Putting his arms tightly around her, he pulled her to him and, lifting up her small, sharp face, kissed her on the mouth. She clung to him, fragile and light, and so terribly, humiliatingly thin. Clutching her, holding her with all his strength, he sat for an endless interval, until at last she moved away from him, a tired, forlorn figure, almost lost in the murky gloom.
“I feel so darn bad,” she faltered.
“Don’t”
“I feel so—empty. I ache all over. Why, Jack? What is it? Why should I feel so bad?”
“Let it go,” he said tightly.
“I don’t want to feel this way. I want to give you something. But I don’t have anything I can give you. I’m nothing but an emptiness, aren’t I? A sort of vacant place.”
“Not totally.”
In the darkness there was a flicker of motion. She had gotten to her feet; now she stood in front of him, blurred and indistinct in a sudden rapidness of motion. When he looked again, he found that she had slid hastily out of her clothing; it was piled up by him in a small, neat heap.
“Do you want me?” she asked hesitantly.
“Well, in a sort of theoretical way.”
“You can, you know.”
He smiled ironically. “Can I?”
“You may, then.”
Hamilton lifted up her bundle of clothes and handed them to her. “Get dressed and let’s go upstairs. We’re wasting our time and dinner’s getting cold.”
“It’s no use?”
“No,” he answered achingly, trying not to see the barren plainness of her body. “No use at all. But you did your best. You did what you could.”
As soon as she had dressed, he took her hand and led her to the door. Behind them, the phonograph still blared out the futile, lush tangle of sound that was Daphnis and Chloe. Neither of them heard it as, unhappily, they toiled up the stairs.
“I’m sorry I let you down,” Silky said.
“Forget it”
“Maybe I can make it up, some way. Maybe I can …”
The girl’s voice faded out. And in his hand, the presence of her small, dry fingers ebbed into nothingness. Shocked, he spun and squinted down into the darkness.
Silky was gone. She had dimmed out of existence.
Baffled, incredulous, he was still standing rooted to the spot when the door above him opened and Marsha appeared at the top of the stairs. “Oh,” she said, surprised. “There you are. Come on up—we have company.”
“Company,” he muttered.
“Mrs. Pritchet. And she’s brought all kinds of people with her—it looks like a regular party. Everybody laughing and excited.”
In a stupefied haze, Hamilton climbed the remaining steps and entered the living room. A babble of voices and motion greeted him. Looming over the group of people stood the great lump of a woman in her tawdry fur coat, ornate hat flapping its feathered grotesqueness, peroxide blond hair clinging in metallic piles to her plump neck and cheeks.
“There you are,” Mrs. Pritchet cried happily, as she caught sight of him. “Surprise! Surprise!” Lifting up a bulging square pasteboard carton, she confided loudly, “I brought over the dearest little cakes you ever saw—regular treasures. And the most wonderful glazed fruit you ever—”
“What did you do with her?” Hamilton demanded hoarsely, advancing toward the woman. “Where is she?”
For a moment, Mrs. Pritchet was perplexed. Then the mottled wads of flesh that were her features relaxed into a smile of crafty slyness. “Why, I abolished her, dear. I eliminated that category. Didn’t you know?”
XI
As hamilton stood, staring fixedly at the woman, Marsha came quietly over beside him and grated in his ear, “Be careful, Jack. Be careful.”
He turned to his wife. “You were in on it?”
“I suppose so.” She shrugged. “Edith asked me where you were, and I told her. Not the details … just the general outline.”
“What category did Silky fall into?”
Marsha smiled. “Edith put it very well. Little snit of a girl, I think she called her.”
“There must be quite a lot of them,” Hamilton said. “Is it worth it?”
Behind Edith Pritchet came Bill Laws and Charley McFeyffe. Both were loaded down with armfuls of groceries. “Big celebration,” Laws revealed, with a cautious, half-apologetic nod at Hamilton. “Where’s the kitchen? I want to put this stuff down.”
“How’s it going, friend?” McFeyffe said craftily, with a broad wink. “Having a good time? I’ve got twenty cans of beer in this sack; we’re all set.”
“Great,” Hamilton said, still dazed.
