The Doomsters

33

MRS. GLEY groaned in her sleep. Mildred ran up the stairs away from both of us. I went up after her, across a drab brown hallway, into a room where she was struggling to raise the window.

It wasn’t a woman’s room, or anybody’s room. It was more like an unused guestroom where unwanted things were kept: old books and pictures, an old iron double bed, a decaying rug. I felt a strange proprietary embarrassment, like a pawnbroker who’s lent money on somebody else’s possessions, sight unseen.

The window resisted her efforts. I saw her watching me in its dark mirror. Her own reflected face was like a ghost’s peering from outer darkness.

“Go away and leave me alone.”

“A lot of people have. Maybe that’s the trouble. Come away from the window, eh?”

She moved back into the room and stood by the bed. There was a soiled depression in the cheap chenille spread where I guessed Carl had been lying. She sat on the edge of the iron bed.

“I don’t want any of your phony sympathy. People always want to be paid for it. What do you want from me? Sex? Money? Or just to see me suffer?”

I didn’t know how to answer her.

“Or do you simply want to hear me say it? Listen then, I’m a murderer. I murdered four people.”

She sat and looked at the faded flowers in the wallpaper. I thought that it was a place where dreams could grow rank without much competition from the actual.

“What did you want, Mildred?”

She put a name to one of the dreams. “Money. That was what set him off from everyone – the thing that made him so handsome to me, so – shining.”

“Do you mean Carl?”

“Yes. Carl.” Her hand moved behind her to the depression in the spread. She leaned on it. “Even tonight, when he was lying here, all dirty and stinking, I felt so happy with him. So rich. Mother used to say I talked like a whore, but I was never a whore. I never took money from him. I gave myself to him because he needed me. The books said he had to have sex. So I used to let him come up here to the room.”

“What books are you talking about?”

“The books he used to read. We read them together. Carl was afraid of going homosexual. That’s why I used to pretend to be excited with him. I never really was, though, with him or any man.”

“How many men were there?”

“Only three,” she said, “and one of them only once.”

“Ostervelt?”

She made an ugly face. “I don’t want to talk about him. It was different with Carl. I’d be glad for him, but then the gladness would split off from my body. I’d be in two parts, a hot part and a cold part, and the cold part would rise up like a spirit. Then I’d imagine that I was in bed with a golden man. He was putting gold in my purse, and I’d invest it and make a profit and reinvest. Then I’d feel rich and real, and the spirit would stop watching me. It was just a game I played with myself. I never told Carl about it; Carl never really knew me. Nobody ever knew me.”

She spoke with the desperate pride of loneliness and lostness. Then hurried on, as though some final disaster was about to fall, and I was her one chance to be known: “I thought if we could get married, and I was Mrs. Carl Hallman, then I’d feel rich and solid all the time. When he went away to the university I followed him. No other girl was going to get him from me. I went to business college and found a job in Oakland. I rented an apartment of my own where he could visit me. I used to make supper for him, and help him with his studies. It was almost like being married.

“Carl wanted to make it legal, too, but his parents couldn’t see it, especially his mother. She couldn’t see me. It made me mad, the way she talked about me to Carl. You’d think I was human garbage. That was when I decided to stop taking precautions.

“It took me over a year to get our baby started. I wasn’t in very good health. I don’t remember very much about that time. I know I went on working in the office. They even gave me a raise. But it was the nights I lived for, not so much the times with Carl – the times after he left when I would lie awake and think about the child I was going to have. I knew that he would have to be a boy. We’d call him Carl, and bring him up just right. I’d do everything for him myself, dress him and feed him his vitamins and keep him away from bad influences, such as his grandmother. Both his grandmothers.

“After Zinnie had Martha, I thought about him all the time and I became pregnant at last. I waited two months to be sure, and then I told Carl. He was frightened, he couldn’t hide it. He didn’t want our baby. Mainly, he was afraid of what his mother would do. She was far gone by that time, ready to do anything to have her way. When Carl first told her about me, long before, she said she’d rather kill herself than let him marry me.

“She still had him hypnotized. I have a nasty tongue, and I told him so. I told him that he was the daring young man on the umbilical cord, but it was a hangman’s noose. We had a battle. He smashed my new set of dishes in the sink. I was afraid he was going to smash me, too. Perhaps that’s why he ran away. I didn’t see him for days, or hear from him.

