Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 38, Fall/Winter 1979

Florence V. Mayberry Out of the Dream Stumbling

One of the oddest stories we’ve published in a long time — a strange story that will get under your skin, skewer into your consciousness — and perhaps into your subconscious...

The man on the witness stand looked younger than he was. Thirty-four, the papers said. In spite of the strain he was under, he had an unused look. Not innocent. The facts of the case made that apparent, and they were underscored by the too-soft set of his mouth. He just looked, simply, unused. The sob sisters were playing him up as a struggling artist, Bohemian, tempted, all that sort of thing. But as for tempting, some people tempt with a crook of the finger.

He was frightened. He kept staring at his sister, who sat in the courtroom with her head down. The way he stared added to his unused look — the way a child looks at its mother, helpless and beseeching. Hurt, too, as though he couldn’t believe anyone could punish him.

The sister was from a different cut of cloth. A thin, pale woman with use all over her. Not ugly. Good features, if the observer went beyond the strain on her face. She was obviously anguished by her brother’s trouble. Several of the newspaper stories had featured her — how she had worked so many years to help her brother become an artist, how she refused to believe he could murder anyone, in spite of the evidence. All the broken, strained, understated words by which she tried to tell how much she loved him...

Many a person in the courtroom was wrenched by pity because of the sister. It gave the case a deeper perspective.

“Call my sister again, please call Lulie back!” the man on the witness stand, cried out, as the prosecuting attorney continued to question him.

An embarrassed hush fell over the courtroom...

If they call me up there again, I’ll break down, I know I will. I wish I could just stay out of the courtroom until — poor Jack, he sounds just as he did when he was three years old and fell down the stairs and cut his chin and wouldn’t let anyone but me touch him. I can’t believe we’ve grown up, and that this has happened to us.

If I didn’t have to listen to all these questions! I think I know what happened, but with all these questions and the answers they think they ought to hear, what really happened becomes a secret that keeps running and hiding. When it hides, I have to search and search. And is it the truth when I find it? I don’t know any more.

Like my dream last night. About the crystal house.

There, I won’t listen to them. I’ll just think about my dream, and Celia’s crystal house. Maybe it will keep me thinking straight. Because the secret is there. I knew it all over again, the truth, when I went out of the dream house stumbling...

I went to the house that was built of crystal. No glass — Celia Hartman’s house would never be built of common glass. I touched its door to enter. In the way of dreams the door swung back and the floor itself seemed to move, although I felt no movement, and without walking a step I was inside the house. I was looking for Celia.

Instead of wallpaper in the great entrance hall there were golden designs imbedded in the crystal walls. There were no lighting fixtures. A glow was in the ceiling and I wished I could see how it worked — it was so fabulous, so rich. Like Celia. Eighty millions, Jack said she had. Or maybe it was one hundred and eighty millions — a hundred millions from her family and eighty millions from her former husband. It doesn’t matter. It was so much that it was shocking.

But the crystal house and its feeling of infinite luxury didn’t shock me. Somehow I expected it to be this way. Anything less would have been a disappointment.

I wondered where the butler was. Because, by this time, everyone knows that Celia Hartman has a butler.

The instant I wondered, there he was, strutting toward me from a gold-fretted archway.

“Where’s Celia?” I asked.

“Who knows?” he said. “She’s probably hiding. And you haven’t a key, so you can’t hunt for her.”

“My brother has a key,” I said. “One key is quite enough for one family. And Celia must be here.”

“In that case,” he said, and turned and strutted ahead of me. He led me into a room, not quite as large as the auditorium of the San Francisco Opera House.

“Is this the living room?” I asked.

“Drawing room,” he corrected primly. “It will be handy for your brother to paint in. Look at the beautiful divans. They’ve been freshly upholstered.”

When I saw the divans, my throat swelled in the way it’s been behaving lately. Nerves, the doctor says. I suppose he’s right, but sometimes I can hardly breathe; it might as well be real instead of nerves. And for all its vastness this room was crowding, squeezing, choking me with its fat, stuffy divans.

“They’re hideous,” I said. “I can’t imagine anyone with as much money as Celia putting towels on her furniture.”

