The Man Who Lost the Sea (40 page)

The old lady, of course, did not know this, even after the silent discovery and quiet excision of the menace. It was quite by accident that she glanced down the stairwell at half-past two one morning and. saw her nephew emerging from, of all places, the dining room, of all things blowing kisses into it. The old lady slipped back into the shadows and had ample opportunity to watch Hubert ascend, grinning fatuously and carrying not only his shoes but his underwear. He passed the thunderstruck watcher all unknowing and entered his room and shut the door, whereupon his aunt, a spry old girl and very fast on her feet, dusted down the stairs like a windblown oat-straw and appeared in the dining-room door.

Four wide solid ancient chairs were placed side by side on the heavy rug, and at the near end of the row hung a dark blouse and a
white brassiere. At the far end, for one brief second full of shock and scorching hate, stood Susie Karina, clad in the skirt which matched the blouse. The faint glow from the tiny night light in the hall was enough to photograph the scene for both of them forever; then Susie melted backwards into the black shadows and disappeared. Without hesitation the aunt followed—it was the butler’s pantry—and shot the heavy bolt on the dining-room side. She then stepped round to the kitchen and locked the other pantry door. Not a word was spoken; save for the snicking of the bolts, there was no sound.

The aunt made the rounds downstairs, being sure that everything was locked up tight—except for the pantry window, which opened easily into the wide wide world—and then, taking the garments from the dining room between thumb and forefinger and holding them not quite at arm’s length, she took them to the maid’s quarters where she briskly and neatly packed all of the girl’s possessions. She secured, from the wall safe, two weeks’ wages, added that to the luggage, and strapped it up. She took it to the kitchen, unlocked the back door, set the two suitcases upon and between the garbage cans, went inside, locked up and went to bed.

She did not know women, but she did know Hubert, and she knew Susie knew Hubert, and that Hubert’s reaction to any scene, any emergency, would be blindly to do as he was told, and not by Susie. How long it took Susie to ponder this out she was never to know, but that Susie got the message was clear the next morning when the aunt looked out and saw the luggage gone.

Hubert still healthily slept. The aunt prepared breakfast and them called him commandingly. When, yawning and yapping, he entered the dining room, she said, “Put the chairs back, Hubert.” Hubert looked once into the kitchen, once at the spectacle of his aunt carrying a tray, and then the blood drained from his face. He put the chairs back. He sat on one. He ate his breakfast.

Actually the only thing that was ever said directly about the episode was said two nights later, when, after dinner, he rose casually and sauntered, with all the skilled histrionics of a spear-bearer on the first night of a high-school play, out to the hall tree where his
hat hung. His aunt then spoke: “A private detective will follow you wherever you go. He reports to Mr. Silverstein.” Now it happened that Mr. Silverstein, who was the lawyer who changed bequests in wills and all that, was also the silent and controlling partner in the advertising agency in which Hubert had just then begun.

Hubert paused. His wage was small and his address excellent. His expenses were almost nothing and his comfort considerable. His ability to provide these things—or anything at all—for himself was negligible. He left his hat where it was and went upstairs without a word. In due course they retired for the night.

Now it must be said that up to this point the old lady’s actions had most genuinely been motivated by concern for Hubert; he could certainly not pursue his career properly in a town this size in such company as Susie Karina, even if the arrangement were legitimized; he had too much going against him as it was. And she had no intention, then, of punishing him. In her odd way, she felt the stirrings of respect for him—not for his specific acts, the charm of which was lost on her, but for his extraordinary success in pulling wool over her sharp old eyes. For she was, to the bone, an admirer of virtuosity, for its own sweet sake. She admired the music, for example, of Fritz Kreisler, not for its music, but for its fingermanship. She admired the better circus jugglers for the same reason and to the same degree. She owned a piece of jade carved with some symbols which, had she tracked them down, would have led her to a truly remarkable history, but her only interest in it was that it consisted of eight filigree balls, one inside the other, all freed from the same stone; never mind what it represented, where it had been, by whom owned to whom it meant what; just look at that for a clever thing, now! So for this gleam of deftness in her lump of a nephew she was happy to forgive and forget—though she saw no reason to reward him for it. Or to replace what it had cost him.

