I See You Read online

  In this peculiar phalanx they moved, they swept along. If anyone chanced or dared to stand in their path, the whole formation could veer without altering their relative positions. The girl simply kept stepping in that strange proud blind way and her three escorts kept bulking, just behind, as if the four of them defied all that might break them apart even when, as a unit and quite flexibly, they yielded and they threaded through. The sweep and rhythm, the rigidity of their march—and something in their cold eyes—made it unnecessary for them to swerve very often.

  When they had gone by, Miss Murphy feigned a decision, closed her hand about the cards, and turned toward the principal’s office. The little shivering ride along her nerves was like a drug she took in secret.

  Was there not integrity in them? In their very scorn? In the imperial air itself, the nerve it took, the calm arrogance of their strange and self-sufficient alliance, the very coldness of their eyes? Was this not somehow magnificent? What would it be to live like that? To have no truck with a thousand nervous little conformities, to resign from the anxiety to please those in authority, to walk so proudly, to be like Ivy Voll, Queen and Head Slave of however small a kingdom, however evil? What could goodness, civilization, propriety, offer that could compare?

  Mr. Madden came up behind her. “Coming to see me? After you, Miss Murphy …”

  She had an uneasy feeling that she had been caught this time.

  The principal sat down behind his desk. A thin man, he was, with a stiff body and stiff white hair. He took off his glasses and massaged his eyes. “How I wish we could reach those four,” he sighed, “before we lose them. Do you have any ideas, Miss Murphy?”

  “I? Why no, I’m afraid not,” she said, knowing that she had indeed been caught since he spoke directly to what he had known was in her mind. “I have these for your file, sir.”

  He did not even look at the cards. “Have you ever tried to get at them individually?”

  “I think everyone has tried,” she said in her bright everyday voice.

  Privately she didn’t think it was any use. For taken one by one, neither the girl nor any of the boys was formidable. Ivy Voll was of no importance in the school’s closed society. She was an indifferent student, and did not compete in any usual ways. The boys were, none of them competing athletes, none of them politicians or joiners. It was their alliance alone that gave them identity. And the alliance was old. She seemed to remember it taking shape during the last quarter of their sophomore year. Now they were seniors. So the alliance was old and it was strong and Miss Murphy did not think that Mr. Madden or any of his staff could break it up before spring came.

  “If we do not help them,” he said and shook his head.

  Help them? thought Miss Murphy daringly to herself. Help them to what? To obscurity and humble place? After this strange, almost mystic thing that gives them status?

  “I am asking your advice because it seems to me—I don’t know how to put this, Miss Murphy—but it seems to me that your approach may be a little different.”

  Miss Murphy flushed. “It’s true that I have tried very hard to understand, from their point of view,” she said piously.

  “Yes?” he said.

  Sometimes Miss Murphy shuddered to think of any possible point of view for the girl, Ivy … or of her possible relationship with those three males, which could scarcely be that of three parfait gentle knights to a fair lady. But this was only one facet of the problem. Not much had been proven against the four this year. Although much was believed and even more suspected. They were almost certainly still vandals. The year before they had been caught twice and lectured and let off. This year they had learned how not to leave any clues behind them. They were bullies, of course, and had been openly so last year. This year they were more skillful, and used pressure and threat instead of blows.

  Nevertheless, Miss Murphy said earnestly, “Mr. Madden … separately they aren’t significant. They have welded themselves into this unit because it gives them meaning—”

  “I don’t like the meaning,” he interrupted sharply.

  “No, no, of course not,” she said hastily, “but just the same—they use some qualities we can admire.”

  “What do you consider those to be?” the principal said flatly.

  “They are loyal to each other—”

  “Are they? Have they ever been tested?”

  “They show,” said Miss Murphy, “a certain courage. Courage in itself should be worth something.”

  “Many criminals have courage,” said Mr. Madden, “and often they have power and power is often glamorous.”

