His cigarette was still smoldering. She carried the ash tray out to the kitchen and washed it, moving awkwardly because she was angry. Hers wasn’t a hot and immediate anger like Lewis’; it couldn’t be satisfied, as his could, by racing the engine of a car or breaking a golf club. Charlotte’s anger was slow and cold; it crept gradually through her body, depressing the nerves, making her almost incapable of moving and talking.
She thought of all the things she should have said. Then she said them silently to herself, rephrasing and cutting them until they were sharp and elegant as diamonds. It was the land of childish satisfaction that she seldom permitted herself.
She looked at the dock. Nine-thirty. Lewis would be home by now, making up a lie for Gwen. Miss Schiller would be putting up her hair and talking to her cat, perhaps even telling it about Violet: “
Today a bad girl came in, bold as you please, and wanted doctor to get rid of the baby
—
oh, the things that happen! And the people you meet!”
Yes, the things that happen. Charlotte felt a stab of regret. I should have helped the girl, she thought I meant to do something for her, but she’d already gone.
She stood at the window, locking and unlocking her fingers. A low gray fog hung over the distant housetops and gave them the contours of a dream. Under one of the housetops was the girl Violet worrying out the night, friendless, penniless, thinking of death.
916 Olive Street. The address had stuck in her memory as the girl’s grief and terror had stuck in her throat.
With a decisive movement Charlotte turned from the window and went to the hall closet for her coat and hat.
Olive Street threaded north-south through the city. At one end there was an imposing hotel that rented ocean views at twenty dollars a night, at the other a flour mill. In the center, once a select suburb, the grandiose old three-storied Victorian houses had been gradually debauched by slums and abandoned. The slums had pushed ahead like an army of grasshoppers destroying everything that grew in its path. Nothing would ever grow again in that concrete wilderness except people. More and more people, whites and Negroes, Mexicans, Chinese, Italians. They kept alive and multiplied. They worked on the dock or at the freight yards; they were gardeners, busboys, charwomen, bookies; they took in washing and roomers; they sold tamales, green tea, religion, firecrackers, used furniture, souvenirs, rose bushes, and Mexican silver jewelry.
Olive Street was never empty or quiet. It had no set hours of work and rest like the middle-class parts of town. It was awake all day and all night. After dark there were fights and crap games, police sirens and recriminations.
Charlotte knew the section well. She had two regular patients within a block of 916. Though she wasn’t apprehensive about visiting Olive Street, she took the precaution of locking her Buick and removing the radiator cap that the garage man had fixed so that she could take it off and put it on herself. (She’d lost two before she caught on to the fact that you couldn’t make people trustworthy by trusting them. It was better to withdraw the temptation.)
916 was a relic. Built to last, it had lasted stubbornly through sixty years and a major earthquake and a succession of owners and tenants.
The present tenant, according to the crudely printed sign in the right front window, was Clarence G. Voss. The sign read, in full:
clarence g. voss. phrenology and palmistry. fresh-out flowers for sale. piano lessons.
Inside the house someone was playing, not a piano, but a harmonica, with brash inaccuracy. An elderly Italian sat rocking on the front porch, his hands pressed tight over his ears.
Charlotte nodded and said, “Good evening.”
He lowered his hands, scowling, “What’s that?”
“I said, good evening.”
“Cold and noisy.”
“Perhaps you could tell me if Mrs. Violet O’Gorman is at home.”
“I pay no attention to other people.”
He replaced his hands over his ears and withdrew into his world of silence. He kept his eyes on her, though, as if there was a remote possibility that she might do something interesting.
Charlotte pressed the doorbell.
“Out of order,” the Italian said.
“Thanks.”
“Nobody fixes anything around here.”
“I think the button is jammed.”
“You’re wrong.”
It was jammed. She fixed it in three seconds with a bobby pin while the Italian watched her with grudging approval.
Inside the house the harmonica stopped abruptly at the sound of the bell.
A man opened the door, a small, middle-aged man with a red baseball cap pulled down over his forehead. His ears jutted out from under the cap, extraordinary ears, pale as wax and enormous. His chin and nose were elfin and sharp, his eyes were like small black peas. Charlotte could see the outline of the harmonica in the pocket of his Hawaiian-print shirt.
