The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow Page 3

  But Aunt Addy should be disciplined. Bruce was right about that. She had to be taught that just because she had the money, it gave her no right to keep them jumping all the time.

  Lorna rolled over onto her stomach. The jetty planks beneath her were rough and warm. There was a delicious smell of brine, seaweed, and tar.

  Bruce! mused Lorna. Her whole mind, body, and spirit were saturated with the thought of her husband.

  Sylvia Emmett, in a white sweater and black slacks, was hurrying down the jetty towards her. Lorna was too indolent to get up. She waved casually. Soon Sylvia’s calves appeared at her eye level.

  “Hi,” said Lorna.

  “Lorna, your aunt called. You’re to call her right back. She says it’s terribly important. She wants you to come home at once.”

  It seemed to Lorna that the jetty rocked queasily under her. She jumped up. “What’s the matter? It isn’t Bruce?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Has Bruce come?”

  “Not yet.”

  Lorna started running down the jetty. She saw now that her happiness had been an omen of disaster. Bruce! Something dreadful had happened to Bruce! Why, oh, why, just because an extra morning sail had seemed so tempting, had she come down ahead of him with Sylvia? It was the first time since their marriage that she had spent the night away from him. How could she have been so crazy? It was all her fault.

  She reached the end of the jetty and started to run through the garden towards the house. As she came, panting, up to the drive, she saw Bruce’s green convertible swinging to the front door.

  Her heart leaped with joy. She ran to the car, reaching it just as Bruce was climbing out. She threw herself into his arms. He swung her up in the air, kissing her cheek, her lips.

  “Hi, babe. What a reception!”

  “Bruce, you’re all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right.”

  “Aunt Addy called. She said it was terribly important. She said I was to go back at once. I was sure something had happened to you.”

  “Oh, that!”

  Bruce set her down on her feet again. He was grinning. There was something about his smile, thought Lorna. It was all gaiety. When Bruce was smiling, it was impossible to remember that anyone in the world could be lonely or miserable.

  “Bruce, what does Aunt Addy want?”

  “Just one of her brainstorms.”

  “Brainstorms?”

  “When we were going through the mail this morning, she got onto the sapphire ring again. She started figuring that if it had been stolen, maybe some of her other jewels had been stolen, too. She went into the vault, opened the wall safe, and searched through her jewel box. She practically had hysterics. Her emeralds were missing.”

  Bruce reached into the back of the car and brought out his brief case.

  “You can imagine the scene. She came barging out of the safe, screaming, ‘We’ve been robbed. Burglars!’ She was going to call the police. She was going to call you and bring you right back as a witness. At least I managed to get her to call you before the police. Thank God I did, because …”

  He started to laugh. Lorna, infected, found herself laughing, too. “Because—what, Bruce?”

  “You’ve guessed the pay-off, of course. We found the emeralds in the drawer of her vanity in the bedroom. She’d worn them the other night to the Silsons’. And not only that, the sapphire ring—”

  “She didn’t find that, too?”

  “Sure. Down in the upholstery of the chaise longue.”

  They were both laughing uncontrollably now.

  “That’s funny,” moaned Lorna. “That’s really funny because I searched in the chaise longue. I spent hours digging down, and it was there all the time!”

  “She’s a card, your Aunt Addy. A real card. Getting old, I guess. Memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Poor, darling Aunt Addy.” Lorna drew away from her husband. “I guess I should call her, anyway.”

  “She’s probably forgotten all about it by now.” Bruce’s face was serious again. “Listen, babe, call her if you like. You know me. I never want to butt in. But—do you think it’s wise? I mean, always letting her feel she can push you around whenever the spirit moves her? After all, just because she got in a swivet, she didn’t think twice about calling you and scaring you to death for fear something had happened to me.”

  Lorna remembered her terrible moment on the jetty. That had been Aunt Addy’s fault. “Yes, Bruce, you’re right. She’s got to learn sooner or later that I’m a grown-up person with a life of my own. If she wants to talk to me, let her call back.”

  “Check, babe.” Bruce slipped his arm around her waist. “Where’re Larry and Sylvia?”

