After Gregory

by Austin Wright

  You looked around, no bathrooms, no silhouette figures of men in pants or women in skirts. Nothing in the Rome Building either, and you didn’t want to go to a restaurant just for that. Now to pee replaced 1 on the list as first priority. You went down to the sidewalk, looking for men-women signs. You walked a block or two, straying out into the world, vulnerable to attack and kidnapping.

  You saw a subway station. Down the greasy steps, two seedy men watching you shove through the filthy door, stepping around the puddles on the floor to the urinal, your shoulders hunched against being mugged with thirty million dollars on your person. The room was empty thank god, your relief quick, then out quickly past the seedy men and up to the bright sunlight and briskly home to the plaza in front of the Rome Building. Thirty million dollars had turned the Rome Building into home.

  You went into the Romex Bank, since the check was drawn on it. To one of the tellers, behind a glass shield, you said I would like to deposit this, and showed her the check.

  She said, You must fill out a deposit slip, and then saw the check. She looked at it a long time. She said, Do you have an account here Mr. Trace? You: No, I would like to open one. In that case you’d better talk to Mr. Maglee. She handed the check back to you, went over to the buzz door at the side and took you to Mr. Maglee’s desk behind the tellers’ desks under a high glass window reaching up beyond two balconies. Mr. Maglee was a young man with tight curly yellow hair.

  Mr. Maglee, Mr. Trace would like to open an account here. Maglee: How do you do, Mr. Trace? He saw the check. He too looked at it a long time, sitting down gradually while looking. He turned it over to look at the back but there was nothing there. After a while he said, May I see some identification, Mr. Trace?

  You showed him the passport. He looked at that awhile, compared you with the picture, and said, The passport is not signed.

  I’m sorry, may I borrow your pen? You took his pen, signed the passport, and gave the pen and passport back to him. He looked at them some more. He picked up the phone on his desk but set it down before dialing, said, Excuse me, got up and took the check with him across the room. Hey come back with that, you kept yourself from saying, wondering if you would ever see the check again, but he stayed in sight, went to the telephone on the file cabinet in back, picked it up and dialed.

  It took a long time. You saw him talking and waiting and looking at the check and at you across the room as he talked. You thought of the police coming to get you, charging Stephen Trace with forgery or a dead raccoon in the woods. You wondered if you should get up and run before his call was finished, if Peter Gregory was about to be jailed for accepting a bribe. When he came back, finally, he was smiling, and you saw the money spread out for you in his smile. Yes indeed, Mr. Trace, we’ll be glad to set up an account, what kind would you like?

  Oh you didn’t know, just an ordinary checking account would be fine for a start.

  Thirty million in a checking account? Don’t you think much of it should be—how about a certificate of deposit? Yes, you’d want advice later on how to invest it, but just for the start, you need time. Well of course we’ll be happy to, and if you would like to apply for a credit card.

  You filled out forms. Mr. Maglee mentioned the IRS. He gave you a checkbook with blank checks and a card and a faded pink stamped copy of a deposit slip showing thirty million dollars. You: Can I get a more definite looking receipt? He seemed surprised but went to the woman at the typewriter in back and came back with a typed statement on fine paper announcing that Stephen Trace had deposited thirty million dollars to start account number such and such. You put Stephen Trace’s official signature on file. Mr. Maglee shook your hand, you drew your first check for a couple of hundred dollars in cash, took it to the teller, and left the bank thinking I’m a millionaire.

  What next? You went out to the plaza again, trying to think. Thought: 11:30, too early for lunch, you could start looking for a place to stay so you could move out of Amy and Joe’s this afternoon. This would be a hotel until you find something more permanent. But what kind of hotel, and where would you find one? With so many millions, you could go to any hotel you liked—unless it wasn’t really true you could go anywhere with thirty million. You tried to remember hotels. Not the one where Gregory and family once stayed. You remembered names vaguely, Algonquin, Biltmore, not knowing which were old or extinct or how many stars, trying to think which might be expensive, Ritz Carlton, St. Regis, Plaza, Waldorf Astoria. You realized it wasn’t necessary to stay in an expensive hotel this first night. The immediate problem was to find any hotel at all. Telephone. Not from home, though, your dying friends must not hear. It would have to be one of the open pay phones, in the lobby of the Rome Building by the elevators.