Mrs. Carstairs, the new maid, certainly did not. She immediately took over Susie’s place, space and responsibilities—a weary soul who wore an aura of such a nature that the less the distance from her, by the inverse square law, the more one felt one had been munching saltpeter. Mrs. Carstairs was there asleep—actually, it was only
her second night in the house, when it happened.

Again it was in the earliest hours of the morning, and again the big house was illuminated only by the speck of light glowing in the imitation brazier in the hall.

The aunt woke in that sudden, silent fashion which marks alertness to a sound which had now ceased; an opening of the eyelids with a click, a throat-throbbing, instant eagerness to pursue the very last echo of something gone but vitally important. The old lady threw off the covers and rolled to a sitting position and, in spite of the hard difficult thump of her heart, held her breath.

She heard a low, happy, whispering laugh. She barely heard it. It was unvoiced, and came from somewhere indeterminate.

She rose to her feet, and again held her breath.

She heard that childish, effortful sound of someone emphasizing a kiss: mmmm-yuh!

She ran on tiptoe to her door, across from which was the head of the stairs, and stopped again to listen.

What moved her, what sent her moving, sprinting, springing to the stairs was nothing at all. But nothing, not a sound, not a breath. She could have borne anything else, but not this waiting for the next sigh, smack, chuckling tongue-cluck; not this wondering where, wondering who.… How? Mrs. Carstairs, did she know every lock, did … or was it—and so she sprang.

And her first foot, the right foot, to step off the landing, flew out and up, dragging the other with it, and so she lay in the air. After that the observations, the memories they painted, were not so sharp. She was sure something dark and rectangular flew away, out and down, as she lay in the air, and curved to the steps below: then the cruel crash at the base of her spine and the small of her back (but no no no pain, horribly no pain!) and her elbows; and oh, that was the agony.

It was dark already; it did not grow dark for her; the dark grew black. But in the last clouded second before eclipse, she seemed to see a small someone dart from the dining room, scoop up the rectangular thing, a thing thicker than a briefcase, not as wide or long, and flick away with it. Then a flash of light as Mrs. Carstairs came
fumbling into the hall—only a flash because of the greater flash of torture from her elbows, and the black.

Eleven years.

Eleven years she thought about it. You can think a lot in eleven years. You can think a lot in bed. You can think a whole lot in eleven bedridden years.

It doesn’t have to drive you crazy, knowing you’ll never walk again, not even when you had always walked, yes, run, yes, up until so recently skied, skated, trudged, hiked. (Never danced, though: now, now that was a good thing.)

What happened that night? Was it what she remembered? She could never quite be sure. And what had happened that she did not see or know about? She’d never know. No one, after Mrs. Carstairs and Hubert came tumbling sleepily out (they always claimed they heard nothing but the fall) and the doctors and ambulance and police were in and out, nobody could possibly piece together which doors were locked, or whether the pantry window had been closed. What she said about dark rectangles flying under her feet, about kissings and laughter somewhere—they listened so carefully to the way she talked that they frightened her, and she mentioned them no more. She might have, ten years later when Mrs. Carstairs, grown slow and hobbly, was cleaning out the pantry and found the old-fashioned carpet sweeper thrown far under the big solid maple butcher table. It had no stick and the brushes were worn away, but it had four good wheels and it was just exactly large enough to hide in the shadows, say, on one step of a flight of stairs. But the aunt never saw it, and Mrs. Carstairs never mentioned it; why should she? It wasn’t good for anything, and besides, it had a big dent in the top as if it had been stepped on; so she just threw it away; it lay for a day on the garbage cans, looking like a little suitcase.

There was Susie Karina; what ever happened to Susie Karina? Why, she got a better deal from another nothing, name of Smith or something, whose important father owned a car dealership dealing in cars so important they sold themselves; the younger Smith was called the salesman. She married him, and he really loved her, which
she didn’t fully realize until he shot her as she was about to make a still better deal for herself. So she no longer mattered to Hubert and his aunt if, indeed, she ever really had. The big thing in their lives was each, the other; Susie had just cleaned up the issue.