Charlotte didn’t smile or even attempt to look pleasant. He was the kind of man who would immediately construe a smile from a strange woman as an invitation to intimacy; a man as quick to take offense as to take liberties.
“I’m looking for Violet O’Gorman. Is she at home?”
“I don’t know.” He had a surprising voice for his stature, deep and resonant. “Who wants her?”
“I do.”
“Sure, sure, I know that, but what name will I say is calling?”
“Miss Keating.”
“Keating. Come inside and I’ll go see if Violet’s home.”
She went in, showing none of the hesitancy she felt. He closed the door by giving it a shove with his foot. The hall smelled sour. In the light of an old-fashioned beaded chandelier Charlotte saw that the linoleum on the floor was grimy and split with age. Dust grew in the corners like mold, and the paint on the woodwork had alligatored.
He stood with his hands in his pockets, his eyes narrowed. “What did you want to see Violet about?”
“A personal matter.”
“My name is Voss. I’m her step-uncle.”
“I thought so.”
“Violet and me’ve got no secrets from each other. She’s one swell little kid, believe you me. Anybody’d harm a hair on her head I’d strangle him with my bare hands.”
“I’m in rather a hurry,” Charlotte said.
He hesitated, then swung round suddenly and skipped up the stairs, quick and neat as a cat.
Charlotte lit a cigarette and wondered if she’d been wise in giving Voss her name.
She wasn’t afraid of him, but the house made her uneasy. It had an air of decadent resignation, as if so many things had happened there that one more wouldn’t even be noticed.
She could hear Voss whispering upstairs. What is there to whisper about, she wondered. Violet is in or she’s not in, there’s no need for secrecy.
But the whispering went on, and the ceiling creaked faintly under the weight of cautious feet. She raised her eyes and caught a glimpse of a face peering down at her through the rails of the banister. The face drew back into the shadows so quickly that she wasn’t sure whether it belonged to a man or a woman. She had only the impression of youth and a picture in her mind of a flat, crooked nose that looked as if it had once been broken.
She called out sharply, “Voss!”
Voss appeared at the head of the stairs. “Violet’s not in. She must have went to a movie or something.”
“You might tell her that I was here and that I’ll call her early tomorrow morning.”
He came slowly down the steps, tracing a pattern on the banister with his forefinger. “Of course, if I knew what your business was, maybe I could help you. I’ve had a lot of experience one way or another in my lifetime.”
“Thanks, I don’t require any help.” She opened the door. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
She breathed in the cool, crisp air, feeling such an overwhelming and irrational relief that her knees shook a little. She was angry at herself for being too imaginative about the house. A house could be old and dirty without becoming the scene of a tragedy. And Voss, while he was a sleazy character, might live a fairly respectable life.
She crossed the dimly lit street to her car. The old Italian whom she’d talked to on Voss’s porch was sitting on the curb out of sight of the house, eating potato chips from a cellophane bag.
He watched her silently as she took the radiator cap out of her purse and replaced it on the car. Then he said, “Voss is a no-good bum.”
“Is he?”
“I see by your car you’re a doctor, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Voss doesn’t need a doctor, he needs an undertaker,” the Italian said gloomily. “He needs one bad.” Charlotte unlocked the front door of the car.
The old man got up suddenly, spilling the bag of potato chips in the gutter. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I could ride down the road a piece with you.”
“Why?”
“I’m not going anywhere else.”
“That’s not a very good reason.”
A small black and white mongrel appeared and began to eat the potato chips one by one in a leisurely manner. The old man reached down and stroked its dusty back. “I have a good reason,” he said. “You want to know about Violet, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then… We can’t talk here. Voss is watching. He hates me, we have a great mutual hate.” Charlotte unlocked the other door. The old man climbed into the car, running his hand over the upholstered seat with a sigh of satisfaction. “This is the life, yes sir, this is where I ought to be sitting, a big shot. And I would be too if it wasn’t that years ago I got an ulcer. A peptic ulcer, the doc called it. Sometimes I suffer—how I suffer! Right now I feel good. My name is Tidolliani, by the way. Tiddles, they call me.”