“His landlady said he’d gone home. I waited as long as I could stand it before I phoned the ranch. His mother said he hadn’t been there. I thought she was lying to me, trying to get rid of me. So I told her I was pregnant, and Carl would have to marry me. She called me a liar, and other things, and then she hung up on me.

“That was a little after seven o’clock on a Friday night. I’d waited for the night rates before I phoned. I sat and watched night come on. She wouldn’t let Carl come back to me, ever. I could see part of the Bay from my window, and the long ramp where the cars climbed towards the Bridge, the mud flats under it, and the water like blue misery. I thought that the place for me was in the water. And I’d have done it, too. She shouldn’t have stopped me.”

I had been standing over her all this time. She looked up and pushed me away with her hands, not touching me. Her movements were slow and gingerly, as if any sudden gesture might upset a delicate balance, in the room or in her, and let the whole thing collapse.

I placed a straight chair by the bed and straddled it, resting my arms on the back. It gave me a queer bedside feeling, like a quack doctor, without a bedside manner: “Who stopped you, Mildred?”

“Carl’s mother did. She should have let me kill myself and be done with it. It doesn’t lessen my guilt, I know that, but Alicia brought what happened on herself. She phoned me back while I was sitting there, and told me that she was sorry for what she’d said. Could I forgive her? She’d thought the whole thing over and wanted to talk to me, help me, see that I was looked after. I believed that she’d come to her senses, that my baby would bring us all together and we’d be a happy family.

“She made an appointment for me to meet her on the Purissima wharf next evening. She said she wanted to get to know me, just the two of us. I drove down Saturday, and she was waiting in the parking lot when I got there. I’d never met her face to face before. She was a big woman, wearing mink, very tall and impressive. Her eyes shone like a cat, and her voice buzzed. I think she must have been high on some kind of drug. I didn’t know it then. I was so pleased that we were coming together. I was proud to have her sitting in my old clunk in a mink coat.

“But she wasn’t there to do me any favors. She started out all right, very sympathetic. It was a dirty trick Carl played on me, running out like that. The worst of it was, she had her doubts that he would ever come back. Even if he did, he’d be no bargain as a husband or a father. Carl was hopelessly unstable. She was his mother, and she ought to know. It ran in the family. Her own father had died in a sanitarium, and Carl took after him.

“Even without an ancestral curse hanging over you – that was what she called it – it was a hideous world, a crime to bring children into it. She quoted a poem to me: ‘Sleep the long sleep: The Doomsters heap travails and teens around us here…’ I don’t know who wrote it, but I’ve never been able to get those lines out of my head.

“She said it was written to an unborn child. Teens meant heartaches and troubles, and that was all any child had to look forward to in this life. The Doomsters saw to that. She talked about those Doomsters of hers as if they really existed. We were sitting looking out over the sea, and I almost thought I could see them walking up out of the black water and looming across the stars. Monsters with human faces.

“Alicia Hallman was a monster herself, and I knew it. Yet everything she said had some truth to it. There was no way to argue except from the way I felt, about my baby. It was hard to keep my feeling warm through all the talk. I didn’t have sense enough to leave her, or shut my ears. I even caught myself nodding and agreeing with her, partly. Why go to all the trouble of having a child if he was going to live in grief, cut off from the stars. Or if his daddy was never coming back.

“She almost had me hypnotized with that buzzing voice of hers, like violins out of tune. I went along with her to Dr. Grantland’s office. The same part of me that agreed with her knew that I was going to lose my baby there. At the last minute, when I was on the table and it was too late, I tried to stop it. I screamed and fought against him. She came into the room with that gun of hers and told me to lie down and be quiet, or she’d kill me on the spot. Dr. Grantland didn’t want to go through with it. She said if he didn’t she’d run him out of his practice. He put a needle in me.

“When I came back from the anesthetic, I could see her cat eyes watching me. I had only the one thought, she had killed my baby. I must have picked up a bottle. I remember smashing it over her head. Before that, she must have tried to shoot me. I heard a gun go off, I didn’t see it.

“Anyway, I killed her. I don’t remember driving home, but I must have. I was still drunk on pentothal; I hardly knew what I was doing. Mother put me to bed and did what she could for me, which wasn’t much. I couldn’t go to sleep. I couldn’t understand why the police didn’t come and get me. Next day, Sunday, I went back to the doctor. He frightened me, but I was even more frightened not to go.

