Marshall was looking down at the tie now in horror, as though he held a snake there in his grasp, and couldn’t let it go.
“I’ll be down at the door,” Lansing promised him in a leaden voice. “I’ll stand there, and I won’t go away. I’ll never leave that door. And in five or ten minutes, I’ll come back up here again. I’ll come back up here, with a policeman. You can meet him — any way you want. That’s up to you.”
“Five or ten minutes is such a short time — to live—” Marshall whispered brokenly. “Such a little time...”
“It’s five or ten minutes more than she had,” Lansing reminded him. And then he added, with a contempt that was both lethal and yet at the same time almost detached, “What do you want to live for, anyway? I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
He walked away from him. He made the turn of the rail. He started down the stairs.
Marshall never moved.
Heavy, broken, dull of heart and of purpose, Lansing went down, step by slow succeeding step. Like a man going nowhere, like a man going to meet the empty years of the rest of his life.
“God forgive me,” Marshall breathed with a shudder.
“No man ever would,” Lansing answered bitterly.
Their eyes met for the last time; from below to above, from above to below.
Marshall never moved. The stray end of his own necktie dangled lifeless from his frozen fist.
Sight was exchanged between them for the last time. And then each died, for the other, and was gone.
Lansing’s head disappeared below the floor level.
Somewhere up above him, unseen, a door closed with a sudden fling of finality. As if it were never going to open again. Like the door of a life, suddenly closing on it, ending it.
Lansing went on down, step by lifeless step, into the barren, bottomless future that awaited him. Without love, without hope, without Marjorie.
11
The policeman came down to the street door for a moment, afterwards, and looked out at him, while he was waiting for his superiors to arrive and take charge.
“You were right,” the policeman said to him. “I didn’t believe you, but you were right. There’s two of them up there, both dead. A woman lying on the floor. A man hanging by his necktie from the clothes rod in the closet.”
And that’s what it boils down to, thought Lansing, nodding to himself. A woman lying on the floor. A man hanging in the closet. Just a woman. Just a man. Any woman. Any man. As though they never knew each other. As though they never loved. How can the dead love the dead, anyway?
“What a hell of a thing to do,” the policeman said.
Why call it that, wondered Lansing. What is hell, anyway? What an earthly thing to do, why not put it that way?
The policeman took out a pencil and a little notebook. “Did you know them both?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Lansing, “I knew them both...”
I loved her from the time she was fifteen. From the time there first was any love, I loved her. You don’t have to say “love” and “Marjorie,” use separate words. Both words were always she to me.
I loved her from the first few kid parties we went to together, the stiff little dances we danced in each other’s arms. She was so pretty then, a pink bow in her hair, a pink sash at her waist. How did she turn into that thing that’s lying upstairs there now? Is that what little girls become? Is that what the little boys who love them can look forward to?
I loved her too much. That’s the whole story. My story.
I just stood by. All her life, I just stood by. Waiting for her to turn my way. And she never turned. He came along. I just stood by. I saw him take her away from me. I just stood by. Now she’s dead upstairs. And I’m still just standing by.
Because I loved her too much. Too much to try to take her away from the happiness I thought she had found.
When you love a little, you can be brave, you can be selfish. You come first, the loved one second. But when you love too much, it makes you a coward. You’re afraid of hurting the thing you love.
He didn’t kill her, I did. I killed the one I loved.
“...Yes,” he said to the policeman, “I knew them both.”
“Stick around,” the policeman told him. “They’ll want to talk to you when they get here. I’ve got to go back upstairs.”
“Yes, I’ll stick around,” Lansing promised. I’ve stuck around all my life. That’s all I’ve ever done, is stick around. I guess I can stick around the little while longer there is.
He stood there alone, by the doorway, in the dusk. Dead already. As dead as they were upstairs. All three of them were dead now; the triangle had been solved. Only, his was the kind of death that doesn’t show. His was the kind of death that takes years, it is so slow. The death of the heart.
Far off somewhere, down on the next block, an organ-grinder was playing in the twilight. The wistful, lonely notes seemed to come from some other time, far away and long ago; as though they had been sounded years ago and only found their way to earshot now, lost all the while somewhere in between.
His head slowly drooped forward, and his buried heart in its grave seemed to say the words over to itself, echoing in its emptiness.
Postscript
In a railroad flat on Third Avenue in the Eighties, Mrs. Timothy Meehan was suffering from one of her recurrent headaches. She sat at one of the old-fashioned, tall, narrow, curved-topped windows, elbows planted to sill, one hand holding in place a wet cloth pasted lengthwise across her brow, beside her a bowl of cold water (or at least as cold as could be hoped for in the jungle heat of a New York July) in which a replacement for the first cloth lay soaking, waiting its turn.
Below her, through layers of tropical miasma, were visible the latticed roadbed and tracks of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway, half again as high as her windows, and under that in turn, hidden in a subterranean dimness that never saw sunlight the tracks of the Third Avenue trolley line and the chasmlike street.
Tim Meehan was motorman on one of the latter’s red and yellow electric surface-cars, and that incessant deafening disturbance going on all about her within the room right now, now toddling, now falling, now squalling, was his firstborn. With another already well on the way. And scant hope of any merciful pause or slackening in the immediate years to come.
“Well, they’ll all be legal, anyway,” she had a habit of consoling herself.
She swerved abruptly, lashed her hand downward and rearward, and was rewarded with a deafening cataclysm of noise. “Keep away from me now, can’t you see I’ve got one of my headaches!” Then resumed her frontal placidity.
Cabbage was reeking from the kitchen coal range, and damp wash was steaming from the indoor clothesline that garlanded the rooms, and an El train was thundering by, shaking the whole window-embrasure that framed her and driving nails into her already-throbbing skull, and the very tar in the asphalt down there was softening up with the heat so that people left footprints in it.
Life wasn’t a bed of roses.
It wasn’t even a bed of the cheapest common field daisies that you picked for nothing.
But Tim Meehan’s wife Leona was practical, had a lot of hard common sense. Always had had. This hard practicality, this common sense, had once almost been her undoing. And now, perhaps, it was her salvation.