My whole body was beginning to shake uncontrollably. I couldn’t believe I was talking about this—talking about having someone kill my wife because she wanted to die and apparently couldn’t bring herself to do it alone. I had to sit on the couch. I really needed a drink, but I didn’t want to leave Katharine alone at a time like this. There had to be a way to persuade her out of this crazy plan.
“Katharine, have you called these people yet?” I could tell at a glance that it was a New York telephone number, even though no address was given.
“Well, no,” she said, shyly. “I thought you might want to....”
“Me!” I thundered.
“Oh, Arthur, please help me! I can’t do this by myself. I need your help!”
In every other situation except this one, I would have rushed to her aid—would have done so without her even having to ask. But this was too much.
“Katharine, I won’t do it....”
“Arthur!” She broke down crying, throwing herself on her bed.
I felt as if some demon were twisting my insides into knots. I think for a moment that I wanted to die myself.
What was I to do? How far would I have to go to bring her back from the precipice? Would I fall over the precipice myself? What would be the outcome? Could it be anything, now, but a tragedy?
I resigned myself to the inevitable—at least for now. I wasn’t giving up; let’s just say I was performing a tactical retreat. I would save Katharine, but now was not the time to challenge her.
“All right, dearest,” I said, coming over to her and stroking her hair. “I’ll call them. I’ll call the Removal Company.”
CHAPTER FOUR
We were on the train heading for New York.
The whole adventure had taken on a dreamlike quality: Loading our baggage (Katharine’s a lot smaller than mine, since—in her view, at any rate—she would only require clothes and accessories for a one-way trip) into our Aston Martin saloon...being driven to the Passenger Rail Terminal on Alameda Street...settling into our private Pullman car...shoving off for the five-day trip—Los Angeles to New York, via New Orleans and Washington, D.C....
It was the most harrowing and bizarre five days of my life—even more bizarre, I think, than what followed. What made it so was Katharine’s attitude of grotesque cheerfulness. She was as effervescent as a schoolgirl, constantly pointing out novel bits of scenery through the window, taking a childish delight in the meals we ate (we had our own private dining car, of course: fraternizing with the other passengers was, under the circumstances, unthinkable, even though they were mostly of our class), and, in essence, enjoying life as I’d never seen her enjoy it before.
Knowing that the burden of existence was soon to be sloughed off had, it seemed, liberated her in some strange way: the simplest, most mundane aspects of life gained that much more sweetness because she knew that she would soon be rid of them. For a few fleeting moments I thought that maybe she was making the right decision after all....
No! I wouldn’t let myself think that! What she was contemplating was appalling, immoral—and, fundamentally, selfish. What right does anyone have willfully and deliberately to truncate the life-span they have been given? How could one be so self-absorbed, so heedless of others’ feelings? And yet, the doubts would come.... Was I being selfish? Did I want her to live just to suit my own pleasure, my own needs? And why was it that my own love for her seemed to matter so little in her decision? How could I not feel scorned, humiliated, insulted?
You can imagine—or can you?—the turmoil of emotions I was undergoing. I could hardly eat, slept badly, and was driven almost out of my mind by watching Katharine so cheerful and lively! (No, that’s a bad word to use....) I think she took pity on me after a while and tried to suppress her eagerness, her vibrancy, her positive thrill at the prospect of self-destruction...self-annihilation conveniently done by another party without trouble or inconvenience to herself.
Of course, I was still holding out the hope that she would recoil at the last minute. Neither Katharine nor I were under any silly religious delusions about the immortality of the soul or anything of that sort. We went to church, of course, but that was largely to please our parents and because it was a part of our social obligation. But we both knew full well that the only thing that follows death is complete oblivion.
And there, perhaps, was my last hope. Perhaps that very thought—complete oblivion—might pull her back at the final moment. Try to picture it, Mr. Scintilla: the utter elimination of the self, the total snuffing out of all consciousness. Far, far deeper than the most dreamless sleep, far more permanent than the longest epoch.... Nothingness. It was scarcely any wonder that most people refused to accept so horrible a fate and claimed to believe in that “better life” that they know in their heart of hearts will not come....
We had to change trains at New Orleans, and again at Washington. With each passing mile my apprehension grew, while Katharine was less and less able to conceal what now became an actual glee at the termination of her own existence. I began to measure every word I spoke to her, wondering how close it was to the last I would ever say to her.
At New York we checked into the Murray Hill Hotel at Park Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets. It was September 13, 1931. I didn’t know it then, but my wife had two days to live.
* * * *
The rest of the episode was in many ways an anticlimax—so mundane on the surface that I could scarcely keep in my mind that Katharine had come here to put an end to her life.
We had called shortly after we had settled into our room, and made an appointment with the Removal Company for the next day. Even now we were not given the address of the place: they had politely but firmly refused to do so when I had first phoned them in Los Angeles, and now all they said was that we were to meet a black Packard in front of the Waldorf at 2 p.m.
Sure enough, at exactly that hour a car answering the description pulled up at the kerb. I waved at it tentatively, and it drew up to us. The window was rolled down slowly on the passenger side of the front seat, and the driver—apparently a short, stocky man of middle age with a bullet head and what I can only describe as dead features, no vitality or expression in them at all—craned his neck out the window.
“Vance?” he said in his flat voice. It was barely a question.
I nodded.
He said nothing, but with a head gesture he indicated that we get in the back seat. It was clear he didn’t want company with him in front.
After we had settled in—Katharine almost leaping in ahead of me, and then bouncing on the seat like a little girl—Bullet Head turned around and glared blankly at us.
“Put these on,” he said, handing us black silk handkerchiefs.
I was nonplussed: did he want me to put the handkerchief in my suit pocket—around my hat—around my neck? What? As we both looked stupidly at him, he deigned to clarify, with not a little impatience:
“Over your eyes.”
This was too ridiculous. I suddenly felt I was in a vaudeville act, or in a story from some cheap pulp magazine.
“You can’t be serious—”
“Put—them—on.”
His tone was so unexpectedly hostile that we backed away from him. At that, Bullet Head relented a bit.
“Please....” The word seemed not to come easily out of his mouth, for he grimaced momentarily as if in pain. “Doctor’s orders. Just for... security. We need to protect ourselves.”
We did as we were told. Katharine complied readily, still smiling broadly as though the whole episode were a game.
The point, of course, was to throw us off