  “Down on the jetty.”

  “Let’s corral them. After all this excitement, I could do with a martini.”

  Mrs. Snow sat crouched on the floor by the furnace duct. She had one of the yachting cups in her hand. Every second or so, she tapped rhythmically with it against the metal of the duct.

  It seemed now as if she had been in the vault for days, but it had been only six hours. Five minutes before, she had stood once again under the ceiling light and blinked her eyes at her watch. It was five o’clock.

  Lorna wasn’t coming. She had resigned herself to that.

  The phone had rung several times. Its insistent ring had been harder to endure than the silence. But, even if one of the calls had been from Lorna, she wasn’t coming. At most, it took two and a half hours to drive up from the Emmetts’. If Lorna had returned from sailing at lunch time, Sylvia would have given her the message right away. If Lorna had been coming, she would have come at once.

  No, her worst suspicions had been confirmed. Bruce had called Arlene and put her off. Bruce had hurried to East Hampton and had managed to convince Lorna that Mrs. Snow’s phone call had been a false alarm.

  Joe Polansky was her only hope. Joe had said he was coming for the sanding machine tonight. She knew his habits. He ate supper at six. Probably he would help his wife with the dishes and then come uptown. He could scarcely arrive before eight. But she was taking no chances. Since four o’clock she had been tapping on the duct.

  The duct had been her one big break. Three years ago, when she had had the new heating system installed, she had made the engineers bring the unsightly duct up through the vault. It led to the cellar where the sanding machine was stored. Even if Joe didn’t come up into the house looking for her, he would certainly hear the tapping.

  For minutes, while she sat there tapping, Mrs. Snow had been trying to accustom herself to the fact that calculated wickedness was not just something that one read about in the papers, that one vaguely knew existed but that could never rear up in one’s own life. She had always thought of herself as a worldly-wise woman who had been everywhere and seen almost all there was to see. She realized now how Gordon’s love and, later, Gordon’s money had kept her almost as naïve as a child.

  Bruce had been living here in the house with her for over a year. Although, for Lorna’s sake, she had tried to blind herself, she had seen through his conceit, his cupidity, his false charm. She had finally exposed him as a thief. But, even when she was accusing him to his face, she had never dreamed that he was anything more than stupid and dishonest. Mortal danger had lurked there, and she hadn’t caught a glimpse of it.

  Even now it was almost inconceivable to her that someone she knew, her own niece’s husband, could be—this! A man who could shut a woman up in a vault and leave her to die!

  The horror of that knowledge was worse than the claustrophobia, worse than the haunting realization of an everyday, bustling Manhattan, stretching all around her little prison cell, going about its business totally ignorant of and unconcerned with her predicament.

  But she was free from panic now because of Joe. Bruce thought he had been so clever, but he hadn’t known about Joe and the sanding machine. Joe was the ace up her sleeve. The thought of him gave her a tense,
gambler’s thrill. She was playing poker, and she was going to win. Her normal, energetic optimism had reasserted itself.

  Of course she was going to win.

  She rapped sharply on the duct with the silver cup. It was strange. She had thought thirst would come before hunger. But it wasn’t so. She didn’t feel thirsty at all, but for some time now she had felt a nagging hunger in her stomach. That was because she had had no breakfast. She had been too eager to get up to the study with the bank statement before Bruce came down and caught her.

  Very faintly, from somewhere far off in the house, she heard the sound of wailing. The cats! She had hardly thought about them all day. Poor Chiang and Mei-Ling! They were used to getting their dinner at five o’clock. If ever Arlene was even a few minutes later, they always howled like banshees. They were down in the kitchen now, prowling.

  Mrs. Snow felt a sudden excitement. The moment Joe arrived, the cats would go hurtling down to the cellar, yowling, scolding, demanding food. Joe knew their ways as well as she herself did. Even without the tapping, he would be sure to guess something was wrong and investigate immediately.

  The tapping, the cats. Everything would be all right. Of course it would….

  Because Joe would come. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind about that. She knew Mrs. Polansky. For years she had had Joe completely under her thumb. If Mrs. Polansky wanted her floors scraped this weekend, scraped they would be.

