“I couldn’t go in myself,” Mrs. Bartlett said, quite simply, eyes still downcast. “You see, I’m all alone here. I wasn’t in any condition to — I had to take to my bed the first few days after I received the news.”
Madeline winced.
“But Mr. Thalor, he’s the funeral director, was very kind, he arranged everything, took charge of everything, for me. He had her brought back here, and saw about purchasing a plot. I didn’t have enough money to buy one outright, but they’re letting me pay for it on the installment plan, a little at a time.”
Madeline couldn’t repress a shudder.
“It sounds terrible, I know,” Mrs. Bartlett admitted. “But what can you do, when death strikes suddenly like that, and you’re not prepared for it? I’d always thought that I’d go first, and she’d take care of things like that for me. I never dreamed I’d — be the one to bury her.” She knitted a tiny fist, white and fragile as an ivory carving, and pressed it just over one eye.
Madeline saw that she had reached the end of her fortitude for the present. There was nothing to do but wait for another time.
She rose to her feet, and said, “I hope I haven’t — I didn’t mean to hurt you like this.”
The little clenched fist was before her lips now, stifling them, crushing them in. She nodded her head a little, but whether in forgiveness or just in acknowledgment of the apology, Madeline couldn’t know.
“May I come again?” she asked. “May I talk to you some more?”
Again the muted figure nodded, but this time the meaning was plain.
As she passed by her on her way to the door, Madeline let her hand come to rest upon her shoulder for a moment, in the futile, only, consolation she could give her. The little fist opened, fluttered upward like a bird spreading its wings, came to rest upon the solacing hand.
From the doorway, as she softly drew the door closed after her, Madeline looked back. Other than that one little gesture, she hadn’t moved, she hadn’t turned her head to watch her go. Madeline could only see her from the back, the light making a sort of blurry, soft focus about the outline of her head, sitting there, still there. Feeling only, breathing only. Life in death. Or death in life.
There are two deaths I am responsible for, Madeline told herself accusingly, and not just one. This one too. The death of a heart.
When she approached the little five-story apartment building the next day, Madeline was at first startled and then somewhat uneasy to see the familiar black-garbed figure of Mrs. Bartlett standing waiting in the shade of the green canvas door canopy, which extended out to the edge of the sidewalk. It was obvious by the way she kept turning every so often, first to look up the street in one direction, then down it in another, that she was waiting for someone to come along. And Madeline knew that someone must be herself. The shortest way from her own hotel had brought her along the opposite side of the street, she knew the older woman had not yet observed her (there was an almost unbroken line of cars parked along that side, screening her), and for a moment she had an impulse to turn around and go back again before she had been noticed.
Why was she waiting for her like that, hatted, out before the house? Was she taking her somewhere with her? Did she want her to meet other relatives, other members of the family? But hadn’t that been Madeline’s very purpose in seeking her out in the first place, to establish leads through her, other contacts? Then why the skittishness, why the timidity?
She forced herself to swerve diagonally across the street toward her, and as Mrs. Bartlett saw her emerge from between two of the parked cars, she came out to the edge of the walk to greet her, and tilted her face an almost imperceptible trifle, as if permissive of a kiss. Madeline placed her lips against her forehead.
“I’m so glad you came early,” Mrs. Bartlett murmured. “I forgot to ask you yesterday where I could reach you.”
Madeline then told her, seeing no need for concealment.
“I did so want you to come with me,” the older woman went on. “I knew you’d want to too.”
“Where, Mrs. Bartlett?” At once, instinctively, she was frightened for a minute into taut, sudden, wary evasiveness.
“Call me Charlotte.”
“Where?”
“Why, to eleven o’clock mass, of course. It’s just around the corner from here. We’ll be just in time.”
The killer praying for the slain. Oh, I can’t. Yet this has been done before. Before, many times over. The murderer praying for the murdered. But oh, I can’t. I can’t go in there with her.
She stood rigid, rooted to the spot. Mrs. Bartlett took a step forward, then turned, and seeing that she had not moved in company with her, extended her hand — she was still only an arm’s length in advance — and gently took Madeline’s hand in her own, then went on once more. Unresistant, Madeline glided along after her. Almost like a sleepwalker guided by someone who is awake.
They turned the corner still with this strange link of hands and came up to the church. Curved gray stone steps led up to its entrance apron, and from the carved niches on either side the blank stone eyes of saints looked sightlessly out upon the world.
The touch of the first step against her toe seemed to wake Madeline from her trancelike passivity, as though a switch had been flicked, turning off some flow of compulsive current, and she disengaged her hand and balked there, Mrs. Bartlett one step higher than she.
“I can’t go in here. Don’t ask me to.”
Mrs. Bartlett’s eyes were calm and unreproachful; above all else they seemed to hold an infinite understanding, the wisdom of old age. “Is it because of the creed? Is it because you’re of a different faith? Why, then we’ll go to your church. God’s houses are all God’s houses. Unitarian, Baptist—”
She thought: A killer is a killer in any denomination.
“I’ll go with you, and pray beside you,” the woman continued. “In my own way, but to the same God. And I’m sure both of our prayers will reach Him just the same. He is just one God, not a segregated God.”
Madeline averted her face, the way one does who is afraid of receiving a blow, of being struck. Not only turned it away, but turned it downward at the same time. Every slantwise line of her body, straining away from the church entrance, expressed aversion. Not the aversion of disgust, the aversion of fear. She began trembling violently all over, so that Mrs. Bartlett’s hand, upon her arm, trembled by transference.
“I’ll wait for you outside,” she said in a muffled voice. “I’ll wait here on the steps.”
Mrs. Bartlett was looking at her curiously. She released her hold upon her. “I’ll say two prayers, then,” she said quietly. “One for her, and one — for you.”
She turned and went slowly up the steps, and opened the door, and went in. It closed soundlessly after her, on its own massive springs.
Madeline stood there waiting, never moving. One foot on one step, the other on the next one down, in a position as of arrested entrance.
The door opened as some latecomers entered, and the music swelled out like a paean, then dimmed into a drone again. She turned her head, and caught a glimpse of taper beads twinkling like golden tears streaming down a wall, as if seen at the end of a long violet-dim tunnel. Then the door closed again, and the world was shut in two, this world and the other world.
At last the mass ended and the people came out, the women and children in their bright dresses, like flowers spilling down the steps all around her. Then when they’d all dispersed and the street was quiet once again, Mrs. Bartlett stood there alone at the top of the steps, last of all to come out.
She came down them slowly and turned aside, and though her eyes were on Madeline there was no recognition in them. Madeline wheeled and fell in beside her, but all the way back they were like two strangers who do not know one another yet unaccountably continue to walk abreast. The close communion of their walk to church was gone, had been destroyed.