Deep Water (23 page)

       "Tell me, what's Don Wilson up to?" Vic asked her that evening.

       "What do you mean what's he up to?"

       "What're you both up to? You do so much consulting."

       "I like him. We have quite a lot to talk about. He's got some very interesting theories."

       "Oh. I never knew theories interested you."

       "Oh, they're more than theories," Melinda said.

       "What, for instance?"

       She ignored the question. She was on her knees, cleaning out the bottom of her closet, dragging out shoes and forgotten stockings, shoe trees, a little dusty cloth doll of Trixie's.

       "I think we ought to get a dog," Vic said suddenly, "It'd be nice for Trix. We've put it off long enough."

       "Just what our household needs," Melinda said.

       "I'll talk to Trixie about it and ask her what kind of a dog she'd like." Melinda didn't want a dog. Vic knew. They had had long discussions about it, Vic pro and Melinda con, and he had always given in to her. He didn't care whether she argued about it now or not. "By the way, how's June Wilson?" Vic asked.

       "All right. Why?"

       "I like her. Such a nice straightforward girl. How on earth did she marry him?"

       "She's a dreary little girl. Maybe he couldn't see what he was marrying."

       "She came to see me about two months ago, you know, especially to tell me that she thought her husband was doing the wrong thing. She put it delicately, I remember. She just said she didn't think along her husband's lines, and she wanted me to know it. It's too bad Wilson's wished an ostracism on her, isn't it? What does she do while you two talk?"

       Melinda wasn't biting that night.

       Vic looked at her bent back for a few moments, watched her hands feverishly dusting shoes and lining them up, an outlet more constructive than usual for her frustrated energy. Vic knew what the atmosphere at the Wilsons' must be. It was the only place Melinda could still go without being treated with a certain coolness. And Wilson must be getting a little bored with her, must see in her an indirect cause of his retreat from Little Wesley and his present disfavor in the community, but he would feel obliged to be cordial to her. June would leave them alone, after giving Melinda a cool greeting, but since Melinda in general despised women, this wouldn't bother her at all. Vic supposed that Ralph was there sometimes. And perhaps Melinda went to see Ralph at his house sometimes when she said she was going to see the Wilsons. That was, if Ralph had the courage to let her come to his house. Vic smiled to himself as he looked down at Melinda's long, strong back and at her busy hands, wondering about the atmosphere at Ralph's house when they were alone together. He imagined Ralph too scared to touch her, and Melinda contemptuous of him for that, but she would be drawn to see him again and again because Ralph formed part of the little anti- Vic league. They'd chatter on about him, repeating themselves, whining, like a couple of old women.

       Vic knocked on Trixie's door. "Mademoiselle?" he called.

       "Yep?"

       He opened the door. Trixie was sitting on her bed, filling colors in a picture book with crayons. He smiled at her. She looked so self-sufficient, so contented, all by herself. He was proud of her. She was her father's daughter. "Well, Trix, what do you think about getting a dog?" he asked.

       "A dog? A real dog?"

       "I don't mean a stuffed one."

       "Oh, 'boy'!" She wriggled forward, off the edge of the bed, then jumped up and down, screaming. "A dog, a dog! Yippee!" She began socking Vic in the stomach with her fists.

       He put his hands under her arms and lifted her up in the air. "What kind would you like?"

       "A big dog."

       "But what kind?"

       "A—collie."

       "Hm. Can't you think of something more interesting?" "A—German police!"

       He swung her down and set her on her feet. "They're so utilitarian. What about a boxer? I think I passed a place the other day on the East Lyme road that had a sign out about boxer puppies. You want a puppy, don't you?"

       "Yes," Trixie said, still hopping up and down, in a mood to want anything.

       "Well, let's try there tomorrow afternoon. I'll pick you up at school at three o'clock. Okay?"

       "Okay!" she said, the breath jerking out of her with her hopping. "What does a boxer look like?"

       "Don't tell me you don't know what a boxer looks like!

       They're brown with a black muzzle, about so high—I think you'll like a boxer."

       "Goody!"

       "I hope that jumping tires you out, because you've got to go to bed. Get your clothes off." He started toward the door. "Run my bath!"

       "Didn't you have a bath before dinner?"

       "I want another bath."

