“I didn’t know she was ever on the radio as a child!” Mrs. Silsburn said. “I didn’t know that! Was she so brilliant as a child?”
“No, she was mostly just noisy, really. She sang as well then as she does now, though. And she was wonderful moral support. She usually arranged things so that she sat next to my brother Seymour at the broadcasting table, and whenever he said anything on the show that delighted her, she used to step on his foot. It was like a hand squeeze, only she used her foot.” As I delivered this little homily, I had my hands on the top rung of the straight chair at the desk. They suddenly slipped off—rather in the way one’s elbow can abruptly lose its “footing” on the surface of a table or a bar counter. I lost and regained my balance almost simultaneously, though, and neither Mrs. Silsburn nor the Lieutenant seemed to notice it. I folded my arms. “On certain nights when he was in especially good form, Seymour used to come home with a slight limp. That’s really true. Charlotte didn’t just step on his foot, she tramped on it. He didn’t care. He loved people who stepped on his feet. He loved noisy girls.”
“Well, isn’t that interesting!” Mrs. Silsburn said. “I certainly never knew she was ever on the radio or anything.”
“Seymour got her on, actually,” I said. “She was the daughter of an osteopath who lived in our building on Riverside Drive.” I replaced my hands on the rung of the straight chair, and leaned my weight forward on it, partly for support, partly in the style of an old back-fence reminiscer. The sound of my own voice was now singularly pleasing to me. “We were playing stoopball— Are either of you at all interested in this?”
“Yes!” said Mrs. Silsburn.
“We were playing stoopball on the side of the building one afternoon after school, Seymour and I, and somebody who turned out to be Charlotte started dropping marbles on us from the twelfth story. That’s how we met. We got her on the program that same week. We didn’t even know she could sing. We just wanted her because she had such a beautiful New Yorkese accent. She had a Dyckman Street accent.”
Mrs. Silsburn laughed the kind of tinkling laugh that is, of course, death to the sensitive anecdotist, cold sober or otherwise. She had evidently been waiting for me to finish, so that she could make a single-minded appeal to the Lieutenant. “Who does she look like to you?” she said to him importunately. “Around the eyes and mouth especially. Who does she remind you of?”
The Lieutenant looked at her, then up at the photograph. “You mean the way she is in this picture? As a kid?” he said. “Or now? The way she is in the movies? Which do you mean?”
“Both, really, I think. But especially right here in this picture.”
The Lieutenant scrutinized the photograph—rather severely, I thought, as though he by no means approved of the way Mrs. Silsburn, who after all was a civilian as well as a woman, had asked him to examine it. “Muriel,” he said shortly. “Looks like Muriel in this picture. The hair and all.”
“But exactly!” said Mrs. Silsburn. She turned to me. “But exactly,” she repeated. “Have you ever met Muriel? I mean have you ever seen her when she’s had her hair tied in a lovely big—”
“I’ve never seen Muriel at all until today,” I said.
“Well, all right, just take my word.” Mrs. Silsburn tapped the photograph impressively with her index finger. “This child could double for Muriel at that age. But to a T.”
The whiskey was steadily edging up on me, and I couldn’t quite take in this information whole, let alone consider its many possible ramifications. I walked back over—just a trifle straight-linishly, I think—to the coffee table and resumed stirring the pitcher of Collinses. The bride’s father’s uncle tried to get my attention as I came back into his vicinity, to greet me on my reappearance, but I was just abstracted enough by the alleged fact of Muriel’s resemblance to Charlotte not to respond to him. I was also feeling just a trifle dizzy. I had a strong impulse, which I didn’t indulge, to stir the pitcher from a seated position on the floor.
A minute or two later, as I was just starting to pour out the drinks, Mrs. Silsburn had a question for me. It all but sang its way across the room to me, so melodiously was it pitched.
“Would it be very awful if I asked about that accident Mrs. Burwick happened to mention before? I mean those nine stitches she spoke of. Did your brother accidentally push her or something like that, I mean?”
I put down the pitcher, which seemed extraordinarily heavy and unwieldy, and looked over at her. Oddly, despite the mild dizziness I was feeling, distant images hadn’t begun to blur in the least. If anything, Mrs. Silsburn as a focal point across the room seemed rather obtrusively distinct. “Who’s Mrs. Burwick?” I said.
“My wife,” the Lieutenant answered, a trifle shortly. He was looking over at me, too, if only as a committee of one to investigate what was taking me so long with the drinks.
“Oh. Certainly she is,” I said.
“Was it an accident?” Mrs. Silsburn pressed. “He didn’t mean to do it, did he?”
“Oh, God, Mrs. Silsburn.”
“I beg your pardon?” she said coldly.
“I’m sorry. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m getting a little tight. I poured myself a great drink in the kitchen about five minutes—” I broke off, and turned abruptly around. I’d just heard a familiar heavy tread in the uncarpeted hall. It was coming toward us—at us—at a great rate, and in an instant the Matron of Honor jounced into the room.
She had eyes for no one. “I finally got them,” she said. Her voice sounded strangely levelled off, stripped of even the ghost of italics. “After about an hour.” Her face looked tense and overheated to the bursting point. “Is that cold?” she said, and came without stopping, and unanswered, over to the coffee table. She picked up the one glass I’d half filled a minute or so before, and drank it off in one greedy tilt. “That’s the hottest room I’ve ever been in in my entire life,” she said—rather impersonally—and set down her empty glass. She picked up the pitcher and refilled the glass halfway, with much clinking and plopping of ice cubes.
Mrs. Silsburn was already well in the vicinity of the coffee table. “What’d they say?” she asked impatiently. “Did you speak to Rhea?”
The Matron of Honor drank first. “I spoke to everybody,” she said, putting down her glass, and with a grim but, for her, peculiarly un-dramatic emphasis on “everybody.” She looked first at Mrs. Silsburn, then at me, then at the Lieutenant. “You can all relax,” she said. “Everything’s just fine and dandy.”
“What do you mean? What happened?” Mrs. Silsburn said sharply.
“Just what I said. The groom’s no longer indisposed by happiness.” A familiar style of inflection was tack in the Matron of Honor’s voice.
“How come? Who’d you talk to?” the Lieutenant said to her. “Did you talk to Mrs. Fedder?”
“I said I talked to everybody. Everybody but the blushing bride. She and the groom’ve eloped.” She turned to me. “How much sugar did you put in this thing, anyway?” she asked irritably. “It tastes like absolute—”