Slam the Big Door

Two

The large patio on the bay side of the Jamison house was half-roofed and completely screened. A small swimming pool, about eighteen feet by thirty, took up a third of the available space. There was a lushness about the inevitable planting areas, tree ferns, jasmine, Jatropha. A big broadleaf Monstera dreamed in a fat cedar tub, nursing its fibrous fruit. Part of the floor area was of compacted concrete block stained dark blue, and there were other areas of slab concrete broken by cypress strips into random rectangles, with broken beach shell set into the cement to give a pleasing texture. There was deck furniture of redwood with wide arms, chairs of tubular bronze, and small, unmatched, glass-top tables.

In the warmth of the April noon the glass doors that separated the living room from the patio had been rolled back on their aluminum tracks into the recesses in the walls on either side. There were bright cushions, sun-faded, on the apron of the pool.

There was a long table near the pool, with a white cloth, stacks of paper plates, and a pattern of sunlight and narrow shadows across the chrome and copper and ceramic tureens under which blue alcohol flames burned, paled by sunlight.

There was no sea wall along the bay shore. Mangroves grew there, and some had been cut away to provide vistas of quiet water and the mile-distant mainland shore speckled with pastel block houses. Just to the north of the house there was a sea wall and a boat basin where the Jamison cruiser, a thirty-eight-foot Huckins, sat hot and white at her moorings, glinting in the sun.

There was quiet music on the high-fidelity system, from speakers hidden in living room and patio.

Mike Rodenska, ravenous after showering and changing to slacks and sports shirt, ladled himself a plate so generous he felt guilty about it, walked over and sat in one of the big redwood chairs in an empty corner, and began to eat.

Two minutes later a round brown woman wearing orange shorts, a red shirt, straw slippers and a clattering jangle of junk jewelry came over to him, carrying half a large Bloody Mary.

“Now don’t try to get up, Mr. Rodensky. I’m Marg Laybourne. A neighbor. We live just down the Key. The pink house. I’m terribly sorry we couldn’t make the party last night. I’m one of Mary’s very closest friends.” She pulled a straight chair close and sat down. She had a breathless way of speaking. He had seen dark brown eyes like those before, and in a moment he remembered where. In the chimp cage at the zoo — an intent and liquid curiosity, full of malice and mischief. “Don’t you think these Sundays are a wonderful custom, Mr. Rodensky?”

“Rodenska. Mike.”

“Oh. Rodenska. Is this your first visit to Florida, Mike?”

“The first.”

“Please keep eating. Everything looks delicious. We’ve been down here five years now, nearly six. Charlie, that’s my husband, was in banking and he had a coronary and retired, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him now, but he does have to be a little careful, but not as careful as he should be, I keep telling him. Are you on a vacation, Mike? Oh, I’m sorry. That was a stupid question. Mary told me you lost your wife a little while ago and they’d asked you down here for a change. Mary said you’re in the newspaper business.”

“I was.”

“You and Troy got to know each other in the army.”

“Marine Corps.”

“Well, in the war anyway. Charlie was in the Navy in Washington on a sort of civilian thing. I guess this must be a really total change for you, Mike, coming to Riley Key.”

“After what I’m used to?”

“It is unusual here, don’t you think? I call it the last outpost of gracious living, and yet we’re not formal at all. I mean the homes along here, it’s more like a club. This whole north end of the Key. The Jamisons and Laybournes and Claytons and Tomleys and Carstairs and Thatchers. Gus Thatcher, and he is an old darling, bought up most of this land in the beginning and he’s been careful to sell it to the right people. And the Key Club is so handy. We usually all end up there Sunday evenings.”

“We do?”

“Haven’t you seen it yet? It’s a rickety old place, full of stuffed fish, but the food is divine, really.”

“It’s all like one big happy family.”

“What? Oh, yes. Exactly. There are a few who don’t... participate very much, but we don’t have any of the wrong sort.”

“This old darling-type fellow, this Gus somebody, you figure he’d sell me a hunk of land?”

She seemed startled. “Well... the best pieces are gone and it’s really gotten terribly dear. The last piece sold, to a perfectly darling couple named Crown, well, it went at a hundred and sixty a foot, Gulf to bay, so they had to pay thirty-two thousand for their two hundred feet, and they’re going to start to build soon.”

“I wouldn’t need so much, Marg. Just to park a trailer on.”

“A trailer!”

“We call them mobile homes now. It sounds more deluxe.”

“You couldn’t do that! This is all zoned A-1 residential. My goodness, you’d never... you’re joking, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I’m pulling your leg, Marg. Actually I’m loaded.”

“What?”

“Loaded. Up to here in money.”

“Really?”

“What you call nouveau riche. I’m a diamond in the rough. Heart of gold. I really come on for dogs and kids. I’d be an asset to the Key.”

She had become very uncertain. “Are you really thinking of staying here?”

“I’m looking around, kiddo. Put it that way. Of course, I move into a place like this, I’d change my name to Rodens.”

“Are you being rude?”

“I don’t want to make you sore. I figure you could tip me off on something good down here to get into. Or that Charlie of yours could. Got to put money to work, you know.”

“Did you... sell your newspaper?”

