The Innocent (9 page)

“There's no use asking her nothing.” The fat woman grimaced doubtfully. “Are you from them? An investigator lady?”

She meant from the hospital. “No, I'm not. I'm Mrs. Carter. Please, I really don't wish to go into any explanations just now.” I don't want to take the chance of Grace explaining this to Charles. If anyone had to explain this to Charles, it had better be herself.

“I'm Mrs. Emma Brown. I live here. I know the whole thing, more than she'll ever tell you. Eddie, she won't talk. You try.” They both stared at the thin girl who moved her hands a little in her lap, then studied them in their new position.

“Edna, you will talk to me, won't you? Mrs. Carter?”

“Eddie, you going to talk to this lady here?”

Edna stared at her hands.

“Please, Mrs. Brown, let me try—”

“She won't talk to nobody. And if she did, all you'd get out of her is she killed Andy, she killed Andy. That's all.”

“I know all about it. I know she didn't kill him.” Her hands fingered the papers in her muff.

“Everybody know she didn't kill Andy,” the fat woman said disdainfully. “I know best of everybody because I was right there all the time. I tole the police and they know I was telling the truth, and she no more killed Andy than I did.”

“Edna, Edna—”

“She won't tell you nothing. No use going on like that. You want to know what happened, I'll tell you.”

Marjorie turned to the girl. “Do you want her to tell me, Edna?”

“She don't care.”

“But—” It was ghastly to talk about her as if she weren't there.

Mrs. Brown laid her heavy left foot on top of her right foot, easing it down softly. She leaned back more comfortably. She had told this many times before and would tell it again. She waited until she felt sure of Marjorie's attention, then began. “Eddie, she come in about nine that night. She was always late coming back from that job. Eddie was always too good-natured; she got took advantage of. I was sitting in my kitchen with this same basket that night, and she give me good evening as she come through.” She pointed to the basket. “Then I hear this terrible noise in Eddie's room and I come in to see what was wrong. If Andrew was starting to beat her up again, I was going to stop it quick. But it wasn't like that. That night Andy, he was lying drunk on the floor there and when she come in she fell on him getting to that light. You ask me, it set her off falling on him that way, lying in the middle of the floor like an old hound dog.”

Edna's head sank lower. She did mind. “Mrs. Brown—”

Mrs. Brown had told the story too often to notice the interruption. “That Andy, he was no good.”

Edna's hands grasped each other. “He was no good, no good,” repeated the fat woman to the hands, for she always directed this portion of the narrative to them. “Andy, he was no good atall, but you wouldn't ever hear it from her. Soft, always, yes suh, soft-spoken always, as if he was a decent man who worked steady and brought home his pay like a man should instead of a old hound dog who took her money to the bars. Yes, suh, I remember everything because Eddie never raised her voice to him before that night, not when he gave her a black eye, not when I was going to have him to court for busting around my apartment, but when I put the light on she was hitting at him and crying, punching him. Yes, suh, not enough to hurt, like a kid would, light and wild. She was punching him on the floor there and crying how she could have things different if not for him. If Andy was good and dead, she was crying, things would be mighty different.

“I wouldn't be surprised,” Mrs. Brown commented editorially. “That was the truth she was saying then. Maybe he saw fit to see the truth, but whatever—her crying and hitting at Andy like that pulled him out of it. He sort of rolled over and sat up and listened to her with his head to one side and his eyes bugging out of his head. That sobered him down, all right, yes, suh.

“Andy and I, we got Edna off the floor, and he gave her a good shot. She needed it, I tell you. But she kept on crying anyhow, but quieter. Then I went back to my room.

“Now, you listen to this and don't listen to her saying I killed him, I killed him. About twelve o'clock Andy comes through and wakes me up. I asked him was he going out drinking again after all this. He put on the light then and I see he was all dressed up, sober, but cleaned up nice. Andy was a good-looking man, he wanted to be. He says he isn't going out drinking, just going out a while. He says Eddie's asleep and he's going out a while. She was asleep because I looked in on her and she was asleep on her bed. I think Andy gave her a couple more shots because I could smell them on her breath. Andy, he went through the curtains and mooched through the Golders' room and out the front door and that was the last I seen of him or anybody seen of him until they found him in Newark.

