The Albatross Read online

  “Audrey, if Esther saw that—”

  “She didn’t; she won’t dear. Nobody will.”

  “She doesn’t want us here, anyhow,” said Joan tensely.

  “You mustn’t say that, Joan,” chided Audrey. “What makes you say that?”

  Joan snorted. “Can’t you see? She watches you like a cat. You and Tom.”

  “Oh, Joan—surely …’”

  Esther had a sudden vision of a cat, licking its chops. The cat in her vision was a black cat.

  “She does,” hissed Joan. “She’d claw your eyes out.”

  “I don’t like to think …” demurred Audrey.

  “And you’d better not leave that envelope around, either.”

  “Hush, I won’t let her see it. Everything is going to be all right. You must not worry.”

  Esther pushed with her palms and her body came upright. Anger was a clear flame along her spine. She stepped around the corner.

  “What mustn’t she worry about?” said Esther bluntly. She stood very tall.

  Joan turned the wheel-chair. She yanked it around viciously. The strength and the power in the movement startled Esther. Joan glared.

  But Audrey gasped, one pale hand on her black bosom. “Esther, dear, how you made us jump! How can you move so lightly, such a big girl …?”

  “What is worrying you?” said Esther.

  “Nothing at all, really. I wouldn’t think of troubling you. Now, please, may I help with lunch? You never let me. You do so much, Esther. You make me feel quite useless.”

  “Can’t I help with what is worrying you?” Esther was stubborn.

  “It’s nothing to do with you,” croaked Joan.

  “I can see that it’s a secret,” said Esther with a sharp little sting in her tone.

  The phone rang. Audrey was nearest. “Yes? Oh, Tom? How are you?… Yes, she’s here … It’s for you, Esther.” Smiling, she lengthened her arm.

  “For me?” Esther let the sarcasm show. “Thank you.”

  “Hi, what’s up?” Tom said in her ear.

  “Nothing much. “She turned to be able to see Joan. Joan was looking at Audrey with a hard stare.

  “Any mail?”

  “None for us. There was a lot of mail for Audrey.” Esther watched Audrey’s eyelids.

  “Well, bully for her,” said Tom in something like his old manner. “No news, eh?”

  “What can I tell you?” Esther said slangily. She sounded her old breezy self. Why was this? Because her heart was lighter. What had lightened it? She’d caught them spying on the phone. They had a secret. Therefore Esther was now able to forgive herself for not liking them very much.

  Tom said, “So long, hon,” and that was that. An old-fashioned phone talk, brief, flip and easy.

  Esther hung up and went about making lunch.

  So, she thought, I watch Audrey like a cat, do I? May as well have the game as the name. I will watch.

  Afterwards, during the afternoon, Audrey did not go out of the house. She did not seem to have a letter to mail. Yet Audrey was going to pay a bill, a bill that Esther for some unknown reason was not supposed to see. Esther racked her brain to try to remember the letters that had come in the morning. She had not looked at the addresses of the senders. She had received only a general impression from the envelopes. The brown one from the bank. The ads had been obvious. The envelope with the window that might have held a bill. That one. She had no idea from whom the bill had come.

  Audrey and Joan were on the back terrace when she slipped into the guest room and picked up the wastebasket. Esther’s heart beat a bit faster. This was sneaky. She didn’t care. She rummaged just the same.

  There was no envelope with a window in it in the basket. Here were the ads, surely—Esther’s neck prickled. She turned her head and there stood Audrey.

  “Esther, dear,” said Audrey gently, “surely I can empty my basket. You mustn’t do that for me. You have enough to do.”

  Esther’s face felt hot. “Mustn’t I?” she said sweetly. “After all, you know, I keep this house.”

  The air was heavy with her double meaning. It was like a declaration of war. Under a veil, battle was joined.

  Audrey said gracefully, “And you do it all so casually, my dear. You never seem to fuss.” She was smiling. She stood aside. There was no clue in the wastebasket.

  Esther, carrying the basket, went past her and walked slowly out through the foyer, kitchen, and down the little hill of her own back yard to the lower corner where the incinerator stood. She emptied out the few scraps of paper. She swung the basket in her hand. She walked back up.

