The Graduate (24 page)

Benjamin grabbed the receiver away from her and brought it in front of his face. “Tell me what is happening, Mrs. Robinson! Tell me whre she is!”

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The phone went dead. Benjamin slammed it back down onto its hook and hurried out of the phone booth and into the street. He waved down a taxi as it sped toward him, then jumped out of the way as it squealed to a stop.

“The airport!” he said, clambering in onto the back seat. “Get me to the airport!”

It was just nightfall. It was perfectly quiet on the street and although the air had become dim the lights lining the curb were not yet turned on.

Benjamin paid the driver, then stood a long time next to a tree by the street looking at the house. There were no lights on upstairs.

Downstairs the light was on in the living room but heavy curtains had been drawn across the windows so that only a thin line of light escaped down the center of each window. Suddently the front door opened and a large block of light shot out into the front yard. Benjamin stepped quickly behind the trunk of the large palm tree beside him and watched as Mr. Robinson walked part way down the path of flagstones to pick up a newspaper lying on the grass. When he had gone back inside Benjamin walked quickly to the driveway and back beside the house.

He stopped under the window in the rear corner of the house and looked up at it. Then he called, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“Elaine!”

There was no answer. He waited a moment then found a small stone beside the driveway and tossed it up against the glass. No onecame to the window. The room behind the window remained dark. There was no sound. Finally he walked the rest of the way to the end of the driveway and quietly opened a gate leading into the back yard. He stepped through the gate and stopped next to a bush. The lights were on in the sun porch and through the glass he could see Mrs. Robinson sitting in a chair. He squinted to make her out more clearly. She was sitting in the chair with a drink beside her on a table and was not reading or talking to anyone but seemed to be simply sitting and staring out into the back yard. Benjamin moved closer to the bush. He waited a moment, then returned through the gate and along the driveway to a door at the side of the house. Very slowly he turned the doorknob and opened it. He turned his head to listen in through the open door. No sound came from inside the house. He removed his shoes and rested them beside the door and walked very slowly into the house. He walked in his stocking feet through the dark kitchen, feeling for the sink, then for the table, and finally for the door leading The Graduate

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into the dining room. He pushed it, then stopped, then pushed it again until a shaft of dim light came through and fell across him. Then he stepped quietly through the door and into the dining room, holding his breath as he brought the door closed slowly behind him.

In the dining room it was just barely light enought to see the table and the chairs around it and the heavy curtains hanging over the windows.

He heard Mr. Robinson cough and stopped to crouch where he was standing. He looked quickly back toward the door but then he heard the pages of the newspaper being turned and it was quiet again and he took several slow steps toward the entrance of the dining room.

There was a hall separating the dining room from the living room and by looking around the wall and through the hall he could see Mr.

Robinson sitting in a large chair in the living room holding the newspaper up in front of himself. Just as he was watching him Mr.

Robinson folded the newspaper suddenly in his lap and stood.

Benjamin flattened himself against the wall. He heard Mr. Robinson walking across the rug toward him but then the front door was opened and after a few moments he heard the sound of sprinklers being turned on in the front yard. Mr. Robinson returned into the house and the front door clicked shut.

“I want you to tell George to trim around the sprinkler heads,” Mr.

Robinson said.

It was silent again.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes I did,” Mrs. Robinson said quietly from the porch.

Benjamin listened to Mr. Robinson settle himself again in the chair and open his newspaper. Then he looked around the edge of the door frame to watch him read a page and then when he had turned to the next page and his head was to the side reading the column farthest away Benjamin stepped slowly out into the hall. He stopped, keeping his eyes fixed on Mr. Robinson, then moved slowly to the foot of the stairs. He drew in his breath very slowly, then let it out. He hurried silently up to the dark second story. He moved along the railing until he was opposite the door of Elaine’s room, then opened the door quietly.

He stepped inside, closed the door behind him and turned on the light.

The room was perfectly neat. The bedspread with the pattern of a large red flower in the center of it was smooth and the white shades were drawn evely halfway down across each of the three windows in the The Graduate

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room and the windows were closed and the room smelled as though no one had been in it for several weeks. There was nothing on the desk except a while blotter. The door to the closet was closed. Benjamin stood a few moments, frowning around the room at the walls and the carpet and the bed, then he turned off the light and walked back out into the hall. He walked down the stairs. When he came to the bottom he stepped out into the wide entrance of the living room and stood staring at Mr. Robinson stil sitting in his chair reading the newspaper.

“Where is she,” he said.

Mr. Robinson pitched slightly forward in his chair, then turned his head to gape at Benjamin standing beside him. It took him several moments to recover, then he liften himself slowly up out of the chair, letting the newspaper fall to the carpet.

“Where is she,” Benjamin said again, stepping down into the room.

“Get out,” Mr. Robinson said quietly.

Mrs. Robinson appeared from the porch. She nodded at Benjamin and smiled.

“Hellow Benjamin,” she said.

“Where is she!”

Without looking away from him Mrs. Robinson reached down for the receiver of a telephone on a table beside wehre she was standing and brought it up to her ear. Still keeping her eyes on him she jiggled the two buttons on the phone and waited.

“Hello,” she said finally, “Get me the police, please.”

Benjamin began walking toward her. Mr. Robinson rushed quickly between them and stared up into Benjamin’s face.

“I want you to send a police car to twelve hundred Glenview Road,”

Mrs. Robinson said. “We have a burglar here.”

