Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 1, No. 12, December 1956

A Date with Jonathan by Sam Merwin, Jr.

If people weren’t constantly talking too much and thereby getting themselves killed, a frightening depression would occur in a business that shall remain nameless. Which makes it something of a dilemma, therefore, whether to cheer for Lurline or her garrulous bat of a mother in this — ah — slice of life — here presented for your entertainment. Ugh!

Lurline Cassidy finished sewing the scrap of veil on her little black hat. Then she held the hat up, turning it, appraising it.

Across the green-walled rectangle of the hotel room, Lurline’s mother, Martha, was busily painting a cigar box. She liked to give the boxes she decorated to friends or acquaintances on birthdays and Christmas.

“Everybody sends cards,” she enjoyed saying with a supercilious tilt of her head, a smug dilation of thin nostrils. “I think it’s so much nicer to give something you’ve done yourself.” Long fingers touched pale, henna-dyed hair. “It conveys so much more.”

Martha was talking as she painted — as usual, whenever her daughter got home from the department store where she sold ladies’ dresses, marked down. Also as usual, she was talking about Hollywood, about the scandals of the old days, when she had been a young widow and Lurline, her hair tediously arranged in Shirley Temple ringlets, had had tiny bit parts and been the family meal ticket, something she still was.

Martha interrupted her chatter to regard Lurline, noted the hat and said, “really, that’s very clever — almost like a new hat.” Then, shaking her head, “It’s a pity you had to take after your father instead of my side of the family. You were such an adorable moppet. If only you could have stayed that way a year or two longer, I feel certain as I’m sitting right here that you’d have been a star.”

“Yes, Martha,” Lurline replied dutifully. She seldom bothered to point out her mother’s inconsistencies any more. They occurred so frequently, and the arguments that resulted when she did try to straighten Martha out invariably ended in confusion, recrimination and tears.

She arose and tried on the hat in front of the battered hotel dresser’s mirror. The wisp of veil that just shadowed her eyes gave a touch of glamour to her prematurely old, over-made-up face. But like her mother, whom she closely resembled, she was still a small, rather dainty, sapless creature with thin lips and board-flat bosom.

She had an hour before she was to meet Jonathan on the corner of Lexington Avenue. She didn’t dare let him come to the hotel and call from the desk downstairs. Martha was always dead set against her having dates or any hint of romance with anyone she considered ordinary. And Jonathan Calder sold shoes.

Martha was still talking about Hollywood, still dabbling at the cigar box. She had, somehow, rambled all the way back to the William Desmond Taylor murder, more than thirty years in the past. “Think of it,” she marveled in her dry, terribly cultured voice. “A great career like Mary Myles Minter ruined — wiped out as if by a blackboard eraser — just at a breath of scandal. Such a pity! And Mabel Normand, too.”

There was a pause and Lurline decided to take the plunge. “Martha,” she said, “I think I’d like to go to a movie.”

Martha lifted her brush from the box. “I think that would be just lovely,” she said. “I’ve been sitting in here all day. What shall we see? They say that French picture— Oh, what is the name of it?”

“Mother.” Lurline knew that using mother instead of Martha, which her mother preferred because it made her feel younger, would halt the unending flow of chatter. “Mother, I want to go alone.”

The older woman’s patrician pose vanished. She suddenly appeared thoroughly hard, cruel. “Lurline, you’re lying. You’re going out with a man. What is it this time — some ribbon clerk?”

It was close enough to hurt. Shoes were not in a higher class than ribbons. Lurline started crying.

“And you can stop sniveling,” said Martha decisively. “You can’t fool me with those tears. You’re not a good enough actress.”

Anger made Lurline’s throat feel tight and caused a little vein to jump just below the left corner of her jaw. Yet, in her own ears, her voice sounded small and ineffectual as she said, “Maybe I’m not a good actress, but I’m a woman — a woman thirty-three years old, and I—”

“Twenty-seven — you’re twenty-seven years old, dear.” Martha’s bland serenity made the incredible lie almost convincing. “You’re only twenty-seven, Lurline, so there’s still lots of time to wait for Mr. Right to come along. It’s your future — your happiness — your security — I’m thinking of. You can’t afford to throw your life away on some— some—”

Lurline turned and fled from the room. She tried the bathroom door down the hall, but it was locked. She cried harder because she had no privacy for her grief. In this wreck of an old New York hotel, she and her mother shared bathroom and kitchen privileges with the other residents of the sixth floor front.

