Black Money

33

Bess Tappinger came to the door with the three-year-old boy holding onto her skirt. She had on a torn and faded sleeveless cotton dress, as if she was dressing the part of an abandoned wife. Sweat ran down her face from under the cloth she had tied around her head. When she wiped her face with her forearm, I could see sweat glistening in her shaven armpit.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I’ve been cleaning the house.”

“So I see.”

“Will you give me time to take a shower? I must look hideous.”

“As a matter of fact you look fine. But I didn’t come for the view. Is your husband at home?”

“No. He isn’t.”

Her voice was subdued.

“Is he at the college?”

“I don’t know. Won’t you come in? I’ll make some coffee. And I’ll get rid of little one. He hasn’t had his nap.”

She led the protesting child away. When she came back, a long quarter of an hour later, she had bathed, changed her dress, and brushed her dark thick hair.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I had to get cleaned up. Whenever I feel really bad, I get this passion for cleaning.”

She sat on the chesterfield beside me and let me smell how clean she was.

“What do you feel bad about?”

Suddenly, she thrust out her red lower lip. “I don’t feel like talking about it. I felt like talking yesterday, but you didn’t.”

Abruptly she got to her feet and stood above me, handsome and still trembling with expectancy, as if the body that had got her into marriage might somehow get her out of it. “You don’t want to be bothered with me at all.”

“On the contrary, I’d like to go to bed with you right now.”

“Why don’t you then?” She didn’t move, but her body seemed to be more massively there.

“There’s a child in the house, and a husband in the wings.”

“Taps wouldn’t care. In fact I think he was trying to promote it.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He’d like to see me fall in love with another man – somebody to take me off his hands. He’s in love with another girl. He has been for years.”

“Ginny Fablon.”

As if the name had loosened her knees, she sat down beside me again. “You know about her then? How long have you known?”

“Just today.”

“I’ve known about it from the beginning.”

“So I’ve been told.”

She gave me a quick sidewise look. “Have you discussed this with Taps?”

“Not yet. I just had lunch with Allan Bosch. He told me about a certain night seven years ago when he and you and your husband and Ginny went to a play together.”

She nodded. “It was Sartre’s No Exit. Did he tell you what I saw?”

“No. I don’t believe he knew.”

“That’s right, I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him, or anyone. And after a while the thing I saw didn’t seem real anymore. It sort of merged with my memory of the play, which is about three people living in a kind of timeless psychological hell.

“I was sitting next to Taps in the near-dark and I heard him let out a little grunt, or sigh, almost as if he’d been hurt. I looked. She had her hand on his– on his upper leg. He was sighing with pleasure.

“I couldn’t believe it, even though I saw it. It made me so sick I had to get out of the place. Allan Bosch came out after me. I don’t remember exactly what I said to him. I’ve deliberately avoided seeing him since, for fear that he might ask me questions about Taps.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I do know, really. I was afraid if people found out that Taps had corrupted the girl, or been corrupted – I was afraid that he’d lose his job and any chance of a job. I’d seen what happened at Illinois, when Taps and I–” She caught herself. “But you don’t know about that.”

“Allan Bosch told me.”

“Allan is a terrible tattletale.”

But she seemed relieved not to have to tell me herself. “I suppose I had some guilt left over from that. I almost felt as if Ginny Fablon was re-enacting me. It didn’t make me hate her any less, but it tied my tongue. I seem to have spent the last seven years concealing my husband’s love affair, even from myself. But I’m not going to do it after today.”

“What happened today?”

“Actually it happened early this morning, before dawn. She telephoned him here. He was sleeping in the study, as he has for years, and he took the call on the extension there. I listened in on the other phone. She was in a panic – a cold panic. She said that you were hounding her, and she couldn’t keep up a front any longer, especially since she didn’t know what had happened. Then she asked him if he killed her father and mother. He said of course not: the question was ridiculous: what motive would he have? She said because they knew about her baby, that he was the father.”

Bess has been speaking very rapidly. She paused now with her fingers at her lips, listening to what she’d said.

“Who told them, Bess?”

“I did. I held my tongue until September of the first year. That summer when my own baby was born, the girl dropped out of sight, I thought we were rid of her. But then she turned up again at the Cercle Français icebreaker. Taps took her home that night – I think he was trying to keep her away from Cervantes. When he came back to the house we had a quarrel, as I told you. He had the gall to say I was interested in Cervantes in the same way he was interested in the girl. Then he told me about the abortion the girl had had to have. I was to blame, just because I existed. I was supposed to get down on my knees and weep for the girl, I suppose.

“I did weep, off and on for a couple of weeks. Then I couldn’t stand it any longer. I called the girl’s father and told him about Taps. He disappeared within a day of two, and I blamed myself for his suicide. I decided I would never speak out about anything.”

Again she seemed to be listening to her own words. Their meaning seeped into her eyes and spread like darkness. “Do you think my husband killed Mr. Fablon and Mrs. Fablon?”

“We’ll have to ask him, Bess.”

“You think he did, don’t you?”

Even as she asked the question, she was nodding dolefully. “Her mother phoned here the other night.”

“Which night?”

“Monday. Wasn’t that the night she was shot?”

“You know it was. What did she say?”

“She asked for Taps, and he took the call in the house. I didn’t have chance to listen. Anyway, it didn’t amount to anything. He said he’d talk to her, and went out.”

