I went in the living room, where in a few minutes she joined me, carrying her handbag and little spring coat. I must have had a look on my face as she dropped them on a chair, and said, “Well? My other things, my bags and stuff, are all packed and in the car.” She sat beside me on my sofa, giving me all sorts of directions about the turkey, the hominy and how to cook it, or warm it up, or whatever I was supposed to do with it, and I guess I listened, though I haven’t the faintest idea what she said. Then she stopped and pulled my arm around her and started inhaling me. “If only you didn’t smell so nice,” she whispered. “Now kiss me. Kiss me good-bye.”
I kissed her. I held her close, so close I meant never to let her loose. She didn’t seem to mind, but kissed back, so our lips were glued. That’s when the doorbell rang. “Oh for Christ’s sake!” I growled.
“You better see who it is.”
“To hell with them — let them go away.”
“Want me to go, Gramie?”
“I’ll do it.”
I went to the door. Jane Sibert was there.
Chapter 21
If there was anyone I wanted to see just then, I can’t think now who it was, but if there was one person on earth I certainly did not want to see, it had to be her. And apparently, she felt the same about me. She had on a spring coat, much like Sonya’s, and a white dress that went nice with her soft blue hair, but her eyes were hard, and looked away as soon as she saw me. She said: “Good evening, Gramie, I hope you’ve been well. I’m calling on Mrs. Kirby, if she’s at home.”
I asked her in and said I’d see, but almost at once Sonya was there, with a bright, chirpy greeting. “Why Miss Jane,” she sang out, “what a nice co-instance. I was fixing to go see you, to drive out to your place, later on in the evening. And so you saved me the trouble. Why don’t we go in and sit down.” Sonya led the way to the living room, sat Jane down on a sofa, took the other one herself, and waited till I camped on a chair, before asking: “What brings you, Miss Jane? What can I do for you?”
“So! It was you!”
Jane whispered it dramatically, but Sonya drew a blank, and gave it a long stare. “Who was me?” she asked.
“That girl who was there. Burl said it was, and...”
“Well of course! I should have said who I was.”
“You ladies know each other?” I enquired.
“Know each other!” said Sonya. “I’ll say we do.”
She started to talk, in the airiest kind of way, as though telling a funny story, which I suppose in a way it was. “Well,” she said, speaking mainly to me, but turning to Jane now and then, as though for corroboration, “I mentioned, I think, that I busted her marriage up, and so long as she’s here, there’s no harm in saying how. I did it by working on Burl, the well-known weakness he has, of chasing skirts any age, so all I had to do was shake mine at him once, and sure enough here he came running.
“So he kept asking me up for a date in that office he has, and I kept putting him off. So then I said I would, but the thing of it was I didn’t trust him, any more than I’d trust any man: that he would be on time, and not give me some kind of a stand-up, so I’d have to wait in the hall. I said give me a key, so I can go in at once, soon as I come to the door, and wait inside; then he’d have a date. So he did.
“So soon as I checked that it really was the right key, and not some kind of a cross he’d handed me, I had a duplicate made, and mailed one to her, in Hyattsville. Care General Delivery there, so it couldn’t be intercepted by Burl out at the house. So soon as she picked it up, after I rang her about it, I lined the stakeout up. I told her come in on us three-fifteen today, and had everything ready, what she was going to find. Well say,” she said to Miss Jane, “you were long enough coming — it was three-thirty and then some before I heard the click of your key turning the lock.”
“Anyway, I came,” said Miss Jane, very grim.
“Okay. So what are you doing here?”
Sonya wasn’t quite so airy now, but Miss Jane snapped back at her: “I told you already — I had to make sure who you were, that Burl was telling the truth!”
“But that’s not all, is it?”
“...I beg your pardon, Mrs. Kirby?”
“Now that I’ve busted your marriage up — at lease as I hope I have — you think you’ll do the same for me. Well I have news for you: My marriage is already busted. I was on my way out, the moment you rang the bell. So you have a clear track with Gramie, and I heartily wish you well. So now...”
She picked up her coat and bag, but Jane, who’d been deflated a bit, tried to blow herself up again. “I caught her!” she screamed. “In the act!”
“Now, Miss Jane, not that. Not quite.”
“In the act! He had exposed himself!”
She repeated it, and I cut in, to Sonya, “Just a minute, please. What does that mean, ‘He had exposed himself?”
“Means he had his thing hanging out — I guess that’s what it means. Yeah, it’s how he makes his pass — we’re supposed to fall in a faint, all us girls are, from the joy of looking at it. Well? It’s how he got her” — jerking her thumb at Miss Jane — “that first night at your mother’s when they ran into each other there, and she ’sisted on riding him home. But then when they got there, to the Stuart Building, he wouldn’t get out of the car, said she was all wrought up and he was going to see her home.
“So he did, and when she brought him inside — lo and behold — he unzipped, took it out, and asked if she wanted to play with it. So she said no, but let on she’d like to fondle it. Well that hit Burl funny, for some reason, and I guess it does me, a little bit. Anyway, when she’d fondled on it awhile, she thought of a place to put it, and did, right there on the parlor floor, in under the whispering cattails. Where the cattails come in, I wouldn’t personally know, but that’s how Burl told it to me, and I aim to be truthful, always.”
Jane, having blown herself up for a moment, made a weak shrivel. When Sonya started her airy recital, she covered her face with her hands, and then, as it went on, pulled her knees up under her chin, and toppled over sidewise, against the end of the sofa, so she was just a small pile of clothing, a tiny, collapsed old woman, shaking and shivering and shuddering.
Sonya went over to her, and wound up: “Miss Jane, we don’t happen to have a hole that you can crawl into, but you can make out, I reckon, with a pillow over your head.” So she put a sofa pillow on Jane’s head, and turned away, as though from a deed well done.
“What are you putting on your head?” I snarled, sounding thick and mean and ugly.
“Well I’m wearing a hat,” she snapped.
“You damned cheap twerp, how can you stand there, and talk about ‘his thing,’ as though it meant nothing at all?”
“Well it didn’t — except to make me sick, for reasons I already said. But listen, I knew about it! It’s not like I had to be scared, or...”
“Will you shut up about it?”
“Then okay, we say no more.”
“Because I just don’t care to think what he may have been doing with it to have it hanging out in such fashion.”
“Oh, so that’s what’s bugging you?”
“It may not seem like much, but—”
“I have proof he didn’t do innything!”
“Produce the proof. Now!”
So she did, a lot quicker than I expected. She just flipped up her dress, and there around her waist, over her panty hose, like a belt, was a length of shiny chain, about the size of tire chain, and between her legs, like a G-string, was another. Fastening the chains together was a little brass padlock. “My ceinture de chastité,” she explained, but called it cincher de chastity. “They had them in olden times, we read about them in school — it’s where cinch comes from, the thing you put on a horse. I had it on when I went to his office, and if he could have got through it, he’s a better man than I think — but things didn’t get that far. They made it for me at College Park Hardware, cutting the chain to my measure, and being somewhat amused when I told them the idea of it. It’s not too comfortable, but I left it on tonight as I expected to go to Miss Jane’s, and I decided to take no chances, as Burl might have been there too.”