The Innocent (11 page)

The holiday was over, the respite all finished with. Marjorie did not know how heavily she had been burdened until the burden was lifted and then put back. For an hour, two hours, she had held her head up. Claire died of shock, she was going to tell everybody, it is peculiar that a person like Claire should have, but true. Now she could tell nobody anything. Now the worry pressed her down, thrust down her head, lowered her eyelids. Claire had seen Edna, talked to her, after she wrote, “I think my heart would be pierced. I feel ill with fright.” She hadn't just died after writing that. She'd been alive enough to talk to Edna. Marjorie didn't think out what had killed Claire if status, thymicolymphaticus hadn't; she just lowered her head, drew in her shoulders, and carried the same old fears. Not for a minute did Marjorie believe that Edna had killed Claire, not for a minute.

Little Pete
was
crying. Grace was rocking his basket jerkily and repeating, “Hush now, hush now,” but without attention. The tears were rolling down Grace's dark cheeks. She jumped up when she heard Marjorie.

“Miz Carter—Miz Carter—Miz Carter, did they—”

“Yes, they came,” Marjorie told her, flinging her coat and hat and muff onto a chair, shuffling off her gloves, rubbing her hands to take the chill off. She lifted the baby out of his basket. She talked quite a lot to little Pete, to soothe him. She said that she would have his bottle in a minute. She said his mother was back now, that his mother wouldn't leave him. She walked into the kitchen with little Pete, holding him against her chest while she bent to the refrigerator to remove one of the nursing bottles. Then she remembered the muff on the chair in the living room. Taking the chance of contaminating the bottle—a proof of desperation—Marjorie snatched the muff off the chair and carried it and the bottle and the baby back into the kitchen. “Come in here,” she said to Grace, because now she didn't want Grace alone in the apartment. Even though Marjorie now held the papers, even though they were safe, she felt it was necessary to have Grace where she could watch her. She did not know any longer what Grace, left to her own devices, could discover in this apartment.

Grace followed obediently. She seemed content to watch Marjorie warming the bottle and comforting little Pete. Humbly, she asked no questions, humbly waited her turn.

Just as Marjorie wished Edna had scratched her face, now she wanted Grace to demand her rights. She wished Grace would scream at her and tell her she must know immediately what had happened to her sister. Then Marjorie could reply that the baby came first, that she had to take care of her own family before she could spare time for Grace or Edna. If Grace admitted that this was so, that nobody could blame a woman for looking after her own family first, then Marjorie would feel better. But Grace did not oblige.

She said, “Yes, ma'am,” when Marjorie told her that she could go home now, that it was all over. She said, “Yes, ma'am,” when Marjorie said she would like to do something for poor Edna, but didn't know what—

There was, however, one thing Marjorie could do. (Safely, she added silently.) It occurred to her while Grace, still humbly weeping, was getting out of her sister's uniform and into her own clothes. Marjorie, taking little Pete and her muff, went to the chest of drawers where the family checkbook was kept. She could give Grace some money for Edna. She could tell Grace to use it for whatever Edna needed. There was a balance of four hundred dollars showing, and Marjorie, leaning on the chest of drawers, wrote out a check for three hundred.

But in the end she didn't do that much, either. Not even that. Marjorie finally put nineteen dollars and fifty cents into Grace's hand because that was all the cash she had in the house.

“You take this, Grace.” She had folded the bills over the change, making a small package. She pressed the folded bills into Grace's palm.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Buy her something, some books. She reads a lot, doesn't she?”

“No, ma'am. Eddie used to read books, but she don't read any more.”

“Buy her something then, anything.”

“Yes, Miz Carter. Thank you, Miz Carter.”

“It's nothing,” Marjorie protested, so violently that Grace drew away from her. “This is nothing. Now take the uniforms and go, Grace. I have to bathe the baby.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Grace.”

The girl nodded and, clutching one of the paper bags which now contained only uniforms and no typewritten sheets of paper, went meekly out of the back door. Marjorie heard her steps outside, walking toward the left, toward the left-hand elevator, the service elevator, the proper one for colored maids.

