Strangers on a Train

Twentyfive

“I don’t give a damn what you think!” Bruno said, his foot planted in his chair. His thin blond eyebrows almost met with his frown, and rose up at the ends like the whiskers of a cat. He looked at Gerard like a golden, thinhaired tiger driven to madness.

“Didn’t say I thought anything,” Gerard replied with a shrug of hunched shoulders, “did I?”

“You implied.”

“I did not imply.” The round shoulders shook twice with his laugh. “You mistake me, Charles. I didn’t mean you told anyone on purpose you were leaving. You let it drop by accident.”

Bruno stared at him. Gerard had just implied that if it was an inside job, Bruno and his mother must have had something to do with it, and it certainly was an inside job. Gerard knew that he and his mother had decided only Thursday afternoon to leave Friday. The idea of getting him all the way down here in Wall Street to tell him that! Gerard didn’t have anything, and he couldn’t fool him by pretending that he had. It was another perfect murder.

“Mind if I shove off?” Bruno asked. Gerard was fooling around with papers on his desk as if he had something else to keep him here for.

“In a minute. Have a drink.” Gerard nodded toward the bottle of bourbon on the shelf across the office.

“No, thanks.” Bruno was dying for a drink, but not from Gerard.

“How’s your mother?”

“You asked me that.” His mother wasn’t well, wasn’t sleeping, and that was the main reason he wanted to get home. A hot resentment came over him again at Gerard’s friend-of-the-family attitude. A friend of his father’s maybe! “By the way, we’re not hiring you for this, you know.”

Gerard looked up with a smile on his round, faintly pink-and-purple mottled face. “I’d work on this case for nothing, Charles. That’s how interesting I think it is.” He lighted another of the cigars that were shaped something like his fat fingers, and Bruno noticed once more, with disgust, the gravy stains on the lapels of his fuzzy, light-brown suit and the ghastly marble-patterned tie. Every single thing about Gerard annoyed Bruno. His slow speech annoyed him. Memories of the only other times he had seen Gerard, with his father, annoyed him. Arthur Gerard didn’t even look like the kind of a detective who was not supposed to look like a detective. In spite of his record, Bruno found it impossible to believe that Gerard was a top-notch detective. “Your father was a very fine man, Charles. A pity you didn’t know him better.”

“I knew him well,” said Bruno.

Gerard’s small, speckled tan eyes looked at him gravely. “I think he knew you better than you knew him. He left me several letters concerning you, your character, what he hoped to make of you.”

“He didn’t know me at all.” Bruno reached for a cigarette. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this. It’s beside the point and it’s morbid.” He sat down coolly.

“You hated your father, didn’t you?”

“He hated me.”

“But he didn’t. That’s where you didn’t know him.”

Bruno pushed his hand off the chair arm and it squeaked with sweat. “Are we getting anywhere or what’re you keeping me here for? My mother’s not feeling well and I want to get home.”

“I hope she’ll be feeling better soon, because I want to ask her some questions. Maybe tomorrow.”

Heat rose up the sides of Bruno’s neck. The next few weeks would be terrible on his mother, and Gerard would make it worse because he was an enemy of both of them. Bruno stood up and tossed his raincoat over one arm.

“Now I want you to try to think once more,” Gerard wagged a finger at him as casually as if he still sat in the chair, “just where you went and whom you saw Thursday night. You left your mother and Mr.Templeton and Mr. Russo in front of the Blue Angel at 2:45 that morning. Where did you go?”

“Hamburger Hearth,” Bruno sighed.

“Didn’t see anyone you knew there?”

“Who should I know there, the cat?”

“Then where’d you go?” Gerard checked on his notes.

“Clarke’s on Third Avenue.”

“See anyone there?”

“Sure, the bartender.”

“The bartender said he didn’t see you,” Gerard smiled.

Bruno frowned. Gerard hadn’t said that a half an hour ago. “So what? The place was crowded. Maybe I didn’t see the bartender either.”

“All the barmen know you in there. They said you weren’t in Thursday night. Furthermore, the place wasn’t crowded. Thursday night? Three or 3:30?—I’m just trying to help you remember, Charles.”

Bruno compressed his lips in exasperation. “Maybe I wasn’t in Clarke’s. I usually go over for a nightcap, but maybe I didn’t.

Maybe I went straight home, I don’t know. What about all the people my mother and I talked to Friday morning? We called up a lot of people to say good-by.”

