by Irwin Shaw
“Yes, you’re right.”
“Who knows?” she said. “If I knew where you were and I had a few weeks of holiday, I might just turn up …”
It was pure blackmail and we both knew it. But it was more than that, too. I was going abroad with the intention of losing myself. I had told Hank that I would get in touch with him from time to time, but that was different. He would never know where I was. Looking across the table at this baffling, desirable woman, I realized that I did not want to lose myself completely, cut all ties to America, have no one in my native country who could, in extremis, reach me with a message, even if the message were only Happy Birthday or Will you lend me a hundred dollars?
“If you’re tempted to open this—” she touched the envelope—“and read what’s in it, by all means do so. Naturally, I’d rather you didn’t. But I promise you there is nothing there that’ll make the slightest sense to you.”
I picked up the envelope and put it in my inside pocket. I was connected to her, even if it was only by the memory of a single night, and she knew it. Just how deeply she was connected to me was another matter. “I won’t open it.”
“I was sure I could depend on you, Grimes,” she said.
“Use my first name, please,” I said, “the next time we meet.”
“I’ll do that,” she said. She looked at her watch. “If you’re finished with your coffee,” she said, “I’ll pay and we’ll leave. I have a date in Virginia.”
“Oh,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. “I thought we might spend the afternoon together.”
“Not this time, I’m afraid,” she said. “If you’re lonely, I believe my roommate, Brenda, isn’t doing anything this afternoon. She said she thought you were very nice. You might give her a call.”
“I might,” I said. I was glad the room was dimly lit. I was sure I was blushing. But I was stung by the callousness of her offer. “Do your lovers always go with the apartment?” I asked.
She looked at me evenly, undisturbed. “I think I told you once before that you are not my lover,” she said. Then she called to the waiter for the check.
I didn’t phone Evelyn’s roommate. By some perverse reasoning that I didn’t really try to understand, I decided that I would not give Evelyn Coates that satisfaction. I spent the afternoon walking around Washington. Now that I knew, at least fragmentarily, what went on behind those soaring columns, off the long corridors, in those massive copies of Grecian temples, I was not as impressed as I otherwise would have been. Rome, I thought, just before the arrival of the Goths. It occurred to me that I probably was never going to vote again, but I was not saddened by the idea. But for the first time in three years I felt unbearably lonely.
As I entered the lobby of my hotel in the dusk, I made up my mind to leave Washington the next day. The sooner I arranged to get out of the country the better. As I packed my bags I remembered George Wales’ ski club. What was its name? The Christie Ski Club. No worrying about baggage allowance, no worrying about the Swiss customs, all the free booze you could drink. I had no intention of arriving economically drunk when I set foot on European soil, but with the freight I would be carrying, being waved through Swiss customs with a smile had obvious attractions. Besides, if anybody was watching for the clerk who had fled the Hotel St. Augustine with a hundred thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills, I reasoned, the last place they’d think to look would be the counter where some three hundred and fifty hilarious suburbanites were embarking for a holiday in the snow from which they would all return en masse in three weeks to the United States.
I was just about to close my second bag when the phone rang. I didn’t want to speak to anybody and I let it ring. But it rang on persistently and finally I picked it up.
“I know you’re there …” It was Evelyn Coates’s voice. “I’m in the lobby and I asked at the desk if you were in.”
“How was Virginia?” I said flatly.
“I’ll tell you when I see you. May I come up?” She sounded hesitant, uncertain.
“I suppose so,” I said.
She chuckled, a little sadly, I thought. “Don’t punish me,” she said. And hung up.
I buttoned the collar of my shirt, pushed the tie into place, and put on my jacket, ready for all formalities.
“Ghastly,” she said, when she came through the door and looked around her at my room. “Chromium America.”
I helped her off with her coat, because she stood there with her arms out as though expecting it. “I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life here,” I said.
“I see,” she said, glancing at the packed bag on the bed. “Are you on your way?”
“I thought I was.”
“Past tense.”
“Uh-huh.” We were standing stiffly, confronting one another.
“And now?”
“I’m not in all that much of a hurry.” I did nothing to make her comfortable. “I thought you said you were busy today. …In Virginia.”
“I was,” she said. “But during the course of the afternoon, it occurred to me I wasn’t fond of Virginia. It occurred to me that there was one person I desperately wanted to see and that he was in Washington. So here I am.” She smiled experimentally. “I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Come on,” I said.
“Are you going to ask me to sit down?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Of course. Please.”
She sat down, with neat, womanly grace, her ankles primly crossed. She must have been walking in the cold in Virginia because the color was heightened along her cheekbones.
“What else occurred to you?” I asked, still standing, but at a good distance from her.
“A few other things,” she said. She was wearing brown driving gloves, and she pulled them off and dropped them in her lap. Her long fingers, nimble with cards, deft with men, shone in the light of the lamp on the desk beside her. “I decided I didn’t like the way I talked to you at lunch.”
“I’ve heard worse,” I said.
She shook her head. “It was pure, hard-boiled Washingtonese. Defend yourself at all times. Professional deformation of speech habits. No reason to be used on you. You don’t have to be defended against. I’m sorry.”