“I never owned one. No, it was like this, Marg. My old man was a real slob. Ran a sheet metal shop in Buffalo, New York. He was so dumb and crude and ignorant people couldn’t stand him. I couldn’t. I never saw him one time since I was sixteen. But he had one hobby. He bought little chunks of stock and put them away. I never knew about that. Not until he died. Crazy stocks like Polaroid and Electric Boat and Reynolds Metals. The timing is interesting. Last October my wife gets a diagnosis of cancer, one of the fast hopeless kinds. By the end of November I am entirely out of money. By middle December the lawyers in Buffalo find me, ten days after the old man is buried, and suddenly I’m worth a few hundred thousand bucks. I could draw against it right away, but I didn’t get it all until two weeks after my wife died. Now my kids are in Melford School in Vermont, and I’m loaded, kiddo.”

She stared at him. He noted that her hand shook a little when she hoisted the drink to her mouth.

She got up and said, “I hope you’ll have a very nice visit here, Mr. Rodenska.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Laybourne.”

She started to turn away and then turned back with a small and social laugh, and a special gleam of malice. “You’d better be careful about putting any of your great wealth in Troy’s project. My Charlie would tell you the same thing.”

She walked away. Rodenska forked up the last piece of cucumber and spoke to himself sharply. Down, boy. You’re too shaky to play games. Even with a target like that.

At one point he had felt close to tears. With no reason. Not about Buttons. Tears, maybe, from a kind of helpless frustration at finding himself mauling the woman without cause. She couldn’t help what she was. Of the two of them, he had been the vicious one. (Except for that crack about Troy.) She was merely empty, in a way that seemed to comfort her. He had been writing dirty words on the sidewalk, out of a kind of compulsion. As if, when Buttons had died, patience had died with her. The world was crummy, and they came at you from all angles lately. Have to watch it.

He changed the subject by focusing his specialized attention on a couple by the pool — a man, dry and brown as a corpse left too long in the sun, sitting angularly on a poolside cushion talking privately to a rounded blonde in a pink suit who lay on a chaise longue with her face upturned toward the sun. He soon realized they were quarreling, slowly, quietly, viciously, with long silences between the unforgivable things they were saying to each other. He did not change expression and barely moved his lips when he spoke to her. When she answered her face would change. She had prettiness, marred by too small a mouth and a piggy little nose. She looked spoiled, petulant, bored and bitter when she answered him. The lines would go away when she again composed her face for the beat of the sun.

Married, he decided. And he’s twenty years older, and it’s probably a second one, and he was so charged up about those tits he didn’t stop to think of what they’d find to do outside of bed, and now she’s started fooling around a little, and he can’t prove anything but he’s suspicious as hell. She was twenty-five when she married him and now she’s thirty — five years older and fifteen pounds heavier — and afraid he’s going to live forever.

The last outpost of gracious living. But informal.

He went over to the bar and found gin and collins mix and made himself a tall strong drink.

As he started to turn away from the bar Troy said, “Party pooper.”

Mike turned and looked up at the taller man. Troy had grown a lot heavier in five years. The hair was thin and blond-gray. There were dark pouches under his eyes.

“I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Don’t kid me. I wasn’t missed.”

Troy started to build himself an old-fashioned. “I should have folded when you did. How are you coming along?”

“Adequate. I just ate like a pig.”

“Mary says you were swimming early.”

“You know how it is with us athletes. What the hell does the ‘D’ stand for?”

“What? Oh, ‘D’ for ‘Dexter.’ ”

“Dexter Troy Jamison. My, my!”

“Looks juicy on that blue mailbox, doesn’t it?”

“Real rich. I’ll call you Dex, like I was a friend.”

“Try it. One time.”

They took their drinks over and sat on a bench on the far side of the pool.

“The Sunday routine,” Troy said. “If I recover fast enough maybe we’ll take the boat out, but probably no. There’ll be a group on the beach. There’ll be some ways you can lose money. Or you can play tennis at the Laybournes’ or the Key Club. Or just drink.”

“I won’t be playing tennis at the Laybournes’.”

“No?”

“Marg Laybourne tried to work me over. But she wasn’t used to a counterpuncher.”

“Same old Mike. Same old war against the phonies. Surprised you bothered with her.”

“So am I. It was too easy. No challenge.”

“In a little while I’m going to see if I can make it all the way to the Gulf.”

“Say, are you used to a counterpuncher, old Troy?”

“Am I a phony?”

“How can I tell?”

“What do you mean by that, Mike?”

“Let me put it this way. I got here Monday. You got a fine place. And, let me add, a dandy wife. I like Mary. But I get the polite, gracious, impersonal routine from you, boy. I’m maybe somebody you met in a club car and invited down here to this last outpost of gracious living. We met seventeen years ago, Troy. Remember me? Chrissake, I don’t want hugs and kisses, but I don’t like you being on guard.”

“On guard?”

“That’s the impression you give. Damn if it isn’t. Are you self-conscious about all this? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? And you were on your way to making it one way, and you goofed yourself out of that, so you married it. All right. I’ve got nothing against you marrying it.”

“That’s nice to know. I needed your approval.”

“Get nasty. At least it’s a change.”

“It’s been five years. People change.”

“Not this much.”

“I guess I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“All of it none of my business, eh?”

“Relax, Mike. You’re down here to relax. Soak up the sun. Have some laughs. Get drunk. But stay off my back.”

“You’ve got bad nerves, Troy. Worse than mine.”

“There isn’t any rule says you’ve got to know everything about everything.”

“With me it’s a habit. Like finding out this big Horseshoe Pass Estates of yours is sour.”

