quickly toward the bedroom. “That's it,” she said, speaking into the bedroom from the doorway. “The maid to turn down the—” And she stopped there—stopped so suddenly, so much as if her breath had been cut off, that Jerry, reaching for the door of the hall closet, whirled, still holding his topcoat.

Pam did not call out, and did not scream. But her slim right hand clung to the doorframe as if, without support, she would have fallen. Jerry was behind her, his topcoat dropped to the floor and forgotten there, and held her shoulders and looked over her head into the bedroom—looked at what she saw, at what had caught the breath from her.

A woman Jerry had never seen before lay on the bed most distant from the door. She was dressed in a gray suit, the jacket neatly buttoned. She lay on her back, her head on one of the pillows of the turned-down bed. She might have lain down to rest and fallen gently asleep, and Jerry, looking into the softly lighted room, almost spoke the word which would—which surely would—awaken her. But he knew before he spoke that she would not hear the word. Her eyes were open, so she did not sleep; she lay, now looked at more carefully, with a curious stiffness. And the clearly modeled face had a peculiar blueness of the skin.

Seeing so much, Jerry did not need to go farther into the room, but he went into the room, and stood looking down at the dead woman. He touched her face gently, and found it without warmth, as he had known he would, and rigid under his fingers. He looked away from her, and toward Pam—her hand still clenching the doorframe; the knuckles white with the intensity of the pressure. He did not need to say anything. He walked to her and said, meaninglessly, “All right, Pam,” although things were certainly not all right. She looked up at him, and her expression was a question.

“I don't know,” Jerry said. “It looks—it looks as though she had just lain down and died. Some time ago, I think. Rigor's—” He did not finish. “I never saw her before,” he said. “I—”

But Pam said, “Wait,” and went into the bedroom and stood for a moment looking down at the woman who lay so peacefully dead. She faced Jerry again, and now, slowly, with a kind of carefulness, she nodded her head.

“On television,” Pam said, and spoke as slowly, as carefully, as she had moved her head. “She interviewed people. This afternoon—” She shook her head, then. “It doesn't matter,” she said. “I watched while—” She paused again, and Jerry waited.

“I can't think of her name,” Pam said. “It's—wait a minute. Towne. Something—Amanda Towne, that's it. Amanda Towne.”

She walked back to Jerry, then, and they went into the living room, Jerry's arm about her shoulders. “I'm all right,” Pam said, and clearly was not, and sat a moment on a sofa. “I'm all right,” she said again, after a few moments, and Jerry, watching her, saw a deep breath lift in her chest and said, “Sure you are,” which by then was true.

“Only,” Pam said, in much her normal voice, “it's such a dreadful thing. She looks so—so alive. And this afternoon she—”

“All right,” Jerry said, and moved toward the telephone.

“Such a—such an awful color,” Pam said. “Her face so—”

“Yes,” Jerry said. “A very peculiar color. We'll have—” He took the telephone from its cradle, and it was silent at his ear. Pointlessly, he moved it a little from his ear and shook it, and then, as if in answer, a clear voice spoke in his ear—spoke with careful sweetness, the utmost of attention.

“Your order, please?” the girl somewhere said.

Jerry North hesitated, momentarily. Absurdly, he was tempted to say, in a tone to match her tone, “Would you mind sending up for a body?” He said, “Will you call the police, please?” and waited.

“Thank you,” the girl said, in precisely the same politely attentive voice. “I'll—
what? What did you say?
”

The mind works slowly; momentum briefly guards the mind from the unexpected, the unbelievable.

“The police,” Jerry said, and was patient. “I'm afraid there is—” It was somehow difficult to put it bluntly. It was a thing to be broken gently. “I'm afraid there's been an—an accident,” he said, which he did not suppose to be true, or to be especially gentle. “That is, a woman seems to have—died. In our room. The room is—” For a moment he could not remember. He read the typed notation in the base of the telephone. “Seven-eighteen,” he said. “My wife—”