“Charley?” called the high, sweet voice of his grandmother.
He saw the curved handle of the door start to move, made an involuntary lunge for the clippings on his bed, then circled back to the bathroom instead. He shook tooth powder into his mouth. His grandmother could smell liquor like a dry sourdough in the Klondike.
“Aren’t you ready to have some breakfast with me?” his grandmother asked.
He came out combing his hair. “Gee, you’re all dressed up!” She turned her small unsteady figure around for him like a fashion model, and Bruno smiled. He liked the black lace dress with the pink satin showing through it. “Looks like one of those balconies out there.”
“Thank you, Charley. I’m going into town the latter part of the morning. I thought you might like to come with me.”
“Could be. Yeah, I’d like that, Grannie,” he said good-naturedly.
“So it’s you’ve been clipping my Times! I thought it was one of the servants. You must be getting up awfully early these mornings.”
“Yep,” Bruno said agreeably.
“When I was young, we used to get poems out of newspapers for our scrapbooks. We made scrapbooks out of everything under the sun. What’re you going to do with these?”
“Oh, just keep ’em.”
“Don’t you make scrapbooks?”
“Nope.” She was looking at him, and Bruno wanted her to look at the clippings.
“Oh, you’re just a ba-aby!” She pinched his cheek. “Hardly a bit of fuzz on your chin yet! I don’t know why your mother’s worried about you—”
“She’s not worried.”
“—when you just need time to grow up. Come on down to breakfast with me. Yes, pajamas and all.”
Bruno gave her his arm on the stairs.
“I’ve got the least bit of shopping to do,” said his grandmother as she poured his coffee, “and then I thought we’d do something nice. Maybe a good movie—with a murder in it—or maybe the amusement park. I haven’t been to an amusement park in a-ages!”
Bruno’s eyes opened as wide as they could.
“Which would you like? Well, we can look over the movies when we get there.”
“I’d like the amusement park, Grannie.”
Bruno enjoyed the day, helping her in and out of the car, piloting her around the amusement park, though there was not much after all his grandmother could do or eat. But they rode the ferris wheel together. Bruno told his grandmother about the big ferris wheel in Metcalf, but she did not ask him when he had been there.
Sammie Franklin was still at the house when they came home, staying for dinner. Bruno’s eyebrows drew together at the first sight of him. He knew his grandmother cared as little for Sammie as he did, and Bruno felt suddenly a great tenderness for her, because she accepted Sammie so uncomplainingly, accepted any mongrel his mother brought on the place. What had he and his mother been doing all day? They had been to a movie, they said, one of Sammie’s movies. And there was a letter for him upstairs in his room.
Bruno ran upstairs. The letter was from Florida. He tore it open with his hands shaking like ten hangovers. He had never wanted a letter so badly, not even at camp, when he had waited for letters from his mother.
Sept. 6
Dear Charles,
I do not understand your message to me, or for that matter your great interest in me. I know you very slightly, but enough to assure me that we have nothing in common on which to base a friendship. May I ask you please not to telephone my mother again or communicate with me?
Thank you for trying to return the book to me. Its loss is of no importance.
Guy Haines
Bruno brought it up closer and read it again, his eyes lingering incredulously on a word here and there. His pointed tongue stretched over his upper lip, then disappeared suddenly. He felt shorn. It was a feeling like grief, or like a death. Worse! He glanced about his room, hating the furniture, hating his possessions. Then the pain centered in his chest, and reflexively he began to cry.
After dinner, Sammie Franklin and he got into an argument about vermouths. Sammie said the drier the vermouth, the more one had to put into a martini, though he admitted he was not a martini drinker. Bruno said he was not a martini drinker either, but he knew better than that. The argument went on even after his grandmother said good night and left them. They were on the upstairs terrace in the dark, his mother in the glider and he and Sammie standing by the parapet. Bruno ran down to the bar for the ingredients to prove his point. They both made martinis and tasted them, and though it was clear Bruno was right, Sammie kept holding out, and chuckling as if he didn’t quite mean what he said either, which Bruno found insufferable.
“Go to New York and learn something!” Bruno shouted. His mother had just left the terrace.
