The Drowning Pool

Chapter 8

Passing the open door of the living-room, I caught a glimpse of the people waiting inside. Voices were subdued, faces white and strained. Nobody seemed to be drinking, and all the gay conversation had run out. The party was a group hangover, the dim old room the ancestral cave of death. A policeman in a blue shirt sat hunched in a chair by the door, studying the visored cap on his knee as if it were the face of a dear friend.

The door of the sitting-room across the hall was locked. I was about to knock on it, when a man on the other side uttered a four-letter word. It sounded incongruous in his high tenor. He was answered by a woman’s voice, rapid and low, too low to penetrate the heavy door and let me hear her words. The only sounds I could make out plainly were the sobbing gasps that punctuated the sentences.

I moved to the next door on that side and entered the dark room beyond it. The light from the hall made crouched shadows of the chairs along the wall and gleamed among the silver and dishes that cluttered the buffet. There was still a little light in the room when I closed the door behind me: a thin shining under the old-fashioned sliding doors that separated the dining-room from the sitting-room. I crossed the room quietly and lay down by the sliding doors. Maude Slocum’s voice slid under them:

“I’ve stopped trying. For years I did my best for you. It didn’t take. Now I’m giving up.”

“You never tried,” her husband answered, flatly and bitterly. “You’ve lived in my house, and eaten my bread, and never made the slightest attempt to help me. If I’m a personal failure, as you say, the failure is certainly yours as well as mine.”

“Your mother’s house,” she taunted him. “Your mother’s bread—a very unleavened loaf.”

“Leave my mother out of it!”

“How can I leave her out?” Now her voice was purring smoothly, in control of itself and of the situation. “She’s been the central figure in my married life. You had your chance to make a clean break with her when we were married, but you hadn’t the courage to take it.”

“I had no real chance, Maude.” The actorish voice wobbled under the burden of self-pity. “I was too young to get married. I was dependent on her—I hadn’t even finished school. There weren’t many jobs in those days, either, and you were in a hurry to be married—”

“I was in a hurry? You begged me with tears in your voice to marry you. You said your immortal soul depended on it.”

“I know, I thought it did.” The simple words held echoes of despair. “You wanted to marry me, too. You had your reasons.”

“You’re damned right I had my reasons, with a child in my belly and nobody else to turn to. I suppose I should have been the true-hearted little woman and swallowed my pride and gone away somewhere.” Her voice sank to an acid whisper: “That’s what your mother wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Your were never little, Maude.”

She laughed unpleasantly. “Neither was Mother, was she? Her lap was always big enough for you.”

“I know how you feel about me, Maude.”

“You can’t. I have no feeling at all. You’re a perfect blank as far as I’m concerned.”

“Very well.” He struggled to keep his voice steady. “But now that Mother’s dead, I think that you’d be a little kinder to—her memory. She was always good to Cathy. She had to go without things herself to send Cathy to school and dress her properly—”

“I admit that. What you don’t understand is the fact that I’m thinking about myself. I put Cathy first, of course. I love her, and I want the best of everything for her. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready for the shelf. I’m a woman as well as a mother. I’m only thirty-five.”

“That’s rather late to start all over again.”

“Right now I feel as if I haven’t started—that I’ve been saving myself for fifteen years. I won’t keep much longer. I’m going rotten inside.”

“Your version at the moment. This is the chance you’ve been waiting for. If Mother hadn’t died, you’d have been perfectly willing to go on as before.”

“I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Approximately as before, then. I know that something’s been happening to you since you made that trip to Chicago.”

“What about that trip to Chicago?” A threat tightened her voice like an unused muscle.

“I haven’t asked you any question about it. I don’t intend to. I do know that you’d changed when you came back that spring. You had more life—”

She cut him short contemptuously: “You’re well advised not to ask questions, James. I could ask questions, too, about Francis, for instance. Only, I know the answers.”

He fell silent for a time. I could hear one of them breathing. Finally, he sighed. “Well, we’re getting nowhere. What do you want?”

“I’ll tell you what I want. Half of everything you have, and that includes half of this property now.”

“Now! Mother’s death has been exceedingly convenient for you, hasn’t it? If I didn’t know you, Maude, I’d believe that you killed Mother yourself.”

“I won’t pretend I’m sorry that it happened. As soon as this unpleasantness is over with, and you’ve agreed to a settlement, I’m going to court.”

“I’ll make a settlement,” he said thinly. “You’ve waited long enough for your share of the property. Now you can have it.”

“And Cathy,” she insisted. “Don’t forget Cathy.”

“I have not forgotten her. Cathy is staying with me.”

“So she can live à trois with you and Francis? I think not.”

He spoke with great effort: “Francis doesn’t enter into the picture.”

“Francis or someone like him. I know your penchant, James.”

“No.” The word exploded from his lips. “Cathy is all I want.”

