Nothing That Meets the Eye (37 page)

“I've overstayed,” he said sadly.

“Oh, no. But I do have to see this person now, because she's coming to interview me.” She smiled and held out her hand. “It's been such a pleasure meeting you. I hope you'll go on with your book. You say you've written a hundred pages?”

“Yes.” Andy was now moving toward the foyer.

“If you hit any snags, don't hesitate to call me. I'm always glad to talk about my favorite subject.”

“Thank you—”

The elevator door had slid open. A tall woman of about thirty-five came slowly out and looked at Andy in a puzzled way. He looked at her in the same way, and then realized with horror that she was the journalist from whom he had stolen—what was it?

“Well! Mr.—O'Neill, isn't it?” she asked.

“No,” said Miss Wooster. “This is Mr. Garrett. Mr. Garrett, Miss Holquist. Or—have you met before?”

“Yes,” said Miss Holquist.

Andy knew he couldn't get away with it. Even though his face was more or less ordinary, Myra Holquist had seen him on two occasions not more than six months ago. “Sorry,” he said. “My name is Garrett. I don't know why I told you it was O'Neill. Just to be adventurous, I guess. Or I think I was trying out my pen name. There are enough writers named Garrett.”

Myra Holquist nodded, as if she were thinking of something else. “How's the journalism going? Weren't you interested in writing something about the passing of the vacant lot in the lives of New York children? Something like that?

Now Miss Wooster was looking at him oddly.

“Something like that,” Andy admitted weakly. “Well, I must be going.”

He felt utterly defeated, shamed, humiliated. All his style was gone. He rang for the elevator, which unfortunately had closed and disappeared.

“Just a minute—Mr. Garrett. Excuse me, Miss Wooster. I wondered why you disappeared so suddenly,” Miss Holquist continued to Andy. “It didn't by any chance have anything to do with a Javanese cigarette box?”

“I don't know what you mean,” Andy said, frowning with feigned perplexity.

She gave him a bitter smile. “But you look as if you do. Miss Wooster, have you known this man very long?”

“Why, no,” Miss Wooster replied. “Just this afternoon. He—”

“Then before he leaves, I think you'd be wise to look around your house and see if anything's missing.”

Miss Wooster gasped, and Andy gritted his teeth and prayed for the elevator door to slide open. But he couldn't even hear the thing coming.

“I mean it, Miss Wooster,” said Miss Holquist in a tone of command.

Some remnant of pride, perhaps even the beginning of a plan, inspired Andy to motion the elevator away as its door slid open. “Thanks, not just yet,” he said to the elevator man, and turned like one about to be executed and followed Miss Wooster back into the living room.

Myra Holquist also came in from the foyer.

“Why—my gold Mayan piece!” Miss Wooster exclaimed. “It's gone!” And she looked at Andy with wide, frightened eyes. “D-did you see it?” she stammered.

“Give it to her, Mr. O'Neill, or Mr. Garrett,” said Miss Holquist coolly.

Then Andy struck her in the side of the head with all the force of his muscular right arm, and she fell to the floor. He knelt and throttled her, bumping her head again and again on the floor, oblivious of Miss Wooster's screams, of her ineffectual efforts to pull him away. Nothing that could be described as a thought was in Andy's mind during those few violent seconds, only a feeling, a consciousness that the woman he was attacking had betrayed him, stripped him of decency, had filled him with an intolerable shame. Her overly made-up face symbolized to him all that he despised in the female sex—its coldness, mercilessness, indifference.

“Shut up!” Andy blazed at Miss Wooster as he got to his feet. But when he saw her retreating from him, he became frightened himself. She had become silent now, but he was afraid someone might appear at any moment in response to her screams. She kept retreating and he kept walking toward her. He wanted a rope, a gag—anything to tie her up until he could get away.

“Where's the bedroom? Go in the bedroom,” he ordered. He saw the bedroom behind her and there was a key in its ornate door. “Get in there.”

She went in obediently.

“And here. You can have this,” he said, pulling the Mayan piece from his jacket pocket. He laid it on the top of a chest just inside the bedroom door. “I'm sorry, really sorry.” Inarticulate, he jerked his head to one side in shamed apology, pulled the door to, and locked it, leaving the key in it.

Then he dashed back to the living room for his briefcase—Miss Holquist was motionless—and not daring to leave by the elevator he looked for the kitchen. Just as he had hoped, it had a delivery entrance, and outside this door he found a service elevator and some stairs.

