by John Jakes
Will was in such turmoil, he didn’t know what to say. Pennel came lurching back, stumbled against his chair and almost fell. He seized the back of the chair and held himself up. He smiled at Will again, half in contempt, half in pity.
“Guess you’re surprised to hear me speak of my wife and daughter the way I do. I’ll tell you the reason. I hate both of ’em. My wife’s a pretentious, domineering bitch. All she cares about are things—oh, and maybe the approval of a bunch of dry-titted, half-crazy old hags she fancies to be her betters. You’ve no idea how frantic she is to keep from being ostracized because of Laura. You’ve no idea how many backsides she must kiss so it won’t happen. That social stuff is shit, my boy. Pure shit. I like feeling important as well as the next man, but by God, I know I came from nothing and will go right back there when I’m all through. My daughter—she’s caught the taint in that house. It’s ruined her. She’s worse than her mother. At least my wife isn’t a whore.”
A seventy-year-old man wearing club livery entered with another tray bearing five more champagne cocktails. He set it down, then removed the first tray without so much as a lifted eyebrow—as if finishing five drinks before a quarter of eleven in the morning wasn’t at all unusual. When the waiter had gone, Pennel helped himself. He stood sipping his fresh cocktail with an owlish look.
At last Will spoke. “That’s a terrible thing to say about your own daughter.”
“Terrible? I s’pose. Trouble is, I don’t know a better word than whore. I tell you again, my boy—you don’t need my permission to marry Laura. You’ve no competition. No one in her own set will have her. Here—”
In the process of placing his cocktail on a bookshelf, he nearly fell again. He rummaged for something in his pockets and finally pulled out a wrinkled piece of newsprint about seven inches wide. One edge was ragged, as if the paper had been torn from a longer galley.
“Here’s her latest escapade. I was one of Colonel Mann’s supplicants at Delmonico’s earlier this week. He arranges to let you know when he’s written an item for Saunterings that he thinks you should see—the fucking robber. I paid eight thousand dollars to keep this out of the next issue of Town Topics.”
Pennel shoved the typeset paper at Will, who was already numb from all he’d heard. His feeling of horror worsened as he read the torn galley.
A hurricane of scandal is about to disturb the tranquil waters of Newport’s summer scene. This particular storm promises to make its landfall near a cottage where the sun was thought to shine perpetually.
Will looked up. “The sun? Is that his way of saying Maison du Soleil?”
Pennel nodded with grudging admiration. “The bastard always finds a way to reveal identities without naming names. Read on. Read all about your dear, sweet intended!”
Not so, the Saunterer discovered a fortnight ago. Next spring will bring more than the traditional blooming flowers to the young mistress of the aforesaid cottage, we are informed. The unfortunate maiden in question may one day discover that her presumably unwanted offspring has inherited a penchant for tennis—though for fetching the spheroids, not lobbing them.
“Godamighty,” Will whispered. For a moment he wanted to believe Mann had invented the story, but that was too far-fetched; how could the publisher hope to collect hush money for a fabrication? But Will didn’t see how Laura could be pregnant if what she’d told him the day after their lovemaking was true—
Wait. The story said a fortnight ago. She might have thought she was pregnant then, only to find before he left Newport that she was not.
It explained some things, but not all. Who was the father? Did the reference to fetching tennis balls mean it was Muldoon? If it did, Laura had lied to him.
And the shacker had told the truth.
Pennel saw his confusion and chuckled in a gloomy way. Sipping his champagne cocktail, he gazed out through the ecru curtains with eyes that almost failed to focus. Will forced himself to read the rest.
If true, the story is a sorry ending to the season for one of the colony’s premier families. Alas, it is not an unexpected ending, however. The erring maiden is said to have erred many times before, thus ensuring an absence of quality suitors upon her doorstep. Ah, la folie d’été! Ah, la folie de la jeunesse!
Will crumpled the galley: “Where do they get material like this?”
