The Americans

by John Jakes

  Nonsense. He was carrying the comparison too far.

  “Certainly,” Eleanor was saying. “That’s what the theater is, after all. A place of escape. A fantasy world. It’s true for the actors as much as for an audience.”

  And is that how you’ve dealt with your hurts all these years? By hiding from them the way your mother did? Is that why you became an actress in the first place—because it was a way to hide?

  The insight left him shaken, though he didn’t yet know whether it was a valid insight, or fatherly foolishness. Now it was his turn to be nervous—and annoyed. He puffed his cigar, toyed with a spoon and said, “Eleanor, forgive me, but—do you mean to say you feel no obligation to stand up to bigots?”

  “Leo’s more militant than I. He feels that obligation. I try to talk him out of it.”

  “I find that incredible in a member of this family.”

  “Oh, Papa—why? Arguing with a bigot is futile. Why should anyone struggle to change minds that can’t be changed?”

  “Because if you don’t, your silence sanctions the behavior of such people. Encourages them to spread their hateful ideas—”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Papa. I don’t think it’s my fight.”

  “It will be the moment you become Mrs. Goldman.”

  “Then you must let us deal with it our own way. I tell you we can overcome any problems we encounter.”

  “And you’ll overcome them by pretending they don’t exist? By running from them?” Gideon kept his voice calm but firm. “I’ll tell you this much. If you don’t stand up for your rights, someone will take them away.”

  Julia’s eyes pleaded for forbearance. She reached out to touch his sleeve. “Dear, haven’t we strayed from the main subject?”

  “Indeed we have,” Eleanor answered, smiling again. “I repeat—Leo and I must deal with things in our own way. I know we can. All that matters to either of us is getting ahead in our profession.”

  At that, an image of the tea bottle flashed into Gideon’s mind. His flare of anger was moderated by a sudden melancholy. With her present attitude, Eleanor would be incapable of providing any leadership for the family in the years ahead; she was uninterested.

  The father within him pushed the preacher aside. He had no wish to prolong the argument. But he now had two things to fret about: her willingness to ignore questions of principle, and some deeper problem of which he’d become aware during the course of this distressing evening. He couldn’t reconcile the coming wedding with her refusal to make a simple statement that she was happy. Something was wrong in her relationship with young Goldman. Something she was keeping locked away inside herself—

  But he wouldn’t discover it tonight. So he might as well try to end the evening on a more positive note. He summoned a smile and said, “All right, Eleanor. You’re a grown woman. I can’t live your life for you. And perhaps Julia’s right. Perhaps we’ve ventured into areas that are none of our affair. Let me turn to something a bit more cheerful. Let me wish you well by giving you this.”

  From an inner pocket he took an envelope which he handed to her. “Inside, you’ll find our wedding gift to you and Leo. Round-trip steamer tickets to Europe—a first-class suite—plus reservations for the boat train to Paris and the Continental Hotel on the Right Bank. Finally, there’s a bank draft to cover a month’s honeymoon. As you know, old Philip’s mother was an actress in the French theater. Good enough to have had a couple of her performances praised by the popular gazettes, too. That’s especially noteworthy when you recall the low esteem in which actresses were held in the eighteenth century.”

  Trying to banish all the upsetting thoughts the table conversation had raised, he reached for Julia’s hand. “We wanted you and Leo to see the theaters where Marie Charboneau appeared. That’s as much a part of this family’s heritage as those weapons of war we treasure.”

  Gideon’s words had quite smoothed away any anger Eleanor had felt. The tears in her eyes were tears of joy. “Wait till Leo hears! Oh, Papa—Julia—thank you. Thank you both.”

  She rushed to her stepmother’s side and flung her arms around Julia’s neck. A moment later she gave her father a similar hug. Julia sipped her tea, painfully aware of the artificiality of Gideon’s smile, and of the worried look which Eleanor couldn’t see as she pressed her cheek to his.

  CHAPTER XIII

  REPRISAL

  i

  A WEEK LATER, JUST past midnight, Carter climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Red Cod with Josie.

