Women Are Funny

Cornell Woolrich Women Are Funny

“I’m frivolous,” she warned him, “you better not.” And she added in an awe-inspiring whisper, “Mother says I’ve never grown up, my father says I never will, and my brother says if I do, you have his sympathy.”

“I know!” Tommy scowled. “They’re jealous because I’m going to have you all to myself.”

“Don’t blame me afterwards,” Nanette shrugged, “if you find out you don’t like it as much as you think you do—” But he simply took her in his arms and silenced her with seventy-eight kisses of all varieties, long ones, short ones, and in-between ones.

“Nothing can stop me,” he said breathlessly, “not even mountains or... or hurricanes!”

“Then,” she said, seeing that it was all settled, “can I bring Guadeloupe to live with us?”

“Why, yes,” said Tommy, too happy to even ask who, what or which Guadeloupe was.

And so he married her — because of her yellow, yellow hair that was the color of sweet print-butter and because of her eyes that did such terrible things to him without meaning to at all every time he looked into them — and principally because she was Nanette and for no other reason.

When the house way out there on Long Island was all in readiness from top to bottom, several weeks later, he drove her out in his roadster to see it, saying, “I want to show you something.” Nanette, in spite of now being an old married lady with a ring and an entirely new name (that she spent hours every morning breaking in by saying it to herself in front of a mirror) and a friendly little book that told you how long coffee should boil and — oh, yes — a strange new person much nicer than a relative around you all the time called a husband for whose sake (the book said) you boiled the coffee — in spite of all these things, Nanette stood up on the seat of the car and clapped her hands together in ecstasy. “Ooh,” she cried wildly, “I love it, I could just eat it up! Tommy, whose is it?”

“Go inside and guess,” said Tommy, opening the door for her. But she simply jumped over the side of the car without waiting, which old married women are not supposed to do, and darted toward the house emitting a succession of squeals.

By the time he had backed the car into the garage and climbed out to follow her indoors, the squeals had ascended to the second floor and were coming from one room after the other through the windows — one squeal for each new room Nanette entered. “Eight,” counted Tommy, “and that’s exactly, right — she even gave one for that blue room.” He hadn’t been at all sure about “that blue room.” His friend Bill’s wife had insisted upon it being put in. “You won’t need it at first,” she said mysteriously, “but in it goes! And don’t look at me like that, either.” It had, when completed, a most childish scheme of decoration — there was a parade of white rabbits around the walls. Almost too childish, Tommy thought, even for Nanette. “But it isn’t for Nanette.” Bill’s wife explained. She turned to Bill and remarked most impolitely, “Did you ever see anything as dense as a young husband?” Tommy felt sure she meant him by the way she looked at him.

“That blue room,” incidentally, was the only one in the house that had been left unfurnished. Tommy wondered why that was (Bill’s wife had taken charge of the furnishings for him), but decided not to say anything about it.

The squeals stopped finally and Nanette came flying down the stairs to him and flung her arms about his neck. “I know whose it is now!” she cried. “I’ve just guessed it. It’s for us — and we’re going to live in it!”

“And how,” said Tommy with mock seriousness, “did you find that out so quickly?”

“I kept looking for the people that lived in it and looking for them,” she related breathlessly, “and I couldn’t find them anywhere, and finally I looked in a mirror and saw myself and it dawned on me that I was the person that was going to live in it!”

“And what about me?” teased Tommy.

Nanette nestled closer to him and said, “You’re the husband of the person that’s going to live in it.”

He didn’t think anything about it at the time, but later the day came when he used to look back and wonder if she had really meant something by saying it in that way.

He lifted her off the ground and held her up in the air, pressed close to him. “Do you love me, Nanette?” he said.

“Do I love you!” answered Nanette, kicking her feet back and forth.

Every night when Tommy drove home from the city after work, the house was waiting for him with an orange light shining a welcome through every one of its windows. He would sound his horn twice, and there would be a terrific shriek of glee from within doors and a decrepit married lady of seventeen would come flying out and leap onto the running-board.

