We All Killed Grandma (17 page)

“Not a thing, yet. Still a blank wall. Well, I’ll call you some other time, Pete.”

“Wait a minute. Have you any plans for the evening after dinner?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, I don’t know for sure whether I’m scheduled to spend the evening, after we eat, with this guy or not. I have a hunch not; he’s spending only a few days here and seeing a lot of people so he probably will give me the brushoff right after we eat because he’ll have somebody else lined up to see then. And we’re eating fairly early, at six, which makes that look even more likely. So there’s a good chance I’ll be home by—oh, say half past eight, or maybe even sooner. If you’re free then, if you still haven’t tied yourself up elsewhere for the evening, why not give me a ring then? And then come on around if I’m home.”

“Okay, Pete,” I said. “I’ll probably do that.”

After I’d hung up I wondered who else I could find to eat with. I thought of Andy Henderson; I’d enjoyed having lunch with him a few days ago. But he had a wife and it was after five o’clock now. It was too late to call anybody, really, so I decided to hell with it. And I was hungry because I’d had only a breakfast around noon so I ate alone. Then I wandered around downtown until I found a movie that didn’t look too bad, and went in. The movie killed time for me until a few minutes after eight and when I came out I phoned Pete again.

“Just got home,” he said. “Glad you tried calling earlier than I said. Come on right around.”

“Shall I bring a bottle of champagne to celebrate?”

“You can bring a bottle of beer to condole.”

“That bad?”

“Not quite; I’ll tell you about it when you get here.”

“Seriously, shall I bring something to drink?”

“Not if you’ll settle for beer. I’ve got half a dozen cans of that in the icebox and I’d rather stick to that myself. Got to work tomorrow.”

“So do I,” I said. “Okay, we’ll drink your beer.”

I brought the Linc back from the parking lot where I’d left it and drove to Pete’s. I waited until we were comfortable and had glasses of cold beer in our hands before I asked him details about his interview with the publisher’s representative.

“He was encouraging, really. Liked the five chapters I have written and said there was an excellent chance they’d take the book when I finished it. Made me promise to give them first crack at it. But he said he didn’t have the authority to give an advance on a book just on one reading—the part I had done would have to be approved by one of the officers. His own position is like that of a first or second reader; he can read something and pass it on with his approval and recommendations but he can’t actually buy. And giving an advance is equivalent to buying—even riskier, because I might have a good start and still louse up the book in finishing it.”

“Or get hit by a truck.”

“Or get hit by a truck. He offered to take my five chapters back with him to New York and see if he could get me an advance, but—”

“Why not?”

“It’s first draft, yellow paper, and I didn’t make a carbon. I wouldn’t want to let it that far out of my hands because it’s several months’ work—and if it got lost I’d have it to do all over again. Besides, without it to refer back to I couldn’t go ahead and work on it, and God knows how long they’d hold it before they’d decide.”

He knocked out his pipe and started refilling it. “I suppose I could retype those five chapters now, with a carbon, and do some polishing on them but it’d be waste motion, just to promote an advance. I’d have to rewrite them again when I had the book finished because I’m not ready yet to do the final version. Oh well, it won’t hurt me to teach some classes this summer. And I can keep plugging on the book on the side.”

I said, “If you don’t want to borrow money why not let
me buy an interest in the book? That way you wouldn’t owe me anything until and unless the book sold and it came out of the proceeds, and still you’d have money to let you work on it full time this summer.”

He looked interested for moment and then shook his head. “Too big a gamble for both of us even to guess what fraction of the proceeds to sell for how much. It might never sell and if it does it might make only a few hundred dollars, in which case you’d be gypped, and it might hit the best seller lists—it’s written for laymen so it
could
—in which case you’d be getting thousands of dollars back for a couple of hundred and
I’d
be gypped. Wait a minute, though, I’ll tell you a gamble I’ll take with you. Even odds, double or nothing. I take your two hundred; if the book sells you get back four hundred.”

