Five Smooth Stones (66 page)

He managed to sleep in brief fidgeting naps before he heard her come into the room and get into bed. He covered his face with his hands, as though even there in the dark the pain could be seen, when he heard her mumble, just before she fell into a stuporous sleep, "Brad—Brad—"—a cry in the night he could not answer because she had gone beyond hearing any answer.

Now, this morning, everything was quiet; it would be an hour or more before she would waken. When she did, she would go into the kitchen and pour a glass of milk. There was a poignant hurt to Brad in her pathetic confidence that he did not know the milk would be liberally laced with whiskey, that he was unaware that the bottle out of which she would pour this morning drink was hidden in some one of a half-dozen places he had long since discovered. For a long time he had brought coffee to her bed those mornings when he was at home, but stopped the practice when he realized there was real cruelty in making it necessary for her to try to hide the fine tremor of her hands, the swollen eyelids, the sniffles and choking hoarseness that were invariable symptoms of one of her hangovers. "Hay fever" she would say, and use her handkerchief or a cleansing tissue as an excuse to turn away from him. Nowadays he waited until the alcohol in the milk had taken hold and stilled the tremors that he knew shook her inwardly as well as outwardly, and when he could—on mornings when he did not have to go to the office —he waited for her to seek him out.

He drew back the draperies and raised the shades, letting a thin sliver of early sun cross the floor. After he had laid and lighted a fresh fire, he decided he felt better, then smiled wryly. "I can put a stop to that," he muttered. "I can end this 'feeling better' just by wondering what in hell I'm going to do." He dreaded these periods of reappraisal, of sending his mind back into the past, searching for some answer that might lie there, trying to find the causes or reasons, finding plausible ones but finding no way to overcome them, no way to replace them with new causes and new reasons that would make reality a bearable burden for Peg, instead of something she could carry only a short time before laying it down and fleeing.

What would have happened if he had said "No" that afternoon years before when Lawrence Travis, just before leaving for Switzerland on his first State Department assignment, had failed him at the office and said, "Can you drop in at the apartment after work? We'll give you sandwiches and a drink. We're in a mess. The movers come in the morning, and we're going to Marcia's mother's for a few days before leaving for Switzerland."

A man didn't say "No" to someone who had done what Lawrence Travis had done for him. He laughed and said, "Dropping in on moving day usually means work."

"This will," said Lawrence. "But not the kind you mean. I have a problem I'd like to leave in your hands. Nothing back-breaking, but it concerns someone of whom Marcia and I are very fond."

"I'll be there as soon as I can get away."

The Travis's apartment door had been unlocked when he got there, and when no one answered his knock he walked into the chaos of the day before moving. He picked his way gingerly over cartons, packing boxes, piles of books, and around furniture that had been pushed into unfamiliar locations to facilitate the rolling up of rugs. He found Marcia Travis in the dining room wrapping chinaware and packing it into a barrel. Her hair, shorn down to short, fair curls, fell over her forehead, smooches of dust were scattered over her face, and her eyes, clear blue under brows darker than her hair, held a look of near panic. "We'll never make it, Brad. We'll have to postpone the van." She had a brusque, clipped manner of speaking; her accent showed clearly the childhood and girlhood spent in England.

"One of the spheres of hell that Dante overlooked was moving day," said Brad.

"Of course. I never thought of it before."

"Where's the boy?"

"At my mother's. Out of the way, thank God."

"And Larry?"

"In his den, sorting books. There comes a time in moving when one has to stop sorting and start packing, sorted or not. Do go explain this to him."

He found Lawrence Travis in blue mechanic's coveralls, bent over a case of books, and said, "Your wife says pack, don't sort."

Travis straightened up. "Thank God, you're here. Now I can stop for a while. Marcia on moving day is not the woman I thought I'd married. Sit down." He cleared books from the seat of a chair. "How would a drink go?"

"Down—and good."

