Rich Man, Poor Man

Chapter 1

The morning was a pleasant one, except for the smog that lay cupped, a thin, metallic soup, in the Los Angeles basin. Barefooted, in her nightgown, Gretchen went through the open French windows, sliding between the still curtains, out onto the terrace, and looked down from her mountain top at the stained but sunlit city and the distant flat sea below her. She breathed deeply of the September morning air, smelling of wet grass and opening flowers. No sound came from the city and the early silence was broken only by the calls of a covey of quail crossing the lawn.

Better than New York, she thought for the hundredth time, much better than New York.

She would have liked a cup of coffee, but it was too early for Doris, the maid, to be up, and if she went into the kitchen to make the coffee herself, Doris would be awakened by the sound of running water and clinking metal and would come fussing out, apologizing but aggrieved at being deprived of rightful sleep. It was too early to awake Billy, too, especially with the day he had ahead of him, and she knew better than to rouse Colin, whom she had left sleeping in the big bed, flat on his back, frowning, his arms crossed tightly, as though in his dreams he was watching a performance of which he could not possibly approve.

She smiled, thinking of Colin, sleeping, as she sometimes told him, in his important position. His other positions, and she had told him about them in detail, were amused, vulnerable, pornographic, and horrified. She had been awakened by a thin shaft of sunlight coming through a rift in the curtains and had been tempted to reach for him and unfold those clenched arms. But Colin never made love in the morning. Mornings were for murder, he said. Used to New York theatrical hours, he was, as he freely admitted, a savage before noon.

She went around to the front of the house, padding happily through the dewy grass with her bare feet, her transparent cotton nightgown blowing around her body as she walked. They had no neighbors and the chance of any cars passing by at this hour was almost nil. Anyway, in California, nobody cared how you dressed. She often sunbathed naked in the garden and her body was a deep brown after the summer. Back East she had always been careful to stay out of the sun, but if you weren’t brown in California people assumed that you were either ill or too poor to take a holiday.

The newspaper was lying in the front driveway, folded and bound by a rubber band. She opened it up and glanced at the headlines as she walked slowly back around the house. Nixon and Kennedy had their pictures on the front page and they were promising everybody everything. She mourned briefly for Adlai Stevenson and wondered if it was morally right for somebody as young and as good looking as John Fitzgerald Kennedy to run for the Presidency. “Charm boy,” Colin called him, but Colin had charm thrown at him every day by actors and its effect on him was almost invariably negative.

She reminded herself to make sure to apply for absentee ballots for herself and Colin, because they were going to be in New York in November and every vote against Nixon was going to be precious. Although now that she no longer wrote for magazines she didn’t get too worked up about politics. The McCarthy period had disillusioned her with the value of private righteousness and alarmed public utterance. Her love for Colin, whose politics were, to say the least, capricious, had led her to abandon old attitudes along with old friends. Colin described himself at various times as a socialist without hope, a nihilist, a single-taxer, and a monarchist, depending upon whom he was arguing with at the moment, although he usually wound up voting for Democrats. Neither he nor Gretchen was involved in the passionate political activities of the movie colony, the feting of candidates, the signing of advertisements, the fund-raising cocktail parties. In fact, they hardly went to any parties at all. Colin didn’t like to drink much and he found the boozy, aimless conversation of the usual Hollywood gatherings intolerable. He never flirted, so the presence of battalions of pretty ladies available at the functions of the rich and famous had no attraction for him. After the loose, gregarious years with Willie, Gretchen welcomed the domestic days and quiet nights with her second husband.

Colin’s refusal to “go public,” as he phrased it, had not damaged his career. As he said, “Only people without talent have to play the Hollywood game.” He had asserted his talent with his first picture, confirmed it with his second, and now, with his third picture in five years in the final cutting and mixing stage, was established as one of the most gifted directors of his generation. His only failure had come when he had gone back to New York, after completing his first picture, to put on a play that closed after only eight performances. He had disappeared for three weeks after that. When he returned he was morose and silent and it had been months before he felt he was ready to go to work again. He was not a man designed for failure and he had made Gretchen suffer along with him. It had not helped, either, that Gretchen had told him in advance that she didn’t think the play was ready for production. Still, he always asked for her opinions on every aspect of his work and demanded absolute frankness, which she gave him. Right now she was troubled by a sequence in his new film, which they had seen together in rough cut at the studio the night before. Only Colin, she, and Sam Corey, the cutter, had seen it. She had felt there was something wrong, but couldn’t give coherent reasons why. She hadn’t said anything after the running, but she knew he would question her at breakfast. As she went back into the bedroom, where Colin was still sleeping in his important position, she tried to remember the sequence of the film, frame by frame, so that she could make sense when she spoke about it.

She looked at the bedside clock and saw that it was still too early to wake Colin. She put on a robe and went into the living room. The desk in the corner of the room was strewn with books and manuscripts and reviews of novels torn out of the Sunday Times Book Review section and Publisher’s Weekly and the London newspapers. The house was not a large one and there was no other place for the never-diminishing pile of print that they both attacked methodically, searching for possible ideas for films.

Gretchen took a pair of glasses off the desk and sat down to finish the newspaper. They were Colin’s glasses, but they fitted her well enough so that she didn’t bother to go back into the bedroom to get her own. Matched imperfections.

On the theater page there was a review from New York of a new play that had just opened, with a rave for a young actor whom nobody had ever heard of before and she made a note to get tickets for the play for herself and Colin as soon as she got into the city. In the listing of movies for Beverly Hills she saw that Colin’s first picture was being revived over the weekend and she neatly tore out the listing to show it to him. It would make him less savage at breakfast.

She turned to the sports section to see what horses were running at Hollywood Park that afternoon. Colin loved the races and was a not inconsiderable gambler and they went as often as they could. The last time they had gone he had won enough to buy her a lovely spray brooch. There didn’t seem to be any jewelry on today’s card and she was about to put the paper down when she saw a photograph of two boxers sparring in training. Oh, God, she thought, there he is again. She read the caption under the photograph. “Henry Quayles with Sparmate Tommy Jordache at Las Vegas in workout for middleweight fight next week.”

She hadn’t seen or heard from her brother since that one night in New York and she knew almost nothing about boxing, but she knew enough to understand that if he was working as somebody’s sparring partner Thomas had gone downhill since the winning bout in Queens. She folded the paper neatly, hoping that Colin would overlook the photograph. She had told him about Thomas, as she told him about everything, but she didn’t want Colin’s curiosity to be aroused and perhaps insisting on meeting Thomas and seeing him fight.

There were sounds from the kitchen now and she went into Billy’s room to wake him. He was sitting cross-legged in his pajamas on the bed, silently fingering chords on his guitar. Pure blond hair, grave, thoughtful eyes, fuzzed pink cheeks, nose too big for the undeveloped face, skinny, young boy’s neck, long, coltish legs, concentrated, unsmiling, dear.

His valise, with the lid up, was on the chair, packed. Neatly packed. Somehow Billy, despite his parents, or perhaps because of his parents, had grown up with a passion for order.

She kissed the top of his head. No reaction. No hostility, but no love. He fingered a final chord.

“You all ready?” she asked.

“Uhuh.” He uncurled the long legs, slid off the bed. His pajama top was open. Skinny, long torso, ribs countable, close to the skin, skin California summer color, days on the beach, body-surfing, girls and boys together on the hot sand, salt and guitars. As far as she knew he was still a virgin. Nothing had been said.

“You all ready?” he asked.

“Bags all packed,” she said. “All I have to do is lock them.” Billy had an almost pathological fear of being late for anything, school, trains, planes, parties. She had learned to be well in advance for anything she had to do with him.

“What do you want for breakfast?” she asked, prepared to feast him.

“Orange juice.”

“That all?”

“I better not eat. I puke on planes.”

“Remember to take your Dramamine.”

“Yeah.” He stripped off the top of his pajamas and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. After she had moved in with Colin, Billy had suddenly refused to be seen naked in front of her. Two theories about that. She knew that Billy admired Colin, but she also knew that the boy admired her less for having lived with Colin before they were married. The strict, painful conventions of childhood.

She went to wake Colin. He was talking in his sleep and moving uneasily on the bed. “All that blood,” he said.

War? Celluloid? It was impossible to tell with a movie director.

She woke him with a kiss under his ear. He lay still, staring blackly up at the ceiling. “Christ,” he said, “it’s the middle of the night.”

She kissed him again. “Okay,” he said, “morning.” He rumpled her hair. She was sorry she had gone in to see Billy. One morning, on a national or religious holiday perhaps, Colin would finally make love to her. This might have been the morning. Non-coordinated rhythms of desire.

With a groan he tried to lift himself from the bed, fell back. He extended his hand. “Give a poor old man a lift,” he said. “Out of the depths.”

She grasped his hand and pulled. He sat on the edge of the bed rubbing his eye with the back of his hand, regretting daylight.

“Say,” Colin stopped rubbing his eye and looked at her alertly, “last night, at the running, in the next to the last reel, there was something you thought was lousy …”

He didn’t even wait for breakfast, she thought. “I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“You don’t have to say anything. All you have to do is breathe.”

“Don’t be sure a naked nerve,” she said, stalling for time. “Especially before you’ve had your coffee.”

“Come on.”

“All right,” she said. “There was something I didn’t like, but I didn’t figure out why I didn’t like it.”

“And now?”

“I think I know.”

“What is it?”

“Well, the sequence after he gets the news and he believes it’s his fault …”

“Yes,” Colin said impatiently. “It’s one of the key scenes in the picture.”

“You have him going around the house, looking at himself in one mirror after another, in the bathroom, in the full-length mirror on the closet wall, in the dark mirror in the living room, in the magnifying shaving mirror, at his own reflection in the puddle on the front porch …”

“The idea’s simple enough,” Colin said irritably, defensively. “He’s examining himself—okay, let’s be corny—he’s looking into his soul in various lights, from different angles, to discover … Okay, what do you think is wrong about it?”

“Two things,” she said calmly. Now she realized she had been gnawing at the problem subconsciously ever since she had come out of the projection room—in bed before falling asleep, on the terrace looking out over the smoggy city, while going through the newspaper in the living room. “Two things. First, the tempo. Everything in the whole picture has moved fast up to then, it’s the style of the whole work, and then, suddenly, as though to show the audience that a Big Moment has arrived, you slow it down to a drag. It’s too obvious.”

“That’s me,” he said, biting his words. “Obvious.”

“If you’re going to get angry, I’ll shut up.”

“I’m already angry and don’t shut up. You said two things. What’s the other thing?”

“You have all those big close-ups of him, going on forever and I’m supposed to be seeing that he’s tortured, doubtful, confused.”

“Well, at least you got that, for Christ’s sake …”

“Do you want me to go on or should we go in and have breakfast?”

“The next dame I marry,” he said, “is not going to be so goddamn smart. Go on.”

“Well, you may think that he’s showing that he’s tortured and doubtful and confused,” she said, “and he may think he’s showing that he’s tortured and doubtful and confused, but all I get out of it is a handsome young man admiring himself in a mirror and wondering if the lighting is doing all it can for his eyes.”

“Shit,” he said, “you are a bitch. We worked four days on that sequence.”

“I’d cut it if I were you,” she said.

“The next picture,” he said, “you go on the set and I’ll stay home and do the cooking.”

“You asked me,” she said.

“I’ll never learn.” He jumped up off the bed. “I’ll be ready for breakfast in five minutes.” He stumped off toward the bathroom. He slept without the tops of his pajamas and the sheets had made pink ridges on the skin of his neatly muscled, lean back, small welts after the night’s faint flogging. At the door, he turned. “Every other dame I ever knew thought everything I did was glorious,” he said, “and I had to go and marry you.”

“They didn’t think,” she said sweetly. “They said.”

She went over to him and he kissed her. “I’m going to miss you,” he whispered. “Hideously.” He pushed her away roughly. “Now go see that the coffee’s black.”

He was humming as he went in to shave, an unusually merry thing for him to be doing at that time of day. She knew that he had been worried by the sequence, too, and was relieved now that he believed he knew what was wrong with it and that in the cutting room that morning he was going to have the exquisite pleasure of throwing away four days’ hard work, representing forty thousand dollars of the studio’s money.

They reached the airport early and the lines of worry on Billy’s forehead vanished as he saw his and his mother’s bags disappear across the counter. He was dressed in a gray-tweed suit and buttoned-down pink shirt, with a blue tie, for traveling, and his hair was neatly brushed and there were no adolescent pimples on his chin. Gretchen thought he looked very grown-up and handsome, much more than his fourteen years. He was already as tall as she, taller than Colin, who had driven them to the airport and was making an admirable effort to hide his impatience to get to the studio and back to work. Gretchen had had to control herself on the trip to the airport, because Colin’s driving made her nervous. It was the one thing she thought he did badly, sometimes mooning along slowly, thinking about other things, then suddenly becoming fiercely competitive and cursing out other drivers as he spurted ahead of them or tried to prevent them from passing him. When she couldn’t resist from warning him about near-misses, he would snarl at her, “Don’t be the All-American wife.” He was convinced he drove superbly. As he pointed out to her, he had never had an accident, although he had been caught several times for speeding, incidents that had been discreetly kept off his record by the studio fixers, those valuable, doubtful gentlemen.

As other passengers came up to the counter with their bags, Colin said, “We’ve got lots of time. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”

Gretchen knew that Billy would have preferred to go stand at the gate so that he could be the first to board the plane. “Look, Colin,” she said, “you don’t have to wait. Good-byes’re such a bore anyway …”

“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” Colin said. “I’m still not awake yet.”

They walked across the hall toward the restaurant, Gretchen between her husband and her son, conscious of their beauty and her own, and happy about it as she caught people staring at the three of them. Pride, she thought, that delicious sin.

In the restaurant, she and Colin had coffee and Billy had a Coca-Cola, with which he washed down his dose of Dramamine.

“I used to puke on buses until I was eighteen,” Colin said, watching the boy swallow the pills. “Then I had my first girl and I stopped puking.”

There was a quick, judging flick of Billy’s eyes. Colin spoke in front of Billy as he did to any grown-up. Sometimes Gretchen wondered if it was altogether wise. She didn’t know whether the boy loved his stepfather, merely endured him, or hated him. Billy was not one to volunteer information about his emotions. Colin did not seem to make any extra effort to win the boy over. He was sometimes brusque with him, sometimes deeply interested and helpful with his work at school, sometimes playful and charming, sometimes distant. Colin made no concessions to his audience, but what was admirable in his work, Gretchen thought, was not necessarily healthy in the case of a withdrawn only child living with a mother who had left his father for a temperamental and difficult lover. She and Colin had had their fights, but never on the subject of Billy, and Colin was paying for the boy’s education because Willie Abbott had fallen upon hard times and could not afford to. Colin had forbidden Gretchen to tell the boy where the money was coming from, but Gretchen was sure Billy guessed.

“When I was just your age,” Colin was saying, “I was sent off to school. I cried the first week. The first year I hated school. The second year I endured it. The third year I edited the school newspaper and I had my first taste of the pleasures of power and although I didn’t admit it to anybody, even to myself, I liked it. My last year I wept because I had to leave.”

“I don’t mind going,” Billy said.

“Good,” Colin said. “It’s a good school, if any school these days can be said to be good, and at the very worst you’ll come out of it knowing how to write a simple declarative sentence in the English language. Here.” He produced an envelope and gave it to the boy. “Take this and never tell your mother what’s in it.”

“Thank you,” Billy said. He put the envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket. He looked at his watch. “Don’t you think we’d better be going?”

They walked three abreast toward the gate, Billy carrying his guitar. Briefly, Gretchen worried about how the school, which was old New England Presbyterian Respectable, would react to the guitar. Probably no reaction at all. By this time they must be prepared for anything from fourteen-year-old boys.

The plane was just beginning to load when they reached the gate. “Go ahead on board, Billy,” Gretchen said. “I want to say good-bye to Colin.”

Colin shook Billy’s hand and said. “If there’s anything you need, call me. Collect.”

Gretchen searched his face as he spoke to her son. The tenderness and caring were real on the sharp, thin features, and the dangerous eyes under the heavy black brows were gentle and loving. I didn’t make a mistake, she thought, I didn’t.

Billy smiled gravely, en route from father to father, disturbing journey, and went aboard, guitar held like an infantryman’s gun on patrol.

“He’ll be all right,” Colin said as the boy went through the gate and out onto the tarmac where the big jet waited.

“I hope so,” Gretchen said. “There was money in that envelope, wasn’t there?”

“A few bucks,” Colin said carelessly. “Buffer money. Ease the pain. There are moments when a boy can’t survive education without an extra milkshake or the latest issue of Playboy. Willie meeting you at Idlewild?”

“Yes.”

“You taking the kid up to the school together?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Colin said flatly. “Parents should be present in twos at the ceremonies of adolescents.” He looked away from her, staring at the passengers going through the gate. “Every time I see one of those ads for airlines with pictures of people smiling broadly as they climb the steps getting onto a plane, I realize what a lying society we inhabit. Nobody’s happy getting onto a plane. Are you going to sleep with ex-husband Willie tonight?”

“Colin!”

“Ladies have been known to. Divorce, the final aphrodisiac.”

“Goddamn you,” she said. She started toward the gate.

He put out his hand and held her back, gripping her arm.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I am a dark, self-destructive, happiness-doubting, unforgivable man.” He smiled, sadly, pleadingly. “Just one thing—don’t talk to Willie about me.”

“I won’t.” She had already forgiven him and was facing him, close to him. He kissed her lightly. The public address system was announcing the last call for the flight.

“See you in New York in two weeks,” Colin said. “Don’t enjoy the city until I get there.”

“Not to worry,” she said. She brushed his cheek with her lips and he turned abruptly and strode away, walking, as always, in a way that made her smile secretly to herself, as though he were on his way to a dangerous encounter from which he was determined to emerge the victor.

She watched him for a moment, then went through the gate.

Despite the Dramamine, Billy threw up as they were approaching Idlewild for the landing. He did it neatly and apologetically into the bag provided for the purpose, but the sweat stood out on his forehead and his shoulders heaved uncontrollably. Gretchen stroked the back of Billy’s neck, helplessly, knowing that it wasn’t serious, but racked, just the same, by her inability at such a moment to stand between her son and pain. The irrationality of mothering.

When he had finished retching, Billy neatly closed the bag and went down the aisle to the toilet to dispose of the bag and rinse out his mouth. He was still white when he came back. He had wiped the sweat off his face and seemed composed, but as he seated himself next to Gretchen, he said, bitterly, “Goddamn, I’m such a baby.”

Willie was wearing sunglasses as he stood in the small crowd that awaited the passengers from Los Angeles. The day was gray and humid and even before she was close enough to say hello to him, Gretchen knew that he had been drinking the night before and that the sunglasses were meant to hide the evidence of bloodshot eyes from her and his son. At least one night, just before he greets a son he hasn’t seen for months, she thought, he might have kept sober. She fought down her annoyance. Friendliness and serenity between divorced parents in the presence of offspring. The necessary hypocrisy of divided love.

Billy saw his father and hurried through the lines of debarking passengers toward him. He put his arms around his father and kissed his cheek. Gretchen purposely walked more slowly, not to interfere. Together, father and son were plainly linked. Although Billy was taller than his father and better looking than Willie ever could have been, their blood connection was absolutely clear. Once again, Gretchen felt her old irritation that her contribution to the genetic make-up of the child was nowhere in evidence.

Willie was smiling widely (fatuously?) at his son’s demonstration of affection, as Gretchen finally approached him. He kept his arm around Billy’s shoulder and said, “Hello, dear,” to Gretchen and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. Two similar kisses, on the same day, on two sides of the continent, departing and arriving. Willie had been wonderful about the divorce and about Billy, and she couldn’t deny him the “dear” or the rueful kiss. She didn’t say anything about the dark glasses or the unmistakable aroma of alcohol on Willie’s breath. He was dressed neatly, soberly proper, just the costume for taking a son to introduce him to the headmaster of a good New England school. Somehow, she would keep him from drinking when they drove up to the school the next day.

She sat alone in the small living room of the hotel suite, the lights of evening New York outside the windows, the growl of the city, familiar and exciting, rising from the avenues. Foolishly, she had expected Billy to stay with her that night, but in the rented car driving into the city from Idlewild, Willie had said to Billy, “I hope you don’t mind sleeping on the couch. I’ve only got one room, but there’s a couch. A couple of springs’re busted, but at your age I imagine you’ll sleep all right.”

“That’s great,” Billy said, and there was no mistaking his tone. He hadn’t even turned around to look questioningly at his mother. Even if he had appealed to her, what could she have said?

When Willie had asked her where she was staying, and she had told him, “The Algonquin,” he had raised his eyebrows sardonically.

“Colin likes it,” she said defensively. “It’s near the theater district and it saves him a lot of time being able to walk to rehearsals and to the office.”

When Willie stopped the car in front of the Algonquin to let her out, he said, not looking either at her or at Billy, “I once bought a girl a bottle of champagne in this hotel.”

“Call me in the morning, please,” Gretchen said. “As soon as you wake up. We ought to get to the school before lunch.”

Billy was on the far side of the front seat as she got out on the sidewalk and the porter took her bags, so she didn’t get to kiss him good-bye and it was just with a little wave of her hand that she had sent him off to dinner with his father and the broken couch for the night in his father’s single room.

There had been a message waiting for her at the desk when she registered. She had wired Rudolph that she was arriving in New York and had asked him to have dinner with her. The message had been from Rudolph, saying that he couldn’t meet her that night, but would call her in the morning.

She went up to the suite, unpacked, took a bath, and then hesitated about what to wear. Finally she just threw on a robe, because she didn’t know what she was going to do with the evening. All the people she knew in New York were Willie’s friends, or her ex-lovers, or people she had met briefly with Colin when she had been in the city three years ago for the play that was a disaster, and she wasn’t going to call any of them. She wanted a drink badly, but she couldn’t go down to the bar and sit there by herself and get drunk. That miserable Rudolph, she thought, as she stood at the window, looking down at the traffic on Forty-fourth Street below her, can’t even spare one night from his gainful activities for his sister. Rudolph had come out to Los Angeles twice during the years on business and she had shepherded him around every free minute. Wait till he gets out there again, she promised herself. There’ll be a hot message waiting for him at his hotel when he arrives.

She almost picked up the telephone to call Willie. She could pretend that she wanted to find out if Billy was feeling all right after his sickness on the plane and perhaps Willie would ask her to have dinner with them. She even went over to the phone, but with her hand reaching out to pick it up, she halted herself. Keep female tricks to an absolute minimum. Her son deserved at least one complete, unemotional evening with his father, unwatched by mother’s jealous eye.

She prowled back and forth in the small, old-fashioned room. How happy she had been once to arrive in New York, how wide open and inviting the city had seemed to her. When she was young, poor, and alone, it had welcomed her, and she had moved about its streets freely and without fear. Now, wiser, older, richer, she felt a prisoner in the room. A husband three thousand miles away, a son a few blocks away, put invisible restrictions on her behavior. Well, at least she could go downstairs and have dinner in the hotel’s dining room. Another lonely lady, with her half-bottle of wine, sitting at a small table, trying not to hear the conversation of other diners, growing slightly tipsy, talking too much and too brightly to the headwaiter. Christ, what a bore it was sometimes to be a woman.

