Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  Then Becky said, “I don’t know, really. Two hundred dollars—”

  “Is a lot of money for me,” Miguel finished for her. “That is just why I had to come home for it.” He paused, watching her. “You’re really making quite a big thing out of not asking me why I need it.”

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  “I don’t mind. I need it for medical attention. That’s a nice polite way to put it, I think.”

  Becky’s frown was puzzled as well. “Medical attention? Whatever are you talking about?”

  “Do you really want to know? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply give me the money and let it go?”

  “I can’t let it go now, Mike. What medical attention do you need two hundred dollars for?”

  He thought for a moment and decided to use Tom’s own words. “Well,” he said deliberately, “it seems your gay stepson has gone and gotten himself a dose.”

  The blood slowly drained from Becky’s face.

  “You do understand what I mean?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said faintly. “Yes, I understand.”

  He shrugged. “That’s about all there is to it. I haven’t enough dough in my account to pay for the shots I have to take and I can’t expect the school health program to cover this sort of—”

  “Yes,” she said again, not looking at him. “How did it happen, Mike?” she asked in a thin voice.

  “You don’t want the details.”

  “No. No, of course not,” she said.

  “So?”

  She shook her head and said nothing. Miguel watched the perspiration gleam on her bronzed skin.

  “Shall I ask Dad?” His voice was flinty in texture.

  “No, Mike. It would upset him terribly.”

  “Yes, I guess it would.”

  “I’ll get the money for you.”

  He stood up and looked down at her, coldly appraising. “Thank you, Mother,” he said softly.

  She turned her face up. He looked at her and she at him and for a long while neither said anything. Finally he smiled at her and said, “I’ve grown up, Becky.”

  She chewed nervously on her lower Up.

  “I won’t wake Dad,” Miguel said. “Tell him I was here, will you?”

  Becky nodded, not taking her eyes from him. He walked to the path and turned around to give her a half-wave. “See you,” he said.

  That day was, for Miguel, the beginning of a strange sort of intimacy between Becky and himself. It was an unwanted intimacy, on his part at least, for he found it impossible to forget that Raoul had committed an unpardonable sin in taking a woman away from his own son. Yet, when the school term was over and Miguel returned home for the summer, he found himself seeking Becky’s company more and more often, until at last Raoul was moved to speak to Becky and suggest that Miguel associate more with people his own age.

  This wasn’t so simply arranged. Other than Julian Trowbridge, Miguel had made few friends at Stanford. He had done some pieces for The Chaparral, but he had maintained such an aloofness while doing so that his co-workers thought him cold. He saw Tom Eubanks occasionally, though Tom had taken a job for part of the summer in a Forest Service blister rust control camp in the Stanislaus. “To keep the dangling dibble dainty,” he explained to Miguel on one of the weekends in the city. The sulfanilamides had done their work and Tom reported he was “pure as the driven snow.”

  Miguel’s dating habits were fitful through the summer. He took an assortment of girls to an assortment of entertainments ranging from ale busts at Alpers on Skyline to the tea dances at the Plaza, but nothing interested him enough to pursue it.

  He missed the Fair, the good bands, like Count Basie and Gene Krupa. But Treasure Island was lifeless now; all the buildings were either being torn down or taken over by the Navy. There was some talk of expanding the trans-Pacific Clipper base there into a municipal airport, but that came to nothing.

  Florian O’Connor made a big play for him that summer, but after a few dates he stopped calling her, and she informed her friends that she had told Mike Rinehart to stay away until he got over that little slut Allie Wylie.

  Occasionally Miguel would take Midge Kimball to the late matinee at the Varsity. She liked dark places, where her face wouldn’t show. She was getting ready to begin two years of intermittent plastic surgery.

  But throughout most of that summer of 1940, Miguel was with Becky. Raoul had a bad siege through July and August, the tumult of the conventions excited him and for a time Dr. Winthrop was sincerely worried about him. Becky displayed an amazing aptitude for nursing Raoul, and Miguel did what he could to help.

  By the time school opened in September, it was obvious to Miguel that Raoul was not going to let him return to Stanford except as a day student, and he resigned himself to living at home.

