The Innocent by Evelyn Piper Page B

suppose I am a harpy, a vampire.
    Harpies aren’t bored. Never a dull moment for vampires.
    Edna has made up her mind. Tonight Andrew was waiting for her outside. I saw her at the window discovering him down there, and I asked was that Andrew and she said yes, it was. She could always tell it was he, because he always wore this cap. Nobody else but Andrew wore a cap. She had bought him hat after hat out of her good money; why did he always have to wear that low, mean, greasy cap?
    She hates Andrew. It is when you pick on something irrational like that cap, unimportant like that, and talk about it so venomously that hatred is shown. Dreaming about France, visualizing the good life there and seeing Andrew as the only drawback, she has come to hate him, nourished that part of what must always have been a highly ambivalent relationship to start with.
    â€œPoor, poor Edna,” I whispered.
    But she didn’t like the low, discreet tone which seemed to approve of her hatred, of which she will never approve, being a good person in spite of herself or me. Edna distrusted me for the first time. “Why do you want to be so kind to me, Mrs. Carter? France and all, I mean.”
    I was prepared for this. I pointed out that she was good to me, that I wouldn’t have been able to manage without her. I was in a bad way when Charles found her in that Harlem place and brought her back here. From what Charles told me about that awful room, Edna lost a fight there. In that dreadful place she must have gone down step by step from respectability, from idealism to Andrew’s animal level of existence. Charles described Edna’s room with very unusual sympathy. I think he felt that there but for the grace of Claire go I. Charles has me. Edna can only have me if she earns me. The Lord helps those who help themselves.
    I asked Edna to do the ironing in here with me today. I said I was lonely. Perhaps I am, but I know, too, that people talk more freely, they feel less guilty about talking when their hands are occupied with solid, routine duties. Edna talked, all right. Doesn’t she know that she comes back to the subject time after time, and after each discussion we are a little further on? As they would say in France, “ Nous arrivons .”
    Today Edna said, “Sometime I think it would be a good thing if Andrew was dead. Better for him. Ah, he hates himself like this, Mrs. Carter. When he sobers up he cries. He hits his fist against the wall until there’s blood on the wall.”
    A wonderful touch, that blood on the wall.
    She said, “Andrew doesn’t like his life, I tell you. It isn’t worth two cents to Andy, but seems he can’t help himself, the things he does.”
    Get Edna’s vocabulary, her rhythm of speech. Today it went along with her ironing, smooth, swooping. She does not talk like a stage Negro or a movie Negro or most novel Negroes.
    Ah, but she is still the Moor. The primitive emotions are there.
    If Edna was the Moor, Claire was Iago, prodding, pushing. Edna was the innocent Moor, the trusting Moor. It was no good screaming, “Watch out! Look out!” What was done was done already. “Eddie done a terrible thing.”
    Edna is nearer murder than was possible three weeks ago. Whether she knows it or not, this talk about Andrew definitely reduced the impact of a murder. Whether she knows it or not, she was saying that it might be a good thing for Andrew if he were dead.
    Today she was asking for it, but I let her wait.
    This morning I showed Edna a picture of my mother. I told her something about Mother, including the fact that she was a diabetic. I reached down into the third desk drawer where I had put it, and took out Mother’s hypodermic syringe in its little cardboard box. I told her that I had kept it as a sad but characteristic souvenir of my mother. “I can’t even think of my poor mother without seeing her giving herself an injection of