The Disappearance Read online

  No Paula, no Edwinna, no Hester, and for that matter, no Alicia.

  Gaunt removed his tortoise-shell spectacles and ran his fingers through his thin hair. He did that in the automatic manner of a man spitting into a river simply because he has leaned over the rail of a bridge. But the latter is merely idle and wishes to make a splash while the man who rakes his hair expresses something definite: his bafflement.

  Gaunt looked at the spectacles, appreciated the gesture he had made, and only then became aware of the fact that he was befuddled.

  He frowned, folded the earpieces, pocketed the glasses and went outside, stooping and dodging to avoid a door-shutting device which had gouged his scalp in the past. He yelled loudly: “Paula!”

  Sun streamed over the sloping roofs of his modernistic house, making straight, angular shadows on the grass. Sun pricked through the live oaks and filigreed his curving driveway. Sun fell upon, but failed to penetrate, a rank curtain of wild vine at which the gardener still hacked.

  “Byron!”

  The colored man rested his heavy hoe and turned.

  “Seen Mrs. Gaunt?”

  “No, sir.”

  “She was there, at your corner of the house, a while ago.”

  “Seemed like she just plain disappeared,” Byron replied, chuckling. “I see her—

  an’ a second later—I don’t. Nor ain’t since.”

  Two voices now invaded the warm afternoon—those of young Gordon Elliot and his father, Jim. The Elliot house, beyond the oaks and the narrow boom-time street on which Gaunt lived (and which the jungle had all but reclaimed), was out of earshot for all but the most vigorous sounds. Father and son were now bellowing unashamedly:

  “Mother! Where are you?”

  “Bella! BELLA! Where the devil are you?”

  Wherever she is, Gaunt thought, Paula and the rest of my womenfolk must be there too. And where, he asked himself, would that be? He started walking down his drive, rapidly—and heard, on the not-distant boulevard, the sound of a siren. It approached from Cocoplum Plaza, shrill and disturbing as it brought alarm closer—and merely provocative as it revealed by passing that the trouble it spelled belonged to others.

  Like every man, Gaunt had quailed slightly at the crescendo and tingled faintly with the diminuendo; unlike most, he reflected for a guilty instant upon the minor inhumanity of that process.

  And then he saw Elliot—a man almost as tall as himself and even thinner, a Yankee with cavernous eyes at once faded and piercing, a lawyer who would have made a better mystic but who did well enough at law owing to a memory for detail that was like the index of a great library. Jim Elliot was, indeed, the most knowledgeable of all men concerning titles, grants and old land claims in the surrounding area and he had turned his information to good account. He was retained by some of the largest landholders and the most acquisitive corporations of the region—even though he was a northerner and though it was known he had practiced Yoga, belonged briefly to the Rosicrucians, claimed to have made “astral” voyages outside his body, and although he had once journeyed in person to the monasteries of Tibet.

  Jim Elliot trotted awkwardly, with his son, on the tree-roofed pavement of the ruined street, calling for his wife. He did not notice Gaunt until the boy yanked at the flapping tail of his plaid shirt and pointed. Then he changed his direction and ran up to the philosopher.

  “Bella’s been taken!” he said in a panting, sepulchral voice. “Gone!”

  Gaunt said, “Nonsense! Paula’s gone too! So’s Edwinna. Hester. Did you hear that siren just now? Probably a fire or a car smash on Sunset Boulevard. Probably the women learned about it and ran to see—the way they always charge out for trouble.”

  “No!” The young boy said that—his dark eyes wide open and the flesh around them white. “I saw her go! She was watering the poinsettias—the big bush—and she disappeared—and the hose dropped and squirted the lawn!”

  Jim Elliot glanced down anxiously at his son, then gazed at Gaunt. “That’s what the boy says. And he doesn’t lie. And it could happen, Bill. It could! The women of ancient Laecocidiae, in the reign of King Lestentum the Third, are said to have—”

  “The hell with King Lestentum! Let’s go over to Sunset and find out what all the excitement is!”

  They might have gone. For a second they stood still, facing each other, in the slopes of sleazy sunlight. Then, from a distance, came a thudding explosion. They turned that way and looked again, uneasily, at each other.

