Man Sinister

Chapter 1

I came out of the three-day spree in a flophouse on Diamond Street. After I decided where I was, I sat on the bed and held my head in my hands for a while. I found my coat crumpled on a chair. There was a nearly full pint of Old Seaman in the pocket. I gagged, looking at the whisky. It seemed that then as an alcoholic I was an also-ran.

I knew then that I was finished with this kind of drinking. It was not the inevitable belief born of hang-over and remorse. It was the simple recognition that whisky had not done for me what I had hoped. The wrong memories blacked out, leaving stark and clear the very memory I’d been wanting to escape for a long time. The memory of what I had done to my wife.

I slugged the Old Seaman once to still the shaking of my hands. I wanted a shave and a bath, after the drink slid down.

I put on the coat, and turned up the collar. Then I went out on Diamond Street, walked two blocks, and caught a taxi. I rode over to Papa Joe’s house.

A strange black car with New York plates was parked in the driveway. I went around to the rear entrance. Ellen was coming out of the pantry. She jumped like a frightened kitten. She and her brother, Wilfred, were the household servants. She was about seventeen, a peaked little thing with faded brown hair and startled brown eyes. She and Wilfred came of the poorest kind of mountain family.

“Oh, Mr. Martin!” She made it sound as if she had been scared by Old Nick himself.

“Who is the company from New York?”

“Your brother.” Then her mouth became petulant. Her voice was sullen as she added, “And with a new wife. A New York girl.”

I took the back stairs to the second floor. In my room I set the pint of Old Seaman on the bureau.

The door opened and Wilfred shuffled in. “I heard you come up, Mr. Martin. Anything I can fetch for you?”

He was a year or so older than his sister, an obese boy with a round, soft face thatched with limp, sandy hair. His face and his vacant, flat blue eyes suggested inbreeding. He was sly, evasive.

I shook my head. “How long has Harold been here?”

“Couple days.”

“Well, it’s a nice time of year to bring his new wife to Asheville. Plenty of summer color and cool nights in the mountains now.”

Wilfred grunted. “If there ain’t anything you need, I’ll be going on downstairs.”

After he went out, I picked up a razor, shaving cream, and a towel from the bureau. The door opened a second time. This time it was Papa Joe.

He slammed the door. He beat the tip of his cane against the floor. He carried the cane more like a weapon than an aid to his crippled right knee. He was a small man with pale blue-eyes, sparse gray hair always plastered to his narrow skull, and bitterness written all over him. He came from an old Southern family, the kind that used to have colonels.

“Steve, you stinker! You rotter!”

“I’ve been drunk before.”

“Not at a time like this. Look at you! Did you let Vera see you?”

“Vera?”

“Harold’s wife. A nice impression you’d have made. I hope you crawled in the back way.”

My face went hot. “I did. You make Vera sound pretty important.”

“Harold has done quite well for himself. But you wouldn’t understand much about a wife, would you?”

I had to sit down. “You’re hitting low.”

He laughed, a sound filled with sadistic pleasure. I looked at him. A sudden chill grabbed my spine.

“How long have you hated me this way?” I asked.

“Hated you? I don’t. I despise you, as I despise all weakness. Weakness in Government, in men, in theories. Unfortunately the weak number many, and are able to usurp power rightfully belonging to their protectors.”

“You’re telling me to get out?”

“Not at all. I rather enjoy the spectacle of you.”

He was not only my senior by twenty-eight years; he was the man who had raised me. I could not strike him. He had spoken his exit line. I kept my face turned until I heard him leave the room.

I got my shaving stuff together again. “Nuts to you,” I told the Old Seaman bottle. Like many women, the bottle would not keep its promises.

I shaved without my mind being on the task. I was stunned at the feelings I’d uncovered in Papa Joe. Something pretty excruciating must have happened to have shattered his control. I didn’t wonder much about it. There remained for me to leave as much like a gentleman as possible.

Now that I’d discovered his feelings, fragments of memories out of my youth came back — his treatment of me, little actions and words dropped here and there. I’d never thought too much of it before. I’d long been conditioned to accept the status of orphan in the household. Now I began to question Papa Joe’s purpose. Perhaps my status, my failures, had been food for years for his sadism.

