The Snare

3. THE UNHOLY VISIT

3. THE UNHOLY VISIT As she stared at it, the photographed face would seem to rise vibrant toward her vision with unknowing force. Then she laid her hand over it quietly and firmly. The picture took up a very large part of the page, almost as much as her hand covered. Now the keen level intelligent eyes probed into her palm, the long square chin jutted up against her handheel, the definite declivity from cheekbone to jaw ran equal length with her palm's outer rise toward the small finger. Her whole hand became alive with the face. She lifted it. The pulses in the tips of her fingers were awake and throbbing. The face still looked evenly out into the world. It did not defend itself, was not alarmed. The underworld, thought Julia, the crime world— what was it? Like a revolving beacon it was always flashing , come and gone on elsewhere before its nature could be known. Julia knew as little about it as though she really were the ex-debutante the reporter, Tommy Arnold, had accused her of being. What she did know was that one day it had turned up in Dr. Pollard's office. Her first impulse when she thought of that winter morning was still what it had been then: to burst out laughing. But that was before the fear had struck her, and now, before the memory of it, sharp, metallic, corrosive as acid, returned. Because she had been scared, all right. She'd been scared to death. The buzz had sounded ("RING AND ENTER," said Dr. Pollard's notice), and the door had opened, and there 30 Elizabeth Spencer 31 they were, the three of them, disreputable, unlikely, and wild, realer than real. They would be famous afterwards. For weeks on end every detail that could be raked up about them would turn into grist for the New Orleans papers, but Julia Garrett, being to all appearances someone out of the straight world with some idea of what she was actually seeing, and whose imagination could guess at further actualities still, saw them first, before the city did. The man Ted Marnie was fragile, with thin mouse-gray hair limp and untrimmed about his neck and brow, and a spare apocalyptic look, shabby and sanctified. God had bit him like a rattlesnake, was Julia's instant impression, and on the very stroke of her thinking that he approached, leaned carefully across her desk, and spoke. "God's grace is yours. Only believe." Eyes without their accustomed glasses, she had noted by now, show it by the whitish over-tender area around them and a naked look. His, in addition, were glittering and gimlet-sharp. They took her breath for the moment, ripped it straight out of her. Innocent was the word that came strangely but accurately to her later on. Because he was that, as in the old comparison of the savage and the precious watch, smashed between rocks to get the tick out. Innocence can do anything, devoid equally of doubt or guilt or fear. To the totally innocent, flowers and garbage are exactly the same, allowing for slight differences in color and smell. Her gaze fell away, fleeing from his, and landed on the two hands placed before her. One wrist was crooked and the hand from it set off at an angle like a flag on a stick, obviously broken. My God, doesn't it hurt? was what she all but gasped. Evidently it didn't. The woman had followed him and stood at his elbow. She nodded in agreement to what he'd said, staring down deeply into Julia's face. Whatever the man said, the woman would support it. She had got converted, Julia decided,;bv methods none too original. Sex and religion 3 2 T H E S N A R E had strongly combined. Now with a prophet in charge, she was even letting the red dye grow out of her hair. Stoop-shouldered, overweight, and sullen, some idea of her own sexiness had got into this woman's head from girlhood on; it had become all that mattered, up to the recent past when religion had entered her life and down she'd gone before a new master, much like the old but with some additions. A smell like rusted metal reached to Julia and she drew back, not wanting to have...