  And not just that! Joe would want to come tonight, if only to get away for a while from home. Mrs. Snow knew how fond Joe was of her. He fussed over her almost as if she were his sister. She and the house were really his whole life. His little room in the cellar was his asylum, his refuge from his wife’s nagging.

  Mrs. Snow felt an odd, cosmic calm. Now that there was no longer any reason to be afraid, she could see that this dreadful experience was not only a punishment for her own error of judgment, it was also a blessing in disguise. Lorna was so infatuated with Bruce that it was perfectly possible she might have forgiven him for the forgeries. But she would never be able to forgive the man who had tried to murder her aunt.

  This, Mrs. Snow told herself, was just another instance of the devious way life worked for the best. Soon Bruce would be in jail, and Lorna, cured of her obsession, would be free of him. Free to pick up once again that happy, untroubled existence that she and her aunt had enjoyed before the wedding.

  No, she mustn’t think selfishly like that. Free to find a decent young man who honestly loved her and would make her a worthy husband.

  The hunger pains were troubling her again. Mrs. Snow tapped the cup against the furnace duct.

  Downstairs she could hear the faint but insistent crying of the cats.

  Joe Polansky came out of the kitchen and sat down cautiously on one of his wife’s new electric-blue lounge chairs. Supper had made him sleepy. He would have liked to relax for a while. He couldn’t, of course. He had to go uptown for Mrs. Snow’s sanding machine.

  Not that he could have relaxed around here, anyway. In the old days, it had been bad enough. What you up to now, Joe? Joe, how many times I got to tell you not to smoke that stinking pipe in here? But the old days had been paradise to what it was now. Joe felt a bitter resentment against Minna’s sister in Jersey for dying the month before and leaving her two thousand dollars. Ever since, there’d been no peace. The fancy new living-room suite with those lace things on the arms; talk, talk, talk, about drapes and plants in pots and heaven knows what. And the floor!

  Joe glanced down at the chipped, uneven boards at his feet. No amount of sanding was going to make them look like anything but what they were—cheap, old, worn-out, cold-water-flat flooring. But you couldn’t tell Minna that!

  “Ready, Joe?”

  Minna bustled into the living room. Her new permanent wave had piled her hair into a cone of tight grey curls. Even her face looked different after that beauty treatment. Kind of tight, too, like it would split, maybe, if she smiled. She had a five-dollar bill in her hand.

  “Here. I don’t have any singles. You’ll have to take this. But mind, now. Just the taxi coming back with the machine. You take the subway up like always.”

  Joe accepted the bill and rose obediently. Years ago—Joe had never been able to find out when—he had given up trying to assert himself with Minna. Maybe it had been when they didn’t have any children and the doctor said it was his fault. And then, maybe, Minna had always been such a big girl and him so small. Joe didn’t know exactly how it had happened. But it had, and because he was ashamed of having lost his manhood, he was too proud to fight his way back.

  “Now, don’t you let Mrs. Snow talk you into doing any chores up there tonight. I know the way she is. I want you back here and in bed early so you can get a good start tomorrow on the floors.”

  Mrs. Polansky followed him out onto the landing. She loomed massively over the stair rail as he started down.

  “Get the little machine, too, the one for the tables. And you come straight on back, now. No dawdling around. Joe—do you hear me?”

  Hear her! Wasn’t anyone on the block, practically, who couldn’t hear her!

  It was pleasant in the street. A real mild evening. Joe always felt better the moment he was out of the apartment. He thought affectionately of Mrs. Snow’s household. Arlene would be finishing up after dinner now. Soon she’d be off. It wasn’t right, Mrs. Snow staying all night there in that big house by herself. He was glad he was going to drop in. He could make sure everything was okay.

  He turned into Sixth Avenue and started through the crowds towards the subway. The image of Mrs. Snow was still in his mind. Sometimes he didn’t know what he’d do if it weren’t for Mrs. Snow and the friendly, familiar world of her cellar. He thought of her sitting there in the study that morning. Go off and have a good Labor Day spree, Joe. A spree! Imagine Minna ever suggesting a spree! Minna, who took every cent of his pay except for carfare and didn’t even allow a bottle of beer in the house.

