by Tom Murphy
It was a cheap envelope, sealed, bearing the name of a hotel Lily did not recognize. No more did she recognize the bold, uneven handwriting. “Mrs. Brooks Chaffee” was all that was written on the envelope.
“Who brought this?”
“A man, madame.”
“A gentleman?”
“I…wouldn’t say that, ma’am.”
Lily frowned and opened the letter. Then she frowned some more, and walked quickly out of the silver closet and up the stairs to her room. Lucky it was that Brooks was out of town today.
In her bedroom, Lily closed the door and, uncharacteristically, locked it behind her. Then she sat down at her little French desk and read the terrible thing over and over again.
Dear Lily [it began]:
Just like the proverbial bad penny, here I am, turning up in San Francisco after these more than twenty years. I hear you’ve done right well by yourself, Lily, which is more than I can say for myself. I don’t know if you heard that my poor father went bust, but he did, and with a crash that is echoing still in certain circles. Well, that’s ancient history now, Lily, but I just wanted to say hello and I also want very much to see you and my old true friend Brooks Chaffee, and of course the kid, who must be anything but a kid by now. The truth of it is, I need your help, Lily dear, for old times’ sake. How well I remember your beauty, my dear, and the good times we had. Meet me tonight at the Belle Hélène restaurant on Market Street, at eight o’clock. I know you will not fail your old friend
Jack Wallingford
Lily’s hand trembled as she read the letter, and she read it over again through eyes blurring with tears.
Jack! Jack, whom she hadn’t thought of in years. Jack, whose name alone could send Brooks into a fury because it recalled Caroline, and Jack had been Caroline’s lover, and Lily’s too, and Katie’s father. Suddenly all of their happiness revolved around Jack Wallingford: their future as a family lay in his hands—and they were careless, careless hands even in the old days. God only knew what they might be like now. Jack would have no way of knowing that Lily had never told Brooks of Kate’s true parentage, nor Katie either. But even if Brooks and Katie knew—and Lily determined they never should—Jack could still cause incredible, wanton damage, especially now, on the eve of the wedding. She must see Jack and deal with him. The threatening tone in his letter was unmistakable. It must be a try at blackmail. She paced the big sunny room, frantic, wondering how much cash might be in the house, and how much Jack might ask, and what might be his conditions. Suppose he wanted her?
For a moment Lily’s mind froze with horror. She stood, stiff with fright, at the window, looking out over the town she had conquered, seeing nothing. Then she rang for her maid and dispatched the coachman to fetch Fergy.
Fergy would know what to do. Fergy was the only one in the world, besides Jack Wallingford, who knew Lily’s whole story. And Fergy had the kind of friends who could arrange things in ways that skirted the law. If Jack Wallingford woke up tomorrow on a freighter bound for China, Lily would not be at all displeased. Fergy would help. Fergy would know what to do. For half an hour Lily paced her bedroom like a trapped cat.
Then he came, and relief flooded through her with the sudden welcoming rush of sun breaking through clouds. She ran to her brother and kissed him, and thought: Thank God, he’s sober. For Fergy wasn’t always sober at three in the afternoon. It was a continual amazement to Lily that Fergy hadn’t killed himself with drink, or in a fight with some of his low-life pals, and that he’d held onto some of the Fleur de Lis money.
He took her in his arms and gave her a big squeeze. It had been more than a month since she’d seen him.
“Why the summons, Lily of my heart?”
She said nothing, but handed him the letter.
“Damn, damn, damn! Lil, this stinks of blackmail.”
“Yes,” she said evenly, “that’s what it looks like, and he’s the only one in the world who could.”
“Why?”
“Because Brooks, who knows everything else about me, doesn’t know about Jack. Katie doesn’t either. And Jack was Brooks’s friend.”
“Brooks is better than that, Lil. He’s seen you through everything. He’ll see you through this.”
“I’m not so sure. There was a time, perhaps, when I could have told it all—and should have. But that time’s past, and…and I don’t want to take the chance, Fergy. It would hurt so many people, not just me.”
“Good old Jack. You’ll have to pay him, then. You’re lucky you can afford to.”