  It was a fair hit and Miss Murphy knew she was flushing. “And these four have achieved a certain amount of power and glamour, pretty young and pretty cheap,” he went on. “Tell me how to jolt them out of that. And make them substitute the kind of power and glamour that you can work for for fifty years.…”

  Miss Murphy found herself thinking, Yes you can work for it and hard for fifty years or for a hundred years, and never get it. And she thought, Just the same, just the same, there is something strong and bold and magnificent—about taking it. Now.

  “I’ve talked to their people myself,” the principal was saying wearily, “and it gets us nowhere. The parents simply do not know. Ivy’s mother and father think of her as a perfectly ordinary young girl, not too bright, not too enthusiastic, not doing too well in her studies … but ‘popular.’ Lord help us! Stan’s father thinks he is grown and he’s quite complacent about it. ‘Let the kid alone,’ he says. Ross’s folks are financially harassed this year and they are so frantically absorbed in their troubles that the boy goes unnoticed. He merely appends to them. As for Tentor, he lives with grandparents who write him off in one sentence. He is seventeen. Once they were seventeen and they survived. They expect him to do the same.”

  He sighed and raised his eyes to her. “So they’ve come up like weeds. And we have failed with them. I wish you could tell me how to change the basic wrong and rotten thing.”

  “They defy the group,” she stammered, “they don’t conform.”

  He stared at her and said, “My soul, my soul … if that were all …” Then he got out of his chair, shaking off that moment of despair. “I will tell you this,” he said. “The moment, if it comes, that they are fairly caught … I will do all I can to blacken their records. I will feed them into the hands of juvenile experts, and police psychiatrists. I can afford no more weak and hopeful wishes about these four. There isn’t time.”

  He smiled at her to let down the tension. “Thanks, anyway,” he said gently.

  Miss Murphy went away in some confusion.

  Just the same, just the same … her mind kept saying. The four of them are so strong. The wide world, she thought, might use them, just as they were—out there where the wicked sometimes flourish like the green bay tree.

  She did not think the school could change them now. She herself would miss the sight of them. The school would miss something when next year the four would not be back.

  Miss Murphy wished she could, in the few weeks remaining, set up a contact for herself. What she had long tried to do was project toward them the sound friendly give-and-take attitude she held toward other students … even as they looked through her with those icy eyes. (They looked through anybody over twenty. Their eyes could pass over you so blankly that you wanted to pinch yourself.) Maybe she had been wrong not to betray to them how she felt she truly understood them.

  But maybe someday, somehow, and yet … she could reach them … without any motive to change them. There was a wicked excitement to this thought.

  Miss Murphy lived with her widowed sister Daphne, who was not well and in Miss Murphy’s memory never had been. Daphne was weak and low that evening. She had been sitting in the sun and had received an irritation of the skin. It was one of the misfortunes of Daphne that nature never did her good. Sun, air, wind, fire or earth, all these usually turned out to have harmed her superdelicate sensibil
ities.

  About a quarter of nine, Daphne discovered that her peach-colored pills had run out, the ones she took before bed. So Miss Murphy set forth to the neighborhood drugstore, with her normal cheerful willingness to serve.

  It was a pleasant evening and she enjoyed walking the four blocks, the seeing into other people’s houses now that the lights were on, the glimpsing of a bridge game or a lonely TV watcher, or a family dinner party lingering late at table because everyone was reluctant to leave the quips and the teasings to wash the dishes. Miss Murphy enjoyed all the dear mild suburban world.

  The little cluster of shops was darkened. Only the drugstore was still in business at this hour. Miss Murphy had a pleasant exchange of commonplaces with the clerk, received her package and left with a cheerful “Good night.”

  But as she drew even with the dark and silent gas station, she began to wonder about Daphne’s lotion. Was it low, too? From old experience, Miss Murphy felt she had better call up home and ask. For the drugstore was about to close, as the hour closed to nine o’clock, and she would not have time to return tonight and if Daphne were uncomfortable …

  So Miss Murphy, both kind and shrewd in the matter, left the sidewalk, stepped into the green phone booth that stood against the stucco outside wall of the office of the service station.

