Into the Night

The train rushed from night into oncoming day, as though it were speeding from the heart of an hours-long tunnel on toward its steadily brightening mouth, coming nearer, ever nearer, far down along the track. Then suddenly it was all light outside, the scoured-aluminum color of first daybreak.

Suddenly there was a landscape, where there hadn’t been before. A tall brick stack went by, with a full-grown shadow already. Suddenly there was today, where there hadn’t been before. Suddenly there was now, and the darkness had become then. The whimpering of a little baby in its mother’s arms, somewhere here within this same railroad coach, was the new day starting. As young as that, as malleable, as un-storied yet.

She hadn’t slept. She hadn’t wanted to, she hadn’t tired. Sleep was for the purposeless, an interruption between nothings, to make them more separately bearable.

Head back against the sloping chair all night. Eyes half-lidded against intrusion but never once altogether closed; just as they still were now. Journeying, journeying, question marks for telegraph poles along the right-of-way. Journeying not into tomorrow, journeying into yesterday. A yesterday twice removed, at that. Somebody else’s yesterday. A yesterday you skipped, that never was, once — to you — today. Ghost yesterday.

The man came to the door and said the name of a town.

She rose and took her bag down, and the train died under her as her tread moved down its aisle. It was dead already, when she reached the platform. Steam veiled the opening to yesterday, the car door, as she stepped down through it. Then it thinned and went away again, and left her — yesterday.

So this was it.

She glanced down at the cindery gravel needling her feet, and up at where the sun rode high in the sky, sending down rays like a chemical bath or solution, bleaching the world. And over at a weighing machine, with a round mirror that showed only sky though it was sighted directly at her face. Probably because the glass was fitted into its frame unevenly.

And at a semidetached shingle hanging lengthwise over a passage entrance, that read “Baggage.” And at a bench, of contour-curving green slats, set against the station wall, with no one on it. With only a folded newspaper on it, left behind by someone. And the shattered wrapping of a candy bar under it, like a little silver derelict ship, rocking lightly in the wind but never sailing forth across the cement platform sea.

So this was it.

Here once you stood, Starr. Waiting for the train that was taking you away. Maybe right where my foot is now, as I move it out a little; to where that crack is in the cement. Maybe you moved your foot out too, to that crack, and covered it for a moment, looking at it but thinking elsewhere. Who stood with you? Did you stand alone? Did Vick stand here by you, perhaps his hand upon your arm in defeated remonstrance; most certainly his eyes upon your face in unavailing plea?

What was he saying? You didn’t hear? Perhaps if you had listened, you would be alive now, instead of dead, at the thousand-mile-away end of these tracks. Wouldn’t it have been better to listen to stale, dull, homespun words of advice, and be alive today, than to throw them over your shoulder, and be dead today? You don’t answer that, Starr. And I don’t either. For I’m not sure what the answer is.

Did you look around you for the last time (perhaps over his shoulder, as his arms held you)? Turn your head, a little here, a little there, a little elsewhere, as I do now? See a mirror that doesn’t reflect your face, a shingle reading “Baggage,” a bench with no one on it? Were you glad? Were you heartsick? Were you frightened? Were you bold?

The bricks and pavings, serried cornices and building fronts, perspective-diminishing streets, of home.

You have come back, Starr.

There was a lunch counter inside the station. There always is, in every station. She went inside and across to it and sat down on a stool.

She hadn’t eaten on the train. She hadn’t wanted to then, she still didn’t want to now. She didn’t want food, she didn’t want sleep. She had no time for distractions like that, she had a dream. She too had a dream now; bitterer, stronger, than any dream Starr’d ever had. But you had to pause, to swallow, to sleep, or you faltered.

There was a girl behind the counter. A single, thin stripe of turquoise-green bordered the cuffs, the collar, the pocket orifices, the upturned cap brim of her otherwise all-white garb.

“I want coffee.”

“Anything else?”

“Coffee and nothing else,” Madeline answered impatiently, as though she were bored even having to waste time with that.

The girl came back with it.

“Could I ask you a question?”

“I can’t stop you,” the girl said pertly.

“Have you lived here long?”

The girl gave her the look that meant, What’s that to you. But she gave her the answer along with it, as well. “Always.”

“Then did you know anyone named Starr Bartlett? Ever hear of anyone named Starr Bartlett?”

“Never heard the name.” Local pride prompted her to add an oblique rebuke. “We’re not so small here.”

Madeline tasted her coffee. It wasn’t good. Even if it had been good, it wouldn’t have been good.

“How do you get to — how would I get to Forsythe Street?”

“There’s a bus takes you. The driver will call it out for you, if you speak to him when you get on.”

Madeline looked at her coffee-dulled spoon, then at the girl once again, hesitantly.

“Just one more.”

“No, that’s all right,” the girl said, with equally formal politeness. Meaning, you haven’t asked me anything I resent yet. When you do, you’ll know it.

“Where would be a good place to stay? I’m by myself. Just came.”

“Somebody like you—” The girl appraised her. The girl was a shrewd appraiser. “A girl who wants to mind her own business — the Dixon is respectable. Awfully dowdy, but respectable. The respectable places always are dowdy, did you ever notice?”

Then, unasked and perhaps unwitting, she gave an insight into her whole philosophy of life. “It’s not the hotel anyway. It’s the person in it.”

Madeline put her money down, left her cup three-quarters full, got down from the stool.

The girl called to her a little brusquely.

“Your coffee’s only ten.”

“It’s on the big sign there,” Madeline agreed.

