Hangsaman (2 page)

 

Slack your rope, Hangsaman,

O slack it for a while,

I think I see my true love coming,

Coming many a mile.

Mr. Arnold Waite—husband, parent, man of his word—invariably leaned back in his chair after his second cup of breakfast coffee and looked with some disbelief at his wife and two children. His chair was situated so that when he put his head back the sunlight, winter or summer, touched his unfaded hair with an air at once angelic and indifferent—indifferent because, like himself, it found belief not an essential factor to its continued existence. When Mr. Waite turned his head to regard his wife and children the sunlight moved with him, broken into patterns on the table and the floor.

“Your God,” he customarily remarked to Mrs. Waite down the length of the breakfast table, “has seen fit to give us a glorious day.” Or, “Your God has seen fit to give us rain,” or “snow,” or “has seen fit to visit us with thunderstorms.” This ritual arose from an ill-advised remark made by Mrs. Waite when her daughter was three; small Natalie had asked her mother what God was, and Mrs. Waite had replied that God made the world, the people in it, and the weather; Mr. Waite did not tend to let such remarks be forgotten.

“God,” Mr. Waite said this morning, and laughed. “
I
am God,” he added.

Natalie Waite, who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen, lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions. For the past two years—since, in fact, she had turned around suddenly one bright morning and seen from the corner of her eye a person called Natalie, existing, charted, inescapably located on a spot of ground, favored with sense and feet and a bright-red sweater, and most obscurely alive—she had lived completely by herself, allowing not even her father access to the farther places of her mind. She visited strange countries, and the voices of their inhabitants were constantly in her ear; when her father spoke he was accompanied by a sound of distant laughter, unheard probably by anyone except his daughter.

“Well,” Mr. Waite customarily remarked, after he had taken his stand as God for another day, “only twenty-one more days before Natalie leaves us.” Sometimes it was “only fourteen more days before Bud goes off again.” Natalie was leaving for her first year in college a week after her brother went back to high school; sometimes twenty-one days resolved itself into three weeks, and seemed endless; sometimes it seemed a matter of minutes slipping by so swiftly that there would never be time to approach college with appropriate consideration, to form a workable personality to take along. Natalie was desperately afraid of going away to college, even the college only thirty miles away that her father had chosen for her. She had two consolations: first, the conviction from previous experience that any place becomes home after awhile, so that she might assume a reasonable probability that after a month or so the college would be familiar and her home faintly alien. Her second consolation was the recurring thought that she might always give up college if she chose, and simply stay at home with her mother and father; this prospect was so horrible that Natalie found herself, when she thought confidently about it, almost enjoying her fear of going away.

Thus, at nine-thirty of a Sunday morning the Waites had breakfasted together. Mr. Waite felt with complacence the touch of the sunlight on his head; Bud, stirring in his chair, sighed with the deep resignation of a boy fifteen years old who is going back to high school in fourteen more days; Mrs. Waite, looking deeply into her coffee cup, spoke with the soft, faintly wistful intonation she kept for her husband. “Cocktail olives,” she said. It was as though she were deliberately setting him off, because Mr. Waite stared for a minute and then said emphatically, “You mean I have to make cocktails for that crew? Cocktails for twenty people? Cocktails?”

“You
couldn't
very well ask them to drink tea,” Mrs. Waite said. “Not
them
.”

Natalie, fascinated, was listening to the secret voice which followed her. It was the police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her mother's voice. “How,” he asked pointedly, “Miss Waite,
how
do you account for the gap in time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body?”

“I can't tell,” Natalie said back to him in her mind, her lips not moving, her dropped eyes concealing from her family the terror she hid also from the detective. “I refuse to say,” she told him.

Mr. Waite spoke patiently. “You serve cocktails,” he said, “you're always making them. With ordinary highballs everyone can make his own. They will anyway,” he added, driving home his point.

“
I
didn't invite them,” Mrs. Waite said.

“
I
didn't invite them,” Mr. Waite said.

