Stranger Than Truth Read online

  “Worse?” shrilled Gloria, stroking the leopard skin pajamas so that her hands would call attention to the curves beneath the stiff fur. “What’s worse than drunkenness and suicide?”

  “Unhappiness,” I said. “Whatever it was that made Lola drink. You ought to know that, Father. Look at your own experience. It wasn’t until you discovered what made you a drunken bum…”

  “That’s entirely different,” interrupted Gloria irritably. As the wife of Noble Barclay she had to believe in absolute honesty, but she preferred not to think about the more sordid chapters in my father’s history.

  “You found out about yourself and learned to overcome your weakness and were able to give up drinking,” I continued, speaking to my father and ignoring Gloria’s disapproval. “Lola’s trouble was worse than. yours because she felt more deeply.”

  “Nonsense,” sniffed Gloria.

  “Her capacity for feeling,” I stumbled on, “was too much for her. She couldn’t bear the way the world is, the way people are fooled and tricked and misled when they try so humbly to be honest and happy.”

  “How ridiculous!” snapped the wife of Noble Barclay. “If she felt sorry for people why didn’t she try to help them, like your father, instead of wallowing in liquor and licentiousness. Isn’t that so, Daddy?”

  My father sighed.

  The glass-enclosed clock tinkled and there was Hardy, as if on signal, with a tray. “Pineapple, grape or apple juice?” he asked, offering the tray.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Drink some; it’s good for you.”

  The obedient daughter drank her apple juice, and gazing, innocent-eyed, at her dearly beloved parent, pondered his reason for accusing her of murder.

  Weak-kneed, pale-lipped, quaking, I said, “Father, I must talk to you.”

  Gloria’s blue eyes gleamed expectantly.

  “Privately,” I added. “It’s very important.”

  My father was not unaccustomed to such requests. An audience with the creator of Truth-Sharing was a privilege granted only to members of the family, close friends and the very rich and influential. He rose and extended his hand, and after he had apologized to Gloria, we went down the stairs to his study.

  This was the room the religious young decorator had called Contradiction. It was a crazy mixture of old alabaster, a marble desk supported on the backs of three wrought-iron blackamoors, modern bookcases of wood bleached to the whiteness of bone and black plush curtains held in place by white plaster hands. Above the fireplace hung a pink nude with bloated haunches and on the opposite wall there was a skilful but morbid painting of the pelvic bones of some large animal.

  “What is it you want to tell me?” my father said gently.

  I closed my eyes. This was no time for me to be looking at nudes and skeletons. In our calendar the blackest sin was disloyalty, a danger which, I used to think, could never threaten Noble Barclay’s daughter. In our office, where skepticism was endemic, I had thought I was immune. My defense had been shrillness whose vehemence failed to conceal my weakening. I caught the disease from the people I liked best, those who were frankest in derision.

  Disloyalty came to me, I think, in the Ladies’ Room. Stenographers and file clerks, more than the clever critics, caused my final disillusionment. These girls would never confide in the boss’s daughter, but when you have to hide in the toilet to enjoy a cigarette, you can’t help overhearing confidences not intended for your ears. I heard the girls talk; I knew that two of them worked a week for the price of one of Gloria’s hats; I grew hot with indignation at the injustices of petty fines and deductions. My father, who advertised his love for mankind in five magazines and a weekly broadcast, told me that I did not understand business when I asked why he paid the girls such miserable wages.

  Mr. Wilson also contributed to my education in disloyalty. He had not been so noisily arrogant as the group at the Editors’ Table, but he had asked his share of questions about my father’s practice of his creed, about our home life with Janet in the old days, and father’s marriage to Gloria, and about my early days in my father’s house in Great Neck. Mr. Wilson had not been outwardly critical; he had discussed my father’s philosophy with the amused detachment of a cultivated bishop inquiring into the antics of a sawdust-trail evangelist.

  After Mr. Wilson died I closed my eyes and my mind to clues that might have solved the mystery. I was sick with terror, but my terror had no substance, for I knew nothing except that my father and Ed Munn had talked in a dark and evil way about Mr. Wilson’s hatred and his aching need for revenge. In the office that afternoon I had tried to laugh at their melodramatic phrases, to hide my bewilderment in humor and bravado, but I had been horrified by the suggestion of conspiracy that their silences and secret glances concealed.

