Psyche (37 page)

Psyche thought of the quiet, patrician face, the lovely almost blind eyes, and kind mouth. “Or too much love,” she said soberly. “What happened to her then?”

“She dropped out of sight. In time she was forgotten. Most people believe she went to Europe and died there. She did go to Europe. She came back seven years ago. That was when she took the place at Bel's. Without the handle nobody recognized her name. You can see what a story it would make, can't you, honey? Any newsman would. All they have to do is go back into their files thirty years or more to find enough material to write a book. Tie those gilt-edged days in with the present set-up, and you've got a front-page sob story with a dozen different angles to it.”

“I don't like it, Joe.”

“I didn't expect you would. Bel won't either. But we're going to play it like that, just the same.”

“They won't need to see her, will they, Joe?” she asked urgently. “It should be enough just to know she's there, shouldn't it?”

“That will be up to you, honey. If you're good enough, if you play it right, you can keep them out of everyone's hair but your
own. They'll want pictures, but they can get those on the street without her ever knowing they're doing it.”

“And she can't see well enough to read a newspaper,” Psyche said slowly. Without further elaboration she saw exactly what he wanted her to do. She was to stand, literally and metaphorically, in front of both Bel and the old lady, shielding the first completely and delivering the second into the hands of the enemy even while attempting to protect her. It would not be easy, but Joe was right—she, because she need not pretend to be anything other than she was, because she had no personal secrets to hide, was the only one who might conceivably put it over.

“You've never met any newsmen, have you, honey? Well, some of them may seem sloppy and not too intelligent, but don't make any mistake, in their own way they're as smart as they come. Each time you tangle with one you'll be playing a pair of deuces against a full house. Your one advantage will be that you know it, and they don't.”

Psyche looked down at her sandaled feet, and saw that unconsciously she had been making a pattern in the gravel: a pattern not unlike an angel with wings outspread. Was it her own guardian angel? Or Kathie's? Or no more than a meaningless smear in gravel warmed by a hot spring sun?

Her eyes narrowed, she said thoughtfully, “It will be like a poker game, won't it? If I think of it that way, I can do it.”

Joe pulled a long black cigar from his pocket, bit off the end, spat it out, and got to his feet. “We'd better be getting back, honey. The doc should be there by now, and it won't do for me to be around these parts once this thing breaks.”

As they left the park, church bells were ringing, a first requiem, it seemed, for Kathie. And it came to Psyche that Bel had said the only really sensible thing that had been said since a sombre dawn that now seemed a long way back in time.

Bel had said, “She was never at peace. She is now.”

Kathie——

6

B
EL
was not easily persuaded.

“You want me to throw that old dame to the wolves!” she said violently. “I won't do it, Joe.”

“Have you any better ideas?”

Bel stared moodily at a row of geraniums, usually in the front windows, now lining the kitchen counter. The geraniums were the all-clear to the boys, thé signal that Bel's place was ready to welcome them. May had removed them without prompting. As Joe had said, you could count on May.

Psyche turned a coffee cup, refilled three times, round and round in its saucer. “You've got to think of the girls, too, Bel.”

“They'll make out.”

“Yeah. In the clink, most likely,” May contributed without rancour.

“I won't have the kid mixed up in this,” Bel said, as she had already said several times before.

May did not usually smoke at all. This morning she was chainsmoking. “She'll be kind of mixed up when they lock her in.”

Bel's head jerked back, and her face, beneath make-up she had applied automatically, was old and haggard. “What do you mean?”

“She'll go in with the rest of us, Bel,” May said quietly. “Maybe she'll get loose sooner, but you won't be able to stop them taking her in.”

“Is that right, Joe?”

He nodded. “That's right.”

“You haven't any choice, Bel,” Psyche told her gently. “You really haven't any choice at all. If it works, good. If it doesn't— well, we won't be any worse off, and I will have done something for you and for Kathie. Don't you go on trying to take that away from me.”

