by Roy Huggins
Jane was facing the closed door, standing with a listening stillness. Then she walked to the door and stepped out and closed it behind her, Kathy turned and sat down at the breakfast table and swallowed past a growing tightness in her throat. She wouldn’t cry, but she felt a need to cry. Not because her breakfast was spoiled or that she must eat alone, but because some sudden and dreadful thing had come between Alan and Jane. She knew her brother well. She knew that nothing else could account for what had happened.
Jane hesitated a moment at her own door, composing herself, reminding herself that she must keep Alan with her at any cost. She opened the door timidly and stood just inside the room, like a small girl called into her father’s study.
“I’m sorry, Alan. Terribly sorry.”
She walked toward him slowly, “It may have seemed petty to you, but it’s actually important. I don’t like to go and sit in the dark and watch other people live. I don’t want to have other people do my living for me. I’m just not made that way!”
He turned his back and picked up a cigarette with clumsy fingers. Jane moved around beside him, and his face was dark and hard, and his eyes looked hot. He dropped the match and picked it up again and broke it.
She said, almost shyly, “Alan, what’s wrong? It isn’t just that I didn’t want to go to a show tonight, I know it isn’t.”
“I don’t think we’d better talk about it right now.”
“Please, Alan.”
He had been pacing jerkily in front of the chesterfield. He stopped now and said, “How much money have you spent in the last four days?”
She laughed and said, “Oh, Alan, surely not that.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, and his voice was tight, “three hundred and eighty dollars. Exactly thirty per cent of our entire account. In four days!”
There was more coming. Jane knew that, and she waited for it. She Look conscious rein on herself and said quietly, “Alan, it’s less than one half of one per cent of the money we have.”
His face was suddenly pale, the lines around his mouth like scars. “We were going to leave it down there. Forget it! Now you’re spending it like mad and keeping books on it and being quietly patient with me because I seem to think it’s a little unreasonable.” He broke the cigarette in a tray and began the pacing again.
“But nothing’s happened, Alan. There’s been nothing in the papers. We’re sure now the money’s ours. And I only bought things I’ve needed for a long time.”
“Sit down, will you, Jane? I’ve got to talk to you.”
She walked over to the chesterfield and stood looking at him for a moment. She sat down. He began quietly enough, but the strain in his voice was like a sickness. “I’ve watched you now for four days—yes, and four nights—walking around like a zombie. I’ve heard you when you got out of bed and paced around in here. Last night I counted it. You stayed in bed exactly two hours.”
“Of course. I’m nervous. We’re both nervous.”
“Yes, we’re both nervous. I’m probably more nervous about this than you are. But it isn’t nervousness that makes you walk, Jane. I don’t know what it in. I don’t want to know. It’s whatever that money has done to you. I’ve tried to tell myself not to let it get to me. I remind myself that I work in a bank, that I’m used to handling bags full of money without getting the idea they’re mine. But it hasn’t done any good to tell myself that.”
Jane said, “Alan, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say to me.”
He looked at her for a long while, and the sickness was in his eyes now, “I’m disgusted. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say that I never knew you until . . . this happened. I keep thinking what an empty shell of a human being you are. I hear you walking around all night long. It’s got so I think about you the way I think of people who take dope. The money is your dope. You’re all hopped up with it. Or maybe you walk the floors at night because the money’s down there. It’s way down at Union Station, instead of here, under your bed where you can count it. The money——”
“Stop it!” She put her hand to her mouth and looked at him wildly over it. “Because I know what the money could mean to us, I’m a hophead! Because I’m sick with dread that we might lose it, I’m——” She put her face in her hands and shook her head, and the soft blond hair fell coolly down across her arms and quieted her and she said no more.
After a while she looked up. Alan had dropped into the wing chair across from her, his face slack, eyes spent and flecked, and two spots of color burning high in his cheeks.
“Anyway,” he breathed, “the problem is ended. We’re not keeping the money.”
“Don’t I have anything to say about that?”
“I’ve gone with you a long way, Jane, Much too far,” he said quietly. “I wish I could say ‘Go ahead and take it,’ but I can’t. When you get caught. I’m caught. If I never touched a cent of it. I’d be just as guilty as you. And you’d be caught, Jane. Apparently they’re keeping a hush on the money. You’ll never know whether it’s hot money or not, until you try and spend some of it and they tap you on the shoulder and take you away.
“But even if the money is all right, you couldn’t spend it the way you want. The world’s too complicated, Jane. People would begin to move in on you: The sheriff’s office, the city police, the FBI, every hawkshaw in the world with an unsolved case involving missing funds or property would get interested in how you got your money. They’d hear about you, Jane, somehow. The Internal Revenue Bureau would begin to pry, and they’d end up asking for a look at your income records. You’d have to have more than a nice smile and a good story for them. They’d want to know where you got it, and when, and from whom. So you’d have to keep it hidden, where it would be safe, but where you could get at it and where a search warrant wouldn’t find it. Can you think of a place like that?” He closed his eyes. It was the longest speech he had ever made.