“Easy, easy,” Tommy would pretend to admonish her, “my paint job!”

“I’m on Chapter Two of the book now,” she announced breathlessly, “and I’ve learned how to cut the insides of grapefruit loose from their moorings! You take a knife,” she explained proudly, “and run it around the inside close to the skin and that does it.”

“No!” teased Tommy. “Can I believe my ears?”

“Tommy,” she pleaded, thrusting a little finger through his buttonhole and folding it over. Tommy knew this gesture by now; it meant she wanted something.

“Go ahead,” he grinned. “What is it?”

“Before you put the car in the garage,” she crooned, “would you run it down to the village like a good boy and bring us back another dozen grapefruit — would you, Tommy?”

“But we had a dozen in the house only this morning,” Tommy protested, mystified.

“Oh, I know,” agreed Nanette mournfully, “but you see I used those to practice on.”

“Well,” said Tommy good-naturedly, “it’s a good thing Chapter Two wasn’t about watermelons!” And he started his engine.

“Let me ride along with you on the running-board,” Nanette remarked, staying where she was. “Go fast, I like to get the breeze!” And she crouched down low, holding on with both hands.

But when he drew up in front of the village store twenty minutes later, she gave another of her famous squeals.

“What is it, Nanette?” cried Tommy in alarm.

“Oh, I just remembered the French fried potatoes I was making,” answered Nanette innocently. “They’re on the stove.”

“You mean,” suggested Tommy gently, “they were on the stove.”

“Maybe,” said Nanette after a moment’s thought, “we ought to eat at some restaurant as long as we’re here in the village.”

“It wouldn’t,” admitted Tommy humorously, “be a bad idea!”

He came home the next evening as per schedule, sounded his horn, and Nanette shrieked joyfully and came bolting out, clearing all five of the veranda steps with a single jump. “Well,” said Tommy, burying his face on her shoulder when she had reached the car, “how’s the grapefruit-killer tonight?”

“Guadeloupe’s here!” Nanette told him excitedly. “Mother sent her out in a taxi with the rest of my things.”

“Oh, company!” thought Tommy, registering a private grimace.

“Come in and look,” Nanette insisted, pulling at him. “You’ve never seen her, have you?”

“No,” said Tommy without much enthusiasm, “and I could’ve waited a while longer, too.”

“You’ll love her,” his aged wife promised, pushing the rear fender of the car as though to help it into the garage.

As he followed her into the house, he paused before the looking-glass in the hall to straighten his necktie. Even if the guest was an unwelcome one, politeness demanded that her host look his best. “She’s upstairs,” Nanette told him, “in the bedroom.” Obediently he trudged up after her.

“There!” said Nanette, ushering him in at the door, “isn’t she the sweetest thing you ever laid eyes on?”

Tommy looked all around in growing wonderment, the fixed smile of false cordiality with which he had been about to greet the unknown visitor slowly fading from his face. There was no one in the room at all! “There!” Nanette repeated impatiently, “don’t you see her?” And then he saw her. She was perched atop the fragile night-stand between their beds, her feet hanging down insouciantly toward the floor, her hands dropping limply at her sides. She was a doll.

There was something about her, though — even Tommy knew as soon as he looked at her. She wasn’t just an everyday boudoir doll, frivolous and French. There was far more to her than that; there was a distinct personality there that could almost be felt. Those eyes, those deep mysterious eyes set deep in her coffee-colored face gleamed out at him unfriendly.

“Well, I’ll be—” said Tommy.

“She’s a voodoo doll,” Nanette whispered gravely. “An old colored woman gave her to me one time when I was on a West Indies cruise with father. I’ve been under her special protection ever since. She’s a little bit alive, you know—”

“Nanette!” admonished Tommy severely, “what’s the matter with you! Have you gone crazy?”

Nanette shook her head and protested, “No one will ever believe me, but it’s true just the same. She can influence people when she wants to — she almost casts a spell if you look at her eyes too long.”

Tommy promptly strode over to Gaudeloupe, seized her roughly by the neck, and turned her face to the wall. “That’ll take care of that, all right!” he said firmly.