“He was gentle with me. I was surprised how gentle. I almost loved him when he told me what he’d done for me, making it look like a suicide. They’d already recovered her body from the sea, and nobody even asked me a question about it. Carl came back on Monday. We went to the funeral together. It was a closed-coffin funeral, and I could nearly believe that the official story of suicide was true, that the rest was just a bad dream.

“Carl thought she’d drowned herself. He took it better than I expected, but it had a strange effect on him. He said he’d been in the desert for almost a week, thinking and praying for guidance. He was coming back from Death Valley when a highway patrolman stopped him and told him his family was looking for him, and why. That was on Sunday, just before sunset.

“Carl said he looked up at the Sierra, and saw an unearthly light behind it in the west toward Purissima. It streamed, like milk, from the heavens, and it made him realize that life was a precious gift which had to be justified. He saw an Indian herding sheep on the hillside, and took it for a sign. He decided then and there to study medicine and devote his life to healing, perhaps on the Indian reservations, or in Africa like Schweitzer.

“I was carried away myself. That glorious light of Carl’s seemed like an answer to the darkness I’d been in since Saturday night. I told Carl I’d go along with him if he still wanted me. Carl said that he would need a worthy helpmeet, but we couldn’t get married yet. He wasn’t twenty-one. It was too soon after his mother’s death. His father was opposed to early marriages, anyway, and we mustn’t do anything to upset an old man with a heart condition. In the meantime we should live as friends, as brother and sister, to prepare ourselves for the sacrament of marriage.

“Carl was becoming more and more idealistic. He took up theology that fall, on top of his premed courses. My own little spurt of idealism, or whatever you want to call it, didn’t last very long. Dr. Grantland came to see me one day that summer. He said that he was a businessman, and he understood that I was a businesswoman. He certainly hoped I was. Because if I played my cards right, with him kibitzing for me, I would be worth a lot of money with very little effort.

“Dr. Grantland had changed, too. He was very smiley and businesslike, but he didn’t look like a doctor any more. He didn’t talk like one – more like a ventriloquist’s dummy moving his lips in time to somebody else’s lines. He told me the Senator’s heart and arteries were deteriorating, he was due to die before long. When he did, Carl and Jerry would divide the estate between them. If I was married to Carl, I’d be in a position to repay my friends for any help they’d given me.

“He considered us good friends, but it would sort of set the seal on our friendship if we went to bed together. He’d been told that he was very good in bed. I let him. It made no difference to me, one way or the other. I even liked being with him, in a way. He was the only one who knew about me. When I was in Purissima after that, I used to go and visit him in his office. Until I married Carl, I mean. I quit seeing Grantland then. It wouldn’t have been right.

“Carl was twenty-one on the fourteenth of March, and we were married in Oakland three days later. He moved into the apartment with me, but he thought we should make up for our earlier sins by living in chastity for another year. Carl was so tense about it that I was afraid to argue with him. He was pale, and bright in the eyes. Sometimes he wouldn’t talk for days at a time, and then the floodgates would open and he’d talk all night.

“He’d begun to fail in his studies, but he was full of ideas. We used to discuss reality, appearance and reality. I always thought appearance was the front you put on for people, and reality was how you really felt. Reality was death and blood and the curse. Reality was hell. Carl told me I had it all wrong, that pain and evil were only appearances. Goodness was reality, and he would prove it to me in his life. Now that he’d discovered Christian existentialism, he saw quite clearly that suffering was only a test, a fire that purified. That was the reason we couldn’t sleep together. It was for the good of our souls.

“Carl had begun to lose a lot of weight. He got so nervous that spring, he couldn’t sit still to work. Sometimes I’d hear him walking in the living-room all night. I thought if I could get him to come to bed with me, it would help him to get some sleep, settle him down. I had some pretty weird ideas of my own. I paraded around in floozie nightgowns, and drenched myself with perfume, and did my best to seduce him. My own husband. One night in May, I served him a candlelight dinner with wine and got him drunk enough.

“It didn’t work, not for either of us. The spirit rose up from me and floated over the bed. I looked down and watched Carl using my body. And I hated him. He didn’t love me. He didn’t want to know me. I thought that we were both dead, and our corpses were in bed together. Zombies. Our two spirits never met.

