JERRY told me afterward that LeNormand’s living room, into which we were shown by a red-eyed domestic, had not changed in a single detail from his recollection of it. The room was square, with two windows on the street and another on a side yard; you entered it from the central hall through a wide double doorway. There were two Morris chairs with faded upholstery, a lumpy-looking sofa with a cretonne cover, several bridge lamps of the sort sold at the co-op for students’ rooms, a small, rather ugly mahogany bookcase with glass doors, and on the walls three or four pictures obviously not selected by the University Art Department. On the center table was a litter of magazines and two untidy ash trays. In short, it was a bachelor’s room and plainly the habitation of a man who did not care much how things looked.
What astonished me was the complete absence of the feminine touch. Brides, particularly those of recent standing, generally make an immediate, if superficial, attack upon the bachelor dowdiness of their husbands’ quarters. They run to new curtains, and vases of flowers, and what they often call “touches of color to brighten the place up a bit.” But there was nothing of that nature here. The room was exactly as it must have been before LeNormand married. The air smelled faintly of tobacco smoke, and I noticed in one of the ash trays a black, battered pipe with the marks of his teeth on the bit. The sight of it irritated me; I felt that it would have been more decent to put it out of sight.
Prexy, Jerry, and I stood around in the room, not quite knowing what to do with ourselves. I wanted to smoke but wondered if it was the proper thing, and decided not. Jerry’s look was fixed almost apprehensively on the open doorway; once he put his hands in his pockets and then took them out again immediately. For no good reason the tune of “Deep in the Heart of Texas” started running in my head. I wanted to whistle it and just caught myself with my lips already puckered. Prexy was studying a mezzotint of an old mill by moonlight as though the thing were the work of a master.
When we heard the sound of steps on the stairs we knew she was coming. It was a slow, uneven tread, with something apathetic in it. Most of all, it seemed to me heavy and slipshod, as though she did not care how clumsily she placed her feet. Then she came into the room.
The human imagination is an odd thing. Prexy had said that some people might consider Mrs LeNormand the most beautiful woman in the world, and my mind had been busy creating an image of the woman to whom, had I been Paris, I should have awarded the golden apple. She did not look anything like the figure I had constructed in my mind. The first thing I saw about her was that she was atrociously badly dressed. Dowdy was the only word I could think of to describe her appearance.
She had on a dark, rough tweed skirt, badly cut, so that the hem line was uneven. Above it was a neutral-color knitted sweater with unbecoming half-length sleeves. Her stockings were the wrong shade for the skirt and her shoes a pair of new Oxfords badly scuffed at the toes. The whole effect was precisely what I should have looked for from LeNormand’s wife, but I had been waiting to see a beautiful woman. My first sensation was one of relief. Grace and her butterfly philosophy of life had made me leery of beautiful women. Prexy’s characterization of Mrs. LeNormand had disturbed me. But this creature—! It would be easy to fob off a few banal and sympathetic remarks and make a swift exit. She was just a person, nothing more.
As I looked at her a second time I saw with a rush of astonishment that I was wholly wrong. The clothes did not belong to her. It was as impossible to imagine her in modern dress as to think of the Winged Victory in tennis shorts. She was tall, almost six feet, and neither slender nor in any place too full. Her hair, untidily collected at the nape of her neck, was the color of winter sunlight, and her eyes, set wide apart below level eyebrows, were a dark, violet blue. Underneath the incongruity of her clothes was a body perfectly integrated, part with part, so that it had the unity of construction and harmony of relationship that great sculptors have now and again succeeded in capturing. In her body, in her hands with their strong, round fingers, in her face, there was strength, beauty, unity.
So far I have not mentioned her face. At the time, except in one particular, it did not appear to me as beautiful as I learned later, through seeing her often, that it was. Her features were strongly modeled and spaced so superbly from the wide, even forehead to the clean, springing line of the jaw that I had an impression of an abstraction or a conscious work of art which expressed not the beauty of a single woman but the essence of all women’s faces. She wore no make-up at all and her skin was so white that it seemed to shine like silver in the shadow of the doorway. Her lips were pale, if anything, but against the clear pallor of her skin they were almost startling. It was almost the face of Pallas Athene, if you like, and yet there was nothing of the goddess about her. Something was missing.
