The young man smiled. “No, thanks.”
Helen Chalmers licked her lips without realizing, debating an answer, then asked for a sherry. Victor glared at his wife, but in company held his tongue. Wedging myself between Chalmers and the bar, I reasserted my rights as hostess and poured her a medium-sized glass. No sooner had Chalmers relinquished his claim to the liquor cabinet, than he appeared to have designs on my father’s desk. I nearly knocked him over heading him off. His drink sloshed around in his glass, but nothing spilled. I took a seat, Gigi’s underclothes safe once again.
Chalmers removed his coat, folded it gently on the arm of the leather sofa, then refilled his vodka. He sat down and invited his wife to do the same. Billy slumped into the adjacent chair.
“What’s this all about?” I asked.
“Ruggero Ercolano was not alone the night he died,” announced Chalmers père. “He was keeping company with a young woman.”
“So? Why tell me?”
“Because you asked Franco Saettano, among others, how it was that I discovered Ruggero in the tub after midnight on a weekend.” His tone was as accusatory as he dared, given the circumstances; he obviously needed something from me. “I want you to know the truth. He was not alone.”
“Are you suggesting there was foul play?” I asked, rocking lightly in my father’s chair.
Chalmers shook his head. “Of course not. Ruggero died stupidly, accidentally. But I’m worried about the implications of me being the one who found him. Thanks to you, Ellie, people are wondering what I was doing there.”
“Well,” I said, “what were you doing there?”
“You must understand, Ellie, that my reputation cannot suffer this scandal. I feel as much a victim as poor Ruggero. I was minding my own business, reading in bed. The phone rang, and someone told me Ruggero was dead in his bathtub, please rush over right away.”
“Who phoned you?”
He bowed his head. “I can’t say. I gave my word that I would never implicate her in this. She had nothing to do with Ruggero’s death; it would be devastating, intensely embarrassing for her. It could ruin her life.”
I stubbed out my cigarette. “You’re not asking for my help; you want me to keep quiet.”
Chalmers drew a sigh and stood to fix himself another drink. Billy just sat there on his chair, penny loafers and argyles crossed over each other at the ankle. I wondered why he and his mother had come.
“You might want to keep the bottle close, Professor Chalmers,” I said as he poured, and just as wise as it sounds.
“It was Hildy Jaspers,” he said in a low voice, ignoring my remark. “I don’t know if you’ve heard the gossip about her at the department, but she’s something of a good-time girl. That’s her business, of course, and in these times I don’t wish to pass judgment. But it has no bearing on Ruggero’s death; that was an accident. She swore to me he was dead when she arrived.”
I wondered what to believe. I had no ax to grind with Hildy Jaspers, even if she did seem awfully cozy with Gigi. Still, what she did on her own time was her business.
“Why did she call you?” I asked.
“She naturally turned to a person of authority, integrity, and discretion,” he huffed. “Since I knew both her and Ruggero, she figured I was the one to call.”
“What do you think, Billy?” I asked, baiting the father. “Does that seem logical to you?”
He shrugged. “Sure, I guess. She was in trouble, so she called him.”
“Leave him out of this,” said Chalmers. “Billy and Helen came along as a show of support. In the meantime, I would rather you not tell Miss Jaspers that I betrayed her confidence. She’s a nice girl, after all. A little too giving of herself perhaps, but a nice girl.”
I didn’t like swearing to the promises of others. “In essence, Dr. Chalmers, you’re asking me to put the whole thing to bed, just on your word.”
“Look,” he said, eyes steely gray, “I was in Bronxville Friday evening for dinner. Helen and Billy were with me. I only got the call from Miss Jaspers when I was ready to retire for the night.”
“I’m not investigating you,” I said. “Tell the police, not me.”
“What about Miss Jaspers?” he asked. “Are you going to tell her I betrayed her confidence?”
“I can’t say I won’t ask her if it’s true.”
