The Vengeful Virgin

“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

His voice wasn’t strong. He had finely drawn features, a long nose, and heavy brows knotted with snarled gray hair. There was a quality of stubborn arrogance in his glance, of tired determination. The hair on his head was iron-gray, and like barbed wire. He looked as if he were grinning, but it was only the shape of his mouth when relaxed. He wore light gray pajamas. The sheet was neatly drawn and folded across his chest, his hands folded on the sheet. He was a shell, but looked as if he’d once been as strong as an ox.

The sound of his normal breathing was bad. Something like a horse with an advanced case of the heaves.

“Ruxton, eh?” he said, breathing like wind in an October corn field. “The only Ruxton I believe I ever had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with was an unmitigated ass and a dirty son of a bitch. You any relation to him?”

I watched the hands shake; big, once-powerful hands, folded on the sheet.

“Probably,” I said.

Some gut-wrung breathless sounds burst past his lips. He was laughing. I knew then I wasn’t going to make any pitch to her for anything. I would do my job and get out of here. I didn’t like the guy.

“Victor,” she said, moving quickly to the side of the bed. “Please, take it easy, will you?”

“Oh, Christ,” he said. He spoke with soft pain. She glanced at me, her eyes up-flung in a show of resignation, and began straightening his pillows.

There were oxygen tanks beside the bed, standing upright in a nickel-steel rack with wheels and handles. A long black coil-rubber hose and mask dangled over one side of the gleaming handles like an eyeless phython with its mouth open.

The room was antiseptically clean, neat and white. Not even a magazine or a chair. Just the hospitaltype bed and the oxygen tanks. To the left a whitecurtained window opened on the side of the house, over the path that led out back. Another window was at the head of the bed. Hanging on a bedpost by a black ribbon was a small, filigreed silver bell; the kind that used to sit on the back of the buffet at your grandmother’s house in the long ago of your early childhood.

I stared at the ceiling over the bed, trying to make it look as if I were doing my job. You think about hanging TV sets on the ceiling, only you just don’t do it.

“I’ll have to check the attic rafters,” I said.

“All right,” she said.

I looked at him again. He didn’t seem too well.

I went over to the bedroom door, and she came along, and we stepped into the living room. The housecoat was coming unbuttoned. She watched my eyes.

“He’s very bad off,” she said.

“How do I get into the attic? You have a flashlight?”

“Yes—”

The sound reached me faintly from the bedroom. A butterfly brushed a broken wing against the silver bell.

“Shir-ley!”

It was Death croaking.

She gave me a quick look and hurried back into the bedroom. I watched her. He writhed on the bed, his mouth open, hands clenching the sheets. He was trying to breathe.

“Would you please help me?” she said.

I went in there.

“Turn that handle wide open. Yes, that’s it.”

She leaned on him, holding one arm down, and mashed the mask over his nose and mouth and I turned it on. It was life pumping through the rubber hose. I looked away and tried to think of something else so I wouldn’t hear him.

In a minute or two she said, “You can turn it off now.”

I turned it off. She came around and draped the black rubber hose over the handle. He lay there with his eyes closed. Sweat had formed in splotches on his face and hands.

“Thanks, baby,” he said. He didn’t open his eyes.

She made a soft purring sound in her throat, and moved to the other side of the bed, straightening the sheet. I watched her and she looked up at me. I caught the expression on her face. It told me a lot.

We watched each other across the bed. She knew I’d seen what she was thinking. It was as if the bed were suddenly empty. He just wasn’t there.

She jerked her gaze away and walked out into the living room. I followed, seeing his feet sticking straight up under the sheet, from the corner of my eye. I’d once done apprentice work for an undertaker and had seen a lot of feet like that.

“Sorry you had to see him that way,” she said.

“Forget it. Glad to help. Where’s that flashlight?”

She went to the kitchen and returned with a five-cell job. I stood on a chair and swung up into the attic through the closet in her bedroom. I checked the rafters. I couldn’t get him out of my head. He was just like a corpse, only he still breathed and he was still king.

I came back down.

“Sure,” I said, handing her the flashlight. “It won’t be too difficult, fastening a TV set to the ceiling.”

“I suppose you’re still concerned about what happened, aren’t you, Mr. Ruxton. I shouldn’t’ve asked you to help. I know how disturbing something like that can be, seeing it for the first time. I just forgot, I’m so used to it.”

I thought, Honey, you’ll never be used to that.

She must have seen something in my eyes. She spoke quickly. “It’s a respiratory ailment. Very complicated. It gets more complicated all the time.” She stared toward his room. “Degeneration,” she said. “He’s been to the finest specialists in the country. Luckily, he’s very wealthy.” She looked at me again. “It’s his lungs, his throat, bronchial tubes—and now, his heart, too. He’s—we, that is, have lived everywhere, but he likes it here best.”

“You’re his nurse, then.”

“He’s my stepfather, Mr. Ruxton. But I suppose you could say I was his nurse. I’ve been taking care of him ever since he sold the business. He manufactured expensive furniture. All kinds. Surely you’ve heard the name Spondell? Very likely some of the television cabinets you sell were designed by Victor.”

His name might as well have been Xshdkgteydh, for all I’d ever heard of him. I said, “Yeah. The name does seem to ring a bell, at that.” She didn’t speak, so I said, “How old are you, anyway?”

She looked at me along her eyes. “Eighteen.” She paused. “He insisted I take care of him—like this.”

“Shouldn’t he be in a hospital?”

She gave a little jerk with her head, and sighed. “That’s just it. The doctors think so. And now Doctor Miraglia claims it’s very important. Victor just tells him ‘Bosh!’ and refuses to go.”

“Who’s this Miraglia?”

“He’s Victor’s doctor now. Victor won’t let anyone else come near him. He thinks Doctor Miraglia’s the finest doctor in the world.” She sighed again. “Everybody thinks Victor should be in the hospital.”

“Who’s everybody?”

“I mean, before we came here.”

“What do you think?”

She smiled. It didn’t mean a thing to me, because she’d pushed the whole business much too far. You get to meet a lot of people, and you know how they react when you first meet them. There was only one reason why she’d tell me all this. Maybe two reasons, but I figured I was crazy, thinking the other one. She said, “Let’s discuss something else. This must be tiresome to you.”

“No relatives?”

“What?”

“Him. Hasn’t he any family of his own? I mean, other than you?”

She turned and moved to a broad cocktail table beside a long, low pale blue couch. She laid the flashlight on the table. “Nope,” she said. “Nobody but me.” She turned and looked at me, smiling.