Nanette smiled uncertainly. “I don’t think you’ll be in good with her any more after this,” she remarked.

“I’ll throw her out!” said Tommy wrathfully.

“I guess not!” Nanette exclaimed, “after all she’s done for me? Why, one night about a year ago when there was no one in the house, a burglar got into my room and she caught him for us.”

“What did she do,” Tommy sneered, “blow a police whistle?”

“He was a big strapping man six feet tall,” Nanette said, “and he was in a dead faint on the floor with Guadeloupe sitting there on the dresser looking down at him with her big eyes.”

“Heart attack or indigestion, most likely,” scoffed Tommy.

“Well, I know better,” Nanette said. She went over to the ill-used personage on the night-stand, reversed her once more, and placatingly smoothed out her wide orange taffeta skirt, that hung from the waist down, like an Oriental dancer’s. “You just leave your hands off her after this,” she told him sulkily, “or I don’t know what’ll happen to you.”

“This house,” said Tommy, turning around and stalking out of the room indignantly, “gets more like a kindergarten every day!”

It had not, of course, been a real quarrel — and yet it was the first time there had been even a difference of opinion between the two of them, so far. But the trouble was, it seemed to keep up intermittently after that. “Good-night, Tommy,” Nanette said cheerfully in the darkness of their room that night. And then she cooed almost inaudibly, “Good-night, honey.” Tommy glowed happily for a few seconds, thinking she had meant it for him. And then a poisonous realization attacked him. The last “good-night” had been directed toward Guadeloupe, he felt positive. He was goaded into vocal utterance. “Does that thing have to stay in the room with us all the time?” he called over to Nanette. “Why don’t you keep her downstairs on the radio?”

There was an angry stir from Nanette’s bed. “She’s not doing anything to you!” she rebuked him. “Why don’t you go and sleep on the sun-porch if you feel that way about it?”

“I will!” Tommy exclaimed in an insulted voice, jumping up and indiscriminately seizing pillow and blankets.

“I’ll sleep here every night,” he assured the cold, clear stars visible through the glass roof a short time later, “until she throws that damn doll out!”

“He’ll come back and apologize to both of us,” Nanette tearfully vowed to Guadeloupe, “or he can stay out there!”

Unfortunately, neither concession was forthcoming — either that night or the following morning. Both parties, as so often happens, seemed to consider themselves as being in the right. Tommy went to and from his shower whistling nonchalantly. Nanette, overhearing him, held a whispered consultation with Gaudeloupe. “I don’t see why I should slave for him, the brute, the way he treats me! He can get his own breakfast!”

When Tommy opened the door and looked in at her some time later, she pretended to be asleep. “Nanette,” he said heartlessly, “I’m going to be late!”

Her eyes flew resentfully open. Was this any way to apologize to a person for one’s misbehavior? “I have a headache,” she stated through the border of a lace pillow. “You made me cry all night, you big bully! There’s grapefruit,” she concluded coldly, “in the icebox — if you can think of food at such a time.” And she drew the covers up to her eyes and stared out at him over the top of them.

“You and your grapefruit!” he barked at Nanette suddenly without in the least meaning to, and turned around and stormed out of the house to his car. He addressed a number of robust remarks to it, nothing personal intended, while backing it out of the garage. Nanette, in the bedroom upstairs, heard them all too plainly through the window.

Things rapidly went from bad to worse. Nanette’s morning headaches became chronic after this. She no longer excused herself on the ground that she had lain awake crying the night before on Tommy’s account, either. Perhaps this was because he no longer looked in at her to ask. Whenever she felt guilty about it, and she frequently did, she only had to turn and look at Guadeloupe to read encouragement and approval in her eyes. “No,” agreed Nanette somewhat dubiously, “I don’t suppose it’s hurting him to eat his breakfast at the drugstore soda-fountain. It seems kind of mean, though.” And she added wistfully, “It used to be fun to dig out the insides of the grapefruit—” But the doll’s eyes were inflexible, and somehow Nanette couldn’t seem to summon the strength to get out of bed; it felt as though something were holding her there against her will.

