The Enchanted Isle

by James M. Cain

  “Well, can’t you call from here?”

  “And have these girls listen in?”

  “Rick, get with it, for God’s sake. Wake up where you are! You could be president of the United States and these girls would not listen in! They’re too busy! This place is too big! It’s...”

  “OK, OK.”

  He grabbed the coat, which was still on the other bed, turned the pocket down to look at the label, and when he had the name of the store found the number in the book. He gave it in, and when the store came on he said, “Fur coat department, please...Fur coats? Did a girl come in today to buy a mink coat off you? Young girl around sixteen, paying with twenty-dollar bills?...Oh, she did! Well, I’m her husband, and I just called to say I’m bringing that coat back! She had no business buying a mink coat at all! That money was given to us, to both of us when we got married, for sheets and blankets and carpets and chairs, to help furnish our home!...What did you say?” Then he held on for some time and listened while some woman talked at the other end. Then, in kind of a different tone, he said, “Then, you won’t take it back? OK, it’s what I wanted to know.” He hung up, fell back on the bed, and gasped, “Thank God, thank God, thank God!”

  “Yeah? For what?”

  “They haven’t called the cops—I could tell from how she talked, that woman who came on the line. She said money was money, and it wasn’t up to them to ask any questions about it. She said the girl did mention her wedding present, but if that much cash was unusual, there was nothing about it that the store had to question at all or pass judgment on. And merchandise on sale is not subject to return. And, she gave me no lead at all to find out who I was or bait me into the store. All she gave me was the brush. So...”

  “Seems that God didn’t make little apples—just big ones, maybe.”

  “Now there’s a thought. There’s a thought and a half.”

  He squirmed in the bed some more, then burst out, “I’ve got to find out about Vernick! Whether he called the cops, or what! I’ve got to check on him!”

  So he looked in the book again and gave the number in that I knew so well. Then: “Mr. Vernick, you don’t know me, but I’m calling about a girl who was out to your house today, or so I understand...” Then a voice cut him off and there came a click. He hung up and said, “Thank God, thank God once more, thank the all-merciful God. He didn’t call any cops either. If he had, he’d have tried to find out who I was, where I was calling from, and where Mandy Vernick was. He didn’t—just said, ‘I’ve nothing to say about her. Goodbye!’”

  “So you got all worked up over nothing.”

  “I’m sorry, Mandy.”

  “And we are sitting pretty, aren’t we?”

  “If we are.”

  “Well? Are we or aren’t we?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know! Mandy, I’m shot.”

  “...You mean...you got hit?”

  “I mean I’m jittered. Bad.”

  “Oh! You scared me there for a minute.”

  At last I calmed down, then took off my clothes and went marching around naked. Then I put my pajamas on and got in the other bed. Sitting pretty or not, I felt like holy hell and wanted arms around me. I own up he didn’t turn me on, at lease not much, but any port in a storm, and I’d been through one. I was hoping he’d come to me, and if it meant that other, then, OK, I’d even have stood for that. But nothing happened. I didn’t know why, especially after that pass that he’d made the night before, talking about my legs and then making a pest of himself to get me in bed with him. He just lay there, now and then sipping his drink. He wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t taking too much, but he seemed to need it, the way he was acting. He said he’d ordered it up from room service, along with the afternoon paper, and signed for it, tipping the boy out of the money I’d given him while we were buying our things at the plaza. He had put the tray on the luggage rack, the sawhorse thing with tapes, and offered me a drink, but I told him I didn’t like it. So it went on for some little time, him sipping and thinking and me sighing and hoping, and then all of a sudden I knew why he was not coming over, not slipping into my bed when he must have known I’d say yes. It was because he was scared, or “shot” as he called it—not on account of me, of that, or of anything in particular, but of everything, especially the cops. And I thought about last night, the way I’d thought about it, on account of being mad. And I realized if a girl gets mad enough, she won’t, and if a guy gets scared enough, he can’t.

