“Yes, Mrs. Parker,” replied my friend. And then, with a phony, winsome expression, he said, “I will miss bedding down with my little rodent friends below decks, but the allure of Egyptian cotton sheets beats burlap pillowcases.”
“Nice digs!” said Soledad, peeking around the door jam.
“Welcome to my humble abode.”
“Join us for a drink, Mr. Benchley?”
“I’d be delighted, my dear Miss Soleil,” said Mr. Benchley with a little half-bow. “After I’ve convinced our steward, here, to leave the fruit basket—I confess it was sent to the fellow who first reserved this room.” He grabbed an apple from the top of the mound of fruit, polished it on his sleeve, and was about to take a bite when I interrupted:
“We are talking about honest-to-goodness Tequila,” I informed. “Bring your Swiss Army knife. We need you to slice up the limes.”
He pocketed the apple and turned with immediacy to the contents of his steamer trunk, pulling out drawers and retrieving various items. “I’ll join you as soon as I’ve arranged this picture of my wife and sons, along with my knickknacks from the Nantucket Whaling Museum, of which I am a fan and contributor, and tack my banner from the Exhibition of ’Seventy-Six, which travels everywhere with me, over my bed—oh, hang it! I left my travel clock down in my old corner in the baggage hold! All right, I’ll just pop down there and fetch it, and see if my briefcase is there, too. By the time I’m done I will most certainly be in need of a little refreshment.”
“Well, I’ve lots of refreshment at my place, if you don’t mind the linen-covered couch and the view of a lifeboat,” Soleil said facetiously.
“She’s one of us, Fred,” I assured him, using the pet name I’d long ago adopted for him.
“I see!”
“So get along with your work, and we’ll be in stateroom—”
“Stateroom two-sixty-five. Just a few doors down—for your convenience.”
“Yes, and hurry it up, will you?” I added. “We are on a work mission.”
“How’s that?”
“A little game; we’re considering various ways to kill a man.”
“Ahhh, that’s always a popular parlor game. Anyone in particular you have in mind?”
“Mistress murders lothario,” tossed out Soledad.
“Slow, painful death, or fast and to the point?”
“Definitely slow. Painful is good—more sensational and sells more books. My readers are sadists, you know.”
“For the bloodthirsty reader, hmmm?” he nodded, weighing the problem along with the ten-pound dumbbell in his hand. “Slow and painful . . . well, that’s easy! She must smother him with love!”
Ladies’ lounge
Dining room
Chapter Three
I decided to forgo breakfast the following morning. Anyway, I’d awoken at eleven, and my head was not exactly sitting straight on my shoulders. Much as I like tequila when I’m drinking it, it doesn’t like me very well the next day. So I was not in the mood to take part in what was to be a morning ritual—Hem’s flashy show of ingesting saltpeter. As the sun was shining, a welcome respite from the days of icy storms, I thought a stroll on deck with Woodrow might clear my head.
Bundled up in hat, coat, and gloves, I dressed Woodrow in his red-plaid sweater and braced myself against the unrelenting wind. But when we walked out of the door I was surprised to find the weather was quite mild, the breeze balmy rather than frigid. Scores of passengers were strolling the deck under a spectacularly sunny sky, while stewards were setting out deckchairs for those wishing to take advantage of the precious few hours of reprieve from expected stormy conditions. Woodrow led us to Saul Gold, occupying a wooden lounge and bundled in a wool blanket, a peaked woolen cap pulled low and shielding eyes that stared out into the hypnotically rolling inky-blue depths. The rumble of the engines and the constant wash of the ocean against the hull as the S.S. Roosevelt cut its path were somehow reassuring as we walked over to him. There was something vulnerable about the huddled figure; he looked small, and he wasn’t a small man. He was rather tall and wiry when standing beside a more substantial Mr. Benchley. But he wore that wounded-warrior look, and I realized that he was indeed a wounded soul, having fought in the Great War and been damaged by gas that scarred lungs, shrapnel that tattered flesh, and the horrific visions of death that destroyed men’s spirits.
