Ideal (5 page)

“Ma-a,” said Cora Mae, “Junior was stealing apple butter from the icebox. I seen him.”

“I didn't!” yelled Junior, raising his pale face from his plate.

“You did, too!” screamed Cora Mae.

The third child, Henry Bernard Perkins, said nothing. He sat in his high chair, with his mush bowl, thoughtfully drooling on his oilcloth bib with a picture of Mother Goose.

“Now, for instance,” said Mrs. Perkins, “supposing Junior ate the apple butter, I hate to think what it'll do to his stomach. I'll bet it was rancid. That icebox . . .”

“I thought it worked all right,” said George S. Perkins.

“Oh, you did? That's because you never see what's under your nose. You don't care if the children eat wilted vegetables. But let me tell you, there's nothing worse'n wilted vegetables. Mrs. Tucker, she heard a lecture where the lady said that if you don't get enough stuff with vitamins what make bones the kids will get rickets. That's what they'll get.”

“In my day,” said Mrs. Shly, “parents sure did think of what they fed the young ones. Take the Chinese, for instance. They don't eat nothing but rice. That's why all the Chinks have rickets.”

“Now, Mother,” said George S. Perkins, “who ever told you that?”

“Well, I suppose I don't know what I'm talking about?” said Mrs. Shly. “I suppose the big businessman is the only one to tell us what's what?”

“But, Mother. I didn't mean . . . I only meant that . . .”

“Never mind, George Perkins. Never mind. I know very well what you meant.”

“You leave Mama alone, George.”

“But, Rosie, I didn't . . .”

“It's no use talking, Rosalie. When a man hasn't the decency to . . .”

“Mother, will you let Rosie and me . . .”

“I understand. I understand perfectly, George Perkins. An old mother, these days, is no good for anything but to shut up and wait for the graveyard!”

“Mother,” said George S. Perkins bravely, “I wish you'd stop trying to . . . to make trouble.”

“So?” said Mrs. Shly, smashing her napkin into the gravy. “So that's it? So I'm making trouble? So I'm a burden to you, ain't I? Well, I'm glad you came out with it, Mr. Perkins! And here I've been, poor fool that I am, slaving in this house like it was my own! Polishing the stove, only yesterday that was, till all my nails is broke! That's the gratitude I get! Well, I won't stand for it another minute! Not one minute!”

She rose, the soft creases of her neck trembling, and left the room, slamming the door.

“George!” said Mrs. Perkins, her eyes wide in consternation. “George, if you don't apologize, Mama will leave us!”

George S. Perkins looked up, blinking, the weariness of years whose count he had lost giving him a sudden, desperate courage.

“Well, let her go,” he said.

Mrs. Perkins stood silent, hunched forward. Then she screamed:

“So it's come to that? So that's what it does to you, your big promotion? Coming home, picking a fight with everybody, throwing your wife's old mother out into the gutter! If you think I'm going to—”

“Listen,” said George S. Perkins slowly, “I've stood about as much of her as I'm going to stand. She'd better go. It was coming to this, sooner or later.”

Mrs. Perkins stood straight and the rhinestone clip snapped open on her chest.

“You listen to me, George Perkins.” Her thin voice made dry, gulping sounds somewhere high in her throat. “If you don't apologize to Mama, if you don't apologize to her before tomorrow morning, I'll never speak to you again as long as I live!”

“All right by me,” said George S. Perkins. He had heard the same promise many times.

Mrs. Perkins ran, sobbing, up the stairs to her bedroom.

George S. Perkins rose heavily and walked up the stairs, slowly, his head bent, looking down at the bulge of his stomach, the old stairway creaking under his steps. Cora Mae watched curiously to see where he would go. He did not turn to Mrs. Perkins' room; he shuffled slowly away, down the corridor, to his bedroom.

Junior stretched his hand across the table and stuffed hastily into his mouth the slice of lamb left on Mrs. Shly's plate. . . .

The clock in the living room struck ten.