       He started to remonstrate, then said, "Okay," and went across the hall into the bathroom and started the tub for her. Her bath mania in the last couple of days was inspired by the toy diver he had given her, which lay now on the end of the tub. He tossed the diver in and squeezed the bulb to keep him afloat. He was a little man some ten inches high dressed in a rubber diving suit and helmet with a tube coming out of his back. Vic watched the figure bobbing around on the surface for a couple of minutes, and when the water was fairly deep he let the bulb expand, and the man obediently sank, sending bubbles up over his head, until his weighted feet were standing on the bottom. Vic smiled, enjoying himself. He squeezed the bulb and brought him up again, then sank him again. It was a delightful toy. Vic had often thought that if he were not so attracted to printing he would have become an inventor of toys. It was the pleasantest occupation he could think of.

       Trixie came in, took off her red-and-white striped robe, and stepped trustfully into the tub without even testing the temperature of the water.

       "Mademoiselle, the bath is yours," he said, going to the door. "Daddy, when Charley drowned in the swimming pool, did he stand on his feet on the bottom, too?"

       "I don't know, honey, I wasn't there."

       "Sure you were there!" she said, her blond eyebrows scowling suddenly.

       "Well, I couldn't see under the water," Vic replied.

       "Didn't you push him down feet first?"

       "Well, I—I don't think I even 'touched' the man!" Vic said, half joking and half serious.

       "Sure you did! Janey says you did and so does Eddie and Duncan and—and Gracie and Petey and everybody I know!" "Good lord, really? Why, that's terrible!"

       Trixie giggled. "You're kidding me!"

       "No, I'm not kidding you," Vic said seriously, realizing that he had often kidded her in this manner, however. "Now, how do your little friends know this?"

       "They heard it."

       "From whom?"

       "From—their mothers and daddies."

       "Who? All of them?"

       "Yes," Trixie said, looking at him the way she did on those rare occasions when she told lies, because she didn't believe what she was saying and wasn't at all sure that he would.

       "I don't believe it," Vic said."Some of them. Then you kids pass it all around." You shouldn't do that, he wanted to say, but he knew that Trixie wouldn't obey, and he didn't want to sound, either to her or to himself, frightened enough to admonish her about the story.

       "They all ask me to tell them how you did it," Trixie said.

       Vic leaned over and turned off the water, which was nearly up to Trixie's shoulders. "But I didn't do it, darling. If I'd done it I'd be put in prison. Don't you know that? Don't you know that killing somebody is punishable by death?" He spoke in a whisper, both to impress her and because Melinda might have been able to hear them from the hall, now that the water was turned off.

       Trixie stared at him with serious eyes for a moment, then her eyes slurred off, very like Melinda's, in the direction of her sunken diver. She didn't want to believe that he hadn't done it. In that little blond head was no moral standard whatsoever, at least not about a matter as big as murder. She wouldn't so much as steal a piece of chalk from school, Vic knew, but murder was something he saw it or heard of it in the comic books every day, saw it on television at Janey's house, and it was something exciting and even heroic when the good cowboys did it in westerns. She wanted him to be a hero, a good guy, somebody who wasn't afraid. And he had just cut himself down by several inches, he realized.

       Trixie lifted her head. "I still think you drowned him. You're just telling me you didn't," she said.

       The next afternoon, Vic and Trixie bought a male boxer puppy for $75 from the kennel on the East Lyme road. The puppy had just had his ears clipped, and they were fastened together with a bandage and a piece of adhesive tape that stood up a little above his head. His pedigree name was Roger-of-the-Woods. It pleased Vic very much that Trixie had singled Roger out from the other pups mainly because of the lugubrious expression on his small, monkeylike face, and because of his bandage. At the kennel, he had bumped his ears against something twice, yelped, and his face had looked sadder than ever. Trixie rode home with the puppy in her lap and her arm around his neck, happier than Vic had ever seen her at any Christmas.

       Melinda stared at the dog and might have made an unpleasant remark if she had not seen that Trixie was so delighted with him. Vic found a big cardboard box in the kitchen that would do for a bed, cut it down to ten inches deep and cut a door in one side for the puppy to walk through. Then he put a couple of Trixie's baby coverlets in the bottom and set the box in Trixie's room.

       Vic had bought packages of dog biscuits and baby cereal and cans of a certain kind of dog food prescribed by the kennel man. The puppy had a good appetite, and after he had eaten that evening he wagged his tail and his expression seemed a little more cheerful. He also played with a rubber ball that Trixie rolled around on the floor for him.

