Strangers on a Train

Thirty

Guy crossed the kitchen and turned at the back door. “Awfully thoughtless of me to invite myself on the cook’s night out.”

“What’s thoughtless about it? You’ll just fare as we do on Thursday nights, that’s all. ” Mrs. Faulkner brought him a piece of the celery she was washing at the sink. “But Hazel’s going to be disappointed she wasn’t here to make the shortcake herself. You’ll have to do with Anne’s tonight.”

Guy went out. The afternoon was still bright with sun, though the picket fence cast long oblique bars of shadow over the crocus and iris beds. He could just see Annie’s tied-back hair and the pale green of her sweater beyond a crest in the rolling sea of lawn. Many times he had gathered mint and watercress there with Anne, from the stream that flowed out of the woods where he had fought Bruno. Bruno is past, he reminded himself, gone, vanished. Whatever method Gerard had used, he had made Bruno afraid to contact him.

He watched Mr. Faulkner’s neat black car enter the driveway and roll slowly into the open garage. What was he doing here, he asked himself suddenly, where he deceived everyone, even the colored cook who liked to make shortcake for him because, once perhaps, he had praised her dessert? He moved into the shelter of the pear tree, where neither Anne nor her father would easily see him. If he should step out of Anne’s life, he thought, what difference would it make to her? She had not given up all her old friends, hers and Teddy’s set, the eligible young men, the handsome young men who played at polo and, rather harmlessly, at the night clubs before they entered their father’s business and married one of the beautiful young girls who decorated their country clubs. Anne was different, of course, or she wouldn’t have been attracted to him in the first place. She was not one of the beautiful young girls who worked at a career for a couple of years just to say they had done it, before they married one of the eligible young men. But wouldn’t she have been just the same, herself, without him? She had often told him he was her inspiration, he and his own ambition, but she had had the same talent, the same drive the day he met her, and wouldn’t she have gone on? And wouldn’t another man, like himself but worthy of her, have found her? He began to walk toward her.

“I’m almost done,” she called to him. “Why didn’t you come sooner?”

“I hurried,” he said awkwardly.

“You’ve been leaning against the house ten minutes.”

A sprig of watercress was floating away on the stream, and he sprang to rescue it. He felt like a possum, scooping it up. “I think I’ll take a job soon, Anne.”

She looked up, astoundedly.” A job? You mean with a firm?”

It was a phrase to be used about other architects, “a job with a firm.” He nodded, not looking at her. “I feel like it. Something steady with a good salary.”

“Steady?” She laughed a little. “With a year’s work ahead of you at the hospital?”

“I won’t need to be in the drafting room all the time.”

She stood up. “Is it because of money? Because you’re not taking the hospital money?”

He turned away from her and took a big step up the moist bank. “Not exactly,” he said through his teeth. “Maybe partly.” He had decided weeks ago to give his fee back to the Department of Hospitals after he paid his staff.

“But you said it wouldn’t matter, Guy. We both agreed we—you could afford it.”

The world seemed silent all at once, listening. He watched her push a strand of her hair back and leave a smudge of wet earth on her forehead. “It won’t be for long. Maybe six months, maybe a lot less.”

“But why at all?”

“I feel like it!”

“Why do you feel like it? Why do you want to be a martyr, Guy?”

He said nothing.

The setting sun dropped free of the trees and poured onto them suddenly. Guy frowned deeper, shading his eye with the brow that bore the white scar from the woods—the scar that would always show, he thought. He kicked at a stone in the ground, without being able to dislodge it. Let her think the job was still part of his depression after the Palmyra. Let her think anything.

“Guy, I’m sorry,” she said.

Guy looked at her. “Sorry?”

She came closer to him. “Sorry. I think I know what it is.”

He still kept his hands in his pockets. “What do you mean?”

She waited a long while. “I thought all this, all your uneasiness after the Palmyra–even without your knowing it, I mean—goes back to Miriam.”

He twisted away abruptly.“No. No, that’s not it at all!” He said it so honestly, yet it sounded so like a lie! He thrust his fingers in his hair and shoved it back.

“Listen, Guy,” Anne said softly and clearly, “maybe you don’t want the wedding as much as you think you do. If you think that’s part of it, say it, because I can take that a lot easier than this job idea. If you want to wait—still—or if you want to break it off entirely, I can bear it.”

Her mind was made up, and had been for a long while. He could feel it at the very center of her calmness. He could give her up at this moment. The pain of that would cancel out the pain of guilt.

“Hey, there, Anne!” her father called from the back door. “Coming in soon? I need that mint!”

“Minute, Dad!” she shouted back. “What do you say, Guy?”

His tongue pressed the top of his mouth. He thought, she is the sun in my dark forest. But he couldn’t say it. He could only say, “I can’t say—”

“Well—I want you now more than ever, because you need me now more than ever.” She pressed the mint and watercress into his hand. “Do you want to take this to Dad? And have a drink with him. I have to change my clothes.” She turned and went off toward the house, not fast, but much too fast for Guy to try to follow her.

Guy drank several of the mint juleps. Anne’s father made them the old-fashioned way, letting the sugar and bourbon and mint stand in a dozen glasses all day, getting colder and more frosted, and he liked to ask Guy if he had ever tasted better ones anywhere. Guy could feel the precise degree to which his tension lessened, but it was impossible for him to become drunk. He had tried a few times and made himself sick, without becoming drunk.

There was a moment after dusk, on the terrace with Anne, when he imagined he might not have known her any better than he had the first evening he visited her, when he suddenly felt a tremendous, joyous longing to make her love him. Then he remembered the house in Alton awaiting them after the wedding Sunday, and all the happiness he had known already with Anne rushed back to him. He wanted to protect her, to achieve some impossible goal, which would please her. It seemed the most positive, the happiest ambition he had ever known. There was a way out, then, if he could feel like this. It was only a part of himself he had to cope with, not his whole self, not Bruno, or his work. He had merely to crush the other part of himself, and live in the self he was now.

Thirty-one

But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him. The wedding so elaborately prepared for, so festive, so pure with white lace and linen, so happily awaited by everyone, seemed the worst act of treachery he could commit, and the closer it drew, the more frantically and vainly he debated canceling it. Up to the last hour, he wanted simply to flee.

Robert Treacher, the friend of his Chicago days, telephoned his good wishes and asked if he might come to the wedding. Guy put him off with some feeble excuse. It was the Faulkners’ affair, he felt, their friends, their family church, and the presence of a friend would put a hole in his armor. He had invited only Myers, who didn’t matter—since the hospital commission, he no longer shared an office with him—Tim O’Flaherty, who couldn’t come, and two or three architects from the Deems Academy, who knew his work better than they knew him. But half an hour after Treacher’s call from Montreal, Guy telephoned back and asked Bob if he would be his best man.

Guy realized he had not even thought of Treacher in nearly a year, had not answered his last letter. He had not thought of Peter Wriggs, or Vic De Poyster and Gunther Hall. He had used to call on Vic and his wife in their Bleecker Street apartment, had once taken Anne there. Vic was a painter, and had sent him an invitation to his exhibit last winter, Guy remembered. He hadn’t even answered. Vaguely now, he remembered that Tim had been in New York and had called him to have lunch during the period when Bruno had been haunting him by telephone, and that he had refused. The Theologica Germanica, Guy recalled, said that the ancient Germans had judged an accused man innocent or guilty by the number of friends who came forth to vouch for his character. How many would vouch for him now? He had never given a great deal of time to his friends, because they were not the kind of people who expected it, but now he felt his friends were shunning him in turn, as if they sensed without seeing him that he had become unworthy of friendship.

The Sunday morning of the wedding, walking in slow circles around Bob Treacher in the vestry of the church, Guy clung to his memory of the hospital drawings as to a single last shred of hope, the single proof that he still existed. He had done an excellent job. Bob Treacher, his friend, had praised him. He had proven to himself that he could still create.

Bob had given up trying to make conversation with him. He sat with his arms folded, with a pleasant but rather absent expression on his chubby face. Bob thought he was simply nervous. Bob didn’t know how he felt, Guy knew, because however much he thought it showed, it didn’t. And that was the hell, that one’s life could so easily be total hypocrisy. This was the essence, his wedding and his friend, Bob Treacher, who no longer knew him. And the little stone vestry with the high grilled window, like a prison cell. And the murmur of voices outside, like the selfrighteous murmurings of a mob impatient to storm the prison and wreak justice.

“You didn’t by any chance bring a bottle.”

Bob jumped up. “I certainly did. It’s weighing me down and I completely forgot it.” He set the bottle on the table and waited for Guy to take it. Bob was about forty-five, a man of modest but sanguine temperament, with an indelible stamp of contented bachelorhood and of complete absorption and authority in his profession. “After you,” he prompted Guy. “I want to drink a private toast to Anne. She’s very beautiful, Guy.” He added softly, with a smile, “As beautiful as a white bridge.”

