Текст книги "Epitaph For A Tramp"

Автор книги: David Markson

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

CHAPTER 4

I had not seen her in all that time. She had come a day later to collect the rest of her gear, and a few months after that I’d gotten divorce papers in the mail, stamped from a place called Athens, Alabama, where I suppose they peddle those things on the corner newsstands. And that had been the end of it. The end, except that I still had the pail and shovel but all the sand was gone from the sandbox.

And now I stood in the doorway of the bedroom holding the phone and not listening to a girl named Sally Kline who was trying to tell me something she thought was urgent. The Second Coming could have waited.

I wondered how much of it had been my fault. “Help me,” she’d said. I wondered if it would have made any difference if we really had talked, if I’d tried to understand it and had had the guts to try and work it out. But I’d had to be one muytough hombre.I’d had to let her walk out that night and I’d had to bury the ache in whisky and the job and other women and not once even ask anybody if she were alive or dead.

And now there she was on the floor like the armful of kindling after somebody’d tripped.

It had happened right outside. It didn’t take Dashiell Hammett to figure that much of it without going down. She’d come in the sports car I’d heard, fast, screeching her rubber along the gutter. And then the second car had stopped, the bigger one, probably right behind her, and someone had caught her between third and home and had poked it into her ribs. Here, smack in the middle of Fannin’s own ball park.

So whatever kind of mess she’d been in, she’d been coming to me. And then she’d let go without telling me who did it because she’d known she didn’t have too many words left and it had seemed more important to her to talk about something else.

But she’d been coming here in the first place because she’d thought she needed me. I kept looking at her, standing there. I’d been as much help as a ruptured aorta. So now all I could do was find out what had happened; and maybe also find out some of the things I should have learned about her a long time before, the things that might have made everything different.

All right, I said, I’ll do that, yes. And then I said I was sorry. Cathy, I said. Baby, I…

I made myself come out of it. Cop, I said. Be cop again, Fannin. Who did it, cop? I lifted the phone.

It was dead. I took the directory and looked up Kline, Sally. There were two of them. One of them lived on 200th Street. I dialed the one in Greenwich Village.

She must have been poised over it like a kitten at a wounded housefly. The first ring didn’t even finish. And then she didn’t give me time to say hello.

“Who.;, who is it?”

“Easy,” I said, “Fannin.”

“Oh, thank heaven! Are you drunk, Mr. Fannin? Is that it? Every time I call you– Oh, please don’t be drunk, Mr. Fannin.”

“I’ll talk now.”

“It’s Cathy, Mr. Fannin. It’s those two boys she went away with yesterday, I think. Those hoodlum ones. Oh, Lord, I told her she’d get into trouble. And the one who’s out there watching the house. I don’t know if he’s one of them or somebody else, but he goes away and then he comes back, it’s been all night now, and then the phone keeps ringing and when I pick it up there’s nobody there, and—”

I pulled out the plug. She was dialing me every channel on the set. “Look,” I said, “I’ll come down. Are you in any trouble yourself?”

“Oh, thank heaven. No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. But I’m scared, Mr. Fannin. That one outside, just standing there. In the alley across the street. I can see his shadow from the window. And I don’t know what to do. I wanted to call you earlier. I thought you would be better than the police, but then I didn’t know whether I should or not because you’re not married to her anymore, but I couldn’t think of anything else, and… can you do something, Mr. Fannin? Do you think you can?”

“What’s your apartment number?”

“Five. We’re on the top floor in front.”

“Your lights on or ofl?”

“I’ve got the bedroom lamp on, Mr. Fannin. But not the ones you can see from the street, if that’s what you mean. That’s how I can see him. He was there when I came in – that was about eleven – but he must think I’m in bed now. I can look out through the blinds in the dark.”

“Keep it that way. Don’t put on any extra lights when I ring.”

“But won’t he see you come in?”

“There’s a front apartment below yours?”

“Yes, but—”

“What number?”

“Three, I think. Yes.”

“All right.”

“But what are you—?”

“Never mind that now. Look, I’ll be thirty minutes, more likely forty. You sit tight and keep your door locked. I mean that.”

“Gosh, Mr. Fannin, you make it sound so—”

“Never mind how I make it sound.” I wanted her to stay edgy and cautious until I got there. The duck outside seemed a pretty good bet to be watching for Cathy, but I didn’t know whether Sally Kline might be in any danger from whoever else was involved in it. Whatever in hell it was.