       "The house is beginning to take on some life," Vic remarked to Melinda, but there was no answer.

Chapter 18

Vic and Melinda went to another dance at the club in November, the "Leaf Night" dance that yearly celebrated autumn in Little Wesley. Vic had not wanted to go when the club's invitation had arrived, but this attitude had lasted hardly more than fifteen seconds. It was the right thing to do to go, and Vic did usually try to do the right thing in the community. His first negative reaction to the club announcement had been caused by two or three factors, he thought: One was that the relationship between him and Melinda had been so much better at the time of the Fourth of July dance and he did not want to contrast the present with that happier period four months ago. Secondly, he was deep in the perusal of a manuscript in Italian—or rather a Sicilian dialect—which he was devoting all his evenings to and from which he did not wish to be distracted. Thirdly, there was the problem of persuading Melinda to go. She didn't want to go, though she wanted him to go. She wanted to be the crushed, dispirited wife who sat at home and wept, perhaps. Mainly she wanted to show herself—by not showing herself—as an enemy of her husband and not his helpmeet. But with only a couple of matters pointed out to her, Vic got her to go. A fourth minor annoyance, but one that he really couldn't complain about, was that he had to have his evening suit taken in at the waist of both trousers and jacket.

       The big round ballroom of the club was decorated with autumn leaves of all kinds and colors, the chandeliers studded richly with pinecones, and here and there in the reddish-brown and yellow leaves hung a baby pumpkin. Once he was there, commencing his usual solitary patrol of the sidelines, Vic began to enjoy himself. He supposed he had momentarily, at home, doubted his own aplomb. He really hadn't known how much to believe of what Trixie had told him. Now he found it very interesting to stroll by or to stand near the same groups of people that he had seen in July. There was Mrs. Podnansky, warmer and friendlier than ever. The MacPhersons—surely no change in them: Mac looked pink-eyed drunk at ten o'clock, though he was going to hold it well all evening probably; and as for his wife, if she betrayed any suspicion of Vic by the long curious look she gave him as she greeted him, it seemed to be canceled out by her remark that he had certainly trimmed down.

       "Did you go on a diet?" she asked, with admiration. "I wish you'd tell me about it."

       And just for the fun of it, Vic stood with them awhile, telling them about a diet that he made up as he talked. Hamburger and grapefruit, nothing else. The hamburger could be varied with onions or not. But nothing else. "The idea is to get so tired of hamburger and grapefruit that you don't even eat those," Vic said, smiling. "That finally happens."

       Mrs. MacPherson was very interested indeed, though Vic knew as surely as he was standing there that she would never lose an inch from her sturdy waistline. And if she happened to mention the diet to Melinda, and Melinda knew nothing about it, that was as usual for Melinda, who, everybody knew, neither cared nor was aware of what her husband did or ate.

       Everybody was cordial, and Vic felt that his own manner was after all just about as cheerful as it had been in July. He asked Mary Meller to dance with him not once but twice. Then he danced with Evelyn Cowan. He did not ask Melinda to dance because he did not want to dance with her. He was concerned, however, with whether she had a fairly good time or not. He did not want her to be miserable. The Mellers were kind enough to talk with her for a while, he noticed, and then she danced with a man Vic had never seen before. Vic supposed she would get along, even though most of their friends—including the MacPhersons, he saw—certainly were not smiling upon her tonight. Vic had a drink with Horace at the long curved bar at the side of the room, and he told Horace about the Italian manuscript he had received. It was the diary of a semi-illiterate grandmother, who had come to America with her husband, from Sicily, at the age of twenty-six. Vic thought of cleaning up the manuscript just enough to make it intelligible, cutting it somewhat, and printing it. It covered the Coolidge administration in a most fantastic way, and the whole text, which related mostly to the upbringing of three boys and two girls was interpolated with extremely funny comments on politics and current sports heroes such as Primo Carnera. One of her sons joined the police force, another went back to Italy, a third became a bookie for the illegal numbers games, one of the daughters went through college and married, and the other married and went with her engineer husband to live in South America. The woman's Impressions of South America, from her home on Carmine Street, Manhattan, were alternately funny and hair-raising. Vic made Horace laugh loudly.