Cloud Nine (17 page)

“So! It was you!”

Jane whispered it dramatically, but Sonya drew a blank, and gave it a long stare.
“Who
was me?” she asked.

“That girl who was there. Burl said it was, and...”

“Well of course! I should have said who I was.”

“You ladies know each other?” I enquired.

“Know each other!” said Sonya. “I’ll say we do.”

She started to talk, in the airiest kind of way, as though telling a funny story, which I suppose in a way it was. “Well,” she said, speaking mainly to me, but turning to Jane now and then, as though for corroboration, “I mentioned, I think, that I busted her marriage up,
and
so long as she’s here, there’s no harm in saying how. I did it by working on Burl, the well-known weakness he has, of chasing skirts any age, so all I had to do was shake mine at him once, and sure enough here he came running.

“So he kept asking me up for a date in that office he has, and I kept putting him off. So then I said I would, but the thing of it was I didn’t trust him, any more than I’d trust any man: that he would be on time, and not give me some kind of a stand-up, so I’d have to wait in the hall. I said give me a key, so I can go in at once, soon as I come to the door, and wait inside; then he’d have a date. So he did.

“So soon as I checked that it really was the right key, and not some kind of a cross he’d handed me, I had a duplicate made, and mailed one to her, in Hyattsville. Care General Delivery there, so it couldn’t be intercepted by Burl out at the house. So soon as she picked it up, after I rang her about it, I lined the stakeout up. I told her come in on us three-fifteen today, and had everything ready, what she was going to find. Well say,” she said to Miss Jane, “you were long enough coming—it was three-thirty and then some before I heard the click of your key turning the lock.”

“Anyway, I came,” said Miss Jane, very grim.

“Okay. So what are you doing here?”

Sonya wasn’t quite so airy now, but Miss Jane snapped back at her: “I told you already—I had to make sure who you were, that Burl was telling the truth!”

“But that’s not all, is it?”

“...I beg your pardon, Mrs. Kirby?”

“Now that I’ve busted your marriage up—at lease as I hope I have—you think you’ll do the same for me. Well I have news for you: My marriage is already busted. I was on my way out, the moment you rang the bell. So you have a clear track with Gramie, and I heartily wish you well. So now...”

She picked up her coat and bag, but Jane, who’d been deflated a bit, tried to blow herself up again. “I caught her!” she screamed. “In the act!”

“Now, Miss Jane, not that. Not quite.”

“In the act!
He had exposed himself!”

She repeated it, and I cut in, to Sonya, “Just a minute, please. What does that mean, ‘He had exposed himself?”

“Means he had his thing hanging out—I guess that’s what it means. Yeah, it’s how he makes his pass—we’re supposed to fall in a faint, all us girls are, from the joy of looking at it. Well? It’s how he got
her”—
jerking her thumb at Miss Jane—“that first night at your mother’s when they ran into each other there, and she ’sisted on riding him home. But then when they got there, to the Stuart Building, he wouldn’t get out of the car, said she was all wrought up and he was going to see
her
home.

“So he did, and when she brought him inside—lo and behold—he unzipped, took it out, and asked if she wanted to play with it. So she said no, but let on she’d like to fondle it. Well that hit Burl funny, for some reason, and I guess it does me, a little bit. Anyway, when she’d fondled on it awhile, she thought of a place to put it, and did, right there on the parlor floor, in under the whispering cattails. Where the cattails come in, I wouldn’t personally know, but that’s how Burl told it to me, and I aim to be truthful, always.”

Jane, having blown herself up for a moment, made a weak shrivel. When Sonya started her airy recital, she covered her face with her hands, and then, as it went on, pulled her knees up under her chin, and toppled over sidewise, against the end of the sofa, so she was just a small pile of clothing, a tiny, collapsed old woman, shaking and shivering and shuddering.

Sonya went over to her, and wound up: “Miss Jane, we don’t happen to have a hole that you can crawl into, but you can make out, I reckon, with a pillow over your head.” So she put a sofa pillow on Jane’s head, and turned away, as though from a deed well done.

“What are you putting on your head?” I snarled, sounding thick and mean and ugly.

“Well I’m wearing a hat,” she snapped.

“You damned cheap twerp, how can you stand there, and talk about ‘his thing,’ as though it meant nothing at all?”

