The Innocent (4 page)

Marjorie folded the paper and put it aside. The item disturbed her. She was furious at that mother. Some mother, she thought, what a mother! She kept seeing the son, Joseph, hiding under his mother's skirts in the closet, and was very happy to hear the thump which meant that the elevator man had thrown the mail down in front of the door. Marjorie hoped there would be a letter from Wilton, from her aunt Hettie. There was. “I told Alma Tamey you were going to have your child any day now. I am not a liar and if things hadn't turned out as they did, you would have had to pay for your sin and so would your baby, but it seems to me that as things stand, there's no sense in telling the truth now. Your father, I'm sure, suspected but he never said so. You know your father, the easiest way, always. Least said, soonest mended. Well, in this case it turned out all right.”

Least said, soonest mended, repeated Marjorie, cherishing the axiom. Least said, soonest mended. Leave well enough alone. Let sleeping dogs lie. Curiosity killed a cat. Of course it did.

The letter continued: “Of course, it would all have come out in the wash if your husband hadn't come to Wilton that day.”

She always called Charles “your husband,” to forget he ever was anything else. My lover, Marjorie thought, and the letter trembled in her hand.

“When you came home, I'm sure people smelled something fishy. People knew how proud you were of your good job in New York City and your little apartment and all. You lit out of Wilton fast enough when you got that scholarship to college. Everybody knew you wouldn't come back here when you were doing so well in New York City. If you'd stayed much longer, it would have gotten around, don't worry, no matter what your father would have tried to do for you.”

Marjorie thought: You wouldn't have done anything for me, Aunt Hettie. You would have turned me over to the police, but that's because you're not a mother. She was just an old-maid relative who had been sour ever since she had come to Wilton to live with Marjorie and her father and to take care of Marjorie after her mother died. Her mother wouldn't have turned her over to the police, no matter what she had done.

What am I talking about? Marjorie asked. I am talking about that item in the paper, about that Italian mother who wronged her child, that's who. No one else. Nothing else. She went back to reading the letter in the same frantic way she hurried from one task to another.

The letter continued: “However, that's all dead and buried now.”

Along with Claire, Marjorie thought, pulling her eyes away from the “dead and buried” which held them, which made her think of Claire dying like that, which made her hunt again for that name, that Latin name of the disease which she used as a charm against all speculation on Claire's death.

“Now you have other things to worry about,” Aunt Hettie wrote, as if she was glad Marjorie had to worry. “From what you tell me about your baby, I would say—”

The rest was all advice on the care and feeding of little Peter. And that's all there is now, Marjorie told herself fiercely for the hundredth time. There's just the care of my baby now. I'm Pete's mother now. I have no mother with skirts to hide in, even though she wouldn't turn me over—What nonsense, Marjorie thought briskly. This is what comes of sitting around like this. The devil finds work for idle hands. I must do the dishes and take little Pete downstairs while his bedroom airs. (“All the air in Arabia will not clean that little bedroom.”) More nonsense. I have to do the rest of the apartment and call the grocer and the butcher, and—

The telephone rang so close on the heel of this thought that Marjorie believed it was the butcher calling, although it was a woman's voice, although it was a soft drawling voice, although it was nothing like Mr. Kirshner's guttural South German accent.

“Miz Carter? This is Grace again. Like you said, can I come and fetch Edna's uniforms?”

She remembered how this girl had screamed, “Eddie, Eddie!” “Of course you may, Grace. Has your sister recovered from her upset last night?”

“No, ma'am.” There was a peculiar sound which might have been a smothered sob. “She isn't.”

Marjorie reminded herself that these days she must not become involved in anyone's troubles the way she used to. It was all very well to do so when she hadn't troubles of her own—little Pete. She told herself she had to harden her heart against other people's troubles these days. But she said sympathetically, “What is wrong with her, Grace?”

“Eddie done a terrible thing last night, Miz Carter. They're coming for Eddie today. Oh, Miz Carter, I got to get the uniforms right now. Can I come fetch them?”

