Vanish in an Instant

24

The lights in the Garinos’ basement apartment were on. From the sidewalk Meecham and Alice could see right into the kitchen. Mrs. Garino was sitting alone at a big linoleum-covered table, motionless, as if she was listening for a sound or waiting for something to happen.

Garino answered the door. He had a sleeping kitten nestled in the crook of his arm.

“You arrived fast, Mr. Meecham.”

“Yes. Miss Dwyer, Mr. Garino. Miss Dwyer is my fiancée. She came along for the ride.”

“Come in, come in.” Garino stepped back to let them in, and at the movement the kitten awoke and began sheathing and unsheathing its claws against the rough wool of Garino’s sweater coat. In and out, the claws moved like iridescent needles being thrust in and out of tiny pink plush cushions. “I will get my keys.”

“I could hold the kitten for you,” Alice said shyly.

“Ah, you like kittens, eh?”

“I love them.”

“This one, he is the littlest. He is always the last to eat, and when he sleeps he is always at the bottom of the pile, so I spoil him a little to make up for this.” Alice sat down in an old wicker rocking chair and Garino put the indignant kitten on her lap. “I will go and tell Mama to fix some coffee.”

“I already put it on,” Mrs. Garino said from the kitchen, sounding rather angry that anyone should have to remind her to make coffee.

“Come out here for a minute, Mama.”

“I’m not dressed for company.” But she came to the door anyway, smoothing her skirt down over her hips. “We’re upset around here today. I didn’t have time to fuss with clothes.”

Meecham introduced the two women and they eyed each other carefully from an ambush of smiles before they stepped out into the open.

“She can stay down here with me,” Mrs. Garino said to her husband. “She wouldn’t want to go up there to that...”

“Mama.”

“How many times a day do you have to say Mama to me like that? You might as well be honest and say shut up.”

“That wouldn’t be so polite,” Garino answered blandly. The two men went out into the hall and Garino closed the door.

“Is she still in her apartment?” Meecham said.

“Yes, I went up to check fifteen minutes ago. She is drunk, naturally, but not as bad as I expected. I heard her through the door walking around talking to herself.”

“Does she know that Earl’s dead?”

“I couldn’t tell her. She was so happy today, spending that money, how could I spoil it? It’s a long time since she had money to spend and it went to her head. When you never have more than a dollar, a hundred dollars seems like it would last forever.”

“If my guess is right, there’s a lot more than a hundred dollars involved.”

“Then you know how she got the money?”

“I don’t know how she got it,” Meecham said. “But I know where it came from originally.”

“She didn’t steal it, though?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” But he sounded relieved.

The door of Mrs. Loftus’ apartment was locked. Though Garino had the key to it in his hand, he knocked once, and then again, before using it.

The old lady was sitting sideways on the battered davenport, her feet up and ankles crossed, her back to the door. She was smoking a cigarette through a long silver holder, her fingers elegantly extended.

She spoke without moving her head. “Don’t I ever get any privacy anymore?”

Garino turned a little white. “I asked you please not to smoke when you’re drinking.”

“You’re a butterinski, Victor. That’s what we used to call people like you in my day. What do you want now?”

“I brought someone to see you.”

“I’ve already seen someone.” She flicked the ashes off her cigarette in the general direction of an ash tray. Some of the ashes spilled on the floor and the rest on her dress. Meecham noticed that the dress already had two or three scorch marks on it though it looked brand new. Everything she wore looked brand new — the magenta-colored dress with a purple velvet flower at the waist, sheer black stockings, ankle-strap suede pumps and a hat made of sleek black feathers. Nothing fitted her. The hat perched on her head like a reluctant raven, the stockings hung in pleats on her legs, and the full skirt of the dress stuck out from her fleshless hips like a ballerina’s tutu.

The room smelled of whisky and of smoke, more acrid than cigarette smoke. Meecham saw then that the old lady had been burning something in the grate. The center of the fire had burned down to a crust of gray and black ash, but around the perimeter some material was still smoldering.

“I didn’t know you were going out,” Garino said.

She bent her head toward him, slowly, as if to avoid frightening the raven on her head. “I am not going out, Victor.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I said...”

“It’s very cold and late, and besides, the bars will be closed pretty soon.”

The old lady’s eyes flickered. “Why, I wouldn’t dream of going out on a night like this.”

