Epitaph For A Tramp (21 page)

“My hands were actually shaking, I had been so unnerved by it all. I opened the door again, almost just to have something to do with them. I asked her what was the matter….

“She had stopped next to the door, and she was smiling at me. She said… she said, ‘Oh, I don’t need you anymore, Estelle. I’m going up to see a man, he’ll help me. The kind of
mm you
wouldn’t know anything about. The kind couldn’t get in your life.’ And then she laughed…

“She laughed. I don’t think she meant to be cruel, she was simply upset. But to say that to me, after all those years…”

Estelle stopped. She sat there. I waited. “Nineteen,” she said then. “I was nineteen when our father died, and Catherine was seven. Even then mother was deaf, capable of almost nothing. All those years when Catherine was a child I supported us. I brought her up. I never asked her to be grateful. But what time did I have for anything else—for men? What man would have married me anyhow, with two other people to support?

“No, I couldn’t get a man. She was right.
She
was the one who could. She was sixteen when it started. I tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t listen. Six years it went on, seven, I don’t know how long. She was a slut, there was no other word for it. She had abortions. Not one, two. The first time when she was
eighteen. Conceived children without even being sure whose they were and then had them torn out of her while I who was never going to have them, who would have given my life to have one, had to watch while she…

“She came to me for the money. Both times. I went with her to the doctor, hid it from mother. She always came to me, but only when it was something like that, only when it was dreadful and…

“And then she married you. You. And I was so glad for her, so glad, because that should have been the end of it. My God, what else could she ask but a man like you? And then when she threw you away, went back to being a tramp…

“And then to say that to me this morning, whether she meant it or not, to throw it up to me that she could still go back to you whenever she wanted, that even after the way she had been unfaithful she could still have you, while I who had no one, no one…

“There was a fruit knife wrapped in tissue paper on the front seat. I’d bought it the day before and forgotten to bring it upstairs. She was standing there, laughing, and I could hear the mockery of it, and I remembered so many things, so many. … And then the knife was in my hand and there was blood on it and… and..
“

“Estelle—”

She sobbed once, making no other move. Her voice was still flat, almost emotionless, and I knew there had to be something she was leaving out. I did not say anything. I told myself to let her finish it first.

“I saw her kneeling there. I threw the knife on the floor. I tried to lean out toward her and I couldn’t, I…

“And then she got up. She… Oh, God! She stumbled across the sidewalk and she almost fell and I still could not do anything. And then I saw her go into the hall—

“The money was on the curb. I don’t know why I picked it up. And then I was driving, running away….

“But I stopped again. I was on Third Avenue. I sat there,
shaking. I had to go back

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I left the car and walked as far as the tailor shop on your corner and I stood in the doorway. And then you came down and the drunk was there and I was going to scream. I couldn’t make a sound. I could only stand there, even after you went back inside, not knowing whether she was alive or…

“You came out again and drove away. I saw you leave the key and I ran across. I went upstairs and I saw her and I… I…

“I vomited in the bathroom. I flushed it three times. I remember that, three times, to make sure it was clean. I was going to wait for you but I couldn’t, not with Catherine on the floor, not knowing I was the one who…

“I had the sack of money with me all the while. I put it in the laundry bag. I didn’t think anyone would find it there, not right away. I thought I was going to be sick again but I wasn’t. I ran out—

“I put the key back under the mat. I walked slowly, I remember that, too. The knife was still in the car. I drove home and brought it upstairs and washed it. I didn’t know if she had told you who had done it, I thought perhaps you had been here looking for me while I was still out, still… And then when that Duke came I thought it was you at the bell, I didn’t even ask who it was, and then a minute later you were here and I could see that you didn’t know, and… and…”

Estelle suddenly had her face in her hands. Her body shook violently. She threw herself face-down against the pillows.

I sat there. The soft light reminded me of places I’d been under dense high firs. If I hadn’t been looking at her, the
sobbing could have been the sounds of scavengers in the brush, chipmunks foraging.

“Why?” I said then. “Not just because she said something about a man you couldn’t get, Estelle. Not just for that.”

The sobs died slowly. She lay still. “Why, Estelle?”

Her face was still buried. She lifted it slightly, not toward me. “Yes,” she said. “For that and… and…”

“What, Estelle? What?”

I was watching her. She pressed her head back against her raised shoulders with her weight on her forearms, holding it there. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Really her head dropped again.

