There are only two kinds of men: the dead, and the deadly.
—HELEN ROWLAND
THERESA
The Pickwick Arms, room 404, at the same time
WELL. YOU can imagine my surprise! The murderous Patent King himself, turning up at my hotel room, dressed in a clever red uniform like a monkey and unaccompanied by any visible member of the police force: local, state, or federal.
“Why, Mr. Faninal!” I exclaim, surveying the room for possible weapons. The pistol still lies in my pocketbook, tucked inside the drawer in the bedroom. “What a tremendous surprise. I thought you were in prison.”
He closes the door with his foot and sets down the tray on the nearest table. Mrs. Lumley utters a scream and runs for the bedroom.
“Where’s Virginia?” he says. “Where are my daughters?”
My gaze alights on the fire irons. I edge a half step toward the hearth. “They’re not here, I’m afraid. Miss Faninal is consoling herself in Manhattan with my fiancé, while Mrs. Fitzwilliam and her daughter have taken the train for Florida.”
“Florida!”
“Yes. Something to do with that absent husband of hers. She’s decided the time is ripe to claim her matrimonial rights, now that her father’s been convicted of murdering her mother. But what about—”
There’s no point in continuing my sentence, because Faninal’s gone and followed Mrs. Lumley into the bedroom. I hover for an instant, torn among fire irons and telephone and door. But I can’t leave poor Mrs. Lumley to face the wrath of her onetime lover, can I? Heavens, no. I reach for a poker, nice and heavy, and then dash for the telephone, dragging the poker behind me.
“Put that down!” Faninal says, from the bedroom doorway. He’s holding Mrs. Lumley by the arm, and the expression on her face is wide and stiff with terror.
I bring up the earpiece. “Nonsense.”
Faninal whips something out of his pocket and holds it to Mrs. Lumley’s throat. “Put it down!” he roars, and click! The earpiece goes back in the cradle.
If I were the Boy, I think, standing there next to the telephone, cold hand wrapped around my impossibly heavy poker, I would have knocked Faninal to pieces by now. I would have slung my poker into his head and brained him. But something’s stopping me. Maybe it’s the baby, tiny and fragile and infinitely dear; maybe it’s some flaw in my nature, some softness in my upbringing.
Maybe he can tell what I’m thinking. “Stay where you are,” he says, more softly, edging into the sitting room with his prize, step by step. He forces her down in an armchair and stands above her with that instrument of his: a kind of knife, except the blade has been sharpened into a point, like an old-fashioned dagger.
“You can’t possibly imagine you’re going to escape,” I say. “The police will come here first.”
“The police are already here,” he says.
“Then why did you come?”
“I wanted to see my daughters first.”
“First before what?”
His lips compress into a thin, pale line. He’s not going to tell me, of course. Why should he tell me, a stranger?
“Well, they’re not here,” I say, “so it’s all for nothing. I suggest you surrender yourself to the police at once. I can’t imagine what you hoped to accomplish by all this.”
Beneath his hands, Mrs. Lumley has begun to shiver. The whites of her eyes begin to show, and I realize her eyes are rolling back in her head. She slumps forward, and Faninal catches her just in time.
“I’ll get water!” I exclaim.
“No! Stay where you are.”
“My God! Don’t you care?”
There is a strange little silence. Around Faninal’s eyes, the tense lines soften, and his lips part. The hand holding the knife drops to rest on the back of the chair, and the other hand eases Mrs. Lumley back into the cushion. He turns for the tray on the lamp table, a few feet away, and for some reason I don’t press my advantage. I stay right where I am, between the fireplace and the telephone, clutching my iron poker.
Faninal takes a napkin from the tray and wets it with a little water from the pitcher. He comes around to the front of the chair and presses the cloth to Mrs. Lumley’s temples, almost tenderly, and I hear him mutter something under his breath, though I can’t make out the words.
