Strangers on a Train

Seventeen

“Charley, what’re all these clippings?”

“Friend of mine, Ma!” Bruno shouted through the bathroom door. He turned the water on harder, leaned on the basin, and concentrated on the bright nickel-plated drainstop. After a moment, he reached for the Scotch bottle he kept under towels in the clothes hamper. He felt less shaky with the glass of Scotch and water in his hand, and spent a few seconds inspecting the silver braid on the sleeve of his new smoking jacket. He liked the jacket so much, he wore it as a bathrobe also. In the mirror, the oval lapels framed the portrait of a young man of leisure, of reckless and mysterious adventure, a young man of humor and depth, power and gentleness (witness the glass held delicately between thumb and forefinger with the air of an imperial toast)—a young man with two lives. He drank to himself.

“Charley?”

“Minute, Mom!”

He cast a wild eye about the bathroom. There was no window. Lately it happened about twice a week. Half an hour or so after he got up, he felt as if someone were kneeling on his chest and stifling him. He closed his eyes and dragged air in and out of his lungs as fast as he could. Then the liquor took. It bedded his leaping nerves like a hand passing down his body. He straightened and opened the door.

“Shaving,” he said.

His mother was in tennis shorts and a halter, bending over his unmade bed where the clippings were strewn. “Who was she?”

“Wife of a fellow I met on the train coming down from New York. Guy Haines.” Bruno smiled. He liked to say Guy’s name. “Interesting, isn’t it? They haven’t caught the murderer yet.”

“Probably a maniac,” she sighed.

Bruno’s face sobered. “Oh, I doubt it. Circumstances are too complicated.”

Elsie stood up and slid her thumb inside her belt. The bulge just below her belt disappeared, and for a moment she looked as Bruno had seen her all her life until this last year, trim as a twenty-year-old down to her thin ankles. “Your friend Guy’s got a nice face.”

“Nicest fellow you ever saw. It’s a shame he’s dragged in on it. He told me on the train he hadn’t seen his wife in a couple of years. Guy’s no more a murderer than I am!” Bruno smiled at his inadvertent joke, and to cover it added, “His wife was a roundheels anyway—”

“Darling.” She took him by the braidedged lapels. “Won’t you watch your language a little for the duration? I know Grannie’s horrified sometimes.”

“Grannie wouldn’t know what a roundheels means,” Bruno said hoarsely.

Elsie threw her head back and shrieked.

“Ma, you’re getting too much sun. I don’t like your face that dark.”

“I don’t like yours that pale.”

Bruno frowned. The leathery look of his mother’s forehead offended him painfully. He kissed her suddenly on the cheek.

“Promise me you’ll sit in the sun a half hour today anyway. People come thousands of miles to get to California, and here you sit in the house!”

Bruno frowned down his nose. “Ma, you’re not interested in my friend!”

“I am interested in your friend. You haven’t told me much about him.”

Bruno smiled shyly. No, he had been very good. He had let the clippings lie out in his room only today for the first time, because he was sure now both he and Guy were safe. If he talked a quarter of an hour about Guy now, his mother would probably forget, too. If it were even necessary that she forget. “Did you read all that?” He nodded toward the bed.

“No, not all that. How many drinks this morning?”

“One.”

“I smell two.”

“All right, Mom, I had two.”

“Darling, won’t you watch the morning drinks? Morning drinks are the end. I’ve seen alcoholic after alcoholic—”

“Alcoholic is a nasty word.” Bruno resumed his slow circuit of the room. “I feel better since I drink a little more, Ma. You said yourself I’m more cheerful and my appetite’s better. Scotch is a very pure drink. Some people it agrees with.”

“You drank too much last night, and Grannie knows it. Don’t think she doesn’t notice, you know.”

“About last night don’t ask me.” Bruno grinned and waved his hand.

“Sammie’s coming over this morning. Why don’t you get dressed and come down and keep score for us?”

“Sammie gives me ulcers.”

She walked to the door as gaily as if she had not heard. “Promise me you’ll get some sun today anyway.”

He nodded and moistened his dry lips. He did not return her smile as she closed the door, because he felt as if a black lid had fallen on him suddenly, as if he had to escape something before it was too late. He had to see Guy before it was too late! He had to get rid of his father before it was too late! He had things to do! He did not want to be here, in his grandmother’s house furnished just like his own house in Louis Quinze, eternal Louis Quinze! But he did not know where else he wanted to be. He was not happy if he were long away from his mother, was he? He bit his underlip and frowned, though his small gray eyes were quite blank. Why did she say he didn’t need a drink in the mornings? He needed it more than any other drink of the day. He flexed his shoulders in a slow rotary movement. Why should he feel low?

The clippings on the bed were about him. Week after week went by and the dumb police got nothing on him, nothing except the heelprints, and he had thrown his shoes away long ago! The party last week with Wilson in the San Francisco hotel was nothing to what he would do now if he had Guy to celebrate with. A perfect murder! How many people could do a perfect murder on an island with a couple of hundred other people around?

