“Nothing,” Martin said. “A piece of paper. Somebody’s burned holes in it with a cigarette.”
“Put it down then, and don’t fidget. You’re as jumpy as Edith.”
“Odd.”
“What?”
“These pictures. They look like my mother. Somebody’s burned the eyes out.”
“What? Give it to me.” Andrew took the paper and looked at it briefly. “Nonsense. Not a bit like your mother.”
“I think so.”
“More implications, Martin?”
“Not at all,” Martin said politely, and tossed the paper aside as if it suddenly bored him.
“You believe,” Andrew said, “that Lucille drew pictures of Mildred and then mutilated them?”
“Oh, what does it matter?”
“It matters to me. If you like, when Lucille comes back home I’ll ask her.”
“Good Lord, no!”
“I insist on asking her,” Andrew said.
Martin pounded his fist on the desk. Nearly all of his arguments with his father left him with this feeling of helpless rage against Andrew’s naiveté. After twenty-five years of being a doctor Andrew seemed never to have lost his faith in human nature. Martin, who had no faith in anyone but himself and no religious convictions beyond the basic one that he was God, alternately respected and despised his father.
The two men watched each other across the width of the desk. The return of Lucille was now an issue between them, and their faces had a waiting look.
At six-thirty Edith arrived. She had left Polly and Giles dining at the Oak Room and had rushed home in the conviction that everything would go wrong in the house if she didn’t.
The fact that everything had already gone wrong was explained to her vividly by Annie as soon as she opened the door. After the first shock was over Edith plunged into the mystery and upset the whole house with her splashing and churning.
It was Edith who discovered that Lucille’s black-suede purse and the housekeeping money for the rest of the month were missing. Della and Annie vigorously denied going near the drawer where Lucille kept her purses. Edith believed them.
“So,” she told Andrew, “Lucille must have taken it herself.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps she wanted to go out and buy something, that’s the simplest explanation.”
“She wasn’t wearing a coat.”
“Nonsense,” Edith said. “I’m not pretending to know why she went out but I refuse to believe any sensible person would go out in this weather without a coat. She may have worn one of mine.”
Edith’s coats, however, were all found in her closet.
It was Della who backed up Edith’s belief in what a sensible woman would do. Della had gone up to her room on the third floor to change her uniform. Her discarded one, tear-stained because Edith had called her a moron, she tossed into the closet. She saw that someone had disarranged the clothes.
A few minutes later she came down the stairs wailing.
“My money,” she screamed at Edith. “My coat and money! She took it! She’s a thief, a common thief!”
Twenty dollars and a reversible raincoat had been taken from Della’s closet. The coat, beige gabardine on one side and red-plaid wool on the other, was practically new and not even a fifty-dollar check mended Della’s broken heart.
Though the manner of Lucille’s departure now seemed to be explained, for Edith the taking of Della’s coat merely deepened the mystery.
“Why Della’s coat?” she said. “Why not one of her own? It’s as if — as if she was escaping and didn’t want anyone to recognize her.”
“No,” Andrew said. “No, I don’t believe it.”
“And the money... Yes, Andrew, she ran away.”
“The girls swear they didn’t hear her go out. They went upstairs and looked for her.”
“That was when she got out,” Edith said. ‘‘She ran up to hide in Della’s room while they were looking through hers. When they went downstairs again and were searching the living room she came down with the coat and the purse and the money...”
She put her hand over her eyes to blot out the picture. How vivid it seemed, how grotesquely easy it was for the mind to twist Lucille’s placid smile into a crafty grin, to add slyness to the quiet eyes, and furtiveness to the sure slow movements of her body.
Perhaps I look like that to someone, Edith thought. We are all protected by a veil of trust. I must think of her as she was.
But the veil was already torn and the crafty grin and the furtiveness became clearer. Suspicions grew in Edith’s mind like little extra eyes.
“And then,” Edith said, “she simply went out the back door while the girls were in the living room.”
“Simply,” Andrew said with a sharp mirthless laugh. “Simply!”
Edith flushed. “I’m terribly sorry, Andrew.”
“Sorry! Another magnificent understatement, my dear. I don’t want you to be sorry for having spoken your mind. If you believe that my wife is a thief and perhaps worse, you can’t help it. Any more than Martin can help it.”
“I haven’t said anything,” Martin said. “Yet.”
“Keep quiet, Martin,” Edith said. She went over to Andrew and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Andrew, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to think.”
He smiled up at her, wryly. “Then why think? If Lucille went away she had a reason to go. She’ll be back.”
Edith and Martin exchanged glances over his head. “And if she had a reason.”
Andrew continued, “she had a right to go. People should be allowed a certain freedom of movement. They shouldn’t get the feeling that they are constantly required to be some place at some specific time. They should have certain periods when nothing whatever is expected from them.”
“This is very like a lecture,” Edith said coldly, “directed against me.”
“Perhaps deservedly, Edith. You’re a driver. You can’t help it, I know, any more than I can help allowing myself to be driven, for the sake of peace.”
“What has all this to do with Lucille?”
“Nothing,” Andrew said. “Nothing at all. I was just talking.”
“You aren’t usually so talkative.”
“I keep thinking,” he said with a vague gesture, “I keep thinking, suppose when she was up in her room she had a feeling that she was in a prison, that she must suddenly escape, that the very walls were a weight on her. When I feel like that I escape to my office, I run like a hare back to my pregnant women, my neurotic young girls, my ladies with cysts and sorrows and headaches and backaches and constipation...”
“Really, Andrew!” Edith said, frowning.
“Women,” Andrew said. “I don’t know how many there are in the world, but I think I’ve seen half of them and they’re all constipated.”
“Father had a couple of drinks before you came,” Martin said.
“You know you can’t drink, Andrew,” Edith said, annoyed. “It goes to your head.”
“Please go away, Edith. Please go away back and sit down some place.”
But Edith refused. She was as incapable of sitting down as she was of keeping quiet. Pacing the room she went over all the facts again, returning in the end to the unanswerable question, why?
“Why?” Martin echoed. “Perhaps Father’s right. She felt like that, and off she went.”
Edith shook her head. “No, that’s quite incredible. You know what a thoroughly sensible person Lucille is. If she felt like that she would simply have gone for a nice t long walk or something.”
“People aren’t always capable of making sense,” Andrew said in a strange voice. “There are forces — forces in the mind...” He leaned forward and fixed his eyes on her. “Look, Edith. See, it’s like a jungle, the mind, dark and thick, with a million little paths that the light never reaches. You never know the paths are there until something pops out of one of them. Then, Edith, you might try to trace it back looking for its spoor and tracks, and you go so far, just so far, but the path is too twisted, too lightless, soundless, timeless...”