“Well it didn’t—except to make me sick, for reasons I already said. But listen, I knew about it! It’s not like I had to be scared, or...”

“Will you shut up about it?”

“Then okay, we say no more.”

“Because I just don’t care to think what he may have been doing with it to have it hanging out in such fashion.”

“Oh, so that’s what’s bugging you?”

“It may not seem like much, but—”

“I have proof he didn’t do innything!”

“Produce the proof.
Now!”

So she did, a lot quicker than I expected. She just flipped up her dress, and there around her waist, over her panty hose, like a belt, was a length of shiny chain, about the size of tire chain, and between her legs, like a G-string, was another. Fastening the chains together was a little brass padlock. “My
ceinture de chastité,”
she explained, but called it
cincher de chastity.
“They had them in olden times, we read about them in school—it’s where
cinch
comes from, the thing you put on a horse. I had it on when I went to his office, and if he could have got through it, he’s a better man than I think—but things didn’t get that far. They made it for me at College Park Hardware, cutting the chain to my measure, and being somewhat amused when I told them the idea of it. It’s not too comfortable, but I left it on tonight as I expected to go to Miss Jane’s, and I decided to take no chances, as Burl might have been there too.”

She took a key ring from her bag, found a key, unlocked the little brass padlock, and took both chains off, putting them in her bag. “My, that feels good!” she exclaimed. “What a relief.”

“I think it’s time you went.”

“I’ll decide when I go!”
She came over and slapped my face. “For the two hundredth time: I’m your wife and this is my home—you’re not putting me out and nobody’s putting me out, except me, when I’m ready to go!”

“As soon as you’re ready, I am.”

“Well I’m not, not yet.”

She went to Jane, lifted the pillow, and shook her. “Miss Jane,” she said, “I’m sorry, but there’s things I must say to you.”

Jane sat up, a broken, shamed old woman. “First,” Sonya went on, “Dale Morgan—does that name mean something to you?”

“I suppose so,” Jane answered dully. “Yes.”

“You know how she died?”

“In some sort of accident I heard.”

“Burl killed her, is how.”

Jane, who until now had taken no interest, opened her eyes wide. “What did you say, Mrs. Kirby?” she asked, very sharp.

“I said Burl Stuart killed her, in some slick way he alone could explain, for insurance he carried on her, fifty thousand dollars, which was paid—and which you’ve been living on, since you’ve been married to him. Miss Jane, here’s what I’m leading to: Burl Stuart means to kill
you,
for the land you’ve made him heir to, in that will you let him have, worth twenty times what he made on Dale. Miss Jane, you’re not to use your car, or go home, or give him inny kind of chance, to do to
you
what he did to
Dale.
And on top of that, right away quick, you must see your lawyer, have him do what it takes to cancel that will Burl has, so it’s not in effect inny more, and so he
knows
you’re no longer worth to him more dead than you are alive. Don’t tell him he must send it back—wild horses couldn’t make him, you’ll have to do more than that, your lawyer can tell you what. I would think draw a new will, maybe making Gramie your heir, as he was before and should have been all along—but that’s up to you, of course. Do you hear what I say, Miss Jane? Am I getting through to you?”

“I don’t believe one word.”

“You and the undertaker, you’re quite a pair, you are—
he
don’t take nobody’s word. He don’t have to.”

That seemed to reach Jane as nothing had until then, and Sonya went on: “I’m going now, so the coast is clear, for tonight. If I were you, I’d stay here if Gramie is willing—crawl in his bed and let nature take its course. Miss Jane, it just might. Because pay no attention to what Burl said, about Gramie not being normal—he’s just as normal as you are, maybe more so, being thirty years younger.” And, as Jane flinched: “Well I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but you haven’t been nice to me, spite of all I’ve been doing for you. So maybe I don’t mind cutting you up. Excuse me.”

Still carrying the coat and bag, she went scampering out to the kitchen, and for some minutes I sat with Jane, who began pulling herself together. Then, in a nervous but conversational tone she asked me: “Could
any of that
be true?”

“Jane, all of it’s true.”

“You’re not serious?”

“Jane, Burl means to kill you!”