Looking at her as she came toward us, I wondered what it was. I could see no grief or shock in her expression, and not much of anything else. There seemed to be no life in her. As she walked I half expected she would drag her feet with each step. Her face was simply vacant. She hardly looked at us as she came into the living room, and her eyes were withdrawn, as if there was nothing on which it was worth their while to focus. The nearest I can come to a description of her is to say that she was like one of the beggars on a city street whose faces are indifferent to life because they no longer have anything to hope for from it. She was not tragic, or sorrowful, or frightened. She was simply indifferent.
The three of us had unconsciously lined up in an awkward row to meet her. She walked toward us and came to a halt, and I thought for a moment that she was hardly aware of our presence. Her eyes, at any rate, were not fixed on any one of us.
Prexy cleared his throat, bowed, and said, “Mrs LeNormand, may I present Mr Lister and Mr Jones?”
We bowed too, and murmured sounds without meaning under our breaths.
She looked at each of us in turn but did not offer to shake hands or invite us to sit down. Indeed, throughout the whole short, incredible interview— I thought of it as an interview, and not a call or visit —she did nothing that an ordinary woman would do. The glance she gave me when Prexy introduced me was blank, devoid of any expression. I might as well have been a piece of furniture. When she spoke her voice was consistent with the rest of her. It had inflection and beautiful clarity and control, but there was something not in it that I missed. Some color, a small imperfection of tone or accent that would have made it the voice of a person.
She said, “I want to thank you for what you did for my husband.” There was no obvious emotion behind those twelve short words.
Even then, the words themselves were something of a surprise to me. I felt they composed a statement, that they were her idea of the proper, appropriate thing to say. And “my husband!” Why had she not said “for what you did for Walter”— surely it was more natural to use the name she must have called him by? There was in the whole speech a quality I definitely did not like. Perhaps the two first-person pronouns. I looked quickly at Jerry to see what he might be thinking about this woman and what she had just said.
He was muttering something like “sorry we could not have come sooner, been of some real use,” but his expression, the tone of his voice startled me. I had lived too long with him not to know when he was being natural and when not. Decidedly, this was not any side of his character that I knew. He was on the defensive, and not because of the awkwardness of the situation. And it was more than de-fensiveness, it was an awareness of danger. At the time I could not have put it so precisely, but he was like a man who, dining with the Borgias, has just felt the harsh rasp of the poison in the wine but seeks to conceal what he is feeling.
She noticed it, I am positive of that, and for an instant she hesitated, looking at him. Then she said, “It is very good of you to come to see me. President Murray has told me of your bravery.”
She kept on looking at him until Jerry began to flush. And as I watched her I saw something happen to her face. The vacancy of her look began to disappear. Interest came into her eyes. She seemed to collect herself, to shake off some stupor which had been on her, and to return to the present world. It was astonishing, and I did not entirely like it. There was a dispassionate quality to her inspection of Jerry that was far from complimentary. Whatever it was that was waking in her, it had an unusual effect on me. I wanted to take a step backward, to keep it at more than arm’s length until I understood it better. But after all, it was not directed at me. Jerry appeared ill at ease but plainly he did not resent her look as much as I did. He returned it, in fact.
“Yes,” she said again, “you were brave. Both of you.” The second sentence sounded like an afterthought.
We deprecated her praise, told her it was nothing. There was really no bravery in what we had done, or at least it did not seem so to me at the time. Perhaps I was wrong about that, and she was wise. To her the whole thing may have worn a different aspect.
She turned to me and said directly, “He was dead when you found him?”
The entire interview seemed so strange that her question caught me napping. The picture of LeNormand’s eyes moving leaped to my mind, and I must have hesitated a fraction of a second.
“Yes.” Jerry spoke swiftly, emphatically. “I want to tell you, Mrs LeNormand, that when we first saw him his face was very calm. I am sure he suffered no agony at all. The—the details are horrible, I know, but I have the feeling that he must have died without pain.”