“How do you know what you’re saying anyway?” Sammie retorted. The moonlight made his fat grinning face blue-green and yellow, like gorgonzola cheese. “You’re pickled all day. You—”
Bruno caught Sammie by the shirtfront and bent him backward over the parapet. Sammie’s feet rattled on the tiles. His shirt split. When he wriggled sideways to safety, the blue had left his face and it was a shadowless yellow-white.
“Th-the hell’s the matter with you?” he bellowed. “You’d a shoved me over, wouldn’t you?”
“No, I wouldn’t!” Bruno shrieked, louder than Sammie. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe, like in the mornings. He took his stiff, sweaty hands down from his face. He had done a murder, hadn’t he? Why should he do another? But he had seen Sammie squirming on the points of the iron fence right below, and he had wanted him there. He heard Sammie stirring a highball fast. Bruno stumbled over the threshold of the French window into the house.
“And stay out!” Sammie shouted after him.
The shaking passion in Sammie’s voice sent a throb of fear through him. Bruno said nothing as he passed his mother in the hall. Going downstairs, he clung to the banister with both hands, cursing the ringing, aching, unmanageable mess in his head, cursing the martinis he had drunk with Sammie. He staggered into the living room.
“Charley, what did you do to Sammie?” His mother had followed him in.
“Ah, whad I do to Sammie!” Bruno shoved his hand toward her blurred figure and sat down on the sofa with a bounce.
“Charley—come back and apologize.” The white blur of her evening dress came closer, one brown arm extended toward him.
“Are you sleeping with that guy? Are you sleeping with that guy?” He knew he had only to lie back on the sofa and he would pass out like a light, so he lay back, and never felt her arm at all.
eighteen
In the month after Guy returned to New York, his restlessness, his dissatisfaction with himself, with his work, with Anne, had focused gradually on Bruno. It was Bruno who made him hate to look at pictures of the Palmyra now, Bruno who was the real cause of his anxiety that he had blamed on the dearth of commissions since he had come back from Palm Beach. Bruno who had made him argue so senselessly with Anne the other evening about not getting a better office, not buying new furniture and a rug for this one. Bruno who had made him tell Anne he did not consider himself a success, that the Palmyra meant nothing. Bruno who had made Anne turn quietly away from him that evening and walk out the door, who had made him wait until he heard the elevator door close, before he ran down the eight flights of stairs and begged her to forgive him.
And who knew? Perhaps it was Bruno who kept him from getting jobs now. The creation of a building was a spiritual act. So long as he harbored his knowledge of Bruno’s guilt, he corrupted himself in a sense. Such a thing could be perceived in him, he felt. Consciously, he had made up his mind to let the police trap Bruno. But as the weeks went by and they didn’t, he was plagued by a feeling that he should act himself. What stopped him was both an aversion to accusing a man of murder and a senseless but lingering doubt that Bruno might not be guilty. That Bruno had committed the crime struck him at times as so fantastic,
all his previous conviction was momentarily wiped out. At times, he felt he would have doubted even if Bruno had sent him a written confession. And yet, he had to admit to himself that he was sure Bruno had done it. The weeks that went by without the police picking up any strong trail seemed to confirm it. As Bruno had said, how could they with no motivation? His letter to Bruno in September had silenced him all the fall, but just before he left Florida, a sober note from Bruno had said he would be back in New York in December and he hoped to be able to have a talk with him. Guy was determined to have nothing to do with him.
Still he fretted, about everything and about nothing, but chiefly about his work. Anne told him to be patient. Anne reminded him that he had already proven himself in Florida. In greater measure than ever before, she offered him the tenderness and reassurance he needed so, yet he found that in his lowest, most stubborn moments he could not always accept it.
One morning in mid-December, the telephone rang as Guy sat idly studying his drawings of the Connecticut house.
“Hello, Guy. This is Charley.”
Guy recognized the voice, felt his muscles tensing for a fight.
But Myers was within earshot across the room.
“How are you?” Bruno asked with smiling warmth. “Merry Christmas.”
Slowly Guy put the telephone back in its cradle.
He glanced over at Myers, the architect with whom he shared the big one-room office. Myers was still bent over his drawing board. Under the edge of the green windowshade, the bobbing pigeons still pecked at the grain he and Myers had sprinkled on the sill a few moments ago.
