Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1967 (UK)

Mrs. Gilly and the Gigolo by Mary L. Roby

Should the reader be prone to censure our heroine, he might well consider, “It is not every question that deserves an answer.”

Mrs. Gilly was accustomed to buying whatever she needed to make life comfortable. Therefore, when it became necessary to make her husband jealous, she did not hesitate to hire a gigolo.

His name was Anthony Powers, and he was much more appealing than Mr. Gilly had been even in his most balmy days. His hair was smooth and dark and his eyes were of the glistening variety. He stood well over five-foot-ten.

All of this compared favourably with Mr. Gilly, who had very little hair, weak and watery eyes, and stood only five-foot-four.

However, Mr. Gilly had power, position and money; Anthony Powers had nothing but his charm and his good looks. Because of this Mrs. Gilly found him boring in the extreme, but she kept up a facade of gushing girlhood in his presence because she hated to admit she was not getting her money’s worth.

It had been necessary for her to involve herself with this oily young man because of Mr. Gilly’s sudden and inexplicable entanglement with a young secretary at one of his offices. It was the usual story. He no longer came home directly at five as he had during all their married life. Friends had told her they had seen him dining and dancing with the girl at expensive night spots. Some wives would have crumpled into a ball and had a good cry, or gone on a buying spree. Not Mrs. Gilly. She had decided she would make her husband jealous, or die trying.

She had found Anthony Powers at one of those dusty agencies which specializes in such commodities. And, in the beginning, he had been a very accommodating boy. He had arrived to pick her up in the evenings in perfectly acceptable evening clothes, and had known how to order at the best restaurants. Of course what he was stood out all over him. But, considering her age and general lack of anything that could remotely be called glamour, Mrs. Gilly thought he was rather a find.

It took a great deal of doing, but she finally managed to put in an appearance with Anthony at the same restaurant where her husband and the little redhead were dining. Mr. Gilly had obviously lost his appetite at the first sight of them, and that night when they had both reached the privacy of their adjoining bedrooms they had decided that kind of philandering on both their parts had to come to an end.

“We don’t want to make ourselves ridiculous,” Mr. Gilly said very seriously.

And even though Mrs. Gilly knew that he was thinking of her and her oily young friend, she didn’t mind because Mr. Gilly always kept his word. Besides, he was kissing her for the first time in months.

It was at this point the trouble really began. When Mrs. Gilly called the agency the next afternoon and told them she would no longer need the services of Mr. Powers, she expected to receive a bill and mark a period to the entire affair.

But Anthony Powers was, it seemed, unwilling to give up so easily. He came to see her just before tea that afternoon and made quite an exhibition of himself.

He began by saying that Mrs. Gilly must promise him not to tell the agency he had come because they would fire him immediately if they knew he had forced himself on her when his company was no longer wanted. At this point his voice broke. He was a fool, he went on to say, to have allowed himself to have become personally involved with someone when he knew that this was all simply a business arrangement. But he had become involved. He loved her. That was it, pure and simple. He had fallen in love with her.

He actually fell to his knees there in the middle of the neat living-room, but Mrs. Gilly made him get up immediately. She was extremely disturbed. Pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace, she kept glancing in the mirror and seeing a dowdy, grey-haired woman who was obviously fifty if she was a day. She began to think that this young man grovelling in front of her had gone out of his mind. Either that, or else she had.

Anthony simply would not stop talking; he talked about his wasted life, and Mrs. Gilly was terrified that he was about to break into tears. She got him to sit quietly on the sofa and rang for tea, but even that didn’t seem to settle him. He drank two cups and ate three little cakes, and rambled on and on about how he couldn’t face life without seeing her every day. Finally he mentioned suicide.

By this time Mrs. Gilly was nearly frantic. She had promised Mr. Gilly she would never see Anthony Powers, nor anyone like him again, and here he was, sitting in her living-room. If Mr. Gilly were to come home he would think she had broken her promise, and perhaps that would make him break his.

Then there was the poor boy opposite her. It was useless to remind him that he was young enough to be her son. And the thought that he might actually take his own life made cold chills run up and down her back.

Mrs. Gilly felt herself to be rather gauche about affairs of the heart. She had never been attractive enough as a girl to have been the centre of any degree of subtle wooing, and now she knew herself to be completely lost. Awkwardly, she pretended that she was fond of Anthony, and offered him a brooch, which she hastily took off her dress, as a keepsake.

“Let it remind you of all the happy times we have spent together,” she said, wanting to fall through the floor in her embarrassment.

Anthony Powers took the brooch. Although he did not examine it carefully and thus could not have realized that it was set with real diamonds and a sizeable ruby, he seemed much happier after the offer had been made.

After all, he said, he couldn’t expect Mrs. Gilly to think of giving up a comfortable home to be with a penniless fellow like himself. Mrs. Gilly replied with some nonsense about the debt which she owed Mr. Gilly. Actually she scarcely knew what she was saying, she was so eager to have the young man gone before her husband returned home. When Mr. Powers finally took his leave, after startling her by grabbing her hand and kissing it in a most impassioned manner, all she could think of was her relief that he had gone in time to avoid a scene. Mr. Gilly had been most definite in his opinion of oily youths who hired their company out to the highest bidder.

Only much later, when she lay sleepless on her bed with Mr. Gilly peacefully snoring beside her, did Mrs. Gilly reflect that the brooch she had given the young man was a very valuable one, and what was more, her husband had given it to her on the occasion of their twentieth wedding anniversary. Never in the past had she lied to Mr. Gilly, but in the wee hours of the morning she decided, if he were to ask her about it, she would tell him it was lost. She had read somewhere that if one must lie, a simple lie was best.

