“Esmeralda” (1944)

I thought this story by John Keir Cross was pretty good, a basic and perhaps early version of the homicidal spouse story that seemed to be quite popular at midcentury, a staple of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show and any number of short stories. Our main character, Felix Broome, is a 45-year-old man who runs a news and tobacco shop. He’s unhappily married. As the story opens, he is lying awake in bed in the middle of the night and his wife is snoring beside him. He has only his thoughts for company. He thinks about how much he hates her and how much better his life would be without her. He’s otherwise content with his work, which he obligingly thinks about too for the sake of exposition. And he thinks about a 13-year-old girl named Esmeralda, his imagined daughter—or tries to. Thinking of her somehow makes him happy but he is soon interrupted. An upstairs neighbor playing the piano wakes his wife, who insists he go pound on the ceiling with a broom handle to make the neighbor stop. The music was a Strauss waltz and we learn the neighbor is a piano teacher. His wife spoils even his harmless nighttime reveries when he cannot sleep. Can’t even appreciate small pleasures when they are in her face. Cross has other ways of making her seem gross and unpleasant, such as close discussion of her perfume. Anyway, this is the night Broome snaps and murders her, smothering her with a pillow and then choking her to death. He buries her in the basement and makes plans to disappear by train that night. After he closes the shop and is packing, he is visited by a vision of Esmeralda. She seems affectionate, but a little taunting, calling him “Father” and talking about “Mother.” It’s something more than idle daydreaming. I’m not sure it makes sense but I’m not sure it has to, or even should. The obvious explanation is probably the right one—Broome is simply cracking up from having made a murderer of himself. Overall I thought this story was a good one in the homicidal spouse category, maybe even a little above average.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
Story not available online.
Listen to 1980 BBC radio adaptation.