This Sweet Sickness (12 page)

16

O
n Monday evening, David drove to Hartford. He had set out at a quarter to six, and he arrived at eight-thirty, in a nasty little rain. He had wanted to ring her bell without telephoning first, but now he felt it would be rude not to call, so he stopped at the drugstore he had called from before, dialed her number without checking on it, and Annabelle answered. He told her he was in Hartford.

“Can I see you, darling? Are you free?”

“Yes—I'm free. Did you want to come here?”

He left his car where it was, dashed obliquely across the street, nearly got hit, and strode on down a dark sidewalk with his face turned up to the fine rain which had suddenly become beautiful and refreshing. Someone was coming out of the house as he arrived, and he lunged and caught the door before it had time to close, ran up the steps and knocked.

“Dave?” Annabelle called.

“Yes.”

A latch turned, the door opened. Annabelle looked at him in surprise. “You got here so fast.”

He held her close and pressed his lips against her cheek. She stirred in his arms, and it was not until her hand pushed his shoulder that he realized she wanted free and he immediately released her. His eyes devoured her as his arms had. She was pale, even her lips colorless. Only her eyes seemed the same, looking up at his face sadly, and as if they spoke to him in words she couldn't utter. He searched them for words of love, and instantly found them, found also regret, apology, hope, and tenderness. It was as if she said to him that she had been longing for him to come, that she needed him, that she had been afraid he might not come. He put his hands on her shoulders and bent to kiss her again.

“You hung up soon,” she said, drawing back, “I didn't tell you that somebody's coming over.”

“Who?”

“A friend. Mrs. Barber. She'll be here in a few minutes.”

“Oh. But at least we have a few minutes. I have so much to say, Annabelle. Isn't there ever any
time
?” He passed his hand across his damp hair.

“Take off your coat, Dave,” she said more kindly, and David's face spread in a smile.

She sat down tensely on the edge of the sofa, her hands in her lap.

He sat down on the sofa also, not too close to her. “I'm sorry you've been unhappy,” he said, and watched her eyes fill slowly with tears.

“It's all such a mistake. I can't believe it sometimes. I think—Gerald's going to walk in the house, but no. Gerald was here—and now he's not here.” She wiped a tear away impatiently.

Her words, which meant little to him emotionally, seemed classically trite—as if Annabelle felt she had to put on a traditional show. David looked from her to the television set with the gray-haired nonentity on it. “I want you to come with me, Annabelle,” he said suddenly, turning back to her, seizing her hand, though it grew stiff at his touch. “I'm selling my house, but I want to buy another house, one you'll like and help me choose. It can be anywhere, depending on where I work, and I'll work anywhere, almost anywhere. I'd like to be with Dickson-Rand in Troy. I want to start a completely new life. Let's both start over. Do you—”

“No,” she interrupted more loudly. “Honestly, Dave, did you come here to talk sense to me or not?”

He looked at her closed hand, which had just come to rest, with tired slowness, on her thigh. It had a plain gold wedding ring on it. “I didn't mean to say it all at once. There's always so little time—or none. I'm sorry, darling.” And he ground his teeth, because he could see from her tense expression that she was nearly out of her mind from fatigue and worry, the worries he so wanted to relieve her from.

“I just have nothing to answer to an outburst like that. You talk as if I have no child, no responsibility to Gerald—”

David was suddenly aware that she wore a man's white shirt with her patterned cotton skirt, realized with discomfort and revulsion that the shirt was probably one of Gerald's. “I know all that takes time.”

“Time? A long time. My life's torn apart now and you come with your crazy plans. My first duty is to my child.”

“We'll take her with us,” David said quickly. “That's understood, darling. I was talking about the future. You've got to think of that too, haven't you?”

“It's a boy, in case you've forgotten,” Annabelle said, wiping her nose with a Kleenex she had taken from the shirt pocket.

A boy, of course. David had been picturing a miniature Gerald, when he thought of the child at all. He asked her if she were going to stay on in the apartment, and she said there was the lease to think of, and that she had friends in the neighborhood who could help her take care of the baby, because sooner or later she would have to take a job.

“That's not necessary, darling, I've got plenty of money.”

“I can't take your money.”

“What's it for, if it isn't for you?”

She took her hand from his again, and for a moment, he thought she was going to get up from the sofa. “Where was your house, Dave?”

“Oh—nearly an hour's drive from Froudsburg.”

“In Ballard?”

“No. Practically in an opposite direction from Ballard. The girl at the boardinghouse just made up Ballard, Annabelle. She didn't know where my house was.”