“All right,” she told me hesitantly.

I didn’t tell her about Cathy. She did not sound like the first girl you’d pick to share a rooftop with when the dam broke. “Sort the laundry or something,” I said again.

“All right, Mr. Fannin.”

I hung it up. The alarm clock said 3:49. Fifteen minutes. Maybe only ten. That would have been the time to get downstairs, when Cathy had first buzzed. So I’d sat here thinking it was some lush or other. Now I wasn’t going to find anything outside but frustrated mosquitoes who’d missed the last open window.

I had to ease her leg aside to get through the door.

There were stains along the floor in the hall, still wet. There were prints of her hand on the wall where she had had to brace herself. None of it looked real. It never does. It always looks like a promotion stunt for a cheap horror film where you follow the painted gore across the lobby to the ticket office. I went down the steps and out.

No one was around. I hadn’t been expecting a B.P.O.E. convention.

There was a red MG at the curb with the keys in the ignition, but the blood did not lead to it. It went off at an angle to the edge of the sidewalk about a dozen feet behind it. To where the second car I’d heard had probably pulled in behind her.

There had been a rush of blood when the knife had come out. It had slowed quickly but you could have painted a country firehouse with what had spilled in those first seconds. If she’d fallen it must have been to her hands and knees, because it had hardly stained her coat.

It was as easy to read as a scrawl in a latrine. It just made you sicker.

She’d been in a jam or she wouldn’t have been coming here, but she hadn’t thought the trouble was the kind you can get dead over. She’d seen the second car and she’d known the person driving it She’d gotten out of the MG and walked back to talk things over with whoever it was. The poor kid had walked right into it.

I tried to map the rest of it. She must have hung there a minute, long enough for the killer to decide she was dead or dying before he gunned off. Or had he seen her get up and start for my door first? Had he seen that and been just too gutless to go for her a second time?

I hoped that was it. I hoped he had seen her make the door and was having to sweat over whether she’d managed to tell me what it said on his dogtags. Oh, yeah. I hoped he was sweating over that enough so he figured he would have to get me next. I hoped he would try that, the son of a bitch.

Yes, I said, try that. Come on, you son of a bitch.

I was standing there in the empty street. Probably I looked like the neighborhood drunk. I must have, because the drunk from the next neighborhood pegged me for a brother the second he reeled around the corner. He let out a bellow like he’d found out what happened to Amelia Earhart and started circling the sidewalk for a landing, coming on full throttle. I went back to the MG and took out the keys. There was a celluloid case on the steering rod which said the car belonged to an Adam Moss of West 113th Street. I left that where it was, pocketed the keys and caught the drunk by the shoulders before he nose-dived the sixty or eighty feet to his shoe tops.

“Buddy,” he said. “Frien’. Customer. You wanna buy a polishy? Sure, you wanna buy a polishy.” He was about fifty. He had gray hair cropped short and he was still very well dressed in spite of the two quarts he’d spilled on his tie. It was an expensive tie and there were probably two maids and a butler watching anxiously for him with a light in the window. “No policy,” I said. “Be nice and sleep it off in your own gutter, huh?”

There was no point in asking him if he’d seen anything. He was too far gone. He wouldn’t be seeing anything but hideous pink snakes.

“Extra speshal polishy,” he insisted. “New kind.” I would have let him go but it would have been like letting go of a piano from high up. “New polishy. Group shuishide plan. Why die wish strangers when you can die wish friends? We pick time, plaish, monuments. Monuments won’t wilt, won’t shrink, won’t shiver, Guar’raranteed. Painlish and inshtant death. Torture clause—”

I caught him off balance and stepped away when the sidewalk wasn’t tilted. I’d tricked him. He hung there on a cord. “You hate me,” he decided then. “Jush how long have you hated me? When did it start? Jush tell me when it started?”

I left that one for his head doctor. He’d have one at about forty bucks a session. The hall had not gotten any prettier but I’d have to leave that, too, for the cops who didn’t make forty bucks in two days. I went upstairs and inside.

She did not have a purse. There was eighty-six cents in change in one of the pockets of her coat, plus a lipstick and a tiny chain with three keys. Two of the keys would be for the place on Perry Street, one for the main entrance and the other for the apartment. The third was for a mailbox lock.