  Phone book on a swivel, awkward. You looked up hotels in the yellow pages. Don’t take too long, you were conscious of people going by. There were too many hotel ads, bewildering. Pick one near the beginning of the alphabet: there was the one across the street from where Peter Gregory had stayed with his family, which at that time looked bigger and classier than the one he was in. It was called the Arthur, and you made a reservation for one, name of Stephen Trace, two nights starting tonight, check-in middle of the afternoon. The woman on the phone was Bronx and efficient.

  That’s two things done. Next comes lunch. Across the street to a cafeteria, through the line, roast beef, mashed potatoes, roll, pie, coffee, the meal heavy, no taste, hard to get down. You felt sleepy. Back to the street, the sun blazed on your eyes, shut them tight, you waited for life to come back.

  Subway to your old apartment. Climbed the cheese-smelling dark stairs for the last time, shocked by the sudden memory of Hank Gummer’s plunge, the place on the tile where he fell. Your feelings were suspended, you didn’t know what they were. Only Amy was at home, looking at you puzzled. Aren’t you working today?

  Stephen Trace now, prepared to be hard-hearted, said, I have to move out. I have to move out this afternoon.

  She was shocked. Before Joe comes home?

  You moved around collecting Stephen White while Amy watched. All you had were the clothes bought after coming to New York, a couple of towels, and toilet things. She gave you a shopping bag to put them in. You ran across the street to Crestmeyer, who said, I always knew you a funny fella. You come back tomorrow I give you your pay. Forget the pay, you said, it was the least you could do for leaving him like that. Forget your pay, you’re crazy. Okay, you said, give it to Amy.

  Back in the apartment, you called a taxi. All the time thinking I am seeing all this for the last time, telling Amy how grateful you were for all she and Joe, you would never forget it. She said, What’s going on? Are you giving up? Are you going back?

  No no, Stephen Trace said, though she did not know and was intended never to know the name of Trace. Not that.

  Aren’t you going to Hank’s funeral?

  Can’t do that either. I’m sorry.

  God damn it Murry, Stephen, where are you going? It’s no fair not to tell after all we’ve been through. You make me mad, honest to God.

  You waved out the back window of the taxi where she stood in the street, sad to tears but with something fake about the sadness like something fake about your love for Amy, and knowing already how quickly these good people would disappear and drop out of mind.

  Then (in the taxi) in the whole world you had no acquaintances except Mr. Jack Rome and (slightly) Mr. Maglee of the bank, and how horrible they were. So new and forlorn and empty you had to remind yourself you had done it all before, the difference this time being you had thirty million dollars, which should make a difference. The taxi took you to the Arthur hotel, and you went inside to the registration desk with your shopping bag.

  The hotel was old and not so big as you expected. It had stubby dirty marble columns around the staircase and dirty pink walls. You thought, Is this my home? Not for long, not for long. The clerk didn’t look at you. She gave you a registration form. Home address. You wrote a fict
itious number on the Ohio street where Peter Gregory used to live. How do you intend to pay, Mr. Trace? She asked for identification, you showed the passport, and she said Mr. Hessian would have to authorize your check when the time came.

  She called the bellman. I don’t need him, you said. The man was an old hunchback with white hair and shaky hands who carried your shopping bag up the elevator to room 818, saying nothing. He and the desk clerk both thought you a bum, skeptical of your ability to pay and afraid you would skip out or your check would bounce. Their thoughts annoyed you, thirty million dollars’ worth, while he unlocked your room and showed you the bathroom, the lights, the TV, and you tipped him more than he was expecting.

  The room was small. Its window looked to the other wing of the hotel, yellow brick across the areaway. There was a familiar hunting print on the wall, a single chair and a dresser whose drawers stuck. It was 3:30 in the afternoon.

  You went to the window to look out, but all you could see were the walls and the blank windows. It was hot and stuffy, you opened the window, you smelled bread and garbage. You sat on the chair, stretched out on the bed, said, Home, by God, and fell asleep.