  The boy called dolefully, “Mo-o-o-ther!”

  The lawyer’s eyes dropped. He shook the craggy head that contained them; he brushed at his fuzzy, dark hair. “Let’s go inside and see if there’s anything on the radio.”

  “It can only be some local mishap—!” Gaunt began. But he followed.

  They went up the back steps and entered a stew-savored kitchen which Jim Elliot himself had outfitted. On the end of a table he had built, in the breakfast nook, under a pot of begonias, stood a small radio. The lawyer switched it on. Gaunt noticed a tremor in his hand. Gordon sat tensely on a stool.

  The hand turned the dial slowly—passing through the hiss of stations on the air but not broadcasting—hurrying over a station that was sending dance music-and finding at last a human voice. A voice ragged with the effort of its owner to maintain control.

  “I repeat,” it said. Elliot turned up the volume so that the kitchen vibrated with hysterical noise: “At four-oh-five this afternoon, now forty minutes ago, the event took place. Confirmed by local observation—confirmed by phone calls—confirmed by the ticker. At present there is not much to add. The ticker is standing still. This station is endeavoring to contact the networks. Newspapers in Miami, reached before the phones became jammed with calls, said they only knew what everybody knew. It is believed there will be advices from the White House presently. It is rumored that the event may be due to enemy action. Stand by—and keep calm. The event. . . .”

  “Event!” Gaunt hit the Formica surface of the table with his palm. “In God’s name, what event?”

  “The women,” Elliot replied almost softly. “Their—going.”

  “Man—make sense!” Gaunt choked off to listen.

  “The event,” the radio went on, “is at present totally unexplained. New York City, like Miami, reports that at four-oh-five all women on the street and elsewhere disappeared. All girls. All female babies. Wait a minute! Stand by!”

  Silence—save for the crackle of wasted electricity.

  Gaunt found himself seeking a chair. He felt his back hit it. He became aware that the lawyer’s eyes were boring into him. Jim Elliot expected him to say something—to comment—to react.

  And Gaunt began commenting. “Impossible! Mass hypnosis! Hardly such a thing as could be accomplished by what that jittery booby calls ‘enemy action’! A moment of universal schizophrenia—the collective result of pent-up anxieties. . . .”

  “Do you feel schizoid?” Elliot smiled as he said it.

  “What about Sarah?” Gaunt asked.

  “I went upstairs as soon as Gordon told me what happened to Bella. Naturally.

  The baby had been in her play pen. Gone.”

  Young Gordon began to cry quietly. His father reached out and touched his shoulder.

  “Go ahead, son. Cry. I could cry myself. We’ve lost them. It’s not what I expected—but it’s no more than we deserve.”

  The philosopher realized the inanity of his attempt to find a reasonable hypothesis for a situation he did not understand. No such thing could happen as appeared to be happening, ergo, it was an illusion. If not mass hypnosis, his own dream. He was asleep somewhere and this was a particularly real and upsetting nightmare. (But he did not believe he was asleep.) He had lost his reason, then, and this was a philosopher’s madness. (But he was not mad. But that was what the mad believed, always.) It was true, then.

  But truth is never preposterous.

  A miracle? But miracles—even to those who credit
them—are never evil.

  The radio spoke again in the tone of a crazed Jove. Jim Elliot reached out and cut down its volume:

  “Here’s a bulletin—the first one through in some time! Paris, London, Mexico City report their women vanished also. All Soviet and Soviet-controlled stations have gone off the air. Soviet women broadcasters are reported by authoritative sources to have ceased talking abruptly at the same instant women vanished elsewhere. The President has called his Cabinet, also Congressional leaders and others. Advisory! Men are urged immediately to go to the rescue of all children who might have been depending on women for their care as these—probably boys only—will now be without any adult.” The announcer’s voice broke. “My God! Will somebody hurry—please—to 808 Evedado Street, Coral Gables, where my twin boys are probably in the nursery on the second floor! Please! Nearest listener! Number 808 Evedado Street, Coral Gables! Two boys, nine months of age! In yard or on second floor!” There was a pause and a gulping sound.