“Carl was still in bed when I came home the next night. He hadn’t been to his classes, hadn’t moved all day. I thought at first he was sick, physically sick, and I called a doctor. Carl told him that the light of heaven had gone out. He had done it himself by putting out the light in his own mind. Now there was nothing in his head but darkness.

“Dr. Levin took me into the next room and told me that Carl was mentally disturbed. He should probably be committed. I telephoned Carl’s father, and Dr. Levin talked to him, too. The Senator said that the idea of commitment was absurd. Carl had simply been hitting the books too hard, and what he needed was some good, hard down-to-earth work.

“Carl’s father came and took him home the next day. I gave up my apartment and my job, and a few days later I followed them. I should have stayed where I was, but I wanted to be with Carl. I didn’t trust his family. And I had a sneaking desire, even under the circumstances, to live on the ranch and be Mrs. Carl Hallman in Purissima. Well, I was, but it was worse than I expected. His family didn’t like me. They blamed me for Carl’s condition. A good wife would have been able to keep him healthy and wealthy and wise.

“The only person there who really liked me was Zinnie’s baby. I used to play a game pretending that Martha was my baby. That was how I got through those two years. I’d pretend that I was alone with her in the big house. The others had all gone away, or else they’d died, and I was Martha’s mother, doing for her all by myself, bringing her up just right, without any nasty influences. We did have good times, too. Sometimes I really believed that the nightmare in the doctor’s office hadn’t happened at all. Martha was there to prove it, my own baby, going on two.

“But Dr. Grantland was often there to remind me that it had happened. He was looking after Carl and his father, both. The Senator liked him because he didn’t charge much or make expensive suggestions, such as hospitals or psychiatric treatment. Carl’s father was quite a money-saver. We had margarine on the table instead of butter, and nothing but the culled oranges for our own use. I was even expected to pay board, until my money ran out. I didn’t have a new dress for nearly two years. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have killed him.”

Mildred said that quietly, without any change in tone, without apparent feeling. Her face was expressionless. Only her forefinger moved on her skirted knee, tracing a small pattern: a circle and then a cross inside of the circle; as though she was trying to exorcise bad thoughts.

“I certainly wouldn’t have killed him if he’d died when he was supposed to. Dr. Grantland had said a year, but the year went by, then most of another year. I wasn’t the only one waiting. Jerry and Zinnie were waiting just as hard. They did their best to stir up trouble between Carl and his father, which wasn’t hard to do. Carl was a little better, but still depressed and surly. He wasn’t getting along with his father, and the old man kept threatening to change his will.

“One night Jerry baited Carl into a terrible argument about the Japanese people who used to own part of the valley. The Senator jumped into it, of course, as he was supposed to. Carl told him he didn’t want any part of the ranch. If he ever did inherit any share of it, he’d give it back to the people who’d been sold up. I never saw the old man so angry. He said Carl was in no danger of inheriting anything. This time he meant it, too. He asked Jerry to make an appointment with his lawyer in the morning.

“I telephoned Dr. Grantland and he came out, ostensibly to see the Senator. Afterwards I talked to him outside. He took a very dim view. It wasn’t that he was greedy, but he was thousands of dollars out of pocket. It was the first time he told me about the other man, this Rickey or Rica who’d been blackmailing him ever since Alicia’s death. The same man who escaped with Carl last night.”

“Grantland had never mentioned him to you?”

“No, he said he’d been trying to protect me. But now he was just about bled white, and something had to be done. He didn’t tell me outright that I had to kill the Senator. I didn’t have to be told. I didn’t even have to think about it. I simply let myself forget who I was, and went through the whole thing like clockwork.”

Her forefinger was active on her knee, repeating the symbol of the cross in the circle. She said, as if in answer to a question: “You’d think I’d been planning it for years, all my life, ever since–”

She broke off, and covered the invisible device on her knee with her whole hand. She rose like a sleepwalker and went to the window. An oak tree in the backyard was outlined like a black paper cutout against the whitening sky.

“Ever since what?” I said to her still back.

“I was just remembering. When my father went away, afterwards, I used to think of funny things when I was in bed before I went to sleep. I wanted to track him down, and find him, and–”

“Kill him?”

“Oh no!” she cried. “I wanted to tell him how much we missed him and bring him back to Mother, so that we could be a happy family again. But if he wouldn’t come–”

“What if he wouldn’t come?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t remember.” She struck the window where her reflection had been, not quite hard enough to break it.