After the First Death

2

IN THE YEARS WHEN I TAUGHT HISTORY (SURVEY OF WESTERN Civilization, Europe Since Waterloo, Tudor and Stuart England, French Revolution and Napoleon) we made much of historical imperatives, of the inevitability of virtually all major developments from the fall of Rome to the Russian Revolution. I was never wholly convinced of the validity of this viewpoint. I have since come to reject it utterly. History, I suspect, is little more than the record of accident and coincidence and random chance. The English Reformation was born in a lustful gleam in a regal eye. Presidents have fallen to the lucky shots of madmen.

For want of a nail, says Mother Goose, a kingdom was lost. And well I believe it.

Had there been a telephone in that room, I would have dialed the operator and asked for the police, and they would have come at once to take me away. There was no telephone in the room. I looked, and there was none.

Had my clothes not been so thoroughly soaked with blood, I would have dressed at once and left the building. I would then have proceeded at once to the nearest telephone and summoned the police, with the same results above described. But my clothes were bloody, so very bloody that I could not bring myself to put them on, let alone go anywhere in them. I could barely summon up the strength to handle them.

Accidents, coincidences, chance. That there was no phone. That my clothes were bloody. That a Supreme Court ruling had released me from prison. That I had taken that unremembered first drink a day or a week or a month ago. That I had met the girl, and brought her here, and killed her. For want of a nail, for want of a nail.

I wanted a cigarette, I wanted a drink, I wanted to go away. My first reaction, to call the police, was temporarily stalemated. I had to do something. I couldn’t stay where I was, in the room, with the girl, the dead girl. I had to do something. I had to get out of there.

There was a key on the floor by the side of the old dresser. An old-fashioned brass key attached by a piece of metal to a triangular wedge of pressed board a little longer than the key itself. HOTEL MAXFIELD, 324 WEST 49^TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY. DBOP IN ANY MAILBOX. WE PAY POSTAGE. The key itself was stamped with the number 402.

I was in a hotel. A cheap hotel, obviously, judging by the appearance of the room and the address of the hotel. A room, judging now by both the address and the body upon the floor, in one of those Times Square hotels to which streetwalkers take their clients. A room to which I had been taken and in which I had committed murder.

The headache grew more violent than ever. I covered my forehead with my hand and tried unsuccessfully to will the pain away. I took a step, slipped, and very nearly fell to the floor. I looked down and saw that I had slipped in the blood.

I turned my head so that I would not see the body or the blood. I walked carefully, skirting the blood, and got back to the bed. I sat on the bed and took the pillowslip from the pillow and used it to wipe the blood from my hands and feet. There were traces of blood elsewhere on my body and I got them off as well as I could with the pillowslip.

I stood up again and stripped one of the sheets from the bed. I folded it around me like a Roman toga and walked around blood and body once again and picked up the key and went to the door. It was latched. I slid the bolt back and eased the door open. The hallway, narrow and dark and dingy, was empty. I slipped out of the room and closed the door and locked it. The door did not have a spring lock; one had to lock it with the key. I walked down the hallway, feeling ridiculous in the improvised toga, hoping desperately that no one would appear. I found the communal bathroom-such hotels have communal bathrooms; I know much about such hotels, I have been in so many of them, so very many of them-and I entered the bathroom and shut and bolted the door. Someone had recently been sick in the toilet. I flushed it, and I closed my eyes, and opened them, and thought of the body on the floor of room 402-my room-and was sick again, and flushed the toilet a second time.

I filled the tub, after first washing it out carefully, and I seated myself in the full tub and bathed. The blood was my main concern. I had to get the blood off. Whatever I was going to do, I had to get the blood off me. I thought of Lady Macbeth. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? So very much blood in one little girl.

When I got out of the tub I had nothing to dry myself with but the sheet I used it and was left with nothing to wear. I looked at myself in the little fly-specked mirror over the sink. I did not seem to have more than a day’s growth of beard. Then today was Sunday, I thought. The last thing that I remembered was Saturday, Saturday morning, and-

No. I was not yet ready to begin remembering things.

And it couldn’t be very late. At those hotels, checkout time was generally somewhere between eleven a.m. and noon, although few of the guests stayed more than an hour or so. No one had come banging on my door, so it was probably still morning. Sunday morning.

I couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever. I took my damp bedsheet and folded it neatly several times until it was the approximate size of a bath towel, then wrapped it around my waist and folded it upon itself so that it would hopefully stay in place without being held. I opened the bathroom door and saw a little old man walking down the hallway. I closed the door again. He passed the bathroom and continued on down the hall. When I heard his footsteps on the staircase I opened the door again, and this time the hallway was empty.

I went back to my room. There was no place else to go.

And it was there, in the room, perhaps half an hour after I had first looked for a telephone to summon the police, that I realized that I was not going to call the police at all.

I had been in prison for four years. Inside, my fellow prisoners called it (how they had despised me; they were criminals, professional or amateur criminals, and I was a woman-killer, and they loathed me for it). I had been inside for four years, and could look forward, according to the standard actuarial tables, to remaining inside for another thirty-seven years. I had become virtually resigned to it. It was not a good life inside. No one could say that it was. But it was a life of sorts, a life with pattern and regularity to it, a life even with the illusion of purpose, albeit the self-deceiving purpose of a hamster upon a treadmill. I had become resigned to it, and they should have left me there until I died.

That they did not was more my fault than theirs. Some damned guardhouse lawyer began making noises down in Florida. He submitted a brief to the Supreme Court, whereupon the Court made one of its landmark decisions. This took the stopper out of the bottle. I read that decision, and obtained a transcript of my own trial, and burrowed through law books, and discovered that my whole case now appeared to be a legal comedy. An unsubstantiated confession, lack of immediate criminal counsel, illicitly obtained evidence-a variety of crucial irregularities, unnoticed at the time, which now took on the shape of a passport to the outside world.

I could have let well enough alone. I was where I felt I belonged and could have remained there. But I was plugged into the machinery of liberation; like a driver so taken with the performance of his car that he misses his turn and drives on into the next county, the discovery of a way out caught me up completely. I was on the road, not stopping to wonder where it might lead.

My own legal action brought others in its wake. I kicked a hole in the prison wall and a handful of prisoners followed me through it. Our verdicts were set aside, and society had the option of releasing us or bringing us again to trial. Most of us could not be retried-evidence was gone or had never existed, witnesses had died or disappeared. And so we were set free, I and Turk Williams and a bank robber named Jaeckle and others whose names I have forgotten.

And now this girl was dead, and I couldn’t go back. I could not do it, I could not go back, not now, not ever. I could not do it.

There was a knife on the floor. As far as I knew, I had never seen it before. But this did not mean much. As far as I knew I had not seen the girl before, or the room. I must have bought the knife Saturday afternoon, and I had evidently used it Saturday night I could use it again. I could draw my own blood with it this time. I could slash my wrists. I could return to the tub and open my veins and bleed to death in warm water, like Cicero. Or cut my own throat as I had cut the throat of the girl Wolfe Tone, jailed after the Irish Rebellion of 1798, had sawed through his throat with a penknife. I wondered if I could do the same. Would the hand falter? Would the pain surmount the determination? Or would purpose simply crumble halfway through the act defeated by the will to live or the fear of death?

I never picked up the knife, never reached for it I stood there, eyeing that knife, wanting a cigarette, wanting the knife, wanting to be dead. And merely thought about it.

I couldn’t kill myself. Not now. I couldn’t go to the police. And I couldn’t stay in the room much longer. I simply couldn’t do it.

I went through my trousers, being very careful not to get blood on my hands again. The pockets were empty. I was looking for cigarettes, and there weren’t any, but while I was at it I looked for my wallet, and it was gone, too. This was no great surprise. Usually, after such a night as this had been, I would awaken without watch and wallet. Both were gone now, and it was no surprise. Evidently I had been rolled before I picked up the girl. Perhaps that was how it had happened, perhaps she had requested money and I had had no money and that was what provoked me. Perhaps-

No. I still didn’t want to try remembering it. I didn’t even want to speculate, not yet.

I just wanted to get out of there.

I went to the door again, opened it. The hotel was noisy now. The guests were waking up and getting out. I waited at the door, held it open no more than a crack, watching, waiting. A tall thin man walked beside a short thin Negro girl. His blond hair needed combing and his face was lined with exhaustion. He looked desperately ashamed of himself; she looked merely tired. They passed. A door opened and a very effeminate young man emerged from it and left. Moments later a sailor vacated the same room; his face held the same expression of shame and exhaustion that I had seen on the face of the tall blond man.

Finally, two doors down the hall, a man in a white terry-cloth robe emerged from a room, crossed the hall, and entered the bathroom. He did not lock his door.