“Oh, we’re covering those. But seriously, Charles—” Gerard leaned back, crossed a stubby leg, and concentrated on puffing his cigar to life—“you wouldn’t leave your mother and her friends just to get a hamburger and go straight home by yourself, would you?”

“Maybe. Maybe it sobered me up.”

“Why’re you so vague?” Gerard’s Iowan accent made his “r” a snarl.

“So what if I’m vague? I’ve got a right to be vague if I was tight!”

“The point is—and of course it doesn’t matter whether you were at Clarke’s or some other place—who you ran into and told you were leaving for Maine the next day. You must think yourself it’s funny your father was killed the night of the same day you left.”

“I didn’t see anyone. I invite you to check up on everyone I know and ask them.”

“You just wandered around by yourself until after 5 in the morning.”

“Who said I got home after 5?”

“Herbert. Herbert said so yesterday.”

Bruno sighed. “Why didn’t he remember all that Saturday?”

“Well, as I say, that’s how the memory works. Gone—and then it comes. Yours’ll come, too. Meanwhile, I’ll be around. Yes, you can go now, Charles.” Gerard made a careless gesture.

Bruno lingered a moment, trying to think of something to say, and not being able to, went out and tried to slam the door but the air pressure retarded it. He walked back through the shabby, depressing corridor of the Confidential Detective Bureau, where the typewriter that had been pecking thoughtfully throughout the interview came louder—“We,” Gerard was always saying, and here they all were, grubbing away back of the doors—nodded good-by to Miss Graham, the receptionist-secretary who had expressed her sympathies to him an hour ago when he had come in. How gaily he had come in an hour ago, determined not to let Gerard rile him, and now—He could never control his temper when Gerard made cracks about him and his mother, and he might as well admit it. So what? So what did they have on him? So what clues did they have on the murderer? Wrong ones.

Guy! Bruno smiled going down in the elevator. Not once had Guy crossed his mind in Gerard’s office! Not one flicker even when Gerard had hammered at him about where he went Thursday night! Guy! Guy and himself! Who else was like them? Who else was their equal? He longed for Guy to be with him now. He would clasp Guy’s hand, and to hell with the rest of the world! Their feats were unparalleled! Like a sweep across the sky! Like two streaks of red fire that came and disappeared so fast, everybody stood wondering if they really had seen them. He remembered a poem he had read once that said something of what he meant. He thought he still had it in a pocket of his address case. He hurried into a bar off Wall Street, ordered a drink, and pulled the tiny paper out of the address-book pocket. It was torn out of a poetry book he had had in college.

THE LEADEN-EYED by Vachel Lindsay

Let not young souls be smothered out before

They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.

It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,

Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,

Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,

Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,

Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

He and Guy were not leaden-eyed. He and Guy would not die like sheep now. He and Guy would reap. He would give Guy money, too, if he would take it.

Twenty-six

At about the same time the next day, Bruno was sitting in a beach chair on the terrace of his house in Great Neck, in a mood of complaisance and halcyon content quite new and pleasant to him. Gerard had been prowling around that morning, but Bruno had been very calm and courteous, had seen that he and his little stooge got some lunch, and now Gerard was gone and he felt very proud of his behavior. He must never let Gerard get him down again like yesterday, because that was the way to get rattled and make mistakes. Gerard, of course, was the dumb one. If he’d just been nicer yesterday, he might have cooperated. Cooperated? Bruno laughed out loud. What did he mean cooperated? What was he doing, kidding himself?

Overhead a bird kept singing, “Tweedledee?” and answering itself, “Tweedledum!” Bruno cocked his head. His mother would know what kind of a bird it was. He gazed off at the russet-tinged lawn, the white plaster wall, the dogwoods that were beginning to bud. This afternoon, he found himself quite interested in nature. This afternoon, a check had arrived for twenty thousand for his mother. There would be a lot more when the insurance people stopped yapping and the lawyers got all the red tape cut. At lunch, he and his mother had talked about going to Capri, talked sketchily, but he knew they would go. And tonight, they were going out to dinner for the first time, at a little intime place that was their favorite restaurant, off the highway not far from Great Neck. No wonder he hadn’t liked nature before. Now that he owned the grass and the trees, it meant something.