  After a long time, he said, “Mandy, I’ve been thinking about it, ’specially about him, this guy today, Vernick. I mean he could be right. Maybe he’s not your father.”

  “He has to be! He and mother were married!”

  “That don’t prove anything.”

  “Well, why wouldn’t he be?”

  “He told you. He knows stuff, of course, that he didn’t mention to you, but on top of that your looks told him, so he said. You don’t look like his kith or kin.”

  “What’s kith?”

  “I don’t rightly know. Friends, maybe.”

  “His friends could be my father? Was that it?”

  “Mandy, I don’t know what it was.”

  “Well, what was he getting at?”

  “That some other guy is your father.”

  “Oh! That’s all!”

  “Mandy, it could be true. And it would help, I would think, if you got with it now, ’stead of cussing him out about it.”

  “You mean if I believed it?”

  “Well? I believe it.”

  “...You believe it? Why?”

  “The stuff you told me, Mandy, about yourself, about your mother, about him, and about Steve, this guy who beat you up who seemed to know more, to know a whole lot more, than he was telling you.”

  “And it’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “At lease you’d quit plaguing yourself about him.”

  “But then I wouldn’t know! Who my father is!”

  “I was coming to that.”

  For the third time I’d been hit in the stomach and started to cry again. When I could talk I said, “Here it’s all I’ve thought about, this last year and a half, my father, my real, sure-enough father, how I would go to him, how he’d ask me in real nice, how he’d take me in his arms, and how we’d be happy. And now look how it’s turned out!” I told him then, for the first time, about the desert island and how I’d dreamed about it, that my father and I would swim there after our plane was forced down, and we’d stay there and live, eating clams and drinking coconut milk. I said, “Maybe we never would, maybe it was just silly, but I would imagine that we were there and laugh to myself about it, thinking how we would live there.” He listened and didn’t make any cracks, just let me talk along. Then he got out of bed and sat on the floor beside me, there between the beds, in front of the liquor tray, so his face was close to mine. Then he took my hand and kissed it. Then he said, “Mandy, why can’t I be your father?”

  “...You! You be my father, Rick?”

  “Yeah, starting right now.”

  “You’re not much more than a boy.”

  “I’m that much more than a boy that I can eat clams with you and drink coconut milk on that island we’re going to have.”

  “You mean you’re not laughing at it?”

  “I mean we’re going to have one!”

  “...When? And where?”

  “In Florida! Now! Now we know where we’re going! Mandy, they have them down there! Cays, they call them—big ones, little ones, whatever size you want, some with palm trees on them, some with nothing but grass, but all of them with clams! We’ll buy ourself one! We got money, haven’t we?”

  “Oh, Rick, you make me so happy!”

  Because I knew, of course, that this was his way of doing, to kind of make it look different, his not coming in with me, as, of course, if he was my father he couldn’t come to my bed, and it would be for that reason, not on account that he couldn’t, that he didn’t. So OK, I w
asn’t kidded. At the same time it was just what I wanted if he and I were to go on. I mean that other was not what I really wanted, though I would have stood for it regardless to get what he was giving me now, kisses and pats and love. So now I had what I really did want, without having to do that other. So it helped, in the most wonderful way. I said, “Rick, I think that’s the nicest thing that’s been said to me, that ever was said to me, in my whole life until now.”

  “Then OK. Now, little daughter, sleep.”

  “You make me want to cry. But happy.”

  He held me close in his arms, and next thing I knew it was dark. I whispered, “Rick, are you there?”

  “Yes, Mandy. You’ve been asleep.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m kind of tired, I guess.”

  I looked then, and when I saw he was in his bed asked, “Did you sleep at all, Rick?”

  “I guess so, little bit... much as I could, worried as I am. I can’t help how I feel. Tomorrow, if we get out of town, if nobody stops us, I mean, if we get started for Florida, I imagine I’ll feel different. Then it’ll be the worry was just for nothing.”

  “I’m sorry I caused it, Rick.”

  “Listen, what’s done is done, and when no harm is done, don’t beat yourself over the head. That’s how I look at it, Mandy.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Well, you got the watch on. Look.”

