The Goodbye Look

chapter 26

Betty came to the front door, as if by prearrangement, and asked me in again. “I have the letters,” she said quietly, “the letters that Nick took from his father’s safe.”

She led me upstairs to her workroom and brought a manila envelope out of a drawer. It was stuffed with airmail letters arranged for the most part in serial order. There must have been a couple of hundred of them.

“How do you know Nick took them from the safe?”

“He told me so himself the night before last. Dr. Smitheram left us alone for awhile. Nick told me where he’d hidden them in his apartment. I went and got them yesterday.”

“Did Nick say why he took them?”

“No.”

“Do you know why?”

She perched on a large multicolored hassock. “I’ve had a lot of different thoughts,” she said. “It has to do with the whole father-son business, I suppose. In spite of all the trouble, Nick has always had a lot of respect for his father.”

“Does that go for you and your father?”

“We aren’t talking about me,” she said in a stiff-mouthed way. “Anyway, girls are different – we’re much more ambiguous. A boy either wants to be like his father or he doesn’t. I think Nick does.”

“It still doesn’t explain why Nick stole the letters.”

“I didn’t say I could explain it. But maybe he was trying, you know, to steal his father’s bravery and so on. The letters were important to him.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Chalmers made them important. He used to read them aloud to Nick – parts of them, anyway.”

“Recently?”

“No. When Nick was a little boy.”

“Eight?”

“It started about that age. I think Mr. Chalmers was trying to indoctrinate him, make a man of him and all like that.” Her tone was a little contemptuous, not so much of Nick or his father as of the indoctrination.

“When Nick was eight,” I said, “he had a serious accident. Do you know about it, Betty?”

She nodded deeply. Her hair slid forward, covering most of her face. “He shot a man, he told me the other night. But I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

“Just one question. What was Nick’s attitude toward that shooting?”

She hugged herself as if she was chilly. Encircled by her arms and masked by her hair, she huddled on the hassock like a gnome. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She pulled up her knees and rested her face against them, almost as if she was imitating Nick in his posture of despair.

I carried the letters to a table by a front window. From where I sat I could see the façade of the Chalmerses’ house glistening white under its red tile roof. It looked like a building with a history, and I read the first of the letters in the hope of filling in my knowledge of it.

I suppose I had been expecting some further light on the case, and the letter was a disappointment to me. It had evidently been written by an idealistic and rather conceited boy who was unnaturally eager to get into the war. The only remarkable thing about it was the fact that the boy had since become a dry stick of a man like Chalmers.

The second letter from the top had been written about eighteen months after the first. It was longer and more interesting, the work of a more mature personality sobered by the war.

It was a fairly impressive letter, with a certain sadness running gray through its perceptions. One sentence stayed in my mind – “He has given his best to the war, and will never become the man he was meant to be” – because it seemed to apply to Chalmers himself as well as his squadron commander. The third letter was dated 4 July 1945:

I put the letters back in the envelope. They seemed to mark points on a curve. The boy or man who had written them had passed from the eager idealism of the first letter into the rather impressive quick maturity of the second, and declined in the third into a kind of tiredness. I wondered what Chalmers himself could see in his letters that made him want to read them aloud to his son.

I turned to the girl, who hadn’t moved from her hassock: “Have you read these letters, Betty?”

She raised her head. The look in her eyes was very dark and far. “I beg your pardon? I was thinking.”

“Have you read these letters?”

“Some of them. I wanted to see what all the shouting was about. I think they’re boring. I hated the one about bombing Okinawa.”

“May I keep the three I’ve read?”

“Keep them all, why don’t you? If Father finds them here, I’ll have to explain where I got them. And it will be just another nail in Nick’s coffin.”

“He isn’t in his coffin. It doesn’t help matters to talk as if he is.”

“Don’t fatherize, please, Mr. Archer.”

“Why not? I don’t believe people know everything at birth and forget it as they get older.”

She reacted positively to my sharp tone. “That’s the doctrine of Platonic reminiscence. I don’t believe it, either.” She slid off the hassock and out of her lethargy and came toward me. “Why don’t you give the letters to Mr. Chalmers? You wouldn’t have to tell him where you got them.”

“Is he at home?”

“I’m afraid I have no idea. I don’t really spend all my time at this window watching the Chalmers house.” She added with a quick wan smile: “Not more than six or eight hours a day, anyway.”

“Don’t you think it’s time you broke the habit?”

She gave me a disappointed look. “Are you against Nick, too?”

“Obviously I’m not. But I hardly know him. You’re the one I know. And I hate to see you caught here, between two fairly dismal alternatives.”

“You mean Nick and my father, don’t you? I’m not caught.”

“You are, though, like a maiden in a tower. This low-grade war of attrition with your father may feel like a battle for freedom, but it isn’t. You just get more and more deeply engaged with him. Even if you do succeed in breaking away, it won’t be into freedom. You’ve got it arranged so another demanding male will take you over. And I do mean Nick.”

“You’ve got no right to attack him–”

“I’m attacking you,” I said. “Or rather the situation you’ve put yourself in. Why don’t you move out of the middle?”

“Where could I go?”

“You shouldn’t have to ask me. You’re twenty-five.”

“But I’m afraid.”

“What of?”

“I don’t know. I’m just afraid.” After a silence she said in a hushed voice: “You know what happened to my mother. I told you, didn’t I? She looked out this very window – this used to be her sewing room – and she saw a light in the Chalmers house when there wasn’t supposed to be one. She went over there and the burglars chased her out and ran over her and killed her.”

“Why did they kill her?”

“I don’t know. It may have been just an accident.”

“What did the burglars want from the Chalmers house?”

“I don’t know.”

“When did it happen, Betty?”

“In the summer of 1945.”

“You were too young to remember, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but my father told me about it. I’ve been afraid ever since.”

“I don’t believe you. You didn’t act afraid the other night, when Mrs. Trask and Harrow came to Chalmers house.”

“I was afraid, though, terribly. And I should never have gone there. They’re both dead.”

I was beginning to understand the fear that held her. She believed or suspected that Nick had killed both Harrow and Mrs. Trask, and that she herself had acted as a catalyst. Perhaps in some dark place of her mind, back beyond memory and below the level of speech, was the false but guilty knowledge that her infant self had somehow killed her mother in the street.