Short Fiction Collected, page 7
But they were hours of agony. He soaked the chair with perspiration, and thrashed about in it helplessly, unable to find a position that would allow him any repose. The sun had set, and the room was soon dark. But now the moon came up, and diabolically spotlighted the row of decanters on the sideboard. To Doc they seemed actors on a stage, awaiting only their cue to enthrall him with a performance of infinite allure and ecstasy. Had he not been so feeble, he would have leaped for them long ago. But whenever he gathered his strength to lurch for the sideboard, he somehow simultaneously summoned up the will power not to. Each time, he would return to thrashing and sweating, and try to repel the bottles’ mute seduction.
After an incalculable period of this purgatory, he heard a faint step on the stairs, and then Beaky was in the room. She saw him splayed against the chair and moaned despairingly, “Oh, Doc!”
“Haven’t had a drop,” he croaked, virtuously indignant.
She knelt beside the chair and peered closely at him. “Doc! You’re sick!” she cried in alarm, and began to dab at his streaming face with a corner of her apron.
“Hell with me,” he said sepulchrally. “Did you do it?”
“Yes, I saw her,” she whispered. “It was easy. But wait—I’ll put some coffee on for you.”
She hurried to the kitchen alcove, and he called after her, “Keep talking. Nobody can hear us out here. Just don’t turn on any lights.”
“Okay. Well, like I said, it was easy. I could of done it any time. Miss Lucas—she’s the night nurse—was real nice. As soon as Cook went to bed, I invited her down for coffee and pie. She came down to the kitchen and I went up to watch over Miss Culverin while she had her coffee-and. When Miss Lucas was finished, she came back upstairs and her and me stayed in Miss Culverin’s room together and talked for a good long time. Course, it wouldn’t of been so easy if Mr. Partridge had come around and spotted me, but—”
Doc, who had been fidgeting through this recital of minutiae, finally interrupted, “Did you talk to the old lady? Did she tell you anything?”
Beaky came out of the kitchen and knelt beside his chair again. “Doc,” she said somberly. “Miss Culverin ain’t never goin’ to talk to nobody again.”
“She can’t be dead!”
“No, but the next thing to it. She’s just livin’ on drugs and stuff. Nurse Lucas says she’d of died a long time ago, except for Dr. Lenz. She hasn’t been awake for better’ll two months now, Miss Lucas says, and then all she did was scream with the pain. Now she’s got a cellophane tent over her head, and tubes in her arm and up her nose . . .” Beaky shuddered at the recollection.
“Did your chum Lucas tell you what’s ailing Miss Culverin?”
Beaky nodded and said, “Cancer. She called it terminal cancer.”
A bubbling noise came from the kitchenette. Beaky got up again and went in there; she returned after a moment with two steaming mugs of black coffee. Doc sipped his gratefully, and began almost to feel a little healthier.
“Anything else to add?” he asked the girl.
She frowned in concentration. “I don’t think so. I could tell you all that we talked about, but it was mostly just, uh, girl stuff.”
“Tell me anyhow.”
She did, and it was mostly girl stuff. Beaky had asked Miss Lucas what it was like to be a nurse, and Miss Lucas had gone into interminable detail to tell her. Then Beaky had asked her how she, Beaky, might go about becoming one, and Miss Lucas had gone into interminable detail to tell her. Then Beaky had asked if doctors ever fell in love with their nurses, and . . .
Doc coughed and interrupted, “Did she say anything about Dr. Lenz?”
Beaky cogitated. “She didn’t say whether he ever fell in—”
“We’ll skip his love life,” Doc said drily. “Does she know any—anything else about him?”
“Oh. No. It’s the first time she’s worked for him.”
They sat in the dark and sipped at their mugs in a contemplative silence. At last Beaky asked, “Did you ever doctor anybody with ternim—terminal cancer?”
He said uncomfortably, “I’ve run across a few cases.”
“Could you—could you cure Miss Culverin?”
He smiled a little at the implied compliment, and said no, probably nobody could.