Edna done a terrible thing. They're coming for her. “Of course, come right away. You know where we are?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Apartment 16A.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Goodbye then, Grace.” Marjorie did not even wait for the girl to say goodbye, but hung up and with compulsive haste began to run rapidly and rather noisily up the narrow stairs. She did not want to wonder what terrible thing it was that this Edna had done. She did not want to wonder who was coming for her. She told herself it was none of her business, that she had never seen the girl. She didn't know her. Marjorie took little Pete from his crib and put him into his basket. She stripped the crib and carried little Pete downstairs, telling him, for he had whimpered sharply, that there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing, that the two of them, both of them must concentrate on one task, on making him strong and big, on keeping him alive, that was all.

She set the basket in a pool of sunshine on the floor and went upstairs to open the window and air the room. It was a difficult window to open, always sticking. It stuck again. (It had stuck eight months ago when another woman tried desperately to raise it.) Marjorie, panting from the effort, looked outside and noted again how very far it was from the street, how you could hardly hear the street noises from up here, how you couldn't possibly make yourself heard from here if you should want to. Anything could happen here, she thought, and it wouldn't be heard. She smiled at herself, because wasn't that all to the good? If she had the sense she was born with, she would know that if they were on top of anyone, if they had any close neighbors in this apartment, there would certainly be complaints about little Pete's weak but persistent mewing. (Mewling, Charles called it, looking down at his son in disgust as he held him. “Mewling and puking.” Charles had quoted, stretching his arms out to keep the infant as far as possible from his brown sharkskin suit. Marjorie had told Charles all infants did that but hastily took hers from Charles, warning herself that it would not do to force little Pete on his father until the baby was more—more appetizing.) Of course it was all to the good that his room was so isolated.

Downstairs, Pete wasn't crying. He was lying and blinking at moving shadows. His blue, wizened hands waved so feebly, so tentatively, with so little verve and assurance that Marjorie's heart turned over in her breast and she had to kneel down beside him for a moment.

Then she remembered that Grace, that girl, would be coming here. She would probably arrive just when Marjorie was busy and it would be inconvenient to find those uniforms for her. Marjorie had to take them out of the closet and give them to the girl, of course. In the first place it wasn't Grace who had worked here but the sister; in the second place one didn't let a strange person wander around by herself, poking into everything.

Marjorie said, “I can't have anyone prying around here.” She quickly amended that to, “Nobody in their right sense would permit a stranger to pry around.” That was just common sense, whether one had anything to hide or not.

Of course she had nothing to hide, although there might be just about anything, for all she knew. What could there be?

Wouldn't any other woman have turned everything upside down, learning where things were, becoming acquainted? Why had she avoided anything like a search of this apartment? She hadn't avoided anything. Being a competent housekeeper, she had started to find out what was what, because she didn't want to have to ask Charles where things were, but then Doctor Larker had told her to take it easy. She had stopped searching because Dr. Larker said no woman in her condition should climb on chairs to get to top shelves or bend to spy out the last things in bottom drawers. She had simply obeyed doctor's orders. Dr. Larker said, “Take it easy. Sit down and fold your hands for the next four months and think beautiful thoughts.”

Well, she had obeyed him about not turning the apartment topsy-turvy, but she hadn't done much sitting around and folding her hands because then she didn't think beautiful thoughts. She thought terrible thoughts.

Beck Winant said that Bluebeard's wife had saved her life when she disobeyed her husband and looked into that locked room.

Marjorie replied that curiosity killed a cat.