“That’s just it: I can’t. That is, I can’t draw out big sums without telling Brooks. All our funds are jointly held, and always have been.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“First, I want you to come with me tonight. I can’t go to a place like that alone. Whatever kind of place it is. Who knows what a man like Jack has in mind?”
“It would be convenient if Mr. Jack Wallingford had a very serious accident, wouldn’t it, Lil?”
She looked at him for a moment that stretched out to an eternity. Lily knew perfectly well that her brother could arrange such an accident. Jack could disappear into the cold swirling waters of the bay and never be seen again except by fishes.
“No. Definitely not that. But there might be some way to induce him to leave.”
“Such as a pistol behind the ears?”
Lily looked at him quickly then, with a new awareness, for there was something in his voice that convinced her he was serious, and capable of doing Jack real violence. She felt herself trembling. Lily had always thought of Fergy as being a danger to himself. Suddenly, and for the first time, she sensed what violence was in him, and how dangerously close to the surface it might be. She reached for his hand.
“You must promise me, Fergy, that you won’t do anything before we plan it out together, and carefully. After all, we don’t know what Jack wants of us, do we?”
“I can smell it from here, Lily. He wants cash, and fast, and plenty of it.”
“Let’s hope,” she said as the precarious balance of her situation sank deeper and deeper into her brain, “that it will be that simple.”
They hired a cab, for Lily would not be seen in one of the Chaffee carriages on such an errand. And as the cab rattled down the great hill, Lily was glad of Fergy’s strong presence beside her, for she felt like a prisoner going to the gallows.
She had dressed carefully for this fateful meeting, dressed simply and in black, and with her only hooded cloak, black velvet and designed more for operagoing than assignations with one’s twenty-two-years-lost lover. Still, it covered her hair, for which she was justly famous, and it thrust most of her face into shadow.
She felt like a criminal, and hated Jack for making her feel thus.
But more than hate and more than any fear for herself was the greater fear of what Jack might do, even unintentionally, to wreck Kate’s happiness.
The Belle Hélène was elegant and sly, precisely the sort of French restaurant where Lily had gone, so long ago, for supper with Luke Ransome, to be seduced by his words of love, and wake to his leather sack of gold nuggets. And that, too, had been for Kate. She took one quick look at the place and knew it cost money, knew there would be discreet little rooms upstairs with locks on the inside only, and that in one of those rooms Jack would be waiting.
And after all I’ve been through, she thought, shivering, it will end here, in this sleazy restaurant, because Jack Wallingford needs money. She stopped in her tracks and whispered to Fergy, “I can’t do it.”
“You have to, Lil. The only thing worse than going would be not going. It’d make the man desperate, and by the sound of him, he’s desperate enough as it is.”
It was unarguable. She took a deep breath and followed the leering headwaiter up the stairs.
It was only by his mocking laughter and by the danger in his eyes that Lily recognized Jack Wallingford.
Her Jack, the Jack of 1856, had been a sle
ek dark boy, very grown up for twenty-one, handsome in his way, although never a patch on Brooks Chaffee, but with a defiant grace to him and a reckless air, a sense of riding upon the wind and laughing at risky heights and caring never a damn about the fall that must surely one day come.
And how he had fallen, that sleek dark boy.
Bloated now to twice his boyhood size, none too clean, and balding, his well-cut dark suit shiny with wear, boots cracked and uncared for, Jack sprawled rather than sat on a French settee that looked far too small for him. A champagne glass tilted in his pudgy hand, and a big silver bucket held one bottle empty and inverted, one open, and two untouched. Jack heard the door and looked in their direction, his eyes moving with a quick furtive motion followed more slowly by the bulk of his head. He struggled to rise, slopping champagne on the red-flowered carpet. The headwaiter paused, surveyed Jack with undisguised disdain, turned, and left them.
Lily suddenly found herself thinking of the limestone palace on Fifth Avenue, of its gilded bronze and marble, of Jack’s mother holding up a bracelet of enormous sapphires, of Marianne and her English baron.
Jack’s laugh cut into her dreams, mocking the dream and her place in it, mocking himself and all the world and its follies.