Guy stood looking at the opened pint bottle. The hubbub out the window seemed to poke fun at him now, at him and Anne. The bottle on the table was part of it, the jaded, half-humorous concomitant of the traditional wedding. He had drunk whisky at his wedding with Miriam. Guy hurled the bottle into the corner. Its solid crack and spatter ended the hooting horns, the voices, the silly tremolo of the organ only for a second, and they began to seep back again.

“Sorry, Bob. I’m very sorry.”

Bob had not taken his eyes from him. “I don’t blame you a bit,” he smiled.

“But I blame myself!”

“Listen, old man—”

Guy could see that Bob did not know whether to laugh or be serious.

“Wait,” Treacher said. “I’ll get us some more.”

The door opened just as Bob reached for it, and Peter Wriggs’ thin figure slipped in. Guy introduced him to Treacher. Peter had come all the way up from New Orleans to be at his wedding. He wouldn’t have come to his wedding with Miriam, Guy thought. Peter had hated Miriam. There was gray at Peter’s temples now, though his lean face still grinned like a sixteen-year-old’s. Guy returned his quick embrace, feeling that he moved automatically now, on rails as he had the Friday night.

“It’s time, Guy,” Bob said, opening the door.

Guy walked beside him. It was twelve steps to the altar. The accusing faces, Guy thought. They were silent with horror, as the Faulkners had been in the back of the car. When were they going to interfere and stop it all? How much longer was everyone going to wait?

“Guy!” somebody whispered.

Six, Guy counted, seven.

“Guy!” faint and direct, from among the faces, and Guy glanced left, followed the gaze of two women who looked over their shoulders, and saw Bruno’s face and no other.

Guy looked straight again. Was it Bruno or a vision? The face had been smiling eagerly, the gray eyes sharp as pins. Ten, eleven, he counted. Twelve steps up, skip seven… . You can remember it, it’s got a syncopated rhythm. His scalp tingled. Wasn’t that a proof it was a vision and not Bruno? He prayed, Lord, don’t let me faint. Better you fainted than married, the inner voice shouted back.

He was standing beside Anne, and Bruno was here with them, not an event, not a moment, but a condition, something that had always been and always would be. Bruno, himself, Anne. And the moving on the tracks. And the lifetime of moving on the tracks until death do us part, for that was the punishment. What more punishment was he looking for?

Faces bobbed and smiled all around him, and Guy felt himself aping them like an idiot. It was the Sail and Racquet Club. There was a buffet breakfast, and everyone had a champagne glass, even himself. And Bruno was not here. There was really no one here but wrinkled, harmless, perfumed old women in hats. Then Mrs. Faulkner put an arm around his neck and kissed his cheek, and over her shoulder he saw Bruno thrusting himself through the door with the same smile, the same pinlike eyes that had already found him. Bruno came straight toward him and stopped, rocking on his feet.

“My best—best wishes, Guy. You didn’t mind if I looked in, did you? It’s a happy occasion!”

“Get out. Get out of here fast.”

Bruno’s smile faded hesitantly.” I just got back from Capri,” he said in the same hoarse voice. He wore a new dark royal-blue gabardine suit with lapels broad as an evening suit’s lapels. “How’ve you been, Guy?”

An aunt of Anne’s babbled a perfumed message into Guy’s ear, and he murmured something back. Turning, Guy started to move off.

“I just wanted to wish you well,” Bruno declared.“There it is.”

“Get out,” Guy said. “The door’s behind you.” But he mustn’t say any more, he thought. He would lose control.

“Call a truce, Guy. I want to meet the bride.”

Guy let himself be drawn away by two middle-aged women, one on either arm. Though he did not see him, he knew that Bruno had retreated, with a hurt, impatient smile, to the buffet table.

“Bearing up, Guy?” Mr. Faulkner took his half-empty glass from his hand. “Let’s get something better at the bar.”

Guy had half a glassful of Scotch. He talked without knowing what he was saying. He was sure he had said, Stop it all, tell everyone to go. But he hadn’t, or Mr. Faulkner wouldn’t be roaring with laughter. Or would he?

Bruno watched from down the table as they cut the cake, watched Anne mostly, Guy noticed. Bruno’s mouth was a thin, insanely smiling line, his eyes glinted like the diamond pin on his dark blue tie, and in his face Guy saw that same combination of wistfulness, awe, determination, and humor that he had seen the first moment he met him.

Bruno came up to Anne. “I think I met you somewhere before. Are you any relation to Teddy Faulkner?”

Guy watched their hands meet. He had thought he wouldn’t be able to bear it, but he was bearing it, without making a move.

“He’s my cousin,” Anne said with her easy smile, the same smile she had given someone a moment before.

Bruno nodded. “I played golf with him a couple of times.”

Guy felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Got a minute, Guy? I’d—” It was Peter Wriggs.

“I haven’t.” Guy started after Bruno and Anne. He closed his fingers around Anne’s left hand.

Bruno sauntered on the other side of her, very erect, very much at ease, bearing his untouched piece of wedding cake on a plate in front of him. “I’m an old friend of Guy’s. An old acquaintance.” Bruno winked at him behind Anne’s head.

“Really? Where’d you two know each other?”

“In school. Old school friends.” Bruno grinned. “You know, you’re the most beautiful bride I’ve seen in years, Mrs. Haines. I’m certainly glad to have met you,” he. said, not with finality but an emphatic conviction that made Anne smile again.

“Very glad to have met you,” she replied.

“I hope I’ll be seeing you both. Where’re you going to live?”

“In Connecticut,” Anne said.

“Nice state, Connecticut,” Bruno said with another wink at Guy, and left them with a graceful bow.

“He’s a friend of Teddy’s?” Guy asked Anne. “Did Teddy invite him?”

“Don’t look so worried, darling!” Anne laughed at him.“We’ll leave soon.”

“Where is Teddy?” But what was the use finding Teddy, what was the sense in making an issue of it, he asked himself at the same time.

“I saw him two minutes ago up at the head of the table,” Anne told him. “There’s Chris. I’ve got to say hello to him.”

Guy turned, looking for Bruno, and saw him helping himself to shirred eggs, talking gaily to two young men who smiled at him as if under the spell of a devil.

The ironic thing, Guy thought bitterly in the car a few moments later, the ironic thing was that Anne had never had time to know him. When they first met, he had been melancholic. Now his efforts, because he so rarely made efforts, had come to seem real. There had been, perhaps, those few days in Mexico City when he had been himself.

“Did the man in the blue suit go to Deems?” Anne asked.

They were driving out to Montauk Point. One of Anne’s relatives had lent them her cottage for their three-day honeymoon. The honeymoon was only three days, because he had pledged to start work at Horton, Horton and Keese, Architects, in less than a month, and he would have to work on the double to get the detailed drawings for the hospital under way before he began. “No, the Institute. For a while.” But why did he fall in with Bruno’s lie?

“Interesting face he has,” Anne said, straightening her dress about her ankles before she put her feet on the jump seat.

“Interesting?” Guy asked.

“I don’t mean attractive. Just intense.”

Guy set his teeth. Intense? Couldn’t she see he was insane? Morbidly insane? Couldn’t everyone see it?

Thirty-two

The receptionist at Horton, Horton and Keese, Architects, handed him a message that Charles Bruno had called and left his number. It was the Great Neck number.

“Thank you,” Guy said, and went on across the lobby.

Suppose the firm kept records of telephone messages. They didn’t, but suppose they did. Suppose Bruno dropped in one day. But Horton, Horton and Keese were so rotten themselves, Bruno wouldn’t make much of a contrast. And wasn’t that exactly why he was here, steeping himself in it, under some illusion that revulsion was atonement and that he would begin to feel better here?

Guy went into the big skylighted, leather-upholstered lounge, and lighted a cigarette. Mainwaring and Williams, two of the firm’s first-string architects, sat in big leather armchairs, reading company reports. Guy felt their eyes on him as he stared out the window. They were always watching him, because he was supposed to be something special, a genius, the junior Horton had assured everybody, so what was he doing here? He might be broker than everybody thought, of course, and he had just gotten married, but quite apart from that and from the Bronx hospital, he was obviously nervous, had lost his grip. The best lost their grip sometimes, they would say to themselves, so why should they scruple about taking a comfortable job? Guy gazed down onto the dirty jumble of Manhattan roofs and streets that looked like a floor model of how a city should not be built. When he turned around, Mainwaring dropped his eyes like a schoolboy.

