Strange Sisters

Chapter 3

This was not the first morning she had awakened in the sour aftermath of the night before to the wish that she might never have to get up, to the regret that she had not died in her sleep. But always before, her depression had been a corollary of her personality, an element in a way of life that, if it never improved, might at least survive. Therefore, there was hope, and after a while the depression lifted and regret was abandoned.

Now there was no hope. She was damned, not for what she was, but for what she had done. She had killed. Murdered. In the tiny kitchen of a certain apartment, a man named Angus Brunn lay on the linoleum with an ice-pick penetrating his abdomen at an upward angle and perhaps puncturing his heart. He was dead, and she had killed him, and there was no way on earth to undo the act or its results, or to make anyone but herself responsible for it.

Soon someone would discover the body, probably before the day was out. It was possible, even, that the body had already been discovered — by a cleaning woman, by a friend, by anyone who might have had a reason for entering the apartment. If so, the intricate social machinery designed for the hunting of transgressors was already in operation. Men to whom murder was a job were converging on the house which had become a focal point because death had given it a sudden significance. And though it was almost incredible, this massive action which would, before it ground to its end, consume thousands of dollars and man-hours, was solely directed toward the detection and apprehension of a damned and frightened fragment of society just twenty-two years of age. Of her, Kathy Gait.

Lying in bed, reluctant to resume physical participation in a menacing world, she thought that it was a long way from ten to murder. A long, long way from a child with no hope to a woman who realized it. How long, actually? Twelve years? No more than a mere dozen years? How many days would that be? She tried to multiply it in her head, but she’d never had much of a head for arithmetic, and she lost her way between digits. It didn’t matter, anyhow. What mattered was that you could learn a lot in twelve years, a lot that should never have been learned. Even more important, you could fail to learn a lot that you should have learned. She wondered if, after all, it could really be reduced to such a splendid simplicity — the development of an adequate balance between a proper ignorance and approved learning.

Reluctantly, working back in reverse order of events, she began to examine again the disastrous night. She remembered the steps she had taken to remove all evidence of her presence in the apartment, but there might, of course, be evidence of a kind that she could not affect. Suppose, for example, that Angus Brunn had confided in a third person that he was cultivating a certain Kathy Gait. This wouldn’t actually tie her to the murder, but it would at least establish a relationship with Brunn. It would make her subject to an investigation which would entail consequences, quite apart from murder, that were unpleasant to contemplate. More than that, however, suppose someone had seen her entering the apartment with Brunn, or had seen her leaving later alone.

So she came by association to the cab driver. The one who had delivered Brunn and her to the apartment house from the night club. Whether the driver could identify her, or would come forward to do it even if he could, was something she couldn’t know. But he became an additional factor in the sum of terror, one more menace in a world that bristled with them.

She lifted her hands and, looking at them, retched suddenly. Sickness churned in her stomach, rose bitterly in her throat. The tips of the fingers of her right hand, she saw, were pink-tinged, and she remembered coming in last night, undressing and going to bed without washing or making any toilet whatever. The pink on her fingers was the stain of Angus Brunn’s blood. Bringing the hand closer to her eyes, she saw under the nail of the middle finger a dried shred of flesh. Two of the nails were torn badly near the quick.

Now she was really sick. Getting out of bed, she went into the bathroom and stood over the commode, leaning forward and bracing herself against the water closet. Her stomach heaved, forcing up the watery fluid that was all it contained. When the spasm had exhausted itself, she turned to the sink and ran it full of water as hot as she could bear. She lathered her hands and rinsed them several times and then stood for a moment longer with clear water from the tap running over them.

Standing there, her eyes caught the reflection of her face in the small mirror on the medicine cabinet, and she lowered them quickly to her hands under the running water. She hardly knew what terrible metamorphosis she had expected in her appearance, perhaps a gross distortion of features to symbolize depravity, but the unchanged slender face with rather sad eyes below a tangle of short brown hair, a childish face, really, was a genuine shock. Untouched by her inner corruption, it seemed to her the ultimate horror.

Her hands scoured, she returned to the bedroom and dressed. Her empty stomach ached dully, and she began to think longingly of the comfort of hot coffee. There was coffee in the kitchen, but she couldn’t bear the prospect of making and drinking it alone. It was necessary, now that she was in motion, to get out of the apartment at once. On the corner below the apartment house was a drug store where she could get both the hot coffee and the cold company of people. People could offer nothing to save her, or even to help her, neither compassion nor pardon, but they could at least hold back the silence and divert somewhat the destructive line of her thoughts. So, acting with decision, she left the apartment and walked down the street to the drug store.