He was about my height, a little heavier. I slipped out of my room and locked my door and padded barefoot down the hall to the bathroom door. He was running water in the tub. He would be a while.

I went to his room, opened his door. I felt a moment’s panic at the sound of footsteps in the hall, then realized that no one would know I was entering a room other than my own. I went inside, closed the door, slid the bolt home.

There were clean underwear and socks in the dresser. No clean shirt, so I took one from a hook in the closet, a plaid flannel shirt, slightly worn at the elbows. It was big on me. He had only one pair of trousers, dark brown, wool, with pleats and cuffs. They were about four inches too big in the waist and very baggy in the seat, but by drawing his belt to the last notch they just about stayed up. The pants had buttons on the fly instead of a zipper. They were the first pair of pants with buttons on the fly that I had seen in more years than I could remember.

His shoes, unlike everything else, were too small. Heavy cordovan shoes, quite old-fashioned. The laces had been broken and retied. I squeezed my feet into them and tied them.

His wallet was in a drawer in the dresser. I didn’t want it, or his National Maritime Union card, or his driver’s license, or his condom. There were two one-dollar bills and a five in the wallet I took the three bills, then hesitated, then put the two singles back. I stuffed the five into my pocket-his pocket; originally, but mine now, possession being nine points of the law and ten points of the truth-and I left his room and hurried back to my own.

I changed his belt for mine, and now the pants stayed up better. They still did not feel as though they had been designed with me in mind, but neither did the shirt or the shoes, and it hardly mattered.

It bothered me, stealing from a poor man. He would miss the clothes, the five dollars, everything. I would have preferred stealing from a richer man, but richer men do not stay at hotels like the Maxfield, not for more than a couple of hours. Still, it bothered me.

His name, according to the driver’s license and the NMU card, was Edward Boleslaw. Mine is Alexander Penn. No doubt his friends call him Ed, or Eddie. My friends, when I had friends, called me Alex.

He was born in 1914, the year of Sarajevo, the year of the start of a war. I was born in 1929, the year of the crash.

Now I was wearing his clothes, and carrying five out of seven of his dollars.

There was no time. He would not bathe forever, he would eventually towel himself dry and pad across the room in his terrycloth robe and discover that he had been robbed. By then I had best be gone.

I opened the door. I looked at the dead whore again, and this time a sudden unexpected wave of revulsion went through me. I was unprepared for the reaction. It nearly knocked me off my feet I got hold of myself, left the room, locked the door (they would open it, they would find her, locking the door would not change this) and walked down the hallway toward a red exit sign. I walked down three drab flights of stairs to the ground floor. The clock over the desk said that it was ten-thirty, and a sign next to the clock announced that checkout time was eleven o’clock.

The desk clerk, a light-skinned Negro with horn-rimmed glasses and a thin neat moustache, asked me if I would be staying another night. I shook my head. He asked for the key. I flipped it onto the desk.

I wondered whether I had used my own name when I signed in. It did not matter, my fingerprints would be all over the room anyway. I started for the door, expecting the desk clerk to call after me, expecting to be met at the door by police. He did not call. No police awaited me. I stepped outside into overly bright sunlight that hurt my eyes. I wanted a cigarette, I wanted a drink, I didn’t know where to go.

HOTEL MAXFIELD, 324 WEST 49^TH STREET, NEW YORK CITT. DROP IN ANY MAILBOX, WE PAY POSTAGE. That would be between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, on the downtown side of the street. I turned to my right and walked half a block to Eighth Avenue. I crossed Forty-ninth Street and walked a block north, and on the comer of Fiftieth and Eighth I found a drugstore. I went inside and broke Edward Boleslaw’s five-dollar bill to buy a pack of cigarettes. I would need a razor, too, and blades, but I did not buy them now. I only had five dollars-$4.56 now, after buying the cigarettes, and the money would have to feed me and clothe me and shelter me until-

Until I gave up and called the police.

No. No, I would not call the police, I would not give myself up, I would not go back inside again.

No.

I lit a cigarette. I drew smoke into my lungs, and my head throbbed, and my hands shook. I went back to the counter and bought a tin of aspirin and took three tablets without water. It was difficult getting them down but I managed it. I put the aspirins in a pocket of Edward Boleslaw’s trousers and put the cigarettes and matches in a pocket of Edward Boleslaw’s shirt and left the drugstore and stood in the sunlight.

I did not know where to go.