“Where are her things?”
“By the stairs, Charlie. Everything is there.”
He started down the hallway, and with the sound of his uncertain footsteps moving away I could feel my heartbeat slowing down to its normal tempo. Celia turned to look at me, and there was such a raging hatred in her face that I knew only a desperate need to get out of that house at once. I took my things from the bed and started past her, but she barred the door.
“Do you see what you’ve done?” she whispered hoarsely. “Now I will have to pack them all over again. It tires me, but I will have to pack them all over again — just because of you.”
“That is entirely up to you, Celia,” I said coldly.
“You,” she said. “You old fool. It should have been you along with her when I—”
I dropped my stick sharply on her shoulder and could feel her wince under it. “As your lawyer, Celia,” I said, “I advise you to exercise your tongue only during your sleep, when you can’t be held accountable for what you say.”
She said no more, but I made sure she stayed safely in front of me until I was out in the street again...
From the Boerum house to Al Sharp’s Bar and Grill was only a few minutes’ walk, and I made it in good time, grateful for the sting of the clear winter air in my face. Al was alone behind the bar, busily polishing glasses, and when he saw me enter he greeted me cheerfully. “Merry Christmas, counsellor,” he said.
“Same to you,” I said, and watched him place a comfortable-looking bottle and a pair of glasses on the bar.
“You’re regular as the seasons, counsellor,” said Al, pouring out two stiff ones. “I was expecting you along right about now.”
We drank to each other and Al leaned confidingly on the bar. “Just come from there?”
“Yes,” I said.
“See Charlie?”
“And Celia,” I said.
“Well,” said Al, “that’s nothing exceptional. I’ve seen her too when she comes by to do some shopping. Runs along with her head down and that black shawl over it like she was being chased by something. I guess she is at that.”
“I guess she is,” I said.
“But Charlie, he’s the one. Never see him around at all. Did you tell him I’d like to see him some time?”
“Yes,” I said. “I told him.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. Celia said it was wrong for him to come here while he was in mourning.”
Al whistled softly and expressively, and twirled a forefinger at his forehead. “Tell me,” he said, “do you think it’s safe for them to be alone together like they are? I mean, the way things stand, and the way Charlie feels, there could be another case of trouble there.”
“It looked like it for a while tonight,” I said. “But it blew over.”
“Until next time,” said Al.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Al looked at me and shook his head. “Nothing changes in that house,” he said. “Nothing at all. That’s why you can figure out all the answers in advance. That’s how I knew you’d be standing here right about now talking to me about it.”
I could still smell the dry rot of the house in my nostrils, and I knew it would take days before I could get it out of my clothes.
“This is one day I’d like to cut out of the calendar permanently,” I said.
“And leave them alone to their troubles. It would serve them right.”
“They’re not alone,” I said. “Jessie is with them. Jessie will always be with them until that house and everything in it is gone.”
Al frowned. “It’s the queerest thing that ever happened in this town, all right. The house all black, her running through the streets like something hunted, him lying there in that room with only the walls to look at, for — when was it Jessie took that fall, counsellor?”
By shifting my eyes a little I could see in the mirror behind Al the reflection of my own face: ruddy, deep jowled, a little incredulous.
“Twenty years ago,” I heard myself saying. “Just twenty years ago tonight.”
John van Druten
The Cat’s-Eye
The famous playwright, John van Druten, has been called a poet, a sophisticate, and a scholar. You will find a measure of each in “The Cat’s-Eye”: the poetry of style, the sophistication of crime, and the intuitive scholarship that is always a subtle characteristic of the creative mind...
The trouble was that he could no longer disentangle what he remembered from what he had been told and what he had read. For he had, quite naturally, read every word that he could find on the subject, ever since they first told him about it when he was fourteen. And there had been a good deal published on it; not only books on famous crimes, which almost always had a chapter on the Cawthra case, but there had been a play and two novels based on it, and a movie based on one of the novels. Jim had read or seen them all.
It was only natural, then, that after all this time his memory and his reading should have become fused, and that he should no longer know which details came from which. The cat’s-eye brooch; he knew that he remembered that, because of his childhood fear of it; but Mrs. Pamphlett, and Auntie Lilian’s lace bedspread — did he really remember them? He thought he did, but he had read about them so often now, that he could no longer really be sure. It was twenty-seven years ago, and on the other side of the world, and he had been only seven at the time.
But at least Mrs. Pamphlett and the bedspread had existed, whereas there were other things that he thought he remembered, which he could not find in the accounts. Albert, for instance. There was no mention of him anywhere; yet he was sure that he remembered him. How did he fit into the story?
There was nobody to tell him, nobody he could ask. Everyone who could have known was dead, or else four thousand miles away. Except her, Auntie Vi-Vi, and nobody knew where she was. She had disappeared entirely after the trial; he had read in some book that she had gone to America; he supposed she would have changed her name. In any case, she was lost, and it was she alone who could have told him about these things for certain.
There had been an afternoon, for example, when he was on his way home from school, and he had run into her with Albert in the street, and she had walked back with him to the house, and asked him not to say anything about it, not to mention seeing Albert, not to anyone, especially his father. She had given him sixpence as a reward for his silence, and he had had quite a time deciding what to spend it on, for he had never had so much money in one lump before. That must have happened, surely? He couldn’t have imagined a thing like that.
Here in Chicago in 1939, it was hard to believe that any of it had happened. Kilburn, the drab northwestern suburb of London, in 1912, seemed an improbable place in itself. Had he really lived in it, and gone to school in Salisbury Road, and bought Liquorice Allsorts at the sweetshop at the corner? What connection was there between that small boy and the married young insurance broker with thinning hair at thirty four, who lived in a small house in Evanston? None that he could see, except continuity, and that was the odd part of it.
He had been born in the United States, and his mother died in giving birth to him. When he was three, his father took him to England. He thought that he remembered the trip, but he was not sure. Perhaps it was the journey back that he was thinking of. In London, Auntie Lilian became his stepmother. He remembered her, or thought he did, as a tall, languid woman, with huge dreary eyes and untidy masses of black hair that seemed too heavy for her. She was given to invalidism and to lying on sofas, dressed in a tea gown, making lace; there seemed to be yards and yards of it, in his memory.