Hanno’s Doll (16 page)

She would have the stone face, the marble eyes. Puppchen would have been the little statue facing him, because she did not want him there.

“Anyway, he thinks you're Mrs. Hanno Dietrich, doesn't he?”

She would have said, “Go away.” She would have said, “I want you to go away.”

“Because you like being Mrs. Hanno Dietrich? You want me to go away and leave you to it. Why? How come?” He would have said, “What's the secret of his success, Kitten? Come on, come on, what does he do for you?”

“Go away.” The Gorgon, the little Gorgon face that should have turned the boy to stone, but hadn't.

“An old man, a fat old man … I don't get it.”

It played. He had been wrong believing it was Anni who had injected the venom into the boy. Anni had suspected what his life had become because she was a smart woman.
There is nothing he will not do for her … the highest … the lowest
. But the boy had known from experience, because he was Puppchen's husband. The boy knew what one had to do for Puppchen because he had refused to do it and so had lost her. The boy had been entitled to the contempt he felt, and it was because he knew this in his heart that he had been so furiously angry with the boy.

The boy's expression of utter contempt was because Puppchen was happy with Hanno. The boy knew what it meant to keep Puppchen happy.

“Mr. Dietrich …”

“
Ja?
” The lawyer back again. The lawyer was doing an embarrassment bit with the knot of his tie.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Dietrich, Kitten can't possibly make it. She sends her apologies. You will understand how much there is to do. I told her she must leave Bradley by eight.”

“
You
will understand I must see her again.” He touched the legal document with his finger. “I must see her again.”

“She was just informed about the poison, Mr. Dietrich.… She's pretty much in a state of shock.”

“Me, also.” He pushed the legal paper away. He looked at the lawyer. “Don't you think that she should come to see me before she leaves, Mr. Clinton?”

Now his whole body did embarrassment. “What I think and what Kitten thinks are two different … the fact of the matter is that I wasn't able to persuade her to change her mind about this any more than I've been able to change her mind about many things in the past. Will you sign?”

He meant, Will you sign anyhow? He signed. Why not?

“Thank you, Mr. Dietrich. Now, don't worry unduly,” he said. “You couldn't get a better man to represent you than Jim McCormick. I don't know how you stand with money, but if …” He looked at Hanno's face. “Well,” he said, nipping up the paper, not forgetting his fountain pen, “the best of luck.” He held his hand out, then turned and left.

It played. Puppchen hadn't been asleep. She must have heard the boy come back. She must have listened to the whole thing from upstairs. She must have known that he believed he killed the boy by shoving him. When he went out to the terrace to kneel down by the boy, she must have come out and watched from the balcony. She must have known he thought he killed a stranger by accident. She knew it all.

And knowing, what did she want?
Status quo
. Things as they were. She wanted Hanno to guard her pleasure, to worship her, tend her, dress her, background her. She wanted Hanno Dietrich to stage-manage her, to give her publicity. She wanted Hanno plus Philip Scott plus the students. She had told him that.
I'm so happy here, Hanno
.

So what had she done?
Ach
, there was a simple rule of thumb to know what Puppchen did: think what Puppchen wanted. Puppchen wanted to keep things as they were. If he had gone to the police, then things would not have been as they were. No, things would have been as they now were.

So what had she done? She had “awakened” when he came upstairs to “tell” her. She said she'd had a nightmare that he was going to leave her … or, at least, about being deserted again. She had told him about the baby. (Ah, she hadn't “miscalculated,” had she?) She had made her annunciation. The baby who was coming. The baby who wasn't coming after all.

What would she have done if he had called the police in spite of the baby, in spite of her nightmare, in spite of the fact that she wanted to keep her happiness with him in Felix's house? What would she have done then?

What was she doing now? What was it she now wanted to do? To get out. To leave him to it.

Let her, he thought. He deserved it. Let her. As Anni sometimes said to Ernest, “It serves you right.” It served
him
right.

