The Innocent (6 page)

“I heard say.” She glowed.

I told her, mostly from literature, what I knew about France. I did a bang-up travelogue. I told her I hated going alone. I stared at her speculatively. I said how would it be if I took her, since I did so hate being unadulterately alone. I tried to make her see herself in France. I painted the picture right pretty, too. Why?

Because. Because. Because.

Marjorie pushed her hair back from her face. She was hot. She told herself that when she was a kid, she used to say, “Because is no reason.” Claire talked about a trip to France because she was leading the girl on. The trip to France was to start the ball rolling. Marjorie saw the ball rolling. It was a bowling ball. “Go bowl your hoop.” Marjorie heard the thunder as the ball rolled up the alley. She saw Edna going down with a bang. “Watch out, watch out for Claire!” Marjorie said aloud. Peter stirred, the panic reaching him.

Claire was trying to find out how far Edna could be driven, whether she would go all the way. She was trying to discover whether what she called a plausible person like Edna would commit murder, given motive. In offering France to Edna, she was offering motive.

Edna is now studying elementary French. She wants me to know this. When Edna came in to do the bedroom, she said, “
Bonjour madame
.” Edna blushed, the red coming up under her dark skin like the dawn coming up like thunder. It came like a thunder clap. It was as good as saying to me, “
Continuez votre sport, madame
.”

Claire would go on with the game. Claire would certainly
continuez
.

I tell Edna more about La Belle France. She listens like a child, with her mouth a bit open, hardly blinking. Watching Edna waiting for my words, I felt like God dispensing blessing. I felt alive.

Marjorie remembered the occasions on which she had seen Claire come alive. They were always times when she was moving the rest of them around to suit her purposes. She could see Claire with the girl listening to her, but she did not see Claire as God. She saw a snake. She saw Edna transfixed.

I am not God. Pooh. I cannot make Edna's fate or anybody's fate. I cannot make my own. I feel like a prisoner of fate myself. I haven't had a visitor for ages. Of course, without a telephone one is terribly cut off. People have lost the habit of writing notes, although I am certainly getting the habit. Quite a few pages of notes here. Get on with it; perhaps it will come to something.

Claire enjoyed biology lab. She cut open her frog and watched its heart beat. That was what she was doing with Edna now. She had made the first incision already.

Edna has permitted herself to daydream about the trip to France. I can tell.

Edna's eyes would be fixed, seeing the far bright horizon of France and not the floor she was scrubbing, the dishes she was washing. She would touch hard things as if they were soft. But that stage would end. It is dangerous to allow yourself to want something too much, to brood over it constantly, if it hasn't the least grain of possibility. Pretty soon the daydream would need some reinforcing. She would ask Claire directly. “There!” Marjorie said, reading the next line. “Here it comes.”

Edna asked me if I really was thinking of going to France. A sharp prickling of perspiration tickled my armpit. I noticed that. I said airily, “I really am thinking of it, Edna. Why shouldn't I go if I want to, but you can't go unless you get rid of Andy first.”

She didn't say, “Oh.” It didn't sound like an “oh.” It was a grunt, an exclamation. I know, it sounded as if I had knocked the air out of her; that was the sound she made when I said she couldn't go to France unless she got shet of Andy first.

It took a certain amount of time for her to be able to speak again. Then she said, very softly, “But if I—how about if I left Andrew, Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Carter, if I just left Andy.”

“You couldn't just leave Andy,” I said.

Marjorie knew, even before she read on, what would happen. Claire had made outrageous suggestions before which people rejected, but then they kept coming back, wanting to talk about it. Edna had told Claire she wouldn't leave Andy, but she wouldn't let it drop. She would come prepared with excuses to talk about it.

“I've done my best for Andy, Mrs. Carter,” Edna would say. “Nobody can say I haven't done my best for Andy.”

Claire would agree. “Perhaps you've done too well for Andy. You could leave him, Edna, but I'm sure he wouldn't leave you.”

“But if I went on a big boat? How could Andy follow me on a big boat?”

