We Five (39 page)

“But I turned into him anyway, didn't I?” he said bitterly. “For all the good your sending me away did.” Jerry paused. He studied the Oriental rug on the floor. He didn't raise his eyes as he said, “I had thought about killing myself. I had thought about killing the both of us.”

At first Clara couldn't find words to respond. She rose from the sofa. Then she said raggedly, “I think you should go. As I—as I have said: I have packing to do.”

Jerry got up as well. But not before flinging the stereoscope to the wooden floor. It made a loud clatter, the handle breaking away on impact, the picture card flying off. Clara started. She took a step back.

“It doesn't look real!” Jerry raged. “They say it's supposed to look real and lifelike when the pictures come together. All well and good, but they're still in damnable black and white. We don't live in a black and white world.”

“No, we do not,” said Clara, her voice aching with pain. “I—I've seen cards where the pictures are color-tinted.”

“Like putting rouge on a corpse.” Jerry was breathing heavily. He took a moment to catch his breath. “I can't hold you accountable for what was done to me. You are a stupid, frightened woman. You would have made a stupid and frightened mother, who would have been of no use to me.”

Clara nodded quickly in a frenzied travesty of agreement.

“It was better that I was raised by the cheddar-heads.”

“I don't—I don't know what that means.”

“It doesn't matter. I'm going. I'm sorry for what I did to your daughter. I'm sorry for casting this brief shadow over
your
life. I needed to see you—not for you to apologize—just to face for one last time the woman who would do this. Now I've faced you. But I am not changed. My heart hasn't softened. I thought it might, but it hasn't. I don't wish you well. I wish that the rest of your life were one long trial. And that you'll regret to your dying day the stupid thing you did.”

Clara spoke softly: “I have always regretted it.”

Jerry left without saying another word.

Clara sank back onto the sofa and wept. She remembered Lucile Mobry's words from the morning—what she said about men, and how, frankly, undeserving they were of redemption, and then she remembered opposing words from her daughter, who felt that a man could be changed through the tendance of a loving, caring woman. Now Clara came to see the truth as it was unveiled to her by the example of Jerry's belligerent visit—the truth that lay somewhere between the two extremes.

She walked over to the stereoscope and picked it up. She wondered if she could repair the handle before her landlady came home from her errands and discovered it broken. She picked up the stereographic card containing the two images of the same Japanese pagoda and scrutinized it. She saw no difference between the two pictures printed side-by-side on the rectangle of thumb-smudged grey-green cardboard. Yet together the images were supposed to create a single picture of fuller dimensionality. Clara shook her head and returned the card to the box of stereographs.

Lucile Mobry and Clara's daughter Maggie had spoken of men and women as if there were worlds of difference between them, but Clara wondered. She saw in each the same elemental needs and then that one great, overarching need: to snatch at happiness whenever one had opportunity, and to use it as a salve for all the aches and throbs that come from human existence. Men and women engaged life, they engaged one another, in very different ways, but in those things that made them most human they were like the pictures on the stereograph: very much alike and very much in need of one another to make the whole picture.

Whatever that picture might be.

Clara climbed the stairs to her third-floor flat, the one with the window and the fine fogless view and the plush seat where one could sit and gaze out and do one's best to push aside dark memories and feelings of painful regret. But Clara did not sit. Instead, she returned to her packing.

She did not hear the wicker of the gelding below, shuffling and unnerved in the street by a portentous vibration below ground undetected by any of the two-legged creatures passing nearby.

Two policemen came looking for Lyle. Will Holborne had told them who he believed had killed his friend in their shared flat on Telegraph Hill. He directed the cops to the Emporium. What they found when they got there were four young women finishing up the last morsels of the supper they'd prepared together. (Ruth had removed herself to the larder, so as not to draw unnecessary speculation as to the reason for her injured face.) Jane was taken singly into the parlor and questioned by one of the two officers.

