The Galton Case

Chapter 3

THE MAID took Sable and me to a sitting-room on the second floor where Mrs. Galton was waiting. The room smelled of medicine, and had a hushed hospital atmosphere. The heavy drapes were partly drawn over the windows. Mrs. Galton was resting in semi-twilight on a chaise longue, with a robe over her knees.

She was fully dressed, with something white and frilly at her withered throat; and she held her gray head ramrod straight. Her voice was reedy, but surprisingly resonant. It seemed to carry all the remaining force of her personality:

“You’ve kept me waiting, Gordon. It’s nearly time for my lunch. I expected you before Dr. Howell came.”

“I’m awfully sorry, Mrs. Galton. I was delayed at home.”

“Don’t apologize. I detest apologies, they’re really just further demands on one’s patience.” She cocked a bright eye at him. “Has that wife of yours been giving you trouble again?”

“Oh, no, nothing of that sort.”

“Good. You know my thoughts on the subject of divorce. On the other hand, you should have taken my advice and not married her. A man who waits until he’s nearly fifty to get married should give up the idea entirely. Mr. Galton was in his late forties when we were married. As a direct consequence, I’ve had to endure nearly twenty years of widowhood.”

“It’s been hard, I know,” Sable said with unction.

The maid had started out of the room. Mrs. Galton called her back: “Wait a minute. I want you to tell Miss Hildreth to bring me my lunch herself. She can bring up a sandwich and eat it with me if she likes. You tell Miss Hildreth that.”

“Yes, Mrs. Galton.”

The old lady waved us into chairs, one on each side of her, and turned her eye on me. It was bright and alert but somehow inhuman, like a bird’s eye. It looked at me as if I belonged to an entirely different species:

“Is this the man who is going to find my prodigal son for me?”

“Yes, this is Mr. Archer.”

“I’m going to give it a try,” I said, remembering the doctor’s advice. “I can’t promise any definite results. Your son has been missing for a very long time.”

“I’m better aware of that than you, young man. I last set eyes on Anthony on the eleventh day of October 1936. We parted in bitter anger and hatred. I’ve lived ever since with that anger and hatred corroding my heart. But I can’t die with it inside of me. I want to see Anthony again, and talk to him. I want to forgive him. I want him to forgive me.”

Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she’d been playing tricks with her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid.

“Forgive you?” I said.

“For treating him as I did. He was a young fool, and he made some disastrous mistakes, but none of them really justified Mr. Galton’s action, and mine, in casting him off. It was a shameful action, and if it’s not too late I intend to rectify it. If he still has his little wife, I’m willing to accept her. I authorize you to tell him that. I want to see my grandchild before I die.”

I looked at Sable. He shook his head slightly, deprecatingly. His client was just a little out of context, but she had quick insight, at least into other people:

“I know what you’re both thinking. You’re thinking that Anthony is dead. If he were dead, I’d know it here.” Her hand strayed over the flat silk surface of her breast. “He’s my only son. He must be alive, and he must be somewhere. Nothing is lost in the universe.”

Except human beings, I thought. “I’ll do my best, Mrs. Galton. There are one or two things you can do to help me. Give me a list of his friends at the time of his disappearance.”

“I never knew his friends.”

“He must have had friends in college. Wasn’t he attending Stanford?”

“He’d left there the previous spring. He didn’t even wait to graduate. Anyway, none of his schoolmates knew what happened to him. His father canvassed them thoroughly at the time.”

“Where was your son living after he left college?”

“In a flat in the slums of San Francisco. With that woman.”

“Do you have the address?”

“I believe I may have it somewhere. I’ll have Miss Hildreth look for it.”

“That will be a start, anyway. When he left here with his wife, did they plan to go back to San Francisco?”

“I haven’t any idea. I didn’t see them before they left.”

“I understood they came to visit you.”

“Yes, but they didn’t even stay the night.”

“What might help most,” I said carefully, “would be if you could tell me the exact circumstances of their visit, and their departure. Anything your son said about his plans, anything the girl said, anything you remember about her. Do you remember her name?”

