The Ferguson Affair

chapter 28

FERGUSON APPEARED shortly after lunch. He hadn’t shaved. He looked frowzy and harried, a Quixote who had tilted at windmills once too often and found out they were giants after all.

“You’re late.”

“I came at all because I owe you a great deal-Holly’s life. But you should not have forced me to leave her. Her life is still in danger. I couldn’t possibly leave the house until Dr. Trench got there.”

“Trench says she’s in fairly good shape.”

“Physically she is, thank God. She’s emotionally upset. We had a most disturbing phone call this morning. That Florida jackanapes, Salaman, insists on seeing her.”

“Don’t let him.”

“How can I stop him? I have no recourse to law.”

“Are you going to pay him?”

“I don’t know. Holly tells me she owes him nothing. She never heard of the man until today.”

“And you believe her?”

Ferguson came unconsciously to attention. “I believe my wife implicitly.”

“How does she explain the alleged abduction?”

“I resent your use of the phrase.”

“That’s your privilege. How does she explain it?”

“She has no knowledge of it. Her mind is a blank from the time that she left the Club.”

“She’ll have to do better than the old blackout gambit. You saw her in Gaines’s car when he picked up your money.”

“I was mistaken. It must have been someone else.” He cupped his hand protectively around his bulbous nose.

“Is that what Mrs. Ferguson says?”

“We haven’t discussed the incident.”

“Don’t you think you better? She can fill you in on a lot of interesting facts, about Gaines, and about herself.”

He stood above me shivering. It wasn’t a cold enough day to make a Canadian shiver.

“Damn you, I resent this, bitterly. I’m going to have to ask you to retract.”

“What exactly do you want me to retract?”

“The whole allegation that she was involved with him in any immoral way.”

“I got the idea from you.”

“I was mistaken, tragically mistaken. I misunderstood their relationship-exaggerated it. It was simply an old man’s jealousy.”

“What about the child she’s carrying?”

“The child is mine. She had nothing at all to do with Gaines, in that sense. She was simply giving the fellow a helping hand. My wife is a remarkable woman.”

His eyes had taken on a euphoric glare. I began to feel the dimensions of the dream that held him. It included his passion for his wife, his hope of a second youth, and now the belief that she would give him a child. I knew precisely how he felt about that.

But the dream had to be destroyed, and I was the one elected to destroy it. “Your wife’s real name is Hilda Dotery. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“Not a thing.”

“It does to some other people. I have witnesses to prove that Hilda Dotery has been mixed up with Gaines for the last seven years, ever since they were high-school delinquents together. His real name, incidentally, is Henry Haines.”

“Who are these witnesses?”

“Their parents, Adelaide Haines, James and Kate Dotery. I talked to all three of them last night in Mountain Grove.”

“They’re lying.”

“Somebody is. I assure you that I’m not. There’s no doubt at all in my mind that the kidnapping was a phony one, and that your wife was Gaines’s partner in it. That’s not the worst of it. She shot me last night. Assault with intent to commit murder is a very ugly charge, but there’s not much use beating around the bush. You can’t keep her shut up at home and expect this thing to blow over. I want complete co-operation from both of you, starting now.”

Ferguson shook his fist at me. The light in his eyes was dancing out of control. “You’re like all the rest. You think you have me on the hip, that you can bleed me for money.”

I sat up and slapped his fist away with my good arm. “You’re pretty fouled up on the money angle, aren’t you? The man with the Midas touch. You may be right at that, Ferguson, in reverse. If you weren’t loaded, nobody in his senses would come within a hundred yards of you. You’re merely trouble that walks like a man. Stupid trouble. Stupid, ignorant trouble. You’re so morally stupid you don’t know where you’re hurt, or what’s hurting you.”

I was hurting him now. He blinked and shuddered under the impact of the words. They seemed to strike through to his knowledge of himself. He walked away from the bed and sat in a chair in the corner behind the door, nursing his hurt.

He spoke after a time. “You’re right about the money-the idea of money. It’s been a root of evil in my life. My father died poor, and he was a better man than I shall ever be.”

I asked him about his father, partly because I was interested, but mainly because it was a way in. I’d begun to understand that it wasn’t happenstance that Ferguson had been victimized by a pair of young criminals. He was one of those victims whose natures, whose whole lives, set them up for a particular crime.

The elder Ferguson had been a sheep rancher who came out from Scotland around the turn of the century and homesteaded near a hamlet named Wild Goose Lake. He went back overseas with the Scots Grenadiers and died at Vimy Ridge.

“I tried to follow him,” Ferguson said. “Though I was underage, I managed to enlist in 1918. But I never got out of the country, in that war. It was just as well: Mother needed me to help run the ranch. We had hard sledding for nearly ten years, until oil and gas were discovered on our section.

“You mustn’t imagine that it was a bonanza, not at first. But enough money began to come in so that I was able to go to college, finally. By the time I finished my degree in Edmonton, we had more money than we knew what to do with. Mother decided that I should have some specific training in business.

“She sent me, more or less against my will, to take a course at Harvard Business School. I didn’t do too well there. For one thing, I was worried about Mother: she hadn’t been strong the last few years; the years of struggle had been too much for her. And then I got involved with the girl I told you about, the one I betrayed.

“It’s a wretched thing for a man to have to confess. It’s still hard for me to relate it to myself. I’d never been in the States before, you see. Whatever happened below the border seemed unreal to me, like life on Mars. My actual life was back in Alberta, where Mother was slowly dying and dictating long letters to her nurse telling me how to conduct myself.