I went downstairs. My head was pretty clear, though a dull ache was working on the base of my skull. I was beginning to get hungry.

The strange car was gone from the driveway. I threw my cigarette over the porch railing, went back in the house, and turned into the heavy, gloomy, overstuffed parlor. A woman was sitting in a mohair wing chair. She was thumbing through a magazine without seeing it.

When she looked up, I said, “How do you do? You must be Vera.”

“Why, yes, and I suppose you are Steven.”

She was beautiful. Her hair was a soft blonde mane. She had wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and good legs, and full breasts with a promise of lushness not hidden by her plunging neckline.

I offered her a cigarette. She took it, and as I held a light for her I had a close-up of her face. Natural, unplucked even brows, gray eyes, a mouth that was full without seeming large.

“Do you plan to be in Asheville long?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.”

I caught the cloud that shadowed her eyes for an instant. Maybe she had made the trip against her will. Or perhaps she just didn’t like it here.

“How do you like our natural wonders — Chimney Rock, the Smokies, the Vanderbilt house?”

“I couldn’t say. I haven’t seen any of them.”

Again that strain in her face. The room grew uncomfortable. She rose, walked to the window.

“How far is it to Pressley’s Drug Store?” she asked.

“About four blocks. Would you like something from there?”

“No. Harold went over there. He should have been back by now.” She stopped speaking. Her face was white. I went over beside her.

“Is something wrong?”

“No... no,” she said quickly. “I just haven’t been feeling up to par. The trip down and all, you know.”

Where the lace curtains parted, I glanced through the window. A man was standing in the shadows of a tree across the street. I couldn’t see details from here, but he was not Harold. Too short and blocky.

“It is a little close in here,” I said.

I raised the window, propped my palms on the dusty sill. The man across the street walked away. I turned from the window.

Vera said, “Would you mind terribly walking down toward the drug store? I’m worried about Harold. He’s a little upset. We had a bit of trouble with the car on the way down.”

“I’ll take a walk down there,” I said.

I went out into the hall. It was a long hall, with a high ceiling, gloomy as twilight. Portraits of Cranfords long dead reposed against the walls in oval frames.

As I reached the porch, Harold’s black car swung into the driveway. I waited for him. He smiled as he came up the porch steps carrying a small package he’d brought from the drug store.

We shook hands and said the usual. Long time no see. You’re looking well. All that.

He hadn’t changed much since the last time I’d seen him. Still the clear, fragile china skin, the light blond hair that waved a little, and with a few locks loose to the breeze. A few more lines were about his eyes, and his mouth was beginning to develop some of the steel-trap qualities of Papa Joe’s.

He was a magazine illustrator, a successful one. Periodically he would send little notices to the Asheville papers when his work was appearing in one of the big national magazines. Now and then nice old ladies and aspiring young artists from the local art club would drop around to ask for Harold’s address.

“It’s nice you could get away for a while,” I said to him.

Whatever was between Papa Joe and myself, I had lived a portion of my life with this man like a brother. We had never been close, though, and in school while I’d been getting a collar-bone broken playing football Harold had been on the debating team. Yet there was bound to be a sort of feeling between us in spite of the fact that we were only foster brothers, and nothing Papa Joe said or did would affect that.

“You should have written that you were married,” I said, “and were coming down. We’d have given you a reception.”

“The past three years haven’t given me much time to write,” he said. “I don’t care for parties, anyway.”

“Liar!” I laughed.

He turned on me suddenly. His eyes got hard. His voice was harsh. “I mean it, Steve! No parties. I didn’t come down here to fool around with a lot of people.”

“It’s your trip,” I said.

He hesitated. “Well, look, Steve. I didn’t mean that quite the way it sounded.”

“Forget it. I met your wife. Was she a model?”

“No. A secretary to a magazine editor.”

“She know how come I’m a Martin in a family of Cranfords?”

He nodded. “I sketched the details when I told her about you.”

I watched him go into the parlor. I’d been tense, talking to him. But he hadn’t asked about Bryanne, my own wife.