The girl separated the excess, guided it a distance along the counter, with a stubborn smile. “I didn’t do anything to earn this.”

“I asked you three questions, and you set up my coffee.” She was really asking her why.

“I don’t know; there’s not the same kick in it. It’s like taking something from yourself.”

Madeline reclaimed the donation. She wanted the girl to enjoy herself; the job was dull enough.

No one answered the bell. After the first ring had gone unheeded a sufficient length of time, she rang a timorous second time. Then waited even longer, fearing to seem importunate, fearing to antagonize. And finally, fearful in the extreme, rang a third time. Still no one came.

She did not know what to do then. She could not summon up courage to ring any more. Either no one was in, in which case it was no use anyway, or else someone was in and did not wish to answer, in which case she would be antagonizing them, the very thing she did not want to do.

At last she turned and started down the stairs. She had not given up, she did not intend to give up, not if it meant she had to fold her coat on the floor outside the door and sit on it waiting, the rest of the day and all of the night. But what she intended to do at the moment was seek out and accost somebody outside on the street nearby, who might be able to give her some information. Even a child if possible — she had noticed some of them playing on the sidewalk before. In fact children were often the best sources of information, lacking in suspicion and reserve as they usually were.

Be all that as it might, she had only gone as far down as the landing below and was still within fair hearing distance, when she thought she heard the door open, and did hear, in this case without any doubt, a voice call out (rather hollowly due to the enclosed hall), “Hello? Was there somebody here just now?” And then again (and she could tell it would be the last time, would not be repeated), “Hello?” She turned and ran back up the flight she has just descended, with utmost speed, so that she might not be cut off from the voice.

As her face, and then her body, sprang agilely up above the hall floor level, she saw that the door stood open. Not just aslant, but wide open, with light that was like incandescent smoke fuming out from it into the dim hall, which had no windows. And out in the middle of the hall, well away from the door, turning her head inquiringly first up this way, then down that, stood a woman no longer young. The woman who, somehow, she knew to be Starr Bartlett’s mother.

It was strange that she could feel so sure at sight, because if she had formed any preconceptions of her, and she had of course, not one of them was accurately fulfilled. She was the opposite in almost everything Madeline had thought she would be.

She had thought she would be gray, not only gray of hair, but with an overall faded, gray aspect. The word “mother” was no doubt what had formed this image in her mind. Having lost her own at an early age, she had had no contemporary, day-to-day experience with one. To her they were all of one type, not individuals. Quite the contrary, the overall aspect of Starr’s mother was dark. Everything about her was black. Her hair was the unlikely and unlifelike black of tar, so that almost certainly some sort of vegetable dye must have been applied to it to keep it that even. Perhaps its use initiated years before, and had now become merely a habit rather than a vanity. Her clothes were black without exception; not a fleck of color showed on her anywhere. But this of course would be because of Starr’s passing. Her brows were heavily black. And in this case naturally so. They were almost like little tippets of black sealskin pasted above her eyelids. And lastly her eyes were black. Black as shoe buttons. But very mobile shoe buttons.

Madeline had thought that her figure would be ample, plump, maternal. She was rail-thin, scrawny. That she would be slow-moving, perhaps even impeded in gait. Her step was sprightly, that could be seen at a glance; it was at the other end that the advancing years had assailed her. She was acutely, cruelly round-shouldered. So that, although she was of a fair height, she was made to seem short, even stunted.

“Mrs. Bartlett?” Madeline whispered. She had to whisper because of the alacrity with which she had bounded back up the stairs.

“Yes,” she said, turning the black eyes on her. They had great sorrowing pleats under them, Madeline saw. “Did you want me? Were you the one who rang?”

“Yes, I was,” Madeline said.

They came a little nearer to one another now.

“Do I know you?” the older woman said.

“No, you don’t,” Madeline replied quietly.

She thought, it’s not kind of me to prolong this. Tell her at once, don’t keep her waiting.

“I knew Starr,” she said then.

Two emotions, primary emotions, swept over the older woman’s face, one right after the other. They were as obvious, as vivid, as though they were two separate revolving gelatin slides, each one throwing its light on her face in turn. First joy. Just plain unadulterated joy. The name itself, the beloved name. Someone who knew her. Someone who was a friend of hers. Someone who could tell of her. Then grief. Just plain abysmal grief. Not she herself, only someone who had known her. Not she herself, only someone who could tell of her.

Her mouth opened. And open like that, its edges flickered, fluttered, as if it were trying to close itself again. And her eyes hurt so. Showed such hurt within them, one should say.

“Come in,” was all she said. And rather calmly. At least it was not tremulous.

Madeline went first, at her almost unnoticeable little gesture.

She followed and closed the door after them both.

It was a small elbow-shaped apartment of two rooms. That is to say, the two rooms were not in a straight line with one another; one was at right angles to the other, leading off in a different direction. The first one was the only one she could see as she entered. It was clean, but far from tidy. There was no dust or litter, but there was far too much of everything in it. It was overcrowded. Or else perhaps, because it was a small room, it gave that impression.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Bartlett said. “No, not in that one. This one’s better. The spring’s broken in that.”

Madeline changed accordingly.

She kept thinking, She used to live here. This is where she lived. Here, where I am now. And because of me, she doesn’t live here anymore. She doesn’t live anywhere anymore. I did that. I. How can I face those black eyes looking at me right now? How can I look into them?

“You haven’t given me your name,” Mrs. Bartlett said, smiling at her. She rested her hand endearingly on Madeline’s shoulder for a minute.

“Madeline Chalmers,” Madeline said. “Murderess. Your daughter’s murderess.” But only the first part passed her lips.

