III
She saw it behind her eyelids, a small cloud but deep, suddenly come, suddenly gone. The light strengthened; there was the rock, and a whiteness in the water. How could you know, Callista, that she was dead?
She had, as usual, dared to move her cot nearer the wall with the barred door and the graffiti, so that if she crouched at that end of the cot a triangle of shadow protected her from the glare of the naked bulb in the corridor. Matron Kowalski on night duty had a habit of turning that light off and on at chancy intervals after midnight. Regulations probably said it should burn steadily, but Kowalski was a zealous screw when not deep in a comic book, and doubtless hoped to catch her charges in bottomless wickedness by playing cute with the switch. Short-sighted as well as thick-witted, Kowalski had apparently never caught on to Callista's crime of moving the cot. Callista generally tried to retrieve the sin before Matron Flannery came on in the morning, though whenever she forgot, Flannery just looked sad and grumbled: "Now dearie, we gotta put that back where it belongs or it's my arse." And sometimes even shoved it back herself with a heave of a massive thigh.
Interesting but maybe unprofitable, to contrast that kindness with the satisfaction Flannery had shown a week ago in disciplining a shouting and clawing wench who didn't want to go downstairs. Flannery had caught the girl from behind with an arm like a side of beef, in the pattern of rape, a stiff block of finger jabbing at nerve clusters here and there, leaving no mark. And if Callista Blake the Weird Woman, Cold Callie the Monkshood Girl, were to create a disturbance, Flannery would be ready, would spread her flat feet and grunt in the same way, like a boar in rut, in the interest of law and order.
"I want more heat, I want more foodibles. I want more heat, I want more foodibles." The old woman down the corridor had been silent a while, the interval like the recession of a toothache. Hearing her resume, Callista dropped her face on her knees, listening more or less. Listening is an act of living. Listening, the human unit can at least say: I am not dead, I am here, I can prove it, the current of life is dancing in the delicate nerves, the brain recording, comparing, remembering—understand, I am not dead!
"I want more heat, I want more foodibles." She sounded plaintive at the moment, harping on a single string, a note in it much resembling enjoyment. The name was Watson; the nearly baritone voice brought the image of a body shriveled and small, crowding seventy perhaps. "I want more heat, I want more foodibles." Watson must have been picked up Sunday as a D&D, Callista supposed, raising hell somewhere in the chilly streets until somebody called the wagon. She couldn't be drunk now, two nights later, but the noise continued unchanged. She didn't belong here of course. "Ya-hoo! Kiss my cold aching ass, you dirty-dirty-dirty—all rise! All rise! I want more heat, I want more foodibles." Sooner or later the fumbling dustmop of the law would pick her up, shake her out into a different sort of institution. Or back to the streets and whatever dim hole of a room she lived in—with small possessions? Old photographs? Sewing-basket? Rocking-chair? "All rise!"
"You Watson, you shaddap." The voice of Kowalski.
"Fuck you, Polack, I want more heat, I want more foodibles."
"Listen here, you don't shaddap, I'm coming in there again."
"Yah!" Weary, diminuendo, but not actually a sound of yielding. Silence followed, as dust settles after an eddy of wind.
Callista tried to review the course of the day, long in retrospect. Maud Welsh all morning. Sergeant Shields, sober, exact, not unkind: four bobby pins and a paper clip. Sergeant Peterson a bleached mechanism for the production of not very good photographs, including one of the rock and the pond by daylight, not the light of a troubled and hazy moon. Trooper Curtis, plaster casts and fingerprints and so what? Sutherland R. Clipp who did everything. Trooper Carlo San Giorgio the nice boy. And Dr. Devens. None of them except Maud Welsh had remained very long on the stand; Cecil who understood the nature of the conflict had let most of them pass by with little or no questioning. Callista found she was remembering too mechanically; names and faces would not coalesce to any rationally useful larger pattern. Yet at some point—she thought it was during the testimony of Cousin Maud—something had been done or said that had lessened the opacity of the Blank, like a hint of dawn or false dawn beyond a dirty window.