During the trial, the defense devoted an entire day of testimony to the subject of Mr. Faninal’s background. How he came from an old and respectable (though not precisely distinguished ) Boston family; how he met Mrs. Faninal at a Cambridge party and fell in love; how they settled in Greenwich because Mrs. Faninal did not like city life, and how her parents—several rungs higher on that implacable Brahmin ladder—weren’t all that pleased with Mr. Faninal’s unsociable habits and obsession with engineering: his dirty hands, in other words. (The middle-class jury, I expect, was supposed to feel sympathy for his predicament—the man cast away from his wife’s blue-blooded family, I mean, for daring to work with his hands for a living.) Better to move elsewhere, then, somewhere away from all that familial friction, and Greenwich was so pretty and newly gentrified, the old farms now splitting up and filling with the country houses of the pedigreed people and their pedigreed horses. Mrs. Faninal fit right into Greenwich society, at first. Most of the seaside houses were occupied only seasonally, but the Faninals were year-round residents, and while the husband was considered a bit eccentric, the wife made friends at the garden club and the ladies’ committee at the local Congregational church. And eccentricity is always overlooked among country families; it’s almost a badge of pride, isn’t it? It’s only murder that gets you thrown out of the club, once you’re in. Murder and cheating at cards.
Now, I admit, these revelations gave me a new appreciation for Mr. Faninal. I suppose my native snobbery was appeased by the fact that—lo, behold!—he came from decent blood, after all. But you can’t quite forget those descriptions of the grisly Greenwich kitchen, the little girl weeping over her mother. Even as I fought to save him from conviction, I felt distaste. I felt the filthiness of what I was doing. I looked at his impassive face and thought maybe he wasn’t human; maybe he wasn’t worth saving, whatever my fine reasons for saving him.
But humanity isn’t so simple, you know. As Faninal sits in front of Mrs. Lumley and presses that linen against her temples, no one could accuse him of a lack of common feeling. And there’s the fact that he exists in this room at all. Why not simply disappear, when he had the chance? Almost as if he never actually meant to escape at all. As if he told me the truth, a moment ago: he only wants to see his daughters outside of a prison’s four walls, without bars or guards or guilt.
“Mr. Faninal,” I say softly, “have you anything to say to me?”
Mrs. Lumley’s eyelids move. Faninal’s hand falls away, and there is a moment, brief and precious, filled with nothing but a kind of reverent interior silence. A bird whistles through the open window. A car engine roars down the nearby avenue. The morning sun beats and beats against the awning.
“Why, you didn’t murder her, did you?” I whisper.
He presses his lips together.
“Why don’t you say anything? Are you covering for someone?”
“No—”
“Who is it? For whom are you covering, Mr. Faninal?”
“Monty,” murmurs Mrs. Lumley, or maybe it’s a moan.
The poker drops to the ground, making a soft thump on the Oriental rug. I fumble for the telephone beside me. As my fingers touch the earpiece, a sharp knock rattles the door. “Virginia!” calls a female voice.
Faninal jumps to his feet and lifts the knife. His face turns urgently toward me.
“Who is it?” I call, all singsong, like one of the birds near the window.
Muffled by wood: “It’s Sophie.”
Now. I really don’t know Miss Faninal all that well, considering the many bonds that link us together. We’ve barely spoken to each other, isn’t that funny? But I’ve seen her day after day in court; I’ve examined, when I thought I could get away with it, all the details of her face and dress and manner. My rival. I’ve hated her and admired her, and hated that I admired her. I have come to comprehend—wretchedly, agonizingly—why the Boy can’t resist her, why my darling Boy has gone and fallen in love with this clean young creature.
But I haven’t come any closer to her than that, not even in her time of greatest need, when any woman could use a friend. I suppose, therefore, I’m not the best judge of her inner nature, of her true character. I’m not really in a position to understand the tone of her voice when she says, brightly, through the wooden door of a suburban hotel suite: It’s Sophie!
So there’s no reason at all that I should suspect something’s wrong, and yet, as Faninal drops his knife in relief and calls out Come in!, I release the earpiece of the telephone and bend down to grip the heavy iron poker with both hands.
The lock rattles; a key clinks loudly. I think—foolishly, since I already know the answer—Well, now, if she’s got a key, why did she knock first?
Then the door swings open, and Sophie herself appears under the lintel: pink of cheek, creamy of skin, slanted of eyebrow.
Accompanied by a man in a wrinkled brown suit.