  “It won’t be as bad as all that, will it, Mike?” Becky asked.

  “It’ll be bad enough,” he said.

  “Your dad just wants you with him,” she said. “And so do I.”

  Miguel studied her face for a moment and then he said, “I can’t figure what he does want. He wants me here, all right. But he doesn’t want me hanging around with you, does he?”

  “Mike, what a thing to say,” Becky protested.

  “He’s jealous, Becky.”

  “Of you?” She tried hard to sound derisive and almost succeeded.

  Miguel flushed. “So the big stallion couldn’t be jealous of his get?”

  “Mike, I won’t have you talking like this.”

  “No,” he said ironically. “I guess you won’t.”

  “And just what does that mean?”

  “Oh, hell,” Miguel said miserably, “why can’t he just let me go live at school the way I wanted to?”

  As Raoul grew older he put more and more restrictions on the people around him, and with Essie in the convent and Luis gone he had only Becky and Miguel. Raoul’s pressure had the effect of reinforcing their already established intimacy.

  The thing that made it so painful for Miguel was that there were times when he loathed Becky with all his heart. He would watch her fawning on his father, indulging in the most outrageous flattery, and he would feel like bellowing at her. She often told Raoul that he was the finest driver she had ever ridden in a car with. This at a time when Raoul was most severely criticizing Miguel for recklessness at the wheel. The truth was that Raoul was an exceptionally poor driver and steadily getting worse as his health deteriorated, and Miguel would set his teeth to hold back the caustic comments that welled up inside him. Once Becky had told Raoul in Miguel’s hearing that he was the most physically desirable man she knew. At fifty, Raoul was now running to fat. His torso and chest had thickened immensely and he had a substantial paunch. To Miguel, the sight of his father’s heavy torso on chicken-thin, hairless legs, was repulsive.

  The main result of Becky’s absurd flatteries was to establish firmly in Miguel’s mind the notion that Becky habitually lied to Raoul and that Raoul would believe anything Becky said to him—provided, of course, that it was a compliment of some kind. And Becky produced nothing but compliments where Raoul was concerned.

  Late in 1941, Raoul grew concerned over the possibility of currency restrictions in Mexico, where he had substantial investments. It was a possibility, certainly, with the international situation growing steadily worse.

  Late in November, he flew—much against Dr. Winthrop’s orders—to Mexico City to see his factor there. Becky remained at home. Miguel drove him to the airport in Becky’s Olds.

  On the way up, Raoul talked about Luis. He did so often these days. “Card from your brother,” he would say. “From San Diego.” Or from Bremerton, or from Hawaii—wherever Luis’s Naval Intelligence duties took him. “Your brother made full lieutenant,” Raoul would comment. “Not bad for the Rineharts, eh?”

  It seemed to Miguel that it was a deliberate effort to convince him that no matter how deep the wound, Luis was still part of the family. In
fact, the assertion that there was a family at all was something Raoul seemed to be in constant need of proving.

  They arrived at Mills Field on a cold and blustery winter morning. Miguel saw to his father’s luggage and then parked the car.

  Raoul was waiting for him in the terminal coffee shop. He had ordered two coffees and they were already on the table. Waiters and waitresses automatically gave Raoul good service. He was still an imposing man, still a man a maître d’ could fawn over.

  Miguel listened vaguely to Raoul’s instructions for the regulation and care of the house, realizing that he would do none of the things Raoul wanted done and that Becky would simply run the place as she saw fit.

  “Are you listening to me, young man?”

  The sound of airplanes had set Miguel to woolgathering. He was, in fact, thinking about money. Finances had become a problem. Years before, Raoul had promised Miguel he would be permitted to learn to fly as soon as he was old enough. But after two years of refusals, Miguel had decided that (according to Raoul) he would never be old enough to learn. Being under age precluded his signing up for the CPT squadron at school without Raoul’s consent and a quarterly report on his grade card. So he had simply saved his allowance and book money and bought dual time at the Progressive Flying School down on Middlefield Road. When it had come time for him to solo, he had forged Raoul’s signature—which was an illegible scrawl anyway—and he now had almost twenty hours of solo time. But he was perennially poverty-stricken. The flying ate up all his resources.

