“That wasn’t the reason. I wish Maggie had talked to you. She might have said it in a way you’d understand.”
“Maggie did tell me about our father’s ill treatment of her. Was this it? Did you send me away because you were worried he might hurt me too?”
“I wish that were the reason. That would certainly exonerate me, wouldn’t it? No, in truth I — well, I just didn’t want another John Barton in this house. From the moment you came into this world, I could see him in you. Your face was his, your little hands — the way they bunched themselves into tight, angry little fists. So I got rid of you. I didn’t know at the time that it would have been easier to divest myself of him instead. Because eventually he did go, and he didn’t put up a fuss about it. But by then it was too late. You were gone and there wasn’t any way for me to get you back.”
Jerry thought about this. He picked up the wooden stereoscope resting on the table next to his chair. He put it up to his face and looked at the composite image presented by the card in the slot. The view was of some place in the Orient. There was a pagoda in the foreground. Behind it were trees that would have looked unreal had Jerry not seen a good many such strangely trimmed trees in the Japanese Tea Gardens at Golden Gate Park. He tried to push from his mind the day he spent at the park with Maggie and her four shop-girl friends, the way he’d forced himself on her, kissing her, touching her rudely upon the hips with his hot hands. The thought came with shame and with anger. It did not have to be this way. If he had known she was his sister he surely would have suspended his pursuit and gone after one of the others instead.
“But I turned into him anyway, didn’t I?” he said bitterly. “For all the good your sending me away did.” Jerry paused. He studied the Oriental rug on the floor. He didn’t raise his eyes as he said, “I had thought about killing myself. I had thought about killing the both of us.”
At first Clara couldn’t find words to respond. She rose from the sofa. Then she said raggedly, “I think you should go. As I — as I have said: I have packing to do.”
Jerry got up as well. But not before flinging the stereoscope to the wooden floor. It made a loud clatter, the handle breaking away on impact, the picture card flying off. Clara started. She took a step back.
“It doesn’t look real!” Jerry raged. “They say it’s supposed to look real and lifelike when the pictures come together. All well and good, but they’re still in damnable black and white. We don’t live in a black and white world.”
“No, we do not,” said Clara, her voice aching with pain. “I–I’ve seen cards where the pictures are color-tinted.”
“Like putting rouge on a corpse.” Jerry was breathing heavily. He took a moment to catch his breath. “I can’t hold you accountable for what was done to me. You are a stupid, frightened woman. You would have made a stupid and frightened mother, who would have been of no use to me.”
Clara nodded quickly in a frenzied travesty of agreement.
“It was better that I was raised by the cheddar-heads.”
“I don’t — I don’t know what that means.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m going. I’m sorry for what I did to your daughter. I’m sorry for casting this brief shadow over your life. I needed to see you — not for you to apologize — just to face for one last time the woman who would do this. Now I’ve faced you. But I am not changed. My heart hasn’t softened. I thought it might, but it hasn’t. I don’t wish you well. I wish that the rest of your life were one long trial. And that you’ll regret to your dying day the stupid thing you did.”
Clara spoke softly: “I have always regretted it.”
Jerry left without saying another word.
Clara sank back onto the sofa and wept. She remembered Lucile Mobry’s words from the morning — what she said about men, and how, frankly, undeserving they were of redemption, and then she remembered opposing words from her daughter, who felt that a man could be changed through the tendance of a loving, caring woman. Now Clara came to see the truth as it was unveiled to her by the example of Jerry’s belligerent visit — the truth that lay somewhere between the two extremes.
She walked over to the stereoscope and picked it up. She wondered if she could repair the handle before her landlady came home from her errands and discovered it broken. She picked up the stereographic card containing the two images of the same Japanese pagoda and scrutinized it. She saw no difference between the two pictures printed side-by-side on the rectangle of thumb-smudged grey-green cardboard. Yet together the images were supposed to create a single picture of fuller dimensionality. Clara shook her head and returned the card to the box of stereographs.
Lucile Mobry and Clara’s daughter Maggie had spoken of men and women as if there were worlds of difference between them, but Clara wondered. She saw in each the same elemental needs and then that one great, overarching need: to snatch at happiness whenever one had opportunity, and to use it as a salve for all the aches and throbs that come from human existence. Men and women engaged life, they engaged one another, in very different ways, but in those things that made them most human they were like the pictures on the stereograph: very much alike and very much in need of one another to make the whole picture.
Whatever that picture might be.
Clara climbed the stairs to her third-floor flat, the one with the window and the fine fogless view and the plush seat where one could sit and gaze out and do one’s best to push aside dark memories and feelings of painful regret. But Clara did not sit. Instead, she returned to her packing.
She did not hear the wicker of the gelding below, shuffling and unnerved in the street by a portentous vibration below ground undetected by any of the two-legged creatures passing nearby.
Two policemen came looking for Lyle. Will Holborne had told them who he believed had killed his friend in their shared flat on Telegraph Hill. He directed the cops to the Emporium. What they found when they got there were four young women finishing up the last morsels of the supper they’d prepared together. (Ruth had removed herself to the larder, so as not to draw unnecessary speculation as to the reason for her injured face.) Jane was taken singly into the parlor and questioned by one of the two officers.
“I don’t know where he’s gone,” she said in a businesslike manner. “He flew out of here a couple of hours ago.”
“So you don’t have a clue as to where he might be headed.”
“That’s what I said. What is it you think he’s done?”
“Killed a man.”
Jane opened her eyes widely in an expression of shock and dismay that served. “My brother wouldn’t kill anyone. It would take too much effort.”
“How about you make a little effort to take our questions seriously, Miss Higgins? A man is dead and there’s one who said it was your brother who did it. He said your brother had it in for the victim.”
Jane was sitting on the sofa. That sofa. It could not be avoided. She didn’t like the way she felt just being in the room. Everything reminded her of what had happened there only a few days before. “Did the person who said this—” said Jane, while effecting a look of serious inquiry, “—did he also say why my brother wanted to see this man dead?”
“Not in the few minutes I had opportunity to question him. But we know there’s a reason there. He said he was nearly positive it was your brother who was the one that did it. We like that phrase ‘nearly positive,’ Miss Higgins. It tends to make our job easier. Anyway, somebody will get it out of him. Sometimes it can be a simple thing: one man doesn’t like another man’s politics. Or his religion. Or the way he’s looking at him. And they exchange words. And they’re both lit, and things turn violent.” The policeman sniffed. “Your brother drinks. I can smell it all around the place. We’re going to make our search now. You go back in the kitchen with your friends. You have some very pretty friends.”