“Mrs. Snider?” Magda asked.
“Yes.”
It was hard to do but she had steeled herself. “I am calling about the accident to your daughter a year ago today.”
“Why bring that up? I remember it well enough.” The woman was very hostile.
“I am Mrs. Walter Brand.”
That did it.
The little white-haired lady softened. “You can come in. You’re not just a nosey-Parker.”
Magda found it hard to breathe. They went into a well-dusted but unused room and Mrs. Snider pulled aside the drapes. “Sit down,” she said. “How long have you been married to him?”
“Over six months. I only recently learned about — about the accident.”
“Well, my girl was pretty once too. Is he thinking of stopping the allowance?”
“No. He doesn’t know that I am here.”
“Money or no money, if you want to know whether she jumped or not, she did, and if you want to know whether he drove her to it, he did that too — just as much as if he pushed her.”
“He was cruel to her?”
“Devilish, fiendish cruel and her always sticking up for him. She blacked his boots with her hose, she was that crazy for him.”
“What did he do?”
“He was bored with her. Told her so straight out. Said she didn’t have the capacity for education. Told her he’d give her an allowance if she’d take her maiden name but he was ashamed of her in front of his fancy friends. I’ll bet he’s not ashamed of you. But I don’t envy you none just the same.”
“Vy didn’t she get a divorce?”
“Because he had the appetite for her and she, the little fool, for him. Every two weeks or so, he’d call her up and off she’d go to New York like a dog after her master, not caring how much she gets kicked. Then after a day or two back she’d come whimpering. I’m hot-tempered, Mrs. Brand, and I wouldn’t stand for it. I blame myself for that. That’s why she was living at the Lord Baltimore in a chambermaid’s room next to the elevator shaft, but I say to myself she’d have done it some other way she was that desperate.”
“Vy vasn’t he called down here ven it happened a year ago?”
“He was on the way to Europe. Oh, they got him to depose and all that. He paid for a decent funeral and the allowance still keeps coming.”
“ ’Sank you, Mrs. Snider. I am sorry I half these old memories recalled to you.”
“I thought you were American. You’re a foreigner, ain’t you?”
“Yes, Hungarian, and you can feel sorry for me too.”
“I do, Mrs. Walter Brand, I do. Goodbye and good luck.”
Now she knew.
But what was she to do?
Slowly she realized that she must get a divorce without his suspecting that she knew. A man who kills his first wife will kill a second.
But on April 15 Walter’s second payment for income tax was due — he paid on a fiscal-year basis. Such dates are increasingly important in human affairs, and this one was the cause of Walter’s writing a letter. It was a very polite, well worded letter, typed by one of his useful and decorative assistants. In it he said that, a full year having elapsed since her daughter’s unfortunate accident, he felt he had more than generously fulfilled his obligations and would no longer be able to mail her a monthly check. “With very best wishes.”
On the eighteenth of April he had his reply. “Walter Brand: I can do without your best wishes. I never had them and you never had mine. And I am not surprised that you stop the money. Every month I was surprised that a skunk would send it. But you can tell your Hungarian wife who you sent to spy on me and who fooled me so much I felt sorry for her I would like to spit in her face. Mrs. William Snider.”
So that was it. Walter smoked his Melachrino slowly. That foolish story of the masher. That was when she had found out. He remembered telling her of Elsie — it had been a dash of braggadocio which he did not regret; but he now recognized her as a foeman worthy of his steel. She did not cringe as Elsie had. Nor would she be easily crushed. Nor did he wish to crush her — she was much too delectable for that. It was a problem, and Walter loved a difficult problem. He decided to spend some time in the Public Library and did so, adding thereby to his erudition.
That evening they were sitting in the Stork Club. It was crowded as usual and about a hundred men had been given a grandstand view of Magda’s magnificent upper bosom and had regretfully wished that they were alone with such a brazen beauty.
“Magda, darling,” he said. “I perceive that you have thought of the idea of divorcing me.” He was again pleased that she did not answer. He detested chatter. “Disabuse your mind. I will not permit it.”
“These are, then, the Dark Ages?”
“No. Relatively enlightened. But in any age, self-preservation is the first law of nature. Do you agree?”
“I agree wholeheartedly.”
“And, according to our legal code, no wife can testify against her husband.”
“I know.”
“To make myself perfectly clear, I had a letter today from a Mrs. William Snider. She says, crudely, that she would like to spit in your face.”
“How charming.”
Strangely, in this dialogue, Magda’s accent did not show.
Strangely, too, the open declaration of war was a relief. They were both dangerous to each other, yet they ate together, spent their leisure hours together, and even slept together. The situation was sufficiently piquant to appeal strongly to his passion for the rare and exotic, and Magda could see the mordant humor in it. Even some of his tenderness towards her returned. But living dangerously is bound to take its toll. The fine lines around her eyes, that had made her merry when she smiled, tautened so that Martha Webster took note of it. Watching her at work one day she had the amazing thought that Magda, sweet, beautiful Magda, looked hard.
Then came the call about the boat. Walter’s boat had not been in the water the preceding summer and she had never seen it, but he had described it precisely as he described everything, a 52-foot yawl so heavily powered as to be almost a motor sailer. She knew that it was being conditioned and was not surprised when the man from the boatyard called. “Mr. Brand is not here,” she said. “This is Mrs. Brand.”
“I tried his office, Mrs. Brand, and his instructions were that he be notified the moment she was ready.”
“Thank you, I’ll tell him.”
“Tell him, please, that it is at the Miami Yacht Club, fully outfitted and ready to sail, and that the Cuban pilot is highly recommended.”
“Thank you. Goodbye.”
Again the chill, the finding it hard to breathe. This was a move against her. She could feel it in her Hungarian bones. Would he push her overboard? But why Cuba at this time of year? There was reason in it. A dangerous reason. She would refuse, point-blank, to go.
When he came in she gave him the message. “The man at the boatyard, Steven Monroe, called and said the boat was ready.”
He looked at her sharply. “Why did he call here? Did he say anything else?”
“He tried to get you at the office and said you wanted to know the moment she was ready to sail.”
“Yes. I promised those two fellows I would take them out for a few days. I’ll pack now.”
So he wasn’t going to throw her overboard. It was something else. When she awoke in the morning he was gone and there was a note on his pillow.