  “I said, Miguel,” Raoul said in Spanish, “are you listening to me? Me escuchas?”

  When his father spoke to him in Spanish, Miguel always made a point of paying attention.

  “I will be back next weekend,” Raoul said. “I want you to behave yourself like a gentleman while I’m away.”

  “I will,” Miguel said.

  “I’ve been concerned about you, lately, hijo. You’ve had a very peculiar attitude. It worries me.”

  Miguel studied his father’s face. Was it possible, he wondered, that he doesn’t know what’s been graveling me since Luis went away?

  “Now about Becky,” Raoul said.

  Miguel made a particular point of looking him in the eye. “Yes, sir?”

  “I wanted to bring her with me. She wanted to come. But you understand how things are in Mexico. Your mother’s people are there. It wouldn’t look good—”

  No, it wouldn’t, Miguel thought. They have a name for what you’ve done down there. I don’t imagine you’d like Becky to hear it.

  Raoul pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted at the lights. He looked tired. His face was lined and puffy with unhealthy fat. His breathing was deep and uneven. He had had to make arrangements to have oxygen all during the flight, and even then Dr. Winthrop was looking grim about it.

  What had happened to the man he remembered? Miguel wondered—the man standing on The Spur in the high mountain quiet with his son beside him. There were times when Miguel felt as though Raoul were a complete stranger to him, a sick old man lapping up Becky’s stupid compliments as though they were the breath of life to him. Well, maybe they were, he concluded bleakly.

  “I don’t want any drinking or parrandiando while I’m gone,” Raoul admonished. “Is that perfectly clear.”

  Miguel nodded.

  Raoul finished his coffee as they announced his flight. They left the restaurant and went outside where the DC-3 was loading.

  “All right, hijo,” Raoul said. “Give me a kiss.”

  Miguel let his father embrace him. He could feel the trembling of his arm. Traveling excited him now.

  Watching him walk out to the airplane, Miguel had a pang of sadness. It was a feeling of loss, a wish for something that he knew he had never really had. Their relationship had never been what a father and son relationship should be. It never would be. They clashed and competed for everything. But to admit it was fatal. That was something Raoul was sure of, Miguel knew.

  He stood there watching until the airplane vanished in the low stratus over the bay. He wished for a moment that his father might have asked him to go along. He could have helped. He could have looked after him—

  He buttoned up the collar of the thigh-length camel’s hair coat Raoul had given him for his birthday and took out the pipe Raoul had selected for him at Thurlow’s last year. He put the cold pipe between his teeth and walked slowly back to the car.

  The week passed quietly. On Wednesday, he and Becky drove up to one of the neighborhood movies in San Francisco to see Kitty Foyle—a picture Becky had missed on the first time around and one Miguel didn’t mind seeing again.

  All week he had been edgy in Becky’s presence, and she in his. He attributed his feeling to the fact that he hadn’t been going out much and was hungry for female companionship. Miguel understood by now that he simply could not be without a woman long—and if the proper one did not present herself, almost anyone would do. It was more than a physical need. He liked the society of women, knowing as he did that most of them found him attractive and some of them found him exciting.

  They ate alone all week, with Avery mixing a single cocktail before dinner and then serving the meal in that ghostly manner of the good houseman.

  On Saturday night, they dined by candlelight on a whim of Becky’s. She wore a dirndl and he put on a tie because she seemed to want him to dress up a little.

  After dinner, Becky poured brandies and Miguel settled down at her feet in front of the fire. It was almost too quiet now, with Avery in bed. He began to feel uncomfortable. When he sat to look into the fire, he imagined he could feel Becky’s eyes on the back of his neck.

  “What do you think about those Japs in Washington, Becky?” he asked too brightly, knowing that Becky never read the newspapers.

  “Your father is very worried about the Japanese situation,” Becky said.

  Miguel stood up. He didn’t want to talk about his father and he wanted to talk about the Japanese situation even less. In fact he didn’t want to talk at all. He walked to the window and stood looking out over the valley and the road that traversed the hill to the house. “Car coming up,” he said, relieved. “Two cars.”

