At least she’d got the name right this time, thought Andrew. She turned back to Mr. Thatcher, smiling radiantly. She was being The Mrs. Jordan Eversley Mulhouse Pryde, graciously permitting herself to be admired by yet another smitten male. Although she was as decorative as ever, there was an ethereal almost transparent quality to her skin. Perhaps Ned was right about her not being well. Andrew thought of the marriage license in his pocket and, remembering his earlier malice, felt ashamed. Poor Mother.
Mr. Thatcher, grave and personable as ever, was watching him from brown, sympathetic eyes. “I hope you don’t think this is unfeeling, Andrew, but I dropped in to see your mother about your brother and my daughter. Rosemary seems quite dramatically in love, and she’s eager, in spite of this terrible tragedy, for the marriage to take place as soon as possible. Since I have never met Ned and Mrs. Pryde has never met Rosemary, I thought the least we could do was to start comparing a few notes.”
Mrs. Pryde said, “I’m sure that your daughter is perfectly delightful, Mr. Thatcher.”
Lem brought Andrew’s drink. His hand was very unsteady. His thumb nail as he handed the glass over was glistening with spilt martini.
Mr. Thatcher said, “Well, Mrs. Pryde, I must be moving on. I’m sure you have a lot to discuss with your son and we seem to have arranged everything anyway. We’ll all meet at our house one day next week and then, unless there’s some very unforeseen development, we old folk will be able to give the young people our blessing.”
From the slight hardening of his mother’s lapis-blue eyes, Andrew realized that his mother hadn’t liked that “old folks” very much. Mr. Thatcher’s tact wasn’t as infallible as he’d imagined. But the radiance persisted. Mrs. Pryde rose and, looping her arm through Mr. Thatcher’s as if they were about to take a stroll on the plage at Deauville, accompanied him out into the hall. Lem had sat down. He was sweating. He took the fussily arranged handkerchief out of his breast pocket and started mopping his face.
Mrs. Pryde came back alone. She had left the Deauville characterization in the hall. Very brisk, she moved to the couch and seated herself, smoothing her full skirt into an elaborate succession of folds.
“Now, Andrew, about the funeral. Lem and I will arrange everything for you, needless to say. But there’s so much to discuss …”
As the voice flowed on, Andrew sat patiently, merely waiting for the moment when he could be alone with Lem. For the past few years Mrs. Pryde had given up the role of glamorous international beauty in exchange for that of the impeccable grande dame whose duty it was to uphold standards of behavior which were so “woefully” disintegrating around her. Andrew was used to it, but while she went on about the funeral arrangements as if she were planning for Maureen’s coming-out as a fashionable debutante, her remoteness from reality seemed to him to border on the insane.
“I think it’ll be more suitable in Hartford.” Hartford was where all Andrew’s father’s family were buried. Suitable! he thought. But if this helped her, if she could imagine herself into a state where nothing indecorous seemed to have happened in her orbit—all right, let her play it that way for as long as she could.
At length she paused and glanced at the tiny platinum watch which glittered on her wrist above the bolder flash and sparkle of her beringed fingers.
“Well, Andrew, I’m afraid there’s no more time now. I must bathe and change. We’re going to the theater. We simply have to. I got the tickets months and months ago. And I hate having to gobble my dinner. But you do agree, don’t you? She must be moved immediately. And then the funeral in Hartford on Monday?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Lem dear, you’re already changed. Why don’t you give Andrew another drink? I won’t be more than half an hour.” She patted Lem’s shoulder and disappeared into the bedroom. Lem’s glass was empty. He almost ran to the bar and poured himself another martini.
As he came back to Andrew, he said, “Andrew, old boy, about Rowie …”
“Yes,” said Andrew. “Let’s talk about Rowie. You’re not divorced from her, are you?”
Lem came to a dead stop. His mouth drooped foolishly open.
“You married Mother less than a month after you married Rowie. Maureen knew, didn’t she? I’ve got her copy of the license in my pocket.”
As Andrew had suspected, the gallant major of the Errol Flynn movie had been defeated in the first skirmish. He watched his stepfather trying desperately to assemble some kind of façade. All that came was a pathetically inadequate attempt at man-to-man sophistication.
