The Cry of the Owl Read online

  Greg tuned the radio station in properly, then started to undress. His closet was too small, and it had annoyed him the whole ten months he had been living here. Lately, he had thought, every time he put a suit on a hanger and squeezed it in, that in another few weeks he’d be living with Jenny in the house in Trenton, which had spacious closets in every room, even the kitchen. Tonight he felt a little shaky about the house, and it maddened him. To let a punk, a nut like Robert Forester upset his life so! Nearly every evening, he drove past Jenny’s house to see if her car was there, and the couple of evenings it had been gone, he had thought she might have been at the Tessers’ or with Rita, because she’d come back before midnight those nights. Now he felt she had spent those evenings with Forester, and last night might not have been the first or the only whole night she had spent with him, because he hadn’t been driving by her place every night.

  At nine-thirty the next morning, in a roadside restaurant about forty miles from Langley, Greg called Langley Aeronautics. The woman who answered the telephone said very calmly that they did not give out the addresses of employees. He called again from a different place half an hour later, and asked to speak to Robert Forester. It took three minutes or so to find him, as Greg did not know what department he worked in. At last, Robert’s voice said, “Hello.”

  “This is Greg Wyncoop. I’d like to see you after work today.”

  “What about?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you. What time are you off?”

  “I get off at five. But it’s not convenient today.”

  “It won’t take long, Mr. Forester. See you at five. O.K.?”

  “All right. At five.”

  Greg was there at five, and when he tried to get in through a gate where cars were already trickling out, a guard stopped him and asked for a pass. Greg said he was meeting one of the employees. He was asked to put his car in a certain spot near the main building that was marked “DELIVERIES—NON-PERSONNEL.” Greg smiled slightly. They ran the place like a top-secret organization, whereas all they made was parts for silly little planes for private citizens. Greg got out of his car and walked around on the parking lot, looking for Robert. He looked also at the cars coming and going along the road, thinking he might see Jenny’s blue Volkswagen. Why had today been inconvenient for Mr. Forester? Greg threw his cigarette down as he saw Forester approaching. Forester had a roll of paper in his hand.

  “Hi,” Greg said with a curt nod.

  “Evening.”

  “I suppose you know why I wanted to see you.”

  “Not exactly,” Robert said.

  “Were you with Jenny last night? I should say was she with you?”

  Robert held the roll of paper lightly in both hands. “I suggest you ask Jenny.”

  “I’m asking you. Where do you live, Mr. Forester?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “There’re all sorts of ways of finding out. Just tell me, were you with her last night?”

  “I think that’s Jenny’s business or my business.”

  “Oh, you do? I still consider myself engaged to her, Mr. Forester. Did you forget that? In January you announced your ‘intentions,’ said you had none in regard to Jenny. Is that still true?”

  “That’s still true.”

  His calm made Greg feel angrier. It wasn’t natural. He remembered what his ex-wife had said: he wasn’t normal. “Mr. Forester, I don’t think you’re fit company for any girl, let alone mine. I’m giving you a warning. Don’t see her and don’t try to see her. Understand?”

  “I understand,” Robert said, but in such a matter-of-fact way, Greg got no satisfaction from it.

  “It’s a warning. I’ll break your neck if you touch her.”

  “All right,” Robert said.

  Greg stepped around him and strode off. His blood was tingling with anger. He hadn’t seen the fear he had hoped for in Forester’s face, but he had won the first round, he felt. He had been brief and to the point. Greg turned around with a sudden inspiration, looked for Robert’s dark overcoat, but didn’t see it. Oh, well, he’d said enough. Then he watched for Forester’s car, which he remembered was a dark two-door convertible, thinking he could follow it and find out where Forester lived, but there were so damned many cars he couldn’t spot it.

  Greg drove directly to Jenny’s house. By the time he got there, it was a quarter to six, and her car was not there. She was usually home by five or five-thirty. He drove back to Langley, knowing it was probably hopeless tonight, but that he would be angry with himself if he went home without giving it a try. He stopped at a dry cleaner’s in Langley that was still open. They didn’t know Forester’s address and didn’t know of Forester, but they asked him why he wanted the address.

  “A package,” Greg said. “I’ve got a package to deliver to him.”

  “Post office could tell you, but it’s closed now.”

  So was the only drugstore that Greg saw. Seventeen wasted miles he had driven. Doubled made thirty-four. Never mind, he’d find out tomorrow.

  The next morning, Greg was at the Langley post office as soon as it opened. He said he had a package to deliver to Robert Forester, asked his address and was given it: Box 94, R. D. 1, which was on Gursetter Road about two miles out of town. The clerk told him how to get there. Greg was already late for an appointment, but he took off for Forester’s house just to see it.

  He watched the mailboxes along the road, and at last saw Forester’s name written on one in white paint. It was a silly-looking house with a high steep-pitched roof, just the sort of house an oddball would choose to live in, Greg thought. It was also gloomy-looking. Greg stopped his car in the driveway, glanced around, and seeing no one, got out and looked through the glass of the door. The place gave him the creeps. It looked like a dungeon or part of a castle. He went to another window, looked through it into a kitchen, and then on the window sill saw something that made his heart jump and begin pounding with anger. It was one of Jenny’s plants. He knew the pot and the plant, and there was no mistake. He thought it was one she called mother-in-law’s tongue, and the pot was of white glass with knobs on it. Greg went back to his car, backed fast out of the driveway, and headed for his appointment.