  He passed the bright, neon-lit entrance to a bar. A sailor and a girl turned sharply in front of him and disappeared through the swinging doors. Heck, it was Labor Day weekend. Everyone having a good time. Joe hesitated at the door, the impulse to revolt stirred unexpectedly in him. Must be close to six months since he’d been inside a bar. He touched the five-dollar bill in his pocket. Minna could never figure out the taxi fare down to the last dime.

  A little man in a blue raincoat, not unlike himself, pushed past into the bar. Joe Polansky followed him in.

  It was just an ordinary tavern, cosy, cheerful, with customers scattered along the bar. A jukebox was blaring. Way down in back a guy was singing and dancing on television. Joe went to the bar and ordered a beer.

  Unintentionally he had sat next to the little man who had come in ahead of him and who was ordering a shot of rye. They glanced at each other. The little man beamed and gestured to the barman.

  “Jack, this gentleman’s beer’s on me.”

  “Oh, no,” said Joe.

  “What you mean, no? This beer’s on me and the next and the next and the next. I’m celebrating. A guy can’t celebrate alone.” The little man leaned closer on his stool and put an arm around Joe’s shoulder. “Know something, old-timer? I’m a granddaddy. My first grandson. Born just a couple of hours ago. Eight pounds. A fine boy. What you know about that, brother? Danny Carson’s the name.”

  Joe was usually shy with strangers, but Mrs. Snow’s word spree had infected him with a sense of adventure. This was a spree—this casual, friendly meeting, all this noise, the chattering voices, the tangy taste of the beer. And it didn’t seem like you had to figure out things to say to Danny, either. He did all the talking—all about his daughter and what a fine girl she was and what a fine steady boy she’d married and how the nurses at the hospital had said they’d never seen a finer-looking baby.

  Joe finished his beer and accepted another. His spirits were soaring. What a real friendly guy Danny was! And what a fine life he led w
ith all those kids and now the grandson and …

  Suddenly Joe remembered Minna. He glanced at the clock. Gee, he’d been in here a half hour already. Danny’s arm was on his shoulder again.

  “Heck,” he said, “I gotta go. Gotta pick up a sanding machine for my wife—or will I catch hell!”

  “Catch hell!” Danny gave a resounding guffaw. “Hey,” he called to the bar at large, “hear that? Here’s a guy so scared of his wife he’s gotta pick up a sanding machine.”

  No one paid much attention, but the barman, who happened to be standing in front of them, gave a knowing smile. Joe felt himself blushing with anger and shame. Of course they were all laughing at him. Why shouldn’t they? These guys that came here were real guys. They didn’t let themselves get pushed around by their wives. They could have as many sprees as they liked.

  Spree! That word and the two beers were just enough to prod his rankling pride. Minna and her “no-dawdling-mind-you-come-straight-home”! What did Minna think he was, anyway? A mouse?

  To hell with the sanding machine! He’d pick it up when he was ready.

  He turned to Danny, slapping him boldly on the back. His whole body glowed with the warmth of liberation.

  “Drink up, Grandpappy. The next round’s on me.”

  It was twelve o’clock—midnight. Mrs. Snow stood under the ceiling light. She was pressing her hand against her mouth to keep from screaming.

  Hour by hour, as her hopes of Joe’s coming grew less and less, fear had begun to get a grip on her. It had invaded her inch by inch, overwhelming her hunger pains, subduing even the nagging thirst that had come soon enough to plague her. Now it had complete control of her. She had never known such a fear could exist. It was like a terrible, obscene insect inside her, coiling around her heart, sliding up her spine, chewing, sucking at her brain.

  Joe wasn’t going to come. He hadn’t just lingered at home, missed his subway, or decided to walk. He wasn’t going to come.

  In Mrs. Snow’s terror-struck mind, Bruce had become a figure of more than human evil and cunning. Somehow Bruce had found out about Joe and had seduced him—just as he had seduced Arlene and Lorna. There was no hope now.