“Well, listen, Robbie, this is what he says he’s going to tell the D.A. I know he’s crazy. I’m frightened for all of us. You had better know, whether it’s dream-stuff or not. I don’t ask; I don’t want to know. I’m only thinking of you. Alf says they have the goods on Grant Associates if they want to come down on you. He says, ‘Some slip-up, eh? Robbie didn’t know. Where did I hear a commercial like that? Some line. Let him tell it to the judge.’ And, Robbie, he knows about us, he keeps on about it, he’s a very coarse man; he said, ‘I hear it from James Alexis, your sweetie’s best friend, and does that explain their fifty per cent partnership in the Honey?’ And he means Mrs. Downs, Robbie. He said last night, ‘The other day, I gave you the straight tip, I tipped you off, you better not tell Grant. I got his number and I’ll know if you tip him off. He’s going to buy me drawers until the statute of limitations and then some more.’ That’s his mania now. Oh, watch out for him, Robbie, and watch out for James Alexis, he sold you out.”
“Thanks, darling,” said Robert, very gruff and greatly disturbed. Between them, they arranged for Betty to watch Alfred Goodwin at every hour of the day and night. Grant would arrange for the holiday at the farm as soon as possible. But he had decided to give Upton a free hand, as Upton had improved considerably since his marriage, and the young wife was an excellent cheap drudge at the farm. They wrote letters every day, now, about the questions of new boilers, new bed linen, new brooms, new wire netting, new curry combs, and this kept Grant in an agreeable fever. He did not mind the Goodwin danger if nothing at all happened, and he sweetened Goodwin by going into numerous small businesses with him.
55
This went on till the spring of 1945. He once more stayed in New York for Christmas. He as usual spent New Year’s Eve with the Flacks, his luck. Mrs. MacDonald was now pottering about in the basement and Grant was happy with her. She gave him sour and sage advice and occasionally came to him with her hand out, asking for extra money for the housekeeping or saying he must pay her more. He enjoyed going into these matters for hours, reducing her to tears, hearing her bitter, honest remarks about himself, and at length giving her a few dollars. He would always chuckle and feel tender. He never allowed Livy Wright to come to New York, but went to visit her in Philadelphia occasionally, and pretended in fact, that he was living in town with his wife and Andrew but that out of terror of his wife he could not give anyone his address.
He allowed the blonde to visit him there, but only because James Alexis was now living at the Pandulfo Hotel in Brooklyn Heights, very near him, and he wanted to keep James Alexis sweet. He paid no more weekly salary to the blonde and rejoiced at what he saw in pencil in the back of a little book he kept for expenses.
The blonde had, however, a key to his apartment. It happened one day that he had been looking through his papers in the old yellow leather hatbox, and had gone to the bathroom for a moment to look at his complexion. If it was an effect of the harsh, virgin light of this spring day, he really looked so bad, he did not know; but in the shaving mirror, he saw himself, a hangdog, ash-gray, baldheaded man with vacant eyes: he was old at last. Yet he had bathed and perfumed himself this morning as other mornings. It was perhaps that he had been up too late with the wrong woman the night before. At other times, he would have dismissed this face with that excuse. Today, he felt a return of manhood. He looked at the face he saw in the shaving mirror, and thought, “That is I: that is how I look to them; I feel the same: but I have known for a long time how old I am—the things they say in stores when they are not trying to insult me. I am old and it is only a day or two since I was a young man. This spring I will be an old man, with yellow hanging chops: they won’t even look at me, wonder if it is worth while playing me for my pocketbook.” In business he had always seen clearly, not deceived himself: of course, he had this perspicacity. He now did not use it in business and it came back like a sharp knife, cutting the cataracts of dream from his eyes, painfully, in his private life. He had only his private life to live for: he had become a small man.
Grant looked profoundly at himself, passing his hand over his jowl. He thought of many things. He became a little puzzled, as at a distance, as a man who tries to puzzle out an accident five hundred yards off at the end of the streetcar line. He did not know what it was he was puzzled about, some moral question? He had never thought of such things: it had all been clear to him: it was settled. He had always been gay. He had done wrong things and made mistakes, but nothing wrong “in a biological sense.”
