Vanish in an Instant

25

Eleven-thirty by Meecham’s watch. For nearly half an hour he had been waiting in the dark on the bottom step of the basement stairs, his shoulder pressed against the old wooden banister. He couldn’t see the front door from this position because there was a turn in the stairs, but he could hear what went on in the hall above. He could even hear, very faintly, Mrs. Loftus walking around in her apartment, making last-minute preparations for the trip. Meecham’s shoulder and the back of his neck felt stiff and sore where the draft struck him. He looked at his watch again. Another minute had crawled by, as slow and laborious as a sloth. She’s not coming, he thought. Perhaps Birdie had been scared away, or perhaps the whole thing was what he had believed at first, the wish-fantasy of a drunken mind.

Then he heard the front door open, and quiet but firm footsteps moved along the thin carpeting. A pause, the click of a doorknob, and then the old lady’s voice, with a sob in it:

“I thought you weren’t coming, Birdie.”

“Of course I was coming.”

“It’s so late.”

“I had some trouble with the car.” The woman’s voice was as quiet and firm as her footsteps. “Is this your suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll take it. Button up your coat, it’s a raw night.” A moment of silence. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Just a nip. You said yourself it’s a raw night.”

“You didn’t tell anyone that you were leaving, or about me?”

“Of course not,” the old lady lied solemnly.

“You burned everything?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, then.”

Footsteps down the hall.

Meecham rose quietly and began to ascend the stairs. At the bend in the staircase he paused. The two women were at the front door, Birdie bent under the weight of the suitcase, and the old lady wrapped like a mummy and clinging to Birdie’s free arm.

“Where are you going?” Meecham said.

They both swerved toward him, and Meecham felt a column of emotion rise thick in his throat, disbelief and then anger and then sadness. In that one brief moment when Birdie turned, three women merged in her and became one, merged inevitably and naturally like atoms forming a molecule.

Her face was as familiar to him as Alice’s: the square forcible jaw, the gentle mouth, and the eyes still blistered from the burning of her tears. He thought back to the last time he’d seen her when she had thrust all the dishes into the sink with a furious sweep of her hand, and the shattered glass had sprayed like water from a fountain.

She was looking down at the old lady with something like pity in her eyes. “You told. You poor fool.”

“I didden, Birdie. I didden tell!”

“It’s all right.”

“You’re mad at me. You won’t take me along.”

“I’m not mad, Clara. I never really expected anything to work out.”

Meecham came up the rest of the steps and Mrs. Loftus watched him, peering at him from her heavy wraps like a mole from a thicket, half-dazed and half-blind.

“You go away! Go on! You’re spoiling our trip. Birdie, tell him to go away. What about our trip, Birdie?”

“I guess we’ll have to postpone it for a while,” Mrs. Hearst said quietly. “Mr. Meecham wants to talk to me.”

“He’s a butterinski.”

“Yes. Yes, I guess he is. Come on, we’d better go back to the apartment.”

With a decisive movement she picked up the suitcase and went back down the hall, the old lady staggering behind her, whimpering.

“I want to live in the country. I want to have dogs in the yard. I want...”

“Sh... Sh, now.”

“You promised.”

“I’ll keep my promise,” Mrs. Hearst said. “But not tonight, Clara.”

She opened the door of the apartment and paused for a moment on the threshold, swaying slightly, as if solid waves of time were beating at her legs.

“I used to live here,” she said to Meecham. “Earl and me. Did you know that?”

“I knew it.”

“I didn’t realize how much you were finding out about me until after supper tonight when you came to see Jim. Then I knew I had to drive over here and cover my tracks somehow.” She crossed the room to the old cherry-wood rocker near the window and touched the headrest with her hand. “This was Earl’s chair. He was just like a baby; rocking soothed him.”

Meecham remembered the rocking chair in the Hearst kitchen and he wondered if Mrs. Hearst had kept it there for Earl to sit in when he came to talk in the evenings.

“We used to fight when we lived here. We were having bad luck. Earl was out of a job and I was trying to support all three of us, working as a waitress. In a small town like this there aren’t many jobs, you take what you can get. Nothing worked out for us. Earl felt like a failure and Clara was drinking all the time, and I couldn’t see anything ahead but hell. I was younger in those days; I thought I knew what hell was like.” She glanced at the old lady who was sitting bolt upright on the davenport with a fixed smile on her face, like a deaf-mute trying to appear interested in a conversation. “Clara knows.”

“What’s that you say, Birdie?”

“Nothing much. Would you like a drink?”

