The Bad Seed (18 page)

Rhoda moved off slowly, an expression of patient bafflement in her eyes; then, throwing herself on the sofa, she buried her face in a pillow and wept plaintively, peering up at her mother through her laced fingers. But the performance was not at all convincing, and Christine looked back at her child with a new, dispassionate interest, and thought:
She’s an amateur so far; but she’s improving day by day. She’s perfecting her act. In a few years, her act won’t seem corny at all. It’ll be most convincing then, I’m sure.

“Answer me!” she said in sudden anger. “Answer me!”

The child, seeing she was not impressing her mother, got up from the sofa, walked leisurely to Christine, and stood before her. “I hit him with the shoe,” she said calmly. “I had to hit him with the shoe, Mother. What else could I do?”

Mrs. Penmark’s anger mounted, and in the desperation of her panic, she slapped the child so hard across her face that she staggered backward and fell into one of the big, overstuffed chairs, her legs stiff and straight before her. Christine pressed her palms against her forehead, feeling sick and frightened. She sat down to compose herself, and when her anger had vanished, and there was left only a feeling of nausea in her stomach, a sense of unreality in her mind, she said wearily, “Do you understand that you murdered the boy?”

“It was his fault,” said Rhoda patiently. “It was all Claude’s fault, not mine. If he’d given me the medal like I told him to, I wouldn’t have hit him.” She began to cry, pressing her forehead against the arm of the chair. “It was Claude’s fault,” she said; “it was his fault.”

Christine closed her eyes and said, “Tell me what happened. I want the truth this time. I know you killed him, so there’s no sense in lying again. Start from the beginning and tell me how it happened.”

Rhoda threw herself into her mother’s arms and said, “I won’t do it again, Mother! I won’t ever do it again!”

Christine wiped the child’s eyes, brushed down her bangs, and said quietly, “I’m waiting for your answer. Tell me. I must know now.”

“He wouldn’t give me the medal like I told him to, that’s all.… So then he ran away from me and hid on the wharf, but I found him there, and told him I’d hit him with my shoe if he didn’t give me the medal. He shook his head and said, ‘No’; so I hit him the first time, and then he took off the medal and gave it to me, like I asked him to.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, he tried to run away, so I hit him with the shoe again. He kept crying and making a noise, and I was afraid somebody would hear him. So I hit him again, Mother. I hit him harder this time, and he fell in the water.”

Christine closed her eyes and said, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

The little girl was crying harder now, her mouth twisted with her apprehension. “I didn’t take the medal. Claude gave me the medal when I asked for it. But after he gave it to me, he said he was going to tell Miss Octavia I took it from him, and then she’d make me give it back. That’s why I hit him after the first time.”

Mrs. Penmark thought:
What must I say? What must I do now?

Suddenly the child wiped away her tears, embraced her mother, and said coquettishly, “Oh, I’ve got the prettiest mother! I’ve got the nicest mother! That’s what I tell everybody. I say, ‘I’ve got the sweetest—’ ”

“How did the bruises get on the back of his hands, Rhoda?”

“He tried to pull himself back on the wharf, after he fell in the water. But I wouldn’t have hit him any more, except that he kept saying he was going to tell on me. So I hit him on the hands to make him turn loose of the wharf. But he wouldn’t turn loose right away, no matter how hard I hit him, Mother; so I had to hit him on the head some more, and on the hands some more,
too. I hit him the hardest of all that time; and that’s how I got blood on my shoe. So finally he closed his eyes and turned loose of the wharf like I told him to. But it was all his fault, Mother. He shouldn’t have said he was going to tell on me, should he?”

Then, remembering what Leroy had told her, the child cried again, but in fright this time, gasping out between her sobs, “Are they going to put me in that little chair and turn on the electricity?” She came closer to her mother and said, “It wasn’t my fault Claude got drowned. It was his fault.”

Christine walked about the room in aimless panic, her hands pressed against her cheeks. The child clung to her mother’s waist and said, trembling with sudden terror, “You won’t let them put me in that chair, will you?… Mother! Mother! You won’t let them hurt me, will you?”

Christine stopped suddenly, turned to the frightened child, and said, “Nobody will hurt you. I don’t know what must be done now, but I promise you nobody will hurt you.”

In relief, the child wiped her eyes. She smiled in her old manner, her dimple showing effectively. She went through all her charming antics for her mother; and she said at length in her small, ingenuous voice, “If I give you a basket of kisses, what will you give me?”

