The Swimming Pool, Page 2

  We were silent for a while. I had tried for years to forget Father’s death, and only to remember his gentleness and kindness. And as I have said, the stark fact of his suicide had not registered until years later. The crash had ruined him. He had paid as much as he could of the debts he owed, but in January of 1930 he had gone back to his office at night and put a bullet through his head. We had not even known he had a gun.

  Anne was remembering, too.

  “Funny,” she said. “Mother never would realize what had happened to the country. She gave a big dinner the night Father—died.” She glanced up at the Laszlo portrait over the mantel. “Martin and I were living there, you know. We were pretty hard up, so I cut the train off my wedding dress and wore it. She had terrapin, I remember.”

  “Do you mean to say he had to sit through all that before he—” I didn’t go on. I could not.

  “He was quiet, I remember that. But he was always a great gentleman, Lois. He just got up and went out after the coffee. Nobody missed him.”

  She saw it was a dangerous topic. She went back to Judith.

  “Ridge says she’s asked him for a divorce,” she said. “She doesn’t give him any reason. Just says she wants to live abroad, or in South America. Of all the idiotic things!”

  “That doesn’t sound like the psychiatrist, does it?”

  “Well, you know Judith. She’s liable to do anything. She was a brat as a child. She’d lie at the drop of a hat, and she’d either sulk or raise a stink if she didn’t get her own way. If Ridge had only turned her over his knee and spanked her, it might have helped. But he was too damned well-bred. He just gave her her head, and now she’s lost it. I’ve always blamed Mother. She practically sold Jude.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while. I suppose Anne was thinking of Mother. I know I was. Phil had once said bitterly that she took Father’s death as a grievance rather than a grief. It was a cruel thing to say, but I could remember when the town house was sold soon after, and her refusal to part with much of the furniture, as well as the tapestries and her Aubusson carpet, all of which she insisted had to go to The Birches. Along with her portrait, of course.

  We had had to sell them later, over her bitter resentment. After all, we had to eat. But neither Phil nor I had the heart to sell the Laszlo. It was still over the mantel in the old library, now our living-room, and Anne got up and stood looking at it.

  “Why do you think she forced Judith to marry Ridge?” she asked. “I’ve often wondered about it. Do you think he helped her out in some way? Money, perhaps?”

  “I suppose it’s possible. He must have been crazy about Jude to—well, to buy her.”

  “He was, of course. He was mad about her.” She looked at her wristwatch and picked up her bag.

  “I have to get home,” she said. “As usual the maid walked out on me yesterday, so I have to cook Martin’s dinner. I thought I’d better warn you about Jude. You certainly don’t want her here. And if you pick Phil up at the station, be careful. The roads are hellish.”

  I saw her into her old sedan and watched her down the drive. Then, with a couple of hours to spare, I went back to my typewriter and what I hoped would be a novel someday. I had moved into Mother’s room after her death, because the light was better and it was easier to heat. But I did no more work that day. The talk about Judith had made me uneasy. Also Anne had said something on the big front porch as she left which set me to thinking. She stopped and looked at me there in the gray winter light.

  “Are you always going on like this, Lois?” she said. “You’re a very pretty girl, you know. And nobody would guess you’re twenty-eight years old. Isn’t it time you stopped looking after Phil and began looking after yourself?”

  “I’m doing all right. I even earn my keep, in a small way.”

  “What about men? Do you ever see any?”

  “I’ve had a few passes made at me,” I said, and I’m afraid I giggled. “Nobody I wanted.”

  She left then and I went back into the house. Her news had really startled me. I went into the living-room and looked up at Mother’s picture. Anne had said Judith had never cared for Ridge, that Mother had forced the marriage. And perhaps she had. I remembered her before she died. She had hated her new poverty, the skimping and saving of the years after Father’s death. But somehow she had managed to give Judith a big wedding. Like Anne’s, and less than a year after Father’s death.

  I never knew where she got the money, but I was too young in those days to worry about it. I remember that Phil gave Judith away, in our small local church, and that she wore sweeping white satin and carried white orchids. But Anne said she had had to press the dress that morning, because Judith had thrown it on the floor and tramped on it.

  I knew something else, too. Until she died five years later Mother had had a small income from some unknown source. She never spoke of it, and Phil said it was probably Father’s pension from the Spanish-American War. But now I wondered if Ridgely Chandler had paid it. Certainly, wherever it came from, it ended with her death.

  Yet, I don’t think Mother was ever satisfied about the marriage. Not that Ridge Chandler was not a good husband. He was pretty nearly a perfect one so far as we knew. But a month or two before Mother died she asked me to look after Judith, if anything happened to her. I was only thirteen at the time, and I remember staring at her.

  “What in the world can happen to her, Mother?”

  She gave me a long, rather odd look.

  “She’s not like the rest of you,” she said. “She’s the kind to get into trouble. And beauty can be a curse, Lois. I’d feel better if you would promise to look after her.”

  “Of course I will, Mother.”

  “I spoiled her badly, I’m afraid” she said feebly, “and the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. I know that now.”

  “Everybody has always spoiled Judith, Mother.”

