A Fox Inside (22 page)

“Why don’t you commit him?” he asked coldly.

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not? You’ve got complete power of attorney (she realized she should never have told him that); and he’s not good for anything. He only clutters the place up.”

“But Maggie….”

“She’s under age. She couldn’t do anything,” he said curtly. He frowned and kicked a log in the fireplace. She could still remember, now, the way he had kicked that log, with a special, slow, accurately aimed shoe, pushing it firmly down until the log broke in a shower of sparks. It only took him a second. She thought he might singe his trouser cuff but he didn’t. “We could be alone,” he said. “You run the whole thing anyhow.”

“No,” she said. For some reason the idea frightened her. “Not yet.”

He looked at her scornfully. “Why wait?” She had got to know and dread that look. “You’ve got what you want. Why not keep it?”

“Is it as simple as that, Charles?” she asked
wonderingly
.

“That’s up to you,” he said. He made it as clear as that. Charles or Jerome. He set his not quite empty glass down on the table and handed her his key. “I’d
better not stay,” he said. “I’ll go round to the hotel in Palo Alto. Phone me first thing to-morrow.” There was no warmth in his voice or expression.

She did not see him to the door. She went right to bed. Of course she did not sleep, at least not until five. When she woke up it was eight and Ethel was knocking on her door. She called “Come in” and Ethel slipped into the room.

“He can’t talk,” she said.

“Can’t or won’t?”

“I don’t know. Shall I clean up the hall?”

“No,” said Lily. “Leave it the way it is.” She waited until Ethel went out and then phoned the hotel. Charles had already left. Somehow she had known he would not be there. She sat in bed, thinking, and then rang through to Jerome’s doctor. She got his wife and she could hear children squalling in the background.
Doctors
who marry before they graduate have a hard pull of it. This doctor was young, he had only recently set up practice, and she knew he would be able to get right over. Charles had found him for her. The previous
doctor
had not pleased Charles at all.

The doctor was at the house by eight-forty-five. He was even shaved and eager. She watched him come up the hall stairs. She told him everything. On the landing, so that he could not help but observe the state of the hall, she paused for a minute, bracing herself to go into Jerome’s room.

She need not have worried. Jerome did not say a word. He only stared at them. He was still trembling. When he opened his mouth he merely mumbled, which was a relief. Pretty sure that he would not and could not
speak, she went out into the hall and waited for the doctor.

When he came out she asked what had happened, as though she did not know what had happened. She moved down the stairs ahead of him, terribly afraid that Jerome had not really lost his voice after all.

“He’s had a severe shock.”

“But his speech?”

“It’s hard to tell. Has it been getting worse?”

“Yes,” she said promptly.

The doctor did not look happy. He refused to catch her eye. “He could be kept here,” he said. “That girl takes pretty good care of him (Ethel was sixty)….” He let his voice trail off anxiously. He seemed embarrassed and eager to leave. She noted that he was both young and handsome. That always surprised her about him. Charles did not usually like to know handsome men.

When the door had closed behind him she locked herself up in the library, watching the clock. She knew Charles would phone sometime, but she did not know when. Fortunately Maggie was away at school, in Coronado. It was a good school and as far away as
possible
. It was only the beginning of the term.

She would have to tell Maggie something of course. She began to phrase tactful letters in her head. She needn’t have bothered. When she was told Maggie just looked at her mother quietly and asked no questions at all.

Charles did not ring until eight-thirty that night.

“Well?” he demanded.

“I had the doctor come.”

“I know that,” he said. “I rang him up last night.
There’s a small private sanatorium near Napa: they understand these things. It would have to be done eventually, anyhow.”

She held the receiver away from her ear. “I can’t do it, Charles.”

“Yes, you can.” And under that soft, emotional,
confiding
vibrato was something else that was dangerous. “You want to, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. Yes….”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “You’d better come up to town to-morrow, to the office.”

She went up to town. She had no will left of her own.