Lem sat down in the chair opposite Andrew, gulping at his drink. “So—so you’re the one who found that license? That’s a relief, old boy. I don’t mind telling you I’ve been scared, damn scared that the police might have got hold of it.” A drop of sweat splashed down from his mustache onto one corner of the wide, propitiating smile. “That wouldn’t have been very pleasant, would it? Not if it had all got into the papers. Think of it from your mother’s point of view. A fine, respected woman like that …”
“What about thinking of it from my point of view?” said Andrew.
“Yours, old boy?” Lem tried hard to look ingenuous. “You can’t think … I mean, what could it possibly have to do with the hoodlums who killed Maureen?”
It was only then that Andrew remembered Lieutenant Mooney’s “respect” for his mother which had kept him from telling the Prydes that there had been no hoodlums. So maybe, just maybe, Lem’s ingenuousness was not fake.
He said, “You’d better tell me the truth.”
“About Rowie and me?” Lem glanced uneasily at the bedroom door. It was closed. The sound of running water was faintly audible from the bathroom beyond. “Of course, old boy, I know what it looks like on the surface. That is, what it’d look like to some of those old fogies who’re still knocking around. But when you hear, you’ll understand, I know you will. After all, poor old Rowie. Got to have some loyalties in life. Can’t just throw her away on the garbage dump, can one, what?”
His fake British accent had never been so exaggerated. Andrew imagined he felt safer hiding behind it. Lem took another gulp of the drink, still grinning fatuously.
“Poor old Rowie. Known her all my life. You should have seen her years ago. Boy, that was a real woman. Not that she isn’t handsome still, of course. Damn fine figure of a woman with some flesh on her bones. There’s the bottle, of course. Had a bit of trouble with it recently, but then it’s been a tough life for her, a tough uphill struggle.”
As he outlined it to Andrew, the story of Rowena La Marche’s life seemed more like a tough downhill struggle, with all the toughness stemming from her relationship with Lem. Rowie, who had once been an actress, had apparently been in love with him for years and had for years been working at one job or another with the sole objective of financing Lem’s so-called career as an actor. It was a long, sordid saga of Lem’s abandoning her at each smell of success and of his returning to her when he was down and broke again. Eighteen months before, his career had seemed to be over once and for all. Sick and destitute, he’d come crawling back to Rowie and, as always, Rowie had welcomed him with open arms and nursed him back to health.
“You can’t imagine how good that woman was to me, Andrew. An angel—an absolute angel. She’d been sick herself, lost her job down in the garment district, but do you know what she did? Went out to scrub floors. Literally, old boy. Every evening she’d go off with some team of women cleaning out offices, and there’d never be any complaints. Always she’d be there in the morning bringing me my breakfast tray, cheerful, always with a joke, best little nurse in the whole wide universe. Gave up the drink too. Laid off completely. Of course I suppose there wasn’t too much cash lying around, but she did it and, well, you must understand. Had to repay her somehow. Couldn’t accept all that and just walk out, could I? Only a bounder would do that. So, since it meant so much to her, since it was the one thing she’d always dreamed about, when I was up on my feet again, I too
k her down to City Hall and made an honest woman of her.”
He laughed. It was a little giggling laugh of pride that he should have been so richly loved and pride that he had given the woman who loved him so rich a reward.
“So that’s the way it was, old boy, and you’d have thought it would have set her up permanently, wouldn’t you? But you can never tell with women. A couple of weeks later she was hitting the bottle again. Really hitting it—pink elephants and everything. Poor old thing, collapsed on the street, got herself lugged off to Bellevue for a spell. And that’s when it happened. I mean, the call from Hollywood. It wasn’t really a call, just some friends of mine high up in the industry. They’d always admired my work. They offered to pay my passage out, put me up and give me another chance to break in. Old Rowie was in Bellevue. She didn’t need me, so off I went. There wasn’t any work as it happened, but after I’d been there just a couple of days, staying with the big-shot friend of mine, I met your mother …”
He seemed quite innocent of embarrassment now. To him obviously they were just men of the world forced by circumstances into an intimacy for which their “sophistication” was more than a match.