There was a stack of newspapers on one end of the tobacco counter. She stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes and pick up one of the papers, and then she continued to the fountain. On a stool she lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, and spread the paper on the imitation marble counter.

The young man behind the counter was wearing a starched white mess jacket and a starched white hat that was cut like a military overseas cap. The hat was cocked at such a precarious angle over one ear that it seemed about to fall off at any moment. His hair was heavy and blond and rather long, brushed around the sides of his head so that it met to form a little ridge, like two waves of water coming together, precisely in the center in the back. The only way a man could brush his hair to achieve such an effect, Kathy thought, would be to stand with his back to one mirror while he looked into another. It would take a lot of time and work to achieve such a precise effect. A lot of vanity.

“A cup of black coffee,” she said.

The young man looked at her and smiled. “Anything else? How about a breakfast roll? Fresh this morning.”

“No, thanks. Just coffee.”

“Doughnut? Hot cake?”

“Please. Just the coffee.”

“Okay, lady. Coffee coming up.” He put a heavy cup on the counter at the edge of her paper and poured the coffee from a Silex. “Ten cents, lady.”

“Oh... yes.”

She dug for the dime and slid it across the counter. Drawing the steaming cup over onto the newspaper under her face, she sat with her head bent and let the warm, moist fragrance rise up into her nostrils. It was a good smell, a reviving smell, a smell that prepared her a little better for the ordeal of the paper that waited her attention under the coffee. She drank a little, relishing the scalding descent into her interior, and then pushed the cup aside again, leaving no barrier between her and the symbolic ink, no last excuse for further procrastination.

She examined the paper carefully, her eyes moving column by column across the front page. And there was nothing there. There was a murder, all right, but it was not Angus Brunn’s. Perhaps, she thought, because Angus Brunn, even dead by violence, didn’t merit the prestige of page one. She turned the page, feeling a strange and desperate affinity for the unknown person who might, at this moment, be reading in loneliness and terror and with God knew what futile regret the page one account of his cardinal transgression. She had never before been compelled to feel compassion for a murderer, though she had felt in her life many things good people are not supposed to feel, and she thought, looking for the report of her own crime, that her corruption was now surely complete.

Nothing on page two. Nor three. Turning the pages methodically, examining each page with the same column by column thoroughness, even through finances^ sports, and entertainment, she gave up only at the classified section. Then, folding the paper as compactly as possible, she dropped it to the floor and returned to her coffee.

What did it mean? That the body of Angus Brunn hadn’t yet been discovered? That it had been discovered and was being kept under wraps by the police for reasons of their own? She doubted that it was the latter. She knew nothing about police procedure, but she doubted that a thing like that would be done in the case of a relatively unknown and unimportant man like Angus Brunn. No, the reasonable assumption was that the body had not been found. Then she began to think, what if it isn’t found for a long time, not until someone is led to it by the nose? She visualized the body, over an extended period, bloating and decomposing and beginning to stink, and she shuddered violently, lifting her cup quickly to take more heat into her stomach.

She sat drinking and smoking, alternating swallows and inhalations. She had a feeling of waiting, of being incapable of doing anything else, as if nothing remained but to let the disastrous effects of grim causes catch up with her. When her cup was empty, she ground out the butt of her cigarette in the saucer and found another dime, which she placed on the counter. The young man with swept-around hair came down to her on the other side.

“More coffee, lady?”

“Yes, please.”

He supplied it and lingered, and she realized with exaggerated resentment that he was about to exercise his charm. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to talk with him. There was something about him that disturbed her even beyond the degree of her usual abnormal reaction which she had long ago come to accept as normal.

“Big night?” he said.

She looked at him coldly, quickly. “I beg your pardon.”

He grinned. “All the coffee. No food. I figured you must be trying to work one off.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“No? Okay, if that’s the way you want it. You take my word for it, though, there’s nothing like a good old Seltzer. You like to try one?”

“No, thank you.”

“Don’t be like that, sweetheart. I’ll make it on the house. Don’t be like that.”

“Let me alone. For God’s sake, let me alone.”

His vanity bled in his face, changing it to a dull, ugly red, and his mouth sagged in an expression of angry sullenness. “Sure, lady. Pardon me for living. Pardon me all to hell.”

He moved off behind the counter, but his words had shattered her defenses against the past. Don’t be like that, he’d said. That silly expression. Someone else had said it to her a long time ago, and its repetition now cued the recollection of an experience she did not want to remember.

