Fright

Postscript

In a railroad flat on Third Avenue in the Eighties, Mrs. Timothy Meehan was suffering from one of her recurrent headaches. She sat at one of the old-fashioned, tall, narrow, curved-topped windows, elbows planted to sill, one hand holding in place a wet cloth pasted lengthwise across her brow, beside her a bowl of cold water (or at least as cold as could be hoped for in the jungle heat of a New York July) in which a replacement for the first cloth lay soaking, waiting its turn.

Below her, through layers of tropical miasma, were visible the latticed roadbed and tracks of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway, half again as high as her windows, and under that in turn, hidden in a subterranean dimness that never saw sunlight the tracks of the Third Avenue trolley line and the chasmlike street.

Tim Meehan was motorman on one of the latter’s red and yellow electric surface-cars, and that incessant deafening disturbance going on all about her within the room right now, now toddling, now falling, now squalling, was his firstborn. With another already well on the way. And scant hope of any merciful pause or slackening in the immediate years to come.

“Well, they’ll all be legal, anyway,” she had a habit of consoling herself.

She swerved abruptly, lashed her hand downward and rearward, and was rewarded with a deafening cataclysm of noise. “Keep away from me now, can’t you see I’ve got one of my headaches!” Then resumed her frontal placidity.

Cabbage was reeking from the kitchen coal range, and damp wash was steaming from the indoor clothesline that garlanded the rooms, and an El train was thundering by, shaking the whole window-embrasure that framed her and driving nails into her already-throbbing skull, and the very tar in the asphalt down there was softening up with the heat so that people left footprints in it.

Life wasn’t a bed of roses.

It wasn’t even a bed of the cheapest common field daisies that you picked for nothing.

But Tim Meehan’s wife Leona was practical, had a lot of hard common sense. Always had had. This hard practicality, this common sense, had once almost been her undoing. And now, perhaps, it was her salvation.

“Still, it’s better than the other way. It’s better than the way I was going on.”

That other way, it gave her the shudders to think of it, even now. It was only at rare intervals that she did, and they were becoming rarer all the time. These headaches brought it back, for they were its inheritance. They were the only link, any longer; the only link between two people who were not the same. The person she had once been, and the person she was now.

That had cured her once and for all, that knock on the head. That had knocked all the wildness out of her, and knocked some sense in, all in the one fell swoop.

That had cauterized her, that had immunized her to all further adventure.

She’d never, not to her dying day, forget how frightened she’d been, coming to her senses in the smothering dark, all buried-under with old clothes, on the inside of a closet (fortunately she’d been able to wrench open the door, after a terrible moment or two of resistance), left for dead on the floor.

And then hysteria, panic, when she’d floundered out of there, only to find herself locked in, in a strange room; head ringing, eyes blurred and scarcely able to focus. Claustrophobia, though she would not have known what the name was. (Even today, she wouldn’t go into a closet; she let Tim hang her things up for her.) All the preceding weeks of disdain for him, lack of respect for him, sweated out of her now on the cold exudation of her terror. He was Bluebeard, he was Jack the Ripper. He’d only left the door locked on her like that because he intended coming back later, either to dispose of her remains or to finish the job of killing her as soon as he found that she was still alive.

She’d pounded frantically, like a wild thing, like a trapped thing, on the door, fearful of his return at any moment, until at last the landlady had been roused, and came running with passkey, and let her out.

Freed, she’d fled by her without a word, bolted past her before she could be stopped and questioned, like a rabbit on the run, she was so scared. Gone tumbling down the stairs, sobbing and heaving and with her head splitting, and out into the open, the blessed open. To be seen around there no more.

All that night she’d lain quivering and cowering in her own bed, with the covers pulled up over her head, afraid of all the nameless ogres and assassins rolled into one that have ever terrified women since the beginnings of time.

Two days later she’d had to go to the hospital for the first time, because of the dizzy spells that were assailing her, and forcing her to stop whatever she was about and lean for support against the nearest wall or shopfront or lamp post. A concussion, they told her. And how had she come by it? She’d fallen, she told them reluctantly, and struck her head. She didn’t say how, and she didn’t say where. She never again, to anyone, said how or where. Far from signing any complaint, her dread now was of ever accidentally encountering him once again.

They’d kept her coming back for treatment for months afterward. Finally they discharged her as cured. There would be, they warned her, violent headaches for a considerable time. Then eventually these too would lessen and would disappear, over the course of years.

Funny, how good came out of evil.

It was on one of these periodic visits to the hospital, riding a Third Avenue trolley, that she’d first met Tim Meehan.

Three months later they were married.

She hadn’t trusted herself to wait any longer than that.

Here came another train, on the uptown track this time. She’d better get in before it gave her headache, now tapering off, another violent stirring-up.

She rose wearily from the window.

The kid was crying, and the damp wash was crisscrossing the room, and the stew was smelling up the place, and the flat was like a furnace, but still it was a lot better than the other way, than the old way. She wouldn’t have changed it back again if she could. She was safe now, and her adventuring was through.

A whimsical chuckle escaped from her, as she pulled the blinds down on her revery. Probably for the last time, probably for good.

“I wonder whatever became of him, that young fellow?” she mused idly. Idly, and fleetingly, and without really wanting to know.