Lydia

by Howard Fast

  “Eight flights,” I cried. This was five down.

  “Harvey, you’re not terribly smart,” Lydia said. “I keep telling myself you are—” The words were chopped by her effort to take double steps and maintain her balance as we flew down. “I try to convince myself. But if you had a brain in your head, you would have gone up, not down.”

  The elevator was going down. It stopped, and we fled past the door and down the next flight as the elevator doors opened. By the time they were actually opened, we had tumbled down to the next landing. What miracle of balance preserved us, I do not know. We were exhausted and Lydia had a few drinks in her, but beyond belief or reason, we leaped, skipped and tumbled down eight flights of stairs without once falling or losing balance or flying head over heels, which is unquestionably what should have happened. I don’t recall thinking of anything much during this time, except that I must learn karate and then come back and break every bone in the body of a certain elevator operator.

  The elevator stopped once again, and again it missed us—and after that, we and the elevator plunged on nonstop to the bottom. We shaded the elevator by just a hair’s breadth, and I flung open the downstairs service door just as the elevator doors began to open. It was all dovetailed and in jerky, matched sequence, like one of those old silent films. Myself, racing across the lobby of 626 Park Avenue to the street door; Lydia, running wildly to keep pace with me—and behind us, pouring through the service door, bent on capture and violent death, Sarbine, his man and the skinny doorman.

  At that moment the street door opened and two middle-aged couples who had been living the good life swept in—long skirts, mink, ermine, black ties—and without thanking them or blessing them, I dragged Lydia past them and shouted wildly at the cab that had brought them.

  The cab, just drawing away from the curb, came to a stop. I opened the door. Lydia fell in. I leaped after her and slammed the door. “Where to?” the driver asked.

  “Uptown—just the way you’re pointed. Uptown.”

  We pulled away as Sarbine burst through the door, his man after him. Lydia, staring through the back window, murmured, “Uncle Mark and his devoted assistant, murdering Sam, We leave them bodily but in heart they remain with us. Is there a red splotch on my face from the plaster, Harvey?”

  “Just tell me where you’re going, buddy—huh?” the cab driver demanded.

  I bounced less well than Lydia. After all, I was thirty-five, and I had just catapulted myself down eight flights of stairs. I was shaking like a reed and covered with sweat, and also exhausted. My first attempt to give directions to the driver sounded like a blurred gurgle, and anyway, I was facing back, staring through the window to where Sarbine and his man stood. They stood there, no car, no cabs. The light stopped us, and then the light changed, and we started again, and still the two of them remained standing. Then I managed to explain to the driver that we wanted to go into Central Park and once or twice around the auto drive. He turned around to look at me, made his assessment, and then began to drive.

  Lydia was trying to mend the tear in her dress with a safety pin. “Help me, Harvey,” she said. I tried, but my hands were shaking too much, and she said, “Poor Harvey—you really are such a coward. Do you have money to pay for the cab? I left my coat there and my purse too—I think—or did I leave my purse back at the bar?”

  I had eleven dollars. “And as far as this coward business is concerned—well, you can make too much of it. I have some normal instincts of self-preservation,”

  “Poor Harvey. And you did save my life.”

  “Twice. And to hell with that poor Harvey stuff. What’s wrong with you anyway? You go out of the hotel and let two bums hustle you into a cab. Did you ever think of screaming? Or kicking? Or biting, for that matter?”

  “Do you bite, Harvey?”

  “That’s a great question, do I bite.”

  “I don’t want to quarrel with you, Harvey,” Lydia said. “Not one bit, believe me. Only—well, don’t you ever hit back?”

  “With what? I weigh one forty-two.”

  “Well—”

  “I manage, don’t I?”

  “I guess so. I’m so tired, Harvey. Will we go back to the hotel?”

  “No.”

  “Then where, Harvey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right. Don’t be upset about it, because it will work itself out, Harvey.”

  “What will?”

  “Well, just the way we are, riding around in a cab. We can’t go on riding around in a cab. Harvey—when did I meet you?”