Claire would bowl over the excuses. Claire would push through the subterfuges. She would say that she was anxious to do things for Edna, but not for Edna's hubsand. Marjorie knew how reasonable Claire would sound. It would be impractical, she would say. Why should she help Edna, educate her, give her a foreign polish—a foreign shine!—so Andy could rub it off? Edna would want to come back to the States to work for her people. Back she'd come and back would come bad penny arolling. Claire would insist that Andy would bitch everything up even if Edna got a divorce.

Edna wouldn't want a divorce. Claire would know that. Claire knew perfectly well that Edna wouldn't shame her people by getting up in court and telling a white judge that Andrew gave her a black eye or took her money and guzzled it. Even if Edna could bring herself to divorce her husband, Claire would say divorce wasn't final enough.

Claire had offered heaven to the girl and then taken it back. Edna would droop without her beautiful dream, but what could she do? If Claire refused to accept her promises to be shet of Andy as legal tender, then Edna was bankrupt.

Tuesday: No change in our patient since I told her Andrew had to be out of the picture. Despairing calm characterizes her activities.

Wednesday: No change.

Thursday: I find Edna standing around idly, waiting for me to make a move. I will not make it.

Saturday: Edna asked for the afternoon off. I asked whether she was ill.

Not ill. “I don't feel just right, Mrs. Carter. I don't know—”

Not ill, it wasn't illness. It isn't easy to lose a dream. I know. It isn't true: 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. When I lost my dream of life with Charles, when Claire took him away, it was much worse than before I dreamed the dream.

“I just don't think I can stand not going away with you on account of Andy,” Edna said. “I just don't think I can stand it. I look at Andy—I look at Andy and—”

I tossed this bomb. “Do you think Mr. Carter would leave me, if I wanted him to?”

Edna must have thought “yes” was insulting. She wouldn't look straight at me when she said Charles would leave me if I wanted him to.

“Well, that's a good thing, Edna, because if Mr. Carter stood in the way of everything I wanted, the way your Andrew does—” I left it at that.

“Yes?” she asked, breathing the question so softly that she could tell herself she hadn't asked it.

“I'd see he left me, that's all. Not that it would be as easy with Mr. Carter as it would be with your Andrew. Your Andrew is a sitting bird, drunk and helpless half the time!”

Her lips went dry. She needed to lick her lips with her tongue. “What do you mean, Mrs. Carter?”

“You're too good for what I mean, Edna. I'm not as good as you are.”

That was like Claire. She was taunting the girl with her goodness, making “good” goody-good. Claire was daring the girl, double-daring her.

She tossed her head. “I'm not good. I'm not good at all. You don't know, Mrs. Carter—Lately—”

I said flatly that I could get rid of Andrew if he stood in my way and nobody would be the wiser.

Edna: Crime doesn't pay.

She had taken the dare. She wasn't being goody-good, she was saying, simply being practical.

I told Edna not to be naive. Given certain conditions, crime does pay. I said given these certain conditions I was perfectly sure that there wouldn't be any awkward questions asked if Andrew were found dead, dead drunk. Drunk dead!

At first she couldn't take the juxtaposition of these two words, Andrew and death. She skittered at first, then she came back to it, making a hypothetical discussion, of course. I explained that to the police. Edna's motives, the desire to be educated, to help her people, was not a motive for murder. I assured Edna that when the payment for a crime is not in cash but in spiritual dollars, they can't tot it up. They don't do higher mathematics. I said that of course the
crime passionel
was an accepted motive, but there was no other man for Edna. She was in love with her people, head over heels, madly.

Madly?

Yes, she is a little mad now, I think.

“You're mad,” Marjorie said. “You're the one.” The mad scientist experimenting with people? Not Claire. She wasn't mad in the least. She was cool and calculating. She was doing this to write a best seller. She was deliberately goading Edna, giving her motive and then giving her means. To see how far she would go?

Marjorie tried to remember Edna's sister's exact words. Grace had said, “Edna did a bad thing. They're coming for Edna today.”

Now Edna's got to work on herself. Now I keep mum until she comes back for more.

It is hard laying off Edna. There is such a satisfaction, such a kick out of this business. I suppose I am in a way drinking her blood to keep myself alive. I suppose I am a harpy, a vampire.