Everywhere one looked one saw the ravages of the still-recent battle: on the streets of New York, in the small villages. Citizens of nations across the world were witness to the crippled and disfigured soldiers who had limped home. The trauma of the War was felt not only by the returning veterans, but also by those who had remained behind, who had lost sons, husbands, and brothers in the killing fields. Even when they weren’t visible, like the raised, sinew-like marking that made me think of Halley’s Comet streaking across Saul Gold’s left cheek, the scars nevertheless were cut close to the bone, like flesh-piercing commemorative medals.
Ten million soldiers from all over the world, killed, twenty million wounded and maimed, and no one knows how many men, women, and children murdered in France; then the Armenian massacres, and twenty million more fallen to the influenza pandemic of nineteen-eighteen. I felt the hard jab of loss, and the even greater despair of my generation that things could never be the way they were before the Great War because something fundamental to our way of life had radically changed: A seismic shifting occurred while we were unaware, while we were fighting for something we didn’t fully understand, and after it was all over, after we buried our dead and bandaged our wounded, we weren’t quite sure how to proceed. The world conflict had served no one; no one was free from sinking into the quagmire. The War cut short the gentle breath of innocent youth, and what was once a simple path through life had become a complicated journey. For all our thrilling modern inventions, for all of our modern machinery intended to make our days easier, we had only burdened our existence and were left pining for the sweeter days, the simpler life before war exposed the sinister. Shit, we were all of us “the walking wounded.”
Saul smiled when Woodrow’s front paws touched his leg and he petted him with a gentle hand. “I’ve thought about getting a little friend like him,” he said, and then he turned those dark, haunted eyes on me.
“Why don’t you?” I said, taking the chair next to his, and looking out toward a never-ending horizon.
“I don’t know if I’d be the best person to take care of a dog.”
“The truth is, Saul, it doesn’t really work like that. The dog takes care of you, you see. I just feed and walk him.”
He chuckled, and continued to pet Woodrow. “I suppose that’s the way it really is. Pure hubris to think otherwise.”
“Woodrow makes sure I never oversleep, that I answer the doorbell, that I take my thrice-daily constitutional, and that I don’t miss too many meals, of which he benefits from the leftovers. Best of all, he makes me laugh and not take myself too seriously. I couldn’t get through a day without him.”
Saul gave me an all-knowing look. We recognized in each other that we were both of us victims of dark thoughts, of recurring and troubling apparitions that stalked our nights.
“He takes his responsibilities seriously, does he?”
“It’s really a mutual contract. Ever have a pet?”
“I had a pet squirrel when I was a kid. Don’t laugh!”
“Who’s laughing?”
“Well, I said he was mine. I liked to think he was. Sam—I named him Sam—lived in this vacant lot a couple of blocks from our tenement on the Lower East Side. It was just a dusty, crusty plot, a block square, where this rich man’s mansion once stood that burned down before I was born. The neighborhood had gone downhill. The lot had this tall wooden fence all around it, with No Trespass bills pasted on. It was a sorry-looking plot, with the occasional rusty can and soda bottle woven down under overgrown weeds, and chipped brick and craggy cement piled at one end. But there was this mulberry tree, and
when I sat under it in the summertime, it was like it was a little bit of country, away from the city and all the commotion of the streets. And because there was this big fence all around, you couldn’t see the buildings nearby, just the sky and the clouds, you know? I liked to read there, under the tree, and there were birds, other than the usual pigeons, songbirds. And when the mulberries were ripe, it was the sweetest fruit I’d ever tasted. They were free and they were mine and nobody else’s. I never felt so rich in my life, just me and my friend, Sam, whom I used to feed bits of bread and seeds and mulberries right from my hand.
