Vanish in an Instant

15

The following morning Meecham reached his office a little after ten o’clock. The secretary whose services he shared with the two senior partners in the firm was behind her typewriter, a thin, stringy-haired, vivacious girl with glasses.

She looked at him with highly exaggerated surprise. “My goodness, it’s Mr. Meecham. I hardly recognized you, it’s been so long.”

“I’m a little too tired for banter this morning, Mrs. Christy.”

“Wild night?”

“Pretty wild.”

“At your age. Well. Here’s the score board. Mr. Cranston is howling mad because his wife bought an antique highboy, and Mr. Post just went home with a migraine because the Doretto case has been dismissed. And there’s a girl waiting in your office, a blonde.”

“Who’s the girl?”

“A Miss Dwyer. She’s been waiting nearly an hour. I gave her a copy of Fortune to read. She looked like the intellectual type.”

“She’s not.”

He opened the opaque glass door of his office. It had his name on it, Eric J. Meecham, in firm black letters, and whenever he saw it he felt a little firmer himself, sharp and clear around the edges.

His office was small and overfurnished, but it had a wide window with a leather-covered seat as long as a couch, where you could sit and watch the street, five stories below, or the sky, a stone’s throw away.

Alice was watching the street, her chin cupped in her hand. The morning sun had turned her hair to tinsel, and Meecham wondered whether she bleached it a little. The thought of the small deception pleased him. It seemed to him charming and feminine for a woman to improve on nature.

“Hello.”

She jumped in surprise at the sound of his voice and made a motion to get up.

“No, don’t move,” Meecham said. “You look pretty.”

“Do I?”

“I should hire you to come and sit there by the hour.”

She gazed at him, unsmiling. “I wish you wouldn’t say smooth things to me.”

“Why not?”

“It puts me off, makes me feel that you’re ordinary. Anyone can be smooth, it’s just words.”

“You’re cross because I kept you waiting.”

“I guess,” she said. “A little.”

He sat down beside her on the window seat. “You shouldn’t be.”

“I kept listening for you so hard, I... well, that’s a bad sign, isn’t it?”

“Very bad.”

He took both her hands and held them against his chest. They looked down at the street together, remote and serene, like angels on a cloud.

Alice stirred finally. “Naturally it isn’t going to work out.”

“Naturally. What isn’t?”

“You know. Even if you feel the same way as I do. Everything’s against it. I don’t like the town and the climate’s terrible and I’m so far from home. And then you’re not very young any more and they say the older a man gets the less adjustable he is to marriage. Naturally it won’t work out.”

“Naturally.”

“You don’t have to keep repeating that word.”

“I’m agreeing with you. You’re such a sensible young woman, I have to. Of course, there are a few other points you didn’t mention. You can’t cook, for one thing. And you bleach your hair.”

“How did you know? Anyway, just a little bit.”

“Also my great-uncle James was a crackpot. I don’t own a house. I haven’t much money, and...”

“Oh, Meecham.”

“Have I forgotten anything?”

“Oh, Meecham, I love you.”

“At this point I think I might kiss you, if I didn’t have one foot in the grave.”

“I didn’t say you had one foot in the grave. I said you weren’t very young and adjustable and...”

“I accept the apology.”

He took her in his arms and kissed her for a long time, feeling that he had never kissed a girl before, it was so strange and perfect.

She looked very solemn. “I will love you forever, Meecham.”

“You’d better... Are you happy?”

She shook her head.

“Well, for Christ’s sake,” he said helplessly. “Why not?”

“I’m just not, that’s all. I feel awful.”

“Well, for...”

“I can’t help it. All that sweet stuff that’s been written about love, and this is how I feel, just plain awful. I ache, and my insides are hollow as if I could eat forever, only nothing fills me up and the sight of food makes me sick. I’ll probably starve to death. I’m too thin anyway.”

“No, you’re not. You’re perfect.”

“No. I don’t have enough of a figure, you know?”

“I have a rough idea.”

“I look terrible in a strapless evening gown. I tried one on in a store once. My collarbones project.”

“I happen to be very fond of projecting collarbones,” he said. “It’s a regular complex.”

“You know what I mean. I’d like to be perfect for you. I’d like myself to be perfect and things to be perfect.”

“If you and things were perfect, you wouldn’t look twice at me.”

“Oh, I would,” she said passionately. “I couldn’t help it.”

“The town isn’t so bad. There are worse climates, and you could always go home for visits.”

“I know.”

“We can work things out. Things don’t work themselves out.”

She looked up at him, still pale and still solemn. “On top of everything else, you’re nice, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes I think so. Not often.”

“The climate — people get used to it, don’t they? And I bet it’s pretty in the spring, isn’t it?”

“Very pretty.”

“With little green sprouts and buds coming out all over. I think I’ll like that part of it very much.”

“I think you will.”

“Anyway, I don’t feel quite so hollow anymore.”

“That’s good.” He lifted her tinseled hair and kissed the soft nape of her neck. Standing there, with his mouth against her skin, he felt that he loved all women because he loved Alice.

“We’ve never even had a date together,” she said. “Isn’t that funny, Meecham?”