She went into the bedroom and pulled out her plainest dress, a black concoction that had cost too much and that she knew Colin didn’t like, and started to dress. She was careless with her make-up and hardly bothered to brush her hair and was just going out the door when the telephone rang.

She almost ran back into the room. If it’s Willie, she thought, no matter what, I’ll have dinner with them.

But it wasn’t Willie. It was Johnny Heath. “Hi,” Johnny said. “Rudolph said you’d be here and I was just passing by and I thought I’d take a chance …”

Liar, she thought, nobody just is passing by the Algonquin at a quarter to nine in the evening. But she said, happily, “Johnny! What a nice surprise.”

“I’m downstairs,” Johnny said, echoes of other years in his voice, “and if you haven’t eaten yet …”

“Well,” she said, sounding reluctant, and despising herself for the ruse, “I’m not dressed and I was just about to order dinner up here. I’m exhausted from the flight and I have to get up early tomorrow and …”

“I’ll be in the bar,” Johnny said, and hung up.

Smooth, confident Wall Street sonofabitch, she thought. Then she went in and changed her dress. But she made him wait twenty full minutes before she went down to the bar.

“Rudolph was heartbroken that he couldn’t come down and see you tonight,” Johnny Heath was saying, across the table from her.

“I bet,” Gretchen said.

“He was. Honestly. I could tell over the phone that he was really upset. He made a special point of calling me to ask me to fill in for him and explain why …”

“May I have some more wine, please,” Gretchen said.

Johnny signaled to the waiter, who refilled the glass. They were eating in a small French restaurant in the fifties. It was almost empty. Discreet, Gretchen thought. The sort of place you were not likely to meet anyone you knew. Good for dining out with married ladies you were having an affair with. Johnny probably had a long list of similar places. The Quiet Philanderer’s Guide for Dining in New York. Put it between covers and you’d probably have a big best-seller. The headwaiter had smiled warmly when they had come in and had placed them at a table in a corner, where nobody could overhear what they were saying.

“If he possibly could have made it,” Johnny persisted, excellent go-between in times of stress for friends, enemies, lovers, blood relations, “he’d have come. He’s deeply attached to you,” said Johnny, who had never been deeply attached to anyone. “He admires you more than any woman he’s ever met. He told me so.”

“Don’t you boys have anything better to chat about on the long winter nights?” Gretchen took a sip from her glass. At least she was getting a good bottle of wine out of the evening. Maybe she would get drunk tonight. Make sure she’d get some sleep before tomorrow’s ordeal. She wondered if Willie and her son were also dining in a discreet restaurant. Do you hide a son, too, with whom you had once lived?

“In fact,” Johnny said, “I think it’s a lot your fault that Rudy’s never been married. He admires you and he hasn’t found anybody yet who lives up to his idea of you and …”

“He admires me so much,” Gretchen said, “that after not seeing me for nearly a year he can’t take a night off to come and see me.”

“He’s opening a new center at Port Philip next week,” Johnny Heath said. “One of the biggest so far. Didn’t he write you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I guess I didn’t pay attention to the date.”

“There’s a million last-minute things he has to do. He’s working twenty hours a day. It was just physically impossible. You know how he is when it comes to work.”

“I know,” Gretchen said. “Work now, live later. He’s demented.”

“What about your husband? Burke?” Johnny demanded. “Doesn’t he work? I imagine he admires you, too, but I don’t notice that he took time off to come to New York with you.”

“He’s arriving in two weeks. Anyway, it’s a different kind of work.”

“I see,” Johnny said. “Making movies is a sacred enterprise and a woman is ennobled when she’s sacrificed to it. While running a big business is sordid and crass and a man ought to be delighted to get away from all that filth and run down to New York to meet his lonely, innocent, purifying sister at the plane and buy her dinner.”

“You’re not defending Rudolph,” Gretchen said. “You’re defending yourself.”

“Both,” Johnny said. “Both of us. And I don’t feel I have to defend anybody. If an artist wants to feel that he’s the only worthwhile creature spewed up by modern civilization, that’s his business. But to expect poor, money-soiled slobs like myself to agree with him is idiotic. It’s a great line with the girls and it gets a lot of half-baked painters and would-be Tolstoys into some pretty fair beds, but it doesn’t wash with me. I bet that if I worked in a garret in Greenwich Village instead of in an air-conditioned office in Wall Street, you’d have married me long before you ever met Colin Burke.”

“Guess again, brother,” Gretchen said. “I’d like some more wine.” She extended her glass.

Johnny poured the wine, almost filling her glass, then signaled to the waiter, who was out of earshot, for another bottle. He sat in silence, immobile, brooding. Gretchen was surprised at his outburst. It wasn’t like Johnny at all. Even when they had been making love, he had seemed cool, detached, as technically expert at that as he was at everything he undertook. By now, the last roughnesses, physical and mental, seemed to have been planed away from the man. He was like a highly polished, enormous, rounded stone, an elegant weapon, siege ammunition.

“I was a fool,” he said, finally, his voice low, without timbre. “I should have asked you to marry me.”

“I was married at the time. Remember?”

“You were married at the time you met Colin Burke, too. Remember?”

Gretchen shrugged. “It was in a different year,” she said. “And he was a different man.”

“I’ve seen some of his pictures,” Johnny said. “They’re pretty good.”

“They’re a lot more than that.”

“The eyes of love,” Johnny said, pretending to smile.

“What’re you trying to do, Johnny?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Ah, hell. I guess what I’m doing is being bitchy because I made such poor use of my time. Unmanly fellow. I now brighten up and ask polite questions of my guest, ex-wife of one of my best friends. I suppose you’re happy.”

“Very.”

“Good answer.” Johnny nodded approvingly. “Very good answer. Lady found fulfillment, long denied, in fulfilling second marriage to short but active artist of the silver screen.”

“You’re still being bitchy. If you want, I’ll get up and leave.”

“There’s dessert coming.” He put out his hand and touched hers. Smooth, fleshed, round fingers, soft palm. “Don’t leave. I have other questions. A girl like you, so New York, so busy with a life of your own—what the hell do you do with yourself day after day in that goddamn place?”

“Most of the time,” she said, “I spend thanking God I’m no longer in New York.”

“And the rest of the time? Don’t tell me you like just sitting there and being a housewife, waiting for Daddy to come home from the studio and tell you what Sam Gold-wyn said at lunch.”

“If you must know,” she said, stung, “I do very little just sitting around, as you put it. I’m part of the life of a man I admire and can help, and it’s a lot better than what I had here, being important and snotty, secretly screwing, and getting my name in magazines and living with a man who had to be dragged up from the bottom of a bottle three times a week.”

“Ah—the new female revolution—” Johnny said. “Church, children, kitchen. Jesus, you were the last woman in the world I’d’ve thought …”

“Leave out the church,” Gretchen said, “and you’ve got a perfect description of my life, okay?” She stood up. “And I’ll skip dessert. Those short, active artists of the silver screen like their women skinny.”

“Gretchen,” he called after her, as she strode out of the restaurant. His voice had the ring of innocent surprise. Something had just happened to him that had never happened before, that was unimaginable within the rules of the nicely regulated games he played. Gretchen didn’t look back, and she went out the door before any of the flunkeys in the restaurant had time to push it open for her.

She walked quickly toward Fifth Avenue, then slackened her pace as her anger cooled. She was silly to have become so upset, she decided. Why should she care what Johnny Heath thought about what she was doing with her life? He pretended he liked what he considered free women because that meant he could be free with them. He had been turned away from the banquet and he was trying to make her pay for it. What could he know of what it was like for her to wake up in the morning and see Colin lying beside her? She wasn’t free of her husband and he wasn’t free of her and they were both better and more joyous human beings because of it. What crap people believed freedom to be.

She hurried to the hotel and went up to her room and picked up the phone and asked the operator for her own number in Beverly Hills. It was eight o’clock in California and Colin ought to be home by now. She had to hear his voice, even though he detested talking on the phone and was most often sour and brusque on it, even with her, when she called him. But there was no answer and when she called the studio and asked them to ring the cutting room, she was told that Mr. Burke had left for the night.

She hung up slowly, paced the room. Then she sat down at the desk and drew out a sheet of paper and began to write: “Dear Colin, I called and you weren’t home and you weren’t at the studio and I am sad and a man who once was my lover said some untrue things that bothered me and New York is too warm and Billy loves his father more than he does me and I am very unhappy without you and you should have been home and I am thinking unworthy thoughts about you and I am going down to the bar to have a drink or two drinks or three drinks and if anybody tries to pick me up I am going to call for the police and I don’t know how I’m going to live the two weeks before I see you again and I hope I didn’t sound like a conceited know-it-all about the mirror sequence and if I did forgive me and I promise not to change or reform or keep my mouth shut on the condition that you promise not to change or reform or keep your mouth shut and your collar was frayed when you took us to the airport and I am a terrible housewife, but I am a housewife, housewife, housewife, a wife in your house, the best profession in the whole world and if you’re not home the next time I call you God knows what revenge I shall prepare for you. Love, G.”

She put the letter into an airmail envelope without rereading it and went down into the lobby and had it stamped and put it into the slot, connected by paper and ink and night-flying planes to the center of her life three thousand miles away across the dark great continent.

Then she went into the bar and nobody tried to pick her up and she drank two whiskies without talking to the bartender. She went up and undressed and got into bed.

When she woke the next morning, it was the phone ringing that awoke her and Willie was speaking, saying, “We’ll be over to pick you up in a half hour. We’ve already had breakfast.”

Ex-husband, ex-airman Willie drove swiftly and well. The first leaves were turning toward autumn on the small lovely hills of New England as they approached the school. Willie was wearing his dark glasses again, but today against the glare of the sun on the road, not because of drink. His hands were steady on the wheel and there was none of the tell-tale shiftiness in his voice that came after a bad night. They had to stop twice because Billy got car-sick, but aside from that the trip was a pleasant one, a handsome, youngish American family, comfortably off, driving in a shining new car through some of the greenest scenery in America on a sunny September day.

The school was mostly, red-brick Colonial, with white pillars here and there and a few old wooden mansions scattered around the campus as dormitories. The buildings were set among old trees and widespread playing fields. As they drove up to the main building, Willie said, “You’re enrolling in a country club, Billy.”

They parked the car and went up the steps to the big hall of the main building in a bustle of parents and other schoolboys. A smiling middle-aged lady was behind the desk, set up for signing in the new students. She shook their hands, said she was glad to see them, wasn’t it a beautiful day, gave Billy a colored tag to put through his lapel, and called out, “David Crawford,” toward a group of older boys with different-colored tags in their lapels. A tall, bespectacled boy of eighteen came briskly over to the desk. The middle-aged lady made introductions all around and said, “William, this is David, he’ll settle you in. If you have any problems today or any time during the school year, you go right to David and pester him with them.”

“That’s right, William,” Crawford said. Deep, responsible Sixth Former voice. “I am at your service. Where’s, your gear? I’ll show you to the room.” He led the way out of the building, the middle-aged lady already smiling behind him at another family trio at the desk.

“William,” Gretchen whispered as she walked behind the two boys with Willie. “For a minute I didn’t know whom she was talking to.”

“It’s a good sign,” Willie said. “When I went to school everybody called everybody by their last names. They were preparing us for the Army.”

Crawford insisted upon carrying Billy’s bag and they crossed the campus to a three-story red-brick building that was obviously newer than most of the other structures surrounding it.

“Sillitoe Hall,” Crawford said, as they went in. “You’re on the third floor, William.”

There was a plaque just inside the doorway announcing that the dormitory was the gift of Robert Sillitoe, father of Lieutenant Robert Sillitoe, Jr., Class of 1938, fallen in the service of his country, August 6th, 1944.

Gretchen was sorry she had seen the plaque, but took heart from the sound of young male voices singing from other rooms and the pounding of jazz groups from phonographs, all very much alive, as she climbed the stairs behind Crawford and Billy.

The room assigned to Billy wasn’t large, but it was furnished with two cots, two small desks, and two wardrobes. The small trunk they had sent ahead with Billy’s belongings was under one of the cots and there was another trunk tagged Fournier next to the window.

“Your roommate’s already here,” Crawford said. “Have you met him yet?”

“No,” Billy said. He seemed very subdued, even for him, and Gretchen hoped that Fournier, whoever he was, would not turn out to be a bully or a pederast or a marijuana smoker. She felt suddenly helpless—a life was out of her hands.

“You’ll see him at lunch,” Crawford said. “You’ll hear the bell any minute now.” He smiled his sober responsible smile at Willie and Gretchen. “Of course, all parents are invited, Mrs. Abbott.”

She caught the agonized glance from Billy, saying plainly, Not now, please! and she checked the correction before it crossed her lips. Time enough for Billy to explain that his father was Mr. Abbott but his mother was called Mrs. Burke. Not the first day. “Thank you, David,” she said, her voice unsteady in her own ears. She looked at Willie. He was shaking his head. “It’s very kind of the school to invite us,” she said.

Crawford gestured at the bare, unmade cot. “I advise you to get three blankets, William,” he said. “The nights up here get beastly cold and they’re Spartan about heat. They think freezing is good for our unfolding characters.”

“I’ll send you the blankets from New York today,” Gretchen said. She turned toward Willie. “Now about lunch …”

“You’re not hungry, are you, dear?” Willie’s voice was pleading, and Gretchen knew that the last thing Willie wanted was to eat lunch in a school dining room, without a drink in sight.

“Not really,” Gretchen said, pitying him.

“Anyway, I have to get back to town by four o’clock,” Willie said. “I have an appointment that’s very …” His voice trailed off unconvincingly.

There was a booming of bells and Crawford said, “There it is. The dining room is just behind the desk where you signed in, William. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to wash up. And remember—anything you need.” Upright and gentlemanly in his blazer and scuffed white shoes, a credit to the three years of schooling behind him, he went into the corridor, still resounding with the clashing melodies from three different phonographs, Elvis Presley’s wail, frantic and forlorn, dominating.

“Well,” Gretchen said, “he does seem like an awfully nice boy, doesn’t he?”

“I’ll wait and see what he’s like when you’re not around,” Billy said, “and tell you.”

“I guess you’d better get over for your lunch,” Willie said. Gretchen could tell he was panting for the first drink of the day. He had been very good about not suggesting stopping at any of the roadhouses they had passed on the way up and he had been a proper father all morning. He had earned his martini.

“We’ll walk you over to the dining room,” Gretchen said. She wanted to cry, but of course she couldn’t, in front of Billy. She looked erratically around the room. “When you and your roommate do a little decorating here,” she said, “this place ought to be very cosy. And you do have a pretty view.” Abruptly, she led the way into the hall.

They crossed the campus, along with other small groups converging on the main building. Gretchen stopped some distance from the steps. The moment had come to say good-bye and she didn’t want to have to do it in the middle of the herd of boys and parents at the foot of the steps.

“Well,” she said, “we might as well do it here.”

Billy put his arms around her and kissed her brusquely. She managed a smile. Billy shook his father’s hand. “Thanks for driving me up,” he said evenly, to both of them. Then, dry-eyed, he turned and walked, not hurrying, toward the steps, joining in the stream of students, lost, gone, a thin, gangling, childish figure departed irrevocably for that budding company of men where mothers’ voices which had comforted and lullabyed and admonished were now and forever heard only from afar.

Through a haze of tears she watched him vanish through the white pillars, the open doors, out of sunlight into shadow. Willie put his arm around her and, grateful for the touch of each other’s body, they walked toward the car. They drove down the winding drive, along a tree-shaded street that bordered the school’s playing fields, deserted now of athletes, goals undefended, base paths clear of runners.

She sat in the seat beside Willie staring straight ahead. She heard a curious sound from Willie’s side of the car and he stopped the car under a tree. Willie was sobbing uncontrollably and now she couldn’t hold it back any more and she clutched him and, their arms around each other, they wept and wept, for Billy, and the life ahead of him, for Robert Sillitoe, Jr., for themselves, for love, for Mrs. Abbott, for Mrs. Burke, for all the whiskey, for all their mistakes, for the flawed life behind them.

“Just don’t pay any attention to me,” the girl with the cameras was saying to Rudolph as Gretchen and Johnny Heath got out of the car and walked across the parking lot to where Rudolph was standing under the huge sign that traced the name of Calderwood against the blue September sky. It was the opening day of the new shopping center on the northern outskirts of Port Philip, a neighborhood that Gretchen knew well, because it was on the road that led, a few miles farther on, to the Boylan estate.

Gretchen and Johnny had missed the opening ceremony because Johnny couldn’t break loose from his office until lunchtime. Johnny had been apologetic about that, as he had been apologetic about his conversation at dinner two nights before, and the drive up had been a friendly one. Johnny had done most of the talking, but not about himself or Gretchen. He had spent the time explaining, admiringly, the mechanics of Rudolph’s rise as an entrepreneur and manager. According to Johnny, Rudolph understood the complexities of modern business better than any man his age Johnny had ever come across. When Johnny tried to explain what a brilliant coup Rudolph had pulled off last year in getting Calderwood to agree to buy a firm that had shown a two-million-dollar loss in the last three years, she had to admit to him that he had finally taken her beyond her intellectual depth, but that she would accept his opinion of the deal on faith.

When Gretchen came to where Rudolph was standing, making notes on a pad on a clipboard he was carrying, the photographer was crouched a few feet in front of him, shooting upward, to get the Calderwood sign in behind him. Rudolph smiled widely when he saw her and Johnny and moved toward them to greet them. Dealer in millions, juggler with stock options, disposer of risk capital, he merely looked like her brother to Gretchen, a well-tanned, handsome young man in a nicely tailored, unremarkable suit. She was struck once again by the difference between her brother and her husband. From what Johnny had told her she knew that Rudolph was many times wealthier than Colin and wielded infinitely more real power over a much greater number of people, but nobody, not even his own mother, would ever accuse Colin of being modest. In any group, Colin stood out, arrogant and commanding, ready to make enemies. Rudolph blended into groups, affable and pliant, certain to make friends.

“That’s good,” the crouching girl said, taking one picture after another. “That’s very good.”

“Let me introduce you,” Rudolph said. “My sister, Mrs. Burke, my associate, Mr. Heath. Miss … uh … Miss … I’m terribly sorry.”

“Prescott,” the girl said. “Jean will do. Please don’t pay any attention to me.” She stood up and smiled, rather shyly. She was a small girl, with straight, long, brown hair, caught in a bow at the nape of her neck. She was freckled and unmade-up and she moved easily, even with the three cameras hanging from her, and the heavy film case slung from her shoulder.

“Come on,” Rudolph said, “I’ll show you around. If you see old man Calderwood, make admiring noises.”

Wherever they went, Rudolph was stopped by men and women who shook his hand and said what a wonderful thing he had done for the town. While Miss Prescott clicked away, Rudolph smiled his modest smile, said he was glad they were enjoying themselves, remembered an amazing number of names.

Among the well-wishers, Gretchen didn’t recognize any of the girls she had gone to school with or had worked with at Boylan’s. But all of Rudolph’s schoolmates seemed to have turned out to see for themselves what their old friend had done and to congratulate him, some sincerely, some with all too obvious envy. By a curious trick of time, the men who came up to Rudolph with their wives and children, and said, “Remember me? We graduated in the same class?” seemed older, grosser, slower, than her unmarried, unimpeded brother. Success had put him in another generation, a slimmer, quicker, more elegant generation. Colin, too, she realized, seemed much younger than he was. The youth of winners.

“You seem to have the whole town here today,” Gretchen said.

“Just about,” Rudolph said. “I even heard that Teddy Boylan put in an appearance. We’ll probably bump into him.” Rudolph looked over at her carefully.

“Teddy Boylan,” she said flatly. “Is he still alive?”

“So the rumor goes,” Rudolph said. “I haven’t seen him for a long time, either.”

They walked on, a small, momentary chill between them. “Wait a minute for me here,” Rudolph said. “I want to talk to the band leader. They’re not playing enough of the old standards.”

“He sure likes to keep everything under control, doesn’t he?” Gretchen said to Johnny, as she watched Rudolph hurry toward the bandstand, followed, as ever, by Miss Prescott.

When Rudolph came back to them, the band was playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and he had a couple in tow, a slender, very pretty blonde girl in a crisp, white-linen dress, and a balding, sweating man somewhat older than Rudolph, wearing a wrinkled seersucker suit. Gretchen was sure she had seen the man somewhere before, but for the moment she couldn’t place him.

“This is Virginia Calderwood, Gretchen,” Rudolph said. “The boss’s youngest. I’ve told her all about you.”

Miss Calderwood smiled shyly. “He has, indeed, Mrs. Burke.”

“And you remember Bradford Knight, don’t you?” Rudolph asked.

“I drank you dry the night of the graduation party in New York,” Bradford said.

She remembered then, the ex-sergeant with the Oklahoma accent, hunting girls in the apartment in the Village. The accent seemed to have been toned down somewhat and it was too bad he was losing his hair. She remembered now that Rudolph had coaxed him to come back to Whitby a few years ago and was grooming him to be an assistant manager. Rudolph liked him, she knew, although looking at the man she couldn’t tell just why. Rudolph had told her he was shrewd, behind his Rotarian front, and was wonderful at getting along with people while carrying out instructions to the letter.

“Of course, I remember you, Brad,” Gretchen said. “I hear you’re invaluable.”

“I blush, ma’am,” Knight said.

“We’re all invaluable,” Rudolph said.

“No,” the girl said. She spoke seriously, keeping her eyes fixed, in a way that Gretchen recognized, on Rudolph.

They all laughed. Except for the girl. Poor thing, Gretchen thought. Better learn to look at another man that way.

“Where is your father?” Rudolph asked. “I want to introduce my sister to him.”

“He went home,” the girl said. “He got angry at something the Mayor said, because the Mayor kept talking about you and not about him.”

“I was born here,” Rudolph said lightly, “and the Mayor wants to take credit for it.”

“And he didn’t like her taking pictures of you all the time.” She gestured at Miss Prescott, who was focusing on the group from a few feet away.

“Hazards of the trade,” Johnny Heath said. “He’ll get over it.”

“You don’t know my father,” the girl said. “You’d better give him a ring later,” she said to Rudolph, “and calm him down.”

“I’ll give him a ring later,” Rudolph said, carelessly. “If I have the time. Say, we’re all going to have a drink in about an hour. Why don’t you two join us?”

“I can’t be seen in bars,” Virginia said. “You know that.”

“Okay,” Rudolph said. “We’ll have dinner instead. Brad, just wander around and break up anything that looks as if it’s getting rough. And later on, the kids’re bound to start dancing. Make them keep it clean, in a polite way.”

“I’ll insist on minuets,” Knight said. “Come on, Virginia, I’ll treat you to a free orange pop, courtesy of your father.”

Reluctantly, the girl allowed herself to be pulled away by Knight.

“He is not the man of her dreams,” Gretchen said, as they started walking again. “That’s plain.”

“Don’t tell Brad that,” Rudolph said. “He has visions of marrying into the family and starting an empire.”