“All you have to do is snap your fingers,” McFeyffe added, his broad face flushed and perspiring. “I mean, all she has to do.”
After McFeyffe came the small, humorless figure of Joan Reiss. The boy, David Pritchet, walked beside her. Taking up the rear hobbled the sour, dignified war veteran, his wrinkled face an expressionless mask.
“Everybody?” Hamilton inquired, sick with dismay.
“We’re going to play charades,” Edith Pritchet informed him joyously. “I dropped over this afternoon,” she explained to Hamilton. “Your cute little wife and I had a good, long, heart-to-heart chat.”
“Mrs. Pritchet—” Hamilton began, but Marsha quickly cut him off.
“Come on in the kitchen and help me get things ready,” she said to him in a clear, commanding voice.
Reluctantly, he followed after her. In the kitchen, McFeyffe and Bill Laws stood around, awkward and clumsy, not certain how to occupy themselves. Laws grinned fleetingly, a brief grimace touched with apprehension and what might have been guilt. Hamilton couldn’t tell; Laws turned hastily away and busied himself unwrapping endless cold cuts and sandwich spreads. Mrs. Pritchet liked hors d’oeuvres.
“Bridge,” Mrs. Pritchet was saying emphatically in the other room. “But well need at least four people. Can we count on you, Miss Reiss?”
“I’m afraid I’m not much good at bridge,” Miss Reiss’ colorless voice answered. “But I’ll do the best I can.”
“Laws,” Hamilton said, “you’re too smart for this. I can see McFeyffe, but not you.”
Laws didn’t look directly at him. “You worry about yourself,” he said huskily, “I’ll worry about me.”
“Don’t you have enough sense to—”
“Massa Hamilton,” Laws burlesqued, “Ah jes’ strings along wit’ what Ah finds. Iffen Ah do, Ah lives longah.”
“Cut it out,” Hamilton said, flushing resentfully. “Don’t turn that junk on me.”
Dark eyes mocking, hostile, Laws turned his back. But he was shaking; his hands trembled so badly that Marsha had to take the pound of smoked bacon from him. “Leave him alone,” she chastised her husband. “It’s his life.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Hamilton said. “It’s her life. Can you live on cold cuts and sandwich spreads?”
“It’s not so bad,” McFeyffe said, philosophically. “Wake up, friend. This is the old lady’s world—correct? She runs this place; she’s the boss.”
Arthur Silvester appeared in the doorway. “Could I have a glass of warm water and bicarbonate of soda, please? My stomach’s a bit acid, today.”
Putting his hand on Silvester’s frail shoulder, Hamilton said to him, “Arthur, your God doesn’t hang around this place; you won’t like it here.”
Without a word, Silvester brushed past him and over to the sink. There, he received his glass of warm water and soda from Marsha; going off in a corner he concentrated on it, excluding all else.
“I still can’t believe it,” Hamilton said to his wife.
“Believe what, darling?”
“Silky. She’s gone. Absolutely. Like a moth you slap between your hands.”
Marsha shrugged indifferently. “Well, she’s around somewhere, in some other world. Back in the real world she’s still cadging drinks and strutting her stuff.” The way she said the word “real” made it sound sm
utty and contaminated.
“Can I help?” Edith Pritchet, fluttering coyly, appeared in the doorway, a great mass of wobbling flesh encased in an outrageously garish flowered silk dress. “Goodness, where can I find an apron?”
“Over in the closet, Edith,” Marsha said, showing her where.
With instinctive aversion, Hamilton drew away from the creature as she waddled past him. Mrs. Pritchet smiled fatuously at him, a knowing expression on her face. “Now, don’t you sulk, Mr. Hamilton. Don’t spoil our party.”
When Mrs. Pritchet had waddled back out of the kitchen and into the living room, Hamilton cornered Laws. “You’re going to let that monster control your life?”
Laws shrugged. “I never had a life. You call guiding people around the Bevatron a life? People who don’t understand anything about it, people who wandered in off the streets, a bunch of tourists without technical training—”
“What are you doing, now?”
A shudder of defiant pride passed over Laws. “I’m in charge of research for the Lackman Soap Company, down in San Jose.”
