Pity Him Afterwards

Or Rod McGee. Eager, friendly, agreeable. Another protective cover for a darker person underneath?

The subject of the summer season exhausted, they went on to anecdotes, telling each other half-truths about their past experiences in theater and the Army and school, and Mel left his morbid reflections alone for a while. He told an exaggerated version of an encounter he’d had with a WAF while touring with an Army Special Services show, and as the talk went on he began to lose the dullness of shock that had been with him since he’d walked into the dead girl’s room this afternoon. His normal ebullience returned, and when he managed in the middle of an out-and-out falsehood about a girl guitar player from Queens to let everybody know he was Jewish, he knew wryly he was his old self again.

Gradually, the group was getting more and more animated. They’d all been needing a change of pace, something to break the spell that murder had cast over them, and this was it. From reminiscence they got to the joke-telling period, and not a single clean joke was heard. They were all laughing so hard, and interrupting each other so often, that even the dirty jokes weren’t heard any too clearly. In the general hilarity — touched just slightly as it was with hysteria — Will Henley thawed and became absolutely amiable, Ken Forrest came way out of his shell and demonstrated a piercing laugh that endangered every wineglass in the place, and Rod McGee settled in with the group and stopped looking as though any second he would dash off and shine a lot of shoes. As for Tom Burns, his eyes got brighter and brighter, his nose got redder and redder, and his speech got shlurrier and shlurrier.

They finally left the Lounge at one-fifteen, only because the bartender insisted. Tom Burns tried to exit with a quote from Shakespeare, but whether he succeeded or not he alone knew; by now his speech was almost entirely unintelligible.

Will Henley started the singing, as they moved out across the night away from the Lounge. “On top of Old Smoky,” he shouted, and they all joined in. Mel took upon himself the job of caller, roaring out the lines before they were sung by everyone else, and wishing he could remember that old Stan Freberg parody so he could shout out some of Freberg’s lines.

They angled across the road, weaving and singing, all linked together with their arms around each other’s shoulders and waists. Lights flicked on in the house bulking ahead of them, and heads appeared in windows, but they ignored it all. They needed release, the one killer and the four unwilling sharers of his drama; what did they care about disapproving heads in lit windows? They were lit themselves, and to hell with everything.

It was Rod McGee who shushed them all when they reached the porch. From loud caterwauling they shifted immediately to comic silence, tiptoeing into the house, giggling, shushing one another, tripping on the stairs. Alden March met them at the second-floor landing, pique on his face and hands on his hips. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” he told them, in a loud whisper. “At a time like this!”

They hooted him down, and staggered on by. Mel and Rod and Will had to climb the additional flight to the third floor, where they whispered incoherent good nights to one another. Mel unlocked his door with not too much difficulty, switched on the light, and entered his room. He closed the door, peeled off his clothing, scattered it around the room, switched off the light, and crawled into bed.

Three minutes later, with embarrassed haste, he got up again to relock the door.

The madman lay frightened and exultant in the darkness, squeezing his hands together and smiling from ear to ear. His room was much like Mel Daniels’, and like it now was in darkness. The door was closed, but unlocked, for of them all the madman had the least to fear tonight, and a sliver of light outlined the door all the way around.

Of them all he had the least to fear, but he too was afraid, and afraid of the same thing as all the rest. He was afraid of the madman, of himself. Exultant, but also afraid.

Exultant, because tonight he had brought it off. The acid test, the acid test. Sitting with them all, joining in their conversation, without suspicion. But also afraid, because in his success he had lost himself, and now more than ever before that was dangerous.