Troy stared at him. “Who says so!”

“Nobody did. It was a shot in the dark. You just confirmed it, boy.”

“Maybe a week is long enough. Maybe that’s all the rest you needed.”

“I’ll stick around awhile, thanks.”

“Goddamn it, Mike!”

“Let’s drop it. When you get off this remote kick you’re on, and realize I might have some ideas — maybe even good ideas — about what’s chewing on you, look me up. I’ll probably be on the beach. Let’s drop it for now. Brief me on that pair over there.”

Troy scowled at him for a few seconds, and then shrugged. “That’s the Claytons. Rex and Tracey.”

“A very loving couple.”

“He loves her and she loves anybody. I got to go find some aspirin.”

During the next hour Mike had some dull talk with some dull people. When he was free he built a third drink and took it back to his pleasant guest room. He stretched out on the bed and thought about Troy. Friendship was one of the great variables. Like everybody is in their own little rowboat, with no oars, and the currents move you around. With some people it’s worth paddling with your hands to keep the rowboats side by side. With others neither of you have to work because you’re caught in the same current anyway. It had been like that with Troy. And he suspected it still was, if Troy would stop being remote. With Troy it wasn’t like other interrupted friendships — where you get back together again with great expectations and find out you’re a couple of strangers. Either you grew in different directions, or one stood still and the other one grew.

He was cynic enough to know that Troy could never entirely forgive him for that New York mess. Nobody can conquer all the subconscious resentment against a man who sees him at his hopeless, helpless worst, and drives off the dogs and gets him back on his feet.

He remembered how it was in New York. New York had to be put into historical perspective, because it was a part of a lot of things that had gone before.

After the war Mike had tried to continue with the column. It meant good money. But a lot of things went wrong. The syndicate was small and couldn’t afford to invest in a promotion to make Mike Rodenska a peacetime success. The bookings began to dwindle. A bunch of the best wartime columns were published in book form, and didn’t sell enough to make the advance. And the labor of tapping out the columns had become more than labor. It was misery. Mauldin and Hargrove were having the same problem — and probably Pyle wouldn’t have found it too easy either had he managed to miss his rendezvous on Iwo Jima. Actually Mike hungered to be back as a member of the working press. Doing a column seemed too remote — almost phony. Buttons wanted him to do what would make him happiest.

And so, by the middle of 1946, Mike and Buttons and Micky and Tommy moved into an elderly rented house in West Hudson, unpacked the cartons with gypsy efficiency, and Mike went to work at Guild minimum for the ancient, honorable and somewhat self-important West Hudson Leader, covering City Hall, County Courthouse and police, doing assigned Sunday features and a three-a-week op-ed column on purely local matters, happy as a flea on a large hairy dog.

Three months later, quite by accident, he heard of a good opening in the largest local advertising agency, and on a hunch he wrote to Troy in Rochester, then tore up the letter and phoned him. For Troy it had come at exactly the right time. Troy was getting very tired of taking directions from a very young and very stupid man who happened to be the only son of the senior partner in the Rochester agency. And he was getting fed up with most of his pregnant Bonita’s Rochester relatives.

Two weeks later Troy and Bunny were installed in a pleasant apartment Buttons had found for them. The first little girl, Lycia, was born on Christmas day, 1946, and the second Jamison baby, Cindy, was born on New Year’s Day, 1948.

Those were the best years, Mike recalled. Buttons and Bunny got along perfectly. They were both smallish, talkative, excitable women, Bunny as dark as Buttons was blond. The four of them spent a lot of time together. And had fun. But to Troy, fun was secondary during those years. He had a lot of drive and intensity, taste and talent and a kind of ruthlessness that was too veiled to be disturbing. Mike remembered how Troy had said, “I want more than my share.”

There was an inevitability about the way he went after it. And an inevitability about the way his work eventually came to the attention of one of the big New York agencies. Both wives wept when the Jamisons moved on to New York, toward Troy’s big golden future.

Mike well remembered a curious thing that happened about a week after Troy and Bunny and Lycia and the baby were gone. He had been in the kitchen, talking to Buttons. And he had said, casually, and perhaps with a little twinge of envy, “Here you are stuck with a newspaper bum, while Bunny gets to lead the fat life.”

Without warning, and only half playfully, Buttons had given him a smack in the chops that made his eyes water and shocked him. “Don’t you ever say that! You’re worth — fifty of Troy Jamison!”

“Hey! I thought you liked the guy.”

“I do, I guess. But he’s weak.”

“Weak? Troy? I don’t understand...”

“He’s pressing too hard, darling. He’s pushing too hard, without really knowing what he wants. And when he starts to get what he’s after, and finds out it isn’t as important as he thought, something is going to give. He’s going to come apart. Bunny is going to be hurt, and maybe you’ll be hurt too, if I let you get dragged into it.”

“But he...”

She had come sweetly into his arms. “Hey, I busted you a good one. It left marks.”

“I’ll get you a bout in the Garden with Sugar Ray.”

“I love you, Mike, and don’t let me ever hear that kind of talk about the fat life. We live that fat life, honey. I couldn’t imagine being married to anybody but you.”

He had thought her wrong, about Troy. But four years later, in 1953, when he was thirty-four, that clever, promising, driving, and demonstrably courageous young man, Troy Jamison, a thirty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year man with Kelfer, Sorensen and Ryan, owner of a lot of house in Larchmont and a pocketful of credit cards, blew up in everybody’s face. And they were astonished.