He was not like the dopes in the newspapers who killed “to see what it felt like,” and never had a bloody thing to report except sometimes a sick-making, “It wasn’t as good as I expected.” If he were interviewed, he would say, “It was terrific! There’s nothing in the world like it!” (“Would you ever do it again, Mr. Bruno?”) “Well, I might,” reflectively, with caution, as an arctic explorer when asked if he will winter up north again next year might reply uncommittingly to a reporter. (“Can you tell us a little bit about your sensations?”) He would tip the microphone toward him, look up, and muse, while the world awaited his first word. How had it felt? Well, there’s only it, see, and nothing to compare it with. She was a rotten woman anyway, you understand. It was like killing a hot little rat, only she was a girl so it made it a murder. The very warmth of her had been disgusting, and he remembered thinking that before he took his fingers away, the heat would really have stopped coming, that after he left her, she would grow chill and hideous, like she really was. (“Hideous, Mr. Bruno?”) Yes, hideous. (“Do you think a corpse is hideous?”) Bruno frowned. No, he did not really think he thought a corpse was hideous. If the victim was evil, like Miriam, people ought to be pretty glad to see the corpse, oughtn’t they? (“Power, Mr. Bruno?”) Oh, yes, he had felt terrific power! That was it. He had taken away a life. Now, nobody knew what life was, everybody defended it, the most priceless possession, but he had taken one away. That night there had been the danger, the ache of his hands, the fear in case she made a sound, but the instant when he felt that life had left her, everything else had fallen away, and only the mysterious fact of the thing he did remained, the mystery and the miracle of stopping life. People talked about the mystery of birth, of beginning life, but how explainable that was! Out of two live germ cells! What about the mystery of stopping life? Why should life stop because he held a girl’s throat too tightly? What was life anyway? What did Miriam feel after he took his hands away? Where was she? No, he didn’t believe in a life after death. She was stopped, and that was just the miracle. Oh, he could say a great deal at his interview with the press! (“What significance did it have for you that your victim was female?”) Where had that question come from? Bruno hesitated, then recovered his poise. Well, the fact she was a female had given him greater enjoyment. No, he did not therefore conclude that his pleasure had partaken of the sexual. No, he did not hate women either. Rather not! Hate is akin to love, you know. Who said that? He didn’t believe it for a minute. No, all he would say was that he wouldn’t have enjoyed it quite so much, he thought, if he had killed a man. Unless it was his father.

The telephone…

Bruno had been staring at it. Every telephone suggested Guy. He could reach Guy now with two well-placed calls, but a call might annoy Guy. Guy might still be nervous. He would wait for Guy to write. A letter should come any day now, because Guy must have gotten his letter the end of last week. The one thing Bruno needed to make his happiness complete was to hear Guy’s voice, to have a word from him saying he was happy. The bond between Guy and him now was closer than brotherhood. How many brothers liked their brothers as much as he liked Guy?

Bruno threw a leg out the window and stood up on the wrought iron balcony. The morning sunshine did feel rather good. The lawn was broad and smooth as a golf course all the way to the ocean. Then he saw Sammie Franklin, dressed in white tennis clothes with his rackets under his arm, grinning his way toward his mother. Sammie was big and flabby, like a softened-up boxer. He reminded Bruno of another Hollywood stooge who had hung around his mother when they were here three years ago, Alexander Phipps. Why did he even remember their phony names? He heard Sammie’s chuckle as he extended his hand to his mother, and an old antagonism fluttered up in Bruno and lay still again. Merde. Disdainfully he took his eyes from Sammie’s broad flannel backsides, and examined the view from left to right. A couple of pelicans flew loggily over a hedge and plopped down on the grass. Far out on the pale water he saw a sailboat. Three years ago he had begged his grandmother to get a sailboat, and now that she had one, he never felt like using it.

The tennis balls wokked around the tan stucco corner of the house. Chimes sounded from downstairs, and Bruno went back into his room, so he would not know what time it was. He liked to see a clock by accident as late as possible in the day, and find it was later than he had thought. If there was no letter from Guy in the noon mail, he thought, he might catch a train to San Francisco. On the other hand, his last memory of San Francisco was not pleasant. Wilson had brought a couple of Italian fellows up to the hotel, and Bruno had bought all the dinners and several bottles of rye. They had called Chicago on his telephone. The hotel had chalked up two calls to Metcalf, and he couldn’t remember the second at all. And the last day, he had been twenty dollars short on the bill. He didn’t have a checking account, so the hotel, the best hotel in town, had held his suitcase until his mother wired the money. No, he wouldn’t go back to San Francisco.

“Charley?” called the high, sweet voice of his grandmother.

He saw the curved handle of the door start to move, made an involuntary lunge for the clippings on his bed, then circled back to the bathroom instead. He shook tooth powder into his mouth. His grandmother could smell liquor like a dry sourdough in the Klondike.

“Aren’t you ready to have some breakfast with me?” his grandmother asked.

He came out combing his hair. “Gee, you’re all dressed up!” She turned her small unsteady figure around for him like a fashion model, and Bruno smiled. He liked the black lace dress with the pink satin showing through it. “Looks like one of those balconies out there.”

“Thank you, Charley. I’m going into town the latter part of the morning. I thought you might like to come with me.”

