September Song (12 page)

If only John had called her those three years ago! Then the burden of her guilt toward Toby would have been worth it. The saddest of all expressions: if only…

He hesitated, stopped, turned around and looked up at the house. “Poor man! To lose his wife,” she then recalled his saying of John. For the sake of her belated and sure to be short-lived happiness she was making of him the same lonely object that he had generously pitied in the other man, her lover. Was he hoping that at the last minute she would call him back? Was he thinking of returning, asking her to reconsider? If he did, what would her answer be? A moment ago she would have known, now she was unsure. Oh, let him turn again, get on with it, she prayed. Let him decide for me. But when he did just that she was frightened—frightened of herself.

She felt her purpose falter as the weight of her years settled upon her. It forced from her a sigh of resignation. It sounded to her like her last breath.

From the door she called him back.

Now what? his carriage seemed to say as he plodded up the walk.

“Please, Toby, forgive me, if you can,” she said. “I'm sorry. It won't happen again. I'll stay. If you want me.”

He nodded wearily.

Well, she asked herself, what warmer welcome back was she entitled to?

Her brother would say, “I'm glad you came to your senses.” Her daughter would be disappointed in her, would think she was a fool to throw away her last chance for a little happiness. Her sons would think she had nobly sacrificed herself. There was nothing noble in it. Her heart longed for what it was too old for.

“I'll try harder,” he said.

Then it was her turn to nod wearily.

Around her neck she felt a collar tighten. He and she were teamed together to the end by the yoke of years.

But whereas before she had told herself that she might still have quite a long time left to live, she told herself now that at least it would not be for long.

Mortal Enemies

H
E MIGHT BE OLD
, his eyesight not quite what it once was, his hand shaky, but he could still shoot. He had killed that wood-chuck with a standing shot at a distance of a hundred yards. The one animal he would kill with no intention of eating it. Varmints!

You knew you were alive for another spring with the arrival in the mail of the seed catalogs. You sent off your order: old reliables, newly developed strains. The snow melted, the ground thawed, the grass greened, the trees budded. You emerged from hibernation. So did the woodchucks.

He could picture them waking to their inner alarm clocks, lean and hungry, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, yawning and stretching, issuing forth and finding Burpee's catalog on the stoop. Their mouths would water as they leafed through its full-color pages. Paws lifted, they would pray in chorus that Farmer Thompson had come through the winter and was planting their garden.

You turned your plot and raked it smooth, lined the rows as straight as music paper, planted, fertilized, mulched, watered, weeded. You sweated, you ached. The peas reached out their tendrils and climbed the stakes, blossomed, the pods appeared, swelled. You could hardly wait for them to ripen. Came the day when you decided that tomorrow you would pick your first. You could taste them already. Overnight a woodchuck tunneled under the fence and got them. Those it did not eat it wantonly destroyed. You had been through it times out of number and still you were outraged afresh. Varmints!

For the past few years he had had to give up gardening. Using the turning fork hurt his bad hip. Getting up off his knees had become painful. His name remained on the mailing lists for seed catalogs but the garden plot had gone to weeds. Yet as surely as the woodchucks came aboveground so his old hatred of them resurfaced. He would have exterminated them if he could. Varmints!

This one had moved in some days earlier, settling at the edge of the lawn, and in its self-satisfied survey of things in the morning seemed to think the place belonged to it. It was this that he resented, this impudence.

He had lain in wait for it. They rose early to do their mischief while the world slept. The head appeared like that of a turtle from its shell. Slowly the body emerged. This was an old one, big. Many a garden it must have feasted on. It stood upright on the mound of earth thrown up in digging its hole, looking about. It pleased him to allow it a last moment of smugness. Slowly—for they were alert to the least movement over a long range—he raised the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed, drew a deep breath, released half of it, and squeezed the trigger, timing the shot to go off when the gun barrel wavered back on target. The animal was shaped like a bowling pin and when the bullet struck it toppled over like one.

He leaned the rifle against the wall. Once more it had served him well. He labored across the lawn, a hitch in his gait from favoring that hip.

“Varmint!” he said as he stood over the dead animal. But this time the satisfaction he had always felt before in having eliminated another of the pests did not come to him. He regretted what he had done. He wanted everything to go on living. What they had in common had made peace between him and his old enemy.

The Dead Languages

F
OR A YEAR
, since his retirement, he had lived the life of a hermit, his days as alike as if spent in silent prayer, going nowhere, seeing nobody, he who had always loved company, conversation, loved to travel, to exercise his French and his Italian. He was at his desk by eight in the morning, and often he worked past the evening news hour. He, the old newspaperman—byline, Bancroft award—curious about everything, hardly knew what was going on in the world anymore, absorbed as he was in his book. The daylong clackety-clack of the typewriter (he was too old for a word processor) was like that of wheels on rails. He was the engineer, howling through the crossings, drawing behind him his finished chapters like coaches, and now pulling the whistle to announce his arrival at the end of the line. It was from his wife that he learned of the sensational multiple murder that had happened not long ago, right in his own back yard. This was not the first time she had spoken to him about it, she said impatiently. But he never listened to anything she said. She'd might as well be talking to a fencepost.

It was a case to make him lay aside his book (it was all but finished anyway), come out of retirement, and rejoin the world of the living—and the dead. A seventeen-year-old model boy, honor student in the local high school, was charged with slaughtering his family of four: his father, his stepmother, his older brother and his three-year-old half-brother. With his father's 9mm Walther he had pumped fourteen shots into them. As the last person known to have seen the victims alive, he was routinely questioned. He had broken down and confessed to the crime before the night of it was over. He was said to have been motivated by the ambition to inherit the family estate, valued at some hundred thousand dollars, and with it establish a worldwide enforcement agency for the protection of wildlife. The father and the dead brother had been avid hunters.