Bunny had phoned Buttons long-distance, incoherent with tears, pleading for help. So Mike had taken time off — by then he was assistant to the managing editor, a promotion that had come about when he had gotten wistful about the Korea thing. They had stashed the boys with a close friend and neighbor and had driven down through soiled sleet to Larchmont, to a big house and a soul-sick woman who bore the bruises of the cruel and drunken beating she had been given, and a situation beyond repair. Bonita Jamison was under control, long enough to give them the facts. It had taken three months for it to go entirely sour — starting with a restlessness on Troy’s part, a compulsion to make savage comments to their friends, a growing indifference to both her and the children. Apparently things were still all right at the agency. But their personal life had gone to hell. There was a woman in the city, from all reports a cheap, amoral type named Jerranna Rowley. Troy had a hotel room, but most of the time he was living with the Rowley woman. He had made no secret of the relationship — in fact he used it as a club. Bunny was sorry she had bothered them. She was going to leave the girls with her people in Rochester and get a Nevada divorce. It was all over. She said there was no point in Mike going into the city to talk to Troy. It had ended.

But he went anyway, the next morning, a grubby gray Saturday morning. He checked the hotel from Grand Central, but Troy’s room didn’t answer. Bunny had said the Rowley woman was listed in the Manhattan book, so he phoned there. Just as he was about to hang up a fuzzy, sleep-thickened, querulous voice answered.

“I’d like to speak to Troy Jamison,” he said.

“Oh, God! What time is it anyhow?”

“Quarter of ten. Are you Miss Rowley?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m an old friend of Troy’s. Mike Rodenska.”

“Oh, sure. I heard him say that name, I think. Mike, you got a bad habit. Phoning people at dawn. You oughta break that habit.”

“Can I speak to Troy?”

“Lover-boy didn’t come home to Jerranna last night. Jerranna got drunky with friends. I don’t know where the hell he is. Try the Hotel Terr...”

“There’s no answer there.”

“Then check the old manse out Larchmont way. Maybe he crawled back to wifey.”

“He isn’t out there either.”

“Then I can’t help you, old buddy.”

“Could I come and talk to you?”

“About Troy? I don’t think you got the scoop, Mike. I can give you a message. You’d be wasting time.”

“I’ve got a little time to waste.”

“Okay,” she said listlessly, “but don’t show up in no half hour. Make it about eleven-thirty, hey? And look, they drunk me out of goodies, so you be a pal and show up with a jug of Gordon’s and a jug of Early Times, okay? It’ll save me going out on such a stinky-looking day.”

The apartment was a third-floor walk-up a few doors from Second Avenue on East Fifty-first. It was in a defeated building and the enclosed air was both musty and sharply antiseptic. When he rang she buzzed the latch from above and he climbed the stairs to 3G, wondering how many times Troy had climbed those stairs. And why.

When she opened the door, took the brown paper sack from him and thanked him absently, and turned toward the kitchen with long strides, saying, over her shoulder, “Sid-down and make like it was home, Mike,” he had even more cause to wonder why Troy climbed those stairs.

She was younger than she had sounded over the phone. Nineteen or twenty, he guessed. She had a round, rather doughy face, a careless mop of pale brown hair worn long, a rather small head, a very long neck, and narrow shoulders. She was thin, but it wasn’t the kind of leanness that can be called slenderness. This was actually scrawniness, accentuated by knobby joints and a sort of shambling looseness in her gait.

“Want I should fix you something?” she called from the kitchenette.

“Bourbon and water. A weak one, please.”

He sat down in a sagging, overstuffed chair with a torn slipcover and unidentifiable stains. No sun would ever come into this room. Aside from the furniture that had obviously come with the apartment, any additional touches seemed to be added by things won at carnival booths. There was a classic collection of liquor rings and cigarette burns. A broken spring prodded him in the left ham.

He got up and thanked her when she brought his drink.

“Manners, huh?” she said, and grinned at him, and sat in a chair that half-faced his and threw one leg over the arm of the chair. She wore black denim slacks and a burgundy cardigan. The rudimentary breasts under the cardigan, pointed and wide-set, seemed almost anachronistic compared with the rest of her figure.

She had a tall glass of orange juice which he suspected contained plenty of gin. “Here’s lookin’ up your address,” she said and drained a third of it. “I was thinking I could get back to sleep maybe, but you cooked it for me.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Sleeping is the best thing I do. I can damn near fall asleep standing up, like a horse.”

“It can come in handy.”

“I suppose you’re going to sit there lookin’ at me like the cat brought me in, wondering where the hell to start saying what you came to say. So I’ll save you the trouble. He’s got a big career and a fine wife and a fine home and two darling little girls and it’s a damn shame he has to get mixed up with somebody like me, so I should give him up and go away quietly or something. That’s where you have the wrong message, Mike. He can take off anytime. I don’t give a damn. I can get along. I have before and I will again, without him paying the freight. I don’t love him and he don’t love me. Now that’s all over, what’ll we talk about?” She grinned at him.

He stared at her. Her mouth was wide and heavy, her lips habitually parted, her teeth large and strong and yellow-white, ridged. He had seen her before, when the state cops had picked her up off the highway. Seen her in the hospital after a gang rape, still bitter, arrogant, undefeated. What in the name of God could attract Troy to this? A will to destroy himself completely?