And in a short time things went from worse to even more worse, if possible. There was the night Tommy came home, for instance, and found not an orange light shining through a single window to greet him. “Nanette!” he called at the foot of the stairs. No answer. He scratched his head and began putting lights on. At the door of her room he listened. Not a sound. He opened it cautiously and looked in. Immediately a pair of glowing orbs, like a cat’s, met his gaze from the night-stand. Tommy shivered slightly and lit the light. The eyes became Gaudeloupe, watching him mockingly. Daggers were exchanged between them for a moment. Then Tommy saw the note, lying upright against the mirror of Nanette’s dressing-table.

“Tommy: I’m in town having dinner with an old friend. There’s grapefruit in the icebox. Nanette.”

“Damn the grapefruit!” said Tommy violently, making mincemeat of the note and flinging the pieces at Guadeloupe. Guadeloupe continued to stare at him, inscrutably triumphant. That look of hers, as though she had put one over on him, was more than he could bear; it was the last straw. And the opportunity to act was too tempting to be resisted.

“I’ve wanted to do this,” said Tommy, advancing warily upon the doll, “for a long time — and here’s where you get yours!”

He seized the individual on the night-stand with savage delight, thrust her under his coat, and buttoned it over. Then, with a large, unnatural swelling under one arm marking the spot where Guadeloupe now was, he left the house, got in his car, and drove toward the village. As he was entering the village outskirts he met a charming little girl hurrying homeward with parcels under her arms. “Little girl!” Tommy called to her with hypocritical sweetness, “would you like a nice doll to play with?”

The little girl paused in alarm and regarded him hostilely. “My mama,” she announced, “told me never to take nothing from strangers, so there!”

Tommy whistled to cover his embarrassment and drove on a little farther. A lighted shop-window attracted his attention. “Mlle. Sadye, Millinery” it said. Tommy went in and accosted Mlle. Sadye in her own premises. “I’ve got just the thing you want to dress up your window,” he declared brightly, and holding up Guadeloupe by the scruff of the neck, displayed her.

“Dun’t bodder me, bizness is rotten!” replied Mlle. Sadye in the most Parisian of accents.

“But it’s free,” announced Tommy, “we’re giving them away as an advertisement!”

“So I’ll take it,” shrugged Mlle. Sadye, “did I say no?”

Tommy drove off again a moment later and blew a kiss behind him. “We hate to lose you,” he mocked happily, “we’re so used to you now!”

One cannot definitely accuse Guadeloupe of working her spells overtime; she may not have had anything to do with it, but — it is a strange coincidence that at the precise moment at which Mlle. Sadye’s assistant deposited Guadeloupe in the shop-window to keep a quantity of Empress Eugenies company, Nanette — speeding homeward with her old school-chum in the latter’s open car — suddenly felt her hat leave her head in a gust of wind and disappear in the darkness. The friend stopped the car almost immediately, and backed it up, and they both got out and searched along the ground, using matches for illumination, without finding it. “Never mind,” said Nanette at length, “it’s gone. It’s probably all dusty by now, anyway. I have plenty of others at home.”

“But it looked so cute on you!” protested her chum, as they continued on their way. “It’s my fault for driving so fast. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do — we’ll stop at the first place we come to and I’m going to buy you another one.”

“But Sylvia, don’t be silly!” Nanette objected. “I’m not the least bit cold without it.”

“I don’t care,” Sylvia insisted, “you’re my guest tonight, and I’m going to see to it that you leave me in as good condition as you met me. Here comes a village now — let’s see what we can do here.”

And, stepping out of the car in front of Mlle. Sadye’s, Nanette gave a louder shriek than any with which she had ever greeted Tommy’s homecoming. “Oh, how could he?” she wailed broken-heartedly, pointing at the glass showcase.

Half an hour later Guadeloupe had been reinstated atop the night-stand and phrases of accusation flew back and forth between bedroom and sun-porch. “It’s... it’s mental cruelty, that’s what it amounts to! I f-feel just like div... divorcing you! Great big bully!”

