“Too soon for what?”
“For the deadline. She had a deadline. I’m not trying to be funny; that’s what it was. Mrs. Goodfield explained the details to me, but I didn’t pay much attention. I’m not,” she added, with a conciliatory little smile, “much of a business woman.”
Greer was not conciliated. “You were paid for your part in the fraud?”
“I hate that word fraud. It sounds—”
“You were paid?”
“No. No. I wasn’t.”
“Expect me to believe that?”
“Well, naturally. It’s true. They didn’t pay me. They were going to when it was all over. Not a lump sum, because I didn’t want it that way and they couldn’t afford it anyway — but just a little each month.” Rose’s eyes were wide and wistful. “It would have been nice for my old age, wouldn’t it?”
“Dandy.”
“You don’t suppose there’s still a chance that I’ll get it?”
“I don’t suppose.”
“Oh well, something will turn up.” She looked across the room at Frank. “Frankie?”
“What do you want?” Frank said.
“You’re mad at me?”
“No.”
“You haven’t spoken a word to me. You must be mad.”
“No.”
“Disappointed, then?”
“A little disappointed, maybe.”
“Oh, what the hell, Frankie, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. It could happen to anybody.”
“But especially to you.”
Rose was delighted by this observation. “That’s the honest-to-God truth, Frankie. I attract disaster.”
Lora turned and addressed her mother coldly: “There wouldn’t be any disaster, there wouldn’t even be any trouble if you hadn’t phoned this guy long after you were supposed to be dead. What a brain wave that was. You—”
“How was I to know she was dead? Ethel didn’t tell me. All she said was to come on over to the house. I didn’t realize there was any great rush about it. So I took my time, I phoned Frank, I bought the postcards and sent him one, little things like that.”
“Little things like that. For Pete’s sake, you’re a birdbrain, a birdbrain.”
“Look who’s calling who a—”
“Ladies,” Greer said, pleasantly. “It’s time to be leaving.”
Rose clutched the black coat around her again, her hands working nervously at the cloth. “Where are we going?”
“To pay a visit to the Goodfields.”
“I don’t want to. I’ve had enough of them.”
“It’s possible,” Greer said, “that they’ve had enough of you, too. But you’re each going to have a little more.”
26
The drawing room was warm and humid and the heavy mahogany and gold satin furniture seemed to smother its occupants with excess. There was too much of everything in the room, too much sun and furniture, too much gilt and crystal, too many mirrors, too many people.
At the huge picture window that framed the mountains, a bluebottle fly buzzed, flung himself against the glass, paused, and attacked again with renewed fury and desperation.
Ethel watched the fly, engrossed, feeling so much empathy with it that she would have liked to pick up the fire tongs and smash the window and let the fly go on its way. If it gets away, she thought, if it escapes, where will it go? What will it do? If I got away, where would I go? What would I do?
Suddenly the bluebottle swooped across the room and out of the open door, directly, as if it had known all along which way to get out and the fussing at the window had been only play. With its departure Ethel felt a certain loss. She wanted to follow the bluebottle right out of the house, wing along beside it, gay, reckless, without a past, without a future, without Willett.
She became aware gradually that the policeman, Greer, was talking, not talking actually, but reading aloud from the letter he held stiffly in both his hands. Everyone was watching him, listening attentively — even Willett, though by this time Willett knew the letter by heart. He’d read it over and over again as if he’d been trying to memorize it like a catechism.
— the event that my son, Willett Peter Goodfield, is implicated in any way with my death, I wish to make the following statement to clarify the facts. With my limited knowledge of the law, I am not certain what credence is given to the written statement of a dying woman. I can only hope it will be full credence. I swear that these statements are true, and that my mind is functioning clearly, perhaps too clearly. If I did not have such real understanding of my children and such bitter awareness of their inability to look after themselves, I could die in peace like an ordinary woman. I cannot. The enclosed pages will explain everything, I wrote them as they happened and I swear they are the full truth.
It is May the fourth. Today my search ended. Months of searching, all over the country, and today, just when I was about to abandon hope, I found her, on a street corner waiting for a traffic light to change. Her name is Rose French. The physical resemblance to me is not perfect by any means and she is younger than I, but her coloring is the same, and the bone structure of her face, and our sizes are identical. I have come to the end of a long journey.
May 7. She is stubborn. That, too, we have in common. But her stubbornness is not as great as mine because there is not the same urgency behind it. I talked to her this evening again. She came out by bus; Willett did not bring her. I want no one to see her with Willett or on these premises, not even the new maid, Ada Murphy, whom Ethel hired yesterday. Hiring the maid was entirely Ethel’s idea. She meant it to be a surprise for me. It was. She couldn’t have done a more stupid thing, under the circumstances. The only course for me to follow is to refuse to have anything to do with Murphy. That way she won’t know the difference when the substitution is effected. As it will be. Rose French is getting very curious, and the smell of money is beginning to tickle her nostrils.
May 9. The arrangements were completed last night, and this afternoon I gave Rose her first coaching. She is an excellent mimic and I enjoyed the afternoon tremendously. I no longer have many pleasures and turning a stranger into oneself is amusing. I see now how I must appear to others, to Willett and Jack and to poor Ethel who hates me and is so ashamed of her hatred and jealousy because she thinks it is abnormal. It is not abnormal at all. If our positions were reversed, I would certainly hate her with equal vigor. As it is, I like Ethel and her essential honesty, and I appreciate her bungling little kindnesses. I have often regretted my decision that she should marry Willett. She deserves a better fate.
Willett and Ethel looked at each other across the room and spoke in silence:
“Do you, Ethel? Do you deserve a better fate?”
“No. No, of course not.”
“Yes, you do. Yes.”
“Not really. Everything’s going to be all right, dear, all right.”
Greer had turned a page and was reading again, softly and slowly and without emotion as if he didn’t intend to be overheard and was merely forming the words with his mouth like an inexperienced reader.
May 12. Tonight we had a preview, Willett and Rose and Ethel and I, though I didn’t count. I was only the audience. I lay in bed and watched. Willett was himself and Ethel was herself, but Rose was me. I rather enjoyed it and I have a suspicion that Ethel did, too. But Rose was nervous and Willett broke down completely and cried and kept asking me why, why we had to go through with this terrible thing. For the fiftieth time I told him why. I explained it to all three of them. Willett did not need an explanation. What he wanted was reassurance; he wanted me to say, no, no, Willett, I’m not going to die. I could not say it. I wish I could.