Park Avenue Tramp

Chapter 6

The morning of that day, Oliver Alton Farnese got up at eight o’clock. This could have been predicted by anyone who was aware of his habits. He got up at eight o’clock every day except Saturday, when he got up at nine, and Sunday, when he got up at ten.

After rising, he shaved and bathed and dressed. His clothes had been laid out for him in a particular place in a particular order, and he not only knew exactly what they would be for every change he made during the course of the day, but for every change for every day for the rest of the week, for he composed every Sunday night a detailed list of what he would wear for every occasion of the week following, and this list was deviated from only in emergency, and not even in emergency without specific authorization.

After shaving and bathing and dressing, he went to the dining room. On the way, he stopped in the hall outside the door of the room in which Charity sometimes slept, and he waited for about thirty seconds for the sound or sense of motion or static life in the room beyond the door, but nothing was heard or sensed, as he had suspected nothing would be, and then he went on to the dining room and sat down and had his breakfast of orange juice and bacon and toast and marmalade and coffee, which was served to him by Edith, the maid. He knew that his breakfast this morning would consist of these things, and that breakfast tomorrow would consist of certain other things, and breakfast of the morning of the day after tomorrow of certain others, for he planned his menus, as he planned his wardrobe, precisely and obdurately, every Sunday night, for a week to come.

“Did Mrs. Farnese come home last night?” he said to Edith.

“No, sir.”

“Did she leave any word for me?”

“No, sir.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“No, sir. Mrs. Farnese never tells me where she’s going.”

“That’s right. She doesn’t. Do you know why, Edith?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course you do. It’s because she despises you. She thinks you’re an informer. Are you an informer, Edith?”

“I know where my first obligation is, sir.”

“That’s nicely put, Edith. Very delicate. You have no idea how much I appreciate your loyalty. You also know where your first advantage is, don’t you, Edith?”

“I think so, sir.”

“You are never a disappointment to me, Edith, You always say precisely the right thing. You know exactly when to lie and when to tell the truth.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tell me, Edith. Where do you think my wife spent the night?”

“I assume, sir, that she spent it with a friend.”

“Precisely, Edith. There is no doubt in the world that she spent the night with a friend. Can you tell me what a friend is, Edith?”

“No, sir.”

“Oh, come, now. Surely you can. Is a friend someone you have known well for a long time, or is it possible for a friend to be someone you merely meet in the course of a night and decide to be friendly with?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’ve never had a friend.”

“Edith, Edith, I adore you. I really do.” He laughed softly, a sibilance with no sound of a vowel. “Go away, Edith. Please do. You have been perfect, absolutely perfect, and if you stay another moment you are liable to say something that will spoil everything.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

She went away, and he poured himself a second cup of coffee and glanced at a morning paper while he drank it. He was hardly aware, however, of what he saw. He was savoring, instead, the aftermath of Edith, and the aftermath, constantly recurring, was the substance of anticipation. He was a rich man, incredibly rich to the cold and avaricious bitch who served his table and told him tales, and it amused him enormously to see how she served him and cultivated him in the design and expectation of an eventual expression of gratitude. It would be a truly delectable pleasure when he decided to make it plain, in due time, that he had despised her all along as much as she had ever been despised by Charity, or by anyone else.

He allowed himself a half-hour for dressing and a half-hour for breakfast. At nine, he left the table and walked through the living room and the foyer to the door. Edith, who knew his schedule perfectly, was waiting at the door with his hat. He took it and put it on his head while she opened the door to let him out. On the way into the hall, just before the door closed behind him, he said, “Good morning, Edith,” and she said, “Good morning, sir,” and the last word, the subservient sir, was amputated in the air by the door’s closing. It was always this way. This way exactly.