I said, “You’re overestimating the odds against its selling, Pete. But if you want me to have a chance for profit to offset the possibility that I might take a loss I’ll give you the two hundred and take back two-fifty if it sells.”

We settled, finally, on three hundred. And I thought he was being cheated and he thought I was, and that’s the way a bargain ought to be, I guess. Anyway he’d be able to put in full time on the book during the summer vacation. Which was what he wanted to do.

We opened another can of beer apiece on it.

For maybe a minute we were quiet and then I said, “Pete, mind if I go back to the old deal, asking questions about myself?”

“Shoot. What do you want to know?”

“Well—this is minor as hell but Arch got me curious telling me I had crazy opinions on politics. I can’t remember what they were—and my opinions on everything else seem to be the same as they used to be. I didn’t get around to asking Arch because we got on to something more important, but I’m still a little curious.”

“I think you can answer your own questions, Rod. What do you think about politics? Wait, let me give you a lead-off by making the question more specific. Which do you think is the best system among, say, socialism, capitalistic democracy, and communism?”

“Do you spell that communism with a small c? I mean,
communism considered abstractly, not what the capital-C Communists have made out of it?”

“Right. Small c.”

“Then I don’t see that it makes much difference. Any one of them can be made to work and any one of them can be corrupted into a tyranny. As Stalin has done with communism, as Hitler did with socialism. And as has been done here with democracy—only on a small scale, when a political boss manages to take over a town or city and run it. It’s never happened on a large scale here, but it could—if we ever get hungry and desperate enough. No, I don’t see that the system matters; it’s how well the system’s run. If I’ve got any bias in favor of democracy it’s simply because that’s the system we’ve got and it makes more sense to go ahead and make it work than to go through the throes of switching to something else that can go wrong just as easily.”

Pete chuckled. “You sound like a playback of yourself. That’s what you thought before all right. Arch, by the way, has believed in each of those three systems—and sometimes pretty rabidly at one time or another—but it’s always one at a time and he can’t possibly understand anyone being even tolerant of all three at once. Me, I’m somewhere in between, so I don’t know which of you is crazy.”

“What’s Arch now?”

“Haven’t talked about such things with him recently—but now that he’s got twenty thousand bucks or so in capital I could make a good guess. He’s in favor of the system that lets him hang onto it. All right, next subject.”

I’d been stalling, of course. I lighted myself another cigarette to stall some more.

Then I said, “Pete, tell me how far the best current opinion goes—one way or the other—on whether insanity can be inherited.”

“That’s not a question about you.” He held another match to the bowl of his pipe and looked at me over the flame of it. “Or—wait a minute, is it?” He didn’t draw on the pipe. He waved out the match and put it and the pipe down on the table beside his chair. “I remember now, you asked that same question once, over a year ago. Only you asked it pretty casually and—yes, you sandwiched it in
with some other questions on psychology. What’s the score, Rod?”

“I’ll tell you,” I said. “But answer the question first, will you? Preferably the same way you answered it last time. Unless you’ve learned something new about the subject since.”

“No, there’s nothing new about it. I’d have told you that insanity isn’t inherited, but a tendency toward it can be. Nobody’s born insane—although of course one can be born with insufficient brain development, causing feeblemindedness, Mongolism, things like that. But I take it that’s not what you’re interested in.”

“No, it isn’t. Go on.”

“The acquired types of insanity—schizophrenia, paranoia, the various psychoses—come from morbid pressures in the life of the individual. But it’s proved and accepted that we can inherit a strong tendency to succumb to those morbid pressures. Probably at least half of the definitely insane, those in asylums, let’s say, were born with a direct or collateral hereditary tendency toward insanity, a predisposition to manifest mental symptoms in the presence of morbid pressures. And if the predisposition is strong enough they’ll find morbid pressures among the everyday troubles that the rest of us take in stride. Is that enough of an answer, or shall I go on?”

“That’s enough of an answer,” I said.

“Your interest is personal?”

I said, “I’d rather not—Hell, why shouldn’t I talk about it? Pete, my mother died in an insane asylum when I was only a year old.”

