However, his eyes were suddenly warm again, and he even wore a slight smile. “Settle down. You can do it.”
And miraculously she knew she could. She had perfect license to focus her resentment, from whichever source, on Augie, who could conveniently represent all that was despicable in men, including their inevitable resort to brutality in moments of crisis, even though in banal reality her husband had never come close to doing such, was notorious rather for crimes of omission, but what did particulars matter when there were so many reasons for killing him? The pity was that he had not brought along his virgin, that saintly little whore, to share his fate!
She looked radiantly at E.G. “You’re right.” She wanted to fondle him but was concerned that he think it too sentimental a gesture and evidence, no matter what she said or what she proceeded to do, of implicit weakness. Her strength was what had held him over the years. He could have had a younger woman. No doubt he had had, did have, would have many to take, meaninglessly, to bed. There was some reason why he had been attached to her. She liked to think it was her resolution, her courage, her self-respect: her strength.
She turned to head upstairs, and just as she did so the sound of running water ceased. The silence changed everything. She had never before killed anything of warm blood. As a child she could not bear to watch her father take the live chicken, raw material for Sunday dinner, to the elm stump and gorily behead it with the same hatchet used for kindling, and even worse, though the bird was then beyond feeling, plunge the body in boiling water to loosen the feathers. Nevertheless, within two hours she was savoring a drumstick, in the self-righteous conviction that she should be provided for, irrespective of the measures required.
She appealed to E.G. once more, even though she might be struck again. “Can’t you do it?”
This time he was not violent but simply contemptuous. “He’s your husband, not mine.”
Just as she reached the foot of the staircase, the nearby front door opened hesitantly and Ellie entered, hugging a brown grocery bag with her usual lack of grace, her eyeglasses slipping down a shiny nose.
The arrival served to distract Esther from brooding on relative mortalities. “It’s about time.”
Ellie protested. “It’s early. They let me go early because my dad’s coming home.” With the usual resentment of voice and expression she directed part of this statement towards E.G., without having acknowledged him in any other way.
“Your father’s upstairs,” said Esther, extending a hand to restrain the girl from too passionate a reaction. “He’s taking a bath at the moment and can’t be bothered.”
“He’s here?”
Esther winced. “Keep your voice down. He’s tired. He’s been drinking. He needs peace and quiet. You can see him when he’s ready.”
Ellie shook the grocer’s bag. “There’s nothing much here but baloney and toilet paper. What are you going to give Daddy for supper? Shouldn’t I go back to Harriman’s and get something nice?” She did an awkward little dance step of elation. “I can’t believe he’s here!”
While Ellie was speaking, E.G. moved out of her peripheral vision and was making signs to Esther. Augie might be out of the tub if she did not get up there soon.
“Uncle Erie is taking us all out to eat. Now get that stuff put away.”
“The toilet paper,” said Ellie in her annoyingly high-pitched voice, “goes in the bathroom.”
At first it had seemed that the interruption and delay had provided Esther with an extra moment in which to develop a resolution for the work at hand, but by now the anxiety had returned.
“Later,” she cried. “Get in the kitchen!”
She hastened up the stairs and into her bedroom. She went to the western wall and removed the framed picture that hung there, a print of an idealized hayfield in sunshine, thatched cottage and cart in half-shadow and no persons. By careful measurement E.G. had determined that the blow should be aimed dead center in the rectangle of clean wallpaper left when the picture was gone.
Esther made a fist and with its heel, as she had been instructed to do so as not to break bones, struck the wall with all her force. Something happened on the other side: there was a distant sound, muffled, unidentifiable. That electrocution was the cleanest sort of killing was why it had replaced the barbarities of hanging and the firing squad.
Esther left the bedroom and hastened to the bathroom door. Ear against a panel, she could hear nothing from within. She went downstairs.
E.G. lingered in the front hall. He did not look at her until she had reached the ground floor, and even then his face was expressionless.
“Be on my way,” said he. “Be back later, after Augie’s rested up.”
“Wait a minute,” said Esther, but her voice was too feeble to be heard by Ellie back in the kitchen. When she tried to raise it, what emerged was a kind of squeak.
E.G. responded to the emergency, but he sounded synthetic in the extreme. “Oh, he’ll be down soon? Well, all right then, I’ll hang around.” If she had spoken too softly, his voice was much louder than normal and the words were enunciated as if being directed to the sort of family dog that has a passive vocabulary of three or four terms carefully pronounced.
Esther tried again to be heard, but her throat had closed so tightly now that it was all she could do to suck air through it.
Once more E.G. stepped in, but no more convincingly than before. “Maybe he went to sleep in the tub?”
Esther was humiliated to be in such a condition. It was so unfair: she had performed well in the hard part, had done the killing to perfection.
She had raised her finger to make some such point, though perhaps not in so many words, when Ellie came from the kitchen, carrying an armload of toilet-paper rolls.
“We’re always running out, so I got some extras for a change.”
Anger unlocked Esther’s voice. “Oh, for God’s sake.”
“It’ll be used,” Ellie said prissily, clamping her bony chin on the topmost roll, to secure it, but too late. The cylinders seemed to explode from her grasp and went everywhere.