He spent the morning dawdling over a job that he had been on for several days. Take your time, they told him. All he had to do was give the client what he wanted and sign his name to it. Now, this job was a department store for an opulent little community in Westchester, and the client wanted something like an old mansion, in keeping with the town, only sort of modern, too, see? And he had asked especially for Guy Daniel Haines. By adjusting his brain to the level of the trick, the cartoon, Guy could have tossed it off, but the fact it was really going to be a department store kept intruding certain functional demands. He erased and sharpened pencils all morning, and figured it would take him four or five more days, well into next week, until he got anything down as even a rough idea to show the client.

“Charley Bruno’s coming tonight, too,” Anne called that evening from the kitchen.

“What?” Guy came around the partition.

“Isn’t that his name? The young man we saw at the wedding.”

Anne was cutting chives on a wooden board.

“You invited him?”

“He seems to have heard about it, so he called up and sort of invited himself,” Anne replied so casually that a wild suspicion she might be testing him sent a faint chill up his spine. “Hazel—not milk, angel, there’s plenty of cream in the refrigerator.”

Guy watched Hazel set the cream container down by the bowl of crumbled gorgonzola cheese.

“Do you mind his coming, Guy?” Anne asked him.

“Not at all, but he’s no friend of mine, you know.” He moved awkwardly toward the cabinets and got out the shoe-polish box. How could he stop him? There had to be a way, yet even as he racked his brain, he knew that the way would elude him.

“You do mind,” Anne said, with a smile.

“I think he’s sort of a bounder, that’s all.”

“It’s bad luck to turn anyone away from a housewarming. Don’t you know that?”

Bruno was pink-eyed when he arrived. Everyone else had made some comment about the new house, but Bruno stepped down into the brick-red and forest-green living room as if he had been here a hundred times before. Or as if he lived here, Guy thought as he introduced Bruno around the room. Bruno focused a grinning, excited attention on Guy and Anne, hardly acknowledging the greetings of the others—two or three looked as if they knew him, Guy thought—except for that of a Mrs. Chester Boltinoff of Muncey Park, Long Island, whose hand Bruno shook in both his as if he had found an ally. And Guy watched with horror as Mrs. Boltinoff looked up at Bruno with a wide, friendly smile.

“How’s every little thing?” Bruno asked Guy after he had gotten himself a drink.

“Fine. Very fine.” Guy was determined to be calm, even if he had to anaesthetize himself. He had already had two or three straight shots in the kitchen. But he found himself walking away, retreating, toward the perpendicular spiral stairway in the corner of the living room. Just for a moment, he thought, just to get his bearings. He ran upstairs and into the bedroom, laid his cold hand against his forehead, and brought it slowly down his face.

“Pardon me, I’m still exploring,” said a voice from the other side of the room. “It’s such a terrific house, Guy, I had to retreat to the nineteenth century for a while.”

Helen Heyburn, Anne’s friend from her Bermuda schooldays, was standing by the bureau. Where the little revolver was, Guy thought.

“Make yourself at home. I just came up for a handkerchief. How’s your drink holding up?” Guy slid out the right top drawer where lay both the gun he didn’t want and the handkerchief he didn’t need.

“Well—better than I am.”

Helen was in another “manic” period, Guy supposed. She was a commercial artist, a good one, Anne thought, but she worked only when her quarterly allowance gave out and she slipped into a depressive period. And she didn’t like him, he felt, since the Sunday evening when he hadn’t gone with Anne to her party. She was suspicious of him. What was she doing now in their bedroom, pretending to feel her drinks more than she did?

“Are you always so serious, Guy? You know what I said to Anne when she told me she was going to marry you?”

“You told her she was insane.”

“I said,‘But he’s so serious. Very attractive and maybe a genius, but he’s so serious, how can you stand it?’” She lifted her squarish, pretty blond face. “You don’t even defend yourself. I’ll bet you’re too serious to kiss me, aren’t you?”

He forced himself toward her, and kissed her.

“That’s no kiss.”

“But I deliberately wasn’t being serious.”

He went out. She would tell Anne, he thought, she would tell her that she had found him in the bedroom looking pained at 10 o’clock. She might look into the drawer and find the gun, too. But he didn’t believe any of it. Helen was silly, and he hadn’t the slightest idea why Anne liked her, but she wasn’t a troublemaker. And she wasn’t a snooper any more than Anne was. My God, hadn’t he left the revolver there in the drawer next to Anne’s all the time they had been living here? He was no more afraid Anne would investigate his half of the bureau than he was that she would open his mail.

Bruno and Anne were on the right-angled sofa by the fireplace when he came down. The glass Bruno wobbled casually on the sofa back had made dark green splotches on the cloth.

“He’s telling me all about the new Capri, Guy.” Anne looked up at him. “I’ve always wanted us to go there.”

“The thing to do is to take a whole house,” Bruno went on, ignoring Guy, “take a castle, the bigger the better. My mother and I lived in a castle so big we never walked to the other end of it until one night I couldn’t find the right door. There was a whole Italian family having dinner at the other end of the veranda, and the same night they all come over, about twelve of them, and ask if they can work for us for nothing, just if we let them stay there. So of course we did.”

“And you never learned any Italian?”

“No need to!” Bruno shrugged, his voice hoarse again, exactly as Guy always heard it in his mind.

Guy busied himself with a cigarette, feeling Bruno’s avid, shyly flirtatious gaze at Anne boring into his back, deeper than the numbing tingle of the alcohol. No doubt Bruno had already complimented the dress she was wearing, his favorite dress of gray taffeta with the tiny blue pattern like peacocks’ eyes. Bruno always noticed women’s clothes.

“Guy and I,” Bruno’s voice said distinctly behind him as if he had turned his head, “Guy and I once talked about traveling.”

Guy jabbed his cigarette into an ashtray, put out every spark, then went toward the sofa. “How about seeing our game room upstairs?” he said to Bruno.

“Sure.” Bruno got up. “What kind of games you play?”

Guy pushed him into a small room lined with red, and closed the door behind them. “How far are you going?”

“Guy! You’re tight!”

“What’s the idea of telling everyone we’re old friends?”

“Didn’t tell everyone. I told Anne.”

“What’s the idea of telling her or anyone? What’s the idea of coming here?”

“Quiet, Guy! Sh—sh—sh-h-h!” Bruno swung his drink casually in one hand.

“The police are still watching your friends, aren’t they?”

“Not enough to worry me.”

“Get out. Get out now.” His voice shook with his effort to control it. And why should he control himself? The revolver with the one bullet was just across the hall.

Bruno looked at him boredly and sighed. The breath against his upper lip was like the breathing Guy heard in his room at night.

Guy staggered slightly, and the stagger enraged him.

“I think Anne’s beautiful,” Bruno remarked pleasantly.

“If I see you talking with her again, I’ll kill you.”

Bruno’s smile went slack, then came back even broader. “Is that a threat, Guy?”

“That’s a promise.”

Half an hour later, Bruno passed out back of the sofa where he and Anne had been sitting. He looked extremely long on the floor, and his head tiny on the big hearthstone. Three men picked him up, then didn’t know what to do with him.

“Take him—I suppose to the guest room,” Anne said.

“That’s a good omen, Anne,” Helen laughed. “Somebody’s supposed to stay overnight at every housewarming, you know. First guest!”

Christopher Nelson came over to Guy. “Where’d you dig him up? He used to pass out so often at the Great Neck Club, he can’t get in anymore.”

Guy had checked with Teddy after the wedding. Teddy hadn’t invited Bruno, didn’t know anything about him, except that he didn’t like him.

Guy climbed the steps to the studio, and closed the door. On his work table lay the unfinished sketch of the cockeyed department store that conscience had made him take home to complete this weekend. The familiar lines, blurred now with drinking, almost made him sick. He took a blank sheet of paper and began to draw the building they wanted. He knew exactly what they wanted. He hoped he could finish before he became sick, and after he finished be as sick as a dog. But he wasn’t sick when he finished. He only sat back in his chair, and finally went and opened a window.

Thirty-three

The department store was accepted and highly praised, first by the Hortons and then by the client, Mr. Howard Wyndham of New Rochelle, who came into the office early Monday afternoon to see the drawing. Guy rewarded himself by spending the rest of the day smoking in his office and thumbing through a morocco-bound copy of Religio Medici he had just bought at Brentano’s to give Anne on her birthday. What assignment would they give him next, he wondered. He skipped through the book, remembering the passages he and Peter had used to like… the man without a navel yet lives in me… What atrocity would he be asked to do next? He had already fulfilled an assignment. Hadn’t he done enough? Another thing like the department store would be unbearable. It wasn’t self-pity, only life. He was still alive, if he wanted to blame himself for that. He got up from the drawing table, went to his typewriter, and began his letter of resignation.