Chalmers slapped his glass down on the table. “Go ahead,” he sneered. “Tell her you know she’s just a randy little slut with the devil under her skirts!” Helen Chalmers choked on her sherry. Billy couldn’t quite suppress a naughty smile. “You’ll do it to get at me,” continued Chalmers. “Because you’ve always hated me. You and your brother both.” He paused for almost thirty seconds, then he picked up his drink. He continued in a softer tone: “So, go ahead and tell Miss Jaspers what you will. I’ll stick to my original story if I must. I found Ruggero Ercolano in his bathtub.”
“All right, then,” I said, unwilling to retract my statement, especially if he was giving me the out. “Anything else?”
“Well, there’s one more thing,” he said. “I’m concerned about Bernard Sanger.”
“Why so?”
“I don’t trust him,” said Chalmers.
“He conspired with Ercolano to make your father chairman,” said Helen, and Chalmers threw another wicked look her way.
I remembered Hildy’s caution on Bernie Sanger earlier that evening.
“He’s a schemer, Ellie,” said Chalmers. “Don’t trust him.”
“And a lecher,” injected Helen Chalmers. “He asked Ruth for a date at the reception this evening. Imagine! He soiled Hildy Jaspers. Of course, she’s just a tramp. But my Ruth? Never!”
“Don’t fall off that high horse, Mrs. Chalmers,” I said.
“Of all the nerve! Victor, aren’t you going to say anything? I’ve a good mind to walk out of here right now.”
“But then you wouldn’t be able to finish your drink,” I said, and Billy laughed.
Chalmers took a deep breath and rolled his eyes. “You are on a high horse, Helen,” he said. Then to me: “But as for Sanger, I intend to say my piece in his reviews, and what I write will not bode well for his career in academe.”
“What about my father?” I asked. “I understand Bernie’s quite close to him.”
“What of it?”
“I’m no expert, but as long as Bernie Sanger is my father’s protégé, he’ll get a fair shake.”
“That won’t be long,” muttered Helen Chalmers.
I didn’t answer her remark. Her husband, however, wasn’t quite so magnanimous. He snatched the glass of sherry from her hand and dashed it into the wet bar sink. Then he turned to me.
“I must apologize for my wife, Ellie. Believe me, we’re all hoping Abe makes a full and speedy recovery.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then grabbed his coat, and nodded to his family. He’d said his piece. I showed them to the door, where I asked one more question:
“Where’s Ruth?”
They paused in the hallway. “She’s at home,” said Chalmers. “Why do you ask?”
“I didn’t have a chance to speak to her this afternoon. I’ve always liked Ruth.”
Chalmers smiled and shook my hand. “Give her a call, Ellie. She’d love to see you. It would do her a world of good.”
I waited in the hallway for a couple of minutes, listening to the elevator chain click its way down fifteen floors. Then, confident my visitors had left the building, I buzzed the elevator.
The door opened and Raul peered out. A gregarious, rotund man in his fifties, he had worked the elevator for ten years, always chattering, always smiling. My mother used to warn me never to tell him anything confidential because he was a terrific gossip.
“Those people who just left,” I said, “How did they get up here?”
“I brought them,” he said, perplexed by my question.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
He smiled. “I didn’t call you because th
ey were going to 1504.”
“Mrs. Farber? But they came to see me.”
Raul shrugged his entire torso. “The gentleman asked for 1504. I thought they were going to Mrs. Farber’s. I usually work days,” he explained. “And I just had a knee operation.” He pointed to his left leg. “So I haven’t been around for the past three months. I don’t know all the people who come at night. But us guys chat before coming on a shift, you know, to pass along messages.”
“About Mrs. Farber,” I prompted.
“Right. Well, you know that we announce all visitors. So, when I came on duty tonight, Rodney tells me Mrs. Farber is expecting her usual gentleman, and I’m supposed to let him up without calling.”
“Mr. Walter?”
“That’s the guy,” said Raul. He shook his head. “Mrs. Farber called me about an hour ago to say she was expecting company. But since I never seen the guy before, when they asked for her apartment number I assumed they were OK. I thought it was a little strange for three of them to come. And from what Rodney said, I figured this Walter guy to be a little older, but that’s not my business. Sorry for the mix-up, Miss Stone. And about your father, too.”