I went over to her and kissed the top of her head. Her hair smelled of winter countryside. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. I’m not as tender as all that.”
“Maybe I think you are,” she said. “Of course you didn’t call Brenda.”
“Of course not,” I said.
“What a stupid, patronizing thing for me to have said.” She sighed. “On weekends,” she said, “I must learn to leave my armor at home.” She smiled up at me, her face soft and young in the subdued glow of the lamp. “You’ll forget I said it, won’t you?”
“If you want. What else occurred to you in Virginia?”
“It occurred to me that the only time we made love, we both had had too much to drink.”
“That’s for fair.”
“I thought how nice it would be if we made love stone-cold sober. Have you had anything to drink since lunch?”
“No.”
“Neither have I,” she said, standing up and putting her arms around me.
This time she allowed me to undress her.
Sometime in the middle of the night she whispered, “You must leave Washington in the morning. If you stay another day, maybe I’ll never let you out of the city again. And we can’t have that, can we?”
When I woke in the morning, she was gone. She had left a note on the desk in her bold, slanted handwriting. “Weekend blues. It’s Monday now. Don’t take anything the lady said seriously, please. E.”
She had put on her armor for the day’s work. I crumpled the note and threw it in the wastebasket.
8
I GOT MY PASSPORT THAT MORNING. Mr. Hale was not in his office, but he had left all the necessary instructions, Miss Schwartz said. I was fairly certain that Mr. Hale was not in his office because by the en
d of the weekend he had come to the conclusion that he wouldn’t be comfortable seeing me again. Not in the presence of Miss Schwartz. It was not the first time that a man had regretted in daylight the dark confidences of midnight.
Miss Schwartz was as beautiful and melodious as ever, but I didn’t envy Jeremy Hale.
I cashed the checks from the poker game, and with the bills in my pocket went to a department store and bought two strong, but lightweight suitcases. They were handsome pieces of luggage, dark blue with red piping, one large, the other an overnight bag. They were expensive, but I was looking for security, not bargains, at the moment. I also bought a roomy leather attaché case, with a sturdy lock. The case fit snugly into the larger of the two bags. I was now armed for travel, Ulysses with the black ships caulked and a fair wind behind him, unknown perils beyond the next promontory.
The salesman asked what numbers I wanted to put into the combination. “It’s advisable,” he said, “to use a number that means something to you, that you won’t forget.”
“Six-O-Two,” I said. It was a number that meant quite a bit to me and I doubted that I ever would forget it.
With the new bags in the trunk of the rented car, I was on my way toward New York by three o’clock in the afternoon. I had called my brother and told him to meet me outside my bank at ten o’clock the next morning.
I stopped at a motel on the outskirts of Trenton for the night. I wasn’t going to stay in New York any longer than I had to.
Knowing that I was doing the wrong thing, accumulating regrets for the future, I called Evelyn’s number in Washington. I didn’t know what I could say to her, but I wanted to hear the sound of her voice. I let the phone ring a dozen times. Luckily, there was no one home.
When I drove through the New York City traffic up Park Avenue, toward the bank, I was stopped at a light at the corner of the cross street on which the St. Augustine was located. On an impulse, when the light turned green, I turned down the street. I could feel the skin on the back of my neck prickling as I drove slowly past the falsely impressive canopied entrance, and I even played with the idea of going in and asking for Drusack. It was not a case of nostalgia. There were some questions that he might be able to answer by now. And his predictable rage would have brightened my morning. If there had been a place to park, I think I would have been foolish enough to go in. But the whole street was solidly blocked and I drove on.
Hank was huddled down into his overcoat, with the collar turned up, looking cold and miserable in the biting wind, when I walked up to the bank. If I were a policeman, I thought, I would suspect him of something, a small, mean crime, petty forgery, abuse of widow’s confidence, peddling fraudulent jewelry.
His face lit up when he saw me as though he had doubted that I would ever arrive, and he took a step toward me, but I didn’t stop. “Meet me at the next corner uptown,” I said as I passed him. “I’ll only be a minute.” Unless someone had been standing near and watching closely, it couldn’t have seemed that there was any connection between us. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the city was one giant eye, focused on me.
In the vault, the same old man, paler than ever, took my key and, using his own along with it, opened my safe and handed me the steel box. He led me back to the curtained cubicle and left me there. I counted out the two hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills and put them in a manila envelope that I had bought in Washington. I was becoming an important consumer of manila envelopes and was no doubt giving a lift to the entire industry.
Hank was waiting for me at the corner, in front of a coffee shop, looking colder than ever. He eyed the manila envelope under my arm fearfully, as though it might explode at any instant. The plate-glass window of the shop was steamed over, but I could see that the place was almost empty. I motioned for Hank to follow me and we went in. I chose a table in the rear and put the manila envelope down and took off my coat. It was suffocatingly hot in the restaurant, but Hank sat down opposite me without taking off his coat or the old, sweat-stained gray slouch hat he was wearing, set squarely and unfashionably on his head. His eyes behind the glasses that dug into the sides of his nose were leaking tears from the cold. He had an old commuter’s face, I thought, the kind of face, weathered by years of anxiety and stale indoor air, that you see on men standing on windy station platforms on dark winter mornings, patient as donkeys, weary long before the day’s work ever begins. I pitied him and could hardly wait to get rid of him.