  “Were you expecting anyone?” Becky asked.

  “Me? No.”

  “You seem so restless.”

  “I am, I guess. I don’t know why.”

  She sipped at her brandy and the firelight made her white dress the color of flame. He found himself thinking of Allie Wylie and a bitter chip of shame lay wedged in his throat. He was getting better at dissembling now and eventually, he knew, he would be able to forget the self-contempt. Perhaps he would even forget the truth.

  “Dad heard from Luis last week,” he said suddenly. “Did he tell you?”

  “Why, yes. He was promoted, wasn’t he?”

  He looked at her steadily. “Just think,” he said. “If you’d stayed married to Luis you might have gotten a trip to the Islands out of it.”

  She put her glass down on the table and looked at him. “Thanks,” she said.

  “For what?” he asked, irritably innocent.

  “Never mind.” She paused a moment and then asked, “Is Luis still in the Islands?”

  “He said he’d be coming back to San Francisco sometime this month.” Miguel indicated the cars that were just now turning in the drive. “That could be he right now, couldn’t it?”

  Becky threw back her head and laughed. “Mike, you can be such a little stinker when you want to be.”

  “I come by it naturally. I come from a long line of stinkers.” The door-knock sounded before she could answer. He walked across the room and into the entryway to open the door.

  “Spicko, you ol’ son of a bitch!” Tom Eubanks and a very disorganized girl stood on the step. Tom’s face was flushed and he held a bottle of Old Taylor in each hand. “Ollie told me your old man was in Mey-hee-coe so I rambled down as fast as Dottie Lamour here would let me. Say hello to the nice man, Miss La
mour. Honest, Spicko, she talks, drinks and dances—in fact she does everything but think. Don’t you, Miss Lamour?”

  The girl was quite drunk, but pleasant about it. She put out a hand and said politely, “How do you do? I’m really not Dorothy Lamour. I wish I was. My name is Marybeth—that’s all one word. Marybeth Margulies. Isn’t that awful?”

  Tom had caught sight of Becky still sitting by the fire. His eyes widened. “Oh, Jesus—I thought you were alone, Spick. I’m sorry as hell. Maybe we better amscray.”

  Miguel took his arm and drew him inside. “To hell with that, Uncle. I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age—not since Albert and friends fixed SC’s wagon.”

  “It never would have happened if I hadn’t been kept on the bench!” Tom began to sing in a very falsetto: “‘Fight on for old SC, the players want their salareee—’ Seriously, Mike. We aren’t busting in?”

  “Of course not. Becky and I were sitting here boring each other.”

  The second car drove in and parked behind Tom’s new Ford.

  “Who’s with you, Uncle?” Miguel asked.

  “Lawt Higby and some pig from Roble and the redoubtable Julian Trowbridge, Esquire and my own dear ex-love Floss the Hoss. The plan was, cousin, to have a par-tee. Maybe a dip in the moonlight.”

  “In December?”

  “Nor rain nor snow nor sleet nor gloom of night,” Tom said, cradling the two fifths of Old Taylor lovingly.

  Julian and Lawt and the girls came tumbling in out of the dark. They were more sober than Tom but not much. Miguel led them into the living room.

  “You know Lawt Higby and Julie,” Miguel said to Becky. “This is Miss Lamour—no, Margulies, wasn’t it? Florian, I think you know, too. And Lawt, you do your own honors. I’ll go get some glasses.” He stopped in mid-stride and turned to Becky. “Are you joining us? Or do the old folks turn in at seven-thirty like always?”

  Becky’s eyes flashed angrily. “If you don’t mind, I’ll join you.”

  Miguel, suddenly taken with an excited urge to bedevil Becky, said to the others, “We have to be particularly nice to the new owner.”

  When Miguel returned with the glasses, soda siphon and an ice bucket, he noted that Becky had turned on the record player and was making his friends feel at home. That was a quality she had, and there was no denying it. She liked the company of young people and when she was among them you could forget that she was twenty-nine and you were only nineteen.