by Matthew Head
“When I came back, Luigi was asking Nicole what would be a good hotel for us to go to, not too expensive, because his room was terrible, he said, and of course you can guess what Nicole said. She said we were to use her apartment upstairs, that she had a comfortable room downstairs she could sleep in. She said it would be a great joy to her to know we were there. That’s what she said, ‘a great joy’. And I think she meant it.”
All of a sudden Marie Louise started to cry. “She was so sweet!” she said. “Nicole was the sweetest person! She was the sweetest person there is, except Luigi.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE WAITERS HAD dismantled and removed the ruins of the breakfast table, and Marie Louise was in the bathroom washing her face. The tears for Nicole had set her off into quite a little crying jag for things in general. After all, the kid had been under something you could call a strain for a long time.
I said to Dr. Finney, “Are we getting anywhere?”
“So far, so good. Hoopy, will you do a little leg work for me? Think you could get to Freddy Fayerweather and Tony Crew? Would they talk to me?”
“I could get Freddy here. He’ll go anywhere and talk to anybody.”
“Call him. The phone’s in the hall.”
Freddy’s telephone rang five or six times, then a woman’s voice said, “Allô.”
“Hell,” I thought, “wrong number.” I apologised and hung up, and gave the clerk downstairs Freddy’s number again, asking him to get it right this time.
“Allô.”
Same woman.
I had a dizzy feeling of having to make a major readjustment. The voice was familiar now but not identifiable. Then Freddy’s voice came on. “Allô-allô-allô-allô,” he carolled. “Hello hello hello and good morning. Who is it?”
“Me, for God’s sake. Hoop Taliaferro. Where are you?”
“Home, dear boy! You called my number.”
“Who’s that woman and what’s she doing there?”
Freddy said to somebody in French, “Come here, darling, it’s Hoopy. Tell him hello.”
“Allô, Hoo-pee,” she said. “You teekleesh?”
Freddy said, “Thanks dear. Now give Daddy the phone. Hello, Hoop, wasn’t that charming? Now. What can I do for you?”
“Is that really Bibi?”
“Of course. Who else?”
“What’s she doing there?”
“Oh, dear boy, now you’re asking. If you must know, she’s living here.”
“Oh, come on. What is this?”
“Life, dear fellow. Warm, beautiful, pulsating life. Life in La Bohème. All open, lovely, frank and unashamed. Bibi is now mine.”
“Freddy, stop all this nonsense and listen to me. I’m at the Prince du Royaume and a friend of mine wants to talk to you. It’s fairly important and I’m asking it as a favour. Can you come over?”
“How high can you rise!” said Freddy. “The Prince du Royaume, no less! Dear me! May I bring Bibi?”
“Yes. Ask for Dr. Finney’s suite. Have you heard about what happened at the club yesterday morning?”
“About Nicole? Of course I’ve heard. Do you think I dwell in a world apart? How is she?”
“Don’t be so flip. She didn’t come out of it. Are you coming right now?”
“Just as soon as we can throw on our tiaras! Oh the things that have happened! You’ve—”
“Missed it. I know. Listen, where can I get hold of Tony?”
“What do you want of Tony?”
“I want to ask him a question. Come on, where do I find him?”
“Tony is the least of my concerns,” said Freddy, too lightly, “but if you really want him, have you tried the police station?”
It was a good tag line and he hung up on it. Altogether, I felt as if somebody had pulled a rug out from under me and I had sat down hard. In this condition I came back into the living-room of the suite; Marie Louise was there, freshened up, which in her case was certainly an extra coat of gilt on the lily.
“Freddy’ll be here,” I told Dr. Finney, “and I think he’ll be bringing a delightful surprise with him. But I can’t get Tony for you because Freddy either doesn’t want to give me his number, and I don’t know his number, or else Freddy’s serious about something I don’t like. He says Tony’s in jail.”
