Sleeping Beauty (4 page)

“Has she often been suicidal before?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Who would know?”

“You could ask her mother.”

He took me into the house as if he owned it. We were close
together for a moment in the lighted hallway, and we exchanged a quick look. He was weathered brown, with impervious blue eyes, and quite a lot of wavy brown hair growing not too high on his forehead. His eyes were a little overconfident, his mouth a little spoiled. And there was a touch of dismay in the eyes and on the mouth, as if he’d felt the first cold draft of age. He had to be at least fifty but looked younger.

His wife was waiting in the living room with Tom’s cousin, the one he had described to me at the drugstore. The two women sat on facing chairs in stiff-necked poses which meant that they had long since run out of things to say to each other.

Tom’s cousin, the younger, had on a light blue pants suit which exaggerated the shape of her body. She looked trapped. But when I gave her a one-sided grin she gave it back to me.

“I’m Gloria,” she said. “Gloria Flaherty.”

The older woman looked the way Laurel might look in twenty years, if she lived. She still had some of her beauty, but there were lines of suffering connecting the wings of her nose and the corners of her mouth, and charcoal marks under her eyes as if she had been through fire. Her hair was streaked with white.

She lifted one of her black-gloved hands and placed it limply in mine. “Mr. Archer? We can’t make any sense of this at all. Can you? Is it true as her husband says that Laurel is suicidal?”

“She may be.”

“But why? Did something happen?”

“I was going to ask you that.”

“But I haven’t really talked to Laurel for several days. She’s been staying at her grandmother’s. She likes to use the tennis court there. She says it’s good therapy for her.”

“Does she need therapy, Mrs. Lennox?”

“I was using the term rather loosely.” She turned and looked quite openly at the cousin, then back at me. “I really prefer not to discuss this matter under the circumstances.”

Gloria got the message and stood up. “I’ll finish cleaning up in the kitchen. Can I get anybody anything?”

Mr. and Mrs. Lennox grimaced and shook their heads. They seemed appalled by the idea of eating or drinking anything in Tom Russo’s house. They were like astronauts artificially sustained on an alien planet, careful but contemptuous of the unfriendly environment and its unlikely inhabitants.

The cousin went into the kitchen. Mrs. Lennox got up and moved back and forth in the limited space in front of the fireless fireplace. She was tall and rather gaunt, but she moved with a certain nervous youthfulness. She flapped her gloved hands in front of her face.

“I wonder what perfume she uses. It smells like Midnight in Long Beach.”

“That’s an insult to Long Beach,” her husband said. “Long Beach is a good oil town.”

I supposed that they were trying to be light, but their words fell heavy as lead. Mrs. Lennox turned to me:

“Do you suppose she’s living here with him?”

“I doubt it. Tom says she’s his cousin. What’s more important, he seems to be in love with your daughter.”

“Then why doesn’t he look after her?”

“I gather that she takes some looking after, Mrs. Lennox.”

She went into a thoughtful silence. “That’s true. She always has. Laurel’s been an unpredictable girl. I was hoping that her marriage—”

“Forget about her marriage,” Lennox said. “It’s obviously on the rocks. They haven’t been living together for weeks. Russo says he doesn’t want a divorce; but he’s just holding out in the hope of some moola. I know these types.”

“You may be mistaken about him,” I said. “He seems to care about her just as much as you do.”

“Really? Bear in mind that I’m her father. And I resent being bracketed with that druggist.”

He was in a mood to resent almost anything. His face had
flushed up red, and then gone gray. His wife was watching the changes in its color as if they were familiar signals to her. There was a certain distance in her look, but she leaned over him and put both hands on his shoulders.

“Calm down, Jack. It may be a long night.” She turned to me. “My husband suffers from tension. Under the circumstances, you can understand why.”

I said, “I don’t understand exactly why you came here, Mrs. Lennox.”

“We thought Laurel might be here. Her grandmother said she’s been talking about coming back to Tom.”

“You must have been concerned about her.”

“I’ve been concerned about her all my life—all
her
life.”

