“How did she take that?”
“In stride. The poor woman has aged badly. Blames herself for what happened to Mac, because she insisted he take over one of the stores.”
“Have they... eh... found anything more about the killer?” I asked, my voice almost calm.
“She was very bitter about the police. Claims they've given up the case. I talked to the lawyer about it, and he told me the cops have talked to local stoolies and are convinced it was the work of an out-of-town stick-up man.”
“Might have been some punk just passing through. No fingerprints, or any clues?”
Elma shook her head. “Not a thing. Cops told Mama Morse that in time the killer will be caught in some other robbery, confess this one.”
“Yeah, guess the police know their business,” I said. If they were waiting for me to commit another stick-up and killing, we'd both die of old age first!
“That's what I tried to tell Mrs. Morse, but all she talks about is avenging Mac, how nothing is being done, and God is punishing her... all that.”
“But with it all, she drove a bargain—made sure you didn't get all of Mac's estate.”
“That's not nice to say—half the stuff I didn't want. Merely took the two policies, made her a sort of... well, gift with the small stuff in his account. Listen to me talk— nearly a grand and it's small stuff!”
“You talk like a wealthy widow,” I said, kidding her.
Elma yawned. “And a tired one, too. First time I've been back in New York in months. Felt good, but better to be here.”
“I had a real bright day,” I said. “Borrowed Tony's pistol, as a model for some sketches. Seemed so nice out, I decided to go hunting for rabbits. I...”
“Hunting?”
“Yes, one of those crazy urges. Never got to shooting any—lost the gun in the woods some place. Hope Tony won't be sore. I'll tell him to buy a new one and send me the bill.”
But when I told Tony he blew his top. I thought he was angry because the gun was a war souvenir, but he said, “Damn it, Marsh, you could have got yourself a year in the can for carrying a gun without a permit, and in a way I'd be at fault.”
“I was merely horsing around and it must have dropped out of my pocket.”
“Guns aren't made to horse with,” Tony snapped. “Come on, let's look around where you were walking. Some kid will find the rod and I'll never forgive myself.”
Tony and I “searched” the woods that afternoon, the next, and most of Saturday. I kept telling him it was probably hidden in the mud and Spring weeds, would never be found, and when I took him into Riverhead and paid for a fancy target pistol he wanted, Tony calmed down.
The night of the afternoon I threw the Luger in the lake, I didn't have any nightmares, slept smoothly. I felt so good in the morning, I started working again—touching up a head I'd done of Elma months ago. Elma always called me to watch her feed the baby, and as I watched her this time... I got an idea: a shell of a baby's head suckling a breast... but just the nose, and part of the face, and only a part of the breast... mainly the lips clinging greedily to the nipple.
I spent the afternoon sketching on paper and liked the idea. Elma thought it was good and I tried to figure out an armature that would support the tricky figure.
I worked hard on the figure, studying Elma feeding the baby, knowing I had to get it exactly right or it wouldn't be anything, had to really capture the spirit of feeding... if there is such a thing.
Two weeks later Elma got a registered letter with a $15,000 check attached and she deposited it in our joint checking account. When I said something about taxes, she grinned at me, said, “You know us, the tax-free kids. Mama's lawyer took care of that. Seems legally I could ask for a share of the stores, so we agreed that for my not being a pig, they would take care of any taxes, and his fee. So I took the deal. There was...”
“Look, when will...?”
“... About a thousand bucks in odds and ends that I gave to Mama for a...”
“Skip the details. When will you stop nursing Joan?”
“Aren't you interested in what I did for Mama?”
“Let's cut the I-remember-mama routine,” I said almost curtly. “Forget that witch. What about you and Joan?”
“She's over a month old, I can stop any time. Why?”
“Thought it might be an idea for us to hire a nurse for a few days, fly down to Maryland, make us both an honest married couple. We could have a second honeymoon—one all tied up in legal ribbons this time.”