“I just thought,” she said, cringing into that ready-to-run attitude of hers, “maybe if you could help her, it would make up for what—what happened to your wife.”
Doc sighed heavily. “I did tell you about that, didn’t I?” he said, remembering. He added, in some puzzlement, “But I didn’t tell you about the cancer.”
Now Beaky was puzzled. “Cancer? No, you said you cut—you said your hand slipped.”
He shook his head. “It was no drunken accident; it was deliberate.”
Beaky stared at him. “Oh, no, Doc . . .”
“Sylvia had been ill; I diagnosed cholecystitis. It shouldn’t have been a very complicated operation. But when I opened her up, I found carcinoma, metastasis far advanced.” Beaky still looked puzzled. “I mean Sylvia was just eaten away inside by cancer. It was only a matter of time, and not much of that . . .” His voice trailed away.
“Then what you did,” Beaky said, after thinking about it, “You just saved her the pain and the waitin’.”
“That’s what I told myself,” he said drearily. “But I probably wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been impelled by those couple of drinks. Later, sober, I realized I had done it out of selfishness.”
“How—selfishness?”
“I couldn’t face having to tell her, having to watch her waste away and die. I couldn’t face having to endure my own helplessness.”
Beaky said, gently but positively, “She’d of wanted it your way.”
“I’ll never know. I didn’t give her a choice; she never opened her eyes again. But Sylvia was no coward. She might have accepted it stoically, might have triumphed over it, made something glorious out of those last remaining months.” His voice lowered again. “How many things she must have left unfinished, undone . . .”
He could sense the bottles winking at him again; he turned to look longingly at them, but did not succumb. Beaky tactfully got up and left him alone for a while, busying herself in the deeper darkness of the kitchenette. When she came back, with gooey cheese-spread sandwiches, the remembered pain had gone from his eyes.
Doc tried to decline the sandwich, but Beaky insisted. “I bet you ain’t had anyting to eat,” she guessed, correctly, “since that dish of eggs I fixed Friday morning.” Chewing was an ordeal to his alcohol-seared mouth, and swallowing was nearly impossible, but he obediently forced the food down.
Outside, the moon had changed position. It no longer lighted the array of decanters; it was now shining on other villains. Beyond the lawn and behind the windbreak poplars, the Culverin mansion brooded in the moonlight, as dark and stark as the House of Usher.
Doc finished his sandwich and said, “We’ve got things to do.”
Beaky helped him rise, a joint at a time, from his deep armchair. She followed him across the room, and looked slightly alarmed when he went to the sideboard. But Doc ignored what was on top, and took the telephone set out of its drawer.
“First,” he said, “How does this work?”
“Why, it’s just the house intercom,” she pointed out. “You can’t call outside on it, if that’s what you mean.”
“How many of these are there around the place?”
“Lemme see.” She began to tick off, on her fingers, “One in the kitchen, one in the pantry, the library, Miss Culverin’s room, the dinin’ room, the greenhouses . . .” She caught Doc’s look of dismay and said, “Oh, but nobody uses ’em hardly. Like I mean the greenhouses are empty, and the chauffeur lives at the house now, and all. I can’t think when anybody does use the house phone, except if one of the nurses calls down to Cook, or somep’n like that.”
Doc said to himself, “Well, no harm trying.” And then to Beaky, “Is there some special place in the house where Lenz and Partridge get together to do their talking?”
“Uh huh. They’re always shuttin’ themselves up in the library. They got a bar set up in there, same as you have here.”
“Beaky.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Could you slip into the library and lift the receiver off that phone?”
“Sure.”
“You’d have to move the set where it wouldn’t be noticed. The house phone, mind, not the outside one. And you’ll have to sneak a look at it once in a while. If one of the other servants replaces the receiver, you’ll have to lift it off again.”
“I can do that. Except when Mr. Partridge and Dr. Lenz are in there. But that’s what you want, huh? You want to listen in on them two?”
He nodded. “It’s one hell of a long shot. After all these months of planning whatever it is they’re up to, they’re not going to stand around and play back a synopsis just for my benefit But if I can only catch one little hint . . .”
