Fred stood up haughtily.
At that pregnant moment, the arthritic footsteps of Mrs. Danielson started clumping up the inner stairway. Fred’s glass and bottle clashed as Beau jumped up. The woman whinnied in sudden decrease of humor, and her eyes tried to focus together on the door.
The hard-heeled steps measured three doorways to theirs and stopped — audible breathing through the door.
“Who’s in there, Fred?” Mrs. Danielson’s keys jingled.
The lock clicked. Beau and Fred stared at each other in horror. Fred made a pushing motion with his hand and Beau, who was closer, caught the door with his foot and shoulder, but Mrs. Danielson was heavier than he and wheezingly determined. Through the widening door space his head disappeared and his voice mumbled something unintelligible.
Mrs. Danielson’s voice exploded like a string of firecrackers. “Beaumont Compton, you’ve been drinking!”
Inside, the blonde woman stood up, shook out her dress and in one fluid motion engulfed the square bottle within her cavernous purse.
Her voice flowed smoothly over Beau’s stammer. “Open the door, Beau dear. I don’t know where your manners have gone. I do so want to meet your housemother.”
With a moan, Beau stepped back and the door bumped after him.
Iron-grey hair strangling across her forehead, arms akimbo, the elderly woman stared. Her expression of tight-lipped distrust loosened uncertainly as the blonde woman crunched brightly on a peppermint from her purse, then stepped forward with her arms extended in feminine greeting.
“Oh, Mrs. Danielson, I’ll have to apologize for Beau and introduce myself. I’m Mrs. Compton, Beau’s mother. Beau has written me such nice things about you. I know you have made this a regular home away from home for him.”
Mrs. Danielson stroked self-conciously at her house-dress. “Yes, I do the best I can.” She smiled unevenly. “We have a nice group this semester. I wouldn’t have come up, but the boys are studying for finals and we have absolute quiet after supper so that we can all study.” Her hand made an involuntary lunge as though she had fumbled the ball, and she added glibly: “Of course I didn’t hear you, you weren’t making any noise, I just came up to see if the boys needed fresh towels. I’m so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Compton.”
The blonde woman dimpled. “Yes, and I’m so pleased to meet you. I worry about Beau. In high school he didn’t always turn in his homework on time.” She stroked at Beau’s head, but he shied away as she gushed: “I had an airline change here on my way to Banff for the national convention of my sorority, and I knew the boys would he studying hard for finals, but I was just dying for them to show me around the campus and that divine little village.”
“Yes, it is quaint.” The housemother tittered politely.
“I wonder if I could telephone a cab from here. My plane leaves at eleven o’clock. My, that’s only twenty minutes.”
“Oh yes, we have a pay phone downstairs. Could I make you a cup of tea? Those airline trips are so tiring.”
“That would be awfully nice of you, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble?”
“Oh no, no, dear, my teakettle is already on the stove.”
Past the row of unshaven undergraduate faces that protruded and retracted from doorways, the four of them trailed uncomfortably downstairs. Fred and Beau stood open-mouthed in the lower hall while the woman telephoned for a cab. Before Fred could find words, she retreated from the telephone to the kitchen.
They could hear the two women laughing politely inside.
The cabby’s knock cut short the sophomores’ frantic angry whispers. The blonde woman bustled magically down the hall, politely pursued by Mrs. Danielson.
“Goodbye dear, study hard now.” She kissed Beau deftly and patted Fred’s half-raised hand.
Stepping quickly, she cut them off from the door. “Goodbye Mrs. Danielson, I wouldn’t have missed our little chat for the world. Fm so relieved about Beau.”
The taxi door slammed before they were halfway down the steps. They could not shout or curse because Mrs. Danielson was sighing pleasantly behind them.
“Beau, I love the way your mother does her hair.”
Beau and Fred glared unreasonably at each other.
After she had clumped back to her own room, Mrs. Danielson clicked on the light above her mirror. She pushed her own grey straggle atop her head; her eyes flitted to the army of bottles and other feminine equipment on her dresser, but the sound of a yelling, thumping fight upstairs brought her charging out and up the stairs with a bobby pin bristling between her teeth.
Beau’s mother hardly gone and Fred and he were fighting!
Manslaughter
by Henry Ewald
Madden hit the guy and Madden fractured the guy’s skull. But it really wasn’t Madden who killed him...
The guy they’re holding for manslaughter is named John Madden.
They’ve got five witnesses who saw him start a barroom brawl, slug a guy and knock him down. The guy hit his head on the corner of the bar rail when he fell and he died later of a fractured skull.
Madden’s going to be sent up. He hasn’t got any defense. He was drinking and he started the brawl, but they know he isn’t the real killer. The real killer is a girl who never saw the dead man in her life and who was ten miles away from the fight when it started.
She’s a little brunette named Mary Brown, and she forgot to make a telephone call.
Madden — the guy they’re holding — was a salesman, but he’s been out of work for six months and now his wife is going to have a kid. The Maddens have been living on money borrowed from Madden’s life insurance.
When he worked, he had the same boss as Mary Brown had, but he got to drinking too much on the job and he was fired. Since then, he’d been trying to get into something steady, without much luck.
Yesterday he went back to see his ex-boss. He told him about the kid on the way and he begged for another chance.
The boss knows that Madden is a good worker when he’s sober, and good salesmen don’t come a dime a dozen. So he told Madden he’d think it over, and he said he’d call Madden if he decided to put him back on the job.
Madden went home hopeful last night. He was sure he’d get another chance, and he was pretty happy about it. He and his wife were excited, talking about how they’d get things going right again, and how they’d manage better this time on the money he’d be earning. They were both real happy.
This morning, Madden’s old boss remembered his promise, and he told Mary Brown to call Madden’s home and tell him to report for work.
Mary Brown made a note of the phone number on the cover of her notebook. She intended making the call before she started to transcribe her dictation. Before that, though, her boy friend called her. After she had made a date with him she started right in typing letters, without ever thinking of Madden again.
All this time, remember, Madden was sitting at home. He and his wife were waiting for the phone to ring with the message that would mean a fresh start for both of them.
At first they were talking and joking a lot, but as the morning wore along without a phone call, the talk died down.
They ate some lunch and Madden said he wouldn’t leave the house because if he did he might miss the phone call. Mrs. Madden said she hoped it would come soon. It was terrible, she said, to live the way they were living.
Madden blew his top then. He said he was trying every way he knew how to find work, and even if it was all his fault, for God’s sake, he wasn’t the first guy in the world to make a mistake. He wanted to know if she was ever going to quit nagging him about it, and he said he didn’t enjoy the way they were living any more than she did but he wasn’t going to cry about it for the rest of his life. There were some things about his wife, he said, that didn’t suit him too well, but he wasn’t going to cry about them, either.