“This morning,” she said. “I told you what happened to Catherine when she was six, what… what a man did to her. The man who attacked her was… his name was Robert Bell. He was twenty. My father was still alive, and Robert was staying with us for a weekend at the cottage we had rented. He was my fiancé, my…

“We were going to be married that autumn. And he did
that
We were sleeping together. I was giving myself to him because I loved him, because I thought that was the way it should be. And he raped Catherine. She was six years old—six!—and he chose her over me. All right, yes, there was something the matter with him, he was obviously ill, but how do you think I felt? He had come into my bed that very night after my parents were asleep and then the next morning in the woods he…

“It was hideous when it happened, hideous! Catherine wandered off and it was three days before they found her. It was terrible for her, yes. But what about me? Everyone was frantic when the doctor told us what had happened, but no one paid any attention to me at all, no one stopped to understand how I felt, to care—

“My father almost went out of his mind. His heart was bad to start with, and that was one of the things that killed him, I’m sure of it. The first night, after Robert confessed, when she was still in the hospital, we were in the waiting room. I was crying and so was mother. And then all of a sudden father was screaming at me, almost insanely. He told me it was my fault for going with Robert. He said… he said, ‘You! You can’t even get yourself an ordinary man like everyone else! No, the only man you can find is a degenerate, a pervert!’ They had to put him to bed. I almost killed myself the same night. He never fully recovered, he…

“And then
she
forgot! Catherine forgot! While all my life I’ve had to live with the memory of it! And all my life I tried to give myself to her, because maybe it
was
my fault in part, maybe I was responsible. I cared for her, cried over what she was, what she had become… and then this morning when she said that to me, said almost the same thing my father had said, that I couldn’t get a man, I…

“I just lost all sense, all reason, I…”

She was clutching the edge of the bed, sprawled across it at an angle near me. Her arms were rigid and her jaws were clamped tight. It was a long moment before her muscles loosened. She drew in her breath deeply.

“But even with that,” she said then, “even with that, my God, do you think I wanted to do what I did? Do you think I
meant
to do it? Can you imagine how I feel, what I’ve gone through since it happened? I almost started to tell you this morning when I mentioned what happened with Robert Bell but I couldn’t, I was afraid. And then later I even called your apartment but the police officer answered and I couldn’t even ask if you were there. And then when you came in before and said that you believed someone else had done it, and that the person was dead, I thought no one would ever know, I thought I wouldn’t

have to say anything at all. Because I… Oh, God, I didn’t mean to kill her, I didn’t! But when she said that to me about going to you, to
you
..”

Her voice dropped again. “You,” she repeated. It was almost a whisper. “Yes, Harry, you were a part of it. Not just the contempt I thought I heard in Catherine’s voice, not just the fact that she could get any man she wanted, but that she could still get you. From the first time I saw you I’ve thought about you, I’ve died a thousand times since you and she separated, hoping that through some impossible chance, some miracle, you and I might, that you and I… And then after all that happened she was going back to you, was telling me that you’d take her, and…”

She looked up at me then. Her face was like something sketched in charcoal on coarse gray paper and then abandoned in the rain. A shudder ran through her.

“All those years without anyone, all those years. Do you have any idea what it was? Can you know? There hasn’t been anyone, not anyone else in all that time. After Robert Bell I couldn’t, not for years, and then there wasn’t any chance. Do I have to tell you how I once let myself get picked up by a soldier and let him take me into an alleyway—into an alley, Harry, in that filth, that stench—just to see if I were still capable of being a woman, if I could feel anything at all! And then just now with you, Harry,
with you!
Can you have any idea what that was for me? Can you? Even lying here with all the horror in my mind, all the horror! Oh, my God, I did it, yes, I killed Catherine! Call the police, do what you must! But hold me first, Harry! Hold me again! Harry, please, again, again!”

She had flung herself toward me. Her arms leaped around my neck and she was tearing at me, trying to drag me across herself with all the fierce, dead weight of her sick agony. Her breath was coming in wild sobs and her voice was choked and
pleading.
“Harry, yes, tell them, do! But not now! Please, oh, God, later! Stay with me now! Don’t leave me yet, Harry, don’t!”

Her head snapped upward viciously when I jerked away. For a moment she hung there, poised on her knees at the bed’s edge with her arms outstretched and her breasts lifted like some doomed heathen priestess waiting in the twilight to be sacrificed. Then she collapsed in a heap, whimpering.

I stood there biting the knuckles of my right hand until I tasted blood.

I went into the bathroom and got dressed. When I came out again she was lying on her back with her face turned away. She hardly seemed to be breathing at all, and the sheet was twisted and crushed about her loins. It might have been the remnant of a shroud in a violated grave.

The tiny shaft of sunlight through the blind had shifted a little, and my watch said 3:29.1 stood there by the bed, staring down at her and not saying anything, and I waited the minute.

The phone felt as cold as a new Colt automatic in my hand. I put it to my head and dialed Brannigan.