“Not towels,” he said superciliously. “Toweling. Special hand-woven, deep-piled toweling. Clean and efficient. Look,” he said, leading me to an immense table beside the crystal wall. It, too, was covered with toweling. “If one spills paint or blood or what have you,” and he knocked over a vase with roses in it, “it sops up. Very handy, as you see.”

I began to think that surely I was wrong in my taste, for Celia wasn’t crazy — at least where physical things were concerned. The quick way she took Jack away from Gigi proved that. She knew the ultimates of clothes and jewels and cars and yachts and men, and, I suppose, houses. If she upholstered her furniture in toweling, it must be right.

“Perhaps it’s fur,” I suggested.

“Fur is for poor people,” the butler said. “This was woven from Miss Celia’s own design in Miss Celia’s own mills.”

My throat tightened over that queer lump again...

I remembered the only fur coat our family ever had. It was ten years ago, right after Jack and Gigi were married. Jack had sold a painting to a bar on Mission Street. I was upset because he sold it to such a vulgar place — spittoons, beer smell, and a juke box blaring. Especially when the painting was so sparkling, clean-lined, one I especially loved of San Francisco on a clear, sunshiny morning. Jack had it priced at $500. I had insisted that he put high prices on his paintings, even his first ones, because people take a second look when things cost a lot.

Then, when I found out Jack had sold it to the bar for $75, I was furious. I told him to take the money back and ask for his painting. But Gigi was so happy that he had actually sold one, he wouldn’t do it.

Jack and Gigi should have used the money to pay the studio rent; I told them they ought to. I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough money for everything. There was a big bill at the art supply store and the bill for clothes I’d bought for Jack so that he would look impressive when he called at the galleries — I had all those to pay.

But Gigi was only nineteen and so beautiful. And she was always threatening to go to Hollywood to earn the money they continually needed. So Jack bought her a fur coat, to prove he could give her what she wanted. Jack loved her. He really loved her very much. I don’t think he ever loved Celia the same way.

They went to Market Street to a cut-rate store and paid $71.45, including tax, for a genuine seal-dyed Dymka. I never heard of such a thing before. I asked about it at my office — and they should know about such things there, it being the office of the biggest department store in San Francisco. The girls laughed like crazy and started playing around with the letters and came up with “d — m yak.”

When I first saw the fur coat, with Gigi parading around their studio with the black fur clutched tight to her flat tummy and slim hips, it frightened me. It looked so expensive that I thought here would be one more bill for me to pay. When she took it off, it changed. Dymka was either rabbit-piled mouse, or mouse-sheared rabbit. Or yak. Still, on a person, even on me, it looked rich. I’m not as young as Gigi. And nobody was ever as beautiful as Gigi. But I am slim and tall, and all those years of ballet gave me a grace I’ll never lose. After I got Gigi the job modeling at the store and she bought a camel’s-hair coat, I could have used the Dymka. But she said she never thought I’d want her discards, so she gave it to a thrift shop.

When their studio rent came due, right after Jack bought the coat, I had to lend them $50. I always keep a hundred dollars or so ahead in the bank for Jack. He’s my baby brother and I feel responsible for him. When we were children, I told him we would be famous together, rich and famous. I was studying ballet, and good at it. And after Jack began to copy cartoons out of the funny papers when he was only six, I knew he should be an artist. I planned it all for us.

But the doctor had to find that murmur in my heart. I’d rather he had let me die. Because he said I had to stop dancing. Mama was just sick about it; she was always sure I was the genius of the family. But after Mama died... well, anyway, there was the murmur. Besides, it takes two people to be a genius, one to push and one to do. The way things turned out, Mama was wrong. Jack was the genius...

“My sister-in-law had a fur coat,” I told the butler. “She didn’t look poor in it. She looked like a million dollars.”

“We’ve got a million dollars in our refrigerator,” said the butler, his nasty little face twisting all over itself. “Miss Celia keeps it on hand to serve with cocktails. That’s what she intends to serve at Mr. Jack’s exhibition.”

“I want to see it,” I said. “All my life I’ve wanted to see a million dollars.”

“This way, madam,” said the butler, drawing himself up, sticking out his stomach, making me notice for the first time that he was wearing red and white striped velvet pajamas. “They’re liveried pajamas,” he explained, smirking.

