Free Hanno’s Doll by Evelyn Piper Page B

season’s greetings. Everything was fine, he said. He and Miss Mildred were going to be married in New Jersey, which was apparently where it could be done most quickly. There was a doctor there who had a private lab which would process the blood tests more quickly than in New York. Oh, and Milly wondered if Hanno would telephone Grace Metal for her. Grace had been asleep when Milly came in the night before to pack, and she hadn’t wanted to wake her.
    A bit more talk from Philip, not much more. (And now he remembered Puppchen smiling when he came from the telephone and told her that he thought Philip must have had a drink. “And before sundown, Puppchen, think of that!” The reason Puppchen had smiled was because he had said, “One night with Miss Mildred and Philip takes to drinking in the A . M . Aie!”)
    And then he had telephoned Miss Metal. “Good morning, Miss Metal. I wish you a good holiday. I am Cupid, Miss Metal. I bring you merry Thanksgiving greetings from Miss Mildred.”
    â€œWhere is Milly?”
    â€œI just spoke to her in New York.”
    â€œOh. Oh!”
    â€œLast night Miss Mildred and Philip Scott eloped to New York. That is why I am Cupid, Miss Metal.”
    She had said, “Cupid! Cupid!” She had hung up.
    Well, he did look more like Gargantua than Cupid.
    After that, they had forgotten the sour Metal, and forgotten Miss Mildred and Philip also. How busy they had been with preparations for that Thanksgiving dinner. Mrs. Brown prepared the goose from the deep freeze for roasting. He had done the liver, chestnut and oyster stuffing à la Dietrich. Puppchen had made rather lopsided kindergarten grapefruit baskets and strung the ruby cranberries to make a necklace for the goose.
    When all was prepared, Puppchen, glowing in the red peau de soie and the antique garnets he had picked up for her at a Parke Bernet auction, had played to him while he rested and read.
    He remembered looking up from Montaigne to what he could see of Puppchen through the ebony triangle of Felix’s Bechstein, and it had occurred to him to try to find her a harpsichord like the ones in the Metropolitan Museum of Art since, at the great shining Bechstein, even a Puppchen couldn’t help slipping into music well over her head, music too mature for a Puppchen, too grave, then too wild, so tumultuous that it offended him, as if she had been wearing black satin, or had hidden her doll’s face behind a mask of tragedy. He had asked her to play something “tinkling,” and after that … oh, she was quick, she was quick … she had paddled obediently in the shallows of Chopin.
    He remembered that he had turned the pages to the essay “Of Presumption” in his Montaigne: “That our actions should be judged by our intentions.” On that Thanksgiving morning, he had asked that his action be judged by his intention. He had not intended to kill that boy.
    Nor had he intended to kill Philip Scott or Miss Mildred, but they had died on what he had considered a day of thanksgiving, while he and Puppchen were drinking a Thanksgiving toast with the four students.
    The police had telephoned him, in Bradley, because it was his station wagon piled up on Route 3 between Secaucus and Lyndhurst. There had been some choice about what to do with what was left of the station wagon, but none, of course, about the two smashed young bodies. They had been taken to a funeral parlor in Secaucus to await word from Philip Scott’s mother in Montreal, Canada, and Miss Mildred’s parents in Clifton, Idaho. (She had died “Miss” Mildred; the accident had occurred on the way to wherever the marriage was quickest done in New Jersey.)
    The four students had put down their champagne glasses and gone away, the tragedy lopping years off them; children again, backing awkwardly out of the house, falling over their feet and over their words of condolence, poor boys. And