As for the possibility that she might see Anthony Powers again, that thought never entered her mind. But one afternoon about a month later, the young man phoned her. He sounded desperate, and quite incoherent. Out of a feeling of responsibility, she finally agreed to meet him at a little restaurant near Washington Square for lunch.

He was there waiting for her, looking pale and thinner. He told her he had given up his profession because of her. He intended to become an honest man. Finally, because it seemed the obvious question, Mrs. Gilly asked him if he needed money.

She found it difficult to convince him that she wanted him to have a hundred dollars. She was not a cruel woman, and her heart had been touched to see the way he had gulped his food. She couldn’t bear to see him starve, she said, and she wanted to show him in some material way how proud she was of his attempt to make a new life for himself.

Finally he agreed to accept a cheque on her personal account for a hundred and fifty dollars. At the same time she tried to make it clear that Mr. Gilly would be most upset if he knew they had picked up the strands of their acquaintance, even for one afternoon. She was able to get away only after listening to the young man’s assurances that he would make something of himself that she could be proud of, and that he would, of course, return the money with interest just as soon as he earned it.

Mrs. Gilly next saw Anthony Powers three weeks later, as she and Mr. Gilly were having cocktails at a very plush bar. They happened to come out of the hotel just behind Anthony. He was escorting an older woman who, in the light of what he had told Mrs. Gilly about giving up his “profession”, could only have been his mother. He helped her into a taxi in the same obsequious way he had once helped Mrs. Gilly, and he was wearing an obviously new dinner jacket.

That incident should have warned Mrs. Gilly that she had not seen the last of her young friend. Nevertheless, she was alarmed when he turned up at the house one evening. Mr. Gilly was at a meeting at his club that night, but was expected home any minute. She found it necessary to be quite abrupt.

She was very sorry, she told Anthony, but she could not allow him to come to her house again. When he tried to tell her about his bad luck in trying to find respectable work, she was cruel enough to suggest he could always pawn his dinner jacket. When he demanded to know what she meant, she told him about having seen him a few nights before. Just as she had suspected, the older woman had been his mother, or so he said, and he had hired the jacket to impress her.

“Poor Mum would be brokenhearted if she knew I wasn’t a success,” he said.

He was so frank and open, and obviously still in love with her, that it nearly broke Mrs. Gilly’s heart to insist that he not contact her again. When he protested, she simply rang the bell and asked the butler to show him out.

Anthony went, but ten minutes later he called her. He had turned very nasty and was not at all like his old self. He told her she couldn’t brush him off that easily, and he threatened to show her husband a photostat of the cheque she had given him unless she continued to produce funds at certain regular intervals.

Mrs. Gilly went weak at the knees, but she kept her head. At his direction she wrote out another cheque for one hundred and fifty dollars and put in into an envelope that very evening. She needed time to think; she had to have time to recover from her shock at the young man’s duplicity.

During the next few days Mrs. Gilly was particularly conscious of the comfort which surrounded her. From the first waking moment of the morning when her maid brought her breakfast on a silver tray, until she wrapped herself luxuriously in an expensive robe and brushed her hair in the evening, Mrs. Gilly reflected on her good fortune. After his single lapse, her husband had become as attentive as any woman could wish him to be, and his affection for her now seemed especially precious.

It was obvious, too, that he had never forgotten what he obviously thought of as her near brush with infidelity. One morning he made a special point of telling her that he had heard his best friend, Bill carter, threaten to kill the next man who demonstrated affection for his wife, who was quite a different sort of person from Mrs. Gilly. Lucy was beautiful and charming, and had always attracted men like bees to honey. Her latest devotee had been a man much younger than himself, and Bill had threatened to shoot him if he found them together again.

Mrs. Gilly knew there was a special meaning behind her husband’s recitation of this dramatic bit of gossip, and she nodded vigorously to show him she understood.

It was then that Mrs. Gilly decided Anthony Powers would be better off dead.

First, she called Bill Carter at his office. With the assurance of an old friend, she suggested that he leave his office early and, together with Lucy, accompany her and Mr. Gilly to a little restaurant near Central Park where they had dined, the four of them, many times in the past on special occasions.

“And make it a surprise for Lucy,” she urged. “Women of our age don’t have much to surprise us, you know. She’ll enjoy herself more if you just pop home early from the office and tell her where we’re going.”

After that, Mrs. Gilly called her husband. He was surprised at the suggestion, but agreeable, and told her she was very thoughtful to have devised something of that sort just when Bill and Lucy needed the attention of their friends most.

Then Mrs. Gilly had only one more phone call to make. The man at the agency was pleased to hear from an old customer, and he promised to make certain her orders were followed exactly.

Mrs. Gilly spent the rest of the day trying to read. By the time her husband arrived home, however, she was in such a nervous state it was no trouble at all for her to portray shocked disbelief when he told her about the tragedy that had occurred at the Carter apartment that afternoon when Bill had arrived home early from work.

The entire story was in the late editions. Mrs. Gilly had called Lucy Carter at once, of course, to express her sympathy and ask her to come to them during the next gruelling weeks, but Lucy had gone to some hideaway in the country to avoid the newspaper men.

The next months were difficult for both Lucy and Bill. No one realized that better than Mrs. Gilly. But Bill was able to afford a very clever lawyer, who managed to convince a jury that the adulterous threat of Anthony Powers had given his client the perfect right to shoot him in the head.

After it was all over, Mr. and Mrs. Gilly and Bill and Lucy Carter took a little trip together to Bermuda. Lucy was troublesome at first. She insisted on wondering over and over again why the young man had come to her apartment in the first place. But Mrs. Gilly finally convinced her friend that the least said, soonest mended.