Christ! she thought. Kenny Renowski!

And now that she had remembered, it seemed to her that there was even a subtle physical similarity between Kenny and the counterman. Kenny was younger, of course, at the time she remembered him, and his hair was darker, and he wasn’t so tall, and maybe he was a little better looking, though she was a poor judge of that, but there was something common to both of them, and she decided it was the silly arrogance, the nasty little bloated ego that could be heard in the voice and seen in the eyes and in the way the head was carried.

Where was Kenny now, she wondered. In what dull town, working at what dull job, married to what dull, impossible girl? Probably the same old town. Probably doing one of the petty, dreary jobs that seemed to be, for some obscure reason, essential to the existence of people in a town like that. Probably married to one of the girls she used to know when she was there.

Jesus, how she had despised him. Him and all the other strutting, revolting little cocks so proud of their fuzzy masculinity, just beginning to be conscious of the weight of their genitals between their legs. And the girls had been no better, for that matter. They were just as bad with their secret little yens, their secret little knowledge, their frightened, frantic attempts to give a nauseating spirituality to what was no more than an ache in the groin. Oh, Jesus, what a relief it was to get away from them after each horrible day of school and get back to the beautiful, exciting company of Stella. To return each day from their gray fringe existence to the clean and shining center that was Stella.

But it hadn’t been that bad at first. At first it was actually almost all right, because then, in the early years, it was right and normal for like to prefer like. But then, later, one somehow crossed an intangible demarcation line, and once you were across it, it was no longer normal for like to prefer like, but it became necessary and normal for like to prefer unlike, and what had been normal back on the other side of the line now became abnormal, and if you didn’t make the change at the time it was supposed to be made, you were in a hell of a fix. You were left, as she had been, with a growing sense of detachment and loneliness in a kind of emotional isolation resulting from the blurred perception of your own oddness. And, it would have been worse than it was, worse than it was later to become, if it hadn’t been for the great compensating constant of Stella. Stella was the poetess-priestess of an island sanctuary, and if there were imperfections in her role of Sappho, there were also subtle mechanisms of the mind to reject recognition of them.

The men, for instance. God, the constant flow of panting men! Even they had been reduced by the devious mind to fantasy figures without body or place in the real scheme of things. One could even ignore, thanks to the adroit mind, Stella’s imperception, her insensitivity to the true character of the relationship of which she was part — her pretty, inept confusion when she tried, on rare occasions, to understand Kathy’s failure to display the orthodox signs of transformation beyond the intangible demarcation line.

“Kathy,” she’d said, “why is it you never go places like the other girls? You’re much prettier than any of them.”

“But I do, Stella. I go lots of places.”

“Please don’t be obtuse, darling. You know what I mean. Why don’t you go out with a nice boy once in a while? You’re old enough now. It would be good for you.”

“I’m not interested in boys, Stella.”

“Well, that’s the point. You ought to be interested in boys. And I happen to know that there are a great many boys who are interested in you. It isn’t that you don’t have opportunities. Look, darling. It isn’t natural for a pretty girl to be alone all the time. Will you please tell me why you have no interest in boys?”

And Kathy’s heart cried out in silence, Oh, Stella, can’t you see that I’m not alone at all? Can’t you see that I can’t be alone while I’m with you, and that I’m with you every minute of my life, because even when we’re physically apart I’m still with you in my mind, and that I can never be alone so long as you are here to touch or to think about? Oh, Stella, Stella, sweet shining Stella, can’t you see anything or understand anything or share with me just a little this feeling that I have?

But all she’d said was, “I don’t know, Stella. I’m just not interested.”

Then Stella had shrugged and laughed and looked prettily frustrated, because naturally she had this intimation that everything was not quite as it should have been, but she never knew, never actually knew, and it was fantastic, looking back, that she could sense this thing but never actually recognize it until it was much too late.

Kenny. Kenny Renowski. What right did he have to come filtering back after all this time from the dark and distant March day when he had been fixed for her as the symbol of a constant threat and, even more disturbing, of self-revelation? The March day of the wet, gray early spring when she had disposed of him once and for all, and had consigned him, she had hoped, to the oblivion of total repression. Damn him to hell, what right did he have to return from the dead by tenuous association with a cheap little drug store clerk to molest her now, at this precarious time, when she was poised on the verge of destruction and needed all her faculties for present trouble?