Casually, he turned the pages of the address book in his lap. He had found it this morning, couldn’t remember if he had had it with him in Santa Fe or not, and wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything about Guy in it before Gerard found it. There certainly were a lot of people he wanted to look up again, now that he had the wherewithal. An idea came to him, and he took a pencil from his pocket. Under the P’s he wrote:

Tommy Pandini

232 W. 76 Street

and under the S’s:

“Slitch”

Life Guard Station

Hell Gate Bridge

Give Gerard a few mysterious people to look up.

Dan 8:15 Hotel Astor, he found in the memos at the back of the book. He didn’t even remember Dan. Get $ from Capt. by June 1. The next page sent a little chill down him: Item for Guy $25. He tore the perforated page out. That Santa Fe belt for Guy. Why had he even put it down? In some dull moment—Gerard’s big black car purred into the driveway.

Bruno forced himself to sit there and finish checking the memos. Then he slipped the address book in his pocket, and poked the torn-out page into his mouth.

Gerard strolled onto the flagstones with a cigar in his mouth and his arms hanging.

“Anything new?” Bruno asked.

“Few things.” Gerard let his eyes sweep from the corner of the house diagonally across the lawn to the plaster wall, as though he reappraised the distance the murderer had run.

Bruno’s jaw moved casually on the little wad of paper, as if he chewed gum. “Such as what?” he asked. Past Gerard’s shoulder, he saw his little stooge sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, staring at them fixedly from under a gray hatbrim. Of all the sinister-looking guys, Bruno thought.

“Such as the fact the murderer didn’t cut back to town. He kept going in this general direction.” Gerard gestured like a country-store proprietor pointing out a road, bringing his whole arm down. “Cut through those woods over there and must have had a pretty rough time. We found these.”

Bruno got up and looked at a piece of the purple gloves and a shred of dark blue material, like Guy’s overcoat. “Gosh. You sure they’re off the murderer?”

“Reasonably sure. One’s off an overcoat. The other—probably a glove.”

“Or a muffler.”

“No, there’s a little seam.” Gerard poked it with a fat freckled forefinger.

“Pretty fancy gloves.”

“Ladies’ gloves.” Gerard looked up with a twinkle.

Bruno gave an amused smirk, and stopped contritely.

“I first thought he was a professional killer,” Gerard said with a sigh. “He certainly knew the house. But I don’t think a professional killer would have lost his head and tried to get through those woods at the point he did.”

“Hm-m,” said Bruno with interest.

“He knew the right road to take, too. The right road was only ten yards away.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because this whole thing was carefully planned, Charles. The broken lock on the back door, the milk crate out there by the wall—”

Bruno was silent. Herbert had told Gerard that he, Bruno, broke the lock. Herbert had probably also told him he put the milk crate there.

“Purple gloves!” Gerard chuckled, as gaily as Bruno had ever heard him chuckle. “What does the color matter as long as they keep fingerprints off things, eh?”

“Yeah,” Bruno said.

Gerard entered the house through the terrace door.

Bruno followed him after a moment. Gerard went back to the kitchen, and Bruno climbed the stairs. He tossed the address book on his bed, then went down the hall. The open door of his father’s room gave him a funny feeling, as if he were just realizing his father were dead. It was the door’s hanging open that made him feel it, he thought, like a shirttail hanging out, like a guard let down, that never would have been if the Captain were alive. Bruno frowned, then went and closed the door quickly on the carpet scuffled by detectives’ feet, by Guy’s feet, on the desk with the looted pigeonholes and the checkbook that lay open as if awaiting his father’s signatures. He opened his mother’s door carefully. She was lying on her bed with the pink satin comforter drawn up to her chin, her head turned toward the inside of the room and her eyes open, as she had lain since Saturday night.

“You didn’t sleep, Mom?”

“No.”

“Gerard’s here again.”

“I know.”

“If you don’t want to be disturbed, I’ll tell him.”

“Darling, don’t be silly.”

Bruno sat down on the bed and bent close to her. “I wish you could sleep, Mom.” She had purple wrinkled shadows under her eyes, and she held her mouth in a way he had never seen before, that drew its corners long and thin.

“Darling, are you sure Sam never mentioned anything to you—never mentioned anyone?”