“I’ll fix it first thing, soon’s I go back. And hey—” She pointed to the window. “I better scoot Gee, Doc, we’ve sat up talkin’ almost the whole night long.”
The sky was indeed beginning to lighten out there. The house was a black, jagged cut-out against the approaching sunrise.
“It’s been real fun,” Beaky said merrily. “And, Doc . . .?”
“Hm?”
“Can you—can you stop drinkin’ ?”
“Sure,” he said, with heedless humor. “I’ve done it a thousand times.”
“No, I mean it. I mean now, while you’re doin’ this telephone business, could you please not take any more liquor? You don’t—” she tried to put it diplomatically “—you don’t hold it very well.”
Doc had to laugh outright at that. But he assured her that he would stay on the wagon as long as it seemed advisable. Satisfied, Beaky went to the door and out onto the landing. There she paused for a moment.
“Doc,” she said meekly, with downcast eyes.
“What, Beaky?”
“That what you said, about a guy full of alcohol not ever foolin’ with girls. Did you mean—?” She gulped audibly. “—Not ever!”
Doc managed to maintain a straight face. By way of reply, he leaned out suddenly from the doorway and kissed Beaky resoundingly on her tremulous lips.
She nearly fell down the stairs, scampering pell-mell from the surprise attack. But at the bottom, at the garage door, she turned back one last time, to flash a glowingly ecstatic smile at him. Then she disappeared into the half-light of the dawn.
On still-shaky legs, Doc groped back to the sideboard and held the house phone receiver to his ear. After a not very long time, he heard a click, then a muffled scrapping. “Okay,” whispered Beaky’s voice. “It’s behind a African violet.” There was a light clatter and, from a distance, the sound of a door easing shut. After that, there was no more to be heard but the nothing-sound of an empty room.
Doc put down the receiver and looked at it, then at the row of bottles ranged behind it. They were all shimmering brightly and delightfully as the apartment grew lighter. Doc swore silently. Ignoring them would be a lot easier if he could pour them all down the john, or at least shut them away in the closet. But if someone showed up unexpectedly, that would require explaining.
There wouldn’t be anything to listen to on the phone for several hours. Maybe he should grab some sleep; it would keep his mind off his thirst. No—in his present state of debility there was too much danger of sleeping right around the clock. With a groan of resignation, Doc lowered himself onto an unrestfully uncomfortable straight-backed chair. He turned it away from the enticing bottles and settled himself for a weary, weary wait.
The sun came up by millimeters. After it had been well up for about a year and a half, the first birds awoke and began to sing their sunrise song. It was easily another eighteen months before Doc glimpsed the first sign of life at the house: a wisp of smoke from the chimney of the kitchen ell. From then on, he made periodic trips to listen to the telephone. But he never heard more than an occasional dim susurrus, presumably the bustlings of early-morning activity in rooms far distant from the library.
But, after several glacial ages, Doc’s forenoon was finally enlivened. He was sitting on his chair, feeling coeval with the dinosaurs and the Petrified Forest, when the telephone made a noise that carried across the room to him. He got up quickly but quietly and tipoted over to pick it up.
It was emitting a rapid cluck-cluck-cluck that puzzled him until he realized that someone was dialing a number. Then, “Drat it!” said a thick, suet-y voice in his ear, so suddenly that Doc jumped. The dialer on the other end hung up for a moment, then lifted the receiver and dialed again. Naturally, thought Doc, nothing would result so long as he was keeping the line open.
“Well, double drat!” said the fat-sounding voice. Doc guessed that it belonged to Cook. Sure enough, the voice veered away from the phone and barked, “This contraption is out of whack ag’in. Beaky, you trot up and ask that Nurse Whatsername how she wants her eggs this clank!” And the phone was mute, lifeless, a vacuum again.
The mention of eggs had pierced Doc to the heart with exquisite misery. Almighty saints, after all these years, it was still just breakfast-time!