The house in which he lived had formerly been a private residence with a large drawing room on the ground floor, and this large salon was still entered by two magnificent sliding doors which he never kept locked. It amused him to be able to slide the noiseless doors apart and pad out in his slippers and pad downstairs or upstairs, and make no noise, or merely to look out when the mailman came.
Thus he had left his doors on the slide, in forgetfulness, this day, with the papers from the hatbox strewn on the large oval center table, and when he came back from creaming his face, found the blonde in the apartment, seated on a divan and putting on make-up. The papers appeared to him to be the same as before, which alone to him appeared unnatural, for he knew the blonde’s curious and acquisitive nature. The blonde Mrs. Downs showed her small damp elastic swimsuit, of an emerald green, an almost unobtainable black-market item which he had got for her, and said she had been having a suntan with James Alexis at the Pandulfo, and had dropped in for tea, but had just remembered an appointment with her dear mother, who was suffering from twinges of rheumatism; and so she went.
This departure seemed very odd to Grant, who was used to the blonde at least asking for some simple thing, like a cake of soap or a stick of chewing gum, before she went; and he went very carefully through his papers. She must have been already in Manhattan when he discovered that she had taken from the strewn documents a letter from some solicitors at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, dated some years back, which revealed quite clearly that Grant had in 1936 arranged for his total property, save in potentially enemy countries, to be vested in two corporations, the first ultimately to be controlled by Gilbert, his son, and the second by Andrew, his young son, in Prince Edward Island. The ostensible offices of the corporations, called Timber Wolf Furs, Ltd. (Gilbert), and Positive-Bitkoff Corporation, Ltd. (Andrew), were both at Charlottetown, in a solicitor’s office. This was all, of course, to avoid estate taxes and to minimize American income taxes. However, in order to make the whole situation correct, and no trouble when the estate passed into his boys’ hands, these corporations had actually long been the property of the two boys, and he actually had had the share certificates issued by the secretary, in the names of, respectively, Gilbert Grant, and in the name of Andrew Grant, a minor, for whom he was a trustee, only to the age of twenty-one. Seventy-five per cent of the estate was in the Timber Wolf Furs (Gilbert) corporation, and twenty-five per cent in the Positive-Bitkoff (Andrew) corporation. If the blondine were to reveal this situation to the boys or to their mother, she would, of course, gain absolutely nothing, and she could not denounce him to the income-tax authorities since it was strictly legal. But Gilbert, very dissatisfied with his father, his wretched salary, and oddities of accounting at the day-old chick farm, had run away to Hollywood with his friend Sergey and was dunning his father for a loan for his films, the $10,000 promised having never been paid. He was very angry with his father. He believed sincerely in his educational films project and was trying to get money for it. If the blondine were to reveal to Gilbert that he owned outright seventy-five per cent of his father’s estate, Grant would at one stroke be reduced from $1,800,000 to $450,000, and from his point of view would be ruined and have to go back to work.
As soon as he could suppose her at home, Grant called up the blonde and said, “Sweetie, the wind blew in and disarranged my papers when I was sorting them. You didn’t see a bit of any on the floor?”
She said, “Yes, I did, dear; an
d I have it with me, I kept it for you, you’re so careless. I think you need a keeper. I think you hedged yourself out. You want me to look after you. Now, I’m a good housekeeper, and I think you need someone with you, not an old woman, because you’re all alone and I know Alf Goodwin is threatening you. Let’s meet for a little chat at the Pandulfo tomorrow.”
When they met the next day, Grant said angrily, “You can’t do a thing, it means nothing, it’s worth nothing.”
The blonde only said, “To me, darling, it’s worth nothing, and to you it’s worth a great big loss, but Gilbert has only to go to Prince Edward Island and identify himself and you would be in the soup. He wants to go to work. He wants to run his own corporation.”
“Look, darling, we must have a little chat.”
“Robbie, you know I have a rent problem.”