“I know what you want. You want a healthy life so you can twine around it like a vine. You tried it with me, but I tore you loose, and you shan’t twist yourself around Cathy. I’m moving out of here, and taking her with me.”

“No. No.” The second word trailed off in a painful whimper. “You mustn’t leave me alone.”

“You have your friends,” she said with irony.

“Don’t leave me, Maude. I’m afraid to be left alone. I need you both, much more than you believe.” His voice was quite unmanned, a hysterical boy’s.

“You’ve neglected me for fifteen years,” she said. “When I’ve finally got my chance to go, you insist I have to stay.”

“You must stay. It’s your duty to stay with me. I can’t be left alone.”

“Be a man,” she said. “I can’t have any feeling for a whining jellyfish.”

“You used to love me—”

“Did I?”

“You wanted to be my wife and look after me.”

“That was a long time ago. I can’t remember.”

I heard breath drawn in, feet moving quickly on the floor. “Whore!” he cried in a harsh choking voice. “You’re a horrible cold woman, and I hate you.”

“It chills a woman off,” she said clearly and firmly, “being married to a fairy.”

“Horrible. Woman.” The caesura between the words was marked by a blow on flesh. Then something bony, his knees perhaps, bumped unevenly on the floor. “Forgive me,” he said, “forgive me.”

“You struck me.” Her voice was blank with shock. “You hurt me.”

“I didn’t mean it. Forgive me. I love you, Maude. Please stay with me.” A retching sob tore through his babbling and lengthened rhythmically. For a long time there was nothing but the sound of the man’s crying.

Then she began to comfort him, in a gentle lulling voice. “Be quiet, Jimmie. Dear Jimmie. I’ll stay with you. We’ll have a good life yet, won’t we, my dear?”

I staggered slightly when I got to my feet. I felt as if I’d been listening in on a microphone built into the walls of hell. I passed the closed door of the sitting-room without breaking my stride, and went out onto the lawn. The sky was black and moving. Long gray clouds streamed across the mountains to the sea, flowing like a river over the jagged edge of the world.

I was halfway across the lawn to the drive when I remembered that my car was parked on the street in Nopal Valley. I went around to the back of the house and found the kitchen empty except for the housekeeper. Mrs. Strang was an elderly woman with a long, soft face and fading hair. She was cooking something in a saucepan on the stove.

She jumped sideways at the sound of my footsteps. “Heavens! You frightened me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m Archer, a friend of Mrs. Slocum’s.”

“Oh yes, you phoned, I remember.” Her lips were trembling and blue.

I said: “Is Cathy all right?”

“Yes, she’s all right. I’m making her some hot milk to put her to sleep. The poor child needs her rest after all these terrible things happening.”

In a way I felt responsible for Cathy, if only because there was nobody else to feel responsible. Her parents were completely involved in their private war, negotiating their little armistice. Probably it had always been like that.

“You’ll take good care of Cathy?” I said to Mrs. Strang.

She answered me with pride: “I always have, Mr. Archer. She’s very well worth it, you know. Some of her teachers think she is a genius.”

“This place is lousy with geniuses, isn’t it?”

I left before I got into an argument. From the kitchen door, I saw a white flash splatter the darkness below the garages like a brushful of whitewash. They were still taking pictures around the pool.

Knudson was there with three members of his department, directing a series of measurements. Near them the body lay under a blanket, waiting patiently to be taken away. The underwater lights of the pool were on, so that the water was a pale emerald depth with a luminous and restless surface filming it.

When he saw me Knudson moved away from his group and lifted his chin at an angle. When I was near enough to hear his low voice: “What did she say? Co-operate with us?”

“I didn’t see her. She was locked in the room with her husband.”

His nostrils flared in a private nasal sneer, not intended for me. “I’ve got our radio cars out looking for Reavis. You could be a help, since you know him to see.”

“It’s a little off my beat, isn’t it?”

“You be the judge of that.” His shoulders rose and fell in a muscular slow-motion shrug. “It seems to me there’s a certain responsibility—?”

“Maybe so. Can you get me a lift into town? Not with Franks.”

“Sure.” He turned to the photographer, who was kneeling by the body. “Just about finished, Winowsky?”

“Yeah.” He threw back the blanket. “A couple more shots of the stiff. I want to do her justice, my professional honor demands it.”

“You take Mr. Archer into town with you.”

“Yeah.”

He stood over the body in a crouching position and flashed the bulb attached to the top of his camera. The white magnesium light drew the dead face from the shadows and projected it against the night. The freckles grew like acne on the lime-white skin. Bulbous and white, like deepsea life, the foam bulged from the nostrils and gaping mouth. The open green eyes gazed up in blank amazement at the dark sky moving between the darker mountains.

“Once more,” the photographer said, and stepped across the body. “Now watch the birdie.”

The white light flashed again on the unmoving face.