“That’s a help,” said Dr. Finney, which I took to be sarcasm, until I saw she was serious. “I was just wondering how we could get Mrs. Jones over here, and this is it. Emmy, where’s the little book?”
Emmy reached into an aperture in her garment and produced a small black address book which she handed to Dr. Finney. Dr. Finney flipped a few pages over, ran her finger down the line, and found a number. She handed the book back to Emmy and went to the telephone, motioning me to follow, and asked the clerk for the number. I could hear the thing ringing, then somebody answered.
“Hello,” said Dr. Finney, giving her name and asking for a Monsieur Duplin. “Hello…Monsieur Duplin…Yes, fine, thanks…very comfortable, thanks. Nice place. Listen, Monsieur Duplin, what’s this about Tony Crew being held?… Antoine Croute. He won’t? Well what about the others?… Who, me? No, I haven’t any ideas at all. What would I know about it? I don’t know these people…Young friend of mine was concerned about Tony, young man you met the other morning just afterward, Mr. Taliaferro. I’ll tell him Tony’s all right. What I really called for, Monsieur Duplin, I want to get in touch with an American woman who’s living here just now but I don’t know how to reach her. Couldn’t you look it up on a registration form or something? She’s a conspicuous person and probably hard to get to—anyway, by one of my age and sex…Well, thanks, I’ll be here whenever you call back.” She gave him Mrs. Jones’s name, and then said, in answer to some question of his, “No, I haven’t forgotten, but I don’t know what I’m going to say. You wouldn’t just let me come to the dinner and not give any address?…Well, another thing. Would it throw your plans out of kilter if I brought a few interested guests along?…No, I mean in addition to Miss Collins… oh, maybe half a dozen…well, that’s nice of you. Thanks. Good-bye.”
Then she translated for me: “Tony’s held because he won’t say where he was from the time The Flea Club closed that night until he got back to his room late the next morning. The barman and all the other employees are accounted for except Bijou, and they can’t locate her because nobody knows her last name or where she lives. He’s going to call me back and tell me Mrs. Jones’s address and number. He’s still expecting me to make that goddamn address tonight and you’re to come along as an extra guest—if you want to. How about it?”
“If I can stay awake. Who’re the others, beside Emily?”
“How do I know, until I’ve talked to the rest of these people? Marie Louise, do you think your mother’s up yet?”
“Are you planning to talk to Mama?”
“I am, or Hoop is.”
“But what would Audrey know about Nicole? Or The Flea Club or anything that happened there? I don’t understand all this. I see why you have a right to know why I was up there all night in Nicole’s room with Luigi, and everything, but what do you want to talk to Audrey about?”
They were hard questions to answer tactfully and I didn’t try. “Audrey’s been seeing René at The Flea Club,” I said, and the words hit Marie Louise with their total implication.
She said nothing, for a long quiet space, and I think she grew up another notch or two. Then she said, very low, “Oh, poor Mama. I’m so sorry.”
The rest of us felt pretty damn awkward. Marie Louise stood up with sudden decision and said, “I’m going back upstairs and see her right now. I’ve been so mean to her, and told you all these things, and all this time she’s been in her own kind of trouble.”
“Does she know about you and Luigi yet?” Dr. Finney asked.
“Yes, she does. But I’ve been so terrible about it. When Hoop brought me back to the hotel that night I changed clothes and left a note for her. All I said was that I had bee
n married for six months to an American boy and he had followed me here and I was with him, and for her not to worry about me because I was fine, but not to try to find me until I came home again, because she couldn’t. I told her there was nothing she could do about any of it any more, and that I would call her the next morning. I signed it ‘Love’. Thank goodness, I at least signed it ‘Love’.”
“Has she met Luigi yet?”
“No. She says she doesn’t want to.”
“When she meets him she’ll feel all right about things,” I said, crossing my fingers. “He’s such a good kid. Do you want me to go up and tell Audrey how good I think the whole thing is? I had a long talk with her one afternoon—about you.”
