The Three Roads Page 13

  “Go ahead. I know where to find you if I want you.”

  Over his shoulder Garth gave him a last worried look. Then his tweedy, fat body was swallowed up by the taxi and trundled away. Bret stood on the curb for a moment to get his bearings, and then turned back on foot in the direction of Caesar Street.

  chapter 15

  A middle-aged woman was sitting on the porch of the white bungalow, looking very much as if she belonged there. He looked at the number again to make sure that it was his. 1233 Caesar Street; he’d addressed too many letters there to be mistaken. But the house evoked no image or sense of place. Even his knowledge that Lorraine had been murdered here and that he had found her body, while it hung upon his mind like a clock weight and had motivated all his actions during the past day and night, seemed wholly external to him, as unassimilable as the strange woman on the porch of his empty house.

  He turned up the walk, and she rose to meet him, a heavy woman with a tired face framed by short, graying hair. An ill-fitting blue flowered cotton dress was wrinkled over her body, which time and gravity had conspired to ruin.

  “Hello,” she said. “If you’re selling, there’s nothing I want to buy, unless it’s nylons, that is.” She looked down at her thick, naked legs. “Haven’t had no stockings for six months, that’s how my legs got so chapped, I always did have a delicate skin.”

  “I’m not selling anything. My name’s Taylor—”

  “You don’t say!” Her slack face tightened in pleased surprise. “Don’t tell me you’re Lieutenant Taylor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I declare! I thought you was—” She dropped the end of the sentence like a hot potato and raised her voice to a shout. “Pa, come and see who’s here. We got a visitor, you’d never guess.” She winked at Bret and whispered hoarsely: “Don’t tell him who you are. Let him guess. He’ll be surprised.” She added to herself, or to the world in general: “Lord knows he needed something to sober him up!”

  “I’m a little surprised myself,” Bret said stiffly. “I thought my house was empty.”

  “You mean to say Miss West didn’t tell you? I knew she didn’t want to bother you when you was sick, but now you’re all better again, it’s funny she didn’t tell you. She was here a little while ago too. Anyway, if you ask me for my opinion, and I don’t care if you knew about it or not, it was real nice of you to let us stay here like this.”

  “Not at all.” It was grotesque and incredible, but he was beginning to suspect that this woman was Lorraine’s mother. Lorraine had told him in San Francisco that her family was in Michigan, but she had evaded detailed questions about them. He’d guessed that she was ashamed of them, and he hadn’t inquired too closely into the story of her father’s being one of Henry Ford’s right-hand men and he could get her a very good secretarial job any day, only she’d rather make her own way in life and have her freedom.

  The woman let her tongue run on with the unselfconsciousness of the poor, the people who have nothing to lose. “I hope you’re not thinking about moving in here yourself right away? Pa hasn’t found a job yet, and the way he’s been hitting the bottle since Lorraine passed away, the good Lord knows when he’s ever going to—Pa!” she cried again. “You gone to sleep in there?”

  A man’s voice grumbled and whined inside the house, and two feet stamped heavily on the floor.

  “He was asleep,” she said. “I never saw a man that could sleep as much as Joe Berker. He was on the graveyard shift the last year at Willow Run, and it got him in the habit of sleeping in the daytime. Now he sleeps at night besides. I told him more than once he ought to get himself examined for sleeping sickness, but I was only kidding. It’s probably just that wine he drinks all the time. He calls it vino since we came out here. You’d think he was a dago or something—”

  Her voice ran down like an unwound phonograph when she perceived that Bret was no longer listening. The name “Berker” had confirmed his guess that this woman was his mother-in-law, and the knowledge filled him with an ugly sorrow. So this was the family he had married into; this gross and aging hag was the substitute he had acquired for the beautiful dead mother of his childhood. Then he became aware of the woman’s worried eyes watching his stony face. The awareness was like a dash of cold water. Snap out of it, you fool! He told himself. Byronic melancholy was the opium of the intellectuals and the last refuge of little minds. Snap out of it and act like a man!

