Into the Night

“Did she miss it?”

“No, she never reopened the valise again. The last-minute things she’d bought, she took with her in an extra shopping bag. There wasn’t any more room in the valise for them, anyway.”

She breathed heavily. “We kissed goodbye, and she took the train. That was the last time in this world I ever saw her. I never even heard from her again by mail. The next thing I knew she was dead. It must have happened right after she got back, within the next day or two.”

Then she added, “She wouldn’t even let me come to the train with her, I remember that. She said she didn’t want me to see her off. That alone showed she fully intended to do — what I’ve told you. We said goodbye right at the door of the apartment, upstairs. And then I watched the light inside the little pane of glass in the elevator door slowly going down. Like a life going out.”

Two very small girls came pedaling by, holding hands, sharing a single pair of roller skates between the two of them. One went down, nearly pulling the other one after her. The fallen one’s face began to work, in the preliminary stages of having a good hearty cry, but her skate-mate, like a very small-sized mother, assiduously helped her up again, patted her hair smooth, and tugged at the bottom of her dress to straighten it out. The cry never developed. They went swinging down the path again, blithe as ever.

“Cute,” remarked Charlotte parenthetically, glancing after them.

At least they don’t have our problems, Madeline thought.

“What did you do with it afterward?” she asked.

“Nothing. I didn’t know what to do, I was afraid to tell anyone I had it. I was afraid to go to the police and report it, because that would link her to it. How could I explain having it in the first place? I couldn’t say I’d found it, it could still be traced back to her. I was afraid to cover it up in a paper bag and just drop it into some trash can along the street. Somebody else might have found it and been tempted into doing something bad with it. Later, after her death, a repairman was coming to look at the refrigerator one day, and I was worried he might catch sight of it, so I took it out from behind there and put it into an empty shoe box, and hid that on the floor at the back of the closet. It’s been there ever since.

“I can show it to you when we go back.

“Every time I go to the closet to get something out I see it, and I don’t like to. It does something to me. One night I even dreamed about it. It came out of the closet by itself.”

“I’ll take it off your hands,” Madeline said, lost in thought.

That evening she sat down at the little table-desk in her hotel room. It was a desk, really, only by grace of two shallow drawers holding hotel stationery, telegram blanks, a pad of printed laundry lists, and a large sheet of green blotting paper that covered its entire surface. She placed her handbag on top of this and opened it. She took out the revolver that Charlotte had turned over to her with unfeigned relief a little while ago, and examined it curiously.

She didn’t know anything about revolvers, only that they could kill (and who should know that better than she?). She couldn’t identify the caliber of this one, other than that it was fairly small. The typical kind that a woman or girl would buy and carry. But small or not, it could take away a life. It was nickel-plated, at least she supposed the gleaming silvery finish to be nickel plating, and its grip was either bone or ivory, which of the two she wasn’t sure.

She put it down to one side on the blotting-paper surface and left it there for the moment. She unzipped one of the inner compartments of her handbag and took out a small, inexpensive pocket notebook, the kind that can be bought at any five-and-dime or stationery store. Its two-by-four pages bore ruled blue lines across them, as further indication of its low cost. On the cover was stamped, with unintentional irony, the single word “Memo.”

But inside there was almost nothing written yet, only one brief phrase:

1. To get even with a woman.

She took a metal pencil with an ink cylinder in it from the handbag and ejected the point with a little click. Then she held it poised, but didn’t write (as if once she wrote, what she wrote would be irrevocable, and she would be held fast to it). She thought of that line in the Rubaiyat that goes: “The moving finger writes, and, having writ, moves on/Nor all your piety and wit/Shall lure it back to cancel half a line/Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”

She looked at the gun, she looked at the pencil, she looked at the page between the two of them that was still blank but for the single phrase. It was a little like signing a death warrant.

She sat there for long moments, motionless. So still the ticking of her little traveling clock on the bureau could be plainly heard in the hush of her heart and her mind, the debating hush.