“Where did you meet Troy, Jerry?”

She frowned. “Jerranna. I always use the whole thing. It’s my whole name and I don’t like nicknames. I met him at a hockey game at the Garden. The boyfriend I was with, he slipped on those damn steep steps and hit his head, and they took him away, and Troy was with some out-of-town guys, all a little high, and we went here and there and to and fro for kicks, me and those three guys, and Troy was the one lasted the distance and brought me home. That was... oh... months ago. I’m not so good on keeping track of time.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Not right now. I gave it up. It was a cafeteria on Broadway up near Eighty-sixth. But I’m not sweating. I can go get a job anytime. I always have and I always will. Since I was thirteen, picking beans out in the Valley. And I’ll always have boyfriends too. Not so big shot like Jamison maybe, but ready and eager to take care — you know how I mean.”

“I guess so.”

“We’re all of us just here for kicks, I always say, so get all you can.”

He asked her more questions. She answered frankly, acted slightly bored, smiled easily, combed her hair back with long fingers, joggled her foot in time to imaginary music, and made them a pair of fresh drinks. And in some entirely inexplicable way she seemed to change slowly, in front of his eyes, as they talked. He knew it was not the drinks. She had made his weak, as he had requested. In the beginning he had thought her entirely unattractive — so much so that he had thought her boast about boyfriends rather pathetic.

But gradually he was becoming more and more aware of her in a physical-sexual way. The thick contours of her mouth, the girdle line along the top of the careless thigh, a knowing, self-confident look of mockery in her bland gray eyes. Yes, even the careless tangle of the brown hair, the thinness of a slightly soiled ankle, the bawdy and knowing tilt of the sharp, immature breasts.

Awareness increased until he wondered how he could have been so unaware in the beginning. Feature by feature, line by line, she was unattractive — almost, in fact, a grotesque. But there was now evident an unmistakable aura, an amiable pungency, about her that was beginning to make his heart beat more quickly and heavily. He suddenly became aware of a silence that had lasted for some time.

“Say it, old buddy,” she said. “What you’re thinking.”

“Could you... would you want to... send him on his way?”

She shrugged. “Why the hell should I? Anyway, I couldn’t. He’d be coming back.”

“So how does it end?”

“The way it always has. He’ll get on my nerves. You know. Giving orders like he owns me. You can do this and you can’t do that. No other boyfriends. No ramming around town. Stay right here. Hell with that noise. That’s when I quit.”

“How?”

“How big is this town? I move four blocks and he can’t find me. He can walk the streets howling like a dog, but he can’t find me.”

“How much longer do you give him?”

“You’re pretty sharp, Mike. Oh, maybe a month.”

“This has happened before?”

“Oh, sure. A thousand times. But not with a fella so rich like Troy.”

“Why does it happen?”

She smirked. “You mean like whadda they see in me? Nothing you can’t see right now, Mike. I’m not pretty. But I could always get fellas hanging around. I used to wonder. My God, how women hate the hell out of me! I’m the way I am. That’s all. I like kicks. And I don’t feel a damn bit shameful about the way I am. Like that song, doin’ what comes natcherly.” She swung the dangling leg.

Mike put his empty glass aside. “I better be on my way.”

She didn’t get up. She looked blandly up at him. The gray eyes were slightly protuberant. In the dim light he could see a slow pulse in her throat. “You in a big fat rush?” she asked.

“I’ve got to be getting along.”

“You’re a cute guy, specially when you look nervous like now. I could tell you what you were wondering about. I can always tell. Don’t you want to find out?”

“But Troy might...”

“I told you I do anything I want to do. I wouldn’t answer the door or the phone. I’d have no reason to tell anybody, and you sure wouldn’t want to. Like a bonus, for trying to help your pal.”

He looked at her and felt actually, physically dizzy. Her gray eyes seemed to grow big enough to fill her half of the room. Her voice had been like fingernails being drawn sharp and slow down his spine. It was a persuasive, evil magic — a spell cast by a contemporary witch, a soiled, scrawny, decadent witch.

He shook himself like a wet and weary dog, and made his voice flat and hard and said, “No thanks.”

“Suit yourself,” she said and got up and went to the door with him.

When he was in the hall, safe, like the swimmer caught in an undertow who climbs out onto a sandbar, he turned and said, “It’s messed Troy’s life up, Jerranna.”

“So I’m bleeding? It wasn’t me, Mike. He was ready to be messed up. He was looking for it.”

“What makes you say that?”

She lifted one narrow shoulder. “I just know. I can tell. I knew others like that. They get hooked on me, like on a drug, on account of — like a drug — I can stop them from thinking about anybody else or anything else in the world. I can keep them from even knowing who the hell they are, and maybe that’s what they want me for. But they got to be ready for me. So don’t blame me.”

“You’ve got it all figured out.”

“I’ve been here and there,” she said, and winked with great solemnity and closed the door, opened it immediately and said, “Thanks for the jugs,” and closed it again.

After he had gone down one flight he leaned against the wall for a few moments, his eyes closed. His body felt sticky and there was a bad taste in his mouth and a dull headache behind his eyes. Though not a superstitious man, he felt that he had been in the presence of evil. Not contrived evil, full of plots and connivings, but a curiously innocent and implacable evil. He knew that Buttons should never know how close he had come to an act that would have irreparably changed his own inner image of himself, made it forever hard for him to have looked deep into his own mirrored eyes.