“I never heard of it.”
“Mrs. Pritchet invented it.” Not quite looking at Hamilton, he explained, “It makes those fancy perfumed bath soaps.”
“Christ,” Hamilton said.
“That isn’t much, is it? Not for you. You wouldn’t be caught dead with a job like that.”
“I wouldn’t manufacture perfumed soaps for Edith Pritchet, no.”
“I tell you what,” Laws said, in a low, unsteady voice. “You try being colored awhile. You try bowing and saying, ‘Yes, sir,’ to any piece of white trash that happens to come along, some Georgia cracker so ignorant he blows his nose on the floor, so moronic he can’t find the men’s room without somebody to guide him there. Me to guide him there. I practically have to show him how to let down his pants. Try that awhile. Try putting yourself through six years of college washing white men’s dishes in a two-bit hash house. I’ve heard about you; your Dad was a big shot physicist. You had plenty of money; you weren’t working in any hash house. Try getting a degree the way I did. Try carrying that degree around in your pocket a few months, looking for a job. Winding up guiding people around with an arm band on your sleeve. Like one of those Jews in a concentration camp. Then maybe you won’t mind operating the research end of a perfumed soap plant”
“Even if the soap plant doesn’t exist?”
“It exists here.” Laws’ dark, lean face was bleak with defiance. “And that’s where I am. As long as I’m here, I’m going to make the best of it”
“But,” Hamilton protested, “this is an illusion.”
“Illusion?” Laws grinned sarcastically; with his hard fist he thumped the wall of the kitchen. “It feels real enough to me.”
“It’s in Edith Pritchet’s mind. A man of your intelligence—”
“Save that,” Laws broke in brutally. “I don’t want to hear it. Back there, you weren’t so concerned with my intelligence. You didn’t particularly mind if I was a guide; you didn’t act very bothered.”
“Thousands of people are guides,” Hamilton said uncomfortably.
“People like me, maybe. But not people like you. Want to know why I’m better off here? Because of you, Hamilton. It’s your fault, not mine. Think that over. If you’d made some attempt, back there … but you didn’t. You had your wife and house and cat and car and job. You had it fine … naturally, you want to go back. But not me; I didn’t have it so fine. And I’m not going back.”
“You are if this world ceases,” Hamilton said.
A cold, vitriolic hate appeared on Laws’ face. “You’d break this up?”
“Bet your life.”
“You want me back with an arm band, don’t you? You’re like the others—you’re no different. Never trust a white man; that’s what they told me. But I thought you were my friend.”
“Laws,” Hamilton said, “you’re the most neurotic sonofabitch I’ve ever met.”
“If I am, it’s your fault.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“It’s the truth,” Laws said emphatically.
“Not exactly. Part of it is true. There’s a hard kernel of truth down in it, somewhere. Maybe you’re right; maybe you ought to stay here. Maybe this would be the better place for you—Mrs. Pritchet will take care of you, if you get down on all fours and make the right noises. If you walk the proper distance behind her and don’t annoy her. If you don’t mind perfumed soap and cold cuts and asthma cures. Back in the real world you’d have to keep fighting it out with everybody. Maybe it’s time you had a rest. You probably couldn’t have won, anyhow.”
“Stop pestering him,” McFeyffe said, listening. “It’s a waste of time—he’s nothing but a coon.”
“You’re wrong,” Hamilton said to McFeyffe. “He’s a human being and he’s tired of losing. But he won’t win here, and neither will you. Nobody wins here but Edith Pritchet.” To Laws, he said: “This will be worse than being pushed around by white men … in this world you’ll be in the hands of a fat, middle-aged white woman.”
“Dinner’s ready,” Marsha called sharply from the living room. “Everybody come and get it”
* * * * *
One by one they filed into the living room. Hamilton emerged just in time to see Ninny Numbcat, attracted by the smell of food, appear in the doorway. Rumpled from having slept in a shoe box in the closet, Ninny wandered across Edith Pritchet’s line of march.
Crossly, half-stumbling, Mrs. Pritchet said, “Goodness.” And Ninny Numbcat, getting ready to hop up on somebody’s lap, disappeared. Mrs. Pritchet went on her way without noticing, a tray of petits fours gripped in her lumpy pink fingers.