Before doing anything else, Marjorie destroyed the check she had written, for she realized the moment she saw her signature on it, Marjorie Carter, that it would be very foolish to write a check, ridiculous to provide such written evidence which could prove a connection between the Carters and Edna Smith. She saw herself in a court of law.

“You admit this is your signature, Mrs. Carter?”

“Yes, your honor.” (“Yes, ma'am,” Grace said.)

“You are not even the Mrs. Carter who employed this girl, so you have no possible obligation to her. Why did you write her a check for three hundred dollars?”

“Because I was sorry for her.” (Because she screamed, “Don't take me. I'm not crazy. Don't let them take me and lock me up.”)

“Sorry for her, Mrs. Carter? Is it not because you realized she was not insane, Mrs. Carter? Is it not because you realized that, on the contrary, she was quite dangerously sane when she stated in front of witnesses that the first Mrs. Carter did not die of status thymicolymphaticus?” The policeman, Kirby, was in the court. Marjorie saw his red ears and faded eyes; she felt his heavy hand on her shoulder. “Is it not because she stated that the first Mrs. Carter did not die of status thymicolymphaticus that you wrote this check?”

But Edna had not so stated. Edna had not said that Claire hadn't died of the disease written on the death certificate. Edna had only said, “God had nothing to do with it.” Edna had said that Claire had killed herself. With that thing.

“Mrs. Carter, did you not give Edna Smith a check for three hundred dollars because you wanted to bribe her? Because you wanted to shut her up, to keep her quiet and safely shut up?”

“I didn't want her shut up. I didn't telephone the police and say she had tried to kill herself and must be shut away. I had nothing to do with it. I am not guilty, not guilty!”

Marjorie even burned the torn-up fragments of the check in an ashtray. Little Pete coughed from the smoke and she said to him, “Your mother is crazy, darling. Your mother is quite hysterical. Don't mind her.”

Now you calm down, she told herself. You be rational.

Rationally, what would the three hundred dollars be hush money for?

Edna had said, “I know God did not kill Mrs. Carter.”

Rationally translated, that meant that Edna knew that Claire had not died of the disease the death certificate stated had killed her.

Edna had said, “I killed her and I did not kill her.”

Rationally, this meant that Edna felt she had killed Claire because, in retaliation for Claire's cruelty, she had told her that Charles was having an affair with Marjorie Black. Edna believed she had killed Claire, since this knowledge had killed Claire. Edna believed she had killed Claire because Claire had killed herself when she discovered her husband was unfaithful to her with her old friend, Marjorie Black.

Edna had said, “She killed herself with that thing.”

But that's ridiculous, Marjorie told herself, that's irrational! Anyone who knew Claire would know she wouldn't kill herself for Charles. Suicide wasn't Claire's thing. It wasn't in her. If this Edna knows Claire at all, she will know that suicide isn't Claire's thing. Given time, that is, given time to recover from the shock of Claire's death, Edna will remember what Claire was like and know it wasn't suicide.

All right, Marjorie thought, given time then, given half a chance to think, Edna would surely become aware that Claire would not kill herself. So what?

Was it to keep Edna where she would not have time to think rationally, was it to keep Edna in a place where no one was credited with rational thought that she had wanted to give her three hundred dollars? Because Claire was dead.

Of course Claire was dead, she had been dead for eight months. She had died of—She had died of a legitimate disease which the doctor had diagnosed and written down on her death certificate. It was a fact that she had died of this disease. It was there on her death certificate.

It would simply prove that Edna was lunatic if she disregarded the unprejudiced opinion of a competent physician. Only crazy people preferred their own mad diagnoses in place of scientific ones. It showed how crazy Edna was, saying calmly, “Oh, no, she didn't die of a disease. She died because she killed herself.”

But she, she, Marjorie, what would she be if she went even further?

She would have to be a raving lunatic to disregard both the death certificate and then the suicide theory in order to believe that Claire was killed. If she believed that Claire was killed, that was murder. If that was murder there had to be a murderer. If there was a murderer—

Marjorie rocked back and forth, saying, “It's impossible. It's impossible.”