“Mann depends on spies. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”
He nodded, remembering Marcus had said exactly that.
“There’s no telling how many informants may be scurrying around our own household, each one hoping to overhear something salable. That must be what happened in this case.”
“You’re acting as if this could be true, Mr. Pennel.”
“Am I, now?”
“You’re pretty damn calm about it. He’s written filth about your own daughter! Is it true?”
“Kindly keep your voice down, Kent. You’ll have the club stewards on my neck.”
“Is it true, goddamn it?”
“Why, my boy, I don’t know. It very well might be.”
Will felt as if a knife had been rammed into his stomach. Pennel went on. “I’d say learning whether it’s the truth is your responsibility, not mine. You’re the one foolish enough to think of marrying her. My only concern was to keep Mann from printing the item. If he did, I’d look like a jackass in the business community. Couldn’t allow that—”
He stumbled to Will and squeezed his shoulder with clumsy cordiality. “Brace up, Kent. Brace up and have a cocktail. If you still want to acquire social standing overnight, my possibly pregnant daughter can give you that much.”
He stared into Will’s dazed eyes. There was genuine sympathy in his voice as he continued. “Don’t feel bad that they gulled you. They gulled me for years. I don’t know you well, but you strike me as honest and decent. That’s why you mustn’t feel bad. Being honest and decent immediately puts you at a disadvantage with my wife and my daughter, since they”—he drank—“they are not.”
The tall clock ticked. Fifteen seconds passed.
Thirty.
The confused look cleared from Will’s eyes. His head came up.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Pennel. The only person who can answer the rest of my questions is Laura.”
He held out the galley. Pennel didn’t move to take it. Will dropped it between them and walked out.
ii
Despite the intense heat, Will walked all the way back to the Bend from midtown. It took him about an hour, and failed to produce the result he’d hoped for—a lessening of the anger and humiliation consuming him. “Being honest and decent immediately puts you at a disadvantage with my wife and my daughter.” What a fool he’d been!
Red-faced and perspiring, he stormed across Bayard Court and into the reception room. It was still empty. But someone from the neighborhood was inside—Mrs. Grimaldi.
She and the others turned toward the door as he entered. He took note of their faces. “What’s wrong?”
Mrs. Grimaldi sighed. “Word has passed in the Bend that anyone visiting these rooms will incur the displeasure of a certain padrone. Nevertheless, conscience compelled me to bring news which otherwise you might not have heard for hours. Grimaldi agreed that I must come.”
Jo watched Will with anxious eyes. Vlandingham wiped his palms on his trousers; the revolver bulged under his surgical apron. He said, “A fisherman found Eustace Banks just after sunrise.”
“Found him where?”
Drew said, “Propped against one of the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge. With his throat cut.”
Will felt light-headed for a moment. Mrs. Grimaldi said, “That is not the worst of it. I did not have a chance to tell the others before you came in—”
“Tell us what?” Jo asked.
The older woman hesitated briefly. “It is being said in the streets that the death of Banks is not the end. It is being said that”—a doleful glance at Will and Drew—“that the two young doctors will be
next.”
CHAPTER XIII
CARNAGE
i
THE REST OF FRIDAY dragged, dark with the threat of rain.
They had one patient, a woman of about thirty with a lined face and exhausted eyes. Her forearm was badly burned. Vlandingham dressed and bandaged it in about fifteen minutes. Even that seemed too long for the woman, who nervously explained that she’d fallen against her stove and wouldn’t have troubled the doctors except that her arm was the one she used for twenty hours of ironing which she did every week for a Bayard Street sweater.
“What she meant,” Mrs. Grimaldi said after the woman left, “is that if there were any neighborhood doctors not in disfavor with Don Andreas, she would have gone to them. But at least she came. That showed more courage than most have exhibited.”
Drew looked skeptical. “Maybe the people in the Bend are showing common sense. Maybe we should, too.”