“Did you know her long?” Mrs. Bartlett said. A jet cross at the base of her neck blinked in the reflected sunlight, as though it had just shed a tear.

“It seems longer — than it was. Much longer. A lifetime.”

The answer, carefully chosen as it was, made no impression. Mrs. Bartlett had averted her head, suddenly, sharply. “Excuse me a minute,” she said in a racked voice. “I’ll be right back.” She went through the doorway — it was an opening really, it had no door — turned right, and went into the next room, the bedroom apparently. She’d gone in there to cry, Madeline knew.

She heard no sound, and tried not to, in case there had been any. But there wasn’t any.

It didn’t make it easier for her, this temporary digression. She tried to take her mind up, looking at little things. Little things that really didn’t interest her.

One of the lamps, because there was an insufficiency of outlets no doubt, had its cord hoisted and plugged into a socket in the ceiling fixture. The wall, at least on the one side facing her, was in two shades of green. Most of its surface a fading yellowing green, like peas when they’ve begun to wither and dry up. And then in the middle of this, an oblong patch of a much darker green, looking as fresh as if it had just been dampened with water. A vacant nail protruded from the middle of it, giving the explanation. A picture had once hung there long ago, and then been moved. Before the window there was a brilliantly bright stepladder. But not a real one, a phantom step-ladder of firming sun motes, placed there as though for some angel in domestic service to step up on and hang the curtains. Its luminous slats were made by the openings in the fire-escape platform outside the window above.

On the roof, visible only in a slanting diagonal that cut across one upper corner of the window, a woman was hanging wash. You could hear the pulley squeak querulously each time she paid out more rope to herself, but not see her or the wash.

Mrs. Bartlett came back again. You could not tell she had been crying.

“Let me get you something,” she said. “I’m forgetting myself. Would you like some coffee?”

“Nothing, please,” Madeline begged her with utmost sincerity. Almost with abhorrence. “I just came here to talk to you, really I did.”

“You wouldn’t refuse Starr’s mother, now would you?” the other woman said winningly. “It won’t take a minute. Then we can sit and talk.” She went into a narrow little opening, almost like a crevice, over at the far side of the front door, and Madeline could hear water running, first resoundingly into the drumlike hollow of a porcelain sink, then smotheredly into tin or aluminum. Then she heard the pillow-soft fluff that ignited gas gives.

Mrs. Bartlett came back again. For the first time since she’d admitted her, she sat down with Madeline.

“You look tired,” Madeline remarked compassionately.

“I don’t sleep much anymore since she’s gone,” she said. ‘‘At nights, I mean. That’s why I have to sleep when I can. I was napping when you rang, that’s why it took me so long to open the door.”

“I’m sorry,” Madeline said contritely. “I would have come some other time.”

“I’m glad you came when you did.” She patted Madeline’s arm and gave a little snuggle within her chair that was pure anticipation. “You haven’t told me a word about her yet.”

“I don’t know where to begin,” Madeline said. And it was true.

“Was she happy?”

“That,” Madeline said with infinite slowness, “I don’t know. Don’t you?”

“She didn’t tell me,” Mrs. Bartlett said simply.

“Was she happy when she was here with you?”

“She was at first. Later on — I’m not so sure.”

Madeline thought, There could be something there. But how to get it out?

“Did she have any particular — ambitions, that she ever spoke of to you?”

“All girls are ambitious. All young things are. Not to be ambitious is not to be young at all.” She said it sadly.

“But any particular?” Madeline persisted.

“Yes,” Mrs. Bartlett said. And then again, “Yes.” And then she stopped as if mulling it over.

Madeline waited, breath held back.

“Wait a minute,” cautioned Mrs. Bartlett, getting up. “I hear the coffee bumping.” She went out to get it.

Madeline softly let her breath out, like a slow tire leak. Oh, damn this coffee break, she thought. Just when we seemed to be getting somewhere.

Mrs. Bartlett bustled with cups and saucers and spoons, and a glass holding little lumps of sugar (she kept them in a water tumbler in lieu of a bowl), and it was impossible to continue consecutively. Whatever ground had been on the point of being gained, which was the most she could say for it, was lost again for the time being.

Mrs. Bartlett sat there and sipped, and the black eyes watched Madeline over the rim of the tipped cup, but in a friendly, trusting manner.

I can’t eat her bread, Madeline thought. Meaning the beverage. Her gorge rose. I’m a murderess. I can’t sit here taking food and drink with her. I killed her daughter. It’s inconceivable, abominable, to do this.

“Don’t you like it?” Mrs. Bartlett asked ruefully.

Madeline forced some into her mouth. And that was all she could do.

“I think I understand,” said Mrs. Bartlett softly, after a great while. For the first time since they’d met, she dropped her eyes, lowered them away from Madeline’s face.

Madeline removed the saucer from below its cup, and let the mouthful of coffee she had already absorbed run back on it again. This wasn’t just a gesture of sentimental delicacy. Her throat had closed up; she would have strangled on just one swallow of the blood-warm liquid. She set the cup and saucer aside.

Mrs. Bartlett moved, very tactfully, very inconspicuously now, and suddenly the cups were gone from sight.

When she came back, Madeline had moved to another chair and was briefly sheltering her eyes with the edge of her hand.

“You are a real friend,” Mrs. Bartlett said in gentle admiration. “You are.” And she said it a third time. “You are.”

“Yes,” Madeline said with bitter mockery. “Yes. Oh, yes.”

They were silent for a short while. Then abruptly Madeline turned around toward her — one shoulder had been turned away until now — and said. “You know how it happened, I suppose?”

