The horizontal man, p.11
The Horizontal Man, page 11
Because he tried to kiss her? That was odd. Because she had been so—so kind up to then. Was she really a puritan, for all her ribald talk? Plainly she did not want him to kiss her, that was plain, but why be so—so brutal about it? She had behaved as if . . . behaved as if . . . His thought stream was muddied and boiling with misery and poisonous secretions . . . And everyone had been so kind. Praising him for his reading—saying goodnight to him as if he were guest of honor. Could it all be a gigantic hoax designed to dash him to earth after first elevating him to a great height? It hardly seemed they would have bothered—she would have bothered. Oh dear, it was all so confusing! He took a large swallow of coffee.
He must think it out in orderly fashion. It seemed to him that something was afoot, whatever he meant by that, and he wasn’t sure. It all began with Kevin Boyle’s murder. Now what could such a thing have to do with him, Leonard Marks? Well, he lived across the hall. He had, as a matter of fact, heard the murderer leave after the crime. If he had been a little more curious, in fact, he might have caught the murderer. As it happened, he heard nothing but the most unidentifiable of noises, beyond Kevin’s loud No. He did not even know if the footsteps sounding in the hall were those of a man or of a woman. Of a woman? What did that remind him of? . . .
The pleasure of violence, she had said. There are not enough murders. But the criminal will not be caught this time . . . He took his spinning head between his hands. Had she really said those things, or had he invented them for her in his cups? But he heard her voice, remembered his own shock. By God, he even remembered thinking of his grandfather preaching about the whore that sitteth upon the waters! He stood up abruptly, pounded one fist on the other palm, and then sat down again, clutching at his forehead. And he had thought she was concerned for her virtue! Ha! His heart had warmed to her, he had thought of her in the same breath with his own mother. Oh, sacrilege! But was it really possible that she . . . ?
“Somebody has to commit murders,” he assured himself aloud, and got up, more cautiously this time, taking his empty cup to the kitchenette for more coffee. He felt a little better, he noticed, but his feet were cold. He looked down at them. No wonder. He had forgotten his slippers. Carrying the coffee back to the living room, he touched a match to the already laid fire, the newspaper caught, and the kindling began to crackle. Why not, why not? He felt very excited. He extended his long bluish toes toward the blaze. Think of her character. She was a woman of self-advertised violence. This in itself, of course, warned caution. Barking dogs never bite. And yet . . . and yet he wouldn’t like to have her after him with a poker. Not, of course, that she had showed signs of being after him with anything . . . His spirits sank again; he swallowed more coffee and lit a tentative cigarette. Suddenly he sat forward.
What was all that business about quarreling? Yelling like a banshee, she said—wait! It was coming back! He saw her mauve chiffon skirts spilling down from the seat of the sofa like the mist from a waterfall. He saw the enormous creamy orbs of her bosom bursting up from the decolletage of her dress. He saw her leaning forward a little, the snake of hair down one shoulder . . . He never, she said, mentioned quarreling with me? “Oh boy!” said Leonard aloud, inadvertently, and rose to pace the drafty floor, regardless of his bare feet. Was he rushing to a conclusion? It all seemed so pat. How had he begun this train of thought? Think back . . . By wondering . . . by wondering why Freda had made all the fuss over him. Wondering why she had . . . and then she hadn’t. It all could fit so neatly, if you accepted the premise. The premise that Freda had murdered Kevin Boyle . . . He stopped dead in the middle of the floor, his feet purple, his mouth agape. And at that moment a knock sounded on his door, as fatefully as if this were the second act of Macbeth.
He paused a moment, listening, then girded up his bathrobe and opened the door. There, on his doorsill, stood a sharp-looking young man with horn-rimmed glasses, and his hat on the back of his head. “Mr. Marks?” he said, somehow injecting breeziness into those two words, “I’m from the Messenger. Wondered if you’d care to tell me a little something about Mr. Boyle’s poetry.”
“Oh,” said Leonard, aware of his bare feet, his unshaven face, his heavy breath, and his uncertain vision, “uh—all right. Come in.”