“Why? Isn't she a friend of yours.”

“I didn't want anybody to know about the house, Annabelle. I wanted to keep it just for us—and I did.”

“Near what town was it?”

He sighed. “The nearest town was—Ruarksville. The house was a mile or so the other side of it. A good ninety miles from Ballard!”

“You told everybody you went to see your mother. Why did you lie, Dave?”

“Because it was the simplest way. I wanted privacy. I didn't want any houseguests. I didn't even have a—” He checked himself from saying he hadn't a telephone. “It was a pretty house. I so much wanted you to see it. I used to imagine you were there with me, and I did everything the way I thought you'd like it done. The bedroom, the living room, the pictures on the walls—even the way I fixed my meals.” He smiled. “I wish I had some pictures of it, so you could see what it looked like.” And he really did wish that, until he remembered that she would have recognized it from the outside.

She nodded, frowning slightly, her eyes far away, not looking at him. “Do you know William Neumeister?” she asked, pronouncing it the German way.

“No.”

“Does anybody at your boardinghouse know him?”

“No. Nobody as far as I know.”

“I very much wanted to talk to him. He was away. I went to the house last Thursday. I knew he wasn't home, but I thought somebody there might know where he was. One of the police. I wanted to ask him what really happened.”

David shrugged, and his eyes were drawn again to the smug face in the photograph on the television set. “He told the police what happened, didn't he?”

“What I can't understand is that Gerald stood there arguing with him—long enough to draw a gun. It doesn't make sense. I know he'd had something to drink, but—”

No, it didn't make sense, and David had thought of it before, but it had to make sense now. “Maybe he thought I was hiding in the house. Maybe he'd had a little more to drink than you thought.”

“But the doctor didn't think he'd had much. He'd had four at Ed Purdy's and I doubt if he stopped for more on the way.”

“Well, there you are—four, and you don't know how big they were.” David said, and felt his desperation was beginning to show through. “It was an accident, Annabelle, any way you look at it. He fell and hit a step. It could've happened to anyone going down the steps in the snow that day.”

“But the other man pushed him,” she said. “I wanted to talk to Neumeister—” Her face, her voice, had twisted again with the oozing tears, the futile tears that David hated to see and could not stop.

“You can't blame Neumeister for resisting a man with a gun.”

She lifted her head. “But it wasn't an accident that he went to find you. Any man would have, if some other man was writing his wife letters like those. And I asked you to stop, Dave, it wasn't as if I encouraged you.”

“I know.”

“But no, along you come with the worst of all. Threats—saying you were going to come here and take me away. Why, Dave, if anybody saw those letters, they'd say you practically belonged in an institution.”

He sprang up. “Oh? Any one of those letters—They're perfectly logical letters and you know it. I love you, and why shouldn't I write you letters?”

“Because I'm married!” she interjected.

“I never laid a hand on you or Gerald, and you talk as if I were an idiot or a maniac. If a man can't plead his case in a letter, what's the world coming to?”

“You don't write letters like those to a married woman! I couldn't even go into it with the police, it's so embarrassing!”

The doorbell rang.

“Embarrassing,” David repeated, stunned.

“And all you can say is ‘I have a right.' You have a right then to kill my husband?” She stood up, white-faced with an anger David could see she thought was righteous.

“Kill him, my foot!” he said, and turned away.

“That's what it amounts to.” She walked out of the room.

David heard the release button downstairs. Then a woman's rather slow steps ascended.

“There's no use in your staying any longer, Dave,” Annabelle said.

“What do you mean?” He was walking toward her, stopped because he knew she would not let him touch her, then in desperation caught her shoulders. “With all my heart I love you and want to make you happy. I might as well be dead myself without you, Annabelle. Just give me a chance.”

There was a rapping at the door.

Annabelle looked at him angrily, as if too angry even to say anything to him, and David scowled, baffled.

“I'll wait downstairs, however long it takes,” David said.

“Do you think I'm going to put you up for the night here?” She opened the door.

There came into the room one of the gray-haired, plumpish, fiftyish women that epitomized to David the word “neighbor,” possibly “good neighbor,” plain and dull. “How do you do?” David said with a little bow, in response to Annabelle's introduction, and saw the woman's smile deflate, leaving pucker lines around her mouth.

“It's—the same one?” the woman asked Annabelle.

Annabelle nodded. “Yes. We had to have a talk. But Dave's leaving now.”

“I was not leaving,” Dave said softly but firmly, “unless I'm in the way, of course.”

The woman stared at him as if he were a curiosity, a phenomenon, her mouth a little ajar—like someone in a crowd photograph snapped watching a parade.

