“I have called the police,” said Mrs. Jones.
“Why?”
“Because you are not welcome here. The secretary told you that. Now please leave. I want to spare you the embarrassment of being arrested.”
“You’re so thoughtful,” smiled the Captain, evidently more charmed by the woman’s consideration than frightened of being arrested.
Roger could not believe what was going on here. He hoped that if he said nothing, all this would go away.
“I feel, Charlotte,” said the Captain, “that you owe me an explanation.”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“Are you engaged to Mr. Freeman?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Have I done or said anything that was out of order?”
“There’s nothing to say.”
Mrs. Jones believed, of course, that she was dealing with a depraved maniac and to her mind she was being exceptionally Christian about all this. She spoke in the sweetly stern manner that was once the mark of teachers. Witters remembered teachers who had spoken to him in this way and life seemed to come full circle with a satisfying click.
“I have made the simplest of requests,” Witters said, “that I would like to talk with you.”
“I may say no, may I not?”
“Yes, of course you may, Charlotte, but I may ask why, may I not?”
As they talked along, their language became more and more old-fashioned, a sure sign of their congruity.
“Am I required to explain my actions to you, Captain?”
“I have been a gentleman. A lady, I believe, would treat me civilly.”
“Perhaps I am no lady.”
“I am sure that you are. I thought so the first minute I saw you.”
“Flattery, you must know, is futile.”
“It was not flattery, Charlotte. It was love speaking forth respect and admiration.”
“None of which is appropriate.”
“And why not? Please tell me.”
Mrs. Sam Jones was too much a lady to say.
Roger Freeman was not decided whether to be alarmed by the Captain’s tenacity or encouraged by the inanity of the dialogue. All he knew was that he had certainly got the Captain’s number from square one, no question about that, he bragged to himself. He remembered the afternoon he took Mrs. Sam Jones to the Captain’s ship. He was showing off, Roger had to admit that much. But all this, he thought, seemed a high price to pay for a little showing off. He was so relieved when he heard sirens rise up in the room. He had not been breathng properly since the Captain entered the room. Now he took several breaths in a row as he lifted the curtain to look outside. And then he confronted the Captain with the blandest of expressions, that tried to say something like, So much for you, Admiral.
Nobody said anything for the last twenty seconds. The Captain merely stared at Charlotte with a school boy’s adoration. The secretary escorted two policemen into the office. The Captain looked them both in the eye and said, one uniform to another, “Good afternoon, gentlemen, so nice of you to come by. But I think we’ve settled our little dispute.” Witters shot a darkling glance at Roger Freeman, who still didn’t know what to say.
The Captain patted the cops on the shoulders and said, “Thanks for coming by,” and moved through them into the hall. The cops looked at the other two faces. Mrs. Sam Jones nodded thoughtfully, then she signalled one over with the tiniest wave of the hand. “I’d appreciate it,” she said, “if you’d make it clear to the Captain that he’s not to return to these premises again.”
The cop looked puzzled.
“That’s all,” she said.
The Captain went out on the front steps smiling to himself, thinking that the next time he would have to attack on the flanks.
49
Daphne said that fame was a disease and her mother said, “I want to catch it.” All those people in the street waiting for her autograph, the interviews in which she would be treated as a race apart, heads turning in Sardi’s. She would try, she told Daphne, not to be too terribly silly about it all. Already she put on airs and carried herself like someone triumphant even though her part was small and the people who came to see Whose Legs had to read the fine print to find the name Chrissie Carlyle. “Never mind,” she said; it was just the beginning and Broadway would not be the same now.
Mrs. Carlyle #2 did not say it but knew that Daphne was the cause of all this upcoming grandeur. How many appointments had there been with how many producers and how many no-shows and how many drunken excuses? Mrs. Carlyle #2 could not dare to speak the words to herself but her daughter Daphne had made her ashamed. And now when they sat at meals together Mrs. Carlyle #2 wanted urgently to thank her or to reward her or merely to reach her. She circled her daughter watchfully and many times she wanted to put her hand on Daphne’s arm and say, “I owe all this to you, my dear.”
