Authors: William March
“Aren’t you afraid, a pretty little thing like you, to live on the first floor without a man to protect you?” asked Reggie.
“It isn’t really the first floor,” said Monica. “Those front stairs rise quite a bit, if you’ll notice. And underneath there’s an enormous basement that’s mostly aboveground. Christine’s window is about ten feet from the ground, really.”
“I’m not at all afraid,” said Christine. “Kenneth bought a pistol for me, and I know how to use it, incidentally.” She smiled and said, “I was surprised that anyone can have a pistol here, if he wants it. In New York, having a pistol is one of the worst things you can possibly do.”
“You have to have a permit,” said Emory. “That is, everybody but the crook that shoots you has to have one. Now, we’re more civilized in this state; we believe in giving the victim a chance, too.”
Mrs. Penmark came into her apartment and stood there idly. She kept repeating under her breath, as though her denials were a charm to save her, “Everything is all right. There’s absolutely
nothing to worry about. I’m making a lot out of nothing at all, as I usually do. I’m being quite silly.” It was getting dark in the rooms that faced the east, and she turned on the light, thinking:
My mother used to laugh and say I could make a mountain out of a molehill without half trying. I remember once in a hotel in London, my mother was talking with some people she knew and she put her arms around my skinny shoulders—my mother was always such an affectionate, gentle woman—and said, “Christine bothers about the strangest things!”… I don’t remember what she was referring to now, but I did know at the time, of course.
She went about her house, performing the usual automatic tasks of late afternoon, and then, standing still in her living-room, she shook her head stubbornly and thought:
There’s no reason to think Rhoda had anything to do with the death of the little Daigle boy. There’s no real evidence against her at all. I don’t know why I’m behaving so strangely. You’d think I was trying to build up a damaging case against my own child out of nothing but my own silliness.…
Suddenly she sat down, as though too weak to stand any more, and rested her head on the arm of her chair, for she knew then that the thing she had determined never to remember again—that affair with its mysterious overtones which she’d never brought herself to face honestly—had entered her mind once more, despite all her resistances. Oh, no! It was not alone the unexplained death of the little boy that had so greatly disrupted the attitude of poised serenity which she had with such difficulty established for herself; it was really the unexplained death of the boy added to another most peculiar death, a death also unexplained, which, too, had involved her daughter—the only person to witness it. Either instance, taken alone, could probably be dismissed as one of those unfortunate but unavoidable accidents that happen everywhere, to everyone; but taken together, with the similarities of their mysteries combined, the
effect was more compelling, more difficult to explain away with casual reasoning.…
The first death had taken place in Baltimore more than a year ago, when Rhoda was just seven. At that time, there had been living in the same apartment house with them a Mrs. Clara Post, a very old woman, and her widowed daughter, Edna. The old lady had become inordinately attached to Rhoda (It was strange, Mrs. Penmark thought, how greatly Rhoda was admired by older people, when children her own age could not abide her.) and when she came home from school in the afternoon, she often went up to visit her ancient friend. The old lady was in her middle eighties, and a little childish, and she took delight in showing her possessions to the child. The one thing she valued most of all her trinkets was a crystal ball filled with transparent fluid, a little ball in which fragments of opals floated, glistened, and changed with a movement of the wrist, into bright and varying patterns. There was a small gold ring sunk in the top of the crystal, like a miniature hitching post, and through it the old lady had run a black ribbon in order that she might wear her opal pendant about her neck.
Often she said that when she could not sleep, she loved to look at the changing ball and watch the varied pictures the floating opals made for her pleasure. Her daughter Edna often shook her head and said, when talking to the neighbors, “Mamma thinks she can see her childhood in the opals. I don’t discourage her. I humor her as much as I can. She hasn’t got much to enjoy these days.”
Rhoda had also admired the floating opal ball, and when she and the old lady were together, Mrs. Post would sometimes pick it up from the table beside her chair and say, “Now, isn’t that quite pretty, my dear? I’ll wager you’d like to have it for your own.”