“Can you imagine him saying anything like that to me?” Bruno wandered about the room. Gerard’s presence in the house irked him. It was Gerard’s manner that was so obnoxious, as if he had something up his sleeve against everyone, even Herbert who he knew had idolized his father, who was saying everything against him short of plain accusation. But Herbert hadn’t seen him measuring the grounds, Bruno knew, or Gerard would have let him know by now. He had wandered all over the grounds, and the house while his mother was sick, and anyone seeing him wouldn’t have known when he was counting his paces or not. He wanted to sound off about Gerard now, but his mother wouldn’t understand. She insisted on their continuing to hire him, because he was supposed to be the best. They were not working together, his mother and he. His mother might say something else to Gerard—like the fact they’d decided only Thursday to leave Friday—of terrible importance and not mention it to him at all!

“You know you’re getting fat, Charley?” his mother said with a smile.

Bruno smiled, too, she sounded so like herself. She was putting on her shower cap at her dressing table now. “Appetite’s not bad,” he said. But his appetite was worse and so was his digestion. He was getting fatter anyway.

Gerard knocked just after his mother had closed the bathroom door.

“She’ll be quite a long time,” Bruno told him.

“Tell her I’ll be in the hall, will you?”

Bruno knocked on the bathroom door and told her, then went down to his own room. He could tell by the position of the address book on his bed that Gerard had found it and looked at it. Slowly Bruno mixed himself a short highball, drank it, then went softly down the hall and heard Gerard already talking to his mother.

“—didn’t seem in high or low spirits, eh?”

“He’s a very moody boy, you know. I doubt if I’d have noticed,” his mother said.

“Oh—people pick up psychic feelings sometimes. Don’t you agree, Elsie?”

His mother did not answer.

“—too bad, because I’d like more cooperation from him.”

“Do you think he’s withholding anything?”

“I don’t know,” with his disgusting smile, and Bruno could tell from his tone that Gerard expected him to be listening, too. “Do you?”

“Of course, I don’t think he is. What’re you getting at, Arthur?”

She was standing up to him. She wouldn’t think so much of Gerard after this, Bruno thought. He was being dumb again, a dumb Iowan.

“You want me to get at the truth, don’t you, Elsie?” Gerard asked, like a radio detective. “He’s hazy about what he did Thursday night after leaving you. He’s got some pretty shady acquaintances. One might have been a hireling of a business enemy’s of Sam’s, a spy or something like that. And Charles could have mentioned that you and he were leaving the next day—”

“What’re you getting at, Arthur, that Charles knows something about this?”

“Elsie, I wouldn’t be surprised. Would you, really?”

“Damn him!” Bruno murmured. Damn him for saying that to his mother!

“I’ll certainly tell you everything he tells me.”

Bruno drifted toward the stairway. Her submissiveness shocked him. Suppose she began to suspect? Murder was something she wouldn’t be able to take. Hadn’t he realized it in Santa Fe? And if she remembered Guy, remembered that he had talked about him in Los Angeles? If Gerard found Guy in the next two weeks, he might have scratches on him from getting through those woods, or a bruise or a cut that might raise suspicion. Bruno heard Herbert’s soft tread in the downstairs hall, saw him come into view with his mother’s afternoon drink on a tray, and retreated up the stairs again. His heart beat as if he were in a battle, a strange many-sided battle. He hurried back to his own room, took a big drink, then lay down and tried to fall asleep.

He awakened with a jerk and rolled from under Gerard’s hand on his shoulder.

“By-by,” Gerard said, his smile showing his tobacco-stained lower teeth. “Just leaving and thought I’d say good-by.”

“Is it worth waking somebody up for?” Bruno said.

Gerard chuckled and waddled from the room before Bruno could think of some mitigating phrase he really wanted to say. He plunged back on the pillow and tried to resume his nap, but when he closed his eyes, he saw Gerard’s stocky figure in the light-brown suit going down the halls, slipping wraithlike through closed doors, bending to look into drawers, to read letters, to make notes, turning to point a finger at him, tormenting his mother so it was impossible not to fight back.

Twenty-seven

“What else can you make of it? He’s accusing me!” Bruno shouted across the table.

“Darling, he’s not. He’s attending to his business.”

Bruno pushed his hair back. “Want to dance, Mom?”

“You’re in no condition to dance.” He wasn’t and he knew it. “Then I want another drink.”

“Darling, the food’s coming right away.”