  “It’s five of ten.”

  “You hungry?”

  “Rick, I hadn’t thought. Yeah, little bit.”

  “I’ll order something sent up. How you do, you call room service. They’ll get you a paper too—I think I’ll have one sent up. The five-thirty if they still have one. It’ll tell more than the one I have here, the same one you read, I guess.”

  “Have two sent up, one for me.”

  “What do you want to eat?”

  “The identical same I had in the coffee shop—tongue sandwich, buttermilk, and apple pie a la mode. It was all wonderful, and the pie was out of this world.”

  “Guess that’s what I’ll have too.”

  So he called down and ordered, and then we got up. It was fun walking around in pajamas and barefoot, with no reason to worry about a swipe being made at my breastworks. He had money, as I’d given him a package of five-dollar bills there in the plaza, but when the food came he signed, giving the waiter a five-dollar tip. It was a very nice guy who said he was going to college and seemed to know we were new at hotels. So he told us what to do with the tray when we finished our supper, to put it out in the hall on the rolling table he brought, and in the night they’d come and get it. So then we ate our sandwiches, and everything tasted so good. We put the tray out, then sat talking about our island, Rick in one chair, me in the other, our bare feet curled up under us. Then I said, “Rick, there’s just one thing.”

  “Yeah, Mandy? What?”

  “Mother. I ought to call her up.”

  “...Call her up? What for?”

  “To tell her...what’s been on my mind ever since I came back from talking to that rat, Vernick. Rick, I’ve been so ashamed to feel toward her like I did and to put what I did in that note. And the reason was that I blamed her for the way he had treated me, Vernick I’m talking about, never writing or calling me, or sending me something for Christmas. I thought it was because she’d never told him where we lived or anything. But now I know whose fault it was. I want to tell her how sorry I am for putting the blame on her.”

  “...Mandy, no, no, no!”

  “But, Rick, why not?”

  “You’ll spill it to her, that’s why.”

  “Spill what?”

  “Everything!”

  “Well, not about the robbery, if that’s what you’re talking about. Only about Vernick.”

  “Oh, that’s all, about Vernick! Wasn’t it bad enough, Mandy, that you went to him with that coat, that you bought it with hot money? It was just our dumb luck that the store didn’t call the cops in and that he didn’t want any trouble. Now you got to start over with a crazy call to your mother! Isn’t there going to be any end to your battiness?”

  “But I said I’m not going to tell her!”

  “About anything, except Vernick and how you showed him the coat and how it flattened him out, with his talk about you wanting money. So she asks where you got it. What are you going to say?”

  “I don’t have to say anything, do I?”

  “OK, you don’t say anything, but she calls Vernick to ask what he knows about it. And he says you didn’t tell him. And she says, ‘I’m telling the cops, I have to, I dare not let it pass.’ What then?”

  “Well, she wouldn’t do that.”

  “How do you know she wouldn’t?”

  “You seem to forget she’s my mother.”

  “On this I wouldn’t trust Jesus Christ.”

  “Well, that’s not a nice thing to say.”

  “O.K., I wouldn’t trust anyone.”

  “Then, I won’t call. But you make me feel so guilty.”

  “I was easier in my mind. Now I’m not.”

  9

  BUT IN THE MORNING we were nice and friendly again, and he let me dress in the bathroom, without peeping or anything. Then I came out and he went in, and when he came out he was shaved, combed, and fresh, with a clean shirt on, one of those he had bought, and his pants and jacket clean and pressed up, after being delivered by the valet the night before, enduring while I slept. So then we went down and had breakfast and talked over what we would do. We decided to hit for Miami, where we could ask about islands, where they were and what they cost. So we went up again and packed, then came down and paid and checked out, then took a cab to the bus terminal, at Howard and Center streets. But my heart almost stopped when we unchecked our bag, the one with the money in it, and the man suddenly asked Rick, “What you got in that thing, bricks?”

  Rick told him, “Books.”

