I See You Read online

  “Tell me, have you permission to play here?” Beatrice sounded reasonable and kind.

  “We always play here.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to play away from the building?” Beatrice was gentle. “You really mustn’t bother other people, you know.”

  But the little girl did not know anything of the kind. She wiggled backwards, swinging her little hind-end sassily. “We always play here,” she shouted defiantly, and was off. Her pack streamed after.

  Beatrice came back to her bench, with her pretty smile on, saying to Janet apologetically, “I suppose this is a park to them. They are having so much fun.”

  I don’t know about that, thought Janet. She seemed to know, instead, that the little leader was bored, that she was faster than the rest and that this bored her. She is ahead, thought Janet. She shouldn’t be playing with younger and slower children.

  Beatrice sat down and said, “That one is a little rascal, I’m afraid, but isn’t she cute? I love children.”

  Oh ho, do you? Janet wondered. In the abstract? What do you know about rascals? She said aloud, old-ladyishly, “Have you any children, my dear?” She guessed the answer.

  “Not yet,” said Beatrice in a tone of reverence and faintly of apology.

  Janet shivered secretly within the coat. Not yet. But I have been, she thought. I have not only been a little girl, a rascal, wild with energy and too quick for the others, but I have already been a young wife, like you, and I, too, said I “loved children.” And I, too, did not know what I was talking about until my son was born. I have been a young mother and got through that terror. I have been a mother grown older. I have also been a middle-aged matron, like Monica, and in those days I, too, encased myself and tried to diet and wore whatever was the thing to wear and “kept up” and ran around to “meetings.” I have been a widow. I have been a well-to-do old lady with a companion to whom I could say anything I chose to say, and with friends who were not yet dead or immobilized. And am now, in this chair, a bag of bones, raddled and worn. Yet I am still Janet. Still Janet. Still all those Janets.

  Her mind abandoned this brooding and concluded, smartly, And that little girl is going to be compelled to tease us, now. I can remember.

  “This air is so fresh,” Beatrice was saying. “Isn’t it good?”

  “Yes,” said Janet. But so is the air of a cave, she thought, the frowst of human closeness, man and woman, mother and child, where we breathe each others’ breath. But no one will ever wish to be close to me, again. I, Janet, am one of those inside, where we shall sit in our separate chairs, after the nurses have washed us sweet and clean, and we shall all antiseptically watch television until we die.

  She seemed to be seeing the whole pageant of her woman’s life and she thought. It was beautiful and it was cruel. It is still a little beautiful and very cruel. But that is the law. The best she could do, from now on out, was to peer at the world’s magnificence through whatever chinks she could find in a day. And be as little trouble as possible.

  A challenging life, if you like, she thought, and said politely, “It is good of you to sit with me.”

  So it is, she thought wearily. It takes control and sacrifice to be bored with any grace at all.

  Then Beatrice stiffened. Something was coming. The little girl in the red plaid dress was flying along this path like an arrow. Full of mischief, under a compulsion to stir up some drama in this meaningless holiday, she ran deliberately too close. She did it to annoy. She stumbled over Janet’s footrest and went tumbling. The string of following children curled up on itself and watched, from afar.

  Janet had felt a hard jolt, but the chair had not capsized, her feet had felt nothing. “Are you hurt, Mrs. Brown?” Beatrice was on her feet, looking pale and responsible.

  “No. No.”

  Beatrice took strides to where the child was picking herself up as nimbly as she had fallen. One of her knees was red. It was nothing. So Beatrice took her by the shoulder and said in a fierce voice that Janet had not heard before, “Look, sister, I warned you and now you have had it. You … go home.” Gone was her blandness. “Do you hear me? What is your name?”

  The old lady in the chair could feel her heart beating, her blood stirring.

  The child, who had been yanked by the angry adult hand so that she was looking into Janet’s face, did not say what her name was. Janet, with a strong and marvelous thirst to remember how it was to be in that skin, was meeting the child’s eyes. They were a smoky blue in color, yet very clear, and now they widened.

  The little girl cried out, in a kind of shocked terror, “Hey, there’s somebody in there!”

  Then she wiggled away from Beatrice, ducked her sun-streaked locks and was off like a wild thing. Her battered sneakers spurted gravel.

  At the end of the path, Monica and Sally Beth were just stepping, side by side, through the gap in the hedge, from the parking lot. The child sensed their bulk, divined her only chance and in an instant took it, plunging through between them as their two bodies, encased like sausages in their stern girdles, each made a mighty swing at its middle to give her passage. The child was gone.

  Now the two ladies uttered twin belated hoots of soprano alarm and clutched each other, tottering on their spike heels, reminding Janet of a pair of bullikens on stilts. They were not hurt. They would not fall. The only thing that was upset was their dignity.

  Janet knew that her mouth was making a wolfish grin. (It was the teeth.) She knew her old eyes were bright with the mischief that was in the child that was still in her. But she grinned up at this Beatrice, because her heart had lightened so. She knew that life, beautiful and cruel, was also sometimes funny.

  “We survive,” she croaked, past the primitive laughter in her throat.

  But the young face above her did not put on its sweet political smile. Those eyes met hers. They were greenish eyes, a trifle slanted. The pupils were set in the corners, now, as the glance came sideways. The look was grave. It said, thoughtfully, I see you.

  Janet Brown was jolted. It was a collision. She covered her teeth. Why, there is somebody in there! she thought with a shock. Behind that smooth and charming face, there is a Beatrice who has been, and who will always be, among others, this Beatrice. As I am Janet.

  They turned, together, to greet the accumulated Monica, and the continuance of Sally Beth, in the beige and the blue.

  About the Author

  Edgar Award–winning Charlotte Armstrong (1905–1969) was one of the finest American authors of classic mystery and suspense. The daughter of an inventor, Armstrong was born in Vulcan, Michigan, and attended Barnard College, in New York City. After college she worked at the New York Times and the magazine Breath of the Avenue, before marrying and turning to literature in 1928. For a decade, she wrote plays and poetry, with work produced on Broadway and published in the New Yorker. In the early 1940s, she began writing suspense.

  Success came quickly. Her first novel, Lay On, MacDuff! (1942) was well received, spawning a three-book series. Over the next two decades, she wrote more than two dozen novels, winning critical acclaim and a dedicated fan base. The Unsuspected (1945) and Mischief (1950) were both made into films, and A Dram of Poison (1956) won the Edgar Award for best novel. She died in California in 1969.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1951, 1952, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1965, 1966 by Jack and Charlotte Lewi Family Trust

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4272-7

  This 2
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