“She’s nice,” Gretchen said.

“Nice enough,” said Rudolph. “Especially for a boss’s daughter.”

A heavy-set woman, rouged and eye-shadowed, wearing a turbanlike hat that made her look like something from a movie of the 1920s, stopped Rudolph, winking and working her mouth coquettishly. “Eh bien, mon cher Rudolph,” she said, her voice high with a desperate attempt at girlishness, “tu parles français toujours bien?”

Rudolph bowed gravely, taking his cue from the turban. “Bonjour, Mlle. Lenaut,” he said, “je suis très content de vous voir. May I present my sister, Mrs. Burke. And my friend, Mr. Heath.”

“Rudolph was the brightest pupil I ever taught,” Miss Lenaut said, rolling her eyes. “I was certain that he would rise in the world. It was plain in everything he did.”

“You are too kind,” Rudolph said, and they walked on. He grinned. “I used to write love letters to her when I was in her class. I never sent them. Pop once called her a French cunt and slapped her face.”

“I never heard that story,” Gretchen said.

“There’re a lot of stories you never heard.”

“Some evening,” she said, “you’ve got to sit down and tell me the history of the Jordaches.”

“Some evening,” Rudolph said.

“It must give you an awful lot of satisfaction,” Johnny said, “coming back to your old town on a day like this.”

Rudolph reflected for an instant. “It’s just another town,” he said offhandedly. “Let’s go look at the merchandise.”

He led them on a tour of the shops. Gretchen’s acquisitive instinct was, as Colin had once told her, subnormal, and the gigantic assembly of things to buy, that insensate flood of objects which streamed inexorably from the factories of America saddened her.

Everything, or almost everything that most depressed Gretchen about the age in which she lived, was crammed into this artfully rustic conglomeration of white buildings, and it was her brother, whom she loved, and who softly and modestly surveyed this concrete, material proof of his cunning, who had put it all together. When he told her the history of the Jordaches, she would reserve one chapter for herself.

After the shops, Rudolph showed them around the theater. A touring company from New York was to open that night in a comedy and a lighting rehearsal was in progress when they went into the auditorium. Here, old man Calderwood’s taste had not been the deciding factor. Dull-pink walls and deep-red plush on the chairs softened the clean severity of the interior lines of the building and Gretchen could tell, from the ease with which the director was getting complicated lighting cues, that no expense had been spared on the board backstage. For the first time in years she felt a pang of regret that she had given up the theater.

“It’s lovely, Rudy,” she said.

“I had to show you one thing of which you could approve,” he said quietly.

She reached out and touched his hand, begging forgiveness with the gesture for her unspoken criticism of the rest of his accomplishment.

“Finally,” he said. “we’re going to have six theaters like this around the country and we’re going to put on our own plays and run them at least two weeks in each place. That way each play will be guaranteed a run of three months at a minimum and we won’t have to depend upon anybody else. If Colin ever wants to put on a play for me …”

“I’m sure he’d love to work in a place like this,” Gretchen said. “He’s always grumbling about the old barns on Broadway. When he gets to New York I’ll bring him up to see it. Though maybe it’s not such a good idea …”

“Why not?” Rudolph asked.

“He sometimes gets into terrible fights with the people he works with.”

“He won’t fight with me,” Rudolph said confidently. He and Burke had liked each other from their first meeting. “I am deferential and respectful in the presence of artists. Now for that drink.”

Gretchen looked at her watch. “I’m afraid I’ll have to skip it. Colin’s calling me at the hotel at eight o’clock and he fumes if I’m not there when the phone rings. Johnny, do you mind if we leave now?”

“At your service, ma’am,” Johnny said.

Gretchen kissed Rudolph good-bye and left him in the theater, his face glowing in the light reflected from the stage, with Miss Prescott changing lenses and clicking away, pretty, agile, busy.

Johnny and Gretchen passed the bar going toward the car and she was glad they hadn’t gone in because she was sure that the man she glimpsed, in the dark interior, bent over a drink, was Teddy Boylan, and even after fifteen years she knew he had the power to disturb her. She didn’t want to be disturbed.

The phone was ringing when she opened the door to her room. The call was from California, but it wasn’t Colin. It was the head of the studio and he was calling to say that Colin had been killed in an automobile accident at one o’clock that day. He had been dead all afternoon and she hadn’t known it.

She thanked the man on the phone calmly for his muted words of sympathy and hung up and for a long while sat alone in the hotel room without turning on the light.

Chapter 2

The bell rang for the last round of the sparring session and Schultzy called, “See if you can crowd him more, Tommy.” The boxer Quayles was going to meet in five days was a crowder and Thomas was supposed to imitate his style. But, Quayles was a hard man to crowd, a dancer and jabber, quick and slippery on his feet and with fast hands. He never hurt anybody much, but he had come a long way with his cleverness. The bout was going to be nationally televised and Quayles was getting twenty thousand dollars for his end. Thomas, on the supporting card, was going to get six hundred. It would have been less if Schultzy, who handled both fighters, at least for the record, hadn’t held out for the money with the promoters. There was Mafia money behind the fight and those boys didn’t go in for charity.

The training ring was set up in a theater and the people who came to watch the sessions sat in the orchestra seats in their fancy Las Vegas shirts and canary-yellow pants. Thomas felt more like an actor than a fighter up there on the stage.

He shuffled toward Quayles, who had a mean flat face and dead-cold pale eyes under the leather headguard. When Quayles sparred with Thomas, there was always a little derisive smile on his lips, as though it was absurd for Thomas to be in the same ring with him. He made a point of never talking to Thomas, not as much as a good morning, even though they were both in the same stable. The only satisfaction Thomas got out of Quayles was that he was screwing Quayles’s wife and one day he was going to let Quayles know it.

Quayles danced in and out, tapping Thomas sharply, slipping Thomas’s hooks easily, showing off for the crowd, letting Thomas swing at him in a corner and just bobbing his head, untouched, as the crowd yelled.

Sparring partners were not supposed to damage maineventers, but this was the last round of the training schedule and Thomas attacked doggedly, ignoring punishment, to get just one good one in, sit the bastard down on the seat of his fancy pants. Quayles realized what Thomas was trying to do and the smile on his face became loftier than ever as he flicked away, danced in and out, picked off punches in mid-air. He wasn’t even sweating at the end of the round and there wasn’t a mark on his body, although Thomas had been hacking away trying to reach him there, for a solid two minutes.

When the bell rang, Quayles said, “You ought to pay me for a boxing lesson, you bum.”

“I hope you get killed Friday, you cheap ham,” Thomas said, then climbed down and went into the showers, while Quayles did some rope skipping and calisthenics and worked on the light bag. He never got tired, the bastard, and he was a glutton for work, and would probably wind up middleweight champion, with a million bucks in the bank.

When Thomas came back out after his shower, his skin reddened under the eyes by Quayles’s jabs, Quayles was still at it, showing off, shadow boxing, with the hicks in the crowd in their circus clothes oh-ing and ah-ing.

Schultzy gave him the envelope with the fifty bucks in it for his two rounds and he walked quickly through the crowd and out into the glare of the searing Las Vegas afternoon. After the air-conditioned theater the heat seemed artificial and malevolent, as though the entire town were being cooked by some diabolical scientist who wanted to destroy it in the most painful way possible.

He was thirsty after the workout and went across the blazing street to one of the big hotels. The lobby was dark and cold. The expensive hookers were on patrol and the old ladies were playing the slot machines. The crap and roulette tables were in action as he passed them on his way to the bar. Everybody in the whole stinking town was loaded with money. Except him. He had lost over five hundred dollars, almost all the money he had earned, at the crap tables in the last two weeks.

He felt the envelope with Schultzy’s fifty in his pocket and fought back the urge to try the dice. He ordered a beer from the barman. His weight was okay and Schultzy wasn’t there to bawl him out. Anyway, Schultzy didn’t much care what he did any more, now that he had a contender in the stable. He wondered how much of Schultzy’s end of the purse he had to give to the gunslingers.

He drank a second beer, paid the barman, started out, stopped for a moment to watch the crap game. A guy who looked like a small-town undertaker had a pile of chips about a foot high in front of him. The dice were hot. Thomas took out the envelope and bought chips. In ten minutes he was down to ten dollars and he had sense enough to hold onto that.

He got the doorman to beg a ride for him from a guest to his hotel downtown, so he wouldn’t have to pay taxi fare. His hotel was a grubby one, with a few slot machines and one crap table. Quayles was staying at the Sands, with all the movie stars. And his wife. Who lay around the pool all day getting stoned on Planter’s Punches when she wasn’t sneaking down to Thomas’s hotel for a quick one. She had a loving nature, she said, and Quayles slept alone, in a separate room, being a serious fighter with an important bout coming up. Thomas wasn’t a serious fighter any more and there were no more important bouts for him so it didn’t make much difference what he did. The lady was active in bed and some of the afternoons were really worth the trouble.

There was a letter at the desk for him. From Teresa. He didn’t even bother to open it. He knew what was in it. Another demand for money. She was working now and making more money than he did, but that didn’t stop her. She had gone to work as a hatcheck and cigarette girl in a nightclub, wiggling her ass and showing her legs as high up as the law allowed and raking in the tips. She said she was bored just hanging around the house with the kid, with him away so much of the time and she wanted to have a career. She thought being a hatcheck girl was some sort of show business. The kid was stashed away with her sister in the Bronx and even when Thomas was in town Teresa came in at all hours, five, six in the morning, with her purse stuffed with twenty-dollar bills. God knows what she did. He didn’t care any more.

He went up to his room and lay down on his bed. That was one way to save money. He had to figure how to get from today to Friday on ten bucks. The skin under his eyes smarted where Quayles had peppered him. The air conditioning in the room was almost useless and the desert heat made him sweat.

He closed his eyes and slept uneasily, dreaming. He dreamt of France. It had been the best time of his life and he often dreamt about the moment on the shore of the Mediterranean, although it had been almost five years ago now, and the dreams were losing their intensity.

He woke, remembering the dream, sighed as the sea and the white buildings disappeared and he was surrounded once more by the cracked Las Vegas walls.

He had gone down to the Côte d’Azur after winning the fight in London. It had been an easy victory and Schultzy had gotten him another bout in Paris a month later, so there was no sense in going back to New York. Instead he had picked up one of those wild London girls. She had said she knew a great little hotel in Cannes and since Thomas was rolling in money for once and it looked as though he could beat everybody in Europe with one hand tied behind him, he had taken off for the weekend. The weekend had stretched into ten days, with frantic cables from Schultzy. Thomas had lain on the beach and eaten two great, heavy meals a day, developed a taste for vin rosé, and had put on fifteen pounds. When he finally got to Paris, he had just managed to make the weight the morning of the fight and the Frenchman had nearly killed him. For the first time in his life he had been knocked out and suddenly there were no more bouts in Europe. He had blown most of his money on the English girl, who happened to like jewelry, aside from her other attractions, and Schultzy hadn’t talked to him all the way back to New York.

The Frenchman had taken something out of him and nobody was writing that he should be considered for a shot at the title anymore. The time between bouts became greater and greater and the purses smaller and smaller. Twice he had to take a dive for walking-around money and Teresa closed him off entirely and if it hadn’t been for the kid he’d have just gotten up and left.

Lying in the heat on the wrinkled bed, he thought of all these things and remembered what his brother had told him that day at the Hotel Warwick. He wondered if Rudolph had followed his career and was saying, to his snooty sister, “I told him it would happen.”

Screw his brother.

Well, maybe on Friday night, there’d be some of the old juice in him and he’d score spectacularly. People could start hanging around him again and he’d made a comeback. Plenty of fighters—older than he—had made comebacks. Look at Jimmy Braddock, down to being a day laborer and then beating Max Baer for the heavy weight championship of the world. Schultzy just had to pick his opponents for him more carefully—keep him away from the dancers, give him somebody who came to fight. He’d have to have a talk with Schultzy. And not only about that. He had to get some money in advance, before Friday, to keep alive in this lousy town.

Two, three good wins and he could forget all this. Two, three good wins and they’d be asking for him in Paris again and he’d be down on the Côte sitting at a sidewalk café, drinking vin rosé and looking out at the masts of the boats anchored in the harbor. With real luck he might even get to rent one of them, sail around, out of reach of everybody. Maybe only two, three fights a year just to keep the bank balance comfortable.

Just thinking about it made him cheerful again and he was just about to go downstairs and put his ten bucks on the come at the crap table when the phone rang.

It was Cora, Quayles’s wife and she sounded demented, screaming and crying into the phone. “He’s found out, he’s found out,” she kept saying. “Some lousy bellboy got to him. He nearly killed me just now. I think he broke my nose, I’m going to be a cripple the rest of my life …”

“Go easy now,” Thomas said. “What has he found out?”

“You know what he found out. He’s on his way right now to …”

“Wait a minute. What did you tell him?”

“What the hell do you think I told him?” she screamed. “I told him no. Then he clouted me across the face. I’m blood all over. He doesn’t believe me. That lousy bellboy in your hotel must’ve had a telescope or something. You’d better get out of town. This minute. He’s on his way over to see you, I tell you. Christ knows what he’ll do to you. And later on, to me. Only I’m not waiting. I’m going to the airport right now. I’m not even packing a bag. And I advise you to do the same. Only stay away from me. You don’t know him. He’s a murderer. Just get on something and get out of town. Fast.”

Thomas hung up on the terrified, high-pitched babble. He looked at his one valise in a corner of the room, then stood up and went to the window and peered out through the Venetian blinds. The street was empty in the four o’clock afternoon desert glare. Thomas went over to the door and made sure it was unlocked. Then he moved the one chair to a corner. He didn’t want to get charged and sent backward over the chair in the first rush.

He sat on the bed, smiling a little. He had never run away from a fight and he wasn’t going to run away from this one. And this one might be the most enjoyable fight of his entire career. The small hotel room was no place for jabbers and dancers.

He got up and went over to the closet and took out a leather windjacket and put it on, zipping it up high and turning the collar up to protect his throat. Then he sat on the edge of the bed again, waiting placidly, hunched over a little, his hands hanging loose between his legs. He heard a car screech to a halt in front of the hotel, but he didn’t move. One minute later there were steps outside in the hall and then the door was flung open and Quayles came into the room, stopping just inside the doorway.

“Hi,” Thomas said. He stood up slowly.

Quayles closed the door behind him and turned the key in the lock.

“I know all about it, Jordache,” Quayles said.

“About what?” Thomas asked mildly, keeping his eyes on Quayles’s feet for the first hint of movement.

“About you and my wife.”

“Oh, yes,” Thomas said. “I’ve been screwing her. Did I forget to mention it?”

He was ready for the leap and almost laughed when he saw Quayles, that dandy and stylist of the ring, lead with a blind long right, a sucker’s punch if ever there was one. Because he was ready, Thomas went inside it easily, tied Quayles up, held onto him, with no referee to part them, and clubbed at Quayles’s body, with delicious, pent-up ferocity. Then, old street fighter with all the tricks, he rushed Quayles to the wall, ignoring the man’s attempt to writhe out of his grasp, stepped back just far enough to savage Quayles with an uppercut, then closed, wrestled, hit, held, used his elbows, his knee, butted Quayles’s forehead with his head, wouldn’t let him drop, but kept him up against the wall with his left hand around Quayles’s throat, and pounded at his face with one brutal right hand after another. When he stepped back, Quayles crumpled onto the blood-stained rug and lay there on his face, out cold.

There was a frantic knocking on the door and he heard Schultzy’s voice in the hall. He unlocked the door and let Schultzy in.

Schultzy took the whole thing in with one glance.

“You stupid bastard,” he said, “I saw that bird-brained wife of his and she told me. I thought I’d get here in time. You’re a great indoor fighter, aren’t you, Tommy? You can’t beat your grandmother for dough, but when it comes to fighting for nothing you’re the all-time beauty.” He knelt beside Quayles, motionless on the rug. Schultzy turned him over, examined the cut on Quayles’s forehead, ran his hand alongside Quayles’s jaw. “I think you broke his jaw. Idiots. He won’t be able to fight this Friday or a month of Fridays. The boys’re going to like that. They’re going to like it a lot. They’ve got a big investment tied up in this horse’s ass—” He prodded the inert Quayles fiercely. “They’re going to be just overjoyed you took him apart. If I was you I’d start going right now, before I get this—this husband out of the room and into a hospital. And I’d keep on going until I got to an ocean and then I’d cross the ocean and if I wanted to stay alive I wouldn’t come back for ten years. And don’t go by plane. By the time the plane comes down anywhere, they’ll be waiting for you and they won’t be waiting for you with roses in their hands.”

“What do you want me to do,” Thomas asked, “walk? I got ten bucks to my name.”

Schultzy looked worriedly down at Quayles, who was beginning to stir. He stood up. “Come on out into the hall.” He took the key out of the lock and when they were both outside, he locked the door.

“It would serve you right if they filled you full of holes,” Schultzy said. “But you’ve been with me a long time …” He looked nervously up and down the hallway. “Here,” he said, taking some bills out of his wallet. “All I got. A hundred and fifty. And take my car. It’s downstairs, with the key in the ignition. Leave it in Reno in the airport parking lot and bus East from there. I’ll tell ’em you stole the car. Don’t get in touch with your wife, whatever you do. They’ll be after her. I’ll get in touch with her and tell her you’re running and not to expect to hear from you. Don’t go in a straight line anywhere. And I’m not kidding when I tell you to get out of this country. Your life isn’t worth two cents anywhere in the United States.” He wrinkled his seamy brow, concentrating. “The safest thing is getting a job on a ship. When you get to New York go to a hotel called the Aegean. It’s on West Eighteenth Street. It’s full of Greek sailors. Ask for the manager. He’s got a long Greek name, but everybody calls him Pappy. He handles jobs for freighters that don’t fly the American flag. Tell him I sent you and I want you out of the country fast. He won’t ask questions. He owes me a favor from when I was in the Merchant Marine during the war. And don’t be a wise guy. Don’t think you can pick up a few bucks fighting anywhere, even in Europe or Japan, under another name. As of this minute you’re a sailor and nothing else. Do you hear that?”

“Yes, Schultzy,” Thomas said.

“And I never want to hear from you again. Got that?”

“Yes.” Thomas made a move toward the door of his room.

Schultzy stopped him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“My passport’s in there. I’ll be needing it.”

“Where is it?”

“In the top dresser drawer.”

“Wait here,” Schultzy said. “I’ll get it for you.” He turned the key in the lock and went into the room. A moment later he was back in the hall with the passport. “Here.” He slapped the booklet into Thomas’s hand. “And from now on try to think with your head instead of your cock. Now breeze. I got to start putting that bum together again.”

Thomas went down the steps, into the lobby, past the crap game. He didn’t say anything to the clerk, who looked at him curiously, because there was blood on his windjacket. He went out to the street. Schultzy’s car was parked right behind Quayles’s Cadillac. Thomas got in, started the motor and slowly drove toward the main highway. He didn’t want to be picked up this afternoon for a traffic violation in Las Vegas. He could wash the wind-jacket later.

Chapter 3

The date was for eleven o’clock, but Jean had phoned to say that she would be a few minutes late and Rudolph had said that was all right, he had a few calls to make, anyway. It was Saturday morning. He had been too busy to telephone his sister all week and he felt guilty about it. Since he had flown back from the funeral, he had usually managed at least two or three calls a week. He had suggested to Gretchen that she come East and stay with him in his apartment, which would mean that she would have the place to herself more often than not. Old man Calderwood refused to move the central office down to the city, so Rudolph couldn’t count on more than ten days a month in New York. But Gretchen had decided she wanted to stay in California, at least for awhile. Burke had neglected to leave a will, or at least one that anyone could find, and the lawyers were squabbling and Burke’s ex-wife was suing for the best part of the estate and trying to evict Gretchen from the house, among other unpleasant legal maneuvers.

It was eight o’clock in the morning in California, but Rudolph knew that Gretchen was an early riser and that the ringing of the phone wouldn’t awaken her. He placed the call with the operator and sat down at the desk in the small living room and tried to finish a corner of the Times crossword puzzle that had stumped him when he had tried it at breakfast.

The apartment had come furnished. It was decorated with garish solid colors and spiky metal chairs, but Rudolph had only taken it as a temporary measure and it did have a good small kitchen with a refrigerator that produced a lot of ice. He often liked to cook and eat by himself, reading at the table. That morning he had made the toast, orange juice, and coffee for himself early. Sometimes Jean would come in and fix breakfast for both of them, but she had been busy this morning. She refused to stay overnight, although she had never explained why.

The phone rang and Rudolph picked it up, but it wasn’t Gretchen. It was Calderwood’s voice, flat and twangy and old. Saturdays and Sundays didn’t mean much to Calderwood, except for the two hours on Sunday morning he spent in church. “Rudy,” Calderwood said, as usual without any polite preliminaries, “you going to be up here this evening?”

“I hadn’t planned to, Mr. Calderwood, I have some things to do here over the weekend and there’s a meeting scheduled downtown for Monday and …”

“I’d like to see you as soon as can be, Rudy.” Calderwood sounded testy. As he had grown older he had become impatient and bad tempered. He seemed to resent his increasing wealth and the men who had made it possible, as he resented the necessity of depending more and more upon dealing with financial and legal people in New York for important decisions.

“I’ll be in the office on Tuesday morning, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. “Can’t it wait until then?”

“No, it can’t wait until then. And I don’t want to see you in the office. I want you to come to the house.” The voice on the telephone was grating and tense. “I’ll wait until tomorrow night after supper, Rudy.”

“Of course, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudy said.

The phone clicked, as Calderwood hung up, without saying good-bye.

Rudolph frowned at the phone as he put it down. He had tickets for the Giant game at the Stadium for himself and Jean Sunday afternoon and Calderwood’s summons meant he’d have to miss it. Jean had had a boy friend on the team when she went to Michigan and she knew a surprising amount about football so it was always fun to go to a game with her. Why didn’t the old man just lie down and die?

The phone rang again and this time it was Gretchen. Ever since Burke’s death, something had gone out of her voice, a sharpness, an eagerness, a quick music that had been special to her ever since she was a young girl. She sounded pleased to hear Rudolph, but dully pleased, like an invalid responding to a visit in her hospital bed. She said she was all right, that she was being kept busy going through Colin’s papers and sorting them and answering letters of condolence that still came drifting in and conferring with lawyers about the estate. She thanked him for the check he had mailed her the week before, saying that when the estate was finally settled she would pay back all the money he had sent her.

“Don’t worry about that,” Rudolph said. “Please. You don’t have to pay back anything.”

She ignored that. “I’m glad you called,” she said. “I was going to call you myself and ask for another favor.”

“What is it?” he asked, then said, “Hold on a second,” because the bell was ringing on the intercom from downstairs. He hurried over to the box and pushed the button.

“There’s a Miss Prescott in the lobby, Mr. Jordache.” It was the doorman, protecting him.

“Send her up, please,” Rudolph said, and went back to the phone. “I’m sorry, Gretchen,” he said, “what were you saying?”