“Do you want to tell me why?”

“I wish I could.”

“Does that mean you can’t, or you won’t?”

She looked at her husband again, as if for a further signal. His face had turned a mottled pink. He pulled his hand across it in a wiping motion which left it quite unchanged. But his voice had changed when he spoke.

“Laurel is very important to us, Mr. Archer. She’s an only child, the only child we’ll ever have. If anything happened to her—” He shrugged and slumped in his chair.

“What do you think might happen to her?”

Lennox remained silent. His wife stood looking down at him as if she was trying to read the thoughts in his head. I asked them both:

“Has she attempted suicide before?”

“No,” her father said.

But her mother said, “Yes. She has in a way.”

“With drugs?”

“I don’t know about that. I caught her once with her father’s revolver. She was playing Russian roulette in his room.”

Lennox moved from side to side in his chair as if he was strapped there. “You never told me any of that.”

“There are a number of things I haven’t told you. I never had to, till now.”

“Hold them for the present, will you? This is a hell of a time to open the floodgates.” He stood up, turning his back on me and towering over her. “What if the old man hears about it?”

“What if he does?”

“Dad’s estate is hanging in the balance; you know that. All that woman needs is a good excuse to take it away from us. And we’re not going to give it to her, are we?”

He raised his hand to the level of her face and brought the open palm against her cheek. It wasn’t a blow, exactly, and it wasn’t exactly a love pat. It made a small slapping noise, and it seemed to jar her.

It jarred me. They were one of those couples who couldn’t pull together. The energy of their marriage passed back and forth between them like an alternating current that shocked and paralyzed.

The woman had begun to cry, dry-eyed. Her husband tried to comfort her with little noises and touches of his hands. Her dry sobs continued like hiccups. She said between them:

“I’m sorry. I always do the wrong thing. I spoil your life for you.”

“That’s nonsense. Be quiet.”

He took her out to their car, and then came back to the front door. “Archer?”

I was waiting in the hall. “What do you want?”

“If you have any sense and compunction at all, you won’t spread this around.”

“Spread what around?”

“The trouble with my daughter. I don’t want you talking about it.”

“I have to report to Russo.”

“But you don’t have to tell him everything that was said. Particularly what just passed between us.”

“You mean about your father’s estate?”

“That’s right. I was indiscreet. I’m asking you to be discreet for me.”

I said I would do my best.

I went out to the kitchen. Cousin Gloria was drying dishes at the sink, her black hair tied up on each side with shoelaces. She gave me a quick bright glance over her shoulder. “You shouldn’t come out here. This place is a mess.”

“It looks all right to me. Everything’s clean.”

“I have been working on it,” she admitted. “I’m practicing up for getting married again.”

“Have you picked the lucky man?”

She turned to face me with a plate in one hand and the dishtowel in the other. “As a matter of fact, I have. He’s a beautiful person.
I’m
the one who’s lucky.”

She was polishing the plate as if it was a symbol of her future. There was something touching about her faith and energy.

“May I offer my congratulations?”

“Sure, and I accept. We’d be married now, but we want to do it right. That’s why I took this little job with Tom on top of my regular job. I’d do it for nothing, but Tom can afford to pay me.”

She was a lively, open girl, and in a mood to talk now that Laurel’s parents were out of hearing.

“Where do you work?” I asked her.

“In the kitchen at the Medical Center. I’m studying to be a dietitian. Harry’s in the food business, too, when he’s working.
Right now he isn’t working. We have a dream that someday we’ll open our own little restaurant.”

“I hope you make it, Gloria.”

“We’ll make it. He’s a smart man, and he has a nice touch with people. Even Tom likes him.”

“What do you mean, ‘even’?”

“Tom doesn’t like too many people. He didn’t like Flaherty—that was my first—at all. You could count the people he really likes on the fingers of one hand.” She raised her left hand, with the fingers spread. “Losing his mother the way he did, when he was so terribly young, it made him kind of suspicious of other people. My mother often said that she’s surprised Tom turned out as well as he did, considering the poor start he had. I think old Mr. Russo deserves a good deal of credit. Old Mr. Russo has his limitations, but he’s a good father to Tom, and always has been.”