“Eddie came in next morning and I told her I seen him go out. She didn't look so good setting off to work but that was because of the drink. Eddie wasn't used to drink, only beer, and her belly hurt her and so on.”

Mrs. Brown pushed her fat chin down on her neck and two more chins blossomed. “So it doesn't do no good saying she killed him because she didn't! He walked through my curtains and out my door and she was in bed, so how come she killed him? They would have put her in jail, she killed him. Nobody is letting anybody get away with nothing. She's just—” Mrs. Brown tapped her head. “She done too much reading. She worry about things too much. I seen that before. It don't do a person no good to worry too much. I told her plenty of times. Now you know.”

Marjorie said, “Yes, thank you. And now may I talk to Edna alone, Mrs. Brown?” Marjorie disliked the white-supremacy tone she was employing, but it was all she could do to bring results. Mrs. Brown, leaving her market basket as hostage, went out of the room. She re-entered immediately and motioned Marjorie to come closer to her. Marjorie obeyed and Mrs. Brown whispered importantly.

“They might be coming for Eddie any minute now. I gave Grace my word to stay with her.”

“I know, but you can wait outside the door, Mrs. Brown.”

“Well, I'm going to wait right outside that door.”

“Thank you, that will be fine.” Edna didn't know they were coming for her. She didn't know they were going to put her into an insane asylum. She didn't know that if she persisted in saying she killed Andrew—Marjorie mentally placed the sensitive, ambitious girl Claire had described in an insane asylum. She saw the large common room, cold, with a few pieces of utilitarian oak furniture whose only specification was that they be too heavy to move, too sturdy to break. Marjorie smelled the sickness smell, heard the sounds that come from the deranged. Those sounds, she thought, must be as destroying to the personality as sounds beyond the ordinary range are to the ear. She felt the firm, not cruel, but perfunctory and unloving way in which this girl would be handled there. Marjorie turned her back on the door and on Mrs. Brown outside it and walked back to Edna. She was pressing her muff to her body and the papers rustled again, in a living way.

Marjorie sat down on the bed next to Edna and began softly, “I really know all about it, not the way Mrs. Brown thinks she knows. I really know. Everything. I found the papers today and read them. I wish I had found them earlier. Look at these, Edna!” She drew one corner of the manuscript out of the muff and Edna did look at it, but was apparently unmoved by the sight. She looked at the protruding papers and then back at her clasped hands as if, of the two, they were the more interesting.

Marjorie shook the muff. “Edna, these are the papers you hid in your closet with the uniforms. I have brought them to you. They're for you, Edna.” There was so little time left that Marjorie became impatient. She put her hand on the girl's shoulder and shook it gently, feeling how frail it was. “Edna, I brought you the papers, the papers you hid.”

“I didn't hide any papers.” She had a soft, rich voice. It was an even voice, as if her denial meant nothing to her.

“You must have hidden them, Edna.”

Edna looked blank, but under Marjorie's hand, the blade-thin shoulder shrugged just perceptibly.

She is telling me that she didn't hide the papers. She told Claire she didn't take the syringe. She was lying then and is lying now. Frightened people often lie. Marjorie pulled more of the papers out of the muff; half of them were now visible. “Don't you want them, Edna?” Edna looked blank. “Edna, it's all in these papers, all written down there. I know what she did to you, and it was she who did it. Edna, her guilt is all written down there. It's not your guilt. You didn't do it, Edna.” Marjorie pulled out the papers and leafed through, looking for something. “Listen to this, Edna: ‘I shall have to be brutal, that's all. I will have to tell her that the whole business was a kind of game with me. I will have to say that I had no intention of doing anything for her.' Edna, it was her fault, not yours.” She shook the papers and the girl blinked, but that was all.