The older woman seemed to shrink lower in her chair. Settle, like something deflating. “Yes, I know,” she said. “They told me.” And then she whispered, “A shot — on the street.” Whispered it so low that Madeline couldn’t hear the words at all. But she knew what they were, because those were the words that belonged in that place. And the lip movements imaged them, fitted them.

After a while Madeline started to ask her, “Did you—?” Then didn’t know how to say it.

“Did I what?” prompted Mrs. Bartlett, eyes on the floor.

“Did you — go there, did you go in to the city, when they notified you? Did you — bring her back with you? Is she resting out here?”

“I couldn’t go in myself,” Mrs. Bartlett said, quite simply, eyes still downcast. “You see, I’m all alone here. I wasn’t in any condition to — I had to take to my bed the first few days after I received the news.”

Madeline winced.

“But Mr. Thalor, he’s the funeral director, was very kind, he arranged everything, took charge of everything, for me. He had her brought back here, and saw about purchasing a plot. I didn’t have enough money to buy one outright, but they’re letting me pay for it on the installment plan, a little at a time.”

Madeline couldn’t repress a shudder.

“It sounds terrible, I know,” Mrs. Bartlett admitted. “But what can you do, when death strikes suddenly like that, and you’re not prepared for it? I’d always thought that I’d go first, and she’d take care of things like that for me. I never dreamed I’d — be the one to bury her.” She knitted a tiny fist, white and fragile as an ivory carving, and pressed it just over one eye.

Madeline saw that she had reached the end of her fortitude for the present. There was nothing to do but wait for another time.

She rose to her feet, and said, “I hope I haven’t — I didn’t mean to hurt you like this.”

The little clenched fist was before her lips now, stifling them, crushing them in. She nodded her head a little, but whether in forgiveness or just in acknowledgment of the apology, Madeline couldn’t know.

“May I come again?” she asked. “May I talk to you some more?”

Again the muted figure nodded, but this time the meaning was plain.

As she passed by her on her way to the door, Madeline let her hand come to rest upon her shoulder for a moment, in the futile, only, consolation she could give her. The little fist opened, fluttered upward like a bird spreading its wings, came to rest upon the solacing hand.

From the doorway, as she softly drew the door closed after her, Madeline looked back. Other than that one little gesture, she hadn’t moved, she hadn’t turned her head to watch her go. Madeline could only see her from the back, the light making a sort of blurry, soft focus about the outline of her head, sitting there, still there. Feeling only, breathing only. Life in death. Or death in life.

There are two deaths I am responsible for, Madeline told herself accusingly, and not just one. This one too. The death of a heart.

When she approached the little five-story apartment building the next day, Madeline was at first startled and then somewhat uneasy to see the familiar black-garbed figure of Mrs. Bartlett standing waiting in the shade of the green canvas door canopy, which extended out to the edge of the sidewalk. It was obvious by the way she kept turning every so often, first to look up the street in one direction, then down it in another, that she was waiting for someone to come along. And Madeline knew that someone must be herself. The shortest way from her own hotel had brought her along the opposite side of the street, she knew the older woman had not yet observed her (there was an almost unbroken line of cars parked along that side, screening her), and for a moment she had an impulse to turn around and go back again before she had been noticed.

Why was she waiting for her like that, hatted, out before the house? Was she taking her somewhere with her? Did she want her to meet other relatives, other members of the family? But hadn’t that been Madeline’s very purpose in seeking her out in the first place, to establish leads through her, other contacts? Then why the skittishness, why the timidity?

She forced herself to swerve diagonally across the street toward her, and as Mrs. Bartlett saw her emerge from between two of the parked cars, she came out to the edge of the walk to greet her, and tilted her face an almost imperceptible trifle, as if permissive of a kiss. Madeline placed her lips against her forehead.

“I’m so glad you came early,” Mrs. Bartlett murmured. “I forgot to ask you yesterday where I could reach you.”

Madeline then told her, seeing no need for concealment.

“I did so want you to come with me,” the older woman went on. “I knew you’d want to too.”

“Where, Mrs. Bartlett?” At once, instinctively, she was frightened for a minute into taut, sudden, wary evasiveness.

“Call me Charlotte.”

“Where?”

“Why, to eleven o’clock mass, of course. It’s just around the corner from here. We’ll be just in time.”

The killer praying for the slain. Oh, I can’t. Yet this has been done before. Before, many times over. The murderer praying for the murdered. But oh, I can’t. I can’t go in there with her.

She stood rigid, rooted to the spot. Mrs. Bartlett took a step forward, then turned, and seeing that she had not moved in company with her, extended her hand — she was still only an arm’s length in advance — and gently took Madeline’s hand in her own, then went on once more. Unresistant, Madeline glided along after her. Almost like a sleepwalker guided by someone who is awake.

They turned the corner still with this strange link of hands and came up to the church. Curved gray stone steps led up to its entrance apron, and from the carved niches on either side the blank stone eyes of saints looked sightlessly out upon the world.

The touch of the first step against her toe seemed to wake Madeline from her trancelike passivity, as though a switch had been flicked, turning off some flow of compulsive current, and she disengaged her hand and balked there, Mrs. Bartlett one step higher than she.

“I can’t go in here. Don’t ask me to.”

Mrs. Bartlett’s eyes were calm and unreproachful; above all else they seemed to hold an infinite understanding, the wisdom of old age. “Is it because of the creed? Is it because you’re of a different faith? Why, then we’ll go to your church. God’s houses are all God’s houses. Unitarian, Baptist—”

She thought: A killer is a killer in any denomination.

