Bedelia (21 page)

“I see,'' Charlie said gently. “Then you didn't know your father?”

She looked at him blankly.

“Didn't you know anything about him? How old he was, his nationality, what sort of people he came from, what he did for a living?”

“He came from an aristocratic English family. His father was a younger son and came to this country because . . .”

“Bedelia,” Charlie interrupted, “we're not playing a game. You've promised me the truth; are you going to keep you promise?”

“Yes,” she said humbly.

“What about your father?”

“I told you. When they had a dinner party, he'd carry me downstairs from the nursery. There were gold plates on the table and hired musicians. My mother had diamond earrings and . . .”

Charlie went off on a tangent. He hoped to shock her into honesty. “Do you remember McKelvey?”

“Who?”

“Wasn't he your first husband?”

“Herman Bender was my first husband.”

Charlie leaped. “Who was Herman Bender?”

“I told you,” she said patiently. “My first husband. We were married when I was seventeen. He kept the livery stable.”

Charlie was shaken. He had prepared himself for horror, but it was tidy horror that concerned facts he knew and had arranged in his mind.

“I promised to tell you the truth,” she said.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he sputtered. “Go ahead, tell me about Herman Bender.”

“I never talk about him because I don't like to remember how horrid people were to me afterward. I had to leave town. They went around saying I'd known about the mushrooms. They were jealous when they found out about the thousand dollars.”

“Herman died after eating mushrooms?”

“I guess they weren't really mushrooms. But how was I to know? He taught me to test them. He was always going to pick mushrooms. They made a good meal and didn't cost anything.”

“You gave him mushrooms and he died, and then you got some money?”

“We always cooked them in butter.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The mushrooms. He wouldn't eat them unless they were cooked in butter.”

“I want to hear about the thousand dollars.”

She spoke patiently. “I didn't know about the thousand dollars, honestly. I'd heard about insurance, but I didn't know what it meant until they sent me the money.”

“Then why did you give him the mushrooms?”

“He liked them. And we could get them for nothing, all we had to do was go out and pick them.” The flesh tightened over her cheekbones. “He was cheap. I didn't think he had any money the way he was always going on about ending up in the poorhouse. He said the horses ate too much, ate up all the profits.”

“Where was this?”

“Just outside of San Francisco. I told you I was born in California.”

There were other things she had told him. He saw now that certain gems of truth shone among her falsehoods, and understood
that when she tried to tell the truth it was tarnished by deceit. For Bedelia there was no clean line between honesty and fabrication.

“Did you love Herman Bender?”

Her laughter was harsh.

“Then why did you marry him?”

Bedelia looked out of the window. The wagons had brought the men back to work. Beside the road the mounds of snow were growing tall. And the men were working their way toward the gate.

“He had a good business and wasn't afraid of getting married,” Bedelia said, turning toward Charlie again.

“It must be hard to marry when you're seventeen and not in love with your husband.”

Her lips moved but no words came out. She was carrying on a debate with herself, arguing the reality of some image that had risen in her mind, pondering the wisdom of telling it.

“Speak up, Bedelia. I'll try to understand.”

The words tumbled out in a cascade. “He was good to me sometimes and sometimes he was horrid. He'd hit me and knock me down. You don't know, Charlie! He was mean and he'd hit me if I asked for money. Maybe you don't believe that either.” Her hands protected her belly. “I lost my baby. It was his fault.”

“And you got a thousand dollars for giving him the mushrooms.”

“No!” she cried. “I didn't mean to, honestly, I was only trying to give him a cheap meal. It wasn't till afterward that I found out he'd gone and insured his life for a thousand dollars after I told him I was in the family way.”

“That's hard to believe,” Charlie said. “His insuring his life showed consideration and tenderness, and looked as if he were glad that you were bearing him a child. It's hard to believe he hit you and made you lose it.”

Her face had become scarlet. She beat her fists against the table. “You've got to believe that, Charlie. There are a lot of things you don't know because you don't know tough people. A
husband's always glad when you tell him you're going to have your first; he thinks he's a wonderful fellow, he's going to be a father. That's the way Herman felt when I told him, only he had a terrible temper. When he got sore he forgot I was in the family way. He was sorrier when I lost it.”

“You might have had another.”

“If he'd lived,” she said piously.

“Or perhaps you'd have prevented it, since you seem to know how.”

“I didn't know that till later. I was green then, I didn't know much of anything. It was later, a long time later, that I found out about those things.”

“Did you know them when you were married to McKelvey?”

Charlie was used to that look of blank inattentiveness. He spoke in a loud, authoritative voice. “Bedelia! Look at me.” She turned her head as the subject might obey a hypnotist. Her eyes were still veiled. Charlie reached across the table, took her chin in his hand, tilting it and forcing her to keep her face turned toward him. Suddenly she smiled. The frost was out of her eyes, they were bright and alive again, her smile warm and loving.

He felt a brute for going on with his interrogation. “What about McKelvey? Were you married to him or weren't you?”

“I don't remember.”

Charlie was not sure he blamed Herman Bender for his fits of temper. With the sense of impotence Charlie's fury swelled. “It's impossible to forget a person you've been married to. Don't think I'm gullible enough to believe that sort of excuse.”

“Please don't shout at me, Charlie. I can't help it if I forget, can I?”

“Your memory serves you conveniently. This morning you told me there'd never been any other husbands but Will Barrett and me, and then suddenly you pull out this Bender.”

“Herman was so mean to me that I forget him a lot of the time.”

