The Ivory Grin

Chapter 12

Sylvia went with me to the end of the hall. “I’m sorry, Mr. Archer. The last two weeks have been terribly hard on her. She’s been under drugs for days. When things don’t fit in with her ideas, she simply doesn’t hear them, or she forgets them. It isn’t that her mind is affected, exactly. She’s suffered so much, she can’t bear to talk about the facts, or even think about them.”

“What facts?”

She said surprisingly: “Can we sit in your car? I think she really wants me to talk to you.”

“You’d have to be psychic to know it.”

“I am a bit psychic where Mrs. Singleton is concerned. When you’re under a person’s thumb, you know.”

“You get to know the thumbprint. How long have you worked for her?”

“Only since June. But our families have known each other for a great many years. Charles’s father and mine went to Harvard together.” She opened the door, leaning across me to reach the knob. “Excuse me, I need some fresh air.”

“Is she all right by herself?”

“There are servants on duty. They’ll put her to bed.” She started towards my car.

“Just a minute, Sylvia. Do you have a picture of Charles? A recent snapshot would be good.”

“Why, yes, I do.”

“Get it for me, will you?”

“I have one here,” she said without embarrassment. She took a red leather wallet from the pocket of her suit and extracted a small snapshot that she handed me: “Is it big enough, clear enough?”

The picture showed a young man in tennis shorts and an open-necked short-sleeved shirt, smiling into the sun. The strength and leanness of his features were emphasized by a short service crew-cut. He was strongly built, with wide sloping shoulders and muscular forearms. But there was an unreal, actorish quality about him. His pose was self-conscious, chest pouting, stomach sucked in, as if he feared the cold eye of the Leica or the hot eye of the sun.

“It’s clear enough,” I said. “May I keep it?”

“For as long as you need it. It’s very like him.”

Climbing into my car, she showed a fine round leg. I noticed when I slid behind the wheel that she filled the interior with a clean springlike smell. I offered her a cigarette.

“Thanks, I never smoke.”

“How old are you, Sylvia?”

“Twenty-one.” She added with apparent irrelevance: “I just received the first quarterly check from Mother’s trust fund.”

“Good for you.”

“About the check, I mean, it’s nearly a thousand dollars. I can afford to employ you, if you’ll work for me instead of Mrs. Singleton.”

“I couldn’t promise anything definite. You want him found pretty badly, don’t you?”

“Yes.” The word had the pressure of her life behind it. “How much money should I give you?”

“Don’t bother about it now.”

“Why should you trust me?”

“Anybody would. What’s more surprising is that you trust me.”

“I know something about men,” she said. “My father is a good man. You’re not like that man Heiss.”

“You talked to him?”

“I was in the room. All he wanted was money. It was so – naked. I had to threaten him with the police before he’d leave. It’s really a pity. Mrs. Singleton might have opened out to you if he hadn’t spoilt things.”

“Are there things she could have told me, that she didn’t?”

“Charlie’s whole life,” she said obscurely. “What did this Negro woman look like?”

I gave her a thumbnail description of Lucy Champion.

She interrupted me before I finished: “It’s the same one.” She opened the door on her side and began to get out. Everything she did was done gently, almost regretfully, as if an action was a dangerous gamble.

“Do you know her?”

“Yes. I want to show you something.” And she was gone.

I lit a cigarette. Before I had smoked a half inch of it, Sylvia came out of the house and climbed in beside me again. “I believe this is hers.”

She handed me a soft dark object. I turned on the overhead light to examine it. It was a woman’s turban, knitted of black wool and gold thread. Inside, there was a maker’s label: Denise.

“Where did you get this?”

“She was here, the day before yesterday.”

“To see Mrs. Singleton?”

“I think now that must have been it. She drove up here in a taxicab in the middle of the afternoon. I was cutting flowers in the garden, and I saw her sitting in the back of the cab as if she couldn’t make up her mind. Finally she got out, and the cab-driver started away. She stood in the drive and looked at the house for a moment. Then I think she lost her nerve.”