All lights were out in the house, save a dim lamp in the window of George S. Perkins' bedroom. George S. Perkins sat on this bed, huddled in a faded bathrobe of purple flannel, and studied thoughtfully the toes of his old slippers.

The doorbell rang.

George S. Perkins started. That was strange; his window opened over the front porch and he had heard no steps in the street outside, nor across the lawn, nor on the hard cement of the porch.

The maid had gone for the night. He rose hesitantly and shuffled down the stairs, the steps creaking.

He crossed the dark living room and opened the door.

“Oh, my God!” said George S. Perkins.

A woman stood there, on the porch. She wore a plain, black suit buttoned high under her chin and a black hat with a brim like a man's, pulled low over one eye, and he saw a tight black glove glistening in the poor light, on a slender, incredible hand grasping a black bag. He saw blond hair spilled in the air under the hat's brim. He had never met that woman before, but he knew her face well, too well.

“Please keep quiet,” she whispered, “and let me in.”

His five fingers were spread wide apart over his mouth and he stuttered foolishly:

“You . . . you . . . you are . . .”

“Kay Gonda,” said the woman.

His hands dropped like weights to his side, pulling his arms down. He had to learn to speak again. He tried. He made a long sound and it came out like: “W-w-what—”

“Are you George Perkins?” she asked.

“Y-yes,” he stuttered. “Yes, ma'am. George Perkins. George S. Perkins. Yes.”

“I am in trouble. You heard about it?”

“Y-yes . . . Oh, my God! . . . Yes . . .”

“I have to hide. For the night. Can you let me stay here?”

“Here?”

“Yes. For one night.”

It could not be his living room around them. It could not be his house. He could not have heard what he had heard.

“But you . . .” He gulped. “That is . . . how . . . I mean,
why
did you . . .”

“I read your letter. And I thought that no one would look for me here. And I thought you would want to help me.”

“I . . .” He choked. “I . . .” The words, coming back, were burning his throat that had lost all habit of sound. “Miss Gonda, you'll excuse me, please, you know it's enough to make a fellow . . . I mean, if I don't seem to make . . . I mean, if you need help, you can stay here the rest of your life, and if anyone tries to . . . There's nothing I wouldn't do for you . . . if you need me . . . me . . . Miss Gonda!”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Come this way,” he whispered. “Keep quiet. . . this way.”

He led her up the stairs, and she followed like a shadow, and he could not hear her steps behind his heavy, shuffling ones.

He closed the door of his room and pulled the blinds over the windows. He stood staring at the pale face, the long mouth, the eyes in the shadows of long lashes, the eyes that saw too much, the eyes that were like a sound, like many sounds, saying something he wanted to understand, always one sound short, the last one, the one that would let him know the meaning of what they were saying.

“You . . .” he stuttered. “You . . . You're Kay Gonda.”

“Yes,” she said.

She threw her bag down on his bed. She took off her hat and threw it on his dresser. She pulled off her gloves, and he looked, bewildered, at the long transparent fingers, at hands that looked like a vision of human hands.

“You mean . . . you mean they're really after you?”

“The police,” she said. She added calmly: “For murder, you know.”

“Listen, they can't get you. Not you. That don't make sense. If there's anything I can . . .”

He stopped, his hand at his mouth. Down the corridor, steps were approaching, heavy, hurried steps with mules flapping against bare heels.

“George!” Mrs. Perkins' voice called from behind the door.

“Yes, d-dovey?”

“Who was that who rang the bell?”

“No . . . no one, dovey. Someone had the wrong address.”

They stood still, listening to the mules flapping away, down the corridor.

“That was my wife,” he whispered. “We . . . we better keep quiet. She's all right. Only she . . . she wouldn't understand.”

“It will be dangerous for you,” she said, “if they find me here.”

“I don't care . . . I don't care about that.”

She smiled at him, the slow smile he had seen so many times at the bottomless distance of a screen. But now the face was there before him, and he could see a light shadow of red on the pale lips.

“Well,” he blinked, spreading his hands helplessly, “well, you just make yourself at home. You can sleep right here. I'll . . . I'll go down to the living room and . . .”