Her wallet was in her other pocket. She had twenty-four dollars in bills and an uncashed paycheck from the publishing house. There was a driver’s license still made out to Mrs. Catherine Fannin, a beat-up birth certificate for Catherine June Hawes, female, and a single ticket for Row E at the Cherry Lane Theater dated for a week from that night. There were folded sales slips from Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue and two deposit slips from her bank for small amounts. These said Catherine Hawes. There was a snapshot of me.

I left everything. I went into the bathroom. I washed quickly, scrubbing the blood from my hands, shaved fast, brushed my teeth. I went into the bedroom, took off the G.I. slacks, changed into a tan suit. I took the modified sportsman’s Luger out of the bottom dresser drawer, removed it from its pocket holster, checked it, put it back in the sheath, clipped the whole thing over my belt and into my right rear pocket. I called Dan Abraham.

It rang three times. His wife took it.

“Sorry,” I said. “Wake him for me, will you, Helen?”

“Harry?”

“Yes.”

“Must I?”

“Yes.”

There was a minute and then I could hear him groaning. He was an old Army friend and the only P.I. in town I trusted enough to ring in on it. We worked with each other from time to time when one or the other of us had a job too big to handle alone. He was still making unhappy noises when he found the mouthpiece.

“It isn’t bad enough that I’m in the racket myself,” he said. “I’ve got to have friends in it, too. Why don’t we take up something where they let you sleep, Harry? Maybe I’ll try out for concert violinist someplace. You know anybody needs a good concert violinist who can move to his left? How about Kansas City? Sure. Hell, they got holes all over the infield—”

“Dan, I’ve got a dead one.”

He took his head out of the quilt then. “Yeah? You getting trigger-happy in your old age or did somebody dump it on your doorstep?”

“Doorstep is close enough. It’s Cathy, Dan.”

“Oh, no, Harry—”

I could hear him telling Helen. We had spent ten or a dozen evenings together the year before. I heard Helen cry out.

“Listen, Dan—”

“Right here. Where are you?”

“Home. Look, I’m going out on it. The girl she’d been living with just called me, worried about her. That’s all I’ve got.”

“You want me to take it from over there?”

“Right. Everything ^’ll be just the way it happened. Roughly 3:30, give or take five. Somebody knifed her on the street but she made it up. Give me an hour or so and then try to get Nate Brannigan at Homicide. Rouse him up if he’s off, his home number’s in the book on my desk. He’ll ride with me longer than most. I’ll call you when I get a chance. Up till then you don’t know where I am.”

“You haven’t told me anyhow.”

“And, Dan, if you see anything that doesn’t look kosher, you might square it away before they start pulling up the floor boards.”

“Harry, you haven’t been seeing her lately?”

I didn’t answer him. He knew better than that.

“Delete that,” he said then. “Be on my way in six minutes. You going to leave it open?”

“I’ll stick an extra set of keys under the mat in the outside hall.”

“Right. And Harry—”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry, fella. If there’s anything else you want me to do? Or Helen maybe—”

“Thanks, Dan. Nothing. I’ll leave the lights on. You’ll trip over her if you’re not looking.”

I cradled it, went back into the living room, glanced at everything except Cathy. The two bourbons I’d poured were still sitting on the stand next to the chair. It would be a dumb sort of thing to have to explain, pouring one of them for an unidentified female sot who took five or seven minutes getting up the stairs and then turned out dead. I carried them into the kitchen, dumped them, washed the glasses. The bottle was still out but the cops would find that quick enough anyhow.

I took the extra set of keys out of the desk. It had been Cathy’s set. I looked at her then, thinking it was probably for the last time. It was all there again. I bit down hard on it and went out.

It followed me down. She’d be stiff before Dan got there. I was thinking about that and I was outside before I remembered I was holding the extra keys. I told myself to quit it. I turned back, opened the outside door and edged the two keys under the rubber.

It was twenty-five minutes since I’d spoken to Sally Kline. It would probably take the night man ten more to unshuffle my Chevy from the loft in the garage around the corner, and I did not see a cab. I had promised the girl I’d be there in forty. I wondered if Mr. Adam Moss of West 113th Street would mind if I borrowed the MG. I wondered who Mr. Adam Moss was. I expected to find out soon.

I was just contorting my hundred and ninety-seven pounds below the low wheel when she came around the corner. I got out again, fast, because this time it wasn’t any drunk’s mating call I heard. The cry was sick with agony or horror or both.