He took the stairs. Down and down, thirteen unlucky floors. It put him out in a cellar, unlighted except for a little daylight that showed through an open door. He went out this door, up some iron steps, and he was on Seventy-eighth Street, between Park and Lexington, only fifteen feet from his car. Slowly he walked to the car, feeling in his pocket for his keys.

He lived on one of those peculiarly gloomy streets of apartment houses near the Manhattan approach of the George Washington Bridge. The bars of that neighborhood were gloomy, too, but Andy went into one and had two quick shots of rye to steady himself before he went home. For once he was grateful that Juliette scarcely spoke to him and never looked him fully in the face. And Martha, he remembered, was having supper with a school friend tonight, and was going to spend the evening with the friend doing homework.

That night Andy did not sleep at all. He was haunted by Miss Wooster's muffled cries through her bedroom door. Had there been a telephone in the room? How soon had she been able to get out? Mr. Garrett, Mr. O'Neill, she had called and called.

Andy turned in his bed with shame and thought of the cache of treasures in his bottom drawer. It was as if he had never seen his revolting pastime objectively before—he who had always considered himself a fairly intelligent man!

The next morning Andy bought a paper at the newsstand near his office, where he checked in every morning at eight forty-five. He found nothing in it about the nightmare of the last evening, but he was not sure if the morning papers could have picked up the story in time. He sold one vacuum cleaner to an elderly lady who had an apartment full of singing canaries.

Then he bought an afternoon paper, which said that Myra Holquist, the well-known journalist, had been throttled to death in the apartment of Rebecca Wooster, the eminent anthropologist, whom she had come to interview. Like the encounter itself yesterday, it seemed fantastic and unreal, until he went on to read the doctor's statement and also the description of “Robert Garrett or O'Neill” given by Miss Wooster. It was him to a T, a portrait of himself in words.

But a murderer! Murder was something Andy had not bargained for.

He knew what the police would do first: look for a Robert Garrett or an O'Neill answering his description, not find any (Andy hoped they would not find any), then a man of his description connected with any company that compiled reference books for the public library. Then they would start looking for a man of his description in the streets, anywhere. And maybe one day—

It crossed Andy's mind to turn himself in, and yet the murder, to him, seemed such an accident, such a piece of bad luck, that he felt he deserved better than to give himself into the merciless custody of the law. So he steeled himself to live with the awful fact that another person, a woman, had witnessed his crime and could, if she ever spotted him, put an end to his present way of life. The briefcase of stolen articles in the bottom of his drawer he could not even touch now. Merely the thought of it was enough to paralyze any action he might have taken to get rid of it.

Six months went by. Andy lost a little weight, but it was so gradual that neither Juliette nor anyone at his office made a remark about it. He could not look a policeman in the face on the street and he could not get over the habit of glancing quickly at all the faces that came flooding out from any opened elevator. The one time he and Juliette had gone to the theater (Juliette's request on her birthday), the intermissions in the lobby had been hell for him.

And then Andy read in the newspaper that Rebecca Wooster, forty-nine, had succumbed to a heart attack while at work in Ceylon. His reaction to this was very slow, covering a period of three days, at the end of which he took the briefcase from his bottom drawer and dropped it from the George Washington Bridge.

After this he felt better, and he expected that he would feel better and better as time went on. He did sleep better for a while, and then his sleep began to grow worse again. He developed circles under his eyes, permanent circles of purple.

Tossing in his bed one night, sleepless, he knew what was the matter. He had no specific enemy now, no one who shared the knowledge of his guilt. He had only himself.

For weeks now he had fought against a compulsion to confess, realizing what it would mean to his daughter and even to Juliette. But he could not convince himself that he was not behaving more heinously by keeping his secret, his unpunished crime, to himself. After all, he was a member of society, and so were his daughter and his wife.

So one cold afternoon in February, Andy went into a police station in the east fifties and gave himself up. He said that he was the Robert Garrett, alias O'Neill, who last May had throttled Myra Holquist to death in the apartment of the late Rebecca Wooster.

His eyelids twitched, as they did habitually now, and he realized that he did not sound very convincing. But he was not prepared for the stone wall of disbelief that confronted him in that police staton. A high-­ranking officer questioned him in detail for several minutes, called another station for a check on the description of Garrett-O'Neill, and even then expressed his doubt.

“Have you ever been in a mental institution?” the officer asked.

“No,” Andy answered.

Another officer of rank arrived and Andy repeated his story, adding now the details of his petty larcenies. But somehow his memory had deserted him. He could not remember more than one name of all the women he had pilfered from—Irene Cassidy, the dress designer. But what had be taken from her? He could describe several of the articles he had stolen, but he could not produce them, he explained, because he had dropped them off the George Washington Bridge two weeks ago.