Jane said, “I’ve thought of all that, Alan. Those people can be bought off. They all have a price. We could go to Las Vegas. We could make an arrangement with one of the gambling houses there. It would cost a little, but they’d be glad to let us seem to win several thousand dollars, and they could take it off their income tax. That’s just one way. There are others. And why is there a problem about hiding it? What you put into a safe-deposit box is your own business.”
Alan opened his eyes and looked at her admiringly. He said, “Not entirely true, but you’ve been thinking. That’s what you do when you walk the floors. But everyone doesn’t have a price, Jane. Don’t ever forget that.”
“Yes, I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking for both of us, Alan!” Her voice broke and she ran over to him and knelt beside him. “I don’t want to lose you, darling. You’ve got to stay with me now. I don’t want it any other way.’”
Alan looked down at her and Jane searched his face anxiously, but there was no warmth there and no response. It was just tired and cold. He moved her hand off his knee and stood up.
He said, “Listen, Jane. I’ve been doing some thinking too. Not about the money. I’ve forgotten the money. I told you I’d wait a week, and I will. Next Wednesday we’re going to drop that ticket in an envelope, type out an explanation and hand it to the district attorney’s office,” he laughed. “That’s one of the things that’s so nice about this. We can’t oven claim a reward now. But that isn’t what I’ve been thinking about, Jane. While you spent your nights pacing around in the living room, I thought about you, and about what you said to me driving home from Burbank. Can you remember, Jane? It was a long time ago, before we latched onto that brown bag. Before that little fortune was dropped into our laps you were going to leave me. You had just given me the pitch. And I was thinking of taking you and me and the new car for a power dive off one of the Mulholland cliffs. Well, Jane, that’s the main reason I’m not keeping the money. Because it would mean keeping you. And I don’t want to keep you.”
The words had been quiet an
d without passion, but Jane had known before they were spoken what Alan was going to say. She had hardly heard the words. She was still kneeling beside the chair, looking up at him, and his face was swimming in a great hot blur, and she could feel herself rising and words welling up until they choked her. But she didn’t rise and the words were never spoken and she gripped the chair and looked at her hand lying limply on the floor. Her eyes began to burn and then were wet, and when she looked up again there was wetness on her face and the taste of salt on her lips.
Alan gazed down at her. Surprise and vague uncertainty lay behind his eyes. He said nothing at all.
Jane said, “It’s all right, Alan. I can’t . . . blame you. If you still feel the same way when Wednesday comes, I won’t try to stop you. I——” But she was crying. She put her face in the chair, and sobs shook her and rode over her and she could hear a wailing in her ears that she knew was hers and that she could do nothing about.
Alan was beside her now, and she felt herself lifted suddenly and swiftly and held close, and lips were kissing her where the tears were and her arms were around Alan, holding tight. The slow ebbing of the sobs and the clawing of breath and Alan’s lips on her eyes. Alan’s whisper that he loved her almost but not quite erased the memory of his words, “I’m not keeping the money.”
PART TWO
“It’s all worked out, Danny, and we’ll get the money tonight,” Jane Palmer said breathlessly.
“But I’ve got to know something first: If I help you get it, how do I know you’ll give me half?”
SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING INSTALLMENT
Driving rebelliously homeward, beautiful, callous JANE PALMER told her ex-Navy flier husband, attractive, mild ALAN, now clerking in a small bank, that she was leaving him. Fearing he would wreck the car, she reached for the ignition key, but turned off the headlights. This apparently was a signal; a bag holding a large sum of money was thrown into their car from another car which it passed them. Jane decided they would keep the money, and she would stay with Alan. Alan, however, at first wanted to call the police; he weakened the next day and decided to hold the money for a time. He checked the bag at the Union Station, said a few words, which Jane could not hear, to the attendant, and put the check in his topcoat pocket, from which it dropped into the lining. They breakfasted with Alan’s pleasant sister, KATHERINE, who noticed that a mysterious constraint had come between them. Later, Alan grew fearful again; he insisted that the bag be sent to the police with a note, and Jane was filled with fury.
THE evening was warm, the Sunday traffic slow and patient on Wilshire. The Palmers were in search of something they had lost. That was the way Alan, in a rare moment of sentiment, had put it, and the place they were going was Alan’s idea: McPhearson Park, for a sail on the lake. They weren’t quite sure whether that was the first thing they had done together when they first met, but it had been sandwiched in fairly early among the more common things that flying men did on a ten-day leave.
They walked down the path toward the bright pavilion, hearing the quiet sounds of the boats on the lake, smelling the heavy odor of shoestring potatoes, ten cents a bag. Inside there were empty stools at the fountain, and they stopped there and had a sundae. The girl behind the counter was blond and young and red-cheeked, with an eager smile and a willingness to talk. Alan asked her if anything had changed about the lake since the war. She said she didn’t rightly know, since she had been in grammar school in Wichita before the war. Alan laughed and told her that her words had officially consigned him to middle age. They finished their sundaes and went down the steep flight of wooden stairs to the landing.
