The House Of Dust

Janet doesn’t think about Phillip much, when she and Brandon are getting acquainted. Brandon is the perfect beast, and she can’t take him anywhere decent without causing a mess — he’s a nuisance at parties, he bullies hostesses and steals other people’s hats, he drinks like a fish. The fun dies off quickly, and all that’s left is the sharp edges. But he’s young and witty and vulpine, with his beautiful suits and his crooked mouth. Letting him near her is a mistake. But Phillip is an accessory to his friend’s petty cruelties — when Brandon runs off to a cheap hotel for the weekend, it’s Phillip who keeps the home fires burning. When Brandon darts out as the party’s in full swing, it’s Phillip who consoles his date for the evening. Phillip is as unobtrusive as the furniture. Under other circumstances, perhaps — but now that she’s known Brandon, never.

They are linked with one another, a matching set, simply because they always have been. Her girl friends all agree. Phillip is a victim of Brandon’s pique just as she is, but he’s one of the boys, one of the select few with which Brandon has always been surrounded. Janet is only a plaything.

*

Afterward, they are joined in the headlines as well — Shaw-Morgan, Morgan-Shaw. Or they call it the Shaw case, and Phillip assumes Brandon’s name. In the first flush of scandal it is made out to be a quarrel over a woman — and that much is only natural, given its main players. That is all Janet is in this equation: a woman who might have been any woman, pinned between three different men. Inset pictures of Janet as a junior debutante — now those badly-considered curls will really haunt her into eternity. She’s not a magazine writer or a Vassar graduate or best-dressed in the yearbook, she’s just some silly roundheels caught up in the world of men.

She visits Brandon in the jailhouse. Janet hates policemen, she frankly despises them — it was a policeman who brought her the news of what her mother had done, not a softer person who might have carried the news with a woman’s sensibility. They are surrounded by policemen here; put Brandon in a different suit, and he’d look like another one of them, with his razor-raw face and flattened hair. If only you wiped that stupid look off his face. He looks like a little boy, shut up behind the bars as a punishment. She may ask him her questions.

Janet asks if they are to be hanged after all. Her gloves are in her hands, wrung into a bundle. Brandon looks younger than she’s ever seen him, stripped of his pretenses – there is something about his eyes. “You didn’t think we were going to live, did you?”

Put that in your book.

*

It is no longer a struggle over a woman, as far as the papers are concerned — at its most elemental it is something murkier, something weird and eerie. They speak of Brandon as if he’s some kind of defective, some bloodless creature born to haunt public washrooms — Brandon, who could have had any woman he wanted and did, Brandon who couldn’t have been further from womanish if he tried. They no longer speak of Janet at all, except in the same breath as Mrs. Atwater. They print photographs of Phillip’s hands, diagrammed in white circles to highlight imaginary calluses from where they’d practiced. Their private lives are cut apart into little pieces and parceled out in the news, day by day. All the absurdities of that night are turned into macabre pieces of puppetry — photographs of Mrs. Wilson looking like a shattered woman in her out-of-season hat, drawings of the wooden chest. What the newspapers can’t say outright, they whisper. Janet knows this approach from the inside — nudging at the unspeakable, always in the best of taste.

All of this for the death of her David, and yet David hardly has any part of it — the highest word of praise anyone can give is that he was normal, a normal unsophisticated boy. How normal could he have been? What kind of husband would he have made?

*

In the courtroom there are nervous smiles and insinuations, displays of evidence, a spirited defense. One muggy afternoon it is announced that ladies must leave the courtroom and Janet has to bribe one of her pals in trousers for the dirty details, much ado about bedrooms and dormitories and bedsheets and washrooms. But for the rest of the proceedings it’s that dreadful gouging word again and again — they are stranglers, not only killers but stranglers.

And Janet must jam pins in her hair and powder her face and answer — did they ever quarrel, the pair of them? (Yes, of course.) Did Brandon ever threaten to end his own life? (No, never. That would have been intolerable.) Did Brandon ever once place his hands around her throat? Did she consider their sex-life together to be normal? Did Brandon ever make any inordinate demands? How many times? How? And where?

And Brandon —

In the courtroom his face is a smooth grinning mask, vacant as a baby’s. He’s not the man she knew. Phillip is in the background, impassive. But Janet knows that look; he’s pleased that it’s all gone to pieces, privately pleased.

*

“So much for journalistic impartiality.”

“Oh, no one who writes about Brandon is impartial. Haven’t you found that to be the case, Rupert?”

“I suppose so.”