“I don't think we finished our talk, Annabelle,” David added.

“Thanks, David, for all your offers. I don't know what else we have to talk about tonight.”

He stared stupidly at Annabelle's brown loafers, her bare slim ankles that without the woman standing there he might have gotten down on the floor and kissed. The taste of blood was in his mouth. He had been biting the inside of his cheek. Annabelle looked at him haughtily, almost as if she were putting on an act for this clod of a neighbor. “When may I see you again?”

“Dave, please—”

“Annabelle, what's the matter with you?” he shouted, in this last minute seizing her hands, and as she drew back there was a sudden crackling fury from the woman, hands fumbling with his arm that he jerked away from her. Then he stood apart from Annabelle, blinking as the woman shouted and gesticulated.

“Haven't you caused enough trouble, you—you filthy character! Filthy character, you are!” she said righteously, nodding.

“I love this girl and I don't care who knows it!” David yelled back.

Now the woman stomped, tossed her head, and yelled something else that David scorned to listen to as he turned back to Annabelle. Annabelle stepped away, at the same time opening the door.

“Good night, Dave, please, please,” Annabelle said tiredly.

He only took a long last look, smiling with relief at the kindness in her voice. “I'll think of you—constantly,” he said, and left.

And for all the time it took for him to walk to his car, his brain was in a vise of self-reproach for having lost his temper. Even in the face of the asinine neighbor, there was no excuse for it. He should have been calm for Annabelle's sake, a pillar of strength, sympathetic, patient, all the things he had not been.

Oh, Christ, how much there was to be done over!

17

   

Jan. 27, 1959

My darling Annabelle,

A new day is coming up as I write this. I have been walking around the town for hours. How I wish I were a poet to be able to tell you what this day symbolizes to me. It is a new beginning. If you could only see our life together like that, if you could simply believe how much I love you. To speak of myself now, I realize, is selfish. I love you for your devotion to Gerald, I respect your grief, but only because it is yours. I pray to whatever powers there are that your devotion and your love may one day be transferred to me. How can I measure my love for you? It fills me to overflowing. It is strangely tangible and yet intangible. It is like a weight inside me. I could not love you more than I do. It is unbelievable to me that a human being could feel as I do and be utterly without hope of his love being returned. Annabelle, I am quite sure one day you will understand, you will smile again at me as you once did.

As for the present—to return to last night, I reproach myself bitterly for having lost my temper, for having shouted. It is unforgivable. I wanted only to brush away your own tears, comfort you. I want only to make you happy. If you understood that completely, I would be the happiest man alive.

My job here is no pleasure and never was. My plans are, within a few weeks or months, however long it takes, to find a place in a research laboratory. I want you with me. I want to buy a house of
your
choosing. Have you thought of going back to La Jolla for a while? It might be very good for you to get your bearings and all that. If you go, believe me that you are in my thoughts day and night and always. I will love you as long as I live.

Dave

He went out quietly and dropped the letter into a box two streets away. It was 7
A.M.
and though when he had walked to the mailbox the town had been colorless as a photograph, on his way back the bricks of a wall across the street had become dark red, and he could see the green in the scraggly hedges. He felt unusually alert, and strangely happy. His letter might erase all the negative atmosphere of last night, might lift her spirits, might suddenly show her everything in a new light.
Some
letter would do it, he knew. It might take a hundred, two hundred letters, but it would not be their weight or their cumulative power, it would be a certain phrase, perhaps one that he did not consider even very important, that would make Annabelle see.

He was whistling as he came up the front walk. On Thursday, he thought, the day after Annabelle received his letter, he would call her from the factory and propose lunch on Saturday. He would take her to some restaurant in the country. Annabelle should see trees, grass, space! The countryside wouldn't be as beautiful, perhaps, as in spring or summer, but compared to that sordid street she lived in, any glimpse of country would be beautiful.

Mrs. McCartney was in the front hall when he walked in. “I just knocked on your door, David. Effie Brennan called you a minute ago. Wants you to call her back. She says it's important.”

“All right. Thank you,” David said.

“You have her number, haven't you?”

“No.”

“It's in the little blue book hanging by the telephone,” Mrs. McCartney told him, again with the smile and the avidly curious eyes.

David did not want to call her from the house. He waited until Mrs. McCartney had gone into the dining room, then went out of the house again. If Effie had told the Beck's Brook police that she had seen David Kelsey in the Neumeister house, then so be it, he thought. It was awkward and embarrassing, but nothing more. If he had to admit that it was David Kelsey who had talked with Gerald Delaney and finally knocked him down, in a fall that happened to be fatal, what then? Did that make him a murderer? If he had tried up to now to conceal his identity because of the Situation, wasn't that understandable?