Her patience with it all, the purple circles under her eyes, pained him so he could not look in front of him. Bruno glanced around for a waiter. The place was so crowded tonight, it was hard to tell a waiter from any other guy. His eyes stopped on a man at a table across the dance floor who looked like Gerard. He couldn’t see the man he was with, but he certainly looked like Gerard, the bald head and light brown hair, except this man wore a black jacket. Bruno closed one eye to stop the rhythmic splitting of the image.

“Charley, do sit down. The waiter’s coming.”

It was Gerard, and he was laughing now, as if the other fellow had told him he was watching them. For one suspended, furious second, Bruno wondered whether to tell his mother.

Then he sat down and said with vehemence: “Gerard’s over there!”

“Is he? Where?”

“Over left of the orchestra. Under the blue lamp.”

“I don’t see him.” His mother stretched up. “Darling, you’re imagining.”

“I am not imagining!“Bruno shouted and threw his napkin in his roast beef au jus.

“I see the one you mean, and it’s not Gerard,” she said patiently.

“You can’t see him as good as I can! It’s him and I don’t feel like eating in the same room with him!”

“Charles,” she sighed. “Do you want another drink? Have another drink. Here’s a waiter.”

“I don’t even feel like drinkin’ with him! Want me to prove it’s him?”

“What does it matter? He’s not going to bother us. He’s guarding us probably.”

“You admit it’s him! He’s spying on us and he’s in a dark suit so he can follow us anywhere else we go!”

“It’s not Arthur anyway,” she said quietly, squeezing lemon over her broiled fish. “You’re having hallucinations.”

Bruno stared at her with his mouth open. “What do you mean saying things like that to me, Mom?” His voice cracked.

“Sweetie, everybody’s looking at us.”

“I don’t care!”

“Darling, let me tell you something. You’re making too much out of this.” She interrupted him, “You are, because you want to. You want excitement. I’ve seen it before.”

Bruno was absolutely speechless. His mother was turning against him. He had seen her look at the Captain the way she looked at him now.

“You’ve probably said something to Gerard,” she went on, “in anger, and he thinks you’re behaving most peculiarly. Well, you are.”

“Is that any reason for him to tail me day and night?”

“Darling, I don’t think that’s Gerard,” she said firmly.

Bruno pushed himself up and staggered away toward the table where Gerard sat. He’d prove to her it was Gerard, and prove to Gerard he wasn’t afraid of him. A couple of tables blocked him at the edge of the dance floor, but he could see it was Gerard now.

Gerard looked up at him and waved a hand familiarly, and his little stooge stared at him. And he, he and his mother were paying for it! Bruno opened his mouth, not knowing exactly what he wanted to say, then teetered around. He knew what he wanted to do, call up Guy. Right here and now. Right in the same room with Gerard. He struggled across the dance floor toward the telephone booth by the bar. The slow, crazily revolving figures pressed him back like a sea wave, baffling him. The wave floated toward him again, buoyant but insuperable, sweeping him yet farther back, and a similar moment at a party in his house when he was a little boy, when he tried to get through the dancing couples to his mother across the living room, came back to him.

Bruno woke up early in the morning, in bed, and lay perfectly still, retracing the last moments he could remember. He knew he had passed out. Had he called Guy before he passed out? If he had, could Gerard trace it? He surely hadn’t talked to Guy or he’d remember it, but maybe he’d called his house. He got up to go ask his mother if he had passed out in the telephone booth. Then the shakes came on and he went into the bathroom. The Scotch and water splashed up in his face when he lifted the glass. He braced himself against the bathroom door. It was getting him at both ends now, the shakes, early and late, waking him earlier and earlier, and he had to take more and more at night to get to sleep. And in between was Gerard.

Twenty-eight

Momentarily, and faintly, as one re-experiences a remembered sensation, Guy felt secure and self-sufficient as he sat down at his work table where he had his hospital books and notes carefully arranged.

In the last month, he had washed and repainted all his bookshelves, had his carpet and curtains cleaned, and had scrubbed his kitchenette until its porcelain and aluminum gleamed. All guilt, he had thought as he poured the pans of dirty water down the sink, but since he could sleep no more than two or three hours a night, and then only after physical exercise, he reasoned that cleaning one’s house was a more profitable manner of tiring oneself than walking the streets of the city.