  Joan sat at the edge of the terrace with her hands clenched on the wheels. Joan’s head was lowered. Joan looked up from under her brows.

  Esther went into the house and thought she heard voices. Then she saw Audrey who had just closed the front door.

  “A poor old fellow, peddling these,” said Audrey softly. “I gave him a little change.” She had in her hand a printed tract. Esther could see the title. Loving-Kindness. “Would you like this, Esther?” Audrey inquired, with her little smile.

  “You keep it, Audrey,” said Esther, smiling.

  Esther made a casserole dish for dinner. She broke her salad greens. She mixed the dressing. She set the table. Dinner was as ready as it could be. So it was Esther, this time, who opened the door for Tom when he came home.

  She trailed him into the bedroom and waited while he washed. Then she said, “Sit down.”

  “What’s up?” He looked alert.

  “I have things to tell you.”

  “Shoot.”

  So she told him, first, what Mr. Saunders had said about Courtney Caldwell’s unhappiness at home, and his reasons for drinking. Tom listened to this stonily.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, “before you start bawling me out. There is more.”

  She quoted him the sentence that Caldwell had said, the night before he died. At this Tom frowned and tipped his head in thought. So she told him she had seen Mueller.

  “What did he say?”

  Esther reported honestly and Tom slumped. “This whole rigamarole is a lot of nothing, Es. I don’t get it. What are you driving at?”

  “There’s more,” said Esther. She told him what she had overheard in the kitchen.

  Tom was looking pinched around the nostrils now. “That all?”

  “Ye-es, except that Joan resents me. Joan thinks that you and Audrey …”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Tom looked outraged. “You should know better than to pay any attention to Joan. Crippled. Sick. She could say anything. She worships Audrey. Audrey knows how to handle her.”

  Something crawled on Esther’s spine. Something thudded in her heart.

  But Tom went on. “You’re so mixed up it’s pitiful. Now, you say that Audrey listened in on the telephone?”

  “She did.”

  “How could she? Nobody was on the telephone. Who doesn’t lift the receiver when he wants to make a call?”

  “She didn’t make a call. She only wanted to find out if I was making a call.”

  Tom said pityingly, “Eavesdropping. Es, don’t you really know who was doing the eavesdropping? You were. Weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was,” said Esther steadily but her heart took a looping drop.

  “So what is your point? I’ve listened. I’ve listened to the whole thing. Come on. Give me your conclusion.”

  “Why don’t they want me to see this bill, whatever it is?”

  “Why should you see a bill of theirs? Do you show them our bills?”

  “I’d like to,” flashed Esther.

  “I won’t mention,” said Tom grimly, “jealousy.”

  “I am jealous of my rights,” said Esther slowly. “I am your wife. This is our home, not hers. And while I may not be up to Audrey’s so-called standards—or filled with saintly kindness—”

  “Well, no,” Tom said.

  “I have standards of my own,” said Est
her, “and I am going to be honest. The truth is, I think she’s a phony. The truth is, Tom, I can’t have them in my house much longer.”

  “And what do you want me to do? You want me to throw them out of my house? Is that it?”

  “Yes, that’s about it. In effect.”

  Tom said, “I won’t do that.”

  “But—didn’t you hear me?” she asked incredulously. “I am your wife. I just told you—”

  “Pulling your rank, eh?” He looked white and stiff. “Just a minute. I asked them here until they could find an apartment. And you agreed. I had my reasons. I still have them. I don’t see anything wrong with my reasons.”

  “Nobody …” Esther clasped her hands. “All right, then here’s another thing. They’re not really looking for an apartment, you know. They like it fine, right here.”

  “That’s a pretty mean accusation.”

  “I’m not being mean. I’m being honest. I believe that and I believe this, too. Audrey has quite a lot too many expensive black dresses for a lady who couldn’t afford to pay her former rent.”

  Tom said, warningly, “Esther …” He thought: Clothes! Women!