At that time Lawrence Travis had been a slender, light-skinned man, shorter than Brad, his eyes dark and deceptively soft and guileless. His speech, unless sparked by emotion, was slow, and the gentle cadences of the South of his birth were still evident in it. Today he was heavier, black-ribbed glasses lending a solemnity not quite deserved; behind them the eyes were sharper and gave clearer evidence of the comprehensive intelligence, the lightning-quick workings of his mind. But to Brad Willis he remained the man who had given him his first break—the slender, quiet man of that winter dusk in a cluttered den.

On that day he had gone out and returned with long drinks, than sank into a chair, groaning loudly. He took a long swallow, groaned again, and said, "I'd better get down to the meat of this thing before my client gets here."

"Here?" Brad looked around the disordered room.

"By design. She'll eat sandwiches from the drainboard with us—you will too, I hope—and if she twists our arms we'll let her pitch in and help. It's what she needs. Right now one more law office, one more breath of legal stuffery, and she'd probably crack."

"I see."

"You will in a minute, at any rate. Do you remember the Montgomery case of three months back?"

"Yes. I read about it. I don't suppose anyone in New England missed it. I even recall that they dusted off the standing type of a routine lead—'Mystery surrounds the death of a Boston couple,' etcetera, etcetera."

"You recall the pictures?"

"Yes. He was a Negro; she was white. And there was a daughter."

"My client. Our client, I should say. A particular favorite of Marcia's and mine since she was in diapers. Curt Montgomery, the father, and I come from the same part of the country, northeast Louisiana, right in the heart of the murder belt. My family came out of the galleon first, when I was very young, by the grace of God and relatives in the North. Curt and I didn't know each other, but when he was on the run— and he was—a mutual friend gave him our address. He didn't have a dime, not a crying dime, when he got here. We took him in—he got what he called a 'li'l piece of a job'—and after we made him go to night school for a year he was O.K. and stuck it out until he had full high-school credits.

"He was always clever with his hands, and he talked himself into a job with one of the best known manufacturers of prosthetics in the country—Addison and Hyatt, near Medford. He also had a clever, inventive mind and he came up with something unusual for an artificial foot and ankle joint. When the firm claimed he had invented it on their time—he had, of course—and wouldn't give him royalties, he quit and started in business for himself, and took, on the side, the agency for another manufacturer. He never became wealthy, but he prospered." Travis paused to rattle the ice in his glass and take another swallow of the drink. "Meantime he had married."

"This is the cliff-hanger?"

"In a way. I know very little about the woman he married —and what I do know I don't like. He met her when he went to her home to fix an artificial limb for her father, and train him to use it. The marriage was a mistake from the start. And obviously to the finish. Neither one of them was equipped for the rigors of a mixed marriage in this country.

"Their little girl, Margaret—Peg—was a lovely child. She's a lovely young woman. The mother was a domineering, possessive, ambitious hellcat."

"If she was ambitious why did she make the one marriage calculated to hold her back?"

"Who knows, Brad? Perhaps she felt that by marrying a Negro she was assuring herself of the upper hand."

Brad laughed. "It just ain't so, Larry."

"I know." Travis chuckled, then sobered. "Anyhow—to get back to the Montgomerys. Curt was light-skinned, about your complexion, only with dark eyes. The mother had red hair, fair skin, blue-green eyes. One is forced to admit her beauty. The child reversed the usual pattern and inherited all her mother's physical characteristics except the eyes. Her eyes are Curt's. She could pass—and did pass, at her mother's screaming insistence—when she entered Smith College."

"And then—Oh! Good God!"

"Yes. But by the time she entered college, life in the Montgomery household was pretty much constant hell. Curt was drinking; so was the mother. Perhaps not habitually, but too much. There were epic quarrels, I gather, just short of actual violence. At least, when the child was around—"

"Why didn't he leave the bitch?"

Travis shrugged. "Again—who knows? For one thing, he adored the child. For another, there may have been a certain ego-satisfaction in having a white wife. Good God, Brad, who knows what holds thousands of couples together? When I first started in practice I worked like hell on a divorce for one couple, and I'd no sooner get it set up for court than they'd reconcile and it would start all over."

"Abernathy won't handle divorce, thank God."

