Sunday At The Salvage Yard: "The People Next Door"

From The Collected Stories of Robert Arthur

"The People Next Door" is a mystery/horror story originally published in June of 1952 in my father's own short-lived publication The Mysterious Traveler Magazine, under the pseudonym Pauline C. Smith. The magazine was intended to supplement (and act as an advertisement for) my father's Mysterious Traveler radio show, produced with his partner David Kogan. But when the show was blacklisted after the officers of the Radio Writer's Guild (of which my father was one) refused to ask members of the Guild to vote on a referendum in support of the Korean War, the magazine folded, too.

However, in the short time it existed, my father put out five issues, and in each of the five he published two or three of his own stories.

Some were published under the pseudonym "The Mysterious Traveler," and others under other pseudonyms—but although, on the whole, my father used pseudonyms for stories he considered less than his best work, I'm certain he would have been happy to publish "The People Next Door" under his own name if he hadn't had the impulse to honor its depressed but highly observant main character, Evelyn, by using a female pseudonym.

For one thing, he chose the story for inclusion, under the name Robert Arthur, when he ghost-edited the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories For Late At Night—published by Random House in 1963—and although a few of his stories in the adult Hitchcock anthologies are a little too savage for my taste, I know they were all stories he was proud of.

For another thing, "The People Next Door" is actually a very spare and literary story—one in which everything is intimation and nuance. It startles not only because of the disparity between its calm surface and the unsettling story it tells, but also because it suggests that Evelyn has an uncomfortably deep understanding of her doppelganger neighbor’s motivation.

Like "A Perfectly Natural Murder"—and perhaps paving the way for it, four years later— "The People Next Door" is a tale of a murderer who is never caught or punished, and although a lot of Dad's stories about murder convey the time-tested message that crime doesn't pay, I myself prefer his stories in which crime does pay, because, in those stories, it consistently seems to be the case that the circumstances of the murder are so unusual as to guarantee that no repeat will ever occur.

Elizabeth Arthur

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR

By Robert Arthur

"WELL, HOW ARE you getting along with our new neighbor?" Ed asked.

Evelyn looked down at the knitting in her lap. "All right," she said.

"I talked with her a few minutes before dinner, while I was out in the yard. They used to live in California, she said. Seemed like a nice, ordinary woman."

Evelyn held up the wool, inspected it. "She did?"

"You like her all right, don't you?"

"I guess so."

"It gives you someone for company during the day. Keeps you from thinking about yourself too much," he persisted.

"I don't see her much. Sometimes I talk to her when she's hanging the wash on the line."

"Well, it's good for you," he said briskly, the clinical look taking over his face.

Evelyn picked up the wool again and clicked the needles. The knitting was a form of therapy.

"She hangs out her washing as if she was angry at it," she said. "She puts the clothespins on the shirts as if she were stabbing them."

"Evie!" His tone was sharp.

"Well, she does," Evelyn persisted. "Maybe it's because there's so many shirts. Fourteen of them. Two clean shirts every day. Perhaps her husband has a phobia about clean shirts."

Ed rattled his newspaper as he lowered it.

"Evie," he said, "you mustn't imagine things! You mustn't try to find phobias and neuroses in everything anybody does. It isn't healthy. I should think you'd have had enough of analyzing and being analyzed all this last year since your breakdown."

Evie thought of the washing erupting convulsively onto the line as the woman next door hung up each garment with controlled violence.

"Maybe she's tired of washing and ironing so many shirts every week," she said. “Maybe she's sick to death of it. Maybe that's why she seems to be stabbing the shirts with the clothespins."

"Evie, you're almost well now!" Ed was speaking with forced calm. "You can't afford to let your imagination run away about every simple little thing. It isn't healthy. You'll have a relapse."

"I'm sorry, Ed." She picked up the wool again. "I won't imagine things."

"That's a good girl." He relaxed. "She tell you what her husband does?"

"He's a salesman," Evelyn said, needles clicking. "He sells cutlery to restaurants—knives and cleavers and things."

"You see?" Ed remarked. "Salesmen have to be neat. That's why he wears so many shirts."

"Is it?" Evelyn studied the sweater. The gray wool was very unexciting. She decided she would work a little pattern into it—red, maybe. "Have you ever seen him?"

"No." Ed removed his glasses and polished them. "Have you?"

"Every morning. He leaves for work a little while after you do. His car is parked in their driveway, right by our kitchen window. I see him while I'm doing the breakfast dishes."

Ed turned the pages of his newspaper to the sport section. "What's he like?"

"He's very tall and thin. His mouth is thin, like a knife. He wears gray all the time. He makes me think of a gray snake."

"Evie!" Ed's voice was angry now. "Stop that!"

"All right." She stood up. "I guess I'll go to bed now."

In her bedroom, she stood for a moment at the window. There was a light on next door—one window was an orange oblong. She got into bed, took a Nembutal, and fell asleep.

OVER THE clean suds of dishwater each morning she saw the man next door appear, stride quickly to his car and get in with his sample case—tall, his features as sharp as the knives he sold, his eyes hooded. Then the car would start, rattle off, and he would be gone.

Through her brief appearances in the back yard, Evelyn grew to know the woman; by her long strides to the refuse can where she would clatter the lid off, throw in her paper-wrapped bundle with an overarm motion, clang the lid back; by her short, fierce tussle with a garment on the clothesline; by her soliloquy as she talked to herself, the words inaudible but the tone clear—sometimes a grumbling complaint and sometimes a violently fierce monologue.