56
The upshot was that Grant ejected Mrs. MacDonald, telling her she was a very fine old lady and must go and live with her daughter and giving her half a month’s pay. The next day the blondine came to live with him, in the large basement apartment, and became his superintendent and rent-collector. She was an excellent superintendent. She saved money, begged milk and Coca-Cola bottles from their tenants, in order to get the deposit money, had Grant’s old shirts and suits turned. Grant was enchanted and kept saying that his wife had never thought of that.
Meanwhile, Grant kept his office going downtown, but now it mainly existed to receive letters he could not receive at the Montague Street house.
Once a week, usually on Sunday, he visited the Flacks for lunch or dinner. Edda was a good cook and prepared a quantity of food for him. He had contracted the curious habit of taking his old-fashioned yellow leather hatbox with him whenever he went out. David, who spent his time in the apartment and on Riverside Drive, when the weather was mild, reproached him with, “Robbie, why don’t you put the blamed papers in a safe deposit and then you won’t be afraid of the blondine or anyone on earth.”
And Grant laughed powerfully at this, repeated, “I’m not afraid of her, nor anyone on earth, but the Government: one day they’ll come down, open all the boxes to hook out the black-market money, and something will stick to their fingers. I’d do it myself. I wasn’t so innocent myself, ha-ha.”
“Don’t carry it about with you, Robbie.”
“Look, Davie, I know what I’m doing. I go along that terrace. I go down by the steps to the quays by the East River, and I think, ha-ha, if I dropped the whole bunch of papers, what a bouquet for the crabs and smelts, I don’t know what they have down in that mud. Once I saw a young man about twenty, in a blue shirt, floating down that river, and only his back showed. He had white skin, a thick neck and blond hair like me when I was like him. I’ll give the whole lot to him. Did I work for that piker with his Sergey, for that ’ooman with her sofa, for a neurotic, draws white horses and pink marguerites? It’ll be the only fun I will have after—when I’m—after—in the hereafter—seeing them scrambling for it, maybe they’ll employ a diver, or a steam-shovel, get up the hatbox from the crabs. Ha-ha.”
“I’m not worrying about that, I’m not worrying about what happens to them; I’m thinking about you, Robbie; I love you. One of these days, someone will think you have something in that box you always carry about with you, and they’ll do you in. I know damn well you’ll never throw it in the East River. I know you. But the yellow blonde may do a little thinking about the yellow hatbox; I’m worried about you. And don’t go and get it in your big empty head I’m thinking about the dough. Profit has been the ruin of you.”
“I’m with you, my boy. If I’d been in a place where they had a law prevented me from putting my hand in your pocket, I would have been a good commissar for pushcarts. Ha-ha.”
One evening in the late spring, Grant went home with his hatbox from the Flacks’. The Hudson was almost red with the setting sun. Grant took a taxi to Brooklyn, but paid the man off before his home as he always did, in a foolish, unthinking notion of precaution, and walked along the heights to observe, as always, the East River. Of course, he would not throw his hatbox in, but he laughed and thought of the divers, the cranes, the Bucyris: but perhaps it would float? He got home before the blonde, and began, as several times before, to search in her apartment, among her valises and closets, for the missing paper. What a smart fox she was!
From now on, the former Mrs. Downs lived in the basement apartment which she had as Grant’s superintendent. She had a good deal of freedom, collected the rents, at which she was very exact and agreeable, paid the taxes, at which she was as neat and hairsplitting as an accountant, and spent most of her evenings with Grant.
Grant’s apartment was on the first floor, raised slightly above street level. A grand sitting room led into a large, airy back room used as a bedroom by Grant. A hall ran past the doors of both rooms to an apartment in the back, containing a kitchen and bathroom. The windows from both their apartments looked out over a small plot. Mrs. Downs and Grant managed both buildings, and were about to buy an excellent house in the same district for $10,000. This house, with some $3,000 improvements and similarly constructed, could be built up to the same condition and would bring in considerable rents from wealthy employees and artists.