“I suspected as much. If you went up and talked to her now, would you be nice to her? Really nice? Kind?”
“I promise.”
“She’s so easy to be mean to. She acts so hard, and lays herself so open to it. I’ve been so awful.”
“How is she now? Do you think she’d see me?”
“She’s just sort of dead-acting. I don’t know, why don’t you call her?”
Audrey’s voice on the telephone was as flat and listless as it had been forced and lilting when I had talked to her the other times.
“See me? What do you want to see me about?”
“About Marie Louise.”
“She’s not here.”
“I know—she’s here. I’m downstairs a couple of floors.”
“Is that where she is? She said she was having breakfast with a friend. I took it for granted she was lying to me and was going out with this Luigi. Not that she doesn’t have a perfect right.”
“Let me come up.”
She hesitated, and then said, “Oh, all right, come on. What difference does it make?”
She opened the door for me without any flourishes or suggestion, said, “Hello, Hoop, come in,” noncommittally, and looked at me out of a face that had just plain given up. The make-up was bright, but perfunctory. Her hair was combed neatly, but it wasn’t a big production job. She had on a pretty dress, since there was no such thing as an unpretty dress in her collection, but she wore it not for itself, but just because it was a dress and she had to be clothed. Don’t ask me where the difference lies. Everybody knows it is there. There are ways of wearing clothes, and Audrey wore this dress with indifference.
When we sat down, she said, “I look awful,” but she offered this as a piece of minor information, not the end of the world. “What do you want to tell me?”
“Marie Louise says you don’t want to meet Luigi. I wish you would. You’d like him.”
“I doubt it.” Always that same listless tone. “I’ve been an awful fool. You did a marvellous job Monday night, didn’t you? Practically helping them to elope.”
“Look, Audrey, they’ve been married six months.”
“Oh, I know. Nothing’s your fault, of course. Everything’s my fault. A grocer’s boy.”
“He’s a damn nice kid. Also, intelligent and ambitious.”
“Ambitious, obviously.”
“He didn’t even know Marie Louise had money. I mean he was ambitious to succeed on his own. He’s going to study law.”
“Oh, none of it really makes any difference,” she said, with that same flat despair. “I’ve been such a fool, and I’m out of things. Out in the cold. Do you know what my allowance is, five weeks from now? One hundred dollars a week. My God, I’ll end up in a boarding-house,” and I saw that after all, she was still good old Audrey, thinking of herself first and only.
“What in the world makes you so sure of that? Marie Louise doesn’t hate you.”
“If she doesn’t, she ought to.”
“That may be true enough.”
“You’re very unkind.”
“I don’t mean to be. Tell me something, Audrey. First, though—please believe I’m here because I’d like to help. Will you believe that?”
“All right, if you say so. I haven’t asked for any help. What do you want me to tell you?”
“What in the world would the advantage have been to you, if I had married Marie Louise?”
“That’s not a question I’d call much help,” she said, but she went on to tell me, anyway. She put her head on the back of the chair and closed her eyes. Every mark of middle age and fatigue showed clearly, yet it was a more attractive face than she had shown me yet. She went on speaking with her eyes closed, half as if to herself rather than to me. “You don’t know what it is to be a person like me,” she said. “I’ve always wanted so much, and when I married Marie Louise’s father I thought I was going to have it. Then when he died I discovered I only had it on probation, and now I haven’t got it at all. He wasn’t anything of a man. I gave him all those years. It was just like him to die before his father and spoil everything. I’ve been so confused these last months. Up until then I thought it would still work out. I wanted Marie Louise to make a real marriage—truly, that was what I first wanted, something good for Marie Louise, a marriage with position and money. That’s all that counts. I guess incidentally I wanted them for myself too. And I did everything I could to lead her in that direction. She says I was like a jailer and maybe I was. But that was what I wanted—the best for her.”
