Killdozer! (36 page)

“Talkative,” said Carole, heading for the stove, where water was already heating the coffee. “Still going on about the talking doll in the giggum pinafore.”

“Carole!” I went to her, put my face in the back of her shining hair. “You’re
worried
about it!” I sniffed. “Mm. You smell good.”

“Wave set,” she said. “Don’t muss me, darling. Yes I am a little worried.” She was quiet a moment, her hands deftly cutting and spreading bread, her mind far from them. “Marie came today.”

“Oh?”

“Henry tell you anything?”

“Yes. He—”

Carole began to cry.

“Darling! Carole, what the … stop it, and tell me what’s wrong!”

She didn’t stop it. Carole doesn’t cry very well. I don’t think she really knows how. “I’ve been too happy, I guess, Godfrey. I feel … I don’t know, darling. Ashamed. I gloated at Marie.”

“Too happy? A heck of a thing to cry about.” I squeezed her. “Don’t cry all over the liverwurst, honey.”

“It isn’t being too happy. I … I don’t really know what it is.” She put down the knife, turned in my arms, and hid her face in my coat. “I’m frightened, Godfrey, I’m
frightened!”

“But what are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. She trembled suddenly, violently,
and then was still. “I’m afraid of something, and I don’t know what that something is. That’s part of it. And part of it is that I’m frightened
because
I don’t know what it is. There’s a difference, do you see?”

“Sure I see.” Suddenly I felt about her the way I do about the Widget. She seemed so tiny; there was so much she couldn’t understand yet, somehow. I talked to her as if she were a child. I said, “What kind of a something is it, darling? Is it something that can hurt you?”

She nodded.

“How can it hurt you?” She was still so long that I thought she hadn’t heard. “How can it hurt, darling? Can it jump out at you and knock you down? Is it that kind of a something?”

She shook her head promptly.

“Can it hurt—us?”

She nodded. I said, “How, Carole? How can it do something to us? Can it take something away from us?”

“It did take something away.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” she mumbled.

I held her and stroked her shoulder, and I felt lost. After a while I went and sat at the table and she finished making sandwiches for me.

It didn’t stop there. In three days I was in the shape Henry had been in when Marie first came out with that fantasy of hers—and in three days Henry was worse. Working, we did little more than to interrupt each other with accounts of the strange goings-on of our wives, and it wasn’t fun.

“She won’t forget it,” said Henry, staring blindly at his bench. His production was way off—the little guy was a worker, but this thing had got between him and his work. “If I’d only known how serious it would be to her, I’d have grinned and said, ‘yes, yes, go on.’ But I couldn’t then, and it’s no use trying now. I’ve done my best to persuade her the thing between her and the Wick never happened, but it’s no use. The more I persuade, the more upset she gets. If she believes me, she begins to doubt her own sanity. If she doesn’t believe me, she can’t figure out what motive I might have for lying about
slugging the man.” He spread his hands, his eyebrows coming up sorrowfully. He looked more than ever like a little lost puppy. “Dead end. What can you do?”

“You’re lucky. At least Marie can put a name to what’s worrying her. Carole can’t. She’s afraid, because she doesn’t know what she’s afraid of. She feels she’s lost something, something important, and she is frightened because she doesn’t know what it is. Where Marie’s worried and—shall I say jealous, maybe?—and generally upset, Carole’s scared silly. I’ve seen Marie worried before. I’ve never seen Carole scared.”

Henry gave up his pretense of working and came around to my bench. “Carole is the coolest head I think I’ve ever run across,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe I am lucky. I … don’t feel lucky though—Godfrey, let’s quit griping about the effects and try to figure out causes. Do the two of them have the same trouble, or is it a coincidence?”

“Coincidence? Of course, Henry. The symptoms, if you want to call them that, are totally different.”

“Oh, are they?”

“Well, what have they in common?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Henry doubtfully. “Um—Nothing, I guess. Except—they’ve both lost something and it worries them.”

“Lost something? Carole has, but what has Marie—oh. Oh, I think I see what you mean. Marie has a memory of an event which is itself lost, as far as placing it in her life is concerned. Like the Widget’s doll with the giggum pinafore.”

“Like what?”

I told him about it. “I have a feeling that’s what sent Carole off the deep end, when you come to think about it,” I said. “She worried about … hey! the Widget’s trouble is the same as Marie’s when you break it down. She had a vivid memory of something that never happened, too. And she frets because she thinks she’s lost it.” I stared at him.