“Yes.”

“We haven’t had a chance to fall in love. How did it happen? How could it have happened?”

“If I knew I’d go out and tell the world.”

The buzzer on his desk sounded, harsh and sudden, like an alarm clock disturbing a dreamer.

He reached over and turned on the switch. “Yes?”

“There’s a Mrs. Hamilton on the phone,” Mrs. Christy said. “Do you want to talk to her?”

“No, but I will.”

“O.K., go ahead.”

He turned off the switch and reached for the telephone. Alice put her hand on his arm to stop him. “Did she say — Mrs. Hamilton?”

“Yes.”

“Tell her I’m not here. Tell her you haven’t seen me or heard from me.”

“All right, if that’s what you want me to say.” He picked up the phone. “Hello.”

“Mr. Meecham, this is Mrs. Hamilton. How are you?”

“Fine. And you?”

“I’m fine too. Everything is.” She sounded so falsely cheerful that he wondered if anything at all was fine. “We seem to have a bad connection, Mr. Meecham. Will you talk louder?”

“All right.”

“The fact is, I’m a little concerned about something. I suppose it’s absurd to worry about a sensible girl like Alice. But then it’s sometimes the sensible ones who do and say silly things, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes.”

“Have you seen her this morning?”

“No, I haven’t.” He looked across the desk at Alice. She was sitting on the window seat again not watching the street, but watching him, her eyes wide and anxious. He smiled at her reassuringly but she didn’t smile back. “What reason have you to worry, Mrs. Hamilton?”

“Perhaps I haven’t any reason. I’m not sure. She’s acting peculiarly.”

“In what way?”

“It’s hard to... well, I think she’s avoiding me. This morning, for instance, she left the house, without breakfast, without saying a word to anyone. She disappeared, in fact.”

“She’s probably downtown shopping.”

“Then why didn’t she tell me where she was going? Surely that would have been the natural thing to do? I was right there, having breakfast with Virginia and Paul in the dining room, and Alice went past the door and that’s the last I saw of her. It seems odd, doesn’t it?”

“Everything seems odd until it’s explained.”

“Outside of the family, you’re the only person she knows in town. I had the notion that she would come to you, if something was — if she had anything on her mind.”

“What would be on her mind?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.” It was a positive yet somehow unconvincing statement.

“She might come here. If she does, I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you. You realize that I’m very fond of Alice, she’s a very dear girl.” She paused. It was a significant pause, Meecham thought, and he waited for the but. It came. “But I didn’t hire her to go running off like this.”

She emphasized the word hire quite carefully, as if to put Alice in her place, through Meecham. Meecham resented her tone, but stronger than his resentment was his feeling that Mrs. Hamilton was a desperate woman fighting with her back to the wall against shadows that Meecham couldn’t see and shapes he didn’t recognize. He thought of Mrs. Loftus in her twilit world where everything was shadow, and shapes were molten and confused. The two women had nothing in common but despair. Yet it seemed that somewhere, at some point, their separate worlds had collided like wandering planets, and one had lost part of itself and the other had cracked through the middle.

“Mr. Meecham, are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll let me know for sure then, if Alice turns up?”

“I’ll let you know. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Meecham.”

Meecham replaced the telephone on his desk, and looked at it thoughtfully, then moved it half an inch to the right. “You could have told her you were going shopping.”

“I didn’t want to face her.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t trust her any more. She’s changed.”

“That’s why you came here, to tell me she’s changed?”

“No.” Alice turned and looked down at the busy street. “A man came to see her last night. I saw him, and I think she knows I saw him.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. But I’m sure she didn’t want me to see him, that the meeting was to be a secret.”

“How did you get in on it?”

“I heard a knock on the front door, not the chime, just a short knock, like a signal. I’d been in my room lying in bed, sort of thinking things over. When I heard the knock I got up to answer it because I... well, I thought it might be you. That’s another bad sign, isn’t it? Every time the phone rings or there’s a knock on the door or footsteps on the sidewalk, every time a car stops I think it might be you.”

“That’s the worst yet,” he said, smiling. “Go on.”

“I put on my robe and slippers and went down the hall. I got as far as the corner where the hall bends and then I heard voices. I looked around the corner and saw Mrs. Hamilton standing at the door talking to a man, a stranger. I don’t know why but I suddenly felt furtive. I wasn’t spying or eavesdropping, I couldn’t even hear what they were saying. But I had the feeling that the meeting was wrong somehow and the man shouldn’t have been there at that time of night.”

“What time?”

“Nearly eleven.”

“Where was the rest of the household?”

“Carney sleeps out, and the cook was in her room... She has a television set and hardly ever leaves it. And Virginia went with Paul to a movie. The celebration dinner had been kind of a flop. Virginia was terribly nervous so someone suggested a movie.”

“Which someone?”

“I think Mrs. Hamilton mentioned it first. Virginia agreed that it was a good idea, and she invited me to go along. It was very — thoughtful of her, wasn’t it?”

“Very. But I wonder what the thought was.”