She opened her eyes, and sat up wearily. “Well, how would you have felt in my place when you discovered—thought you had discovered anyhow—that Marie Louise had been sleeping around all over New York?”
“You should have known she never would. It’s as simple as that.”
“We won’t argue it,” she said. “As far as I was concerned, I had no reason to think she’d been doing anything but sleeping around. Then I took her out of school and this terrible time began. I told you I thought she must be psychotic, or whatever they call it. The way she moped around, wouldn’t go out with men, all that. Well, I won’t defend myself. I thought I had a piece of damaged merchandise on my hands and I also thought if I could find the right man to marry her…”
She stopped, and turned her head away.
“Me, for instance.”
“This makes me sound so awful. Maybe I am awful.”
“Get it off your chest. After all, it’s practically in the family.”
“All right. Marie Louise hated me, that was obvious. I’d done something or other to her she couldn’t forgive—”
“You’d separated her from Luigi. Not to mention this other puppy-love affair you broke up.”
“I wish she’d tell me half as much as she seems to tell you. I’d have understood.”
“You don’t understand now.” I knew, because Marie Louise had told me, what she really couldn’t forgive, and I had to remember that I was supposed to be kind to Audrey, in order to keep from repeating it.
Audrey went on, “She hated me, and here she was, almost nineteen. I saw I was just never going to get any of that money. And if she went out and married somebody, then they would both hate me, and it would be even worse—the way it’s going to be now, with Luigi hating me too. But I thought if I found the husband—if he was somebody I picked out, somebody I could make a friend of, first—you, for instance—well, between you and me there might have been a kind of sympathy, an understanding, so that I wouldn’t be thrown out—this is awfully hard, Hoop.”
“You mean that if I married Marie Louise after the proposition you put to me, we could work it out so that after she was nineteen and the money was hers, you’d at least have the husband to get through to her with.”
She lowered her eyes, pitifully ashamed, and said, “Yes.”
“You and your daughter’s husband would be accomplices against her.”
“Don’t put it that way. I can’t stand much more of this.”
“But, Audrey, it was such a poor plan anyway. Any man bastard enough to enter into an agreement like that would be bastard enough to leave you out in the cold. René for instance.”
She jumped, and said, “Oh, God, you know everything.”
“Al
l I know is that you tried him on Marie Louise and it didn’t take, and that I saw you at The Flea Club with him, and that you were described to me as his ‘new one’. What I’m guessing is that when René smelt the money and Marie Louise was out of it, he turned his guns on you. I’m still trying to help, believe it or not. You know what René is, don’t you? You can’t not know. The kindest thing I can do for you right now is to tell you to drop René fast. He thinks the money is yours, doesn’t he? Tell him it isn’t, and you’re out of trouble. Get rid of that one, and fast.”
She was sitting up straight now, her hands clutching at one another, the fingers writhing and pulling like a nest of snakes. “I can’t stand any more of this, Hoop. I can’t stand it. I tell you I can’t stand it. He’s in my blood. My whole world’s gone to pieces. I’m afraid I’ll do something terrible. These last few days—that poor woman at The Flea Club—I need help! I need somebody—” and she went to pieces in the most horrible way, twisting her body back against the chair, in the worst fit of hysterics I had ever seen.
I ran to the phone and called Mary Finney. “Come right up here and come as a doctor,” I said. “I don’t know what you do for hysterics, but come do it for Audrey.”
It couldn’t have taken Mary Finney more than five minutes to get there, but I hope I never spend another five minutes as long as those. Marie Louise was right behind her, but I made her stay out in the corridor with me while Dr. Finney went in. I didn’t want Marie Louise to see Audrey the way she was, although I couldn’t keep her from hearing, which was bad enough. After a little while, the sounds quieted down, and Dr. Finney came to the door, still holding a hypodermic syringe. “Come on in,” she said. “I had to sit on her to give her this stuff. Will you help me to get her to bed, Marie Louise?”