“What about Mr. Walter?” I asked. “Did he show up?”
Raul shook his head. “She called me up about ten minutes ago asking if I seen him.”
I returned to my father’s apartment and found Gigi waiting in the foyer, wearing his shirt and nothing else.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“Just talking to the elevator man,” I said. “Chalmers is gone.”
“What did he want? Did he know I was here?”
I shook my head. “No. He wanted to talk to me about Ruggero Ercolano. To explain how he had happened to find the body at such an hour.”
“And?” he said finally. “What was his explanation?”
“He said someone called him from Ercolano’s apartment. A young lady. It seems Chalmers wants to protect this girl’s reputation, so he didn’t tell the police about her.”
Gigi listened, attentive but not overly interested. “Did he tell you who she was?”
I shook my head.
He shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know.”
I felt vaguely guilty about my night with Gigi. He was attractive and eager, and I had no qualms about what he wanted from me, but I couldn’t shake the shadow of my father’s regard, particularly in his own house. God knows I didn’t want to care what he thought of me, but I was still subject to shame when I thought about how undignified the rut of intercourse would seem to him. (Why had I let that enter my mind?) And should I be enjoying so pleasant a pastime while my father hovered near death a few blocks away? The last few days had been a thorny journey for me. Returning home after so long, for the first time since my mother had died; sensing Elijah’s presence and absence all about me; seeing my father so fragile, without a voice; and facing the prospect of the rest of my life as the last Stone standing. And then there was my shameful behavior with the shameless Mr. Lucchesi. He was a comfortable diversion, a blur in my head. I had lots to do but felt no drive to get on with it. I was like Ulysses in the thrall of a curly-haired siren. Or an incubus.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 1960
The next morning, Wednesday, in the light of day, a palpable discomfiture hung in the air. After our intimacy, covered by the darkness of night, we had to face each other as the virtual strangers we were; we had little to say if we weren’t flirting. I covered myself shyly with a robe before slipping into the bathroom to dress.
When I emerged a while later, I had composed myself, and the façade was up again. I smiled at my guest, waved for him to follow me to the kitchen, and asked him how to make a proper pot of Italian coffee, what they call espresso in coffeehouses like the Figaro on Bleecker. Once he’d finished his demonstration, as he rinsed out the machine, I took the coffee into my father’s study where I planned to have one last look around before asking Nelda to clean up.
My father’s collection comprised more than six hundred LPs and 78s, plus about a hundred reel-to-reel tapes. I examined the pile of disks on the floor, separating the shattered from the merely scattered. I matched the undamaged records to their jackets and stacked them on the corner of the desk. Of the broken ones, I collected the identifying labels in a separate pile that I planned to catalogue in case my father wanted to replace them. In case he’d still be around to want to replace them. Then I checked the titles against the orphaned dust jackets, all of which had been torn. It took only a few minutes to figure the damage: four LPs of Mendelssohn’s (Lieder, Italian Symphony, and incidental music to A Mid-summer Night’s Dream); two Mahlers (symphonies V and IX); Bruch (the violin concerto and Kol Nidrei); one Meyerbeer and Bloch (Poèmes juifs). Arthur Rubinstein, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris; and Bruckner’s Second Symphony. Thirteen disks by my reckoning, and an eclectic, anachronistic collection to boot. The destroyed records crossed generic boundaries and spanned centuries, in what appeared at first glance to be a random fashion. But what alerted me to a pattern was the destruction of more than one LP by a particular composer. Mendelssohn, Mahler, Bruch, and Gershwin each had been hit at least twice. The burglar hadn’t destroyed all of their work, but they were certainly targets.
I circled the room, rethinking every detail with new intensity. The constant traffic through the apartment had disturbed nearly everything, making it impossible to reconstruct the state of the mess the morning after the burglary. Easing myself into the leather sofa, I sipped my coffee and thought hard. I stared at the torn dust covers on my father’s desk, searching for an explanation, something to justify the burglar’s apparent dislike of the music before me. It didn’t take long, and I almost laughed at myself for not having seen it right away.