As he reached the sidewalk he saw Troy paying off a cab-driver a hundred feet away. As the cab pulled away, Troy turned and saw him. Troy looked lean and pallid, unpressed, unsteady on his feet. Mike wondered what in hell he could say to Troy. Troy whirled and went around the corner onto Second Avenue, almost running. When Mike reached the corner, Troy was halfway down the block. Mike did not follow him.

A month later, while Bunny was in Reno and her girls were with her people in Rochester, Mike got a phone call one evening from a man in New York named Grady. After he hung up Buttons stared at him, frowning, and said, “Who was that? What about Troy? When do you have to go to New York?”

“It’s a man named Grady. Troy’s at his place, in bad shape. I either go get him, now, or Grady calls Bellevue and has him picked up.”

“So let him call Bellevue!”

Mike looked at her with a fond and crooked smile. “Grady said he had resigned so that left just one friend of Jamison’s. Okay. I’ll call back and tell Grady I can’t bring a mess like that into my home.”

“Darn you anyway,” Buttons said. “I’m going to feel awfully disloyal toward Bunny, but go get him.”

“Bunny would understand how it is.”

It took three and a half hours to drive to New York, and another twenty minutes to locate John Grady’s bachelor apartment in the Village, so it was nearly one in the morning when Grady, a tall young man with big glasses and a harried expression, let him in.

“Mr. Rodenska? Good. He’s in the bedroom. I got worried after I called you, so I got hold of a doctor. He charged me fifteen bucks for a house call.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“Hell with that. Call it my last contribution to Troy Jamison, thank God. I better brief you. Sit down. Drink?”

“No thanks. What did the doctor say?”

“Alcoholism. Malnutrition. He gave him some shots.”

“Can he be moved?”

“Not tonight, damn it. In the morning, when he wakes up. Which will be about ten. If he has the shakes too bad to travel, he can have a two-ounce shot in the morning. I won’t be here. I’ve got to go to work.”

“He’s out of work?”

“Man, he’s about as far out of work as you can get. He left in a big way almost a month ago. I’m with K. F. and S. too. He hired me, as a matter of fact. There’s been talk about him for months, around the shop. His marriage busting up. And when he was coming in at all, he was coming in half-loaded. And he didn’t seem to give a damn. I think they were trying to talk him into a leave of absence. When you get as high up as Troy was, there’s a sort of rule you don’t fire a man. They took Walther Electric away from him. It had always been his baby, a very tender account. They bill three million five. They took it away two months ago. Just about three weeks ago Mueller was giving a presentation to a flock of Walther executives. Jamison came walking in, boiled. Before they could hustle him out he yelled that the new program was tired old crap, that Walther would be better off with somebody else. He busted Mueller a beaut right in the eye and knocked him down. He knocked the projection machine off the stand, then turned and told the executives of Walther he was glad he didn’t have to deal with such lintheads any more. About then they got him out, too late. Walther canceled out. And they didn’t even let Troy clean out his desk. They sent his stuff to the hotel by messenger. It’s a damn shame, Mr. Rodenska. He was as sharp as they come. But he’s dead in this industry forever. There isn’t anybody connected with it from coast to coast who doesn’t know the story by now. He’ll never get back in, and I guess he knows it.”

“Where do you fit in, Grady?”

“Good question. He hired me. I felt some obligation, even though I hope everybody forgets I was hired originally by Jamison. So I’ve been taking care. I got him out twice when he was charged with D and D. After he got tossed out of the hotel he slept here a few times. I’ve loaned him money.”

“He can’t be broke!”

“He gives a good imitation if he isn’t. Lately I’ve been thinking it isn’t going to do me any good at the agency if people find out I’m helping him. Anyhow, he’s been getting worse. And I figure I’ve paid off any obligation. Tonight was the end. He knocked. I opened the door. He staggered in, fell down, threw up on my rug and passed out. He’d told me about you. So I phoned you. I told you what I was going to do if you didn’t feel like taking over. Want to look at him? If you haven’t seen him lately, it’ll be a shock. He looks like any skid row bum.”

Troy woke up at eleven the next morning. He didn’t seem either surprised or grateful to see Mike, or particularly interested in the plan of going up to West Hudson. Mike could detect neither shame nor remorse. Just a dullness, an impenetrable apathy. Grady had donated some elderly but clean clothing to the cause. He had said it wasn’t necessary to have them back. After the hot bath and the permissible two ounces, Troy was steady enough to shave himself.

Mike made a few futile attempts to start casual conversations on the way north, and then gave up. He did not take Troy home. He took him to the office of a friend who was a doctor. After the examination, Troy was taken directly to a rest home fifteen miles from town, a place which specialized in such problems. Three weeks later Mike brought him back to the house on Killian Street. Buttons received him politely, and with a measured amount of warmth.

“When you want to talk,” Mike said, “I’ll listen. In the meantime you can stay here until you’re well.”

“It’s a lot for you people to do.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“One thing you may be glad to know. They told me out there. I’m not a genuine, honest-to-God alcoholic. This was more like a nervous breakdown. So you don’t have to lock up the liquor. I thought you’d like to know that. They said I can drink socially again, if I feel like it. But not this year. It won’t matter a damn to me to see other people drinking.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll stay out of your way as much as I can. Don’t figure on trying to pull me into social things. I’m not ready.”