“It helps to know that,” she said carefully. After a moment, still looking at Jerry, she went on. “I cannot understand his death. There is no reason for it.”
Prexy said, “You mustn’t think about it.”
“I know,” she replied, “I know. You must not think me strange for asking these questions. The answers to them may help me to stop going over and over it in my mind.”
“If there’s anything more we can tell you—” Jerry said.
She turned to him again with a curious intensity. “It will seem a foolish woman’s question to you, Mr Lister, but he didn’t leave any message, any note, anything to explain what happened to him?”
Jerry shook his head. “There was nothing, Mrs LeNormand. I am sure he did not know he was going to die.”
“No,” she said. “Of course not. But sometimes, when he was staying all night with his telescope, working, he sent me notes to say that he would not be home. If there was such a note as that, I should iike to know of it.”
A little wind had sprung up from the Sound, and the trees were whispering in the dark. Under the starshine the water of the bay was moving, the ripples coming faintly toward us and making the Sound seem like a river, flowing out of invisibility and pouring itself on the shore. As I watched it, the illusion of a current was so perfect that I had to remind myself there was no flow, no current there, but only the eternal, unchanging reservoir of the sea.
“Of course,” I said to Dr Lister, “I can repeat the words we said, or something like them, but I cannot reproduce a conversation. Expression, the posture of bodies, the pitch and timbre of voices, the gestures, are all lost in the retelling.“
He had been listening to me with the most extraordinary attention. “I understand that, naturally. . . Neither of you ever told me what was said when you first met her.”
“It’s odd,” I went on, “how quick one is, at moments like that, to take things at their surface value. When she said to Jerry, ‘It will seem like a foolish woman’s question to you, Mr Lister,’ I think we both accepted her estimate of what she was saying. Now it does not seem at all like a normal question to me. And her story about the notes LeNormand used to send to her. Does that sound credible to you?”
“No,” he answered.
“You see, these are things that I have been fitting together in my mind. They are all small things, but they add up to something.”
He nodded. “You think she knew all along . . . ?” His question did not finish itself; none of the questions I had asked myself over and over ever quite completed themselves.
“When LeNormand died,” I reminded him, “she was at home. The cook was still there, washing dishes. She saw her there, sitting in the living room, three times in that half hour. She could not have done it—physically impossible.”
For several moments he was silent, thinking. “Perhaps there was a plot. Some accomplice.” His voice sounded as if he could think of the answers to that as easily as I.
“She gained nothing by LeNormand’s death. What sort of plot could there have been?”
He nodded. He was beginning to lose some of his confidence in his own power of intellectual analysis, I think.
Her question about a note from LeNormand had astonished me. Never once in Jerry’s picture to me of the man had I got the idea that he was capable of thinking of anything or anyone else after he once started to work. It was impossible to think of him writing: “Darling—can’t make it home for supper. Don’t wait up for me; I’ll be here late.”
“There wasn’t any note,” I blurted out. “We looked at his papers. They were just some equations.”
“Ah,” she said quickly, and her tone did not quite convey disappointment. “Equations.” And then, after a moment, “You mean, just notes about his work?”
“Yes,” Prexy said gently. “Mathematical symbols that he used to express the relationships of things.”
“Thank you.” Her voice was still perfectly level. “I should like to have the last things he used and wrote.” It was a natural sort of request, but somehow it surprised me a little.
“I’m afraid the police will have to keep them, for a time at least.” Prexy sounded almost as though he were explaining something to a child.
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
Jerry said quietly, “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry Bark and I feel about this, Mrs LeNormand. Your husband and I were friends. If there is anything at all we can do for you, please feel that we’ll be only too glad to do it.”
She looked gravely at him for several seconds. “Thank you. It is very kind. If there is anything, I shall most surely call upon you.”
In the awkward pause that followed, Prexy cleared his throat. “Mrs LeNormand,” he said, “if you would like me to get in touch with any members of your family, or his, make any—er—travel arrangements, I shall be only too happy.”
She seemed for the first time at a loss. “I do not know anything about Mr LeNormand’s family. . . . He never spoke of a family. ... I don’t know what is the right thing to do.”