Rhoda said eagerly that she would, and Mrs. Post laughed
mildly and said, “It’s going to be yours some day, my love. I’m going to leave it to you in my will when I die—that much I solemnly promise. Edna, you heard me say it, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Mamma, I heard you.”
Then, cackling in triumph, the old lady added, “But don’t go and get your hopes high, honey, because I haven’t any idea whatever of dying real soon. We come from a long-lived family, don’t we, Edna?”
“Yes, Mamma, we certainly do. But you’re going to live longer than any of them, I always think.”
The old lady smiled with pleasure, and said, “My dear father lived to be ninety-three, and he wouldn’t have died that young if a tree hadn’t blown down on him.”
“I know it,” said Rhoda. “You told me.”
“Mamma even beat Papa’s record,” said the old lady. “Mamma died at ninety-seven, and many claim she’d be alive today if she hadn’t got her feet wet that cold night when she went over to visit the Pendletons and then came down with the pneumonia.”
And then one afternoon, when Edna was shopping at the supermarket, and the old lady and Rhoda were alone together, Mrs. Post somehow fell down the spiral back stairs and broke her neck. When Edna returned, Rhoda met her at the door to tell her the news. She had an innocent, plausible explanation of the accident. The old lady had heard a kitten mewing like it was lost on the back stairs landing. She had insisted on going outside to see about it, the child following her. Then somehow she had miscalculated distance, missed her step, and had fallen the five flights to the little cement courtyard below. Rhoda pointed out where the body was laying, and Mrs. Penmark joined her neighbors beside the body in time to hear her daughter repeat her story of the accident.
Edna looked at the child with a strange, intense look. She
said, “Mamma hated cats. She was afraid of them all her life. All the kittens in Baltimore could have been on the landing mewing and she wouldn’t have gone near them.”
Rhoda’s eyes opened wide in surprise. “But she did, though, Miss Edna. She went out there to look for the little kitten just like I said.”
“Where’s the kitten now?” asked Edna.
“It ran away,” said Rhoda earnestly. “I saw it running down the steps. It was a little gray kitten with white feet.”
Then, in sudden alarm, she tugged at Edna’s sleeve and said, “She promised me the little glass ball when she died. It’s mine now, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Penmark said, “Rhoda! Rhoda! How can you say such a thing?”
“But she did, Mother,” said Rhoda patiently. “She promised it to me. Miss Edna heard her do it.”
Edna looked strangely at the child and said, “Yes, she promised it to you. It’s yours now. I’ll go get it for you at once.”
Mrs. Penmark remembered these things with painful clarity, and now, looking back, she also remembered that neither she nor her husband had been asked to the funeral, although the other neighbors had gone. She also recalled that, later on, when she’d met Edna in the elevator, and had spoken to her, the daughter, who had always been so pleasant and friendly, had turned her back and pretended not to hear.… For a time Rhoda had worn the ball each night when she went to bed; for a time she would rest against her pillow, her lips pursed, her eyes narrowed in an expression reminiscent of the old woman, and peer down into the shifting opals, as though she had not only taken the old woman’s pendant, but her personality as well.
Upon impulse, Christine went quickly to her child’s room. She saw the opal ball looped over one post of the little girl’s bed, as though it were a charm. She lifted the ornament in her hand
a moment; but she let it fall at once, as though it were somehow evil, as though it had burned her hand.
When Rhoda came back from the park, Christine said abruptly, even before the child had put her book away, “Were the things you told the Fern sisters about Claude Daigle the truth?”
“Yes, Mother. They were all the truth. You know I don’t tell lies anymore, after you said I mustn’t.”
Christine waited a moment, and then went on. “Did you have anything to do—anything at all, no matter how little it was—with Claude getting drowned?”
Rhoda stared at her, an expression of surprise on her face, and then said cautiously, “What makes you want to know that, Mother?”
“I want you to tell me the truth, no matter what it is. We can manage things some way, but if we’re to do it, I must know the truth.” She put her hand on the child’s shoulder, and said impulsively, “I want you to look me in the eyes, and tell me. I must know the absolute truth.”
The child gazed at her with bright, candid eyes, and said, “No, Mother. I didn’t.”
