Hanno’s Doll (11 page)

So Miss Metal had telephoned Miss Mildred's father, and the sweater had not been made for him; at least Milly hadn't said she was knitting for him; at least he had never received any sweater.

Miss Metal had agreed to go to Milly's room and try to find the sweater among Milly's things. (Still in the suitcase she had left behind?) No sweater there.

Miss Metal recalled that Milly had finished the sweater on November 15. She remembered because she had helped Milly block it. (Miss Metal had taught Milly to knit. She had taught Milly to knit back in Clifton, Idaho, when Milly was just a kid and thought Miss Metal was somebody, because she was older.)

The last time Miss Metal had seen that sweater was on the nineteenth. She remembered because Milly hadn't eaten any lunch that day and when she went to Milly's office to see whether she felt all right, Milly told her she was going to have to work late again that evening. (It was on these working-late evenings during which he had seduced Milly, Miss Metal hinted.)

“Yes, I remember how she came up to check. I remember!”

The last time Miss Metal had seen that sweater was when it lay, blocked and folded, on Miss Mildred's desk. (“There! Right there!”) Miss Metal remembered because she had had to move the sweater to put down the tray she had brought up from the cafeteria so that Milly wouldn't skip supper, too. And that was the last she had seen of the sweater.

There! Where was the sweater, then?

Now Anni gulped and turned pale. He knew that she was remembering where she had seen that sweater. Then she continued in a queer, stifled voice, her eyes fixed on him, her eyes somehow standing back from what she was saying, watching what she was saying, judging what she was saying.

The sweater, Anni said, hadn't been a young man exactly, but it had been something. It had cheered Puppchen up very much to have thought of that wool, Anni said, and then and there Puppchen got the idea of using the remnants of wool in Miss Mildred's drawer. She immediately took out the wool, needles, pattern, and she cast on her stitches.

(Had Puppchen brought that knitting to the infirmary? Did he remember that? Had there been the sound of the needles clicking through the fever mists? Had he caught glimpses of Puppchen with her head bent over the knitting? Puppchen—Penelope, faithfully knitting, believing that this was the way to bring her Ulysses back to her.)

Miss Metal had said a sweater pattern wasn't a fellow. That Milly had knitted a sweater for a fellow didn't prove a thing. Even if it had disappeared, it didn't prove a thing.

But with a sweater, you might trace a fellow, Puppchen had said. She, Anni and the Ernest had found a detective agency.

“Oh, God!” (While Puppchen knitted, knitted, not Puppchen—Penelope, but one of the blind Fates, blindly weaving.)

The detectives, using the pattern of sweater as clue, found something immediately. The sweater had been a distinctive one, not its pattern, a Fair-lawn pattern, Anni said, but the colors Miss Mildred had chosen.

(He felt the smooth young flesh sliding under the wool as he grabbed the boy's shoulder.)

The detectives had turned up a student who remembered seeing such a sweater on a boy sitting at the big table in the Green Lantern.

(So it had been true that the boy had gone to eat his dinner at the Green Lantern that evening.)

The college boy remembered the sweater because … Why does one remember? Anyhow, he remembered. Had he seen Miss Mildred knitting it? No, he hadn't. The student had not been able to describe the young man, just the sweater. No, not one of the students. No, he hadn't talked to them, had listened though, all ears. He remembered that the sweater boy had listened to their talk while he ate his dinner at the big table. And that he remembered for a funny reason. (Funny how things happened.) Because it was that night that he had decided to drop out of Drama. What happened was that one of the fellows … just because there was a stranger at the table—a member of the audience … one of the fellows, naming no names, had immediately started to put on an act. There was something about the way that fellow had put on an act which had made him decide that maybe he wasn't cut out to be an actor after all.

He interrupted to ask the K.K.K., who seemed to know all about this sweater (of course he knew all about this. Everybody would soon know all about it!), he asked the K.K.K. whether the student who remembered had remembered what the boy who put on an act had put on an act about? (Boasted about having the freedom of Hanno Dietrich's house? Free to go there and “guzzle beer and Mrs. Dietrich”?)

The K.K.K. d-d-didn't know.

Anni didn't know.

At any rate they then had Miss Mildred's sweater placed on a young man. And if so, then it was possible that this had been Miss Mildred's young man … and not Hanno Dietrich. And if so, then there was a flesh-and-blood sweatered young man, not merely a figment of Puppchen's loyalty to her husband.