“You know something, Andrew? Never in my whole life had I come across a woman like your mother. I mean, the real thing. Oh, there’d been movie stars, of course, women the average man in the street only dreams about, but not a woman like your mother. Not the real thing, not the top drawer. I think I’m being accurate when I say it was a revelation, changing my whole life. And when she seemed interested in me, why, suddenly I knew that this was what I was always cut out for. Everything else, all the up-and-down struggle had only been marking time. I thought of Rowie, of course. Poor old Rowie. Used to send her postal cards every day. But, well, I knew Rowie would understand. She was never one to expect the impossible from a man. I knew she’d rather die than ever stand in my way. I hadn’t mentioned her to your mother, of course. Anyone could see Rowie wasn’t the sort of woman your mother would appreciate. So when the time came, when—well, it’s possibly a little caddish of me to bring this up, Andrew old boy, but it was your mother who proposed to me.”
He beamed. “Right there in Malibu under the biggest damn moon you’d ever seen and … well, you know her. You know how she’s used to getting what she wants when she wants it. Before you could say knife, it was all fixed. We were driving to the Mexican border. We were married in Tia Juana at eight-thirty the next morning.”
He threw out his hands, exposing plump palms which, to go with his battle-toughened military characterization, shouldn’t have been so plump and smooth.
“You see, old boy? It was done almost before I had time to take it in and, after all, who suffered from it? A technicality, that’s all—a mere technicality. When I came back here to the Plaza, old Rowie was out again. I expected it to be a bit tricky explaining to her, but women are funny. You know something? She didn’t mind about your mother at all, only so long as I promised not to divorce her. You see, that was the one thing she’d always wanted—to know that she was, conventionally speaking, my wife. And that’s all she needs now. She’s got those chihuahuas. She’s crazy about them. I go see her as often as I can and I always take her some gift, some little fool trinket that women like. It was working fine. And it would have gone on working for all parties concerned if it hadn’t been …”
He broke off and his heavy handsome face was flushed now with righteous indignation. “I hate to say this, Andrew, but we’ve got to handle this situation like adults. Everything would have been fine and dandy if it hadn’t been for that … that sly little, scheming little …”
He broke off again. “Old boy, let’s get this over once and for all. I don’t know how much you’ve found out. But it’s time you faced up to it. The best thing that ever happened in your life was when those hoodlums fired those two bullets into that crooked little bitch of a wife of yours.”
FOURTEEN
Andrew had been expecting something like that. Whatever Lem had or hadn’t done, he would realize that his only hope for whitewashing himself lay in blackening Maureen. He sat saying nothing, watching as his “stepfather” shifted uncomfortably back and forth in his chair.
“This isn’t going to be easy, old man. I mean, she had you fooled, didn’t she? At least at the beginning. And I don’t blame you. I was quite struck with her myself when you first brought her around here. Always so charming, making such a fuss of your mother. Andrew’s certainly picked himself a juicy little peach, I thought. But that was only at first. I soon got her number. That one’s out for something, I told myself. Your mother saw through her too, didn’t she? Never fell for her. It takes a real thoroughbred to smell out the phonies.”
He glanced once again at the closed bedroom door. “Yes, old boy. That little girl’s up to something, I used to say to myself, and I tried to figure out what it could be. Could she have discovered that your mother was planning to leave her money to Ned? You know and I know that it’s a perfectly just arrangement since you inherited your father’s business interests. But was that it? I wondered. Was she throwing her charms around in the hopes of getting the old girl to change her will? That’s how I finally had it doped out and, as things turned out, I wasn’t far wrong.”
He took a final gulp of the martini. The twist of lemon peel disappeared into his mouth. He spluttered and picked it out from between his teeth with his finger and thumb.
“You see, old boy, it all broke about eight months ago—through Rowie. Can you imagine what that wife of yours had been up to? She’d been following me when I went out in the afternoons, and then, one day, she showed up at 215 when Rowie was alone. Poor old Rowie, probably she’d had one or two. She’s a trusting soul anyway. Maureen got the whole story out of her in a trice and then she started on me. The very next day—it was a Thursday, your mother’s regular afternoon for Dr. Williams and her allergy injections—she called from downstairs. I invited her up and she walked in here waving that photostatic copy of the marriage license.”