  Her plain, cramped room at the end of the corridor had a slanting ceiling—the underside of the roof—and a large, round window in a gable at one end. The window over looked the water; the back of the tavern perched on the pier directly above the harbor.

  Carter had spent the first part of the evening at the processing plant. But he’d been out of sorts, and resentful of his situation, too much so to stay until the end of the shift. He’d gone to Kimpton and spun a story about feeling sick. It only took a few words to overcome the objections of the witless foreman, who really didn’t care whether Carter worked or walked out. If he did the latter, his pay would be docked, Kimpton said with a shrug.

  Although the night air was chilly and damp, Carter roamed the streets for an hour, wondering why he was unable to put up with the work routine tonight. He always hated it, but this evening was the first time he’d been incapable of lasting to the end of the shift.

  Maybe it was the season. At Christmastime people felt happy—or pretended they did. The mood at home was doubly cheerful because of the forthcoming wedding of his stepsister.

  Carter, by contrast, felt miserable. Gideon was bullyragging him again. Last week they’d had a ferocious argument, just because Carter had promised to be home for dinner on his night off and hadn’t showed up. An all-night card game at a tavern called the Gloucester Arms had kept him occupied.

  The game had cost him nearly twenty dollars, too. When Carter played poker, he won an occasional hand but generally came out the poorer at the end of the evening. He liked cards but had no true card sense. He often wished he did, because gambling was one relatively effortless method of making your way in life—if you were good. Since he wasn’t, he had to keep searching for something else.

  Cross and tense, at the end of his hour of roaming, he drifted to the Red Cod. He’d decided that what he needed was a woman. He was right. Not long after paying Phipps, he lay with his arm around Josie in the darkness of her mean room and felt far more relaxed than he had when he first flung her on the pallet and began pawing at her clothes. He felt peaceful, almost happy. Josie, too, was in a warm, reflective mood, in part because he’d paid to be with her until morning.

  She leaned her cheek against his bare shoulder, sighing in a contented way. Downstairs, a couple of raucous voices were raised above the murmur of conversation. The men began to bellow “On the Banks of the Sacramento.” In the harbor, a deep horn sounded once, then again. In the last hour, a heavy fog had blown in.

  “Ah,” Josie said softly. “Times like this, I wish I could get out of the North End an’ marry a young man like yourself.”

  Carter laughed and tugged the coverlet higher over both of them. “Don’t be fooled, Josie my love. If you married the likes of me, you’d be disappointed.”

  “Oh, no!” She tapped the end of his nose with an index finger. “Why d’you think so poorly of yourself?”

  “Usually I don’t. Tonight, though—” His voice trailed off.

  “Well, I think a lot of you, love. You’re handsome. Clever. You can be generous if you’re feeling like it. An’ you speak so beautifully. At least when you have a mind to—”

  “Lot of good that does me in the plant,” he grumbled.

  “You’ll find a place where it’ll do you good, Carter. I know you will.”

  Her faith touched him—though for a moment, he wondered whether she was another Helen, who would now want extra payment in return for all the compliments.
<
br />   But she didn’t ask for that—just for his nearness, warm flesh against flesh, and sometime later, for renewed intimacy. Her hands reached down to caress him and he kissed her, glad to forget the world’s deficiencies—and his own— for another brief interval. Afterward, he yawned, glanced out the moisture-speckled window at the thick fog, then fell asleep on her shoulder.

  ii

  At a few minutes past four, Phipps bid the last of his serving girls good night, sleepily rubbed his eyes and opened a drawer beneath the serving counter, preparing to count his receipts for the evening.

  The Cod was still, and empty save for one last customer who sometimes slept the night on the high-backed deacon’s bench before the fire. The man was a regular, so Phipps permitted that. The sleeping form was invisible except for the man’s boots, which jutted past the end of the bench to the hearth, where the embers brightened, faded, and sent up showers of sparks when gusts of air whipped down the chimney.

  Except for the sleeping patron, Phipps was alone. Of his girls, only Josie was employed for the night. He dumped the coins from the drawer on the counter and began separating them into piles. But his eyes blurred from exhaustion, and he was forced to close them and put his head down on his forearm.