“I called them,” Mrs. Waite said, “but you made out the list.”

“You realize,” the detective said silently, “that this discrepancy in time may have very serious consequences for you?”

“I realize,” Natalie said. Confess, she thought, if I confess I might go free.

Mr. Waite shifted his ground again; by now he and his wife knew one another well enough to substitute half-hearted disagreement for a more taxing marital relationship, and an aimless, constant argument where either one took any side was to them a familiarity as affectionate as the ponderous sympathy of a Victorian household. “God,” Mr. Waite said, “I wish they weren't coming.”

“I can cancel it,” his wife said, as she always did.

“I could get some work done for a change,” Mr. Waite said. He looked around the table, at his wife gazing into her coffee cup, at Natalie regarding her plate, at Bud watching out the window some presumably enrapturing adolescent dream. “No one ever
looks
at anyone else in this house,” Mr. Waite said irritably. “Do you realize I'm two weeks behind in my work?” he demanded of his wife. He enumerated on his fingers. “I've got to review four books by Monday; four books
no
one in this house has read but myself. Then there's the article on Robin Hood—that should have been finished three days ago. And my reading, and today's paper, and yesterday's. Not to mention,” Mr. Waite added ponderously, “not to mention the book.”

At the mention of the book, his family glanced at him briefly, in chorus, and then away, back to the less choleric plates and cups on the table.

“I wish I could help you, dear,” Mrs. Waite said artificially.

“Are you aware,” the detective demanded sarcastically of Natalie, “that you are retarding the course of this investigation by your stubborn silence?”

“Listen,” Bud said abruptly, “
I
don't have to come to this thing, do I?”

His father frowned, and then laughed rudely. “What were you planning to do instead?” he asked; if there was a note of thunder in his voice his family ignored it through long familiarity.

“Something,” Bud said insolently. “Anything.”

Mr. Waite looked down the table at his wife. “This son of mine,” he explained elaborately, “has such a distaste for the literary life that he prefers doing ‘something—anything' to attending a literary cocktail party.” An epigram obviously occurred to him and he tried it out cautiously. “A literary cocktail party holds few attractions for one,” he began slowly, feeling his way, “who is at the same time too untaught for literature and too young for drink.”

The family considered; Mrs. Waite shook her head.

“Adolescence is a time when—” she suggested finally, and Mr. Waite took it up: “When one is too untaught for literature and too young for drink.”

“Too old for literature?” Natalie asked.

Bud laughed. “Too smart to get anywhere near it,” he said.

They all laughed, and the sudden family gesture was so pleasant to them that they immediately took steps to separate themselves from one another. Mr. Waite left first; still laughing, he slid his napkin into the ring which was composed of two snakes curiously and obscenely entwined (“nothing to sit at table with,” Mrs. Waite called it) and rose, saying, “Excuse me,” to his wife as he did so. A moment later Bud eased himself from his chair and was, by a typical sliding grace, able to reach the door ahead of his father. “After
you
, sir,” Bud said grandly as he held the door for his father, and Mr. Waite bowed formally and said, “Thank you, young man.” They went down the hall together, and Natalie and Mrs. Waite could hear Bud saying, “As a matter of fact, I'm going swimming.”

Terror lest she be left alone with her mother made Natalie almost speechless; as her mother opened her mouth to speak (perhaps to say, “Excuse me,” to Natalie; perhaps she was as much troubled by being left alone with Natalie) Natalie said quickly, “Busy now,” and went with little dignity out of the French doors behind her chair and down the flat steps into the garden.

She did not really prefer the garden to several other spots in the world; she would rather, for instance, have been alone in her room with the door locked, or sitting on the grass by a brook at midnight, or, given an absolutely free choice, standing motionless against a pillar in a Greek temple or on a tumbril in Paris or on a great lonely rock over the sea, but the garden was closest, and it pleased her father to see her wandering morning-wise among the roses.

“And your age?” said the detective. “Occupation? Sex?”