“No,” she said. “I don't want to sleep. Stay here. You and I, we have so much to talk about.”

“Oh, yes. Sure . . . that is . . . about what, Miss Gonda?”

She sat down on the bed, without noticing it, as if she'd lived there all her life.

He sat on the edge of a chair, gathering his old bathrobe tightly, wishing dimly, painfully, that he had bought the new robe he had seen on sale at the Day Company.

Her wide, pale, wondering eyes were looking at him, as if she were waiting. He blinked and cleared his throat.

“Pretty cold night, this is,” he muttered.

“Yes.”

“That's California for you . . . the Golden West,” he added. “Sunshine all day, but cold as the . . . but very cold at night.”

“Sometimes.”

He felt as if she had seized something somewhere very deep inside of him, seized it and twisted it in her strange, bluish fingers, and was pulling it, so that it hurt him, a pain he remembered having known very long ago, and now he knew he could feel it again, and it made him choke.

“Yes,” he said, “it sure is cold at night.”

She said: “Give me a cigarette.”

He leaped to his feet, fumbled in his coat pocket, produced a package, held it out to her, the package trembling. He struck three matches before he could light one. She leaned back, a red dot trembling at the end of the cigarette.

“I . . . I smoke this kind,” he muttered. “Easier on your throat, they are.”

He had waited forty years for this. Forty years—to see a slender black figure sitting on the patchwork quilt of his bed. He had not believed it, but he had been waiting for it. He knew he had been waiting. What was it he wanted to say to her?

He said:

“Now, Joe Tucker—that's a friend of mine—Joe Tucker, he smokes cigars. But I never took to them, never did.”

“You have many friends?” she asked.

“Yes, sure. Sure I have. Can't complain.”

“You like them?”

“Sure. I like them fine.”

“And they like you? They respect you and bow to you on the street?”

“Why . . . why, I guess so . . .”

“How old are you, George Perkins?”

“I'll be forty-five this coming June.”

“It will be hard—won't it?—to lose your job and to find yourself in the street? In a dark, lonely street where you'll see your friends passing by and looking past you, as if you did not exist? Where you will want to scream out and tell them of the great things you know, but no one will hear and no one will answer?”

“Why . . . when . . . when would that happen?”

“When they find me here,” she said calmly.

“Listen,” he said. “Don't you worry about that. They won't find you here. Not that I'm afraid for myself.”

“They hate me, George Perkins. And they hate all those who take my side.”

“Why should they hate you?”

“I'm a murderess, George Perkins.”

“Well, if you ask me, I don't believe it. I don't even want to ask you if you've done it. I just don't believe it.”

“If you mean Granton Sayers . . . no, I don't want to speak about Granton Sayers. Forget that. But I am still a murderess. In so many ways. You see, I came here and, perhaps, I'll destroy your life—everything that has been your life for forty-five years.”

“That's not much, Miss Gonda,” he whispered.

“Do you always go to see my pictures?”

“Always.”

“Are you happy when you come out of the theater?”

“Yes. Sure. . . . No. I guess I'm not. That's funny, I never thought of it that way. I . . . Miss Gonda,” he said suddenly, “you won't laugh at me if I tell you something?”

“Of course not.”

“Miss Gonda, I . . . I cry when I come home after every picture of yours. I just lock myself in the bathroom and I cry, every time. I don't know why. I know it's silly for a grown man like me . . . I've never told that to a soul, Miss Gonda.”

“I know that.”

“You . . . did?”

“I told you I'm a murderess. I kill so many things. I kill the things men live for. But they come to see me, because I make them see that they want those things killed. That they want to live for something greater. Or they think they do. And it's their whole pride—that they think and say they do.”

“I—I'm afraid I don't quite get you, Miss Gonda.”

“You'll understand someday.”

“Look,” he asked, “did you really do it?”

“What?”

“Did you kill Granton Sayers?”

She looked at him and did not answer.

“I . . . I was only wondering why you could have done it,” he muttered.