  As she pulled the thin flaps of the door shut, the light failed to go on but, after firming the door as best she could, Miss Murphy made nothing of the semidarkness, which was not very important, and hopefully put her dime in.

  Nothing happened. The phone was dead and dumb. It must be out of order. Turning her mind to the prospect of going back and calling from the drugstore itself—Miss Murphy took a full minute to discover and realize that she could not open the door of the booth. It was out of order, too, in a very stubborn way. She could not get out of the dark phone booth. She was imprisoned in this upright coffin with no way to telephone for help.

  It was a ridiculous entrapment.

  Nine o’clock of a spring evening and Miss Delphine Murphy had gotten herself locked into a telephone booth!

  She peered out through the glass fighting a sudden feeling of suffocation which was purely subjective. She could tell by reflections on the sidewalk that some of the lights in the drugstore were going out. Then she was able to make out the figure of the clerk, as he emerged and as he locked the door. Miss Murphy rapped on the glass with the metal clasp of her purse, making all the noise she decorously could, but he strode away in the opposite direction.

  Never in her life before had Miss Murphy been in a position to cry out for help … to lift up her voice. She couldn’t decide what to shout. To shout “Help” seemed absurd. It seemed quaint and ridiculous like something out of a comic strip. Nevertheless, she had to shout something so she called, “HI … HI … Hi there!” The clerk vanished into the reaches of the parking lot at the other side of the drugstore, and in a little while his car rattled out into the street and turned to go off the other way, so that it did not pass her. Now the whole small business section was abed for the night.

  Traffic on this street was rather thin. Miss Murphy was not in absolute darkness because the streetlight was shedding down upon the gas station corner. But neither was she very visible in her little prison and the passing cars made nothing of the fact that the door to the phone booth was shut. Perhaps they could not even see that this was so.

  Miss Murphy resolved that she must take the desperate measure of breaking the glass. It was a shock to discover that she could not break it, that the glass was very tough, and had embedded in it, besides, a wire mesh. When the heel of her shoe had no more effect than had her elbow, she began to be afraid.

  The fear whistled around her head like a bird and lit upon the name of her sister, Daphne. Miss Murphy had the medicine. Daphne was alone and not feeling well and was easily visited by swarms of wild dreads and melodramatic forebodings. Daphne would miss her soon. Daphne would think that something terrible had happened to her. Daphne would know that her sister never never would delay deliberately her return with the medicine. So Daphne would be frantic and to be frantic was very bad for her.

  Miss Murphy felt frantic for Daphne’s sake. But after a minute or two, she knew she was frantic for herself. She was feeling claustrophobic. How was she going to get out … GET OUT … the words began to shout in her consciousness. GET OUT.

  She caught herself turning and twisting and pounding unreasonably on the glass when there was no one who could possibly have heard her. Miss Murphy took a hold upon herself and tried to think. The thing to do was stop someone. There did not seem to be any pedestrians. But there were cars. How could she stop a car? Peering with her cheek tight on the cold glass, Miss Murphy saw a convertible come gliding. It was cruising, going softly. It was not full of stern purpose. One could feel this. It seemed, almost, that this car, in the gentle evening, in the quiet streets of the town, was looking for trouble.

  Miss Murphy rapped on the glass and cried, “HI! HI! HI!”

  As the car slipped by, she saw who was in it.

  Stan Fuller was driving. The car, no cheap rattletrap jalopy, but a good-looking modern shining expensive car, was his. It was hard to say how the kids got these cars … they just did. It seemed that the intense desire, the absolute necessity of the young American to own a car generated its own satisfaction. So … Stan Fuller sat behind the wheel but it was as if the common agreement of the four of them directed the car’s cruising prowling motion. Ivy Voll sat in the middle and on the edge of the front seat, a little forward of the others, as was her assigned position. Tentor sat on her right, watching and guarding. Ross, who belonged on the left, was draped by his arms across the back of the seat behind Stan where he could project his watchfulness to the left, as was his station.