She started to run toward me. She was an old woman and her hair was disheveled and it didn’t matter to her that her housecoat was flapping loose from the flimsy white nightgown she wore under it. She lost a slipper but she couldn’t bend for it, not with what she was carrying pressed against her breast.

It was swaddled in a white blanket. The blanket had blood on it.

I jerked open the door on the sidewalk side of the MG. “Here!” I told her. “Quick!”

“Oh, thank the Lord, thank the Lord! Any hospital, any hospital at all. She fell out of the window. On the fourth floor. She—”

There was no movement in the blanket, no sound. “She what?”

The woman had started to get into the car. “Why, she’s always out there at night,” she said. “She was just playing. She—”

I had taken her by the elbow. I eased her around firmly before she could get seated and lifted a corner of the blanket. The cat was an expensive angora. Its head was bloodied up some but it had a good seven or eight other lives ahead of it. I kept propelling the woman around until I could swing the door shut. Then I ducked around to the other side of the car.

“But—” The woman was gaping at me. “You mean you won’t—” She was sputtering. I choked the car and she was shocked. When I released the handbrake she was outraged.

New York at night. You think anybodysleeps? The loonies in Bellevue, maybe they sleep.

The woman stuck her tongue out at me. “Get a rickshaw at the corner, lady,” I told her. I heard the cat yowl once and then saw it racing along the sidewalk as I pulled out. I went over to Second Avenue and straight down.

Around midtown I remembered Cathy’s mother and sister.

That did not make the night any better. Someone was going to have to tell them and I didn’t much want it to be any tactful plainclothes cop working overtime with a hangover.

I liked them both. Mrs. Hawes was over sixty and stone deaf. She had taken to me and had been broken up when things did not work out for us. She had not understood Cathy, but then who had?

Estelle was thirty-six or so. She taught grammar school and you wouldn’t mistake her for Moll Flanders in the darkest bedroom in town. She wore steel-rimmed glasses and straight plain dresses that had gone out with the N.R.A. I had always suspected that buried under that Iowa-spinster get-up she had a shape something like Cathy’s, but she did as much with it as a baker does with last Tuesday’s bagels. It was as if she had given up all hope of ever getting a man and did not much care. Or probably she was frigid and had found that out somewhere along the line and did not care about that either. But she worried about Cathy and I was not ecstatic knowing I would have to break it to her and the old woman.

I cut across 14th and then down again. I left the MG in front of a Sanitary Valet shop on 11th, just off Seventh Avenue. It was 4:28.1 walked the single short block down to Perry and then the block and a half across. I walked jauntily, tossing my keys as if I made book for every widow in the neighborhood. I did not see anyone to have to convince, however, either on the street or in the alley across from Sally Kline’s number. There were no lighted windows in her building, a three-story brownstone.

I rang five, where the card said Kline – Hawes.I had intended to ring three at the same time, so that the light would go on in another front apartment, but with no one outside I didn’t bother. I glanced at my watch again. I was a half-minute overdue on my promise.

I was about to ring again when the hall door finally buzzed.

I went in. There was a wide stairway that was well carpeted and softly lighted and I climbed the two flights. The place was as quiet as a prairie in the moonlight. I saw Five ahead of me at the front end of the top corridor and I went down and tapped on the door.

Nothing happened. I waited six or eight seconds, tapped again, then tried the handle.

It turned. I eased the door inward several inches, seeing only darkness. I had just decided to unsheath the Luger when someone else’s gun nosed through the crack and parked itself cordially against my navel.

CHAPTER 5

It was not a very nice gun. It was home-made, of the sort that enterprising young high-school boys put together in machine shops when teacher is preoccupied with the bottle in the cloakroom. I stared at it, giving it about C-minus for sloppy craftsmanship.

There was a voice behind it somewhere. “Okay, Jack,” it told me. “Inside.”

The voice was not particularly nice either, nor was it Sally Kline’s. Hormones, my dear Watson. Two sexes, don’t you know? Elementary. Sure. So meanwhile what do we do now?

We close the door. Because whoever he was, Zip-Gun was not much of a thinker. The rod and the fist holding it were poked out at an angle through the eight-inch crack like roses ftom a bashful admirer. And my own hand was still on the knob.

There was not much noise, just a quick muted cracking. A broken ulna generally makes that kind of sound. Or maybe it was the radius that went. One of those insignificant bones about two inches above the wrist.