“A vision, that’s what you are, my Lily, a vision, but then, you always were a vision, even—heh-heh—when my vision wasn’t quite clear. But who may this be. Surely not—no, it is not!—my dearest, oldest chum. Brooks?”
She wondered if the liquor had completely rotted his brain, or what was left of it. “Fergus Malone, meet Jack Wallingford. Jack, this is my brother.”
“Aha! The long-lost brother. Well I remember Lily’s tales of you. Lost at sea, were you not?”
“That,” said Fergy with unaccustomed gravity, “is what Lily thought.”
Jack reconsidered his attempt to rise, and waved them rather grandly into the two available chairs.
“Do, do sit down, and perhaps you’ll take a glass of wine with old Jack, in fond memory of times past.”
And your no-good bank draft, and buying me off for a thousand dollars, and for all the other servant girls you’ve ruined, Lily though with a rush of unexpected bitterness, and we’ll toast the good gone days with champagne that I’ll end up paying for, and at inflated prices, too, in this gilt-edged whorehouse.
But then she thought of what he might do, and the dangers of angering him, and Lily accepted the glass Jack offered with his none-too-steady hand.
She swept the black velvet hood from her head and looked at the man whose lust had changed her life forever, and found that she could not hate him.
What Lily felt was more like pity, for she thought of all the happiness the years had brought her, even when mixed with shame and with suffering, and it was all too obvious what sad changes the same amount of time had wrought on Jack Wallingford.
“And how,” she asked, for want of any better thing to say, “are your parents?”
“Dead, both dead, and better for it, the way things turned out. The last of the famous Wallingford sapphires went to bury them in fine style, finer far than they’d known these last years.” He lifted the champagne glass high, as if making some silent toast, then in one quick gesture emptied it. “No one came, of course. They don’t, in New York, come to the funerals of dead nouveaux riches with the bad grace to lose their riches. Twelve funeral carriages, I ordered, and nine of them went empty.”
“And how have you been, Jack?”
“I? How have I been? I’ve been exemplary, my dear Lily, quite exemplary. How often in this fickle world does one get the chance to so spectacularly fulfill all the prophecies the bon-ton of New York made about me in my feckless youth? They all said I’d come to a bad end, and…here I am!”
He said it with a little note of triumph, pathetic in its childlike enthusiasm. Then he refilled his wineglass.
“Here I am,” he said, as if to an empty room, “on my uppers and blackmailing servant girls. A bounder, that’s what I am, Lily, and that’s what they all expected me to be. Bounding Jack Wallingford. Well, dearie, I’ve come bounding right straight across the wide prairies and into your life.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Money, of course. An income. A bit of security for my old age.”
Lily stood up. Green fire flashed from her eyes. “There is no way, my dear Jack, to blackmail Lily Cigar. What would you accuse me of that the gossips of the town haven’t accused me of already, time and again?”
“I wasn’t thinking so much of you, Lily. I was thinking of Lily Cigar’s daughter, of the fair Katharine, of her upcoming marriage to young Mr. Dane Atkinson of New York City, an event that seems to delight the local newspapers nearly as much as might the revelation of the girl’s parentage.”
Lily looked at him, shocked beyond disgust, angered beyond fear. Suddenly she understood why murders happen, and she knew that if the little revolving pistol Stanford had given her long ago were in her reticule now, she might well use it. And she thought of Katie, and thanked all the angels for sparing the child this dark, dark side of her heritage. When Lily replied, it was in a low, even tone, a voice drained of all emotion.
“You wouldn’t dare do such a thing to your own daughter.”
“Aha! Then she is my daughter. I wasn’t quite sure. One of the luxuries we bounders can’t afford, Lily, is tender feelings for the family tie, even when bound to it by law. Nor am I sure how the good Brooks Chaffee might react to learning I’ve made horns for him twice now, in a manner of speaking, first with you, dear Lily, first of all men, and then with the sainted Caroline.”
Lily’s temper came back to her then, back from the cold, dead place where Jack’s words had sent her feelings into hiding. The worst part was that Jack seemed to be enjoying himself so. It wasn’t just a question of money, that was clear now: it was the pleasure he got from inflicting pain. The rage built in Lily until she couldn’t trust herself to speak. Helpless, fuming, she looked to Fergy. Anything Fergy wanted to do or have done to this monster, Lily would agree to, and give her blessing. Death was too kind for Jack Wallingford.