Anne insisted they go out and celebrate that evening. She was so glad, so overflowing with gladness, Guy felt his own spirits lifting a little, uncertainly, as a kite tries to lift itself from the ground on a still day. He watched her quick, slender fingers draw her hair tight back at the sides and close the bar pin over it in back.

“And, Guy, can’t we make the cruise now?” she asked as they came down into the living room.

Anne still had her heart set on the cruise down the coast in the India, the honeymoon trip they had put off. Guy had intended to give all his time to the drafting rooms that were doing his hospital drawings, but he couldn’t refuse Anne now.

“How soon do you think we can leave? Five days? A week?”

“Maybe five days.”

“Oh, I just remember,” she sighed. “I’ve got to stay till the twenty-third. There’s a man coming in from California who’s interested in all our cotton stuff.”

“And isn’t there a fashion show the end of this month?”

“Oh, Lillian can take care of that.” She smiled. “How wonderful of you to remember!”

He waited while she pulled the hood of her leopard coat up about her head, amused at the thought of her driving a hard bargain with the man from California next week. She wouldn’t leave that to Lillian. Anne was the business half of the shop. He saw the long-stemmed orange flowers on the coffee table for the first time. “Where”d these come from?” he asked.

“Charley Bruno. With a note apologizing for passing out Friday night.” She laughed. “I think it’s rather sweet.”

Guy stared at them. “What kind are they?”

“African daisies.” She held the front door open for him, and they went on out to the car.

She was flattered by the flowers, Guy thought. But her opinion of Bruno, he also knew, had gone down since the night of the party. Guy thought again of how bound up they were now, he and Bruno, by the score of people at the party. The police might investigate him any day. They would investigate him, he warned himself. And why wasn’t he more concerned? What state of mind was he in that he could no longer say even what state it was? Resignation? Suicide? Or simply a torpor of stupidity?

During the next idle days he was compelled to spend at Horton, Horton and Keese to launch the drawings of the department store interior, he even asked himself whether he could be mentally deranged, if some subtle madness had not taken possession of him. He remembered the week or so after the Friday night, when his safety, his existence, had seemed to hang in a delicate balance that a failure of nerve might upset in a second. Now he felt none of that. Yet he still dreamt of Bruno invading his room. If he woke at dawn, he could still see himself standing in the room with the gun. He still felt that he must, and very soon, find some atonement for what he had done, some atonement for which no service or sacrifice he could yet envisage sufficed. He felt rather like two people, one of whom could create and feel in harmony with God when he created, and the other who could murder. “Any kind of person can murder,” Bruno had said on the train. The man who had explained the cantilever principle to Bobbie Cartwright two years ago in Metcalf? No, nor the man who had designed the hospital, or even the department store, or debated half an hour with himself over the color he would paint a metal chair on the back lawn last week, but the man who had glanced into the mirror just last night and had seen for one instant the murderer, like a secret brother.

And how could he sit at his desk thinking of murder, when in less than ten days he would be with Anne on a white ship? Why had he been given Anne, or the power to love her? And had he agreed so readily to the cruise only because he wanted to be free of Bruno for three weeks? Bruno, if he wanted to, could take Anne from him. He had always admitted that to himself, always tried to face it. But he realized that since he had seen them together, since the day of the wedding, the possibility had become a specific terror.

He got up and put on his hat to go out to lunch. He heard the switchboard buzz as he crossed the lobby. Then the girl called to him.

“Take it from here if you like, Mr. Haines.”

Guy picked up the telephone, knowing it was Bruno, knowing he would agree to Bruno’s seeing him sometime today. Bruno asked him to have lunch, and Guy promised to meet him at Marios Villa d’Este in ten minutes.

There were pink and white patterned drapes in the restaurants window. Guy had a feeling that Bruno had laid a trap, that detectives would be behind the pink and white curtain, but not Bruno. And he didn’t care, he felt, didn’t care at all.

Bruno spotted him from the bar and slid off his stool with a grin. Guy walking around with his head in the air again, he thought, walking right by him. Bruno laid his hand on Guy’s shoulder.

“Hi, Guy. I’ve got a table the end of this row.”

Bruno was wearing his old rust-brown suit. Guy thought of the first time he had followed the long legs, down the swaying train to the compartment, but the memory brought no remorse now. He felt, in fact, well-disposed toward Bruno, as he sometimes did by night, but never until now by day. He did not even resent Bruno’s evident gratification that he had come to lunch with him.

Bruno ordered the cocktails and the lunch. He ordered broiled liver for himself, because of his new diet, he said, and eggs Benedict for Guy, because he knew Guy liked them. Guy was inspecting the table nearest them. He felt a puzzled suspicion of the four smartly dressed, fortyish women, all of whom were smiling with their eyes almost closed, all of whom lifted cocktail glasses. Beyond them, a well-fed, European-looking man hurled a smile across the table at his invisible companion. Waiters scurried zealously. Could it all be a show created and enacted by madmen, he and Bruno the main characters, and the maddest of all? For every movement he saw, every word he heard, seemed wrapped in the heroic gloom of predestination.

“Like ‘em?” Bruno was saying. “I got ‘em at Clyde’s this morning. Best selection in town. For summer anyway.”

Guy looked down at the four tie boxes Bruno had opened in their laps. There were knitted, silk and linen ties, and a pale lavender bowtie of heavy linen. There was a shantung silk tie of aqua, like a dress of Anne’s.

Bruno was disappointed. Guy didn’t seem to like them. “Too loud? They’re summer ties.”

“They’re nice,” Guy said.

“This is my favorite. I never saw anything like this.” Bruno held up the white knitted tie with the thin red stripe down the center. “Started to get one for myself, but I wanted you to have it. Just you, I mean. They’re for you, Guy.”

“Thanks.” Guy felt an unpleasant twitch in his upper lip. He might have been Bruno’s lover, he thought suddenly, to whom Bruno had brought a present, a peace offering.

“Here’s to the trip,” Bruno said, lifting his glass.

Bruno had spoken to Anne this morning on the telephone, and Anne had mentioned the cruise, he said. Bruno kept telling him, wistfully, how wonderful he thought Anne was.

“She’s so pure-looking. You certainly don’t see a—a kind-looking girl like that very often. You must be awfully happy, Guy.” He hoped Guy might say something, a phrase or a word, that would somehow explain just why he was happy. But Guy didn’t say anything, and Bruno felt rebuffed, felt the choking lump traveling from his chest up to his throat. What could Guy take offense at about that? Bruno wanted very much to put his hand over Guy’s fist, that rested lightly on the edge of the table, just for a moment as a brother might, but he restrained himself. “Did she like you right away or did you have to know her a long time? Guy?”

Guy heard him repeat the question. It seemed ages old. “How can you ask me about time? It’s a fact.” He glanced at Bruno’s narrow, plumpening face, at the cowlick that still gave his forehead a tentative expression, but Bruno’s eyes were vastly more confident than when he had seen them first, and less sensitive. Because he had his money now, Guy thought.

“Yeah. I know what you mean.” But Bruno didn’t, quite. Guy was happy with Anne even though the murder still haunted him. Guy would be happy with her even if he were broke. Bruno winced now for even having thought once that he might offer Guy money. He could hear the way Guy would say, “No,” with that look of drawing back in his eyes, of being miles away from him in a second. Bruno knew he would never have the things Guy had no matter how much money he had or what he did with it. Having his mother to himself was no guarantee of happiness, he had found out. Bruno made himself smile. “You think Anne likes me all right?”

“All right.”

“What does she like to do outside of designing? Does she like to cook? Things like that?” Bruno watched Guy pick up his martini and drain it in three swallows. “You know. I just like to know the kind of things you do together. Like take walks or work crossword puzzles.”

“We do things like that.”

“What do you do in the evenings?”

“Anne sometimes works in the evenings.” His mind slid easily, as it never had before with Bruno, to the upstairs studio where he and Anne often worked in the evenings, Anne talking to him from time to time, or holding something up for him to comment on, as if her work were effortless. When she dabbled her paintbrush fast in a glass of water, the sound was like laughter.

“I saw her picture in Harper’s Bazaar a couple months ago with some other designers. She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

“Very good.”

“I—” Bruno laid his forearms one above the other on the table. “I sure am glad you’re happy with her.”

Of course he was. Guy felt his shoulders relax, and his breathing grow easier. Yet at this moment, it was hard to believe she was his. She was like a goddess who descended to pluck him from battles that would certainly have killed him, like the goddesses in mythology who saved the heroes, yet introduced an element at the end of the stories that had always struck him, when he read them as a child, as extraneous and unfair. In the nights when he could not sleep, when he stole out of the house and walked up the rock hill in pajamas and overcoat, in the unchallenging, indifferent summer nights, he did not permit himself to think of Anne. “Dea ex machina,” Guy murmured.

“What?”