The gun clattered to the floor without going off. I’d heaved myself to the side, but I hadn’t seriously expected it to fire. Jam your wrist into a vise and your fingers open, they don’t close on any triggers.

My friend had let out a sickening gasp. He let out a louder one when I grabbed the wrist. It made a nifty fulcrum, bent that way. I jerked him forward and shouldered the door inward at the same time, then swung the arm in a fast arc so that his body followed it around. I could feel the cracked end of the bone through the skin when I pressed the arm up between his shoulderblades.

“You may take one giant step,” I told him then. He didn’t want to so I shoved him. My foot got in his way and the poor slob fell on his face into the room. He lay there clutching the break and sucking air through his teeth like the little choo-choo that couldn’t.

I let him lie for a minute. They’d be running off the next few heats without him.

I picked up the zip-gun. It was taped together. I broke it apart, dropped the handle section onto a chair just inside the doorway, slipped the lethal end of it into my pocket. The barrel had been cut from an automobile aerial, most of which are perfectly chambered for.22’s. Detroit ingenuity. I found a lamp switch and shed a little light on the subject.

I was in the living room. It was an ordinary middle-class furnished apartment. Grand Rapids had been nuts about it once. Nothing had been changed in it since the Titanicwent down and wouldn’t be until it came up again. Off to the left there was a closed door with a crack of light under it and that was the only element of the decor which interested me.

My welcoming committee was still chewing a corner of the carpet. He made a feeble effort to get to his feet when I closed the door to the hall. I caught him by the back of his collar and helped him along.

“No more,” he said. “Damn, Jack, no more.”

“Mr. Jack to you.” I could have wheeled him around like a pushcart by latching onto the wrist again, but I decided it would be easier with the Luger. “This one’s glued together nicer than yours,” I told him. “How about you and me taking a stroll to that bedroom, huh, doll?”

He looked at me with glassy black eyes that were either out of focus from too many needles or else were naturally bleary. Anyhow they hadn’t gotten their dim look from poring over books. He was a punk as I had thought, maybe a year or two past twenty, narrow-jawed with a lot of greasy black hair and a mustache like an eraser smudge. If the leather jacket was in hock he’d have it back as soon as he jimmied his next pay phone. He said nothing and his breath was still coming hard.

“Move,” I told him.

He was no bigger than he had felt when I’d handled him in the darkness. He shuffled forward without much enthusiasm, protecting the wrist as if he thought I might not let him have his share when mealtime came around. When he got to the door he stopped again.

“You want the other one, too? You want it so you can’t bat from either side of the plate?”

He opened it. I elbowed him in but he didn’t go anxiously. He was hurting but he was also scared now. Nobody told me why. Bright Harry. I just had to look at the girl who would be Sally Kline.

She was a pretty girl. She was a redhead, with freckles and green eyes, and she had lovely high breasts. I could see clearly how lovely they were, because Junior hadn’t bothered to cover them up when he’d come out to answer the door.

She was tied into a chair with her arms drawn back and locked behind it. There was a gag over her mouth that was probably her last matching nylon. She was wearing slacks the color of crème de menthe and she had on a yellow pullover blouse which Junior had ripped down the front and left hanging open. Her torn brassiere was on the floor.

The cigarette Junior’d been puffing for something more than the simple joy of fine tobacco was still burning in an ashtray near her.

Junior’s head was tilted around and he was looking at me now. He hadn’t moved away from the muzzle of the Luger but you could see from the quiver in the line of his jaw that he guessed the latrine didn’t quite pass inspection. You could also see from the way his shoulders were drawn up that he knew damned well he was about to get a scolding.

Now a Luger does not have a particularly heavy barrel, but you do the best you can. The front sight helps some. I laid his skull open to the bone with the first one and then I gave him two more, which made one for each of the dirty black burns on the upper curve of the girl’s left breast. He was already going down when the second one landed. The third one was a knee in the neck to get him out of the way of the decent folk as he fell.

The girl’s eyes were wide and she was still frightened. The knot in the stocking came apart quickly and her head drew up and back and she sucked in air. I untied the belt from around her wrists.

Her hands went to her face. For a minute she sat forward, breathing deeply. Then she began to sob.

Junior was going to nap until Mommy kissed him and brushed back his precious locks. I put the Luger away and went into the John. There were a couple of washcloths on a rack and I held one of them under the warm water, then wrung it out.