Then Fergy spoke, and his voice was quiet, measured, and very unlike the usual hotheaded response Lily had come to expect of him.
“I think,” he began evenly, “that there’s a solution that may make us all happy. How,” he asked Jack gently, “would you like an easy position at a very good salary—guaranteed—in one of the most beautiful places on this earth, inhabited by some of the most beautiful women on earth, and with a good cash settlement to help you get started?”
“Where is this paradise?”
“Hawaii, and paradise is the right word for it. We are expanding into the pineapple trade there, and a general overseer is just what we need. You’ll have a big house and servants, high on a hill overlooking the sea. The native women are lovely and very fond of making love. The salary will be generous and the work minimal, and you’ll have plenty of help. And, let us say, a hundred thousand dollars in the bank.”
Lily looked at her brother in barely concealed wonderment. He was making it all up. There were no such plans, although they had discussed the prospect vaguely from time to time over the years, and always put it aside as unmanageable. Then she looked at Jack, and saw his interest growing.
Jack looked at them both. “It’s all too easy-sounding,” he said, as if to himself. “There’s got to be a hook in it somewhere.”
“There certainly is,” Lily said quickly, “for while we will go some distance to avoid…complications, we are not fools altogether. First, you must stay in Hawaii for five years, no less. Secondly, you must never attempt to contact Kate or my husband. And third, you must put that in writing, on a contract that will be in your hands by this time tomorrow, along with the money and your passage to Honolulu.”
He looked at her blankly for a moment and then smiled. “You learn fast, my little Lily, you learn very fast.”
Jack turned to Fergy, then back to Lily. �
�I’ll do it, and thank you both very kindly. More wine?”
For an instant Lily thought she had heard him wrongly. He’ll do it, then! He will actually do it. Fergy has saved me from being a murderess. With a quick, involuntary gesture, Lily cast her eyes to the ceiling, fully expecting to find a band of angels up there, watching over her. For surely this was a miracle! She came out of her daze, blinking, flustered, and she was still fighting for control of her voice when she replied.
“Really, we must be going. Fergy will visit you tomorrow with a bank draft and the rest of it.”
He sipped his wine and peered at her over the rim of the glass. “‘Really, we must be going,’ My, my. I found an upstairs maid, but what did I lose? I salute you, Lily Cigar, for it’s a fast track and you are indeed some kind of a thoroughbred.”
“Thank you, and good-bye.”
She turned and left, with Fergy quick behind her. They were halfway out the door when his voice came back at them, sharp and startling.
“Wait!”
Fergy turned back to face the room. Jack laughed. “I forgot this.” He held up the restaurant’s check. Fergy took out his wallet and left several large bills on a table.
“Thanks, pal.”
“I’ll see you here at five tomorrow.” Then Fergy took his sister’s arm and walked her down the stairs.
Only in the hansom cab did she dare speak. “Fergy, if I live forever, I can never thank you enough. I was trembling back there. I didn’t know whether to kill him…or myself.”
He looked at her, and smiled, and bent across the short distance to kiss her cheek. “And what have I ever done for you, Lil, but caused you pain and sorrow? You think it’s a good plan?”
“Anything that gets that beast out of town is a good plan, Fergy. Yes, it’s a fine plan. Better far than anything that came into my poor head. I was thinking only of Kate.”
“I’ll be sad to miss the wedding, but she’ll forgive her feckless old uncle, I hope.”
“But why miss it?”
“To go with him, silly girl. You don’t think I’d ever turn a man like that loose with a hundred thousand dollars and his good word? I know the type very well, Lily, my love, far too well for my own good, and but for the grace of God and my sister, I might be like Jack Wallingford. His promises are written in smoke, Lil, no matter what he signs. He’d be back like a shot to bother you more. No, think not another thought on it: I’ll sail with him, and very soon, and see that he stays put, at least for a good while. And in any event, I’ve always wanted to go out there, truly I have. If what they say about those native girls is true, well, there’s no answering for just when I’ll be back.”