The Galton Case (3 page)

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m telling you to.”

“You could at least tell me in private. How much longer do I have to wait?”

“I thought you were going to read to your Aunt Maria.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“You promised.”

“You were the one who promised for me. I played badminton with Cassie, and that’s my good turn for the day.”

She moved away, deliberately exaggerating the swing of her hips. Howell glared at the chronometer on his wrist, as if it was the source of all his troubles. “I must be getting along. I have other calls to make.”

“Can you give me the wife’s description?” I said. “Or her name?”

“I don’t recall her name. As for appearance, she was a
little blue-eyed brunette, rather thin in spite of her condition. Mrs. Galton—no, on second thought I wouldn’t ask her about the girl unless she brings the matter up herself.”

The doctor turned to go, but Sable detained him: “Is it all right for Mr. Archer to question her? I mean, it won’t affect her heart or bring on an asthmatic attack?”

“I can’t guarantee it. If Maria insists on having an attack, there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. Seriously, though, if Tony’s on her mind she might as well talk about him. It’s better than sitting and brooding. Good-by, Mr. Archer, nice to meet you. Good day, Sable.”

T
HE
maid took Sable and me to a sitting-room on the second floor where Mrs. Galton was waiting. The room smelled of medicine, and had a hushed hospital atmosphere. The heavy drapes were partly drawn over the windows. Mrs. Galton was resting in semi-twilight on a chaise longue, with a robe over her knees.

She was fully dressed, with something white and frilly at her withered throat; and she held her gray head ramrod straight. Her voice was reedy, but surprisingly resonant. It seemed to carry all the remaining force of her personality:

“You’ve kept me waiting, Gordon. It’s nearly time for my lunch. I expected you before Dr. Howell came.”

“I’m awfully sorry, Mrs. Galton. I was delayed at home.”

“Don’t apologize. I detest apologies, they’re really just further demands on one’s patience.” She cocked a bright eye
at him. “Has that wife of yours been giving you trouble again?”

“Oh, no, nothing of that sort.”

“Good. You know my thoughts on the subject of divorce. On the other hand, you should have taken my advice and not married her. A man who waits until he’s nearly fifty to get married should give up the idea entirely. Mr. Galton was in his late forties when we were married. As a direct consequence, I’ve had to endure nearly twenty years of widowhood.”

“It’s been hard, I know,” Sable said with unction.

The maid had started out of the room. Mrs. Galton called her back: “Wait a minute. I want you to tell Miss Hildreth to bring me my lunch herself. She can bring up a sandwich and eat it with me if she likes. You tell Miss Hildreth that.”

“Yes, Mrs. Galton.”

The old lady waved us into chairs, one on each side of her, and turned her eye on me. It was bright and alert but somehow inhuman, like a bird’s eye. It looked at me as if I belonged to an entirely different species:

“Is this the man who is going to find my prodigal son for me?”

“Yes, this is Mr. Archer.”

“I’m going to give it a try,” I said, remembering the doctor’s advice. “I can’t promise any definite results. Your son has been missing for a very long time.”

“I’m better aware of that than you, young man. I last set eyes on Anthony on the eleventh day of October 1936. We parted in bitter anger and hatred. I’ve lived ever since with that anger and hatred corroding my heart. But I can’t die with it inside of me. I want to see Anthony again, and talk to him. I want to forgive him. I want him to forgive me.”

Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she’d been playing tricks with
her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid.

“Forgive you?” I said.

“For treating him as I did. He was a young fool, and he made some disastrous mistakes, but none of them really justified Mr. Galton’s action, and mine, in casting him off. It was a shameful action, and if it’s not too late I intend to rectify it. If he still has his little wife, I’m willing to accept her. I authorize you to tell him that. I want to see my grandchild before I die.”

I looked at Sable. He shook his head slightly, deprecatingly. His client was just a little out of context, but she had quick insight, at least into other people:

“I know what you’re both thinking. You’re thinking that Anthony is dead. If he were dead, I’d know it here.” Her hand strayed over the flat silk surface of her breast. “He’s my only son. He must be alive, and he must be somewhere. Nothing is lost in the universe.”

