The Reincarnation of Peter Proud

by Max Ehrlich

  “Southern California. Everybody plays at a very early age. They put a tennis racket in your little baby hand long before a rattle. In Los Angeles, if you don’t play tennis, they think you’re queer. They put you in corners at parties. And you? Where did you learn your tennis?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always loved the game. My mother’s been a member here for years, so it was always available. The courts, I mean; instruction. Of course, if you believe in chromosomes, I might have inherited it from my father.”

  “Your father?”

  “He was the tennis pro at this club a long time ago.”

  “Oh? Then he met your mother here?”

  “Yes. I suppose this is pretty corny. But they probably fell in love playing singles.”

  “Nothing like a good tennis romance,” he said.

  “Oh? Then you know all about them?”

  “They’re the best kind.”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s nice hearing that from an expert.”

  “Those who volley together, stay together. And so your father and mother lived happily ever after.”

  “No. My father’s dead,”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be. He’s been dead for almost thirty years. I never knew him. I was only three months old at the time. He drowned in some lake. It broke my mother up. She was madly in love with him—” Then she stopped. The violet eyes were astonished. “Why am I telling you all this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know you about an hour, you’re a perfect stranger, and here I am babbling along as though this is a confessional.” She wrinkled her forehead, studying him. “You wouldn’t be a priest in white shorts, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Or a psychiatrist?”

  “No.”

  “Then satisfy my very natural and lively curiosity—about lots of things. Like who are you? What are you doing here in Riverside? How long will you be here? Will the real Peter Proud please stand up?”

  He told her, briefly, about his teaching, the book, his research project. He found he talked easily to her. The violet eyes watched him steadily. He sensed they were more than just interested; they were almost possessive. She seemed to have already marked him as an important entry in her life, even on this first and casual meeting. She was saying to him, You have not seen the last of me, and I have not seen the last of you. Something is happening here, and we both know it.

  When he had finished, she stared at him.

  “You said you have Indian blood?”

  “That’s right. No high cheekbones. But I’m one-sixteenth Seneca. Or maybe one thirty-second. I’m not sure, at this point.”

  “Talk about coincidence. I’ve got Indian blood in me, too, from way back. On my father’s side. Mother tells me he was very proud of it.”

  “What tribe?”

  “Pequot.”

  “Not too far apart geographically,” he said. “Maybe it isn’t coincidence at all. Maybe we met in some previous incarnation.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe I was a Seneca warrior, and I wandered south by east, and I ran into the Pequots, and there you were. Daughter of a chief, and the most beautiful squaw east of the Hudson. So I talked to your father, and he tested my skill in hunting and fishing and found it good. After that, I paid him six belts of wampum, two horses, the pelts of twenty beavers, and took you back to my tribe. After that, we had five beautiful papooses and lived happily ever after….”

  “You’re mad,” she said, laughing. “You’re absolutely mad.”

  They talked for another half hour. She told him she’d lived most of her life in Riverside. She’d never had to worry about money; her grandfather, now dead, had been president of the Puritan Bank and Trust. She had gone to Wellesley, had met a boy from Harvard, and after they had both graduated, they had married and gone to New York to live. He had worked in his uncle’s law firm, and she had gotten a job in the advertising department of Lord and Taylor. She had been good at the creative end of it, writing copy and so forth, and eventually had made rather a large salary. But the marriage hadn’t worked and they’d been divorced, and she didn’t want to talk about that. It was fortunate they didn’t have children, and the parting was reasonably amicable. Two years ago she’d come back to Riverside to stay. As a freelancer, she wrote advertising copy at Stanley’s, the largest department store in town, and also did some book editing for two New York publishers. Otherwise, she passed the time playing a lot of tennis and a little golf. She went out now and then with this man and that, but nobody excited her enough to change her life. It was all rather dull, but it was reasonably comfortable. Time passed, and she was getting older, and wasn’t that true with everybody?

  “Something I don’t understand,” he said. “You seemed to be all set in New York. And with all due respect to your hometown, it’s a lot more exciting than Riverside. Yet you left it and came back here. Why?”

  Her face clouded at that. Suddenly the violet eyes became veiled. He knew she did not like the question, and he regretted asking it.

  “Look,” he said hastily, “I seem to have touched a nerve somewhere. I’m sorry I asked you. Let’s just say I was desperately making conversation, just to keep you here. Just so you won’t go away.”

  She smiled at that. “Did it show that much?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know why it should. The reason’s very simple. My mother’s been—well, sick for the last few years. She needed me,”

  “I see. You live with her then?”

  “Most of the time. But I have a secret little place of my own. An apartment. Even Mother doesn’t know about it. Just so I can go there once in a while and do a little private screaming.”

  “Then you do have something to scream about?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I would imagine that this apartment of yours has a telephone.”

  “It does. A private number.”

  “I could ask you to give it to me.”

  “You could.”

  “Only you’re not about to give it to me.”

  “Not yet. Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not.” Then he grinned. “One thing you’ll learn about me. I try. I’m very persistent.”

  She smiled. “I like that in a man.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try again sometime.”

  “I hope you do. I want you to.”