We were all deeply surprised, I think, but Prexy recovered himself quickly. “I understand,” he said soothingly. “I shall see what I can find out. Doubtless in England . . . And what about your own family?”
She shook her head. “I have no one to notify.”
“No one?” Prexy’s voice was, for all his control, clearly incredulous.
“No one at all,” she said with a faint smile.
“I see.” But it was plain that Prexy did not see, that she had baffled him, thwarted him in some way not clear to me at the moment.
“When I have had a few days to think this all over,” she went on, “I shall consult you, if I may, as to what is best for me to do.”
“Certainly. I shall be only too glad.” Prexy’s voice sounded stiff.
“Please,” she said, looking at each of us in turn, “do not be too distressed. Do not worry about me. I shall be all right. And do not think of this dreadful thing which has happened. It will be best for all of us not to think too much about it. We must leave it to the police. Thank you all again for coming.” It was an incredible sort of speech for a woman in her situation; without waiting for any reply from us, she turned, left the room, and went up the stairs. I noticed now with what flawless, integrated grace she moved, and how, under her clumsy clothes, her body was a moving statue, incredibly changed into flesh and blood.
For a moment the three of us stood there, staring foolishly after her. The sound of her footsteps died out along the upstairs hall.
“Well!” Prexy’s tone was incredulous and for the instant distinctly irritated, but he covered it up smoothly by going on at once. “Since there is nothing more we can do for Mrs LeNormand—”
We went out at once; I was last through the door, and as I went I felt for an instant as though there was something at my back. The click of the latch behind me was pleasant.
Prexy said good-by to us on the sidewalk in front of the house; he thanked us for coming and promised to keep in touch with us about the progress of the investigation. Again, in a fatherly way, he warned us against talking about what had happened. Then he was off, his broad shoulders square, his step, as Charles Lamb once said, “peremptory and path-keeping.” We watched him go in silence.
“And now, what?” I asked.
“Let’s see if the car is still there,” suggested Terry, “and if it is, let’s get the hell out of this place.” He glanced swiftly up and back at the house behind us as we swung off toward the bowl.
It was a cold, clear Sunday. The November sun lighted every twig of tree and detail of building as we crossed the campus. The chapel bell was tolling with bronze insistence as we walked, and our feet scrunched loudly in the gravel.
Without my overcoat, the air had a shrewd bite to it, and I should have been uncomfortable had I not been too busy thinking to notice how I felt. The interview with Mrs LeNormand, as I went over it in my mind, bothered me more and more. There is no predicting how people will react to tragedy and disaster, and I realized that because Mrs LeNormand had not behaved or spoken as I expected a grief-stricken widow to do, I yet had no right to see anything queer or unnatural about it. But there was a flavor to the interview that eluded me, that I could not put a name to, but which I definitely disliked. I thought of her as she came down the stairs, of the way she looked at us and specially at Jerry, when she talked, of the extraordinary quality of her beauty. I tried to imagine her married to LeNormand, their courtship, their sharing a common bed. It was all incredible. She was no more to be imagined in any of those ways than her magnificence was to be confused with the shabby clothes she had been wearing. I thought about those clothes for a while. I felt that if I could understand them I should have learned something about her.
“Jerry,” I began tentatively, and stopped.
“What?”
“Those clothes she wore. Did you notice them?”
“No.” There was a suggestion of reproof in his voice, but I disregarded it.
“Well,” I said, “they were terrible. Dowdy and unbecoming and inappropriate and messy and the kind of thing you can imagine a Bryn Mawr senior’s wearing and no one else.”
He glanced at me with a little frown. “I don’t see what you’re trying to say.”
“I was wondering,” I said carefully, “why she dressed like that.”
“Good God,” Jerry replied in amazement, “what do you expect? Paris fashions when her husband’s not yet cold—?” He bit off the end of the sentence.
“Easy, easy,” I said. “Whatever she wore this morning, it had to be something she already had. I can’t believe a woman like that would ever dress herself in that skirt, that sweater, those shoes.”