  “Mrs. Berker.” He held out his hand to her, fumbling awkwardly for words that would compensate for the contempt he had been feeling and had scarcely tried to hide. “I’m glad to meet you. Lorraine often talked about you—and wrote about you.” Lorraine had mentioned her once or twice: the prominent clubwoman and gracious hostess, a little stuffy and straitlaced as befitted her social position, though she had been a successful career woman before her love marriage to the rising young executive Berker—

  Her hand, thick and coarse-grained, gripped his warmly. “Mercy me, don’t call me ‘Mrs. Berker,’ call me ‘Ma’! I guess we’re still related even if poor Lorraine ain’t with us any more.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Ma.” The bitter bleating word incredibly brought tears to his eyes.

  He was glad that she had turned away from him to peer through the dirty window into the house. “Look at that now. He’s gone back to sleep in there. Excuse me a minute. I’d ask you in only the parlor’s in such a mess.”

  She pulled open the screen door and paused in the doorway for an instant before she went in. “Just sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

  “Thank you.”

  For an instant of no more than a heartbeat’s duration the angles of her cheekbones and jaw had caught the light in such a way that he saw her resemblance to Lorraine. The line of the skull was there beneath the aging flesh, tender, pathetic, and clear, like a sculptured fragment of youth caught out of time. Just for that instant, it seemed that Lorraine had come back and was standing before him, heavy from the grave and cruelly aged by the eternal hours of death.

  It was no more than a trick of the eye perhaps, but it had the stern and general sadness of deep insight. He saw more clearly than he ever had before that flesh was as grass, youth and beauty impermanent and precious, life itself a perishable good to be used while it lasted, generously and honorably. Even in pain and sorrow there was a sweet excitement, a sense of life; and a hard-earned pleasure like a boxer’s in submission to the punishment of time. The one irreparable loss was that of life itself. Lorraine was the one to be sorry for, the dead girl married to oblivion, and not the worn-out woman who had borne and survived Lorraine, who carried still within her declining body the talismanic fragments of youth.

  The slamming of the screen door set a period to his thought. He sat down in the worn canvas chair his mother-in-law had vacated, and watched the street, trying to throw his attention away from himself, away from Lorraine and her family and the past, from all the bottomless spiral anguish of the world. Women were walking babies and shopping-carts on the pavement. A delivery boy went by on a red scooter that emitted a continuous stuttering raspberry. A paralytic old man passed the house inch by inch, walking quadrupedally with two canes. He was so old and thin, with the withered skin hanging in folds from his obstinate skeleton, that it was a wonder he could move at all. He stopped at regular intervals to rest and to look up at the sun, the emergency battery on which he depended for another month or another year of life.

  Bret smiled at the old man with the sun in his face, half from sympathy and half from envy. At that age the only problem was to live, to wring another drop of energy from food and weather, cover another city block by minuscule degrees, reconquer the lengthening space between waking and sleeping. For a while in the hospital he had been like an old man himself, an old man or an infant, who needed nothing but sleep and food, until his resurgent mind had driven him like a cruel angel out of the Eden of the physical life. It was a hard rebirth into the adult world. He still had a nostalgia
for the warm and quiet places of mental death, and a wildly yawing inclination to self-pity. Only in the last week had he been able to face the memory of Lorraine, to recognize the difficult fact that he had destroyed himself through her. No doubt the years of the war had softened him up for the final blow; Lorraine was the one who had found the fatal crack in his defenses.

  For a while after their quick and ill-timed marriage he had held the truth at bay. During the first weeks of separation, when the one physical love of his life had been cut off and left him raw and sensitive to the masculine life of the ship, it had been important to him to keep her image intact. She was a good girl, a devoted wife, perhaps a little harebrained, but basically as sound and sweet as an apple; this was the icon that gave him strength in return for his uncritical worship. Then time and distance, working together like acids in combination, dissolved the fabric of the illusion. The memories of their marriage day and their drunk honeymoon fell into the patterns of reality, and her infrequent letters came to fill in the blanks. She was selfish. She was a liar. She was lazy and discontent. She was a fool. And he, who had married her between drinks on time he owed to another woman, was worse than a fool.