It was easy and swift. He made it swift. His name was on the commitment papers. He was her lawyer now. They had talked Foster into handing over the
administration
of the estate to him, in return for Charles’s
contribution
to the firm. Or hers.

Then they hired a private ambulance and two
attendants
, who came down from the home. It cost like fury. The earlier in the morning it was done the less fuss there would be, so she was dressed and waiting by eight. Ethel served breakfast, but seemed morose. Then she went up to dress the old man. It had been agreed that it would be better to tell him nothing. There was no point in having any extra trouble.

Alone in the breakfast-room Lily went over to the windows and stared out at the shrubs towards the trees beyond. She noticed that there was dew on everything. It lingered a long time under these trees.

Charles arrived in a black chesterfield rather tightly fitted and with, in that morning light, an oddly pale
and almost pock-marked face. They found they did not have much to say to each other. His eyes had that special hardness they always had when he was bringing something off.

They both heard wheels on the drive and went through the living-room towards the hall. Charles let the attendants in and they went right up the stairs, grumbling to each other. Their white tunics smelled of carbolic and starch. Charles and Lily followed. Charles even took her arm.

When they opened the bedroom door Jerome was sitting in the armchair with a bundle of letters in his lap, in the cold early sunlight. He looked up, saw the men, and made a grab for the left post of the four-poster bed. The letters cascaded to the floor together with some photographs. The attendants glanced briefly at each other.

“No,” shouted Jerome. “No.” His voice was disused but completely distinct. Lily drew back behind the night table in the corner. Charles stooped and picked up the letters and photos and flung them on the bed. They were faded snapshots of Maggie at various ages. Lily did not even have to look at them to know that. Ethel watched, memorizing everything. Lily watched her and Jerome glanced at her, too. His hands were white at the knuckles and he braced himself against the bed. But he was too weak: the attendants pried him lose as easily as a trained diver can loosen an abalone from a rock without so much as splintering the shell.

Jerome straightened up. He looked straight at Lily. “I didn’t think you’d dare,” he said clearly. She saw with displeasure that Ethel had not shaved him. The stubble
was a faint mixture of nicotine-coloured yellow and wiry white. She closed her eyes.

Charles took her arm and they went down the stairs after the attendants. Jerome did not speak again. He did turn to look at the house as though it had fallen down around him. Charles and Lily went outside, got into the Cadillac, and followed the ambulance up to the city, across the bridge, and all the way to the hills. Napa was in the wine country to the north. It produced very good wine.

The sanatorium was pleasant and well secluded, a series of bungalows set in a small wood, with an
underbrush
of bright orange manzanita trees contorted in half shadow and open sun. The general effect was horrible.

Lily waited in the car while Charles took care of the details. She hated sitting there alone. But when she saw him come out of the office bungalow, talking to the superintendent, a plump, red-faced man with heavy glasses and a bald head, the two of them blinking matter of factly in the sun, she wished that she would never have to see Charles again. She did not want him to touch her. She knew that in some way he had tricked her. She was right: he had.

For it was odd about Jerome. With Jerome in the house she had had something to bargain with. She had not realized that at the time, but Charles had. And now she had nothing to bargain with at all.

That left her Maggie. Maggie was fifteen then. She was a nervous child, easily scared. Maggie was no
problem
. Maggie never dared to say a word.

With power of attorney and full control now, she should have had everything. Yet somehow she had
nothing at all. She stopped seeing Charles. She
consented
to everything he wanted. She never stopped thinking about him night or day.

*

And now it was over. She stared through the
windshield
at a street she didn’t even know the name of, near the City Hall.

Senator Ford got out of the car and left her. He had heard enough. He went back to the City Hall, phoned Luke at his hotel, and came out again. As he stood on the steps of the building on the square side he saw, on the big expanse of brick paving, a little boy playing a
deliberate
game. He chose a pigeon and followed it round and round in circles. The pigeon would walk faster, shake its feathers, glance round him, and then fly off in a low despondent circle into the shrubs. At last an old woman with a basket of bread shooed the boy away.

