The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Part 16

"What did she say?"

"That it was out of the question, that I was far too young. I wrote and said I didn't need her consent, I was legally able to get married and I was going to, soon as I came home at Christmas, so I could go abroad with Edward. She was furious."

He nodded. He knew Gran's furies. The violence, the hatred, flowing out of her like champagne from a shaken bottle.

"Edward said he thought my brothers could persuade her. And in the end, she gave in. She invited Edward to have Christmas dinner with us." She checked, touched her forehead, closed her eyes. "I really thought that she ..."

Softly, he said: "It was Christmas Day, somewhere up north."

Equally softly, she said: "It was snowing that day and Edward was so late that we were about to start without him. Then he suddenly appeared at the door of the dining-room. He stood there, looking at me. Just-looking. Not smiling. And then my mother leaned over to me and said ... she said ..."

"What?" All these years, and he could feel the inner emptiness begin to fill at last with what should always have been there.

"She must have planned it, decided exactly when she would tell me, right down to the second. Normally I would never have sat next to her at the table but that day she made me. So n.o.body but me heard her say that she and Edward ... that they were lovers. That she'd seduced him, that it had been easy, that it was not me he loved but her."

"Did you believe her?"

"No. Not all of it. Not ... everything."

"What then?"

"Edward knew what she was doing. He called my name. He said he loved me, that in spite of everything, I was to remember he loved me. Then he-suddenly, he was gone, out through the front door. We heard a shot."

"My G.o.d."

"I ran and ran across the gra.s.s, in my new shoes. I could see him lying on the ground with his gun beside him, and I knelt in the snow and held him while he died. His blood was so red against the white. She put her arm round me for the first time in her life. She said they would have married. That Edward had no choice, not in the circ.u.mstances."

"Did you believe her?" he said again.

"Not at first." She sighed. "Later, I went into a ... hospital for a while."

"Of course. If you were carrying ... I suppose in those days ... more of a stigma ... unmarried ..." His voice died away.

"When I came out, Bobby had died in a car crash and my elder brothers had both gone out to Australia. She'd gone, too. She took you away with her, down south. You were all that was left of my Edward."

"You poor thing."

"Because of course, she and Edward had ... not that I ever blamed him. It was all her fault."

"Poor darling Mother." He covered her hand. They would be friends, she and he. They would make up for all the years that the evil old woman, Gran, had taken from them both. He thought swiftly about Gran's dying, wished it had taken her longer, that she had suffered more, that he had been, perhaps, more brutal at the beginning. "Why didn't you come looking for me?"

She moved from under his hand. "Why would I? It would only have brought it back. The trauma. Besides, eventually I got over the shock of it all."

He wished she did not sound so indifferent. "I didn't," he said.

"Jim and I started courting, we got married, had the children ..." She shrugged. "You know how it is."

"But, Mother ..." The word hung in his mouth, succulent, unaccustomed.

She stared at him for a moment. "I'm not your mother," she said, giving the word a hard emphasis.

"What?" He did not take in what she was saying.

She smiled a small, familiar, not-quite-pleasant smile. "Not me, Martin. Your father and I didn't ... hadn't ... I was a virgin when I wed Jim."

"Then ... who?"

She didn't answer.

"Gran?" he said.

"If that's what you called her."

"She told me my parents were dead," he said. Tears filled his eyes. Hatred, raw and red-edged, filled him. Was Gran, that blowsy, disgusting old woman, was she the mother, the flesh and blood, it had taken him so long to find?

The woman looked at him. "In a way, she was right, wasn't she?"

"No! Don't say that!" His hands were around her neck. He could feel the bone at the base of her skull and the convulsive movements of her throat. He shook his head. "She can't be ... not Gran," he said.

He squeezed harder, trying to force the right words from her mouth, while her white fingers tore at his hands and her face darkened. "Tell me it wasn't Gran," he screamed, but she did not answer.

When he let her drop back in her chair her eyes, so like his own, had grown dull. In one of her small hands she still held the photograph of that long-past never-finished luncheon, and the champagne in a silver bucket, on Christmas Day.

THE BUTLER'S CHRISTMAS EVE.

Mary Roberts Rinehart.