He had been one of the facile boys. One of the complacent and arrogant little aristocrats of adolescence that rise like cream — or scum, as she thought of them — to the surface of the human volume of every high school. She had been pretty, and he had been, of course, irresistible. Or so he had considered himself, and in the beginning it had been fun. It had been great fun to watch his obvious advances against her indifference, to follow with a mild sadistic pleasure the progressive stages of his incredulity and disintegration as he found the indifference to be impregnable. Oh, Christ, it was really funny! A lonely, withdrawn girl of no position, however pretty, totally unimpressed by his attention! It was really quite impossible. It wasn’t supposed to be that way at all. She was supposed to melt, to submit, to acknowledge his charm with appropriate concessions. She was supposed to wet herself with joy. And it was fine fun for a while, before the fun was killed, to watch the formula of conquest reverse itself. To see him debased by a green and sappy passion. To see him watching her in revolting humility, groveling inwardly, pleading with dog’s eyes.

She wondered how far she should permit the ridiculous business to go, and she decided that the limit should be imposed by her own stomach. So long, that is, as her perverse pleasure in his silly suffering was a larger factor than her revulsion. So she let it develop to its natural climax, and in the end it was she who suffered more. It was she who finally confronted for the first time, thanks to the catalyst of his fumbling aggression, a reality far more disturbing than a temporary glandular frustration.

He had fallen into the practice of standing on a certain corner to watch her pass on her way home from school. She never looked at him directly, but she was acutely aware of him, and she relished the sharp turmoil of emotions his presence aroused — the confusion of contempt and curiosity and genuine animus. He worked so hard to achieve a studied casualness, as if it were the purest coincidence that he just happened to be at that spot evening after evening at the very time she would be passing it. And finally, as she had known he would, he made a move.

It was this wet gray day in March with water dripping from the branches of trees and standing in little puddles on the sidewalk and in the street. In the air there was the lift, the raw promise, the damned lie of spring, and as she passed with a load of books under her arm, he fell in beside her and said, “Hello, Kathy.”

She increased the cadence of her steps a bit. “Hello,” she said.

“Let me carry your books, Kathy.”

She felt his hands on them, and she clamped them more I tightly against her side. “No, thanks. I can carry them.”

“Oh, come on, Kathy. Don’t be like that.”

He tugged at the books, and rather than make a foolish issue of it, she released them suddenly.

“Oh, well. Go ahead and carry them if you want to.”

She could sense at once the subtle change in his personality. Already, with such a nominal concession, his bruised ego began to recover, to reorganize itself along a line of dominance. She caught in the corner of her eye the change in his expression, the quick little lift of his chin, and her contempt for him swelled within her, assuming the proportions of exorbitant mockery. She speculated on the extent of his consternation if there were all of a sudden a contact of mental telepathy between them, and the thought prompted in her a wild urge to hilarious laughter.

“You’re a funny girl, Kathy,” he said. “Am I?”

“What I mean is, you don’t seem to mix much. Sometimes it seems as if you just don’t like anyone.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Not even me?”

“Why should I make an exception of you?”

“I don’t know. Anyhow, I like you. I think you’re the prettiest girl in school.”

“Do you?”

“I just said so, didn’t I? Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Not particularly.”

“You see what I mean? Why can’t you be nice to a guy?”

“If you don’t like the way I am, you can give me my books and leave. Nobody’s holding you here.”

Again from the corner of her eye, she saw the impact of her words on his ego, the swift collapse of the slight bloat that had developed as a result of his obtaining her books.

He said quickly, “Let’s go over to Tinker’s for a coke. Would you like a coke, Kathy?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on. Give a guy a break, can’t you?”

“Why should I?”

“Well, damn it, just to see what it’s like. You could just try it once.”

She hesitated. She was tempted to concede again, and she didn’t quite know why. Not, God knew, because she anticipated any pleasure from it. Except, perhaps, the pleasure of extending her manipulation of his emotions a little longer, of seeing him humbled and debased in the silly pursuit of something he’d never get. Of something that didn’t even exist, although there was no possible way for him to understand that. She herself hardly understood it yet.

“All right,” she said. “If you want to buy me a coke, I guess I can drink it.”

So they turned at the next corner and went down to Tinker’s. It was a small clapboard building with a flat roof. Inside, there were plywood booths around three walls, the fourth wall being reserved for the counter. There were stationary stools before the counter and a few tables with chairs scattered in the central area. There was also a garish juke-box of many colors with golden bubbles rising soundlessly through visible tubes. There was always a spinning platter, an amplified voice or the overwhelming collaboration of strings and reeds and brass and percussion, the fiat five-cent can of what passed for music. Tinker’s was one of those places which, for no apparent earthly reason, catches on and hangs on and will not die. Its short orders were bad, its accommodations were inferior, its attitude was indifferent; but in spite of these things it was popular, a congregating place, and trade was brisk in dimes and quarters primarily.