We walked — slowly and heavily, like wading through water — into the kitchen. There was the refrigerator, all done up in toweling too.

That idiot butler hopped into the kitchen sink, pajamas and all, and turned on the water. “Hand me the towel off the icebox,” he said.

“Don’t be such a fool,” I said. “All the stories I’ve read about butlers, they didn’t act like you. I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want to see Celia’s money, I want to see Celia. Where’s she hiding?”

“She’s in the courtroom,” he said.

“Nonsense,” I said. “If I know Celia, she’ll be in the bedroom.”

But I don’t think it was I who said that. It was my voice, but I think Gigi said it... She could never quit dwelling on the time she found Celia in Jack’s and her bedroom. Like a wildcat, she was.

Gigi was supposed to be at work. It was busy at the store — they were getting ready for a fashion tea. And it was stupid of me — I shouldn’t have mentioned, while Gigi and I were eating lunch together, that Celia was coming to the studio that afternoon to talk over the one-man show Celia was sponsoring for Jack. In the middle of the afternoon Gigi told her boss she was getting appendicitis or something, and went home. It was a horrible mess. Gigi slapped Celia and kicked her as she ran downstairs. Celia had a bad fall. I was thankful she was so rich, else she might have sued.

Every time Jack came near Gigi, she scratched his face. Fighting was in her blood. She was beautiful and a good enough girl, but quite common on occasion. Malloy was her name before she married Jack.

The minute Jack called me, I rushed right from the office to her studio. “Georgiana Grace!” I scolded, using her real name instead of the pet name Jack liked. “Do you realize you may ruin Jack’s chance to have this big exhibit? Celia’s going to bring important critics. Maybe Jack will get a picture story in Life — Celia knows one of the editors. You know very well Jack’s paintings are hanging all over this apartment, even in the bathroom. Would you spoil his career just because he showed his sponsor the paintings in the bedroom?”

Gigi said a filthy word. “Grow up!” she said. “Jack’s too big to dress in doll clothes any more.”

“Jack, will you give me your word that everything between you and Celia was — proper?” I asked. Jack never lied to me. When he was small and used to work coins out of my piggy bank, he would always admit it.

“Everything was proper,” Jack said.

“I’ll bet!” Gigi yelled, and scratched him again.

The madder she got, the more Jack tried to hold her and kiss her. At last she let him. When I went into their kitchen to start dinner, he was holding her on his lap explaining how it would be foolish to give up the exhibition when it would all be over in another week or so.

“Then I’ll buy you another Dymka, baby!” he laughed. But not a word about the hundreds and hundreds of dollars that — oh, well...

Watching the butler splash himself and his velvet pajamas in the sink made me suddenly frantic to be clean and cool. I was drenched with perspiration. I was stifled by this house.

I tiptoed out and entered what seemed to be the dining room, with chairs arranged around a long rectangle. But the rectangle was not a table. It was a huge painting, a portrait of Jack, one I had never seen. He was dressed in evening clothes, and carried two cats by their tails. The cats had women’s faces. One was mine, the other was Gigi’s. Her face looked lovely and right, on the cat’s body. Her long, slanted blue eyes — Jack always called them the eyes of a Celtic nymph — were feline, wonderfully exotic.

Beyond this room was a long hall. At the end of it, through a broad doorway, I saw the golden posts of what I thought must be a bed.

“Celia!” I called. A bathroom would be off her bedroom. And I was driven by the need to bathe myself.

My cry couldn’t be heard, even by me. All the hall was padded with the soft, thick toweling. Every sound was absorbed. The soundless cry backed up in me. It created a rhythm, a bottled frenzy; it made my blood beat, beat, until it was like music. I began to dance, the way I used to. My head bent, my neck curved like Pavlova’s in the pictures Mama collected for me.

Suddenly I knew why I was hunting Celia. I was going to ask her to sponsor me in a dance exhibition.

I went dancing down the long, muffled hall. Bending, leaping with a lightness I should have lost years ago. It would astonish Celia, with her superior veiled look. She’d not look at me now the way she did at that cocktail party she gave for Jack, wondering what part of me could possibly be like Jack.