She could not do this. Daphne was the evening star in a winter’s sky. Mrs. Carlyle #2 felt that she could reach forever and not reach across the distance between them. There were those eyes, shining clear and cold, like gleams on snow.
Aside from this, Mrs. Carlyle #2 had a very high opinion of her new life. The critics said that Whose Legs would run for years. As nearly as anyone could pin it down, the play was a mystery-thriller-sociosexual-comedy that was said to embody the “lust” (Daily News) and the “existential anxieties” (New York Times) of the age. The writer had figured out close to forty ingenious ways for the various players to be seen from the thigh, or even hip, down, so that the audience was in a perpetual state of uncertainty about who was speaking and doing what to whom, not to mention a perpetual state of titillation. The play represented the most sustained flirtation with the human crotch yet to come to the Great White Way. Mrs. Carlyle #2, for example, made two appearances hidden under a raincoat and what she could do dramatically with her thigh muscles made the audience gasp. In another scene where an elevator was stuck between floors so that the audience could see only the lower third of the seven people inside, Mrs. Carlyle #2 did in fact steal the show by virtue of being shorter than the others and people were heard in the lobby each night discussing her taste in lavender lingerie.
People who were not really interested in art drove up the price of the seats in the front rows.
Off-duty, Mrs. Carlyle #2 contrived to have her legs propped up whenever feasible so that she could admire them. She had known that they were shapely but somehow she had never quite realized that her legs were, how to put it, divinely inspired. The producer of the play, Charles Sanborn, had put it precisely that way one night when he had exhausted his compliments of her hair, now done his way. These two had begun an affair of sorts for fairly unromantic reasons. Mrs. Carlyle #2, seeing her star on the rise, felt that it was entirely fitting and proper that a lot of eager men should be slobbering about and why not start with Charlie? Whereas he was in a constant rage about his wife’s audacity and his idea of a good way to punish her was to give whatever romantic energies he had to anybody but his wife. This would put her in her place.
Still, there was the mystery of Daphne. Here was this rich and beautiful girl. And what was she doing? As far as Mrs. Carlyle #2 could determine, Daphne was spending many hours each day at the New York Public Library. It was preposterous. Rich and beautiful girls didn’t read.
The only theory that occurred to Mrs. Carlyle #2 frightened her. She had read all those stories about Patty Hearst and the other rich and beautiful girls who turned against their families and their class and turned instead to robbing banks and blowing up chic restaurants.
The very idea made Mrs. Carlyle #2 cringe, even as she admired her divinely inspired legs and contemplated with a charming petulance the shiny saliva left by Charlie’s eager kisses.
When the Reverend Michaels told his wife that she could if she wanted come with him to New York on some ecumenical business, she surveyed the cultural offerings and perceived immediately that Whose Legs was precisely
the sort of trash they must avoid. She read all the reviews she could find and if there was one single event that perfectly illustrated the decline of the country, she told her husband, Whose Legs was it. He agreed that they did not have to see it. No, he did not think they needed to picket it. No, he did not think that God would work the miracle of making the roof cave in on both cast and audience.
50
There was much passion and many good intentions, but both of them were thinking the same things: it’s no good, we shouldn’t be doing this, this is all wrong, I don’t know how I ever let myself get into this. From their expressions it seemed they were going off to war or prison rather than to a motel to spend the evening together.
What had been fatal was the quiet, desolate way that each one had looked at the other. Each was a vacuum of need sucking in the other, a lagoon of welcome for the forlorn voyager.