“Well, you just try it,” vowed Tommy hotly, “and I’ll break the judge’s neck, break the jury’s neck, break the lawyer’s neck, and... and—” He struggled desperately for self-control, but it eluded him fatally — “wring your neck too!” he concluded half-heartedly, hoping she wouldn’t hear this last remark of his.

Unfortunately she did. There was a moment’s startled silence from the bedroom. Her aggrieved eyes sought Guadeloupe’s. “Did you hear that?” she gasped. “That,” she assured Guadeloupe hectically, “is the absolute last straw! He thuh — threatened me with physical violence!” And she dissolved into a flood of rather loud and thoroughly indignant sobs, lifting her head from time to time to remark “I’ll fix him, you wait and see! He’ll be sorry he spoke to me like that!” And Guadeloupe’s inscrutable expression might have been taken to mean: “I’ll help you. Why don’t you do it now?”

“I’ll wait till tomorrow,” Nanette whimpered softly, “I’ll give him just one more chance.”

In the morning, when the tyrant had departed citywards without apologizing for his heinous conduct and blood-curdling words, Nanette reluctantly decided that the moment of retribution was at hand. She was not quite sure of just what to do, though. Guadeloupe apparently decided for her. For, looking into the doll’s eyes, Nanette suddenly remembered that very kind gentleman, Mr. Perry, whom she had met through Sylvia and who had seemed so very anxious to see her home the night before.

“Just the thing!” cried Nanette, “I’ll use him — Mr. Tommy has got to be taught a lesson!”

“Good!” Guadeloupe seemed to say, “I was hoping you would.”

“But how on earth can I reach him—?” Nanette’s face clouded.

“Leave that to me,” Gaudeloupe seemed to say.

At once, without a moment’s waste of time, the telephone began to ring downstairs. Nanette hurried down to it. It was — she was nearly incapable of speech for a moment — Mr. Perry himself! Sylvia, he explained a trifle nervously had given him her phone number. He hoped she, Nanette, wouldn’t mind, his calling her like this.

“Isn’t that the funniest thing!” said the candid Nanette, “I was just thinking of you only a moment ago—”

Mr. Perry, evidently encouraged by this, wanted to know if she would have tea with him.

Guadeloupe, upstairs in the bedroom, was working overtime; the “No” on Nanette’s lips somehow changed to a “Yes” and escaped from her before she could control it. She looked about her helplessly, as though not understanding what had happened to her.

Mr. Perry, however, seemed greatly pleased. “Where will I meet you?” he said, and “What color dress will you wear?” A thought-wave from the bedroom came shooting down the stairs and made Nanette answer “pink.”

When she had hung up she passed a hand before her eyes in mystification. “Now what made me do that?” she said to herself, “I feel just as if I were in a trance.”

Some time later a messenger arrived at the door and delivered a profusion of long-stemmed pink roses, in a cardboard box, into the amazed Nanette’s hands.

She was dressed to go out, and wearing the pink dress she had never intended to put on but somehow had found herself in a few moments ago. When she carried the box inside and opened it on the living-room table she found a card with Mr. Perry’s name on it and a written message: “Wear one of these in friendship and make the rest jealous.”

Nanette slowly pinned one to the shoulder of her dress. “But I can’t leave them lying here like this,” she said to herself, “Tommy will wonder where they came from.” And then, insinuatingly, the thought presented itself: “That’s just what you want, isn’t it? It will teach him a lesson.” Nanette sighed and nodded slightly in agreement, but without much enthusiasm.

In fact, there was nothing at all gay or lively about her as she began putting on her gloves to leave.