“After winter, the next spring, when the trees were starting to bud, I left school one day to go over to my vacant lot to sit under my tree and feed my squirrel, and goddammit—the fence was down and bulldozers had ripped the gorgeous tree up from its roots. My Sam, who was there only the day before—well, I couldn’t find him. I remember running home in tears to tell my mother, who didn’t think much about it. She said it was good; the lot was just a fenced-up eyesore, a place where kids could get in trouble at night, taking dope and knocking up the girls, and that the squirrel would just find another tree to make its nest, because squirrels don’t belong to anyone in particular . . . . So, that was the only pet I ever had, Dorothy.”
“I heard tell he relocated to the great elm in Washington Square.”
He smiled, and then let out a hearty chuckle. “Well, then, it appears he moved up in the world.”
While I pondered his tale, he called my attention: “There’s Bob, doing what appears to be praying over a—what is that—?”
“Looks like a cigar box,” I determined, and I called out to Mr. Benchley, who was standing solemnly at the deck’s rail. When he didn’t answer, I threw off my blanket and walked over to stand beside him as he mumbled what sounded like the Pater Nostra.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—”
“What fresh hell?”
“Shush, Dottie; have some respect,” he chided, while keeping his eyes on the cigar box. He completed his graveside eulogy, and then met my eyes. “It’s Francesca and Antonio,” he said, and then clarifying in the face of my frown, “my rodent couple from the nether-regions of this ship. I found them, dead.”
“Rat trapped?”
“Certainly not! They must have gotten into something they shouldn’t’ve.”
“What else would you call a trap, but something you shouldn’t get into?”
“And they smelled a bit . . . funny.”
“You smelled a rat!”
“Make light of it, if you must,” he said, slipping the box out over the rail and sending it into the sea. “Why, only last night, when I went down to fetch my travel clock, they were in fine spirits. After I fed them—”
“Quiet, they’ll have you committed!”
“This morning, when I went back down there to search for my typewriter, I found them just lying there . . . .”
“All right, well, they died together, I’m sure that’s how they wanted it to be.”
“That’s not funny.”
“When you’ve had some time to think it over, I’m sure you’ll see it my way. Say, shall we invite Saul to join us at cards? Five should give us a good poker game.”
“Yes, let’s,” said Mr. Benchley, “He looks rather grim, if you see what I mean?”
“So it appears. You two have lots in common, I’d say.”
“Is that so?” he said, as we walked over to Saul.
“You are both adopted of rodents as pets.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Never mind, I’m ready for coffee.”
I left Mr. Benchley in the company of Saul Gold and returned Woodrow to my cabin, and then went in search of a pot of coffee in the dining room, on the way meeting Ronald, the Bad Boy of the British Upper Classes, who appeared sobered up if not a little hung over. The evening before I hadn’t seen him approach the table, so I hadn’t been aware of the serious limp or the cane he relied on. He turned an ingratiating smile and comment toward me as we now entered the dining room. “Mrs. Parker, once again I am graced by your presence.”
“Hello, Ronald.”
“Call me Ronnie, please, Mrs. Parker, everybody does.”
“Except his servants, of course,” came the dulcet tones of Lady Twinton, appearing suddenly at my side, taking my arm to lead the way. I was led to a table for four and we all sat down.
“The King calls me Ronnie.”
“That’s because your name is a mouthful,” she said with a snort. “Marquis Ronald Everett Hampton-Crispin-Jones.”
“The King?” I asked, disbelieving.
“And he’s also the Duke of something-or-other, on his French mother’s side.”
“May I call you Dorothy?”
“Why not? Since me and the King can call you Ronnie.”
“Ernest told me that your maiden name is Rothschild. That’s quite a legacy,” said Ronnie.
“Lot of good it did me,” I chuckled.
“Can it, Ronnie; can’t you see how embarrassing you are?”
“Go away, Daff. There must be some other fellow you can bother.”
“That’s no way to talk to your fiancée.”
“Ah, yes, darling wretch, I almost forgot you are my intended,” he said as he plopped into a chair and signaled for the waiter. “But don’t you always forget you’re my intended when you see a pretty face, my dove? Sometimes I think you only tolerate me.”