Andrew had decided not to interrupt. It was best to hear Lem out. So far everything fitted. Lem had omitted to mention his own efforts at blackmailing Maureen. He was posing as a victim of unmotivated aggression. But that was reasonable enough. If he were in Lem’s shoes, it was the version he would have used himself.
Lem seemed plunged in thought. At length he shook his head. “Poor old Rowie, can’t really blame her for losing her nerve. She can’t lie. Never could. You could tell that today. All that stuff she made up for you about Maureen being her friend, coming to visit her, bringing her gifts—a child of ten could have seen through that. She only met Maureen that once and she hated her. For my sake, of course. I never realized old Rowie could hate anyone until a couple of days after Maureen had been there, when I walked into 215 and there she was cutting capitals out of newspapers and sticking them onto a piece of paper. Anonymous letter, you know. She admitted she’d already sent you one. That’s how mad she was with Maureen. Of course I soon put a stop to it. Anonymous letters—really! There are some things in life you don’t stoop to. Poor old Rowie, she was quite ashamed when I explained, but she’d only been trying to get back at Maureen for my sake.”
That, then, was the explanation of the letter. Whatever else was false, Andrew could believe in that. He could see Rowena La Marche lumbering around with scissors and glue while the chihuahuas yipped and scrabbled at her skirts.
YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE IN NEW YORK
WHO DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT YOUR WIFE.
“Let me see, old boy, where was I?” Lem was leaning a little closer to him, indicating the constant strengthening of their intimacy. “Oh yes, that Thursday. There was Maureen tripping into the apartment, pretty, smiling, just the same as ever. You should have seen her. You should have seen how smooth she was. ‘Look what I’ve found,’ she said, waving that copy of the marriage license. Wasn’t it embarrassing? She was sure, of course, that I must have had terribly good reasons for committing bigamy, but
think how terrible it would be for poor Mrs. Pryde if it should ever come out—particularly when my other wife was such a colorful character. And—can you believe it?—she produced some wretched tabloid picture of poor old Rowie’s collapse on the street? She must have gone to the library or somewhere and dug it up.”
Lem shook his head to indicate his astonishment at the perversities of life. “ ‘Yes,’ she said. Wasn’t it lucky that the person who had found out about it all happened to be her, because she, of course, was my friend just as I was her friend. And, since she was so sure I was her friend, she was positive that I would want to help her rectify a flagrant breach of justice. I agreed, didn’t I, that it was criminal of Mrs. Pryde to be leaving all her money to that no-good Ned when Andrew was the elder son and obviously the one who should get it. That’s when she waved the marriage license again and, still smiling as cutely as any little movie starlet, she said, ‘Do I make myself plain? You’re going to see the old woman changes her will and changes it fast, or if you don’t … What’s the penalty for bigamy in New York State? Three or four years, isn’t it? After all, you must realize my position,’ she said, ‘You don’t think I married Andrew for his brains or his beauty, do you? I married him because I assumed he’d one day be a rich man and that’s what he’s going to be.’ ”
You don’t think I married Andrew for his brains or his beauty, do you? Those were almost the identical words which had been used in the letter to Rosemary. Andrew felt a shiver of panic. My God, was it possible after all that … that…?
“Can you imagine?” Lem was smiling his hearty military smile. “Really, when she laid it on the line like that, for a moment I felt like laughing in her face. I honestly did. I thought it was a joke or something. I mean, you know your mother, old boy. Can you imagine anyone trying to influence her about what she does with her money? Me going to her, me saying, ‘Look, chickie, you’ll be dead soon. Why don’t you write a new will and leave all the lot to that nice Andrew? But I didn’t laugh. Oh no, I wasn’t that much of a fool. I saw what I was up against and I played along with her. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do my best but it’ll take time, of course.’ That seemed to satisfy her. She went away and, because it had all seemed so crazy, I thought that perhaps that was the end of that. It wasn’t, of course.”
The Green-Eyed Monster Page 12