  I thought about it for a while before I answered and told her that it was fourteen hours, give or take a half hour.

  “Fourteen hours?”

  “That’s about it, Lydia.”

  “You mean I didn’t know you before? I never saw you before? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “That’s about it, Lydia.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment as the cab turned west to Central Park, and the driver said to me, “You’re sure, Jack, that this is what you want—around the park?”

  “I got eleven dollars. That should take me around the park. We had a rough time, so why don’t you just relax and drive us.”

  “All right, I was not trying to be nosy, Jack, but it is almost two o’clock in the morning. A cab is primarily for riding.”

  “Just relax and drive,” I snapped at him, and eyes closed, Lydia whispered to me:

  “You sound so tough, Harvey—really. Is it true that I just met you? I think we lost a day somewhere.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “We don’t really fight or anything, do we, Harvey? I mean, we get along, don’t we? Of course, I like to face the truth—I like to face facts and to call a spade a spade, and sometimes that irritates you, doesn’t it, Harvey?”

  “No. Never.”

  “What was I saying, Harvey?”

  Her head fell over on my shoulder and she was asleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THERE IS a Hertz rental station in the forties that stays open all night, and I told the cab driver to take us there. Maybe he was disappointed in that he never did have a chance to circle the park with sin playing games on his back seat. The fact of the matter was that sin, in a torn dress and with a scratched arm, was curled up against me, sound asleep; and I had a time awakening her at the Hertz place.

  “I want to sleep, Harvey,” she pleaded. “Why don’t you let me sleep?”

  “All right, cooky, but not in the cab.” Then I steered her into the Hertz place and deposited her in a waitingroom chair, and told her, “You can sleep right here if you want to, but if two oversize hoodlums grab you, just start screaming at the top of your lungs.”

  “Thank you, Harvey,” she whispered, and when I let go of her, she was asleep again.

  I talked the girl at the counter out of two dollars’ worth of change, and then I went into the telephone booth and called my Aunt Evelyn Bodin, who lives alone in a large stone house near New Hope, Pennsylvania. It was a cruel time to call and awaken her, but I was desperate and also thoroughly frightened.

  She answered the second ring, with the dry, alarmed, uncertain voice of a person awakened from sleep, and when I told her who was calling, she said, “Good heavens, Harvey—what time is it?”

  “About two in the morning, Aunt Evelyn, and I feel rotten about waking you like this, but I need help and I’m in trouble—real trouble.”

  “Speak up, Harvey,” Aunt Evelyn said. “Really, I’m only half awake. What is all this about trouble?”

  “I said, I’m in trouble.”

  “Well, of course you are. Of course you are. I know that. Is that any reason to awaken me in the middle of the night?”

  “Aunt Evelyn, please listen to me.”

  “I am listening, Harvey.”

  “Well, there’s a girl—”

  “Naturally. Is she the one you want to bring to dinner tomorrow? Then why can’t all of this keep unt
il tomorrow?”

  “Because if it keeps, we may not be alive tomorrow. Now listen to me, Aunt Evelyn. I want to come down right now. I’m in New York—and I want to drive down now, do you understand, and I want to bring this girl with me.”

  “Now? In the middle of the night?”

  “Please, Aunt Evelyn—please, I promise I’ll explain. All I want now is shelter for the night. You can leave the door open, and we’ll come in very quietly—”

  “Harvey, you and this girl—are you? I mean, do you both—I mean—”

  “No, we’re not sleeping together, Aunt Evelyn. She’s just a kid who’s in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Not that kind,” I assured my aunt. “Her trouble is with people who want to kill her.”

  “Harvey, I never heard such nonsense in all my life.”

  “Look, darling,” I told her, “I’ll clear this all up tomorrow.”

  “It is tomorrow.”

  “Then today. The point is, will you leave the door unlatched? And may I put her in Hillery’s room, and may I bed down in the guest room?”