Charlie shook his head.

“I don't always remember unpleasant things,” Bedelia said
plaintively, and when Charlie looked at her face he knew that this at least was the truth.

Still he tried patiently to get some order and logic into her story. “What did you do after Bender died?”

“I went away.”

“Where?”

“Different places. I was companion to a rich old lady and we traveled a lot. We went to fashionable resorts, Nantucket, Bar Harbor, and Asbury Park.”

Charlie remembered that Ben had spoken of Asbury Park as the scene of her meeting with McKelvey. “Did you meet anyone there?”

“That's where I met Harold De Graf. I've told you about him. He was a Southerner, awfully good-looking and immensely wealthy, but he had consumption. He fell in love with me . . .”

“Bedelia,” Charlie said wearily, “I've heard that story. I want the truth. You promised to tell me the truth, you know.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Was there actually a rich old lady and a consumptive millionaire?”

“Of course, dear. I've told you about her. She wanted to leave me a lot of money, but her relations were against me, particularly her nephew; he was a terrible scoundrel and when I wouldn't let him make love to me . . .”

“What about Jacobs?” snapped Charlie.

Bedelia did not answer, but her left hand covered the right on which she wore the ring of gold and garnets that Charlie had given to her to replace the black pearl.

“Then you do remember Jacobs?”

A vein bisected her forehead. It stood out prominently, slanting from her hairline to the left eye. Charlie noticed that it was throbbing. Her teeth cut into her lower lip.

“You must remember Jacobs. You kept the black pearl.”

When she spoke, Charlie saw the mark of her teeth on the lower lip. “It was mine. I had the right to keep it.”

“It must have been hard to leave everything else,” Charlie
said coldly. “All your clothes and the kitchen things and fur coats. But you kept the ring and it was the ring that trapped you.”

“You sound like you don't love me.”

The men with snowshovels had reached the strip of road in front of their house. The vast silence which had surrounded the house was broken by the clatter of shovels and the men's coarse, good-natured laughs.

CHARLIE'S LEGS WERE stiff. The back of his neck ached. Beyond the terrace the river rushed along as cheerfully as ever and in the western sky the clouds had become luminous islands on a pearly sea. The wagon had called for the snow-shovelers, who had been driven back to City Hall for their pay. It was five o'clock, and Charlie had been standing at the window for almost an hour.

He remembered with astonishment that he had not telephoned the office. Although his phone had been connected all day, he had not once thought to call the office. On the day of his mother's death he had telephoned his foreman three times.

Bedelia was sleeping. The quarrel had worn her out and she had been able to cast aside her worries and curl up on the bed like a kitten. For Charlie there was not such easy refuge.

When he made up his mind to ask his wife about Ben's accusations, Charlie had expected denial or confession. He had got neither, only evasions which fell between the two. She had owned neither to marriage nor acquaintance with Jacobs and McKelvey, but had given signs that dwelt somewhere in the twisted avenues of her memory. He had mentioned Jacobs and she had made an involuntary gesture toward the hand on which she had worn the black pearl. And Asbury Park, which had been the meeting-place between romance with the tubercular millionaire. The fabric of her story was woven with threads of truth as well as with the colors of deceit. She had a strong enough memory for all her fancies; it was her sins that she forgot.

And there had been Herman Bender, the livery-stable proprietor, the husband she had forgotten in the morning and remembered
in the afternoon. If his death had been, as she said, an accident, it had been a piece of remarkably good fortune for her. She had been freed of a disagreeable mate and endowed with one thousand dollars, which had seemed at that time a fortune. Her husband's death had come as a rare piece of luck and the tawdry accident became a pattern for crime. In one form or other she had repeated it remorselessly, always with greater cunning and new refinements. Charlie's flesh shrank as he recalled the emotions which had churned in him when she had first confided that she was pregnant.

She had never once admitted to murder. Nor had Charlie asked the direct question. Delicacy forbade it. He could no more speak to Bedelia of murder than he could mention deformity in the presence of the deformed. There had been pathos in her confession that she had married Herman Bender because the man was willing and he made a good living. No other answer could so clearly have shown that her early life had been sordid. Like the mansion in San Francisco, the aristocratic forebears, the gold plates, hired musicians, the diamonds in her mother's ears, it pointed to youthful poverty and shame.

Charlie pitied her because she had not been able to grow beyond these humiliations, but he was too honest to accept these as excuse for her crime. If everyone whose childhood has been sordid were to become a murderer, at least eighty per cent of the population would be homicidal. Early deprivations, unhappiness, hunger, may lead to a grudge against society, bitterness, protest, or the healthy attempt to make a better world for the new generation, but no sane judge would accept such excuse for deliberate, cruel, plotted murder.

There was no mystery about her motives. She had killed for money, planning her life like a business man who hopes to lay aside a tidy fortune for his old age. She had arranged her business affairs with acumen, had invested a part of her capital in each new venture. There was no mystery about it, no grandeur, but here was enigma, the enigma of the soul of a human being who is able to commit crime as normally and efficiently as the business man plans a deal. Why is one person incapable
of crime, another able to kill in cold blood? Why, where, what is the cause of that delicate balance between good and evil? This is the mystery beyond all mysteries, the problem that neither detective, physician, nor psychologist has yet solved. Charlie remembered the newspaper story about the New Hampshire elder who had smothered his sister with a sofa pillow because, after seventeen years, he had believed she was interfering in his love affair. Why after seventeen years on that particular day?