It was a beautiful morning, and the garden seemed to be enjoying it. The grass had exerted itself to be unusually green just beyond Natalie's feet, the roses were heavy and sweet and suitable for giving to any number of lovers, the sky was blue and serene, as though it had never known a tear. Natalie smiled secretly, moving her shoulders stiffly under her thin white shirt, agreeably conscious of herself going from the flat line of her shoulders all the way down to her feet far below, so that she was, leaning back with her shoulders against the solid intangible of the air, a thin thing, a graceful thing, a thing of steel and subtle padding. She breathed deeply, satisfied.

“Will you talk now?” the detective demanded, his voice rising a little, although he kept it still under iron control. “Do you think that you alone can stand against the force of the police, the might and weight of duly constituted authority, against
me
?”

A lovely little shiver went down Natalie's back. “I may be in danger every moment of my life,” she told the detective, “but I am strong within myself.”

“Is
that
an answer?” the detective said. “What if I told you that you were seen?”

Natalie lifted her head, looking proudly off into the sky.

“The housekeeper,” the detective said, dropping his voice into a vicious, slapping murmur. “She has testified—under oath, mind you, Miss Waite, under oath—that she saw you enter the house fully fifteen minutes before your screams summoned the household to the study where you stood over the murdered body of your lover. Well, Miss Waite, well?”

“I have nothing to say,” Natalie said, barely able to form the words.

“What becomes of your story now?” the detective went on ruthlessly. “Miss Waite, what becomes of your precious statement that you were alone in the garden?”

“I have nothing to say,” Natalie said.

“Tell me, Miss Waite,” the detective continued remorselessly, his cruel face closer to Natalie's, his voice soft and evil, “tell me, do you doubt the word of the housekeeper? Do you dare to say that she lies? Do you believe that she is unable to estimate time?”

“Ten o'clock, Natalie,” Mrs. Waite called from the French doors.

“Coming,” Natalie called back. Because she almost always ran instead of walking she cleared the steps with one long bound—like a deer, she thought in mid-air—and went in through the French doors. “Where's my notebook?” she asked her mother as she passed, and did not stay for an answer; her notebook was on the hall table where she had left it that morning when she came down to breakfast. With her notebook in her hand, she knocked on the study door.

“Come in, my dear,” her father said.

He looked up, smiling at her across the desk as she came in. “Good morning, Natalie,” he said formally, and Natalie said, “Good morning, Dad.” It was a fiction of theirs that these little meetings began the day for both of them, although before meeting in the study they usually breakfasted together, and pursued privately their personal morning occupations; Natalie watching the morning from her bedroom window and making hasty notes about it on her desk pad, combing her hair so that it fell carelessly along her shoulders, putting on the secret little locket she always wore; her father awakening and looking at himself in the mirror and smoking his first cigarette of the day and, presumably, somehow dressing himself.

“You look very fresh this morning, my dear,” Mr. Waite said, and Natalie said to him solemnly, “I've been thinking a lot today,” and he nodded.

“Of course,” he said. “Brilliant sunshine, seventeen years behind you, the infinite sorrows of growing up on your shoulders—one
must
think.”

Sometimes, these mornings in the study, Natalie was uncertain whether or not to laugh at her father's statements. It was difficult, usually, to tell if his remark was a joke because it was a point of conduct with him not to laugh at his own jokes, and with herself the only audience Natalie had only her own reactions to depend on. She was serious this time, because, although her father's expectant air seemed to indicate that this
had
been a joke, his pointing out that she had seventeen years behind her had given her a sudden sense of the immensity of time; seventeen years was a very long time to have been alive, if you took it into proportion by the thought that in seventeen years more—or as long as she had wasted being a child, and a small girl, silly and probably playing—she would be thirty-four, and old. Married, probably. Perhaps—and the thought was nauseating—senselessly afflicted with children of her own. Worn, and tired. She brought herself away from the disagreebly clinging thought by her usual method—imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive—and turned expectantly to her father.