Vanish in an Instant

11

When he rang the doorbell Emmy Hearst answered it herself, immediately, as if she’d been there at the door watching from behind the lace curtains of the little window for someone who would never come. Her eyes were so swollen that they didn’t look like human eyes at all, but like twin blisters raised by fire. When she spoke she held one hand against her throat as if to ease its aching:

You saw him?”

Mecham nodded. “Yes.”

I tried to. They wouldn’t let me. They said I had no right, no right.” She clung to the door for support, a tall strong woman who had come abruptly, in a single day, to the end of her strength.

They’ve transferred him to the hospital,” Meecham said.

He’ll get good care there. Won’t he?”

“Of course.”

There was a burst of masculine laughter from one of the rooms on the second floor.

Mrs. Hearst glanced nervously at the staircase. “I can’t ask you to come in, I... I’m busy. I have business to attend to.”

Mecham said, “I can’t stay anyway. Loftus asked me to pick up a package of letters that he wants me to take to his mother.”

“His mother,” she said quietly. “Always his mother. She’s a stone around his neck, drowning him, she’s like a... Yes, I have the letters. They’re in the kitchen. I’ll get them for you.”

She went down the hall and through the swinging door into the kitchen. Meecham heard her give a little cry of surprise: “Why... why, I thought you were upstairs.”

“Well, I’m not upstairs. How do you like that, eh?”

The door stopped swinging and settled into place, entombing the sound waves in its heavy oak. But the woman’s little cry of surprise hung in the air for a moment like a question mark of smoke and then disintegrated.

Meecham waited, uneasy and depressed. The front door was still open and he didn’t close it; he felt that she had left it open deliberately. The wind blew down the hall and up the stairs, agitating the lace curtains and the coats and sweaters hanging on the old-fashioned hall rack. On the floor beside the rack there was a pile of rubbers and galoshes and a pair of battered tube skates and one gym shoe with the name Kryboski inked on each side.

Meecham looked at his watch and then coughed, a long purposeful cough. A minute later the swinging door opened again and Mrs. Hearst came toward him with a brown package under her arm. She was lurching slightly, as if she was carrying either inside the package or inside herself something heavy that threw her off balance.

She thrust the package at him. It was very light. “Here. Please go. Please.”

“Certainly,” Meecham said. But he was a little too late. A man had come out of the kitchen, a big ruddy-faced man with fair hair. A hall-length away he looked quite distinguished and physically powerful. But as he came nearer, the shaft of light from the open door exposed the fraud like an efficient camera. His body was running to fat, and his face was disfigured by lines of indecision and self-doubt, ambition gone sour and life gone sour. His pale eyes moved constantly, back and forth, like birds at sea looking for a piece of kelp to rest on. He was one of those men Meecham recognized as a common type; the big boy whose mind and emotions had never been able to keep up with his maturing body. With the years the gap widened and the personality narrowed. He was, perhaps, forty-five.

Mrs. Hearst deliberately turned her head away as he approached. When she spoke she didn’t look at either of the men, she seemed to be addressing the grease-darkened lilies that climbed the wall:

“This is my husband, Jim.”

“Say, what is all this anyhow?” Hearst said. “Just what is it? Mysterious packages, cops in the house, Emmy bawling all over the joint. A guy has a right to know, don’t he?”

He tugged, self-consciously, at his tie. The checked suit he wore was a little too tight around the hips, and the sleeves were too short, so that his wrists stuck out, not the vulnerable pipe-stem wrists of a growing boy, but thick wrists covered with coarse gold hairs. His manner, his clothes, his expression, they all added to his air of chronic failure... the air of a man who has tried and quit a hundred jobs in a hundred places, always out of step and off-beat.

“Well? Ain’t anybody going to say anything but me? Not that I can’t do the talking. I’ve got plenty to say and plenty to ask too.”

“Shut up, Jim,” Mrs. Heart said, without turning.

“Now she tells me, shut up. Mind my own business, she says. Maybe that’s my trouble, I have minded my own business. I’ve winked an eye at things.” He looked at his wife. “Some pretty funny things, eh, Emmy?”

“Shut up,” she repeated listlessly. “He’s not a cop, he’s a lawyer. And the package... Oh, you tell him, Mr. Meecham. Tell him what’s in the package since he won’t believe me.”

“They’re letters,” Meecham said. “Written to Loftus by his mother. I’m returning them to her at his request.”

Hearst looked disappointed. “Just a bunch of old letters, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“You mean all the value they’ve got is just sentimental?”