“For that matter, you and I both have the same trouble,” said Henry suddenly. “We’ve certainly lost something.”

I knew what he meant—particularly for himself. There is a certain something about being newly married that shouldn’t be spoiled.
His was being spoiled suddenly, which was so much worse. “No, Henry, I don’t know why, but I think that’s a side issue. Marie, the Widget, Carole. They have something. It’s because they have something that we’re in the state we’re in.” I suddenly noticed the remarkable fact that Henry wasn’t even pretending to work. “Henry—we’ve got a deadline to meet on this job. Wickersham—”

Henry uttered one brief syllable that adequately disposed of Wickersham and the deadline. “All right—who had it first?”

“Why … Ma … no. Not Marie. The Widget and her doll. Then Marie and her melodrama. Then Carole and her … then Carole.”

“The Widget, huh?”

“What are you driving at?” I snapped, seeing the vitreous sheen of stubbornness slip over Henry’s eyes.

“Marie’s always going over to your place, isn’t she?”

“Henry, you’re crazy! Contagion, for a … mental disorder?”

“She had it first, didn’t she?”

“She’s just a kid!”

Henry looked at me levelly. “Just a kid. Would you say that if the three of them came down with scarlet fever and she was the first to have it, and the three of them had been together so much?”

“Now look,” I said, trying to keep my voice down. “I hope I’m wrong about what you’re driving at. But there’s nothing wrong with my kid, see?”

“You fellows lose something?” said Wickersham.

We literally jumped, used as we were to the Wick’s cat-footing techniques. Henry stared at the big man, and his feet carried him back to his bench by pure reflex.

Wickersham stood there, teetering a bit on the balls of his feet, his big hands behind him. Suddenly his great still face broke, and his white, even teeth showed in a grin. Then he turned and walked out.

“To him,” muttered Henry, “something is funny.”

I said, “Sometimes I’m sorry he pays the kind of money he does.”

We worked, then. If the Wick had tried, he couldn’t have picked a sweeter moment to interrupt us. I was just on the point of achieving a thorough-going burn at Henry, with his goofy insinuations about the kid. Henry’s glum and steady concentration at his bench
kept me just under the blow-off point until it really began to hurt. Not another word passed between us, although I did drive him home as usual. But his words stuck.

“Widget,” I said after dinner, “you’re being very silly about this doll.”

“Hm-m-m?” she said innocently.

“You know what I mean. Mummy says you’ve been talking her ears off about it.”

“I want my doll again, that’s all. Mrs. Wilton told Mummy that whenever she wanted anything from her old man, she just talked and talked about it until he gave it to her to shut her up.”

“Widget! You shouldn’t listen to that kind of thing!”

“Listen? Did you ever hear Mrs. Wilton talk, daddy?”

I laughed in spite of myself. Mrs. Wilton whispered at about a hundred and thirty-five decibels. “Widget, don’t change the subject. If I could get you a doll like that, I would. Don’t you know that?”

“You did, though. I had the doll.”

“Darling, you didn’t have the doll. Truly you didn’t. I would certainly remember about it, but I
don’t.”

She opened her mouth to speak, and I braced myself for the blast of denial. I knew the symptoms. But instead her eyes filled with tears, and she ran out of the room to the kitchen, where Carole was doing the dishes.

I sat there feeling frustrated, feeling angry at myself and at the child. I tried to piece together the murmur of voices from the kitchen—the Widget’s high and broken, Carole’s soft and comforting—but I couldn’t. The temptation to march in there and defend myself was powerful, but I knew that Carole was more than competent to handle the situation.

After what seemed like months, Carole appeared at the living-room door. “Stay out there and eat it all up, darling. There’ll be more if you want it,” she called back, her voice infinitely tender. Then she swung on me with sparks flashing out of her eyes.

“Godfrey, how can you be so
stupid?”
she said scathingly.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh, you idiot,” she said, sinking tiredly into a chair. “It wasn’t
bad enough to have the child in the grip of a dangerous fantasy; you had to make it worse.”

“I don’t see that it’s particularly dangerous, and I don’t see how I made it worse,” I said warmly. “Otherwise you may be right.”

