“Tomorrow morning,” Susan was saying into the telephone, when he went back into the bedroom. “And home Monday evening. And—no. It isn’t!”
She listened, then. She said, “It can’t be, if it is,” which baffled Heimrich, who stood and looked at her. She wore a bathing suit, briefly. She looked fine in a bathing suit. Almost as fine as, standing at the window, looking at Palm Beach’s share of the Atlantic Ocean, she had looked without one.
“Let me speak to your aunt a moment,” Susan said, and waited only a moment, and said, “Emily. You’ll see that he–”
She listened. She laughed. “All right,” she said. “I know I am. He’s fine.” She listened again. “All right,” she said, “he’s wonderful. Do you want to talk to him?”
She listened again and laughed again and put the receiver in its cradle.
“Your sister,” she said, “has nothing to say to you that’s worth the money. It’s snowing in Van Brunt, but Michael says that it’s warm, really, and that he doesn’t need to wear all the things Aunt Emily makes him wear. And otherwise everything is fine. And that Colonel chased a deer and didn’t catch it.”
Can’t be warm if it’s snowing. Of course. Clarification comes to him who waits. Naturally.
It was warm on the section of the beach staked out—and brushed and combed—by the Palm Haven Motor Lodge and Villas. (S. Ocean Blvd. On ocean. Room control air-cond. & heat. Efficiencies, family units, pool, restaurant, cocktail lounge, TV; 300 ft. pvt. bch. No pets.) It was beautiful on the beach. Everything was beautiful. (My Susan most of all. He makes other men look paunchy, or look frail.) They lay on beach mats, canvas shelters shading their heads. They went down into the water and swam and came out and lay in the sun and went down the beach into the water and swam. As on every day for three weeks of days. (Except it had rained one day and they had spent that day in the room. Pat the room on the head for that day, too.)
Tommy Stein, who was nine years old and tow-headed, walked resolutely across sand and stopped and looked at them. He said, “Good morning.” He said, “Have you seen my sister?” They had not.
“Good,” Tommy Stein said, and walked away again.
“We could have brought Michael,” Susan Heimrich said. “Other children stay out of school.”
“We couldn’t,” Merton Heimrich told her, “have brought Colonel. No pets. The boy’s all right.” But he looked at her, his eyes questioning. She reached over and patted his nearest hand. She said, “Everything’s all right. Everything’s fine.” She said, “Your sister’s good with kids. And with big dogs, come to that.” She said, “It was wonderful of her, wasn’t it?”
“She likes the country,” Heimrich said. “She likes kids. Also, she likes you.”
“I,” Susan said, “am beginning to get hungry. Are you beginning to get hungry?”
He stood up, took hands offered him, pulled and she flowed up and against him. That was brief.
Hilda Stein also was tow-headed. She was eleven. She said, “Mama says anybody for Scrabble and have you seen my brother?”
“A few minutes ago, Hildy,” Susan said. “He was looking for you. He went down toward the water.”
“Good,” Hilda Stein said, and went away from the water. They watched her. “Scrabble?” Susan said. “No Scrabble,” Heimrich said. They put on beach jackets. They walked two cabana shelters down and said, “No Scrabble,” to Tom and Leona Stein, who were as tow-headed as their children.
“Your minds,” Tom Stein told them, “will rust away.”
“Are you really going tomorrow?” Leona Stein said. “You just got here.”
“He’s got murderers waiting,” Tom said. “Standing in line. Refusing to be caught by anybody else. Chanting, ‘We want Heimrich.’”
“Be seeing,” Heimrich said, and they walked on across sand.
“Will we?” Susan said. “And all the others—the Greshams, the Kennedys. People we didn’t know, had never seen, two weeks ago. Spent hours with—played with. Such nice people.”
“Very nice people,” Heimrich said.
“And so—cards next Christmas, and maybe the one after and—” She did not finish, except with a brief lifting of shoulders under beach jacket.
“Things are always ending,” Merton Heimrich said. “It’s a way things have.”
“And,” she said. “Beginning. Which is more important. I’m thirsty, as well as hungry.”
There were tables around the pool, and the one under the biggest palm was vacant.