  The quick, soft opening of the front door brought Phipps’ head up again. A thin, shabbily dressed man scanned the interior of the Cod. Phipps recognized him, and was not too sleepy to realize the man should have been somewhere else.

  “What are you doing here, Sancosa? Did the plant let you off early, or—?”

  The words died in a welter of saliva that suddenly filled Phipps’ mouth. Sancosa had merely been scouting the tavern for another man, who now appeared behind him. The little ring in Ortega’s ear glinted as he stepped in, shut the door, and leaned against it.

  “I heard you were back,” Phipps said with a nervous smile.

  “Right you are, mamão.”

  Phipps didn’t know what the last word meant. But from the contemptuous way Ortega said it, he knew it wasn’t complimentary. Phipps was rigid with terror. The sound of voices had roused the sleeper by the fire. Phipps could hear small noises from the other side of the deacon’s bench, but he didn’t dare look that way.

  Ortega walked—or more properly, swaggered—toward the serving counter. His companion, who was also Portuguese, followed. Sancosa’s frayed coat was unbuttoned. Beneath it, tucked into the man’s belt, Phipps glimpsed a fish knife.

  What the devil did these two want here? he wondered. Not a drink, certainly. Not this late. His legs began to wobble. He gripped the counter for support, trying to smile in an ingratiating way.

  “That’s a handsome coat, Ortega. New York must have agreed with you.”

  Ortega shrugged. “I was married for a while. I thought I was going to stay in New York, and let her sell hats in a hat shop to support me. But I found she couldn’t get enough cock—not even from me—so I had to kill the man she was fooling with.”

  He fingered the woolly yellow lining of his lapel. “I took this coat from him. And I fixed her so no one would ever again think she was pretty. After that, I decided it was time to come home.”

  Abruptly, the deacon’s bench fell over. The three at the counter stared at the fat man who had risen suddenly and clumsily and was now staring at Ortega with disbelieving eyes. It was Tillman.

  Sancosa jerked the knife from his belt and started toward the fat man, who bolted for the side door with surprising speed. The door banged. Sancosa started to chase Tillman into the fog but Ortega called, “Deixa que êle vá!”

  Sancosa halted, frowned, then turned back. But he didn’t return his knife to his belt.

  “But that man is—” Phipps began, then choked off the words. He would volunteer no information. He smelled liquor on Ortega, and from the way the Portugee blinked and smiled, Phipps knew he was dangerously drunk. Not so drunk that he couldn’t make his intentions clear, however.

  “I hear he’s on the premises tonight. The college boy. Sancosa works at the Northeast too. He saw the boy leave earlier, and followed him. Sancosa knows of my interest in the young man.”

  Without thinking, Phipps exclaimed, “It’s hell of a long time to hold a grudge, Ortega.”

  The Portugee fixed him with a murderous stare, though he still smiled. “That’s right, mamão. But I can hold a grudge for years. I have a fine memory. That boy and Royce—they made me look less than a man. They made me give up a good life in this town.”

  “Because of what you did to Royce afterward!”

  Ortega’s smile widened. Suddenly his hands flew—one beneath his coat, one to the bib of Phipps’ leather apron. He dragged Phipps halfway across the serving counter and with his other hand brought the point of his fish knife to a spot half an inch below Phipps’ left eye.

  Then, slowly, he drew the point down Phipps’ cheek a distance of three inches, very lightly yet with sufficient pressure to produce blood. Behind the counter, unseen by the others, Phipps urinated in his breeches.

  “Are you going to argue with me?” Ortega purred. “Or are you going to tell me where he is?”

  The landlord detested the boy who had been a friend of Eben Royce. But disliking someone and consigning him to death were two different things. If he told, there was no doubt that—

  Ortega’s smile disappeared. He tugged the bib of the apron. “Come on, mamão. Else I’ll cut you in parts and cook you in your own stove.”

  Phipps swallowed. The only responsibility he had was to save himself. The only one! Besides, the college boy was arrogant. He deserved whatever he got. The landlord whispered, “Upstairs. Last room at the end.”

  “Thank you.” Ortega bobbed his head and released Phipps. “You stay here and don’t interfere or I’ll come back down and kill you.”