“Promise.”

“It never even occurred to me to go out on a night like this. As a matter of fact, I was about to retire when I decided to try on my new clothes.”

“It’s a pretty dress.”

“You really like it? It doesn’t fit, but then I didn’t buy it for fit. I bought it,” she added in a very reasonable tone of voice, “for the color. It’s such a cheerful color it makes me feel alive.”

“Ella can maybe take it in at the seams for you.”

She stared at him coldly. “Then you don’t really like it, after all.”

“Yes, I do. I was only...”

“You have no right to force your way into my home and inflict your opinions about clothes on me, Mr. Garino.”

“You’d better go to bed before...” Garino hesitated, looking down at his hands.

“Before what, Mr. Garino?”

“Before Ella has to put you to bed.”

She thought this over quietly for a moment. Then she said with an air of triumph, “I can’t go to bed. I’ve got company.” She pointed the cigarette holder at Meecham. The cigarette had burned down to the end and gone out. “Who are you, company?”

Meecham repeated his name.

“Well, sit down, sit down some place and we’ll all have a cozy drink together. You too, Victor.”

“No, I don’t want one, thank you,” Garino said.

“You needn’t pretend, in front of me, that you don’t drink. I happen to know that you drink in secret all the time. A lot of people do. Billions. Pour some of us billions a drink, Victor.”

Garino’s dark skin showed an angry streak of purple across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. “You can wait for a while.”

“I can’t wait. I need the energy. Whisky is a body fuel. I read that in the newspaper. There’s no reason why I can’t have some body fuel.”

“You intend to go out, don’t you?” Garino said. “You weren’t trying on clothes.”

“Why, of all the absurb ideas!”

“Where were you going?”

“Give me a drink.”

“Where were you going?”

“You dirty foreigner.”

Garino’s eyes glittered like an oil sludge over moving water. “Watch what you say. I am your only friend.”

“Oh no, you’re not. I have lots of friends.”

Meecham sat down facing her. The scarred and rickety coffee table seemed like a precarious bridge between them that must be crossed carefully, one step at a time.

“Who are they?” he said.

“Who are they is none of your business. I don’t go around to other people saying who are they, who are they all the time.”

“Did your friends give you any money?”

She raised her head high and tried to look haughty. “I wouldn’t dream of accepting charity. I’m a woman of independent means.”

“I realize that, of course,” Meecham said. “But you wouldn’t have any objection to accepting money that came from Earl. It did come from Earl?”

“Don’t bother me. I’m tired. I need some body fuel.”

“All right.” Meecham nodded at Garino, and Garino went, silent and tight-lipped, into the kitchen. When he returned he was carrying a plastic tumbler filled to the brim with whisky.

Mrs. Loftus drank it in three gulps. “That newspaper was right. It is a fuel. Why, I feel warmer already.”

Meecham said, “Earl is dead, Mrs. Loftus.”

The old lady began to tremble, and Meecham thought for a moment that she was going to react violently to the news. But too many nerves of communication had been cut between her and the outside world. Pain was dulled and pleasure remote.

“Did you hear me, Mrs. Loftus?”

“I don’t want to hear anything. You leave me alone.”

“Before he died he had over six thousand dollars,” Meecham said. “How much of that did you get?”

“I’ve forgotten his face. He was nice-looking, but I’ve forgotten... I can’t picture it.”

“Who sent money to you? Or brought it to you?”

Though her mouth worked, she didn’t speak for a moment, and when she did it wasn’t an answer to Meecham’s questions but to questions that rose within her like smoke from a forgotten fire. “Such a hard life, a terrible life. Earl is lucky. I wasn’t a good mother to him. Something happened to me. What was it? I don’t remember. Something happened. I think I was ill and too tired to care.”

Meecham recalled the piercing words Loftus had used about her: One drink and she was a drunk. She’d been a drunk for thirty years and didn’t find it out until then. For her the world vanished in that instant. She has never seen it since. She never will again.

“Earl didn’t understand,” she said in a whisper. “He wrote cruel things to me sometimes, said I broke my promises, said I didn’t try hard enough. I burned all his letters. Birdie told me to.”

“Who told you?”

“Birdie did. Tonight. I was sitting here and suddenly in comes Birdie through that door like a ghost.” She glanced at the locked door expectantly as if she wanted to conjure up the ghost again, a friendly ghost more real than the shadows she lived among.

