Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  Alaine, after listening to him, had said pityingly, “Poor dear Mike. You’ve really held on to all this, haven’t you?” And then she had gone on to make her classic remark, “I’m glad you told me the whole thing at last—the reason you’ve never stopped looking after your tragic love.”

  He had been angry with her for making what he considered to be a facetious comment. But he had given no sign of it, because only he knew how much he was withholding. The way he had relied on Tom during that period, for example. He had said nothing about that. And yet, without Tom to stand by him he would have cracked up completely. Because he had loved Allie Wylie. In spite of everything and all the unpleasant truths that came with self-knowledge—truths he was withholding from Alaine now—he had loved Allie Wylie very much. And Tom had helped him bury the unpleasant truths with a parranda—a hell-raising carousal that had lasted more than a year.

  Truth wasn’t easy to come by. Not when the truth concerned yourself.

  The aficionados of the bull ring had a phrase for the climax of the brave festival. El momento de verdad—the moment of truth. It was a catch phrase now for all the neohispanophiles who sought to commit words to paper in the manner of Hemingway. But vulgarization hadn’t reduced the aptness of phrase. It was still the instant when a person was said to see himself with clarity.

  In the matter of Allie Wylie, Miguel’s momento de verdad had come on New Year’s Day, 1939.

  He had driven to Roslyn to see Karl Olinder and to borrow some trig texts from Mr. Snell, the mathematics master. He was far behind in Snell’s classes. Since Allie went away he had been increasingly lax about completing assignments and truant a good part of the time, so that Mr. Hamner had complained to Raoul and had insisted that Miguel catch up during the winter

  Miguel had taken to driving to the city almost every day to see Tom. Even after Raoul expressly forbade it, he had continued to do so, turning back the car’s odometer so that he couldn’t be checked.

  On the way home he stopped in Palo Alto to see Midge. She was getting around a little more and she liked to have Miguel stop by to give her all the news. She wasn’t as shy about her face with him as she was with some of the others in the crowd. But Midge wasn’t home and neither were her parents.

  Acting on long habit left over from the hot summer days, he had parked the Chevrolet down the street under a particularly sheltered oak.

  He walked down the path and out onto Waverly Street, suddenly noticing the odd stillness of the day. Everyone was at an open house or a party somewhere, he thought. He had been asked to Florian’s open house but without Tom and Allie he had decided he would rather not go, and so now he found himself alone.

  He walked slowly toward his car, noting the strange feel of the day—the quality of emptiness. The street was deserted Nothing moved. The sun, shining coldly through a rift in the low clouds, tinted everything with a fey, yellowish light. The trees lining Waverly cast tenuous shadows with their bare branches. His footsteps echoed in the silence. There was no wind, no sound of life in the blank-faced houses. He had the sensation of being alone in the silent town.

  Across the street, a door opened, creaking dryly. A woman bundled against the chill, walked carefully down the stone steps toward the street. She reached the sidewalk and paused. Miguel watched her, caught up by some inner tension.

  Her face was very white, almost yellow in the strange light. Her eyes looked large and luminous. She looked across the pavement at him without seeing him.

  He turned away. Even with the loose, heavy coat she wore, he could see that her belly was swollen with a child. He walked toward his car. He could not have said why, but there was a tightness in the small of his back. It was almost as though he sensed the hoarse cry forming in the woman’s throat.

  When it came, it was a strangled cry for help, a blind appeal. He turned and looked back.

  The woman cried, “Oh, God, oh, my baby, my baby—1”

  She stood rocking for a moment, her legs apart, her hands clutching at the air for support. Then, horribly, the spasm of a labor pain struck her, doubling her up. She uttered a scream of pain and fell face down, thudding on the cement, where she lay moaning.

  Miguel stood rooted to the ground. His heart seemed to swell suddenly and fill his chest. Allie, Allie, Allie—Fear and disgust blended into panic. He ran for the car, slammed the door closed behind him. He started up as doors began opening along the street. He drove blindly, too fast and without direction. He did not stop until he had reached the security of Frenchman’s Tor.