At the elevator, he pushed the button and stood waiting briefly with indiscernible impatience as the car climbed its shaft in response to his summons. He was not impatient because he was in a hurry or had any place to be at a certain time, although it was part of his schedule to be certain places at certain times, but simply because he felt that his waiting was somehow improper and unnecessary, and that the car should have been waiting, instead, for him. He arrived at the elevator at this minute of the hour five mornings a week, give or take thirty seconds at the most, and it was in effect a personal affront, a deliberate indifference to the reservation he had made of time and space, that the operator did not wait with the car as Edith waited with his hat.

When the car arrived, its door slipping open with a soft gasp after its breathless ascent, he stepped inside and said, “Good morning,” in the identical tone he always used at this time to greet the operator, and the operator said, “Good morning, Mr. Farnese. Beautiful day outside,” and this was an example of another minor irritant that had acquired the cumulative quality of a threat from being repeated so often. The operator always seemed to find it necessary to append a comment to the simple greeting, which would have been tolerable if it had been regularly repeated, but it wasn’t. Sometimes it was a comment like this one, pertaining to the kind of day it happened to be, and sometimes it was something altogether different, pertaining to a current event or something of the sort, and it was impossible to anticipate with any accuracy what it would be on any given morning, and this was disturbing. People who performed repeatedly the same services should say repeatedly the same words and should look consistently the same way. When they did not, it was a violation of the order of things and therefore threatening.

Leaving the building with a word for the doorman, he found that his black Imperial had been brought around from the garage as usual. Getting behind the wheel, he drove by a particular route to the office he maintained in a building on Fifth Avenue, and it was, when he got there, a particular time. Crossing the outer room, he said, “Good morning, Miss Carling,” to the woman he called his secretary and who was actually nothing necessary at all, and went into the inner room and sat down at his desk, and after that there was nothing especially to do.

He didn’t need the office. He didn’t need to go there. Except that the office and his going there were necessary to the survival of the flesh and blood and bones and nerves that existed in the unique identity of Oliver Alton Farnese. Some of his mail was directed there, and this he opened and read and disposed of, and sometimes he even dictated to Miss Carling a reply to one or more of the letters. Now and then he made or granted an appointment with someone, and these appointments were scheduled as strictly for definite times as if he had a full agenda. If a person who had an appointment arrived early, he was kept waiting until the scheduled hour, and if he arrived late, he was advised by Miss Carling that he could not be seen and would have to make another appointment, if he wished, for another day.

Much of the time, after and between the mail and the appointments, if there were any of either, Farnese passed in reading selected newspapers and magazines related to investments and industry and certain sports. He did not handle his investments, nor did he engage in industry or games, but some attention to these matters seemed appropriate to his position, and they bored him somewhat less than art and literature and politics and social affairs. The truth was, he could not possibly have survived the pressures and tensions of any competitive activity whatever, and his father had recognized this and had left him the bulk of a huge family fortune so legally restricted and secured that he really had very little to do with it, except to sign documents occasionally and live richly off the income.

He had practically nothing to do that had to be done, and there was practically nothing that could have been done that he wanted to do, but it was essential to his survival to be constantly committed, if not genuinely occupied. All his life he had lived in private terror under the perpetual threat of personal disintegration. He shored himself with the minutiae of a self-imposed and obsessive regimentation. He substituted rigidity for strength, cruelty for courage. In the observation of the infliction of pain, he took an almost orgiastic pleasure. He was monstrously vain.

Miss Carling, who usually did all her day’s work in thirty minutes and frequently in no minutes, was expected, nevertheless, to be present for seven hours. She arrived at nine and departed for the day at five and took an hour for lunch between noon and one. Farnese lunched between one and half-past two. He went regularly to his club, where he received from the head-waiter a copy of the planned luncheon menu a week in advance, which enabled him to plan his personal menus in advance also, and so he always knew exactly what he would eat on any day, exactly what he would drink before and after the meal, and almost exactly how long it would require to do it. His schedule was rarely disturbed by the claims of other members on his time, for he was not understood or liked, and he usually drank and ate alone. At any rate, he was inevitably at his desk in the office at two-thirty, and often he sat there for the rest of the afternoon and did nothing at all.