Ford shifted his gaze. In one of the public flower-beds another old woman was digging up tulip bulbs and
putting
them in a sack. Her manner was anything but
furtive
. When Ford looked back the little boy was walking round the pigeons again, but farther away. The old woman was glowering at him: angels of retribution have no sex and very little power, and neither do small boys, public tribunals, or very old men. He went off alone to eat his lunch.

T
HEY HELD THE FUNERAL THE
next day. It was May 2nd, the feast-day of St. Mary the Egyptian, but outside of the church, and of Charles, who had had a taste for hagiography, but was dead, nobody remembered that.

Lily had set the machinery in motion days before. No doubt she would have preferred something less formal now, but once she had started it up the machinery rolled over her. She let it roll. Luke did not have that attitude. He was not indifferent. They had no enemies left but the real one, who was unknown, and there was nothing he could think to do. He did not see why either he or Maggie should have to pay for other people’s pasts, and yet that was what they were doing. It was what, so far, they had always done. Only Lily had got off scot-free. Lily had done better than either of them. Lily had had to pay only for her own past.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he was afraid, not of what Ford had told him, or what he thought of it, but of something else. He knew perfectly well of what. When you cleaned out an abscess you had to clean out all of it and let it drain. There was some of the infection
remaining
, that would suppurate still. He didn’t know
where or what, but he knew it was there. It was
something
they could not yet supersede.

He phoned Maggie, but only to reassure her. He needed time alone. He went up to the “Top of the Mark” and had a few drinks and then he went to bed. But first he looked out over the city. He thought instead of Los Angeles. San Francisco was one small tight city, but Los Angeles was a series of towns. It was still possible, down there, to take your pick. People in a unified city like San Francisco think it is themselves who count, but they are wrong. Only the city counts. Like a fire, a city, once it has caught on, needs only fuel and a prevailing wind. Human breath no longer helps it.

Which, he supposed, was why he had never liked San Francisco. Its beauty by night was only electricity; and a thousand men hanging by leather straps in mid-air, against poles, automatically repairing frayed wires and then being replaced by other men, who were younger, did not alter the fact that the wires remained. The people who went on fanning the fire blew themselves away. The fire burned on without them.

All a man could do was to gather his own kindling and set the match. When the fire got too hot you moved away, you didn’t jump into it. And home was a nice cool place like a cave or a bedroom, more likely a bedroom, for a bedroom had a door you could lock. And you walked through the city jangling the keys in your pocket, the only reminder you had that you had any private existence at all. Even then, ten to one, when you got home and unlocked the door there wasn’t
anybody
there, but just an unmade bed left over from the night before.

Perhaps that phase was over now. He hoped so. You can never know all the odds, but if you’re going to play at all you have to use your own chips. That left him Maggie.

He went to sleep and woke up early. People usually don’t like to remember how they feel in the morning. He woke up and could sense his body lying in the bed. It was heavier than it used to be. It was thickening into maturity. Idly he visualized the gymnasium he would go to for six months to keep fit, if he had the time; and the gym instructor in canvas shoes and a woolly T-shirt, looking faintly supercilious with the sadism of the
over-muscular
, who are getting themselves hunched to give you the works for your own good. It would take about six months. He would start in about a week. If he had the time.

It was a three-quarter bed. He forgot about the wooly T-shirt and the gymnasium smell. Not quite awake he rolled over on his left side and played with the pillow, pretending Maggie was there, and running his hands caressingly up and down over the sheet, the mattress underneath bumpy and uneven. The hotel advertised an air-foam mattress in every room, but apparently this room was the exception.

He realized suddenly that he had a heavy body odour that had permeated the bed and was faintly unpleasant. He forced himself to get up and take a shower. He was pleasantly conscious of himself in the shower. Looking down he seemed longer, if not taller, than he was, and he wasn’t in half the bad shape he thought he was in the mornings, waking flaccid in his bed, with his belly against the sheets.