Rupert Cadell is wearing a gray suit — he always wears a gray suit, here on a bench outside the courtroom. In his lap is one of those blue-covered books you can get for a nickel — or at least you used to get them that way.

Women don’t write books about this kind of thing — about murderers, sexual psychopaths, perverts. They’ll never let her publish it without a fight. Rupert could — writing from a position of serene magisterial oversight, explaining what he really meant by it all at his leisure with the only two men capable of contradicting him safely in their graves. It’s like a stiletto blade in her heart — to know that this man had Brandon first, had him when he was young and new, this man had Brandon more than anyone else ever did, and what did he do with him? He doesn’t have the eyes of an aging roué, he has the eyes of a schoolmaster.

“I suppose we both had our share of him. At the master’s foot, Kenneth said.” Janet can’t resist carving into him a little, but Mr. Cadell has nothing to say for himself. No wit. “The two of us should stick together, hmm?”

Janet smooths her skirt over her knees, swiping away a fleck of torn paper, but Rupert isn’t even looking at her. His profile is pert and distracted — he must have been terrifically good-looking once. There’s more white in his gray hair. He can’t be forty years old, and he looks parched, bleached, lost.

 

His hands are shaking. Janet pries open her handbag and lights his cigarette with a match. He must have been unspeakably handsome, before the war; even now the way he wears a suit makes Janet want to break out her pencils and start scribbling. Alone with an old bachelor — Janet’s not so silly that she thinks she has anything to fear

*

They don’t kill the pair of them, Brandon and Phillip, but it’s no real treat letting them live. Janet thinks of writing a letter, pressing the matter in the newspapers or throwing herself on the sentiments of some judge, but the suitable time has passed her by before she can stand to put pen to paper.

David’s gone. Kenneth won’t let her forget it. She’ll dedicate the book to him — sweet, cloddish, gentle David who never did a thing to hurt anyone. She’ll never manage to convey what a man he was — what a man he might have been, without turning him into a paper doll, a pastel-tinted photograph. Everyone wants to know everything about Brandon, and no one gives a damn about David. They should have killed the pair of them, and let David live.

David’s mother and father are terribly kind, of course, and Kenneth — but the path that had been so clear before her is terribly brambled now, and overgrown. There is no ticket to security, no use in keeping the body beautiful. Perhaps there are better things to do.

*

The newspapers report that Brandon has successfully made a bid to excuse himself from chapel visits on religious grounds, specifically that he has no religion and his presence is nothing but an imposition on his fellow inmates. In photographs without his tailored clothes he looks shiftless, surly, rumpled. But Brandon has always felt at home in institutions. He has supporters and detractors both.

Phillip is sent to a sanatorium to dry out before the trial, in the hopes that the quiet will be a balm to his lacerated nerves. He is expressly forbidden to play another note on the piano.

Just one photograph for her book; this is what Janet needs. She telephones the institution, then she writes, then she writes to the presiding doctor directly, then to Phillip himself. No soap. She makes the long drive upstate, all by her lonesome, and they turn her and her little camera away at the gate.

Somewhere behind those gates there’s the only man who’s ever really known Brandon for what he is. It looks like a nice sort of place, very romantic, very airy. Not frightening in the least. The sort of place where you’d like to spend the holidays, not a place you’d mind being shut up in for a month or two. Grassy lawns and lots of high windows with beautiful white curtains. Janet hopes they are kind to him there.

*

On August 3rd, at 6 o’clock after supper, Brandon James Shaw hangs himself in his cell with a length of cord from the ward’s utility closet. Prison staff cut him down, but not soon enough. At 7 o’clock Phillip Charles Morgan steps outside for a cigarette. He drops from the edge of a scenic terrace, and breaks his neck. He always was a few steps behind Brandon — always.

*

On the first of September, the fall term at the old school begins with traditional fanfare. It’s a chance to see how the other half lives, so to speak – no hockey-sticks and birdcages but just as many pimples. Boys meet their new housemates and bid awkward farewell to their fathers and mothers. Boys carry suitcases. The incoming class of students is somewhat diminished from its pre-war glories; it will never again be what it once was before its most infamous alumni. The question of whether it will ever admit girls as students will stand unanswered. Perhaps one of these freckled monsters harbors desires that he will never admit.

Janet writes an article about the changes or lack thereof at the old school, and she even shops it around to a few other publications that might appreciate something weightier than fall fashions or what football stars look for in a wife. If any of them want a story like this one, they don’t want it from her. Janet will file it away for a chapter in some other book. She must remain.