Or was it anything done or said? Cousin Maud of the Plum Jam understood nothing of the interview with Ann at Covent Street, a happening far outside the cage where the life of Cousin Maud fluttered and squeaked. Perhaps this was the way of it: during the examination of Cousin Maud the Blank had thinned temporarily, of itself; a coincidence in time, maybe nothing to do with any word spoken. Probably during the cross-examination, when Cecil was questioning Maud about the Saturday night, the bedroom scene—A sorry Hamlet I made!
"Fuck your stinking jail too! We got rights, Polack. You ain't saving the taxpayers nothing, we all die of pee-neumo-nia, they gotta pay for a box. Listen, I been flang out of better jails before you was old enough to shove a finger up it. I want more heat, I want—"
Callista winced at the smack of Kowalski's feet passing her cell. She heard the clash of keys, clang of the iron door, high anticipatory whimpering (still that note of enjoyment?) broken off by the crack of a flat hand against flesh, repeated and repeated, Callista's body clenching in misery at each repetition of the sound, her scream of protest choked into silence by a bitten lip. They can't! Stop it! But it had happened the same way last night, would happen again and again, maybe always, here and there in the world, throughout the extent of foreseeable time: how long is that? Callista's fingernails were hurting her legs. Her mind held firm somewhere, listening.
Watson wasn't yelling much. She hadn't last night either, only a small rhythmic outcry. Mouse in a trap. "You gonna quiet down now?"
"Uh-huh. I'm sorry, Kowalski."
"Mrs. Kowalski."
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Kowalski. Gi' me a butt."
"This ain't no charity ward." Anger spent, Kowalski probably just wanted to get back to her comic book. "Nor you ain't no psycho, you're putting on to get attention, beat the rap for what you done wit' your busted bottle. All the jerks on Mullen Street, you had to stick it into plain-clo'es cop. That was crazy, but now you're crazy like a fox. You know that t'ing punt'red his intestyne? Still in hospital, and that ain't good news for you, Crazy-like-a-fox."
Watson giggled. "Couldn't he'p it, he wasn't nothing head to foot on'y one big turd. Gi' me a butt. Just one, huh, please?"
"God give me patience!" That noise of Kowalski's was mechanical, a kind of breathing, blurred by the iron clang. Callista was standing by her own cell door. "Matron—"
Kowalski's square bulk swung about, her flat face slipping into shadow as her head turned from the light. "You, huh?"
"Will you take her a pack of mine? I don't use 'em much."
"Got plenty, huh?"
"Yes." Callista held the pack through the bars. Kowalski made no move to take it. "I'd like her to have it."
"You'd like.... You feel pretty big, don't you, Miss Blake? You feel real big wit' them cigarettes. I t'ought we was just dirt, now everyt'ing's okay, you can bend low 'n' give an old woman a pack of your butts." She held her voice down; Watson was mumbling and crooning to herself, perhaps not listening. "Maybe it wouldn't occur to you, Miss Blake, but that old trot's got pride. She ain't lickin' up no at'eist prisoner's dirty leavings. Me neither. Miss Blake, I wouldn't touch you not by a ten-foot pole." Callista saw thumb and forefinger of the woman's hand pinched in a circle at the shelf of her breasts. Her soft tones had lost distinctness, slipping back into the vaguer argot of a South Winchester childhood. "Ain't comin' in 'ere, not 'less Sheriff or somebody gives me direc' order, you can drop dead. You ain't human, you're a stinkin' t'ing, you can hang yourself I won't go in, leave you for Flannery to find by the morning."
Callista put the cigarettes away and sat on her cot gazing at interlaced fingers, trying (as if the time allowed were not short but the need urgent) to grasp the nature of hatred, especially in this new guise. Kowalski had not displayed it before, had seemed only an indifferent mechanism busy with her job. It occurred to Callista that she herself must have been shamefully unobservant. Did others unsuspectedly ache with this kind of loathing for her? T. J. Hunter? Cousin Maud? Jim? Why?