Kathy sat in a booth and sipped her coke and tried to avoid looking at the face of Kenny Renowski across from her. The juke-box blared, there was a heavy smell of greasy hamburger and onions in the stagnant afar, and all around her were students she didn’t like engaged in an awkward mass flirtation with a function she abhorred. She choked on her coke and set the glass unemptied on the table of the booth.

Standing, she said, “I’m leaving.”

He also stood. “Already? Be a sport, Kathy, and stick around. We have lots of fun in this joint. Stick around, you’ll see.”

“I don’t want to stick around. I want to leave. Thanks for the coke.”

“Wait a minute. I’ll go with you, then.”

“You don’t have to come. You can stay and have some of the fun you were talking about.”

“Damn it, Kathy, I said I’d come, didn’t I? Why do you have to be so antagonistic about everything?”

“I’m not antagonistic. I just don’t care whether you come or stay. You can suit yourself.”

He took hold of her arm and said desperately, “Don’t be like that, Kathy.”

They were outside again by that time, and she wheeled to face him, jerking her arm furiously from the grip of his fingers.

“That’s the second time you’ve said that. Please don’t say it again.”

“What?”

“That silly stuff about my not being like that. I am like that, whatever that means, and if you don’t like it, you can get away from me. Just get the hell away.”

She turned again and began walking, and he fell into step beside her. “I didn’t mean to make you sore, Kathy. It’s just an expression. Would you like to take a walk?”

“A walk? Where?”

“Oh, out in the country a little way. It’s a swell day for walking, don’t you think? You can actually smell the earth, wet as it is, and there’s a kind of feeling in the air. It would be nice outside of town today. We could walk out to West Creek and back. It isn’t very far. How about it, Kathy?”

Again she hesitated, and again, for what obscure reason she would never be able to say, she made the concession. And though it seemed afterward to have been a great mistake, the cause of intense suffering, perhaps it was not a mistake after all, but rather a necessary traumatic experience that had to come sooner or later and was better to have come sooner.

“All right,” she said, and they walked in silence along the wet street under trees on which there was an early hint of foliage, an almost invisible tinge of emerging chlorophyll. They crossed the western limit of the small town and walked for perhaps a quarter of a mile along the shoulder of a farm-to-market road. The shoulder was spongy from the rain that had fallen, but it was not muddy, being covered with a mat of heavy brown dead grass left over from the last warm days of the year before. Eventually they left the shoulder and cut at an angle across a pasture toward the long wavering stand of scrub timber that marked the course of West Creek. As they walked, the sun, already far down toward the horizon in its descent of the sky, broke through a cluster of clouds and touched with cold white fire the gray remnants of rain and the drab wet growth of earth. It was all at once an expanded world, still and shimmering and incredibly delicate, and Kathy felt within the close confinement of her ribs a vast swelling of pain and pleasure that she thought must surely burst the slender bones.

She closed her eyes, wanting to cry out in hurting ecstasy, and she wished with all her heart that Stella were here to share the shining world. If only it were Stella beside her instead of this ridiculous, bumbling, offensive boy. By keeping her eyes closed, stepping carefully to avoid stumbling in her self-imposed blindness, she almost managed to convince herself that it was true, that it was indeed Stella beside her and that there was no such person as Kenny Renowski to defile the purity of the new world that the sun had casually created in the last hour before it disappeared.

They crossed the pasture and descended a gentle slope through trees to the bank of the narrow, sluggish creek. And there in the shadows of the trees beside the muddy water, her brief, bright, spun-glass world shattered and fell in silence and lay around her in countless jagged and menacing shards. At first, for a few seconds, she was so frozen, so paralyzed by the violence of her reaction, that she made no protest whatever, and her passivity was mistaken for submission. Then, in an instant, she was a sobbing, clawing fury in fierce and disproportionate retaliation to his mild and harmless aggression. Her vision was impaired by a thick, swirling mist, and the first thing she saw clearly after vision was restored was his clawed, bleeding, terrified face.

Turning, she ran. Wildly, still sobbing, she fled up the slope through the trees and back across the pasture to the road, and though she stopped there on the shoulder to recover her breath and quiet the rampant beating of her heart, she had in a way never stopped at all, had run on and on for a long time over a long way from one bleeding face to another. A long time and a long way from Kenny Renowski to Angus Brunn.