I danced into the room with the golden bedposts. But there was no bed attached to the posts. They were slender, golden columns that spiraled so high they held up the blue sky. No, it wasn’t the sky. Only a blue ceiling. In the blue ceiling were star shapes, outlined with tubed light. It was hideously ugly, because it was dead. It was a dead sky.

The golden posts formed a high, open circle. Celia stood within the circle. Her big dark eyes were lowered so I could not see the golden flecks in them that always reminded me of how rich she was. So I wasn’t frightened of her any more.

It was wonderful not to be frightened of a rich person. Always before I had been frightened by her rich house and her rich thinking and her rich manners — even by the rich way she was put together, her round golden flesh, her lips like little red-satin cushions, her poured-honey hair, the golden flecks, all the smooth butter luxury of her.

“You’re not as beautiful as Gigi,” I told her confidently. “Gigi is a Celtic nymph. She’s Irish, you know.”

She still didn’t look at me. “Yes, I know,” she said. “Jack told me.”

“I was always a nervous child,” I explained. “If I had not been so nervous, I would have been as beautiful as Gigi — as beautiful as you.”

“Not as Gigi,” she said. “Gigi is a Celtic nymph.”

“I’m tired of hearing that,” I said. “Do you have a bathtub in your bedroom?”

“This is not a bedroom,” she said. “This is the courtroom. I am standing in the middle of the court. Isn’t it lovely the way I was able to buy heaven for its ceiling?”

She lifted her eyes, but so high that I couldn’t see into them. She clasped her hands under her chin and gazed at the blue ceiling.

“Don’t try to look saintly,” I warned. “I know as much about your kind as Gigi does. I just pretended I didn’t so I wouldn’t hurt Jack’s career. It’s my career too, you know.”

She smiled. She really looked quite kind. “Ever get fooled?” she asked softly.

My body burned, but at the same time I was cold with perspiration. The lump in my throat hurt. I began to cry. “I must have a bath, I’m filthy, and there’s no tub here.”

Celia moved beside me, her eyes once more directed toward the floor. I think she pressed a button on one of the golden posts — I was too disturbed to see. For the floor of the circular court slowly slipped aside, revealing a large pool of water with steps leading into it.

I walked slowly down the steps to the water’s edge.

“But the water’s dirty! It’s full of old dead leaves,” I said, weeping again.

“You’ve let it get stagnant,” Celia sneered. “You should have drained it long ago.”

What a terrible woman! Blaming me for her own dirty pool of water! I hated her terribly. I hated her with all the hate I had ever had for anyone throughout my life.

I turned, whirling, leaping up the steps, a nymph doing arabesques of fury.

Celia began laughing, raising her eyes toward me.

“Don’t look at me!” I warned. “If you look at me, I’ll kill you!”

But she was already looking. Staring, staring.

There was a towel in my hand — I must have picked it up somewhere in the house.

She waved her hand at me, as though in farewell, and turned her back. Then she lay on the floor and went to sleep.

Slowly, as though walking through water, I went to her, eased the towel beneath her cheek. Then I knotted it tightly over her face. She made no struggle. She was already sound asleep.

I left her and ran away. The house compressed, the way things do in dreams, and I was running out the door, stumbling, running again, the secret no longer hiding but pursuing me...

“Your sister’s testimony was clear,” said the prosecuting attorney to the defendant. “There is no need to call her back. Now, is it not true that you entered the bedroom where the deceased was sleeping, asphyxiated her with a chloroform-saturated towel, and—”

The defendant began to cry. “I wasn’t there when she died!” he said wildly. “I was at Celia Hartman’s house. Only she wasn’t home. I had a key — that’s why the butler didn’t know I was there. But he thought he heard a voice calling in the hall — he testified to that.”

“He thought,” the prosecuting attorney emphasized sarcastically. “And a voice so unclear to him that it could be either male or female. The butler had been sound asleep — he had retired early under bromides because of a heavy cold. He believes he may have been having a nightmare. But he arose at once, put on his bathrobe, and examined the upper hall and the lower. No one was there.”

“My sister sent me there! She sent me, but she won’t tell you!” the defendant said. He stood up and faced his sister. “Lulie, in the name of God, tell them!”