“Give me a cigarette, somebody,” Bel said hoarsely. “Joe, how have you figured it? The other girls will be waking up soon. We better have it all straight before any of them bust in here.”

The police arrived just before noon. The doctor came back with them. They accepted his story, that he had been called in toward mid-morning and had himself cut the dead girl down. They talked briefly and politely with an old lady who could tell them nothing. They talked briefly and politely with the owner of the premises who also told them nothing. They talked at slightly greater length but still politely with the owner's niece who, it appeared, had been the only one in the house to know the dead girl at all intimately.

“How long had you been taking these private lessons with her, Miss Moran?”

“Since early in January,” Psyche said.

“And you noticed a difference in her behaviour recently?”

“She was highly nervous. Very restless.”

“Could you give us any reason for this?”

“No,” Psyche replied steadily. “She—she was a very reserved person.”

“Would you have known if there was any man?”

For you—Kathie. “There was no man.”

They went away quite satisfied that there was nothing further to be learned at the girl's lodgings. Enquiries would be made at the school, but they did not expect to find much there. It was, after all, a very ordinary story. A friendless school-teacher, plain and unloved, lonely and underpaid, who had not found life worth living. They came to the city, girls like this, from all over the country, their hearts set on a career or marriage, or both. They met, only too often, with nothing but disappointment.

It was a depressing, but nevertheless very ordinary story.

When the two black cruisers no longer stood against the curb, Bel lifted her tiny feet out of brogues two sizes too large for her, shed a black cardigan in the middle of the living-room floor, and went to her room and locked the door. Violet continued to stare woodenly at a finger-nail bitten to the quick. Ruth and Joan cried quietly on each other's shoulders. May, lifting the pillow she had held over Monique's head, left her to continue her hysterics uninterrupted. And Psyche was sicker than she had ever been in her life.

After that initial ordeal Psyche was able to handle the reporters without much difficulty. Disliking their mission, contemptuous of anyone who made a vocation of prying into other people's affairs, she even took a certain grim pleasure in misleading them. That they were, as Joe had warned her, far from stupid, helped rather than the reverse, for it turned what might have been a series of dreary evasions into a sharp game of wits.

There were four of them who came and went on the Monday and Tuesday of that week.

All through Monday and Tuesday Psyche, in her blue dress, her hair tied back with a blue ribbon, sat in the living-room near the top of the stairs, a shopping-bag and a light coat on the floor beside her. The girls, in their plainest clothes, went out to work as usual, all except May. May and Bel took turns watching the street through a carefully drawn lace curtain.

“This looks like one of them, honey,” May would say. “Get into your routine.”

And a reporter, reaching the front door, would meet a tall, pretty girl on her way out to do the daily marketing. A very appealing girl, wistful and grave, who would reluctantly allow herself to be drawn into conversation, and who, having said something she obviously wished she had not, would try to insist that he go in and talk to her aunt instead.

Perhaps twenty minutes later he would depart, feeling like a bit of a louse but none the less jubilant because he had come across a very nice story where he had had no real reason to expect one. It had, after all, been nothing but a routine assignment.

Psyche, successful but unbearably depressed, would climb the
stairs again to sit and leaf through love story magazines May had thrust upon her, and which she had not had the will to resist. There was nothing in these purple pulp stories which even remotely resembled love as she envisaged it, and as she was quite certain that somewhere, sometime she would find it. That she
would
find it was something she was as sure of as she had once been sure that that she would never stand, a widow, beside an unsung miner's grave.

At the moment, however, this was a certainty which gave her little or no comfort, for its realization seemed to her then to be a long way off.

By Wednesday afternoon, it was apparent that they had seen the last of the reporters, for no more had come, and the papers had all by that time carried, in one form or another, the story which had been given to them. Kathie, in every case, had rated no more than a brief paragraph on an inside page.

Bel turned slowly away from a window at which she had spent most of her time for three days. A sigh of relief and fatigue escaped her. “Well, I guess we've seen the last of them. You've done a good job, baby. There isn't any way I can thank you. You'll just have to take it as read, baby.”