He looked at the unopened newspaper on his bed, then got up and glanced through all its pages. But the papers had stopped mentioning the murder six weeks ago. He had taken care of every clue—the purple gloves cut up and flushed down the toilet, the overcoat (a good overcoat, and he had thought of giving it to a beggar, but who would be so base as to give even a beggar a murderer’s overcoat?) and the trousers torn in pieces and disposed of gradually in the garbage. And the Luger dropped off the Manhattan Bridge. And his shoes off another. The only thing he had not disposed of was the little revolver.

He went to his bureau to look at it. Its hardness under his fingertips soothed him. The one clue he had not disposed of, and all the clue they needed if they found him. He knew exactly why he kept the revolver: it was his, a part of himself, the third hand that had done the murder. It was himself at fifteen when he had bought it, himself when he had loved Miriam and had kept it in their room in Chicago, looking at it now and then in his most contented, most inward moments. The best of himself, with its mechanical, absolute logic. Like him, he thought now, in its power to kill.

If Bruno dared to contact him again, he would kill him, too. Guy was sure that he could. Bruno would know it, too. Bruno had always been able to read him. The silence from Bruno now brought more relief than the silence from the police. In fact, he was not anxious at all lest the police find him, had never been. The anxiety had always been within himself, a battle of himself against himself, so torturous he might have welcomed the law’s intervention. Society’s law was lax compared to the law of conscience. He might go to the law and confess, but confession seemed a minor point, a mere gesture, even an easy way out, an avoidance of truth. If the law executed him, it would be a mere gesture.

“I have no great respect for the law,” he remembered he had said to Peter Wriggs in Metcalf two years ago. Why should he have respect for a statute that called him and Miriam man and wife? “I have no great respect for the church,” he had said sophomorishly to Peter at fifteen. Then, of course, he had meant the Metcalf Baptists. At seventeen, he had discovered God by himself. He had discovered God through his own awakening talents, and through a sense of unity of all the arts, and then of nature, finally of science—of all the creating and ordering forces in the world. He believed he could not have done his work without a belief in God. And where had his belief been when he murdered? He had forsaken God, not God him. It seemed to him that no human being had ever borne, or had needed to bear, so much guilt as he, and that he could not have borne it and lived unless his spirit was dead already, and what existed of himself now only a husk.

Awkwardly, he turned and faced his work table. A gasp hissed between his teeth, and nervously, impatiently, he passed his hand hard across his mouth. And yet, he felt, there was something still to come, still to be grasped, some severer punishment, some bitterer realization.

“I don’t suffer enough!” burst from him suddenly in a whisper. But why had he whispered? Was he ashamed? “I don’t suffer enough,” he said in a normal voice, glancing about him as if he expected some ear to hear him. And he would have shouted it, if he had not felt some element of pleading in it, and considered himself unworthy of pleading for anything, from anyone.

His new books, for instance, the beautiful new books he had bought today—he could still think about them, love them. Yet he felt he had left them there long ago on his -work table, like his own youth. He must go immediately and work, he thought. He had been commissioned to plan a hospital. He frowned at the little stack of notes he had already taken, spotlighted under his gooseneck lamp. Somehow it did not seem real that he had been commissioned. He would awaken soon and find that all these weeks had been a fantasy, a wishful dream. A hospital. Wasn’t a hospital more fitting than even a prison? He frowned puzzledly, knowing his mind had strayed wildly, that two weeks ago when he had begun the hospital interior he had not thought once of death, that the positive requisites of health and healing alone had occupied him. He hadn’t told Anne about the hospital, he remembered suddenly, that was why it seemed unreal. She was his glass of reality, not his work. But on the other hand, why hadn’t he told her?

He must go immediately and work, but he could feel in his legs now that frenzied energy that came every evening, that sent him out in the streets finally in a vain effort to spend it. The energy frightened him because he could find no task that would absorb it, and because he felt at times that the task might be his suicide. Yet very deep inside him, and very much against his own will, his roots still clung to life, and he sensed that suicide was a coward’s escape, a ruthless act against those who loved him.

He thought of his mother, and felt he could never let her embrace him again. He remembered her telling him that all men were equally good, because all men had souls and the soul was entirely good. Evil, she said, always came from externals. And so he had believed even months after Miriam, when he had wanted to murder her lover Steve. So he had believed even on the train, reading his Plato. In himself, the second horse of the charioteer had always been obedient as the first. But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative. The splitting of the atom was the only true destruction, the breaking of the universal law of oneness. Nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it. Could space exist in a building without objects that stopped it? Could energy exist without matter, or matter without energy? Matter and energy, the inert and the active, once considered opposites, were now known to be one.