“I got a letter from Billy from school yesterday,” she said, “and I don’t like the way it sounds. There’s nothing that you can grasp in it, but that’s the way he is, he never really tells you what’s bothering him, but somehow I have the feeling he’s in despair. Do you think you could find the time to go and visit him and see what’s wrong?”

Rudolph hesitated. He doubted that the boy liked him enough to confide in him and he was afraid he might do more harm than good by going to the school. “Of course I’ll go,” he said, “if you want. But don’t you think it might be better if his father went?”

“No,” Gretchen said. “He’s a bungler. If there’s a wrong word to be said, he’ll say it.”

The front door was ringing now. “Hold on again, Gretchen,” Rudolph said. “There’s somebody at the door.” He hurried over to the door and threw it open. “I’m on the phone,” he said to Jean and trotted back into the room. “Back again, Gretchen,” he said, using his sister’s name to show Jean he wasn’t talking to another lady. “I tell you what I’ll do—I’ll drive up to the school tomorrow morning and take him to lunch and see what’s up.”

“I hate to bother you,” Gretchen said. “But the letter was so—so dark.”

“It’s probably nothing. He came in second in a race or he flunked an algebra exam or something like that. You know how kids are.”

“Not Billy. I tell you, he’s in despair.” She sounded unlike herself, near tears.

“I’ll call you tomorrow night, after I see him,” Rudolph said. “Will you be home?”

“I’ll be home,” she said.

He put down the phone slowly, thinking of his sister alone, waiting for a telephone call, in the isolated house on the mountain crest, overlooking the city and the sea, going over her dead husband’s papers. He shook his head. He would worry about her tomorrow. He smiled across the room at Jean, sitting neatly on a straight-backed wooden chair, wearing red-woolen stockings and moccasins, her hair brushed and bright and pulled together low on the nape of her neck in a black-velvet bow, and falling down her back freely below the bow. Her face, as always, looked scrubbed and schoolgirlish. The slender, beloved body was lost in a floppy camel’s-hair polo coat. She was twenty-four years old, but at moments like this she seemed no more than sixteen. She had been out on a job and she had her camera equipment with her, which she had dumped carelessly on the floor next to the front door.

“You look as though I ought to offer you a glass of milk and a cookie,” he said.

“You can offer me a drink,” she said. “I’ve been on the streets since seven this morning. Not too much water.”

He went over to her and kissed her forehead. She smiled, rewarding him. Young girls, he thought, as he went into the kitchen and got a pitcher of water.

While she drank the bourbon, she checked the list of art galleries in last Sunday’s Times. When he was free on Saturdays they usually made the rounds of galleries. She worked as a free-lance photographer and many of her assignments were for art magazines and catalogue publishers.

“Put on comfortable shoes,” she said. “We’re in for a long afternoon.” She had a surprisingly low voice, with husky overtones, for such a small girl.

“Where you walk,” he said, “I shall follow.”

They were just going out the door when the phone rang again. “Let it ring,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

She stopped in the doorway. “Do you mean to say you can hear a telephone ring and not answer it?”

“I certainly can.”

“I never could. It might be something absolutely wonderful.”

“Nothing wonderful has ever happened to me over the phone. Let’s get out of here.”

“Answer it. It’ll bother you all day if you don’t.”

“No, it won’t.”

“It’ll bother me. I’ll answer it.” She started back into the room.

“All right, all right.” He pushed past her and picked up the phone.

It was his mother, calling from Whitby. From the tone in which she said, “Rudolph,” he knew the conversation was not going to be wonderful.

“Rudolph,” she said, “I don’t want to interfere with your holiday—” It was his mother’s fixed conviction that he left Whitby for New York only for unseemly, secret pleasures. “But the heating’s gone off and I’m freezing in this drafty old place—” Rudolph had bought a fine old low-ceilinged eighteenth-century farmhouse on the outskirts of town three years before, but his mother referred to it at all times as this crumbling dark hole or this drafty old place.

“Can’t Martha do anything about it?” Rudolph asked. Martha was the live-in maid who kept the house, cooked, and took care of his mother, a job for which Rudolph felt she was grossly underpaid.

“Martha!” his mother snorted. “I’m tempted to fire her on the spot.”

“Mom …”

“When I told her to go down to look at the furnace, she flatly refused.” His mother’s voice rose a half octave. “She’s afraid of cellars. She said for me to put on a sweater. If you weren’t so lenient with her, she wouldn’t be so free with her advice about putting on sweaters, I guarantee. She’s so fat, swilling down our food, she wouldn’t feel cold at the North Pole. When you get back home, if you ever do deign to come back home, I implore you to have a word with that woman.”

“I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon and I’ll talk to her,” Rudolph said. He was aware of Jean smiling maliciously at him. Her parents lived somewhere in the Midwest and she hadn’t seen them for two years. “In the meanwhile, Mom, call the office. Get Brad Knight. He’s on today. Tell him I told you to ask him to send one of our engineers.”

“He’ll think I’m an old crank.”

“He won’t think anything. Do as I say, please.”

“You have no idea how cold it is up here. The wind just howls under the windows. I don’t know why we can’t live in a decent new house like everybody else.”

This was an old song and Rudolph ignored it. When his mother had finally realized that Rudolph was making a good deal of money she had suddenly developed a gluttonous taste for luxury. Her charge account at the store made Rudolph wince every month when the bills came in.

“Tell Martha to build a fire in the living room,” Rudolph said, “and close the door and you’ll be warm in no time.”

“Tell Martha to build a fire,” his mother said. “If she’ll condescend. Will you be home in time for dinner tomorrow night?”

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “I have to see Mr. Calderwood.” It wasn’t quite a lie. He wasn’t going to dine with Calderwood, but he was going to see him. In any case, he didn’t want to have dinner with his mother.

“Calderwood, Calderwood,” his mother said. “Sometimes I think I’ll scream if I ever hear that name again.”

“I have to go now, Mom. Somebody’s waiting for me.”

He heard his mother begin to cry as he hung up. “Why can’t old ladies just lie down and die?” he said to Jean. “The Eskimos do it better. They expose them. Come on, let’s get out of here before anybody else calls.”

As they went out the door he was glad to see that Jean was leaving her camera equipment in the flat. That meant she’d have to come back with him that afternoon to pick it up. She was unpredictable in that department. Sometimes she’d come in with him when they’d been out together as though it were inconceivable that she could do anything else. Other times, without any explanation, she’d insist on getting into a taxi and going downtown alone to the apartment she shared with another girl. Then, on several occasions, she had merely appeared at his door, on the off chance that he’d be home.

She went her own way, Jean, and pleased her own appetites. He had never even seen the place she lived. She always met him at his apartment or in a bar uptown. She didn’t explain this, either. Young as she was, she seemed self-reliant, confident. Her work, as Rudolph had seen when she came up to Whitby with the proofs after the opening of the Port Philip center, was highly professional, surprisingly bold for a girl who had seemed so young and shy when he had first met her. She wasn’t shy in bed, either, and however she behaved and for whatever reasons, she was never coy. She never complained that because of his work in Whitby there were long periods when he couldn’t see her, two weeks at a time. It was Rudolph who complained of their separations, and he found himself plotting all sorts of stratagems, unnecessary appointments in the city, merely for an evening with Jean.

She was not one of those girls who lavished a full autobiography on her lover. He learned little about her. She came from the Midwest. She was on bad terms with her family. She had an older brother who was in the family firm, something to do with drugs. She had finished college at the age of twenty. She had majored in sociology. She had been interested in photography ever since she was a child. To get anywhere, you had to start in New York, so she had come to New York. She liked the work of Cartier-Bresson, Penn, Capa, Duncan, Klein. There was room among those names for a woman’s name. Perhaps, eventually, it would be hers.

She went out with other men. Not described. In the summer she sailed. Names of craft unmentioned. She had been to Europe. A Yugoslavian island to which she would like to return. She was surprised that he had never been out of the United States.

She dressed youthfully, with a fresh eye for colors that at first glance seemed to clash, but then, after a moment, subtly complemented each other. Her clothes, Rudolph could see, were not expensive and after the first three times he had gone out with her, he was fairly certain he was familiar with her entire wardrobe.

She did the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle faster than he did. Her handwriting was without frills, like a man’s. She liked new painters whose work Rudolph couldn’t appreciate or understand. “Keep looking,” she said, “and then one day, a door will open, you will suddenly cross the barrier.”

She never went to church. She never cried at sad movies. She never introduced him to any of her friends. She was unimpressed by Johnny Heath. She didn’t mind getting her hair wet in the rain. She never complained about the weather or traffic jams. She never said, “I love you.”

“I love you,” he said. They were lying close together in bed, his hand on her breast, the covers pulled up under their chins. It was seven o’clock in the evening and the room was dark. They had strolled through twenty galleries. He had crossed no barriers. They had had lunch in a small Italian restaurant, where the proprietors had no objection to girls with red-wool stockings. He had told her at lunch that he couldn’t take her to the game tomorrow and told her why. She wasn’t disturbed. He had given her the tickets. She said she would take a man she knew who had once played tackle for Columbia. She ate heartily.

They had been cold when they came in from their wanderings around the city, because the December afternoon had turned bitter early, and he had made them both hot tea spiked with rum.

“It would be nice if we had a fire,” she said, curled up on the sofa, her moccasins kicked off on the floor.

“The next apartment I rent,” he said.

When they kissed they both tasted of rum, perfumed with lemon.

They had made love unhurriedly, completely.

“This is what a Saturday afternoon in New York in the winter should be like,” she said, when they had finished and were lying together quietly. “Art, spaghetti, rum, and lust.”

He laughed, pressed her closer. He regretted his years of abstinence. Then he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps it was because of the abstinence that he was ready for her, free for her.

“I love you,” he said. “I want to marry you.”

She lay still for a moment, then moved away, threw the covers back, started to dress in silence.

I have ruined everything, he thought. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s a subject I never discuss naked,” she said gravely.

He laughed again, but was not happy. How many times had this beautiful, assured girl, with her own mysterious rules of behavior, discussed marriage, and with how many men? He had never been jealous before. Unprofitable emotion.

He watched the slender shadow move around the dark room, heard the rustle of cloth over skin. She went into the living room. Bad sign? Good sign? Would it be better just to lie here as he was, not go after her? He hadn’t planned on saying either “I love you” or “I want to marry you.”

He got out of bed and dressed quickly. She was sitting in the living room, other people’s furniture, fiddling with the radio. Announcers’ voices, honeyed and smooth, voices you would never believe if they said, “I love you.”

“I want a drink,” she said, without turning around, still fiddling with the dials.

He poured them both some bourbon and water. She drank like a man. What previous lover had taught her that?

“Well?” he said. He stood before her, feeling at a disadvantage, pleading. He hadn’t put on his shoes or his jacket and tie. Barefooted and in his shirtsleeves he felt he wasn’t properly dressed for the occasion.

“Your hair is mussed,” she said. “You look much better with your hair mussed.”

“Maybe my language is mussed,” he said. “Maybe you didn’t understand what I said in the bedroom.”

“I understood.” She turned the radio off, sat down in an easy chair, holding the glass of bourbon in her two hands. “You want to marry me.”

“Exactly.”

“Let’s go to the movies,” she said. “There’s a picture I want to see just around the corner …”

“Don’t be flip.”

“It’s only on till tomorrow night and you won’t be here tomorrow night.”

“I asked you a question.”

“Am I supposed to be flattered?”

“No.”

“Well, I am flattered. Now let’s go to the movies …” But she didn’t make any move to get up from the chair. Sitting there, half in shadow, because the one lamp that was lit threw its light obliquely from the side, she was fragile, vulnerable. Looking at her he knew that he had been right to say what he had in bed, that he hadn’t spoken just from a flicker of tenderness on a cold afternoon, but from a deep and abiding need.

“I will be broken,” he said, “if you say no.”

“Do you believe that?” She was looking down into her glass, swirling the drink around now with a finger. He could see only the top of her head, her loose hair gleaming in the lamplight.

“Yes.”

“Tell the truth.”

“Partially,” he said. “I partially believe it. Partially broken.”

It was her turn to laugh. “At least you’ll make somebody an honest husband,” she said.

“Well?” he demanded. He stood above her and put his hand under her chin and made her look up at him. Her eyes seemed doubtful, frightened, the small face pale.

“The next time you come to town, give me a ring,” she said.

“That’s no answer.”

“In a way, it is,” she said. “The answer is I want time to think.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve done something I’m not particularly proud of,” she said, “and I want to figure out how I can be proud of myself again.”

“What’ve you done?” He didn’t know whether he wanted to know or not.

“I’ve overlapped,” Jean said. “It’s a female disease. I was having an affair with a boy when I started with you and I haven’t broken it off. I’m doing something I thought I’d never do in my whole life. I’m sleeping with two men at once. And he wants to marry me, too.”

“Lucky girl,” Rudolph said bitterly. “Is he the girl roommate you share your apartment with?”

“No. The girl is an authentic girl. I’ll produce her for you if you want.”

“Is that why you never let me come to your place? He’s there?”

“No, he’s not there.”

“But he has been there.” With surprise, Rudolph realized that he had been wounded, deeply wounded, and worse yet, that he himself was intent on turning the knife in the wound.

“One of the most attractive things about you,” Jean said, “was that you were too sure of yourself to ask questions. If love is going to make you unattractive, forget love.”

“What a goddamn afternoon,” Rudolph said.

“I guess that wraps it up.” Jean stood up, put her glass down carefully. “No movies tonight.”

He watched her put on her coat. If she walks out now, like this, he thought, I’ll never see her again. He went over to her and put his arms around her and kissed her.

“You’re all wrong,” he said. “There’ll be movies tonight.”

She smiled at him, but tremulously, as though it cost her an effort. “You’d better finish getting dressed,” she said. “I hate to miss the beginning of a picture.”

He went into the bedroom, combed his hair, put on a tie and got into his shoes. He looked briefly at the tumbled bed, now a confused battlefield, as he put on his jacket.

When he came out into the living room again, he saw that she had slung her camera equipment around her. He tried to argue but she insisted upon taking the stuff with her.

“I’ve been in this place enough,” she said, “for one Saturday.”

As he drove along the rain-drenched highway the next morning on the way to Billy’s school, through sparse early traffic, he was thinking about Jean, not about Billy. They had gone to the movie, which was disappointing, had eaten supper afterward in a joint on Third Avenue, had talked about things that hardly mattered to either of them, the movie they had seen, other movies, plays they had seen, books and magazine articles they had read, rumors from Washington. The conversation of strangers. They had avoided mentioning marriage or overlapping lovers. They were both unaccountably weary, as though a great physical effort had drained them earlier. They drank more than they usually did. If this had been the first time they had gone out together, they would have thought each other dull. When they had finished their steaks, in the emptying restaurant, and had a cognac apiece, he was relieved to be able to put her into a taxi, walk home alone and turn the key behind him in the silent apartment, although the raw colors of the décor and the arty spikiness of the furniture made it look like an abandoned float from last year’s Mardi Gras. The bed now was just messy, the neglected tangle of a slatternly housewife, not the warm abode of love. He slept heavily and when he awoke in the morning and remembered the night before and his errand for the day, the sooty December rain outside his window seemed the appropriate weather for the weekend.

He had called the school and left a message for Billy that he would be there around twelve-thirty to take him to lunch, but he arrived earlier than he expected, a little after noon. Even though the rain had stopped and a faint cold sun was filtering through the clouds in the south, there was no one to be seen on the campus, coming or going into any of the buildings. From what Gretchen had told him about the school, in fine weather and a more clement season it was a place of beauty, but under the wet sky, seemingly abandoned, there was something forbiddingly prisonlike about the cluster of buildings and the muddy lawns. He drove up to what was obviously the main building and got out uncertainly, not knowing where to find Billy. Then, from the chapel a hundred yards away he heard young voices singing strongly, “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Sunday. Compulsory services, he thought. They still do that in schools. Christ. When he was a boy Billy’s age, all he had to do was salute the flag every morning and pledge allegiance to the United States of America. The advantages of public education. Separation of Church and State.

A Lincoln Continental drove up to the steps and stopped. It was a richly endowed school. Future rulers of America. He himself drove a Chevrolet. He wondered what would have been said at faculty teas if he had arrived on his motorcycle, which he still owned, though he now seldom used it. An important-looking man in a smart raincoat got out of the Lincoln, leaving a lady in the car. Parents. Occasional faint weekend communication with a future ruler of America. From his manners, the man had to be at least the president of a company, ruddy and brisk, well exercised. By now Rudloph could spot the type.

“Good morning, sir,” Rudolph said, in his automatic speaking-to-company-presidents’ voice. “I wonder if you could tell me where Sillitoe Hall is?”

The man smiled widely, showing five thousand dollars’ worth of exquisite dental work. “Good morning, good morning. Yes, of course. My boy was there last year. In some ways the best house on the campus. It’s just over there.” He pointed. The building was four hundred yards away. “You can drive there if you want. Just down this driveway and around.”

“Thank you,” Rudolph said.

The hymn rang out from the chapel. The parent cocked an ear. “They’re still praising God,” he said. “All in favor of it. We could stand more of it.”

Rudolph got into his Chevrolet and drove to Sillitoe Hall. He looked at the plaque commemorating Lieutenant Sillitoe as he went into the silent building. A girl of about four, in blue overalls, was pedaling a three-wheeler around the cluttered common room on the ground floor. A large setter in the room barked at him. Rudolph was a little disconcerted. He hadn’t expected four-year-old girls in a boys’ school.

A door opened and a chubby, pleasant-faced young woman in slacks came into the room and said, “Shut up, Boney,” to the dog. She smiled at Rudolph. “He’s harmless,” she said.

Rudolph didn’t know what she was doing there, either.

“Are you a father?” the woman asked, grabbing the dog by the collar and half strangling him, while he wagged his tail madly, full of love.

“Not exactly,” Rudolph said. “I’m Billy Abbott’s uncle. I called this morning.”

A curious little expression—concern? suspicion? relief?—shadowed the pleasant, chubby, young face. “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “He expects you. I’m Mollie Fairweather. I’m the housemaster’s wife.”

That explained the child, the dog, herself. Whatever was wrong with Billy, Rudolph decided instantly, it wasn’t the fault of this healthy, agreeable woman.

“The boys’ll be back from chapel any minute now,” the woman said. “Don’t you want to come into our place and have a drink, perhaps, while you’re waiting?”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” Rudolph said, but didn’t protest further, as Mrs. Fairweather waved him in.

The room was large, comfortable, the furniture well worn, the books many. “My husband’s at chapel, too,” Mrs. Fairweather explained. “But I do think we have some sherry.” A child cried from another room. “My youngest,” Mrs. Fairweather said, “making an announcement.” She poured the sherry hurriedly and said, “Excuse me,” and went off to see what announcement her child was making. The cries stopped immediately. She came back, smoothing her hair, poured herself a sherry, too. “Do sit down, please.”

There was an awkward pause. It occurred to Rudolph as he sat down that this woman, who had only met Billy a few months ago, must know him much better than himself, who was on a mission, unbriefed and flying blind, to rescue the boy. He should have asked Gretchen to read the letter that disturbed her so to him over the phone.

“He’s a very nice boy,” Mrs. Fairweather said, “Billy. So handsome and well behaved. We do get some wild ones, Mr. …” she hesitated.

“Jordache,” Rudolph said.

“So we appreciate the ones who know their manners.” She sipped at her sherry. Looking at her, Rudolph decided that Mr. Fairweather was a lucky man.

“His mother is worried about him,” Rudolph said.

“Is she?” The response was too quick. Gretchen wasn’t the only one who had noticed something.

“She got a letter from him this week. She said—well, of course, mothers are prone to exaggeration—but she said it sounded as though Billy is in despair.” There was no sense in not revealing to this obviously level-headed and well-meaning woman what his errand was. “The word seems a little strong to me,” he said, “but I’ve come to see what can be done. His mother’s in California. And …” He was a little embarrassed now. “She remarried.”

“That’s not so uncommon around here,” Mrs. Fairweather said. She laughed. “I don’t mean about parents living in California. I mean the remarried.”

“Her husband died several months ago,” Rudolph said.

“Oh,” Mrs. Fairweather said. “I’m so sorry. Perhaps that’s why Billy—” She left the sentence unfinished.

“Have you observed anything in particular?” Rudolph asked.

The woman pushed at her short hair uncomfortably. “I’d prefer it if you talked to my husband. It’s really his department.”

“I’m certain you wouldn’t say anything that your husband wouldn’t agree to,” Rudolph said. Without meeting the husband, he was sure that the wife would be less guarded, less defensive about the school, if indeed the school was at fault.

“Your glass is empty,” Mrs. Fairweather said. She took it from him and refilled it.

“Is it his marks?” Rudolph asked. “Are any of the boys bullying him for some reason?”

“No.” Mrs. Fairweather handed him the tiny glass of sherry. “His marks are fine and he doesn’t seem to have any trouble keeping up. And we don’t allow any bullying here.” She shrugged. “He’s a puzzling boy. I’ve talked it over several times with my husband and we’ve tried to sound him out. Without success. He—he’s remote. He doesn’t seem to connect with anybody. Not with any of the other boys. Or any of his teachers. His roommate has asked to be transferred to another house …”

“Do they fight?”

She shook her head. “No. The roommate says Billy just doesn’t talk to him. Ever. About anything. He does his share of housekeeping neatly, he studies at the proper hours, he doesn’t complain, but he barely answers yes or no when he’s spoken to. Physically he’s a strong boy, but he doesn’t join in any of the games. He doesn’t even throw a football around and during this season there’re always dozens of boys playing pickup touch tackle games or just passing the ball back and forth in front of the house. And on Saturdays when we play other schools and the whole school is in the stands, he stays in his room and reads.” As she spoke, her voice sounded just as troubled as Gretchen’s when she had spoken over the phone about Billy.

“If he were a grown man, Mr. Jordache,” Mrs. Fairweather said, “I’d be inclined to say he was suffering from melancholy. I know that’s not very helpful …” She smiled apologetically. “It’s a description, not a diagnosis. But it’s the best my husband and I have been able to come up with. If you can find out anything specific, anything the school can do, we’ll be most grateful.”

The bells of the chapel were ringing far away across the campus and Rudolph could see the first boys crossing from the chapel porch.

“I wonder if you could tell me where Billy’s room is,” Rudolph said. “I’ll wait for him there.” Perhaps there would be some clues there that would prepare him for his meeting with the boy.

“It’s on the third floor,” Mrs. Fairweather said. “All the way down the corridor, the last door to the left.”

Rudolph thanked her and left her with the two children and the setter. What a nice woman, he thought as he mounted the steps. There certainly had been nobody as good as that connected with his education. If she was worried about Billy, there was something to be worried about.

The door, like most of the doors along the corridor, was open. The room seemed to be divided by an invisible curtain. On one side the bed was rumpled and strewn with phonograph records. Books were piled on the floor beside the bed and there were pennants and pictures of girls and athletes torn from magazines pinned to the wall. On the other side, the bed was tightly made and there were no decorations on the wall. The only photographs on that side were on the neatly ordered small desk. They were separate ones of Gretchen and Burke. Gretchen was sitting in a deck chair in the garden of the house in California. The portrait of Burke was one that had been published in a magazine. There was no picture of Willie Abbott.