  Buried truths, my father’s book says, are festering sores; they poison the mind and corrupt the spirit. The sore had suppurated; it was green with pus, gangrenous and putrid. I was guilty, too, guilty of the willful error to which my father attributed so much of human suffering. And like the rest of the fools and invalids, I blinded myself deliberately, donned a mask to shield my squeamish eyes from the furious light.

  For a short time the blinders had been off. The sudden light was more than I could stand. I became ill, physically ill, hurried home with a splitting headache, deserted Johnnie the day Grace Eccles insisted on five minutes of Truth-Sharing in the Ladies’ Room. It was not so much what Grace revealed as what I imagined as background for the sum of her small odd facts. Why had my father forbidden her ever to mention the name of the murdered man? Why was his anger so fierce when Grace asked him about the gun which I had absent-mindedly carried out of the Studio when I had been summoned so peremptorily to his office?

  “What is it you want to tell me?” my father asked again.

  I had been off in a trance. Startled, I stared up into his face. He seemed a stranger beside me on the hard gray couch. He was smooth, tanned, exercised, massaged, handsome and healthy, but his face still showed the ravages of his dissipated youth. I looked at the insolent jaw and thought of that swaggering young drunk my mother had loved so extravagantly that the failure of their marriage was death to her.

  He caught my scrutiny and, sure of his charm, smiled. “What do you think of that thing, Eleanor? You’ve got good taste.” He nodded toward the painting of the animal’s pelvis.

  “It’s repulsive.”

  His pleasure was ingenuous. “My taste isn’t so crude, is it? I’d have thrown it in the ashcan long ago, only Gloria tells me it’s art. The Lord knows I’ve got enough horses’ asses around me in the office without having to hang one up in my home.” This was Noble Barclay, a robust, jolly man, entertaining his daughter with a small, not unkind joke against his wife.

  My voice was smooth, creamy, the Sunday-afternoon voice of a good child as I asked, “Why did you tell John Ansell what you told him this afternoon?”

  “So he came to you and blabbed. Chivalrous, isn’t he?”

  “That’s not the point. I want to know why you said it.”

  “Why did you bring the gun up to my office that day?”

  I looked away, at the white plaster hands clasping the black plush curtain. “The gun had nothing to do with it. It was a mistake; you know that, Father. I was told to rush up to your office; I’d just signed for the gun; I picked it up instead of my pocketbook. That isn’t the point…”

  My wrist was locked in my father’s strong hand. “Tell me the truth, child.”

  “I’m waiting for you to tell me the truth, Father. Why do you pretend that you think I killed Mr. Wilson? Why were you so furious when you found out I knew him? Why did you say all those ridiculous things about his hating you and wanting to destroy us?”

  My wrist throbbed under the cruel fingers. I was ashamed to tell my father that he was hurting me.

  He sighed. “Must we go over all of this again? I explained it to you then. I…”

  “You explained nothi
ng,” I said, forgetting that it was considered disloyal to contradict Noble Barclay. “You played the heavy father; you shouted and ordered me around and reminded me that I ought to respect you. But you never told me why; you never explained your insane fury and your unreasonable hints about my being in danger because I knew Mr. Wilson.”

  “He had deceived me. It was part of a plot. He wanted to use my own daughter against me.”

  “Why?”

  Father looked at the bones of the horse and sighed again.

  “You told me that Mr. Wilson hated you and lived only to revenge himself upon you,” I reminded him. “Then you said he’d injured you and because he wasn’t strong enough to acknowledge the truth about his own weakness, he turned against you. But you never told me what he did and how he…”

  “Sh-sh, you’re shouting!”

  “I’ve got to know.”

  “You’re getting hysterical. Calm down. Sit quiet for five minutes and say nothing.” His dark bright eyes shifted toward the black marble clock on the mantel. “Five quiet minutes and then we can share the truth, bitter as it is, about this unfortunate incident.”

  “I’m not hysterical, I…”

  “Quiet!”