At last, she seemed to get through her head that it wasn’t a game of some kind that Sonya had been playing, or a contest in nasty remarks, or something of that kind. She began gasping, as fear started to talk, and of all the things that can talk, I guess fear says it plainer. She sat there, trying for control, and occasionally massaging her lips, that sure sign of terror. Then she jumped up, saying: “I have to know more about this!” and went running out to the kitchen. Once or twice she called “Mrs. Kirby!” and then came stumbling back, a baffled look on her face. “She’s not there!” she said. “She’s not anywhere around.”

A horrible, frightening suspicion crept in on me, as I went charging back to the kitchen, whispering: “Sonya! Sonya, where are you?” But she wasn’t there, though the kitchen was in apple pie order. I went out back and called, looked for her car in the drive, then went out front and looked. It wasn’t there, it wasn’t anywhere. I let myself in the front door, went back in with Jane and sat down. She stared at me but nothing was said. Pretty soon the phone rang and I answered.

“Gramie?” said Sonya, very soft and friendly. “I’m at People’s. I called to say good-bye and blow you a kiss on the phone. I couldn’t have kissed you just now, not with her looking on.” She said more, but I kept cutting in, begging her to come back, saying I hadn’t meant it, what I’d told her before she went, and all kinds of stuff of that kind, and God knows I meant every word. But she kept holding to it, that she’d left me, that she was going away, that I mustn’t try to find out where she was or what she was doing. Then, saying she’d call now and then, “To see how you’re getting along,” she blew me the kiss and hung up.

Back in the living room, I sat for some moments with Jane staring at me. “You love her?” she asked, pretty soon.

“I’m nuts about her. She’s part of me.”

“I have to be going now.”

“Where?” I snapped. “Didn’t you hear what she said?”

“Well I can’t stay here, that’s certain!”

She was a little hysterical about it, and I took her back over it once, what Sonya had explained to her, why she couldn’t go home, why she had to go someplace where she’d be safe from Burl. All of a sudden I went to the phone and dialed Mother. “Can you put Jane up for one night?” I asked her.

“Put up with her, I think you mean!”

“Okay, call it that, but something has happened.”

“Is she there?”

“I’ll see if she wants to talk.”

Jane talked, like a schoolgirl holding her hand out to be blistered with a ruler. Then she motioned me back to the phone, and Mother said: “All right, send her over.” But instead, I took her over, on the way explaining to her what she had to do with her car: Have the garage men come and get it, first explaining to them it had better be towed, else the steering might go haywire, and she understood all right, as she collapsed into tears in the middle of it, and kept moaning: “I’m so scared! Oh, Gramie, I’m so scared.”

Mother was cool at first, but then suddenly warmed, when she saw the state she was in, and took her upstairs to bed. When she came down I explained, at least a little of it, what had happened today and tonight, and she stood there shaking her head. “Will I ever hear the end? Will there be any end to this mess?”

I didn’t have an answer to that.

It was going on twelve when I headed home once more, to enter the bleakest house, and start the blackest night, that any man ever faced.

T
HE NEXT SIX WEEKS
were a mockery. Everything broke for me, in a material way, and also broke for Mother, but everything else went flooey.

In business I got a break from the F.X. Reilly Estate, which retained me to sell ten houses, rental jobs in West Hyattsville, running $20,000 apiece. It was a $200,000 deal, and I tore in, of course. I didn’t stampede, just took it one house at a time, but in a month, believe it or not, I’d got rid of them all. I rated a bonus and got it, and had reason to feel proud—but didn’t feel anything. Because Sonya was calling by now, every two or three nights, very friendly, wanting to know how things were, and I begged her, pleaded over the phone, to come back to me, but she wouldn’t.

The worst of it was, I didn’t know where she was, but suspected it was Reno. And what really made it bad was that her mother knew. She was calling Mrs. Lang too, and Mrs. Lang would call me, in a friendly way, just wishing she could tell me where Sonya was, but of course couldn’t, as she was pledged not to. That’s nice, when your mother-in-law knows where your wife is staying, and you don’t. So maybe she’d break if you coaxed, and give you a little hint, but fat chance of that, really.

And on Mother’s end, she picked up an ace when Mort Leonard, Jane’s lawyer, heard of her bust-up with Burl, and realized what it could mean—perhaps having his own opinion of Burl to start with, and perhaps having heard a few rumors. Anyway, it seems that to revoke one will you have to draw another, but in whose favor was the question Jane was faced with. So, for various reasons, there could be only one answer, and she was back once more to Mother. That put the dream back on its feet, but I took no interest and neither did she.