“She took your cat,” David Pritchet spoke up shrilly, in a loud, accusing voice.
“Don’t worry about it,” Marsha said absently. “There’re plenty more.”
“No,” Hamilton corrected thickly. “There aren’t. Remember? There goes the whole class of cats.”
“What was that?” Mrs. Pritchet asked. “What was that term? I didn’t catch it.”
“Never mind,” Marsha said quickly, seating herself at the table and beginning to serve. The others took their places. The last to appear was Arthur Silvester. Having finished his glass of warm water and baking soda, he entered from the kitchen, carrying a pitcher of tea.
“Where’ll I put this?” he asked querulously, hunting for a place on the crowded table, the glass pitcher large, slippery, and shiny, in his withered hands.
“I’ll take it,” Mrs. Pritchet said, smiling vacantly. As Silvester came toward her, she reached up for the pitcher. Silvester, without a change of expression, raised the pitcher and brought it down on the woman’s head with all his atrophied strength. A gasp of disbelief rose from the table; everybody was on his feet.
An instant before the pitcher struck, Arthur Silvester faded out of existence. The pitcher itself, falling from his dissolved hands, dropped to the carpet, shattering and rolling. Tea spilled everywhere, an ugly, urine-colored stain.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pritchet said, vexed. Along with Arthur Silvester, the smashed pitcher, the pool of steaming tea, ceased to exist.
“How unpleasant,” Marsha managed, after awhile.
“I’m glad that’s over,” Laws said thinly, his hands shaking. “That—was close.”
Abruptly, Joan Reiss rose from the table. “I’m not feeling well. I’ll be back in a moment.” Turning quickly, she hurried out of the living room, down the hall, and disappeared into the bedroom.
“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Pritchet inquired anxiously, gazing around the table. “Is there something upsetting the girl? Perhaps I can—”
“Miss Reiss,” Marsha called, in an urgent, penetrating voice, “please come back here. We’re eating dinner.”
“I’ll have to go see what’s troubling her,” Mrs. Pritchet sighed, beginning to struggle to her feet.
Hamilton was already out of the room. “I’ll
handle it,” he said, over his shoulder.
In the bedroom Miss Reiss sat, her hands folded in her lap, her coat, hat, and purse beside her. “I told him not to,” she said quietly to Hamilton. She had taken off her horn-rimmed glasses; they rested loosely between her fingers. Her eyes, exposed, were pale and weak, almost colorless. “That’s not the way to do it”
“Then it was planned?”
“Of course. Arthur, the boy, and myself. We met today. That’s all we can count on. We were afraid to approach you, because of your wife.”
“You can count on me,” Hamilton said.
From her purse, Miss Reiss took a small bottle and laid it on the bed beside her. “We’re going to put her to sleep,” she said tonelessly. “She’s old and worn-out.”
Sweeping up the bottle, Hamilton held it to the light. It was a liquid preparation of chloroform, used in biological specimen fixing. “But this’ll kill her.”
“No, it won’t.”
David, the boy, appeared anxiously in the doorway. “You better come back—Mother’s getting fretful.”
Rising to her feet, Miss Reiss took back the bottle and stuffed it in her purse. “I’m all right, now. It was the sudden shock. He had promised not to do it … but these old soldiers—”
“I’ll do the job,” Hamilton told her.
“Why?”
“I don’t want you to kill her. And I know you will.”
For a moment they faced each other. Then, with a brief, impatient twitch, Miss Reiss fished out the bottle and pushed it in his hands. “Do a good job, then. And do it tonight.”
“No. Sometime tomorrow. I’ll get her outdoors—on a picnic. We’ll take her up into the mountains, early in the day. As soon as it’s light”
“Don’t get frightened and back out”
“I won’t,” he said, pocketing the bottle.
He meant it.
XII
OCTOBER sunlight hung cold and sparkling. A faint trace of frost still lay over the lawns; it was early morning and the town of Belmont steamed quietly in a dull cloud of blue-white mist. Along the highway, a steady stream of cars moved up the peninsula toward San Francisco, bumper-to-bumper.