That wonderful wide mouth gave me a big grin and a bigger kiss as Elma whispered, “Marsh, I do want that, want it so much, darling.”
I tried to nibble at her tongue, said, in my usual corn-ball manner, “You know of course I'm only marrying you for your money.”
“Why of course, sir, you're such an arch villain, you probably killed my husband, you hammy dastard,” Elma said, laughing.
“Yeah, that's me, the villain,” I said, holding on to her tightly, my voice sounding hollow as fright replaced all desire within me.
CHAPTER SIX
IT STARTED OUT AS A lovely summer. We spent a seven-day honeymoon traveling about Maryland, even flew over to Kentucky to be with my folks for a couple hours. I squeezed a hundred bucks into my father's thin hand when I left. He thanked me, stared at the money and asked, “What you doing these days, Marsh?”
“I'm a sculptor. I make statues and heads and things.”
“Don't say.” My old man fingered the five 20-dollar bills again, said, “You must make out good at it.”
“Not yet.”
“Man make himself a living at fooling with clay?”
“Very few do. I can't.”
“Then why you doing it?” the old man asked.
“I don't know. Guess because I like it.”
“Hmmm! Son, son, don't you know life ain't doing what you like?”
“No, pop. Elma and me, we try to do as much as we can of what we like to do. That's called happiness.”
The old man shook his head and pocketed the cash. “Marsh, that's just talk unless you got money—and you seem to have money.”
The art colony came back to Sandyhook and there was the usual heavy talk, the heavy drinking, and all of it gay and—interesting. And we had that and in addition the wonder of raising a baby. My statue of Elma... RELAXED... had won several honorable mentions, and the new one, which I called... HUNGER... was so fragile I had to make it in sections, and it gave me a hard time before it was finally cast. It caused some talk, especially when one jerky critic decided it was obscene and an insult to “motherhood,” when my agent displayed it in his gallery.
Don't get me wrong—I wasn't the boy wonder of the art circle, no one was shouting my name up and down 57th Street, but I was becoming known. My name would be mentioned as “promising” or as one of the “younger” artists in some of those dull Sunday bread-and-butter articles the critics wrote. But I could see I was a tiny bit important and enjoyed the feeling—from the way Sid and the others talked to me, asked my opinions. Wasn't anything they said, but the way they said it that made me feel good.
Elma and I were completely in love and Joan was a healthy bawling baby. We decided she would be given ballet training as soon as she was old enough—not that we especially wanted her to be a dancer, but dancing gives people such wonderful bodies. Elma wanted to start having another baby—mine—but I felt it would be best if we waited a year or so.
Elma was full of little surprises: she could swim like a fish—seemed to love the sea. When I asked her where she learned to swim so well, she gave me a corny, seductive look with her almond eyes, said, “You know the gag... I was a call girl in Venice! Father taught me to swim soon as I could stand.”
She and Joan practically lived on the beach, Joan even crawling around in the water. They were both tanned a deep nut brown and I loved to watch Elma take off her bathing suit, the creamy white of her breasts and hips in happy contrast to the brown of her body. I decided to do a terra-cotta figure of her in the nude... the UNDRESSED BATHER... made several water-color sketches, finally decided to do her from the waist up and accentuate the whiteness of her bosom by making the nipples a deep red.
My agent was excited about it and I even crushed bricks to mix with the clay, for heating... but somehow I was too busy bathing and going to parties to work. I had the sketches down, would work on the clay during the winter.
Elma was quite popular with the summer crowd. They were happy she was part Lapp—having never seen a Laplander—and they trooped into our house to hear her old records, get into hot, wordy arguments over King Oliver and Bix and Bunny Berrigan, the atomic bomb, and anything else that came to mind. We hired a part-time nurse to look after Joan, purchased a second-hand boat with a new outboard, some ridiculous yacht caps, and did a lot of fishing.
We were really eating high up on the hog.