And then he remembered that if he let her she would go away with the Ernest. And then he understood that she must have decided to go away with the Ernest before last night or she would not have seen to it that the police were called in. (How far he had “reached” when he had made Anni the one. He had seen how each possibility had been grasped and used: the mail, Miss Metal, Miss Mildred's wool, but he had “reached” and put Anni in Puppchen's place.) Puppchen had decided she could use the Ernest. She would keep him until someone else could serve her better. “No,” he thought. “No.”

And then he heard himself calling, using his full voice so that if Anni were anywhere on the floor, perhaps huddled and weeping in that wicker chair, she would hear him. (And where else would she be, Anni? Always, always, where she could hear him. Always as near as she could get to him.) He called, “Anni! Anni! Come to me here, Anni.”

Outside an argument with the K.K.K. As if, even now, even after what he had done—“Dirty Judas,” he had called her—anybody could keep Anni from him when she heard him call from the grave, his old voice calling to the old Anni.

“But Hanno wants me,” she was saying. “You heard him. Hanno wants me.”

Who could withstand her? He held out his arms and she came to him and he put his arms around her thickened body and she pressed his head into her soft, fallen breast. He heard the beating of her heart and knew that he must not confide in her. (This was the hardest.) She must not be, as that lawyer had warned that Puppchen must not be, an accessory. Anni must not be involved. “Anni,” he said softly. He turned his head so that she could hear his words but not see his face and learn from it, that is, that the fat, blind fool had had his eyes opened at last. “Anni, I must see Puppchen once more and she will not come to me.”

He felt her body jerk with shame for him. He felt her complete and final disgust with him. She tried to pull free but he held her tight. “I must see her once more, Anni.” He pressed her body to him as if he did not know what she was feeling. “Just once more, Anni, Anni.”

“So that is why you called me.”

“Once more. Help me, Anni.” He writhed under it. This was the worst, to make her pity him for this, but he had to do it. “Help me, Anni.”

“How can I? If she won't come, she won't come. She won't listen to me. You think she will listen to me?”

“Help me, Anni.” He knew what her face would be like while she was trying to think how she could help him. (And was she not as depraved as he had been? Wasn't it the same with her? Would she not do anything he wanted? Pander to him as he had to Puppchen, poor Anni?)

She said, nodding, “But Ernie will listen to me.”

“That's it.”

“Ernie will listen to me. I will have to tell Ernie how you are.”

How I am? A craven jackass, a blind, fat, old fool, a sodden mess of longing to the end. The urge to confide in her was almost intolerable. (They were two of a kind. He had the same intolerable need to show what he knew; he knew what was what, Hanno, always he knew.… Yes, the same as Anni.) He made himself blubber frantically. “Yes, Anni, tell Ernest. Tell Ernest I must see her once more because I may never see her again.” Anni had found the way. Ernest was so good. Ernest would not be able to understand or forgive such hardness in Puppchen. Puppchen could not take the chance that if she refused his request, Ernest might have his eyes opened to her.

Anni nodding. “Ernest might stop wanting a doll if he once saw it had no heart, Hanno.”

Anni had said, A girl, yes. A doll, no.

“When I tell Ernest, she will have to come, Hanno.”

“Thank you, Anni.”

She stood up and awkwardly straightened her clothes. There were white circles around her nostrils. This was her disgust. There were tears in her eyes. This was her pity. She forced herself to start toward the door and this was her love for him.

“Rest yourself, Hanno. She will have to come when I tell Ernie to bring her.”

Anni would manage it for him. When she went out, he wiped his forehead on his sleeve and wiped his palms up and down the white cotton bed cover. Then he reached to the table and took up the Montaigne, turning to the two pages which had been glued together for so long. It was too dark in the room, however, he had to put the light on. When had the daylight gone?

He bit his lip to steady his trembling hands. There was, of course, no instrument left in the room which could serve to help him separate the two glued-together pages, nothing like a letter opener, or a nail file; he had only his sweating hands. He encouraged himself under his breath as if talking to someone else, for this old, this old, done man wasn't Hanno Dietrich. His fingers were doughy and perspiration dripped from his forehead and burned in his heavy eyebrows. “Not much more to do,” he promised himself. “Not much more.”