One book, open and face down, lay on the bed. Rudolph leaned over to see what it was. The Plague, by Camus. Peculiar reading for a fourteen-year-old boy and hardly designed to rescue him from melancholy.

If excessive neatness was a symptom of adolescent neurosis, Billy was neurotic. But Rudolph remembered how neat he had been at the same age and no one had considered him abnormal.

Somehow, though, the room oppressed him, and he didn’t want to have to meet Billy’s roommate, so he went downstairs and waited in front of the door. The sun was stronger now, and with the groups of boys, all shined up for chapel, advancing across the campus, the place no longer seemed prisonlike. Most of the boys were tall, much taller than the boys Rudolph had gone to school with. Increasing America. Everybody took it for granted that it was a good thing. But was it? The better to look down upon you, my dear.

He saw Billy at a distance. He was the only boy walking alone. He walked slowly, naturally, with his head up, nothing hangdog about him. Rudolph remembered how he had practiced walking himself at that age, keeping his shoulders still, trying to glide, making himself seem older, more graceful than his comrades. He still walked that way, but out of habit, not thinking about it.

“Hello, Rudy,” Billy said, without smiling, as he came up to the front of the building. “Thanks for coming to visit me.”

They shook hands. Billy had a strong, quick grasp. He still didn’t have to shave, but his face was not babyish and his voice had already changed.

“I have to be up in Whitby this evening,” Rudolph said, “and since I was going to be on the road anyway, I thought I’d drop in and have lunch with you. It’s only a couple of hours out of the way. Not even that.”

Billy eyed him levelly and Rudolph was sure that the boy knew that the visit wasn’t as off-hand as all that.

“Is there a good restaurant around here?” Rudolph asked, quickly. “I’m starving.”

“My father took me to lunch at a place that wasn’t too bad,” Billy said, “when he was up here the last time.”

“When was that?”

“A month ago. He was going to come up last week, but he wrote that the man who was going to lend him the car had to go out of town at the last minute.”

Rudolph wondered if originally Willie Abbott’s picture had been on the neat desk, next to the photographs of Gretchen and Colin Burke and had been put away after that last letter.

“Do you have to do anything in your room or tell anybody you’re going out to lunch with your uncle?”

“I have nothing to do,” Billy said. “And I don’t have to tell anybody anything.”

Rudolph suddenly became conscious as they stood there, with boys passing them in a steady stream, laughing and fooling around and talking loudly, that Billy hadn’t said hello to a single one of them and that no one had come up to him. It’s as bad as Gretchen feared, he thought. Or worse.

He put his arm briefly around Billy’s shoulder. There was no reaction. “Let’s be off,” he said. “You show me the road.”

As he drove through the lovely school grounds, with the somber boy beside him, past the handsome buildings and playing fields, so intelligently and expensively designed to prepare young men for useful and happy lives, so carefully staffed with devoted men and women of the caliber of Mrs. Fairweather, Rudolph wondered how anyone dared to try to educate anybody.

“I know why the man didn’t lend my father the car last week,” Billy was saying as he went at his steak. “He backed into a tree getting out of the parking lot here when we had lunch together and crushed the fender. He had three martinis before lunch and a bottle of wine and two glasses of brandy after lunch.”

The censorious young. Rudolph was glad he wasn’t drinking anything but water.

“Maybe he was unhappy about something,” he said. He was not there to destroy the possibility of love between father and son.

“I guess so. He’s unhappy a lot of the time.” Billy went on eating. Whatever he was suffering from had not impaired his appetite. The food was hearty American, steaks, lobster, clams, roast beef, hot biscuits, served by pretty waitresses in modest uniforms. The room was large and rambling, the tables were covered with red-checkered cloths and there were many groups from the school, five or six boys at a table with the parents of one of the students, who had invited his friends to take advantage of the parental visit. Rudolph wondered if one day he would claim a son of his own from a school and take him and his friends out for a similar lunch. If Jean said yes and married him, perhaps in fifteen years. What would he be like in fifteen years, what would she be like, what would his son be like? Withdrawn, taciturn, troubled, like Billy? Or open and gay, as the boys at the other tables seemed to be? Would schools like this still exist, meals like this still be served, fathers still drunkenly ram into trees at two o’clock in the afternoon? What risks the gentle women and comfortable fathers sitting proudly at table with their sons had run fifteen years ago, with the war just over and the atomic cloud still drifting across the skies of the planet.

Maybe, he thought, I will tell Jean I have reconsidered.

“How’s the food at school?” he asked, just to break the long silence.

“Okay,” Billy said.

“How’re the boys?”

“Okay. Ah—not so okay. There’s an awful lot of talk about what bigshots their fathers are, how they have lunch with the President and tell him how to run the country, how they go to Newport for the summertime, how they have horses at home, and how their sisters have debutante parties that cost twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“What do you say when they talk like that?”

“I keep quiet.” Billy’s glance was hostile. “What am I supposed to say? My father lives in one room and he’s been fired from three jobs in two years? Or should I tell them what a great driver he is after lunch?” Billy said all this in an even, uninflected conversational tone, alarmingly mature.

“What about your stepfather?”

“What about him? He’s dead. And even before he died, there weren’t six boys in the school who ever heard of him. They think people who do plays and make movies are some kind of freak.”

“What about the teachers?” Rudolph asked, desperate to find one thing at least that the boy approved of.

“I don’t have anything to do with them,” Billy said, putting more butter on his baked potato. “I do my work and that’s all.”

“What’s wrong, Billy?” It was time now to be direct. He did not know the boy well enough to be indirect.

“My mother asked you to come here, didn’t she?” Billy looked at him shrewdly, challengingly.

“If you must know—yes.”

“I’m sorry if I worried her,” Billy said. “I shouldn’t have sent that letter.”

“Of course, you should have sent the letter. What is it, Billy?”

“I don’t know.” The boy had stopped eating by now and Rudolph could see that he was fighting to control his voice. “Everything. I feel like I am going to die if I have to stay here.”

“Of course you won’t die,” Rudolph said sharply.

“No, I guess not. I just feel as though I am.” Billy was petulant, juvenile, for a moment. “That’s a whole different thing, isn’t it? But feeling is real, too, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” Rudolph admitted. “Come on. Talk.”

“This is no place for me,” Billy said. “I don’t want to be trained to grow up into what all these fellows are going to grow up into. I see their fathers. A lot of them went to this same school twenty-five years ago. They’re like their kids, only older, telling the President what to do, not knowing that Colin Burke was a great man, not even knowing he’s dead. I don’t belong here, Rudy. My father doesn’t belong here. Colin Burke wouldn’t have belonged here. If they keep me here, by the end of four years they’ll make me belong here and I don’t want that. I don’t know …” He shook his head despondently, his fair hair swinging over the high forehead he had inherited from his father. “I guess you think I’m just not making any sense. I guess you think I’m just another homesick kid griping because he wasn’t elected captain of the team or something …”

“I don’t think that at all, Billy. I don’t know whether you’re right or not, but you certainly have figured out your reasons.” Homesick, he thought. The word had reared up from the sentence. Which home?

“Compulsory chapel,” Billy said. “Making believe I’m a Christian seven times a week. I’m no Christian, Mom isn’t a Christian, my father’s not a Christian, Colin wasn’t a Christian, why do I have to take the rap for the whole family, listen to all those sermons? Be upright, have clean thoughts, don’t think about sex. Our Lord Jesus died to cleanse our sins. How would you like to sit through crap like that seven times a week?”

“Not much.” The boy certainly had a point there. Atheists did have a religious responsibility toward their children.

“And money,” Billy said, his voice low but intense, as a waitress passed nearby. “Where’s the money going to come for my big fat education now that Colin’s dead?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Rudolph said. “I’ve told your mother I’d take care of it.”

Billy looked at him malevolently, as though Rudolph had just confessed that he had been plotting against him. “I don’t like you enough, Uncle Rudy,” he said, “to take that from you.”

Rudolph was shaken, but he managed to speak calmly. After all, Billy was only fourteen, only a child. “Why don’t you like me well enough?”

“Because you belong here,” Billy said. “Send your own son here.”

“I won’t comment on that.”

“I’m sorry I said it. But I meant it.” There was a pressure of tears in the long-lashed, blue, Abbott eyes.

“I admire you for saying it,” Rudolph said. “By the time boys reach your age they usually have learned to dissemble for rich uncles.”

“What am I doing here, on the other side of the country, when my mother is sitting alone, all by herself, night after night, crying?” Billy went on, in a rush. “A man like Colin is killed and what am I supposed to be doing—cheering at a silly football game or listening to some Boy Scout in a black suit telling us Jesus saves. I’ll tell you something—” The tears were rolling down his cheeks now and he was mopping them with a handkerchief, but speaking fiercely at the same time. “If you don’t get me out of here, I’m going to run away. And, somehow, I’m going to turn up in that house where my mother is, and anyway I can help her I’m going to help her.”

“All right,” Rudolph said. “We can stop talking about it. I don’t know what I can do, but I promise you I’ll do something. Fair enough?”

Billy nodded miserably, mopped some more, put the handkerchief away.

“Now let’s finish our lunch,” Rudolph said. He didn’t eat much more, but watched Billy clean his plate, then order apple pie à la mode and clean that plate. Fourteen was an all-absorbing age. Tears, death, pity, apple pie, and ice cream mingled without shame.

After lunch, in the car driving over to the school, Rudolph said, “Go up to your room. Pack a bag. Then come down and wait for me in the car.”

He watched the boy go into the building, neat in his Sunday go-to-chapel suit, then got out of the car and followed. Behind him, a touch-tackle game was in progress on the drying lawn, boys crying, “Throw it to me, throw it to me,” in one of the hundreds of games of their youth that Billy never joined.

The Common Room off the hallway was full of boys playing Ping-Pong, sitting over chess boards, reading magazines, listening to the Giant game on a transistor radio. From upstairs came the roar of a folk-singing group from another radio. Politely, the boys around the Ping-Pong table made way for him, older man, as he walked across the room, toward the doorway of the Fairweathers’ apartment. They seemed like fine boys, good looking, healthy, well mannered, content, the hope of America. If he were a father he would have been happy to see his own son in this company this Sunday afternoon. But among them, his nephew, misfitted, felt that he was going to die. The Constitutional right to be a misfit.

He rang the bell to the Fairweather apartment and the door was opened by a tall, slightly stooping man, with a lock of hair hanging over his forehead, a healthy complexion, a ready and welcoming smile. What nerves a man must have to be able to live in a house full of boys like this.

“Mr. Fairweather?” Rudolph said.

“Yes?” Amiable, easy.

“I hate to disturb you, but I’d like to talk to you for a moment. I’m Billy Abbott’s uncle. I was …”

“Oh, yes,” Fairweather said. He extended his hand. “My wife told me you paid her a visit before lunch. Won’t you please come in?” He led the way down a book-lined hallway into the book-lined living room, the noise from the Common Room miraculously extinguished with the closing of the door. Sanctuary from youth. Insulation from the young by books. Rudolph wondered if perhaps when Denton had offered him the post at the college, the book-lined life, he had made the wrong choice.

Mrs. Fairweather was sitting on the couch, drinking a cup of coffee, her child sitting on the floor leaning against her knee, turning the pages of a picture book, the setter sprawled, asleep, against her. Mrs. Fairweather smiled at him, raised her cup in greeting.

They can’t be that happy, Rudolph thought, conscious of jealousy.

“Please sit down,” Fairweather said. “Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thank you, I’ve just had some. And I can only stay a minute.” Rudolph sat, stiffly, feeling awkward because he was an uncle, not a father.

Fairweather sat comfortably next to his wife. He was wearing green-stained tennis shoes and a wool shirt, making the most of Sunday afternoon. “Did you have a good talk with Billy?” he asked. There was a little pleasant holdover of the South in his voice, gentlemanly Tidewater Virginia.

“I had a talk,” Rudolph said. “I don’t know how good it was. Mr. Fairweather, I want to take Billy away with me. For a few days at least. I think it’s absolutely necessary.”

The Fairweathers exchanged glances.

“It’s as bad as that, is it?” the man said.

“Pretty bad.”

“We’ve done everything we can,” Fairweather said, but without apology.

“I realize that,” Rudolph said. “It’s just that Billy’s a certain kind of boy, certain things have happened to him—in the past, recently …” He wondered if the Fairweathers had ever heard of Colin Burke, mourned the vanished talent. “There’s no need to go into it. A boy’s reasons can be fantasy, but his feelings can be horribly real.”

“So you want to take Billy away?” Mr. Fairweather said.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“In ten minutes.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Fairweather said.

“For how long?” Fairweather asked calmly.

“I don’t know. A few days. A month. Perhaps permanently.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. From outside the window, thinly, came the sound of a boy calling signals in the touch-tackle game, 22, 45, 38, Hut! Fairweather stood up and went over to the table where the coffee pot was standing and poured himself a cup. “You’re sure you don’t want some, Mr. Jordache?”

Rudolph shook his head.

“The Christmas holidays come in just two and a half weeks,” Fairweather said. “And the term-end examinations begin in a few days. Don’t you think it would be wiser to wait until then?”

“I don’t think it would be wise for me to leave here this afternoon without Billy,” Rudolph said.

“Have you spoken to the headmaster?” Fairweather asked.

“No.”

“I think it would be advisable to consult with him,” Fairweather said. “I don’t really have the authority to …”

“The less fuss we make, the fewer the people who talk to Billy,” Rudolph said, “the better it will be for the boy. Believe me.”

Again the Fairweathers exchanged glances.

“Charles,” Mrs. Fairweather said to her husband, “I think we could explain to the headmaster.”

Fairweather sipped thoughtfully at his coffee, still standing at the table. A ray of pale sunlight came through the windows, outlining him against the bookshelves behind him. Healthy, pondering man, head of family, doctor of young souls.

“I suppose we could,” he said. “I suppose we could explain. You will call me in the next day or two and tell me what’s been decided, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

Fairweather sighed. “There’re so many defeats in this quiet profession, Mr. Jordache,” he said. “Tell Billy he’s welcome to come back any time he wishes. He’s bright enough to make up any time he’s lost.”

“I’ll tell him,” Rudolph said. “Thank you. Thank you both for everything.”

Fairweather escorted him back along the hallway, opened the door into the turmoil of boys, didn’t smile as he shook Rudolph’s hand and closed the door behind him.

As Rudolph drove away from the school, Billy, in the front seat beside him, said, “I never want to see this place again.” He didn’t ask where they were going.

It was half-past five when they got to Whitby and the street lights were on in the wintry darkness. Billy had slept a good deal of the way. Rudolph dreaded the moment when he would have to introduce his mother to her grandson. “Spawn of the harlot,” might not be beyond the powers of his mother’s rhetoric. But he had the appointment with Calderwood after the Calderwood Sunday supper, which would be over by seven, and it would have been impossible to take Billy back to New York and then arrive in Whitby on time. And even if he had had the time to drive the boy down to the city, to whom could he have turned him over? Willie Abbott? Gretchen had asked him to bypass Willie in the matter and he had done so and there was no having it both ways. And after what Billy had said about his father at lunch, being put in Willie’s alcoholic care could hardly have seemed like much of an improvement over staying in school.

Briefly, Rudolph had considered putting Billy in a hotel, but had discarded the idea as too cold-blooded. This was no night for the boy to spend alone in a hotel. Also, it would have been cowardly. He would have to face the old lady down.

Still, when he awakened the boy as he stopped the car in front of the house, and led him through the door, he was relieved to see that his mother was not in the living room. He looked down the hallway and saw that her door was closed. That meant she had probably had a fight with Martha and was sulking. He could confront her alone and prepare her for her first meeting with her grandson.

He went into the kitchen with Billy. Martha was sitting at the table reading a newspaper and there was a smell of something cooking coming from the oven. Martha was not fat, as his mother spitefully described her, but in fact was an angular, virginal, gaunt woman of fifty, sure of the world’s displeasure, anxious to give back as good as she got.

“Martha,” he said, “this is my nephew, Billy. He’s going to stay with us for a few days. He’s tired and he needs a bath and some hot food. Do you think you can give him a hand? He’ll sleep in the guest room, next to mine.”

Martha smoothed out the newspaper on the kitchen table. “Your mother said you weren’t going to be in for dinner.”

“I’m not. I’m going out again.”

“Then there’ll be enough for him,” Martha said. “She—” with a savage gesture of the head toward the part of the house inhabited by his mother—“she didn’t say nothing about no nephews.”

“She doesn’t know yet,” Rudolph said, trying to make his voice sound cheery, for Billy’s sake.

“That’ll make her day,” Martha said. “Finding out about nephews.”

Billy stood quietly to one side, testing the atmosphere, not liking it.

Martha stood up, her face no more disapproving, really, than usual, but how could Billy know that? “Come on, young man,” Martha said. “I guess we can make room for a skinny little thing like you.”

Rudolph was surprised at what was, in Martha’s vocabulary, practically a tender invitation.

“Go ahead, Billy,” he said. “I’ll be up to see you in a little while.”

Billy followed Martha out of the kitchen, hesitantly. Attached now to his uncle, any separation was full of risk.

Rudolph heard their footsteps going up the stairs. His mother would be alerted that someone strange was in the house. She recognized his tread and invariably called out to him when he was on his way to his room.

He got some ice out of the refrigerator. He needed a drink after the almost teetotaling day and before the meeting with his mother. He carried the ice out into the living room and was pleased to find that the living room was warm. Brad must have sent over an engineer yesterday for the furnace. His mother’s tongue would at least not be honed by cold.

He made himself a bourbon and water, with plenty of ice, sank into a chair, put his feet up, and sipped at his drink, enjoying it. He was pleased with the room, not too heavily furnished, with modern, leather chairs, globular glass lamps, Danish wood tables and simple, neutral-colored curtains, all of it making a carefully thought-out contrast with the low-beamed ceiling and the small eighteenth-century, square-paned windows. His mother complained that it looked like a dentist’s waiting room.

He finished his drink slowly, in no hurry for the scene ahead of him. Finally, he pushed himself up out of the chair, went down the hallway, and knocked on the door. His mother’s bedroom was on the ground floor so that she wouldn’t have to manage the stairs. Although, now, since the two operations, one for phlebitis, the second for cataracts, she got around fairly well. Complainingly, but well.

“Who is it?” The voice was sharp behind the closed door.

“It’s me, Mom,” Rudolph said. “You asleep?”

“Not any more,” she said.

He pushed the door open.

“Not with people tramping up and down like elephants all over the house,” she said from the bed. She was propped up against lacy pillows, wearing a pink bed jacket that was trimmed with what seemed to be some kind of pinkish fur. She was wearing the thick glasses that the doctor had prescribed for her after the operation. They permitted her to read, watch television, and go to the movies, but they gave a wild, blank, soulless stare to her hugely magnified eyes.

Doctors had done wonders for her since they had moved to the new house. Before that, when they were still living over the store, although Rudolph had pleaded with his mother to undergo the various operations he was sure she needed, she had adamantly refused. “I will be nobody’s charity patient,” she had said, “being experimented on by interns who shouldn’t be allowed to put a knife to a dog.” Rudolph’s protestations had fallen then on deaf ears. While they lived in the poor apartment nothing could convince her that she was not poor and doomed to suffer the fate of the poor once confided to the cold care of an institution. But once they made the move and Martha read the write-ups in the newspapers about Rudy’s successes to her and she had ridden in the new car that Rudy had bought, she went boldly into surgery, after ascertaining that the men who treated her were the best and most expensive available.

She had been literally rejuvenated, resuscitated, brought back from the lip of the grave, by her belief in money. Rudy had thought that decent medical care would make his mother’s last years a little more comfortable. Instead, they had almost made her young. With Martha glooming at the wheel, she now went out in Rudy’s car whenever it was free; she frequented beauty parlors (her hair was almost blue and waved); patronized the town’s movie houses; called for taxis; attended Mass; played bridge with newly found church acquaintances twice a week; fed priests on nights when Rudy was not at home; had bought a new copy of Gone With the Wind, as well as all the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes.

A wide variety of clothes and hats for all occasions were stored in the wardrobe in her room, which was as full of furniture as a small antique shop, gilt desks, a chaise longue, a dressing table with ten different flasks of French perfume on it. For the first time in her life her lips were heavily rouged. She looked ghastly, Rudolph thought, with her painted face and gaudy dresses, but she was infinitely more alive than before. If this was the way she was making up for the dreadful years of her childhood and the long agony of her marriage, it was not up to him to deprive her of her toys.

He had played with the idea of moving her to an apartment of her own in town, with Martha to tend her, but he could not bear the thought of the expression on her face at the moment when he would take her through the door of the house for the last time, stricken by the ingratitude of a son whom she had loved above all things in her life, a son whose shirts she had ironed at midnight after twelve hours on her feet in the store, a son for whom she had sacrificed youth, husband, friends, her other two children.

So she stayed on. Rudolph was not one to miss payment on his debts.

“Who is it upstairs? You’ve brought a woman into the house,” she said accusingly.

“I’ve never brought a woman into the house, as you put it, Mom,” Rudolph said, “although if I wanted to, I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”

“Your father’s blood,” his mother said. Dreadful charge.

“It’s your grandson. I brought him home from school.”

“That was no six-year-old boy going up the staircase,” she said. “I have ears.”

“It isn’t Thomas’s son,” Rudolph said. “It’s Gretchen’s son.”

“I will not hear that name,” she said. She put her hands to her ears. Television-watching had left its mark on her gestures.

Rudolph sat on the edge of his mother’s bed and gently took her hands down, holding them. I have been lax, he thought. This conversation should have been held years ago.

“Now listen to me, Mom,” he said. “He’s a very good boy and he’s in trouble and …”

“I won’t have that whore’s brat in my house,” she said.

“Gretchen is not a whore,” Rudolph said. “Her son is not a brat. And this is not your house.”

“I was waiting for the day you would finally say those words,” she said.

Rudolph ignored the invitation to melodrama. “He’s going to stay only a few days,” he said, “and he needs kindness and attention and I’m going to give it to him and Martha’s going to give it to him and you’re going to give it to him.”

“What will I ever tell Father McDonnell?” His mother looked, eyes magnified and blank, up toward Heaven, before whose gates stood, theoretically, Father McDonnell.

“You’re going to tell Father McDonnell that you have finally learned the virtue of Christian charity,” Rudolph said.

“Ah,” she said, “you’re a fine one to talk about Christian charity. Have you ever seen the inside of a church?”

“I haven’t got time to argue,” Rudolph said. “Calderwood is expecting me any minute now. I’m telling you how you’re going to behave with the boy.”

“I will not allow him in my presence,” she said, quoting from some portion of her favorite reading. “I will close my door and Martha will serve my meals on a tray.”

“You can do that if you want, Mom,” Rudolph said quietly. “But if you do, I’m cutting you off. No more car, no more bridge parties, no more charge accounts, no more beauty parlors, no more dinners for Father McDonnell. Think about it.” He stood up. “I’ve got to go now. Martha’s prepared to give Billy dinner. I suggest you join them.”

