Double Jeopardy (10 page)

I will not ask you to believe me in this; the jury didn't. After nearly two years in France, sojourning for the most part with people who spoke no English, it doesn't sound plausible that I had not picked up enough French to decipher Gilberte's simple message. Nevertheless, it is so. I have never been good at learning languages and, except for a few choice idioms of profanity garnered at the front, I am hopelessly incapable of translating anything more than drugstore Latin.

After a glance at it, I passed the letter across the table for Anita's inspection. “What does it say?” she asked coldly. “Or is it too personal for your wife to know?”

“I don't know myself,” I replied with a shrug.

“Really!”

“You can see for yourself. It's in French.”

She sniffed. “And you can't read it, eh?”

“No.”

Anita turned the letter over and read the signature. “Gilberte. Who's she?”

“She was one of the nurses in the hospital. A nice old lady who was kind to me,” I lied for no other earthly reason than perhaps to divert her attention from the letter. “I'll get someone to translate it for me tomorrow. I think Mr. Ottavio, the Italian shoemaker, speaks a little French. Or maybe one of the professors from up on the hill might come into the store.”

And with that, I stuffed the letter into my pocket and promptly forgot about it. There was nothing farther from my mind at that time than Gilberte; and while I had come to miss her, other and more important things kept cropping up before I had time to evoke any more than a few pleasant memories. Like Doctor Carpenter, Nurse Monet was only a shadow of the past, occasionally looming up to loiter near the more remote fringe of the present.

We continued to eat the meal in silence, Anita chewing cautiously in one side of her mouth. As she brought in the dessert—;a gelatin pudding topped with whipped cream—;I asked her what the dentist had accomplished. As an answer, she reached into her apron pocket and rolled two very large molars onto the table. The roots of the teeth were still dark with traces of dried blood and the sight of them at the dinner table was almost enough to make me ill. With difficulty, I mastered my nausea and turned what I hoped were sympathetic eyes in her direction.

“Poor kid,” I murmured and going over to her I took her in my arms. She turned her back to me so that it was impossible to see her face, but the gelatin in the dish she was holding trembled and almost bounced to the floor. “Darling, I didn't know. It must've been awful.”

“Much you care!” she said, bursting into tears. I held her as close as I could and straining myself, I managed to kiss the side of her mouth.

“Now, now. You know I care!”

“I... I thought you... loved me!” she whimpered.

“But what an idea! Of course I love you! Have I ever said that I didn't? Come now, Anita. What is it? Have I been nasty to you?”

“You... you don't care how I feel! You won't do the one thing in the world I want you to do! You know I'm rotting here! You know everyone in town hates me!”

I tried to laugh her out of the idea although I suddenly realized how few friends Anita really had. None of the other young married women ever came to call on her. I had taken note of this once before and, after much thought, had put it down as rank jealousy. Anita was far too beautiful. But it was unnatural that she should not have at least one friend among her own sex.

“And I hate them, too!” she continued in that little choking voice. She had moved over to the table and, disregarding the dishes, some of which were dangerously close to the edge, buried her face in her arms. Her position reminded me of that night—;July 2, 1917—;when she had shed alcoholic tears in almost the same spot.

How long she continued to sob there and how long I stared blankly at her quivering breasts and at the delicate tendrils of blonde hair that curled at the nape of her neck, I do not know. For it was then that I began to weaken a little in my resolution. As this was happening to me, I became conscious of the fact that I was speaking, backing up my gradually dying decision not to sell with forceful words of refusal. Just exactly what I said and precisely what she replied to me, I am unable to remember. It may be that a touch of my old shell-shock malady came back and seized my memory for a little, twisting it out of focus.

Because the next thing I can vividly recollect is Anita standing on her two feet, pale and furious, with mother's discolored steel carving-knife in her hand. On the floor around the legs of the table were several chipped and broken dishes which her sudden leap must have knocked down.