  Even so he had enough integrity and objectivity to try to make the best of it. If he had made an unfortunate marriage so had she. He answered her letters dutifully. He sent her as large an allotment as he could afford, and, when she asked for it, the money for the down payment on the house, more than half the money he had saved for writing his book when the war ended. He tried to keep his thoughts loyal to her and to give her the benefit of whatever doubts he had. Meanwhile he lived on his nerve and by his sense of duty. Neither of these was enough to sustain a man indefinitely in the operational area. The last seven weeks before the ship was lost there was an average of eight or ten general quarters a day, but they didn’t disturb him much because he had given up sleeping almost entirely.

  Now there were no more doubts. Lorraine’s morals, like her mind, had been as light as a net balloon. The only mystery was why he had not seen it on the first night. As casually as any tart she had let him pick her up and take her to his hotel room. He suspected he was only one in a long series of lovers that did not end with him, a second-class private in the nocturnal army that had bivouacked on her young mons. Perhaps the man who had caught her on this porch with Garth had been her steady lover, but even if that was so, she had been willing to be unfaithful to him, and with such a creature as Garth. He couldn’t hate the girl who had betrayed him and then died suddenly in the midst of her light sins. She had nothing to lose but her life, and she had lost it. Her body was already half turned to dust. All his hatred settled on the man who had been the last to violate her bed, the shadowy man who had taken her life as hostage to his jealousy.

  The screen door creaked behind him, and he jumped up to meet Lorraine’s father, who was framed in the doorway like a living portrait of depression.

  “That’s your son-in-law, Pa. Lieutenant Bret Taylor, no less. Go on out and make yourself sociable.”

  Berker pushed the screen door partly open and slid through. He was wearing a faded denim shirt that gaped open at the neck, showing the mat of wiry hair on his chest, a shade darker than his gray stubble beard. His breath was winy, and the whites of his swollen eyes were wine red. He held out a grime-cracked hand with the forefinger cut off below the first joint.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” Bret said as they shook hands.

  “Same here. I guess you noticed I got a missing finger. Lost it in a corn cutter in 1915. I went down in the silo to look for it, but couldn’t find it. Probably made pretty good ensilage at that—”

  “Now, Pa, the Lieutenant don’t want to hear about that.” She smiled apologetically at Bret. “It’s the first thing he wants to tell them about whenever he meets anybody.”

  “Wouldn’t want them to think I was born that way,” Berker said moodily. “I stuck it in a little hole in the corn cutter, and whish! I’d of been more careful if I’d knew how hard it was to get a job with a finger missing. I don’t suppose you got any job worries though. That fiancée of yours looks pretty well heeled if I ever saw one—”

  “Be quiet, Joe,” his wife said sharply. “Where’s your manners?”

  “You want a slug of vino?” Berker asked, by way of remembering his manners. “I got a half-gallon jug, and it’s only half killed.”

  “No, thanks. Did you say Paula was here?”

  “Yeah, a couple of hours ago,” Mrs. Berker said. “She was looking for you. She was even talking about putting an ad in the papers, but I told her it wasn’t anything to get so worked up about. Joe here used to drop out of sight for a month at a time when he was your age, and then he’d turn up like a bad penny as dapper as you please.”

  “Do you have a phone?” He resented Paula’s persistent interference, but if she was worried about him he’d have to get in touch with her.

  Berker grinned sheepishly. “We got a phone, only it’s disconnected. We don’t know nobody in this burg anyhow, so it don’t make no difference. Why in hell we ever drove across the country to come and live in a burg where I don’t know nobody and can’t even get a job—”

  “You be quiet,” his wife snapped. “If you got no job, you know whose fault it is, and you wouldn’t want your eldest daughter lying dead with nobody to tend her grave. Besides, Ellie’s making some real nice friends in the store, which is more than you can say for the trash she knew in that trailer camp. Ellie’s our other daughter,” she explained parenthetically to Bret. “You’d like her. If we was still in Michigan, you know as well as I do, Joe Berker, Ellie wouldn’t of stayed with us any more than Lorraine.”