  He was shaking, frightened and guilty. A woman had cried out for help and he had run away. He had reacted with shocked, animal horror. And with something else.

  A woman had started to give birth to a child on the street and he had thought of Allie. Suddenly he knew beyond a doubt that he had never really wanted to marry Aldyth. Never. He had lied to her and to himself. His feeling had been almost the same as this afternoon. Shock, and then a withdrawal. The thought of marrying Allie—the thought of marrying anyone had been terrifying.

  He had been glad when they took her away. He loved her—and yet he had been glad, relieved.

  He buried his face in his hands and whimpered under the crushing burden of his shame.

  No one would ever know.

  No one.

  Except himself.

  He threw himself on the seat and screwed his eyes up tight, trying to force tears, something, anything, to relieve this great knot of self-contempt, of self-hatred inside him.

  He put his hands to his throat and held his mothers medallion against his chest. I’m a fraud, he thought, I’m a fake and a fraud.

  He had gone through the motions of love, he had fooled Allie and Tom and Raoul and Allie’s mother and father and even, for a time, himself. He was empty inside. He had no real capacity for love. He could feel nothing genuine—ever.

  FIFTEEN

  Miguel sat smoking drowsily in the dark as the airplane flew steadily west at three hundred and fifty miles an hour—almost six miles every minute.

  He was thinking of the amazing havoc one genuinely destructive person could create. The strangest part of it all was that anyone who tried to save such a person became fair game.

  The question that occurred to him now, as it had so many times before, was simply: Why should anyone put up with it? In a herd of wild beasts, the rogue was always driven out. No one tried to save him.

  One night, he remembered, after Aldyth went away, he had frightened Tom almost out of his wits. Tom had been staying in Los Altos with him for the weekend and they had taken the Chevy to the city and ended up at El Prado for endless rounds of gin fizzes at dinnertime. Miguel hadn’t eaten. He kept talking drunkenly about finding Allie. Then someone at the bar had said something and Miguel had thrown himself at him in a blind rage and the bartenders and waiters had rushed him out of the place and told him not to come back.

  Then they had gone to Li Po’s in Chinatown for more drinks and Miguel had insisted on Tom’s taking him to a whorehouse. They tried three before they found one that would let Miguel in. He was stiffly drunk and in an ugly mood. There had been a madam and three girls in the room, he remembered—in the living room of a flat somewhere on Bush Street. The madam had been reading a newspaper story about the pledge given to Poland by Daladier and Chamberlain in case of Nazi attack, and she had regarded Tom and Miguel sadly, commenting on the fact that they were both about military age and wasn’t it too bad about all that European trouble. One girl, a tired redhead, had been warming her feet before an electric heater and staring out the open window at the rainy night. Miguel had chosen her without a moment’s hesitation, treating her with sarcastically elaborate courtesy. But once in the bedroom he felt miserable and lonely and the girl had asked him “what sort of party” he wanted and he hadn’t known what to answer. He didn’t understand her and had no desire for her anyway. She worked over him for a long while, and when it was finally over, he felt sick and savagely angry. He ha
d refused to let Tom drive home and had covered the Skyline route between San Francisco and Los Altos in under an hour, driving eighty and eighty-five all the way on the wet mountain roads.

  Tom had said after that, “Do you have to try and kill me, too?”

  And the frightening part of it had been that he actually had wanted Tom to stay with him, even if they crashed a barrier and ended under thirty feet of water in Crystal Springs Lake.

  In June of 1939, Miguel was graduated from Roslyn and registered at Stanford. That summer Luis went into the Navy—to do his year of military service. And Becky went to Reno and divorced him.