"That's not all to the good. It's graduate work you'll never get in a university. Back to our client. Curt was a sweet man. I mean, in the true sense of the word. Gentle under ordinary circumstances, kind, and there wasn't a child he didn't love, didn't identify with. I've seen him after he had been to a hospital and fitted some youngster with an artificial limb. He'd glow with happiness, skip around, do a little dance step to show how well it would work in time. He never lost his southern speech. 'Lawd!' he'd say. That was a mighty happy chile. A mighty happy chile.'" Travis was silent for a moment. "Curt was my link with the past, my 'lest we forget.' When his wife heard little Peg use one of the Deep South idioms she had picked up from her father, she'd slap her across the mouth."

"May I interject something here, Larry?"

"Certainly."

"The child adored her father."

"Of course. He told me that one time when he returned from a business trip—she was still very small—instead of jumping up and down with joy or laughing, she climbed into his arms, and sobbed. She hated her mother, I'm sure, although she may not have recognized that hatred. But, like Curt, she was helpless. That woman, Brad, was like a juggernaut—"

"I know. I've run into them."

"To get to the time when Peg was due to enter college. Peg had been an outstanding pupil, straight A's, all that. Smith accepted her—and her mother insisted that she go over the line."

"Parents visit students who are in colleges that close at hand. How did she manage that?"

"The story to the college was that Peg's parents were separated. The mother came up on special occasions: Curt didn't. But she came close to making one fatal mistake. Her first plan was to say that she was a widow, that Peg's father was dead. Peg went into a screaming, hysterical rage, rushed out of the house, and went to her father's shop. At first, she refused to go back, but he 'gentled' her into it. 'You got to get that education, honey,' he told her. 'You just be patient. Life ain't easy, but you just get that college education; then mebbe you and me can find us a place together. Mebbe we can take off together. You do what your mother says and keep things peaceable. You stick with it, honey; then you'n me'll see about things.' Her mother backed down on the widow story."

"And that's what pulled her through?"

"Yes. Give Curt the credit. She was in her senior year when lightning struck. Thank God for our friends. One of mine, a newsman on the
Globe,
got hold of me before the story hit the papers and radio and I was able to get hold of the authorities at Smith on the telephone, and they kept her incommunicado on some excuse until Marcia and I got there."

"Give me the details, Larry. Was it a killing and suicide?"

"No one will ever know. A neighbor came to the door to borrow something. There was no answer, and when she looked through the glass of the door she could just see Curt's legs sprawled on the stairs. She called the police. When they broke in, they found Curt sprawled along the bottom steps, his head on the floor, dead of a broken neck. Upstairs they found the mother dead of a bullet wound. She was also on the floor. The gun was nearby. There had been a struggle. There was a mishmash of prints on the gun—both his and hers—which was almost impossible to interpret. Was he leaving after a quarrel, and did she come up behind him and push him down the stairs? Then go back and shoot herself? Or did he shoot her, start to run down the stairs, trip and fall? They had both been drinking."

Brad finished his drink, got up and walked the length of the room and back, then sat again. "My God, Larry! What do you want me to do?"

"Just keep an eye on things, help Peg if she needs it. Curt and his wife made separate wills; I drew his up six weeks before he died. There's no difficulty in either case. Both wills name Peg as principal beneficiary. The mother left what she had—not a great deal—in trust until Peg is twenty-five. Old Colony is trustee. Curt's is also in trust until Peg is twenty-one. Which she will be in a few months. That is when she will need help and counseling."

"Will she want me to take over?"

"Brad, haven't you any idea how shot to hell she must be inside? If I advise it, she'll do it."

"Is she back at Smith? Is she going back?"

"No. She tried. She lasted two weeks. Remember—she had passed for almost four years. Suddenly she's the central figure in a sordid tragedy involving her parents—a white mother and a Negro father. I thought it would help her if she talked it out, and I asked her point-blank what the attitude at college had been. All she would say was, 'They were very kind. They were very kind.'"

"Christ almighty!" Shivers crawled up Brad's back, around his ribs, into his belly.

Travis, watching his face from across the desk, said: "Yes. I thought you'd react that way. It would have been better if they'd been cruel, called her a nigger, enraged her, given her cause to identify with her dead father, the only person she really loved. Instead, they were 'very kind.' God bless them all —they meant well."