  “Good riddance, then.”

  “That’s a fine way to talk. You want the lieutenant to think we ain’t good parents to our children? Where would we be now if it wasn’t for Ellie? Answer me that.”

  “Go to hell!” He went in and slammed the door behind him. His diminishing voice complained as he retreated: “I made better money in my life than any snip of a girl—”

  “Don’t pay no attention to him,” the woman said. “He hasn’t been the same since Lorraine—and then they closed down the plant. He’s worried about Ellie, thinks she’s getting fast ideas from the girls at the five-and-ten. He was worried about Lorraine the same way after she ran away to Hollywood. I told him a girl as pretty and bright as Lorraine was sure to land on her feet and maybe even make a success in pictures, but he always said she’d be ruined. It certainly turned the tables on him when she sent us the letter as cool as you please that she was married to a full lieutenant in the Navy. I hope you’ll get a chance to meet Ellie some day soon. I don’t think she’s quite as pretty as Lorraine, but a lot of people do. She’s a blonde, taking after Joe’s mother, and her hair is naturally wavy. She never had a permanent in her life.”

  Bret’s sympathy had receded in spite of his efforts, and left his original stony contempt. “I have to be going,” he said brusquely. Wasn’t one of your daughters enough for me? Keep your Ellie with the naturally wavy hair, and keep the house and the furniture and the memories in it.

  “Goodness gracious,” she said, “why don’t you sit down and relax for a bit? Don’t let Joe put you off like that; he don’t mean anything. We haven’t even had a real visit yet, and I know you want to see Lorraine’s pictures. She was the cutest kid you ever saw when she was little. Did she ever tell you she had red hair when she was a toddler? I got a lock of it in the trunk.”

  On the point of departure he was struck by the full realization that these were the steps where Garth had been attacked, that was the door from which the murderer had come. Perhaps Lorraine had known the man for years, perhaps her mother knew him. Mrs. Berker was standing at the door holding it open, waiting uncertainly for some encouragement from him to fetch her mementos of Lorraine. Gradually her arm relaxed and let the door swing shut.

  “I’m looking for a man Lorraine knew. He may have had something to do with her mu
rder.”

  “Now who would that be?” The whimpering question ended in a high-pitched sob, and a devil-mark grimace slid over her face and curled its sagging lines. “It was a terrible thing—a terrible thing to happen to my little girl.” The word “murder” had swept away her defenses, leaving nothing, no childhood snapshots or locks of hair, between her and the fact. She stood blinking like someone staring into a blinding light.

  “I don’t know his name. I haven’t even a good description of him.”

  “Somebody in Michigan? She had a lot of friends in Michigan, but most of the fellows she knew at Dearborn High were real nice boys. They wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  “Did she know a big man with light hair? He probably had some money, he wore good clothes. About my size, I think, and he liked fighting. It’s possible his hair wasn’t blond.”

  “It couldn’t be Sammy Luger? He was a big blond boy she went out with, and he had good clothes. Only I heard when we left Michigan he was still in the army. He was a sergeant in Berlin.”

  “Then it couldn’t be Sammy Luger, could it?” He instantly regretted the savage irony of his tone and softened it. “Do you know of anyone else who fits the description?”

  “She knew lots of big men, but she never ran around with the brawling kind. She was with a nice high-class crowd at Dearborn High. When she was in her junior year they elected her the most popular girl in the class. I guess it went to her head, sort of. She was doing real good in her studies but she quit before she finished up the year. She should have stayed with her ma and pa,” she lamented, “and then this wouldn’t of happened. It wasn’t anybody she knew that did it. It was one of these Los Angeles sex maniacs, a Mexican or a nigger. They’ll do anything to get a white girl. Many’s the time I’ve thought it’d been better for her if she’d grew up as ugly as a witch.”