This afternoon, however, he had an appointment at three o’clock with a private detective. The detective arrived six minutes early and was compelled to wait in the outer office. He was a grossly obese man whose swollen body with its narrow shoulders and heavy mammae and broad, tremulous hips and rump gave him, in spite of his size, a womanish appearance. His head was bald, his scalp scored and pocked by some kind of skin infection he had once had, and his face was gray and soggy. His name was Bertram Sweeney, and for more than a year it had been his job to shadow Charity McAdams Farnese and report regularly on her activities to Oliver Alton Farnese, her husband.

At three o’clock, he was told by Miss Carling that be could go into the inner office, and he went in and sat down in the chair from which he always made his reports. He removed a notebook from a sagging side pocket of his coat and opened it to the place where Charity had entered it yesterday afternoon, and then, without speaking, he sat holding the open notebook on one knee and looking at Farnese. He hated the man who had hired him. He hated Farnese for many reasons, some of them valid, but mostly he hated him because it was so much easier to hate anyone than to like him or to be indifferent to him.

Farnese also sat without speaking for quite a long time. He sat erect in his chair with his hands folded on the desk in front of him, and there was in the rigid immobility of his posture a cataleptic quality that was almost frightening. A tall, slender man with blond, graydusted hair and a face like a narrow wedge of stone, he might have been in his withdrawal either psychotic or ascetic, but what he was in the opinion of Sweeney could best be expressed in the language of the gutter, which Sweeney spoke fluently, and now to himself in the merest whisper he called Farnese the name of what he was, forming the word with livid lips. He wasn’t fooled, either, by the pose of quietude that Farnese held. He had learned long ago to sense the sickening turbulence beneath the surface of icy reserve, and when he sat and made his reports with quiet malice, he laughed and laughed within himself, the laughter growing and becoming so enormous inside his flabby body that he was sure it would break loose like thunder in the room.

When Farnese spoke at last, his voice, like his face, did not betray his feelings. It was modulated and flat, deviating only slightly from a monotone. His thin lips barely moved to permit the passage of words, and if there was any sign of emotional disturbance at all, it was in the fine line of a scar that followed so precisely for about three inches the line of the mandible that it seemed to have been made deliberately by a scalpel. This scar was ordinarily invisible, but sometimes it turned dead white, as now, and could be seen plainly against darker flesh, and Sweeney found it extremely interesting, and useful as a kind of adrenal barometer. He had thought at first that Farnese was older than he admitted, that the scar was evidence of plastic surgery, but he now knew definitely that this was not so. Farnese was forty-five. He had married Charity McAdams when he was forty-one and she was twenty-five. They had been married, after a fashion, four years. These were vital statistics of which Sweeney was certain.

“All right,” Farnese said. “Begin whenever you’re ready.”

Sweeney began. Using his notes to remind himself of specific times and places, he reported that he had been waiting yesterday afternoon, as per instructions, in the office of the garage in the apartment building on Park Avenue in which the Farneses lived. At exactly 4:57 be had received a telephone message from the Farnese maid that Mrs. Farnese had just left the apartment. He, Sweeney, had picked her up at the front entrance and followed her to the apartment of Miss Samantha Coy, who was not new to Sweeney’s notebook. Mrs. Farnese had remained here for nearly two hours, leaving with a party of six, including herself, at 6:43. The party of six was evenly composed of men and women in pairs, and they had apparently had quite a few cocktails, and they drove in one car, a Cadillac, to an Italian restaurant on Tenth Street. They had arrived at the restaurant at 7:18.

“Never mind the exact timetable,” Farnese said. “I’ve told you before that it isn’t necessary.”

“I like to be accurate,” Sweeney said.

“Never mind it. When I want to know a time, I’ll ask for it. Get on with the report and omit the details.”

Sweeney bowed his head above his notebook and whispered to himself the name of what Farnese was. He continued his report.