“I planned it that way,” Heimrich said. They stuck their legs out into sunshine and sipped long drinks. Time stood still around them; time rushed past them. “This has been a fine place to have lunch,” Susan said. “Palm trees are fine things to sit under. I want a rare hamburger on a toasted bun and potato chips and iced coffee. You plan things wonderfully. You’re especially good at weather.”
“Just a knack,” he told her. “Also, a moment for decision has almost arrived. Beach? Or tennis?”
“We’ll study it,” she said. “Thought is indicated. On the one hand, we’ll have to change if it’s tennis. On the other, there’s no real reason we shouldn’t take the Greshams.”
“Only,” Heimrich said, “that they happen to be a bit better. We might have a last try, naturally.”
They went back to the room—to the little house; the impersonal room which had been somebody else’s three weeks ago and would be somebody else’s tomorrow. Our first room, Susan Heimrich, who had been Susan Faye four weeks ago, thought. A room like no other room.
They changed. They lost to Ned and Rachel Gresham, seven-five. They sat in the shade of palm trees by the tennis court and had gin and tonic in long glasses. “Tomorrow?” Ned Gresham said, and his wife said, “You forget things. They go tomorrow.”
“Be seeing,” Ned Gresham said, when they had reached the bottoms of long glasses.
They went along a familiar path, up familiar steps. “The people in the green Cadillac aren’t here any more,” she said, as she looked down from the balcony. “There’s a new car from Minnesota. I wish the Greshams didn’t live in Idaho. We’ve got to pack, haven’t we?”
It was like packing up summer; it was a packing up of sunny days. The gray-green sleeveless print from Saks-Fifth Avenue—but really Saks-Worth Avenue—was a week ago yesterday, to wear to the Royal Poinciana Playhouse with the Kennedys. A play on “pre-Broadway tour.” A play never going near Broadway. A beautiful theater. The good and the bad. A sun hat of many colors. And where on earth to put it? That was way back—a distant sunny day. It was also a hat she would never wear in Putnam County, however sunny days came there. A green straw handbag.
A pair of walking shorts. (Of course you don’t look ridiculous in them, Merton. Must you be so self-conscious?) He must wear them sometime to Hawthorne Barracks. Detective disguised in walking shorts. A slim silver bracelet in a pocket of the shorts. (“Susan! All the time we were looking in the sand! Right here in my—”) That late evening on the beach, with almost nobody on the beach—not where they had walked. Where they had—walked. Two weeks ago Tuesday.
Pack up two weeks ago Tuesday, and a beach at night.
A bottle of sun-tan lotion, unopened. Why unopened? A genuine alligator belt to take back to small Michael. (With the “Made in Japan” label, belatedly discovered, scraped off.) A pari-mutuel ticket on a dog which had not won. The night in West Palm Beach when Rachel Gresham, with a ticket on the dog which had, said, “Oh. Oh! Oh!” as a man shoved bills toward her through a window.
And winter clothes to be taken from hangers, looked at, shaken half-heartedly, put in the ready case. Not tomorrow. Probably not the day after Certainly the day after that. Pack up summer; get out winter and shake it half-heartedly. (Three weeks and a day or two ago in Brunswick. Pompano in aluminum foil at “The Deck.” We won’t need these heavy clothes for the last day’s drive. Won’t need them for weeks.)
“Merton,” she said, and he—putting a white dinner jacket, wor
n once, on a suitcase hanger—turned his head. “It’s been wonderful,” she said. “It’s going to be wonderful to get home again, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Merton said. “Naturally, darling.”
“It’ll be almost time to put in peas,” she said. He said, “Almost.”
“And,” Susan Heimrich said, “quite time to force for-sythia. And things will be getting green around the edges.”
“Yes.”
“Now you’ve taken up tennis again we must play this summer.”
“Yes.”
“Darling. Is it all right if I love you very much?”
Before it was quite dark they drove north on South Ocean Boulevard—at first merely a straight road; at first (admit it) merely Florida A1A. But call it South Ocean Boulevard. Palm Haven Motor Lodge and Villas liked it so; Palm Haven had been kind and should be humored. At first a straight road; then a sharply twisting road, with ocean on one side and, for the most part, walls on the other. High walls, with gaps in them; behind the walls the anguished roof lines of the Palm Beach houses.