Tears as he closed his mother’s bedroom door. What a cheap way to threaten an old lady, he thought. Why didn’t she just die? Gracefully, unwaved, unrinsed, unrouged.

There was a grandfather’s clock in the hallway and he saw that he had time to phone Gretchen if he made an immediate connection to California. He put in the call and made himself another drink while waiting for the call to come through. Calderwood might smell the liquor on his breath and disapprove, but he was past that, too. As he sipped his drink he thought of what he had been doing the day before at just this hour. Entwined in twilit warmth in the soft bed, the red-wool stockings strewn on the floor, the sweet warm breath mingled with his, rum and lemon. Had his mother once lain sweetly in a lover’s arms on a cold December afternoon, clothes carelessly discarded in lover’s haste? The image refused to materialize. Would Jean, old, one day lie in a fussed-up bed, eyes staring behind thick glasses, old lips rouged in scorn and avarice? Better not to think about it.

The phone rang and it was Gretchen. He explained the afternoon as quickly as he could and said that Billy was safely with him and that if she thought best he would put Billy on a plane to Los Angeles in two or three days, unless, of course, she wanted to come East.

“No,” she said. “Put him on a plane.”

A tricky little sense of pleasure. An excuse to get to New York on Tuesday or Wednesday. Jean.

“I don’t have to tell you how grateful I am, Rudy,” Gretchen said.

“Nonsense,” he said. “When I have a son I will expect you to take cafe of him. I’ll let you know what plane he’s on. And maybe one day soon, I’ll come out and visit you.”

The lives of others.

Calderwood himself answered the door when Rudolph rang. He was dressed for Sunday, even though his Sabbath duties were behind him, dark suit with vest, white shirt, somber tie, his high, black shoes. There never was enough light in the frugal Calderwood house and it was too dark for Rudolph to see what sort of expression Calderwood had on his face as he said, neutrally, “Come in, Rudy. You’re a little late.”

“Sorry, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. He followed the old man, who walked heavily now, a certain measured number of steps between him and the grave, to be economized, doled out.

Calderwood led him into the somber oak-paneled room he called his study, with a big mahogany desk and cracked oak and leather easy chairs. The glassed bookcases were filled with files, records of bills paid, twenty-year-old transactions that Calderwood still didn’t trust putting in the modest basement vaults where the ordinary business files were kept, open to any clerk’s prying eye.

“Sit down.” Calderwood gestured toward one of the leather and oak easy chairs. “You’ve been drinking, Rudy,” he said mournfully. “My sons-in-law, I regret to say, are also drinkers.” Calderwood’s two older daughers had married some time before, one a man from Chicago, another a man from. Arizona. Rudolph had the feeling that the girls had picked their mates not out of love, but geography, to get away from their father.

“That isn’t what I brought you here to talk about though,” Calderwood said. “I wanted to speak to you man-to-man, when Mrs. Calderwood and Virginia were not on the premises. They have gone to the movie show and we can speak freely.” It was not like the old man to indulge in elaborate preliminaries. He seemed ill at ease, which also was not like him.

Rudolph waited, conscious that Calderwood was fiddling with objects on his desk, a paper opener, an old-fashioned inkstand.

“Rudolph …” Calderwood cleared his throat portentously. “I’m surprised at your behavior.”

“My behavior?” For a wild instant Rudolph thought that Calderwood had somehow found out about himself and Jean.

“Yes. It’s not like you at all, Rudy.” The tone was sorrowful now. “You’ve been like a son to me. Better than a son. Truthful. Open. Trustworthy.”

The old Eagle Scout, covered with merit badges, Rudolph thought, waiting, wary.

“Suddenly something has come over you, Rudy,” Calderwood continued. “You have been operating behind my back. With no apparent reason. You know you could have come to the door of my house and rung my bell and I would have been glad to welcome you.”

“Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said, thinking, old age here, too. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am talking about the affections of my daughter Virginia, Rudy. Don’t deny.”

“Mr. Calderwood …”

“You have been tampering with her affections. Gratuitously. You have stolen where you could have demanded.” There was anger in the voice now.

“I assure you, Mr. Calderwood, that I haven’t …”

“It’s not like you to lie, Rudy.”

“I’m not lying. I don’t know …”

“What if I told you the girl has confessed everything?” Calderwood boomed.

“There’s nothing to confess.” Rudolph felt helpless, and at the same time like laughing.

“Your story differs from my daughter’s. She has told her mother that she is in love with you and that she intends to go to New York City to learn to be a secretary to be free to see you.”

“Holy God!” Rudolph said.

“We do not use the name of God in vain in this house, Rudy.”

“Mr. Calderwood, the most I’ve ever done with Virginia,” Rudolph said, “is buy her a lunch or an ice cream soda when I’ve bumped into her at the store.”

“You’ve bewitched her,” Calderwood said. “She’s in tears five times a week about you. A pure young girl doesn’t indulge in antics like that unless she’s been led on artfully by a man.”

The Puritan inheritance has finally exploded, Rudolph thought. Land on Plymouth Rock, hang around for a couple of centuries in the bracing air of New England, prosper, and go crackers. It was all too much for one day—Billy, the school, his mother, now this.

“I want to know what you intend to do about it, young man.” When Calderwood said young man, he was apt to be dangerous. Instantaneously, Rudolph’s mind flashed over the possibilities—he was well entrenched, but the final power in the business lay with Calderwood. There could be a fight, but in the long run Calderwood could get him out. That silly bitch Virginia.

“I don’t know what you want me to do, sir.” He was stalling for time.

“It’s very simple,” Calderwood said. Obviously he had been thinking about the problem ever since Mrs. Calderwood had come to him with the happy news about their daughter’s shame. “Marry Virginia. But you must promise not to move down to New York.” He was demented about New York City, Rudolph decided. Haunt of evil. “I will make you a full partner with me. Upon my death, after I make adequate provisions for my daughters and Mrs. Calderwood, you will get the bulk of my shares. You will have voting control. I shall never bring up this conversation again and there will be no reproaches. In fact, I shall put it out of my mind forever. Rudy, I couldn’t be happier than to have a boy like you in the family. It has been my fondest wish for years and both Mrs. Calderwood and I were disappointed when we invited you to partake of the hospitality of our home that you seemed to take no interest in any of our daughters, although they are all pretty, in their way, and well brought up, and if I may say so, independently wealthy. I have no idea why you thought you couldn’t approach me directly when you had made your choice.”

“I haven’t made any choice,” Rudolph said distractedly. “Virginia’s a charming girl, and she’ll make the best of wives, I’m sure. I had no inkling she had any interest in me whatever …”

“Rudy,” Calderwood said sternly. “I’ve known you a long time. You’re one of the smartest men I’ve ever met. And you have the nerve to sit there and tell me …”

“Yes, I do.” The hell with the business. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll sit right here with you and wait until Mrs. Calderwood and Virginia come home and I’ll ask her point-blank in front of both of you whether I’ve ever made any advances to her, if I’ve ever as much as tried to kiss her.” It was all pure farce but he had to go on with it. “If she says yes, she’s lying, but I don’t care. I’ll walk out right now and you can do whatever you want with your goddamn business and your goddamn stocks and your goddamn daughter.”

“Rudy!” Calderwood’s voice was shocked, but Rudolph could see that he had suddenly become uncertain of his ground.

“If she’d had the sense to tell me long ago that she loved me,” Rudolph went on swiftly pressing his advantage, reckless now, “maybe something would have come of it. I do like her. But it’s too late now. Yesterday evening, if you must know, in New York City, I asked another girl to marry me.”

“New York City,” Calderwood said, resentfully. “Always New York City.”

“Well, do you want me to sit here and wait until the ladies come home?” Rudolph crossed his arms menacacingly.

“This could cost you a lot of money, Rudy,” Calderwood said.

“Okay, it could cost me a lot of money.” Rudolph said it firmly, but he could feel the sick quiver inside his stomach.

“And this—this lady in New York,” Calderwood said, sounding plaintive. “Has she accepted you?”

“No.”

“Love, by God!” The insanity of the tender emotion, the cross-purposes of desire, the sheer anarchy of sex, was too much for Calderwood’s piety. “In two months you’ll forget her and then maybe you and Virginia …”

“She said no for yesterday,” Rudolph said. “But she’s thinking it over. Well, should I wait for Mrs. Calderwood and Virginia?” He still had his arms crossed. It kept his hands from trembling.

Calderwood pushed the inkstand irritably back to the edge of the desk. “Obviously you’re telling the truth, Rudy,” Calderwood said. “I don’t know what possessed my foolish daughter. Ah—I know what my wife will say—I brought her up all wrong. I made her shy. I over-protected her. If I were to tell you some of the arguments I’ve had with that woman in this house. It was different when I was a boy, I’ll tell you that. Girls didn’t go around, telling their mothers they were in love with people who never even looked at them. The damned movies. They rot women’s brains. No, you don’t have to wait. I’ll handle it alone. Go ahead. I have to compose myself.”

Rudolph stood up and Calderwood with him. “Do you want some advice?” Rudolph asked.

“You’re always giving me advice,” Calderwood said petulantly. “When I dream it’s always about you whispering in my ear. For years. Sometimes I wish you’d never showed up that summer at the store. What advice?”

“Let Virginia go down to New York and learn to be a secretary and leave her alone for a year or two.”

“Great,” Calderwood said bitterly. “You can say that. You have no daughters. I’ll see you to the door.”

At the door, he put his hand on Rudolph’s arm. “Rudy,” he said, pleading, “if the lady in New York says no, you’ll think about Virginia, won’t you? Maybe she’s an idiot, but I can’t stand to see her unhappy.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said ambiguously, and went down to his car.

Mr. Calderwood was still standing in the open doorway, lit by the frugal hall light, as Rudolph drove away.

He was hungry, but decided to wait before going to a restaurant for dinner. He wanted to return to the house and see how Billy was doing. He also wanted to tell him that he had talked to Gretchen and that he would be going out to California in two or three days. The boy would sleep better after hearing that news, the specter of the school no longer hanging over him.

When he opened the front door with his key he heard voices in the kitchen. He went silently through the living and dining rooms and listened outside the kitchen door. “There’s one thing I like to see in a growing boy—” Rudolph recognized his mother’s voice—“and that’s a good appetite. I’m happy to see you appreciate food, Billy. Martha, give him another slice of meat and some more salad. No back talk, Billy, about not eating salad. In my house, all children eat salad.”

Holy God! Rudolph thought.

“There’s another thing I like to see in a boy, Billy,” his mother went on. “Old as I am, and I should be beyond such feminine weaknesses—and that’s good looks combined with good manners.” The voice was coquettish, cooing. “And you know whom you remind me of—and I never said so to his face for fear of spoiling him—there’s nothing worse than a vain child—you remind me of your Uncle Rudolph and he was by common agreement the handsomest boy in town and he grew up into the handsomest young man.”

“Everybody says I look like my father,” Billy said, with the bluntness of his fourteen years, but not aggressively. From his tone he was obviously feeling at home.

“I have not had the good fortune ever to meet your father,” the mother said, a slight chill in her speech. “No doubt there must be a certain resemblance here and there, but fundamentally you resemble my branch of the family, especially Rudolph. Doesn’t he, Martha?”

“I can see some signs,” Martha said. She was not out to give the mother a perfect Sunday night supper.

“Around the eyes,” the mother said. “And the intelligent mouth. In spite of the difference in the hair. I never think hair makes too much difference. There’s not much character in hair.”

Rudolph pushed the door and went into the kitchen. Billy was seated at one end of the table, flanked by the two women. Hair flattened down wet after his bath, Billy looked shining clean and smiling as he packed into his food. The mother had put on a sober-brown dress and was consciously playing grandmother. Martha looked less grumpy than usual, her mouth less thin, welcoming a bit of youth into the household.

“Everything all right?” Rudolph asked. “They giving you enough to eat?”

“The food’s great,” Billy said. There was no trace of the agony of the afternoon in his face.

“I do hope you like chocolate pudding for dessert, Billy,” the mother said, hardly looking up for a moment at Rudolph, standing at the door. “Martha makes the most delicious chocolate pudding.”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “I really like it.”

“It was Rudolph’s favorite dessert, too. Wasn’t it, Rudolph?”

“Uhuh,” he said. He didn’t remember ever getting it more than once a year and he certainly didn’t remember ever remarking on it, but this was not the night to halt the flights of his mother’s fancy. She had even refrained from putting on rouge, the better to play the role of grandmother and she deserved some marks for that, too.

“Billy,” Rudolph said, “I spoke to your mother.”

Billy looked at him gravely, fearing a blow. “What did she say?”

“She’s waiting for you. I’m going to put you on a plane Tuesday or Wednesday. As soon as I can break away from the office here and take you down to New York.”

The boy’s lips trembled, but there was no fear that he was going to cry. “How did she sound?” he asked.

“Delighted that you’re coming out,” Rudolph said.

“That poor girl,” his mother said. “The life she’s led. The blows of fortune.”

Rudolph didn’t allow himself to look at her.

“Though it’s a shame, Billy,” she continued, “that now that we’ve found each other you can’t spend a little time with your old grandmother. Still, now that the ice has been broken, perhaps I can come out and visit you. Wouldn’t that be a nice idea, Rudolph?”

“Very nice.”

“California,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see it. The climate is kind to old bones. And from what I hear, it’s a virtual paradise. Before I die … Martha, I think Billy is ready for the chocolate pudding.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Martha said, rising from the table.

“Rudolph,” the mother said, “don’t you want a bite? Join the happy family circle?”

“No, thanks.” The last thing he wanted was to join the happy family circle. “I’m not hungry.”

“Well, I’m off to bed,” she said. She stood up heavily. “Must get my beauty sleep at my age, you know. But before you go upstairs to sleep you’ll come in and give your grandmother a great big good-night kiss, won’t you, Billy?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Billy said.

“Grandma.”

“Grandma,” Billy said obediently.

She swept out of the room. One last triumphant glare at Rudolph. Lady Macbeth, the blood behind her, undetected, now splendidly running a nursery for precocious children in a warmer country than Scotland.

Mothers should not be exposed, Rudolph thought, as he said, “Good night, Mom, sleep well.” They should be shot out of hand.

He left the house, ate dinner at a restaurant, tried to call Jean in New York to find out what night she could see him, Tuesday or Wednesday. There was no answer at her apartment.

Chapter 4

Draw the curtains at sunset. Do not sit in the evenings and look out at the lights of the city spread below you. Colin did so, with you at his side, because he said it was the view he liked most in the world, America at its best at night.

Do not wear black. Mourning is a private matter.

Do not write emotional letters in answer to letters of condolence from friends or from strangers using words like genius or unforgettable or generous or strength of character. Answer promptly and politely. No more.

Do not weep in front of your son.

Do not accept invitations to dinner from friends or colleagues of Colin who do not wish you to suffer alone.

When a problem comes up do not reach for the phone to call Colin’s office. The office is closed.

Resist the temptation to tell the people who are now in charge of finishing Colin’s last picture how Colin wanted it to be done.

Give no interviews, write no articles. Do not be a source of anecdote. Do not be a great man’s widow. Do not speculate on what he would have done had he lived.

Commemorate no birthdays or anniversaries.

Discourage retrospective showings, festivals, laudatory meetings to which you have been invited.

Attend no previews or opening nights.

When planes fly low overhead, leaving the airport, do not remember voyages you have taken together.

Do not drink alone or in company, whatever the temptation. Avoid sleeping pills. Bear in unassuaged silence.

Clear the desk in the living room of its pile of books and scripts. They are now a lie.

Refuse, politely, the folios of clippings, reviews of plays and films your husband has directed, which the studio has kindly had made up in tooled-leather covers. Do not read the eulogies of critics.

Leave only one hasty snapshot of husband on view in house. Pack all other photographs in a box and put them away in the cellar.

Do not, when thinking about preparing dinner, arrange a menu that would please husband. (Stone crabs, chili, piccata of veal pizzaiola.)

When dressing, do not look at the clothes hanging in the closet and say, “He likes me in that one.”

Be calm and ordinary with your son. Do not overreact when he gets into trouble at school, when he is robbed by a group of hoodlums or comes home with a bloody nose. Do not cling to him or allow him to cling to you. When he is invited with friends to go swimming or to a ball game or to a movie, tell him, “Of course. I have an awful lot of things to do about the house and I’ll get them done faster if I’m alone.”

Do not be a father. The things your son must do with men let him do with men. Do not try to entertain him, because you fear it must be dull for him living alone with a grieving woman on top of a hill far away from the centers where boys amuse themselves.

Do not think about sex. Do not be surprised that you do think about it.

Be incredulous when ex-husband calls and emotionally suggests that he would like to remarry you. If the marriage that was founded on love could not last, the marriage based on death would be a disaster.

Neither avoid nor seek out places where you have been happy together.

Garden, sunbathe, wash dishes, keep a neat house, help son with homework, do not show that you expect more of him than other parents expect of other sons. Be prompt to take him to the corner where he picks up the school bus, be prompt to meet the bus when it returns. Refrain from kissing him excessively.

Be understanding about your own mother, whom son now says he wishes to visit during the summer vacation. Say, “Summer is a long time off.”

Be careful about being caught alone with men whom you have admired or Colin has admired and who admire you and have been known to admire many other women in this town of excess women, and whose sympathy will skillfully turn into something else in three or four sessions and who will then try to lay you and will probably succeed. Be careful about being caught alone with men who have admired Colin or Colin had admired and whose sympathy is genuinely only that but who will eventually want to lay you, too. They, too, will probably succeed.

Do not build your life on your son. It is the most certain way to lose him.

Keep busy. But at what?

“Are you sure you’ve looked everywhere, Mrs. Burke?” Mr. Greenfield asked. He was the lawyer Colin’s agent had sent her to. Or rather, one of a huge battery of lawyers, all of whose names were on the door of the suite of offices in the elegant building in Beverly Hills. All of the names on the door seemed equally concerned with her problem, equally intelligent, equally well dressed, equally urbane, smiling, and sympathetic, equally costly, and equally helpless.

“I’ve turned the house upside down, Mr. Greenfield,” Gretchen said. “I’ve found hundreds of scripts, hundreds of bills, some of them unpaid, but no will.”

Mr. Greenfield almost sighed, but refrained. He was a youngish man in a button-down collar, to show that he had gone to law school in the East, and a bright bow tie, to show that he now lived in California. “Do you have any knowledge of any safety deposit boxes that your husband might have had?”

“No,” she said. “And I don’t believe he had any. He was careless about things like that.”

“I’m afraid he was careless about quite a few things,” Mr. Greenfield said. “Not leaving a will …”

“How did he know he was going to die?” she demanded. “He never had a sick day in his life.”

“It makes it easier if one thinks about all the possibilities,” Mr. Greenfield said. Gretchen was sure he had been drawing up wills for himself since he was twenty-one. Mr. Greenfield finally permitted himself the withheld sigh. “For our part, we’ve explored every avenue. Incredibly enough, your husband never employed any lawyer. He allowed his agent to draw up his contracts and from what his agent said, most of the time he hardly bothered to read them. And when he allowed the ex-Mrs. Burke to divorce him, he permitted her lawyer to write the divorce settlement.”

Gretchen had never met the ex-Mrs. Burke, but now, after Colin’s death, she was beginning to get to know her very well. She had been an airline hostess and a model. She had an abiding fondness for money and believed that to work for it was unfeminine and repugnant. She had been getting twenty thousand dollars a year as alimony and at the time of Colin’s death had been starting proceedings to get it raised to forty thousand dollars a year because Colin’s income had risen steeply since he had come to Hollywood. She was living with a young man, in places like New York, Palm Beach, and Sun Valley, when she wasn’t traveling abroad, but sensibly refused to marry the young man, since one of the clauses that Colin had managed to insert in the divorce settlement would cut off the alimony on her remarriage. She or her lawyers seemed to have a wide knowledge of the law, both State and Federal, and immediately after the funeral, which she had not attended, she had had Colin’s bank deposits impounded and had secured an injunction against the estate to prevent Gretchen from selling the house.

Since Gretchen had had no separate bank account and had merely asked Colin for money when she needed it and allowed his secretary at the office to pay the bills, she found herself without any cash and had to depend upon Rudolph to keep her going. Colin had left no insurance because he thought insurance companies were the biggest thieves in America, so there was no money there, either. As the accident had been his fault alone, with no one else involved (he had hit a tree and the County of Los Angeles was preparing to sue the estate for damage to the tree), there was nobody against whom Gretchen could press claims for compensation.

“I have to get out of that house, Mr. Greenfield,” Gretchen said. The evenings were the worst. Whispers in shadowy corners of rooms. Half expecting the door to open at any moment and Colin to come in, cursing an actor or a cameraman.

“I quite understand,” Mr. Greenfield said. He really was a decent man. “But if you don’t remain in possession, physical possession, Mr. Burke’s ex-wife might very possibly find legal grounds for moving in. Her lawyers are very good, very good indeed—” The professional admiration was ungrudging, all the names on one door of an elegant building paying sincere tribute to all the names on the door of another elegant building just a block away. “If there’s a loophole, they’ll find it. And in law, if one looks long enough, there is almost always a loophole.”

“Except for me,” Gretchen said despairingly.

“It’s a question of time, my dear Mrs. Burke.” Just the gentlest of rebukes at a layman’s impatience. “There’s nothing clear-cut about this case, I regret to say. The house was in your husband’s name, there is a mortgage on it, payments to be made. The size of the estate is undetermined and may remain undetermined for many years. Mr. Burke had a percentage, quite a large percentage of the three films he directed and a continuing interest in stock and foreign royalties and possible movie sales of quite a number of the plays he was connected with.” The enumeration of these splendid difficulties that remained to be dealt with before the file of Colin Burke could be marked “Closed” obviously brought Mr. Greenfield an elegiac pleasure. If the law were not as complicated as it was he would have sought another and more exigent profession. “There will have to be expert opinions, the testimony of studio officials, a certain amount of give and take between parties. To say nothing of the possibility of other claims against the estate. Relatives of the deceased, for example, who have a habit of cropping up in cases like this.”

“He only has one brother,” Gretchen said. “And he told me he didn’t want anything.” The brother had come to the cremation. He was a taut young colonel in the Air Force who had been a fighter pilot in Korea and who had crisply taken charge of everything, even putting Rudolph on the sidelines. It was he who had made sure there were no religious services and who had told her that when Colin and he had spoken about death, they had each promised the other unceremonious burning. The day after the cremation, Colin’s brother had hired a private plane, had flown out to sea and strewn Colin’s ashes over the Pacific Ocean. He had told Gretchen if there was anything she needed to call on him. But short of strafing the ex-Mrs. Burke or bombing her lawyer’s offices, what could a straightforward colonel in the Air Force do to help his brother’s widow, enmeshed in the law?

Gretchen stood up. “Thank you for everything, Mr. Greenfield,” she said. “I’m sorry I’ve taken so much of your time.”

“Not at all.” Mr. Greenfield stood, legally courteous. “I’ll keep you informed, naturally, of all developments.”

He escorted her to the door of his office. Although his face showed nothing, she was sure he disapproved of the dress she was wearing, which was pale blue.