In the evening, Grant lounged in the sitting room or parlor, by the big windows overlooking the street, his shirt sleeves rolled above the elbows, his horn-rimmed spectacles on, and his legs stretched out like felled trees, beside him a bottle of beer. Mrs. Downs, who was fond of knitting, would often sit opposite him in the opposite pair of windows, with a half-jersey already knitted on her needles, wearing an unbecoming knitted jacket buttoned up to the neck. She did not have to look at the clock in the hall. She knew the exact hour by the goings and comings of people, sounds in the house—someone who went down and came upstairs, even the fall of shadows, the cries of birds, a child bouncing a ball, a cat mewing. When a certain hour had come, she would put on some extraordinary red hat she had bought, or else knot over her head some odd cheap square of cotton she had bought for a bargain at a local department store in the Heights, and would go out to buy some provisions for the evening, meat, beer, milk, vegetables. If she was too long away, Grant would frown and ask her roughly upon coming in, “Did you go to the Pandulfo?”
She would show him her swimsuit, and say, “Yes, I went to get a suntan and a swim and I met James Alexis.”
James Alexis, now an old man but lively and vain about his love affairs, still kept an apartment in the Pandulfo for his New York visits. But now he came rarely. Grant knew that the blonde woman met him there, but constantly hoped for business from him. Unlike himself, James Alexis had gone out to make money, and now was worth about $5,000,000.
Sometimes, as in the old days, when Grant did not want to sleep in the evening, he, Alexis, Mrs. Downs, or he and Alexis and two young women would have a party. The situation pleased him very much. Mrs. Grant had retired to a long silence in Boston. The young boy was declared to be a great painter in embryo, and Grant would write one letter a week, adjuring the boy to work hard and do well, and to think a little also about earning a little money, there were all kinds of things today—comic strips, the movies, educational films, like Walt Disney, and even war factories, during war times painted to look like fields of cotton.
Grant still kept his office in Hanover Square. He would arrive there later than before, about ten, and say to Di Giorgio, now raised to $37.50 a week, “Where’s the mail? Let’s see the mail.”
There was rarely any mail. At each mail-hour he would spring up from his easy chair or couch, rush to the outer office, and say, “What’s in the mail? Let me see the mail at once.”
Very often he sent Di Giorgio on long errands through the city, and when he came back he would find Grant “taking a stretch” on the sofa and would say, “Well, you have not much to do, Mr. Grant. Why don’t you take a walk?”
Grant would then spring and say angrily, “I’m exhausted with work. I have everything to think o
ut, you do nothing.”
And he would dictate some letter which must be sent out to two hundred or so correspondents, not multigraphed, but typed by a typist, offering goods which no longer existed, or could not now be handled internationally on account of local tariffs, exchanges, or nationalization. If he sent out six hundred letters he would get back two hundred answers, and be happy for a day or two—but no business resulted. Sometimes he resorted to misquoting prices and materials, so that some correspondence could ensue about these mistaken figures or quality. He would take on partners, old friends like Delafield and Goodwin, and lose them because there was no more business. The world was a monopoly or the commodity was controlled or the product was under Government control or black-marketeers were shot or the exchanges were closed. The world had moved away from old-line private enterprise.
After a very wearing day, he would go uptown to some bar for a tea and chat with some new woman, but rarely found one to “give him a thrill,” as he thought of it. At night he went home and sat in his shirt sleeves, reading a great number of fresh-smelling evening papers, with the blonde opposite.
Night would come. The blonde would put on the lamp. There were many lamps. The expense was considerable, but Grant preferred this light for he did not know what was in the shadows. It seemed to him that he could not make out what was there, that people were concealing things from him. Also, Death might be there. He believed really in Death. He believed that when Death came for him, Death would knock on the door and he would hear the rap. Sometimes when he and the blonde sat there they would laugh, talk some gossip, and sometimes concoct an anonymous letter between them—the world, they knew, was a vile, dishonest place, and no man could go before the police and say, “You have nothing on me,” and if he could—there was more fun in their denunciations; for as Grant had reasoned one day, “The Flacks, you know, three times in succession lived opposite a church, and suppose a bomb had burst in that church—eh? What does it look like?”
A Little Tea, a Little Chat Page 51