He said, “Dorothea? Agnes is dead.”
Dorothea gripped the telephone receiver hard and sat on the edge of a table. Uncomprehending, she said, “Agnes is—”
“Agnes is dead.”
“—dead?”
“Just now. I mean—I’ve found her just now. In the house.” He spoke in queer uncharacteristic gusts and waves. Dorothea could hear noises, men’s voices, in the background. “I’m here—at the house. The police are here. The ambulance too—but it’s too late, she’s dead. Dorothea? I found her just now—a while ago, I mean. There hadn’t been any answer all day when I called her so I came over and let myself in and went upstairs thinking she was, she might be—you know how she has been—thinking she might be sick, or unconscious, in her bed. Thinking she might have fallen and injured herself. I called her name and there wasn’t any answer so I went upstairs and the bathroom door was shut and locked, and I forced my way in, and there she was—I mean, is; I think she still is, unless they’ve moved her—in the bathtub. In the bathroom. Upstairs. She—seems to have had an accident.”
Dorothea’s eyes immediately flooded with tears. “My poor darling,” she said. “Oh, my poor, poor darling Charles! How terrible! For Agnes! For Agnes, and for you! Shall I come over there, darling? What can I do?”
“It seems somehow she drowned,” Charles said wonderingly. “In only a foot or so—how many inches could it be?—of water. I found her lying there in the water—the water was stone cold—her face was submerged—I checked for a pulse but couldn’t find one. It was horrible! Her lips were purplish-blue. I knew she was dead.”
Charles Carpenter paused. In the background someone, a man, was shouting directions. Dorothea wiped at her eyes and said, “Charles? Are you all right? You’ve had a terrible shock, shall I come over? Or would I be in the way? I had better come over.”
He said half accusingly, “She’d been drinking. She reeked of it. There were bottles in the bedroom, bourbon and gin. That must have been it—that, and the other.”
“Yes? What other?”
“You know—I’ve told you. The drugs. The sleeping pills. And there were diet pills too, for a while. I don’t in fact think that Agnes ever gave up any prescription willingly; I think she simply changed doctors. My God, I told her, I warned her! And she refused to listen! These past few weeks, Dorothea”—Charles had moved to a residential hotel in Boston in mid-February—“have simply been hell. She has been—had been—simply impossible. The drinking, the raving, the abuse, the threats, the terrible, unforgivable things she said—ah, but I’ve told you enough of it already, dear Dorothea. I can’t heap such filth upon your head, I can’t—I don’t dare—” He was speaking more and more rapidly until finally he stopped; and Dorothea, her heart pierced, could hear him sobbing. How she longed to hold him in her arms, to comfort him. For surely she had the right? Surely she, of all living beings, had the right?
Dorothea offered again to come to him but Charles rather curtly told her no, he didn’t think that was a good idea right now; he would speak with her later, try to see her later that evening if possible—if the police were finished with him by then. “I’m sure they have questions to ask of me,” he said, with a sudden grim gust of humor. “The husband is always the first suspect.”
“But Charles—”
He hung up abruptly—in other circumstances, it would have been rudely—and Dorothea Deverell was left gripping a telephone receiver tight against her ear, listening to a dead line. She thought, Yes? What if—if Agnes Carpenter’s death were not accidental, but deliberate? Since the Carpenters’ separation Agnes had repeatedly threatened to kill herself, had several times threatened to kill both herself and Charles. Dorothea burst into fresh, despairing, bitter tears.
“That terrible woman—it would be just like her.”
After a tactful several minutes Jacqueline poked her head into the office and, seeing the state Dorothea Deverell was in, went to comfort her. What had happened? Why was she so upset? Dorothea said in a rapt, slow voice, “It’s horrible: Charles Carpenter’s wife is dead, she has died, it must have been only a few hours ago.” Jacqueline expressed surprise and sympathy, to a degree: she didn’t after all know Mrs. Carpenter, though she was acquainted with Mr. Carpenter. Dorothea murmured, “Horrible, horrible,” pleating the fabric of her skirt, tears streaming unimpeded down her cheeks.
“But how did it happen?” Jacqueline asked.