  On the first weekend in August, Raoul and the Eubankses drove to Reno. Tom stayed in Los Altos with Miguel and the two of them promoted a roaring, drunken party that ended with several couples nearly drowning in the swimming pool at five in the morning and then a road race through the hills of Los Altos which Miguel and a dark girl from Mountain View named Yvonne something won hands down from Tom and a girl from Redwood City. Lawt Higby wrecked his car on the hill climb section over The Twisters, and Billy Alberg was so shocked by the proceedings that he hitchhiked from Los Altos to Mountain View where he could catch a Greyhound for home.

  On Sunday night, while Tom and Miguel were cleaning up the aftermath of their party, a wire arrived from Raoul. Miguel opened it and began to laugh. Tom took it and read: BECKY AND I WERE MARRIED TODAY HOME TUESDAY LOVE DAD.

  Miguel sat down and stopped laughing suddenly. He was thinking about the time Raoul saw him rubbing her back. And the night in Paradise Cove. He crumpled the telegram in his hands and said to Tom, “Let’s go drink a toast to the newlyweds.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Tom said. “I don’t know if my guts will take any more.”

  “Come on,” Miguel said sharply. “We have to celebrate. I just got a brand-new stepmother.”

  That night they had serenaded Florian with “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” they had raced at full throttle around the circle at Castilleja until some housemother called the police, and had ended sleeping on the second tee of the Menlo golf course, with the Chevy bogged down in a ditch.

  In September, when school opened, Miguel had his first real quarrel with Raoul.

  Raoul could not see why Miguel couldn’t live at home and drive the seven miles to school every day. Miguel refused. The unpleasantness of their disagreement occupied all their thoughts, so that the invasion of Poland, the beginning of the war in Europe, was nothing more than a background of discord for the clash of father and son.

  In the end, it was Becky who prevailed on Raoul to allow Miguel at least one year of living away from home. Raoul accused her of always “taking up” for Miguel, and she replied that he was, after all, his father’s son. This remark, meant to be a compliment, infuriated Miguel.

  The years were beginning to show on his father, Miguel thought, and as time went on he grew less active and more testily demanding. Miguel thought of his affair with Becky as a last fling of delayed youth, an ugly foolishness that shamed him. He, Miguel, carried a kind of murky anger inside himself constantly when he thought of his father.

  Raoul’s heart condition was worse; still not enough to incapacitate him. But it was enough to slow down his activities so that he spent a good deal of his time at home rather than in the office and his health was the main topic of conversation between himself and Becky. The Nereid had been sold. Raoul no longer had any interest in yachting. Miguel wondered how long it would take a woman as young and restless as Becky to get bored.

  On the morning of May 5, 1940, Miguel drove the red Chevrolet into the drive at home. He saw with some satisfaction that Becky’s new Olds was parked in the courtyard. It was a yellow convertible with a black top and it had been her wedding present from Raoul. Miguel often wondered what the neighbors thought when they saw her driving around in the car, knowing that she had divorced Luis to marry his father. But then the Rineharts had never considered themselves part of any community, so it didn’t really matter what anyone thought of them.

  It was warm and he peeled off his sweater as he got out of the car, tying it around his waist by the sleeves. He was thinking of Tom, waiting back at Encina with Julie Trowbridge. The poor old uncle had really managed to run himself into a cul-de-sac.

  Miguel walked through the gate around to the back of the house. He could hear music down by the pool. He made his way through the flowering shrubs toward the sound. Avery met him on the path.

  “Master Michael,” the houseman said, pleased. “Good to see you. You’re a stranger in these parts lately.”

  “Been pretty busy with midterms,” Miguel said. “Dad around?”

  “Mister Rinehart is napping,” Avery said. “But the Missus, she’s down by the pool.”

  “I’ll see her, then.”

  “Can I bring you some lunch? Something to drink, maybe?” Avery asked.

  “Some iced coffee would be perfect.”

  “Iced coffee coming up.” A white smile flashed in the dark face and he walked on up toward the house. Miguel went on down to the pool.