He was hairy. He soaped all the hairs, playing up the lather against his brown skin; and he knew perfectly well what he was thinking about. The idea made him happy and cheerful, so he began to whistle. Then he got out of the shower and shaved with great care, knicking himself twice in the process. Standing naked at the
washbowl
he looked into the mirror and made faces at himself, pretending he was somebody else, and even tried a sort of half-sensual swoon. Then, feeling slightly abashed, he threw all his dirty clothes into the laundry basket, got dressed, and went down to breakfast. He hadn’t put on a dark suit, he hadn’t brought a dark suit, and he didn’t care. It wasn’t his town or his funeral. He felt about seventeen years old.

It was time to get married, anyway. He was on his way up. Marriage was the right thing to do now. But if you had luck, sometimes you even got to marry not only the right person, but the preferable one as well. His luck seemed to be holding out.

He finished his breakfast. He tipped the waiter. He brushed off his coat flaps. He put on his hat and he walked jauntily out into the street, feeling exactly like a full page colour illustration in the
Saturday
Evening
Post
, for those ads showed him just exactly what he wanted to be and how he wanted to feel, and this morning that was exactly how he felt. Los Angeles had many
advantages
. Taken right, it made everybody six inches taller and a good deal younger in the jaw; and a theatrical tailor also helped. As a couple, he thought, they should really be a wow.

He did not notice the city at all. What he saw was a portable bar, the good hot sun, and both of them beside
the swimming pool, with guests. And why not? Life may as well look like the pictures once in a while: it lends the illusion a pleasant air of verisimilitude.

By the time he was in a cab he had sobered down. He knew one dream from another very well and made no mistakes about which was whose. It wasn’t time for his own yet.

He peered anxiously out of the window, glad he would be leaving soon. The trouble with these people was that they thought that the dream and the reality were the same thing. The confusion was instructive. They could keep their city and their pride.

When he halted in front of the Barnes-Shannon house, paying off the driver, he thought he could quite well understand how Maggie clung to her car. It was the sort of house from which you wanted a ready get-away; and he would be glad when he saw the last of it. People had stopped living in it decades ago. It had the hotel smell.

Maggie was waiting for him in the library. There was some sunlight to-day, so she had opened the windows. A breeze through the room made it seem dustier than ever. She had opened the doors, too, as though to clear out the house, and the room was cold. She did not seem to mind. She was sitting, alert and waiting, on the sofa, smoking a cigarette and looking self-possessed. He was glad of that. It was as though she were catching up with lost time.

“Lily went down early,” she said. “She’s changed, Luke. I can’t make it out.”

“I know.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked round the room, the way you look round a hotel
room before leaving it, to see if you have forgotten
anything
. It looked about as impersonal as a hotel room and he wondered if Lily would sell the house or just board it up. It wasn’t a room to settle back and be comfortable in. To try that out he sat down on the sofa beside her, took her hand, leaned his head back and put his feet up on the coffee table, looking thoughtfully at his shoes. They were well polished.

“It’s like going to a play,” she said.

He frowned. “Well. Maybe.” He didn’t want to talk to her now. He thought she was too keyed up. Yet he might as well know the truth some time, now that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. That was the way truth was: by the time you found it out it very seldom did.

He looked at his watch. “We’d better go,” he said, and leaned over to kiss her. She drew away and glanced towards the door.

“Not here,” she said. He stood up, disappointed, but she was quite right. Not there.

They went through the house to the garage and she got out her car. She felt like driving this morning and she drove with an efficient, self-satisfied self-confidence. But she was also biting one of her nails.

“What’s wrong?”

“Is it really over?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I should think so. Anyhow, we’ll go away.”

“That’s what I mean. Can we? I mean, it’s a scandal and you’re a lawyer.”

“People forget,” he said, but it was what had been at the back of his mind and he knew it. “We’ll go away.”

“To Los Angeles?” She watched him briefly.

“Yes,” he said, but it made him thoughtful. “Yes. Where else would we go?” He glanced at her out of the sides of his eyes and realized he should have sounded more cheerful. It was the side of it he hadn’t wanted to face.

“I don’t want to trap anybody,” she said. “I never did.”

“We can talk about it later,” he said warily.

