After the First Death

3

HOME IS WHERE, WHEN YOU HAVE TO GO THERE, THEY HAVE to take you in. That is the best definition of the word that I have ever heard. By its terms, I had no home. I had been born and raised in Chillicothe, Ohio, in which town my only living relative, a widowed aunt, still made her home. When I was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Evangeline Grant, my Aunt Caroline had written me a brief note: I hoped and prayed you would be hanged to spare you and all your family many years of shame. May you make your peace with God, and may He some day grant you rest. By all your family she meant, I presume, herself.

I plotted a telephone conversation in my mind. “Aunt Caroline? This is Alex. You may have heard that I’ve been released. Yes, several months ago. No, I haven’t gone back to teaching. No, nothing like that But the reason I called, you see, is that I’ve gone and done it again. Gone and killed another girl; yes. Cut her throat, just like the last one. And why I’m calling, you see, is that this time I’m not going to give myself up to the police. Not this time. Instead I figured on coming out to Chillicothe and staying with you for a spell. Just while I pull myself together-”

Christ.

Before the murder-the first murder, the Evangeline Grant murder-I had had a wife. She was very good throughout the ordeal of arrest and trial. She stood by me through it all, Gwen did, and I have always felt that she quite forgave me for killing Evangeline Grant while never absolving me of my guilt for having had coitus with the girl. In any event she remained true-blue until I was safely inside, and visited me there twice, and divorced me in Alabama, moved to the West Coast, met someone in Los Angeles, and married him. I did not recall her married name, although I must have learned it at one time or another.

Hers was another doorstep on which I could not turn up. There were also the doorsteps of friends, though few remained, and few of those in New York. I had called a handful of men since I left prison. I had seen one of them, Doug MacEwan, and him only two or three times. And I had been only a little more successful at making new friends than at keeping the old. While I had made no enemies in prison, neither had I formed any firm relationships. Once I saw a fellow prisoner on the street and we passed one another without speaking. Another time Turk Williams looked me up. He offered me a job, not, I don’t think, because he felt my talents were particularly adaptable to the wholesale heroin business but out of some impulse of gratitude. My own legal actions had opened the door to his cell, and I had further helped him prepare his appeal.

I did not take the job, no doubt to his relief. Nor did I see him again after that. He lived somewhere in Harlem and had left his phone number at my place on Ninth Street. It was probably still somewhere around the apartment.

Ah, yes. The apartment. For home, to use a more mundane definition, is also where you hang your hat and I hung mine, and had for about ten weeks, on East Ninth Street between Avenues B and C, in a part of New York which is called the Lower East Side by traditionalists and the East Village by romantics.

I decided to go there now. Not because any urgent business called me there, but because now was probably the last chance I would have. At any moment now the desk clerk would bang on the door of my room at the Hotel Maxfield, announcing that it was time for me to depart. Then he would notice that I had already checked out, and so he would get the key and unlock the room, or else a chambermaid would perform that task. Whoever did the job, the body of the girl would be discovered, and within a half hour or so the police would arrive, and in a matter of hours after that my fingerprints would be identified (or faster identification would be accomplished from something left in my clothes, or, quite possibly, I would have used my real name in signing for the room), and before very long, perhaps that very afternoon, perhaps not until the following morning, the police would be knocking on the door of my apartment.

It would not do to be there when they arrived. And, certainly, there were reasons why I would want to get to the apartment. I had clothes there, clothes which fit me better than the borrowed clothing of Edward Boleslaw. There was no money-everything had been in my wallet, and my wallet was gone. There was a checkbook, though, that would do me little good; there was no place I knew of where I could cash a check, not on Sunday, and by the time the bank opened in the morning the police would know of me, and it would be dangerous to go to the bank. But clothing alone was incentive enough. I felt alarmingly conspicuous in his large shirt and flapping trousers, and horribly cramped in his small shoes.

I balanced time and money, which is like comparing apples and bananas, and took a taxi to my apartment. This, with tip, ate up two dollars of my $4.56. It seemed the lesser evil. There is simply no logical way to get that far east on Ninth Street by subway. Whatever combination of trains I might take, I would be left with a long walk. My feet couldn’t take it, not in those shoes, nor could I afford the time. I took a taxi, and sat in back watching the meter, smoking my cigarettes, suffering from my headache, and struggling neither to think nor to plan nor to remember.

Of course I didn’t have my key. I had to rouse the building superintendent, and together we climbed three joyless flights of stairs, he grumbling and I apologetic, and he opened the door for me and suggested that I take my key along with me next time. I forebore telling him that I had no key to take with me, or that I would never be returning to the apartment. He went away, and I removed Edward Boleslaw’s clothing and showered (Here’s the smell of the blood still! All the perfumes of Arabia…) and dressed anew in clothing of my own. Good presentable clothing: a gray sharkskin suit, a white shirt, black shoes, an unmemorable striped tie. Before dressing, but after showering (it’s difficult to keep one’s chronology straight) I shaved and combed my hair. Throughout all of this I was much more relaxed than I had expected to be. My hand did not shake while I shaved, and I did not even nick myself, a feat I usually perform even when unrattled by either hangover or guilt. I was quite calm right up to the point where I looked at myself in my mirror, all neatly dressed and neatly groomed and, if not handsome, not entirely badlooking either, and cocked a grin at myself, and tried a wink, and then, without warning, crumbled completely.