  NINETEEN

  Newborn Stephen Trace awoke to the shadow of late afternoon on the opposite brick wall, with a horrible afternoon nap feeling, of the world going on too long without him, thinking he was Peter Gregory. No better to realize he was not Peter Gregory, worse in fact, waking up alone in no world but a space ship leaving behind forever the bluewhite crystal where life was.

  Then he remembered thirty million dollars, looking at the drab wallpaper and the trite hunting picture (every hotel has one), wondering if the memory was true. Deciding it was, he made an attempt to cheer himself saying, thirty million dollars should set things straight.

  His suit rumpled from having been slept in, and this massive feeling of neglect, the whole world had moved off in a shipload during his absence. He stared at the ceiling and said, Calm down, Stephen. One thing at a time. You can pay for the hotel room and everything after that, so the only thing to worry about now is dinner. You can eat dinner in the hotel dining room. Then it will be evening. You can sleep here tonight. Then comes tomorrow, which will be tomorrow.

  Dinner in the hotel dining room then, despite your crumpled suit, no proper clothes. You washed up, pressed the wrinkles with your hands, no effect. Never mind, since the people in the dining room didn’t know about your money it didn’t matter how you looked. You went down in the elevator. The restaurant was mostly empty. It had paper place mats. You sat in a booth by the window, ordered a drink and then a meal. In the center of the table was a card describing special concoctions from the bar. You could read that. You could also look at the street through the slats in the blinds, but you wished you had a newspaper. Thinking there is no pleasure in a restaurant alone, even with a lot of money.

  After dinner, the late summer twilight, again the question what to do? On your first night in the woods you had refused to go back into the village to see a movie Peter Gregory would have avoided. This time you would go. Kill the evening, that was the point, knock it dead. Anxiety was stammering in your bloodstream, how to get out of here, with nothing possible until tomorrow. You bought a paper, took it to your room, picked a movie, went by taxi: detective thriller, minimum emotional demand. All through the movie you were distracted by money. It wove through the shots of city streets and highways and green buildings like lines of music. It grew through the excitement of the movie into a clamor, so that by the time you came out, you were wild with exhilaration, swollen with thrill, how gorgeous, how full, how rich I am. Your heart was a dynamo humming with power, your soul was full of ice cream and swagger, thinking the stories you could tell.

  You skipped the bar with jazz across the street, so as to go back to your room and play with your wealth. Buy a notebook, make plans, figure things out.

  From the standpoint of exhilaration, you thought how ugly, drab, miserable and lonely this hotel room is. Ideas of the rich twisted through your mind like music, up from Gregory depths. You mingled with them, saw yourself at a country club playing golf (Peter Gregory had never played golf ). Stood on the grass with sporty young men wearing white pants talking to young women holding cocktail glasses outdoors. Idled on the dock in white shorts with other bright people in shorts, their suntans, the colors of their T-shirts, by the sailboats tied up, gleaming with brass and teak, with coils of rope and comfortable people on the decks talking to those on shore. Through the city streets and out to the towns in a chauffeured limousine, insulated from the crowds by glass and your driver to houses in the country, estates on hills or overlooking the sea, castles with turrets, stone houses with porches and towers, great shingled sea houses, in Bar Harbor, Newport, or the Cape. Sat deep in the wide seats of first class in the airplane, rode first class in European trains. Fine clothes wherever you went, with healthy looking young people also wearing fine clothes. Gatsby parties on Long Island lawns. Voices high and fat, boasting and criticizing, though the dim faces were all looking at you a little askance, which made you feel shy, and there was something a shade unpleasant about the pictures in your mind. You will have to decide what to do with your money, that’s the point, you will have to make decisions.

  First the question of a place to live, a center, a place of return. The word for this was home. After all your departures, there was a kind of thrill in that: you would have a home, and it would belong not to someone else but to you. Now think: what kind of home would a rich man like you be expected to have? A house behind a great lawn with a view of the ocean. A deluxe top floor apartment with a view of Central Park. Not yet, though. It would take time to find a suitable place, and in the meantime you could only stay in a hotel. Not this one, though. What kind of hotel would a rich man like yourself live in? You must find out, then move as fast as you can.