“Could be. Yeah, I’d like that, Grannie,” he said goodnaturedly.

“So it’s you’ve been clipping my Times! I thought it was one of the servants. You must be getting up awfully early these mornings.”

“Yep,” Bruno said agreeably.

“When I was young, we used to get poems out of newspapers for our scrapbooks. We made scrapbooks out of everything under the sun. What’re you going to do with these?”

“Oh, just keep ‘em.”

“Don’t you make scrapbooks?”

“Nope.” She was looking at him, and Bruno wanted her to look at the clippings.

“Oh, you’re just a ba-aby,” She pinched his cheek. “Hardly a bit of fuzz on your chin yet! I don’t know why your mother’s worried about you—”

“She’s not worried.”

“—when you just need time to grow up. Come on down to breakfast with me. Yes, pajamas and all.”

Bruno gave her his arm on the stairs.

“I’ve got the least bit of shopping to do,” said his grandmother as she poured his coffee, “and then I thought we’d do something nice. Maybe a good movie—with a murder in it—or maybe the amusement park. I haven’t been to an amusement park in a-ages,”

Bruno’s eyes opened as wide as they could.

“Which would you like? Well, we can look over the movies when we get there.”

“I’d like the amusement park, Grannie.”

Bruno enjoyed the day, helping her in and out of the car, piloting her around the amusement park, though there was not much after all his grandmother could do or eat. But they rode the ferris wheel together. Bruno told his grandmother about the big ferris wheel in Metcalf, but she did not ask him when he had been there.

Sammie Franklin was still at the house when they came home, staying for dinner. Bruno’s eyebrows drew together at the first sight of him. He knew his grandmother cared as little for Sammie as he did, and Bruno felt suddenly a great tenderness for her, because she accepted Sammie so uncomplainingly, accepted any mongrel his mother brought on the place. What had he and his mother been doing all day? They had been to a movie, they said, one of Sammies movies. And there was a letter for him upstairs in his room.

Bruno ran upstairs. The letter was from Florida. He tore it open with his hands shaking like ten hangovers. He had never wanted a letter so badly, not even at camp, when he had waited for letters from his mother.

Sept. 6

Dear Charles,

I do not understand your message to me, or for that matter your great interest in me. I know you very slightly, but enough to assure me that we have nothing in common on which to base a friendship. May I ask you please not to telephone my mother again or communicate with me?

Thank you for trying to return the book to me. Its loss is of no importance.

Guy Haines

Bruno brought it up closer and read it again, his eyes lingering incredulously on a word here and there. His pointed tongue stretched over his upper lip, then disappeared suddenly. He felt shorn. It was a feeling like grief, or like a death. Worse! He glanced about his room, hating the furniture, hating his possessions. Then the pain centered in his chest, and reflexively he began to cry.

After dinner, Sammie Franklin and he got into an argument about vermouths. Sammie said the drier the vermouth, the more one had to put into a martini, though he admitted he was not a martini drinker. Bruno said he was not a martini drinker either, but he knew better than that. The argument went on even after his grandmother said good night and left them. They were on the upstairs terrace in the dark, his mother in the glider and he and Sammie standing by the parapet. Bruno ran down to the bar for the ingredients to prove his point. They both made martinis and tasted them, and though it was clear Bruno was right, Sammie kept holding out, and chuckling as if he didn’t quite mean what he said either, which Bruno found insufferable.

“Go to New York and learn something! “Bruno shouted. His mother had just left the terrace.

“How do you know what you’re saying anyway?” Sammie retorted. The moonlight made his fat grinning face blue-green and yellow, like gorgonzola cheese. “You’re pickled all day. You—”

Bruno caught Sammie by the shirtfront and bent him backward over the parapet. Sammies feet rattled on the tiles. His shirt split. When he wriggled sideways to safety, the blue had left his face and it was a shadowless yellow-white.

“Th-the hell’s the matter with you?” he bellowed. “You’d a shoved me over, wouldn’t you?”

“No, I wouldn’t!” Bruno shrieked, louder than Sammie. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe, like in the mornings. He took his stiff, sweaty hands down from his face. He had done a murder, hadn’t he? Why should he do another? But he had seen Sammie squirming on the points of the iron fence right below, and he had wanted him there. He heard Sammie stirring a highball fast. Bruno stumbled over the threshold of the French window into the house.

“And stay out!” Sammie shouted after him.

The shaking passion in Sammies voice sent a throb of fear through him. Bruno said nothing as he passed his mother in the hall. Going downstairs, he clung to the banister with both hands, cursing the ringing, aching, unmanageable mess in his head, cursing the martinis he had drunk with Sammie. He staggered into the living room.

“Charley, what did you do to Sammie?” His mother had followed him in.

“Ah, wha’d I do to Sammie!” Bruno shoved his hand toward her blurred figure and sat down on the sofa with a bounce.

“Charley—come back and apologize.” The white blur of her evening dress came closer, one brown arm extended toward him.

“Are you sleeping with that guy? Are you sleeping with that guy?” He knew he had only to lie back on the sofa and he would pass out like a light, so he lay back, and never felt her arm at all.