But where was the young man?

“Enough,” he shouted. “Enough!”

The detectives found that a young man wearing such a sweater had asked where Hanno Dietrich lived. The detectives found someone who had directed such a sweatered young man to Aspen Road.

“Enough!”

The sweatered young man had been traced to Felix's house, and then no more tracings, no further trace.

So where was this sweater boy?

“And that was where you came in, Anni?”

The K.K.K. repeated what he had said. “Th-they w-w-would h-have found it anyhow, M-m-mister Dietrich. S-s-sure!”

(So that was how they had come to the body in the funk hole. So circuitous, so fortuitous, each possibility grasped, grabbed at, utilized, almost as if someone had known the body was there the whole time and had made tools of Puppchen and Miss Metal and detectives and wool. Almost as if someone who knew about the body the whole time had used Puppchen's wool to pull over his eyes.)

Suppose someone had known the boy was coming to Bradley? Someone? Anni! Who else? (She squirmed under his stare.)

Suppose Anni … suppose this sweater boy had been to Anni in New York for voice? Miss Mildred had told him the boy had been in the professional theatre. There was no reason why the sweater boy could not have been both Miss Mildred's lover and Anni's voice pupil.

Suppose when this sweater boy had received, at this post-office-box number in New York, his letter from Miss Mildred, Miss Mildred had mentioned Hanno Dietrich in it. Why shouldn't she have written about Hanno Dietrich as well as about the trouble she was in? (Hadn't Miss Mildred told him she had written of him?)

Suppose then the sweater boy had mentioned to Anni that a girl he knew was working for Hanno Dietrich in Bradley? What would be more natural? Why wouldn't he have, with all the pictures Anni had of Hanno Dietrich in her studio? Hanno Dietrich, thin and beautiful at twenty-one in Wien, a hat cocked to one side, his first publicity picture, Hanno as Falstaff, Hanno, Hanno … At least fifteen pictures of Hanno Dietrich still papered the four drab walls of Anni's studio. Anni had not turned the fifteen pictures of Hanno Dietrich to the wall when he married Puppchen, only her mental pictures of him as an old friend and a sensible man. (He remembered the tone of her voice telling the K.K.K. “There is nothing he will not do for her … the highest … the lowest.”)

And the sweater boy had told Anni he was going to Bradley to see Miss Mildred that day, for why shouldn't he have told Anni?

And Anni had told the sweater boy to go and see Hanno Dietrich when he was in Bradley. No, she had told the sweater boy to go and see
them
, how
they
did. Go see what Hanno did for Puppchen …
the highest … the lowest
. And the sweater boy had believed he had seen how they did. “He can give her anything but love, baby. He does give her anything but love, for that he uses the college boys.”

Anni said, “Hanno!”

“
Moment.
” Go see how they did there, Anni told the sweater boy. See how Hanno manages his Puppchen. What else had the sweater boy come to see that night? He had stated outright that this was what he had come to see. To see by what perverted means December satisfied May in Bradley College.

Because it would have been preposterous for a boy who had simply heard about himself and Puppchen from the innocent lips of the drama students at the big table in the Green Lantern to have been so venomous. Someone had to have injected the venom so that it could spew out as it had that evening.

“Hanno, why are you looking like that?” Anni asked.

“Mo
ment
.”

“Are you feeling sick? You look terrible!”

“Mo
ment
, Anni!” Had he not caught it before, the tone, the same tone, Anni's, the boy's? Had he not connected Anni and the boy before? This venomous tone was a real link between the sweater boy and Anni. My God, how else could such evil have come? It was preposterous of him to have credited the boy with the evil which had been in Berlin in the twenties. The boy had not been born in the twenties. The evil thoughts had come from Anni. The boy came from Anni, Anni!

And the sweater boy would have told Anni that he would certainly go and inspect the Dietrich ménage, and then he had promised to report back to Anni in New York the next day. (He had planned to stay only one day in Bradley. He had told both himself and Miss Mildred that he was going to hitchhike back.)

And then when the boy did not come to report to Anni?

Anni would wonder. And then why couldn't she, checking on wherever the sweater boy lived in New York, find that he had not returned there, find that he had not been heard from?

