a hotel off Scollay Square. I shouldn’t have done that. She wasn’t a prostitute, she wanted to marry me. When we faced each other in that shabby hotel room, I realized that I was using her. I threw her down on the bed.”
His voice cracked like an adolescent’s through his aging mask. It was a strange conversation, and getting stranger. I’d had a few others of its kind. In the tension of a legal contest, or the aftermath of a crime, old springs of emotion stir. Unsuspected fissures open into the deep past.
“She’s been on my mind this past year,” Ferguson said. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since I met Holly again.”
“Again?”
“I don’t mean ‘again.’ It’s just that Holly reminded me of her in so many ways. I believed I was being given a second chance-a second chance at happiness. When I didn’t deserve the first chance.”
“What exactly did you do to the girl?”
He didn’t answer directly. His eyes were turned downward, fixed on the past, like eyes watching underwater movements, a drowned girl or a swimmer or a monstrous shape compound of both. Like an insubstantial colloidal web, the truth or something near it formed between us slowly as he spoke.
“Mother died that winter, and I had to go home for her funeral. I’ll never forget her face the night she said good-by to me in Boston Station. She was three months pregnant, unmarried and still working, but she looked so damn
“Perhaps I believed myself. I didn’t know certainly that I would never go back until the afternoon we buried Mother. It was a bitter day in the middle of February. The grave-diggers had to use pickaxes and blowtorches to break through the crust of the earth. The lake below the graveyard was nothing but a flat place under the snow. The wind swept down from the Arctic Circle across it.
“They covered the chunks of frozen earth with that imitation green grass they used in those days: a little rectangle of horrible fake green in the middle of the flat white prairie, with wooden oil rigs standing on the horizon. I could never think of going back to Boston and marrying the girl. I couldn’t even imagine her face without the blackest feeling of melancholy. As I think I told you last night, I arranged with a lawyer in Boston to give her a thousand dollars.”
“You could have gone in person, at least.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I’ve had it on my conscience for twenty-five years.”
“Weren’t you concerned about the child?”
“I’ll be honest. My main concern was fear that she would search me out, turn up on my doorstep with the child in her arms. Or sue me. I was a rich man, you understand, and on my way to becoming richer. She was a girl from the Boston slums who couldn’t speak proper English. I was afraid that she would stand in my way.”
“Your way to where?”
He didn’t try to answer that question. It was rhetorical, anyway. I lay there wondering how much weight his conscience was able to bear. Though I felt sorry for the man, I couldn’t see any way out of telling him what I suspected. Perhaps it was in him already, unrecognized and unadmitted, but eating away at his marrow like moral strontium.
“Why did you marry Holly?” I said.
“I’ve told you why. When I saw her on the screen, then met her in the flesh, she was like my youth come back to me-a second springtime.” He broke off, shaking his head. “I must sound like a romantic fool.”
“I think you were looking for something impossible. The worst of it is, when you want something impossible, you often get it. You married Holly because she resembled a girl you knew in Boston twenty-five years ago. Did you ever think of questioning that resemblance?”
“I don’t understand you.”
“What was the girl’s name?”
“Mulloy. Kathleen Mulloy. I called her Katie.”
“Did Holly ever tell you who her mother was?”
“No.” He got up and came to the side of the bed. He walked with his eyes down, slowly, watching each step. “What sort of a woman is her mother? You mentioned that you spoke to her last night.”
“She’s not a bad sort of woman, and quite good-looking. She looks like your wife twenty-five years older. Her name, as I think I said, is Kate Dotery. I don’t know what her maiden name was, but I can guess. She came originally from Boston, and she told me that Hilda was her eldest daughter. She also said something suggesting that Hilda was not a legitimate child.”
Ferguson hung over me like a man falling through space at the end of a long tether. He reached the end of the tether. His head came up with a jerk.
He walked mechanically to the window and stood with his rigid back to me. My room was four stories up. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of taking the final fall. Then the first deep shock hit him.
He let out a coughing groaning grunt: “Augh!”
I sat up with my legs over the edge of the bed, ready to go for him if he opened the window. He made a stumbling run for the bathroom door. I heard him being sick behind it.
I got up and started to put on my clothes. I was half dressed when Ferguson came out.
He looked like a man who had passed through a desperate crisis, a nervous breakdown, or an almost mortal illness. His eyes in their deep cavities were very bright, not with hope. His mouth was like blue iron. “What are you doing?”
“I have to talk to your wife. Take me to her, will you?”
“I will, if it has to be. Forgive my outburst. I’m not myself.”
He helped me on with my shirt and jacket, and tied my shoelaces for me. He spoke like a supplicant from his kneeling position. “You won’t tell her, will you? What you just told me?”
“No.”
“It would drive her out of her mind.”
Perhaps it already had.
chapter 29
SHE WAS SITTING UP in the long chair by the window, with the sky and sea behind her. The sea was ruffled and burnished by wind. Spinnakers stood on the horizon, as still to the eye as traveling moons.
She looked like a young barbarous queen. A scarf worn like a turban and held in place by jeweled pins concealed the places where the fire had scorched her hair. Jeweled dark harlequin spectacles hid her eyes. A silk robe covered her legs and the lower part of her body.
“I thought you were never going to come back,” she said to Ferguson. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Mr. Gunnarson, Holly. The man who rescued you from the fire.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Gunnarson.”
She held out her hand in a rather regal gesture and kept it out until I took it. It was limp and cold. What I could see of her face had a pale and lunar look.
Her voice barely moved her lips. “I’ve been wanting to thank you in person for all you did. You really plucked me burning, didn’t you? Like in that poem which my husband bought me a record of. By T. S. Eliot. I never heard of the label before, but the poem certainly sent me.”
Except for the last line, the little speech sounded rehearsed. The expressionlessness of her face gave it a ventriloquial effect. The entire scene had a staged quality.
If I had been feeling stronger, I’d have gone along with it for a while. But my knees were shaking with weakness and anger and doubt. “We’ve met before, Mrs. Ferguson.”
“I guess you could say we have, in a way. I wouldn’t remember, drugged like I was. The dirty ba-the dirty beggars drugged me.”
“You don’t remember shooting me?”
The room was silent for a long moment. I could hear the susurrus of the waves like whispering at the windows.
