“How did it happen?” she asked.
“He, it was—”
“How did it happen?”
Timothy should have to be doing this; not Matthew. It was all Timothy’s fault, wasn’t it? Anger made him blunter than he had meant to be. “He shot himself,” he said — flatly, like a child tattling on some dreadful piece of mischief that he himself had had no part in.
“Oh, no, that’s so unfair!” his mother said.
“Unfair?”
He paused. Nothing he had planned covered this turn in the conversation. Mrs. Emerson felt her face with her hands, sending off icy trembling sparkles from her rings. “Mother,” Matthew said, “I wish there was something I—”
“Did he suffer any pain?”
“No.”
“But how did it come about?” she said. “What was the cause? Where did he find a gun?”
“I’m not too sure. Elizabeth said—”
“Elizabeth!” Her face had the stunned, grainy quality of a movie close-up, although she was across the room from him. She felt behind her on the desk and brought forth an inkbottle. Without looking at it she heaved it, overhand, in a swift, vicious arc — the last thing he had expected. He winced, but stood his ground. The inkbottle thudded against the curtain on the door, splashing it blue-black and cracking one of the panes behind it. In the silence that followed, the dictaphone said, “Would Margaret like Mr. Hughes to print her up more of those address labels?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Emerson said.
She flicked the dictaphone off, and then bent to pick up a sheet of stationery that had floated to the floor. “There was no excuse for that,” she said.
“It’s all right.”
“What were you saying?”
“Well—” He hesitated to mention Elizabeth’s name again, but his mother prompted him.
“Elizabeth said?”
“She said she went to eat lunch with him. She was just walking down the hall to his apartment when she heard the shot.”
“Oh, I see,” his mother said.
She never gave any explanation for throwing the inkbottle. She had Elizabeth replace the pane immediately, and Alvareen washed the stain from the curtain. And in restless moments, pacing the bedroom or waiting out some silence among her family, she still said, “Where is Elizabeth? Why isn’t she here with us?” Matthew watched closely, less concerned for his mother than for Elizabeth herself, but if anything she seemed closer to Elizabeth now than before. He saw her waiting at the kitchen window for Elizabeth to come in from staking roses; he saw her reach once for Elizabeth’s hand when they met in the hallway, and hold onto it tightly for a second before she gave a little laugh at herself and let it go. The inkbottle settled out of sight in the back of Matthew’s mind, joining all the other unexplainable things that women seemed to do from time to time.
He didn’t believe what Elizabeth had told the police. Too many parts of it failed to make sense. It came out very soon that she and Timothy must have driven downtown together, and then a neighbor of Timothy’s said she had heard people quarreling, and the police discovered a long distance call that had been made to Elizabeth’s family. “I was with him but left, and then came back,” Elizabeth said. Well, that was possible. If they had had an argument she might have stormed out and then changed her mind later and returned. But what would they argue about, she and Timothy? And when had she been known to leave in a huff? And if she did leave, was she the type to come back?
One of the things he had long ago accepted about Elizabeth was that she didn’t always tell the truth. She seemed to view truth as a quality constantly shifting, continually reshaping itself the way a slant of light might during the course of a day. Her contradictions were tossed off gaily, as if she were laughing at her stories’ habit of altering without help from her. With the police, now, she confined herself to a single version, remodeled only once when they discovered her earlier visit. Yet there were points at which she simply shut up and refused to answer. “You apparently don’t realize that you could be in serious trouble over this,” the policemen said. But that was where they were wrong. She must have realized, to have stopped so short rather than spin whatever haphazard tale came to mind.
“Where did he get the gun?” they asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It just came out of nowhere? What were you two arguing about?” “Arguing?”
“Why were you shouting?”
“Shouting?”
“Miss.”
Elizabeth looked at them, her face expressionless.
“Why did you call home?”
“To say hello.”
“Was that during the earlier visit?”
“Of course.”
“Did the argument arise from that phone call in some way?”
“Argument?”
They gave up. There was no doubt it was a suicide — they had the powder burns, the fingerprints, the statement of his professor providing motivation. Elizabeth was only the last little untied thread, and although they would have liked her to finish wrapping things up they had never thought of her as crucial. They layered death over with extraneous interviews and coroners’ reports and legal processes until Timothy himself was all but forgotten. Then, almost as an afterthought, they declared the case closed. The deceased could be buried, they said. That was the end of it.
“Mother,” Matthew said, “come drink this tea.”
“In a minute.”
She was standing by the window, moving a plant into a pool of sunlight.
“I’ve been talking with Elizabeth,” Matthew told her.
“Oh?”
“She wants to leave her job.”
Mrs. Emerson’s hands dropped from the flowerpot. She straightened her back, so that her sharp shoulderblades suddenly flattened.
“She’s going to wait till after the funeral, though,” he said.
“But leaving! Why? What did she say about me?”
“Well, nothing about you.”
“Did she say I was the cause?” “Of course not.”
“She must have given you a reason, though.”
“No. Not really,” Matthew said.
His mother turned. Her eyes, when she was disturbed, never could rest on one place; they darted back and forth, as if she were hoping to read her surroundings like a letter. “And why tell you?” she said. “I am her employer.”
“I guess she thought it was a bad time to bother you.”
“No, she blames me for something. But now! To leave now! Why, I’ve been thinking of her as one of the family. I took her right in.”
“Maybe you could talk to her,” Matthew said.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”
“If she knew how you felt about it—”
“If she wants to leave, let her go,” said his mother. “I’m not going to beg her to stay.”
Then she settled herself in a flowered armchair, arranging her skirt beneath her, and pushed her bracelet back on her wrist and leaned forward with perfect posture to pour herself a cup of tea.
Matthew went downstairs and into the kitchen, where he found Peter eating the sandwich that had been on the drainboard. “Oh, sorry,” Peter said. “Was this yours?”
“I didn’t want it.”
“Just got to needing a little snack,” Peter said. He gulped down one more bite and then set the rest of the sandwich aside, as if he felt embarrassed at being hungry. He was forever embarrassed by something, or maybe that was just his age — nineteen, still unformed-looking, clomping around in enormous loafers bumping into people and saying the wrong things. He had come at the tail end of the family, five years after Melissa. The others had no more than a year between them and some of them less; they were a bustling foreign tribe, disappearing and reappearing without explanation, while Peter sat on the floor beside his rubber blocks and watched with surprised, considering eyes. Then the oldest ones were given quarters on the third floor, into which they vanished for all of their last years at home. They read in bed undisturbed, visited back and forth in the dead of night, formed pacts against the grownups. Peter stayed in the nursery, next door to his parents. No one ever thought to change the pink-and-yellow wallpaper. He grew up while their backs were turned, completely on his own, long after the third floor was emptied and echoing. Now when he came home on visits he bumped into doors and failed to listen when he was spoken to, as if he had given up all attempts at belonging here.