“All right.”

“I’ll go to work soon as I can.”

“Don’t try to rush it.”

“Maybe you could do one more thing. I don’t know where the hell I stand. I don’t even know if the house was sold. That goes into the settlement. You could check with George Broman, 114 East Forty-third. He’s my lawyer and tax guy. It’ll be interesting to find out if there’s anything left.”

“How about alimony?”

“It’s being set up on the basis of a percentage of earnings. That’s lucky for me, and tough on Bunny. She’s got people to help her, though. She gets it until she marries again. And I’ve been wondering about mail, Mike. I didn’t...”

“I fixed that up. They were saving a bunch of stuff at the hotel. It’s here now. I changed your mailing address to here. They didn’t want you getting mail out there. Do you want to see it now?”

“No. Not now. I’ll look at it later on.”

He slept a great deal in those first weeks, and as the spring days grew warmer he would sun himself in the backyard. Later he began to take long walks. Buttons took pride in putting the pounds back on him. He spoke little and seldom smiled, though he was not irritable or sullen. He was good with the boys. As his strength came back he began to do minor repairs around the house — fixing doors that stuck, ripping up and replacing asphalt tile in the storeroom. He was good with his hands, neat and quick.

The divorce became final. George Broman ascertained that, after income tax refunds had come in, and after Bunny’s settlement, Troy Jamison had a balance of nearly thirteen thousand dollars. After it was transferred to a savings account at West Hudson National, Troy insisted, despite Mike’s protests, on paying the medical expenses Mike had incurred on his behalf.

In late June of 1953, Mike and Buttons got a letter from Bunny, postmarked Colorado Springs.

The letter arrived at lunchtime. After Buttons read it she gave Mike an odd look, and then handed it to Troy to read. He was halfway through his lunch. He read it quickly, got up without a word and left the house. Mike then read it. Troy was not back by the time they went to bed. He had his own key.

At three in the morning Buttons shook Mike awake and said, “I think he just came in, honey. He may be dreadfully drunk. You better go check.”

He put on his robe and met Troy in the upstairs hallway. Troy was not drunk. He whispered to avoid waking the boys.

“Sorry I took off like that, Mike. It was rude.”

“Where have you been?”

“Walking. Thinking. A hell of a long walk.”

As Mike looked at him he sensed that Troy had changed during that walk. There was more alertness in his expression. The brooding look was hidden. Not entirely gone. But not as obvious.

“I had to get used to her being married to somebody else,” Troy whispered.

“Sure. I know. Well... good night.”

He went back to bed and told Buttons. As he was going back to sleep he realized that Troy would soon be gone.

Two days later, on a Sunday afternoon, Troy told Mike his plans. “I know I can’t get back into advertising. Maybe I could get some crummy little job with a small-town agency, but I don’t want that. My father was a builder. Not a big one. Small houses, and I don’t think he ever had more than eight men working for him at one time. I worked for him for four straight summers. I’ve got a tiny bit of capital. That’s what I’m going to do. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

“Here in West Hudson?”

“No. I’ve decided on Florida. The west coast. I’m going to go down there and hire out to a contractor down there and learn what’s new in the field, and what special local problems they have. When I’m ready, I’ll try it on my own.”

“All cured?”

“Thanks to you, Mike. And Buttons. I’ll never forget it. It’s not... a total cure, I guess. But the best I can manage.”

“What happened, Troy? Is that a fair question?”

“It’s a fair question. I just wish I could give you an answer. I don’t know what the hell happened. Everything was fine. Overnight everything went sour for me. I hated the work and the city and myself. I just plain stopped giving a damn. Like a motor stopping. Running down. I don’t know.”

“I saw that woman.”

“I know you did. I remember seeing you in front of her place. Memory of that period is all... misty. And I don’t get things in the right order. But I remember seeing you there. Running away from you. But she didn’t do it. Everything had slipped a long, long way before I found her. She just helped me find bottom — slide all the way down.” He managed a faint smile. “It was easy.”

“Grady told me about your farewell performance in the office.”

“I can just barely remember that. I did a great job. It was just a few days after she disappeared. I don’t know how many.”

“Strange girl.”

Troy stared into space. “There should be a better word than that. I think about how it was. And sometimes it makes me want to throw up. It couldn’t have been me. But I’ve got this fear, Mike. That if I ever saw her again... I’d either kill her, or it would be the same thing all over again. But this time... there’s not as much to lose. You can only lose your career and your wife one time.”

“Maybe it will be easier... in one sense, not having so much to lose.”

“It’s a big comfort to me. Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound snotty. I’m dead, Mike. In a special way. Walking, breathing, eating, but dead. You’ve been swell. And there’s nothing more to say about the whole thing.”

“Delayed combat fatigue?”

“That’s a wild idea.”

“Is it? Take it this way. They didn’t kill you. They just twisted you a little. New values. But the values didn’t fit you, Troy. And it took you a long time to find out. Then the roof fell in.”

Troy studied him. “Interesting. You know, if I was anxious to find an excuse for myself, boy, I’d be hanging on every word. But somehow I don’t give a damn about the reasons. I know what happened. It happened. I didn’t dream it. Keep your psychiatrics.”

“You must be better, you’re so much nastier.”