“You're killing me!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. The shrill quality of her voice sent a shuddering response through me. My heart constricted, leaving me as cold as ice and dead certain that something awful was about to happen, I could feel the hairs rise on me. “Don't you know that you're killing me, you fool? Every day, every minute I have to stay here!...Oh, I can't stand it any longer!”

Risking a nasty cut, I went toward her, hoping to get the knife away from her; but she moved off a few paces as I approached. “Don't be childish, Anita,” I pleaded. “And stop that screaming. Do you want the neighbors to hear?”

It may seem silly that at a trying moment like that I should be concerned about anyone other than the two of us; nevertheless, such was the case. I have always secretly dreaded that my personal affairs someday might be aired in public. This fear was born of a life spent in a small town. I have seen too many people broken and unable to hold their heads up after the malicious work of gossipers and scandal-mongers.

I continued to try to quiet her but she would not be hushed. “Why are you doing this to me? You hate me, don't you? Oh, don't deny it! I know you hate me! Well... I hate you, too!”

“Anita!” I gasped.

“Yes, I do! I hate you! I can't stand the sight of you! You bore me, see? You didn't know that, did you? Well, now you do!”

The tears were drying on her face and in her eyes, leaving them rimmed and reddened. The rouge on her cheeks stood out against her dead white skin in round, uneven splotches. With her hair in disarray, she looked almost mad and, I must confess, horribly ugly. Seeing her this way after once having witnessed her beautiful, frightened me. It also hastened me in my decision to do what she wished.

I managed to get my hand on the hilt of the knife and I began to twist it from her grasp. Struggling to retain it, Anita commenced to shout again with still more rage. “Let me alone! Let me alone, do you hear? I'll kill you if you take that away! Oh... you're hurting me! God damn you! I'll... I'll...” And here her words ran into one another, becoming unintelligible expostulations of hatred.

I suppose I did hurt her a bit; but it was absolutely necessary. In the mood she was in, I was afraid either that she might attack herself with the knife or use it against me. In any case, her being in possession of the thing was a decided menace.

To anyone outside who might have heard Anita's words, it would undoubtedly seem that she really and truly despised me; I myself put no stock in them. I was sure that her fit of temper was but a phase of her physical condition and that she didn't mean any of the mean things she said about me. You must know then that Anita was menstruating that night and do not forget that earlier that very day she had had two teeth extracted. What she had gone through was enough to make any woman fly off the handle.

I thought that if I could get the knife away from her and put her to bed, in the morning everything would be peaceful again. She was still screaming and clawing at my chest like some enraged lioness when I finally managed to remove the dangerously sharp knife from her fingers.

Then, to my dismay, the doorbell rang.

Anita stopped her noise at once. Together we looked stupidly at one another. Then she nodded that I should go and see who was outside. The ringing of the bell evidently calmed her hysteria for, as though thoroughly done in, she sank into a chair as I moved reluctantly toward the front door, absent-mindedly dangling the captured knife from one hand.

Well, young Tom Murphy saw that carving-knife and he could not have helped hearing all the screaming as he came up the walk. He gave me a searching look as he handed me the package containing the sleeping draught.

“Here you are, Mr. Thatcher,” he said. “This ought to do the trick.”

I accepted the package with the hand that held the knife, thanked him in a hollow voice, and he hurried away as though he was anxious to get out of the vicinity.

When I got back to the kitchen, Anita was opening a large bottle of beer which we were accustomed to drink after dinner during the hot weather. She poured out two glasses recklessly, the foam spilling onto the tablecloth.

“It's a sleeping powder, Anita,” I said, opening the packet and placing the little fold of paper near her hand. “Your tooth may ache. Good idea to drop it in your beer.”

She gave no sign that she heard me. Although she had stopped crying, there was a wet shine to her eyes that I didn't like. In her silence I could feel repressed a stony hatred for me and it absolutely took away what few regrets I had regarding the store I was now so firmly resolved to sell. Why I didn't tell her of my change of heart, I do not know. Maybe if I had, things would have turned out differently. However, I thought that if I waited until morning, Anita would be in a more receptive mood. At the moment she was in a very unbalanced state and the subject was one which would have to be handled delicately. If I came right out and admitted defeat she might think that her weeping and wailing had affected me. I did not want her to know that; she might employ those tactics to wheedle me in the future.