  “Ortega, I—I can’t afford trouble in my—”

  “Don’t worry,” Ortega cut in, smiling and squeezing his shoulder as if they were the warmest of friends. “I won’t hurt him the way I hurt Royce. I’ll just scare him. If he dies of fright, it won’t be my fault—eh, mamão?”

  With a jaunty wave of his knife, he strolled toward the stairs, Sancosa right behind.

  iii

  Josie’s scream wakened him. Her scream and the rough hand that ripped the coverlet away and left him shivering and groggy.

  “Wake up. Wake up, filho de puta.”

  He reached for his eyes to knuckle them. Why was the voice so familiar?

  There were shadows in the room. The silhouettes of two men were etched against the feeble lantern light from the corridor. Josie cried out, “Carter, don’t you see who it— ?” Then a fist smacked her cheek and she tumbled out of bed, striking the floor hard and whimpering. The shorter of the two men—the one with the familiar voice—grabbed Carter’s bare shoulder and hauled him to his feet.

  Suddenly Carter saw yellow-tinted light flash on the serrated blade of a knife. A second knife gleamed in the hand of the taller man. Recognition flooded over Carter then. The tall Portugee guarding the door was a worker at the plant; Carter didn’t know his name. The shorter, thicker man with the ring in his ear—

  “Ah.” A dazzling smile. “I see you remember me. I don’t forget either. I trust you got messages to remind you of that. Now—”

  Ortega began to draw small circles in the air with the knifepoint. Carter backed up a half step. Felt his bare heel come down on the edge of Josie’s pallet. He heard her breathing loudly where she’d fallen, but didn’t dare take his eyes from the slow-moving knife.

  He was naked. It made him feel even more vulnerable. He was trapped—the slanting ceiling behind him, the door blocked, and only the round window offering escape—but it was a two-story drop to the icy water.

  And where was Phipps? The son of a bitch had probably helped the Portugee trap him!

  Tormenting him, Ortega moved the knife two inches closer, still drawing circles. The Portugee glanced, at Carter’s groin, snickered.

  “A big man. May
be I fix it so you won’t be so big anymore. What do you think? Should I? You made me mad enough, that night you helped Royce—the two of you made me look foolish and weak in front of many others—”

  His face wrenched suddenly. “Cagão!” he spat, jabbing the knife at Carter’s belly. Carter cried out in surprise and jumped back, smacking his head on the ceiling and almost losing his balance on the skidding pallet.

  His reaction made Ortega laugh. Again Ortega jabbed the knife toward him; again Carter had to dodge to keep from being slashed. Ortega enjoyed the game, feinting left and forcing Carter to move that way, then lunging in from the other direction. Carter’s throat quickly grew dry. His heart pounded so hard it hurt. He was terrified of the moving, taunting knife. He could actually smell the blade each time it slid by him at the end of one of Ortega’s lunges. The blade reeked of fish.

  How long could the game go on? He was numb with cold and with fear, and Ortega was relentless—jabbing at him, then drawing back, almost cutting him each time, almost but not quite. He kept forcing Carter to jump and enjoyed the sport of it while Sancosa stood behind him, a smiling observer, the knife still in his hands but his arms folded over his coat.

  The game went on.

  Two minutes.

  Three.

  The Red Cod was silent except for Ortega’s occasional sly chuckle, and the creak of the floor when the Portugee lunged and Carter jumped. He thought he heard a door slam somewhere, but wasn’t sure. In the shadows, Josie’s face was a white oval dotted by her huge, dark eyes, watching the awful contest—

  Finally, out of breath, Carter could stand no more. “For God’s sake get it over if that’s what you’re going to do!”

  “Watch him,” Sancosa warned his friend. “He’s getting mad.”

  And so he was. Carter’s fear, consuming at first, had begun to lessen, because he could be no more frightened than he already was. He guessed he was going to die. If he did, he might as well make the death worthwhile. He wasn’t brave, but there was a kind of desperate, half-crazed courage pumping through him, and it wrenched his face into a pattern of rage and turned him from passive victim to aggressor. Ortega recognized the change in Carter’s eyes and stance. The change made him hesitate.