“Good,” Celia said, and meant it.
“Oh, and one thing.” The friendliness of Mrs. Pond’s voice and eyes did not alter in the least. “No throatcutting, hm? Well, poor Miriam’s, if you must, but on no account mine . . . I imagine you’ll have to do something about your apartment,” she added in the same light and practical tone while Celia was still gazing in assumed bewilderment, “so why don’t you take the morning for that?”
. . . The morning. Mary Ellen Vestry was being buried out on Long Island; Celia assured herself of that by a glance at the obituary column (services private, interment in Oak Memorial Park) before she set out for the apartment. In the vestibule she glanced from habit at the mailbox, where a new slip saying only “Brett, C.” had been inserted, and took out a single envelope with her name and address typed on the front. It was postmarked Providence.
There was no one in the shadowed lobby. Celia tore the envelope open, and read David’s brief and frantic-looking handwriting which said, without salutation, “I must see you. Will be in N.Y. Friday night and phone from airport.”
Coolly, without even having to think about it, Celia screwed paper and envelope into a single tight twist, thrust it deep into the urn of sand beside the elevator, and went up to the apartment with the big suitcase borrowed from Mrs. Pond.
And they—Susan or an emissary—had been very quick indeed, because in spite of what had been done the air had had time to go still and dead again. Through the wide-standing door Mary Ellen’s vivid and cluttered room was now a shell containing bed and bureau. The door to Celia’s bedroom was closed. She paused just inside the long living room and looked about her with cold and mounting rage.
The apartment in which she had the right to live for two more weeks if she chose could still have been called furnished, technically, although the Navajo rugs were gone and the superintendent had not gotten around to putting back whatever floor covering they had replaced. The couch and chairs and some of the lamps were still there, and so was the bookcase—now empty except for a meticulous pile of Celia’s magazines—and it would have been possible to cook in the kitchen. But every trace of warmth and charm had been remorselessly stripped away: the rooms had the sullen chill of a landscape just before a storm.
To herself, in her frozen wrath, Celia put down to greed this total removal of everything that Mary Ellen had brought to this place where she had taken her own life. With rapid contempt, because that was the only way to dispel the impression that she was being evicted, she swept the bathroom shelves clean of her possessions, folded her clothes into the suitcases augmented by Mrs. Pond’s, and was ringing the superintendent’s bell only a little more than an hour later.
The superintendent had clearly been interrupted at his coffee break, and by the time he joined Celia at the elevator to go up for her bags a well-dressed young couple had entered the lobby. They had the tentative, appraising air of people who had come to look at an apartment with a view to renting, although Celia knew that there were no vacancies. She did not miss the surreptitious and sidelong glance the superintendent shot at her before he said to them, “I’ll be right with you folks, soon as I get this lady’s bags.”
The lease had been in Mary Ellen’s name and terminated automatically with her death, Celia supposed, but what right had this man, this employee, to assume without even asking that she could not afford to keep the apartment on by herself? She let a little of her fury escape; she said to the waiting couple as the elevator doors opened, “I know it’s a silly superstition, not being able to bear an apartment where there’s been a suicide, but I just cant help myself,” and had the satisfaction of seeing the smiles congeal.
Stonily, mouth tight with anger, the superintendent carried Celia’s bags down through the now-empty lobby to the curb, stonily accepted her key, said, “You want to leave a forwarding address?”
“I’ll leave it at the post office.” Celia held out the dollar bill she had marshalled from her handbag; direct tipping, and not the coins left anonymously on a restaurant tray, was still new enough to give her a tiny sense of patronage. “Here you are.”
“Keep it,” said the superintendent contemptuously, gazing Celia fully in the face. “I wouldn’t want you to run yourself low on my account.” He added over his shoulder with disproportionate savagery as he walked away, “Think you’re smart.”
But Celia had recovered her equanimity, and she did not allow this startling little unpleasantness to ruffle it. The March sunlight had a thin, windy, exciting look; she was not only embarked upon the course she wanted but was being paid for it; by her bald reference to suicide she had wiped away that humiliating sense of eviction. As always when she had cut any unpleasant ties, all was well in Celia’s world.
It was uncharacteristic of her to have forgotten the buried sharpness of something overlooked in that visit to the basement apartment in Bridgeport. Fresh preoccupations had covered it like skin healing over a thorn, and there was no way of knowing that it would come piercing through, carrying a killing infection with it, years later on a cold New Mexico night.
Fourteen
CELIA was Mrs. Pond’s assistant for nearly a year. By the end of the first month the hapless Miriam was replaced by a stenographer-typist who came in for two hours every morning, and Celia’s salary could be raised accordingly. She looked upon the extra money as a fringe benefit; when she had told Mrs.