  “Bulletin! Car crashes reported everywhere as women drivers vanished from behind wheels. Fires breaking out. Advisory! Warn all survi . . . all men—to see to it that stoves, lamps, backyard fires, irons and other electrical equipment are checked or cut off immediately. Investigate all homes. Break and enter if necessary. Two gas explosions in Miami already reported as result of ovens turned on but not lighted. Inspect all homes.

  Use caution. Bear in mind that looting will be punished. Martial law expected at once.

  Bulletin! . . .”

  Gaunt signaled by twisting his hand and Elliot cut off the radio.

  For some moments the two men and the boy were speechless.

  Then Jim Elliot glanced at the stove. A double boiler simmered there. “Bella was having stew tonight, Bill. Better join us.”

  Gaunt said slowly, “Good God. Yes. Maybe I should go over to my place and make sure it won’t catch fire or blow up. I’ll be back.”

  As he went out the door he heard young Gordon say plaintively, “But they’ll come home soon, won’t they?”

  And his father answered, “Never, my boy. For us—this is the end of the world!”

  Gaunt cut through a hedge of hibiscus and walked up his drive. He was glad to be alone. Alone, he might at least ascertain whether or not he was sane.

  2

  FAMILIAL DISCORD, OF A SORT NOT RARE IN THESE TIMES, DISTRESSES A LADY OF PARTS—AND IS THRUST ASIDE BY ANOTHER

  MATTER.

  Paula Gaunt was a woman of warmth, of engagingly varied moods, and of many capacities. She was perceptive and sympathetic—as a rule. She had one minor vanity: she dyed her hair the shade of red she’d been born with. As far as she could tell, Bill had not caught on, although she’d begun to dabble with henna fifteen years ago when the first gray strands had appeared. She called the original color “copper pink”—and henna had not restored it. But other chemicals had been effective. Through frequent visits to expert hair-dressers she had maintained to the age of forty-six the hue and luster of her unusual adornment. The trouble was not to know whether Bill knew. Since this was a matter of pride, and slightly obsessive, she gave it undue importance.

  On a Tuesday, the second in February, and her regular afternoon at the beauty salon in Coral Gables, Marcel had been absent and Francis had performed the chromatic ritual. Francis was competent at cutting and setting; but, as Paula saw immediately upon taking the mirror he gave her, he had used the wrong shade. Her hair was, actually, a deep auburn with an opalescence which, in daylight or even lamplight, gave it another surface shade, a semitransparent beige, or a dusty rose, or even a mistily bluish pink, so that when she turned her head, or walked, or when the wind blew, men—and women too—looked at her not just because she was lovely but because of the unusual and fascin.1ting climax of her good looks.

  Paula’s troubles that day did not end with the discovery that Francis had altered the hue so that her locks were too pale and Bill, this time, would certainly discover that his wife was vulgarly dyeing her hair.

  She drove home to a continuation of bother.

  Edwinna had left her roadster in the drive at such an angle that to pass it Paula was obliged to cut across a stretch of newly planted monastery grass. Upon entering her kitchen, Paula found that Hester, who should have finished the wax polishing and started tea, was still buzzing away upstairs. Edwinna—who might have taken over, since she knew the routine—was asininely, fatuously giving forth with song in her room. Little Alicia, untended, had executed on the terrazzo in the living room crayon work which would take hours to remove.

  The child saw her grandmother as she opened the Kelvinator door to get a drink of cold water and came running to the kitchen in one of those elfin, tiptoe, eye-cutting moods that men love and women rightfully suspect. Before Paula could get back to the refrigerator door, Alicia had reached in, grabbed an open jar of jam, and dropped it.

  Paula had a strong impulse to spank the little girl. She resisted. She was not a child swatter and it was not Alicia’s fault that she was spoiled and meddlesome. It was her mother’s. The faults of Edwinna, moreover, could be ascribed in the same way to Edwinna’s parents. Paula felt guilty and sad.