“Let's not talk about it, Bel.”

“I wish we could have gone to the funeral, you and me,” Bel said. “That part of it—well, it just wasn't right.”

“It didn't matter, not really,” Psyche said.

But it had mattered, terribly. Regret, that Kathie should have gone to her last resting place alone, was a leaden weight within her.

She stood up. “If there's nothing you want just now, Bel, I think I'll go up to my room for a while.”

“Go right ahead, baby,” Bel said. “Have yourself a sleep. You deserve it. I'll call you when supper's ready.”

When she reached her room, Psyche did not lie down. Instead, she sat on the edge of the window-seat, chain-smoking, and staring blankly at the
Blue Boy
that Kathie had hung up at a time when some hope must still have remained alive amongst the ashes of her growing despair.

Bel's voice, when she raised it, had real carrying quality. “You still sleeping, baby? Supper's on!”

If I don't answer. Psyche thought, she will come upstairs, so I must answer.

“I'm coming!” she called, without hearing the sharp note of hysteria behind her words. And when she went to the mirror to comb her hair she saw nothing in her reflection to warn her that she was very close to the breaking-point.

She had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch, but it was not until she reached the living-room and saw the geraniums once more in place in the window, that she realized it would be quite impossible for her to face even the thought of dinner. She would go out, she decided swiftly, and she would go now. Bel would not want her to leave, might even want her to remain in all evening. But she could not stay to watch it all begin all over again as if nothing had happened.

She wasted no time while fetching her coat and gloves, but it was slowly, and with a reluctance she could not have explained to herself, that she approached the kitchen door.

They were all in the kitchen, Bel and her girls, sitting on red-and-chrome chairs around a red-and-chrome table.

It was like a tableau in red and black and silver, briefly without movement, posed, as all faces turned toward her where she stood, equally still, in the doorway. Bel's red dress and black curls. May's flashing silver ear-rings and black satin, Monique's lacquer-black head and silver blouse, Violet's heavy silver bracelets and barbaric red finger-nails, Ruth's and Joan's red lips parted in smiles without meaning. There were other colours there, but they were momentarily obliterated by a three-colour process that screened out all but the dominant red and black and silver—red lipstick—black mascara—silver tinsel.

Bel was the first to speak, and because Psyche had known in effect what she would say, it was like a prepared speech, rehearsed, inevitable. “You're not going out, baby! Not tonight.”

“Yes, Bel.”

“But you haven't had anything to eat.”

“I'm not hungry.” I wish they would move, Psyche thought. I wish somebody else would say something.

“It's going to rain, baby,” Bel said, and her voice was an entreaty. “You won't be gone too long, will you?”

“No,” Psyche said. “I won't be gone—too long.”

There was still some light in the sky when she let herself out of the front door.

She had meant to close the door quietly, but a draught from the empty hall behind her forced it shut with a sharp, unintended finality. Unbidden, the picture of her life as a long corridor of closed doors sprang to her mind again, and she was visited by an urgent impulse to re-open this particular door at once, simply to prove that it could be done.

She lifted her hand toward the knob; then, deriding herself silently for her foolishness, let it fall again and turned away from Bel's place.

7

W
ALKING
northward from bel's, psyche knew almost at once that if she continued to walk in the evenings she would now do it without direction or objective. the will-o'-the-wisp she had chased all winter had ceased to beckon her, the far past drawing away, to vanish cloaked in dreams she was unlikely to dream again. they had not been purposeless or futile, those dreams, because they had helped across the years to shape her, to give her guidance of a kind that her environment had not provided. she would continue to believe that she had not been cast off deliberately, and that her origin, unknown though it might remain, was
such that she need not be ashamed of it, for she saw in herself some factual proof of this. But to go on thinking that she might stumble across a road that would lead her back to a real place, to real people, was to be a child playing hide-and-seek in a dark wood, hunting for something she would not recognize even if she found it.