“He called her Teddy. I have no idea if that was her name or not. We had very little conversation. I can’t recall what was said. The atmosphere was unpleasant, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. She left a bad taste in my mouth. It was so evident that she was a cheap little gold-digger.”

“How do you know?”

“I have eyes. I have ears.” Anger had begun to whine in the undertones of her voice. “She was dressed and painted like a woman of the streets, and when she opened her mouth – well, she spoke the language of the streets. She made coarse jokes about the child in her womb, and how” – her voice faded almost out – “it got there. She had no respect for herself as a woman, no moral standards. That girl destroyed my son.”

She’d forgotten all about her hope of reconciliation. The angry wheezing in the passages of her head sounded like a ghost in a ruined house. Sable was looking at her anxiously, but he held his tongue.

“Destroyed him?” I said.

“Morally, she destroyed him. She possessed him like an evil spirit. My son would never have taken the money if it hadn’t been for the spell she cast on him. I know that with utter certitude.”

Sable leaned forward in his chair. “What money are you referring to?”

“The money Anthony stole from his father. Haven’t I told you about it, Gordon? No, I don’t believe I have. I’ve told no one, I’ve always been so ashamed.” She lifted her hands and dropped them in her robed lap. “But now I can forgive him for that, too.”

“How much money was involved?” I said.

“I don’t know exactly how much, to the penny. Several thousand dollars, anyway. Ever since the day the banks closed, Mr. Galton had had a habit of keeping a certain amount of cash for current expenses.”

“Where did he keep it?”

“In his private safe, in the study. The combination was on a piece of paper pasted to the inside of his desk drawer. Anthony must have found it there, and used it to open the safe. He took everything in it, all the money, and even some of my jewels which I kept there.”

“Are you sure he took it?”

“Unfortunately, yes. It disappeared at the same time he did. It’s why he hid himself away, and never came back to us.”

Sable’s glum look deepened. Probably he was thinking the same thing I was: that several thousand dollars in cash, in the slums of San Francisco, in the depths of the depression, were a very likely passport to oblivion.

But we couldn’t say it out loud. With her money, and her asthma, and her heart, Mrs. Galton was living at several removes from reality. Apparently that was how it had to be.

“Do you have a picture of your son, taken not too long before his disappearance?”

“I believe I have. I’ll ask Cassie to have a look. She should be coming soon.”

“In the meantime, can you give me any other information? Particularly about where your son might have gone, who or where he might have visited.”

“I know nothing of his life after he left the university. He cut himself off from all decent society. He was perversely bound to sink in the social scale, to declass himself. I’m afraid my son had a nostalgie de la boue – a nostalgia for the gutter. He tried to cover it over with fancy talk about re-establishing contact with the earth, becoming a poet of the people, and such nonsense. His real interest was dirt for dirt’s own sake. I brought him up to be pure in thought and desire, but somehow – somehow he became fascinated with the pitch that defileth. And the pitch defiled him.”

Her breathing was noisy. She had begun to shake, and scratch with waxy fingers at the robe that covered her knees.

Sable leaned toward her solicitously. “You mustn’t excite yourself, Mrs. Galton. It was all over long ago.”

“It’s not all over. I want Anthony back. I have nobody. I have nothing. He was stolen away from me.”

“We’ll get him back if it’s humanly possible.”

“Yes, I know you will, Gordon.” Her mood had changed like a fitful wind. Her head inclined toward Sable’s shoulder as though to rest against it. She spoke like a little girl betrayed by time and loss, by fading hair and wrinkles and the fear of death: “I’m a foolish angry old woman. You’re always so good to me. Anthony will be good to me, too, won’t he, when he comes? In spite of all I’ve said against him, he was a darling boy. He was always good to his poor mother, and he will be again.”

She was chanting in a ritual of hope. If she said it often enough, it would have to come true.

“I’m sure he will, Mrs. Galton.”

Sable rose and pressed her hand. I was always a little suspicious of men who put themselves out too much for rich old ladies, or even poor ones. But then it was part of bis job.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “I want my lunch. What’s going on downstairs?”

She lunged half out of her long chair and got hold of a wired bellpush on the table beside it. She kept her finger pressed on the button until her lunch arrived. That was a tense five minutes.