Those first hours were tedious, but not quite unbearable. Beaky’s company through the night had revivified Doc to an amazing degree. He was still weak and trembly, but her sandwiches and coffee had provided much-needed nourishment, and he could feel the improvement. The evening before, when he had first defied the beckoning bottles, had been a time of “cold turkey” anguish. But that was behind him now, and he felt ten times better because of it—he told himself. He could even contrive to find some humor in this dreary waiting. He could laugh at how he misjudged the passing of time. At least, for the first few hours he could.
But as the caterpillar day crawled on, his nerves began to coil with increasing tension. His senses were honed by the slow sandpaper of time, until they were sharp enough to see the bottles even when he wasn’t looking at them—to smell and taste and, yes, hear the luscious liquids inside.
He could not sit still on his straight-backed chair for more than a minute at a time. When that position became intolerable, he would go over and listen at the phone for an alternative minute. Then, for another minute, he would pace the floor, either whistling soundlessly or silently mouthing such things as, “Why the devil isn’t there something to read around here?” He didn’t dare to make more than a minimum of noise, for fear that someone at the house would pick up a phone and hear him.
So, with the telephone stubbornly silent and his own movements hushed, the loudest noise in the apartment came to be the bottles’ insistent screeching for attention. To drown them out and, hopefully, to delude his mounting thirst, Doc went to the kitchenette and made a mug of instant coffee. The first sip nauseated him. He poured it out, went back to his chair and sat down, a sickly sweat beginning to glaze his face.
Like a bubble trapped in Jell-O, the sun crept up to the zenith, and seemed to dawdle there for an eon before it began to ooze down the other side of the sky. It was finally out of the sight of the man who writhed in the straight-back chair. His face contorted, his limbs twitching, his clothes again soaked through with perspiration, Doc was being scourged anew by the torments of total withdrawal.
He wrenched himself up from the chair and flung himself across the room to check the phone. When he picked up the receiver, the bottles roundabout seemed to crowd closer, begging, “Pick me up next.” The phone told him nothing; spoke only that clammy, mocking silence. But Doc knew there had to be a malignant presence at the other end, breathelessly waiting to hear him crack. Probably that African violet. What the hell was an African violet, anyhow?
Good God above, he thought, I am truly going insane. It’s only just beginning to be afternoon, and already I’m out of my skull. And what for? Whatever happens, whatever action is called for, I’m no mortal use in this condition. But just one drink—
The very thought was surrender enough. He wheeled in his pacing and grabbed for the nearest bottle. But his hand froze on its neck. The telephone receiver, lying just under his outstretched arm, suddenly scolded him with a thin, shrill whine. For a moment, Doc stood transfixed, but slowly his hand uncurled from the bottle and slowly picked up the keening phone.
Doc listened. The feeble peal would go on for a second, pause and peal again, over and over. He had just decided that what he heard was the “outside” telephone ringing in the library, when he caught the unmistakable sound of a door opening and footsteps approaching.
The ringing ceased and Partridge’s voice said hello. The subsequent conversation was necessarily one-sided and fragmentary.
“Yes, I’ll accept the charges,” said Partridge. “Hello . . . Yes, this is he . . . Calling collect from there, pal, you’d better have some good news . . . Is that right? . . . Are you sure? . . . Just dandy, just perfect, unless you’ve made a mistake in identification . . . Yes, bound to stay in a hotel . . . You canvass all of them if necessary, and call me back . . . I’ll be sitting on top of the phone.”
There came the small clash of the receiver being put down, and Doc thought he caught Partridge’s familiar frosty chuckle. The same phone was immediately picked up again and Partridge dialed swiftly.
“Would you call Mr. Lenz to the phone, please? . . .” A long wait. So, Doc noted, Lenz was just plain Mister to his landlady.
“Lenz,” the lawyer said sharply, “we’ve got him . . . No fooling. Do you think I’d fool about—yes, just this minute . . . Out on the Coast . . . You get right over here. I don’t want to tie up the phone. I’m waiting for them to call back and verify . . . I’ll send the car immediately.”
The receiver was replaced again, and Doc could hear nothing now except a faint, cheery whistling and what sounded like the happy snapping of fingers.