  At six o’clock, precisely at six because he had made himself wait until then, Greg drove past Forester’s house again. Jenny’s car was there, and so was Robert’s. She was blatantly spending nights there. This might be the seventh, the tenth, for all he knew. Lights were blazing in the house now. He imagined them laughing and talking and fixing dinner, Jenny making one of her big salads, and then—Greg couldn’t bear to imagine any more.

  He stopped at a roadside bar that was appropriately depressing, he felt, with its three male customers hunched over beers watching television. He ordered a rum, not that he cared for it much, but he liked the sound of the word in the mood he was in. Rum. He tossed the jigger down, then paid for it and got some change for a call to New York.

  Nickie Jurgen’s telephone did not answer.

  Greg drove to his apartment and tried the New York number at intervals all evening. It was ten of midnight before anyone answered. A man answered, and Greg asked to speak to Mrs. Jurgen.

  “Hello, Greg,” Nickie said. “How are you?”

  “Well, not so good,” Greg said, though he already felt better because of her friendly tone. “I guess—I think—Well, my worst fears have been confirmed, as they say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, my girl—my fiancée—she seems to be spending her nights at Robert’s now.”

  “What? Why, that’s awful.”

  Nickie could not have been more sympathetic. She asked for Robert’s address and wrote it down. She advised Greg “to take Jenny in hand,” and she warned Greg again that Robert was not to be relied on for anything except erratic and possibly dangerous behavior.

  “I’m sure it’s going to end soon,” Nickie said, “unless your fiancée is off her own rocker, which I doubt
. Any girl can see what Robert’s all about before too long.”

  “You don’t think he’d harm her, do you?” Greg asked, suddenly alarmed.

  “There’s no telling.”

  “I asked him to keep his hands off. I talked to him a couple of nights ago. Then, the same damned evening, she sees him.”

  “I understand how you feel. Robert’s always doing this, having a fling with some woman, preferably a young and innocent one, then dropping her when he’s tired of her, which is usually in six weeks or less. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to talk to one of the unhappy—”

  “Dirty so-and-so,” Greg muttered. “I’m going to see Jenny tomorrow and talk to her. She’s in such a state lately, she doesn’t want to see me, so I didn’t want to annoy her, but I can see that’s the only thing to do.”

  “Take her home with you.”

  Greg tried to laugh. “Yeah, that’s it. I wish there was some way I could scare him out of town. Just how much off his nut is he? Did he ever have to be under psychiatric care or anything?”

  “Did he? I should say. Twice at least. He’s one of those people who aren’t quite crazy enough to be locked up, just sane enough to go around messing up other people’s lives. Why don’t you threaten to beat him up? He’s a terrible coward, and you sound like anything but.”

  “You’re right about that. O.K., I’ll think it over, but I’ll try seeing Jenny first.”

  “Good luck, Greg.”

  And Greg intended to see Jenny the next morning, Saturday, or if she wasn’t there in the morning, then in the afternoon. But she did not come home at all on Saturday or Saturday evening. Her car was at Forester’s. She might as well have moved in with Forester, but Greg couldn’t quite get himself to bang on Forester’s door and ask to see her. She was not at her house Sunday either. If she came home to change her clothes or water her plants before she went to work on Monday morning, he missed her.

  10

  As soon as Jenny walked in the door Monday evening, Robert knew something had happened with Greg.

  “I just saw Greg,” she said, and let her pocketbook and a paper bag slide onto the chair by the door.

  Robert helped her off with her coat and hung it. “At your house?” He knew she had gone by her house after work to pick up something.

  “He came by at five-thirty. He’s been calling your wife again. He said your wife said you were a psychopath.”

  Robert groaned. “Jenny, what can I do about that? She’s not my wife any more, don’t forget that.”

  “Why can’t they leave us alone?” Jenny asked him as if she expected an answer from him.

  “What else did Greg say?”

  Jenny sat down on the red couch, her shoulders bent, her hands limp in her lap. “He said you’ll get tired of me in a couple of weeks and that’s what your wife said. Gosh, is it so much to ask for—privacy?”

  Robert went into the kitchen, finished emptying an ice tray into the ice bucket, and came back into the living room with it. “Well, Jenny, let’s face it, spending four or five nights here—what do you expect Greg to think? That we’re spending those nights like a couple of monks, me upstairs and you down?”

  “The idea of snooping to find where my car is. He told me he snooped to find out where you lived. Asked the post office.”

  “Well—people snoop.” Robert took a cigarette from the box on the coffee table.

  “But is it any of their business?”

  He looked at her. “I suppose he told Nickie you spent a few nights here, too?”

  “Oh, sure,” Jenny said.

  She was looking at him in a surprised way, and he knew it was because his thoughts showed on his face.

  “No, it’s none of their business,” he said. “It’s certainly not Nickie’s.”