Marjorie stood up suddenly, knocking against little Pete's basket so that he gasped, his tiny mouth worked. When she had soothed him, she went into the kitchen. In the short back hall was the closet which Claire had assigned to the maid. She had looked into the closet once; the uniforms were there all right. There were three of them hanging on thin wire hangers, one white, one blue with white, and a maroon rayon one. On the shelf above was another uniform, rolled up neatly. It had been laundered, but not yet ironed. As Marjorie reached up and touched the rough fabric, something rustled in back of it; something rustled, fluttered, beat inside Marjorie. She dragged over a kitchen stool and stood on it, pushing aside the uniform to see behind it. Her eyes were stretched and her mouth felt stiff and she had to giggle, because there was only a neat collection of paper bags behind the uniform, carefully folded along their seams and stacked.

Some people couldn't help saving paper bags. It was an obsession with some people. Silly. This was her apartment now, her kitchen. Away with them. Marjorie lifted the stack from the shelf, carefully backed off the stool, and carried the bags to the red trash basket. A triangular piece of white among the brown of the bags caught her eye. She reached in and found a wad of typewritten sheets and straightened them out, flattening them. There were about fifty sheets. Marjorie wondered what this girl, this Edna, had been up to.

Shall I put them back? Put the papers back among the bags, put the bags back on the shelves? Shall I tell the girl, the sister, Grace, that the uniforms are in the closet and that I am very busy so would she take them herself? Shall I be upstairs with little Pete?

She wondered why Edna had left them there. She wondered whether these papers were what the girl really wanted, whether asking for the uniforms had been just a ruse. She thought: why didn't she come for the uniforms before this? A poor general housemaid couldn't have not had a job for eight months, could she?

“Edna done a terrible thing,” her own sister had said. “They're coming for her today.”

She stared at the sheets of paper, seeing them hidden away in that closet, among the innocent paper bags. Oh, yes, hidden! They had been cunningly hidden there among the paper bags.

She couldn't let the girl take them. If there was one attitude Marjorie ordinarily despised, it was that lordly assurance of some housewives that they have the right to invade their maid's privacy. It was a mark of her nervousness that she intended to read these papers. She had to see what was written in those papers before allowing the girl to remove them from the house. Feeling it was Edna's secret, she wouldn't have touched them, but now she had to make certain that this had nothing to do with anyone else's secrets.

Marjorie put the paper bags back into the closet. It is difficult, when all your life you have not found it necessary to do anything underhand, to begin. It made everything unreal. Marjorie's sly glance around the kitchen to make sure she was unobserved was unlike her and somehow made the kitchen strange also. Everything became strange; the apartment in which she had lived for seven months became foreign, alien, exotic. She felt no kinship with the furtive fall of her own feet, for the quick hushed breaths she was drawing.

Holding the papers in her hand, she sat in the living room, far enough away from little Pete so the cigarette she had lighted wouldn't bother him, but near enough to watch him. Before she began reading, Marjorie glanced around the newly strange living room, wondering, if by the time she next looked at it, it would be changed forever. Everything might be changed forever; that was the way she felt now. And she was right.

The typewriting on the first sheet—on all of them as Marjorie flipped through—was very inexpert. The machine had been handled jerkily; the alignment was very poor. She read the first sentence:

I have made a count. In the last two months I have read fifty-six mystery-books.

Marjorie released the breath she had been holding in. Mystery books!

See my bills from Macy's Book Department. See the rental library bills. Fifty-six mystery books is a lot of mystery books.

There were a lot of mystery books on the shelves upstairs in Claire's study. Had Edna read them too? But surely she hadn't paid for them?

Most of them were psychological suspense stories, not whodunits. There are more and more of them nowadays and they are becoming increasingly plausible and exciting because they have characters in them rather than the ciphers who live in whodunits. The conventional murder mystery is mathematics and I never was good at arithmetic.

In college Claire used to boast about being lousy in math. She used to crib my work, Marjorie thought. Claire always acted as if being bad in math was one more proof of her superiority. I never could see why.

I'm pretty good at character, though, or I never would have held my job. A top advertising copywriter has to understand what makes people tick, what they go for.

Claire. Of course, Claire. She was a copywriter. What is this Edna girl doing with Claire's papers?