What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Read Online Free PDF

had wheeled her chair close to it, seeking the touch of the cool breeze from the spring day outside. As she strained forward her profile was illumined by a reflected shaft of sunlight and for just a moment she was again the silver-haired girl of thirty years before. Actually this was not entirely illusion, for Blanche had never really lost her beauty. Her near-perfect features, refined and sharpened by pain had successfully resisted the dulling influence of the encroaching years. Indeed there were times when it seemed that Blanche’s invalidism had given her a kind of delicate, waxen loveliness that, in its own way, transcended the bright prettiness of her youth.
    Unaware, she directed her gaze thoughtfully down the hillside to the ragged patchwork of yards and red tile roofs that marked the other thirty-year-old Mediterranean extravagances like her own. So much of what she saw, like the grillwork, had become dimmed by familiarity. But now she made herself look at it more closely, more analytically, and in so doing she saw that the neighborhood, as if while she had dozed, had turned old and shabby. Seeing it this way, she was suddenly assailed by a nearly overwhelming desire to be away from it. All at once she wanted only to be free of this house, this room, this feeling of being buried alive in the past.
    Her reasons for clinging to the old house all these years had been purely emotional ones. She had known this, really, from the very beginning. After the accident she had needed badly some tangible confirmation of the time before when she had been something more—much, much more—than the drab, useless cripple she was now. And so, in clinging to the house, she had clung to the past. The same past that she now felt so urgent a need to escape. Blanche nodded her head in solemn resolution: she would do it; she would call Bert Hanley and ask him to put the house up for sale.
    Bert was one of Blanche’s few remaining contacts with the outside world. He was one of three partners in the business management firm that handled her financial affairs. It was Bert who had shrewdly and carefully invested her studio earnings so as to provide the income that had supported her and Jane through the intervening years.
    After the accident Bert had taken it for granted that Blanche would sell the house. And so his astonishment had been acute when she had refused. He had pointed out to her, volubly and at length, all the obvious reasons for selling; the house was too big, too costly to maintain, too inconvenient, and it would depreciate in value too swiftly. And, he argued, it was almost insanely dangerous for an invalid to live, as she did, in an upper story room.However, in the face of her continued refusal, he had been forced, finally, to give up.
    “Someday,” Bert had shouted at her in exasperation, “you’ll be sorry! You’ll see!”
    Since then Blanche’s affairs had become a matter of minor routine for Bert, and he had given up ever mentioning the house. Actually it had been two years now since Bert had come to Hillside Terrace for a visit; their relationship, with the passage of time, had formalized itself into a matter of periodical letters and business statements, these interspersed with an occasional phone conversation.
    Outside the breeze touched the tall eucalyptus beside the window. A branch leaped forward, its leaves tapping at the edge of the sill like quick, brittle fingers. Blanche smiled at her present mood of decision; tomorrow—or the next day at the latest—she would call Bert and tell him to sell the house to the first taker for whatever price he could get. Meanwhile, she must think about a new place to live, so she could discuss that with Bert too. Something away from the hills would be best, something smaller and more convenient. After all, it was only fair to Jane; despite the continuation of her astonishing vigor, it was time she be allowed to take things easier. Something newly built, Blanche thought