A deep, offkey male voice was humming an old song of the twenties — Ukulele Lady — in the kitchen. It was Major Farwell, a genial, disabled World War I flier, who spent his time commuting between the hotel and Veterans’ hospitals. Lurline dried her eyes. She didn’t feel like exchanging pleasantries with the Major. But she didn’t feel like going back to the room to face her mother — not just yet.

“... Ukelele Lady lika you,” came from the kitchen, the final syllable punctuated by a dull splatting sound. Lurline moved to the open kitchen door and looked in. Major Farwell, grizzled and stout, wore his familiar blue hospital robe and slippers. He lifted his arm, as Lurline watched, to deliver a resounding thwack to a piece of meat with the flat of a cleaver. He saw Lurline and paused, saying, “Hope I’m not disturbing you, m’dear, but I’ve been looking forward to cube steak for breakfast tomorrow, and the confounded butcher didn’t do the job right.” He delivered another blow with the heavy meat cleaver.

Lurline stood nursing her anguish while the major finished preparing the steak, put it in the icebox and returned the cleaver to its hook above the long sink.

“There!” he said, moving toward the door. “That should do it.” He winked at Lurline, as he winked at all women, and added with an intoxicated air, “My, you’re looking mighty pretty tonight, Miss Lurline. If you don’t look out, you’ll become as big a threat to us men as your mother.”

Lurline moved aside to let the major pass. She said nothing, because she could not speak — the Major’s remark, coming on top of the scene with her mother, made her physically ill. She watched the Major go to his room, then took a deep breath and marched back to her own door, opened it and went inside.

“Mother,” she said. “I want you to know I’m going out with...” Her voice trailed off as she saw what Martha was doing. “You’re tearing my hat!”

Mrs. Martha Cassidy did not reply. She went right on completing the demolition of the little hat with its wisp of veil.

Lurline stood and watched as she had watched the Major prepare his steak. Suddenly she turned and left the room. She went to the kitchen, took down the cleaver, returned to the room and hit her mother with it, hard, on the side of the head. Martha made an odd little grunting noise as she went down on her hands and knees. Lurline hit her again with the flat of the cleaver, knocking her mother over on her side. Then she brought it down hard, pounding Martha’s head into the carpet, like the Major pounding the steak flat to the block.

She stood there, breathing a little hard, looking down at her mother. Her mother was dead — one whole side of her skull was soft and squishy. Her left eye had been sprung loose from its socket by the force of the blows and hung, dangling like a pendulum. There was very little blood, for which Lurline was grateful. She didn’t think she could have stood it, if it had been messy.

Her first thought was, Well, I’ve done it. I’ve really gone and done it! It were almost as if she had been thinking of killing Martha all along. But, actually, she couldn’t remember ever having had the impulse before. Her second thought was, I suppose I’d better do something about cleaning this up, though her mother had always protected her from anything that might possibly have been considered menial. She looked at the clock and discovered she still had fifteen minutes before her date with Jonathan.

She decided to put Martha down the kitchen incinerator. Unless she was awfully unlucky, there was small chance of anyone seeing her. The two girls that shared a room at the other end of the hall were never in after six, and Major Farwell had had liquor on his breath, as usual, when he passed her on his way from the kitchen. So he’d be safe in his room. That left only old Mrs. Paskman, with a room next to the girls. It must have been Mrs. Paskman who had been in the bathroom earlier.

Lurline went out and checked, found that the old woman had returned to her room. She went back and got her hands under Martha’s shoulders and began pulling her toward the door. It was awkward, but not as difficult as Lurline had feared it would be. Martha weighed less than a hundred pounds. And though she was small, and the incinerator system an old-fashioned one with a large opening, on each floor, it was a tight squeeze.

Lurline got the cleaver next and hung it in place and then hurried to the bathroom to wash.

The phone in the room was ringing when she emerged, and Lurline had to run to answer it. She hoped the hotel people hadn’t discovered Martha’s body so soon. For a moment she hesitated, her hand stopped in mid-air before the instrument. If she answered, and it was the hotel, it would ruin her date with Jonathan. She could think of nothing worse. As she paused, unable to decide, it rang once again, peremptorily. Thirty-three years of obedience had its way. She picked up the receiver, said hello.

It was Jonathan. He said, in his rather flat, Midwestern voice, “Miss Cassidy? I’m terribly sorry, but I won’t be able to keep our date tonight. You see a friend of mine has gotten sick, and I’ve got to stay with him. So I’ll have to ask for a raincheck. I hope I haven’t caused you any trouble, Miss Cassidy.”

Before she put down the phone, Lurline managed to say, “No... no trouble at all.”