And Bruno, he and Bruno. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved.

For a moment, he felt as if he might be mad. He thought, madness and genius often overlapped, too. But what mediocre lives most people lived! In middle waters, like most fish!

No, there was that duality permeating nature down to the tiny proton and electron within the tiniest atom. Science was now at work trying to split the electron, and perhaps it couldn’t because perhaps only an idea was behind it: the one and only truth, that the opposite is always present. Who knew whether an electron was matter or energy? Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron!

He threw his cigarette at the wastebasket and missed.

When he put out the stub in the basket, he saw a crumpled page on which he had written last night one of his guilt-crazed confessions. It dragged him up sickeningly to a present that assaulted him from all sides—Bruno, Anne, this room, this night, the conference with the Department of Hospitals tomorrow.

Toward midnight, when he felt drowsy, he left his work table and lay down carefully on his bed, not daring to undress lest he awaken himself again.

He dreamed that he woke up in the night to the sound of the slow, watchful breathing that he heard every night in his room as he tried to fall asleep. It came from outside his window now. Someone was climbing the house. A tall figure in a great cape like a bat’s wings sprang suddenly into the room.

“I’m here,” said the figure matter-offactly.

Guy jumped from his bed to fight him. “Who are you?” He saw it was Bruno.

Bruno resisted him rather than fought back. If Guy used his utmost strength, he could just pin Bruno’s shoulders to the floor, and always in the recurrent dream, Guy had to use his utmost strength. Guy held Bruno to the floor with his knees and strangled him, but Bruno kept grinning up at him as if he felt nothing.

“You,” Bruno answered finally.

Guy awakened heavy-headed and perspiring. He sat up higher, vigilantly guarding his empty room. There were slimily wet sounds in the room now, as of a snake crawling through the cement court below, slapping its moist coils against the walls. Then suddenly he recognized the sound as that of rain, a gentle, silvery summer rain, and sank back again on his pillow. He began to cry softly. He thought of the rain, rushing at a slant to the earth. It seemed to say: Where are the spring plants to water? Where is the new life that depends on me? Where is the green vine, Anne, as we saw love in our youth? he had written last night on the crumpled paper. The rain would find the new life awaiting it, depending on it. What fell in his court was only its excess. Where is the green vine, Anne…

He lay with his eyes open until the dawn eased its fingertips onto the sill, like the stranger who had sprung in. Like Bruno. Then he got up and turned on his lights, drew the shades, and went back to his work.

Twenty-nine

Guy slammed his foot on the brake pedal, but the car leapt, screaming, toward the child. There was a tinny clatter of the bicycle falling. Guy got out and ran around the car, banged his knee excruciatingly on the front bumper, and dragged the child up by his shoulders.

“I’m okay,” the little boy said.

“Is he all right, Guy?” Anne ran up, white as the child.

“I think so.” Guy gripped the bicycle’s, front wheel with his knees and straightened the handlebars, feeling the child’s curious eyes on his own violently trembling hands.

“Thanks,” said the boy.

Guy watched him mount the bicycle and pedal off as if he watched a miracle. He looked at Anne and said quietly, with a shuddering sigh, “I can’t drive anymore today.”

“All right,” she replied, as quietly as he, but there was a suspicion in her eyes, Guy knew, as she turned to go around to the driver’s seat.

Guy apologized to the Faulkners as he got back into the car, and they murmured something about such things happening to every driver now and then. But Guy felt their real silence behind him, a silence of shock and horror. He had seen the boy coming down the side road. The boy had stopped for him, but Guy had swerved the car toward him as if he had intended to hit him. Had he? Tremulously, he lighted a cigarette. Nothing but bad coordination, he told himself, he had seen it a hundred times in the past two weeks—collisions with revolving doors, his inability even to hold a pen against a ruler, and so often the feeling he wasn’t here, doing what he was doing. Grimly he reestablished what he was doing now, driving in Anne’s car up to Alton to see the new house. The house was done. Anne and her mother had put the drapes up last week. It was Sunday, nearly noon. Anne had told him she had gotten a nice letter from his mother yesterday, and that his mother had sent her three crocheted aprons and a lot of homemade preserves to start their kitchen shelves. Could he remember all that? All he seemed to remember was the sketch of the Bronx hospital in his pocket, that he hadn’t told Anne about yet. He wished he could go away somewhere and do nothing but work, see no one, not even Anne. He stole a glance at her, at her coolly lifted face with the faint arch in the bridge of the nose. Her thin strong hands swung the wheel expertly into a curve and out. Suddenly he was sure she loved her car more than she loved him.

