Philip turned around, all the belligerent uncertainty coming back into his face. Alice quietly took her hand from his arm and walked toward Loring.
“You wanted to talk to me?” she said gravely. “Come in here.”
She didn’t look back at Philip. Loring followed her into the drawing room, frowning faintly at her back as if she had done something he couldn’t explain and didn’t like.
When the door had closed again, Sands repeated, “Going out?”
“Yes, I was,” Philip said. “I was going to see you.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to find Murillo and prove that Johnny never had anything to do with him.” He didn’t sound like a hero, or look like one.
Champagne to stale beer, Sands thought and wondered if Alice Heath had planned this change in him. Incalculable woman, you couldn’t tell about her. “And how would you go about finding Murillo, Mr. James?”
“The girl,” Philip said. “His girl, the one you said shot Mr. Jordan.”
“Mamie Rosen,” Sands said.
“Mamie Rosen,” Philip repeated eagerly. “Yes. If she was his girl, she’d know. You have only to insist, really insist on her telling.”
“You think so?”
“If I could talk to her and tell her just what it means to people like Alice and Johnny, nice people who’ve never done any harm, I’m sure she’d see... see reason, and tell where this man is hiding.”
“There are all degrees of reason,” Sands said. “She might just say to hell with nice people like Alice and Johnny. In fact she did.” He took a step closer to Philip so that their eyes were only two feet apart. “No. See, she loves this man Murillo. It doesn’t matter what you call him, murderer, thief, anything, he’s the one. Love. For Mamie it may come down to something quite simple like Murillo being better in bed than any man she knows.”
“Not so loud,” Philip said, frowning. “Alice might hear you.”
“Some day,” Sands said, “Alice will have to be told where babies come from, but you better put off telling her until she’s thirty-five.”
“I...” The hero in him wanted to object but was far too feeble.
“Go ahead,” Sands said. “You go and tell Mamie Rosen all about Alice and Johnny. Tell her about the house they live in, tell her about Maurice tiptoeing around in a monkey suit and taking sunbaths. She won’t know what a sunbath is but tell her anyway. Tell her that Alice put her hands in dishwater today for the first time in her life and broke down. Tell her about that little room down the hall where Alice sits and makes her powerful decisions, like whether to add mushrooms to the chicken patties.”
One corner of his mouth turned up in a half-smile. “Yes. Mamie will break down. You’ll have her weeping. She’ll tell you where Murillo is, if you really want to know. She lives at one hundred and ten Charles Street.”
For a time Philip’s face loosened, the jaws were slack, the eyes undetermined. But he had the mulishness of an insecure man who feels he’s being pushed and the pushing gave him something definite to fight against.
“I’m going,” he said at last.
“Of course you are,” Sands said.
“You mean — you’re letting me?” he said, sounding almost indignant.
“Sure. It’s your funeral.”
“Funeral? You mean she’s dangerous?”
“Want me to come with you?”
“No! No, of course not! I’m... perfectly capable of... of managing her. Well. You say one hundred and ten Charles Street?”
“I say one hundred and ten Charles Street,” Sands said. “Happy Landing.”
Philip took a couple of steps toward the door, then he swung around to find Sands smiling, an idiotic smile like a well-fed happy baby.
“I—” Philip said.
“Yes?” Sands said softly. “Go on, Mr. James. You want to save Alice and Johnny, and your own soft berth here, don’t you? Go on.”
The door opened and banged shut again. With the banging of the door the smile disappeared from Sands’ face.
“I’m so smart,” he said. “I’m so goddamn smart I have to go messing around.”
He looked out of the little square windows at the top of the door and saw Philip disappearing around a bend in the driveway.
Loring saw him too, from the windows of the drawing room. He hadn’t spoken since he entered the room, but had stood watching the leaves falling from the trees, almost hypnotized by the constant motion. One leaf, a second leaf, a million leaves.
And one of them’s me, he thought, and it doesn’t matter a damn what I do. My time’s half up, I’ve fluttered half-way down. The rest is up to me, and if I like kids, there’s no reason...
“Mr. James has gone out,” he said.
He didn’t turn around, but he heard her move, sigh.
“Has he?” she said after a time, and he knew from her voice that she had been crying noiselessly since they’d come into the room.
“I guess I haven’t anything to talk about after all,” he said abruptly. “I don’t know why I came except...” Except to see you, he finished silently.
“Except to see how things were going?” Alice said. “That was nice of you.”
He turned from the windows and looked at her to see if she was being ironic. But her face told him nothing. It was expressionless, and the eyes beneath the pink lids were dead.
If any man loved her, Loring thought, she’d kill him, gradually, day by day she’d kill him as her mother killed her father.
Frozen-face. I want to get out of here.
“Won’t you sit down?” Alice said.
“No. No, thanks,” he said violently. “I have a few calls.”
“Could I offer you a drink?”
Don’t offer me anything, stay away from me, sit there in that chair while I run away from you. “No, thanks, nothing.” He walked quickly toward the door.
She stirred in her chair but did not rise. “Shall we see you again?”
“See me again?” he said hoarsely. “No, no, I’m leaving town. I’m thinking of starting over again — pediatrics.”
She blinked slowly when the door slammed and thought, how peculiar. But an instant later she had forgotten him. It was not Loring who had left, but Alice herself. She had slipped back into the past, skipping lightly like a child over the well-known paths. Her fingers lay tense, stretched out along the arms of the chair as if they were ready to grasp some half-forgotten word or thought or gesture and fondle it.
The past was dead and dear, it couldn’t change, it didn’t threaten. Comfortable and pleasant, like a closet full of old clothes. You could wear some of them when you were alone, but you didn’t have to bother with the rest, even to look at them.
Some of the clothes were ugly with sagging seams, and evil stains, tattered, too loose or too tight. Leave these in the closet. Bring out the yellow linen dress and slip it over your head. See how thick the cloth was and how well it fitted. It made you twenty again.
Twenty. You were sitting on a piano bench with a young man beside you...
She put her hand up to her forehead and moved her fingers gently over it. Yellow linen. Ah, that was a dress, with Philip sewn into every seam and the pockets full of music and the cloth soft as a baby next to your skin.
She opened her eyes suddenly and they were wild and anguished.
“Where is it?” she whispered. “Where is it now? Where is my yellow dress?”
Given to the poor or used as dusters or burned or decayed into nothing or grayed with mildew in an attic.
Behind her she heard the door opening, and turned her head slowly. Loring was standing in the doorway holding her yellow dress over his arm.
He’s brought it back to me, she thought. He has found it and brought it back. I’ll never lose it again now.