The young man entered, looking around Leonard’s apartment with exaggerated appraisal. “Won’t you take off your coat?” said Leonard. “Won’t you sit down?” And wondered why he was being so bloody polite, because he had hated this young man on sight.
“Thank you, thank you,” said the reporter, and removing his coat, sat down, looking much too much at home in Leonard’s own chair.
“Some coffee?” said Leonard, caught inexorably in the compulsion of his manners.
But the young man said he had already breakfasted. “I understand there was a reading of Mr. Boyle’s poetry last night.”
Leonard sat down in the chair that he thought of as being for visitors and tucked his naked feet under it. “Yes,” he affirmed. “Ah, yes, at Mrs. Cramm’s house. A sort of memorial gathering, I believe.”
“You believe?” said the young man rudely. “I thought you were the one who read the stuff.”
“Oh,” said Leonard, “ah—yes, of course.”
“Well,” demanded the questioner, “what do you think of it?”
“Think of it?” echoed Leonard.
“Yeah—what do you think of the poetry?” The young man looked at him inquisitively. “You look a little under the weather,” he remarked. “Hung?”
“I beg your pardon?” said Leonard.
“I said,” said the young man, raising his voice as if Leonard were deaf, “have you a hangover?”
“Oh,” said Leonard. “Oh, ah, that. Ah, yes, I dare say I have.” Ever since this young man had come on the scene, things had seemed very strange in a distant way—like a Kafka novel. Somebody walks into your room, and you have a dim feeling that he doesn’t belong there, yet it seems altogether too out of order to say, What are you doing here? or Get the hell out . . . and besides, you are not too sure he would go. It might turn out that you were the one who was . . . A wave of nausea came sweeping down on Leonard like a rip tide. He had only time to say “Excuse me,” in a strangled voice, and dash for the bathroom.
When he came back he felt very weak, yet somehow stronger. He had washed his face, combed his hair, put on his glasses and his slippers. He had tied the belt to his bathrobe. He had spit on his moustache and swept it to the left and to the right with his fingertips. He felt abler to cope. But he suffered a setback almost immediately when he found the young man making himself quite at home in the kitchenette. He appeared from behind the door carrying in a glass a concoction which resembled some waste product from a surgical operation. “Just swallow this,” he said, and Leonard’s gorge leaped like a hart in protest. “I know it looks terrible,” said the Samaritan (showing his first resemblance to a human being), “but it will settle your stomach.”
“But I—” Leonard began feebly.
“Don’t quibble, drink it right down.”
Leonard found himself clutching the glass and swallowing the slick fluid, which had a certain unity about it, leading Leonard to suppose that it was based on a raw egg. It descended to his stomach as dubiously as a paratrooper entering enemy territory, and then, to his surprise, settled there rather comfortably. “Thank you,” he remarked tardily. “Ah—very kind of you.”
“I know just how you feel,” said the young man, and producing a notebook and pencil, sat down in Leonard’s chair again. “Look, I’m sorry to bother you at such a time, but I’ve got to cook up some kind of tale about this poetry reading before I lose my job. This is a hell of a murder, you know.” He was a companionable bastard, thought Leonard bitterly, retiring to the guest chair again. “First I get myself in a jam involving the honor of this virgin up at the Infirmary. My paper thinks the story’s wonderful, but unfortunately I have by that time got myself amorously involved with a strange and luscious tomato who can’t see things the practical way quite as plainly as she might. Now the paper is after me for more about Molly Morrison, but my newly acquired and highly valued love life says thumbs down, so now I’ve gotta get a new angle. Any ideas?”
The young man was beginning to appear more bearable to Leonard. His monologue seemed without ulterior motive, and genuinely troubled. As his health improved, Leonard’s heart filled with sympathy, and some idea began to work in the back of his mind—when his head really cleared it would be plain just what its nature was. “Perhaps,” said Leonard timidly, “you could do a piece about the poetry.”
“That,” said the young man, “was the general idea. Although how happy my boss is going to be to get a piece of literary criticism instead of a new suspect, I’ll leave you to imagine.”
“Perhaps,” ventured Leonard, with unprecedented boldness, “you may—ah—be able to—ah—supply your—ah—boss with both.”
The young man sat forward in his chair. “So?” he said, cocking his cropped head.