  The water sparkled, clear and turquoise in the May sunlight It was early to have the pool open but the spring had been warm and it looked like an early summer. From where he stood he could see the huge silver shape of the hangar at Moffett dominating the rest of the structures in the valley. To the south, the plume of steam from the Permanente Cement plant rose straight into the still morning. Miguel remembered the uproar it had caused when the plant was built. Raoul had served on committees to bar it from the area, there had been editorials in the papers, and demonstrations of how the dust from the plant would turn Los Altos into a desert. But the plant had been built anyway, and Los Altos had remained much as it had always been except for the sight of Henry Kaiser’s blue Cad Sixty Special with the red lights on the front speeding down Fremont Road every morning.

  Becky lay on an aluminum-and-green canvas chaise. She wore a two-piece bathing suit that left her midriff bare. She lay face up with a towel across her eyes. There was a popular novel face down on the coping stones beside her, and a bottle of suntan oil (Miguel frowned as he remembered that), a package of cigarettes, a box of Kleenex, a glass of iced tea or coffee, a pair of Japanese geta, and a softly playing portable radio on the steel table.

  Miguel regarded her in silence for a moment. She was attractive, there was no denying that. She was still under thirty and she had a good-looking body and a passionate, full mouth. He had always thought her rather stupid, but he had to admit that a woman who could marry two Rineharts in less than a generation couldn’t be completely unintelligent.

  That she had a weakness for Rineharts was obvious enough. Miguel didn’t think she had married Raoul because of his money. In the first place, there wasn’t enough money to make it worth all that; and in the second place Becky had never given any indication of being governed by anything but glands. Luis simply had not been enough man for her and she had gone directly to the source for more.

  Miguel wondered at the instinct that had told her Raoul, who professed such family loyalty, would put horns on his son just for the pleasure of enjoying her body.

  She must be quite a piece, Miguel thought with deliberate vulgarity. She must be hotter than a two-dollar pistol. What a hell of a time it was for Raoul to start feeling his age and infirmities—now that he had Becky to keep his bed warm all the time.

  For a moment Miguel despised her, and his father as well.

  He walked across the stone deck toward her. She heard him and sat up.

  “Hi,” Miguel said.

  “Mike—“ She sounded surprised. “What are you doing here? I thought you were having your exams this week.”

  “I am. Had a couple of free periods. Dad sleeping?”

  “Yes. Sit down.”

  How easily she took over the role of chatelaine, Miguel thought. Making the younger son of the lord and master feel at ease in his own home.

  “Thanks.” He sat down and lit a cigarette. “Been
in?” He indicated the pool.

  “Not yet.” She laughed coquettishly. “You know me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Ma.”

  Becky frowned. “Mike—”

  He looked at her.

  She said, “We had that all out, didn’t we? Were still good friends, just like we always were?”

  “Sure, Becky,” he said. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here.”

  She swung her legs over the side of the chaise and sat up, watching him with an expression of concern. “You aren’t in any kind of trouble—”

  “Again?” He laughed. “Is that what you were going to say?”

  “No. That’s not what I was going to say and you know it.”

  “Well, trust old Becky to sniff out problems,” he said looking at his cigarette. “Our own Gestapo.”

  “There is something, isn’t there?”

  How she could belabor the obvious, Miguel thought wonderingly. Wasn’t there always something with the goddam Rineharts?

  “Yes,” he said. “I need some money.”

  Becky heaved a sigh of relief. “Oh, is that all?”

  “Don’t you want to ask me what for? I might be in debt to gangsters. Or I might need it for paying off blackmailers.”

  “Don’t joke, Mike. How much do you need?”

  “Two hundred dollars.”

  “That’s quite a bit, Mike.”

  She thought a moment and then said, “Is your checking account flat?”

  “Not completely.”

  Avery arrived with Miguel’s iced coffee tinkling in a tall glass. They waited until he had gone before saying anything more.