“I’ll get it. We’ll celebrate old times, eh, Birdie? Shelebrate old times.” She started toward the kitchen, arms outstretched like an amateur tightrope walker. “Don’t let me disturb the talking. I love to hear good talk.”

Looking at the two women now it was impossible for Meecham to imagine the “old times” when the two strong personalities had clashed. There was no clash any longer; one of them was too weak to make a sound, like a broken drum.

“Well, I divorced Earl. I borrowed the money from my sister and took a bus to Las Vegas. When I came back to Arbana I was single again. I started a rooming house, and that’s how I met Jim. I was feeling so empty and old and... Anyway, we got married. I guess I’m the kind of woman that don’t know how to live without having a man to please and cook for and look after.”

For the second time that night Meecham thought what a pity it was that such a forceful woman would always choose emotionally or physically weak men like Hearst and Loftus.

The old lady was still moving around the kitchen, rattling dishes and opening and closing cupboard doors.

“Jim and I got along all right. Nothing special, but all right. Then, about a year ago, I met Earl on the street. I hardly recognized him, he’d changed so much. We stood there in front of Kresge’s... It was snowing, and Earl didn’t have a hat on and his hair was soaking wet, and he told me that he was sick. He had just found out what was the matter with him and he’d been walking the streets trying to figure things out. Those were the words he used, figure things out.

“I took him home and we sat in the kitchen and he asked me if I had a room for him to stay in. He moved in the next week. I didn’t tell Jim or anyone who he was. My sister found out and we often fought about it. But to me it was the right thing to do. We didn’t live together as husband and wife, we lived as friends that needed each other. He talked to me when I got upset or lonely, and I looked after him when he was sick, and kept his apartment clean and saw that he got enough to eat. We had a lot of quiet happiness together, Earl and me. There was always in the back of my mind the hope that someday someone would find a miracle cure for his disease. The worse he got, the more I hoped, until it was all I could think about, making him live.”

She was looking out of the window, down at the dark and empty street. “If I hadn’t hoped so hard he would be still alive.”

“I don’t believe I understand,” Meecham said.

“I went to Claude for money.”

“Money for Loftus?”

“Yes, to take him away. I’d read in the paper about a cancer clinic in New York where they were doing research on Earl’s disease, and I thought if I could just get him there, there might be a chance for him. I didn’t have a cent and nothing to sell except an old car, and no one to borrow from. Except Claude. The more I thought about going to Claude, the more reasonable it seemed. We had known each other a long time, long before Lily ever met him, and when we parted there was no final blowup or anything, we just drifted apart. That’s how I thought of it.

“I went to his office a week ago today and waited for him outside. We went and sat in his car and I told him everything. What a terrible mistake I made!” she said bitterly. “If I’d asked him to lend me money for a new house or a trip I’d have gotten it. But Claude was a vain man. He couldn’t believe that I loved another man, and that it was the kind of love he and I never had together. He kept saying how he knew I’d come to him, and I kept trying to tell him how I felt about Earl and how serious his condition was. Claude wouldn’t listen. I got out of the car and walked home. I was burning up inside, and my head was splitting so I felt like it was going to blow up. You can feel more anger for somebody else than you ever can for yourself.”

Meecham knew that she was right. Listening to her, he experienced inside his own head a corresponding pressure of anger and resentment, against Margolis, and against all the tyrannies and tyrants that harass the weak.

“For the next two days I went around as usual. I guess I did all the ordinary things, but I couldn’t stop thinking of the money and how easily Claude could have lent it to me if he wanted to, and how much it might mean to Earl. On Saturday night Jim came home after a bad week on the road. He started an argument about me paying too much attention to Earl. I had to get out of the house so I went to the hockey game by myself. That much of what I told you before is true. After the game I was driving through town on my way home when I saw Claude. He was just getting out of his car in front of the Top Hat. There was a girl with him that I didn’t know, all dressed up like a Christmas tree. I stopped my car. I had no plan or anything in mind. I think I stopped mostly because I didn’t want to go home anyway and because I was curious. At first that was all, I was curious.

“They went into the Top Hat together, and I waited. A long time I waited, picturing the two of them inside, drinking and laughing and dancing like only people can that have their health and some money. I tried to picture Earl and me in there having a good time and I almost laughed, it was so funny.