Evelyn grew to know her, she felt, quite well. And sometimes at night she would hear sounds from next door. Not very loud sounds; not conversation. Muffled sounds. You would have to use imagination to say they were sounds of anger, or perhaps of pain. And she had promised Ed not to let herself imagine things . . .

When the car had been sitting in the driveway for two days, she mentioned it to Ed. He lowered his paper.

"Oh?" he said politely. "Is he sick?"

"Maybe he is. I haven't seen her, either."

"You'd better go over, hadn't you? Maybe they're both sick."

"No. I don't want to go over there."

He glanced at his paper, then at his wife. "Why not? You've talked to her. It would be the kind thing to do."

Evelyn bent over her occupational therapy, the knitting on her lap. "She might think I was snooping."

Aggravation and indulgence struggled in Ed's face. At last, he said mildly, "I don't think she'd think that."

"She might."

Through one more day without backyard clangor, Evelyn listened and watched while the house next door slept.

On the next day the woman next door emerged to hang out her washing. She no longer moved with a controlled fury. She handled the pieces of wash, even the shirts, as if they were fabric, inanimate and impersonal—no longer as if she wrestled a hated opponent.

Stepping to the dividing fence, Evelyn rested her hands on the palings. She leaned over. "I see your husband's car in the driveway . . ." she began.

The words seemed to filter slowly through the other woman's mind, to arrange themselves in her brain to make a sense which startled her. She looked at the car, then back at Evelyn.

"He took a trip." Her expression was suddenly veiled and withdrawn. She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. "He's gone off to a convention. It was too far to drive. He took the train and left the car for me."

"Oh, that's it," Evie said politely. "We were afraid he was sick."

"No, he's not sick. He's not sick at all."

Abruptly the woman backed away, spare-lipped mouth moving as if to utter further words of explanation that would reduce the unusual to the commonplace. Then she turned, stepped through her back door, and locked it behind her.

"The man next door is out of town," Evelyn told Ed that evening.

He smiled. "So you went over, after all."

"No."

"Oh? You talked to her, though?"

"Yes. I talked to her." Evelyn bent over the knitting. "She took the car and went away this afternoon."

Rustling the paper, Ed settled to read.

"She wasn't gone long. When she came back, she had two big dogs in the car with her."

He lowered the paper. "She did?"

"Two big thin dogs," said Evelyn. "She tied them in the back yard using the clothesline to tie them to the clothes pole. She had a big wash this morning and after it dried, she went and got the dogs and tied them with the clothesline."

"Maybe she's scared while her husband's gone. And she got them for watchdogs."

"Maybe."

Now Evelyn felt ready to give up the Nembutal she had used to get her to sleep all these months. Pushing the little bottle of sleeping tablets far back on the bedside table, she lay down. She thought of the woman next door, the dogs and the car in the driveway . . . the woman, the dogs and the car . . .

At last, she rose to pace through the darkened house.

Standing at the kitchen window, she looked out at the night to see a button of light cross the yard next door. Her eyes followed it. She heard a plop, a snarl and a growl-then the gulping, snuffling sound of hunger being satisfied. The light made an arc and moved back to the house and was lost.

For a long time she stood at the window, then she went to her bedroom, took a Nembutal, and fell asleep . . .

"She doesn't like the dogs," Evelyn told Ed several days later.

"She doesn't have to. They're watchdogs, not pets."

"She walks them every day. She unties their ropes from the clothes pole and goes off with them. When she comes back, she's tired and the dogs are tired. Then after dark she gives them a big dinner."

Evie thought of them, the slip-slap drag of the animals, their lolling tongues—the fatigued tread of the woman, her face drained of everything but lassitude. Of the way she retied them to the clothes pole, knotting, knotting, and re-knotting the ropes while they lay, eyes closed, panting, satiated. "What does she say about her husband? Seems to me that convention is lasting awfully long."

"She doesn't say anything. She just walks the dogs. Walks them and feeds them."

Ed laid down his paper. "Evie," he said. "Don't you talk with her anymore?"

Holding the needles tightly, Evelyn looked at him. "I don't see her to talk with her. She just walks the dogs. She doesn't bang anything on her line any more because she doesn't have any line. She doesn't seem to do anything in the yard except untie the dogs and tie them up again."

"Well, that's too bad. I wanted you to have some company. Maybe you could walk ..."

"No! I don't want to walk with her or the dogs." Evelyn dropped the knitting on the chair as she left for bed.

Filled with torpor, the dogs were quiet now, lazy, growing fat as they ambled reluctantly at the end of their rope leashes, to crawl back and lie somnolent.

Evelyn was knitting quietly. The sweater was almost finished; the drab, uninteresting sweater with the bright little pattern of scarlet she had added. "She took the dogs away in the car today," she told Ed on Friday.

Ed looked at her over his glasses. "She did?"

"And she came back alone. Then she went in the house, got two suitcases, came out, put them in the car and drove off."

"Maybe that's why she took the dogs away—she's going on a trip."

"She's going on a trip all right."

"Or perhaps the upkeep was too high." Ed yawned and polished his glasses, fitted them carefully on his nose. "She shouldn't have exercised them so much. It made them too hungry." He opened his paper and placed it across his knees. "Must have cost her plenty to feed the brutes."

Evie pulled the needles from the yam and folded the sweater. She stood. The thing was a pattern, its design all finished.

"I don't think it did," she said. "I don't think it cost her hardly anything at all."