“Don’t be sardonic,” she said. “It doesn’t suit your silly face. Oh darling, can’t you see what’s happened?” She leaned forward and spoke to me gently. “The Widget hasn’t been unhappy about this thing. She’s been bothered, and she’s bothered me, but that’s nothing I can’t take.”

“And what did I do?”

“You presented her with a new aspect to her problem. At first the doll was the important thing, but it wasn’t overly important. But you have loaded her up with an insoluble abstract.”

“What, sweetheart, are you driving at?”

“What, sweetheart,” she mimicked, “do you think the child was crying about just now?”

“Search me. Disappointed about the final realization that her doll was a figment, I suppose.”

“Nothing of the kind. She was crying because she had lost something more important than the doll. You see, beloved, strangely enough she trusts you. She believes you. She believes you now; but then if what you so solemnly told her is the truth, she is wrong about the doll.”

“That was what I was after.”

“But she
knows
she is right about the doll!”

“The doll idea is nonsense!”

“That doesn’t matter. It’s real enough to her. As far as she is concerned, the doll conception is the evidence of her senses. That’s a tangible thing. The only evidence she has against it is your word. That’s an abstract. She wants to believe it, but to do so she would have to deny a concrete realization. It isn’t in human nature—normal human nature, that is—to choose, through faith, a fact when its alternative is supported by direct evidence.”

“Oh … oh. I begin to see what you mean. So she’s lost—”

“Both. Both her doll and the completeness of her belief in you.”

Her lower lip suddenly seemed a little fuller. “The way Marie and … and—”

I looked at her and thought of cat-footed Wickersham and his amused “Lost something?” and about then was when the thing began to get me mad.

All morning there was a coolness between Henry and me. I kept my nose pointed at my bench, and so did he. His suggestion that my Widget had in some way infected Carole and then Marie still griped me, and obviously his resentment of Marie’s condition was aimed at the Widget through me. It wasn’t cozy.

He broke the ice. At a little after noon he came over and nudged my elbow. “Let’s go eat.”

“I’ve got my lunch here. You know that.”

He hesitated, then went back to his locker. I suddenly felt like a heel. “Wait up, Henry.” We usually ate in the shop, but when we wanted some beer with it, we dropped around to O’Duff’s, around the corner. I shut off my soldering iron and oscilloscope and joined him at the door.

After we were settled in the grill, munching sandwiches, Henry came out with it. “Look,” he said, “I’m willing to drop what I said—
if
you can suggest an alternative. You ought to be able to. The whole thing’s so crazy anyhow. It might be anything.”

I grinned at him. “Heck, Henry, I know why you picked on that contagion angle. It was the only common denominator. Now, instead of jumping to conclusions, suppose we figure out a solider one.”

“Suits me,” he said, and then, “Godfrey, I hate to stay mad at anyone!”

“I know, I know,” I smiled. “You’re a good apple, Henry, in spite of your looks. Now let’s get to it. When did our women-folks get this affliction, and how? What was it—time of day, environment, or what?”

“Hm-m-m. I dunno. Seems as if they got it outside somewhere. Marie walked into my house with it. I think you said the kid had it when you got home that evening?”

“Yeah, and Carole had been out. Hm-m-m, Widget in the afternoon, Carole in the evening—what about Marie?”

“She was late home that first night, the night she climbed all over me congratulating me for the Humphrey Bogart act.”

“Where had she been?”

“Uh? I dunno. Shopping or something, I guess.”

“Call her up and ask her.”

“O.K.—wait. No, Godfrey, I don’t want to remind her of it.”

“I see your point. Uh—maybe we don’t have to.” I thought hard. One of the Widget’s odd little mispronunciations was running around in my head. “Giggum pinafore,” I said vaguely.

“What?”
snapped Henry, startled.

I grinned. “Hold on—Uh … oh. Got it! I got it, Henry! The cormium hemlet!”

“And I’ve got athlete’s foot. What are you gibbering about?”

I grabbed his arm excitedly and spilled his beer. “Carole took the kid into the beauty shop for a shampoo. The Widget told me herself that she first remembered her talking doll under the cormium hemlet—chromium helmet. She fell fast asleep under the hair drier. And … that’s it, Henry!… That night Carole first acted up, I started to mug around—I said she smelled good. She drew back a little and said, ‘Wave set. Don’t muss me.’ Now, when Marie came in late that night, hallucination and all, could she have just come from—”