“I’ll go with you, and pray beside you,” the woman continued. “In my own way, but to the same God. And I’m sure both of our prayers will reach Him just the same. He is just one God, not a segregated God.”

Madeline averted her face, the way one does who is afraid of receiving a blow, of being struck. Not only turned it away, but turned it downward at the same time. Every slantwise line of her body, straining away from the church entrance, expressed aversion. Not the aversion of disgust, the aversion of fear. She began trembling violently all over, so that Mrs. Bartlett’s hand, upon her arm, trembled by transference.

“I’ll wait for you outside,” she said in a muffled voice. “I’ll wait here on the steps.”

Mrs. Bartlett was looking at her curiously. She released her hold upon her. “I’ll say two prayers, then,” she said quietly. “One for her, and one — for you.”

She turned and went slowly up the steps, and opened the door, and went in. It closed soundlessly after her, on its own massive springs.

Madeline stood there waiting, never moving. One foot on one step, the other on the next one down, in a position as of arrested entrance.

The door opened as some latecomers entered, and the music swelled out like a paean, then dimmed into a drone again. She turned her head, and caught a glimpse of taper beads twinkling like golden tears streaming down a wall, as if seen at the end of a long violet-dim tunnel. Then the door closed again, and the world was shut in two, this world and the other world.

At last the mass ended and the people came out, the women and children in their bright dresses, like flowers spilling down the steps all around her. Then when they’d all dispersed and the street was quiet once again, Mrs. Bartlett stood there alone at the top of the steps, last of all to come out.

She came down them slowly and turned aside, and though her eyes were on Madeline there was no recognition in them. Madeline wheeled and fell in beside her, but all the way back they were like two strangers who do not know one another yet unaccountably continue to walk abreast. The close communion of their walk to church was gone, had been destroyed.

When they reached the apartment house, Mrs. Bartlett entered first as her age entitled her to do, but she noticeably did not hold the door for Madeline, who had to catch and hold it in order to be able to make her way in. At the upstairs door, when Mrs. Bartlett took out her bunch of keys, her hand quivered so that she couldn’t manage to insert the right one in the lock. They jangled loudly in the silence of the hall. But when Madeline reached out to try to take them, in order to do it for her, she snatched them back out of her reach with an abruptness that almost suggested animosity.

When she finally had the door open, Mrs. Bartlett stepped in, but then turned around and faced Madeline coldly, standing there in such a way that Madeline could not enter herself. He face was gray with pain, pitted with it, the texture of a pumice stone.

“Why do you want to come in here? I have no more children.”

Madeline drew in her breath, sharp and cold as a razor cutting her throat as it went down.

“I had only the one. Find someone else’s house now to bring sorrow into.”

Madeline kept silent.

“You’re the one,” the bereaved woman went on. “You did it. I knew it when you wouldn’t come into the church with me.”

And little by little she began to close the door between them, still speaking as it narrowed.

“You did it. You.”

The door closed.

Madeline’s body gave a half roll-around of despair that brought her shoulders back against the wall, to one side of the doorway. She hung her head.

After a while she straightened, turned again, and knocked softly, entreatingly, on the door.

There was no answer.

After a while she went away.

At eleven the next morning the door opened and Mrs. Bartlett came out trundling a small wheeled shopping cart behind her. She saw Madeline standing there waiting, but didn’t speak.

When she returned over an hour later, the small cart was filled with the purchases of her shopping tour. She saw Madeline still there, but didn’t speak.

The door closed after her.

At about noon the next day the door opened again, and she came out again. She saw Madeline standing there waiting again, but didn’t speak. When she came back some time later, she was holding a dry-cleaning garment of some kind protected by a plastic bag. She was holding it by a wire hanger whose hook protruded from one end of the plastic bag, and it was hard for her to hold it up clear of the floor and at the same time get out her door key.

Madeline stepped forward and unobtrusively took it from her hand and held it for her, while she brought out her key and unlocked the door. Then, just as unobtrusively, Madeline handed it back to her. She went inside with it.

The door stayed open behind her.

After a while Madeline timidly went in after her and closed it behind her.

Mrs. Bartlett had set two cups out on the table.

“I married when I was very young. Seventeen. We had nothing but misfortunes, almost from the day of our marriage. When I look back now sometimes, it almost seems like an omen.

“We had a little baby boy first, before Starr. Then we lost him, when he was about five years old.”

“He died?” Madeline asked.

“No,” she said. “Or, if he did, we never knew.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He just disappeared one day. Disappeared from the face of the earth. We never saw him again. One minute he was playing in front of the door, in full sight. The next minute there wasn’t a sign of him. I don’t know if some degenerate enticed him away, and then got rid of him. If he’d simply been lost, he would have been found again eventually. No child stays lost indefinitely. The police worked on it for months. Months and months. They finally came to me about a year later. It must have been fully a year. Over a year. By that time I’d got used to living with it. They told me there was only one conclusion they could come to. He was no longer alive, or he would have been found before then. They told me he must have been killed right away, within the first day or two, before the hue and cry had got fully started. And his body disposed of in some way so that it never turned up again. A child that age has such a small body,” she said wanly. “You could almost hide it in a woodburning stove or a canful of ashes. Or roll it down an open sewer.”

Madeline shivered and bit the back of her own hand. God, there isn’t anything on the face of the earth more hideous than child murder! Adult murder is a clean, upright thing by comparison.