Bedridden, the aunt now imprisoned him. He had tried to kill her (or the girl had, which was altogether the same thing) and for that she flung her coils around him, coils of business, of banking, of guilt and habit and demand (the threat kind of demand: the sheer nuisance kind of demand). Numb, bound, inarticulate, helpless, he stayed. The only wrinkle in the gelid stream of his life was when he had left the low level of the advertising business which would have lasted the rest of his life had he stayed, for a lower level in television; and anyone but Hubert could see that in some years’ time he would elevate himself to about where he had been in advertising, and stay there for the rest of his life.

And what did Hubert think about? It is quite possible he thought not at all; this he was equipped for. But he could feel, and his aunt saw to it that he did. She wasped and prodded him and sat him down and walked him away; she would demand his presence and then not talk to him, but stare into the flat bland silver eye of the television to which she was addicted, and if he shifted his feet she would shush him. And she read aloud to him—car repair manuals, and highly specialized articles on bird food, and legal reviews and murder stories, during all of which he sat mute and moist outside—he was one of those heavyset men with a shiny face—but puckering a bit from some internal drying. Or she would talk to him: “My, Hubert, how little it takes to kill a man, how much sometimes! Why, remember Doc Maginn, so hale and happy, stepped on a needle in the pile of his bedside rug, dead in a week. Yet I’ve seen basket cases from the First War, Hubert, everything shot away, legs, arms, eyes, voice, hearing; still they live. You can live a long time in a basket, Hubert, in a bed. Keep yourself alert, keep busy doing something, keep your mind alive; have someone to wait on you—why—you can last forever that way, Hubert. Hubert, get up. Sit over there.” And Hubert would get up and sit down again over there, moved because she felt like moving him. Oh, she hated him. Oh, she was going to kill him, she
was killing him; and the weapon she chose was time and abrasion; she was going to outlast him, she was going to hammer out the length of her life thin and sharp and long, long, and ease it into him up to the hilt till he was dead of it. “Now put me to bed, Hubert, put your old aunty to bed. Close the blinds. Open the window. Hubert,” she would snap if he began to decelerate, “pay the rent!” He paid nothing in cash; he never had; he knew what she meant. Earn your keep, do as you’re told, be what you’re for: pay the rent. So every night he turned the TV to face her bed, he lowered the blinds, opened the drapes, opened or shut the window, checked the heat.

She knew how everything worked; he understood none of it. By how many leaves of the old-fashioned one-pipe steam radiator were hot, she could tell him where to set the thermostat downstairs. By the size of the picture on her TV she could tell how much voltage drop occurred in the line, and by the way it changed, she could tell what caused it, and she knew the difference between the effect of Mrs. Carstairs’ ironing downstairs, and the use of the rotisserie in their neighbors’ house. She could splice rope, and taught Hubert by the hour because he could not learn: “Worm and parcel with the lay, turn and serve the other way,” she’d chant at him, and watch him do it wrong even while he repeated it. She invented things and made him build them. She had him fix a brass handle to a rope from the beam overhead, so she could reach the window sill or turn the TV to face the bed when he wasn’t there, or, after the weeks it took him to rig it, the bird-feeder. And a headboard with shelves and a buzzer and light to call him when he was asleep and one to call Mrs. Carstairs. And a sick room tray with a little vise and a rack for hand tools. And inventions on the inventions. A plaited rawhide grip for the brass handle. A floor stand for the workbench so it didn’t bounce when she used the jack plane. Remote controls for the TV: on, off, volume, phone jack, in the days before they sold them with sets. She had lived a variegated and busy life, in the long process of doing something instead of the something she did not understand. She was a pioneer of all the Rosie-the-Riveters, going to work in a Liberty engine plant as a young girl; she was tiny then, and the only one in the place with hands small enough to adjust the carburetor heat controls from inside.
She had been the first woman to be called Yachtsman at the Bar Harbor Club, recklessly slamming a Star-class forerunner in the regatta. She was a court reporter and studied law and was a legal secretary—actually running a firm for the figureheads. She made a lot of money and invested skillfully and made more, and hung on to every dime of it. Now she had all this to devote to Hubert. Life was full. Life always had been full.