She went down a long aisle flanked by rows of desks at which secretaries typed rapidly, without looking up, deeds, wills, complaints, summonses, contracts, bankruptcy petitions, transfers, mortgages, briefs, enjoinders, writs of replevin.

They are typing away the memory of Colin Burke, she thought. Day after day after day.

Chapter 5

It was cold up in the bow of the ship, but Thomas liked it up there alone, staring out at the long, gray swells of the Atlantic. Even when it wasn’t his watch, he often went up forward and stood for hours, in all weathers, not saying anything to the man whose watch it happened to be, just standing there silently, watching the bow plunge and come up in a curl of white water, at peace with himself, not thinking consciously of anything, not wanting or needing to think about anything.

The ship flew the Liberian flag, but in two voyages he hadn’t come close to Liberia. The man called Pappy, the manager of the Aegean Hotel, had been as helpful as Schultzy had said he would be. He had fitted him out with the clothes and seabag of an old Norwegian seaman who had died in the hotel and had gotten him the berth on the Elga Andersen, Greek ownership, taking on cargo at Hoboken for Rotterdam, Algeciras, Genoa, Piraeus. Thomas had stayed in his room in the Aegean all the time he was in New York, eight days, and Pappy had brought him his meals personally, because Thomas had said he didn’t want any of the help to see him and start asking questions. The night before the Elga Andersen was due to sail Pappy had driven him over to the pier in Hoboken himself and watched while he signed on. The favor that Pappy owed Schultzy from Schultzy’s days in the Merchant Marine during the war must have been a big one.

The Elga Andersen had sailed at dawn the next day and anybody who was looking for Tommy Jordache was going to have a hard time finding him.

The Elga Andersen was a Liberty ship, ten thousand tons. It had been built in 1943 and had seen better days. It had gone from owner to owner, for quick profits, and nobody had done more to maintain it than was absolutely necessary to keep it afloat and moving. Its hull was barnacled, its engines wheezed, it hadn’t been painted in years, there was rust everywhere, the food was miserable, the captain an old religious maniac who knelt on the bridge during storms and who had been beached during the war for Nazi sympathies. The officers had papers from ten different countries and had been dismissed from other berths for drunkenness or incompetence or theft. The men in the crew were from almost every country with a coast on the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Norwegians, Italians, Moroccans, Mexicans, Americans, most of them with papers that could not stand inspection. There were fights almost every day in the mess room, where a poker game was always in progress, but the officers carefully refrained from interfering.

Thomas kept out of the poker game and the fights and spoke only when necessary and answered no questions and was at peace. He felt that he had found his place on the planet, plowing the wide waters of the world. No women, no worrying about weight, no pissing blood in the morning, no scrambling for money at the end of every month. Someday, he’d pay Schultzy back the one fifty he had given him in Las Vegas. With interest.

He heard steps behind him, but didn’t turn around.

“We’re in for a rough night,” said the man who had joined him in the bow. “We’re going right into a storm.”

Thomas grunted. He recognized the voice. A young guy named Dwyer, a kid from the Middle West who somehow managed to sound like a fag. He was rabbit-toothed and was nicknamed Bunny.

“It’s the skipper,” Dwyer went on. “Praying on the bridge. You know the saying—you have a minister on board, watch out for lousy weather.”

Thomas didn’t say anything.

“I just hope it’s not a big one,” Dwyer said. “Plenty of these Liberty ships have just broke in half in heavy seas. And the way we’re loaded. Did you notice the list to port we got?”

“No.”

“Well, we got it. This your first voyage?”

“Second.”

Dwyer had signed on in Savannah, where the Elga Andersen had put in after Thomas’s first return voyage on her.

“It’s a hell hole,” Dwyer said. “I’m only on it for the opportunity.”

Thomas knew Dwyer wanted him to ask what opportunity but just stood there staring out at the darkening horizon.

“You see,” Dwyer went on, when he realized Thomas wasn’t going to talk, “I’ve got my third mate’s papers. On American ships I might have to wait years before I move up top. But on a tub like this, with the kind of scum we got as officers, one of them’s likely to fall overboard drunk or get picked up by the police in port and then it’d be my opportunity, see?”

Thomas grunted. He had nothing against Dwyer, but he had nothing for him, either.

“You planning to try for mate’s papers, too?” Dwyer asked.

“Hadn’t thought about it.” Spray was coming over the bow now as the weather worsened and he huddled into his pea jacket. Under the jacket he had a heavy turtle-neck blue sweater. The old Norwegian who had died in the Hotel Aegean must have been a big man, because his clothes fit Thomas comfortably.

“The only thing to do,” Dwyer said. “I saw that the first day I set foot on the deck of my first ship. The ordinary seaman or even the A.B. winds up with nothing. Lives like a dog and winds up a broken old man at fifty. Even on American ships, with the union and everything and fresh fruit. Big deal. Fresh fruit. The thing is to plan ahead. Get some braid on you. The next time I’m back I’m going up to Boston and I’m going to take a shot at second mate’s papers.”

Thomas looked at him curiously. Dwyer was wearing a gob’s white hat, pulled down all around a yellow sou’wester and solid new rubber-soled, high, working shoes. He was a small man and he looked like a boy dressed up for a costume party, with the new, natty, sea-going clothes. The wind had reddened his face but not like an outdoor man’s face, rather like a girl’s who is not used to the cold and has suddenly been exposed to it. He had long, dark eyelashes over soft, black eyes and he seemed to be begging for something. His mouth was too large and too full and too busy. He kept moving his hands in and out of his pockets restlessly.

Christ, Thomas thought, is that why he’s come up here to talk to me and he always smiles at me when he passes me? I better put the bastard straight right now. “If you’re such an educated hotshot,” he said roughly, “with mate’s papers and all, what’re you doing down here with all of us poor folks? Why aren’t you dancing with some heiress on a cruise ship in your nice white officer’s suit?”

“I’m not trying to be superior, Jordache,” Dwyer said. “Honest I’m not. I like to talk to somebody once in awhile and you’re about my age and you’re American and you got dignity, I saw that right away, dignity. Everybody else on this ship—they’re animals. They’re always making fun of me, I’m not one of them, I’ve got ambition, I won’t play in their crooked poker games. You must’ve noticed.”

“I haven’t noticed anything,” Thomas said.

“They think I’m a fag or something,” Dwyer said. “You didn’t notice that?”

“No, I didn’t.” Except for meals, Thomas stayed out of the mess room.

“It’s my curse,” Dwyer said. “That’s what happens when I apply for third mate anywhere. They look at my papers, my recommendations, then they talk to me for awhile and look me over in that queer way and they tell me there’s no openings. Boy, I can see that look coming from a mile off. I’m no fag, I swear to God, Jordache.”

“You don’t have to swear anything for me,” Thomas said. The conversation made him uncomfortable. He didn’t want to be let in on anybody’s secrets or troubles. He wanted to do his job and go from one port to another and sail the seas in solitude.

“I’m engaged to be married, for Christ’s sake,” Dwyer cried. He dug into the back pocket of his pants and brought forth a wallet and took out a photograph. “Here, look at this.” He thrust the snapshot in front of Thomas’s nose. “That’s my girl and me. Last summer on Narragansett Beach.” A very pretty, full-bodied young girl, with curly blonde hair, in a bathing suit, and beside her, Dwyer, small but trim and well muscled, like a bantamweight, in a tightly fitting pair of swimming trunks. He looked in good enough shape to go into the ring, but of course that meant nothing. “Does that look like a fag?” Dwyer demanded. “Does that girl look as though she was the type to marry a fag?”

“No,” Thomas admitted.

The spray coming over the bow sprinkled the photograph. “You better put the picture away,” he said. “The water’ll ruin it.”

Dwyer took out a handkerchief and dried the snapshot and put it back in his wallet. “I just wanted you to know,” he said, “that if I like to talk to you from time to time it’s nothing like that.”

“Okay,” Thomas said. “Now I know it.”

“As long as we have matters on a firm basis,” Dwyer said, almost belligerently. “That’s all.” Abruptly, he turned away and made his way along the temporary wooden cat track built over the oil drums stowed as deck cargo forward.

Thomas shook his head, feeling the sting of spray on his face. Everybody has his troubles. A boatload of troubles. If everybody on the whole goddamn ship came up and told you what was bothering him, you’d want to jump overboard there and then.

He crouched in the bow, to escape the direct blows of spray, only occasionally lifting his head to do his job, which was to see what was ahead of the Elga Andersen on his watch.

Mate’s papers, he thought. If you were going to make your living out of the sea, why not? He’d ask Dwyer, offhandedly, later, how you went about getting them. Fag or no fag.

They were in the Mediterranean, passing Gibraltar, but the weather, if anything, was worse. The captain no doubt was still praying to God and Adolf Hitler on the bridge. None of the officers had gotten drunk and fallen overboard and Dwyer still hadn’t moved up top. He and Thomas were in the old naval gun crew’s quarters at the stern, seated at the steel table riveted to the deck in the common room. The anti-aircraft guns had long since been dismounted, but nobody had bothered to dismantle the crew’s quarters. There were at least ten urinals in the head. The kids of the gun crew must have pissed like mad, Thomas thought, every time they heard a plane overhead.

The sea was so rough that on every plunge the screw came out of the water and the entire stern shuddered and roared and Dwyer and Thomas had to grab for the papers and books and charts spread on the table to keep them from sliding off. But the gun crew’s quarters was the only place they could get off alone and work together. They got in at least a couple of hours a day and Thomas, who had never paid any attention at school, was surprised to see how quickly he learned from Dwyer about navigation, sextant reading, star charts, loading, all the subjects he would have to have at his fingertips when he took the examination for third mate’s papers. He was also surprised how much he enjoyed the sessions. Thinking about it in his bunk, when he was off watch, listening to the other two men in the cabin with him snore away, he felt he knew why the change had come about. It wasn’t only age. He still didn’t read anything else, not even the newspapers, not even the sporting pages. The charts, the pamphlets, the drawings of engines, the formulas, were a way out. Finally, a way out.

Dwyer had worked in the engine rooms of ships, as well as on deck, and he had a rough but adequate grasp of engineering problems and Thomas’s experience around garages made it easier to understand what Dwyer was talking about.

Dwyer had grown up on the shores of Lake Superior and had sailed small boats ever since he was a kid and as soon as he had finished high school he had hitchhiked to New York, gone down to the Battery to see the ships passing in and out of port, and had got himself signed on a coastal oil tanker as a deckhand. Nothing that had happened to him since that day had diminished his enthusiasm for the sea.

He didn’t ask any questions about Thomas’s past and Thomas didn’t volunteer any information. Out of gratitude for what Dwyer was teaching him, Thomas was almost beginning to like the little man.

“Some day,” Dwyer said, grabbing for a chart that was sliding forward, “you and I will both have our own ships. Captain Jordache, Captain Dwyer presents his compliments and asks if you will honor him and come aboard.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “I can just see it.”

“Especially if there’s a war,” Dwyer said. “I don’t mean a great big one, like World War II, where if you could sail a rowboat across Central Park Lake, you could get to be skipper of some kind of ship. I mean even a little one like Korea. You have no idea how much money guys come home with, with combat zone pay, stuff like that. And how many guys who didn’t know their ass from starboard came out masters of their own ships. Hell, the United States has got to be fighting somewhere soon and if we’re ready, there’s no telling how high we can go.”

“Save your dreams for the sack,” Thomas said. “Let’s get back to work.”

They bent over the chart.

It was in Marseilles that the idea hit Thomas. It was nearly midnight and he and Dwyer had had dinner together at a seafood place on the Vieux Port. Thomas remembered that this was the south coast of France and they had drunk three bottles of vin rosé between them because they were on the south coast of France, even though Marseilles hardly could be considered a tourist resort. The Elga Andersen was due to lift anchor at 5 A.M. and as long as they got back on board before that, they were okay.

After dinner they had walked around, stopping in several bars and now they were at what was going to be their last stop, a small dark bar off the Canebiere. A juke box was playing and a few fat whores at the bar were waiting to be asked if they wanted a drink. Thomas wouldn’t have minded having a girl, but the whores were sleazy and probably had the clap and didn’t go with his idea of the kind of lady you ought to have on the south coast of France.

Drinking, a little blearily, at a table along the wall, looking at the girls, fat legs showing under loud, imitation silk dresses, Thomas remembered ten of the best days in his life, the time in Cannes with the wild English girl who liked jewelry.

“Say,” he said to Dwyer, sitting across from him, drinking beer, “I got an idea.”

“What’s that?” Dwyer was keeping a wary eye on the girls, fearful that one of them would come over and sit down next to him and put her hand on his knee. He had offered earlier in the evening to pick up a prostitute to prove, once and for all, to Thomas that he wasn’t a fag, but Thomas had said it wasn’t necessary, he didn’t care whether he was a fag or not and anyway it wouldn’t prove anything because he knew plenty of fags who also screwed.

“What’s what?” Thomas asked.

“You said you had an idea.”

“An idea. Yeah. An idea. Let’s skip the fucking ship.”

“You’re crazy,” Dwyer said. “What the hell’ll we do in Marseilles without a ship? They’ll put us in jail.”

“Nobody’ll put us in jail,” Thomas said. “I didn’t say for good. Where’s the next port she puts into? Genoa. Am I right?”

“Okay. Genoa,” Dwyer said reluctantly.

“We pick her up in Genoa,” Thomas said. “We say we got drunk and we didn’t wake up until she was out of the harbor. Then we pick her up in Genoa. What can they do to us? Dock us a few days’ pay, that’s all. They’re short-handed as it is. After Genoa, the ship goes straight back to Hoboken, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So we don’t lose any shore time, them keeping us on board in a port. I don’t want to sail on that lousy tub any more, anyway. We can always pick up something better in New York.”

“But what’ll we do between now and Genoa?” Dwyer asked worriedly.

“We tour. We make the grand tour,” Thomas said, “We get on the train and we go to Cannes. Haunt of millionaires, like they say in the papers. I been there. Time of my life. We lay on the beach, we find ourselves some dames. We got our pay in our pocket …”

“I’m saving my money,” Dwyer said.

“Live a little, live a little,” Thomas said impatiently. By now it was inconceivable to him that he could go back to the gloom of the ship, stand watches, chip paint, eat the garbage they handed out, with Cannes so close by, available, waiting.

“I don’t even have my toothbrush on me,” Dwyer said.

“I’ll buy you a toothbrush,” Thomas said. “Say, you’re always telling me what a great sailor you are, how you sailed a dory all over Lake Superior when you were a kid …”

“What’s Lake Superior got to do with Cannes?”

“Sailor boy …” It was one of the whores from the bar, in a spangled dress showing most of her bosom. “Sailor boy, want to buy nize lady nize little drink, have good time, wiz ozzer lady later?” She smiled, showing gold teeth.

“Get outa here,” Thomas said.

“Salaud,” the woman said amiably, and spangled over to the juke box.

“What’s Lake Superior got to do with Cannes?” Thomas said. “I’ll tell you what Lake Superior’s got to do with Cannes. You’re a hot small boat sailor on Lake Superior …”

“Well, I …”

“Are you or aren’t you?”

“For Christ’s sake, Tommy,” Dwyer said, “I never said I was Christopher Columbus or anybody like that. I said I sailed a dory and some small power boats when I was a kid and …”

“You know how to handle boats. Am I right in supposing that or ain’t I right?”

“Sure, I can handle small boats,” Dwyer admitted. “I still don’t see …”

“On the beach at Cannes,” Thomas said, “they got sailboats you can rent by the hour. I want to see with my own eyes how you rate. You’re big on theory, with charts and books. All right, I want to see you actually get a boat in and out of some place. Or do I have to take that on faith, too, like your not being a fag?”

“Tommy!” Dwyer said, hurt.

“You can teach me,” Thomas said. “I want to learn from an expert. Ah—the hell with it—if you’re too yellow to come with me, I’ll do it myself. Go on back to the boat, like a nice little boy.”

“Okay,” Dwyer said. “I never did anything like this before. But I’ll do it. The hell with the ship.” He drained his beer.

“The grand tour,” Thomas said.

It wasn’t as good as he’d remembered it, because he had Dwyer with him, not that wild English girl. But it was good enough. And it certainly was a lot better than standing watches on the Elga Andersen and eating that slop and sleeping in the same stinking hole with two snoring Moroccans.

They found a cheap little hotel that wasn’t too bad behind the rue d’Antibes and went swimming off the beach, although it was only springtime and the water was so cold you could only stay in a little while. But the white buildings were the same, the pink wine was the same, the blue sky was the same, the great yachts lying in the harbor were the same. And he didn’t have to worry about his weight or fighting some murderous Frenchman when the holiday was over.

They rented a little sailboat by the hour and Dwyer hadn’t been lying, he really knew how to handle small boats. In two days he had taught Thomas a great deal and Thomas could slip a mooring and come up to it dead, with the sail rattling down, nine times out of ten.

But most of the time they spent around the harbor, walking slowly around the quays, silently admiring the sloops, the schooners, the big yachts, the motor cruisers, all still in the harbor and being sanded down and varnished and polished up for the season ahead.

“Christ,” Thomas said, “would you believe there’s so much money in the world and we don’t have any of it.”

They found a bar on the Quai St. Pierre frequented by the sailors and captains working on pleasure craft. Some of them were English and many of the others could speak a little and they got into conversations with them whenever they could. None of the men seemed to work very hard and the bar was almost always at least half full at all hours of the day. They learned to drink pastis because that was what everybody else drank and because it was cheap. They hadn’t found any girls and the ones who accosted them from cars on the Croisette or back behind the port asked too much money. But for once in his life Thomas didn’t mind going without a woman. The harbor was enough for him, the vision of the life based on it, of grown men living year in and year out on beautiful ships was enough for him. No boss to bother about nine months of the year, and then in the summer being a big shot at the wheel of a hundred-thousand-dollar craft, going to places like St. Tropez and Monte Carlo and Capri, coming into harbor with girls in bathing suits draped all over the decks. And they all seemed to have money. What they didn’t earn in salary they got in kickbacks from ship chandlers and boatyards and rigged expense accountts. They ate and drank like kings and some of the older ones weren’t sober from one day to the next.

“These guys,” Thomas said, after they had been in town for four days, “have solved the problems of the universe.”

He even thought of skipping the Elga Andersen for good and trying to get a job on one of the yachts for the summer, but it turned out that unless you were a skipper you most likely only got hired for three or four months, at lousy pay, and you were let go for the rest of the year. Much as he liked Cannes, he couldn’t see himself starving eight months a year just to be there.

Dwyer was just as dazzled as he was. Maybe even more so. He hadn’t even been in Cannes before but had admired and had been around boats all his life. What was an adult discovery for Thomas was a reminder for Dwyer of the deepest pleasures of his boyhood.

There was one Englishman in the bar, a dark-brown colored little man with white hair, named Jennings, who had been in the British navy during the war and who owned, actually owned, his boat, a sixty-footer with five cabins. It was old and cranky, the Englishman told them, but he knew it like his own mother, and he coaxed her all around the Med, Malta, Greece, Sicily, everywhere, as a charter captain during the summer. He had an agent in Cannes who booked his charters for him, for ten per cent. He had been lucky, he said. The man who had owned the boat and for whom he had worked, had hated his wife. When he died, out of spite, he had left the boat to Jennings. Well, you couldn’t bank on things like that.

Jennings sipped complacently at his pastis. His motor yacht, the Gertrude II, stubby, but clean and comfortable looking, was moored for the winter across the street, just in front of the bar, and as he drank Jennings could look fondly at it, all good things close at hand. “It’s a lovely life,” he said. “I fair have to admit it, Yanks. Instead of fighting for a couple of bob a day, hauling cargo on the docks of Liverpool or sweating blood oiling engines in some tub in the North Sea in a winter’s gale. To say nothing of the climate and taxes.” He waved largely toward the view of the harbor outside the bar where the mild sun tipped the gently bobbing masts of the boats moored side by side at the quay. “Rich man’s weather,” Jennings said. “Rich man’s weather.”

“Let me ask you a question, Jennings,” Thomas said. He was paying for the Englishman’s drinks and he was entitled to a few questions. “How much would it cost to get a fair-sized boat, say one like yours, and get into business?”

Jennings lit a pipe and pulled at it reflectively. He never did anything quickly, Jennings. He was no longer in the British navy, or on the docks, there was no foreman or mate to snarl at him, he had time for everything. “Ah, that’s a hard question to answer, Yank,” he said. “Ships are like women—some come high and some come cheap, but the price you pay has little to do with the satisfaction you get from them.” He laughed appreciatively at his own worldliness.

“The minimum,” Thomas persisted. “The absolute minimum?”

Jennings scratched his head, finished his pastis. Thomas ordered another round.

“It’s a matter of luck,” Jennings said. “I know men put down a hundred thousand pounds, cash on the barrelhead, ships designed by the fanciest naval architects, built in the best shipyards in Holland or Britain, steel hulls, teak decks, every last little doodad on board, radar, electric toilets, air conditioning, automatic pilot, and they cursed the day the bloody thing was put in the water and they would have been glad to get rid of it for the price of a case of whiskey, and no takers.”

“We don’t have any hundred thousand pounds,” Thomas said shortly.

“We?” Dwyer said bewilderedly. “What do you mean, we?”

“Shut up,” Thomas said. “Your boat never cost any hundred thousand pounds,” he said to Jennings.

“No,” Jennings said. “I don’t pretend it ever did.”

“I mean something reasonable,” Thomas said.

“Reasonable aren’t a word you use about boats,” Jennings said. He was beginning to get on Thomas’s nerves. “What’s reasonable for one man is pure lunacy for another, if you get my meaning. It’s a matter of luck, like I was saying. For example, a man has a nice snug little ship, cost him maybe twenty, thirty thousand pounds, but maybe his wife gets seasick all the time, or he’s had a bad year in business and his creditors are panting on his traces and it’s been a stormy season for cruising and maybe the market’s been down and it looks as though the Communists’re going to take over in Italy or France or there’s going to be a war or the tax people’re after him for some hanky-panky, maybe he didn’t tell them he paid for the ship with money he had stowed away quiet-like in some bank in Switzerland, so he’s pressed, he’s got to get out and get out fast and suddenly nobody wants to buy boats that week … You get my drift, Yank?”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “You don’t have to draw a map.”

“So he’s desperate,” Jennings went on. “Maybe he needs five thousand guineas before Monday or the house falls in on his head. If you’re there and you have the five thousand guineas …”

“What’s a guinea?” Dwyer asked.

“Five thousand guineas is fifteen thousand bucks,” Thomas said. “Isn’t it?”

“Give or take a few bob,” Jennings said. “Or you hear about a naval vessel that’s up for auction or a vessel that’s been confiscated by the Customs for smuggling. Of course, it needs refitting, but if you’re clever with your hands and don’t pay these pirates in the shipyards around here to do your work for you—never trust a Frenchman on the Côte, especially along the waterfront, he’ll steal the eyes right out of your head—why, maybe, playing everything close and counting your money every night, maybe with luck, and getting some people to trust you till the end of the season for gear and provisions, you’re in the water and ready for your first charter for as little as eight, ten thousand pounds.”