  She took a dustpan from the broom closet and a damp cloth from a hook. She began cleaning up the spattered jam and the broken glass. She wondered if spanking would improve Alicia: authorities differed on the matter—as they differed about everything concerning children. Paula also reflected on how much Alicia resembled Theodora at the same age. Theodora would be eighteen now—if there hadn’t been a polio epidemic when she was six. For a moment, Paula thought of the child she and Bill had lost and she tried to imagine whether or not Theodora would have grown up to be difficult, like Edwinna.

  Alicia meanwhile began trying to help and Paula smiled gently at her.

  “It’s a terrific mess,” the child said.

  “It sure is!”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Well, dear, I’ll soon have tea ready. And there’s more jam.”

  Edwinna pushed through the kitchen door so suddenly that it rapped Paula’s knuckles. She rubbed them.

  Edwinna was wearing a cocktail dress—a new one, of Paula’s, which Paula had tried on only at the store. Edwinna’s blonde hair was combed in its smooth, femme fatale zigzag, to a point that just touched the dihedral arch of her brows. Her dark eyes—eyes like her father’s, but without their patience and repose—perceived the splashed preserves and shattered glass. The winged brows rose. But no apology came from her beautiful.

  crimsoned lips. She looked at her daughter with malice and said. “Poltergeist!”

  “What’s that?” Alicia asked.

  Paula felt angry—and resigned. She had never been able to understand her daughter. And this was, in any case, one of those days. One of those days when you had to go to the dentist and the hairdresser and when you had to argue about a bill, spend an hour and a half with a tax accountant, give up a lunch appointment that would have been fun and cat a sandwich instead. On such days the mayonnaise in the lonely sandwich would be rancid—it had been—and the lettuce brown. On such days, your daughter would help herself to your newest frock and bang your hand with the swinging door.

  Paula felt almost superstitious about “sequences.”

  The only thing to do was to stay calm. If you lost your temper you felt more miserable than before. They were all little things. Life was, alas, mostly little things.

  Occasionally she wished trifles would lump themselves together to make one big calamity—something worthy of her mettle. But she shied from that thought too: big troubles were just worse troubles. Not trouble but pettiness was the occasional bane of her days, excepting, of course, Edwinna. Adult, unsatisfactory offspring are tragic.

  Edwinna, having rebuked her daughter by calling her a name, now pirouetted like a dancer. “How do you like your new dress?”

  “I thought,” Paula answered patiently, “you were going to stay home tonight?

  You said s
o—and Bill and I made a date to play bridge with the Claytons.”

  “They can come over here just as well, can’t they?” Paula sighed. “They wanted us to see their new slathouse. Bill’s thinking of having one.”

  “I’ll bet if Dad starts raising orchids, he wears ‘em! I’ve seen men do it around here. In their lapels.”

  “Why shouldn’t he?”

  “Drippy—that’s why.” Edwinna’s eyes narrowed. “Alicia! Get away from that spider! It might be a black widow!”

  Paula rose, with the dustpan and the cloth. She looked. “It isn’t—and why scare the child? It’s a house spider. Don’t—!”

  She was too late. Edwinna had already crossed the room and set her smart sole on the frightened spider.

  “They catch other insects,” Paula murmured. “They’re harmless. And we’ve never seen a black widow around here. Just on the Beach, at the other house.”

  “Oh, fiddle! How can a child tell a harmless spider? Alicia! Sit down somewhere!

  You make me nervous. Look, Paula. A perfectly darling-sounding man phoned me, earlier. A pal of Toby Newton. He asked me to go over to the Woods’ for cocktails, and dinner afterward, at Ciro’s.” She scraped the dead spider from her shoe on the tile step that led down to the laundry. “I didn’t have anything decent to wear—which brings up another point.”

  “Not money?”

  “Yes, money! Charlie, that twerp, hasn’t sent Alicia’s monthly check yet. And Billy is behind, as usual. I haven’t a cent.”

  It had never occurred to Edwinna that she could work. That she was highly educated. That she had energy, youth and intelligence. That a twenty-six-year-old woman, twice married, twice divorced, with alimony from one man and child maintenance from the other, might—by the exercise of a little resourcefulness and from a sense of self-respect—make up any difference she wanted (she actually required no more money) by her own efforts.