“Hey! Damn it all! Open up!” Again Fletch pounded on the door. Again he looked to the street corner. Again he tried the doorknob. Again he read the sign: EMERGENCY EGRESS ONLY. MAIN ENTRANCE AROUND CORNER. AGNES WHITAKER HOME. He was about to sprint again. He banged the door one more time with his fist. “Hey!”
It opened.
Inside, on the cement floor, were green sneakers.
“I saw you through the window,” Mrs. Habeck said. “You’d better come in.”
Fletch entered quickly and closed the door behind him.
“Why was that policeman chasing you?” Mrs. Habeck asked.
“Damned if I know.” Fletch breathed deeply. “Just after I parked, about five blocks from here, this cop jumped out of his car, yelled at me, and started chasing me. His partner got stuck in traffic. Thanks for letting me in.”
“You certainly had a good lead on him,” Mrs. Habeck said admiringly. “Of course, you’re dressed for running. If it’s the police’s job to catch people, why don’t they wear shorts and sneakers too?”
In the utility hall where they stood her flowered dress seemed particularly bright.
Fletch said, “I don’t know your first name.”
“Why should you?” Mrs. Habeck turned and led him through a door and along a corridor. “I’ve been awaiting you, you’ll see. But now you’re late. They’ll be setting supper for us soon. A ridiculously early hour, I know, but, as you know, institutions set out their three meals within the same eight-hour workday. As a result, some institutionalized people are too fat; some are too thin: none can outrun a policeman, I’m sure.”
They went into a large room at the front of the building.
A television at the back of the room played a quiz-game show for three depressed-looking people. A man in a full suit sat at a bridge table, mulling over a hand of cards. The three empty positions at the table had cards neatly stacked in front of them. At the side of the room, a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt that said PROPERTY I.C.U. ATHLETIC DEPT. worked a computer terminal.
Fletch and Mrs. Habeck sat in chairs in a front corner of the room. She had an excellent view of the street from her window.
“My name is Louise,” she said.
“Is that what your friends call you?”
“Don’t have any friends,” Louise Habeck said. “Never have, since I was married. My husband’s friends genuinely didn’t like us, you see. None of our friends did. Your shorts ask if I want a friend. Well, I did want a friend, at one time. It’s like wanting a cup of tea in a desert. I’m sure you know what that’s like. After a while of not having a cup of tea, it becomes all right. You stop wanting it.” She lifted a large, brown, paper shopping bag from the floor beside her chair and put it in Fletch’s lap. “I’ve been nothing less nor more than Mrs. Habeck for a good long time now.”
In the bag, neatly folded, were his jeans, T-shirt, undershorts, and socks. They smelled clean. At the bottom of the bag, he could feel his sneakers.
“You did wash my clothes for me!”
“I said I would.”
“My favorite sneakers!”
“My, they made an amusing noise going ’round in the dryer. The noise a camel might make, after having been trained for an Olympic track event.”
He changed from his new, white sneakers to his old, dirty, holey sneakers.
She watched him wriggle his toes in them.
“You might have been able to run away from the policeman even faster, if you’d been wearing those.” Outside the window, the policeman stood, arms akimbo, on the curb. “My husband, of course, always wore black shoes. Somehow or other, he always managed to wander away in black shoes.”
They watched the police car come down the street, make a U-turn, and pick up the policeman.
“I honestly don’t know what the policeman’s chasing me was all about,” Fletch said. “Maybe I should have stopped and asked, but there’s a lot I want to do yet today.”
“I love the way you arrive places,” she said. “Yesterday, reeking of bourbon. Today, chased by a cop. Reminds me of no one whatsoever.”
“You depart places pretty well.” He remembered her disappearing yesterday with his clothes.
“Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Once you’re put out of your own home because you’re too much trouble, after that, you know, departing anywhere becomes easy. Like not wanting a cup of tea.”
“Tea,” he said. “Yes.”
“Sorry I can’t offer you any,” she said. “All these people around here dressed in white are not paid to fetch and carry.” A large man dressed in white was now standing just inside the recreation-room door. “They make that quite clear when you first arrive. They’re paid to stand around like dolts and grimace.” She grimaced at the large dolt. He didn’t see her. His eyes were totally bloodshot. “Scat!” she said to him. “Go set supper!”
The well-dressed bridge player put down his hand, took the seat to his left, and picked up that hand.
“I’ll be a cup of tea,” Fletch said.
She smiled and nodded with understanding.
“Tell me,” Fletch said gently. “Do you know by now your ex-husband is dead?”
She laughed. She slapped her knee. “That would make him ex enough! Ex-pired!”
Again, in her presence, Fletch did not know if he ought laugh.
He cleared his throat. “I’ve spent today visiting your family.”
