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By Root 679 0

hand on the back of it. He had waited through the endless questions, the short, stark answers, the final re-reading of her statement. The policeman who read it stumbled woodenly over her words, so that it sounded as if she herself had stumbled although she hadn’t. His voice was bored and dismal; he was like someone reciting lists. Even her useless repetitions had been conscientiously recorded—“I don’t know. I don’t know,” which she must have said before Matthew came in, and surely not in such a despairing drone. She would have been quick with it, flicking it off her tongue like a dismissal, the way she always did when she felt cornered. The thought made Matthew want to move his hand from the chair to her shoulder, but he kept still.

On the telephone he had not even asked her the cause of death, but when it came out at the police station he wasn’t surprised. He had assumed it was suicide from the start. Now he wondered why. He had never known that he expected such a thing of Timothy. Why not a car accident? He was a short-tempered driver. Why not a hold-up man, a hit-and-run, one of those senseless pieces of violence that happened in this city every day? He couldn’t answer. When he fixed an image of his brother in his mind, trying to understand, he found that Timothy had already grown flat and unreal. “He had a round face,” he told himself. “He had short blond hair, sticking out in tufts.” The round face and blond hair materialized, but without the spark that made them Timothy.

He had driven Elizabeth home and left her outside, sitting on the porch steps facing the street, while he went into the house. He found his mother writing letters in the bedroom. The little beige dictaphone was playing her voice back, as tinny and sharp as a talking doll’s: “Mary. Is Billy old enough for tricycles? Not the pedal kind, I know, but—”

“I have bad news,” Matthew said.

She spun around in her chair with her face already shocked. “It’s Andrew,” she said instantly.

“No, Timothy.”

“Timothy? It’s Timothy?” She had dropped the pen and was kneading her hands, which looked cold and white and shaky. “He’s dead,” she said.

“I’m afraid he is.”

“I thought it would be Andrew.”

Behind her the mechanical voice played on. “Does he have a wagon? A scooter? Ask Peter about his plans for the summer.”

“How did it happen?” she asked.

“He, it was—”

“How did it happen?”

Timothy should have to be doing this; not Matthew. It was all Timothy’s fault, wasn’t it? Anger made him blunter than he had meant to be. “He shot himself,” he said —flatly, like a child tattling on some dreadful piece of mischief that he himself had had no part in.

“Oh, no, that’s so unfair!” his mother said.

“Unfair?”

He paused. Nothing he had planned covered this turn in the conversation. Mrs. Emerson felt her face with her hands, sending off icy trembling sparkles from her rings. “Mother,” Matthew said, “I wish there was something I—”

“Did he suffer any pain?”

“No.”

“But how did it come about?” she said. “What was the cause? Where did he find a gun?”

“I’m not too sure. Elizabeth said—”

“Elizabeth!” Her face had the stunned, grainy quality of a movie close-up, although she was across the room from him. She felt behind her on the desk and brought forth an inkbottle. Without looking at it she heaved it, overhand, in a swift, vicious arc—the last thing he had expected. He winced, but stood his ground. The inkbottle thudded against the curtain on the door, splashing it blue-black and cracking one of the panes behind it. In the silence that followed, the dictaphone said, “Would Margaret like Mr. Hughes to print her up more of those address labels?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Emerson said.

She flicked the dictaphone off, and then bent to pick up a sheet of stationery that had floated to the floor. “There was no excuse for that,” she said.

“It’s all right.”

“What were you saying?”

“Well—” He hesitated to mention Elizabeth’s name again, but his mother prompted him.

“Elizabeth said?”

“She said she went to eat lunch with him. She was just walking down the hall to his apartment