They had sat at a table at right angles to each other and sometimes Eloise Samson held his arm, sometimes he put his hand on her leg, sometimes she tilted her head against his shoulder. The passion between them had a slow grinding inevitability about it like the advance of glaciers. When he would look at her he would think that more than anything else in the world he wanted to kiss her. Then his attention would transfer to her leg, and he would think that more than anything else in the world he wanted to touch her thigh, see it, kiss it.
When they went to the room, each had to cheer up the other. “Come on, it’s not that bad,” Georges said. And a few minutes later she said, “Cheer up, Ben,” the name she knew him by.
Both had that sense of being boats carried along by a current and the scenery may or may not be beautiful but all you can think of is that you are not in control and your nervousness taints everything else.
It was no use fooling himself, Lawrence Georges thought, I’m over my head. I’m way over. In all departments. Still, he had no thought of turning back. He took pleasure in pointing out to himself how vulnerable he was and how likely to perish, all in all. Never mind. Georges wanted to think of himself as somebody who would die for a good cause. He suspected that most people he passed on the street would not be able to think of anything they would fight for or die for. And he thought that must be the most deathly feeling of all.
They took off their clothes standing up. He held her in his arms in an almost reverential way and he forgot to notice her underwear. Her way was that of a teenage girl, feverish and unsure. Logically, she could ask herself, why not? She was a grown woman and could do what she wanted. It was not the matter of being unfaithful to her dead husband. The hell with him, she thought as she had consumed a few drinks earlier in the evening. No, it was this man, so desirable in so many ways but ultimately, what was he, some sort of questionable character like her husband? What was wrong with her that she ended up with people that didn’t behave, didn’t fit, didn’t belong? She had always thought of herself as hopelessly normal but look at this, her husband was some kind of crooked operator, killed by the lowest kind of criminals, people he must have been associating with, and now this man. If they were lost in a forest or adrift in space, he would be the perfect mate but, for God’s sake, they were not lost or adrift, they were in a community and she had teenage children and friends. She had not pressed him about things he didn’t want to talk about. Why, when she would only have to confront more directly that she was not allowed to know everything because everything was illegal or unpleasant.
There was not one thing good about this liaison, not from the point of view of their thoughts, and yet to see them, you would have known it was the most beautiful love-making you would ever witness, both of them grave and courteous and solemn, as though each was the other’s servant.
Lawrence Georges thought he would like to spend a half-hour on kissing her neck. Eloise Samson could stare five minutes at his eyes, old and wary and kind. Neither was in a hurry. Each knew they were taking an irrevocable step and neither was all that eager to have the step completed.
The trouble finally, Eloise knew, was that this was the strongest man in her world, the most protective, the most thoughtful. That was what she needed and she had been drawn to him irresistably.
And even as they tensed toward their separate climaxes, they were both so sad. Afterwards Eloise cried on his shoulder. He did not want to see this as he might also cry. He tried not to look directly at her but held her close and shut his eyes in the dark shadows of her hair on the pillow.
And later that night, after he had called his wife Mary to say he was driving down from upstate, and he would be home very late and she shouldn’t wait up, and after he had made a point of saying that he missed her and would be glad to see her, he went out on Highway 27 and killed off Lawrence Georges.
51
Uncle Hughie died a natural death in the most comfortable surroundings money could buy. Nobody attended the funeral. Nothing changed in Saint Louis. Ties that bind, however, snapped on both coasts.
Mrs. Adele Morris would now inherit the trust fund that had been set up to sustain Uncle Hughie. It was more than three hundred thousand dollars. When she heard the news of Uncle Hughie’s death, she made two quick decisions. She would not go to the funeral because she assumed that her son would be there, and he was pathetic and disgusting, unredeemably so. Secondly, she would not let Roger Freeman back into her house. This idea had been in her mind. But she had thought she needed Roger, how she wasn’t sure, but in the legal tangles ahead, he would be a good ally. Now there were no legal tangles. She was twice as rich. And who needed an unenthusiastic smoothie like Roger, who was probably two-timing her anyway, and after all she had done for him?