She heard herself talking perhaps a little too much, and turned back to her dishes. I was content with a little silence while I took in what she’d said. Tom had lost his mother young, and now he was in danger of losing his wife. The two losses together didn’t form a pattern but they suggested the possibility of one. It hung in the bright kitchen like a double shadow caused by a defect in the lighting.

“What happened to Tom’s mother?”

Gloria said after a pause, “Aunt Allie died. It happened so long ago I don’t remember it. I remember we lived here for a while, all of us together in this house.” She looked around the kitchen nostalgically, possessively. “But everything comes to an end. Mother got an offer of a job, and Mr. Russo thought she ought to take it.”

“Does Mr. Russo live here with Tom?”

“Not any more. Tom took over the house from him when Tom and Laurel got married. Mr. Russo moved into an old people’s home in Inglewood. It was kind of rough on him, but he always wanted Tom to have the house.”

“How did Tom and Laurel happen to meet?”

“She just walked into the drugstore one day, and he fell for her at first sight. When she said she’d marry him, he thought he was the luckiest man in the world.”

“Didn’t you think so?”

She shook her head, and her tied-up hair flopped like vestigial wings. “It’s nothing against Laurel, though God knows she has her problems. But I sometimes think Tom took on too much when he married into that family. They’re so rich, and we work for everything we get. All Tom really has is a job in somebody else’s drugstore. And this old house which he’s buying from his father.”

“And Laurel.”

“If
he’s got her.”

“What was the trouble between them, do you know?”

“Tom never discussed it with me. He’s very close-mouthed.”

“But you know both of them. You’ve seen them together.”

“Sure.”

“How did they get along?”

“It’s hard to say. They didn’t talk much to each other. But each of them always knew the other one was there, if you know what I mean. I think they love each other. Harry thinks so, too.”

“Does Harry know them?”

“Sure he does.” Her face was open, ready to say more. Then she seemed to remember something, and fell silent for a while. She added, without apparent connection, “Tom is very jealous of Laurel. I think she’s the only girl he ever looked at.”

“How old is Tom?”

“Thirty-one. He’s four years older than I am.”

“And Laurel’s the only girl he ever had?”

“So far as I know. I was his girl for a while. Not really—we were more like brother and sister—but he used to take me places. I taught him to dance, stuff like that, but we both knew it didn’t amount to anything. He just wanted to find out how to conduct himself with a young lady.”

“How did he conduct himself?”

“All right. He was kind of stiff and stand-offish, though. He still is. I don’t think he ever kissed me once in his life.” Her dark eyes came up to mine, sober and confiding. “He was waiting for Laurel, if you know what I mean. She was his fate, the only one for him.”

“Then why did they break up?”

“They didn’t really break up. She goes back to her folks from time to time, or she goes and lives with friends.”

“Like Joyce Hampshire?”

“That’s right. They’re real old friends. I might do the same thing if I was married to Tom. He goes in for these long silences; he always has. And Laurel has troubles of her own—you don’t need me to tell you that. But they’ll be back together, I guarantee it.”

“I hope so.”

I thanked her, and left.

Greenfield Manor, where Joyce Hampshire lived, was a row of two-story town houses surrounded by an imitation adobe wall. A thin young man dressed like a spy in a trench coat and turned-down hat came out through Joyce’s gate as I went in.

The patio light was on, and I caught a glimpse of his face. It wasn’t so young after all. It was grooved by time and trouble, like my own. He turned away from me as if he didn’t want to be known or remembered.

I pressed Joyce’s doorbell. She must have been waiting on the other side of the door, because she flung it open immediately. She opened her arms and said:

“Honey?”

She was a nice-looking woman, but everything about her was a trifle blurred. Her soft hair was blurred by the light behind it, her eyes were blurred by doubt, her figure by excess flesh.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to call you honey. I thought you were someone else.”

“I don’t mind.”

“But it’s so embarrassing.”