  She nodded her poor head. It was queer, but as she failed and depended more and more on me, I found myself giving her the affection I had never felt as a child. We could not afford a nurse, so Helga and I looked after her, with Phil giving us a hand when he could. And I was alone with her that day.

  “I’ve made a good many mistakes,” she said. “Some I felt were for the best, but I knew she wasn’t in love with Ridgely when she married him. But you were a child then. You don’t know how things were. I thought Judith needed someone to look after her. She was too attractive to men. And Ridge was older. All those boys—”

  Just before she died a few weeks later, I think she tried to tell me something more. But Helga came in just then, and she never finished it. I have wondered since if she meant to tell me the whole story, and if it would have helped me if she had.

  So there I was, after Anne’s visit that day, bound by that old promise to look after a Judith whom I scarcely ever saw—a Judith in some sort of trouble after twenty years of marriage. A Judith, too, who, although she was thirty-eight when she went to Reno, could pass for thirty any time. And also—as though she knew of the promise to Mother—was to change her plans and decide to come to The Birches. For safety.

  We did not want her. Both Phil and I knew from the beginning that trouble was her middle name, but there was nothing we could do. A part of the place was legally hers, and there was plenty of room. There should be a law against families who, in the luxurious years before two world wars, built vast country places and then left them to their descendants. Here we were, with a hundred acres and the big house in Westchester County, and with two maids we could barely afford. As Helga, now an old woman, never put a foot beyond the kitchen, we had to have a general housework girl as well. Her name was Jennie.

  I don’t want to sound bitter, in view of Judith’s tragedy, but she had been the spoiled beauty of the family far too long, and after the way she had lived for twenty years it must have been hard for her to adapt herself. Not that she really tried. It was no help to my work that she chose the times when I was at my typ
ewriter to play the fine old Bechstein piano Mother had salvaged from the wreckage of the town house. And I noticed after she came that Phil increasingly took refuge in the library, under pretense of work.

  But I have not told how she came to The Birches, or why I went to Reno with her. Nor that at first when we got home she refused even to mention Bernard Townsend, her psychiatrist. We pretended not to know about him, but she was in such nervous shape and sleeping so badly that Phil finally suggested someone of the sort.

  Her first reaction was one of sheer fury and, I thought, of suspicion.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “If you think I’m going to spill my guts to one of those Peeping Toms you can think again. ‘What do you dream about?’ ‘What is the earliest thing you remember?’ It’s childish. It’s sickening.”

  She slammed out of the room, and Phil grinned.

  “I guess Anne was wrong,” he said. “She hasn’t fallen for the guy, nor he for her. I don’t know why he hasn’t. After all she’s a damned attractive woman, and I don’t suppose her idiosyncrasies would bother a chap like that. He must see a lot of crackpots.”

  Because by that time we had decided that something was definitely wrong with Judith. I suppose every now and then some family has somebody like her; someone who has gone slightly off the rails psychopathically—if that’s the word. Phil thought she had a persecution complex, for certainly she was terrified of something, or somebody. I knew that on the train coming back from Reno, when she fainted in the vestibule of our car.

  But that faint was definitely not psychopathic. She was terrified, although it was only after long months of what I can only call travail that we learned the reason for it.

  Chapter 3

  IN A WAY I HAVE already jumped the gun in this record. To make things clear I must go back to a day or so after Anne’s visit, when, looking up from my typewriter, I saw Ridgely’s car coming up the drive.

  It was Jennie’s day out, so I went down and let him in. It was still slushy, and the snowplows had not got around to clearing the roads. He stamped the melting snow off his feet, apologized for the mess, and then remembered to shake hands with me.

  Looking at him as he took off his overcoat, I thought he looked half sick. I had never cared for him, and so far had our paths diverged that it was a couple of years since I had even seen him. For one thing, he was thinner, but as always he was immaculately dressed. He was a smallish dapper man in his late fifties, with an arrogant manner and an already balding head.

  Some of the arrogance was gone that day, however, as I took him into the library and put a match to the fire there. He looked, I thought, rather desperate.

  “Sorry to bother you, in case you were writing,” he said. “I see you still have the Laszlo. It’s a nice piece of painting.” And he added, “She was a strong woman, your mother, and a dominant one. It’s very like her.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Nobody has ever taken her for Whistler’s mother. Would you like a drink? It must have been a nasty drive.”

  “Not now. Perhaps later.”

  He waited until I sat down, and then seated himself. I had an idea that never in his life had he sat while a woman stood. He did not speak at once. He seemed to be wondering how to begin. When he did his voice was dry and hard.

  “I’m not going to beat about the bush, Lois,” he said. “I suppose you know why I’m here. Or do you?”

  I nodded. “Anne told me. It’s Judith, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It’s Judith,” he said. “She’s not herself. She hasn’t been for the past month or so. I’m worried about her.”

  I hedged a bit. “What do you mean? Isn’t she well?”

  “Oh, she’s well enough, or at least she has been until lately. Good God she must be as strong as an ox, the way she’s been getting around. I’m not feeble myself, but I couldn’t take it. Haven’t for years. Lois, do you think it’s possible she’s fallen in love with somebody?”