Why was he sitting here with Bruno, eating at the same table with him? He wanted to fight Bruno and he wanted to weep. But all at once he felt his curses dissolve in a flood of pity. Bruno did not know how to love, and that was all he needed. Bruno was too lost, too blind to love or to inspire love. It seemed all at once tragic.

“You’ve never even been in love, Bruno?” Guy watched a restive, unfamiliar expression come into Bruno’s eyes.

Bruno signaled for another drink. “No, not really in love, I guess.” He moistened his lips. Not only hadn’t he ever fallen in love, but he didn’t care too much about sleeping with women. He had never been able to stop thinking it was a silly business, that he was standing off somewhere and watching himself. Once, one terrible time, he had started giggling. Bruno squirmed. That was the most painful difference he felt separating him and Guy, that Guy could forget himself in women, had practically killed himself for Miriam.

Guy looked at Bruno, and Bruno lowered his eyes. Bruno was waiting, as if for him to tell him how to fall in love. “Do you know the greatest wisdom in the world, Bruno?”

“I know a lot of wisdoms,” Bruno smirked. “Which one do you mean?”

“That everything has its opposite close beside it.”

“Opposites attract?”

“That’s too simple. I mean—you give me ties. But it also occurred to me you might have the police waiting for me here.”

“F’ Christ’s sake, Guy, you’re my friend!” Bruno said quickly, suddenly frantic. “I like you!”

I like you, I don’t hate you, Guy thought. But Bruno wouldn’t say that, because he did hate him. Just as he would never say to Bruno, I like you, but instead, I hate you, because he did like him. Guy set his jaw, and rubbed his fingers back and forth across his forehead. He could foresee a balance of positive and negative will that would paralyze every action before he began it. Such as that, for instance, that kept him sitting here. He jumped up, and the new drinks splashed on the cloth.

Bruno stared at him in terrified surprise. “Guy, what’s the matter?” Bruno followed him. “Guy, wait! You don’t think I’d do a thing like that, do you? I wouldn’t in a million years!”

“Don’t touch me!”

“Guy!” Bruno was almost crying. Why did people do these things to him? Why? He shouted on the sidewalk: “Not in a million years! Not for a million dollars! Trust me, Guy!”

Guy pushed his hand into Bruno’s chest and closed the taxi door. Bruno would not in a million years betray him, he knew. But if everything were as ambiguous as he believed, how could he really be sure?

Thirty-four

“What’s your connection with Mrs. Guy Haines?”

Bruno had expected it. Gerard had his latest charge accounts, and this was the flowers he had sent Anne. “Friend. Friend of her husband.”

“Oh. Friend?”

“Acquaintance.” Bruno shrugged, knowing Gerard would think he was trying to brag because Guy was famous.

“Known him long?”

“Not long.” From his horizontal slump in his easy chair, Bruno reached for his lighter.

“How’d you happen to send flowers?”

“Feeling good, I guess. I was going to a party there that night.”

“Do you know him that well?”

Bruno shrugged again. “Ordinary party. He was one of the architects we thought of when we were talking about building a house.” That had just popped out, and it was rather good, Bruno thought.

“Matt Levine. Let’s get back to him.”

Bruno sighed. Skipping Guy, maybe because he was out of town, maybe just skipping him. Now Matt Levine—they didn’t come any shadier, and without realizing it might be useful, he had seen a lot of Matt before the murder. “What about him?”

“How is it you saw him the twenty-fourth, twenty-eighth, and thirtieth of April, the second, fifth, sixth, seventh of March, and two days before the murder?”

“Did I?” he smiled. Gerard had had only three dates the last time. Matt didn’t like him either. Matt had probably said the worst. “He was interested in buying my car.”

“And you were interested in selling it? Why, because you thought you’d get a new one soon?”

“Wanted to sell it to get a little car,” Bruno said obliviously. “The one in the garage now. Crosley.”

Gerard smiled. “How long have you known Mark Lev?”

“Since he was Mark Levitski,” Bruno retorted. “Go back a little farther and you’ll find he killed his own father in Russia.” Bruno glared at Gerard. The “own” sounded funny, he shouldn’t have said it, but Gerard trying to be smart with the aliases!

“Matt doesn’t care for you either. What’s the matter, couldn’t you two come to terms?”

“About the car?”

“Charles,” Gerard said patiently.

“I’m not saying anything.” Bruno looked at his bitten nails, and thought again how well Matt matched Herbert’s description of the murderer.

“You haven’t seen Ernie Schroeder much lately.”

Bruno opened his mouth boredly to answer.

Thirty-five

Barefoot, in white duck trousers, Guy sat cross-legged on the India’s forward deck. Long Island had just come in sight, but he did not want to look at it yet. The gently rolling movement of the ship rocked him pleasantly and familiarly, like something he had always known. The day he had last seen Bruno, in the restaurant, seemed a day of madness. Surely he had been going insane. Surely Anne must have seen it.

He flexed his arm and pinched up the thin brown skin that covered its muscles. He was brown as Egon, the half-Portuguese ship’s boy they had hired from the Long Island dock at the start of the cruise. Only the little scar in his right eyebrow remained white.

The three weeks at sea had given him a peace and resignation he had never known before, and that a month ago he would have declared foreign to him. He had come to feel that his atonement, whatever it might be, was a part of his destiny, and like the rest of his destiny would find him without his seeking. He had always trusted his sense of destiny. As a boy with Peter, he had known that he would not merely dream, as he had somehow known, too, that Peter would do nothing but dream, that he would create famous buildings, that his name would take its proper place in architecture, and finally—it had always seemed to him the crowning achievement—that he would build a bridge. It would be a white bridge with a span like an angel’s wing, he had thought as a boy, like the curving white bridge of Robert Maillart in his architecture books. It was a kind of arrogance, perhaps, to believe so in one’s destiny. But, on the other hand, who could be more genuinely humble than one who felt compelled to obey the laws of his own fate? The murder that had seemed an outrageous departure, a sin against himself, he believed now might have been a part of his destiny, too. It was impossible to think otherwise. And if it were so, he would be given a way to make his atonement, and given the strength to make it. And if death by law overtook him first, he would be given the strength to meet that also, and strength besides sufficient for Anne to meet it. In a strange way, he felt humbler than the smallest minnow of the sea, and stronger than the greatest mountain on earth. But he was not arrogant. His arrogance had been a defense, reaching its height at the time of the break with Miriam. And hadn’t he known even then, obsessed by her, wretchedly poor, that he would find another woman whom he could love and who would love him always? And what better proof did he need that all this was so than that he and Anne had never been closer, their lives never more like one harmonious life, than during these three weeks at sea?

He turned himself with a movement of his feet, so he could see her as she leaned against the mainmast. There was a faint smile on her lips as she gazed down at him, a half-repressed, prideful smile like that of a mother, Guy thought, who had brought her child safely through an illness, and smiling back at her, Guy marveled that he could put such trust in her infallibility and rightness and that she could still be merely a human being. Most of all, he marveled that she could be his. Then he looked down at his locked hands and thought of the work he would begin tomorrow on the hospital, of all the work to come, and the events of his destiny that lay ahead.

Bruno telephoned a few evenings later. He was in the neighborhood, he said, and wanted to come by. He sounded very sober, and a little dejected.

Guy told him no. He told him calmly and firmly that neither he nor Anne wanted to see him again, but even as he spoke, he felt the sands of his patience running out fast, and the sanity of the past weeks crumbling under the madness of their conversing at all.

Bruno knew that Gerard had not spoken to Guy yet. He did not think Gerard would question Guy more than a few minutes. But Guy sounded so cold, Bruno could not bring himself to tell him now that Gerard had gotten his name, that he might be interviewed, or that he intended to see Guy strictly secretly from now on—no more parties or even lunches—if Guy would only let him.

“Okay,” Bruno said mutedly, and hung up.

Then the telephone rang again. Frowning, Guy put out the cigarette he had just lighted relievedly, and answered it.

“Hello. This is Arthur Gerard of the Confidential Detective Bureau….” Gerard asked if he could come over.

Guy turned around, glancing warily over the living room, trying to reason away a feeling that Gerard had just heard his and Bruno’s conversation over tapped wires, that Gerard had just captured Bruno. He went upstairs to tell Anne.

“A private detective?” Anne asked, surprised. “What’s it about?”

Guy hesitated an instant. There were so many, many places where he might hesitate too long! Damn Bruno! Damn him for dogging him! “I don’t know.”

