The Key to Nicholas Street Read online

  “The attic door?” she said. “Locked?”

  “Very, very locked,” said I.

  “I never,” she said, and looked around at the kitchen as if she expected to find some handwriting on the wall that would Reveal All.

  “If you ask me,” I told her, being careful to name no names, “there is someone in this house with a sense of humor that hurts. And he happens to know that if any little thing can make things hard for me it would be just a trick like that.”

  “He?” said Mrs. A, and then looked hard at me. “I don’t know any reason why he should know where the attic key is kept. Is there any reason, Junie?”

  I suppose I could have read into this anything I wanted, but all that interested me was the news that there was a key, and that Mrs. A could lay her hands on it.

  I nicely hinted this to her, and she said, “But, of course. That key is always kept on a nail in the storeroom, right about where those paintings are stacked,” and then suddenly she gasped, “Oh, no!” and dashed for the stairs as if she had gone right out of her mind.

  What could I do but race after her thinking that this had certainly blossomed into one beautiful Sunday, and up the stairs we went right to the top where Mrs. A grabbed the knob of the attic door, and with one twist sent the door flying open!

  It was my turn to have my jaw drop open, but I didn’t have time for that. Without appearing to take notice that the door wasn’t acting up as I had reported, Mrs. A went down the little attic hall where the beams were so low she had to keep ducking her head to avoid them, and then threw open the door of the storeroom and looked in as if expecting Lord knows what. I looked in over her shoulder, and it was clear that there was nothing out of place. The only window to the storeroom was a sort of porthole, the size of a dinner plate, that looked out over the back yard, and under it were stacked Mr. A’s masterpieces, and around the rest of the room were the few cartons of stuff that Mrs. A thought worth saving. Outside of that, nothing.

  For the first time since our gallop Mrs. A seemed to take hold of herself. She turned around to me and said, “I thought you told me the door was locked. I’m positive you said it, Junie.”

  “I’m positive it was locked,” said I, and I was.

  “But you see,” said Mrs. A, “it wasn’t. It wasn’t locked at all.” It was more as if she were telling it to herself than to me, and then she went over to the window and took something from a nail next to it, and held it out toward me. “And there’s the key,” she said, “right where it belongs.”

  Well, what’s to do or say in a situation like that. I apologized very nicely, and then I took the Ballou’s key from my room and walked downstairs behind Mrs. A thinking my own thoughts, and none of them pleasant. And, sure enough, right there on the bedroom floor at the foot of the stairs stood the Chaves waiting, as it were, with just the flicker of a smile on his face like the cat who ate the canary and is finding even the tail feathers pleasant. That was just too much for little Junie to take, and I opened up on him as soon as Mrs. A was out of earshot.

  “I want to thank you, Mr. Chaves,” I said, “for all the fun you’ve provided me this morning.”

  “It was nothing,” he said, as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  “And,” said I, “I want to tell you now that that attic is my personal living quarters in this house, and you are to stay away from it. Far away.”

  “I will fight my impulses,” he said, “and stay away from it.”

  “And,” said I, “when Miss Ballou wants to know why her hot water wasn’t ready when she gets back I will be glad to explain just what you had to do with it.”

  That seemed to surprise him. “Miss Ballou?” he said. “But she came home last night.”

  I grabbed my head.

  “Last night!” I said, and I could hear my voice going up like a siren. “You mean she’s been sitting there waiting for me to start that heater all this time, and you never said a word!”

  After all, the woman had been paying me the kind of money that would allow me to finance the sort of home furnishings I always dreamed about when Bob and I would be united for better or worse, and while she was a good-tempered sort it could be some little thing like this that might mean the end of that income. I told that to the Monster, and to indicate his great concern he shrugged his shoulders.

  “If that’s what worries you,” said he, “you’ve got more to worry about than you know. Miss Ballou came back to pick up some personal things and take them back to New York. When she shakes the dust of Sutton off those white-walled specials this evening I have a feeling it will be for the last time.”

  For an instant I believed him, and then I didn’t, and then I didn’t know what to believe. All I could think of was a certain bedroom suite in Hibbard’s that would be a long, long time in coming if all this was true, and I actually felt sick to my stomach. But it is human nature to keep hopes up, and the way to do that, I figured, was to carry on until the evidence was all in, one way or the other.

  So I said, “Well, if she’s home now she’ll still be wanting her hot water,” thinking that there was nothing like a direct question to milady to put an end to misery.

  “No,” said the Chaves, and my suspicions of his sense of humor started to percolate again. “I wouldn’t bother about it now, if I were you, Junie. I don’t think it’s important to her right now, and I don’t think she’s in a mood right now to have anyone bother around her, or the house for that matter.”

  If anything could have prodded me on it was just this. “Thank you,” said I, “for your very kind advice, Mr. Chaves. But if you don’t mind I’ll do what Miss Ballou expects me to do until I’m told different.”