  “Well?” she cried. “Look at the whole thing for one minute from outside your private conscience. This is just great for Audrey, isn’t it? I do all the housework. I sit with Joan. We take care of the bills. They get food and shelter. She’s happy here. Joan said she feels secure.”

  Tom said, “If you are going to start blowing your top over expense …”

  “No, I’m just going to tell you flat out—we are being taken, Tom.”

  “If so, I can’t help it,” he said bitterly. “You said you knew how I felt, and I believed you. Now you don’t seem to know any more. All right. Even if they are absolute crooks and they are taking me—not that I believe that …”

  Esther felt sick. “You don’t believe that?”

  “I think you’re jealous. I think you’re rationalizing. It seems to me that Audrey understands my feeling better than you do.”

  Esther made a little sound of pure pain.

  “And if you’ll notice,” Tom said, “Audrey has been rather decent about the whole lousy deal. I killed her husband. That’s what you keep forgetting. Don’t think she forgets that. Yet she has never been one bit small or mean or vindictive.”

  “Why should she bother?” said Esther furiously, “As it is, she runs our house and our lives. She is absolutely the albatross hanging around our necks. That’s pretty good revenge.”

  “Everybody is not two-faced,” said Tom stiffly.

  Esther said, “Not everybody, true. I’ll tell you this. I don’t intend to be two-faced any more. I don’t like these women in my house one bit and I am not going to pretend that I do.”

  “Did you really think you’ve been fooling anybody?” he said angrily, and tore away from the bedroom.

  It was impossible to sit to the dinner table and act as if all were well.

  Audrey, however, seemed able to read the plain signs that her hosts were in the midst of a bitter quarrel without being ruffled by it herself. She was detached. She seemed to be forgiving them for being—oh naturally and rather lovably—such naughty children.

  It was Joan who was made nervous, who tried to bring up natural topics. But Joan had little skill. The talk was fitful and full of strain.

  Esther turned off Audrey’s offers to help with the dishes, for once, most gratefully. She washed them slowly, alone.

  In the big living-room, Tom looked up from his magazine to meet Audrey’s purple eyes all drenched with sympathy.

  “I’m so sorry, Tom,” she was murmuring. “Kindness and goodness can be misunderstood. Oh, I know it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Tom with a painful grimace which meant “Shut up.”

  “I mean your kindness, of course,” she cooed. “Would it help …? Is there anything I can say to Esther?”

  He did not reply to this at all.

  “Perhaps she doesn’t understand herself,” went on Audrey softly.

  Tom was appalled. He was good and mad at Esther, true. But Esther was his business. And he did not propose to discuss her with Audrey Caldwell. Or before Joan, either. Joan, who was listening. She was always there, listening. Yet how could he let this go by?

  “What doesn’t she understand?” he snapped.

  “Why … nothing …” said Audrey. She seemed to fold her feelers in, withdrawing. She sighed just perceptibly. “Forgive me, I shouldn’t have spoken …”

  “No,” he said, “you shouldn’t.”

  The purple eyes filled with tears. Then she bent her head.

  Tom went over and tuned in the TV. He cracked the switch on savagely. He would not be in the middle.

  But he was.

  At last Esther came slowly into the big room—her room—every detail of which she had wrung from her own imagination, to please both herself and Tom: the big, relaxed, delightful, all-purpose room that was their home’s heart, done to their taste, designed for ease, for pleasant flopping in soft places, a place where every picture on the wall, each little bit of glass or colour, was a memory or a symbol or a little joke between them, or the first part of a plan known to them only, but to them clearly.

  In this room sat Audrey in what had become “her” chair, and Joan’s tyres were set in the mark they were beginning to impress upon the carpet. Music played and credits tumbled over the screen. Tom turned a face that looked eyeless.

  “What do you want to watch now?”

  Then Audrey said in her sweet low voice, “Esther, dear, there’s something that has been troubling me a little.”

  “There is?” said Esther faintly. She saw Tom wince. She tucked herself into her own couch corner.

  “Don’t you agree,” said Audrey, “that it’s best to be direct and honest with one’s friends?”

  Tom’s fingers on the switch reduced the noise. His face was grim.