Esther lost control. “God damn you!”
“Nothing broke,” Ellie said. She stoically gathered up the rolls one by one and made two equal stacks on the second step.
Toilet paper was kept in the bathroom closet. Esther suddenly recognized that this supply gave her the excuse she needed. “All right,” she said when Ellie had retrieved the farthermost roll, that which had tumbled as far as the umbrella stand. “I’ll take them from here on.”
“I’ll help,” said Ellie, but was driven away with pantomimed slaps. Grimacing, she said, “What’s wrong with you? I’m going up to my room, anyway.”
“Just go then,” Esther told her. This too was reasonable enough: Ellie’s room was on the other side of her own, farther from the bath. “Just don’t disturb your father.”
Ellie shrugged and ascended the stairs, E.G. had disappeared into the living room. When the girl was gone Esther squatted to embrace the toilet paper, two stacks of three rolls each, and balancing them, rose and went upstairs. It took some doing to lower her burden without mishap against the wall alongside the bathroom. Perhaps because of this distraction she omitted an essential feature of the plan and did not knock at the door and through it loudly ask Augie whether there was enough hot water—only then, receiving no answer, was she to go within and find the body.
Instead she entered without pretext.
Chin lowered onto his chest, Augie was bleeding slightly from a gash in his scalp. The electric fan had never reached the water but had rather struck him on the head, bounced away, pulling its plug from the sconce, and hit the floor, where it now lay on the side of its deformed wire cage.
Still, if he was dead, what did the details matter?
He groaned.
Esther found, amazingly, that her first feeling was of relief: she could never be charged with a murder that had not occurred. This was followed immediately by anger with h
erself for not so positioning the fan that it would have missed Augie’s head as it fell—though she now could see very well that it could not but strike some part of his body, for he filled the width of the tub. The plan had been defective, the plan that was an original creation of E.G.’s.
For an instant she had been alone with the problem, but now she left the bathroom and hastened downstairs.
E.G. stood in the living room, staring out the bay window from which they had watched Orrie leave for college. He did not turn to greet her arrival.
“Christ,” Esther said. “He’s not dead. He was just knocked out when the fan fell on him. What do we do now?”
At last he looked at her. “Nothing.”
“What?”
“Let it go.”
“There won’t be another chance,” Esther said! “If we don’t get him now, he’ll go back down South and marry that little chippy of his, taking the insurance with him.”
E.G. shrugged, offering no assistance.
“You just want to give up?” For the first time she began to doubt him.
“You got a better idea?”
“Plug the fan in again and drop it in the tub while he’s still groggy.”
“Jesus,” said E.G. “You could go back up there and do that?”
“I was hoping I might get some help.”
“With the kid right down the hall?”
“Oh, God!” Esther said. “Did I leave the door open?” She dashed out and went up the stairs, almost whimpering in anxiety, but reaching the bathroom, saw the door had been closed all the while. She had to take command of herself.
Ellie looked out of the doorway of her room. “What’s all the commotion?”
“I just forgot something,” said Esther, trying to catch her breath. “Is it any of your business?”
“Is Daddy going to be out soon?”
The innocence of the question took away Esther’s pugnacity. “It won’t be long now,” she said in a nearly affectionate tone. “He had a hard trip, can use a good soak.” But more was needed. “He’s looking forward to seeing you, too.” Fearful that Augie might groan loudly enough to be heard, she repeated, “It won’t be long.”
“Where are we going to eat?” asked Ellie.
Esther was immediately angry again. “Just wait till you’re told!”
“You want me to change my clothes?”
“What I want you to do is run back to Harriman’s and get some cold beer. That would be nice.”
“Yes, it would,” said Ellie.
Esther followed her downstairs and, when the girl had left the house, stepped into the living room.
“Come on,” she said to E.G. “We’ve only got a few minutes.”
“You mean, kill him?”
“Yes!”
“I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” said Esther. “But I don’t see any alternative.” She was the leader now and preceded him on the route to the bathroom.
Augie lay as before, though he did not groan, not even when she touched his shoulder, at first gently and then with the stiff prod of an index finger.
“Hell,” E.G. said, standing well back of her, “he’s dead.”
“He’s breathing,” said Esther. She picked up the fan and handed it to her lover, the wire dangling. He made no use of it, simply stood there. “Well, plug it in!”
He did as much, then lowered the fan as far as it would go. At the level of Augie’s bare shoulder, the wire was taut, at its maximum extension.
E.G. straightened up. he had come out of his stupor. “Look at this,” he said furiously. “It’s not long enough to reach the water. It wasn’t ever long enough to reach the water. You didn’t even test it, did you? I told you to test it, and you didn’t. For Christ’s sake, you didn’t test it!”
Esther felt only contempt for him. “I’ve had to do everything. All you’ve done is talk. Are you yellow? Is that it?”
His face was contorted, and his clenched fist was rising. She took no measures to protect herself, being incapable of dealing with physical violence.
Augie groaned again at this point and made a movement of his trunk, too slight to alter his position but enough to catch the attention of his would-be murderers.