“Mostly, I do,” said Daphne, throwing off his attack to request a pot of coffee from the waiter.
I couldn’t resist: “My, my, children, if you quarrel like this now, how will it be ten years from now?”
“I don’t think that far ahead,” said Ronnie.
“No, Ronnie doesn’t think, period. He just broods.”
“I suppose I will leave you then—”
“Please don’t, Dorothy,” said Daphne, touching my arm. “We are just getting our daily workout; our sparring keeps us on our toes. Keeps us from getting bored with each other. No harm meant.”
“Yes, sorry, Dorothy, we are trying, I suppose, but our friends get used to it after a while. Let’s talk about happier, more congenial things.”
I wanted to say that I would never get used to their “sparring” because I had no intention of becoming their friend. For want of a polite reply I asked the mundane question, “Was this your first trip to the States?”
“Yes. We found it quite interesting, very entertaining, didn’t we Daff?”
“Quite.”
“Well, there we are, now. Glad we could entertain you,” I said, gulping down the too-hot coffee, and then standing to leave. Ronnie jumped to his feet, well, he tried to, and asked me to stay so we could chat some more.
“Daphne, my dove, Dorothy must think we are incorrigible. We do love one another, you know. The way it counts.”
“Yes, the way it counts,” agreed Daphne, leaning over to plant a kiss on his lips.
I softened for a moment, considering the dynamics of their relationship.
“How long have you been together?”
“Not so very. We sort of grew up together, you see, so we were very familiar with each other. I married a chap—”
“My cousin!”
“Yes, Ronnie’s cousin.”
“And things didn’t quite work out, so—”
“It’s us now.”
I didn’t know how to make out his things didn’t quite work out, but I knew I’d regret asking for clarification.
“When do you plan to marry?”
“Soon as the divorce comes through,” said Daphne.
“I really must go, you know. Mr. Benchley awaits me out on deck, you see.”
As I walked out of the dining room, I was trying to figure out how best to avoid their company during the rest of our journey, but I was met by Soledad Soleil in the hall. “Gird your loins, Soledad.”
“I suppose I should heed your warning. Is it the Royal couple?”
“I’ll order breakfast in my room, then.”
“Sounds like a good idea. Will you join us for cards later?”
“I shall be there.”
Just as we were about to part ways, there appeared an unexpected sight, and we stopped in our tracks to observe an ancient couple hobbling toward us. She was elderly and bent, which sent her stride out of kilter, and on pencil-thin limbs she appeared to fling from side to side like a tightrope walker. Yet, she soldiered on toward us. At her side, and supporting her weight from toppling to the floor, was an equally ancient character, bandying a cane in what appeared a coordinated rhythm to continue a forward-moving momentum. His leg clicked with each advancing goosestep. Had she not been so fragile, and he not so measured, and the roll of the ship not so prominent, one might think they were a couple of drunks staggering home at dawn.
The man was the more youthful in appearance, his profile regal and aquiline; despite the steely gray hair and the measured gate he had retained the strong and handsome features of his youth.
She was dressed in black, and topped with a head of thick, snowy-white hair, and her skin looked as tender and white as the skin of an onion. What really proved striking was the blue of the old woman’s eyes against the snowy field of her face. When she stopped suddenly to cast a smile up at her younger escort, her eyes twinkled with youthful vigor, and in return she received a playful squeeze, which evoked a girlish giggle of delight.
Soledad and I made way for the couple to pass, giving them a wide berth with the hope that neither of us would get kicked by flailing limbs. They nodded at us and carried on into the dining room where luncheon was being served.
“That’s the Duchess Sofia Louise of Russia, if you didn’t know.”
“Oh, my goodness!”
“A cousin by marriage of the Tsar’s. She’d been in England during the Revolution, so she survived the slaughter.”
“She is very frail.”
“She is very old.”
“And the gentleman?”
[Dorothy Parker 05] - A Moveable Feast of Murder Page 4