“I didn’t give up hope even then. What mother does? But the weeks became months, and the months — Bennett, my husband, saw that I was brooding, eating my heart out, and he finally suggested that we have another. I guess to take my mind off it, give me a new lease on life. I refused point-blank. I didn’t want to go through that a second time, the fear of losing it just as you’ve grown attached to it, learned to love it. I told him I wouldn’t know a minute’s piece if I had another child, after what had happened to the first one. It would be bad for the child, and worse for me. Nothing he could say would prevail upon me.

“Well, I suppose this is a rather delicate and personal matter to discuss, but so many years have gone by it’s no longer very important. I don’t know how he did it, but I suddenly found that I was carrying a child again. I even went to a doctor, to ask him to do something about it, but he talked me out of it. And Starr was born nine months later.”

Poor Starr, Madeline thought poignantly. Even her own mother didn’t want her.

“And after that?”

“It drove a wedge between us, it drove us apart. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, the marriage had just been ill-starred. Some marriages are. There was a long period of — I don’t know what word to use. Tolerance. Indifference. Then in later years he started to drink. I guess he’d grown embittered. It’s a terrible thing to see a man drink himself to death right before your eyes. The falls on the floor. The vomiting. The bodily indecencies. I kept the child from seeing as much of it as I could. Kept her in her room under lock and key. I mean, once he’d come back home at nights. But children are smart. They know things, they can sense them.

“And then — I suppose this is a dreadful thing to say, but God in His infinite mercy was kind. Kind to him and kind to me and kind to his child. He lay stupefied in a doorway all one bitter below-zero night, unable to get up and walk, and he died of exposure.”

And was God good to Starr too? Madeline wondered iconoclastically. Carrying her off at twenty-two, after giving her such a childhood!

“When Starr was small, did you worry and dread a repetition of the first child’s disappearance, as you had expected you would?”

“No, strangely enough, I didn’t,” Charlotte said. “I went to my priest, and he played a great part in relieving my mind. He said, in effect, that lightning never strikes twice, and it was almost outside the bounds of possibility that such a thing should happen a second time to the same family, the same parents. I saw what good sense this made, and from that time on I lost all my fears.”

“Are you sure you have no objection?” Madeline asked, before untying the slender packet Charlotte had handed her.

“No, go ahead; you’re welcome to read them if you want to,” Charlotte invited. “There isn’t anything of consequence in them; just the typical letter a girl away from home sends home.”

Then she added pensively, “I suppose it’s foolish to keep letters — especially after the writer is gone.”

“But we all do at one time or another,” Madeline reminded her.

“You’ll have to turn them upside down if you want to read them in order,” Charlotte pointed out. “The early ones are at the bottom, the later ones at the top.”

It may help me to know her better, Madeline thought defensively, and knew she was lying to herself. She wasn’t trying to know Starr better; she was simply prying, trying to ferret out evidence, almost the way a detective would have. She was uneasily aware there was a big difference between questioning Charlotte conversationally and reading Starr’s private letters, letters written to someone else. At least there was to her own mind, which was what counted. It was like seeing someone undressed.

She took them over beside a window and sat down there, to read them in more privacy. Charlotte remained where she’d been, silently looking down at the backs of her own hands, as if reliving in memory the time she’d first read them herself.

Madeline didn’t read each one through from start to finish; she didn’t have to. Her eyes would skim down the page and pick out a key phrase. Sometimes the whole gist of the letter, its importance to her purpose, was expressed in that key phrase.

Madeline refolded the letter and closed her eyes.

That rings true, she reflected. That can’t be faked, that can’t be made up. The very ink it was written with still glows this long after. They were desperately in love, madly in love, truly in love.

It was the last of the letters. There were no more after that.

“But the first wife didn’t take it lying down. She was a singer. Worked in clubs. A roughneck, know what I mean? She did something to them that completely destroyed the marriage. Completely destroyed it.”

“What?”

“I never knew what. Starr wouldn’t say what.”

“Did Starr ever meet her? Did she know her at all?”

“I asked her that myself. She said, ‘I never set eyes on her in my life.’ Those were her words. ‘I never set eyes on her in my life.’ Then she said, ‘She called up just once. Just once, one o’clock one morning. Just one little phone call, but it wrecked my life, ruined my happiness, opened wide the gates of hell and pushed me through.’”

Madeline stared at her, intently, fearfully, wonderingly.

“As I stared at her,” Charlotte said, reading the look.

“Did she say anything else?”

“Only this. ‘I’d like to get even with her.’ She rounded her small fist, held it clenched like this — and brought it back against her own face, between her eyes. ‘I’d like to get even with her,’ she said. ‘But what could I ever do to her that could equal what she did to me? There can be only one of such a thing in this world, only one, never two.’”

Charlotte came to the door and her face lighted up when she saw Madeline. She was beginning to be fond of her, Madeline guessed. They kissed one another lightly on the cheeks.

“Come in,” Charlotte said. “I’ll fix you up a little lunch. It’s so nice to have someone to eat with, and not be alone.”

“No,” Madeline protested. “I came to take you out. It’s such a lovely day. Have you seen it yet?”

Charlotte nodded. “It really is. I could tell from the windows.”

“Let’s take a walk in that restful little park you have not far away from here—”

“Lakeside?”

“—and sit in the sun awhile and chat. Then I’ll buy you whatever you feel like having, in a restaurant or tearoom. You’ll see what an enjoyable way it will be to pass part of the day.”

“You’re spoiling me,” Charlotte said wistfully.