“An accident,” Dorothea said. “I don’t suppose they quite know, yet. He said—Charles said, Charles Carpenter—he’d come home and found her in—oh, Jacqueline, it’s so terrible! So sordid, somehow!” Dorothea began to weep harder, helplessly, for Charles’s sake; and for poor wretched Agnes’: and for herself too, perhaps—the guilt of it, the shame of it, the misfortune. For at this point, in the late afternoon of April 11, when, as the pathologist’s report would later disclose, Agnes Carpenter had been dead approximately nineteen hours, it had not yet begun to occur to Dorothea Deverell that the death of her lover’s wife, whether by accident or otherwise, might be a factor in her good fortune.
If Jacqueline was mystified by Dorothea Deverell’s passionate grief, and the look of frank shocked guilty fear that showed in her face, she had the discretion not to show it; she was a kindly woman, for all her occasional caustic wit, and she seemed to look upon Dorothea Deverell—her superior at the Institute—as a personal charge, an innocent very much in need of a protector. As Dorothea wept and murmured repeatedly, “Horrible, horrible,” Jacqueline sent Mrs. Harmon away and must have told the others simply to go home (it was the end of the working day for the staff) without disturbing Dorothea. Afterward, Dorothea would recall how readily her assistant had absorbed, not so much the fact of Agnes Carpenter’s death as of Dorothea Deverell’s emotional connection with Charles Carpenter.
Has Jacqueline known all along? Dorothea wondered.
Has everyone known, all along?
The fact of death is public: what is personal yields to the impersonal; even one’s body shifts out of one’s unique possession, no longer tenanted. So there was a funeral for Agnes Carpenter, which everyone in her circle, or in Charles Carpenter’s rather wider circle, attended. There had been, prior to the funeral, an autopsy; there would be, in ten days’ time, an inquest. The county corner would file his report. The local newspapers would print whatever seemed “newsworthy”—not a good deal, for neither Agnes nor Charles Carpenter was a public figure—but it rankled Charles that the information should be so freely printed, that the Carpenters had been “formally separated, divorce pending” at the time of Agnes’ death. Most distressing, the Carpenters’ home on West Fairway Drive—in particular the Carpenters’ bedroom, and Agnes’ bathroom—was thrown open temporarily but aggressively to a team of strangers: investigating detectives, police photographer, fingerprint man, pathologist. Though there appeared to be no evidence of foul play in the death—no fingerprints found other than those of the dead woman and her husband, no forced door or window, no sign of theft—the investigation would turn upon whether Agnes Carpenter had died accidentally or by her own hand.
Charles Carpenter was surely not a suspect in his wife’s death, as he had jokingly remarked to Dorothea, but he was questioned repeatedly, to the point of despair and exhaustion. To his distress (and to Dorothea Deverell’s) two crumpled sheets of stationery were discovered in a waste-basket in Charles’s former study, with the words “Charles” and “Dear Charles” written on them, in Agnes’ very shaky but recognizable handwriting: raising the possibility of a suicide note, thus suicide.
“Agnes would not have done it,” Charles Carpenter said, many times. “She was simply not the type. She was not the type.”
But hadn’t she threatened suicide, by his own account? Might not her death have had a good deal to do with the pending divorce, the separation?
With lawyerly doggedness Charles Carpenter repeated, “My wife would not have done it. She was not the type to take her own life. I kn
ew the woman for more than twenty years—and I would swear under oath.”
But hadn’t there been planned, the investigating officer persisted, for next Monday, a meeting between the Carpenters and their lawyers, to discuss the terms of the divorce? Did Charles believe it could be nothing more then a coincidence that his wife should die only a few days before this meeting?
Charles Carpenter said angrily, “I would swear under oath.”
Days passed, and Dorothea Deverell was to hear many times her lover’s account of how, concerned about his wife, he’d gone to the house and discovered her body; in his bereavement (and Charles Carpenter was truly bereaved) he seemed under a spell, or a compulsion, to tell and retell the story, to dredge up new details, as if desperate to get it right. And, relaying his story to others in abbreviated form, Dorothea too came under the spell of the need to get it right.