“Even when I believed you killed your husband with the insulin, which is what I thought at first, even then I didn't blame you. I didn't quite understand what really had happened until just now, until Mrs. Brown explained the whole thing, but this is the point, Edna. Even if you had done exactly as Claire told you to, it wouldn't be you who did it. Look, Edna, take these papers. Let a judge read them or your priest. Ask them if they feel you are the guilty one! And you didn't even do that! You just came home that night Mrs. Brown talks about and found him drunk again, lying on the floor like a pig—like a hound dog—and you told him what you could have if not for him. That's what happened, isn't it, Edna? Finding him like that was the straw that broke the camel's back. You began to cry and hit out at him and you told him what you could have if he were only dead.

“You told him because you couldn't bring yourself to kill him, that was why. If you could have killed him, you wouldn't have talked about it. You would have been very, very quiet and used the syringe the way Claire urged you to. You told him only because you couldn't do what Claire planned you to do.

“Don't blame yourself. Don't you see? You sobered him up by crying that way. Mrs. Brown said you never had complained before. Claire wrote you hadn't ever complained. You made Andy see himself and see what he was doing to you. If he sobered up that night and wanted to—to kill himself so you could be happy and help your people too—he wasn't murdered. He died nobly, he gave his life, making one brave gesture for you and for your people. For your people, too. It was Claire who made everything meaningless. It was Claire who made his death even more useless than his life. He'd have been so happy to see you go to France, Edna, to see you having the kind of life you should have, by rights.

“Oh, can't you understand? He wouldn't want you to be like this. Come out of it, Edna. Listen, I can't send you to Paris, but I'll help you somehow. I'll give you what I can and see that something fine becomes of you. Wake up, Edna dear!

“Say to yourself that Andy killed himself. If you can't go that far, say that if Andy was made to kill himself, it wasn't of his own free will, if he was murdered, then it was Claire who murdered him. Please wake up, Edna!”

The girl gave a start, the girl woke up, but that was not because Marjorie's words reached her at last, it was because there was a great knocking on the front door. It was because the nearer door, the cracked door, groaned and shook as Mrs. Brown shoved against it to give herself a head start down the hall. Edna trembled because she heard a strange voice.

Then Mrs. Brown answered the voice. “Yessir,” said Mrs. Brown. “Yes
suh
, that's right.”

Now there were more heavy steps coming back, then the splintered door was opened and Mrs. Brown shoved herself in and then stepped aside for the two men. One of them, in a white uniform, was tall and thin and carried a black doctor's bag; the other, shorter, whose belly pushed his dark gray uniform jacket into folds, carried a stretcher and a roll of light gray canvas.

“Hello, Edna,” said the tall one, the one with the doctor's bag. He spoke pleasantly and laconically.

Edna wet her lips. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I'm Dr. White from the hospital. We're going to take you for a little ride. Anything you want to pack, Edna? Mrs. Brown here will help you pack anything you like. O.K., Mrs. Brown?”

“Yessir,” said Mr. Brown. “Yes
suh
. Keeps saying she killed him, she killed him.”

Edna's hand went to her bruised throat. She stood up, her eyes raised to the gray uniform, the white uniform, the black doctor's bag and the stretcher and the rolled-up canvas, which was a strait jacket. She raised her eyes to Mrs. Brown and saw that she was already past pity, already telling how they come to take poor Eddie. Then, for the first time, Edna turned to Marjorie. Her mouth quivered in the way Claire had described it as quivering. Her eyes questioned and asked help.

Marjorie said, “Doctor, just a moment.”

He was plainly astonished when he looked at her, when he took in her good coat, the muff, her careful accent, “Yes?”

“Must you, Doctor?”

“Must I take her, you mean? Really, now!” The doctor turned to the attendant, who shrugged and pulled at the loose flesh on his cheeks to express equal astonishment. “Naturally I must take her. That's what I've been sent here to do.”

Edna screamed and immediately the stretcher was unfurled on the floor and the two men were at her sides, one holding each of her thin arms. Under the plump upper arm of the short man in the dark gray uniform, the roll of strait jacket was ready for use.

Edna looked down at her imprisoned arms. She whispered, “No. Don't.”

“Now, honey—” Mrs. Brown stepped forward, but the doctor frowned at her. She wouldn't use the even voice necessary with these cases; she would roll her eyes and shake her head and further excite the patient.