Wasn't it even possible, David thought as he dialed Effie's number, to make a clean breast of the whole thing and come out in a better position than he was now with Annabelle? Up to this moment, he had been afraid to contemplate making a clean breast of it. This morning anything seemed possible.

“Hello, Effie. This is David Kelsey.”

“Dave—hello,” she said breathlessly. “I'm sorry I called you so early. Are you all right?”

“I'm all right. Why?”

“I was worried,” she said quickly.

“About what?”

“Everything. Where were you just now?”

“Out mailing a letter.” He had an impulse to tell her he owed her an apology, to apologize for his outburst last Saturday. But now both the incident and whether Effie Brennan was an enemy or not seemed unimportant.

“Dave, I shouldn't have come by Saturday. Once again, I'm sorry.”

“It's all right,” he said, puzzled by her shaky voice.

“I want you to know, Dave, whatever happens, I'm with you. I'm on your side. At least—”

“At least what?”

“I'm confused about so many things. I wish I'd never told Gerald Delaney anything. I want you to know, Dave, that the things you've told me are the things I'll tell too. And even believe. Is that what you want me to do?”

“Tell who? Listen, Effie, I don't care who or what you tell. I'm not trying to hide anything.”

“You're not? I think you'd better, Dave.”

“Why?”

“It's just that I have funny feelings. Anticipating. You know?”

At that moment he had no patience for funny feelings.

“I still have your portrait, but I've put it away, out of sight. Dave, are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I call you this evening? Please. I want to, Dave.”

“Why?”

“Just tell me I can. Can I call you at six?”

“All right, Effie,” he said to get it over with.

“Thanks. Good-bye, Dave.”

He hung up, and after a moment thought no more about Effie Brennan, or of what might be worrying her. But in the factory that day, he found himself wondering a few times if Effie had told Wes that she had gone to the house in Ballard Saturday and seen him there. David did not see Wes that day until after four, and then only for a few seconds, when Wes was coming out of a men's room, and David could tell from Wes's smile and the lift of his hand as he greeted him that nothing had changed.

Punctually at six the telephone rang in Mrs. McCartney's hall. Effie wanted to see him. She did not want to talk to him on the telephone. David tried to postpone it until tomorrow evening, postpone it forever, not that he was afraid of her, but that anybody breathless, any woman on the brink of tears, made him want to run in another direction.

“It's important, Dave. Please. This once.”

So he gave in and told her he would come over at eight o'clock. But she did not want him to come to her apartment. She proposed a drugstore on Main Street.

“It has booths,” Effie said.

David was a little late. Effie sat in a back booth behind a pink plastic table, a cup of black coffee in front of her. She smiled nervously when she saw him. After he had sat down, she still looked rigid and shy, as if she had to guard against his striking her, or against his resentment.

“Effie, I'm sorry I shouted at you Saturday.”

She nodded, as if in a trance, as if she were unaware of nodding. “That's all right. I'll forget it. I'll forget I ever went there, Dave. That's what you want me to do, isn't it?”

“I suppose.”

A waitress came, and he ordered coffee.

“I saw Annabelle today,” Effie said.

“You
what
?” He looked at her, nodding again, and he could not believe it. “She came here? To Froudsburg?”

“No. I went to Beck's Brook. The police there called me at seven this morning, and they drove me up during my lunch hour. They asked me again if I knew Newmester or knew where he was, and I think they were even wondering if I knew Annabelle, but they saw I didn't. Annabelle wanted to talk to Newmester. It was the second time she'd come to see him. But he couldn't be found.” She paused, looking at him with the wary, troubled eyes. “They described him.”

David folded his arms over his guilty heart. “Very well. They described him.”

“They said he was about five ten, medium build, thirty years old, with black hair. Your hair's brown, but—he's you, isn't he?”

“Yes,” David said quietly. “And so what?”

Her frilly pink blouse rose and fell as she breathed. “So what is that Annabelle would like to talk to him. The police want to find him too, or the man who used that alias, because they can't find anything—anything about a Newmester who's a freelance journalist. I stuck to my story, Dave, that I'd just made up the house in Ballard and it happened to belong to a man named Newmester. So your name wasn't even mentioned by the police. Or by Annabelle to them. I wanted you to know that, Dave,” she said earnestly, and David frowned down at the table. Effie lit another cigarette. “Annabelle talked about you later. I asked her to have a sandwich with me.”