"I guess you don't talk, you can't be bod'ered."
"No, Mrs. Kowalski, I'd rather not talk."
"Oh, you'd rather not. Much too good to talk to a dumb Polack. Let me tell you somet'ing, Miss Blake, what they do after they pull the switch in that little room—what they do, they take out the heart, doing the oddopsy, understand? No matter you got lots of money, 'r' gonna be buried fancy somewheres, they take out the heart. They got a reason. All right, you don't talk."
Kowalski stood there a while longer, exercising great courage perhaps, or having faith in the cold iron of the bars. Then Callista sensed that the woman had gone away. I will think about the night of Saturday, the 15th of August.
Cousin Maud must have been telling the truth about that episode on the front porch. Callista could not remember seeing or hearing Ann then, but Cousin Maud would not have lied.
How unmistakably the bedroom was Mother's! Nothing there of Herb, who slept at the far end of the upstairs hall in a room Mother indulgently called "his den," as one might refer to a cat's favorite basket. Well, the entire house merely tolerated Herb Chalmers, who after all did nothing except own it, pay taxes and upkeep, and exist there. Poor Herb! If only he wasn't so inclined to agree with that estimate himself! By contrast, the spook of The Professor, the great Malachi Chalmers so respectably dead, was quite at home. Cousin Maud liked to behave as though all major directives were announced jointly by The Professor and Victoria.
The room smelled of Victoria, a scent resembling dilute vinegar now and then penetrating the ordinary flavor of sachet and face powder. That night, without asking, Callista knew her mother had been sitting for some time at the antique secretary desk, dealing with correspondence of the Thursday Society of Shanesville. And Victoria, after her absent-minded greeting, would go on sitting there preoccupied, long enough to make the point. "I'm sorry I didn't know you planned to come out tonight, dear."
"No plan—impulse. I wanted to talk to you, Mother."
"Oh, something terribly important? Well, dear, just make yourself comfortable till I'm through here and we'll have a nice little visit." Callista stood near the desk, where Victoria must at least be aware of her. "I wish you would sit down, Callista. It is a little trying to be stared at when one is attempting to concentrate."
"Sorry. But I wasn't staring at you, Mother." That was true. Her mind, too swiftly to be caught in the act, had generated an image perhaps well worth staring at: a thing approximately sixty days old (for it must have been conceived in the deep middle days of June) possessing a bent head larger than the blob of body, stubs with a blind intent to become legs and arms; a thing charged with the strain and pressure of life, and yet finger and thumb (if they could reach it) might pinch it out of existence like a soft bug: Mrs. Chalmers' grandchild. Callista's hand, driven by involuntary thought, dropped to rest at the level of her womb where the thing sheltered inaccessible—whether a motion of hostility or protectiveness or both, impossible to say; and Mother would never notice. "I was staring at something that happened a long time ago. You may not remember it. I wanted to find out if you did."
Resignedly, Victoria capped her pen and laid it on the unfinished letter; took off her amber-rimmed reading glasses and retired them deliberately to their case. "Callista, I must say that for anyone so young this habit of mulling over past events is not healthy, not the way to become adjusted to reality."
"I know, Mother. I'm not in tune with the times, am I?"
"If you realize it, I dare say that's a step in advance."
"What," said Callista, "is the virtue of being in tune with the times when the times are corrupt?"
"Callista, I am rather tired. Must we have one of your—your rather naïve philosophical discussions? All part of the process of adjustment I dare say, but frankly I am not up to it."
The big questions, Callista thought, always break the line and swim away. Too big, and a weak line; who wants the great dangerous things anyhow? Not Mrs. Chalmers nor the Thursday Society. "Mother, do you happen to remember the time I spilled that nitric acid?"
"Happen to remember! Callista, that passes belief." Large gray upturned eyes filled with tears. "I am not a monster. Am I?"