Benjamin started for her, then checked himself as Mr. Robinson suddenly crouched and clenched his fists in front of him.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Robinson said. “I’ll ask him. Are you armed, Benjamin?” She shook her head. “I don’t think be is.” she said. She nodded. “Thank you.” She hung up the phone.

The three of them stood perfectly still another few moments. Mrs.

Robinson with her hand on the phone, her husband still crouched The Graduate

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slightly in front of her and Benjamin leaning forward staring over Mr.

Robinson’s head at his wife.

“Do you want a quick drink?” Mrs. Robinson said.

Mr. Robinson straightened up slowly and walked past Benjamin and back to his chair. He sat down, took a very deep breath, picked up his newspaper off the carpet and held it up in front of him. Mrs. Robinson walked back to the porch, seated herself next to the drink on the table and stared back out at the dark back yard. Benjamin took several steps out onto the porch after her, looked at her but then turned and crossed back through the living room without saying anything. He stood over Mr.

Robinson’s chair. Mr. Robinson turned a page and started a new column.

“What have you done to her.”

Mr. Robinson smiled and looked up over the top of his page.

“What Ben?”

“I have to know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Ben says he has to know what we’ve done to Elaine,” he called to his wife.

She didn’t answer him.

“Tell you what, Ben,” Mr. Robinson said, looking back at him. “Why don’t you come back in a week or so.”

“What?”

“You come on back in a week or so,” Mr. Robinson said. “Then we’ll give you the whole story.”

Benjamin grabbed his paper away from him. “She’s not—” He shook his head. “She’s not getting—”

There were no sirens but Benjamin heard the car squeal to a stop in front of the house, then two doors being opened and banged shut. He looked up, dropped the paper, then ran quickly back through the dining room and through the dark kitchen, slamming his hip against a table, and out the back door. He picked up his shoes. Then he heard footsteps on the cement driveway. He raced for the fence on the otherside of the driveway and leapt up onto it and let himself tumble down into the yard of a neighbor. Then he got up and ran.

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The next day was Saturday. Just before dawn Benjamin landed at the San Francisco airport and hurried off the plane and into a phone booth. There was only one Carl Smith in the directory. He called but there was no answer. Then he tore the page out of the phone book and had a taxi take him to the address. The front door of the apartment building was unlocked. Benjamin pushed it open and hurried up the three flights of stairs and down a darkened hall to the door of Carl Smith’s apartment. Just as he was about to knock he noticed a white envelope thumbtacked into the wood of the door next to the doorknob. He tore it off and ran back down the hall with it to a window. On the front of the envelope the name
Bob
written.

Benjamin ripped it open, pulled out a sheet of paper from inside and read it quickly by the gray light coming in through the dirty glass of the window.

Bob,

Prepare yourself for a real jolt, old boy. Believe if or not I am getting hitched. Elaine Robinson, the girl I brought up to your party last month, has accepted my proposal and in fact insists that we tie the knot his very weekend. I cannot believe my luck and am, needless to say, in quite a daze at the moment so I know you will forgive me for canceling out on our plans.

It was all arranged in a midnight visit from her and her father.

There are many strange and bizarre circumstances surrounding the whole thing which I don’t have time to go into now. Elaine is down in Santa Barbara staying with my folks and I am on my way down. We will be married in the First Presbyterian Church on Allen Street in S.B. at eleven o’clock Saturday morning. If perchance you find this note soon enough, be sure and hop it down there as I think I can promise you a pretty good show.

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Janie is frantically trying to dig up bridesmaids and Mother is telegramming invitations to everyone in sight. Dad is too stunned to do anything.

I will be back early in the week, bride in tow, and will see you then if not before, Hallelulial

Carl

His airplane touched down in a small airport in the outskirts of Santa Barbara just at eleven o’clock. Benjamin was the first out of its door and down the ramp. Several minutes later his taxi pulled to a stop in front of the First Presbyterian Church on Allen Street. He jumped out and handed the driver a bill through the window.

The church was in a residential section of large houses and neat green lawns and was itself an extremely larges building with a broad expanse of stained-glass windows across the front and wide concrete stairs leading up to a series of doors, all of which were closed.

Benjamin squeezed between the bumpers of two limousines parked in front of the church and hurried up the stairs. He grabbed the handles of two doors and pulled. They were locked. He rushed to the next pair of handles and pulled again. They were also locked. He began banging with his fist on one of the doors, then turned around and ran down the steps. He ran to the side of the church. A stairway led up the wall of the church to a door. Benjamin hurried back along the wall, then ran two steps at a time up to the top of the stairs. He tried the door. It opened. Thick organ music poured out from inside the building. He ran down a hall to a door and pushed it open, then hurried through it and stopped.

Beneath him were the guests. They were standing. Nearly all of them were turned part way around and looking back toward the rear of the church under the balcony where he was standing. Most of the women were wearing white gloves. One was holding a handkerchief up to her eye. A man with a red face near the front of the church was turned around and was smiling broadly toward the back. Carl Smith and another boy were standing at the front of the church. Both were wearing black tuxedos with white carnations in their lapels. Benjamin saw Mrs. Robinson. She was standing in the first pew in the church and wearing a small hat on her head. He stared at her a moment, then a girl wearing a bright green dress came walking slowly under him and down the aisle of the church toward the altar. Another girl appeared, also wearing a bright green dress, then another and another. Then The Graduate