I made my way into the living-room in search of the evening paper. Somehow it had found its way under one of the sofa pillows so that it was almost five minutes before I returned with it to the kitchen. Anita was no longer in the room. One of the beer glasses was empty and the sleeping powder paper was crumbled into a tiny ball beside it.

“Ah, she has taken it,” I thought to myself, glad that the remainder of the evening would be unspoiled by such scenes as had taken place at dinner.

Through the back window I could see Anita sitting woodenly on a camp-chair, facing the lake. It looked so very peaceful out of doors with the soft hand of twilight caressing the great trees, the ragged lawn and the lake itself. It reminded me of the war, strangely enough. After a heavy bombardment, when the firing ceased an unearthly stillness seemed to shriek in one's ears and the relief of it all was enough to drive one mad with happiness. And as I stared out of the window, I was happy. The storm had blown over and, if I had anything to do with causing it, it would never come again.

With my glass of beer and my paper, I retired to the living-room. I would have liked to sit outside with Anita but I did not wish to risk any repetition of the quarrel. I was sure that she wanted to be alone and I knew how unpleasant it was to have one's solitude trespassed upon. So I made up my mind to let her alone. In the morning I would tell her of my surrender, trying to make it sound as if it were my own wish and not her's, and everything would be forgotten. We would dispose of the store, the house, and all of the furniture which was sadly out of date anyway. In New York we would start our lives all over again.

Curiously, I began to anticipate making this fresh start with pleasure. After all, Ithaca had not been very kind to us. True, we had made a good living there, but we had had our scraps as well; and since our marriage the war had forced its way between the two of us, brandishing its most cruel weapon: estrangement.

And the business I had built up out of nothing and struggled to keep; what had it brought me? Trying to hold on to it in the face of Anita's objections was a pyrrhic victory, a triumph as empty as the war. My most precious possession, I told myself, was Anita's love. The rest was only just so much baggage.

These thoughts ran through my mind, bringing with them a conviction that I had been a fool. When I took Anita as my wife I promised myself that I would make her happy.

Before I finished my beer or as much as read two columns of the newspaper, I dropped into a deep sleep.

Now I come to the part of the story that is difficult to relate. During the following hours I was still drowsy and feeling quite ill; then again, it all happened so suddenly that before I actually became aware of what was taking place, I found myself cooling my heels in the Ithaca jail.

I suppose I even looked guilty. Real emotions hardly ever seem real. Stage performances have taken the edge off of them and stylized both physical and mental reactions to such a degree that if a faint is not executed in a certain way it looks bogus. My shocked expression, throughout these proceedings I here set down, no doubt impressed the police as being a very amateur affectation, attempted by me to conceal my obvious guilt. I even heard one of the cell attendants informing someone that I was “going to play nuts.”

If the following account of the morning I woke up sounds like a falsehood, remember that it has since been proved the truth.

It seemed to me that I had merely drifted off for a few minutes but when I finally opened my eyes a bright morning sun was shining. So brilliant was it that I was momentarily blinded and confused. I started to rise from the chair but succeeded only in stumbling to the floor. My legs were numb and my head felt inflated, like some child's balloon. Before I could pick myself up from where I had fallen, I became conscious that the doorbell was ringing. It was an insistent ring, as though someone was belaboring the button in short, angry jabs.

Still half asleep, I staggered to the door and opened it. I rubbed my eyes, squinting up into the ruddy face of one of the town's constables. It was Richter.

“Sorry to get you up, Thatcher,” he greeted me with apologetic gruffness. “Say! You must have had one too many last night, eh?”

“Hello, Captain. My God, what time is it?”

“Almost ten. Young Murphy's going crazy down there at the store. Business is certainly good this morning.” He paused and fumbled in his cap for a paper. “Say, Thatcher, I've got some bad news for you. I'm afraid I'll have to bring you around to the station.”