  “Another drink?”

  She looked shocked. “In the middle of the day like this? Before God and everybody and the staid members of the Green Hills Country Club? God, no. Besides, I’m driving, and anyway, I’ve got to go. I’ve got an appointment.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Very. It’s with my hairdresser.”

  He looked at her hair and grinned. “Don’t let her change anything.” Then: “Will you be taking another tennis lesson tomorrow?”

  “It so happens that I will. Why?”

  “I thought maybe we’d play again.” He smiled. “You know, work on your backhand a little more.”

  “You worked on it very well this morning. I thought you’d never hit one to my forehand. But yes. I’d love to play.” She smiled at him. “But don’t you have work to do?”

  “It can wait.”

  She laughed, said goodbye, and walked away in the direction of the locker rooms. Now, as before, he was struck by her walk. There was something special about it. The tilt of the hips, the slight sway of the buttocks slightly controlled, the graceful rhythm of the long legs as they moved were superbly feminine. He tried to imagine that body stripped of its tennis clothes, totally naked. He thought of it hungrily. He imagined how she would feel in his arms, how that body would feel pressed against his, the smell of her hair, the taste of her pink mouth on his, her odor, and what she would do when those carefully banked fires he knew were there suddenly blazed….

  Suddenly he hated himself. He felt a little queasy. Not just like a
lecher, but incestuous. This girl had been his daughter once. And here he was, at the age of twenty-seven, thinking like a dirty old man.

  The next day, they played tennis again. And on the following day he called the house at 16 Vista Drive.

  “Hello?”

  “Is Ann there?”

  “Yes. May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Peter Proud.”

  “Just a moment …”

  The voice was velvety, with a little slur. Older than he remembered it at the lake, but still identifiable as Marcia’s.

  The goose pimples popped out on his skin. Ann came on the phone. He asked her out for dinner that night, and she agreed.

  They arranged for him to pick her up at the house at seven, have a drink, and then go on.

  Chapter 24

  He took a deep breath and rang the bell. It seemed a long time before anyone came. Finally the door opened, and she was standing there.

  “I’m Peter Proud,” he said.

  “Oh. I’m Marcia Chapin. Ann’s mother. Please come in.” She closed the door and turned to him. “Ann’s upstairs. She’ll be down in a minute.”

  The blue eyes he remembered so well studied him. Then, puzzled:

  “Have we met before?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive.”

  She continued to watch him, baffled. “That’s strange. I have the funniest feeling that we—but no, I guess you’re right. Peter Proud, if you’ll forgive me, is such an odd name, I’d have remembered it if we had met.” Then: “Ann tells me you’re from Los Angeles, and this is your first time in Riverside.”

  “Yes. Or in New England, for that matter.” He was aware that she was still puzzled, that something about him nagged her.

  “I don’t know why we’re standing out here. Why don’t we have a drink while you’re waiting?”

  “Thanks. I’d like that.”

  He tried hard not to stare at her, lest she think him rude. This was the same woman he had seen in his dreams, no doubt about that. Yet even though he’d known she would have changed, part of him had expected her to look like the young Marcia he had seen so many times. Meeting her now was a shock. He judged her to be fifty, perhaps a year or two older. Here and there, the ghost of her once exciting beauty was still present—in the eyes, in the faint Oriental cast of her face, in the sway of her body under the red housecoat she wore. There were streaks of gray in once coal-black hair. She had thickened out somewhat, although she was not heavy enough to be called matronly. Her face had a faint pasty quality, an indoor pallor which seemed almost unhealthy.

  Somehow, he felt a little let down. He had expected some kind of high drama in this first meeting. After all, he had lived with this woman a long time, both in his last incarnation and in his present life. In one, she had struck him down in the prime of his life, in cold blood; and in the other, she had tormented him endlessly. He had come a long way to find her, and it had taken him some time. Yet he felt no anger, no resentment, no desire for revenge. Only curiosity. He wanted to know why she had done what she had done, why she had been able to kill him with such savagery.

  She led him through a large living room and into a combination recreation room and den with deep leather chairs and a small bar.

  “Please sit down. What can I give you to drink?”

  “If it isn’t any trouble, a martini.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  She mixed the drink quickly and expertly, as though she had done it many times before. He noticed that all she took was club soda. But it was the room that fascinated him, and the photographs that filled the panel walls. It was definitely a man’s room, from the furniture to each small decorative touch. There wasn’t a feminine frill in it. Yet, as far as he knew, no man lived in this house.

  The photographs particularly interested him. There must have been twenty of them lining the walls, and each was a photograph of Jeff Chapin. Sometimes Marcia was in the picture with him, the young Marcia of his dreams, looking exactly the way he had seen her.

