Two very small girls came pedaling by, holding hands, sharing a single pair of roller skates between the two of them. One went down, nearly pulling the other one after her. The fallen one’s face began to work, in the preliminary stages of having a good hearty cry, but her skate-mate, like a very small-sized mother, assiduously helped her up again, patted her hair smooth, and tugged at the bottom of her dress to straighten it out. The cry never developed. They went swinging down the path again, blithe as ever.
“Cute,” remarked Charlotte parenthetically, glancing after them.
At least they don’t have our problems, Madeline thought.
“What did you do with it afterward?” she asked.
“Nothing. I didn’t know what to do, I was afraid to tell anyone I had it. I was afraid to go to the police and report it, because that would link her to it. How could I explain having it in the first place? I couldn’t say I’d found it, it could still be traced back to her. I was afraid to cover it up in a paper bag and just drop it into some trash can along the street. Somebody else might have found it and been tempted into doing something bad with it. Later, after her death, a repairman was coming to look at the refrigerator one day, and I was worried he might catch sight of it, so I took it out from behind there and put it into an empty shoe box, and hid that on the floor at the back of the closet. It’s been there ever since.
“I can show it to you when we go back.
“Every time I go to the closet to get something out I see it, and I don’t like to. It does something to me. One night I even dreamed about it. It came out of the closet by itself.”
“I’ll take it off your hands,” Madeline said, lost in thought.
That evening she sat down at the little table-desk in her hotel room. It was a desk, really, only by grace of two shallow drawers holding hotel stationery, telegram blanks, a pad of printed laundry lists, and a large sheet of green blotting paper that covered its entire surface. She placed her handbag on top of this and opened it. She took out the revolver that Charlotte had turned over to her with unfeigned relief a little while ago, and examined it curiously.
She didn’t know anything about revolvers, only that they could kill (and who should know that better than she?). She couldn’t identify the caliber of this one, other than that it was fairly small. The typical kind that a woman or girl would buy and carry. But small or not, it could take away a life. It was nickel-plated, at least she supposed the gleaming silvery finish to be nickel plating, and its grip was either bone or ivory, which of the two she wasn’t sure.
She put it down to one side on the blotting-paper surface and left it there for the moment. She unzipped one of the inner compartments of her handbag and took out a small, inexpensive pocket notebook, the kind that can be bought at any five-and-dime or stationery store. Its two-by-four pages bore ruled blue lines across them, as further indication of its low cost. On the cover was stamped, with unintentional irony, the single word “Memo.”
But inside there was almost nothing written yet, only one brief phrase:
1. To get even with a woman.
She took a metal pencil with an ink cylinder in it from the handbag and ejected the point with a little click. Then she held it poised, but didn’t write (as if once she wrote, what she wrote would be irrevocable, and she would be held fast to it). She thought of that line in the Rubaiyat that goes: “The moving finger writes, and, having writ, moves on/Nor all your piety and wit/Shall lure it back to cancel half a line/Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”
She looked at the gun, she looked at the pencil, she looked at the page between the two of them that was still blank but for the single phrase. It was a little like signing a death warrant.
She sat there for long moments, motionless. So still the ticking of her little traveling clock on the bureau could be plainly heard in the hush of her heart and her mind, the debating hush.
Once she wrote, she must obey it, follow it through to the end, for she was that way, and nothing could make her other than what she was.
Suddenly the pencil dipped to the paper, and the numeral “2” came out.
1. To get even with a woman.
2.
She stopped it again. She clasped her two hands, the pencil still caught between their multiple fingers, and brought them up before her mouth and held them there like that, pressed against her lips as if she were whispering to them.
The medicine I take to cure my illness is the illness itself repeated a second time, she thought. But have I the right to do this? She had hate for him, I have none. How can I have, I don’t even know him. Have barely even seen him. Only his smile in a torn photograph.
I promised her. I pledged it to her. You cannot break faith with the dead, or they will arise to accuse you.
Suddenly the pencil struck the paper, rippled along in a quick, staccato line, rolled free and unfingered two or three times over. It was done.
1. To get even with a woman.
2. To kill a man.
Madeline first saw her one night at a place called the Intime. She was the singer there. She had a small combo of three backing her up, piano, traps, and bass. She was the singer there, and she was good.
There was a sort of narrow platform or balcony running along one side of the room just a little above head level, and she was on it, hands on railing, looking down on the listeners. A pencil spotlight from the other side of the room measured off her face with the exactitude of a white mask, leaving not a sixteenth of an inch of light over, leaving her throat and shoulders and arms and dress in smoky brown dusk.
Singing of love, of love lost. There was that utter velvet hush that means complete command of the listeners.
Couples side by side, holding hands, heads nestled on shoulders, believing it, drinking it in, living it. No one in the place was too much over thirty. It was for the young. The operator had had a good idea there, and Madeline caught on at once what it must have been.
People with a lot of money to spend on their night life go to one of the big flashy clubs with their dance floors, chorus lines, and twenty-piece bands. People with no money to spend on their night life go to the bar on the corner and watch TV with their neighborhood friends around them. But there is an in-between group that doesn’t fall into either category. The young engaged couples and the young married pairs, still wrapped in rosy mists of love, still believing in it, still wanting to hear it sung. This place was for them and the buck or two they had to spend; Madeline could see them all around her, stars in their eyes, cheek pressed to cheek, dreaming their dreams. They’d come back again and they’d bring their friends, others of their own kind: the young-and-in-love. Mr. Operator had a built-in patronage. Young Mr. and Mrs. Tomorrow. Yes, he had a good gimmick there.
Throughout the song and the two or three that followed, she kept thinking, But this isn’t enough. How do I get to know her? Get to really know her? Send her a fan note, saying I admire her, want to meet her? That’s only good for a smile, a handshake, a few polite phrases, and then I’m expected to be on my way again. When men want to meet a performer, they became stage-door Johnnies. That’s what I’ll do she decided. Become something on that order, but with a slightly different purpose in mind. I’ll become a stage-door Jenny.