  I sat rigid, watching the hands of the clock moving so slowly that they seemed to know my anxiety and to wish to thwart it. Scenes of this sort were not new to me. My father had often made me sit for five minutes without moving a muscle. In his book this was suggested as a preface to confession. The effect was supposed to be soothing, but I had always grown more nervous during the enforced silence that preceded the hearing or telling of something unpleasant.

  The door opened silently and Ed Munn was there. He had not bothered to knock. Ed stood tall in the doorway, looking down at us, his eyes bland, his grin rubbery.

  “I’ve made all the arrangements. The inquest’s on Monday, and we’ll have her buried the next morning. Funeral’s strictly private.”

  Wrapped securely in the cotton wool of my own concerns, I had forgotten Lola. Recollection stabbed painfully. “Why did she do it?” I cried. “Has anything been discovered, Ed? Do you know anything?”

  Ed sucked at his lips. “Drunk, of course. There were empty bottles all over the place.”

  “Why? She’d been drunk before. There were always empty bottles. Something must have hurt her frightfully…”

  One insolent shoulder was lifted. He did not even bother to shrug properly. “Probably discovered that one of her lovers had betrayed her.”

  I shivered. Ed’s unctuous voice sickened me. He considered Lola a bad woman; her virtue was beyond his understanding. Lola had been capable of compassion and indignation; Ed was all oily self-righteousness.

  “I didn’t expect to find you here, Eleanor. It’s an unexpected pleasure.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Why are you sarcastic? I’m trying to pay you a compliment.”

  “Am I sarcastic? You said it was a pleasure to see me and I thanked you. Nothing sarcastic about that.”

  “You’re always sarcastic with me. You act as if I wasn’t—weren’t—good enough for you. Maybe I’m not a college graduate, but I’m no pint-sized runt…”

  “Please, Ed.” My voice was querulous, too. Nothing made me more uncomfortable than the sound of a grown man’s whining.

  “Cut it, Ed. That’s all finished,” my father snapped.

  “Is it?”

  “I told you over a year ago she’d never have you. And I made it clear that I wouldn’t force her into it. She’s a grown woman; her life’s her own. I’m sick of arguing with you about it…”

  “Once you needed something,” Ed interrupted. “And you gave me your promise that if I helped you, you’d use your influence…”

  My father’s eyes glittered and in the light shed by the lamp behind him his white hair shone like a crown. Ed leaned forward, shoulders drooping, long arms hanging loose. The lamplight illumined their hatred. I saw then that Ed Munn held some secret power which my father feared and resented.

  “Please, Ed,” I said quietly, “please leave us. I want to talk to my father.”

  Ed Munn was aware of his power, proud, showing my father how far he could go. A weak man had discovered and armed his arrow at the Achilles’ heel of his superior. Slowly, turning his distorted smile upon me, Ed gloated, “About Wilson’s death, huh? You want to know why your father blamed you for it, don’t you? You want to know…”

  “You’ve been spying,” I said.

  “That’s my job.” Ed’s voice was all syrup and complacence. “Your father’s made it my business for years to spy for him. The habit’s developed. How can I help it if I spy on him for a change?” The speech sounded as though it had been written and memorized.

  “Okay, Ed, but get the hell out now, will you?” Father said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Get out.”

  The elastic grin widened as Ed turned to me again. “That boy friend of yours is too inquisitive. We thought he’d keep his mouth shut if he thought you’d done it.”

  “Was that your bright idea?” I asked coldly. “I can see the Machiavellian touch.”

  “Get out,” my father said again.

  Ed seated himself in one of the metal chairs and held fast to the arms with his white, thin-skinned hands. There was swagger in his movements, defiance in his voice. “I’m sick of being kicked around. I’m tired of broken promises. You’re going to keep your word to me or…” The pause was heavily significant.

  “I must say, Ed, your threats worry me a lot,” my father said with mock joviality. “Honestly, I’m shaking in my boots, I’m so afraid of you.”

  “Please tell me,” I begged, “what’s this all about? Why all the mystery? Why do you want Johnnie to quit asking questions about Mr. Wilson?”