Leonard drew himself up in his chair, frowned, and touched his moustache. “Can I trust you not to quote me if I simply relate to you certain notions which have entered my mind as to the possible murderer of Kevin Boyle?”
“I guess you can sue me for libel if I do, since we haven’t any witnesses,” said the reporter wearily.
“Personally,” said Leonard impressively, “I found the entire notion of the poetry reading last night a very suspicious business.”
“How so?” said the young man, holding his pencil suspended over his pad.
“For one thing,” said Leonard, “the entire English Department was given to understand that part of the purpose of the gathering was to have Philip Frisbee, one of the editors of Cornish House, hear Mr. Boyle’s poems read. Yet Mr. Frisbee did not appear.”
“Oh, that could be explained very easily, I’m sure,” said the reporter, looking disappointed.
“It was explained,” pronounced Leonard impressively. “To me. By Mrs. Cramm. After the party. She knew from the beginning that Frisbee was not coming.”
“Well,” said the young man pensively.
“But that is not all,” said Leonard. “She admitted this to me in conjunction with a number of other remarks which seemed to me very much out of the ordinary. About murder. She said to me flatly and in so many words that there were not enough murders, and that in this case the murderer would never be caught.” He paused impressively and folded his hands on one knee.
“She may be right on both counts,” said the young man, biting his thumbnail.
Leonard sniffed irritably. He was beginning to dislike the young man again. “While mulling over Mrs. Cramm’s very odd remarks this morning, I was trying to reconstruct my own impressions of the departing steps of the murderer. I heard him—or her—leaving Boyle’s apartment, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. I interviewed you once before, but it was with a bunch of other reporters. Donelly’s my name.”
“Oh,” said Leonard correctly, “how do you do, Mr. Donelly?”
“Not very well, thank you,” said the young man abstractedly. “How’s your health?”
“Better,” replied Leonard. “That—that thing helped me.”
“What were you going to say about the murderer leaving Boyle’s place?”
“Well,” continued Leonard with renewed eagerness, “I got to thinking about the footsteps. I got to thinking about how there was no way I could remember whether the footsteps were those of a woman or a man. Now if they had been the footsteps of a—well, a slender woman, in high heels, it would have been quite simple to distinguish them from those of a man, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure, I guess so,” said Donelly.
“However,” said Leonard, leaning forward, “had the steps been those of a large woman, wearing brogues, they would have been very difficult to distinguish, wouldn’t they?” He leaned back triumphantly.
“So?” said Donelly, unimpressed.
It seemed to Leonard that he had gone quite far enough—the reporter’s lack of enthusiasm dashed him a bit, but he pulled himself together and went on. “Boyle used to talk to me a good deal,” he said. “He used to talk to me about—ah—women. I was quite conversant with the type he preferred. He frequently and graphically described it. Among other less relevant characteristics were those of good legs set off by high heels, and willowiness.”
“That’s what I used to say to myself,” said the reporter in a puzzled voice.
“Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Mr. Donelly?” quipped Leonard boldly.
For a moment the reporter’s face looked almost irate; Leonard wondered what on earth he had said wrong this time. “Look,” said Donelly at last, “are you trying to say you think Mrs. Cramm did Boyle in?”
“I think,” said Leonard coldly, “that I have gone quite far enough. You may make what use you like of my deductions.”
The reporter rose exhaustedly and put on his coat and hat. “It doesn’t cook,” he said. “I always knew there was no story in the poetry angle. There isn’t any story, and that’s the long and the short of it, because there aren’t any clues—unless you take this Morrison girl, and I can’t take the Morrison girl or I’ll lose my girl, and I don’t think I want to lose my girl,” he muttered on in an amazed undertone, “because I think I might want to marry her.”
Deep pity rose in Leonard’s breast for Donelly’s troubled spirit. If he had been writing himself in a book, he would have had himself clap Donelly on the shoulder and say, Don’t worry, old man, it will all come out in the wash; but in real life this seemed both unrealistic and impertinent. He followed Donelly to the door, commiserating silently. Just as he had his hand on the knob, the reporter turned suddenly on Leonard. “By the way, Marks,” he said, “what was that paper you tore up and put in your pocket on the sun porch at Freda Cramm’s last night?”
