Day of Wrath

THOUBLED FACES HAD BEGUN TO LOOK ALIKE TO ME. And people's
troubles, too. It was a prejudice I wasn't fully aware of until Mildred
Segal walked into my office late one rainy afternoon and I found myself
remembering her. Not just her air of misgiving or even the depth of trouble
behind her light green eyes. I remembered her: Details of her life. Grievances,
disappointments, sacrifices. Above all, sacrifices. To parents, husband,
kids. Mildred Segal had been born for sacrifice, like an island princess.
And I suppose I should have felt sorry for her. Only I thought I knew her
too well. Thought I knew that behind the abject look was a fierce pride—a
victim's canny assurance that, come what might, she would be wronged. It
was the next best thing to having a destiny. But I guess I should also
have known that people who act like they have a destiny are the only true
innocents in the world.

Only I wasn't thinking clearly that April day. I was thinking
that I didn't care to deal with the drab, familiar lady sitting in front
of me. I was thinking that I wanted to go home to the Delores and drink
cold beer and listen to the spring rain pattering against the windows.
April just wasn't the right month to delve into someone else's past. Especially
the last week of April.

I listened to her anyway. With half an ear. And since
I couldn't feel the pity she felt was owed her, I made a show of being
polite. I fetched sighs at all the right places. Shook hands with the notion
that the world was a theater of injustice. And offered her a cigarette
when I couldn't think of anything else to offer up.

"But I don't smoke!" Mildred Segal replied. And then,
as if that had been the last straw,. she began to cry. "I can't do anything
right!" she said helplessly.

I sat there for a moment—staring at her. And slowly,
against instinct and judgment and the faint tug of the weather, I found
myself feeling exactly what I should have felt the instant she'd walked
through the door—deep, authentic pity. She was not an attractive woman
—short, flat-chested, with a long, U-shaped, horsey face, pulled down
at the mouth, like a horse's mouth, as if she, too, were trained to hold
a bit between her teeth. She'd made herself up badly, as well. She was
wearing so much eyeliner that her eyes looked as if they had been drawn
in ink. And then she'd dressed with awkward solicitude, in a tweed suit
that looked to be at least twenty years old.

Watching her cry I felt, I think, a little of what women
must feel when they see grown men break down. But what finally got to me
wasn't Mildred Segal; it was my own hardness of heart. I'd pegged her for
martyrdom the moment she'd walked into the office. And the fact that I'd
been right depressed me. It just didn't seem fair to Mildred to know what
I already knew about her.

So I got up and walked over to her chair—a wad of Kleenex
in my right hand and my left hovering about her shoulder in a pantomime
of concern. I couldn't quite bring myself to touch her; it would have been
too much—like kissing a cousin. But I did offer to help—a piece of
generosity that I immediately regretted.

"I don't even know if I can afford you," she sobbed. "That's
how hopeless I am—coming here and wasting your time and making a fool
of myself." She blew her nose noisily, folded up the tissue as if it were
a monogrammed towel, and dabbed at her pale green eyes.

"You can afford me," I said half-heartedly. "The question
is—do you need me? You haven't really told me why you've come."

"I haven't?" She looked down at the floor as if she'd
taken my question as a rebuke. I had the feeling that that was the way
she reacted to any question. "It's so personal," she said in a small, dispirited
voice.

"
Mrs. Segal, most of my cases are personal."

"I suppose that's true," she said. She passed a hand through
her short brown hair and sighed. "Yes, I suppose that's true." She finished
drying her eyes and looked up at me with a weak smile. "I don't really
know very much about detectives—outside of what I've read in books or
seen on TV. The fact that I'm here at all is . . . alarming. . .I had to
take a sick day to do it. That'1l catch up with me," she said, almost as
an afterthought. "One of these days, that'll catch up with me, too. I have
this odd feeling that my whole life is about to catch up with me—all
the mistakes."

Her smile began to collapse; so I changed the subject,
although I wasn't sure if any subject was exempt from her sense of tragedy.
She was wired for it, like a switch-board—the remotest line of thought
leading straight to her suffering heart. It occurred to me that it had
taken considerable courage for a woman like this to come to me at all.
It made me think better of her than I had at the start.

"You mentioned sick days?" I said. "Where do you work?"

"I teach school," she said. "Elementary school. They're
quite strict about personal holidays. I've already taken both of mine—because
of Robbie. So I had to call in sick this morning. I just hope no one saw
me down-town, that's all. I don't think I could take any more trouble.
I mean, on top of Robbie."

I asked her who Robbie was.

"Why, she's my daughter, of course," Mildred Segal said
with surprise, as if it were headline news. "Robbie's my daughter."

"And the trouble she's in?"

She dropped her head to her breast and in a tiny, guilt
ridden voice whispered, "She's run away from home."
 

HOME WAS IN THE NORTHSIDE SUBURB OF BOSELAWN on Eastlawn
Drive, an L-shaped, residential street with a large stone church—school
set in the bend of the L. Worn, two-story brick houses—each one with
its own foursquare patch of lawn, low dividing hedge, narrow asphalt driveway,
and maple tree planted in the center of the yard—lined the street on
either side of the church. The whole neighborhood had a nervous, conformable,
slightly depressed look of probation, as if the presence of that massive
church had made the householders stiff and uneasy, forced them to look
inside themselves each day and wonder if they'd truly arrived at respectability.
From what I could see of the street on that rainy Wednesday afternoon,
the time of arrival had come and gone for these families. Everything but
the church looked small and haggard and thoroughly sick of pretending to
be good.