He saw that I was in earnest. “Well, I didn’t notice especially what she had on, but I’ll take your word that it offended your aesthetic eye.” He paused and said, half to himself, “Though if you have an aesthetic eye—well, shoot, what’s on your mind?”
“Well,” I went on doggedly, feeling foolish, “I just wondered if LeNormand had bought those clothes for her.”
“It’s possible. What of it?”
“Several things of it. One is that I never got the idea from you or from LeNormand the few times I saw him that he was the sort who would buy any woman clothes, not even his wife.”
Jerry grinned. “No, you’re right there. But the only thing that proves is he probably didn’t buy them after all.”
I tried again, another way. “She is a very beautiful woman,” I said, “and beautiful women almost always know they are. And they don’t dress to conceal the fact.”
“She didn’t conceal it.”
“Damn it,” I said, “you don’t get the point. Those clothes were too wrong for her even to own them. For one thing, she’s too intelligent—”
That was it, of course! Why hadn’t I realized it before? She was too intelligent. Too intelligent. For all her beauty and her strangeness, it was the quality of mind that had most impressed me about her. The way she had questioned us, the precision and calculation of everything she had said after the first minute or so came back to me in a rush. She had not been speaking from grief or even loneliness. There had been something she wanted to find out from us, something she had found out from us. Perhaps more than one thing. At any rate, she had cross-examined us mercilessly and directly, and I’d been such a dunce I had not even realized she was doing it. I felt my mental pulse begin to quicken. If that was so, what did it mean?
The first conclusion I came to was a disappointing one. Neither her beauty nor any mystery about her was necessary to explain her marriage to LeNormand. He had met someone intellectually equal to himself. She was a woman, and so he had married her. Perhaps she had been as surprised, as glad as he must have been to find, in a world of little people thinking small, imprecise thoughts, a person of the same intellectual size and efficiency. The very fact, I thought, that LeNormand was such a lonely man, so little in need of people, must have made the attraction between them deep and strong. It was natural they should have married, natural even, I had to admit, that she should care nothing at all for clothes. Perhaps it was inevitable that she had reacted to the news of his death in a purely mental, impersonal sort of way. The quality they had in common would make anything more customary for the rank and file of humanity out of place—a psychological absurdity. People with minds as strong and clear as I realized upon reflection hers must be were more likely to be stoical and self-contained. I began to feel I’d been scenting mystery where there was none.
“I don’t see,” Jerry was saying, “what intelligence has to do with the clothes a woman wears, necessarily.”
“All right,” I conceded somewhat crossly, “forget it. I had an idea, but on second thought it isn’t so hot.”
“One thing,” said Jerry. “It’s no mystery now why LeNormand married her. Prexy was right. She damn well is the most beautiful woman in the world.“
“She’s certainly one of the most intelligent.”
“Maybe.” He did not sound particularly interested.
“You needn’t try to be that way,” I said to him, with a little prickle of annoyance beginning to come into my tongue, “I saw you look at her when she started to cross-examine us.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Listen,” I said to him patiently, “when she began asking us all those questions, I saw you go on guard. Mentally, I mean. You got something right then that I’ve only just doped out.”
“For Christ’s sake, Bark!” His voice was sharp for an instant and he checked himself immediately afterward. Then he looked at me and grinned. “No man can remain a mystery to his roommate, I suppose. Well—” he paused and thought a moment— “you’re about half right. Something did go through my mind. I’ll admit that. You go on looking into the crystal globe of my character a bit more, and you ought to be able to tell what it was.”
He was nice about it, but the snub was there just the same. We walked on in silence, I a good deal annoyed at him and he apparently sunk in some thought that did not include me or my annoyance.
The car was still there, solitary in the parking field and looking like a monument. We got in it and started back to New York without saying anything more. It was bitter cold and we stopped once along the way to have a drink from Jerry’s flask.
All the way back there was an emptiness inside me, a Sunday Weltzschmerz, due, I suppose, to nervous fatigue. Perhaps a few more drinks or a couple of sodamints would have cured the feeling of foreboding which haunted me, but I don’t believe so. Some subliminal part of my mind must have understood that the die of the future was cast, and that Jerry and I were headed toward different lives from any we had known thus far.