Kept checking, Anni. Kept finding no trace of the boy.

And suspect?

Why not suspect? Why not? Suspect mischief because she knew she had made the mischief. She knew what evil seed she had planted in that boy's mind. She knew what could flower from such a seed. She would know that he, seeing this flower, smelling its noxious odor, which befouled his house, himself, the Puppchen, might have cut it down.

Coming with the Ernest to ask him to give the house back had been her flimsy excuse. Wanting Felix's house back because of the swastika on the Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue had been her entrée. She wanted the house because she suspected the boy was in the funk hole. She had become more certain when he wouldn't give up the house, the generous Hanno. (When had he refused her anything in the old days?) More certain than ever when he had ignored what Puppchen wanted. “No!
Schluss! Finished!
” Oh, then she had been certain, certain!

And then the pneumonia had given Anni her chance, she must have looked into the funk hole at the first opportunity, and from then on, using whatever came to hand, Puppchen's typing, Miss Metal's hysteria, Miss Mildred's wool … Was that what made him angriest at her? To have turned his Puppchen from Penelope, knitting, knitting, so her lord could come home to her, into a
tricoteuse
? Wasn't that the worst thing to have turned Puppchen into a Madame Defarge, knitting, knitting, until she had knitted him into place on the guillotine and the knife was ready to descend.

Should he shove the chair toward Anni now, lurch out of it, set his feet on the floor and be on her, pressing his hands around her throat? Didn't Anni deserve to die for what she had done? Perhaps, but he couldn't do it to her. If he shoved the chair forward before the K.K.K. could stop him, and got out of it, putting all his weight on the balls of his feet, putting both his hands around her neck, the hands would slide off; he would slide down, be on the floor before her, like a Japanese committing hari-kari, or like a fat man in pajamas proposing to an aging woman. Whatever Anni had done, he couldn't do it to her.

She was standing next to him. “Hanno, please … what is it?”

He said, “Get out! Get out, you!” To the K.K.K., “Get her out of here! Get her away from me!”

“Hanno!”

“I know you now,” he said. “I know you now!”

“Hanno!”

“Out of my sight! Out of my sight!”

Her eyes blazed at him, their glory returning as a gutted house, before it falls, for the last moment lit by the flames, is whole and perfect; then the eyes were dead. She was dead. She collapsed into the wicker chair, and sat, shriveled, ashes, nothing, no longer Anni. There was no Anni any longer.

Even the K.K.K. could see she was annihilated. He said, “You stay there, M-M-Mrs. Leopold. W-We'll g-g-go back t-to the r-r-room.”

The K.K.K. wheeled him back to his room. The door had been left open. The State policeman was gone.

The K.K.K. helped him out of the chair and into the bed. He was glad to get into bed. It wasn't fatigue though; betrayal. It wasn't pneumonia; Anni, rather the death of Anni. No more Anni.

A food-ordering nurse came in and said it was time to order dinner. (All his years of Anni were finished and it was time to order dinner.) The nurse said that his doctor had left orders that he could have the regular diet tonight, wasn't that nice? (She didn't “know,” wasn't in the know.) He turned from her blandness to the K.K.K.'s unhappy face, the not so Komic K.K.K. He said, “Order me a good lawyer. Order me a good lawyer, Mr. Starter … rare … not thick.”

The food nurse looked puzzled. “Pardon?”

The K.K.K. said to the nurse. “S-s-suppose you or-order, h-h-huh? You kn-kn-know wh-wh-what's b-b-est.” When the food nurse went out, he said perhaps Mrs. Dietrich's lawyers from the city were going to take Mr. Dietrich's case.

Ah, it was a genuine case now, a murder case. For keeps. Probably the K.K.K. now believed he had lied to him about the accident, although he was not acting as if he held it against him, simply was sorry for him. In a sudden fury, he shoved his leg to one side, hearing the sound of fresh sheets. Had been made up fresh, he told himself. He wondered how far the search had gone. Had the State police ripped the mattress open? Would the infirmary charge him (his estate) for a new mattress in that case, or would the State be liable for it? All these matters were thought of and decided on by someone. Somewhere the taxes paid by citizens (including himself) involved payment for the metal polish to keep the electric chair bright and shiny. No, this wasn't morbid; Montaigne would approve of this. Where was his book? “My book, Mr. Starter … where is my book?”