Several hours later a horn sounded a number of times outside the doorway of the silent, unlighted house. There was an expectant pause, and then a crestfallen Tommy put his key to the door and came in. “Nanette!” he called, and then ran hopefully up the stairs. He came down them again a moment later, but much more slowly and with his head hanging despondently. “Didn’t even leave a note of explanation this time,” he murmured ruefully, switching on the living-room lights. Then he saw something on the table and went over to it curiously. A box of exquisite pink roses — what were they doing here? A sudden guilty thought assailed him and made him jump. Had today been Nanette’s birthday and had he forgotten all about it? “No, it’s November,” he said, and then he found the card. “J. Walter Perry. Wear one of these in friendship and make the rest jealous.”

It is best to draw a veil over the next five minutes. Such words as he used, in reference to J. Walter Perry, even though familiar ones, were enough to make the pale pink roses themselves turn a deeper red in embarrassment. When he had finished kicking the helpless flowers around the four corners of the room, and only leaves and petals and faint perfume remained, Tommy shook his fist wrathfully at the ceiling, above which the bedroom lay. “She did this!” he cried, “She’s to blame!” And he didn’t mean Nanette, either.

He stormed out to his car once more and started citywards, in quest of Bill, sympathy, and strong drink with which to forget what he considered to be his wrecked home life. And if his eyes grew hotly moist several times during the course of the journey, it was simply grains of dust blowing into them from the highway.

Meanwhile Nanette, on a magic, amber-lighted floor, was learning all about the rumba from J. Walter Perry. Even that funny little corner-step where you bend in and out as though you had a cramp from eating green apples. “Oh, it’s fun!” she proclaimed, “let’s try it again!”

J. Walter Perry led her back to their table and thought for a while. Then he said, very cleverly, “You almost have it — but not quite. Now, if you go home before you’ve finished learning it, you’ll forget it again in no time at all. Now, I know a place out on the Merrick Road where they have the best rumba orchestra in the state. Why don’t we drive out there and practice some more — just for an hour or two?”

“Oh, but I shouldn’t,” Nanette said doubtfully. Still, learning the rumba was a lot of fun — and then she mustn’t forget that every extra hour she stayed away from home taught Tommy that much bigger lesson. Maybe he would appreciate her more after this — especially if she could turn on the radio and dance the rumba for his special benefit. She could almost hear him saying, “Why, Nanette, how talented you are! I never thought you had it in you!”

“Oh, come on!” J. Walter Perry was coaxing. “He probably isn’t home himself, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Nanette conceded, “I’ll telephone home from here and find out — because if he is in, I don’t want him to worry about me too much,” she smiled. “You see I didn’t even leave word where I’d be or anything.”

The crafty J. Walter Perry frowned and said: “If he is in, you don’t need to mention any names or anything—” But Nanette was already on her way to the telephone.

When she came back to the table, she was the one who was doing the frowning. “I’ll just show him,” she stormed, “for neglecting me like this! Let’s go to that place, if you want to.”

“Was he in?” asked J. Walter Perry nervously.

“No,” said the inconsistent Nanette, “the mean old stayout!”

They departed forthwith for the roadhouse on the Merrick Road.

“But,” protested Nanette innocently, “if we eat upstairs in a private room like this, how are we going to practice the rumba?” Less than a quarter of an hour later she was seen coming downstairs again — alone and going some place in a hurry. The place, by the way, was home. She also seemed to be in a very bad humor, as the proprietor discovered when he approached and bowed to see if he could be of any help. “You get me a taxi this very minute!” blazed Nanette, whirling on him furiously, “do you hear me?”

“Madame,” said the manager anxiously, “has something happened?”

“Go upstairs,” snapped Nanette, “and help the person I left there to get the soup-tureen off his head — I just pushed it on with all my might! And what you see all over his shoulders isn’t blood, it’s tomato soup!” And she made her way haughtily outside to the waiting taxi.

She had to continue being haughty all the way home, on account of the driver. He mustn’t be able to say to people that he had seen an aged married lady of seventeen frightened and crying.