The room reeled, the reporter seemed to leer at him like the wolf from Grandma’s bed, the Kafka-esque quality of the encounter increased a thousandfold.
“Paper?” gasped Leonard feebly, “Paper?” and making a hopeless upward gesture, turned and fled to the bathroom, where he threw up the Prairie Oyster in the toilet.
“Dr. Forstmann, Mr. Bainbridge,” said Miss Seltzer, sticking her head around the door, and disappeared to admit the tall dripping figure of the psychiatrist. Bainbridge came round from behind his desk.
“Hullo, Julian,” he said. “I’m as glad to see you as any of your anxious patients.”
“A good deal gladder than most, I assure you,” said Forstmann, shaking out his trench coat, knocking the drops off the brim of his hat, and standing his wet umbrella in a corner.
“Julian, this business of the Morrison girl becomes more and more pressing. Sit down.” Bainbridge went behind his desk again and sat down, passing and repassing his hand over his bald spot. “How am I going to keep that idiot Flaherty from arresting her?”
Forstmann sat down and lit a cigarette. “I suppose that if it were absolutely necessary he could put a police guard outside her door at the Infirmary.”
Bainbridge shook his head. “I’d hate that, and so would the trustees. Lord, what a scandal! I wish I could just ship the girl home.”
Forstmann grinned. “Flaherty would love that.”
“Oh, I know, I know, but I’m at my wit’s end. Now you must tell me what you think about her.”
“Think about her? That’s a poser. I think it probable that she could and should undergo a successful analysis. But as to whether she’s a murderess or not, I have no more idea than you. Her Rorschach shows her to have a high intelligence, but low productivity. She is very much introverted, and has great difficulty in making contacts with people, even to the point of showing paranoid tendencies.”
Bainbridge groaned. “Pity my gray hairs and translate, Julian.”
“Delusions of persecution,” said Forstmann sharply. “Lucien, do you know what a hepcat is?”
“Why—ah—yes, I believe I do,” said Bainbridge, amazed. “It’s approximately—ah—a jitterbug, isn’t that correct? Good heavens, what has that to do with the Morrison child—”
“It has only to do with your affected ignorance of psychiatric terms which have long since become common parlance, Lucien. From your overprotestations I sometimes suspect that one morning I’ll come to the office and find you on my couch.”
“Not if I see you first,” said Bainbridge colloquially. “And you seem a little touchy yourself.”
“If you want to be convinced of my humanity,” said Forstmann, “I had a flat tire on the way over, and I’m catching cold.”
“Patient shows a tendency to wander away from the subject,” murmured Bainbridge.
“All right, all right,” said Forstmann. “The picture of Molly Morrison that I’ve gotten from three visits with her is this: Her father is Miles Morrison, as you know, and a very distinguished painter who is not successful financially. Her mother makes no bones about having married him on the assumption that he would one day be rich and famous; when he failed to become so, she became very much embittered and took out the frustration of her social ambitions on both the father and the child. Wait a minute.” He unzipped the brief case that was on his knees and withdrew a manila folder. He scanned a sheet and then began to read from it.
There were constant recriminations, and Morrison evidently felt a good deal of guilt about his own inability to make money, which Molly shared with him. Molly also seems to have gotten the idea that if she had never been born, things would have been easier between her mother and father. She came to Hollymount actually dreading to leave home, but feeling that if she did leave, relations between her mother and father might become smoother. She is strongly attached to her father, and I should imagine that her feeling for Kevin Boyle was a pretty direct transference of her feelings for her father to a nearer object. Her relations with all women are fearful and inhibited, as a reflection of her dealings with her mother—she seems to have had literally no strong relationships outside her home in all her life. When she speaks of her housemother, of the nurses in the Infirmary, or of the students in her dormitory, her sense of persecution is intense—she imagines she is always being ridiculed, scorned, despised. It’s interesting, for instance, that her feelings about Flaherty during the interview in which she made the confession are nowhere near so violent as those she has about Miss Sanders taking her to the Infirmary, which she felt was just another move in the conspiracy of women—mothers—to get rid of her.
