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So—what was my next move?
It was quarter past four, and I decided my next move was visiting Sadie. I started for my car, which
was parked on Main Street. On the corner of Main and Houston, just past the old courthouse, I had a
sensation of being watched and turned around. No one was on the sidewalk behind me. It was the
Depository that was watching, all those blank windows overlooking Elm Street, where the presidential
motorcade would arrive some two hundred days from that Easter Sunday.
8
They were serving dinner on Sadie’s floor when I arrived: chop suey. The smell brought back a vivid
image of the way the blood had gushed over John Clayton’s hand and forearm before he fell to the
carpet, mercifully facedown.
“Hey there, Mr. Amberson,” the head nurse said as I signed in. She was a graying woman in a
starched white cap and uniform. A pocket watch was pinned to her formidable bosom. She was looking
at me from behind a barricade of bouquets. “There was a fair amount of shouting in there last night.
I’m only telling you because you’re her fiancé, right?”
“Right,” I said. Certainly it was what I wanted to be, slashed face or no slashed face.
The nurse leaned toward me between two overloaded vases. A few daisies brushed through her hair.
“Look, I don’t ordinarily gossip about my patients, and I ream out the younger nurses who do. But the
way her parents treated her wasn’t right. I guess I don’t entirely blame them for riding down from
Georgia with that lunatic’s folks, but—”
“Wait. Are you telling me the Dunhills and the Claytons carpooled?”
“I guess they were all palsy-walsy back in happier days, so all right, fine, but to tell her that while
they were visiting their daughter, their good friends the Claytons were downstairs signing their son’s
body out of the morgue . . .” She shook her head. “Daddy never said boo, but that woman . . .”
She looked around to make sure we were still alone, saw we were, and turned back to me. Her plain
country face was grim with outrage.
“She never shut up. One question about how her daughter was feeling, then it was the poor Claytons
this and the poor Claytons that. Your Miss Dunhill held her tongue until her mother said what a
shame it was that they’d have to change churches again. Then the girl lost her temper and started
shouting at them to get out.”
“Good for her,” I said.
“I heard her yell, ‘Do you want to see what your good friends’ son did to me?’ and honey-pie, that’s
when I started running. She was trying to pull off the bandages. And the mother . . . she was leaning
forward, Mr. Amberson. Eager. She actually wanted to look. I hustled them out and got one of the
residents to give Miss Dunhill a shot and quiet her down. The father—a little mouse of a man—tried
to apologize for his wife. ‘She didn’t know she was upsetting Sadie,’ he says. ‘Well,’ I says back, ‘what
about you? Cat get your tongue?’ And do you know what the woman said, just before they got on the
elevator?”
I shook my head.
“She said, ‘I can’t blame him, how can I? He used to play in our yard, and he was just the sweetest
boy.’ Can you believe that?”
I could. Because I thought I had already met Mrs. Dunhill, in a manner of speaking. On West
Seventh Street, chasing after her older son and yelling at the top of her lungs. Stop, Robert, don’t walk so
fast, I’m not done with you.
“You may find her . . . overly emotional,” the nurse said. “I just wanted you to know there’s a good