"I'm sorry, I spoke clumsily. I meant, do you remember the details? I was going-on-five—it's difficult—"
"What details? Naturally I remember them all perfectly. What do you want to know?" The sharpness was excusable; yet Callista wondered whether she truly regretted the cruelty of that blurted question. Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4—she had reread the play in the afternoon. A catalytic action, although it had been a seemingly random choice, a turning to Shakespeare for relief, illumination, distraction, and something more, in a time of trouble, as another might have turned to music, or physical exertion, or the warmth of a friend. Her thought still rang with it, reverberated, and she understood now that the choice had not been random at all: "Let me be cruel, not unnatural: I will speak daggers to her, but use none." "Your father was drunk, Callista, otherwise I don't suppose even he could have been so heedless as to leave that bottle where a child could knock it over. Is that what you wanted to know?"
"No. That's only what you've told me before. Drunk?"
"Of course."
"It keeps coming back to me that his face was burning."
"What?"
"His face was burning. It was the malaria. Wasn't it? You've told me yourself, he brought that home from New Guinea, latent but never cured."
"Oh, he had that, yes. A mild form."
"Mother, malaria is not mild if it gives you recurrent fevers and collapse. I've read up on it. I had to, trying to understand."
"You're very full of book knowledge, certainly."
"I've found more truth in books than in people. A mild form—why, two years later he died of it, didn't he?"
"Now, my dear, your father died, and I think you know this perfectly well, of pneumonia. The doctor informed me that the malaria was at most a—a complicating factor. The pneumonia was induced by exposure, and that in turn was caused by his passing out, as they call it, on a January night, in a drunken stupor, on his way home from a bar."
"A drunken stupor, or a blinding fever. I was seven; I remember hearing you answer the telephone—the hospital, I suppose it was, where they'd taken him. I'd been put to bed long before, but wasn't sleeping. You were having drinks or something with Cousin Trent, after Aunt Cora and Uncle Tom Winwood left. I even remember hearing Aunt Cora say good night, and then your voice going on a long time, to Cousin Trent. I don't suppose I heard many of the words, but I knew the tone, the one you always used when you were explaining Father's shortcomings."
"Callista!"
"Wait! I must tell you what I remember, but not about this; I mean the earlier time, two years earlier. Let me tell you what I remember of that, and then I'll go. I remember running into the studio, dragging my red fire-engine. Father was on the couch. He'd been working, the big table was littered with his things. He sat up and smiled and held out his arms to me. I climbed into his lap. When he kissed me his face was burning, his hands shaking. I know he talked to me, but the words won't come back. Except 'Draw me a big horse and a little horse.' Then I remember lying belly-down on the floor, working with crayons—the horses, I suppose. And he went out of the room, for quinine probably—he had an allergic reaction to atabrine in the Army, didn't he?"
"Something like that. Callista, I can't see—"
"It was morning, Mother. Sunlight in that east window. Shining aslant across the things on his work-table. From what I've learned, what I can remember and piece together, I don't believe my father would have been drunk in the morning."
"Callista, is this your time of the month?"
"No, God damn it."
"Really! Callista, I must ask you to control yourself."
"I was never colder. I think I must have a fuller memory than most. It comes back, how serious I was about the drawing, at going-on-five. Precocious. I still possess some talent that way."
"Callista, as you know, you have a quite considerable talent that way, if you would learn to discipline it, and—well, and outgrow your taste for the unpleasantly morbid and erotic subjects that seem to attract you so much. I have never understood in fact why you chose to be so childishly disagreeable a year ago when I ventured to show some of your—your less controversial drawings to the Thursday Society. Very well, I should have asked your consent, being merely your mother. Now Mrs. Wilberforce, who is after all an art teacher of somewhat wider experience than yours, to say nothing of having written and illustrated a number of altogether charming children's books, Mrs. Wilberforce felt that one or two of those drawings showed distinct promise. Distinct promise."