THE FIRST MYSTERY NOVEL to appear on the bestseller list in America was The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart in 1909. She had written it as a serial for the first pulp magazine, Munsey's Magazine, which also serialized her novel The Circular Staircase (1908), which was released in book form before The Man in Lower Ten, probably her most successful work. She and Avery Hopwood adapted it for the stage as The Bat in 1920, by which time she had become the highest-paid writer in America. As the creator of the now frequently parodied "Had-I-But-Known" school, Rinehart regularly had her plucky heroines put themselves in situations from which they needed to be rescued. "The Butler's Christmas Eve" was first published in her short story collection Alibi for Isabel (New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).

The Butler's Christmas Eve.

MARY ROBERTS RINEHART.

WILLIAM STOOD IN THE RAIN WAITING for the bus. In the fading daylight he looked rather like a freshly washed eighty-year-old and beardless Santa Claus, and underneath his raincoat he clutched a parcel which contained a much-worn nights.h.i.+rt, an extra pair of socks, a fresh s.h.i.+rt, and a brand-new celluloid collar. It also contained a pint flask of the best Scotch whisky.

Not that William drank, or at least not to speak of. The whisky was a gift, and in more than one way it was definitely contraband. It was whisky which had caused his trouble.

The Christmas Eve crowd around him was wet but amiable.

"Look, mama, what have you done with the suitcase?"

"What do you think you're sitting on? A bird cage?"

The crowd laughed. The rain poured down. The excited children were restless. They darted about, were lost and found again. Women scolded.

"You stand right here, Johnny. Keep under this umbrella. That's your new suit."

When the bus came along one of them knocked William's package into the gutter, and he found himself shaking with anxiety. But the bottle was all right. He could feel it, still intact. The Old Man would have it, all right, Miss Sally or no Miss Sally; the Old Man, left sitting in a wheelchair with one side of his big body dead and nothing warm in his stomach to comfort him. Just a year ago tonight on Christmas Eve William had slipped him a small drink to help him sleep, and Miss Sally had caught him at it.

She had not said anything. She had kissed her grandfather good-night and walked out of the room. But the next morning she had come into the pantry where William was fixing the Old Man's breakfast tray and dismissed him, after fifty years.

"I'm sorry, William. But you know he is forbidden liquor."

William put down the Old Man's heated egg cup and looked at her.

"It was only because it was Christmas Eve, Miss Sally. He was kind of low, with Mr. Tony gone and everything."

She went white at that, but her voice was even.

"I am trying to be fair," she said. "But even without this-You have worked a long time, and grandfather is too heavy for you to handle. I need a younger man, now that-"

She did not finish. She did not say that her young husband had enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, and that she had fought tooth and nail against it. Or that she suspected both her grandfather and William of supporting him.

William gazed at her incredulously.

"I've handled him, one way and another, for fifty years, Miss Sally."

"I know all that. But I've talked to the doctor. He agrees with me."

He stood very still. She couldn't do this to him, this girl he had raised, and her father before her. She couldn't send him out at his age to make a life for himself, after living a vicarious one in this house for half a century. But he saw helplessly that she could and that she meant to.

"When am I to go?" he asked.

"It would be kinder not to see him again, wouldn't it?"

"You can't manage alone, Miss Sally," he said stubbornly. But she merely made a little gesture with her hands.

"I'm sorry, William. I've already arranged for someone else."

He took the breakfast tray to the Old Man's door and gave it to the nurse. Then he went upstairs to his room and standing inside looked around him. This had been his room for most of his life. On the dresser was the faded snapshot of the Old Man as a Major in the Rough Riders during the Spanish War. There was a picture of Miss Sally's father, his only son, who had not come home from France in 1918. There was a very new one of Mr. Tony, young and good-looking and slightly defiant, taken in his new Navy uniform. And of course there were pictures of Miss Sally herself, ranging from her baby days to the one of her, smiling and lovely, in her wedding dress.

William had helped to rear her. Standing there he remembered the day when she was born. The Major-he was Major Bennett then, not the Old Man-had sent for him when he heard the baby's mother was dead.

"Well," he said heavily, "it looks as though we've got a child to raise. A girl at that! Think we can do it?"

"We've done harder things, sir," said William.