  “Oh, that explains it. Boy, is that heavy.”

  Walking away, we looked at each other, and Rick said, “Well, we found something out. Now we know what we got. In case the subject comes up. In case it does again.”

  “I almost died.”

  “Forget it. We made a gain.”

  But when we asked at the ticket window, it turned out that to get to Miami, to get the express bus, we had to go to Washington by local. My heart did a little more skipping when we had to surrender our bags, check them through when we got on the bus, but no comment was made anymore about how heavy the big one was. We rode on the back seat, as we had on the local from Hyattsville going to Baltimore, and I whispered to Rick, “Hiya, Pop?” He squeezed my hand, so I felt happy and loved and safe. We changed in Washington, but bought tickets only as far as Raleigh so we could have lunch there before going further south. We decided to stop in Savannah and spend the night in a hotel, before going on next day. So we did have our lunch in Raleigh, more sandwiches and pie a la mode and buttermilk, and it wasn’t the same as it had been in the hotel, but not too bad either. Then we went on, with tickets bought to Savannah, checking the bags through again, riding the back seat again, and finally getting off again. And once more I almost died, as I was halfway up the aisle, leaving the bus, before I remembered the coat, which Rick had put topside on the rack. I ran back and got it and he sicked his finger at me. Then we unchecked our bags on the platform and right away rechecked the big one at the check-it-to-leave-it window, Rick taking the check that time, and then caught a cab to the hotel. Once more, I don’t say which one it was, except it was down by a square, near the City Hall and Cotton Exchange, with a view looking out on some river.

  They treated us very nice, very different from how they were next morning with me, and they said nothing at all about being paid in advance. We went up, and I unpacked as usual, putting our things away, and then we went out and had dinner, as it was late and the hotel dining room looked deserted. We found a place called The Isle of Hope and had a pretty good dinner of crab soup, snapper, and parfait, and with
his fish Rick had some wine. Then we went back to the hotel, and I didn’t undress in the bathroom, but in front of him, out in the open. But he didn’t pay much attention, and I guess I liked it that way, but I was beginning to wonder how long his fright would last and if it would ever end. I mean I liked it, him being my father, but after all I’m human. But he didn’t make any pass, and I sat there a while in the chair, the only one we had, and he sat sipping his Scotch, as he’d brought the bottle along, the one he’d had sent up in Baltimore. And I said, “Rick, there’s just one thing.”

  “Yes, Mandy, what?”

  “The same old. Mother.”

  “...You mean you still want to call her?”

  “Rick, it’s been bugging me all day. Forget what I said last night, about my reason for wanting to then—now there’s another reason. Rick, after what you said, about her calling the cops, it has popped in my head that she could, anyway, without knowing about the coat. Just to report me in as a runaway girl or something. A truant juvenile, something like that. Or suppose she takes space in that magazine? They have one, did you know that? That locates missing children. And how you do, you take an ad out, give in the missing child’s picture, and they run it with her description. And that magazine goes everywhere—to police, filling stations, bus terminals, airports, any place you can think of. And it gets results, so they say. The missing child is found. Well, suppose she does that to me—not out of meanness, but love. So she does what it takes to find me, and then they pick me up... and you up. And there we’ll be with that money, just from being too dumb to put in a call while we still had the chance and head off that dragnet stuff. That’s what I’m worried about!”

  “OK, OK, I see your point. And I know what you do.”

  “Yes, Rick? What?”

  “Soon as we get to Miami you send five bucks to New York, to the newsstand at Grand Central Station, to mail you cards, picture postcards of New York, in the return envelope that you send. So they do, and when you get those cards, you write your mother one, what a swell place it is, New York. Then you say you’re all right and please don’t worry about you, you’ll write her more later. So then you send that in an envelope, to the same newsstand, with a note: ‘Please mail the enclosed card for me.’ So they do and that’s that. Your mother thinks you’re up there, she has no reason to worry, she don’t call the cops or take any ad in that magazine. ... Hey, Mandy, I try to help.”