“Order!” demanded the judge, pounding his gavel...

I never intended to have Jack blamed. That just happened. One thing built on another, and after it did, I began to think that Jack ought to suffer a little. A person needs to suffer to learn how to take care of himself. And after this Jack will have to take care of himself.

First, the police came. Jack had called them. I was across the street with old Mrs. Bellingham — she reminds me so much of Mama. And she isn’t right any more — she didn’t know when I came in, she can’t remember five minutes at a time. But even though Jack had called the police, and swore he was innocent, his fingerprints were all over the chloroform bottle. And there were the bruises on her shoulders where he’d held her to keep her from scratching out his eyes.

They were sure he did it. And I kept thinking: suffering toughens a person, and Jack needs toughening. Just for a little while. So I told them I wasn’t there, that I didn’t know anything.

After all, he intended to do it. That night, when I saw him fumbling in my medicine cabinet, I felt uneasy. He’s always borrowing things. But that night he had a queer, white look around his mouth. Earlier I’d heard them fighting, too, that’s when she got the bruises. But he told me she was asleep and he needed antiseptic for a scratch. As for her falling asleep right after a fight, that was natural. She was a beautiful animal, and a good fight relaxed her.

He was gone a half hour or so. Then he came tearing back. “For God’s sake, wake her up! Get a doctor!” he said. “I think she’s dead. Lulie, I didn’t mean it. But she swore she’d stop my exhibit, swore she’d kill Celia—”

I ran next door to their apartment. The nasty smell of chloroform hit me. I knew then what he had borrowed from my medicine cabinet. It was the chloroform I’d bought for my kitten when it had fits.

A towel hung from the bed beside Gigi. The chloroform smell came from it. I examined Gigi. “You’re always losing your head,” I told Jack. “She’s not dead. She’s breathing and her heart’s beating. You know how soundly she sleeps. But you idiot! How could this help us?”

“I don’t know — I didn’t want to lose the show — I don’t know,” he kept saying.

“Get out of here,” I said. “Go see Celia. Stay there a while. But don’t tell anyone, you hear? — about what you tried to do. I may have to call a doctor and I don’t want you around here talking too much. Remember, keep your mouth shut.”

He ran out.

I put cold water on Gigi’s face. I blew my breath into her mouth. It was useless. Before I began, I knew it. There had been no breath, no heartbeat, when I examined Gigi. She was dead before I ever got to their apartment.

And already I knew what I had to do. I don’t have a career, and Jack does. Besides, I want to take care of him — it’s my life! What else have I got?

I fixed it so that Jack would believe I was the one who really murdered her. That way, he could go on living and working; he wouldn’t have to hate himself so much. I picked up the towel, put it on her face, and poured the rest of the chloroform on it. My fingerprints were on the bottle, too. That was only natural. It was my chloroform.

Jack came back, found the towel on her face, and called the police. But when they questioned him, he just kept saying, “Talk to my sister, talk to my sister.” He didn’t know how to handle it. For what could he say that wouldn’t make him guilty, too?

The police found me across the street with that dear old soul, Mrs. Bellingham. She kept muttering how I’d been there since I came home from work. I had run in to see her for a minute when I first came home, and she didn’t remember I’d ever left. By then, with all those policemen and reporters around, I was almost numb. I didn’t say anything. I let them talk and I just nodded. It was so clear they thought Jack had killed her. Well, I was scared, and I kept thinking I hadn’t really done it. And Jack needed some sense scared into him. So I let it ride.

In those crazy dreams I always start to kill Celia. Then, like the girl beside the pool in the crystal house, when her eyes look directly at me they have no golden flecks. They aren’t dark. They are Gigi’s blue, slanted eyes.

I’ll sit here, quiet, free, for just another minute or two. Then I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them I did it.

Everyone in the courtroom gazed at her as Lulie abruptly arose from her seat. “Please! Please!” she cried. “Let him alone! He didn’t do it, I did it! But it wasn’t Gigi, it was the butler I killed. He wouldn’t take me to Celia. He was sitting in the kitchen sink, and I held his head under the faucet until he drowned!”

The judge pounded his desk with his gavel. “Bailiff,” he ordered. “Remove that poor woman from the court!”