  Miss Murphy saw them go by, saw Stan and Ivy hold their heads to look straight forward, saw only Tentor peering to the right where she was so helplessly hidden.

  The sight of the four of them, on the prowl in a car, briefly intrigued her. But she was not out of her prison and she could not think how to get out.

  In about four minutes, she was astonished to see the convertible approach once more and from the same direction, as if it had circled.

  Then she was thrilled when it rocked gently over the gutter and slipped in upon the pavement of the service station. It rolled into the shadow of the laundry building that bounded this place. It stopped. The four of them sat there.

  Miss Murphy filled with relief and also with shame to be caught, and especially by them, in so undignified and ridiculous a situation, tapped primly upon the glass. She called out, “The door is jammed. Stan? Would you please try to open it? This is Miss Murphy. Jim Tentor? Ivy?”

  They did not appear to have heard her.

  So Miss Murphy kept on tapping and calling to them, repeating and repeating in a curious suspension of her own attention. She chose not to notice how much time was going by. But at last her wrist weakened and felt tired and her hand fell and her voice failed. She could see their heads. She began to think she could see their cold eyes, their expressions—as cold and baleful as wolves. She saw Stan put one huge foot up and hang it by the ankle over the far side of the car. She knew Ross had relaxed, for he had nothing to watch to the left now but the brick wall of the laundry. She saw Tentor, with neck arched, watching the street behind them. Ivy sat with her head high. Ivy lit a cigarette. They seemed to have settled themselves, as if this were a drive-in movie. Were they going to sit there and watch Miss Murphy turning in her trap?

  She did turn. She revolved in her cage. She tried the phone again. But nothing had happened to put it suddenly and obligingly back in working order. She braced herself to make no more appeals, to wait with some kind of dignity.

  But the thought of Daphne came again and she felt her nerve crack, her dignity wash out in rage.

  “Listen!” she cried. “Listen to me. My sister is ill. I have her medicine. I must get out. My sister is ill. She needs
her medicine! Medicine!” It should have counted, the appeal to medical necessity. It did count among the civilized. Did not planes fly with the serums, ambulances race, cops clear the way to the hospital? The world agreed that the medicine must get through.

  But the four of them were not moved.

  In a kind of last grasp after reason, Miss Murphy supposed she could not be heard. So she stopped her useless noise.

  She heard Ross say restlessly, “What’d say? Shall we stripe out?”

  And Ivy say, “What’s the hurry?”

  They spoke in ordinary conversational voices. Miss Murphy heard them. Therefore, they had heard everything she had been shouting—every frantic word of hers that still rang in her own ears.

  Miss Murphy’s head became filled with a red rage.

  She sank down, missed the seat, went all the way to the floor and felt at first an enormous relief. To be so degraded as to sit on a dirty floor and lean her clean forehead upon the worn wooden seat … to give up … to feel the first comforting rush of self-pity … Soon Miss Murphy was weeping.

  She would not look at them again. But they were looking at her. They could see her, crumpled where she was. They could even hear her sobbing. A little pride came back. She hushed herself and looked at her watch as best she could. It was 9:22. Twenty-two minutes had reduced her to this?

  She put her chin on her forearm, stared at the back wall of the booth and forced her mind to turn over. The gas station opened, she guessed, not much earlier than eight in the morning. This then was her earliest firm hope of release.

  Now she trembled and felt ill. She could endure. She must endure. But it was horrifying and primitive: it called upon reserves she had not used in years if ever. Long shudders of rage were going up and down her spine. She must not think, for even one moment, of the four of them or she might begin to pound her head upon the glass and hurt herself.