Gerard arrived promptly. He fairly bowed over Anne’s hand, and after apologizing for intruding on their evening, made polite conversation about the house and the strip of garden in front. Guy stared at him in some astonishment. Gerard looked dull, tired, and vaguely untidy. Perhaps Bruno wasn’t entirely wrong about him. Even his absent air, heightened by his slow speech, did not suggest the absent-mindedness of a brilliant detective. Then as Gerard settled himself with a cigar and a highball, Guy caught the shrewdness in the light hazel eyes and the energy in the chunky hands. Guy felt uneasy then. Gerard looked unpredictable.

“You’re a friend of Charles Bruno, Mr. Haines?”

“Yes. I know him.”

“His father was murdered last March as you probably know, and the murderer has not been found.”

“I didn’t know that!” Anne said.

Gerard’s eyes moved slowly from her back to Guy.

“I didn’t know either,” said Guy.

“You don’t know him that well?”

“I know him very slightly.”

“When and where did you meet?”

“At—” Guy glanced at Anne—“the Parker Art Institute, I think around last December.” Guy felt he had walked into a trap. He had repeated Bruno’s flippant reply at the wedding, simply because Anne had heard Bruno say it, and Anne had probably forgotten. Gerard regarded him, Guy thought, as if he didn’t believe a word of it. Why hadn’t Bruno warned him about Gerard? Why hadn’t they settled on the story Bruno had once proposed about their having met at the rail of a certain midtown bar?

“And when did you see him again?” Gerard asked finally.

“Well—not until my wedding in June.” He felt himself assuming the puzzled expression of a man who does not yet know his inquisitor’s object. Fortunately, he thought, fortunately, he had already assured Anne that Bruno’s assertion they were old friends was only Bruno’s style of humor. “We didn’t invite him,” Guy added.

“He just came?” Gerard looked as if he understood. “But you did invite him to the party you gave in July?” He glanced at Anne also.

“He called up,” Anne told him, “and asked if he could come, so—I said yes.”

Gerard then asked if Bruno knew about the party through any friends of his who were coming, and Guy said possibly, and gave the name of the blond woman who had smiled so horrifically at Bruno that evening. Guy had no other names to give. He had never seen Bruno with anyone.

Gerard leaned back. “Do you like him?” he smiled.

“Well enough,” Anne replied finally, politely.

“All right,” Guy said, because Gerard was waiting. “He seems a bit pushing.” The right side of his face was in shadow. Guy wondered if Gerard were scanning his face now for scars.

“A hero-worshiper. Power-worshiper, in a sense.” Gerard smiled, but the smile no longer looked genuine, or perhaps it never had. “Sorry to bother you with these questions, Mr. Haines.”

Five minutes later, he was gone.

“What does it mean?” Anne asked. “Does he suspect Charles Bruno?”

Guy bolted the door, then came back. “He probably suspects one of his acquaintances. He might think Charles knows something, because he hated his father so. Or so Charles told me.”

“Do you think Charles might know?”

“There’s no telling. Is there?” Guy took a cigarette.

“Good lord.” Anne stood looking at the corner of the sofa, as if she still saw Bruno where he had sat the night of the party. She whispered, “Amazing what goes on in people’s lives!”

Thirty-six

“Listen,” Guy said tensely into the receiver. “Listen, Bruno!”

Bruno was drunker than Guy had ever heard him, but he was determined to penetrate to the muddled bram. Then he thought suddenly that Gerard might be with him, and his voice grew even softer, cowardly with caution. He found out Bruno was in a telephone booth, alone. “Did you tell Gerard we met at the Art Institute?”

Bruno said he had. It came through the drunken mumblings that he had. Bruno wanted to come over. Guy couldn’t make it register that Gerard had already come to question him. Guy banged the telephone down, and tore open his collar. Bruno calling him now! Gerard had externalized his danger. Guy felt it was more imperative to break completely with Bruno even than to arrange a story with him that would tally. What annoyed him most was that he couldn’t tell from Bruno’s driveling what had happened to him, or even what kind of mood he was in.

Guy was upstairs in the studio with Anne when the door chime rang.

He opened the door only slightly, but Bruno bumped it wide, stumbled across the living room, and collapsed on the sofa. Guy stopped short in front of him, speechless first with anger, then disgust. Bruno’s fat, flushed neck bulged over his collar. He seemed more bloated than drunk, as if an edema of death had inflated his entire body, filling even the deep eye sockets so the red-gray eyes were thrust unnaturally forward. Bruno stared up at him. Guy went to the telephone to call a taxi.

“Guy, who is it?” Anne whispered down the stairway.

“Charles Bruno. He’s drunk.”

“Not drunk!“Bruno protested suddenly.

Anne came halfway down the stairs, and saw him. “Shouldn’t we just put him upstairs?”

“I don’t want him here.” Guy was looking in the telephone book, trying to find a taxi company’s number.

“Yess-s!” Bruno hissed, like a deflating tire.

Guy turned. Bruno was staring at him out of one eye, the eye the only living point in the sprawled, corpselike body. He was muttering something, rhythmically.

“What’s he saying?” Anne stood closer to Guy.

Guy went to Bruno and caught him by the shirtfront. The muttered, imbecilic chant infuriated him, Bruno drooled onto his hand as he tried to pull him upright. “Get up and get out!“Then he heard it: “I’ll tell her, I’ll tell her—I’ll tell her, I’ll tell her,” Bruno chanted, and the wild red eye stared up. “Don’t send me away, I’ll tell her—I’ll—”

Guy released him in abhorrence.

“What’s the matter, Guy? What’s he saying?”

“I’ll put him upstairs,” Guy said.

Guy tried with all his strength to get Bruno over his shoulder, but the flaccid, dead weight defeated him. Finally, Guy stretched him out across the sofa. He went to the front window. There was no car outside. Bruno might have dropped out of the sky. Bruno slept noiselessly, and Guy sat up watching him, smoking.

Bruno awakened about 3 in the morning, and had a couple of drinks to steady himself. After a few moments, except for the bloatedness, he looked almost normal. He was very happy at finding himself in Guy’s house, and had no recollection of arriving. “I had another round with Gerard,” he smiled. “Three days. Been seeing the papers?”

“No.”

“You’re a fine one, don’t even look at the papers!” Bruno said softly. “Gerard’s hot on a bum scent. This crook friend of mine, Matt Levine. He doesn’t have an alibi for that night. Herbert thinks it could be him. I been talking with all three of them for three days. Matt might get it.”

“Might die for it?”

Bruno hesitated, still smiling. “Not die, just take the rap. He’s got two or three killings on him now. The cops’re glad to have him.” Bruno shuddered, and drank the rest in his glass.

Guy wanted to pick up the big ashtray in front of him and smash Bruno’s bloated head, burn out the tension he felt would grow and grow until he did kill Bruno, or himself. He caught Bruno’s shoulders hard in both hands. “Will you get out? I swear this is the last time!”

“No,” Bruno said quietly, without any movement of resistance, and Guy saw the old indifference to pain, to death, that he had seen when he had fought him in the woods.

Guy put his hands over his own face, and felt its contortion against his palms. “If this Matt gets blamed,” he whispered,“I’ll tell them the whole story.”

“Oh, he won’t. They won’t have enough. It’s a joke, son!” Bruno grinned. “Matt’s the right character with the wrong evidence. You’re the wrong character with the right evidence. You’re an important guy, f’ Christ’s sake!” He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to Guy. “I found this last -week. Very nice, Guy.”

Guy looked at the photograph of “The Pittsburgh Store,” funereally backgrounded by black. It was a booklet from the Modern Museum. He ready: “Guy Daniel Haines, hardly thirty, follows the Wright tradition. He has achieved a distinctive, uncompromising style noted for a rigorous simplicity without starkness, for the grace he calls ‘singingness’…” Guy closed it nervously, disgusted by the last word that was an invention of the Museum’s.

Bruno repocketed the booklet. “You’re one of the tops. If you kept your nerve up, they could turn you inside out and never suspect.”

Guy looked down at him. “That’s still no reason for you to see me. Why do you do it?” But he knew. Because his life with Anne fascinated Bruno. Because he himself derived something from seeing Bruno, some torture that perversely eased.

Bruno watched him as if he knew everything that passed through his mind. “I like you, Guy, but remember—they’ve got a lot more against you than against me. I could wiggle out if you turned me in, but you couldn’t. There’s the fact Herbert might remember you. And Anne might remember you were acting funny around that time. And the scratches and the scar. And all the little clues they’d shove in front of you, like the revolver, and glove pieces—” Bruno recited them slowly and fondly, like old memories. “With me against you, you’d crack up, I bet.”

Thirty-seven

Guy knew as soon as Anne called to him that she had seen the dent. He had meant to get it fixed, and had forgotten. He said first that he didn’t know how it got there, then that he did. He had taken the boat out last week, he said, and it had bumped a buoy.

“Don’t be terribly sorry,” she mocked him, “it isn’t worth it.” She took his hand as she stood up. “Egon said you had the boat out one afternoon. Is that why you didn’t say anything about it?”