“Eight, ten thousand pounds,” Dwyer said. “It might as well be eight, ten million dollars.”

“Shut up,” Thomas said. “There’re ways of making money.”

“Yeah?” Dwyer said. “How?”

“There’re ways. I once made three thousand bucks in one night.”

Dwyer took in a deep breath. “How?”

It was the first time Thomas had given anybody a clue to his past since he had left the Hotel Aegean, and he was sorry he had spoken. “Never mind how,” he said sharply. He turned to Jennings. “Will you do me a favor?”

“Anything within my power,” Jennings said. “As long as it don’t cost me no money.” He chuckled softly, boat owner, sitting on top of the system, canny graduate of the Royal Navy, survivor of war and poverty, pastis drinker, wise old salt, nobody’s fool.

“If you hear of anything,” Thomas said. “Something good, but cheap, get in touch with us, will you.”

“Happy to oblige, Yank,” Jennings said. “Just write the address down.”

Thomas hesitated. The only address he had was the Hotel Aegean and the only person he had given it to was his mother. Before the fight with Quayles, he had visited her fairly regularly, when he was sure he wouldn’t run into his brother Rudolph. Since then he had written her from the ports he had touched at, sending her folders of postcards and pretending he was doing better than he was doing. When he had come back from his first voyage there had been a bundle of letters from her waiting for him at the Aegean. The only trouble with her letters was that she kept asking to see her grandson and he didn’t dare get in touch with Teresa even to see the boy. It was the one thing he missed about America.

“Just write the address down, lad,” Jennings repeated.

“Give him your address,” Thomas said to Dwyer. Dwyer got his mail at the headquarters of the National Maritime Union in New York. Nobody was looking for him.

“Why don’t you stop dreaming?” Dwyer said.

“Do like I say.”

Dwyer shrugged, wrote out his address, and gave it to Jennings. His handwriting was clear and straight. He would keep a neat log, Third Mate Dwyer. If he ever got the chance.

The old man put the slip of paper into an old, cracked, leather wallet. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled and my ears open,” he promised.

Thomas paid the bill and he and Dwyer started along the quay, examining all the boats tied up there, as usual. They walked slowly and silently. Thomas could feel Dwyer glancing at him uneasily from time to time.

“How much money you got?” Thomas asked, as they reached the foot of the harbor, where the fishing boats, with their acetylene lamps, were tied up, with the nets laid out along the pavement, drying.

“How much money I got?” Dwyer said querulously. “Not even a hundred bucks. Just enough to buy one-millionth of an ocean liner.”

“I don’t mean how much money you got on you. I mean altogether. You keep telling me you save your dough.”

“If you think I’ve got enough for a crazy scheme like …”

“I asked you how much money you got. In the bank?”

“Twenty-two hundred dollars,” Dwyer said reluctantly. “In the bank. Listen, Tommy, stop jerking off, we’ll never …”

“Between us,” Thomas said, “you and me, one day, we’re going to have our own boat. Right here. In this port. Rich man’s weather, like the Englishman said. We’ll get the money somehow.”

“I’m not going to do anything criminal.” Dwyer sounded scared. “I never committed a crime in my life and I’m not going to start now.”

“Who said anything about committing a crime?” Thomas said. Although the thought had crossed his mind. There had been plenty of what Dwyer would call criminals hanging around during his years in the ring, in two-hundred-dollar suits and big cars, with fancy broads hanging on their arms, and everybody being polite and glad to see them, cops, politicians, businessmen, movie stars. They were just about like everybody else. There was nothing so special about them. Crime was just another way of earning a buck. Maybe an easier way. But he didn’t want to scare Dwyer off. Not yet. If it ever came off, he’d need Dwyer to handle the boat. He couldn’t do it alone. Yet. He wasn’t that much of an idiot.

Somehow, he told himself, as they passed the old men playing boules on the quay-side, with the harbor behind them, the protected sheet of water crowded with millions of dollars worth of pleasure craft, shining in the sun. The one time he had been here before, he had sworn he’d come back. Well, he had come back. And he was going to come back again. SOMEHOW.

The next morning, early, they caught the train on the way to Genoa. They gave themselves an extra day, because they wanted to stop off and see Monte Carlo. Maybe they’d have some luck at the Casino.

If he had been at the other end of the platform he’d have seen his brother Rudolph getting out of one of the sleeping cars from Paris, with a slender, pretty, young girl and a lot of new luggage.

Chapter 6

When they walked through the exit gate of the station, they saw the Hertz sign and Rudolph said, “There’s the man with our car.” The concierge at the hotel in Paris had taken care of everything. As Jean had said, after the concierge had arranged for tickets to the theater, for a limousine to tour the chateaux of the Loire, for tables at ten restaurants, for places at the Opera and Longchamps, “Every marriage should have its own private Paris concierge.”

The porter trundled their luggage over to the car, said merci for the tip and smiled, although they were plainly American. According to the newspapers back home Frenchmen were not smiling at Americans this year. The man from the Hertz agency started to talk in English but Rudolph showed off with his French, mostly to amuse Jean, and the remaining formalities for renting the Peugeot convertible were concluded in the language of Racine. Rudolph had bought a Michelin map of the Alpes-Maritimes in Paris, and after consulting it, with the car top down, and the soft Mediterranean morning sun shining on their bare heads, they drove through the white town and then along the edge of the sea, through Golfe Juan, where Napoleon had landed, through Juan-les-Pins, its big hotels still in their pre-season sleep, to the Hotel du Cap, shapely, cream colored and splendid on its gentle hill among the pines.

As the manager showed them up to their suite, with a balcony overlooking the calm, blue sea below the hotel park, Rudolph said, coolly, “It’s very nice, thank you.” But it was only with the greatest difficulty that he kept from grinning idiotically at how perfectly the manager, himself, and Jean were playing their roles in his ancient dream. Only it was better than the dream. The suite was larger and more luxuriously furnished; the air was sweeter; the manager was more of a manager than anyone could imagine; he himself was richer and cooler and better dressed than he had been in his poor-boy reverie; Jean, in her slim Paris suit, was more beautiful than the imaginary girl who had walked out onto the balcony overlooking the sea and kissed him in his fantasy.

The manager bowed himself out, the porters finished placing the bags on folding stools around the gigantic bed-room. Solid, real, with a solid, real wife, he said, “Let’s go out on the balcony.”

They went out on the balcony and kissed in the sunlight.

They nearly hadn’t married at all. Jean had hesitated and hesitated, refusing to say yes or no and for awhile he was on the brink of delivering an ultimatum to her every time he saw her, which was tantalizingly seldom. He was kept in Whitby and Port Philip a great deal of the time by work and then, when he did get to New York it was often only to find a message with his answering service from Jean telling him that she was out of town on a job. One night, he had seen her in a restaurant after the theater with a small, beady-eyed young man with matted long hair and a week-old growth of dark stubble on his jaws. The next time he saw her he asked her who the young man was and she admitted it still was the same one, the one she was overlapping with. When he asked her if she was still sleeping with him, she answered that it was none of his business.

He had felt humiliated that he was in competition with anyone that unsavory looking and it didn’t make him feel any better to be told by Jean that the man was one of the most famous fashion photographers in the country. He had walked out on her that time and waited for her to get in touch with him, but she never called him and finally he couldn’t bear it any longer and called her, swearing to himself that he would screw her but he’d be damned if he ever would marry her.

His whole conception of himself was damaged by her treatment of him and it was only in bed, where she delighted him and seemed to be delighted by him that he found any relief from his brooding feeling that he was being debased by the entire affair. All the men he knew assured him that all the girls they knew did nothing but plot constantly to get married. What sensational lack was there in his character or his lovemaking or general desirability that had made the only two girls he had asked to marry reject him?

Virginia Calderwood hadn’t helped matters either. Old man Calderwood had followed Rudolph’s advice about allowing his daughter to come down to New York and live alone and take a secretarial course. But if she was learning typing and stenography, Virginia must have done it at very odd hours indeed, because almost every time Rudolph went to his New York apartment, he would spot her, lurking in a doorway across the street or pretending just to be walking by. She would telephone in the middle of the night, sometimes three or four times, to say, “Rudy, I love you, I love you. I want you to fuck me.”

To avoid her, he took to staying in different hotels when he came to New York, but for some prudish reason, Jean refused to visit him in a hotel and even the pleasures of the bed were denied him. Jean still wouldn’t let him call for her at her apartment and he had never seen the place where she lived or met her roommate.

Virginia sent him long letters, horrifyingly explicit about her sensual longings for him, the language straight out of Henry Miller, whom Virginia must have studied assiduously. The letters were sent to his home at Whitby, to his apartment, to the main office at the store, and all it would take would be for one careless secretary to open any one of them and he doubted if old man Calderwood would ever talk to him again.

When he told Jean about Virginia, she just laughed and said, “Oh, you poor attractive man.” Mischievously, one night, when they came back late to his apartment and he spotted Virginia in the shadows across the street, Jean wanted to go over and invite the girl up for a drink.

His work suffered and he found that he had to read simple reports over three and four times before they registered on his brain. He slept restlessly and awoke weary. For the first time in his life he had a rash of pimples on his chin.

At a party in New York he met a bosomy blonde lady who seemed to have three men around her at all times during the evening, but who made it plain to him that she wanted to go home with him. He took her to her apartment in the East Eighties, off Fifth Avenue, learned that she was rich, that she was divorced, that she was lonely, that she was tired of the men who pursued her around New York, that she found him ravishingly sexy (he wished she had found another style of expressing herself). They went to bed together after one drink and he was impotent and he left on a volley of coarse laughter from the useless bed.

“The unluckiest day of my life,” he told Jean, “was the day you came up to Port Philip to take those pictures.”

Nothing that happened made him stop loving her or wanting to marry her and live with her for the rest of his life.

He had called her all day, ten times, a dozen times, but there never was any answer. One more time, he decided, sitting disconsolately in the living room of his apartment, I’ll try one more goddamn time and if she’s not home I will go out and get roaring drunk and pick up girls and fight in bars and if Virginia Calderwood is outside the door when I come home I will bring her up here and screw her and then call the men with the straitjacket and tell them to come and take us both away.

The phone rang and rang and he was just about to put it down when it was picked up and Jean said, “Hello,” in the hushed, childish little way she had.

“Has your phone been out of order?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been out all day.”

“Are you going to be out all night?”

There was a pause. “No,” she said.

“Do we meet?” He was ready to slam the phone down if she said no. He had once told her that he only had two alternating emotions about her—rage and ecstasy.

“Do you want to meet?”

“Eight o’clock?” he said. “I’ll give you a drink here.” He had looked out the window and had not spotted Virginia Calderwood.

“I have to take a bath,” she said, “and I don’t feel like hurrying. Why don’t you come down here and I’ll give you a drink.”

“I hear the sound of cymbals and trumpets,” he said.

“Stop trying to sound educated,” she said, but she chuckled.

“What floor?”

“Fourth,” she said. “No elevator. Be careful of your heart.” She hung up.

He went in and showered and shaved. His hand wasn’t steady and he cut himself badly on the chin. The cut wouldn’t stop bleeding for a long time and he didn’t ring the bell of her apartment on East Fortieth Street until five minutes past eight.

The door was opened by a girl in blue jeans and a sweater whom he had never seen before, who said, “Hi, I’m Florence,” and then called, “Jeanny, the man’s here.”

“Come in, Rudy.” Jean’s voice floated out of an open door leading off the foyer. “I’m making up.”

“Thanks, Florence,” Rudolph said and went into Jean’s room. She was seated naked at a table in front of a small mirror putting mascara on her eyelashes. He hadn’t realized before that she used mascara. But he didn’t say anything about the mascara. Or her being naked. He was too busy looking around the room. Almost every inch of wall space was taken up with photographs of himself, smiling, frowning, squinting, writing on the clip board. Some of the photographs were small, others were immense blowups. All of them were flattering. It’s over, he thought gratefully, it’s all over. She’s decided.

“I know that man from somewhere,” he said.

“I thought you’d recognize him,” Jean said. Pink, firm, and dainty, she went on putting on mascara.

Over dinner, they talked about the wedding. By the time dessert came, they nearly called it off.

“What I like,” Rudolph said bitterly, “is a girl who knows her own mind.”

“Well, I know mine,” Jean said. She had grown sullen as Rudolph had argued with her. “I think I know what I’m going to do with my weekend,” she said. “I’m going to stay home and tear down every one of those photographs and whitewash the walls.”

To begin with, she was grimly devoted to secrecy. He wanted to let everybody know immediately, but she shook her head. “No announcements,” she said.

“I have a sister and a mother,” Rudolph said. “Actually, I have a brother, too.”

“That’s the whole idea. I’ve got a father and a brother. And I can’t stand either of them. If they find out that you told your family and I didn’t tell them, there’ll be thunder from the West for ten years. And after we’re married I don’t want to have anything to do with your family and I don’t want you to have anything to do with mine. Families’re out. Thanksgiving dinners at the old homestead. Christ!”

Rudolph had given in on that without too much of a fight. His wedding couldn’t be a gloriously happy occasion for Gretchen, with Colin dead just a few months. And the thought of his mother blubbering away in some horrible concoction of a church-going dress was not an appealing one. He could also easily do without the scene Virginia Calderwood would make upon hearing the news. But not telling Johnny Heath or Calderwood or Brad Knight would lead to complications around the office, especially if he wanted to leave immediately after the wedding on the honeymoon. The points that Jean and he had agreed upon were that there was to be no party, that they would get out of New York promptly, that they would not be married in church, and that they would go to Europe on the honeymoon.

They had not agreed upon what they would do when they returned from Europe. Jean refused to stop working and she refused to live in Whitby.

“Damn it,” Rudolph said, “here we’re not even married yet and you’ve got me down as a part-time husband.”

“I’m not domestic,” Jean had said stubbornly. “I don’t like small towns. I’m on my way up in this city. I’m not going to give it all up just because a man wants to marry me.”

“Jean …” Rudolph said warningly.

“All right,” she said. “Just because I want to marry a man.”

“That’s better,” he said.

“You’ve said yourself, the office rightly ought to be in New York.”

“Only it’s not in New York,” he said.

“You’ll like me better if you don’t see me all the time.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Well, I’ll like you better.”

He had given in on that, too. But without grace. “That’s my last surrender,” he said.

“Yes, dear,” she said, mock demurely, fluttering her eyelashes. She stroked his hand exaggeratedly on the table. “I do admire a man who knows how to assert himself.”

Then they had both laughed and everything was all right and Rudolph said, “There’s one sonofabitch that’s going to get an announcement and that’s that slimy photographer and if he wants to come to the wedding tell him he’s welcome, but he’s got to shave.”

“Fair enough,” Jean said, “if I can send an announcement to Virginia Calderwood.”

Cruel and happy, hand in hand, they left the restaurant and went into bar after bar on Third Avenue secretly and lovingly and finally, drunkenly, to toast the years ahead of them.

The next day he bought a diamond engagement ring at Tiffany’s, but she made him take it back. “I hate the trappings of wealth,” she said. “Just make sure to show up at City Hall on the day with a nice simple gold band.”

It was impossible, finally, not to tell Calderwood and Brad and Johnny Heath that he was going to be away for at least a month and why. Jean conceded the point, but on condition that he swear them to secrecy, which he did.

Calderwood was mournful. Rudolph couldn’t tell whether it was because of his daughter or because he didn’t like the idea of Rudolph being away from the business for a month. “I hope you’re not being rash,” Calderwood said. “I remember the girl. She seemed like a poor little thing to me. I’ll bet she doesn’t have a dime.”

“She works,” Rudolph said defensively.

“I don’t approve of wives working,” Calderwood said. He shook his head. “Ah, Rudy—and you could have had everything.”

Everything, Rudolph thought. Including crazy Virginia Calderwood and her pornographic letters.

Neither Brad nor Johnny Heath was wildly enthusiastic, but he wasn’t marrying to please them. Enthusiastic or not, they both came to the wedding at City Hall and drove out to the airport with the bride and groom and Florence.

Rudolph’s first husbandly moment came when they checked in and Jean’s luggage was nearly a hundred pounds overweight. “Good Lord,” he said, “what have you got in there?”

“A change of clothes,” Jean said. “You don’t want your wife to walk around naked in front of all those Frenchmen, do you?”

“For a girl who doesn’t like the trappings of luxury,” he said, as he wrote out the check for the overweight, “you sure carry around a lot of supplies.” He tried to make it sound light, but he had a moment of foreboding. The long years of having to pinch pennies had made him fitfully careful about money. Extravagant wives had ruined men many times wealthier than he. Unworthy fear. I’ll handle her, if necessary, he thought. Today he felt he could handle anything. He took her hand and led the way toward the bar.

They had time for two bottles of champagne before they took off and Johnny Heath promised to call Gretchen and Rudolph’s mother and tell them the news once the plane was off the ground.

The days grew warmer. They lazed in the sun. They became dark brown and Jean’s hair turned almost blond, bleached by the sun and salt water. She gave him tennis lessons on the courts of the hotel and said that he had talent for the game. She was very serious about the lessons and spoke sharply to him when he didn’t hit out correctly. She taught him how to water ski. She kept amazing him with the number of things she could do well.

They had lunch brought to them at their cabana overlooking the speed-boat mooring. They ate cold langouste and drank white wine and after lunch they went up to their rooms to make love, with the windows shuttered against the afternoon sun.

He didn’t look at any of the girls lying almost naked around the hotel pool and on the rocks next to the diving board, although two or three of the girls well deserved to be looked at.

“You’re unnatural,” Jean said to him.

“Why am I unnatural?”

“Because you don’t ogle.”

“I ogle you.”

“Keep it up,” she said.

They found new restaurants and ate bouillabaisse on the terrasse of Chez Felix, where you could look through the arch of the rampart at the boats in the harbor of Antibes. When they made love later they both smelled of garlic and wine, but they didn’t mind.

They took excursions to the hill towns and visited the Matisse chapel and the pottery works at Vallauris and ate lunch on the terrace of the Colombe d’Or at St.-Paul-de-Vence, in the white flutter of doves’ wings. They learned with regret that the flock was kept white because the white doves drove off pigeons of any other color. When occasionally the doves did tolerate their impure fellows, the proprietor killed them off himself.

Wherever they went, Jean took her cameras along, and took innumerable pictures of him against backgrounds of masts, ramparts, palms, waves. “I am going to make you into the wallpaper for our bedroom in New York,” she said.

He no longer bothered to put on a shirt when he came out of the water. Jean said she liked the hair on his chest and the fuzz on his shoulders.

They planned a trip to Italy when they got tired of the Cap d’Antibes. They got out a map and circled the towns of Menton, San Remo, Milano for the Last Supper, Rap-pallo, Santa Margherita, Firenze, for Michelangelo and the Botticellis, Bologna, Siena, Assisi, Rome. The names were like little bells chiming in sunshine. Jean had been everywhere. Other summers. It would be a long time before he learned everything about her.

They didn’t get tired of the Cap d’Antibes.

One day, he took a set from her in tennis. She fought off set point three times, but he finally won. She was furious. For two minutes.

They sent a cable to Calderwood to say that they weren’t coming back for awhile.

They didn’t speak to anyone at the hotel except an Italian movie actress who was so beautiful that you had to speak to her. Jean spent a morning taking photographs of the Italian movie actress and sent them to Vogue in New York. Vogue cabled back that they were going to run a set in their September issue.

Nothing could go wrong that month.

Although they still were not tired of the Cap d’Antibes, they got into the car and started driving south to visit the towns they had circled on the map. They were disappointed nowhere.

They sat in the cobbled square of Portofino and ate chocolate ice cream, the best chocolate ice cream in the world. They watched the women selling postcards and lace and embroidered tablecloths from their stands to tourists and they eyed the yachts moored in the harbor.

There was one slender, white yacht, about fifty feet long, with racy, clean Italian lines and Rudolph said, “That’s what machinery is all about. When it comes out like that.”

“Would you like to own it?” Jean asked, scooping up her chocolate ice cream.

“Who wouldn’t like to own it?” he said.

“I’ll buy it for you,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said. “And how about a Ferrari and a mink-lined overcoat and a forty-room house on the Cap d’Antibes, too, while you’re at it?”

“No,” she said, still eating her ice cream. “I really mean it. If you really want it.”

He examined her closely. She was calm and serious. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Vogue isn’t paying you that much for those pictures.”

“I don’t depend on Vogue,” she said. “I’m awfully rich. When my mother died she left me an obscene amount of stocks and bonds. Her father owned one of the biggest drug companies in the United States.”

“What’s the name of the company?” Rudolph asked suspiciously.

Jean told him the name of the company.

Rudolph whistled softly and put down his spoon.

“It’s all in a trust fund that my father and brother control until I’m twenty-five,” Jean said, “but even now my income is at least three times the size of yours. I hope I haven’t spoiled your day.”

Rudolph burst into a roar of laughter. “Christ,” he said. “What a honeymoon!”

She didn’t buy him a yacht that afternoon, but as a compromise, she bought him a shocking-pink shirt in a faggy shop alongside the harbor.

Later on, when he asked why she hadn’t told him before, she was evasive. “I hate talking about money,” she said. “That’s all they ever talked about in my family. By the time I was fifteen I came to the belief that money degrades the soul if you think about it all the time. I never went home a single summer after the age of fifteen. Since I got out of college I never used a cent of the money my mother left me. I let my father and brother put it back into the business. They want me to let them keep using the income when the trust expires, but they’re in for a big surprise. They’ll cheat me if they can and I’m not out to be cheated. Especially not by them.”

“Well, what are you going to do with it?”

“You’re going to handle it for me,” she said. “I’m sorry. For us. Do whatever you think best. Just don’t talk to me about it. And don’t use it to make us lead soggy, fancy, useless lives.”

“We’ve been leading pretty fancy lives these past few weeks,” Rudolph said.

“We’ve been spending your money and you worked for it,” Jean said. “Anyway, this is a honeymoon. It isn’t for real.”

When they got to the hotel in Rome there was a cable waiting for Rudolph. It was from Bradford Knight and it read, “Your mother in hospital Stop Doctor fears end is near Stop Believe you should return soonest.”

Rudolph handed the cable to Jean. They were still in the lobby and had just handed over their passports to the clerk at the desk. Jean read the cable silently, gave it back to him. “I suppose we ought to see if there’s a plane out tonight,” she said. It had been nearly five o’clock in the afternoon when they drove up to the hotel.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Rudolph said. He didn’t want to have to think about what to do about his mother’s dying in a crowded Roman hotel lobby.

They went up in the elevator and watched while the clerk who had accompanied them opened the shutters and let in the late sunlight and the roar of Rome.

“I hope you enjoy your stay,” the clerk said, and left.

They watched the porters come in and arrange their luggage. The porters went and they stared at the unopened bags. They had planned to stay in Rome at least two weeks.

“No,” Rudolph said. “We’re not going to see if there’s a plane tonight. The old lady is not going to do me out of Rome completely. We’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll take one day for you and me. She’ll be alive when I get there. She wouldn’t do herself out of the pleasure of dying before my eyes for anything in the world. Unpack.”

Chapter 7