  “When Courtney passed away …” said Audrey. It was the first time his name had come out of her mouth since she had been in this house.

  Tom clicked the set off. Now he was completely alert to every nuance. This touched his wound.

  “I think now,” said Audrey, abandoning her first sentence, “that in grief there must be a kind of distortion. I see now that I did a most selfish thing.”

  “What was that?” Tom said in a voice unlike his own.

  “Why, I bought myself too many clothes,” said Audrey with purple eyes swimming.

  Tom went deeper into his chair.

  “I don’t think so,” said Joan truculently, “and I told Esther—”

  “Oh, Esther thinks so,” said Audrey, nodding wisely. “Esther is right, of course. Esther, dear, can I explain to you? Will you please try to understand? It seemed”—Audrey faltered—“it seemed, at the time, that I must. It seemed that to put myself into mourning was really all I could ever do for Courtney, any more.”

  “Nobody’s business …” growled Tom. The knife was turning.

  “But it was expensive,” Audrey said. “Yes, it was, Joan.” She said to Tom, “Joan was so upset the other day. Because, of course, Joan doesn’t want Esther to be in any way offended.”

  “I didn’t mean—” said Esther. Her throat was dry. “How could I be offended?”

  “I do wish,” said Audrey softly, and the purple eyes turned now to Esther, “you had questioned me, instead. Joan is a little—well, she’s upsettable, sometimes, poor darling. And the fault was all mine.”

  “No fault, that I can see,” Tom croaked. Esther could feel his eyes burning upon her. “Did you say Audrey had too many clothes?”

  Esther said, primly and tonelessly, “I’m very sorry if I upset Joan, or seemed to pry.” Her heart thumped, heavy. She was pinned in her corner, put in the wrong.

  “When the bill came today,” said Audrey with a sigh, “Joan really was quite silly.” Now she smiled at her sister. “Fancy,” said Audrey fondly, “she didn�
�t want Esther to know how much it came to.”

  Joan was looking both sulky and sly.

  “Why should Esther know how much it came to?” Tom shifted his feet.

  “But she had asked …” Audrey lifted her right hand and turned it gently. “At least, Joan thought … I only wanted …” She looked from face to face.

  “Do you need any cash to cover that bill?” Tom asked harshly.

  “Oh Tom, no, my dear,” cried Audrey. “There’s only a small balance owing, and I have it put safely away. You know I can’t take the money. Why, you have both been completely kind and generous to me; I couldn’t ask for more. I only wanted Esther to understand and forgive me. The clothes cost almost two hundred dollars.” Audrey cast down her eyes. “It was very foolish and emotional,” she murmured, “in my circumstances.”

  “I don’t see what’s so—” Joan began.

  “Hush,” said Audrey. “It was natural for Esther to wonder.”

  “Do you understand now, Esther?” said Tom loudly.

  “Of course,” said Esther. She was all tightened and tense. “I didn’t mean to be critical, Audrey, or if I was, forgive me.” The words were a little bitter on her tongue. Also, Esther seemed able to stand off and listen to them somewhat cynically.

  “There, Joan, you see?” said Audrey meltingly, with no bitterness at all. “Now, isn’t everything better? So silly to make a secret of it. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Can we skip it?” Tom said. “Fuss about nothing. Anybody want this thing turned on? Or who wants to play a little Scrabble?”

  “I will challenge you,” said Audrey gaily. “Will you play with us, Esther, dear?”

  Esther returned her smile brilliantly. Was it war? “I think I’d rather read, Audrey,” said Esther, “if you’ll please excuse me.”

  “Dear, if you’d rather … But Joan will play.” She swept Joan in and Joan brightened and they three played.

  Esther in her corner stared at a book. Her skin felt hot and then cool but to herself she thought: Audrey is pretty clever. I see I will have to use my brain.

  Later when they were alone, Tom said to Esther, “Now you understand about that bill? The mystery is solved, isn’t it?”

  Esther said, “Yes, Tom,” quietly.

  “I notice you didn’t come into the open about going to Arcadia behind Audrey’s back.”