"All right," said the Major. "But get this, William, I want no spoiled brat around the place. If I find you spoiling her, by the Lord Harry I'll fire you."

"I won't spoil her," William had said st.u.r.dily. "But she'll probably be as stubborn as a mule."

"Now why the h.e.l.l do you say that?" the Major had roared.

But William had only smiled.

So she had grown up. She was lovable, but she was wild as a March wind and as stubborn as the Bennetts had always been. Then-it seemed almost no time to William-she met Mr. Tony, and one day she was walking down a church aisle on her grandfather's arm, looking beautiful and sedate, and when she walked out again she was a married woman.

The old house had been gay after that. It was filled with youth and laughter. Then one day Miss Sally had gone to the hospital to have her baby, and her grandfather, gray of face, had waited for the news. William had tried to comfort him.

"I understand it's a perfectly normal process, sir," he said. "They are born every day. Millions of them."

"Get your smug face out of here," roared the Major. "You and your millions! What the h.e.l.l do I care about them? It's my girl who's in trouble."

He was all right then. He was even all right when the message came that it was over, and Miss Sally and Mr. Tony had a ten-minute-old son. But going out of the hospital he had staggered and fallen, and he had never walked again. That was when the household began to call him the Old Man. Behind his back, of course.

It was tragic, because Miss Sally had had no trouble at all. She wakened at the hospital to learn that she had borne a man-child, asked if he had the proper number of fingers and toes, stated flatly that she had no intention of raising him for purposes of war, and then asked for a cigarette.

That had been two years ago, and she had come home on Christmas Eve. Mr. Tony had a little tree for the baby in the Old Man's bedroom, with Miss Sally's battered wax angel on the top, and the Old Man lay in his bed and looked at it.

"I suppose this kind of thing will save us, in the end," he said to William. "d.a.m.n it, man, people will go on having babies, and the babies will have Christmas trees, long after Hitler is dead and rotted."

The baby of course had not noticed the tree, and there was nothing to indicate that a year later William would be about to be dismissed, or that Mr. Tony, feverishly shaking a rattle before his sleeping offspring, would be in his country's uniform and somewhere on the high seas.

It was a bad year, in a way. It had told on Miss Sally, William thought. Her grandfather had taken his stroke badly. He would lie for hours, willing that stubborn will of his to move an arm, a leg, even a finger, on the stricken side. Nothing happened, of course, and at last he had accepted it, wheelchair and all. William had helped to care for him, turning his big body when the nurse changed the sheets, bathing him when he roared that he would be eternally d.a.m.ned if he would allow any woman to wash him. And during the long hours of the night it had been William who sat with him while he could not sleep.

Yet Miss Sally had taken it bravely.

"He cared for me all my life," she said. "Now I can care for him. William and I."

She had done it, too. William had to grant her that. She had turned a wing of the ground floor over to him, with a porch where he could sit and look out at the sea. She gave him time and devotion. Until Pearl Harbor, that is, and the night when Mr. Tony had slipped into the Old Man's room while William was playing chess with him, and put his problem up to them.

"You know Sally," he said. "I can't even talk to her about this war. But she's safe here, and the boy too. And-well, somebody's got to fight."

The Old Man had looked down at that swollen helpless hand of his, lying in his lap.

"I see," he said. "You want to go, of course?"

"It isn't a question of wanting, is it?"

"It is, d.a.m.n it," said the Old Man fiercely. "I wanted to go to Cuba. Her father couldn't get to France fast enough. I wouldn't give a tinker's curse for the fellow who doesn't want to go. But"-his voice softened-"it will hurt Sally like h.e.l.l, son. She's had enough of war."

It had hurt her. She had fought it tooth and nail. But Tony had enlisted in the Navy almost at once, and he had gone a few days before Christmas. She did not cry when she saw him off, but she had the bleak look in her face which had never since entirely left it.

"I hope you enjoy it," she said.

"I don't expect to enjoy it, darling."

She was smiling, a strange stiff smile.

"Then why are you going?" she asked. "There are plenty of men who don't have to leave a wife to look after a baby and a helpless old man. Two old men," she said, and looked at William, standing by with the bags.

She was still not crying when after he had gone she had walked to the Old Man's room. William was there. She stood in the doorway looking at them.