For the first months after Troy left he wrote at dutiful intervals, and his letters had somewhat the flavor of those a boy might write home from army training. He had decided on Ravenna, Florida. Big opportunities for growth. He was working for Brail Brothers Construction, living in a used house trailer he bought, doing a lot of weekend fishing. The letters became less frequent and had a more distant tone. In August of 1954, he started his own small firm, doing foundation work on subcontract. Troy Jamison, Builder. They got a card at Christmas, with a short note. He was busy and prospering, had made a small investment in land and was putting up three low-cost spec houses.

In late March he wrote them that he had married Mrs. Mary Dow, a widow. The next communication was a Christmas card, without note, from Troy and Mary Jamison. It looked elegant and expensive. And others in 1956 and 1957 and 1958, except that in 1958 he knew about Buttons and no cards went out.

About two weeks before the whole thing was over, after Buttons was back in the hospital again, a letter came to the house for her from Bonita Linder, and Mike opened it. It was a warm, amusing, chatty letter, and she sounded a little bit cross about not hearing from Buttons in months.

It made Mike realize that it wasn’t entirely fair to leave Bunny, who after all the years was still Buttons’s best friend, completely out of it. By then, through that sardonic miracle, there was enough money, and he had quit the paper in order to spend more time with her. And he was trying desperately to be steady and dependable and reliable and unhysterical about the whole thing. So that evening he had placed a call to her in Colorado, and tried to tell her how things were with Buttons. But in the middle of it something broke, and she arrived two days later, leaving the girls and her three-year-old son on the ranch, and moved in and took over with a compassionate efficiency that made things a little easier than they had been. The two women had some chances to talk, and it seemed to make Buttons a little less scared of the blackness dead ahead of her — not that she had ever whined or even come close to it, but you could tell about the being scared.

So he thought he had been prepared for it, that he was braced for it. But when it happened it was worse than he had been able to imagine. It was like being struck blind and sick and dumb, and left in a world of strangers.

There were plenty of friends to try to help, but Bunny helped the most. She organized the routines of death, and got him and the boys through it somehow, and stayed until he could talk to her about the future — a word that had always had a nice ring to it, but now had an ironic connotation. Bunny had wisdom. She sensed that if he tried to hold the family unit together it would be an artificial thing, and bad on the three of them. If the boys were younger they would need that security, but at fifteen and seventeen, it would be like three men forever aware of the empty chair, the empty room, the silences where her voice had been. So, in addition to getting rid of Buttons’s things, instinctively knowing the things he would want to keep, she made the arrangements to get the boys into the Melford School, and through the subtle uses of propaganda, got them into a frame of mind where they were looking forward to it.

She talked with Mike about the money, and she said she felt that old wheeze about hard work effecting a cure was largely nonsense. The thing to do was get away, go somewhere with no obligations, and sit and mend — and told him he was lucky he could afford it.

She wanted him to come to the ranch, but he said maybe later. He had written to all the faraway friends about Buttons, and all of them had answered. But Troy hadn’t, and that was a special hurt, combined with indignation.

After they drove the boys up and got them settled, Bunny went back to her kids and husband. He had promised her he would go away. Close the house for an indefinite time and go away. But after she was gone he couldn’t seem to make the move. He lived in the emptiness of the house, and often he would not answer the phone or the door, and he did not eat very well. He could not seem to get enough sleep.

And then the letter came from Troy. It was a good letter. He explained they had been on a cruise, hadn’t had their mail forwarded, had come back and tried to reach him by phone. He insisted Mike take time off from work and come down and stay as long as he could. Mary Jamison had written her warm invitation at the bottom of the letter. It was the stimulus he had needed. So he had made the arrangements and gone down, and been met by Troy in a shining car a half block long, and been driven down through St. Pete, and over a bridge, and down through Bradenton and Sarasota to Ravenna and on down to Riley Key to a home so beautiful, a wife so gracious, in a setting so sun-and-sea spectacular that Troy Jamison was obviously fighting to keep from showing understandable pride.

He had explained to Troy about the money, but had concealed that the fact of his unemployment was largely the result of Bunny’s instinctive wisdom about him and the shattering extent of his loss. Left to his own devices, he would have gone back to work, would have tried to dull mind and memory by knocking himself out on the job and trying to keep up a shallow imitation of a family unit.

On the second day of his visit, on Tuesday, alone on the beach, he had suddenly lost all reservations and knew that Bunny had been right. He wasn’t the kind of man who could make an adjustment to loss by turning away from it. He had to be alone where he could look at it squarely and brace himself solidly, and then open himself up to the realization of the total significance of it. It was his only hope of mending, and Bunny had sensed it.

He sat on the side of his bed and drained the drink and sighed again, then went to the small desk to write to his sons. They did not like joint letters. They wanted one apiece.

“Dear Micky, There is a curious phenomenon down here called sunshine. I will try to explain it to you. Every day this big round yellow thing comes up out of the east, surrounded by a sky which is an abnormal blue instead of the grubby gray we’re used to. Exposure to this yellow thing turns people bright red instead of the infinitely more pleasing fish-belly white, but the natives down here seem to feel this ugly red is a desirable...”

The “o” on the old portable was printing solid. He opened the lid, picked the goo out of the “o” with a matchstick, lit a cigar and continued the letter, typing with four fingers, working — in a special sense — at his trade, taking comfort in the familiar sound, the cigar angled well to port to keep the smoke out of his eyes, a stocky man — very much alone.