The lake was the trysting place of a large part of Los Angeles’ more callow population, but it was too early yet for them. Now, in the early evening, many of the boats still carried adults with children on their laps. Alan paid a deposit and got a ticket for one of the motorboats, and while they waited he talked with the basque-shirted boy who handled the loading. Jane looked off across the lake and relaxed for a moment from the strain of sharing Alan’s mood.
In a little while they were on the lake. The boat was made for privacy—high sides, a canvas top—the lake a dark and enchanted place. Jane lay back with her head against Alan’s shoulder, the boat moving silently on its electric motor, Alan holding the wheel with the touch of his hand and telling Jane that everything was going to be all right; that, as a matter of fact, he was thinking seriously of getting his commercial license. More pay, no humdrum, and he’d be flying again.
Jane stared off across the cold hard surface of the water. She shuddered, and Alan held her closer and asked if she was cold. She shook her head and Alan talked again of his plans. But Jane did not hear the words. They impinged upon the surface of her mind and altered and hardened and became other words that thrust at her over and over again, I’m not keeping the money. It would mean keeping you. I’m not—
Everything was going to be all right.
The black and dimpled water stirred suddenly as a brief wind rippled across it, and Jane found herself recalling another time, another stretch of waters. The autumn wind lowered across the Arkansas River and cut sharply at the girl standing on the bridge. The girl was tall and thin, and she was not pretty. There was a hump in the thin nose that sharpened the face. She was sixteen years old, and her name was Jane Petry. She looked at the water in the way that people do who are wondering how it will feel when it folds over them and their dreams and the things that brought them there. She stood and leaned against the cold wet metal of the guard rail. As she stood there, in her mind she visualized herself climbing the rail, clinging to it a moment and jumping. She anticipated how long the drop would be, and how the water would bite, and how her throat would scream against the seal of waters. And out of that infinity of imagined deaths, Jane Petry found new terms on which to live.
She left school, and within the week she was working. She claimed to be eighteen and found a job as a switchboard operator in Tulsa’s largest realty firm. She lived ascetically and worked with sober and passionless precision. She was never late. She was never absent. In six months she was operating the Monster, a great complex bookkeeping machine, and she was earning thirty-five dollars a week and saving twenty-seven of it.
At the end of the first year she wrote to the California Medical Association and asked for the names of the best plastic surgeons in California. She wrote them all, and made her arrangements with one in Los Angeles. She left Tulsa when she was nineteen with a bag full of bare essentials, thirty-five hundred dollars and a plan. She took a room in a dark walk-up hotel on Alvarado and called on her doctor. He was a good doctor. Some of the world’s best people looked down noses which he had fashioned. He told her that because she was alone, she would have to make arrangements for a bed in a hospital. Jane didn’t want that. She had planned carefully, and there were other places for the money, Jane invented a sister, and the doctor insisted she have the sister with her the day of the operation.
Jane hired a girl to be with her on that day, and she lost the hump in her nose. She went back to her hotel in a cab and the hired sister left her there and went away, Jane lay in the dark room, the pain dull at first, like soft hammers beating behind her eyes. And then the pain was agony, and delirium came with the night. The Monster rode the delirium, clattering and sending out great spirals of figures that she totaled over and over in mounting frenzy, and the totals were forever wrong and the figures were an endless torment. But Jane dressed her wound and bathed her body and brought herself back to her doctor each day for ten frightful days, until the agony was gone.
And Jane had received the first installment on her dream: a new nose, a beautiful flawless face.
Now Jane shopped; not with a breathless immediacy or as a means of expression, but soberly, carefully, taking no special pleasure in the act itself. She bought where the buying was best and sewed labels from the Wilshire shops into purchases from downtown stores. In the evenings she went to school and learned something
of California’s complex laws of community property, and of divorce.
And when the rains came she went to Palm Springs. Two months later she was Mrs. Michael Blanchard, and, not long after, she found that her dream had collapsed abruptly about her. She had first seen Blanchard at a Palm Springs casino. He had dropped a fifty-dollar chip, had watched it roll under a table with a kind of amused abstraction, and had ignored it. He was in his late fifties, and she had learned that he was a free-lance director. It was only later that Jane understood this was a kindly way of saying that he was unemployed. And later yet she understood that his was a profession in which unemployment was pernicious and incurable. He had—
Jane winced, her head turning suddenly to the side, as if she had been slapped. This was an old wound. She found now, as she had found in past reflections on this first marriage, that she could not probe too deeply here without dropping an involuntary curtain across her mind. The truant wind returned and Jane whispered into it soundlessly that she had betrayed Jane Petry, The war had come. The gay bright people had run for cover. And she had married Alan. She had betrayed the girl who had lain for days and nights that were a babbling eternity of madness, who had lived the dusty dedicated years—
Everything was going to be all right.
IT was seven-thirty on Monday morning and Alan was standing at the door, ready to leave. Jane went to him and kissed him, and Alan said, “We’re not licked, are we, honey?”
“Not us.”
“I wonder if everybody lives as cockeyed a life behind their doors as we do, Jane?”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, they probably think they do.”
“Probably.”