“If anybody’s hungry, speak up now,” Anne said. “This little store’s the last place for miles.”

But no one was hungry.

“I expect to be asked for dinner at least once a year, Anne,” her father said. “Maybe a brace of ducks or some quail. I hear there’s some good hunting around here. Any good with a gun, Guy?”

Anne turned the car into the road that led to the house.

“Fair, sir,” Guy said finally, stammering twice. His heart was flogging him to run, he could still it only by running, he was sure.

“Guy!” Anne smiled at him. Stopping the car, she whispered to him, “Have a nip when you get in the house. There’s a bottle of brandy in the kitchen.” She touched his wrist, and Guy jerked his hand back, involuntarily.

He must, he thought, have a brandy or something. But he knew also that he would not take anything.

Mrs. Faulkner walked beside him across the new lawn. “It’s simply beautiful, Guy. I hope you’re proud of it.”

Guy nodded. It was finished, he didn’t have to imagine it anymore as he had in the brown bureau of the hotel room in Mexico. Anne had wanted Mexican tiles in the kitchen. So many things she wore from time to time were Mexican. A belt, a handbag, huarachas. The long embroidered skirt that showed now below her tweed coat was Mexican. He felt he must have chosen the Hotel Montecarlo so that dismal pink-and-brown room and Bruno’s face in the brown bureau would haunt him the rest of his life.

It was only a month until their marriage now. Four more Friday nights, and Anne would sit in the big square green chair by the fireplace, her voice would call to him from the Mexican kitchen, they would work together in the studio upstairs. What right had he to imprison her with himself? He stood staring at their bedroom, vaguely aware that it seemed cluttered, because Anne had said she wanted their bedroom “not modern.”

“Don’t forget to thank Mother for the furniture, will you?” she whispered to him. “Mother gave it to us, you know.”

The cherry bedroom set, of course. He remembered her telling him that morning at breakfast, remembered his bandaged hand, and Anne in the black dress she had worn to Helen’s party. But when he should have said something about the furniture, he didn’t, and then it seemed too late. They must know something is the matter, he felt. Everyone in the world must know. He was only somehow being reprieved, being saved for some weight to fall upon him and annihilate him.

“Thinking about a new job, Guy?” Mr. Faulkner asked, offering him a cigarette.

Guy had not seen his figure there when he stepped onto the side porch. With a sense of justifying himself, he pulled the folded paper from his pocket and showed it to him, explained it to him. Mr. Faulkner’s bushy, gray and brown eyebrows came down thoughtfully. But he’s not listening to me at all, Guy thought. He’s bending closer only to see my guilt that is like a circle of darkness about me.

“Funny Anne didn’t say anything to me about it,” Mr. Faulkner said.

“I’m saving it.”

“Oh,” Mr. Faulkner chuckled. “A wedding present?”

Later, the Faulkners took the car and went back for sandwiches from the little store. Guy was tired of the house. He wanted Anne to walk with him up the rock hill.

“In a minute,” she said. “Come here.” She stood in front of the tall stone fireplace. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his face, a little apprehensive, but still glowing with her pride in their new house. “Those are getting deeper, you know,” she told him, drawing her fingertip down the hollow in his cheek. “I’m going to make you eat.”

“Maybe need a little sleep,” he murmured. He had told her that lately his work demanded long hours. He had told her, of all things, that he was doing some agency jobs, hack jobs, as Myers did, in order to earn some money.

“Darling, we’re—we’re well off. What on earth’s troubling you?”

And she had asked him half a dozen times if it was the wedding, if he wanted not to marry her. If she asked him again, he might say yes, but he knew she would not ask it now, in front of their fireplace. “Nothing’s troubling me,” he said quickly.

“Then will you please not work so hard?” she begged him, then spontaneously, out of her own joy and anticipation, hugged him to her.

Automatically—as if it were nothing at all, he thought—he kissed her, because he knew she expected him to. She will notice, he thought, she always notices the slightest difference in a kiss, and it had been so long since he had kissed her. When she said nothing, it seemed to him only that the change in him was simply too enormous to mention.