"Yes, Mrs. W.'s a nice lady. O Mother, so much comes back! Spring of 1945—he was invalided home a whole year before then, wasn't he? 1944? Didn't I have him a whole year before my face was burned? Why are you crying? Wasn't it 1944?"
"1944? Yes, he came home that year. And to think, she even offered to let you try some illustrations for one of her own books, was willing to instruct you, help you in every possible way!"
"Who?—oh, Wilberforce. Yes, she's nice—what a pity the books are garbage. Why are you crying? Cousin Trent? That little man?"
"Trent—why, I never—Callista, you are hysterical."
"I was never colder. 'Mother, you have my father much offended.'"
"What? What are you saying?"
"I'm not thinking of Cousin Trent—that doesn't matter. It couldn't matter if you sneaked into the sheets with him a hundred times—"
"Callista!"
"It doesn't matter, I said. The real infidelity was in the way you treated my father, day to day, the nagging, belittlement, the wearing down, little needles of disparagement, mental castration—but I don't think you ever managed that, I think he stayed a man. I was seven when he died—you think I couldn't feel what you were doing to him, and can't remember it? I do. Even more I think of how you've gone on since then, trying to destroy him for me—why, in your view nothing he ever did was good, or wise, or even honorable. Isn't that why you cut me off from Aunt Cora Winwood—because she knew better? Mother, he was one of the gentle ones—a fault if you like—is that what you held against him? That he couldn't black your eye when you needed it? Mother, I have three paintings he did to please himself, escape from commercial work. Just three. He must have done a great deal that was never sold. There must have been sketches, unfinished things, portfolios put aside. I never asked you this before, afraid of the answer I think: what became of that work?"
"I simply will not endure any more of this."
"What became of my father's work?"
"Oh, if you mean—well, when we moved here from New York, and there was so much—"
"I was right then. You threw it away?"
"If you will control yourself and listen reasonably: yes, your father did leave certain drawings and paintings which were very obviously done to please himself, as you put it. They were—I am sorry, Callista—they were vile. No one could call me a prude, but there are certain limits—"
"Now it's out."
"Callista, I must ask—"
"They were all destroyed, all his visions? Everything beyond the level of, say, the Thursday Society—destroyed? Everything? You didn't save one charcoal sketch, one line drawing, one bit of a doodle on scratch paper? If you did I'll stay, to beg you for it—or steal it if I can. I want nothing else from you, ever, but for one scrap of my father's work I'd go on my knees."
"Callista, you are out of your mind."
"'Mother, for love of grace, lay not that flattering unction to your soul, that not your trespass but my madness speaks.'"
"Oh, this morbid dramatizing, this neurotic—quoting 'Hamlet' at me as if I—are you laughing?"
"Not very much. I was thinking how neither poor Herb nor Cousin Trent fits the picture very well—it doesn't matter. There's more than one way to pour poison in the ear of a king. You did it with words, millions of little nibbling words, all the years he lived with you and—and for a final dirty joke of the fates, begot me—but I think he knew I loved him, as much as a child's capable of loving, maybe it gave him something, after all he couldn't see ahead. And I was thinking: I must write to Aunt Cora, I think she'd remember the crazy brat who adored her and then couldn't come to see her any more, because Tom Winwood d-r-rinks! She might have some of his work, and might send me to friends of his, people you never knew. I was thinking, Mother, how differently you'd feel if his work could be recognized, now that he's been safely dead for twelve years. What a change! Then you'd be—what, his inspiration?"
"Callista, don't! Stop it! Do you have to break my heart completely? What have I done?"
"'Such an act'—oh, poor Mother, nothing, nothing at all. Maybe that's the worst of it. You've done nothing, just lived inside the shell of your own vanity—as everyone does, I suppose. I'm sorry, Mother. It's all right, I'm going, and I won't come back. My own vanity tricked me into saying too much, but you'll forget, and go on in your own way. I haven't changed anything. 'Assume a virtue if you have it not'—remember? 'Forgive me this my virtue, for in the fatness of these pursy times'—you don't have one little scrap, a three-line scrawl on the back of an envelope?"