  “Of course you may, Harvey, although I must say that it is somewhat uncivilized to make these arrangements at this hour. I’ll leave the door unlatched and see to the rooms. You will stay for dinner? You know, I planned it.”

  “I promise.”

  “Is she a nice girl, Harvey?”

  “Sort of—a trifle skinny.”

  “I mean has she an acceptable background?”

  “Well, you’ll see her. But don’t wake us, please. We have already passed the point of being simply tired.”

  “All right, Harvey. But please, as far as the future is concerned, try to live with more normal hours.”

  Now at least we had a place to go, a place where I could leave Lydia, where she could rest and react to a normal world, a normal home and some normal people. In exchange, I would present Aunt Evelyn with normal hours.

  I hired the Hertz car on the strength of my credit card, and when it was ready, about ten minutes later, I used my remaining persuasion on Lydia. She wasn’t having any. “You go ahead, Harvey,” she said, her eyes tight shut. “I’ll stay here and sleep.”

  “I don’t move a step without you.”

  “Harvey, you want me to scream?”

  “If you have to, scream, wail, anything. But you’re coming with me.”

  “Where, Harvey?”

  “To Aunt Evelyn’s place in New Hope.”

  “Oh.”

  She never opened her eyes. Finally I lifted her and carried her into the car. The night clerk and the night attendant both wanted to know whether there was anything seriously wrong?

  “Mentally, yes. Physically, it is simply fatigue.”

  “Go to hell,” Lydia whispered.

  I got her into the car, and I finally drove off. At that hour the streets were empty, and we drove to the Lincoln tunnel through a deserted city. Then, once through the tunnel and out onto the road, I could relax for the first time in quite a while. Exhausted though I was, nevertheless I could sit back and know that for at least the next few hours, my life was safe and Lydia’s life was safe. You will say that the city was wide and the countryside even wider, but then you have never been hunted. Man is the hunter; he is conditioned to that; and the feeling of what horror it is to be the hunted lurks far back in the mind, deep in the mind.

  On 22 and then on Route 202, I drove slowly. There were almost no other cars. The night was late and would be later, and Lydia slept, her head pressed up against my shoulder, her hair in dark disarray across her features. I thought of a Kerry Blue and of one of those blank-faced, amiable English sheepdogs. It was not very charitable of me, but then neither was my relationship to Lydia like any relationship I had ever developed with anyone else, or like any notion I had ever had of what should be between a man and a woman.

  I drove on, and the moon rose and flooded the low hills with silver light. The Delaware River was like a still, fixed band of dark steel, the hills beyond it glistening with dew or black with the new-plowed furrows. Four miles more, and I coasted silently into Aunt Evelyn’s driveway. Wisely, she had let her two dogs out, and now they came racing over without barking, recognized me, and licked my hand. They were both stupid, good-natured setters, and in all likelihood they would have had enough sense to bark at a stranger.

  Lydia curled up on the seat and at first refused to move, but I insisted. “About twenty feet from here,” I said softly but firmly, “there is a large stone house, full of beds and covers and non-murderous people.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Let them murder me.”

  “No more murder. Bed. But you must walk there. I am too tired to carry you, Lydia.”

  That penetrated, and somehow or other she made her way out of the car and stood swaying in the cold morning air, complaining that she was cold, and shivering too. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her, and then I led her to the house. The door was open, and we entered quietly. The hall light was lit to show us the way. On the doorknob of the guest room a sheet of paper was suspended.

  The paper was offered as proof of my Aunt Evelyn’s sophistication. It informed us where this and that was, extra blankets, pajamas, and instructed Lydia, if she needed a change of clothes, to look into Hillery’s closet and see what would fit her. “Hillery?” Lydia asked me, and I told her briefly about my aunt’s dead daughter, but only briefly. Lydia was falling asleep again, and I took her to her room, let her drop on the bed, pulled off her shoes and covered her.