But once she was in the house, that was different! And no Tommy anywhere to console her! He had been home and he had gone again — she could tell because he had left the lights on in the living room, and he had kicked those horrid pink flowers (she never wanted to see pink flowers again as long as she lived) all around the rug, and — what was this? — he had found that awful person’s card and torn it into tiny pieces! “Oh!” she bleated softly, “maybe I’ve lost him for good! Maybe he’ll never come back any more!” And she ran from room to room, like a little girl who is afraid of being left alone in the dark, calling “Tommy! Oh, Tommy dear! I didn’t mean to do it!”

No Tommy answered. She went upstairs then, to have a much longer and more thorough cry across the top of her bed, which was one of those beds just perfect to cry on. And there she saw Guadeloupe, sitting on the night-stand, serene as ever, smirking — even gloating.

They stood staring at one another. “You never liked him, did you?” said Nanette at last, very slowly and very dangerously. “Well, maybe I’ve lost him,” she continued, drawing nearer the doll little by little, “but you’re not going to sit around and be able to say ‘I told you so!’” And with a sudden bloodthirsty squeal, she pounced like a kitten on a mouse. Was there an answering squeal of terror from Guadeloupe, or was it simply the echo given back by the walls?

Down the stairs crept Nanette, with a limp doll hanging from one hand and a stony, starey, fixed look on her face.

And the other half of the household was racing citywards at that precise moment, in a black-and-blue mood that hid the stars above from sight, and with a speedometer that said 55–60. Before him lay bright lights, strong drink, and a Nanette-less evening. He didn’t want any of those things — and yet there he went, speeding toward them as fast as he could go. All he really wanted was to forget, to forget pink roses and Nanette’s being out with somebody else. And it was darned hard to forget; that was why his chin was sunk dejectedly on the edge of the wheel, and dust kept getting in his eyes and making them wet, and the speedometer attained 61½, and the two halves of what had once been a perfectly good heart kept beating in time, just as though it wasn’t broken at all.

He never knew later why he did it, or what happened to make him do it; but first he seemed to hear a faint, far-off squeal or cry of some kind, that came to him out of the nowhere. It couldn’t have been the car, because he’d had the car oiled only that afternoon. But whatever it was, he thought he’d heard it, and it did something to him. The black-and-blue mood left him all at once and departed elsewhere, and the sky was suddenly full of happy little stars that sent a rain of silvery light down on him. But most amazing of all, he took his eyes from the wheel and found out that he was going back in the direction from which he had just come. The car seemed to have deliberately turned itself around the other way, right under his very hands, at the moment he had heard that strange, unearthly squeal. He didn’t waste time wondering what had happened, because all he knew now was that he wanted to be back where he belonged, where Nanette was, and nothing else counted. He couldn’t seem to get there quickly enough! The speedometer began to flirt with 65, and ahead of him, all down the long road home, Tommy could see a vision of pale yellow hair and beckoning eyes dancing just ahead of his roadster. “Nanette,” he murmured wistfully, “open your arms and forgive me, because here I come!”

He got there — home where she was and where he wanted to be too — jammed on his brakes, and was in the house almost before the wheels had stopped turning. “Nanette,” his mended heart called happily, “where are you?” Up the stairs five at a time and into her room. She wasn’t there, but he took one look around and then he saw something: the night-stand between the two beds looked different. For there, where Guadeloupe who had worked evil spells used to be, she wasn’t any more; in her place was a photograph in a frame, the picture of someone who loved Nanette very deeply, the picture of Tommy.

He tiptoed out of the room and down the stairs again very quietly, and just as he got down there the door leading to the cellar opened and a very smudged and soiled Nanette stepped forth. Tommy opened his arms, and she was in them, like a baseball in a glove.

“Oh, I was wrong,” breathed Tommy, “and you were right! And from now on that’s going to be the rule with us — you’ll always be right.”

“But where,” he said after a while, “did you get all that soot on your hands and face?”

“Oh,” Nanette answered complacently, even a little proudly, as though she had done a good deed, “I’ve been down in the cellar stuffing rags and — and things — into the furnace.” And she winked at him mischievously. “We won’t mention any names,” she said.

And as their lips touched and touched again, starlight from outside was coming in through every window of the house, even through the window of that blue room upstairs that had pictures of white rabbits on the wall.