“What type of insanity?”

I told him what little I knew, about the catatonic states and the suicide attempt.

“Manic-depressive, maybe,” he said. “You don’t know whether she had periods of elation and excitement, do you?”

“No, I don’t. Would it matter whether it was manic-depressive or schizophrenia?”

“Well—no, I guess it wouldn’t.”

I said, “Pete, I know now what could have happened between
Robin and me. Part of it, anyway. I don’t think I knew about my mother when Robin and I were married; I learned it afterward. Robin probably wanted children and after I learned that about myself I wouldn’t have, couldn’t have.”

“Would you have explained that to Robin?”

“I—don’t know. I rather think I must have. Because I think she must suspect my sanity. I think she thinks I killed Grandma.”

“Good God, what gives you that idea?”

I told him what gave it to me, Robin’s attitude in general and that one look of fear I’d caught on her face in particular.

Pete said, “There’s one can of beer apiece left in the refrigerator. We might as well finish them.”

He got the beer and came back. He was frowning. He said, “I don’t like it, Rod. Robin thinking that. Doesn’t she know that you’re definitely cleared on the basis of solid evidence, that you
couldn’t
have done it?”

“She doesn’t know the details. I guess all she knows is what was in the newspapers. That means she knows that the police don’t suspect me—but she could think they were wrong. But—”

“But what?”

“But that would mean she’d have some reason to think they were wrong. And the only reason I can think of is one I don’t like. I must have exhibited, during our marriage, sufficient mental symptoms to make her think that I could have become homicidally insane.”

Pete fussed with his pipe again. He said, “Rod, I’m going to have a talk with Robin.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t. It can’t do any good and—no, please don’t go to her, Pete.”

“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

“Still or again, yes. I know now that I should never have gone to see her—that’s one thing Arch was right about. And then for a while I was foolish enough to hope I might get her back. That was before I learned—relearned—about my own heredity. The best thing I can do about Robin, for her sake
and
mine, is to let her completely alone and try to forget her completely. I’ve got an idea, Pete, that my
subconscious mind has known that all along, that forgetting Robin is the only possible thing, and that’s why my mind has a definite block against my going to a psychoanalyst for treatment to get my memory back.”

Pete said, “If you’re in love with her anyway, what would it matter?”

“I don’t know, but the block’s still there.”

I took the last swallow of my beer and stood up. “Eleven o’clock,” I said. “I’d better be going. I start in at the agency again tomorrow and I’d better get a good night’s sleep for once. Thanks for everything, including the beer.”

Driving home, I found myself going along Robin’s street. No, I hadn’t gone out of my way to take that route; it was a natural one between Pete’s place and mine, although I could have gone other ways.

There was a light on in a room on the third floor that I thought was Robin’s bedroom. But I didn’t stop to count windows to make sure; I drove fast and kept going.

T
HE
alarm woke me at seven-thirty and I felt lousy because, despite the fact that I’d been in bed by midnight I hadn’t gone to sleep until after half past two. How much after I don’t know but that’s the last time I’d looked at the clock. And I’d decided then that, at my first opportunity, I’d see Dr. Eggleston and get a prescription from him for some sleeping powders. Especially now that I was going back to work I couldn’t continue indefinitely being unable to get to sleep until the middle of the night and sometimes later than that.

And it was a gray, dreary morning. Not raining yet but looking as though it would start any moment and keep raining all day.

I took a cold shower to wake me up and it helped. And by the time I got to the Carver Agency at nine I had three cups of hot black coffee under my belt and felt almost human.

May Corbett, the switchboard girl and receptionist who’d reintroduced herself the last time I was here, gave me a smile as I walked in. She said, “Hi, Rod. Swell to have you back.”

“Good to be back, May,” I said. “Will you tell me where I go?”

“Jonsey said to have you see him first when you came in. You’ll know him, won’t you? I think you met him in Mr. Carver’s office when you were in here Monday.”

“Sure,” I said. “Which is his office?”

“The door next to Mr. Carver’s. Same side of the hall.”