Strange Sisters (11 page)

It was a long time before Kathy knew it. She sat in a cold white hall on the top floor of the hospital and waited. She sat on the edge of a straight chair with her torso and head held perfectly vertical and rigid from the hips and her knees and ankles together in the posture of a small, terrified girl trying valiantly to contain her terror. People in white went past her on rubber soles. Their feet made no noise, but their clothing whispered like brittle branches stirring in a winter's wind. They didn't look at her sitting there on the edge of the chair, didn't seem to care that she had prayed to God to let a man die and that God had let the man die and would perhaps let Stella die, too. They didn't care because they were meatless and soulless. You could tell by their soundless tread, their deathly pallor, their indifference to suffering and damnation.

She wondered why she couldn't weep for release, but the bleak frigidity of the environment had permeated her flesh and frozen her blood, and so she sat mute and motionless. She tried to pray again, this time for life as she had prayed earlier for death, but she found that she couldn't pray because she was now afraid of the whimsy of God. She could only sit rigidly and wait, and after a long time she was rewarded by the approach and owlish observation of a man in white. He was a man who was neither tall nor short, neither lean nor stout, an elusive mercurial impression of a man quite capable of presenting death without acquiring by association any color or permanence in her mind, so that she could never later remember what he looked like nor any material thing about him.

He introduced himself and said, "I'm afraid I have bad news for you, Miss Gait"

She looked at him and said nothing, and he added, "Your aunt is dead."

Aunt? she thought. Whoever is he talking about? Whatever is an aunt? An aunt is a mother's sister. Or a father's sister. I had a mother once, and my mother had a sister, and her name is Stella. Stella? Can this odd man be talking about Stella? If so, he's a liar. He's a cruel, malicious liar. Certainly Stella couldn't die. And if she could, it would be in a cloud of fire ascending to heaven and not in this ugly sterility scented with ether.

She swayed on the edge of the chair, catching herself in a second and resuming her rigid posture. She said in a remote voice, "I must see her."

He peered at her closely. "Do you think that would be wise? Perhaps after a sedative and some rest..."

"I must see her now."

"Very well." He shrugged and turned. "If you will come this way, please."

He took her to a closed door and opened it for her to pass through and from the doorway said after her, "Only for a minute, please. I'll wait for you here." Then he closed the door between them, and she was in a small white room with a narrow bed in it and on the bed under a sheet was what appeared to be a body, and there was apparently a rumor spreading that the body was Stella's, which was ridiculous.

She walked over to the bed and pulled the sheet back off the face of the body, and it looked like Stella's face, all right but it was made of wax. The lids were closed, and the lips were the bloodless lips of a dry wound that had obviously never known the sound and shape of laughter. This was no more than the final deception of a monstrous fraud, this waxen figure in the form of Stella, the final stroke of God's cruel whimsy. She stood for several minutes looking down at the face, thinking that if this were really Stella she would surely feel more than she felt, should feel more than this even in response to a bitter joke—sadness or anger or anything at all instead of this strange, numb impotence.

Replacing the sheet, she turned and left the room, walking as she had sat on the chair in the hall, her head and torso rigidly perpendicular, as if she feared that excessive motion would topple her off balance. Passing the waiting doctor, she walked down the hall without pausing or speaking, and she didn't respond when he spoke to her from behind. He asked her if she was all right, if she would like a bed to he down upon, but she made no sense of the words at all. Passing the elevator, she found the stairway and descended, leaving the hospital by the front entrance and walking down the broad concrete approach to the street.

She paused there under the trees, not so much wondering where to go as sensing, without ever giving specific thought to the sense, that there was really no place to go at all. Not home certainly. There was a reason, if she could think of it, why she couldn't go home. Then she recalled that it was because Stella had gone away. Stella had gone away, and she had said that she wouldn't be back for several days, and so it was, of course, impossible to go there until Stella returned. Why was that? She asked herself why it was, and she couldn't quite find an answer. It had something to do with a man and a prayer and the unpredictable caprice of God.

The moon had vanished on its way around the earth. The earth continued on its way around the sun. Across the street, a sign said hamburgers.

She went across and into the all-night lunch counter and said, "Coffee, please."

The waiter supplied it. He was fat, very fat, with three chins, and he could smell the ether on her. He thought that she looked like she was in a state of shock, and he thought that someone had died on her or was about to die on her, and he felt sorry for her, because he was a man of compassion.

Then she remembered that she had no money and stood up. "I have no money," she said.

"Forget it," he said. "Drink your coffee." She sat down again, wondering if he would be so kind to her if he knew that she had just been punished by God. Looking down into the coffee cup, she faced the truth for the first time. She formulated the truth with her lips and put it into words. "Stella's dead," she said. Her breath stirred the surface of the coffee...

“... coffee," said the bald It.

 The aroma of the black brew drifted into her nostrils. Raising her head, she slanted a look upward through her hair.

"What?" she said. "What did you say?"

"I said, here's your coffee, lady. Drink it, you’ll feel better."

"I feel all right. Just a little strange, that's all. Whimsical, I mean. I feel very whimsical."

"Sure, lady. Coffee's good for that, too."

"Really? Coffee's good for whimsy? With all respect for coffee, I find that hard to believe. I've found in my own experience that nothing is good for whimsy. Have you checked your facts?"

"What say we just try it? Just drink some while it's hot."

"Oh, yes. While it's hot. It is necessary to strike while the coffee is hot. That means you must act at the psychological moment. At the right time. I did something because I thought it was the right time, but it didn't turn out to be the right time at all, and now I can see that no time would have been the right time."

She caught herself up and stared at him slyly through her hair. Although she couldn't remember at the moment precisely what it was she had done, she knew that she must be careful not to tell this agreeable It too much. She had great faith in him, but it didn't pay to place too much faith in faith. She had had personally some very unfortunate experiences in that respect. If you had too much faith, someone was quite likely to get whimsical with you.