  I moved away and he took hold of my shoulder. “Look, Junie …” he started to say, but I pulled loose.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Chaves,” I said, and went down the stairs with everything upside down in me.

  Well, he wasn’t lying about her being home, as I could tell when I crossed the driveway in front of the garage, and could see the gleam of that big Cadillac convertible on her side of it. And he wasn’t lying about her not being in the mood for anything, as I could see when I got the side door to her place open and started down the cellar steps. Because there she lay at the bottom of the steps as gray and limp and dead as anything I ever hope to see in all the days I spend on this earth.

  PART TWO

  LUCILLE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Backbone.

  There never was one of the Ayres breed that had it or ever will have it, and that is the truth about the lot of them. And it was the old man himself said so that night when Harry sat down at the table and showed him the paper from the accountants. The hundred thousand in stocks gone three years before, a month after the market crash; the property on Monroe Avenue all gone; and the inventory of the store not worth a button. And the old man sitting there looking at the piece of paper with his hands shaking so that when he tried to take a drink of water he splashed it all over my fresh tablecloth.

  “We still have the house,” I said, and the old man looked at me and said, “Lucille, you have more backbone than all the Ayres put together. Thank God for that,” he said, and put down the glass and walked away from the table with not a bite of food in him.

  I couldn’t help thinking about that when Junie told me about the attic being locked, because it had not been locked since that night. At eleven o’clock that night Harry had come into the bedroom, and there was that look on him that got me out of bed before he even spoke a word.

  “Have you seen father?” he said. “He isn’t in his room, or the bathroom, and when I went downstairs to lock up I didn’t see him anywhere. I’ve even been up to the attic, but the door is locked up there ….”

  “Harry,” I said, “I never locked that door,” and although I was seven months along with Richard then, I was never more than a step behind Harry when he went up those stairs again, and broke open the door with his shoulder, and there was t
he old man hanging from that piece of clothesline. And the worst part was the way he had neatly hung up his jacket and tie as if they were something supposed to go to the tailor in the morning.

  So it was always some consolation to know that while the old man and I never did take to each other too well the very last words he spoke to anybody in the world showed he knew what I meant to him and Harry. Although little enough I had to thank him for when tongues started wagging up and down Nicholas Street, and Rose McIntyre and Freda Lutey and the rest of them were handed their chance to take down the Ayres a lick or two.

  But it is backbone that makes respectability and keeps idle tongues from wagging, and the old man had none any more than Harry had when high and mighty Miss Ballou came along and waggled her finger at him, or Bettina had when Matthew Chaves decided she’d be a nice one to fetch and carry for him. Even Richard is all Ayres sometimes, with his head in the clouds and his feet tripping over all the rocks in the road, but when it comes to Richard I will say with a full heart that it is something for a mother to know that what she has been to a son and done for him is truly appreciated. And, as I am not ashamed of saying, I think Richard shows as much loving appreciation of his mother as any son could.

  Of course, a son’s feelings are never really tested until he’s married (and then let’s see how much he thinks of his mother) but a boy who thinks to phone and write regularly when at camp or away from home for some reason, or who takes the trouble to prepare a lovely little poem as a secret surprise, or who knows just what little things his mother would appreciate as a gift, these things are no small sign of the future, and can lead one to look forward to it with anticipation and not fear as so many mothers must.

  I was thinking that very thought when through the kitchen window I saw Junie running across the alleyway from Katherine Ballou’s, and I wished at that moment that Dick, and some others on Nicholas Street whose eyes pop out when she passes them on the street, could have seen her as she looked just then. Stuffed into that ridiculous dress with every part of her flopping and jiggling, her hair every which way, and those shoes she persisted in wearing until she knew I would give in and tell her to take one of Bettina’s slightly used pairs, she was really a spectacle.

  She came into the kitchen and then she leaned back against the wall with the breath pumping in and out of her so that you could hear it, and her hand holding tightly against her side as if there were a stitch there and she were trying to ease it. And in her eyes that kind of flighty look you see on a skitterish horse that’s had a piece of paper blown in front of him.

  “Junie!” I said very sharply, pulling the reins on her as it were. “What’s wrong!”

  “Miss Ballou!” she said. “Down the cellar steps …!”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Dead!” said Junie. “She’s dead!” and then she started to laugh and cry in that mixed-up way a body does when she is all wound up for a spell of hysterics, and is going to enjoy every bit of it.

  I slapped her across the face just once, but good and hard.

  “Junie,” I said, “you come out of that!”

  She put her hand up across her face with a surprised look, but she came out of it. Her breathing eased up, and she shook her head at me. “I didn’t mean anything, Mrs. Ayres,” she said. “It’s the way she’s laying there. It was seeing her all of a sudden ….”

  If there is anything I cannot abide it is a person thinking that what you are doing for her good is being done because you are heartless. And in that way a girl like Junie is a living trial, because you have to work twice as hard to prove to her that all you are doing to make her a decent and useful woman is done out of good, old-fashioned love; the kind of love that every human being ought to feel toward even the humblest of God’s creatures, old-fashioned as that might sound.

