It wasn’t a woman’s room, or anybody’s room. It was more like an unused guestroom where unwanted things were kept: old books and pictures, an old iron double bed, a decaying rug. I felt a strange proprietary embarrassment, like a pawnbroker who’s lent money on somebody else’s possessions, sight unseen.
The window resisted her efforts. I saw her watching me in its dark mirror. Her own reflected face was like a ghost’s peering from outer darkness.
“Go away and leave me alone.”
“A lot of people have. Maybe that’s the trouble. Come away from the window, eh?”
She moved back into the room and stood by the bed. There was a soiled depression in the cheap chenille spread where I guessed Carl had been lying. She sat on the edge of the iron bed.
“I don’t want any of your phony sympathy. People always want to be paid for it. What do you want from me? Sex? Money? Or just to see me suffer?”
I didn’t know how to answer her.
“Or do you simply want to hear me say it? Listen then, I’m a murderer. I murdered four people.”
She sat and looked at the faded flowers in the wallpaper. I thought that it was a place where dreams could grow rank without much competition from the actual.
“What did you want, Mildred?”
She put a name to one of the dreams. “Money. That was what set him off from everyone – the thing that made him so handsome to me, so – shining.”
“Do you mean Carl?”
“Yes. Carl.” Her hand moved behind her to the depression in the spread. She leaned on it. “Even tonight, when he was lying here, all dirty and stinking, I felt so happy with him. So rich. Mother used to say I talked like a whore, but I was never a whore. I never took money from him. I gave myself to him because he needed me. The books said he had to have sex. So I used to let him come up here to the room.”
“What books are you talking about?”
“The books he used to read. We read them together. Carl was afraid of going homosexual. That’s why I used to pretend to be excited with him. I never really was, though, with him or any man.”
“How many men were there?”
“Only three,” she said, “and one of them only once.”
“Ostervelt?”
She made an ugly face. “I don’t want to talk about him. It was different with Carl. I’d be glad for him, but then the gladness would split off from my body. I’d be in two parts, a hot part and a cold part, and the cold part would rise up like a spirit. Then I’d imagine that I was in bed with a golden man. He was putting gold in my purse, and I’d invest it and make a profit and reinvest. Then I’d feel rich and real, and the spirit would stop watching me. It was just a game I played with myself. I never told Carl about it; Carl never really knew me. Nobody ever knew me.”
She spoke with the desperate pride of loneliness and lostness. Then hurried on, as though some final disaster was about to fall, and I was her one chance to be known: “I thought if we could get married, and I was Mrs. Carl Hallman, then I’d feel rich and solid all the time. When he went away to the university I followed him. No other girl was going to get him from me. I went to business college and found a job in Oakland. I rented an apartment of my own where he could visit me. I used to make supper for him, and help him with his studies. It was almost like being married.
“Carl wanted to make it legal, too, but his parents couldn’t see it, especially his mother. She couldn’t see me. It made me mad, the way she talked about me to Carl. You’d think I was human garbage. That was when I decided to stop taking precautions.
“It took me over a year to get our baby started. I wasn’t in very good health. I don’t remember very much about that time. I know I went on working in the office. They even gave me a raise. But it was the nights I lived for, not so much the times with Carl – the times after he left when I would lie awake and think about the child I was going to have. I knew that he would have to be a boy. We’d call him Carl, and bring him up just right. I’d do everything for him myself, dress him and feed him his vitamins and keep him away from bad influences, such as his grandmother. Both his grandmothers.
“After Zinnie had Martha, I thought about him all the time and I became pregnant at last. I waited two months to be sure, and then I told Carl. He was frightened, he couldn’t hide it. He didn’t want our baby. Mainly, he was afraid of what his mother would do. She was far gone by that time, ready to do anything to have her way. When Carl first told her about me, long before, she said she’d rather kill herself than let him marry me.
“She still had him hypnotized. I have a nasty tongue, and I told him so. I told him that he was the daring young man on the umbilical cord, but it was a hangman’s noose. We had a battle. He smashed my new set of dishes in the sink. I was afraid he was going to smash me, too. Perhaps that’s why he ran away. I didn’t see him for days, or hear from him.
“His landlady said he’d gone home. I waited as long as I could stand it before I phoned the ranch. His mother said he hadn’t been there. I thought she was lying to me, trying to get rid of me. So I told her I was pregnant, and Carl would have to marry me. She called me a liar, and other things, and then she hung up on me.
“That was a little after seven o’clock on a Friday night. I’d waited for the night rates before I phoned. I sat and watched night come on. She wouldn’t let Carl come back to me, ever. I could see part of the Bay from my window, and the long ramp where the cars climbed towards the Bridge, the mud flats under it, and the water like blue misery. I thought that the place for me was in the water. And I’d have done it, too. She shouldn’t have stopped me.”
I had been standing over her all this time. She looked up and pushed me away with her hands, not touching me. Her movements were slow and gingerly, as if any sudden gesture might upset a delicate balance, in the room or in her, and let the whole thing collapse.
I placed a straight chair by the bed and straddled it, resting my arms on the back. It gave me a queer bedside feeling, like a quack doctor, without a bedside manner: “Who stopped you, Mildred?”
“Carl’s mother did. She should have let me kill myself and be done with it. It doesn’t lessen my guilt, I know that, but Alicia brought what happened on herself. She phoned me back while I was sitting there, and told me that she was sorry for what she’d said. Could I forgive her? She’d thought the whole thing over and wanted to talk to me, help me, see that I was looked after. I believed that she’d come to her senses, that my baby would bring us all together and we’d be a happy family.
“She made an appointment for me to meet her on the Purissima wharf next evening. She said she wanted to get to know me, just the two of us. I drove down Saturday, and she was waiting in the parking lot when I got there. I’d never met her face to face before. She was a big woman, wearing mink, very tall and impressive. Her eyes shone like a cat, and her voice buzzed. I think she must have been high on some kind of drug. I didn’t know it then. I was so pleased that we were coming together. I was proud to have her sitting in my old clunk in a mink coat.
“But she wasn’t there to do me any favors. She started out all right, very sympathetic. It was a dirty trick Carl played on me, running out like that. The worst of it was, she had her doubts that he would ever come back. Even if he did, he’d be no bargain as a husband or a father. Carl was hopelessly unstable. She was his mother, and she ought to know. It ran in the family. Her own father had died in a sanitarium, and Carl took after him.
“Even without an ancestral curse hanging over you – that was what she called it – it was a hideous world, a crime to bring children into it. She quoted a poem to me: ‘Sleep the long sleep: The Doomsters heap travails and teens around us here…’ I don’t know who wrote it, but I’ve never been able to get those lines out of my head.