"Tell me, It," she said. "Did you ever pray for something?"

"Will you please drink your coffee, lady?"

"Of course. Naturally. By all means. If you answer my question, that is. I'm willing to make that bargain with you. You answer the question, I drink the coffee."

"All right. So I've prayed."

"You're begging the question. I asked if you'd ever prayed for
something.
I distinctly remember asking that."

"So I've prayed for something."

"Recently?"

"No. A long time ago. When I was a kid."

"Did you get it? What you prayed for, I mean."

"I don't remember ever getting anything."

She shook the hair out of her eyes and looked at him with a return of triumph in her expression. "You see? I told you God loved you. Maybe you thought it wasn't considerate of God not to give you what you wanted. Is that true? Well, I assure you it was
very
considerate of God, because not getting anything is better than getting too much. Once I asked for something, and I got it, but I got something else, too, and all together it was too much. Can you understand that?"

"Sure. I understand everything. Now be good and drink the coffee like you promised."

Yes. A promise is a promise is a promise is a rose, and the roses are blooming in the night, and the night is June. She could smell the roses below the window, and they smelled like coffee. She lifted her cup and swallowed some of the roses, and they were hot. They burned a path to her stomach.

"That's the way," said the bartender. "Just drink it slow and pretty soon you'll be as good as new."

She began to giggle then, because the thought crossed her mind, prompted by his assurance, that being as good as new might be no improvement. Why was it that people always made the bland assumption that something was necessarily better when it was new than when it was older? That was not true of cheese or beer or blessed rye whisky, and it might not be true of people. If one could start over, be new again, could one be different? Before Stella and Vera and Jacqueline? Before Renowski and Brunn and murder? Could one do differently and think differently and go a different way? Or was the potential not only determined but also directed—nothing to do but what must clearly be done and one way only open? It was a complex problem, rather like metaphysics, and it mixed her all up. It made the world whirl around.

She lifted the cup and scalded her throat. The bartender nodded approvingly. She had great faith in him. Should she tell him the truth right out? I'm a strange one, It. I have the wrong color hair. Because of it, I killed a man with an ice-pick. He had a desk set in his apartment, and my hair was the wrong color. Again she giggled, visualizing the bald It's expression. But she would be unable to see his expression because of the thick mist that was settling. As a matter of fact, it had already swallowed him up.

Quite suddenly, pricked by a desire to move, she got up herself and pushed her way into the mist It was a soft tangible impediment to progress, and she leaned her body against it, feeling it cleave before her and flow together soundlessly behind her. She had an idea that the mist existed only in the lounge, that it would be clear outside, but she discovered on the street that this was not so. The mist was still around her, thick and swirling. It shifted and drifted and rifted, and there was a yellow blur of electric lights, and through the rifts an occasional person or object. It made walking very difficult. Walking becomes very awkward when the ground—or the sidewalk, to be precise—turns out to be higher than one had judged. One then makes a new estimate of the distance to the sidewalk, and the perverse sidewalk immediately assumes a level lower than the estimate. When walking thus becomes a precarious undertaking, the best thing is to move closely to available buildings for support. The buildings may shift and sway with the mist, but they won't collapse. They are essentially stable.

Walking along the buildings, she arrived in time at an open newsstand on the corner. Here the yellow light was brighter, thinning the mist and she saw with reasonable clarity die colorful covers of many magazines in racks, a stack of newspapers on the counter. Newspapers! There was something she had expected to read in the newspapers. Something she had looked for earlier and had not found. Something of peculiar importance to herself that she kept forgetting and remembering and forgetting. She stood looking at the newspapers, thinking very hard, and slowly Angus Brunn took shape again in the mist that was solely the emanation of her brain.

Moving down the counter, she removed the top paper from the stack and folded it and slipped it quickly under her arm. Then, turning to the attendant on the other side of the counter, she was aware for the first time since leaving the lounge that she didn't have her purse. Where had she left it? In the booth? At the bar? Certainly she had had it at the bar, because she had paid for her drinks, and all her money had been in her purse. Perhaps she had carried it back to the booth with her, but it was certainly one place or the other, and clearly she must return for it or give up the newspaper. The lounge seemed suddenly very remote, a far-away, mist-shrouded place to which she was intensely reluctant to return, even if she could find her way. On the other hand, she could not give up the newspaper. It was a terrible dilemma on which she threatened to break, tension mounting at once to the maximum of her capacity to endure it, and she was saved only by the chance contact of her fingers with some odd coins in the pocket of her jacket. Dropping a nickel on the counter, she left with an exorbitant feeling of relief.

At the intersection, the curb tricked her by being in a place it had no business being. The treacherous descent of her foot beyond the expected point of contact caused her to stagger forward into the street. There was a shrill scream of rubber, a confused rise of voices, and she was conscious of a soft blow on her thigh that apparently completed the destruction of her balance because afterwards she was sitting on the curb with her feet in the gutter, and it wasn't likely that she would have sat there deliberately. A frightened face under a cap with a hard bill was swimming around in front of her eyes, and there was a voice that apparently issued from the face, and the voice was frightened, too.

She comprehended the words with difficulty. "Jesus Christ, lady, you jumped right in front of me. Against the light, it was. You jumped right out in front of me against the light."

"Did I?" she said. And then because she was sorry to have frightened him, she said so. "I'm sorry," she said.

"Are you hurt, lady?"

"Hurt? Why should I be hurt?"

"Can you stand up all right?"

"Of course I can stand up."

"Try it once. Here, let me help you."

She felt the gentle upward pressure of his hand on her elbow, and she rose with it easily.