“Call Irene Cassidy,” the new officer said.

Miss Cassidy worked in her own studio, and she was in. The officer explained the situation laboriously—as if he were trying deliberately to muddle the woman, Andy thought. He could tell from the officer's words that he was getting negative replies to everything, so Andy asked if he could speak with her. The telephone was passed over to him.

“Hello, Miss Cassidy,” Andy said. “I can't remember the name I used when I saw you, but I asked to talk to you because I had a fourteen-year-old daughter who wanted to be a dress designer. Remember that? It must have been—I suppose over a year ago.” Maybe it had been two years ago.

“Well—I might remember if I saw you,” Miss Cassidy replied, “but I see a lot of people who want to talk to me because they or somebody they know wanted to be dress designers.”

“You didn't notice that something was missing—after I saw you that time?”

“Missing? What?”

“Some small thing from your studio—or your desk—I don't remember exactly.”

“The guy's nuts,” murmured a voice behind him.

“Can you come down to this station? Please?” Andy pleaded.

Miss Cassidy did not want to be bothered. Andy asked her to wait a moment, then passed the telephone to an officer and told him to do what he could to persuade her to come to the station. The officer was more successful.

There was a painful wait of forty-five minutes, during which time they let Andy sit on a bench from which he could easily have slipped out the door and into the street. At last Miss Cassidy arrived, small and chic, in a short fur wrap, a hat of bird feathers. The police led her to Andy and asked her if she had ever seen him before. Miss Cassidy looked blank.

“I've lost a little weight,” Andy said to her. “Not much, but it might make a difference. We talked about Yves St. Laurent, remember? The talent of youth and all that?”

It was hopeless. There was a run-down, somewhat shabby look about him now. He was no longer the robust, self-confident man she had talked with a year ago, or perhaps two years ago.

Miss Cassidy shook her head, and looked at the officers. “I hope I'm not standing in the way of justice or anything like that, but to the best of my recollection I never saw this man before. Is he trying to save himself from something?”

“No, he's trying to confess to a murder,” the officer said with a smile. “A sensation seeker. We get a lot of ‘em like this. He's throwing in a lot of other things about robberies all over town.”

Now Miss Cassidy looked positively frightened of him. Women, Andy thought. Why should she have forgotten? It was not even deliberate, he thought, only an unconscious blow she had struck in the eternal battle of the sexes.

“We checked with the company he works for,” the officer continued. “He hasn't missed a day's work in the nine years he's been there. Hey, is there a psychiatrist or something your company uses?” he asked Andy. “I think you better have a checkup, Forster. Maybe you've been working too hard lately.”

A few minutes later Andy was released and out on the street again.

He went into a subway and threw himself on the tracks in front of an onrushing train.

THE RETURNEES

T
he return of Esther and Richard Friedmann to Germany in 1952 was a kind of triumphant reinstatement for both of them. It was as if a miracle had been visited upon them, as miraculous turns of fortune are visited upon banished but worthy kings in fairy tales, causing them to be returned to their domains, except that in the Friedmanns' case, their fortunes had risen even beyond what they had been before. Richard now had his old job back with his publishing house in Munich, at a salary higher than he had earned before the war. And Esther and he, after fourteen years of cohabitation, more or less furtive and awkward for the first several years, were now man and wife.

Richard had wanted to get settled immediately in a permanent home in Munich, and Esther, who was energetic and practical, had found in a very short time a two-story stone house in Bogenhausen, an old residential quarter of the city. Richard had told Esther that they would have to do a lot of entertaining, and on a much more formal scale than they had in England. Richard was very satisfied with the new house. He remarked that it was only three blocks from the big square house where Thomas Mann had lived and worked for twenty-five years.

During the first week, Esther busied herself with getting the linens and silverware in order—all hers, the things she had salvaged from her last and rather disastrous marriage, and sentimentally kept through thick and thin for just such a time as this—hiring two full-time maids, and laying down a routine for the household. She called up two friends in Munich, Greta Schwarzenfeld and Hermione Pieterich, and they both shrieked their surprise and delight at finding her once more in Germany. And married! Esther thought she noticed the least cooling off when she told them she had married Richard Friedmann, perhaps because of his Jewish name, Esther thought. Greta said she remembered him from a meeting ages ago. Hermione didn't know him. “He's back with his old firm, Beckhof Verlag,” Esther said. “You must come to see us as soon as we get straightened out.” They both said they would. Esther forgot that hint of coolness. She was very busy those first days. Richard had buried himself at once in his new job, and in the evenings he buried himself in his study, so Esther had to do everything herself, even get the tickets for the opera and ballet they went to.