The telephone rang again.
“I’d like to see you, Guy,” Bruno said.
Guy stood up. “Sorry. I don’t care to see you.”
“What’s the matter?” Bruno forced a little laugh. “Are you nervous, Guy?”
“I just don’t care to see you.”
“Oh. Okay,” said Bruno, hoarse with hurt.
Guy waited, determined not to retreat first, and finally Bruno hung up.
Guy’s throat was dry, and he went to the drinking fountain in the corner of the room. Behind the fountain, sunlight lay in a precise diagonal across the big aerial photograph of the four nearly finished Palmyra buildings. He turned his back to it. He’d been asked to make a speech at his old school in Chicago, Anne would remind him. He was to write an article for a leading architectural magazine. But so far as commissions went, the Palmyra Club might have been a public declaration that he was to be boycotted. And why not? Didn’t he owe the Palmyra to Bruno? Or at any rate to a murderer?
On a snowy evening a few days later, as he and Anne came down the brownstone steps of his West Fifty-third Street apartment house, Guy saw a tall bareheaded figure standing on the sidewalk gazing up at them. A tingle of alarm traveled to his shoulders, and involuntarily his hand tightened on Anne’s arm.
“Hello,” Bruno said, his voice soft with melancholy. His face was barely visible in the dusk.
“Hello,” Guy replied, as if to a stranger, and walked on.
“Guy!”
Guy and Anne turned at the same time. Bruno came toward them, hands in the pockets of his overcoat.
“What is it?” Guy asked.
“Just wanted to say hello. Ask how you are.” Bruno stared at Anne with a kind of perplexed, smiling resentment.
“I’m fine,” Guy said quietly. He turned away, drawing Anne with him.
“Who is he?” Anne whispered.
Guy itched to look back. He knew Bruno would be standing where they had left him, knew he would be looking after them, weeping perhaps. “He’s a fellow who came around looking for work last week.”
“You can’t do anything for him?”
“No. He’s an alcoholic.”
Deliberately Guy began to talk about their house, because he knew there was nothing else he could talk about now and possibly sound normal. He had bought the land, and the foundations were being laid. After New Year’s, he was going up to Alton and stay for several days. During the movie, he speculated as to how he could shake Bruno off, terrify him so that he would be afraid to contact him.
What did Bruno want with him? Guy sat with his fists clenched at the movie. The next time, he would threaten Bruno with police investigation. And he would carry it through, too. What vast harm was there in suggesting a man be investigated?
But what did Bruno want with him?
nineteen
Bruno had not wanted to go to Haiti, but it offered escape. New York or Florida or anywhere in the American continent was torture so long as Guy was there, too, and would not see him. To blot out his pain and depression, he had drunk a great deal at home in Great Neck, and to occupy himself had measured the house and the grounds in paces, measured his father’s room with tailor’s tape, moving doggedly, stooping, measuring and remeasuring, like a tireless automaton that wavered only slightly off its track now and then, betraying the fact it was drunk and not deranged. Thus he spent ten days after seeing Guy, waiting for his mother and her friend Alice Leffingwell to get ready to go to Haiti.
There were moments when he felt his whole being in some as yet inscrutable stage of metamorphosis. There was the deed he had done, which in his hours alone in the house, in his room, he felt sat upon his head like a crown, but a crown that no one else could see. Very easily and quickly, he could break down in tears. There was the time he had wanted a caviar sandwich for lunch, because he deserved the finest, big black caviar, and when there had been only red in the house, had told Herbert to go out and get some black. He had eaten a quarter of the toasted sandwich, sipping a Scotch and water with it, then had almost fallen asleep staring at the triangle of toasted bread that finally had begun to lift at one corner. He had stared at it until it was no longer a sandwich, the glass with his drink no longer a glass, and only the golden liquid in it part of himself, and he had gulped it all. The empty glass and the curling toast had been live things that mocked him and challenged his right to use them. A butcher’s truck had departed down the driveway just then and Bruno had frowned after it, because everything had suddenly come alive and was fleeing to escape him—the truck, the sandwich, and the glass, the trees that couldn’t run away but were disdainful, like the house that imprisoned him. He had hit both his fists against the wall simultaneously, then seized the sandwich and broken its insolent triangular mouth and burnt it, piece by piece, in the empty fireplace, the caviar popping like little people, dying, each one a life.