“You mean they were trying to get rid of me for the night, Virginia and Mrs. Hamilton?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. It’s also possible that Virginia invited you because she took a liking to you. She’s unpredictable.”

“She didn’t take anything to me, like or dislike. She ignored me until the movie business came up, and then she tried to sound very cordial and friendly. I don’t know, maybe she was being cordial and friendly. I can’t tell. My judgments of people have gone haywire, so I can’t trust my...”

“Don’t get excited.” He put his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. “You refused the invitation?”

“Yes. I said I was going to bed early, and I did. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about you, and what you said about me going back home as soon as possible. I wasn’t worried about them trying to get rid of me for the evening. I was worried about you trying to get rid of me forever.”

“It seems I failed.”

“Miserably.”

“It’s my nicest failure, to date,” he said. “You may regret it, though.”

“Meecham, I’m trying to tell you something, only everything seems to come around to us, just us.” She frowned. “I should try to be impersonal, don’t you think?”

“By all means. Be impersonal.”

“I... don’t look at me then.”

“All right.” He looked at the wall. “Go on.”

“Well, they stood there in the hall talking. The man could have been anybody, a friend, or someone selling insurance or Christmas cards or something. If he had come in the daytime, I’d never have noticed him or thought twice about him. It was the secrecy that disturbed me — the lateness, the soft knock on the door instead of the chime, their low hurried voices. But I didn’t try to hear what they were saying. I went back to bed. Then a few minutes later Mrs. Hamilton came down the hall very quietly. If I hadn’t been listening for her, I don’t think I’d have heard her. She didn’t go to her own room directly. She stopped at my door. I could actually hear her breathing, very heavy labored breathing like someone whose air had been cut off, someone who’d been choked. Not that I... not that I really think she was choked...”

“What do you think?”

“That she’d had a shock, a bad shock, and that she was checking up on me to make sure I hadn’t seen or heard anything.”

“You didn’t hear anything, though.”

“No.”

“And all you saw was a stranger at the door. Was the hall light on?”

“One of them was.”

“You must have had a fairly good view of him then.”

“For a minute I did. He was a tall man, rather handsome, with light hair and a reddish face. He was about forty, I think, and he was wearing a bright green plaid topcoat. I never thought of it before, but he might have been a policeman.”

“He might have been,” Meecham said. But he knew he wasn’t a policeman. He remembered the man and he remembered the green plaid coat hanging with the other coats on the hall rack, swinging in the wind from the open door. This is my husband, Jim.

Jim Hearst and Mrs. Hamilton. Another equation to be solved, he thought, and each new equation led to still another, and on and on into the infinity of the human mind. He felt stunted and inadequate, an engineer without a slide rule, a chemist without a formula.

“Of course he was a policeman,” Alice said, sounding irrationally pleased, as if she too had discovered an equation and had solved it quite simply, by counting on her fingers. “I guess I was just depressed and dreamed up a lot of nonsense, didn’t I?”

For a minute he couldn’t answer. He was not sure how much to tell her, or even how much he himself knew.

“Didn’t I, Meecham?”

“I suppose you did.”

“Things seem so much worse at night, in the dark.”

“They do when you’re alone.”

“I’ll never be frightened with you, Meecham.”

“No.” He took her in his arms again. She was warm and soft in her innocence, eager in her new love that would endure forever, burn through the dark of night and the chill of winter. He wondered, with a detachment that was cruder to himself than it was to her, how long it would last.

He said, “You’d better have a story ready for Mrs. Hamilton.”

“All right. What?”

“You went to get your hair done.”

“But it isn’t done.”

“Get it done.”

“All right,” she said meekly. “Meecham, how did you know? About the bleach, I mean.”

“I have little birds spying for me all over town.”

“No. I mean it. How did you?”

“A blind guess, darling.”

“I wouldn’t like to think you knew too much about women,” she said, frowning. “Other women, I mean. I don’t care what you know about me. Naturally I’ll try to act mysterious sometimes.”

“When you do I promise to act mystified.”

“Oh, Meecham. I feel... I feel just overcome with love. Do you think I’m making a mistake telling you that? Should I keep you guessing?”

“It’s a little late for that,” Meecham said. “Besides, I’m tired of guessing. I ought to buy a new slide rule or go back to counting on my fingers like you.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing.” He kissed her lightly on the temple. “Run along now and get your hair done.”

“When will I see you? Couldn’t we have lunch together, perhaps?”

“Not today. I have to go out to the hospital to see Loftus.”

“Loftus again,” she said, flatly.

“Loftus again.”

“Why?”

“I have some money that belongs to him. I want to know what to do with it.”

“Why should he give you money? Why should you still be involved with him like this?”

“There’s no involvement.” He knew there was, though. First a moral and mental involvement, and then gradually a physical one which had him trapped in a net of human ropes. Every way he turned he found new knots in the net. He couldn’t fight or talk or buy his way out of it; each knot, tighter and more intricate than the preceding, must be loosened and picked apart — the old lady, the Garinos, Virginia and her mother, the dead Margolis, Emmy Hearst and the husband she despised, and Loftus himself, the first and the final knot, and the most difficult of all.