When she carried the baby upstairs again, having fed him, she tucked the muff under her arm. As she bent over little Pete on the bathinette and rubbed him with baby oil and wiped him off with swabs of cotton and bent his bluish legs and arms twenty times to exercise his muscles since he was not lusty enough to do this for himself, she could feel the muff in back of her. Marjorie knew that with the help of the papers in that muff she would have to prove to herself that it was impossible.

She would have to reconstruct the impossibility of the crime, otherwise she really would go mad. She would have to change back into the kind of person who could think, the kind of person she had been before Charles' telegram had arrived in Wilton.
Claire passed away suddenly on Saturday. Arrive Wilton nine fifty-six Friday. Love. Charles
. From the moment the telegram had been handed to her, at ten in the morning when she was at her lowest ebb, feeling ill and nauseated, ugly and unwanted, she had not been a thinking person.

Little Pete smelled of perfumed oil. His flannel nightgown was fresh and sweet. Marjorie laid her head gently on his belly and, for the first time, he reached out and his hand tangled in her soft hair. For the first time little Pete was displaying curiosity; so must she. When Marjorie had disentangled the tiny fingers, she kissed them and put the infant back in his crib and turned her back on him, resolutely determined to see this room, which she had tried to see only as little Pete's room, as Claire's room.

That bed there was Claire's bed. She had probably died in it. The empty closet once contained Claire's smart clothes. It was Claire's pink satin robe which had hung behind the bathroom door where now Marjorie's old, sour, padded robe hung. In the next room were Claire's books, her damned mystery novels which had started this terrible thing. The books were still on their shelves. There was Claire's rather affectedly large and businesslike desk. Where was the typewriter on which she had typed those sheets of paper? It was downstairs now. It had been downstairs when Marjorie and Charles returned from their wedding trip, for it had been one of the first things Marjorie had seen as she entered the house, noticing it because it looked out of place sitting on the chest of drawers in the living room. (Charles had wished to carry her over the threshold, but she had moved away from him, pretending not to notice the scooping movement of his arms toward her, feeling that such a bride-and-groom tradition was out of place in this apartment which had been his wife's. She had noticed the typewriter immediately because it was out of place, too. It was the only out-of-place item in the carefully manicured living room.) Marjorie stared round Claire's study and disliked it. She had disliked this apartment from the beginning; neither she nor Charles wanted to live in it, but there was no alternative. She had given up her own small place and there was nothing else to be had. They had to come back here.

Fate?

Skip that. There might be enough real trouble without dragging fate into it.

What was it, if not fate? Hadn't fate made Edna telephone last night?

Not fate, necessity. Edna had to start earning a living again. Edna could not afford to buy new uniforms; that wasn't fate, it was economics. She, Marjorie, couldn't afford to allow anyone to poke around this apartment without her; that was economics, too. She couldn't afford to have anything stolen. Fate didn't enter into it. There was nothing fatal in this apartment and no ghosts. Claire's decorator wouldn't have permitted ghosts; they would have been out of period.

Marjorie tried to smile at her feeble joke, but she knew it was whistling for wind.

To hell with jokes.

Oh, this is hell, Marjorie thought, feeling a lump of misery in her throat, trying to swallow it. This is hell, not knowing and not really wanting to know. I'm so frightened, she thought, and remembered that this was what Claire had written, that she was frightened.

At the end Claire had been frightened.

Marjorie pulled the papers from her muff and straightened them out. She turned to the next to the last page. Yes, Claire had been frightened. Claire had discovered that the syringe was gone. Edna had denied having taken it. Claire had threatened Edna with exposure if she didn't return the syringe, but Edna, still denying having taken it, had burst into tears and run out of the room.

Claire had written: “I will have to be cruel, that's all
—
I just wanted to see how far she would go and, I shall say, with that syringe gone, it has gone quite far enough
.…
Not knowing Edna's response frightens me. Edna will react to my revalation. My palms are cold. There is a muscle in my cheek which I never knew existed and it twitches.…