Except human beings, I thought. “I’ll do my best, Mrs. Galton. There are one or two things you can do to help me. Give me a list of his friends at the time of his disappearance.”

“I never knew his friends.”

“He must have had friends in college. Wasn’t he attending Stanford?”

“He’d left there the previous spring. He didn’t even wait to graduate. Anyway, none of his schoolmates knew what happened to him. His father canvassed them thoroughly at the time.”

“Where was your son living after he left college?”

“In a flat in the slums of San Francisco. With that woman.”

“Do you have the address?”

“I believe I may have it somewhere. I’ll have Miss Hildreth look for it.”

“That will be a start, anyway. When he left here with his wife, did they plan to go back to San Francisco?”

“I haven’t any idea. I didn’t see them before they left.”

“I understood they came to visit you.”

“Yes, but they didn’t even stay the night.”

“What might help most,” I said carefully, “would be if you could tell me the exact circumstances of their visit, and their departure. Anything your son said about his plans, anything the girl said, anything you remember about her. Do you remember her name?”

“He called her Teddy. I have no idea if that was her name or not. We had very little conversation. I can’t recall what was said. The atmosphere was unpleasant, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.
She
left a bad taste in my mouth. It was so evident that she was a cheap little gold-digger.”

“How do you know?”

“I have eyes. I have ears.” Anger had begun to whine in the undertones of her voice. “She was dressed and painted like a woman of the streets, and when she opened her mouth—well, she spoke the language of the streets. She made coarse jokes about the child in her womb, and how”—her voice faded almost out—“it got there. She had no respect for herself as a woman, no moral standards. That girl destroyed my son.”

She’d forgotten all about her hope of reconciliation. The angry wheezing in the passages of her head sounded like a ghost in a ruined house. Sable was looking at her anxiously, but he held his tongue.

“Destroyed him?” I said.

“Morally, she destroyed him. She possessed him like an evil spirit. My son would never have taken the money if it hadn’t been for the spell she cast on him. I know that with utter certitude.”

Sable leaned forward in his chair. “What money are you referring to?”

The money Anthony stole from his father. Haven’t I told you about it, Gordon? No, I don’t believe I have. I’ve told no one, I’ve always been so ashamed.” She lifted her hands and dropped them in her robed lap. “But now I can forgive him for that, too.”

“How much money was involved?” I said.

“I don’t know exactly how much, to the penny. Several thousand dollars, anyway. Ever since the day the banks closed, Mr. Galton had had a habit of keeping a certain amount of cash for current expenses.”

“Where did he keep it?”

“In his private safe, in the study. The combination was on a piece of paper pasted to the inside of his desk drawer. Anthony must have found it there, and used it to open the safe. He took everything in it, all the money, and even some of my jewels which I kept there.”

“Are you sure he took it?”

“Unfortunately, yes. It disappeared at the same time he did. It’s why he hid himself away, and never came back to us.”

Sable’s glum look deepened. Probably he was thinking the same thing I was: that several thousand dollars in cash, in the slums of San Francisco, in the depths of the depression, were a very likely passport to oblivion.

But we couldn’t say it out loud. With her money, and her asthma, and her heart, Mrs. Galton was living at several removes from reality. Apparently that was how it had to be.

“Do you have a picture of your son, taken not too long before his disappearance?”

“I believe I have. I’ll ask Cassie to have a look. She should be coming soon.”

“In the meantime, can you give me any other information? Particularly about where your son might have gone, who or where he might have visited.”

“I know nothing of his life after he left the university. He
cut himself off from all decent society. He was perversely bound to sink in the social scale, to declass himself. I’m afraid my son had a
nostalgie de la boue
—a nostalgia for the gutter. He tried to cover it over with fancy talk about re-establishing contact with the earth, becoming a poet of the people, and such nonsense. His real interest was dirt for dirt’s own sake. I brought him up to be pure in thought and desire, but somehow—somehow he became fascinated with the pitch that defileth. And the pitch defiled him.”