From the cabinet where she was rearranging bottles, Jo looked at her brother. “Are you saying we should lock up and leave?”
“I’m suggesting we might think about it. Does it really make sense to stay here when we’ve been threatened, and Banks has been murdered?”
Vlandingham’s swivel chair squeaked as he swung around; he’d been reading one of the texts from the shelf above his desk. But he hadn’t turned a page in almost twenty minutes. In reply to Drew’s question, he said, “No, it doesn’t make a whit of sense—not if your sole concern is self-preservation. I can tell you this much. If we leave before noon tomorrow, we might as well not come back. The confidence I’ve worked years to build will be gone like that.”
He snapped his fingers. Then, chair squeaking again, he returned to his study of the same page.
ii
Around six that evening, they extinguished the lamps in the office, locked up and walked slowly toward the Bowery. Heavy thunderclouds rumbled in from the northwest. Wind billowed grit and rubbish through the streets. Neighborhood people ran for cover, some of them casting pitying looks at the three men and the girl.
On the corner of Mulberry, peddlers were hurriedly covering their carts with tarpaulins. Will checked the street for oncoming vehicles and got a shock. Four doors down on the far side of Mulberry, Giuseppe Corso was just turning into a saloon.
Corso recognized the foursome at the intersection. He took a cheroot from his mouth and, his eyes on Will, dropped the cigar to the pavement and stepped on it. Then, laughing, he ducked inside.
Will looked to see who else had noticed. Drew and Dr. Vlandingham were engaged in conversation about the comparative merits of catgut and silk ligatures. But Jo had seen Corso; her expression made that clear.
Bayard Street grew almost pitch-dark under the heavy clouds. After the four of them had crossed Mulberry, Jo dropped back and took Will’s arm. Her touch was comforting and familiar, somehow. Her hand seemed to belong right where it was. “You’ve been very quiet ever since you got back from Wall Street.”
He shrugged, as if to indicate he had nothing to say on that subject. She went on. “I do agree with what Drew said yesterday. This really isn’t your fight. I wouldn’t think less of you if you left. Drew wouldn’t think less of you.”
He remembered the contemptuous way Corso had reached for his watch chain with the knife. Remembered some of the people he’d seen in the surgery, people desperate for the care the doctors offered. Now they’d been frightened away—
“But I’d think less of myself,” he said. “And it is my fight. I’ll stay until Sunday.”
He reached across with his other hand, closing it on hers. They gazed at one another and let their eyes speak eloquently of their feelings. They might have been alone on the dark, windy street.
Several steps ahead, Vlandingham grabbed his derby as a gust lifted it from his head. “Hurry up, you two!”
They ran to catch up. But each knew something had changed, and changed profoundly, in that moment in which they’d looked at each other.
The grit-laden wind blew harder than ever. A butcher shop sign over the sidewalk creaked on its iron rod. Creaked and screeched and threatened to tear loose, just as old confusions and uncertainties were tearing loose within Will Kent. Tearing loose and blowing away—gone for good—
“I wish you’d go,” Jo whispered suddenly. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I feel the same way about you.” The feeling had been struggling for release for days, he realized. Even in the midst of their predicament, he experienced a moment of almost unbelievable happiness. “That’s one more reason I have to stay.”
“You’re more stubborn than I gave you credit for at first.”
He smiled. “Being stubborn is one of the chief pastimes of the Kents.”
“Tell me why you’ve been so quiet all afternoon.”
He frowned. “Oh—thinking.”
“About Don Andreas?”
“Not entirely.”
Memories cascaded through his mind—memories of Thurman Pennel and the torn galley from Town Topics; of Muldoon’s taunts; and of Laura’s puzzling behavior— suggesting a quick marriage one day, only to reject the idea the next. He’d thought Laura was just a proper young woman carried away by her feelings. Her feelings for him and no one else—
Damn fool, he said to himself as he and Jo walked arm in arm. Muldoon as much as told you what she was. You thought he was only saying it to settle a grudge.