Mrs. Morris placed all of his possessions in several large cardboard boxes, tied them neatly with twine, and deposited the boxes on the front porch. She called his secretary and suggested that he might want to pick them up quickly, there was so much petty thievery in the neighborhood.
Then she called Sam Jones Real Estate and said she wished to put her house on the market. It was probably fortunate that she didn’t happen to speak to Mrs. Sam Jones herself as Mrs. Morris would undoubtedly have said that she was discarding her lover, and Mrs. Sam Jones might have been innocent enough to ask, “Well, what about your brother who lives with you,” and so forth.
Mrs. Morris was fifty. Reaching a half-century was strictly for hunger, a phrase that her father, a tough-minded person like herself, often used to describe anything undesirable or second-rate. On the good side was the fact that she had never before in her life been so rich and so well-dressed. She had never had so few responsibilities. She had not been in such good shape—thank you, Roger Freeman—in more than fifteen years. And as she admired, in a large mirror, the red-hot lady of means she now was, it became the official policy of her life that, what the fuck, she had another ten good years and she was going to RAISE HELL. Or maybe she would have a facelift first and then RAISE HELL.
Mrs. Morris was sipping cognac and reflecting on which far-off and exotic cities she would raise hell in first when Roger Freeman roared up in his car. He knocked on the door, now bolted on the inside. Finally, Mrs. Morris pulled back the curtain over the panes in the front door and with no expression on her face and a steady flapping on the four fingers on her left hand, she waved at him. Bye-bye.
At the same moment, Bradford Morris her son was drinking the same brand of cognac. Otherwise there were no similarities.
“Uncle Hughie was like a son,” Morris kept saying, although he knew it sounded stupid.
It was already dark in New York and Felix and Morris were on their terrace, and they were drinking toasts to the dearly departed. Morris had immediately decided not to go to the funeral because he assumed that his mother would be there and he could not bear her presence. She was overbearing and without pity, unredeemably so.
Uncle Hughie had been expected to die any day now ever since he was six years old. Morris was a very young child when he had first heard about Uncle Hughie and the first thing he was told was that
the doctors did not expect Uncle Hughie to live very much longer. But he went right on living. And Uncle Hughie and Morris had grown up together. And Uncle Hughie was a symbol of something, Morris wasn’t able to articulate what too clearly, persistence perhaps, beating the odds, enduring, outlasting everyone. Uncle Hughie’s death made Morris feel old. It also made him feel useless. He had decided to fight for Uncle Hughie’s rights, needing a cause. Then Uncle Hughie died and the cause died and the usefulness, too.
Morris held his wife’s hand. “Felix, sweetheart.”
“I know, sonny, I know,” she said gently, apparently playing some English actress, “life is full of terrible things.”
“I’ve made a decision, Felix. A major decision.”
“I’m sure the New York Times will be fascinated.”
“Can we be serious?”
“Oh, dear, what’s that like?”
“Goddamnit, Felix, no more jokes! Look at me.”
“When we got married,” Felix said, “I could look at you all day. You were the most handsome man. You reminded me of Poe, did I ever tell you that? Maybe you could comb your hair like his. It’s very appropriate. Now.”
“Felix …”
“Yes.”
“I want to be serious.”
“Hmmmmm.”
“Serious. And dignified. And tender.”
“Oh dear.”
“Can you do this with me?”
“I’ll try. But don’t get too sappy or I’ll start chortling in my cognac. Chortle chortle chortle.” Felix looked at her husband’s pained face. “All right, all right.” She waved a hand. “I think I’ve got it.”
Morris put one arm around her neck and pressed the other hand on her breasts and he said, “I’ve decided that I want to die with you.”
“Talk to me when you’re not drinking.”
With equal emphasis on each word Morris said, “I-know-what-I-am-saying. You’re going to commit suicide. I’ll be right there with you. I don’t think it’s going to be all that long.”
American Dreams Page 18