“Yes.” Meecham didn’t mention the money in one of the envelopes. He had the notion that if Hearst knew there was money involved he would put up a fight to keep it; a not unreasonable fight, since the package had been left in his own kitchen, and he, Meecham, had no power of attorney for Loftus, and, in fact, no proof that the package even belonged to Loftus.

But Hearst had already lost interest in the package. He was watching his wife, his eyes moving constantly in their sockets but keeping her within range. “He’s quite a sentimental guy, Loftus is. Too bad I don’t have that sentimental stuff, the ladies are crazy for it. And manners he’s got too, real fancy manners that makes an ordinary guy feel like a bum. I’m not a bum. I’m a rough diamond, sure, but I don’t go around carving people up either. Eh, Emmy?”

“I don’t know what you do when you’re out of town,” she said distinctly. “And I don’t care.”

“I work. That’s what I do. I work.” The word seemed to stimulate him. He turned to Meecham, suddenly animated: “Right now I’m pushing a new product we got out, a soapless suds. Best thing on the market, Noscrub it’s called. I’m in charge of out-of-town advertising.”

“You distribute free samples from door to door,” his wife said, still speaking in the same clear and distinct way, like a teacher correcting the repeated lies of a small boy.

“That’s right, build me up. That’s great. Funny how you could get so mealy-mouthed over Loftus because he read books instead of doing a man’s work. Books and soft talk...”

“A man’s work. A two-year-old could be taught to deliver samples from door to door.”

His face purpled and he seemed ready to strike her. He looked, for the first time, decisive, sure of his ground and his rights. But the moment passed. His anger, like his other emotions, was not quite fully developed; it turned against himself so that he was his own victim.

“Wait till the product catches on,” he said. “Just wait.”

“Yes, Jim.”

“I’ll be advertising manager, I’ve got Weber’s word for it.”

“Yes, Jim.”

“Yes Jim, yes Jim, yes Jim.” He shook his head, in a new anger and an old despair. “Goddam it, build me up, Emmy. Like a real wife, build me up.”

“The higher you’re built the sooner you’ll fall.”

“You built him up. Earl this, Earl that, Earl you’re wonderful.”

“I never said he was wonderful.”

“You did. I heard you.”

“People who spy at doors will hear anything, and what they don’t hear they’ll make up.”

“I didn’t have to spy at doors. It was here, all over the place, right under my nose.” His eyes shifted to Meecham. “How about that, eh? You take a guy into your home, you treat him right, treat him like your own...”

“You never said a civil word to him in your life.” She was examining the wallpaper again. “Not a civil word.”

“You said enough for both of us, didn’t you? What do you think, I should of shook his hand for making me feel like an old bum?”

“I haven’t had a friend since I left school, man or woman, not a friend. That’s what Earl is to me, a friend.”

“I’ve kicked around in my life, and one thing I know, there’s no such thing as a man and woman being friends. It’s not in the books. It’s against nature.”

“Your nature, maybe. Not...”

“Anybody’s nature!”

“Keep your voice down. The boys might hear you.”

“Let them. Maybe they’ll learn a thing or two.”

“If you don’t mind,” Meecham said, “I’d better be going.”

Neither of them paid the slightest attention. They were absorbed in each other, like boxers in a ring, each of them intent only on the other’s weak spots and unguarded moments.

She had crossed her arms on her chest, as if protecting a vulnerable place. “What are you accusing me of? Say it.”

“I will.”

“Well, go on. Say it in front of Mr. Meecham here. He’s a lawyer.”

“Sure, I’ll say it. I don’t care if he’s President Truman.”

“Well, what’s stopping you? Go on, go on.”

“He was your lover,” Hearst said. “That piddling little shrimp was your lover.”

“You fool,” she whispered. “You terrible fool.” She began to cry, very quietly, her forehead pressing against the wall. Tears fell from her swollen eyes and splattered the greasy lilies of the wallpaper. Her head moved, from one side to another, in misery and denial.

“Emmy?”

“Go away.”

“It’s not true then, eh, Emmy?”

“What do you think? A sick man — a dying man — what — do — you — think?”

“I... well...”

He looked with pathetic uncertainty at Meecham, like a small boy who had made his mother cry and sought reassurance that eventually she would stop and everything would be all right again.

“Emmy?” He touched her shoulder tentatively. “I didn’t mean nothing, Emmy. You know me, I shoot off at the mouth, sure, but I wouldn’t hurt a hair of your head. If you was only honest with me, Emmy. If you was only honest.”

Meecham went out the door with the package under his arm. Neither of them noticed or cared.

Outside, the wind was fresh, but he had a sensation of suffocating heaviness in his throat and chest, as if the slices of life he had seen in the course of the morning were too sharp and fibrous to be swallowed.