Callista's mother, weeping with her head on her arms, did not answer that. To Callista, standing in the doorway not yet able to turn and go, it seemed as though all hatred and resentment had drained away suddenly from within her; including the old dark aching hatred for herself, which until then had seldom released her except at certain times in the warm presence of Edith Nolan. She would have liked to cross the room, try for some physical contact implying comfort and forgiveness with that stranger over there who still made strangled sounds of self-pity and other kinds of pain, all of them real. But having no confidence in her skill at such gestures, no illusion that a relation thus broken could ever be repaired, and fearing to lose the new-found inner quiet, Callista only said: "Good night, Mother." Downstairs then, pausing on the landing, her hand tightening on the rail as she waited on the passing of a curious nausea. Too early for the sickness of pregnancy, wasn't it? Nothing else wrong, and the nausea did pass. "My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time."
She wondered, standing there still faintly sick, how the self of a week before could possibly have knelt in that wild garden, pulled up those innocently wicked plants, broken off the roots to be dropped in her handbag, and thought: This way would solve everything and hardly hurt at all. Yet the self of a week before had done that; the self of a few hours past had glanced at the brandy bottle, death dissolved and waiting, and had thought: Have it out with Mother—there could be some of his work, maybe buried in the attic where my searching never uncovered it—and then, then probably—
The self pausing on the landing, hand letting go the rail and moving again softly, shelteringly, over the secret life in the womb, had thought practically and sensibly: Throw away that stunk-up mess as soon as you get home. And the self of twenty minutes later, arriving at the apartment with a burden of abnormal fatigue and drowsiness, had forgotten—(is there any true forgetting this side of death?)—forgotten all about bottle and canister, everything except bed.
The self on the landing thought: It's all right, Funny Thing, look, it's all right, I'm going to bear you. I'm going to take care of you. I can do that. I will. Had wondered, incidentally, if the small bra wasn't already a bit tight. The girl on the landing ran a finger lightly along the column of her neck—wasn't there slightly more fullness, softness? Should go to a dentist too—and—oh, lots of little chores. Never mind anyhow, Funny Thing, never mind the details, it's going to be all right for you and me.
The self seated on the cot where Kowalski had left her stood up uncertainly, with a sense of listening, although she knew Kowalski was gone, Watson was keeping quiet, the night also was in a deep hush with no longer that occasional whine of wind beyond the barred glass. No one had spoken. Unless I did.
She glanced at the window, uneasy as though the blank of winter night beyond it had paled, and might show again some light or color if she stared patiently enough. No. Not that window. Not that blank. And no true sound of speech.
She stood with eyes closed and hands pressed over her ears. Waiting; and hearing at least the dull noise—muffled, as it ought to be on the other side of a closed door—of a bottle, heavy glass, drawn across resonant wood from the back of a shelf. Faint pop of a cork and clink of glass, and tap of high heels: "Callie, come on now! I poured a little drink for you." And that fool lying frozen on the bed down there—why, how long had that fool held herself frozen, knowing everything?
How long before that fool was telling herself: I didn't really hear her, I couldn't make out what she said—how long? Whining maybe before the Blank shut down complete: It wasn't anything I did, I wasn't there, I couldn't move, anyway how could I know she'd drink it herself? Saying later (O the Blank!) in righteous innocence to Mr. Lamson: "I don't know, I can't remember." Screaming in the secret heart where not even Cecil could hear it and understand: I don't want to know! I don't want to remember!
Eyes open, hands fallen, she noticed by the cot the handful of trifling possessions allowed her. She fumbled through it, unsure what she sought until her fingers held the lipstick pencil. To the wall then, dizzy and obliged to lean against the cool plaster while her hand labored, but the effort was interesting; she could feel wryly, justifiably certain that no hand had ever written these words on this wall, ever before. She stood back, dizziness gone, and saw how the red letters in the dim light took on a magnificence, a glory like tranquillity:
I AM GUILTY.