Madeline shook her head slightly to herself while she stood waiting, partly in and partly out of the doorway. She couldn’t help feeling a little disloyal, a little secretive. And yet, she told herself, there was nothing in this to harm Charlotte or be to her detriment. On the contrary, she was only trying to carry out her own daughter’s wishes, trying to fulfill them. That should make her approve, that should make her feel content, if she were to know.

Charlotte came back with simply a hat and a handbag added to her basic dress.

“Make sure it’s locked tight,” Madeline reminded her protectively as she pulled the door shut after her.

They walked down the sun-glowing street together, the girl and the older woman, like mother and daughter. Like Starr herself might have, in a day that was gone now.

Madeline sighed a little. Starr. Always Starr. Why was I born with such an oversensitized conscience, she thought. Those that aren’t, how much easier they have it.

They entered the park and, slackening still further their already leisurely pace, strolled down one of the long, winding, paved walks. The greenery was absolutely incredible, its hues heightened almost above nature by the clearness of the air and the brilliance of the sun. The grass was like emeralds, and even had a sparkle to it (from being recently wetted down, she supposed). The leaves on the trees were like little slivers and disks of wafer-thin dark green jade, and under each tree lay a pool of sapphire shadow. It looked like an artificially colored picture postcard of a park, and not a real one, on such a jeweled day as this.

“Cities, and their parks, still can be beautiful at times, even nowadays,” Madeline remarked.

“I used to come here and play when I was a child myself, many times. My mother would bring me.”

They came past a small lake with ducks swimming on it. The water flashed and dazzled like highly polished silver. Even the plumage of the ungainly little fowl glinted like burnished bronze and green-gold.

Madeline had seen her opening in the last remark.

“I suppose Starr did too, afterward.”

“Yes, I brought her as often as I could. And the cycle repeated itself. Strange thing, life.”

But now she’s dead, so she herself will never be able to bring a little girl of her own here to play, in her turn.

Charlotte turned toward her quite unexpectedly and said, “I know what you were thinking just then.”

Madeline didn’t try to deny it. She simply nodded and said, “Yes, I was.”

They came to a bench and Madeline said, “How about sitting here? Will this do?”

They both sat down.

Madeline took out cigarettes and offered one to her companion.

“It’s been years since I’ve tried one,” Charlotte said. “But I think I will have one for a change, as long as it’s all right with you.”

“I want to talk to you a little more about Starr,” Madeline said. “That is, if it doesn’t bother you.”

“It doesn’t now anymore,” Charlotte said. “Not since you’ve been here. Before that it used to hurt even to think about her. Now it seems to help me, to ease me, if I talk about her.”

Madeline wasted no further time on preliminaries. “When she went back to the city, when she left you the last time, do you think she intended to — rejoin her husband, effect a reconciliation to him?” She completed dropping her midget cloisonné-enamel lighter back inside her bag.

Charlotte looked up at her in considerable surprise.

“Why do you hesitate about answering? You’re not sure, is that it?”

“I am sure,” Charlotte said, and looked the other way.

“You’re sure she was not going back to him?”

“I’m sure she was not going back to him. Not in the way that you mean.”

“Oh, I see,” Madeline said briefly, hoping that enough impetus had been given the conversation by now for the rest of it to come more or less by itself without having to dig at it too much.

It did but a little reluctantly.

“I asked her that question myself, when she started her packing the night before she was to leave. It was a natural one for a mother to ask a married daughter who’s been estranged from her husband, don’t you think?”

Madeline nodded, trying not to break in.

“She stopped what she was doing and looked at me. I’ll never forget that look as long as I live. It was a terrible look. I’d never seen such a look on her face before. Not on anyone else’s either. It was grim, it was deadly with hate. Her eyes were pulled back tight at the corners, and they were hard as rocks. Her mouth was drawn out too, into a thin, bitter line. And even her nostrils, I could see them pulsing in and out with her breaths. I repeat, it was the most terrible look I’d ever seen.

“And then she said — and even her voice wasn’t the same — ‘I’m going to look him up, all right. I’m going to look him up if it’s the last thing I do. I’m going to look him up, you can count on it.’

“I didn’t understand, just as I see you don’t now, what she meant. I knew by the terrible, almost maddened look I’ve just been telling you about, she didn’t mean reconciliation, she didn’t mean forgiveness, she didn’t mean love. Even the way she’d said it. She didn’t say, ‘I’m going back to him.’ She didn’t say ‘I’m going back with him.’ She kept hammering on the words ‘look him up,’ as though that was where the threat or the implication of whatever she intended doing lay.”

Charlotte was holding her cigarette in the way of a woman unaccustomed to smoking, two fingers hooked around the extreme back end of it. She threw it down on the walk and stepped it out.

“Have him arrested, perhaps, have him taken into court. Or even put in jail?”

Charlotte shook her head, very quietly, very slowly. “More than that.”

“What more than that can a wife—?”

“She intended to kill him.”

Madeline gave an involuntary start. “How can you be sure of that?”

“I have the gun,” Charlotte said flatly.

“How did you know she had it?”

“I didn’t. It came about quite accidentally. She finished her packing that night, and we didn’t talk about it anymore. I didn’t want to see that look on her face anymore. I didn’t want to bring it back. The next day she went out for a short while to do some last-minute shopping before she took the train. I came across some handkerchiefs of hers that I’d given her a helping hand with by washing and pressing. I’d forgotten to give them back to her the night before in time to go into the valise, and evidently she’d forgotten I still had them.

“I went into her room with them. The valise was locked and ready to go, but she’d left her keys on her dresser top. No reason for her not to. I’d never been the prying sort of mother that noses into a girl’s belongings, even when she was younger. I opened it and started to spread the handkerchiefs out evenly all over the top of it. While I was doing this I felt something hard and heavy under one of the layers of clothing. I exposed it, and it was a gun.”