“Mine is Keating.”
“I know. I heard you tell Voss. I was listening at the window.”
“Why?”
He looked surprised. “Why? Well, I like to know what my enemies are doing so I can outwit them.” Charlotte pulled away from the curb. She suspected that the old man, Tiddles, wasn’t entirely sane, but he seemed harmless and, besides, he had put into words her own feeling about Voss. (She thought of how angry Lewis would be if he ever found out. He was always trying to make her promise not to pick up hitchhikers, and he’d even bought her a gun to keep in the glove compartment of the car. Though she was flattered by Lewis’ concern, she’d refused to accept the gun.)
“You can stop anywhere now,” Tiddles said.
She turned off at the next side street and parked the car. She asked abruptly, “Where is Violet?”
“I don’t know, but Voss does. He knew she wasn’t up in her room. He took her away himself in a car two hours ago, him and another man, one of the new roomers.”
“
Took
her away?”
“Well, she acted like she didn’t want to go. The other man was driving the car, an old blue coupé with an out-of-state license.”
“Did she have a suitcase with her?”
“No. The three of them drove off together, and pretty soon Voss and the roomer came back. Voss had two bottles of muscatel with him, and didn’t even offer me a drink. As if I cared,” he said bitterly. “As if I cared.”
“Violet didn’t come back later on by herself?”
“No. Maybe she never will.”
“Why do you say that? Of course she’ll come back,” Charlotte said firmly. “And when she does, I want you to tell her that I’ll call her tomorrow morning, in case Voss forgets.”
“He won’t forget, but he won’t tell her.” He glanced at her slyly out of the corner of his eye. “You might think I exaggerate about Voss, eh, because I hate him? Wrong! I don’t! He is a cheap crook that ought to be in jail. When I think of the people they put in jail nowadays, and here is Voss running loose on the streets! I have a friend who committed a murder. He had a record so clean you could eat off it, he never even put a slug in a pay phone, but he got sent up for life. They ought to have let him go. He’d learned his lesson, he’d never do it again. Besides there was only this one person he ever wanted to murder, his wife it was. A very nice lady but she made him nervous. Take a man like Voss, now. He would do anything for a dime, anything that was mean and petty and miserable and low enough. Yes. Yes, he even thinks he can play the piano and the harmonica!”
The old man was getting drunk on words and hate. Charlotte said, “I’ll drive you home now.”
“All right,” he said with a sigh. “All right.”
“It was kind of you to go to all this trouble.”
“Think nothing of it. It was a pleasure.”
He got out at the corner nearest Voss’s house. Though he seemed tired, he had obviously enjoyed his little conspiracy with Charlotte against Voss.
“Voss,” he said, “Voss will think twice before coming in with two bottles of muscatel and not even offering me a drink.”
“Thanks for your help, and good night, Mr…”
He spread his hands. “Such a hard name. You call me Tiddles like the rest.”
“Good night, Tiddles.”
“I’ll wait up for Violet.”
He shuffled up the street, his head bent against the wind.
She thought about the old man all the way home. He was getting senile. The only thing that kept him alive was his hatred for Voss.
She put the car away in the garage, glad to be back again. The sight of her wide-windowed cheerful house raised her spirits. She thought, I was silly to get upset and worried over Violet. I’ll phone her tomorrow, help her in some way. The old man must have been exaggerating about Voss…
She was raising her hand to pull down the garage door when the blow struck her. She had no time to duck, or even to be aware that she’d been hit on the side of the head.
She dropped stiffly like a felled tree.
In the dream she was riding in a long, gray bus with Lewis and Voss and Violet and the old man, Tiddles. The rest were quarreling fiercely, and Charlotte kept trying to pacify them, to reason with them. But the words that came out of her mouth were terribly wrong:
You must calm down and regurgitate yourselves
.
You must stop this synthetic acne and parturition. I’ll call the police and you’ll all be incarcinomated
.
Stop the bus
,
I say
,
stop the pus!
When she regained consciousness she was lying on the davenport in her own sitting room. Lewis was kneeling beside her, urging her to drink from the bottle of Scotch he held under her nose as if the fumes alone were medicinal like smelling salts.