“You’re not going back to the Fern School next year,” said Mrs. Penmark presently. “They don’t want you there anymore.”
An expression of wariness came over the child’s face. She waited, but since her mother did not go on with the subject, she moved away slowly, and said, “Okay. Okay.” She went immediately to her own room, sat at her table, and began working on her jigsaw puzzle.
Later Christine got out her typewriter and began a letter to her husband, a much longer one than she usually wrote him. She dated the letter June 16, 1952, and began:
My darling, my darling!…
She typed on and on, as though it were only thus she could rid herself of the things that troubled her. She gave him the details of the penmanship medal which Rhoda had not
won, after all; she wrote of the Daigle boy’s death; she told him of the Fern School’s unwillingness to accept Rhoda for the coming term; she spoke of the death of the old lady in Baltimore.
She said,
I don’t know why these things frighten me so. I was always considered the calm one. It was one of the things you said you admired in me when we met that first time at your aunt’s apartment, with all those others trying to talk one another down. Do you remember that now? Do you remember the things you said to me the next evening when we went dancing together? I remember them, my darling! I remember them all! I remember the moment I first knew I loved you, and would love you forever. Don’t smile at my silliness, but it was when you picked up your change, looked up sideways, and smiled at me.
That was such a happy evening. But I feel now as though I’d been caught up in some dreadful trap I’d not expected at all, one I can’t escape from. I feel as though I have something to face which I haven’t the strength to face. There are so many things, so many intangible things, I can’t explain to you, or even put into logical, everyday thought for myself.
You must not jump to any conclusion based on the things I’ve told you in this long letter, because these things, as you can see, are susceptible of more than one interpretation. But I keep seeing old Mrs. Post after she fell while Rhoda was visiting her; and I keep seeing, in my mind’s eye, at least, the bruises on the Daigle boy’s forehead and hands. I do not know. I tell you, I simply do not know.
I wish you were here at this moment. Then you could hold me in your arms and laugh at my silliness; you could laugh your soft, wonderful laugh and rub your cheek against mine and tell me not to worry so. And yet if I had some magical power to bring you back, I would not use it. I swear to you, I would not use it, my dearest one.
My darling! My darling! I am deeply worried. What shall I do? Write and tell me what I must do now. Write at once—I did not know I was so vulnerable.
She finished her letter, but long before she had done so, she knew she would not send it, for she realized how important the work he was doing was for her husband at this point in his career. She felt its success or failure would be the turning point in his career in this new place, and, of course, the turning point in hers, too, since her life was forever tied to his own. No! Kenneth must go on with his work untroubled and unhindered, and she must go on with hers as best she could. The problem of Rhoda was basically her problem, and she must solve it. She must manage somehow.
She addressed the envelope, sealed it, and put it in the drawer of her desk, the drawer she always kept locked, aligning it evenly with the pistol she also kept there. She felt better afterward: perhaps she was making too much of imponderables. Perhaps.…
Toward the end of the week, Mrs. Breedlove telephoned and said, “I’m truly ashamed of myself for neglecting Rhoda’s locket the way I have; but I must go to town this morning, and this will be a good time to get it fixed. If you’ll ask Rhoda for it, I’ll pick it up on my way out.”
Her daughter, Christine said, was playing under the Kunkels’ big scuppernong arbor, but she was confident she could find the locket without help; Rhoda kept her valued possessions in a Swiss chocolate tin in her top dresser drawer, and the locket should be there, too.
The locket was where she thought it would be, and returning
the box to its original place, Mrs. Penmark felt something flat and metallic under the oilcloth that covered the drawer. She outlined the object with her forefinger, wondering what it could be, and then, lifting the covering in sudden, intuitive panic, she found the lost penmanship medal.
For an instant, the occurrence had little meaning for her, her mind refusing to accept the implications of its discovery; it seemed merely part of a thing she’d read once in a book, a thing with neither value nor application for herself; then, as the inevitable significance of the discovery of the medal in this particular place came to her, she returned it to its place under the oilcloth, her palms pressed against her cheeks, and stood perplexed in the room.
Everything she told me about the medal is a lie,
she thought.
Everything. She had it all the time.