“He left the house?”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“It must have been quite late. I was on my way to bed. I was asleep when he came in.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I wanted to, yesterday morning. You didn’t give me a chance.”

Her eyes were wide and blind, like a statue’s.

“Was anything else said on the phone this morning?”

“He said he loved her, that he had always loved her and always would. I said something into the phone then. It was a dirty word: it just came out. It seemed so terrible to me that he could speak like that to another woman with our three children sleeping in the house.

“I went out to the study in my nightgown. It was the first time I’d gone to him since our little one was conceived – our last happy time.”

She paused, listening, as if the three-year-old had cried out in his sleep. But the house was so quiet I could hear water dripping in the kitchen sink. “Since then our life has been like camping on ice, on lake ice. I did that once with Daddy in Wisconsin. You find yourself thinking of the ice as solid ground, though you know there’s deep dark water underneath.”

She looked down at the worn rug under her feet, as if there were monsters swimming just below it. “I suppose in a way I was collaborating with them, wasn’t I? I don’t know why I did it, or why I felt as I did. It was my marriage, and she was breaking it up, but somehow I felt out of it. I was just a member of the wedding. I felt as if it wasn’t my life. My life hasn’t even started.”

We sat and listened to the dripping silence. “You were going to tell me what happened when you went out to the study early this morning.”

She shrugged. “I hate to think about it. Taps was sitting at his desk with a gun in his hand. He looked so thin and sharp-nosed, the way people look when they’re going to die. I was afraid he was going to shoot himself, and I went to him and asked him for the gun. It was almost an exact reversal of what happened the night that little one was conceived. And it was the same gun.”

“I don’t understand.”

She said: “I bought the gun to kill myself with four years ago. It was a secondhand revolver I found in a pawnshop. Taps had been out night after night with the girl, pretending to be tutoring, and I just couldn’t stand it any longer. I decided to destroy all three of us.”

“With the gun?”

“The gun was just for myself. Before I used it I called Mrs. Fablon and told her what I was going to do and why. She’d known of the affair, of course, but she didn’t know who the man was. She’d assumed that Taps was merely Ginny’s tutor, a kind of fatherly figure in the background.

“Anyway, she got in touch with Taps wherever he was and he rushed home and took the gun away from me. I was glad. I didn’t want to use it. I even managed to convince myself that Taps loved me. But all he had in mind was avoiding a scandal – another scandal.

“Mrs. Fablon didn’t want one, either. She made Ginny drop out of college and go to work for some clinic near the hospital. For a while I thought that the affair was over. I was pregnant again, with our third child, and Taps would never leave me, he promised he wouldn’t. He said he threw my suicide gun in the ocean.

“But he was lying. He’d kept it all these years. When I tried to take it away from him this morning, he turned it on me. He said I deserved to die for using a filthy word in Ginny’s hearing. She was absolutely pure and beautiful, he said. But I was a filthy toad.

“I took off my nightgown, I don’t know exactly why, I just wanted him to see me. He said my body looked like a man’s face, a long lugubrious face with pink accusing eyes and a noseless nose like a congenital syphilitic and a silly little beard.”

Her hands moved from her breast to the region of her navel, then lower to the center of her body.

“He ordered me out and said he’d shoot me if I ever showed myself in his private room again. I went back into the house. The children were still sleeping. It wasn’t light yet. I sat and watched it grow light. Some time after dawn I heard him go out and drive away in the Fiat. I got the children off to school and then I started cleaning. I’ve been cleaning ever since.”

“You say he isn’t at the college?”

“No. The Dean’s office called this morning to see if he was ill. I said he was.”

“Did he take the revolver with him?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been in the study, and I don’t intend to go in. It will have to stay dirty.”

I made a quick search of the study. No gun. I did find in a desk drawer about twenty versions of the opening page of Tappinger’s “book” about French influences on Stephen Crane. The most recent version, which Tappinger had been working on when I first came here on Monday, was lying on top of the desk.

“Stephen Crane,” it began, “lived like a god in the adamantine city of his mind. Where did he find the prototype of that city? In Athens the marmoreal exemplar of the West, or in the supernal blueprint which Augustine bequeathed to us in his Civitas Dei? Or was it in Paris the City of Art? Perchance he looked on his whore’s body in the massive cold pity of Manet’s Olympe. Perchance the luminous city of his mind was delved from the mud of Cora’s loins.”

It sounded like gibberish to me. And it suggested that Tappinger was breaking up, and had been breaking up when I first walked in on him.

Besides the hopeless manuscript lay a rough draft of the five questions he had devised for Martel: 1. Who responsible for Les Liaisons old and new? 2. ‘Hypocrite lecteur’ 3. Who believed Dreyfus guilty? 4. Where Descartes put soul? (pineal gland). 5. Who got Jean Genet out of jail?

Seeing the questions as they had occurred to Tappinger, I realized their personal significance. He had used them, perhaps unconsciously, to speak of the things that were driving him close to the edge: a dangerous sexual liaison, hypocrisy, guilt and imprisonment, the human soul trapped in a gland.

If the questions had seemed oddly one-sided to me, it was because they were answers, too, forced out in a kind of code by Tappinger’s moral and emotional conflict. I recalled with a slight shock that the answer to the fifth question had been Sartre, and wondered if, in Tappinger’s queer complex academic code, it referred to the night at the play seven years before.