“I can understand that.”

“It is imposing, isn’t it? I called out to her, to ask her what she wanted, and when she saw me coming towards her she literally ran. I felt like some sort of an ogress. I called to her not to be frightened, but she only ran faster down the drive. Her hat fell off, and she didn’t even stop to pick it up. Which is how I happen to have it.”

“You didn’t follow her?”

“How could I? I had an enormous bunch of ’mums in my arms. The driver saw her running after him, and backed up for her. I had no right to stop her, in any case.”

“You’d never seen her before?”

“Never. I thought perhaps she was a sightseer. She was quite smartly dressed, and this is a good hat. The fact that she didn’t come back for it made me wonder, though.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“Mrs. Singleton disapproved. I thought of asking Denise, but Mrs. Singleton was opposed to that, too.”

“You know the woman who made this?”

“I know of her. She has a shop on the ocean boulevard, near the hotel.”

“Here in Arroyo Beach?”

“Of course. Isn’t it possible, if you question her, that she might know something more about Miss Champion?”

“It’s very likely. Why didn’t you see Denise yourself? You’re not that much afraid of Mrs. Singleton.”

“No.” She was silent for a time. “Perhaps I was afraid of what I might find out. I’m not any more. Charles ran away with a woman, you see.” She spoke with reluctance, but she got it out: “I think I was afraid that the Negro girl was – another of his women.”

“His mother seems to have shared that idea. Any particular reason for it?”

“I don’t know. She knows so much about him, more than she’s ever admitted to herself.”

“That’s a hard saying.”

“It’s true. These pre-Freudian women know it all, but they never say it, even in their thoughts. Their whole lives are dressing for dinner in the jungle. That’s my father’s phrase. He teaches philosophy at Brown.”

“Who was this woman, the one Charles ran away with?”

“A tall woman with yellow hair, and very beautiful. That’s all I know about her. They were seen together in the bar at the hotel, the night he left. The parking lot attendant saw them drive away in his car.”

“It doesn’t necessarily mean he ran away with her. It sounds more like a pickup.”

“No. They had been living together all summer. Charles has a mountain cabin on the Sky Route, and the woman was seen there with him nearly every weekend.”

“How do you know?”

“I talked to a friend of Charles’s who lives in the same canyon. Horace Wilding, the painter – you may have heard of him. He was very reticent, but he did tell me that he’d seen the woman there with Charlie. Perhaps if you talked to him? Since you’re a man?”

I turned up the dash-lights and took out my notebook: “Address?”

“Mr. Wilding’s address is 2712 Sky Route. He has no telephone. He said she was beautiful, too.”

I turned to look at Sylvia, and saw that she was crying. Sitting quietly with her hands in her lap and tear-tracks bright on her cheeks. “I never cry!” she said fiercely. And then, not fiercely at all: “I wish I were beautiful, like her. I wish I had yellow hair.”

She looked beautiful to me, and soft enough to put a finger through. Past the gentle outline of her body, I could see the lights of Arroyo Beach. Between the highway neons and the dotted line of lights hem-stitching the shore, the spotlit dome of the great hotel swelled like a captive balloon. Beyond it the moon was rising like a smaller white balloon dragging a cable of light across the sea’s surface.

“If you want to be a blonde,” I said, “why don’t you bleach your hair like all the other girls?”

“It wouldn’t do any good. He wouldn’t even notice.”

“You’re in love with Charlie.”

“Of course I am,” as if every young girl in her senses fell in love with Charlie. I waited for her to go on, and she did: “From the first time I saw him. When he came back to Harvard after the war, he spent a weekend with us in Providence. I fell in love with him, not he with me. I was only a child. He was nice to me, though.” Her voice sank to a confidential murmur: “He read Emily Dickinson with me. He told me he wanted to be a poet, and I thought I was Emily, I really did. All through college I let myself imagine that Charles would come for me and marry me. Of course he never did.