The Segal home-pitch roof, red brick facade, white colonial
trim—was located across from the church on the east side of the drive.
I could see a rain-swept school yard from the front stoop. A small, lonely
looking boy in a knit cap, windbreaker, and jeans was standing in the rain
and staring up at one of the basketball hoops as if it were another kind
of crucifix. But there were so many emblems of sacrifice up and down Eastlawn
Drive that I suppose I could have read an allegory in a Buick. Mildred
Segal made sad sense against the. backdrop of this middle-class neighborhood.
She was the final product of the probationary mentality—a woman so fixed
on proving herself before the neighbors that her whole life had taken on
the legal, presumptive, and slightly crazy aspects of a trial by jury.

The living room was small and sterile. The furniture—an
uncomfortable couch covered with a polished cotton print of yellow flowers
on a blue field, two wingback chairs in light blue velvet, a low mahogany
coffee table with Queen Anne legs—looked exactly as it must have looked
in the showroom. Color-coordinated, fussy, and unlived in. Mildred actually
groaned when I sat down on the couch, as if I'd seated myself on an oil
painting. Instead of telling me to get up, she ran off to the kitchen to
make coffee. And I sat back—rather gingerly—on the sofa, stared out
the front window at the boy in the rain, and asked myself what I was doing
in a house where the furniture, and apparently just about everything else,
was meant for show.

I knew what I'd thought I'd be doing there—taking my
own kind of inventory, measuring what it was that Robbie Segal had run
away from. But it was fairly clear that I wasn't going to learn much from
the visit. At least, not much that I didn't already know. Who wouldn't
run away from that living room? I asked myself. Or from a woman whose heart
broke when you sat on her chairs? By the time she returned from the kitchen
with a coffee pot in her hand, I'd begun to dislike Mildred Segal again
and all the strident familiarity of her household. There weren't going
to be any surprises here.

"Maybe you'd like some coffee?" she said timidly.

"That would be fine."

"Maybe we should serve it in the kitchen?" she said with
a half-strangled amiability and looked greatly relieved when I got up off
her couch and walked through an arch that opened on the dining room. The
cherrywood table was set with four immaculate place settings—just as
it had been in Pogue's display window. That was one meal that would never
be served, I thought, and sighed. I was already beginning to feel sorry
for Robbie Segal.

I followed Robbie's mother through another opening into
the kitchen. There was a round formica table in the center of the room.
Mildred Segal sat down at it abruptly. I guess we camp here, Harry, I said
to myself and glanced at the woman. She had a sweet, abstracted smile on
her face, as if she'd just looked up from her knitting and found me standing
in front of her.

"Do sit down, Mr. Stoner," she said gaily. "And I'll pour
you some coffee?"

She was happy now. She'd gotten her way. The furniture
was intact and I was safely in the kitchen. Everything was swell. I sat
down across from her and let her pour me a cup of coffee. Manipulative
people make a habit of rewarding you when you go along with their manipulations,
like animal trainers slipping a lump of sugar to their beasts.

"Perhaps I should have used the good china," she said,
when she caught me staring moodily into the cup. "But they were my grandmothers,
and I'd hate to see any of them get chipped."

I felt like throwing the cup against the wall. Instead,
I asked her to tell me about Robbie, and her face bunched up again.

"For chrissake," I said irritably. "We're not going to
get anywhere if you keep breaking down."

"Don't snap at me!" she said with sudden vehemence.

Then she blushed and said, "I'm sorry. I'm just used to
dealing with children all day long. And then Tom, my husband, used to snap
at me . . . I don't like men snapping at me."

"Where is Tom?" I asked her.

"Oh, he's dead," she said nonchalantly. "He died eight
years ago. Robbie was only six. He died of a stroke in the very chair you're
sitting in. From all that snapping, probably." She smiled rather disturbingly.
"I was joking, Mr. Stoner. Every once in a while, I make a bad joke. Tom
died of arteriosclerosis. For Robbie's sake, I wish he'd survived. To be
quite frank, I hadn't bargained on raising a child all by myself. I've
done my best, of course, but I've always lacked a certain empathy, if that's
the right word. I'm not sure what to call it. It runs in the family, though.
My parents weren't particularly warm people. Generous. And supportive.
But not empathetic. I didn't expect empathy from them. But this is a different
generation. They expect you to communicate in different ways. Ways that
I'm simply not equipped to handle. I've done my best, of course. But .
. .

Her lips began to tremble again. "I want to say something,"
she said heavily, "because I'm probably going to cry, in spite of your
warning. And because I know how I must appear to you. I'm not as blind
as you think. I know I'm fussy and old-fashioned and not terribly likeable.
It is not easy, Mr. Stoner, to go through life knowing that you're not
. . . likeable. My marriage suffered from it, and my daughter has suffered
from it. And if I may say so, I've suffered from it, too. But that's not
what wanted to tell you." She looked up at me as if the thing she was looking
to say was hidden in my face. "I am trying to find a way to express what
I feel for Robbie."

"You love her," I said.

Tears spilled out of Mildred Segal's green eyes. "I'm
not sure," she whispered guiltily. "I'm not at all sure that I understand
what that word means."

I looked down into my coffee cup and said, "That's not
a problem I can help you with, Mildred."