“I thought of all kinds of crazy things when I was sitting there. I thought of going in and facing up to Claude, demanding money right in front of his new girlfriend. Claude’s car was parked across the road, and I even thought of getting behind the wheel and driving it away and selling it some place. Imagine thinking of stealing! Never did I think of stealing before, even when I was a kid, but I thought of it then. Everything began to get very sharp and separated in my mind, so I felt anything I could do for Earl was good and what anyone did against him was bad.

“Maybe I would have stolen the car, I don’t know. But I didn’t, because the girl came out of the Top Hat. She was alone and I could see when she passed me that she was drunk. She was staggering around and talking to herself. She went on up the street into another bar and I followed her. She was standing at the counter when I got there, talking to the man beside her. I heard her say that she wanted a beer and that she’d left her purse behind, and what a terrible place the bar was.”

“That it stank, in fact,” Meecham added.

“Yes, those were her words.”

“And that’s how Loftus knew exactly what happened in that bar, not because he was there but because you told him.”

“I told him,” she said, painfully. “He made me. He planned everything as soon as he found out what I’d done.”

“Margolis came into the bar?”

“Yes. He didn’t stay, but took the girl by the arm and steered her outside. It was nearly closing time. A lot of people were leaving and I left too. When I got outside, I saw Claude trying to lift the girl into his car. She had folded up completely and she was hard to handle because she wasn’t little, like Clara. I wondered who the girl was. I thought, she must have someone, parents or relatives or maybe a husband, who wouldn’t want to see her like that with a man like Claude. And then the idea occurred to me that I should follow them, that maybe the situation might have money in it somewhere, money for Earl.”

She went on talking, quietly and earnestly, as if it was very important to her to explain everything and clarify her motives. It seemed to Meecham that the explanation was not for him or for herself but for Earl.

“They went to Claude’s cottage on the river. I walked right in. The girl was on the couch asleep and Claude was starting a fire in the grate. Claude said, how the hell did you get here? I didn’t answer that. I just told him again I wanted some money and if he didn’t give it to me I would phone Lily and the police and the girl’s parents, everyone I could think of. He laughed at me. He said the police wouldn’t be interested and the girl had no parents and Lily was in South America. When I heard that, I felt that I had nothing left, no hope, no chance, nothing. The whole world was against me and Earl, the whole world, laughing at us, like Claude. I went over to the fireplace. Claude had turned away from me and was poking at the fire again. You’re showing your age, Emmy, he said. You’d better start dyeing your hair. Those were the last words he ever spoke. When I stabbed him he sort of twisted around and nearly fell on top of the girl. Blood spurted all over her dress and coat but she didn’t wake up. I stabbed him again, three or four times more, and I stood there and watched him die. I wasn’t sorry for him or scared for myself. I just felt kind of relieved, like some awful pressure was gone from inside me.”

It was her second mention of the pressure of anger. But Meecham was aware that behind the anger, like a chorus lost in the shadows of a stage while the spotlight followed the principal, there were other pressures; a whole chorus of pressures chosen haphazardly from every period of her life, unrehearsed, dancing out of step and time, screaming off-key.

“I didn’t plan anything,” she said. “It all just happened, and so quick, quicker than telling about it.”

“His wallet was missing.”

“I took it. I stole it. Sometimes I think I feel worse about that than I do about killing him. I was brought up strict, I never stole or told lies when I was a kid. I... well, there was forty dollars altogether. I kept the money and threw the wallet in the snow on my way home. It was snowing heavy by that time. That was lucky for me because I never thought of tire tracks or footprints or anything. I never even thought of the girl being left there with Claude’s body. That seemed like luck too, at first, having her get arrested. I never dreamed it would turn out like this, me with the money I wanted for Earl, and no Earl to make it worthwhile. Six thousand dollars, and no Earl.”

From the kitchen came the crash of glass and the old lady’s voice, thick with the sleep she wooed and fought with like a lover: “A mesh, an awful mesh, mush clean it up fore Victor sheath it.”

“I wasn’t scared until I got home and then I realized what I’d done. It hit me the way I’d struck Claude hard and fast, so I could hardly crawl into the house. Everyone was asleep and the lights were off. I rapped on Earl’s door and he let me in. I told him what had happened. He didn’t get excited, he just kept saying everything would be all right. He fixed me some coffee and when I’d drunk it he made me tell him everything I saw and heard and did, every detail. He wrote down what I said in a notebook. I didn’t know then what his idea was, not until he said, Where will we get the blood? Where will we get the blood,” she repeated dully.

“Where did you get it?”

“From me, from my arm. I told you that I’d cut my arm on the broken tap... I had to tell you something, I knew you’d seen the bandage. But I didn’t cut it, Earl did. It took such a long time to get enough blood and Earl was sick from hurting me. But we had to have it to stain the clothes and it had to be mine because it was the same kind as Claude’s.”