Harpies aren't bored. Never a dull moment for vampires.

Edna has made up her mind. Tonight Andrew was waiting for her outside. I saw her at the window discovering him down there, and I asked was that Andrew and she said yes, it was. She could always tell it was he, because he always wore this cap. Nobody else but Andrew wore a cap. She had bought him hat after hat out of her good money; why did he always have to wear that low, mean, greasy cap?

She hates Andrew. It is when you pick on something irrational like that cap, unimportant like that, and talk about it so venomously that hatred is shown. Dreaming about France, visualizing the good life there and seeing Andrew as the only drawback, she has come to hate him, nourished that part of what must always have been a highly ambivalent relationship to start with.

“Poor, poor Edna,” I whispered.

But she didn't like the low, discreet tone which seemed to approve of her hatred, of which she will never approve, being a good person in spite of herself or me. Edna distrusted me for the first time. “Why do you want to be so kind to me, Mrs. Carter? France and all, I mean.”

I was prepared for this. I pointed out that she was good to me, that I wouldn't have been able to manage without her. I was in a bad way when Charles found her in that Harlem place and brought her back here. From what Charles told me about that awful room, Edna lost a fight there. In that dreadful place she must have gone down step by step from respectability, from idealism to Andrew's animal level of existence. Charles described Edna's room with very unusual sympathy. I think he felt that there but for the grace of Claire go I. Charles has me. Edna can only have me if she earns me. The Lord helps those who help themselves.

I asked Edna to do the ironing in here with me today. I said I was lonely. Perhaps I am, but I know, too, that people talk more freely, they feel less guilty about talking when their hands are occupied with solid, routine duties. Edna talked, all right. Doesn't she know that she comes back to the subject time after time, and after each discussion we are a little further on? As they would say in France, “
Nous arrivons
.”

Today Edna said, “Sometime I think it would be a good thing if Andrew was dead. Better for him. Ah, he hates himself like this, Mrs. Carter. When he sobers up he cries. He hits his fist against the wall until there's blood on the wall.”

A wonderful touch, that blood on the wall.

She said, “Andrew doesn't like his life, I tell you. It isn't worth two cents to Andy, but seems he can't help himself, the things he does.”

Get Edna's vocabulary, her rhythm of speech. Today it went along with her ironing, smooth, swooping. She does not talk like a stage Negro or a movie Negro or most novel Negroes.

Ah, but she is still the Moor. The primitive emotions are there.

If Edna was the Moor, Claire was Iago, prodding, pushing. Edna was the innocent Moor, the trusting Moor. It was no good screaming, “Watch out! Look out!” What was done was done already. “Eddie done a terrible thing.”

Edna is nearer murder than was possible three weeks ago. Whether she knows it or not, this talk about Andrew definitely reduced the impact of a murder. Whether she knows it or not, she was saying that it might be a good thing for Andrew if he were dead.

Today she was asking for it, but I let her wait.

This morning I showed Edna a picture of my mother. I told her something about Mother, including the fact that she was a diabetic. I reached down into the third desk drawer where I had put it, and took out Mother's hypodermic syringe in its little cardboard box. I told her that I had kept it as a sad but characteristic souvenir of my mother. “I can't even think of my poor mother without seeing her giving herself an injection of insulin.”

“Giving herself?”

I said with this syringe it was as easy as falling off a log. I showed her the little spring thing. I said anyone, however inexperienced, could give an injection with this gadget. I showed Edna how it worked without working it, because there are five cc. of insulin in that baby.

I said, holding it to the light, that insulin was funny stuff. It was diabetics' meat and other people's poison. “There's enough right here,” I said, “to kill a nondiabetic ox.”

Edna would stare at the hypodermic. Her eyes would dilate. She would take deep, deep breaths, as if the air in Claire's room had become thin.

I said, “Of course there's one catch to it. It isn't so easy to give an injection to anyone who doesn't want it, but if someone is drunk and helpless—All you need is this syringe, a couple of seconds of helplessness, twenty minutes, and nobody will call it murder. Twenty minutes,” I said, “and pouff.”