“Please, Mrs. Loftus,” Meecham said sharply. “Take it easy now. Tell me...”

“Forget the past, Birdie said, burn it all up. And she’s right. From now on things are going to be different. I’m going away, I’m going to start a new life. Birdie says it’s bad for me living here like this from hand to mouth in a town full of gossip.” Birdie said and Birdie says... The words seemed to hypnotize her like a new religion with a special chant. “Birdie says I ought to live in the country, in a big house with lots of trees and flowers around and dogs in the yard.”

Meecham leaned toward her across the table trying to focus her attention. “Birdie was here tonight?”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you that. She doesn’t want Victor to know, doesn’t like people who snoop.”

“I’m not snooping. But you must be making a mistake, Mrs. Loftus. It couldn’t have been Birdie.”

“I know Birdie. I recognized her right off, she didn’t have to open her mouth.”

“Earl claimed she was killed in an accident out West.”

She didn’t seem surprised. “Sometimes Earl told little fibs.”

“This was more than a little fib. If he lied about her death, it means that he was deliberately trying to prevent anyone from finding her.”

“Well, I found her without even looking. She’s alive, all right. Showing her age, I must say,” Mrs. Loftus added slyly. “Oh, yes, she’s gotten older. And she’s had a few knocks in the process, so now she understands better about other people with troubles, like me. She’s different, Birdie is. She says I’m different too.” She tilted her head at Garino. “You think I am, Victor?”

“Ah — yes.” Garino looked sick. “Very different.”

“You don’t mean that nice, do you?” she said slowly.

“I mean it nice.”

“At least I haven’t gotten stout. So many older women get stout.”

Not without food, Meecham thought. “Birdie gave you money?”

“She sent it to me. It came this morning in the mail, a check with a little note. Two hundred dollars.”

“And then?”

“Then what? I spent it, of course.”

“All of it?”

“Not all of it,” she said disdainfully. “I’m not a fool. I have twelve dollars left.”

“How far do you think twelve dollars will go toward that big house in the country?”

“Birdie says I’m not to worry. She’s taking care of everything; Earl asked her to. She knows where the house is. She’s going to drive me there tonight. It might be quite a long drive. If I could have another drink, Victor?”

“It would be better not to,” Garino said.

“Just one. Then I’ll throw the bottle away. I’m going to quit drinking — did you know? I am. I promised Birdie and I promise you, too.”

Garino brought the bottle out of the kitchen and poured her a drink. While she drank it he stood over her with melancholy patience like a hen brooding over an egg that has gone rotten in its shell.

“Now I’ll throw the bottle away, see, as I promised. Give it to me.”

Garino recorked the half-empty bottle and put it in her lap. Then he held out his arm and she pulled herself to her feet by hanging on the sleeve of his old sweater coat. She tottered toward the fireplace, balancing precariously on her new spike-heeled pumps like a child on stilts.

“Didden think I’d keep a promise, eh? Well, you were mistaken, Victor.” With loving care she placed the bottle upright in the center of the grate where the fire had died. Then she returned to the davenport breathing hard and noisily, as if she had walked, not the width of a room, but a great distance across a span of years.

She sat down carefully, her eyes avoiding Garino’s. Garino didn’t say anything. He went over to the fireplace, removed the bottle and took it out to the kitchen again. The silence in the room was unbearable, the silence of terrible words not yet spoken.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Victor,” she said at last.

Garino’s face was like wood. “You could blow the place up. It’s a fuel. Remember?”

“You have turned against me.”

“I don’t want the place blown up.”

“You and Ella both. I’ve only got one friend left.”

“Birdie was never your friend,” Garino said. “I remember the fighting, fighting all the time the two of you.”

“Things have changed.”

“Where is this big house she’s taking you to, with trees and flowers and dogs in the yard?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Is it a private house?”

“What do you mean, is it private. Of course it’s... What do you mean?”

“I thought it might be some place where they take care of — older people and so on.”

“An asylum.”

“No, I didn’t mean...”

“You meant an asylum,” she said shrilly. “Earl wouldn’t allow it. Do you hear me? He’d never allow it!”

“Earl is dead.”

“But he gave her money to look after me and she promised him she would, she promised.”