“I suppose.”

“Did you take it out by yourself?” Anne smiled a little, because he wasn’t a good-enough sailor to take the boat out by himself.

Bruno had called up and insisted they go out for a sail. Gerard had come to a new deadend with Matt Levine, deadends everywhere, and Bruno had insisted that they celebrate. “I took it out with Charles Bruno one afternoon,” he said. And he had brought the revolver with him that day, too.

“It’s all right, Guy. Only why’d you see him again? I thought ‘ you disliked him so.”

“A whim,” he murmured. “It was the two days I was doing that work at home.” It wasn’t all right, Guy knew. Anne kept the India’s brass and white-painted wood gleaming and spotless, like something of chryselephantine. And Bruno! She mistrusted Bruno now.

“Guy, he’s not the man we saw that night in front of your apartment, is he? The one who spoke to us in the snow?”

“Yes. He’s the same one.” Guy’s fingers, supporting the weight of the revolver in his pocket, tightened helplessly.

“What’s his interest in you?” Anne followed him casually down the deck. “He isn’t interested in architecture particularly. I talked with him the night of the party.”

“He’s got no interest in me. Just doesn’t know what to do with himself.” When he got rid of the revolver, he thought, he could talk.

“You met him at school?”

“Yes. He was wandering around a corridor.” How easy it was to lie when one had to lie! But it was wrapping tendrils around his feet, his body, his brain. He would say the wrong thing one day. He was doomed to lose Anne. Perhaps he had already lost her, at this moment when he lighted a cigarette and she stood leaning against the mainmast, watching him. The revolver seemed to weight him to the spot, and determinedly he turned and walked toward the prow. Behind him, he heard Anne’s step onto the deck, and her soft tread in her tennis shoes, going back toward the cockpit. ‘I It was a sullen day, promising rain. The India rocked slowly on the choppy surface, and seemed no farther from the gray shore than it had been an hour ago. Guy learned on the bowsprit and looked down at his white-clad legs, the blue gilt-buttoned jacket he had taken from the India’s locker, that perhaps had belonged to Anne’s father. He might have been a sailor instead of an architect, he thought. He had been wild to go to sea at fourteen. What had stopped him? How different his life might have been without—what? Without Miriam, of course. He straightened impatiently and pulled the revolver from the pocket of the jacket.

He held the gun in both hands over the water, his elbow on the bowsprit. How intelligent a jewel, he thought, and how innocent it looked now. Himself—He let it drop. The gun turned once head-over, in perfect balance, with its familiar look of willingness, and disappeared.

“What was that?”

Guy turned and saw her standing on the deck near the cabin. He measured the ten or twelve feet between them. He could think of nothing, absolutely nothing to say to her.

Thirty-eight

Bruno hesitated about the drink. The bathroom walls had that look of breaking up in little pieces, as if the walls might not really have been there, or he might not really have been here.

“Ma!” But the frightened bleat shamed him, and he drank his drink.

He tiptoed into his mother’s room and awakened her with a press of the button by her bed, which signaled to Herbert in the kitchen that she was ready for her breakfast.

“Oh-h,” she yawned, then smiled. “And how are you?” She patted his arm, slid up from the covers, and went into the bathroom to wash.

Bruno sat quietly on her bed until she came out and got back under the cover again.

“We’re supposed to see that trip man this afternoon. What’s his name, Saunders? You’d better feel like going in with me.”

Bruno nodded. It was about their trip to Europe, that they might make into a round-the-world trip. It didn’t have any charm this morning. He might like to go around the world with Guy. Bruno stood up, wondering whether to go get another drink.

“How’re you feeling?”

His mother always asked him at the wrong times. “Okay,” he said, sitting down again.

There was a knock on the door, and Herbert came in. “Good morning, madam. Good morning, sir,” Herbert said without looking at either of them.

With his chin in his hand, Bruno frowned down at Herbert’s silent, polished, turned-out shoes. Herbert’s insolence lately was intolerable! Gerard had made him think he was the key to the whole case, if they just produced the right man. Everyone said how brave he was to have chased the murderer. And his father had left him twenty thousand in his will. Herbert might take a vacation!

“Does madam know if there’ll be six or seven for dinner?”

As Herbert spoke, Bruno looked up at his pink, pointed chin and thought, Guy whammed him there and knocked him right out.

“Oh, dear, I haven’t called yet, Herbert, but I think seven.”

“Very good, madam.”

Rutledge Overbeck II, Bruno thought. He had known his mother would end up having him, though she pretended to be doubtful because he would make an odd number. Rutledge Overbeck was madly in love with his mother, or pretending to be. Bruno wanted to tell his mother Herbert hadn’t sent his clothes to be pressed in six weeks, but he felt too sickish to begin.

“You know, I’m dying to see Australia,” she said through a bite of toast. She had propped a map up against her coffee pot.

A tingling, naked sensation spread over his buttocks. He stood up. “Ma, I don’t feel so hot.”

She frowned at him concernedly, which frightened him more, because he realized there was nothing in the world she could do to help him. “What’s the matter, darling? What do you want?”

He hurried from the room, feeling he might have to be sick. The bathroom went black. He staggered out, and let the still corked Scotch bottle topple onto his bed.

“What, Charley? What is it?”

“I wanna lie down.” He flopped down, but that wasn’t it. He motioned his mother away so he could get up, but when he sat up he wanted to lie down again, so he stood up.“Feel like I’m dying!”

“Lie down, darling. How about some—some hot tea?”

Bruno tore off his smoking jacket, then his pajama top. He was suffocating. He had to pant to breathe. He did feel like he was dying!

She hurried to him with a wet towel. “What is it, your stomach?”

“Everything. ” He kicked off his slippers. He went to the window to open it, but it was already open. He turned, sweating. “Ma, maybe I’m dying. You think I’m dying?”

“I’ll get you a drink!”

“No, get the doctor!” he shrieked. “Get me a drink, too!” Feebly he pulled his pajama string and let the pants drop. What was it? Not just the shakes. He was too weak to shake. Even his hands were weak and tingly. He held up his hands. The fingers were curved inward. He couldn’t open them. “Ma, somp’n’s the matter with my hands! Look, Ma, what is it, what is it?”

“Drink this!”

He heard the bottle chatter on the rim of the glass. He couldn’t wait for it. He trotted into the hall, stooped with terror, staring at his limp, curling hands. It was the two middle fingers on each hand. They were curving in, almost touching the palm.

“Darling, put your robe on!” she whispered.

“Get the doctor!” A robe! She talked about a robe! What did it matter if he was stark naked? “Ma, but don’t let ‘em take me away!” He plucked at her as she stood at the telephone. “Lock all the doors! You know what they do?” He spoke fast and confidentially, because the numbness was working up and he knew what was the matter now. He was a case! He was going to be like this all his life! “Know what they do, Ma, they put you in a straitjacket without a drop and it’ll kill me!”

“Dr. Packer? This is Mrs. Bruno. Could you recommend a doctor in the neighborhood?”

Bruno screamed. How would a doctor get out here in the Connecticut sticks? “Massom—” He gasped. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t move his tongue. It had gone into his vocal chords! “Aaaaagh!” He wriggled from under the smoking jacket his mother was trying to throw over him. Let Herbert stand there gaping at him if he wanted to!

“Charles!”

He gestured toward his mouth with his crazy hands. He trotted to the closet mirror. His face was white, flat around the mouth as if someone had hit him with a board, his lips drawn horribly back from his teeth. And his hands! He wouldn’t be able to hold a glass anymore, or light a cigarette. He wouldn’t be able to drive a car. He wouldn’t even be able to go to the john by himself!

“Drink this!”

Yes, liquor, liquor. He tried to catch it all in his stiff lips. It burnt his face and ran down his chest. He motioned for more. He tried to remind her to lock the doors. Oh, Christ, if it went away, he would be grateful all his life! He let Herbert and his mother push him onto the bed.

“Tehmeh!” he choked. He twisted his mother’s dressing gown and nearly pulled her down on top of him. But at least he could hold to something now. “Dome tehmeh way!” he said with his breath, and she assured him she wouldn’t. She told him she would lock all the doors.

Gerard, he thought. Gerard was still working against him, and he would keep on and on and on. Not only Gerard but a whole army of people, checking and snooping and visiting people, hammering typewriters, running out and running back with more pieces, pieces from Santa Fe now, and one day Gerard might put them together right. One day Gerard might come in and find him like this morning, and ask him and he would tell everything. He had killed someone. They killed you for killing someone. Maybe he couldn’t cope. He stared up at the light fixture in the center of the ceiling. It reminded him of the round chromium drainstop in the basin at his grandmother’s house in Los Angeles. Why did he think of that?