“You’re trying to discover who done Donald in!” she said gleefully.
“Well, I’m trying to get the story. Trying to understand…”
“There’s no understanding Donald. Never was. If he himself told me he was dead, I’d wait for the obituary, before believing it.”
“Obituaries,” Fletch said solemnly, “are not always to be believed either.”
“I hope they had some source for the news of his death other than himself. Or his office.”
“They did. He was shot to death. In the parking lot of one of the newspapers.”
“He must have a jury deliberating somewhere.” “What do you mean?”
“Donald always calls attention to himself when he knows a jury is going to bring in a positive verdict. He says it’s good for business.”
“He didn’t shoot himself,” Fletch said. “The gun wasn’t found.”
“It wandered away,” she said. “Wandered away on black shoes.”
“Yes. Okay. Tell me, do you often go back to your old house and sit in the garden? The gardener didn’t know you.”
“Not often. Usually I don’t sit there unless I know no one’s there. I’m used to that house being empty, you know. Sometimes Jasmine surprises me. She comes out of the house and sits with me and we talk. She’s discovered living with Donald is lonelier than living alone. He wanders away, you know.”
“On black shoes. What was special about yesterday?”
“Yesterday? Let me think. Oh, yes, Donald got shot.”
“I mean you stayed at the house even though the gardener was there.”
“Such a nice day.”
“When I met you yesterday, did you know Donald had been killed?”
“I knew it some time. I don’t know whether I knew it before or after meeting you. Meeting you didn’t seem that significant, originally. You weren’t drunk, were you?”
“No.”
“You smelled it.”
“Did you know before I told you that Donald intended to announce he was giving five million dollars to the museum?”
“I washed your clothes for you. Bumpity-bumpity-bump! went the sneakers in the dryer. Exactly like a camel running the four-forty.”
The bridge player was now in the fourth position at the table.
“How do you get around, anyway?”
“Vaguely.”
“I mean, how do you get around the city? To your daughter’s house, to—”
“I sit in an open, empty car. When the driver comes back, from shopping or whatever, I tell him or her where I want to go. They take me.”
“Always. I’m a little, old, blue-haired lady in a bright dress and green sneakers. Why wouldn’t they? Sometimes they have to go someplace else first. I go, too. The secret is that I’m never in a hurry. And,” she noted, “sometimes I get to see places I wouldn’t otherwise see.”
Fletch frowned. “Your daughter did somewhat the same thing this afternoon.”
“Did she? I never explained to her how I do it. She never asked. But, poor dear, she hasn’t any money, either.”
“I went with your daughter to the Monastery of St. Thomas this afternoon and spoke with Robert.”
“That sinner!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Have you ever heard of the sin of omission?”
“No.”
“Robert’s omitting life in that monastery. I suspect he’d rather be in jail, but he knew his father would prevent his going to jail, no matter what he did. I think some people want to be in jail, don’t you?”
“Shooting his father would accomplish two goals, wouldn’t it?”
“Splendidly!”
“I think I heard your son, the monk, actually saying something like he doesn’t much care if his father goes to hell.”
“Oh, we all felt that way about Donald. Didn’t you?”
“Didn’t know him.”
“Not a pity.”
“When Nancy was telling Donald their father was dead, she wept.”
“Nancy! I brought her up to be such a pretty girl and, for a while there, she was such a whore.”
“Was she?”
“She married her college professor, you know. What’s his name?”
“Tom Farliegh.”
“Yesterday you didn’t know his name. Today, you do. You see? You’ve learned something.”
“Not much.”
“I try to get his name around, in my own small way.”
“Rather a strange man, don’t you think?”
“Oh, he’s a darling. Very good to me. He publishes my poetry.”
“What?”
“Well, he gets it published. Under his own name, of course.”
Fletch sat forward. “What?”
“Well, you just indicated you wanted to learn something.”
“What are you saying?”
“That little book, The Knife, The Blood. Those are my poems.”
Fletch stared at the blue-haired lady in the corner of the Agnes Whitaker Home’s recreation room. “You do like playing with words.”
“Very much,” she said firmly. “Very much.”
“Ex-pired husband. With sounds. Hay Ha Haw.”
“They’re good poems, aren’t they?”
“I think I believe you. The Poetry of Violence written by…”
“The few critics who reviewed the poems referred to them as that. ‘Poetry of Violence’? I suppose so. Poetry of Truth and Beauty. I don’t like labels.”
“Your writing those poems changes the meaning of them altogether.”
“Does it? It shouldn’t.”