E.G. shuddered. For an instant Esther thought he might run away, but then, his face blanched, eyes rigidly focused, nostrils flared, he hurled himself on Augie’s shoulders and head, forcing them under water. Beneath him, Augie now showed some life and, bigger and stronger, even though wounded and semiconscious he might well have saved himself had he been able to get a purchase with any part of his body, but his arms were trapped and the surface of the tub was too slick to grasp. He finally got his hands flat, under his body, and pushed up, but it was now that Esther added her effort to E.G.’s and together they managed, with their combined weights and strengths, to hold him under despite a savage and prolonged resistance that was amazing in a maimed man. But finally the last bubble had come up and burst.
Esther sagged against the far wall. She had not expected to commit murder in such a personal way. It was a nasty business even though there was no blood except the little bit at the head wound. For a few moments, eyes closed, gasping, dripping, she forgot all about E.G. and imagined that she had done the deed singlehandedly and was appalled and yet exhilarated by the revelation of a capability she had not suspected she possessed. But then she was chilled, as though the water had been iced and not still quite hot when Augie died in it. He had always liked his bathwater at a temperature too high for anyone else to bear. She was freezing!
She opened her eyes and looked towards the tub. E.G. was kneeling alongside it in an attitude of prayer, except that his fingers were not tented but rathe repulsive Unclether flattened on his thighs.
She started to ask a question. “You think…?” But forgot the rest of it. She would not have been startled to hear a posthumous groan from Augie, who had died so passionately, yet so quietly: he had some noise coming. But had his death been all that soundless? Was it rather that she had been deaf to the thrashing of legs, the bubbling of nose and mouth?
E.G. rushed, on his knees, to the toilet, the lid and seat of which he had hardly flung back when the vomit left him in a torrent.
Esther was revolted by this symptom of weakness, but then she was almost getting used to E.G.’s failures. He had not acted well since the beginning of this sequence, which by now seemed so long before. His part in Augie’s death had been hysterical. If she had undertaken the murder so as to join herself indissolubly with E.G., she had been misguided.
Augie’s upper half lay underwater, his legs as far as the calves protruding from the other end. E.G. pulled himself to his feet. She could smell the stench of his puke.
“Flush the toilet,” she said in disgust. “And wipe your chin. Ellie’U be back any minute. We’ve got to fix our story.” She turned so as not to see Augie’s feet. “The fan fell and knocked him out. His head slipped under, and he drowned. There’s not enough water in there now. Run it to the brim: that’ll account for all of it that splashed out.”
They were standing in water. The knees of E.G.’s pants were soaked. Esther’s housecoat was wet, and her mules were probably ruined.
E.G. moved to follow her orders, opening the cold tap. “Use the hot,” she said. “He always liked it almost boiling.” That she remembered to call for such verisimilitude stimulated her self-confidence. In an instant she had formulated the rest of the plan. “As soon as we hear her come in, we pull him out onto the floor and give him artificial respiration.”
“What if it works?”
“Do you know how to do it?”
“I’ve seen it in movies, but I don’t really know how to do it.”
“Good,” said Esther.
He shrugged towards the tub. “Maybe we better start to get him out now? He might be heavier than we think.”
“Let him be for a while yet. We want to be sure he won’t revive.”
E.G. was look
ing at her. “Jesus,” he said, “you’re a cool customer.”
“It’s taken me long enough,” said she. “I wasted a lot of time on the way.” At the moment she was not only more bitter towards Augie than when he was alive, but she resented E.G. as much.
The sound of the screen door reached, them. For once Esther was pleased that Ellie had let it slam, something that in normal times, even when the girl’s arms were burdened, never failed to startle and infuriate, for it was like a gunshot.
“Quick now,” Esther whispered, and they went to the body and tried to lift it from the tub, she at the feet (which were still warm; a damp cornplaster was on the left little toe). But Augie’s upper half proved too heavy for his cousin to move singlehandedly. Esther dropped the feet and pitched in at the shoulders, but as the tub butted against the wall, leverage could not be applied at its most effective place, so both of them grappled with one arm and shoulder as the lifeless head lolled on a limp neck.
Getting him out was as ugly an affair as killing him had been. At one point his upper back was across the rim of the tub but not yet so far as to outweigh that part of him still within, and unless strength was applied continually he threatened always to slip back. Then when at last the balance was effectively altered, he came out and over too rapidly, all at once, and hit the floor crown first, which had he been alive might have broken his neck in the lethal way but could do no meaningful damage now, and a great deal of water came with him.
Ellie was en route upstairs, her errand completed. The noises from the bathroom brought her at the run. By the time she reached the doorway, E.G. was straddling her prone, wet, naked father, hands on the bare back.
Her mother spoke quickly, before the girl could get past dumb horror. “Your dad had an accident in the tub. He’s not breathing. Go phone the lifesaving squad.”
Ellie did not move. “Go on!” Esther cried. “Don’t you want him to live?” The question was inspired, and had the desired effect. The telephone was on the ground floor, in a niche in the passage between front hallway and kitchen. Ellie could be heard running down the stairs.