Ordinarily the argument would have gone like this:

Defense attorney: He did it because he's crazy.

Prosecutor: How do you know he's crazy?

Defense attorney: Because he did it.

Now, on the eve of the trial, the boy's lawyer told reporters that he was not going to enter a plea of insanity. He claimed there was no evidence to convict. What about that confession? Forced.

Interest in the case was widespread. He knew without asking his former editor that, being on the scene, he would be wanted to come out of retirement and cover it. He still kept his old press card, and the name of his paper was enough to gain him a seat in the front row of the press corps.

He had been in the county courthouse many times over the years, for this had been his legal residence while it was still only his summer home, but never before above the ground floor. He had gone there to renew his driver's license, search his deed, apply for a passport, but having been excused from jury duty on the grounds that he alone could do the work he did, he was seeing the courtroom now for the first time. The sight was not reassuring. It was vaulty, full of echoes, and the only air conditioning was a pair of noisy big standing electric fans. The attorneys' backs would be toward you as they questioned the witnesses. Taking notes was going to be a strain.

Even the most lurid of trials had its dull sessions. At times on those somnolent summer afternoons with the fans droning hypnotically, jurors and even members of the press corps nodded. He was too old a hand for that, but he was also old enough not to concoct interest out of nothing and file a daily dispatch to his paper. That hard-earned byline of his was not to be wasted. Often when court was adjourned in the afternoon, he walked past the cub reporters queued up for the courthouse's one telephone, grateful for his age and the status it had gained him, his freedom to judge for himself what was newsworthy.

It was his editor on the phone:

“Where the hell were you yesterday?”

“What was that?”

“WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU YESTERDAY?”

“In court.”

“You'd might as well not have been. Didn't you hear the testimony? The kid's lawyer, the one they woke at three in the morning to represent him, was not allowed by the state police sergeant to accompany him into the polygraph room. He was denied his rights. He has gunned down his entire family and he's going to go free. He will even inherit that hundred thousand dollars he was after. Every paper in the state has headlined it. All but ours.”

“I've been telling you for years that your hearing was going bad,” said his wife. “‘I hear what I want to hear,' that's your comeback. Now maybe you'll do something about it.”

In the doctor's office he was placed in a soundproof booth wearing earphones. He could see the audiologist through the window.

“Raise your hand if you hear this sound,” she said.

Pleased with his performance, he raised his hand as eagerly as a bright schoolchild, until he began to miss the cues.

“Say the word ‘grass.' Say the word ‘soon.' Say the word ‘park.' Say the word ‘dark.'”

This went on for half an hour.

“You have lost about fifty percent of your hearing,” the doctor told him. “A bit more than that in your right ear, a bit less in the left.”

“What can be done for me?”

“Unfortunately, yours is a case in which surgery is not indicated. There is no impairment to the mechanism of the ears. Yours is the commonest kind of hearing loss. Degeneration of the nerves. It says here that you are retired. Did you spend your working life in a noisy environment? A shipyard? An assembly line?”

“At a typewriter.”

“That could do it. A low repetitive noise, prolonged over years, can be as destructive as loud ones.”

“Is it going to get worse?”

“Most likely. It is sounds in the upper register that you cannot hear. That and certain consonants.”

“Good thing then I'm not Polish,” he said. He didn't think it was so funny either.

“How could it have happened so suddenly?” he asked.

“It didn't. It has been coming on for a long time. You just didn't become aware of it until it reached a certain point.”

He told about the day of discovery when he missed the crucial testimony at the murder trial. Surely that indicated something acute, not chronic, something treatable?

“Think back,” said the doctor. “Can you not see yourself cupping your ears, puzzling over what you'd heard, not quite catching the words, asking people what they'd said?”

A mirror had been held up to him.

“Sometimes my hearing is better than at other times,” he volunteered hopefully.

The doctor said nothing for what soon came to seem a long time, meanwhile regarding him steadily. At length he asked gravely, “Are you sure of that?”

Initially he was irritated. Who better than he knew the ups and downs of his hearing? But having said with some indignation, “Of course I'm sure,” he regretted it when the doctor said, “Quite sure?”

It seemed to him that, just as when he was in the test booth, the doctor was moderating his volume. He thought of the accused boy in the polygraph room attached to monitors as he had just been, and he wished that he was represented by counsel.

“Hmm,” the doctor said, and, enunciating all too carefully, “now don't take offense, but I must tell you that intermittent loss and gain of hearing is commonly associated with syphilis.”

Going home on the evening train he was not only deaf, he was afflicted with tertiary paresis and had visions of winding up like Maupassant, naked on all fours in a padded cell and finger-painting with his excrement. How long had he had it? How had he gotten it? Had he infected his wife? His children?

“Stan!” (His family doctor, whom he had called at home, out of office hours.) “I've got syphilis!”

“Who says so?”

“The ear doctor. He told me.”

“I've been testing you for syphilis for years. Not that I suspected you of having it. Just standard practice.”

“Ah, but there are two different tests. He told me. One doesn't show the kind that affects the hearing.”

“You're telling me. That's the test you've had. You haven't got syphilis. Meanwhile you seem to be hearing me all right.”

“On the phone. With the earpiece pressed close. Then I still do fairly well.”

“You haven't got syphilis. You'd have had to have it for years for it to affect your hearing.”

“The doctor says I've been losing my hearing for years. I just hadn't noticed.”

“You'd have had to develop other symptoms of syphilis in that time. You didn't get your deafness off a Dixie cup.”

He had been healed of all his former afflictions. Unable to believe that in this age of commonplace medical miracles nothing could be done for this one, he consulted another specialist, although the first was famous in the field.