Elma and I had our little spats, too. She felt we should live abroad while we had the money, while I wanted to play it safe—make our cash last as long as possible. Elma said, “You yourself told your father happiness is doing what you like to do. Way things are, all this war talk, let's enjoy ourselves. Joan has her own money. If after a year or two we end up starving artists, hell with it, I'll go back to punishing a typewriter.”
She gave up the idea of Europe, after reading all the travel ads, when I pointed out she would have passport trouble, due to her non-citizenship. We compromised on seeing California and maybe Mexico during the winter. With everything, we were living cheaply, spending money only for food and rent.
Sid, and some toy manufacturer who was interested in art, were working on the idea of plastic reproductions. They worked hard but ran into several snags. They made some transparent heads, but the transparency robbed all realness, and when we experimented with colors—a foggy gray, white, blue, the figures somehow reminded us of piggy banks. But we all had hopes of it making our fortune, some day.
All in all I was never so happy in my life—till one Sunday early in August. One of the painters always made a point of inviting Negroes down. Knowing I was from Kentucky, he seemed to get a bang out of introducing them to me.
Actually, since I was raised in a mill town and the mill only hired whites, I never saw a Negro when I was a kid. I suppose I grew up with some sort of prejudice instilled in me, but I lost that with my drawl while scuffling for a living in New York. Outside of admiring the works of Barthe, a Negro sculptor, I didn't especially like or dislike Negroes.... I never thought of people as a race, but merely as persons.
This week-end the painter had a West Indian down, a middle-aged dark-brown man named Sandler, whose heavy body was still fairly muscular, and a face with an interesting high forehead and sharp cheek-bones. Sandler was some sort of union leader on the water front, and in his lousy, patronizing manner, the painter insisted I take Sandler fishing in my boat. Being from the islands, Sandler was nuts about fishing.
I wanted to study his face, and as I was going out anyway, I was glad to have company. He had an odd, sloppy English accent, and was fond of talking. As we fished, not getting much outside of some small porgies and one weakfish, he kept telling me about his work as an organizer of the rank and file along the water front.
He talked a lot; about the corruption on the docks, the stealing and dope racket, the gangster control. “And the stoolies,” he said. “We had this white joker started to hang around our group, and the sonofabitch turned out to be a dick, like I suspected.”
“From one of these un-American committees?” I asked, because I had to say something. I relit my pipe and watched the muscles of his big face as he talked. I had his head firmly in mind, but didn't want to look like an “artist” and start sketching as we were bouncing around on the waves.
Sandler laughed. He didn't have white teeth or a flashing smile, merely bad teeth. “That's what we thought. Like to give us a fit. But turned out he was just a private dick hunting for a punk. Seems there was a hold-up and a killing in New Jersey and... I don't know what made them think a longshoreman did it, but this guy was just nosing around. So we...”
I didn't move. I bit through the stem of my pipe and my guts began turning over and I thought I was going to puke.
For a while I didn't say a word, let him talk on. But when we ran into a school of king fish and Sandler started remembering the fishing he did in Trinidad as a kid, I said, “This fellow hunting for a murderer—what did you say his name was?”
“You mean the guy who was killed? Some clown who ran a jewelry shop over in Newark.”
“I mean the dick?”
“Used a phony name with us, of course, but when we got suspicious of him, he was ducking too many real jobs, we did a little snooping on our own. Name is Harry Logan. Why do you ask?”
“No special reason,” I said, hoping my voice wasn't shaking. “Don't have much to read out here in the winter, so we read every line in the papers, including all the murders. Remember that case.”
Sandler reeled in a two-pound king, said, “All you see is crime headlines. I say only way to cure crime is to cure the society that makes it necessary to rob to eat or...”
I waited till he was done making his speech, asked, “And that dick, he was a real cop or a private snooper?”
“Private dick. We got the whole story out of him. Some woman in Newark had hired him, given him a few bucks and offered a reward. He told us everything—to get off the stoolie hook. That's the trouble, always suspect hard working people, especially black people, although it turned out he was looking for a white man. But of course they never investigate the gangsters who run the docks and...”
