Now he stood back from the window. Several of the people from yesterday were there again. My God, he thought, they’re acting it out.
He recognized Mrs. Frankel among them. She was wearing her city clothes and looked hot and uncomfortable standing beside Bieberman’s empty pool. She seemed to be arguing ferociously, in her excitement unconscious of the big purse that followed weirdly the angry arcs of her arms. The sun caught the faces of some stones on her heavy bracelet and threw glints of light into Preminger’s eyes as she pointed in the direction of the pool. He did not know what she was saying, but he could imagine it easily enough. He had heard her bullying before. She was like a spokesman for some political party forever in opposition.
In a moment he noticed something else. Beyond the excited crowd gathered about Mrs. Frankel, he saw Bieberman, who stood, hanging back, his head cocked to one side, his expression one of troubled concentration. He looked like a defendant forced to listen in a foreign court to witnesses whose language he can not understand. Beside him was the social director, scowling like an impatient advocate.
He turned and began again to dress.
When he approached the main building the others had finished their breakfasts and were already in the positions that would carry them through until lunch. On the long shaded porch in front of Bieberman’s main building people sat in heavy wicker rockers playing cards. They talked low in wet thick voices. Occasionally the quiet murmur was broken by someone’s strident bidding. Preminger could feel already the syrupy thickness of the long summer day. He climbed the steps and was about to go inside to get some coffee when he saw Mrs. Frankel. She was talking to a woman who listened gravely. He tried to slip by without having to speak to her, but she had already seen him. She looked into his eyes and would not turn away. He nodded. She allowed her head to sway forward once slowly as though she and Preminger were conspirators in some grand mystery. “Good morning, Mrs. Frankel,” he said.
She greeted him solemnly. “It won’t be long now, will it, Mr. Preminger?
“What won’t?”
She waved her hand about her, taking in all of Bieberman’s in a vague gesture of accusation. “Didn’t they tell you I was leaving?” she asked slowly.
He was amazed at the woman’s egotism. “Vacation over, Mrs. Frankel?” he asked, smiling.
“Some vacation,” she said. “Do you think I’d stay with that murderer another day? I should say not! Listen, I could say plenty. You don’t have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to see what’s happening. Some vacation. Who needs it? Don’t you think when my son heard, he didn’t say, ‘Mama, I’ll be up to get you whenever you want?’ The man’s a fine lawyer, he could make plenty of trouble if he wanted.”
For a moment as the woman spoke he felt the shadow of a familiar panic. He recognized the gestures, the voice that would take him into the conspiracy, that insisted he was never out of it. Mrs. Frankel could go to hell, he thought. He’d better not say that; it would be a gesture of his own. He would not go through life using his hands.
Mrs. Frankel still spoke in the same outraged tones Preminger did not quite trust. “The nerve,” she said. “Well, believe me, he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”
Bieberman suddenly appeared at the window behind Mrs. Frankel’s chair. His huge head seemed to fill the whole window. His face was angry but when he spoke his voice was soft. “Please, Mrs. Frankel. Please,” he said placatingly. Preminger continued toward the dining room.
Inside, the bus boys were still clearing the tables. He went up to one of the boys and asked for some coffee and sat down at one of the cleared tables. The boy nodded politely and went through the large brown swinging doors into the kitchen. He pushed the doors back forcefully and Preminger saw for a moment the interior of the bright kitchen. He looked hard at the old woman, Bieberman’s cook, sitting on a high stool, a cigarette in her mouth, shelling peas. The doors came quickly together, but in a second their momentum had swung them outward again and he caught another glimpse of her. She had turned her head to watch the bus boy. Quickly the doors came together again, like stiff theatrical curtains.
He turned and saw Norma across the dining hall. She was holding a cigarette and drinking coffee, watching him. He went over to her. “Good morning,” he said, sitting down. “A lot of excitement around here this morning.”
“Hello,” she said.
He leaned across to kiss her. She moved her head and he was able only to graze her cheek. In the instant of his fumbling movement he saw himself half out of his chair, leaning over the cluttered table, like a clumsy, bad-postured diver on a diving board. He sat back abruptly, surprised. He shrugged. He broke open a roll and pulled the dough from its center. “Mrs. Frankel’s leaving,” he said after a while.
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
“The Catskillian Minute Man,” he said, smiling.
“What’s so funny about Mrs. Frankel?”
Preminger looked at her. “Nothing,” he said. “You’re right. One of these days, after this Linda Goldstone affair had blown over, she would have gotten around to us.”
“She couldn’t say anything about us.”
“No,” he said. “I guess not.”
“ ‘Goldstone affair,’ ” she said. “The little girl is dead.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Affair,” she said. “Some affair.”
He looked at her carefully. Her face was without expression. What did she want from him — a statement?
“All right,” he said. “Okay. The Goldstone affair — excuse me, the Goldstone tragedy — was just the Goldstone drowning. Norma, it was an accident. Everyone around here carries on as though it has implications. Even you. I suppose the thing I feel worst about — well, the parents, of course — is Bieberman. He’s the only one who still has anything to lose. It could hurt him in the pocketbook and to a man like him that must be a mortal wound.”
Norma looked as if he had slapped her. It was a dodge, her shock; it was a dodge, he thought. Always, fragility makes its demands on bystanders. The dago peddler whose apples have been spilled, the rolled drunk, the beat-up queer, the new widow shrieking at an open window — their helplessness strident, their despair a prop. What did they want? They were like children rushing to their toys, the trucks, the tin armies, manipulating them, making sounds of battle in their throats, percussing danger and emergency.