And then the precious stuff, the potassium cyanide was out from between the two glued pages. He had put the crystals into the corner of an envelope, and there they were, the same as when he had last seen them, so little, so much. You died easily, he had been promised. It is instantaneous. You will feel nothing. The knowledge that he could die painlessly had saved his life when he had been questioned by the Nazis. He put the envelope into the pocket of his pajama jacket.

But, of course, he could not seal back the pages. The years which had left the cyanide deadly, had dried the glue and made it useless. Well, they could find the pages afterward and discover how he had managed, but it must not be found until it was over. And wait, he thought, wait.… He leafed through the book for the passage, but couldn't find it, could not. Then he remembered that it was also quoted in the introduction. There it was: “What passed as truth was often a matter of climate and upbringing, of passion and prejudice, depending entirely on the inquirer's viewpoint.” Now it came.… Here it was: “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is amusing herself with me, or I with her?”

He had no pen. He had no pencil. He tried to underline the passage with his fingernail, but it made no clear mark. Just in time, he remembered that he could call his nurse and did so, authoritatively, pressing the button pinned to the mattress. He asked Miss Claremot if he could have his window open. She said he couldn't. He asked whether he could borrow her pencil for a minute—“I'll give it right back”—She said he could.

He had underlined, “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is amusing herself with me, or I with her.” He had put a small A in the margin next to it. With luck, perhaps Anni would know that in the end he found out. “How that still matters,” he said, and held the book in readiness to give to Anni.

She came into the room and he saw how she would not look at him, how her glance slid to the side of him.

“Ernie will talk to her right away,” Anni said. “Ernie's crying, Hanno. He will not be able to stop crying, and she won't be able to refuse his tears. You will see.” To avoid looking at his shame, she stared around the grim room. “They don't take care of you very well in this hospital,” she said, to say something.

“I'm a prisoner, not a patient. I'm a real prisoner now, Anni. When I saw you in the sunroom, it was because they were searching my room … Otherwise, I can't leave it.”

The mention of the sunroom reminded her. “I brought you some soup, Hanno. Should I get it?”

He shook his head.

“Well, I can at least fix your pillow,” she decided, only wanting, he knew, to do something, anything for him.

She came to the bed to fix the pillow and he tried to take her hand, to kiss her hand so that somehow, later perhaps when it was over, when Ernest was saved and he was dead, she would realize that he had not died a fool, but she would not permit it. Anni wanted no
küsse die Hand
in gratitude for bringing Puppchen to him.

And then the K.K.K. came in: telephone call for Mrs. Leopold.

It was sure to be the Ernest. And then, while straining his ears to hear from the tone of Anni's voice whether or not Puppchen was going to come, the nurse arrived with his dinner. It was the dinner tray which gave him the idea. “I don't want it,” he said. “Nothing, thank you.”

“G-g-g-go on, Mr. D-Dietrich,” the K.K.K. urged. “G-go on and h-have s-some dinner. The f-food's pretty good h-here.”

“I see what you mean, Mr. Starter. You are telling me it will be better than what I'll get in jail.”

Anni came hurrying back so that he would not have an extra moment's worry that Puppchen wasn't going to come to him.

“This is my last meal here, isn't it? They will be moving me tomorrow, I imagine.” He lifted the fork and poked with it at the food.

“Ernest will be here right away, Hanno.”

She had avoided saying that it was Puppchen who would be there as well. “Anni … call the Ernest immediately, please. Before he leaves. Mr. Starter. Anni,
liebchen
, tell Ernest please to bring a bottle of champagne with him. If there is one in the refrigerator, good; if not,
tant pis
. The champagne and two of the Waterford glasses, Anni. That is important. Champagne in water tumblers is not champagne.”

The K.K.K. said, “Now w-w-wait a m-m-minute, w-w-wait a m-minute, there.”

Anni turned on him as if he were a monster. “
Ach,
” she said, “let him, let him. She is going away tonight, you know that. He will be alone after tonight. Mr. Starter, he is a great one for champagne. Let him have it.”