“What are you doing, Ellie?” asked Gigi from the study door.
“Thinking of changing the locks.”
Gigi ducked out a few minutes before I left, asking me to buzz the elevator in five minutes.
“I’ll take the stairs,” he said.
I asked why.
He blushed. “A girl doesn’t want everyone to know she’s had a gentleman spend the night.”
“You’re no gentleman,” I smiled.
“Five minutes, OK? I’ll listen for the elevator to go up before I sneak out the front door.”
I agreed, wondering if this was his routine or some spontaneous inspiration. God, he was beautiful. More than that, he was a kick. And I didn’t know what I was doing with him.
Morning at Saint Vincent’s: puffy-eyed attendants, slow starters even in summer, lean on their gurneys and flirt with the nurses. The residents and interns, wearing stethoscopes like badges, scurry up and down the corridors, attending to their urgent cases. The doctors shuffle in later, sipping their coffee, reading their charts, and mumbling directives to the nurses, all without the haste of their juniors. The patients just lie there.
I sensed something was wrong as soon as I reached my father’s bed. His breathing was low, almost imperceptible. Yet despite the weakness, he seemed to be struggling for air beneath the breathing tube. I hit the call button and yelled for help. A few seconds later, a thin blonde nurse arrived.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. “Look at him.”
The nurse bent over the patient, checking his vital signs, while the respirator bellows continued to pump its usual rhythm. Still, it wasn’t right. My eyes darted to the tube snaking from the oxygen tank to the bellows, following it along the floor to its juncture with the glass jar. I could hear air whistling through the respirator, so I knew the problem wasn’t there. Maybe the bellows’ exit tube—the one stuffed down my father’s throat—was blocked or twisted. Starting from his mouth, I felt my way up the tube, and immediately found that it was lying on the floor. The nozzle of the glass jar was uncovered, oxygen hissing from its mouth into the room as the respirator tube lay harmlessly on the white-tiled floor below. The thumb-scre
w clamp on the nozzle was open wide. I snatched the tube off the floor and stuffed it onto the nozzle. My father’s chest inflated immediately.
The nurse, noticing what I was doing, glided around the bed, slipping past the machinery like a nimble pixie. Without a word, she relieved me of the respirator tube, sliding the clamp back over the end of the hose and screwing it tight. When the apparatus was secure, she turned to me.
“What’s going on here?” I demanded. “Isn’t this the ICU? How about some intensive care?”
The nurse, whose name tag identified her as R. Tielman, smoothed her white frock and pursed her lips. “I don’t know how this happened, miss, but I’m going to find out. I’ll get a doctor,” she said as she rushed down the corridor.
The confusion mounted. I became aware of a low, pulsing beat coming from the machine next to the bed. The rhythm bounced, dipped, then sped up and began to flutter wildly in short beeps. An intern arrived at a gallop, Nurse Tielman at his heels, and a second nurse bringing up the rear. The young doctor pushed past me and hunched over my father, checking his pupils, respiration, and pulse rate. He watched the blipping machine for a moment before turning calmly to Nurse Tielman.
“Riley, I need some epinephrine and digoxin. And get me a cardiac needle.”
She took off on a run toward the pharmacy, and the doctor addressed the other nurse: “Phyllis, get a crash cart in here, now. And page Dr. Frankel. He should be in Cardiology.”
Phyllis, too, disappeared, leaving me with the intern and my father, whose chest was rising and falling violently. He was struggling for his life. I felt powerless, useless, and in the way. Then the fluttering beeps ceased, and a steady, high-pitched tone shrieked from the EKG machine next to the bed. I stared at the paper-strip recorder. The stylus had stopped moving and was leaving a flat line in its wake on the scroll.
“What is it?” I demanded. “What is it? Tell me!”
The intern was massaging my father’s chest, over the heart. He didn’t turn to look at me. “You shouldn’t be here for this,” he said, the machine still howling like a siren. “His heart has stopped. Please wait in the lounge, miss. We’ll send for you.”
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