“Yes.” There was an acuity in her tone he was not expecting. “But we have to think about it now.”

He Watched the traffic.

The funeral parlour was in a valley between hills, or what had been a valley once. Now it was built up with hotels and a garage. She parked the car. The car was blue. Most of the cars parked along the street on that side were black. She had been driving bare-handed, but now she slipped into her gloves as though they afforded her some sort of protection. Infections from the dead could be dangerous.

He got out and held the door open for her and they walked towards the building. The reception hall was soundproof, finished in mocha of the shade of a Siamese cat. Lily was sitting on a round ottoman. She did not notice them. She was wearing a black astrachan coat that was heavy and stiff, and which did not suit her at all. Maggie was wearing a little round black hat. Now she lowered her veil, not like a visor, but like a wire cage. She did this automatically as soon as she saw her mother.

Lily looked like an old woman. She would have been more attractive if she had not always tried to appear young. This morning she had made herself up that way from habit, and it gave her two faces, neither of them
flattering or kind. She did not speak to them. She just stood up and led them into the mortuary chapel. They were scarcely a unified family, but they pretended to be one, for the sake of the press, except that the press hadn’t bothered to come; and for the sake of their friends,
except
that they didn’t have any.

The chapel, in that plaster Georgian which smart funeral directors seemed to prefer, leaving Tudor and stained glass to fellow-operators with a less expensive clientele, had a heavy, faintly disagreeable odour of vacuumed carpetting and scented air-conditioned air. The coffin was placed on a trestle, head on to the aisle. The three of them sat in one row and listened to a few inappropriate words. It seemed to take a long time. He could see, through her veil, that Maggie had her eyes closed, but Lily watched everything with a chipmunk furtiveness. For her, he supposed, it was the end of
something
. Or perhaps she was counting the house, for she watched the guests rather than the coffin.

Soon enough they passed up the aisle towards the cars. As he looked back he saw the coffin sinking through the floor on an hydraulic lift. The mourners were clumped in the reception room.

“Get out your handkerchief and play faint,” he said to Maggie. “Lily can handle them.”

Maggie gave him a startled glance and uncurled her fingers, in which a handkerchief lay already crumpled. He looked down at it. It was stiff and dry. He took her arm and got her outside into the street and the car.

They sat in the car, waiting. One or two streetcars went by, clanging their bells. It was a busy intersection. She did not say anything. She hid behind her veil. He
saw the coffin carried out and slid on to the grooves of the hearse. Then everybody, like a theatre crowd leaving a not very good show, got into the other cars and he swung Maggie’s out into the procession. The blue car was all too noticeable. It was like one false bead on a string. Once they were away from traffic the cars spaced out. He wondered which one contained Lily. Then, at a stop light, several of them pulled up abreast, and he saw her, two cars over, sitting comfortably alone in the back of one of them, behind the chauffeur. She was
powdering
her nose.

Then they drove on again. He turned and looked at Maggie.

“How did you find out about Jerome?” he asked.

She lifted her veil and stared at him blankly. Then she left the veil up over the brim of her hat and looked down at her finger-nails.

“I found the commitment papers,” she said quietly. “I think now he wanted me to find them. He was very angry.”

“Is that why you wanted to kill him?”

“I didn’t want to kill him.” She was quite matter of fact about it, to his relief. “I wanted to hurt him. What good would killing him do? He must have engineered the whole mess. He wanted me to know it, I think.” She watched the cars ahead of them and gave a queer half smile. “It’s a pity you don’t really trust me.”

“I trust you.” It was the truth, but trust had nothing to do with belief.

“People make a mystery of things,” she said. “I
always
knew what was wrong with Daddy. I think I always did. Ethel told me. But I loved him. He was the
only person I had. The only one. I didn’t want to see him if he really had gone. I thought he had gone, you see. And Lily said maybe that … well, I might have
inherited
it. It took me a long time to find out she was lying. I could have found out, I suppose, but I never did. Of course for the marriage I had to have a blood test whether I wanted to or not.”