  No one spoke. I looked up at my father’s gleaming dark eyes and the white crown of his hair. My father, I whispered, my own father who used to walk with his hand around my forefinger and kiss my bruises. I had not forgotten the security of his arms and the strong tenderness of his caresses. These were sentimental things, but memory is all slyness and deceit, and I knew that I was lost unless I rejected it. I thought about Mr. Wilson who had been murdered and I said in a clear, bold voice:

  “Was it you, Father?”

  He did not answer, and I said, “Was it you who killed Mr. Wilson? Tell me the truth, please.”

  It struck me as curious, even then, that I should demand the truth of Noble Barclay. I had been taught, nearly all of my life, that truth was his nature, that a camel might pass through a needle’s eye more comfortably than a word of deceit fall from his lips.

  He raised his head. “I’ve done much wrong in my life, Daughter. I’m responsible for the death of my beloved mother and of your mother, my sweet wife. It was my stubborn pride and my weakness that broke their hearts. I have sinned but I have not committed murder. I have not aimed a gun at a man’s heart.”

  “Someone shot Mr. Wilson in the back,” I said.

  My father shook his head as though he were denying accusation, and his fists clenched and unclenched in nervous challenge. Behind him were the black curtains and the white amputated hands. “Have you believed all these months that I was guilty of murder? Why didn’t you come to me openly and talk to me about it?”

  “You haven’t answered my question, Father.”

  “You were suspicious, child. You locked suspicion in your heart and were unwilling to admit the cleansing light of truth.”

  “I was frightened,” I admitted. “You acted so strange that night, and then I found that Mr. Wilson was dead. I was afraid, Father…”

  “If you’d only had the courage to speak to me,” he interrupted. “Believe me, child, I had nothing to do with the murder. As a matter of plain fact, it wasn’t until the following Monday morning, on the train from Washington, that I found out Wilson was dead.”

  “The news must have been a blow,” observed Ed Munn who had been enjoying our arg
ument.

  “Are you still here?” Father said.

  Ed stood up. He was smiling and his thin red mouth curved and coiled like a snake. He and my father hated each other so violently that the stench of their malice filled the room.

  From the floor above came the enraged sobs of a child awakened by a nightmare. The other twin was disturbed by the sobs, and started shrieking, too. When this had ended we heard Gloria’s silvery treble:

  “Coming up soon, Daddy?”

  “I’m busy, Lover. Go to sleep.”

  “Don’t be long. Daddy. I’m lonesome.”

  The house became quiet again. Ed shifted, turning toward me with a smirk that suggested evil victory. “One thing I’ve always wondered, Eleanor. Why did you bring that gun up from the Studio? Did your father tell you to bring it?”

  “Damn you, Ed, it was a mistake,” I shouted. “Father sent for me in such a rush that I was upset and absent-minded. I picked up the gun instead of my pocketbook. You know that…”

  “Sh-sh!” my father said. “You’re screaming. Of course it was just a coincidence. Ed’s just trying one of his tricks again.” To Ed, he added, “You make her nervous. If you’ve got anything to say, say it to me.”

  Once more Gloria’s soprano floated down the stairs. “I’m lonely. Please hurry. Daddy.”

  “For God’s sakes!” I shouted up at her. “He’s not your Daddy; he’s your husband. You’re a grown woman and you’ve borne him two children. Can’t you call him by his name?”

  “Poor Eleanor.” Father led me toward the couch. “The poor kid, her nerves are shot. Let her rest, Ed, let her recover from the shock.” Father arranged the pillows, and waited solicitously, as though I were an invalid, until I had stretched on the couch. “I’ll go up and tell Gloria that you didn’t mean it, dear. I’m afraid you’ve hurt her feelings. She’s a sensitive girl, Gloria. Come on, Ed. Time you were going home.”

  “I’m staying,” Ed answered. He sat as if he had been molded into the chair.

  Father left. I closed my eyes, played the shocked and weary role, hoping with idiotic optimism that Ed would respect my fatigue. A few strained seconds passed. I turned to the wall. The modern chair did not creak when Ed got up and the thick rug silenced his footsteps, but every nerve in my body knew that he had come close to the couch. I turned my head, opened my eyes and Ed, taking this as a gesture of grace, sat beside me. He reached for my hand. I snatched it away.