Alice Leffingwell, his mother and he, and a crew of four including two Puerto Ricans left for Haiti in mid-January on the steam yacht, Fairy Prince, which Alice had spent all fall and winter wresting from her former husband. The trip was a celebration of her third divorce, and she had invited Bruno and his mother months before. Bruno’s delight in the voyage inspired him to a pretense of indifference and boredom during the first days. No one noticed. Alice and his mother spent whole afternoons and evenings chattering together in the cabin, and in the mornings they slept. To justify his happiness to himself at such a dull prospect as being cooped up on a ship for a month with an old bag like Alice, Bruno convinced himself he had been under quite a strain watching out the police didn’t get on his trail, and that he needed leisure to dope out the details of how his father could be got rid of. He also reasoned that the more time elapsed, the more likely Guy would be to change his attitude.
On shipboard, he detailed two or three key plans for the murder of his father, of which any other plans laid on the estate would be mere variations. He was very proud of his plans—one with gun in his father’s bedroom, one with knife and two choices of escape, and one with either gun or knife or strangulation in the garage where his father put his car every evening at 6:30. The disadvantage of the last plan was lack of darkness, but it had compensations in comparative simplicity. He could all but hear in his ears the efficient click-click of his plans’ operations. Yet whenever he finished a careful drawing, he felt obliged to tear it up for safe
ty. He was eternally making drawings and tearing them up. The sea from Bar Harbor to the southernmost of the Virgin Islands was strewn with the subdivided seeds of his ideas when the Fairy Prince rounded Cape Maisi bound for Port-au-Prince.
“A princely harbor for my Prince!” cried Alice, relaxing her mind in a lull of conversation with his mother.
Around the corner from them, in the shade, Bruno fumbled up the paper he had been drawing on and lifted his head. In the left quarter of the horizon, land was visible in a gray fuzzy line. Haiti. Seeing it made it seem more distant and foreign than when he had not seen it. He was going farther and farther away from Guy. He pulled himself from the deck chair and went over to the port rail. They would spend days in Haiti before they moved on, and then they would move farther south. Bruno stood perfectly still, feeling frustration corrode him internally as the tropical sun did externally now, on the pale backs of his legs. Abruptly, he ripped the plan to pieces and released them by opening his hands over the side. The wind perversely carried the pieces forward.
As important as the plans, of course, was to find someone for the job. He would do it himself, he thought, if not for the fact Gerard, his father’s private detective, would nail him no matter how carefully he planned it. Besides, he wanted to put his no-motivation scheme to the test again. Matt Levine or Carlos—the trouble was he knew them. And it was dangerous to try to negotiate without knowing if the person would agree. Bruno had seen Matt several times, and hadn’t been able to mention it.
Something happened in Port-au-Prince that Bruno would never forget. He fell off the gangplank coming back aboard ship the second afternoon.
The steamy heat had stupefied him and rum had made it worse, made him hotter. He was on his way from Hotel La Citadelle to the ship to get his mother’s evening shoes, when he stopped in a bar near the waterfront for a Scotch with ice. One of the Puerto Ricans of the crew, whom Bruno had disliked since the first moment he saw him, was in the bar and blind drunk, roaring around as if he owned the town, the Fairy Prince, and the rest of Latin America. He called Bruno a “wite bum-m” and a lot of other things Bruno could not understand but which made everybody laugh. Bruno left the bar with dignity, too tired and disgusted to fight, with a quiet determination to report it to Alice and get the Puerto Rican fired and blacklisted. A block away from the ship, the Puerto Rican caught up with him and kept on talking. Then, crossing the gangplank, Bruno lurched against the handrope and fell off into the filthy water. He couldn’t say the Puerto Rican had pushed him, because he hadn’t. The Puerto Rican and another sailor, also laughing, fished him out and dragged him in to his bed. Bruno crawled off the bed and got his bottle of rum. He drank some straight, then flopped on the bed and fell asleep in his wet underwear.
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