In the last few days he’d made a lot of discoveries about Laura Pennel. But he’d made even more important ones about himself. He’d discovered how badly false ambition could distort perception and judgment. He had believed what he wanted to believe about Laura, never what the facts suggested. He’d discovered how wrong he was to want all that the Pennels represented. Most important of all, he’d discovered Jo.
The clouds burst with a blaze of lightning, a clap of thunder. He rushed Jo toward a covered passage between buildings. It was just half a dozen steps away but they got soaked.
He heard Drew calling from shelter farther down the block. He shouted a reply but the storm muffled it. In the darkness of the passage, with thunder shaking the pavements and rain cascading from black clouds, he took Jo’s waist in both hands.
“I don’t know any way to tell you except straight out. I’ve fallen in love with you. You’re the only one I want.”
She put her hands on his shoulders. For a moment her face shone. But a sudden memory erased the radiant look. “What about the girl in Newport?”
“I’ll see her once more. To say goodbye. Maybe one of these days I can explain how she misled me. How I let myself be misled. But it’s pointless right now.”
“You mean because of Don Andreas?”
He nodded and kissed her. They held each other without speaking, their tightly clasped arms communicating their love, and their fear that they’d found each other too late.
iii
The most severe weather passed in less than an hour. But it rained all night and on into the next day. Drew, Will, and Jo reached the office shortly after eight-thirty Saturday morning. Dr. Clem was already there. This Saturday would regularly have been his day off. But he’d changed his schedule, he said. They all knew the reason.
They kept the waiting room door closed, to provide more warning if anyone tried to come in that way. The Adams revolver lay on the examination table. In the hallway of the tenement, the pump handle squeaked with its familiar rhythm.
By ten Jo had cleaned the entire surgery. Will had read a chapter on delivery of a child by surgical section. Drew and Dr. Clem had used the time to go over the account book for the practice—a study good for producing a lot of dismayed laughter from both of them.
About ten-fifteen, Mrs. Grimaldi appeared with a strapping, black-haired young man she introduced as her son, Tomaso. He would be staying with her in the surgery until twelve o’clock had come and gone, she said.
No amount of argument from Drew and the others did any good. She had made up her mind a
bout staying. If Don Andreas sent roughnecks at noon, at least those roughnecks would have to deal with more people than they’d bargained for.
Eleven came.
Eleven-thirty.
Twelve.
Two lamps illuminated the gloomy surgery. Rain dripped steadily in the passage beyond the curtains—which bore constant watching since there was no way to close or shutter the window.
From twelve until half-past there was scarcely a word of conversation. The temperature dropped. A dank chill began to pervade the room. Soon Jo was shivering and chafing her arms.
At one o’clock, Mrs. Grimaldi rose from a stool where she’d been sitting for over an hour. “Come, Tomaso. I think it is safe for us to leave. If the padrone meant to make good on his threat, he would have done so by now. Something changed his mind. I always suspected he was a cowardly windba—”
“Mrs. Grimaldi,” Jo whispered, pointing at the homemade curtains. “I thought I heard someone—”
There was a loud explosion in the passageway. One of the curtains whipped wildly. Jo screamed as something struck Vlandingham’s shelf of books and sent one spinning to the floor.
iv
Tomaso Grimaldi leaped at his mother and flung her to the floor. Someone outside yanked the curtains apart. In the window, looking like a goblin, Corso crouched, his derby tilted down over his eyes and a small silvery gun in his right hand.
High up in the tenement, people began to shout and scream. Corso hunted a target. Will lunged for the revolver on the examination table. Behind him he heard the crash of the reception room door flying open, then heavy footsteps, and Drew’s warning: “Look out. It’s McCauley—”
A thunderous explosion. Jo cried, “Dr. Clem!” Something thudded to the floor.