“Please!” said Christine. “Please!”

“Give me the answer, Mother! If I give you a basket of kisses, what will you—”

“Go into your room and read,” said Mrs. Penmark harshly. Then, in a weary voice, she added, “I want to think. I must decide what’s best to be done.”

But even as she spoke, she knew she was unable, in that moment of stress, either to make the decisions now inevitable for her new, required attitudes toward her child, or to formulate the plans necessary to put into motion such decisions, even if made. Her mind no longer moved in the straight line of rational
thought; it turned like a rotating wheel in rapid, intense circles of emotion which she seemed unable to escape, the things the child had confessed repeating themselves over and over in a neat, inaudible pattern in her ear.

She had wanted to assuage her doubts, to know the truth—and now she did know. What she’d dreaded in fantasy so long, she faced at last in unalterable reality. And now that she did know, she comforted herself, even in this moment of turmoil, with the certainty that no matter how dreadful the truth had been, at least she could no longer torture herself with half-knowledge, or lash at her mind with doubt.

After a time she came into her child’s room and said, “Why don’t you go into the park and play? I want to be alone. I must think what’s best to be done for all of us.”

She added, as Rhoda nodded, smiled, and approached the door, “You must promise me you won’t tell anybody else what you’ve told me. It’s very important. Do you understand? Do you—” But seeing the tolerant, contemptuous look in her daughter’s eyes, she suddenly felt inexperienced and a little gauche. Her voice wavered and ceased, for she knew her warning only betrayed the depth of her own amateurish ineptness, that there was no chance whatever that Rhoda would needlessly reveal what she’d done. Then, wearily, while the child stood in amusement before her, though outwardly submissive, as she always was, she added, “How did you manage it with the old lady in Baltimore? I know so much now, another thing won’t matter greatly.” And Rhoda, sure of her triumph, smiled and said meekly, “I shoved her, Mother. I shoved her a little.”

When her child had gone, she went to her bathroom, her purpose not clear in her mind; she stood there in indecision, but seeing her reflection in the mirror, she pointed her finger at her image and laughed shrilly. Then, resting her head against the glass, her arms hanging limply at her sides, she knew she must
live with her secret as best she could; she must optimistically hope for the best.

She wanted more than anything to discuss her daughter with another, but she knew she could not, certainly not at the present time. It would be difficult even to tell Kenneth, as, of course, she inevitably must. Then, when the desire to confide was too strong for her to bear longer, she made a sort of left-hand, compromise confession to Reginald Tasker, a confession she was sure he’d fail to interpret at its true worth. She telephoned him and said she’d been working steadily on the structure of her novel. She’d decided the book would revolve around a criminal child, a child not unlike what any of the murderesses she’d been reading about had once been.

“How about the mother? Is she going to be criminal, too?”

“No. The mother will be commonplace, and rather stodgy.”

“There’s your conflict,” said Reggie. “When you figure out what you’re going to do with it, let me know, won’t you?”

They chatted for a time about people they both knew, and when they’d finished, Christine sat again by the window, her hands resting in her lap. The wild spinning in her head had lessened now, and she forced her mind to consider the courses open to her in dealing with her daughter’s future. The first thing to consider was the child’s sanity; was Rhoda actually insane and, as such, not responsible for what she’d done? If she were insane, didn’t she belong in some place where she could be treated, and perhaps cured—where she’d be prevented, at least, from doing further harm to people? But almost at once she shook her head in denial. Rhoda was not insane, and anyone who knew her at all knew that well. But even if she were, even if she and Kenneth agreed later on that that was the best thing to do with her, how did you arrange such matters? Would Kenneth’s family have to know? She shook her head helplessly. She did not know how these things were done.

She got up suddenly and walked about her apartment, arranging and rearranging her belongings without conscious thought, as though her actions were merely the outward mechanics of an inward turbulence she could not so easily arrange. She told herself she’d read no more of the criminal cases; they would only serve now to enhance her anxieties, to deepen her depression; and then, moving with the detached precision of a walking toy, she began eagerly to read again, as if knowing, somewhere in her being, the cases would point out to her, sooner or later, things she wanted to learn; would reveal to her at last some secret knowledge of her own life—knowledge which, she felt now, she could no longer reasonably avoid.