“Promises breed like fleas in your family.”

“You go away!” she wailed. “I won’t listen to you!”

“What if she doesn’t show up? What then? You’ll be glad enough then to stay here, won’t you, even if it’s not good enough for you. And me, I’m not good enough either, I’m a dirty foreigner.”

“Please, both of you,” Meecham said. “This arguing isn’t accomplishing anything. Mrs. Loftus, are you listening to me?”

The old lady raised her head slowly like a sick animal. “Birdie will come for me, won’t she?”

“She’ll be here, sure,” Meecham said with conviction. “Are you all packed and ready to leave?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me first, where did you cash that check she sent you?”

“At a... little place down the street.”

“Store? Bar?”

“A... a tavern. I just happened to be passing by and...”

“Yes, I know. What is the name of the place?”

“Peterson’s. It’s not a bad check, is it? I’ve spent the money. I couldn’t pay it back. I don’t want to cheat Mr. Peterson. He’s helped me out when I... when I’ve been ill.”

“The check’s probably good.”

“It’s got to be. He didn’t want to cash it at first because I told him it was from my daughter-in-law, and he said, how could it be, it wasn’t signed Mrs. Loftus. I had to explain to him that Earl and Birdie were divorced and Birdie took back her maiden name of Falconer.”

“Of what?”

He spoke the words so explosively that the old lady shrank back in fear. “Maybe Birdie wouldn’t like me to be telling so much.”

“How did she sign that check?”

“J — Jemima Falconer.”

“Jemima Falconer,” Meecham repeated. The name sounded very familiar yet remote, like the echo of a friend’s voice.

“She never let anyone call her Jemima. She thought it sounded as if she was colored. We called her Birdie — that was her nickname at school.”

Meecham remembered the descriptions of Birdie that he’d heard from various people. From Garino: “Birdie they called her. Such a silly name. She wasn’t anything like a bird. She was a big woman, older than Earl and quite pleasant unless you crossed her — she had a terrible temper.” From Mrs. Loftus, the night he had found her at the bus depot: “Didn’t say a word about her till the day he brought her home and said, this is my wife. And there she stood, with that hennaed hair and that hard look, forty if she was a day, forty, and him just a boy.” From Loesser, at Lily Margolis’ house: “My impression is that she’s a highly respectable woman. I knew Lily had been thinking for some time that Claude had a steady mistress, but I couldn’t believe it was this Falconer woman.” From Gurton at the restaurant: “Loftus used to come in here two or three years ago with his girlfriend, a tall bright-looking redhead.” And from Gill, the orderly who had spent the last night with Loftus, listening to him talk: “Birdie this, Birdie that. He must have been crazy about that woman.”

On that last night, with his own death molded and cast and waiting for him like an iron maiden, Loftus had tried to protect Birdie with the only weapons that were left to him, lies. He had invented her death in the auto accident in the West so that no one would look for her or discover where and who she really was. He had covered her with lies as the snow covers walkers on a winter night and obscures their footprints behind them.

Now, from out of this white ambush Birdie had stepped clear and sharp and real, with blood in her veins and money in her hand and promises on her lips. A big house with trees, and a new life with hope; Birdie said and Birdie says. Why? Why did she come back to say anything? Meecham looked at the old lady... She was intent on fitting a new cigarette into the silver holder, her whole mind and body intent on this small task which would be so easy for anyone else, and he realized the futility of asking her questions.

“I’ll do that for you,” he said.

“Leave me alone. I can do it. Whyn’t you go away?”

“That might be a good idea.”

“It’s an exshellent idea. Ex — cell — ent.”

Meecham rose and went to the door. “I hope you’ll send your new address to Mr. Garino.”

“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.”

“Come on, Garino.”

Garino stood where he was. “We can’t leave now. I’m going to stay and see that things are all right. I don’t trust...”

“Things will be all right. Let’s go.”

“But...”

“I can look after myself, Victor,” the old lady said firmly. “I’m a woman of ex — pe — rience.”

“Good night, then.”

She didn’t answer. She was peering at the little clock on the mantel, her eyes narrowed to slits to make them focus. It was eleven o’clock. Or perhaps it was twelve. Or ten? The hands of the clock wavered, this way, that way. Ten, twelve, eleven, ten.

“Make up your mind,” she said to the clock.