For Esther, it was a delicious pleasure to have a house again after the rather cramped flat in London. Esther reckoned up: sixteen whole years since she had had a house of her own. Sixteen years since she had left Germany so casually to spend a month with Vincente dalla Palma and his dull wife at Cap d'Antibes. Then she had been Baroness Esther von Dorhn-Neven. Hitler had been in power about three years, and the talk of purges, armament, and more horrible things to come was already dampening the conversation at dinner parties in Berlin. At her husband's table it had been worse, especially when any of their guests were Jewish. Her husband had been an outspoken anti-Nazi, and even before she left Germany, Esther remembered, the government had been making it difficult for him to get chemicals, because he had refused to convert his two plastics factories for military purposes. Her husband's letters during that summer of 1936 had become grimmer and grimmer, and Esther had chosen to stay on the Cap. She remembered that her husband had never made the least reference to Vincente, though the whole Côte had known that they were having an affair. All the international set knew that Esther von Dorhn-Neven had had a reputation for being a flirt as well as a beauty since she was seventeen. The baron was her third husband. The baron could see, perhaps, but he did not want to believe. Then, sometime in the winter of 1936–37, a mutual friend brought the baron positive proof in the form of several French newspapers full of photographs. The baron at once filed for divorce. Esther was even more shocked than all her friends, who marveled that anyone would divorce for such a trivial reason. Esther felt he had acted completely out of character. Actually, he behaved absolutely true to character. Esther had simply misjudged him. So had she misjudged also the character and generosity of her lover, Vincente. The baron cut her off without a cent, and Count Vincente dalla Palma, furious at all the publicity, made it very clear he did not want to see her again.

It spoiled all the fun on the Côte, so Esther went to England and recuperated from her shock in a comfortable London hotel for several weeks. She met some attractive people, but none she very much cared for. She knew she was not the type that Englishmen generally liked—dark-haired, lively, with an earthy wit that seemed to keep them off balance. Moreover, she could not easily return hospitality, and she was that awkward quantity, a single woman. She went for a while to Paris, but no one she knew was there except the Rosenfelds, who were actually refugees, they said. Things were going from bad to worse in Germany. The people seemed to be paralyzed, and the Jews, those who had any intelligence, the Rosenfelds said, were getting out. Esther thought the Rosenfelds were exaggerating. She went back to England, intending to wait a few more months until the talk about her divorce, and the Hitler craze in Germany, had quieted down before she went back and resumed her place—after all quite outside her husband's stodgy circle—in Berlin society.

Then, quite by accident, she met Richard Friedmann at a cocktail party in Chelsea. She had met him three or four years before in Berlin. He remembered her, too, from an evening at her husband's house.

He seemed terribly happy to see her, his ugly, lean, chinless face lighted with sudden warmth, and he showed his rather bad teeth in a boyish grin. He had come to England about a year ago, he said, and was now working for a publishing house in Chelsea, and also for a Fleet Street political magazine. In a corner of the room, they began to talk in German. He told her he had left Germany because, being half Jewish, he had been liable at any minute to be called up to work in the coal mines or at some other equally dangerous job where he would have been killed sooner or later. Either that or a concentration camp. He babbled it all out to her in his naive way, and the fact that he spoke in German made it all more real to Esther than ever it had been when she read it in the newspapers. He asked Esther to have dinner with him that evening.

She was not particularly taken with him; he certainly wasn't handsome, and obviously could hardly keep himself on what he made, but she was attracted to his frankness, his pleasure in being with her, and she found it wonderfully comfortable to be with someone who, if he did not come exactly from her own social set in Berlin, at least had an idea of it. Esther saw him several times a week, and on Sunday mornings he invited her to breakfast with him in his two-room flat, because in the furnished room that Esther lived in, she could not cook. Esther, who spoke English more correctly than he, helped him polish up his articles for the political magazine, and typed them over for him, as his typing was very bad. Inevitably came a Saturday night when Esther did not go home, and after that, they spent every weekend together in Richard's flat. He was not the best lover she had ever known in her life, and neither was he very gallant. Esther thought he treated her with an amazing indifference, in fact, considering her background and the men she had been used to—only one of lesser rank than a baron—which certainly Richard might have guessed. He asked her very few questions about herself, and when she did start to answer, to reminisce about some summer in Ravello or Capri, Richard would interrupt her with something that had happened that day in the office or in the newspaper.