Her breathing was noisy. She had begun to shake, and scratch with waxy fingers at the robe that covered her knees.

Sable leaned toward her solicitously. “You mustn’t excite yourself, Mrs. Galton. It was all over long ago.”

“It’s not all over. I want Anthony back. I have nobody. I have nothing. He was stolen away from me.”

“We’ll get him back if it’s humanly possible.”

“Yes, I know you will, Gordon.” Her mood had changed like a fitful wind. Her head inclined toward Sable’s shoulder as though to rest against it. She spoke like a little girl betrayed by time and loss, by fading hair and wrinkles and the fear of death: “I’m a foolish angry old woman. You’re always so good to me. Anthony will be good to me, too, won’t he, when he comes? In spite of all I’ve said against him, he was a darling boy. He was always good to his poor mother, and he will be again.”

She was chanting in a ritual of hope. If she said it often enough, it would have to come true.

“I’m sure he will, Mrs. Galton.”

Sable rose and pressed her hand. I was always a little suspicious of men who put themselves out too much for rich old ladies, or even poor ones. But then it was part of his job.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “I want my lunch. What’s going on downstairs?”

She lunged half out of her long chair and got hold of a
wired bellpush on the table beside it. She kept her finger pressed on the button until her lunch arrived. That was a tense five minutes.

I
T CAME
on a covered platter carried by the woman I’d seen on the badminton court. She had changed her shorts for a plain linen dress which managed to conceal her figure, if not her fine brown legs. Her blue eyes were watchful.

“You kept me waiting, Cassie,” the old woman said. “What on earth were you doing?”

“Preparing your food. Before that I played some badminton with Sheila Howell.”

“I might have known you two would be enjoying yourselves while I sit up here starving.”

“Oh come, it’s not as bad as all that.”

“It’s not for you to say. You’re not my doctor. Ask August Howell, and he’ll tell you how important it is that I have my nourishment.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Maria. I thought you wouldn’t want to be disturbed while you were in conference.”

She stood just inside the doorway, still holding the tray like a shield in front of her. She wasn’t young: close up, I could see the fortyish lines in her face and the knowledge in her blue eyes. But she held herself with adolescent awkwardness, immobilized by feelings she couldn’t express.

“Well, you needn’t stand there like a dummy.”

Cassie moved suddenly. She set the tray on the table and uncovered the food. There was a good deal of food. Mrs. Galton began to fork salad into her mouth. The movements of her hands and jaws were rapid and mechanical. She was oblivious to the three of us watching her.

Sable and I retreated into the hallway and along it to the head of the stairs which curved in a baronial sweep down to the entrance hall. He leaned on the iron balustrade and lit a cigarette.

“Well, Lew, what do you think?”

I lit a cigarette of my own before I replied. “I think it’s a waste of time and money.”

“I told you that.”

“But you want me to go ahead with it anyway?”

“I can’t see any other way to handle it, or handle her. Mrs. Galton takes a good deal of handling.”

“Can you trust her memory? She seems to be reliving the past. Sometimes old people get mixed up about what actually happened. That story about the money he stole, for example. Do you believe it?”

“I’ve never known her to lie. And I really doubt that she’s as confused as she sounds. She likes to dramatize herself. It’s the only excitement she has left.”

“How old is she?”

“Seventy-three, I believe.”

“That isn’t so old. What about her son?”

“He’ll be about forty-four, if he’s still extant.”

“She doesn’t seem to realize that. She talks about him as if he was still a boy. How long has she been sitting in that room?”

“Ever since I’ve known her, anyway. Ten years. Occasionally, when she has a good day, she lets Miss Hildreth take her for a drive. It doesn’t do much to bring her up to date, though. It’s usually just a quick trip to the cemetery where
her husband is buried. He died soon after Anthony took off. According to Mrs. Galton, that was what killed him. Miss Hildreth says he died of a coronary.”

“Is Miss Hildreth a relative?”

“A distant one, second or third cousin. Cassie’s known the family all her life, and lived with Mrs. Galton since before the war. I’m hoping she can give you something more definite to go on.”