  I wanted to say she was in love with herself and always had been. I couldn’t, of course.

  “She’s always had men around her,” I told him. “Like any woman with her looks. But I think it’s unlikely, Ridge. She’s—well, she really doesn’t care for men. Not the way you mean, anyhow.”

  “I realize that,” he said dryly. “She only cares for herself. I had some hope when she married me, but it didn’t work out. I suppose I was a fool. I wasn’t married a week before I knew she didn’t really give a damn for me.”

  “You’ve stuck it out a long time,” I said.

  He gave me a chilly smile.

  “What was I to do? I come of an old conservative family. We have stood for something in the city. Even in the country itself. Much like your own people. I—well, I put up with a lot for that reason. As for divorce—”

  I found myself feeling sorry for him. He had been twenty years older than Judith when she married him. Now I wondered if it had been twenty years of martyrdom for a proud man.

  “I must confess I don’t understand it,” he went on. “I’ve never given her any grounds for it.” He smiled faintly. “You might say the shoe should be on the other foot! I have stood for a great deal for a good many years. Not that I think she’d commit adultery, but she hasn’t been a wife to me for a long time. Years, in fact. She—has she talked to you about it?”

  “No. I hardly ever see her, Ridge.”

  He seemed rather at a loss. He took a cigarette from a gold case and lit it before he spoke.

  “She sprung it on me at breakfast a day or two ago. She didn’t often get up so early, but that day she did. I was surprised, because she’d been out late the night before. She simply sat down at the table and threw it at me.”

  “She always did unexpected things,” I said. “Her life’s full of exclamation points. You hadn’t done anything to annoy her, had you?”

  “Practically everything I do annoys her.” He looked rather grim. “Outside of that, no. There isn’t another woman, either, although the way things have been between us for years she probably wouldn’t have minded that much. No, Lois. I’m well past the stage of extramarital affairs.”

  He hesitated.

  “Perhaps I’d better tell you about the night before that breakfast when the divorce came up,” he said. “I’m not proud of it, but maybe you can make some sense out of it.”

  What developed was that they had occupied separate rooms for years, and that he seldom even heard her come in. That night, however, he did, and did not go to sleep again. After a while he realized that she was not following her usual bedtime routine of bath, face cream, and so on. Instead she was walking the floor.

  “It puzzled me,” he said. “It wasn’t like her.”

  I looked at him impatiently. I have no use for men who let their women trample all over them.

  “Why on earth didn’t you go in and find out?” I said.

  He shrugged his padded shoulders.

  “I told you. We haven’t been on terms like that for a long time. I suppose it was my fault. I work hard and I need my sleep. I couldn’t take her routine, and if I looked at the clock when she came in she thought I was checking up on her.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, why wouldn’t you check up on her?” I said indignantly.

  He let that go. He was gazing up at Mother’s portrait again.

  “I don’t know exactly why I’m telling you all this,” he said. “It’s damned unpleasant. After all, she’s my wife. But I have to know why she’s leaving me, or what has happened to her the past few weeks, and especially the past few days.”

  Some of what had happened, when he finally got down to it, was queer enough. It seems he lay in his bed, expecting to hear her usual ritual before going to bed. But as it turned out she was not going to bed. So far as he could make out she was walking about the room, her high heels clicking on the hardwood between the rugs. Then she must have decided something, for he heard her working at the safe where she kept her jewels. As she never bothered to put away what sh
e had worn until the next morning, this surprised him.

  He must have picked up his courage at that point. Anyhow, he got up and went to her door. Her back was to him, and she did not hear him. She had got out everything she owned: the diamond bracelets, the pearls, the emerald earrings and necklace, a dozen or so clips and brooches, and she added to them the huge ten-carat solitaire which was her engagement ring. She was examining them piece by piece.

  “As if she was appraising them, by the Lord Harry,” he said. “And some of them had been my mother’s.”

  I stared at him incredulously. He had left her there like that, he said. He had returned to his room and finally gone to sleep. But, idiot that I considered him, he was not entirely weak minded. It had looked like blackmail to him. What else could he think of?

  “Only apparently it isn’t,” he said. “When she said she wanted a divorce, I asked her if she was in any sort of trouble, and if she was I was willing to help. She could have any money she needed. Do you know what she said to that?”

  “What?”

  “That all she wanted was to get out of the country! She intended to live somewhere abroad.”

  “And no reason?”

  “No reason whatever. By God, I began to wonder if she’d killed somebody!”

  “You don’t think so now?”

  “No. She’s not a passionate woman. She has a temper, of course, but she’s pretty well controlled. She would never risk a thing like that. She’s played around. She likes admiration, but she’d never get into trouble about a man. Even if she did, why would she want a divorce? You’d think she’d want to stick to me, at least for safety’s sake. And she’s no child, Lois. She’s kept her looks, but she’s facing middle age. And there’s nothing she can do about it.”

  I was puzzled. Whatever Judith felt about Ridgely, she had cared passionately for the life he enabled her to live. He had plenty of money, and she liked money. He had position, too, and, like Mother, that meant a lot to her. To throw everything overboard like this sounded crazy to me.