Esther took a job as typist and letter writer for an auditing firm near Shaftesbury Avenue. It paid little and was a crashing bore, but she faced the fact that nearly every piece of jewelry she owned was gone now, and that Richard couldn't possibly support her. She still went to fashionable parties now and then, but Esther knew that at forty-five she couldn't expect to have the same success with men that she had had at thirty-five, or even at forty, when she had come to England. She had lived hard and fast since eighteen, and the last four years in London, on little money, had been even harder for all their boredom. She had put on weight around the hips, her chin had begun to sag with a look of middle-aged plumpness, and no amount of alcohol daubing could make the pouches under her eyes entirely disappear. Her beautiful nose stayed the same, but it was unobtrusive, too, and did not compensate for the rest. Only one man seemed to care for her, and he was Richard. But he had told her at the start of their relationship that he would never want to marry. He'd been born a bachelor, he said, and he would die one. That rather selfish bachelor attitude accounted, Esther thought, for his cautiousness about money, and the fact he'd never bought her a single present, except at Christmas. But neither was Esther in a hurry to marry. Besides, she was not quite sure she loved Richard enough to marry him.

Richard, and Esther, too, were among the few people who were thrown into a panic on the day in September 1938 when Czechoslovakia was abandoned by the Allied powers. Only a month before, Esther had learned through a letter from a friend in Germany that her former husband had disappeared from Berlin, and that all his properties had been confiscated. Esther had heard of five or six of her friends who had disappeared during the previous year. Esther told Richard she would like to move into his flat with him, and he agreed. Esther was frightened, and she felt less frightened living with Richard. As to what the neighbors said about their having two different names, Richard didn't give a hang, and neither did she. But Esther was not too frightened to join firefighting and plane-spotting squads, and to stand side by side with the Londoners during the air battles of Britain. Both she and Richard stayed in London during the whole war, and neither of them ever suggested leaving for a safer place inland. With Richard it was a fatalistic indifference; with Esther, perhaps, that she never quite had time to realize how frightened she was. At the end of the war, when Germany was defeated, and she had been cited for personal bravery in saving an old man from a burning building near St. Paul's, Esther realized that she had accepted the facts of the war with a numbness that, five years before, would have been completely unlike her. She realized, too, that she accepted Richard now in the same way. She no longer considered him in her secret heart a faute de mieux. She had grown to love his ugliness, his indifference, his dependability, which was nothing really but a bachelor's rigid routine. The war years had welded their existences together, and it was no longer thinkable to Esther that she, or even he, could live alone again.

The friends they had in London were mostly artists, writers, and editors, not the sort of people to care whether she and Richard were married or not, but it had begun to bother Esther vaguely—like a tooth that doesn't yet hurt but ought to be taken care of before it does—that she and Richard were not married. But whenever Esther hinted that they should marry, Richard escaped behind the wall of economic fact: he ­didn't have the money to support a wife, he said.

“I don't see that we'd be spending any more than now. I'd keep on working, you know,” Esther said.

Richard pondered this a moment. “This doesn't embarrass you, this kind of life, does it, Esther?”

Esther assured him that it didn't, but it did, a little. And as people got to be fifty and over, it seemed the logical thing to her to consolidate oneself somehow. Esther said this, and Richard simply looked blank.

“You said you're making twelve or thirteen pounds a week?” Esther asked. It varied because of Richard's freelance writing.

“Yes,” Richard answered solemnly.

“Well, I make seven a week. That's at least nineteen or twenty pounds a week. We could live on that. We're living on it now.”

“Esther, I—” he said between puffs as he got his pipe going. “If I do a thing like getting married, I want to do it right, not on a shoestring.”

The conversation more or less ended there. They had said the same things before. Esther did not want to remind him again that she would be just as happy living the way they were now, that she didn't want any fancy apartment with new linens and expensive dishes. She was not twenty years old anymore. But the fact was, she did not really know the state of his finances. Was he in debt? Was he already getting some of his frozen accounts out of Germany and banking them here? Did he really make about twelve pounds a week, or less? She felt most of his answers were only half-truths, and so long as she was not his wife, she felt she could not insist on exact answers.

So their life went on in the same way, and Esther adjusted herself to the prospect of an eternal loose relationship with Richard, as she adjusted herself to the prospect of eternal rationing in England. Things were far worse in Germany, she knew. But her cousin, Lotte Kiefer, who had just come from Munich, had told her that a great many German firms were on their feet again. Esther told Richard that Lotte had said Leopold Beckhof, the son of the founder of Beckhof Verlag, had bought back half his presses. Richard surprised her by saying that he knew it already. He had exchanged a few letters with Leopold's secretary, he said, because he thought it was a good idea to keep Beckhof Verlag informed where he was.