“I don't know where he's gone,” she said in a businesslike manner. “He flew out of here a couple of hours ago.”

“So you don't have a clue as to where he might be headed.”

“That's what I said. What is it you think he's done?”

“Killed a man.”

Jane opened her eyes widely in an expression of shock and dismay that served. “My brother wouldn't kill anyone. It would take too much effort.”

“How about you make a little effort to take our questions seriously, Miss Higgins? A man is dead and there's one who said it was your brother who did it. He said your brother had it in for the victim.”

Jane was sitting on the sofa.
That
sofa
.
It could not be avoided. She didn't like the way she felt just being in the room. Everything reminded her of what had happened there only a few days before. “Did the person who said this—” said Jane, while effecting a look of serious inquiry, “—did he also say
why
my brother wanted to see this man dead?”

“Not in the few minutes I had opportunity to question him. But we know there's a reason there. He said he was nearly positive it was your brother who was the one that did it. We like that phrase ‘nearly positive,' Miss Higgins. It tends to make our job easier. Anyway, somebody will get it out of him. Sometimes it can be a simple thing: one man doesn't like another man's politics. Or his religion. Or the way he's looking at him. And they exchange words. And they're both lit, and things turn violent.” The policeman sniffed. “Your brother drinks. I can smell it all around the place. We're going to make our search now. You go back in the kitchen with your friends. You have some very pretty friends.”

“Thank you. I'm the team mascot.”

“You're a funny one. Are you girls having a party?” The officer craned his head to see past the door and into the kitchen down the short connecting hallway.

“Not really. We just like to get together now and then, away from work. We're salesclerks at Pemberton, Day.”

“My wife was there only yesterday. She bought a tam o' shanter for my daughter—for her birthday. Maybe you sold it to her.”

“I don't think so. I'm in the ribbons department.”

The policeman led Jane back into the kitchen. Then he and his partner looked around the showroom and through all the back rooms of Jane and Lyle's living quarters. After searching the house, they went out to the yard in the back. There was a storage shed, where some of the stock was kept. It was locked. Jane gave them the key. Twenty minutes later, the police officers were gone.

We Five agreed to wait in the kitchen until they felt confident the men weren't coming back. They took this opportunity to come to one mind about the fate of Jane's brother Lyle, who was presently hiding in a crawlspace above his bedroom.

“I'm not comfortable harboring a fugitive from justice,” said Ruth. “But you know already that this is where I stand. And
I
know that I'm outvoted. The three of you think that Lyle shouldn't have to pay for what he did. And Molly, having yet to make up her mind, abstains.”

Maggie, who was sitting next to Molly at the table, the two having lovingly patched up their differences so that they now held hands in sisterly affection beneath the table, said, “Molly's torn in two different directions when it comes to her father. It's too much to make her decide the fate of Lyle Higgins as well.”

Molly shook her head. “No, Mag, I
have
made up my mind about Papa. He is my father and I love him, and I don't trust a judge or jury to be lenient with him. As for Lyle, I'll go along with whatever the rest of you want.”

Ruth, who had been pacing back and forth, now stopped and addressed the three young women sitting at the table and the tall one washing dishes at the sink: “I was raised to understand the difference between right and wrong. But I was also raised by a minister and his sister to recognize how murky is the swamp that lies in between. Mobry himself has given shelter to men—Negro men, who are alleged to have committed crimes—but in these cases it was to shield them from the lawlessness of mob justice. It's a complicated matter deciding what's totally right, what's
half
right, and what's only a
little
right. And if I'm to be perfectly honest, I'd say that keeping Lyle from arrest is only a little right—the kind of right that comes from selfish love. But it's the same kind of selfish love that would make me do the very same thing for any of you.”

“Please take the last slice of mocha cake, Ruth,” responded Jane with tearful affection.

“Are you insisting?”

“We're
all
insisting,” said Carrie.