Susan, whose tastes are otherwise, had said, with almost prayerful simplicity, “My God!” when she had first seen the roofs of the Palm Beach houses. She had said, afterward, that Spain deserved abject apologies, Franco or not. She had said, “What kind of people live in those?” and Heimrich, turning just enough to smile at her, had said, “Rich people, Susan.”
Two Palm Beaches, with West Palm Beach not counting, the big house Palm Beach; the transient Palm Beach. Two Palm Beaches touching—touching where? In the upper levels of the Palm Beach Towers? Or in the vastness of the Breakers, where a parking lot for wheel chairs is maintained outside the dining room?
“I do sort of wish,” Susan said, as they crept around the turns of the real South Ocean Boulevard, “that we’d met just one of them. As a specimen.”
Heimrich said “umm,” his eyes on a mirror set up opposite a driveway gap in the wall on the left. Sensible precaution; even the very rich must now and then emerge, trust themselves to public highways.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, with the bend rounded, “we did. Bedlow. And Mrs. Bedlow.”
She said, “Well—” with doubt. She said, “Doesn’t he just rent, though? And it was at La Petite.”
It had been during the first week, on one of their early explorations of Worth Avenue, which is sometimes called “fabulous” and is, certainly, unusual. Name a luxury shop from almost anywhere, New York to San Francisco, and it has an offspring in the Worth Avenue nursery. Windows shopped, they had gone through an arcade and found La Petite. (And pompano amandine of an excellence.)
They had found also, in the cocktail lounge, Mr. James Bedlow, who was tall and a little heavy, had smooth white hair and was in his sixties, and Mrs. James Bedlow, who was, at a guess, in her early thirties and, with no guessing whatever about it, beautiful. Beautiful and with a dark streak in silvery (not gray; not ever gray) hair and with a stole which must have cost—ouch!—and a dress that—Susan’s mind had thrown up its hands at the dress.
“Aren’t you Captain Heimrich?” James Bedlow had said, and stood up. “New York State Police?”
It is part of a policeman’s trade to remember faces, and names to go with them. So Merton Heimrich had not hesitated, had said, “Good evening, Mr. Bedlow. We’re both some way from home, aren’t we?”
James Bedlow. His wife, Ann—who, evidently, might be not much more than half his age. And a lean, gray-eyed man—with a lean face—who was named Norman Curtis.
“On holiday?” Bedlow had said, when names had been passed around. Heimrich said, “On holiday.” Asked to have a drink with them, he had said, “Glad to,” and that, after the drink, had been that. Except that the Bedlows had “taken the Biddleworth place” and hoped that Captain and Mrs. Heimrich might, before they left, come by some evening for another drink.
At their table that evening, waiting for scampi, Susan had arched eyebrows in enquiry.
“Owns the Chronicle,” Heimrich told her. “Has a big place up near—”
“Oh,” she said. “That Bedlow.”
That Bedlow it was. Owner, in the near hills of Putnam County, of an estate austerely named “The Hilltop”; owner of the New York Chronicle—morning tabloid; owner, before that and hence of that, of oil wells in Oklahoma and, evidently, profusion; once mentioned as a possible ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. (Nothing had come of that; too many Democrats still around.)
Captain Heimrich had been dragooned, a year or so before, into a speech about the New York State Police. Bedlow had been one of those he spoke to. He had also been one of those who, with the speaking over, had solaced the speaker with a drink. At The Hilltop. Hence—
“His wife’s very beautiful, isn’t she?” Susan had said, and waited.
“Why—yes,” Heimrich had said, and his tone had, apparently, satisfied.
“A great deal younger,” Susan said. “Years younger.”
“His second wife,” Heimrich said. “As a matter of fact, he has a couple of daughters almost her age. At a guess. I don’t know her age.”
“And Mr. Curtis?”
“Managing editor of the Chronicle,” Heimrich said, and was told that he seemed to know everything.
“Now Susan,” Heimrich said. “Things stick in my mind. A cop’s mind.”