A little of the fear and worry came back to her face, Madeline could see, even this long after.

“I was afraid to leave it in there. I kept seeing that look on her face the night before. I didn’t want her to do it, to get into trouble. Her whole life would be worthless from then on, ruined. No matter what he’d done to her. I took it out and rearranged the valise, and relocked it. Put the keys back where I’d found them.

“I didn’t know what to do with it. I knew if she missed it in time, before she got on the train, she’d look high and low for it. I didn’t want her to get it back. Finally I thought of a place that might very well not occur to her. The refrigerator in the kitchen was very old, and there was a space between the back of it and the wall. I slipped it down inside there. The part that you hold, the handle, was a little bit thicker than the rest of it, so it didn’t drop all the way down, it got caught and stayed where it was, near the top.”

“Did she miss it?”

“No, she never reopened the valise again. The last-minute things she’d bought, she took with her in an extra shopping bag. There wasn’t any more room in the valise for them, anyway.”

She breathed heavily. “We kissed goodbye, and she took the train. That was the last time in this world I ever saw her. I never even heard from her again by mail. The next thing I knew she was dead. It must have happened right after she got back, within the next day or two.”

Then she added, “She wouldn’t even let me come to the train with her, I remember that. She said she didn’t want me to see her off. That alone showed she fully intended to do — what I’ve told you. We said goodbye right at the door of the apartment, upstairs. And then I watched the light inside the little pane of glass in the elevator door slowly going down. Like a life going out.”

Two very small girls came pedaling by, holding hands, sharing a single pair of roller skates between the two of them. One went down, nearly pulling the other one after her. The fallen one’s face began to work, in the preliminary stages of having a good hearty cry, but her skate-mate, like a very small-sized mother, assiduously helped her up again, patted her hair smooth, and tugged at the bottom of her dress to straighten it out. The cry never developed. They went swinging down the path again, blithe as ever.

“Cute,” remarked Charlotte parenthetically, glancing after them.

At least they don’t have our problems, Madeline thought.

“What did you do with it afterward?” she asked.

“Nothing. I didn’t know what to do, I was afraid to tell anyone I had it. I was afraid to go to the police and report it, because that would link her to it. How could I explain having it in the first place? I couldn’t say I’d found it, it could still be traced back to her. I was afraid to cover it up in a paper bag and just drop it into some trash can along the street. Somebody else might have found it and been tempted into doing something bad with it. Later, after her death, a repairman was coming to look at the refrigerator one day, and I was worried he might catch sight of it, so I took it out from behind there and put it into an empty shoe box, and hid that on the floor at the back of the closet. It’s been there ever since.

“I can show it to you when we go back.

“Every time I go to the closet to get something out I see it, and I don’t like to. It does something to me. One night I even dreamed about it. It came out of the closet by itself.”

“I’ll take it off your hands,” Madeline said, lost in thought.

That evening she sat down at the little table-desk in her hotel room. It was a desk, really, only by grace of two shallow drawers holding hotel stationery, telegram blanks, a pad of printed laundry lists, and a large sheet of green blotting paper that covered its entire surface. She placed her handbag on top of this and opened it. She took out the revolver that Charlotte had turned over to her with unfeigned relief a little while ago, and examined it curiously.

She didn’t know anything about revolvers, only that they could kill (and who should know that better than she?). She couldn’t identify the caliber of this one, other than that it was fairly small. The typical kind that a woman or girl would buy and carry. But small or not, it could take away a life. It was nickel-plated, at least she supposed the gleaming silvery finish to be nickel plating, and its grip was either bone or ivory, which of the two she wasn’t sure.

She put it down to one side on the blotting-paper surface and left it there for the moment. She unzipped one of the inner compartments of her handbag and took out a small, inexpensive pocket notebook, the kind that can be bought at any five-and-dime or stationery store. Its two-by-four pages bore ruled blue lines across them, as further indication of its low cost. On the cover was stamped, with unintentional irony, the single word “Memo.”

But inside there was almost nothing written yet, only one brief phrase:

She took a metal pencil with an ink cylinder in it from the handbag and ejected the point with a little click. Then she held it poised, but didn’t write (as if once she wrote, what she wrote would be irrevocable, and she would be held fast to it). She thought of that line in the Rubaiyat that goes: “The moving finger writes, and, having writ, moves on/Nor all your piety and wit/Shall lure it back to cancel half a line/Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”

She looked at the gun, she looked at the pencil, she looked at the page between the two of them that was still blank but for the single phrase. It was a little like signing a death warrant.

She sat there for long moments, motionless. So still the ticking of her little traveling clock on the bureau could be plainly heard in the hush of her heart and her mind, the debating hush.

Once she wrote, she must obey it, follow it through to the end, for she was that way, and nothing could make her other than what she was.

Suddenly the pencil dipped to the paper, and the numeral “2” came out.

She stopped it again. She clasped her two hands, the pencil still caught between their multiple fingers, and brought them up before her mouth and held them there like that, pressed against her lips as if she were whispering to them.

The medicine I take to cure my illness is the illness itself repeated a second time, she thought. But have I the right to do this? She had hate for him, I have none. How can I have, I don’t even know him. Have barely even seen him. Only his smile in a torn photograph.

I promised her. I pledged it to her. You cannot break faith with the dead, or they will arise to accuse you.

Suddenly the pencil struck the paper, rippled along in a quick, staccato line, rolled free and unfingered two or three times over. It was done.