It was Jane and Carrie who went into Lyle's bedroom to tell him the coast was clear. Jane tapped the ceiling above his bed. A panel slid back and Lyle dropped down. Jane told him what the police officer had said. Meanwhile, Carrie's eyes were drawn to Lyle's sketchpad on the table.

She opened it and turned its leaves, each bearing a pastel drawing of a scenic landscape.

“Did you do all these?” she asked.

Lyle interrupted his conversation with his sister to answer, “Yes. Yes I did.”

“They're really quite wonderful,” said Carrie, who could not keep her eyes from them. “I'd like to have one to keep.”

“Where will you keep it, Carrie?” said Jane, brusquely. “You don't have anywhere to live.”

“You keep it
for
me then, Lyle.
This
one.” She turned to a sketch of a seaside village. “That's Tiburon, isn't it?”

“Yes it is.”

“Put my name on it. It's mine.”

“All right.”

“Are you both quite finished?” asked Jane. “We can't stay here. It isn't safe. The police will pay a return visit as soon as Holborne is made to tell them everything he knows. They'll want to ask me a thousand questions. I can't answer a single one. I'll fall to pieces.”

Carrie nodded. “And I don't like it that Holborne's still out there—that he may want to come after us. Look at what he did to Ruth's face.” Carrie had put her statement in the present tense because Ruth at that moment was coming into the bedroom, along with Maggie and Molly.

Ruth, having already taken charge of matters, was
in medias res
with the other two: “The next ferry to Oakland isn't until early tomorrow morning. Molly, you and Jane and Lyle will need a place that isn't far from the Ferry Building where you can spend the night. If you hide yourselves well enough, you stand a good chance of getting Lyle on the boat without being seen and followed.”

“You might as well come with us, Ruth,” said Maggie. “You're already packed and you already have your ticket for New York.”

“That leaves Carrie,” said Jane. “What are you going to do with yourself, Carrie?”

“I've been giving it a lot of thought. There's a music school I've been looking into. It's in New York.”

Ruth corrugated her brows with interest. “Are you saying you'd like to come with
me
, Carrie?”

“There's nothing keeping me here in San Francisco. Especially with all of you leaving. Yes, I'd like to come with you, Ruth. I have money in the bank. I didn't put it in my mattress like some do. I put it in a savings account. I'll just withdraw it all tomorrow morning and then you and I can be on our way. If, that is, you'll have me.”

“Why shouldn't I have you, Carrie? You seldom get under my skin the way our three sisters do.”

Ruth's attempt at dry levity went unacknowledged.

Carrie looked at Lyle. “I think, then, I
will
take that picture from you, Lyle. Because I don't know when I'm ever to see you again.”

Lyle tore the sketch from the book. There was a shyness, an awkwardness about him that seemed out of character. But then again, there was very little Lyle Higgins had said or done over the course of the last two or three days that seemed
in
character. He handed the sketch to Carrie.

She looked at it with the loving eyes that her present discomfiture would not permit her to raise up. “I always wanted to live in this little village. I'll look at it and think of you, Lyle.”

Lyle swallowed nervously. He glanced up at the ceiling as if he might wish to climb right back up into the crawlspace to escape his present unwonted unease.

Ruth looked back and forth between the two of them, half smiling with curiosity. “How did I happen to miss the first act of this little play?”

“You didn't miss anything at all,” chuckled Jane. “It feels to
me
as if the curtain has just begun to rise.”

What was also rising at that moment was the color in both Lyle and Carrie's cheeks.

“So just where
will
we be staying tonight?” asked Maggie, returning the discussion to more practical matters. “Holborne knows where each of us lives. Miss Colthurst gave all our personal information to the Katz Agency.”

“I'd like to make a suggestion,” said Ruth. “You may not like it, but then again, it's not a place Holborne or any officer of the San Francisco Police Department would be likely to go. Cain took me there. It's in Chinatown. We can sleep there. They have little rooms.”