  A rich man like Stephen Trace would have to do something about the money itself, sitting like rat bait in the Romex checking account. Wondering how much it really was. With all these resources, you ought to know what they could do, what they couldn’t. You tried to calculate what you would have available to live on. Estimating conservatively with hefty taxes and taking care to plow back enough to protect against inflation, you came up with a spendable income for yourself of zero dollars per year. That can’t be right. Loosening your estimates gave you about as much as Peter Gregory made as a teacher. Further revision brought you a life of luxury, but now your estimates were probably too wishful. You warned yourself to restrain expectations, felt the threat of disappointment, and were ashamed of that disappointment.

  You turned out the light, lay down to sleep, with a dim red glow outside on the opposite wall, and then it crashed. Like Hank Gummer down the stairwell. Everything down. Falling, down down down, a drop with no end, you could see it out below drawing away from you. Wrenching miserable loneliness. You without name or soul, exile from life in life, bereft, a space traveler forgotten on Mars. Metaphors trying to do justice to bleak pain. It was not exactly new. Though you had never felt anything like it, you felt as if you had never felt anything else, reaching back, loss and grief and horror, underneath not only this evening’s phony exhilaration but long ago before your wealth, before your death, your real soul groaning in despair and loneliness under all the papier mâché disguises you had created for it. Yet it was worse in the hotel than before, worse than the woods, whose nights in this retrospect seemed so benign, healthy, natural. You wondered if other human beings endured such grief, and thought not, because others’ griefs were human but yours was grief for grief itself, mourning not any loss but loss as such—or humanity, or life.

  For self-preservation, such a feeling was dangerous. So: argue yourself out of it. The argument: such loneliness is not unique, history is full of exiles, many transitional to noble effects. The origins and growth of this country, families crossing oceans they would never cross again, young men and women leaving families in Ireland and Italy and Sweden and R
ussia to create a new national heritage. Crusaders, explorers, pioneers: only in the modern world can an exile be canceled by a few hours’ flight. Say this: every rebirth requires first a death. Revolutions destroy before they build. The new world rises on the corpse of the old. You: a revolutionary of the soul, whose pain proves the integrity of the change. If there were no pain, then you should worry. Such arguments calmed you until you could sleep.

  Awake in the morning, in the drab light on the opposite wall, the same misery returned, and now it was all dungeon and slave ship and land waste, bones in the desert. You had to argue all over again, this time by recalling your money, thirty million dollars you had forgotten about. You drew your money around you like a blanket, it soothed the raw burn. Think of money when the black thoughts threaten, it will keep them out of sight.

  Think of the relief to be Gregory never again. The deep relief of Never Again, which the money assured, the things that would never torture you henceforth. You heard the sound of Gregory’s accidents and mistakes receding into history, dropping out of your life. The name Sebastian, Mary, Jacky, Jenny, the little family they said Gregory had destroyed, disappeared in the noise of the hotel air-conditioner. You were free at last. Sebastian had nothing to do with you. Gates had nothing to do with you. Long and Hadley had nothing to do with you. Hank Gummer, in his deep and permanent chemical sadness, had nothing to do with you. It was a matter of making your feelings believe what your mind says. What you don’t feel can’t hurt you.

  A fat breakfast in the empty hotel dining room and you felt better, in spite of the sullen silent waitress arguing with some-body in the kitchen. You advised yourself to feel like a millionaire. You called the bank for investment advice. They gave you an appointment with Mr. Campbell at eleven. He was soothing and reassuring, not fat but his cheeks hung down the sides of his chin and he had a resonant church bass voice. Also a potted green plant on a stand by his desk. You told him vaguely about Jack Rome. He did not ask why Mr. Rome had given you so much, nor did he try to penetrate your vagueness. He sketched out ideas on a large pad of lined legal paper in big figures sprawled across five or six lines. Talk about a balanced portfolio, growth and security and income, hedge against inflation and keeping your tax obligation down. Whether to put it in a trust fund managed by yourself or through Rome Investors, the Rome organization’s answer to Merrill Lynch. His own recommendation was, frankly between you and me, and since you wanted to start right away, he sent you up to Mr. Peck in his tenth floor office.