  Now Peter Proud had a good chance to see himself as he had really looked in his previous incarnation. The newspaper photo had been vague, a little blurred. These were clear. There was a photo of Jeff Chapin standing at the backline of a tennis court, poised to serve. A photo of him, smiling, in Marine uniform. Another in the same genre, Chapin again in uniform, sitting at the edge of a road somewhere with two or three of his buddies, smiling and relaxed, a cigarette dangling from his lips. And on each, the legend: To Marcia. With all my love. Jeff. There were shots of Jeff and Marcia in the big Packard Clipper, he grinning at the photographer, she smiling. Then the two of them lying on a beach somewhere. And another with Jeff laughing and carrying a protesting Marcia in his arms as he walked into the sea. Still another, a wedding picture, Jeff Chapin looking very young and self-conscious and ill at ease, Marcia, young and beautiful and radiant, and other members of the wedding party, people he did not know. There was a photo of Jeff standing behind a huge sailfish he had caught and which hung by a hook at the weighing platform on a dock. He was holding a fishing pole and mugging at the camera. And still others: Jeff Chapin, again in tennis clothes, face shining with perspiration, smiling and accepting a loving cup from a tournament chairman; Jeff Chapin in a business suit, sitting behind a desk, probably, guessed Peter, in the Puritan Bank and Trust. And finally, a framed military citation from the Marine Corps to Corporal Jeff Chapin for conspicuous bravery in action; and, below that, a medal and a ribbon.

  It was eerie sitting here in a deep leather chair and sipping a martini and watching a panorama of his previous life up there on those walls, a kind of retrospective of who he was and what he was doing then, and those highlights of his life considered important enough to photograph and frame and hang here on these walls. He studied the pictures critically, thinking, I wasn’t a bad looking guy, not bad at all, a hell of a lot better looking than I am now …

  “That was my husband,” said Marcia.

  “Yes. Ann told me about him.”

  “He was a wonderful man. This used to be his favorite room. His own personal hideaway.”

  He stared at her. “Then you’ve lived here ever since …”

  She nodded. “Ever since 1945. The year before he died. He loved this house so. After—after he’d gone, I couldn’t bear to leave it. There was too much of him still here, you see.”

  She had finished her club soda and poured another. With the tongs, she reached into a silver ice bucket and picked out a cube of ice. He could see that her hand was trembling a little. She put enormous concentration into this small task. When she sat down, she held her own glass limply. She seemed far more fascinated in the martini he was holding. He was suddenly aware that he was tapping the rim of the glass with his fingernail, listening to the ring of the glass. He felt that it upset her, and he stopped abruptly, acutely conscious of her stare.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Just an old and annoying habit of mine.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Only it’s so strange.”

  “Yes?”

  “He had that same habit, too. My husband. He used to tap the edge of his glass the same way you do.” She seemed to have gone suddenly pale. A shiver ran up his spine. If he had carried one of Jeffrey Chapin’s little eccentricities beyond the grave, how many more did he have that Marcia Chapin would recognize and identify in the same way?

  He changed the subject, nodding at the photographs on the wall. “It seems a terrible thing. To die so young.”

  “He was only twenty-seven. Did Ann tell you how it happened?”

  “Well, she said he drowned.”

  “But she didn’t tell you how?”

  “No.”

  “You know, it’s so idiotic, the way tragedy happens. The thing is, you never expect it. I keep thinking back, and I keep thinking back, and I tell myself it couldn’t have happened that way. It just couldn’t …”

  “Look, Mrs. C
hapin, maybe I shouldn’t have brought this up. I’m sure it’s upsetting …”

  “No,” she said. “No. It happened such a long time ago. I’m over it now. I’ve been over it for a long time. I know it can’t possibly interest you, but I don’t mind talking about it now. I really don’t. You see, we had this cottage at a lake outside of Riverside. Lake Nipmuck. It was late September, you know, when all the summer people had gone home. Jeff and I used to love to go out to the cottage then. It was so quiet and peaceful, so beautiful, a time when all the leaves were just changing into autumn colors.”

  The blue eyes were vacant now, far away. Her voice was a monotone, as though she were reciting a much repeated and much rehearsed speech. Did she talk about this with every stranger she met? How often did she have this kind of discussion, this monologue about a husband who had been dead for twenty-eight years? Perhaps it was this room, with its photographs on the wall, that had set her off. And, of course, her own guilty memory.

  “On this particular night, my husband had an urge to swim the lake. He loved to swim in the nude, and it was night, nobody could see him. It wasn’t unusual for him to do this. He’d swum the lake many times, and he was a very strong swimmer. I begged him not to go—the water was too cold—but he insisted. He’d had, well, a drink or two, and he could be stubborn. When my husband got an idea into his head, nothing could stop him. When he had gone, I thought how foolish it all was. What would he do when he reached the opposite shore? He had no swimming trunks on. And he’d be cold. He’d catch his death of pneumonia. So I took out our boat and went after him, to pick him up and bring him back with me. But then—I couldn’t find him. He had disappeared. He must have gone down somewhere. Something had happened, a cramp perhaps. I don’t know. But he couldn’t have made the other side; there wasn’t time. I went around and around the lake, crying out his name. But he was gone. I went to the other side, to the hotel, and called the police. They brought him up from the bottom of the lake—two days later. Have you ever seen a person who’s been drowned and been under water for a while? They look so white, so bloated, so awful …”

  He listened, and for the first time he felt a stab of anger. Oh, you liar, he thought. You murdering bitch. “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “I really don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”