She read cases concerned with the work of the more celebrated women mass murderers, all of whom had been interested only in the profit in it for them. There was Mrs. Archer-Gilligan, owner of a home for the aged, who took her guests on a lump-sum, life basis and who took the proper precautions to see that she did not go into the red; there was Belle Gunness of Indiana, who, after striking her admirers with a hatchet, was said to have chopped them up into a sort of silage and thriftily fed them to her pigs; there was Miss Bertha Hill, who lived in a village called “Pleasant Valley”; there was Christine Wilson, the English girl, who used colchicum with such enthusiasm that the doctors of her day thought a new, unknown epidemic had broken out in England; there were Mrs. Hahn, Mrs. Brennan, and Miss Jane Toppan; there was Susi Olah, who, almost unaided, practically wiped out the male population of two Hungarian villages.

There was a series of cases involving the male mass murderers, but she read only one of them: Albert Guay, the Quebec jeweler, blew up a plane and the people in it, to collect the trip insurance he’d placed on the life of his wife, one of the passengers. There was a note attached to the Guay case. In Reginald’s opinion, he’d leaped, with his twenty-three victims, into the ranks of the distinguished
mass murderers not through merit but through accident. Compared with such outstanding artists as Alfred Cline, James P. Watson, or the Incomparable Bessie Denker, he’d been fumbling and foolish indeed.

Mrs. Penmark laid aside the folders, stood beside her window that overlooked the park, and said in a puzzled voice, “Bessie Denker. Bessie Denker— Where have I heard that name before?” She toyed with the cord of the Venetian blind, and after a moment her lips, as though functioning without the prompting of thought, shaped the words, “Bessie Denker! August Denker! Emma Denker!… And there was an old lady we called Cousin Ada Gustafson.”

In sudden panic, she called Rhoda in from the park; and when the child stood before her, she said harshly, “Take the shoes and put them in the incinerator!”

The child moved away to obey her, and Christine called out in a shrill, agonized voice, “Hurry! Hurry, Rhoda! Put them in the incinerator! Burn them quickly!”

She stood beside her door, watching while the little girl went down the hall, lowered the chute, and dropped the bloodstained shoes into the furnace below.

Later that afternoon Mrs. Breedlove entered the Penmark apartment in her usual aggressive, effervescent manner. She’d been shopping, and she sank down into the first chair she saw, saying, “I bought both of us a little present. It’s something I’ve wanted
for a long time, but could never find before. I knew you’d want one, too, because your kitchen is just like mine.”

It was a soap dish to be fastened above a kitchen sink. “You don’t have to drill holes in the tiles to put it up,” she said. “It fastens to the tiles by suction.” She exhibited the suction cups, and continued. “You coat the inside with castor oil, of all things, and slap it on the tiles with a firm, quick motion. It sticks like it was nailed there.”

But Mrs. Penmark was still under the shock of what she’d recently heard from her child, and she listened to Monica in a withdrawn silence, smiling vaguely, nodding her head at regular intervals, and hearing little her guest said.

Mrs. Breedlove fanned herself and went on. “The arrogance of salespeople never ceases to astonish me. When I bought the dishes, the salesman said, ‘I’d better show you how to put it up, madam.’ And so I said, ‘My dear man, I can read a bit, I assure you; and the directions are plainly printed on the card.’ And then he smirked in that superior way men affect, particularly when there are other men around listening, and said, ‘The ladies aren’t much good when it comes to mechanical things. My wife can’t even screw in a light bulb and keep it straight.’ And so I said, ‘I daresay I can fix anything you or any other man can fix, and what’s more, it wouldn’t surprise me if I couldn’t fix a lot of things you can’t fix.’ ”

She talked on and on in a pleased, hearty voice, repeating the things she’d said to the salesman, and the things he’d said to her. Mrs. Penmark smiled in agreement, and sat with her hands so inert in her lap that already they seemed to have lost some of their realistic, everyday power. Mrs. Breedlove’s story came to her vaguely, not as a thing in itself, but only as a background for her own thoughts, for her mind was still on the problem of Rhoda, and what to do with her now.… Should she go to the police and confess the things her child had done?
Was that the best solution? Of course, it wasn’t likely a child so young would be arrested and tried for murder; but certainly they’d take her away and put her in an institution.
They used to call them reform schools,
she thought, nodding again, and smiling reassuringly in Monica’s direction,
but I’m not sure if they still call them that.