  So I patted her and made a fuss over her, the big baby, and then when she had herself in hand again I left her there and went across the way to Katherine Ballou’s. The side door was swinging open, and the screen door was unlatched so I just went in, and down at the bottom of the cellar steps was that woman. She had long gone to wherever a woman like that goes in the afterlife, and the good Lord in His miraculous way had heeded the prayer of a wife and mother who had called on Him in her distress and had smote down the transgressor.

  She lay sprawled out at the foot of those stairs as wanton and shameless as she was in life, one leg still partway up the stairs and her legs showing as far as her garters. And that red hair spilled over the floor and wisps of it now and then stirring when the draft blew down the steps, so that it looked as if it were the one part of her that was still alive.

  In her outstretched hand, still gripped tight, was the handle of the screen door upstairs, the same kind of small brass handle we had on ours at 161, and you could see the ends of it sticking out beyond her clenched fist, and one end had the screw in it.

  Her blouse had been torn from the shoulder to halfway down the waist at the back so that you could see her brassière strap peeking through, and I neatly pulled the edge of the torn blouse together, and then pulled her skirts down so that she would be a little less of a spectacle. And while I was doing that I was thinking of everything that would have to be arranged: the doctor and the police called in like they were when the old man went, and a good, sound, common-sense talk with Harry. It certainly wasn’t too much to hope that Harry would come to his senses now, and in all truthfulness I never felt more forgiveness for the erring than I did just then. Over and over I had told myself that it was woman who first tempted man to evil, that it would always be woman who did this, and that no man could be more susceptible than one who is in those dangerous downhill years and meets a glib-talking, perfumed woman of no morals who makes it her business to convince him he is irresistible.

  Hold a mirror before such a man to let him see his weary image, tell him the truth about himself, show him the mockery being made of him by such a woman, and he is blind, deaf, and dumb to you. But it is not the man’s fault, not in such a case as Harry’s. It is temptation that comes to seek them with a tongue always wagging smoothly, and with the kind of body a woman can afford if she never chooses to bear children and feed them at her breast and spend her life like a drudge to make a home for them and their father. It is temptation that must come right up to a man and shake him by the shoulders until he recognizes it and answers it, while all the wife and mother can do is go around with her eyes red and the fear in her heart that the Rose Mclntyres and Freda Luteys and their world of scandalmongers will guess the truth, or that her children will discover it.

  So I stood over the serpent that lay with her head crushed in the dust, and knew that the nightmare was over. There were times when I had almost surrendered, when the pride and decency in me were at such a low ebb that I said to myself, “Why are you fighting? Why do you choose to suffer like this?” but now I could be glad I had faced the battle. Faced it even at such a moment as this very morning when Matthew Chaves chose to open his vile mouth the way he had.

  And then everything seemed too much for me all of a sudden and my knees buckled. I held on to the wall and slowly made my way back up the steps out to the sunshine and fresh air in the driveway where I found the strength coming back to me. In the kitchen at 161 Junie was sitting at the table, and in front of her was the bottle of elderberry wine we used on occasions now and then, and she was sipping at a glass of it, knowing that I would never object at a time like this. I simply walked past her into the dining room and through it to the living room. Harry sat there, part of the Sunday paper in his lap, but his head was resting against the back of his chair, and his eyes were closed.

  “Harry,” I said, and he opened his eyes and looked at me. “Harry, there’s been an accident next door.”

  “Next door?” he said dully.

  “At 159,” I said.

  He sat up slowly, not even noticing the papers that went sliding to the floor, and his hands took hold of the arms of his chair so that I
could see his fingers digging into the material. And from the way he looked at me right then I think he knew. How he could know was beyond me, but when he looked at me like that I was sure he knew.

  “Katherine Ballou fell down the cellar steps there, Harry,” I said.

  He got up from the chair and took a step toward me, his face showing his feeling for her as clear as if the words were written on his forehead.

  “Is it serious!” he said. “Is she hurt!”

  “She’s stone cold dead, Harry,” I told him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It isn’t any more than a ten-minute drive from the police station near the Plaza up to Nicholas and Monroe, but our police department being what it is, naturally we had to wait half an hour before anybody showed up. Which was more than enough time, of course, for all the busybodies on the block to smell trouble in the wind and come a-running. So I stood in the driveway with Bettina and Junie while Harry and Matthew Chaves were down in that cellar, and all around me Freda and Rose and Mort Bennauer yap-yapping like school children waiting for the circus parade to come by.

  And, of course, Junie had perked up considerably when it struck her that she was set to be a center of attention, and trust her to have smeared on lipstick and fixed her hair and to be acting up like queen of the ball.

  I finally got her off to the side and told her good and proper. “Junie,” I said, “there’s a time and place for everything, and what has happened here is that a precious life has been removed from our midst.”