“Easy,” I told her then. Her head was on the back rest of the chair now and her arms were limp at her sides. She was still inhaling deeply and her eyes were closed. I stood next to her and pressed the wet cloth across the upper part of her breast, cupping it there but not rubbing it. Most of the ash came away.

I went back and found some Unguentine. She sat there while I coated the burns with a heavy film. I lifted a torn half of her blouse and tried to drape it across her. I kept running out of material.

She’d stopped crying. She lifted the other half of the blouse herself, holding it and looking down, and then she dropped it again.

“I guess it doesn’t much matter, does it?”

I showed her my best don’t-you-fret-about-old-Uncle-Silas grin. “You feel all right?”

“You areMr. Fannin?”

“Harry,” I told her.

“I thought—”She looked at Junior, then shook her head. “The bell rang and I thought it was you. About fifteen minutes ago. I looked down and I didn’t see anybody outside. I was just so darned scared by then that I–I went to the door and asked if it was you and he said yes. And then he put his gun against my stomach and I—” Her breath caught. “Oh, I’m so glad you came. I was—”

The butt end of Junior’s smoke was still burning. I crushed it out, then went and sat on the bed.

“Will there be… will the scars last long?”

“A few months,” I told her. A generous racketeer had let me smell a six-bit panatela along the cheekbone once. He had been going for the eye so I’d still consider myself the big winner if I was seeing a mark every time I shaved. But it had faded out.

“He put that gag on when I rang the bell?”

“Yes.”

“You tell him what he was trying to find out before that?”

“I couldn’t. I don’t know where she is, Mr. Fannin. Harry. I tried to tell him I haven’t seen her since the day before yesterday. But he wouldn’t believe me. He kept standing there and puffing on that cigarette until it would glow and then he’d put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t scream and—”

I waited for her. She bit her lip, turning her head away. The flap of her blouse had fallen away again but she did not seem aware of it. Part of her had gotten a suntan someplace.

“I don t know whereshe is. That’s why I called you. She told me she was going away with him and Duke, the one she’s been seeing, and that was Tuesday and I—”

“You mean a friend of this one’s?”

“Duke something, yes. And then when Eddie came in he said something about them getting split up – something about some kind of job,’ I don’t know what he meant – and—”

I had gone across and put my hand on her shoulder. “Sally, listen, can we start with the cast of characters maybe? Eddie is this throw rug on the floor here?”

“I’m sorry. Yes. It’s Bogardus or something like that. And his friend’s name is Duke. Duke Sabatini. Duke’s the one Cathy was going out with. She brought them up here one night, it was about two weeks ago. I didn’t like them and I told her so then, Mr. Fan – Harry. Duke is older, maybe Cathy’s or my age, and he’s handsome, but he still looks like one of those horrible kids you see all over. I wanted to hide my pocketbook while they were here. I told her she’d get into trouble hanging around with them but Cathy just laughed. You know how she is, never taking anything seriously, always running around after somebody new and—”

She had been looking at me. She didn’t turn away. “I’m sorry.”

“Tell it the way you want to.”

“Have you – may I have a cigarette?”

I gave her one. Her hands trembled a little when she took the light. She took a long drag and then stared at the cigarette.

“I don’t know what it is,” she went on. “It’s as if – well, as if she’s sick in some ways. Lord knows, every girl who gets to be old enough starts sleeping around a little. But golly, you discriminate about it, you wait to see how it works out with someone, if it’s going to be a good thing. Oh, sure, sometimes you get a little tight and you crawl into bed the first night, that can happen too, but you don’t make a habit of it. You do it and then you hate yourself for it, and so you’re all the more careful the next time, or at least most girls are that way. Lord knows we talk about it enough. But Cathy always just laughs. It’s as if she has to have adventures all the time – new experiences, whatever you want to call them. She goes out to the places down here where the Village crowd hangs out, bars mostly, and – well, sometimes three or four nights a week she doesn’t come home at all except to change to go to work in the morning. And then sometimes she stops. Sometimes she won’t go out for two or three weeks, not once, just sitting here all evening and reading or something. Then it starts again. It isn’t anything that shocks me – I don’t mean it that way – but it seems like such a waste. I mean she’s so bright and she can be so good to be with, I always think it’s such a shame that she doesn’t get married—

“I keep forgetting,” she said then. “I suppose this is the same kind of thing that happened when she wasmarried.”