Her perfume flooded over me as I entered. She was wearing so much perfume that it hinted at panic.
She ushered me into a fair-sized front room which was obviously her studio. An upright grand piano as old as the house stood against one inner wall. A Siamese cat jumped straight up into the air from a mohair armchair which was in process of being disemboweled. The cat hung in the air for a long instant, glaring at me with its hazel eyes, then reached for the arm of the chair with stretching legs. It landed on the piano stool with all four feet together like a mountain goat, struck one angry chord on the keyboard, and rebounded to the piano top. There it slunk and slalomed among metronomes and music racks, and crouched behind a old-fashioned photograph of a girl in a cloche hat.
On second glance, it was a very fine photograph. The arrogant good looks of the girl jumped to the eye like a mask of pride and pain.
“That was taken in San Francisco,” Mrs. Haines said conversationally, “by San Francisco’s leading photographer. I was very beautiful, wasn’t I? I gave recitals in Sacramento and Oakland. The Oakland
It was a speech from a play, a shadow play in the theater of her mind. She stood by the piano and declaimed it without feeling or gestures, in a monotone.
“But you know all this, don’t you? I don’t want to borrow you-bore you with my sorrows. In any case, the clouds have silver linings. Hell has its hindrances.” She smiled her disorganized smile. “Sit down, don’t be bashful, let me make you some coffee. I still have my silver percolator, at least.”
“No thanks.”
“Afraid I’ll poison your cup?” Perhaps it was meant to be a humorous remark. It fell with a thud, and she went on as if it had been uttered by someone else, a third person in the room.
“As I was saying, life has its compensations. Among my compensations, my voice is coming back, as happens in a woman’s prime occasionally.” She sang a cracked scale to prove it, sat down at the piano, and struck a cluster of notes as discordant as the cat’s chord. “Since my pupils dropped away-none of them had any talent anyway-I’ve had an opportunity to work with my voice again, and even do some composing. Words and music come to me together, out of thin air. Like that.”
She snapped her fingers, struck another discord, and burst into improvised song. “Out of thin air, I don’t know where, You brought me a love so rich and rare. That’s two songs in five minutes.”
“What was the other one?”
“No chaperone,” she said. “It started to sing itself to me as soon as I said those words.” She raised her voice again to the same tuneless tune. “We’re all alone, No chaperone, And no one to bother on the telephone.”
She laughed and turned on the piano stool to face me. The cat drifted onto her shoulder like a piece of brown floating fur, and ran down her body to the floor, where it stationed itself between her high-heeled feet.
“He’s jealous,” she said with her nervous giggle. “He can tell that I’m attracted to you.”
I sat on the arm of the disemboweled chair and looked as forbidding as I knew how. “I wanted to talk to you about your son, Mrs. Haines. Do you feel up to talking about him?”
“Why not?” she said. “It’s a pleasure. I really mean it. The neighbors don’t believe me when I tell them how well Henry is doing. They think I can’t tell the difference between my dreams. In fact, I seldom have an opportunity to converse with a person of cultivation. The neighborhood has gone downhill, and I’m seriously thinking of moving.”
“Moving where?” I said, in the hope of switching her mind to a more realistic track.
“Buenavista, perhaps. I’d like that, but Henry’s opposed. He doesn’t want me getting in his way, I realize that. And I’m not equal to the high-flying people that he has the opportunity to rub elbows with. Perhaps I’ll just stay here and renovate the house.” She looked around the shabby room. The rug was threadbare, the wallpaper was fading, spiders had fogged the corners of the ceiling. “God knows it needs it.”
The dream was wearing thin at the edges. I chopped at it with the harshest words I could bring myself to speak to her. “What are you going to use for money?”
“Henry is generous with me, are you surprised? I hate to take money from him. He is, after all, a young man on his way up. He needs fluid capital, which is why I keep working at my little songs. One of them will be a hit, you know, and then I won’t be a burden on Henry’s shoulders. I fully expect to write a song which will sell a million copies. I’m not a stupid woman. And I recognize other intelligent people at sight. But you know that.”
Her assumption that I knew whatever she knew was the most disquieting thing about her, of several disquieting things. I sat there caught between pity and something close to panic, wondering what Henry’s childhood had been like. Had he walked on the walls of her fantasies and believed they were solid earth? Or doubted the earth itself when his feet broke through the wallboard?
“How does Henry make his money?”
“He’s in business,” she answered with satisfaction. “Buying and selling art objects to a private clientele. It’s just a temporary thing, of course. Henry hasn’t given up his own artistic aspirations, as I’m sure you are aware. But Mr. Speare told him the time wasn’t ripe for him yet. He needed further study. So Henry went into business, he has a fine eye for value. Which it’s only fair to say he inherited from his mother.” Her smile was wide and toothy, a sudden manifestation which her mouth could hardly contain. “Do you know Henry well?”
“Not as well as I’d like to. Were you referring to Michael Speare the agent?”
“Yes. Henry hoped that Mr. Speare would represent him. But Mr. Speare said he needed more work before he made his professional debut. Art is a hard taskmistress, as I have good reason to know.”
She spread out her fingers and flexed them several times. The cat rose on its hind legs and batted upward, playfully, at her hands.
“Down, Harry,” she said. “I call him Harry.”
I said from far left field: “Did Harry make contact with Speare through Hilda Dotery?”
“Henry,” she corrected me. “I prefer not to discuss that. There are certain people I will not sully my tongue with. The Doterys are at the head of my personal blacklist.”
“But Henry knows Hilda Dotery? They were in a high-school play together, weren’t they?”
Without obvious alteration, her smile had become an angry grin. “I won’t discuss her. She brought filth into my house. Henry was a good clean-living young man before she corrupted him. That Dotery girl was the source of all his terrible troubles.”
“What did she do to him?”
“She attached herself to him like a succubus, she taught him wicked things. I caught them in the attic, right in this very house.” The cat had begun to moan and pace, whipping back and forth like a bigger cat in a cage. “They pretended to be dressing up, trying on costumes for a play, but I knew what they were doing. She had a bad name already at that early age. I picked up a piece of rope that was on the wall, and I drove her out of here half dressed as she was, down the attic stairs and out the back door. I’m not a violent woman, you know that. But Christ drove the money changers out of the temple, didn’t he? You know your Bible, I’m sure, a man of your brain power.”
Her flattery, if that is what it was, had a quality of sardonic mockery. Her most affirmative statements seemed to be expressions of dreadful doubt. I was conscious of a darkness in her, a hidden self operating her smiles and gestures like a puppeteer. But the strings were tangled.
“ ‘Harry,’ I said to him, he was Harry then: ‘Your mother loves you as no one else will ever. Promise me on your bended knee you will never see her again.’ I told him about the awful things that can happen to a boy, the disasters and the diseases. He was very meek and mild. He cried in my lap, and he promised that he would be a good boy forever. But he betrayed me, betrayed my confidence in him.”
The cat stood still, like a cat in a frieze, transfixed by her high, thin voice. Its moaning changed to a snarling, and its long tail erected itself.
“Be quiet, Harry. I had the same trouble with you until I had you fixed. Didn’t I, boy?” she asked liltingly. “But you still love your mother, don’t you, boy? Eh, Harry?”
She crooked her finger. The cat jumped into her lap and rolled itself into a ball, perfectly still. She stroked it, talking to it in infantile language.
I broke in on their conversation. “You mentioned some trouble Henry had, Mrs. Haines. What sort of trouble?”