As if we are testifying in a court of law, Dorothea thought. Like criminals on trial, to be judged by the sincerity of our words.
According to the pathologist’s report, Agnes Carpenter had died in her bath at approximately 9 P.M. of April 10. Charles had last spoken with her late in the evening of April 9, and they had had a vicious quarrel. “Her final words to me were, ‘You deceitful son of a bitch!’” Charles said. “And then she slammed down the receiver and practically broke my eardrum.” Agnes had been drunk, irrational, vindictive—the previous week she’d telephoned Charles’s parents to tell them what a “lying hyprocrite” their precious son was, which greatly upset them; now she was threatening to make a visit to Charles’s law partners to tell them what he was really like. “I didn’t want to provoke her even by pleading with her,” Charles told Dorothea. “I dreaded her guessing you—somehow knowing it was you.”
“But it seems so unfair,” Dorothea said guiltily, stroking her lover’s hair. “That you should bear the brunt of all that alone.”
“Agnes was my wife,” Charles said. “In a sense none of this had anything to do with you. I mean—I love you and want to marry you of course, but Agnes and I had fallen out of love with each other a long time before. Our marriage had been dead for years before you and I met.” He spoke briskly; he was nodding, telling himself this story too as if its veracity were unquestioned; which perhaps it was. “I’ve come to see, Dorothea, that you have nothing to do with it—any of it. The ugliness, the scandal. You are really quite innocent, darling, of it all.”
As if he knows how hopeful I am, Dorothea Deverell thought humbly, of being told so.
Yet she could not resist speculating: “I wonder if, you know, there was anything we might have—I might have—done … to prevent it.”
“Nothing,” Charles Carpenter said emphatically. “Absolutely nothing.”
And then he might retell the story another time, in a slow, wondering voice: evoking for Dorothea a vision, very nearly cinematic in its fluidity, of how, having telephoned Agnes without success on the morning of April 11 and intermittently throughout the day, he’d driven to the house … knowing something was wrong as soon as he saw not one but several newspapers lying on the sidewalk. And that day’s mail was still in the mailbox. And he’d unlocked the rear door and gone inside, entering through the kitchen, dismayed at the overflowing trash can and the plates messily stacked on the counters and in the sink and even on the floor. And the numerous empty gin, bourbon, and wine bottles in plain view. (For the past three weeks Agnes had refused to allow their cleaning woman to come to the house: she didn’t want her “poking her nose in my business.”)
Charles called Agnes’ name but there was no response—nothing.
The radio was on in the living room, turned up high, which struck him as strange. During the daytime, when she was alone, Agnes frequently turned on the television, even when she was too restless to watch; but the radio, rarely.
“Agnes?” Charles called. “Where are you? It’s Charles.”
He dreaded what he might find upstairs, in their bedroom. He halfway feared she might be hiding and would rush out to attack him.
He was appalled by the condition of the bedroom: the bed unmade, bedclothes disheveled, blinds drawn, everywhere items of soiled clothing underfoot. And here too were empty bottles. And the close stale air reeking of alcohol.
“Agnes?” he called. “Where are you?”
Several times she’d fled from him in a rage and locked herself in her bathroom, so it did not surprise Charles that, when he tried her bathroom door, it was locked. “Agnes? Agnes?” he said. He was not yet alarmed but he seemed to have a sense, he didn’t know but he knew, that this was no ordinary episode in their lives. He called to her, pleaded with her to open the door, and when there was no response he threw his weight against it and forced it open and found Agnes inside, naked in the bathtub, slumped over, her head partly submerged in the water.… He knew in an instant that she was dead: the bathroom smelled of deadness. Yet he could not believe it, really; he shouted her name, felt for a pulse, tried to lift her from the tub as if to revive her. She was not breathing and her lips had turned a ghastly purplish-blue, her skin horribly white and puckered from the water. Her eyes had rolled partway back into their sockets as he had never seen human eyes before. He knew she was dead but could not believe it: he knew the woman’s stubbornness, her perversity—and this seemed to him, in his shock, in that suspension of feeling that shock initially provides, a part of her subterfuge, her ill will and hostility. “Agnes! Agnes! Agnes!” he shouted.