“I conducted myself very badly, as it turned out. I was in my late twenties, but I’d never had a girl, in the physical sense. I realized before long that I could have the girl if I wanted her. I had all the money I needed, and she came from a desperately poor family. They lived in a crowded flat somewhere in the wilds of South Boston.”

“How did you meet the girl?”

“She was a salesgirl in Filene’s. I went there to buy a gift for Mother. She was very helpful, and it went on from there. It took me a week to get up the nerve to kiss her, and then that very night she let me have her. I took her to a hotel off Scollay Square. I shouldn’t have done that. She wasn’t a prostitute, she wanted to marry me. When we faced each other in that shabby hotel room, I realized that I was using her. I threw her down on the bed.”

His voice cracked like an adolescent’s through his aging mask. It was a strange conversation, and getting stranger. I’d had a few others of its kind. In the tension of a legal contest, or the aftermath of a crime, old springs of emotion stir. Unsuspected fissures open into the deep past.

“She’s been on my mind this past year,” Ferguson said. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since I met Holly again.”

“Again?”

“I don’t mean ‘again.’ It’s just that Holly reminded me of her in so many ways. I believed I was being given a second chance-a second chance at happiness. When I didn’t deserve the first chance.”

“What exactly did you do to the girl?”

He didn’t answer directly. His eyes were turned downward, fixed on the past, like eyes watching underwater movements, a drowned girl or a swimmer or a monstrous shape compound of both. Like an insubstantial colloidal web, the truth or something near it formed between us slowly as he spoke.

“Mother died that winter, and I had to go home for her funeral. I’ll never forget her face the night she said good-by to me in Boston Station. She was three months pregnant, unmarried and still working, but she looked so damn hopeful. She ate a dozen cherrystone clams, for the good of the child, she said, and assured me that she’d be fine while I was gone. I promised her I’d be back as soon as the estate was settled, and then we could be married. She believed me.

“Perhaps I believed myself. I didn’t know certainly that I would never go back until the afternoon we buried Mother. It was a bitter day in the middle of February. The grave-diggers had to use pickaxes and blowtorches to break through the crust of the earth. The lake below the graveyard was nothing but a flat place under the snow. The wind swept down from the Arctic Circle across it.

“They covered the chunks of frozen earth with that imitation green grass they used in those days: a little rectangle of horrible fake green in the middle of the flat white prairie, with wooden oil rigs standing on the horizon. I could never think of going back to Boston and marrying the girl. I couldn’t even imagine her face without the blackest feeling of melancholy. As I think I told you last night, I arranged with a lawyer in Boston to give her a thousand dollars.”

“You could have gone in person, at least.”

“You don’t have to tell me that. I’ve had it on my conscience for twenty-five years.”

“Weren’t you concerned about the child?”

“I’ll be honest. My main concern was fear that she would search me out, turn up on my doorstep with the child in her arms. Or sue me. I was a rich man, you understand, and on my way to becoming richer. She was a girl from the Boston slums who couldn’t speak proper English. I was afraid that she would stand in my way.”

“Your way to where?”

He didn’t try to answer that question. It was rhetorical, anyway. I lay there wondering how much weight his conscience was able to bear. Though I felt sorry for the man, I couldn’t see any way out of telling him what I suspected. Perhaps it was in him already, unrecognized and unadmitted, but eating away at his marrow like moral strontium.

“Why did you marry Holly?” I said.

“I’ve told you why. When I saw her on the screen, then met her in the flesh, she was like my youth come back to me-a second springtime.” He broke off, shaking his head. “I must sound like a romantic fool.”

“I think you were looking for something impossible. The worst of it is, when you want something impossible, you often get it. You married Holly because she resembled a girl you knew in Boston twenty-five years ago. Did you ever think of questioning that resemblance?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“What was the girl’s name?”

“Mulloy. Kathleen Mulloy. I called her Katie.”

“Did Holly ever tell you who her mother was?”

“No.” He got up and came to the side of the bed. He walked with his eyes down, slowly, watching each step. “What sort of a woman is her mother? You mentioned that you spoke to her last night.”

“She’s not a bad sort of woman, and quite good-looking. She looks like your wife twenty-five years older. Her name, as I think I said, is Kate Dotery. I don’t know what her maiden name was, but I can guess. She came originally from Boston, and she told me that Hilda was her eldest daughter. She also said something suggesting that Hilda was not a legitimate child.”

Ferguson hung over me like a man falling through space at the end of a long tether. He reached the end of the tether. His head came up with a jerk.

He walked mechanically to the window and stood with his rigid back to me. My room was four stories up. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of taking the final fall. Then the first deep shock hit him.

He let out a coughing groaning grunt: “Augh!”

I sat up with my legs over the edge of the bed, ready to go for him if he opened the window. He made a stumbling run for the bathroom door. I heard him being sick behind it.

I got up and started to put on my clothes. I was half dressed when Ferguson came out.

He looked like a man who had passed through a desperate crisis, a nervous breakdown, or an almost mortal illness. His eyes in their deep cavities were very bright, not with hope. His mouth was like blue iron. “What are you doing?”

“I have to talk to your wife. Take me to her, will you?”

“I will, if it has to be. Forgive my outburst. I’m not myself.”

He helped me on with my shirt and jacket, and tied my shoelaces for me. He spoke like a supplicant from his kneeling position. “You won’t tell her, will you? What you just told me?”

“No.”

“It would drive her out of her mind.”

Perhaps it already had.