The cruel jab of the hypodermic needle shocked him to sharper consciousness.

The young, jumpy-looking doctor was talking to his mother in a corner of the darkened room. But he felt better. They wouldn’t take him away now. It was okay now. He had just been panicky. Cautiously, just under the top of the sheet, he watched his fingers flex. “Guy,” he whispered. His tongue was still thick, but he could talk. Then he saw the doctor go out.

“Ma, I don’t want to go to Europe!” he said in a monotone as his mother came over.

“All right, darling, we won’t go.” She sat down gently on the side of the bed, and he felt immediately better.

“The doctor didn’t say I couldn’t go, did he?” As if he wouldn’t go if he wanted to! What was he afraid of? Not even of another attack like this! He touched the puffed shoulder of his mother’s dressing gown, but he thought of Rutledge Overbeck at dinner tonight, and let his hand drop. He was sure his mother was having an affair with him. She went to see him too much at his studio in Silver Springs, and she stayed too long. He didn’t want to admit it, but why shouldn’t he when it was under his nose? It was the first affair, and his father was dead so why shouldn’t she, but why did she have to pick such a jerk? Her eyes looked darker now, in the shaded room. She hadn’t improved since the days after his father’s death. She was going to be like this, Bruno realized now, stay like this, never be young again the way he liked her. “Don’t look so sad, Mom.”

“Darling, will you promise me you’ll cut down? The doctor said this is the beginning of the end. This morning was a warning, don’t you see? Nature’s warning.” She moistened her lips, and the sudden softness of the rouged, lined underlip so close to him was more than Bruno could bear.

He closed his eyes tight shut. If he promised, he would be lying. “Hell, I didn’t get the D. T. s, did I? I never had ‘em.”

“But this is worse. I talked with the doctor. It’s destroying your nerve tissue, he said, and it can kill you. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“Promise me?” She watched his eyelids flutter shut again, and heard him sigh. The tragedy was not this morning, she thought, but years ago when he had taken his first drink by himself. The tragedy was not even the first drink, because the first drink was not the first resort but the last. There’d had to be first the failure of everything else—of her and Sam, of his friends, of his hope, of his interests, really. And hard as she tried, she could never discover why or where it might have begun, because Charley had always been given everything, and both she and Sam had done their best to encourage him in everything and anything he had ever shown interest in. If she could only discover the place in the past where it might have begun—She got up, needing a drink herself.

Bruno opened his eyes tentatively. He felt deliciously heavy with sleep. He saw himself halfway across the room, as if he watched himself on a screen. He was in his red-brown suit. It was the island in Metcalf. He saw his younger, slimmer body arc toward Miriam and fling her to the earth, those few short moments separate from time before and time after. He felt he had made special movements, thought special brilliant thoughts in those moments, and that such an interval would never come again. Like Guy had talked about himself, the other day on the boat, when he built the Palmyra. Bruno was glad those special moments for both of them had come so near the same time. Sometimes he thought he could die without regrets, because what else could he ever do that would measure up to the night in Metcalf? What else wouldn’t be an anticlimax? Sometimes, like now, he felt his energy might be winding down, and something, maybe his curiosity, dying down. But he didn’t mind, because he felt so wise now somehow, and really so content. Only yesterday he had wanted to go around the world. And why? To say he had been? To say to whom? Last month he had written to William Beebe, volunteering to go down in the new super-bathysphere that they were testing first without a man inside. Why? Everything was silly compared to the night in Metcalf. Every person he knew was silly compared to Guy. Silliest of all to think he’d wanted to see a lot of European women! Maybe the Captain’s whores had soured him, so what? Lots of people thought sex was overrated. No love lasts forever, the psychologists said. But he really shouldn’t say that about Guy and Anne. He had a feeling theirs might last, but just why he didn’t know. It wasn’t only that Guy was so wrapped up in her he was blind to all the rest. It wasn’t just that Guy had enough money now. It was something invisible that he hadn’t even thought of yet. Sometimes he felt he was right on the brink of thinking of it. No, he didn’t want the answer for himself. Purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

He turned on his side, smiling, clicking and unclicking the top of his gold Dunhill lighter. That trip man wouldn’t see them today or any other day. Home was a hell of a lot more comfortable than Europe. And Guy was here.

Thirty-nine

Gerard was chasing him through a forest, waving all the clues at him—the glove scraps, the shred of overcoat, even the revolver, because Gerard already had Guy. Guy was tied up back in the forest, and his right hand was bleeding fast. If he couldn’t circle around and get to him, Guy would bleed to death. Gerard giggled as he ran, as if it were a good joke, a good trick they’d played, but he’d guessed it after all. In a minute, Gerard would touch him with those ugly hands!

“Guy!” But his voice sounded feeble. And Gerard was almost touching him. That was the game, when Gerard touched him!

With all his power, Bruno struggled to sit up. The nightmare slid from his brain like heavy slabs of rock.

Gerard! There he was!

“What’s the matter? Bad dream?”

The pink-purply hands touched him, and Bruno whirled himself off the bed onto the floor.

“Woke you just in time, eh?” Gerard laughed.

Bruno set his teeth hard enough to break them. He bolted to the bathroom and took a drink with the door wide open. In the mirror, his face looked like a battlefield in hell.

“Sorry to intrude, but I found something new,” Gerard said in the tense, high-pitched voice that meant he had scored a little victory. “About your friend Guy Haines. The one you were just dreaming about, weren’t you?”

The glass cracked in Bruno’s hand, and meticulously he gathered up the pieces from the basin and put them in the jagged bottom of the glass. He staggered boredly back to his bed.

“When did you meet him, Charles? Not last December.” Gerard leaned against the chest of drawers, lighting a cigar. “Did you meet him about a year and a half ago? Did you go with him on the train down to Santa Fe?” Gerard waited. He pulled something from under his arm and tossed it on the bed. “Remember that?”

It was Guy’s Plato book from Santa Fe, still wrapped and with its address half rubbed off. “Sure, I remember it.” Bruno pushed it away. “I lost it going to the post office.”

“Hotel La Fonda had it right on the shelf. How’d you happen to borrow a book of Plato?”

“I found it on the train.” Bruno looked up. “It had Guy’s address in it, so I meant to mail it. Found it in the dining car, matter of fact.” He looked straight at Gerard, who was watching him with his sharp, steady little eyes that didn’t always have anything behind them.

“When did you meet him, Charley?” Gerard asked again, with the patient air of one questioning a child he knows is lying.

“In December.”

“You know about his wife’s murder, of course.”

“Sure, I read about it. Then I read about him building the Palmyra Club.”

“And you thought, how interesting, because you had found a book six months before that belonged to him.”

Bruno hesitated. “Yeah.”

Gerard grunted, and looked down with a little smile of disgust.

Bruno felt odd, uncomfortable. When had he seen it before, a smile like that after a grunt? Once when he had lied to his father about something, very obviously lied and clung to it, and his father’s grunt, the disbelief in the smile, had shamed him. Bruno realized that his eyes pled with Gerard to forgive him, so he deliberately looked off at the window.

“And you made all those calls to Metcalf not even knowing Guy Haines.” Gerard picked up the book.

“What calls?”

“Several calls.”

“Maybe one when I was tight.”

“Several. About what?”

“About the damned book!” If Gerard knew him so well, he should know that was exactly the kind of thing he would do. “Maybe I called when I heard his wife got murdered.”

Gerard shook his head. “You called before she was murdered.”

“So what? Maybe I did.”

“So what? I’ll have to ask Mr. Haines. Considering your interest in murder, it’s remarkable you didn’t call him after the murder, isn’t it?”

“I’m sick of murder!” Bruno shouted.

“Oh, I believe it, Charley, I believe it!” Gerard sauntered out, and down the hall toward his mother’s room.

Bruno showered and dressed with slow care. Gerard had been much, much more excited about Matt Levine, he remembered. As far as he knew, he had made only two calls to Metcalf from Hotel La Fonda, where Gerard must have picked up the bills. He could say Guy’s mother was mistaken about the others, that it hadn’t been he.

“What’d Gerard want?” Bruno asked his mother.

“Nothing much. Wanted to know if I knew a friend of yours. Guy Haines.” She was brushing her hair with upward strokes, so it stood out wildly around the calm, tired face. “He’s an architect, isn’t he?”

“Uh-huh. I don’t know him very well.” He strolled along the floor behind her. She had forgotten the clippings in Los Angeles, just as he had thought she would. Thank Christ, he hadn’t reminded her he knew Guy when all the Palmyra pictures came out! The back of his mind must have known he was going to get Guy to do it.

“Gerard was talking about your calling him last summer. What was all that?”

“Oh, Mom, I get so damn sick of Gerard’s dumb steers!”