“I don’t know. It’s possible. It’s also possible that Virginia invited you because she took a liking to you. She’s unpredictable.”
“She didn’t take anything to me, like or dislike. She ignored me until the movie business came up, and then she tried to sound very cordial and friendly. I don’t know, maybe she was being cordial and friendly. I can’t tell. My judgments of people have gone haywire, so I can’t trust my...”
“Don’t get excited.” He put his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. “You refused the invitation?”
“Yes. I said I was going to bed early, and I did. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about you, and what you said about me going back home as soon as possible. I wasn’t worried about them trying to get rid of me for the evening. I was worried about you trying to get rid of me forever.”
“It seems I failed.”
“Miserably.”
“It’s my nicest failure, to date,” he said. “You may regret it, though.”
“Meecham, I’m trying to tell you something, only everything seems to come around to us, just us.” She frowned. “I should try to be impersonal, don’t you think?”
“By all means. Be impersonal.”
“I... don’t look at me then.”
“All right.” He looked at the wall. “Go on.”
“Well, they stood there in the hall talking. The man could have been anybody, a friend, or someone selling insurance or Christmas cards or something. If he had come in the daytime, I’d never have noticed him or thought twice about him. It was the secrecy that disturbed me — the lateness, the soft knock on the door instead of the chime, their low hurried voices. But I didn’t try to hear what they were saying. I went back to bed. Then a few minutes later Mrs. Hamilton came down the hall very quietly. If I hadn’t been listening for her, I don’t think I’d have heard her. She didn’t go to her own room directly. She stopped at my door. I could actually hear her breathing, very heavy labored breathing like someone whose air had been cut off, someone who’d been choked. Not that I... not that I really think she was choked...”
“What do you think?”
“That she’d had a shock, a bad shock, and that she was checking up on me to make sure I hadn’t seen or heard anything.”
“You didn’t hear anything, though.”
“No.”
“And all you saw was a stranger at the door. Was the hall light on?”
“One of them was.”
“You must have had a fairly good view of him then.”
“For a minute I did. He was a tall man, rather handsome, with light hair and a reddish face. He was about forty, I think, and he was wearing a bright green plaid topcoat. I never thought of it before, but he might have been a policeman.”
“He might have been,” Meecham said. But he knew he wasn’t a policeman. He remembered the man and he remembered the green plaid coat hanging with the other coats on the hall rack, swinging in the wind from the open door. This is my husband, Jim.
Jim Hearst and Mrs. Hamilton. Another equation to be solved, he thought, and each new equation led to still another, and on and on into the infinity of the human mind. He felt stunted and inadequate, an engineer without a slide rule, a chemist without a formula.
“Of course he was a policeman,” Alice said, sounding irrationally pleased, as if she too had discovered an equation and had solved it quite simply, by counting on her fingers. “I guess I was just depressed and dreamed up a lot of nonsense, didn’t I?”
For a minute he couldn’t answer. He was not sure how much to tell her, or even how much he himself knew.
“Didn’t I, Meecham?”
“I suppose you did.”
“Things seem so much worse at night, in the dark.”
“They do when you’re alone.”
“I’ll never be frightened with you, Meecham.”
“No.” He took her in his arms again. She was warm and soft in her innocence, eager in her new love that would endure forever, burn through the dark of night and the chill of winter. He wondered, with a detachment that was cruder to himself than it was to her, how long it would last.
He said, “You’d better have a story ready for Mrs. Hamilton.”
“All right. What?”
“You went to get your hair done.”
“But it isn’t done.”
“Get it done.”
“All right,” she said meekly. “Meecham, how did you know? About the bleach, I mean.”
“I have little birds spying for me all over town.”
“No. I mean it. How did you?”
“A blind guess, darling.”
“I wouldn’t like to think you knew too much about women,” she said, frowning. “Other women, I mean. I don’t care what you know about me. Naturally I’ll try to act mysterious sometimes.”
“When you do I promise to act mystified.”
“Oh, Meecham. I feel... I feel just overcome with love. Do you think I’m making a mistake telling you that? Should I keep you guessing?”
“It’s a little late for that,” Meecham said. “Besides, I’m tired of guessing. I ought to buy a new slide rule or go back to counting on my fingers like you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” He kissed her lightly on the temple. “Run along now and get your hair done.”
“When will I see you? Couldn’t we have lunch together, perhaps?”
“Not today. I have to go out to the hospital to see Loftus.”
“Loftus again,” she said, flatly.
“Loftus again.”
“Why?”
“I have some money that belongs to him. I want to know what to do with it.”
“Why should he give you money? Why should you still be involved with him like this?”
“There’s no involvement.” He knew there was, though. First a moral and mental involvement, and then gradually a physical one which had him trapped in a net of human ropes. Every way he turned he found new knots in the net. He couldn’t fight or talk or buy his way out of it; each knot, tighter and more intricate than the preceding, must be loosened and picked apart — the old lady, the Garinos, Virginia and her mother, the dead Margolis, Emmy Hearst and the husband she despised, and Loftus himself, the first and the final knot, and the most difficult of all.
16
The county hospital was a heterogeneous group of old and new buildings about three miles to the south of town. The so-called prison ward was not a ward but a two-story yellow brick house separated from the other buildings by some fifty yards and a steel fence. Originally the house had been the superintendent’s quarters, but as additional hospital facilities became necessary, the superintendent moved out and the house was used as an isolation ward for victims of the more highly contagious diseases like diphtheria and typhoid. Immunization gradually decreased the number of these diseases to almost nothing, but no immunization had been found against crime, and the number of county prisoners had increased considerably. Some of them were physically sick and needed attention, and some were mentally sick and needed even more. This latter fact was recognized after a series of spirited board meetings, newspaper editorials and a petulant statement from the local congressman who was running for re-election.
The conversion from protecting society from diphtheria to protecting it from its own bastard, the criminal, was accomplished with simple economy. The curtains were removed from the windows and bars were substituted; the fence was constructed; nurses were replaced by orderlies, and what had been first the superintendent’s parlor, and then the children’s ward, was now furnished as a combination chart room, office and lounge for the orderlies.