“It changes the perspective. The sidewalks of the city/ Offer up without pity/ Old ladies to be mugged. If you think a young man wrote that, it seems cruel. But if you know a sixty-year-old woman wrote it—”
“I don’t know about criticism. I know Tom needed to publish something, to keep himself employed at that university. His own poems wander around on black shoes like Donald. Never can get ahold of them. So verbose they should be verboten. Well, they are forbidden, essentially. Couldn’t get them published. So I gave him mine. He has my five grandchildren to support.”
“My God. Life is crazy.”
“Interesting thought.”
“Tom talks as if he wrote those poems!”
“He’s supposed to. It’s a secret, you see. Even Nancy doesn’t know. You mentioned perspective. Who’d publish the poems of a little old lady in a private mental home? Tom is a university professor. If he presents something to a publisher, at least it will be read. Right? I can’t help it if the world’s perspective is crazy.”
“When people are corrupt enough to oblige lies, you oblige them.”
“Tom’s working on the second volume now. I’m helping him. It’s very difficult for him, you see. When a person has to lecture almost every day in fifty-minute lumps, it must be nearly impossible for him to think in terms of a simple, concise line, each word pulling more than its own weight, a cadence that works in the briefest moment. Don’t you think?”
“I have no idea.”
“But you see, I, on the other hand, have lived more or less in silence. A silence so profound that when a sound, a word emerges into it, I realize it in the most complete sense, hear it, feel it, touch it, taste it, turn it over and over, in its isolation, in my isolation. Sound, to Tom, in his busy life, with five children, must be resisted, somewhat. Sound to me is cherished, and I coax it into fullness, into meaning.”
“Explored, exploited, explained, exploded,” Fletch said. “Expired.”
“I do think I’ve identified for Tom a previously unadmitted, shall we say? source of beauty. He’s getting the hang of it. Pretty soon some of these poems will be entirely his.” Louise Habeck looked around the recreation room. “And pretty soon it will be time for supper.”
“There’s a story I’ve heard,” Fletch said slowly, “that Donald Habeck was taking a turn for the religious.”
“Donald was always religious,” Louise Habeck said.
“No one else seems to think so.”
Louise Habeck shrugged.
“He was a liar,” Fletch said. “A paid liar, a professional liar. You yourself said you wouldn’t believe him if he told you he was dead.”
“A liar has a regard for the truth such as the rest of us do not have,” Louise Habeck said. “A liar believes that truth is somehow difficult, mysterious, mystical, mythical, unobtainable, to be pursued. I’ll bet you that while Demosthenes was wandering the earth, searching for an honest man, he was selling gold bricks on the side and cheating his landlords. To the rest of us, truth is as obvious, as common, as plain, as a simple poem.”
“Would you believe Donald would retire into a monastery?”
“Oh, yes. It would be just like him. Just what he would do. He was forever poring over religious tracts, books of sermons, proofs of this and that.”
“How could his children not know that?”
“They know nothing about him, other than what they read in the newspapers. Nobody did. After you read about Donald in the newspapers, you don’t want to know him.”
“Did he ever take instruction in any religious faith?”
“All of them. That’s how he spent most of his evenings. That’s why I never saw him. The children never saw him. Never knew him.”
“Listen,” Fletch said softly, “Donald Habeck had a mighty unusual lady we both know committed to a mental institution.”
“Yes,” Louise Habeck said. “Me. It was very kind of Donald, very correct. Living here is much nicer than living with him. I get to watch other people eat. All of the people here” —she waved her arm around the room— “are better company than Donald was. I come and go as I please. People give me rides. They talk to me, usually. I tell them stories about Peru. And Donald was right: I was buying rather too many washing machines and lawn mowers.”
“Have you ever been to Peru?”
“No, but neither have they.”
“Mrs. Habeck, your son is a monk who can’t find peace. Your daughter and grandchildren live in squalor. Your son-in-law is a pudgy impostor.”
“What does that have to do with Donald?”
“Donald could have helped them, gotten help for them, at least have been accessible to them, tried to know them, see them.”
Louise Habeck stared at the floor between them for a long moment. “Donald wandered away,” she said, “after God. I hated him for it.” Somewhere in the building a soft gong sounded. Her eyes rose to meet his. “The poetic irony would be,” she said, “if Donald were shot before he could escape his life of lies.”
“Did you shoot him?”
She smiled. “At least now I know where he is.”
People were hurrying out of the room.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you out the side door. It’s much simpler than going through all that rigamarole at the front door. Your not signing in would confuse your signing out.”
“Thanks for doing my laundry,” he said, following her. “Although your delivery system leaves something to be desired.”
Walking down the corridor ahead of him, she said, “Washing your clothes, I came to love you.”
At the Emergency Egress Only, Fletch said, “Okay if I come by someday and take you for a cup of tea?”
Louise Habeck shook her head. “I doubt I’ll be thirsty.”