Whatever happens, I thought, I am not going to look like that when I’m his age. We still didn’t say a word to each other.
When the waitress came over, I asked for a cup of coffee.
“What I need is a drink,” Hank said, but he settled for coffee, too.
Against the partition at the end of the small table, there was a small slot for coins and a selector for the jukebox near the entrance. I put in two dimes and jabbed the selector at random. By the time the waitress came back with our coffees, the jukebox was playing so loudly that nobody could have heard me at the next table unless I shouted.
Hank drank his coffee greedily. It did not smell of cinnamon or rum or oranges. “I puked twice this morning,” he said.
“The money is in there.” I tapped the envelope.
“Christ, Doug,” Hank said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“So do I,” I said. “Anyway, it’s yours now. I’ll leave first. Give me ten minutes and then you can go.” I didn’t want him to see my rented car and note the license number. I hadn’t planned any of this and didn’t believe it was really necessary, but caution was becoming automatic with me.
“You’ll never regret this,” he said.
“No, I won’t,” I said.
With a crumpled handkerchief he wiped at the cold tears streaming from his eyes. “I told the two fellows that I was coming up with the money this week,” he said. “They’re delirious with joy. They’re going for the deal. They didn’t say boo.” He opened his overcoat and fished past an old gray muffler that hung around his neck like a dead snake. He brought out a pen and a small notebook. “I’ll write a receipt.”
“Forget it,” I said. “I know I gave you the money and you know you got the money.” He had never asked for a receipt for any of the sums he had lent me or given me.
“Inside of a year you’ll be a rich man, Doug,” he said.
“Good,” I said. His optimism was forlorn. “I don’t want anything on paper. Not anything. As an accountant, I imagine you know how to arrange to check off whatever may be coming to me without any records being kept.” I remembered what Evelyn Coates had said about Xeroxes. I was reasonably sure there were Xeroxes in Scranton, too.
“Yes, I imagine I do.” He said it sadly. He was in the wrong profession, but it was too late now to do anything about it.
“I don’t want the Internal Revenue Service looking for me.”
“I understand,” he said. “I can’t say I like it, but I understand.” He shook his head somberly. “You’re the last man in the world I’d …”
“That’s enough of that, Hank,” I said.
The first record on the jukebox ended with an ear-shattering climax, and the voice of the waitress giving an order to the counterman sounded unnaturally loud in the lull. “Eggs and bacon, up. One English.”
I took another gulp of my coffee and got up, leaving the envelope on the table. I put on my coat. “I’ll be calling you. From time to time.”
He smiled up at me wanly as he put his hand on the envelope. “Take care of yourself, kid,” he said.
“You, too,” I touched his shoulder and went out into the cold.
The flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until eight Wednesday night.
On Wednesday afternoon, at two thirty, I left a hundred-dollar bill in the safety-deposit box and walked out of the bank with seventy-two thousand, nine hundred dollars in the attaché case I had bought in Washington. I was through with manila envelopes. I couldn’t have explained, even to myself, why I h
ad left the hundred dollars behind. Superstition? A promise to myself that one day I would come back to the country? In any event, I had paid in advance for the rental of the box for a year.
This time I was staying at the Waldorf Astoria. By now, anybody who was looking for me must have decided that I had left the city. I went back to my room and opened the attaché case and took out three thousand dollars, which I put into the new sealskin wallet I had bought for myself. It was large enough to hold my passport and my round-trip charter ticket. At the Christie Ski Club office on Forty-seventh Street, where I had gone after I left Hank in the coffee shop, I had asked for Wales’ friend Miss Mansfield, and the girl had filled out my application form and predated it automatically. She told me I had been lucky to come in just then, as they had two cancellations that morning. Offhandedly, I asked her if the Waleses were also making the flight. She checked her list and to my relief said that they weren’t on it. I still had plenty of cash from my winnings on Ask Gloria and the Washington poker game. Even without the money in the attaché case and after the expenses of the hotels in Washington and Scranton and what it had cost me when I returned the rented car, I still had more money on me than I ever had carried at one time in my whole life. When I checked in at the desk at the Waldorf, I didn’t bother to ask what the room cost. It was a pleasant experience.
I gave Evelyn Coates’s address in Washington as my residence. Now that I was completely alone, all my jokes had to be private ones.
There had been very little opportunity for any kind of laughter at all in the last few days. Washington had been a sobering experience. If, as so many people believed, wealth made for happiness, I was a neophyte at the job. I had made a poor choice of companions in my new estate—Hale, with his blocked career and nervous love affair, Evelyn Coates, with her complex armor, my poor brother.
In Europe, I decided, I was going to seek out people without problems. Europe had always been a place to which the American rich had escaped. I now considered myself a member of that class. I would let others who had preceded me teach me the sweet technique of flight. I would look for joyful faces.