I think I wept. I don’t know. There was a blank moment and then I was sitting on my own narrow bed with my head in my hands and my eyes focused on the floor between my own feet.

One remembers odd things at odd moments. I remembered the last meeting with Morton J. Pillion, the warden of the prison in which I spent four years. He was a frail, birdlike man, gray of hair and pink of face, and from the first time I had met him I had felt he was altogether miscast for his role. A prison warden should be more like Broderick Crawford, and he was rather on the lines of an elderly Wally Cox.

He said, “You know, Alex, I’ll miss you. Now don’t feel you have to return the compliment I suspect you’re anxious to be outside.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t even have to sit still for this talk, you know,” he went on. “You’re to be discharged at once. That’s the language of the order. Not like a prisoner who’s served his time and has to have that final interview with the Old Man whether he likes it or not. Improper representation by counsel, improper use of confession, oh, all of that. A free man. Care to walk out on me, Alex?”

“No.”

“How do you feel?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Understandable.” He gave me a cigarette and a light. “The usual lecture contains a lot of tripe about the prisoner’s having paid his debt to society. I don’t like the phrase, but it’s a convenient one. But you haven’t paid your debt, have you, Alex? You committed a murder and now we’re letting you out.” He sighed, shook his head. “Know what you’ll be doing now?”

“I’ll look for work. I’m not sure what kind.”

“You’re a professor, of course-”

“I’m afraid that’s out.”

“Perhaps, though time does heal wounds. Even of this sort. What else are you qualified for?”

“Library work?”

“You’ve certainly done a fine job here. I’d gladly give you a reference. But you may have difficulty getting hired. How are you fixed financially?”

“I have some money saved. A savings account.”

“Much?”

“Enough for the time being. I’m not rich. I’ll have to work sooner or later, and God knows at what.”

“Try to get something on your own merits. Without changing your name, or hoping your identity doesn’t catch up with you. Know what I mean? Because people always find things out sooner or later, and you’re better off it you don’t set yourself up for a fall.”

We talked a good deal about this, about what sort of work I might get, about what town I would settle in-I was going back to New York, because that was the place I knew best, and because it is the easiest town in which to lose oneself and remain nearly anonymous.

Eventually he said, “You’ve never remembered it have you?”

“The murder, you mean? No. Never.”

“I wonder if that’s good.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure myself, Alex. I wonder if a person’s better off losing the memory of a crime. Forgive me an unpardonable liberty, but I have to say this. The important thing is that you not repeat the offense.”

I said nothing.

“Every man has a devil in him,” Pillion said. “With some the devil lives close to the surface, and alcohol or some other force can liberate him. This happened to you, with disastrous results. You must never lose sight of the fact that it could very possibly happen again.”

“I won’t let it.”

“I hope not.” He toyed with desktop objects-a pen, a pipe, an ashtray. “Two things to guard against. First, you don’t remember the murder itself. Second, you’re being released; you’re being told in effect that you’re legally innocent. These elements can combine to fool you, lead you to think that it never really happened in the first place. The tree falling when no human ear can hear it, eh? No murder, no guilt, no need to guard against a repeat performance. Eh?”

“I’m afraid you’re getting a litde metaphysical-”

“Perhaps. I’m not certain. What’s the saying? ‘He who fails to learn from the past is condemned to repeat it. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten the words wrong, but you know my meaning, you’re a historian yourself.”

“Yes.”

He lowered his eyes. “Actually, you’re a lucky man. A very lucky man. You’re getting a second chance, not because of anything you’ve done but because of a combination of circumstances. I hope you’ll keep that devil buried. Or see a psychiatrist and exorcise him entirely. And I hope you’ll stay far away from liquor. Some men can drink and some can’t, and-”

“I always thought I was one who could.”

“Perhaps you could have, at one time. Don’t experiment. Stay away from drink. Keep the lid on tight. Learn from the past, Alex. God, yes, learn from the past, don’t repeat it. It’s not a good past Don’t repeat it.”

I wanted to call him. I wanted to get him on the phone-better, to see him in person, in his office, sitting across the desk from him, telling him about it. I had not learned from the past, I had repeated it, and there would be no third chance.

I took some aspirin, then wandered around the apartment trying to think what it held that I might want to take with me. Certainly there must have been specific articles which might have been of value to a criminal on the run, but this was a role I had never before played and one to which I was consequently quite unaccustomed. I had to run. Presumably I had to run somewhere. But where? Embezzlers went to Brazil. Western gunmen went to the Badlands. Where did modern-day murderers go? And how?

Or did one merely attempt to avoid capture, staying in the same city, lurking in familiar haunts? That seemed unlikely. From what I had read, criminals usually headed for bright lights, the busy downtown sections of major cities. And there they were quickly caught. Or else they raced for the Mexican border, and were captured attempting to cross it.

Perhaps if I just went somewhere in the Midwest. But my face would be broadcast everywhere, newspapers, television. I would be recognized, I would be caught-

I left the apartment without taking anything with me. Not even my checkbook, nothing, nothing at all. I left the apartment and started walking.