Then in a panic he ran to telephone the police. And an ambulance.
Like a terrified child he begged them to come help him. “My wife—she isn’t breathing! Please help me! Help us! The name is Carpenter, we live at Fifty-eight West Fairway Drive—”
Awaiting their arrival he ran back and forth between the bathroom and an upstairs window from which he could see the street, as if under a compulsion to check every few seconds to see that Agnes was really in the state in which he had described her … now that he had made the calls, now that the outside world would know of what had been until now a sheerly private matter; he had a childish expectation that perhaps he’d made a mistake and Agnes was not in fact dead but playing some sort of cruel trick on him.
He thought, But these things don’t happen to people like us.
And afterward, when the house was open to strangers, and teams of men entered it freely, including a police photographer, a youngish bearded man in tinted sunglasses who took numerous photographs of the naked woman in the scummy gray water who had been Charles Carpenter’s wife, he thought, as a corrective: If these things can happen then we weren’t the people we imagined we were. All along, we had been other people.
“I suppose I actually felt, on a purely unexamined level,” Charles Carpenter told Dorothea Deverell, “that, living in that particular house, on West Fairway Drive, in Lathrup Farms—being, you know, the sort of person I believe I am—I would be spared such monstrosities. And could spare others from them.”
Dorothea Deverell said naïvely, gazing up into Charles Carpenter’s face, in love, “But Charles—you are that person!”
Dorothea Deverell was not of course the only friend who comforted Charles Carpenter during this period of grief and upset—the Weidmanns, among others, rallied to him—but she was the friend upon whom, most clearly, he depended. And with the passing of days, weeks, eventually months, it would become yet clearer that their connection, their emotional rapport, went deeper than simply friendship. For Charles Carpenter was often at Dorothea Deverell’s home for dinner (though he did not stay the night), and friends who invited one to their homes began quite naturally to include the other. If a general communal curiosity was aroused by such practices—if, behind Dorothea’s and Charles’s backs, gossip of various degrees of intensity made the rounds—they were not to know of it directly; though Dorothea, forever sensitive to emanations in the air, supposed that people must be talking—“They would hardly be normal, otherwise.”
For gossip after all is the very s
oul of a community: evidence that it is not a mere mechanical gathering of individuals but a living organism with its own life’s blood.
And one day Ginny Weidmann impulsively telephoned Dorothea Deverell, to ask her friend point-blank, “Are you—? And Charles—? Is it—Dorothea, is it true?”
Dorothea had long ago prepared a dignified little speech with which she might explain herself to such friends as Ginny Weidmann; she would say, “I don’t know precisely what you are asking, Ginny, but I can tell you—yes, Charles Carpenter and I are very good friends; yes, I suppose we are in love; but Agnes Carpenter knew nothing of it and it had nothing to do with the disintegration of the Carpenters’ marriage—that marriage had been, as everyone knows, dead for years.” Now, however, confronted at last with the actual question, Dorothea Deverell merely said in a quiet, hopeful voice, “Yes.”
And then there came the inquest, in late April, at which, to Charles Carpenter’s (and Dorothea Deverell’s) immense relief, the verdict of accidental death was given.
According to the county coroner, the specific cause of Agnes Carpenter’s death was drowning; there had been water in her lungs. But the alcoholic content of the deceased’s blood was so high, and she had taken so many tablets of Valium, that she’d clearly been unconscious, even comatose, at the time of her death. And she had a medical history of alcohol and drug abuse.
“So they chose not to make an issue of the ‘suicide’ notes after all,” Charles Carpenter said. “I suppose they didn’t think it was worth the effort—trying to build a case against me on such slender evidence.”
“A case against you?” Dorothea Deverell asked, puzzled. “But wouldn’t it have been a case against poor Agnes, arguing that she had meant to take her own life?”
“But Agnes is dead,” Charles Carpenter said carefully. “And I, as the surviving husband, stand to collect her estate—and her life insurance, which would have been null and void in the case of self-inflicted death.” He paused, as if mildly ashamed, not quite looking at Dorothea. “I thought you understood, dear. The usual terms of life insurance …?”