After leaving the Italian restaurant, the party of six had driven in the Cadillac to Fourth Street, where they visited three nightclubs in about three hours. While they were in the third of these, Mrs. Farnese had deserted the party and had gone away with a young man in a white Mark II. Sweeney did not know the identity of the man, but he had obtained the license number of the Mark II, and it would be a simple matter from that to get the identity.

“Don’t bother,” Farnese said. “I know who he is.”

“Oh,” Sweeney said.

Mrs. Farnese and the man in the Mark II, he said, had gone to a place in the area of Sheridan Square. Another night spot. The place was very crowded and noisy, filled with confusion, but Mrs. Farnese and the man had sat at a small table not far from the bar, and he, Sweeney, had managed to grab a stool from which he could observe them clearly. After a while, Mrs. Farnese had got up and gone away alone, presumably to the ladies’ room. Since the man had remained at the table, it was a fair assumption that Mrs. Farnese would return, which was the assumption that Sweeney made, and this was a mistake, or had almost been one, for she didn’t return after all, and it was only by the sheerest luck that he had caught a glimpse of her at the last second as she was going out past the check stand.

When he got outside after her, she was standing on the sidewalk in front of the building, just standing there very quietly, and there had been, he thought, an odd expression on her face. Or maybe it had been the absence of any expression at all. A kind of vacancy. It was pretty hard to describe, but about the best word he could think of was gone. She’d looked gone. Not there. Nobody home.

Moving suddenly, as if she’d just remembered something, she’d started walking down the street with him behind her, and she’d walked very rapidly for several blocks and had then stopped in front of still another night spot, a crummy little place identified by a few twists of neon tubing as Duo’s. She’d patted the bricks by the door as if she were in love with them, and had gone inside and sat at the bar and talked for quite a while with the bartender.

“Is this bartender important?” Farnese said.

“What do you mean?” Sweeney said.

“Did she do anything with him, go away with him, give any indication at all that he was any more to her than a common bartender?”

“No. Nothing like that. She just talked with him and drank the Martinis that he made for her.”

“Then why make a point of him? Please get finished.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Sweeney took a deep breath, held it five seconds, released it slowly. “There was a piano player there. A so-so thumper. Name’s Joe Doyle. He’s the one she went away with. After quite a while, that was. I was sitting at the bar talking to a redhead who hit me for a drink.”

“Did you follow or stay with the redhead?”

“Followed. When I’m on a job, the job comes first.”

“I congratulate you on your integrity. Where did they go?”

“They picked up his car in the alley and made a tour of half a dozen places. Didn’t stay long in any one of them. They seemed to be looking for someone, and it’s a good bet it was the guy in the Mark II.”

“Possibly. But they didn’t find him, of course.”

“No. Finally they drove to the place this other guy lives. The piano thumper. Joe Doyle.”

“Where is this?”

“An old residence south of Washington Square. Probably he has a room there. Maybe a small apartment.”

“Quite likely. What did they do then?”

“Well, that’s a matter for speculation.” Watching the stony face of Farnese, Sweeney spoke now with deep, delicious malice. “They went inside together, and they didn’t come out. Not before daylight, anyhow. I waited that long, and then I went home for a nap. A guy has to sleep now and then.”

Farnese said nothing. He sat rigidly erect in the cataleptic pose, and Sweeney kept his eyes on the fine white line of scar tissue along the mandible, and the thunderous mirth grew in Sweeney’s gross body.

“That’s all,” Sweeney said.

“Very well,” Farnese said.

“Shall I continue on the job?”

“Not today. Perhaps tomorrow or the next day. I’ll let you know.”

“All right,” Sweeney said.

He folded his notebook and replaced it carefully in the sagging pocket of his coat. Rising, he walked to the door and let himself out of the room, and Farnese continued to sit unmoving in his chair. He sat with his hands folded and submitted himself to the violations of fury and terror and incongruous desire.