“How did you know that?”

“Once years ago he was hurt on the job and had to have a transfusion. They used my blood, so I guessed it was the same kind. We had to take the chance anyway. Earl bandaged my arm. I guess I broke down then and started to scream because Earl put his hand over my mouth and he kept saying, I killed Margolis, you were home in bed, you know nothing about it, I killed him.

“I was crazy with fear but Earl wasn’t. He said no jury would convict him because he was going to claim that he killed Claude to protect the girl, and the police would never be able to prove any other motive because there wasn’t any. With me it was different, Earl said. They could trace back and find out about my relationship with Claude, they could pin fifty motives on me.

“I don’t know how I got through that night. The next morning I drove over to my sister’s in Chelsea, like Earl told me to do. It was Sunday, and Earl had to wait until Monday to go to the police because he wanted to sell whatever he could before they locked him up. I didn’t find out that the girl had been arrested until Sunday night. I drove back home right away to talk to Earl. Earl said her arrest wouldn’t affect his plan. He was wrong. Neither of us imagined how wrong he was, how it was going to affect not just us but everybody.

“On Monday morning Earl left the house early to sell his old Chevvy and pawn whatever he could, and went over to the Sheriff’s office with the confession in his pocket written out and memorized. You know what happened there... He met the girl’s mother, Mrs. Hamilton, in the corridor. Earl was never a schemer, never wanted anything for nothing. But he had a scheme then when he realized Mrs. Hamilton thought her daughter was guilty.

“He came home just before lunch time, terribly excited. He told me all about it, how the girl being a suspect would give me double protection and how the money would take care of Clara and me. He made me promise to look after Clara no matter what happened.

“He brought the money to me late in the afternoon, six thousand dollars. A fortune. Next morning the first thing I did was go down to Devine’s and buy back the things Earl had pawned. They were Earl’s keepsakes and I thought I’d have them waiting for him as a little surprise when he got out. I did what Earl said to do with the rest of the money. I deposited a little of it in the old account I had under my maiden name and hid what was left. I thought I was safe. Everything seemed so foolproof. Even if Earl’s confession was torn apart, suspicion wouldn’t fall on me but on the girl. Yes, I felt safe, I even felt hopeful. Earl would get off, we’d go away together, he’d be cured. I was full of crazy dreams like when I was young. I guess Earl didn’t have any dreams. This morning he hanged himself.”

The old lady’s voice drifted from the other room: “Birdie? You there?”

“I’m here.”

“Going to bed, very tired.”

“I’ll help you.” She met the old lady at the kitchen door and took her by the arm. Slowly, the two of them moved across the room. “I can’t stay with you tonight, Clara. You’ll be hearing from me, though. I have to go away for a while but I’ll be back, don’t worry. I’ll be back, won’t I, Mr. Meecham?”

He was sure she would.

The snow had stopped. The air was clear and sharp, and the midnight moon traveled with them along the highway.

You are leaving Kincaid. Elevation 900, Population 10,550. Come Back Soon!

“She’ll be back,” Meecham said. “In a year, two years. Maybe sooner.”

Alice pressed closer to his side, as if the mere mention of departures and returns was a threat of separation. “What will happen to her then? What will she be like?”

“She’ll be the same. The pattern is the same — for Birdie, Miss Falconer, Emmy Hearst — and she’ll follow it.”

Alice shook her head in protest. “No, that’s too cynical. People can change; they do.”

“Do they?” The lights of Kincaid were no longer visible, though their reflection shone in the sky. “She’ll come back,” he repeated. “If Jim is still around she’ll take up with him again. If he isn’t, she’ll find someone else, some man who will depend on her, a prodigal son she can mother.”

“You must believe in fate, Meecham,” she said gravely.

“Maybe.”

“Then I guess you must be my fate. I didn’t choose you. You just suddenly loomed up like a... well, like an iceberg.”

“That’s a beautiful thought.”

“I mean it to be.”

He took his eyes off the road for a second and looked down at her. Her face was a vague white blur in the darkness, anonymous, not Alice’s face, but any woman’s. He wondered, with a curious feeling of tightness in his throat, how many icebergs were ahead for Birdie and with what reckless skill she’d steer toward them.

Whatever happened, Birdie would survive. Thinking of her and of the girl beside him, Meecham was conscious of a great surge of energy and power, as if he could go on driving forever without food or sleep.