  She got up and took a cigarette. Robert let her light it. She was frowning, looking down at the floor. She was like a child threatened with the deprivation of some pleasure she considered quite innocent and harmless. Friday evening, when they had had their second dinner here together, she had said, “Robert, can I spend the weekend with you? I’ll cook—and I won’t bother you, if you want to work.” If he had refused, he felt the weekend would have been just a dreary stretch of time to her. He hadn’t been able to think of a really good reason to say no. He was a free man, and if he invited a girl for the weekend, wasn’t that his right? Greg’s threats, which he hadn’t told Jenny about, had annoyed him, and he had felt that if he told her she couldn’t stay the weekend, it would have been partially because he was knuckling down to Greg. But during the weekend Robert had wished once or twice that he could have a couple of hours alone, not that she bothered him when he was working, but he foresaw that she was going to focus more and more on him, that she was the sort of girl who lived for the man she was in love with, and he regretted having agreed to her staying the weekend. He regretted having let her come over again tonight for dinner, just because she took it for granted that she would come. He thought of Saturday evening after dinner, when she had been lying on the red couch and he sitting in the armchair, with the fire dying low in the fireplace and the lights out as Jenny had wanted them. She had said, lying on her back and looking up at the ceiling, “I’m so happy now, I wouldn’t mind dying.”

  “Do you think you could ever love me, Robert?” she asked.

  I do now, he thought. But it was not the way people usually loved. It was not the way he had loved and been in love with Nickie, for instance. “Jenny, I don’t know. Maybe I could. I don’t care to make any promises.”

  They were silent for several seconds.

  “You’re afraid of promises? Words?” she asked.

  “Yes. They don’t change any feelings about—I’m afraid of promises that get broken. If people love each other, words aren’t going to make them love each other more—or change anything.” He was thinking of Nickie, of everything collapsing, in spite of the words and the promises. “If I loved you now, I wouldn’t say it. I’m not going to promise that I will. But if I ever do and I don’t say it, that’s not going to change the facts at all. Things either happen or not.”

  She didn’t move. “I love you, Robert, and I don’t care about anything else. I just would like to know how you feel about me.”

  “Well—I like to be with you. You’re very easy to be with, even when I’m working. You make me happier.” He couldn’t say any more.

  “And what else?”

  “But it can’t go on like this, Jenny—you staying nights—because people talk. If it isn’t Greg, it’ll be the Kolbes next door pretty soon. They know I’m not married. They’ll see your car here, they’ll find out you’re a very good-looking girl of twenty-three. And there’re your friends the Tessers, et cetera. Once they start commenting … We shouldn’t see each other every evening, Jenny. You didn’t see Greg every evening, did you?”

  “I wasn’t in love with Greg,” she said flatly. The ash of her cigarette fell to the floor, and noticing it, she bent over the coffee table to put the cigarette out.

  Robert looked at her long-waisted figure in the black suit with the short jacket. Even in the flat shoes she wore because she thought herself too tall, she was graceful, even beautiful. Friday she had worn the black suit, which she said was ancient—four years old—but Robert had said he liked it, so she had worn it again.

  “All right, I don’t have to see you every night,” she said sadly, “and I won’t see you any night you want to be by yourself, but it’s not going to be because of Greg that I won’t be seeing you. It’ll be because both of us agreed to it. For instance, tomorrow night I won’t see you if you prefer it. I’ll see you Wednesday.”

  Robert smiled. “O.K.”

  She didn’t return his smile.

  “Want to go out somewhere tonight for dinner?” he asked.

  “I made the soup. Remember?” She went to the bag on the straight chair.

  He had forgotten the soup. She had gone home to start it last night, because
all the ingredients were at her house, and then come back to spend the night at his house, and tonight after work she had gone by her house to finish it. Now she was solemnly starting their dinner in the kitchen—leek and potato soup and a big green salad—as if they had been married for a year.

  He picked up a postal card from his writing table. “Want to see the yellow-bellied thumbsucker?” He walked into the kitchen.

  “The what?” The frown had left her face. She took the card, looked at it, and smiled a wide smile. “Where’d you find this bird?”

  “Oh, he sits on my window sill all the time. Here’s another, the clothesline bird. He says, ‘Ah-eee! Ah-eee!’ just like a rusty pulley on a clothesline.”

  Robert had drawn two birds working a clothesline full of small trousers and shirts.

  “I know that bird. I’ve heard it,” Jenny said, “but I’ve never seen one.”

  He laughed. Jenny was taking his birds as seriously as if they existed.

  “Got any more?” she asked.

  “No. But I’ll make more. Should that soup be boiling?”

  “Ooooh, no.” She turned the burner off and pushed the pot back. “I guess we’re ready—as soon as I set the table.”

  “I’ll set the table.”

  Jenny had three helpings of her salad. Robert stayed his appetite on the soup and several slices of dark bread and butter. Then they had coffee and brandy by the fire. Jenny leaned back in her chair, quiet and pensive, and Robert stared at her slender face surrounded by darkness, the dark of her suit and the shadows of the room. Was she happy, was she sad? Impulsively, Robert got up, touched her shoulder lightly, and kissed her cheek.