“I saw him a few times, once for lunch in Boston, and he was charming to me and that was all. Then he went home, and I never heard from him. Last spring when I graduated, I decided to come west and see him. Mrs. Singleton was looking for a companion, and my father secured the position for me. I thought if I was in the house with Charles he might fall in love with me. Mrs. Singleton rather approved. If Charles had to marry anyone, she preferred someone she could manage.”

I looked into her face and saw that she was perfectly sincere. “You’re a strange girl, Sylvia. Did you really talk it over with Mrs. Singleton?”

“I didn’t have to. She left us together whenever it was possible. I can recognize a fact. Father says that a woman’s chief virtue is the ability to see what is under her nose. And when she tells the truth about what she sees, that is her crowning glory.”

“I take it back. You’re not strange. You’re unique.”

“I think I am. But Charles didn’t. He wasn’t even at home very much, so I had no decent chance to make him fall in love with me by propinquity. He spent most of his time in his cabin, or driving around the state. I didn’t know about the woman then, but I think she fits in with what he was trying to do. He was trying desperately to break away from his mother and her money and create a life of his own. Mrs. Singleton had all the money, you see, even before her husband died. He was the old-fashioned type of rich woman’s husband: yachtsman and polo player, and errand boy for his wife. Charles had different ideas from his father. He believed that he and his class were out of touch with reality. That they had to save their individual souls by going down to the bottom of things and starting all over.”

“Did he?”

“Save his soul, you mean? He tried. It turned out to be harder than he thought. This summer, for instance, he worked as a tomato-picker in the valley. His mother offered him the managership of a ranch, but he wouldn’t take it. Of course he didn’t last very long. He had a fight with a foreman and lost his job, if you could call it a job. Mrs. Singleton almost died when he came home with his face all swollen and blue. I almost died, too. But Charles seemed to take a certain satisfaction from it.”

“When was this?”

“In July, a few weeks after I came. The middle of July.”

“Where did the fight take place?”

“On a ranch near Bakersfield. I don’t know exactly.”

“After that, did he stay here until the first of September?”

“Off and on. He was often away on trips for two or three days at a time.”

“Do you think he’s off on another trip this time?”

“He may be. If he is, I don’t believe he’s coming back this time. Not ever. Not of his own accord.”

“Do you think he’s dead?” The question was blunt, but Sylvia could take it. Under her air of gentle bewilderment, she had strong reserves.

“I’d know it if he were dead. I don’t believe he’s dead. I believe he’s made his final break with his mother, and the money from his great-grandfather’s land grant.”

“Are you sure you want him to come back?”

She hesitated before she spoke: “At least I must know that he’s safe and living a kind of life that won’t destroy him. For a man who shot down enemy planes during the war, he’s such a child, such a dreamer. The wrong woman could break him.” She drew in her breath sharply. “I hope I don’t sound melodramatic.”

“You sound very good to me. But you may be letting your imagination run away with you.” I saw that she wasn’t listening, and stopped.

Her mind was moving on a remote curve that she was trying to plot in words: “He felt so guilty about the money he’d never worked for, and doubly guilty because he was disappointing his mother. Charles wanted to suffer. He saw his whole life as an expiation. He would choose a woman who would make him suffer.”

Against the moonlight her face had a virgin bleakness. The softness of her mouth and chin was broken by angular shadows.

“You know what sort of woman she was, then.”

“Not really. All my information is third-hand. A detective interviewed the bartender at the hotel, and told Mrs. Singleton about the woman. She told me.”

“Come down there with me,” I said. “I’ll buy you a drink. I think you could use a drink.”

“Oh no. I’ve never been in a bar.”

“You’re twenty-one.”

“It isn’t that. I have to go in now. I always read her to sleep. Good night.”

When I leaned across to open the door for her, I could see the tears on her face like spring rain.