“A nice mind,” Susan had said. “A little slow, I thought for—for quite a while. But—nice.”
Mrs. Bedlow had, in fact, called them a few days later, suggesting cocktails. But that was the theater night with the Kennedys. Mrs. Bedlow—she had a low, rather throaty voice—had said “Another time.” But there had been no other time. The Palm Beach paper, which concerns itself with such matters, had reported the following Monday that Mr. and Mrs. James Bedlow had returned to New York. “To open their summer home in Westchester County.” Which was close enough.
On the evening of the last day of March, La Petite Marmite was much less busy than it had been two and a half weeks before. They did not have to wait; their favorite table was theirs without question. But the waiter was not Henri.
“He’s gone back North,” the available waiter told them. “Going myself Monday. Pompano amandine. Thank you, sir.”
The migration of waiters was under way.
The waiter returned quickly, and shook his head sorrowfully.
The migration of pompano also had begun. Broiled shrimps scampi remained—tautologically, but nevertheless admirably.
II
There isn’t, Dinah Bedlow told herself, anything I can do about it, whether I decide I want to do anything about it or not. She can crook a little finger and that will do it—most beautifully crook a little finger, as she does everything so beautifully; as now she walks so beautifully down a flight of stairs, although only I am watching. She would walk so, with the same grace, the same poise, if there were no one watching. Give her that, Dinah told herself. Snap out of it, Dinah told herself.
She was sitting by a window, with a book—sitting close to the window, since it was still cloudy, although the snow with which the day had begun was long over and the rain which had briefly followed it had ended too. Only the sky now was watery—the sky and, it was to be presumed, the grass and walks and drives around the big house. From where she sat, Dinah could see, through the wide archway, the staircase from second floor to foyer, and her father’s wife descending it. She had only to put her book down. She put her book down.
And, involuntarily, she raised a hand to her short dark hair, smoothing it. Consciousness of what she had done came only as correcting fingers touched the hair and, with consciousness, that flicker of disappointment in herself, of lack of respect for herself, which had, during the past week or so, become familiar. Be what you are, Dinah told herself. Be rumpled, if you are rumpled. Don’t feel inadequate, worry about hair misplaced. Or, if you must—if you’re such an unshaped thing—don’t show you know it. Don’t apologize by—
“All alone?” Ann
Bedlow said, stopping on the second step from the bottom of the flight—stopping with the fingers of her left hand just touching the rail, standing somehow as if still, gracefully, she moved.
Yet it was not posed. Give her that, too, Dinah Bedlow thought, as she smiled and nodded and then said, meaninglessly, “All alone.” It could not be said that her father’s wife posed. It was not a pose, nothing so obvious as a pose. It was a way of being Ann Bedlow.
Ann came down the last two steps and a little way toward the arch between foyer and living room—an arch so wide that there was only a token separation between the rooms. She stood for a moment, smiling at the younger woman and, in that moment, a shaft of sunlight came through the glass of the front door and touched silvery hair, perfectly arranged (no need ever for a hand to smooth that hair) with a darker streak sweeping, in triumph, from right temple to crown. Even the sun comes on cue for her, Dinah thought, and smiled at her stepmother. (What a term for Ann Bedlowl)
“Dad’s where he always is, I suppose,” Dinah said, and the older—ten years older? Eight?—woman shook her head, sharing knowledge of James Bedlow’s predictability; sharing affection for a man so set in his ways.
It lacked a few minutes of five on the afternoon of Thursday, March thirty-first. Until five, James Bedlow would be in the office wing.
“Catching up,” his wife said, now, again sharing understanding with the dark-haired girl by the window. “As if he weren’t always caught up. Even in Florida—”
Mrs. James Bedlow moved her shoulders in the immaculate suggestion of a shrug, letting the motion say what did not need saying.
“Ann,” Dinah said, “can’t you persuade him to begin letting up a little? After all, he’s not—”
But Ann, and now her smile was rueful, was shaking her head. She said, “Not I. Not anybody, I’m afraid.” Her smile vanished. “Don’t,” she said, “think I haven’t tried, my dear. But, he goes his own way, your father. He—”
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