David squirmed. Annabelle having a sandwich with Effie.

“And what did you tell her?” David asked.

“Nothing. I swear nothing, Dave. She knows I know you, of course—and I told her I was in love with you. Which I am, Dave. And she told me she's the girl you've been in love with all this time. I think I suspected it when I first saw her. So I asked her and she admitted it.” Effie's voice had dropped so David had to strain to hear, but he had heard.

“That's no business of anybody's but mine.”

“Isn't it? I'm glad to know,” she said shakily. “She looks like a wonderful girl, Dave—and now she's free.”

“I'm not interested in discussing her with you,” he said quickly.

“Why're you so angry? Well, I know why. You're never going to get her, Dave,” she said, shaking her head. “Never.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing—except that I love you.”

It exasperated him. “Why did you say that, that I'll never get her?”

She leaned toward him, wide-eyed. “A woman doesn't suddenly decide to marry a man she thinks killed her husband, does she? A man she never was in love with in the first place?”

There it was, ugly, crude, coming out of that shopgirl-secretary face. “That's not true.”

“She said if it hadn't been for your letters, her husband never would've died. She said that, Dave. I don't mean she thinks it was you who pushed him. Did you just push him, Dave, or did you really mean to—?”

“I hit him with my fist and I knocked him down,” David said, feeling his strength leave him. He rested his head on his hand.

“What're you going to do, Dave?” she asked tearfully.

He lifted his head. “Shut up.” He spoke softly, but he leaned toward her and hit the table top gently with his fist. “Just shut up about Annabelle.”

“You don't want to hear the truth. I understand that. But you can't keep it up, Dave.”

“Oh, can't I,” he replied, taking her words as some kind of challenge to his perseverance, his character in general.

“No. You're going to drive yourself crazy.”

“I've heard enough lately about insanity. I don't want to hear anything about it from you.”

“All right, you've heard enough. There's just no talking to you. But what're you going to do when the police tell Annabelle there really isn't anybody named William Newmester? Don't you think they'll come to that conclusion sooner or later? And by way of clearing it up, they might want to see David Kelsey.”

“Why?” David asked more softly. “Just how long do you think they can go on over an accident?”

“Was it an accident?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Annabelle wants to see the man who pushed her husband. She's going to find it out sooner or later. Not through me but some other way.” Now her eyes were glassy with tears.

David's fist was still clenched on the table. “Naturally, you could drop a few hints, and it wouldn't be coming from you at all, would it?”

“Dave, don't be bitter. I'd never, never do that!”

“Go ahead. I can stand it. Annabelle could stand it, too. Annabelle and I could stand it. Try it, if you think we can't. And suppose I beat them to it anyway? Maybe I'll tell them myself. I'll give them a blow-by-blow description of what happened that day. Matter of fact, I already have. They know damned well it was an accident. But I can also tell them it was David Kelsey who hit him.”

“Suppose they don't believe it was an accident? They'll say you had a motive to kill him.”

“Gerald had a gun pointed at me.”

“They'll still say you had a motive.”

He disdained to answer, and stared at her with a blind hate. She was trying to trap him, trying to blackmail him, to get her grip on him by scaring him, and promising to keep his secrets.

She looked at him with wide-open eyes, as if picking and choosing among a thousand words for the strongest. “You say you love Annabelle. She loved Gerald. It seems to me you—you not only want to forget that, you don't even give her any sympathy now when she needs it. Not that she'd accept any from you, Dave.”

“Just stop talking about it, will you?” David said softly and quickly, sitting on the edge of the booth seat now, ready to leave.

“That's all you can say. It's—just like that house of yours where you lived hidden away under another name. You're trying all the time to shut out reality.”

“That's a lot of pseudoscientific jargon.” David put a quarter down, bumped his cup as he stood up, and coffee spilled into the saucer.

“Where're you going?”

“I'm going to the Beck's Brook police,” he said. “If you'll excuse me.”

“David!”

He did not look back. He walked quickly in the direction of Mrs. McCartney's, where his car was. But he had not walked a block before he realized that he could never bring himself to tell those police officers that William Neumeister was David Kelsey. Not that he could not have borne their questions, or that Annabelle might not understand finally that it had been an accident, but that he did not want to betray William Neumeister, the better half of himself who had never failed, who had lived with Annabelle in the pretty house in Ballard, that Neumeister whose existence had made the Monday-to-Friday existence of David Kelsey tolerable for nearly two years. A lucky accident that he had been wearing a hat that afternoon, so they couldn't see that his hair was brown. And they were three inches or so off in his height. Had fear made him stoop?