  Back in the guest room, I undressed, got into pajamas, smoked a cigarette and thought about things. My cousin Hillery, my mother and my brother—all killed in a single car in a witless, senseless accident. And then my father, unable to face it or deal with it in any intelligent manner, decided to blow out his brains. That bound me to Lydia in some strange and peculiar way, but just how, I did not quite know—any more than I really knew whether I wanted to marry a skinny, half-baked kid whom I had known less than twenty-four hours.

  Suddenly I was very tired. I put out my cigarette, turned off the light—and fell asleep so quickly that I remember none of it.

  Light in my eyes awakened me, sunlight pouring in through the open window.

  I closed my eyes for a while more, and then eased them into the light. I was a thousand miles and a thousand years from anywhere, and I lay there in the small, low-ceilinged Dutch room, luxuriating in a sense of security, a gracious little-boy feeling of reposing beyond harm or threat. I looked through the window to where a tree was putting out its first buds, and beyond the tree, fields, hedges, woods—the flow of land, slope upon slope, to where the next stone house stood, small and bare and ancient in that sun-drenched distance.

  I looked at my watch, and it was a half hour past noon.

  I took a bath, shaving while I waited for the tub to fill. There was always a fresh razor in Aunt Evelyn’s guest room, and at some time this morning she must have slipped in quietly and looked at my clothes. In any case, my dirty gray suit had been removed for cleaning, and in its place, a pair of brown slacks, a clean white shirt and a green corduroy jacket. She must have kept all of my uncle’s clothes, and it was at least five years since he had died. They fitted fairly well. Dressed, I went across the hall to Hillery’s room, but Lydia was gone, the room made up.

  Downstairs, in the sunny, cheerful living room, Mrs. Sokol, the housekeeper, told me that my aunt was in New Hope, that Lydia was somewhere out back, and that she had been waiting breakfast for me to awaken.

  “That’s a nice girl, Harvey,” she said to me.

  I was suddenly very hungry, and I told Mrs. Sokol that I would find Lydia, and that she could start frying eggs or whatever she was going to do about breakfast.

  “You want eggs in deep bacon fat, Harvey?”

  “I can’t think of anything I want more right now.”

  In back of the house, the land sloped down to a little duck pond, and there
Lydia was watching a big goose give swimming instructions to her young. Wearing a gray skirt, white sweater and white sneakers, my aunt’s or Hillery’s, Lydia looked at least five years younger than the twenty-three she laid claim to. Rested, her face bright, scrubbed clean, her dark hair blowing in the breeze, she hung upon a fence, intent upon the geese. She didn’t hear me until I was almost upon her, and then she whirled suddenly to confront me. She grinned and impulsively threw her arms around me; then she let go of me and backed away.

  “I keep forgetting that you don’t like me and that we don’t really know each other,” she explained.

  “Well, that’s all right,” I told her. “You’re just a kid and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by someone like me.”

  “The trouble is, Harvey, that you mean that. You’re so obnoxious, you know. Did you sleep well?”

  “Like a baby.” I took her arm and started to lead her back to the house. “I’m starving—”

  “I saw your aunt for a moment before she went off. She’s the sweetest thing in the world. And very beautiful, Harvey.”

  “She was a silent-picture star.”

  “No?”

  “Yup—back in ancient times. Is it hard for you to believe that anyone out of those days is still alive?”

  “It really gets you that I’m twelve years younger than you are, doesn’t it, Harvey?”

  “Maybe—sort of.”

  We ate in the breakfast room—orange juice, fresh rolls, sausage and bacon and eggs. I ate three eggs and four strips of bacon. Lydia had three eggs, six strips of bacon, two sausage patties and four of the rolls. I had only one roll.

  “I am not always this hungry,” Lydia said apologetically.

  “I know. You miss the lard.”

  “Lard?”

  “The butter of a southern girl.”

  “Harvey, I hate lard. Furthermore, Harvey, you show a certain hostility that manifests itself in various ways, all of them unpleasant.”

  “Aren’t you making much of a small crack?”

  “Pass me the marmalade,” she said. “You should have enough sense to see that I remain slim. I wear a ten dress, and I certainly have nothing that resembles that suspicious bulge at your waistline.”