“You all right?” he asked, looking more than a little worried. “You know, I told you I’ve reserved this suite.”
“My God.”
“Well, I hate to wake you up, but we have to—”
“All right.”
“I don’t know exactly when—”
“My God.”
“If I’d thought—”
“All right. Where is she?”
“Who? Oh, well, about six o’clock this morning—”
“My God, never mind.”
“I thought you’d want to sleep for a few hours, but—”
“All right.” I found my trousers and my wallet and I somehow paid off Bert. “I’ll be out of here in three minutes. Was there anything, by the way—?”
“Nothing, Mr. Stroud. It’s just that this room—”
“Sure. Get my bag out of here, will you?”
He said he would, and after that I got dressed in a hurry, looking around the room for possible notes as I found a clean shirt, washed but did not attempt to shave, poured myself a fraction of an inch that seemed to be left in a bottle of Scotch somehow on hand.
Who was she?
Pauline Delos. Janoth’s girl friend. Oh, God. What next?
Where did Georgette think I was? In town, on a job, but coming home a little late. All right. And then?
What was I supposed to be doing at the office today?
I couldn’t remember anything important, and that was not so bad.
But about the major problems? Well, there was nothing I could do about them now, if I had been as stupid as all this. Nothing. Well, all right.
I combed my hair, brushed my teeth, put on my tie.
I could tell Georgette, at her sister’s in Trenton, that I had to work until three in the morning and didn’t want to phone. It would have awakened the whole household. Simple. It had always worked before. It would work this time. Had to.
I closed my valise, left it for Bert in the middle of the room, went downstairs to the barber shop in the lobby. There I got a quick shave, and after that I had a quicker breakfast, and then a split-second drink.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when I got back to my desk, and there was no one around except Lucille, Roy’s and my secretary, listlessly typing in the small room connecting our two offices. She did not appear curious, and I couldn’t find any messages on my desk, either, just a lot of inter-office memos and names.
“Anyone phone me, Lucille?” I asked.
“Just those on your pad.”
“My home didn’t call? Nothing from my wife?”
“No.”
So it was all right. So far. Thank God.
I went back to my desk and sat down and took three more aspirin tablets. It was an afternoon like any other afternoon, except for those nerves. But there should be nothing really the matter with them, either. I began to go through the routine items listed by Lucille. Everything was the same as it had always been. Everything was all right. I hadn’t done anything. No one had.
George Stroud V
AND ALL of that went off all right. And two months passed. And during those two months, Mafferson and I worked up the data and the groundwork for Funded Individuals, and we also worked up a take-out of bankruptcy for the May issue, and a detailed story about bought-and-sold orphans for the June book.
Then one evening, early in March, I had one of those moods. I reached for the phone, and from our confidential telephone service got the number I wanted. When the number answered I said: “Hello, Pauline. This is your attorney.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, after a second. “That one.”
It was a spring day, I told her, as it was the first. We fixed it to have cocktails at the Van Barth.
Georgette and Georgia were in Florida, returning in two days. Earl Janoth was in Washington, for at least a couple of hours, and possibly for a week. It was a Friday.
Before leaving that night I stepped into Roy’s office and found him conferring with Emory Mafferson and Bert Finch. I gathered that Emory was filled with doubts regarding “Crimeless Tomorrow, Science Shows Why, Finance Shows How.”
Emory said: “I can see, on paper, how Funded Individuals works out fine. I can see from the insurance rates and the business statistics that it works out for a few people who happen to be funded, but what I don’t see is, what’s going to happen if everyone belongs to the corporation pool? See what I’m driving at?”
Roy was being at his confident, patient, understanding best. “That’s what it’s supposed to lead to,” he said. “And I think it’s rather nice. Don’t you?”
“Let me put it this way, Roy. If a person capitalized at a million dollars actually returns the original investment, plus a profit, then there’s going to be a tremendous rush to incorporate still more individuals, for still more profit. And pretty soon, everyone will be in clover except the stockholders. What do they get out of the arrangement?”
Roy’s patience took on palpable weight and shape. “Profit,” he said.
“Sure, but what can they do with it? What have they got? Just some monetary gain. They don’t, themselves, lead perfectly conditioned lives, with a big sum left over to invest in some new, paying enterprise. Seems to me the only people that get it in the neck with this scheme are the subscribers who make the whole thing possible.”
Roy said: “You forget that after this has been in operation a few years, funded people will themselves be the first to reinvest their capital in the original pool, so that both groups are always interested parties of the same process.”
I decided they were doing well enough without interference from me, and left.
In the bar of the Van Barth I met a beautiful stranger in a rather austere gray and black ensemble that looked like a tailored suit, but wasn’t. I hadn’t been waiting for more than ten minutes. After we settled on the drink she would have, Pauline said, rather seriously: “I shouldn’t be here at all, you know. I have a feeling it’s dangerous to know you.”
“Me? Dangerous? Kittens a month old get belligerent when they see me coming. Open their eyes for the first time and sharpen up their claws, meowing in anticipation.”
She smiled, without humor, and soberly repeated: “You’re a dangerous person, George.”
I didn’t think this was the right note to strike, and so I struck another one. And pretty soon it was all right, and we had another drink, and then after a while we went to Lemoyne’s for supper.
I had been living pretty much alone for the last three weeks, since Georgette and Georgia had gone to Florida, and I felt talkative. So I talked. I told her the one about what the whale said to the submarine, why the silents had been the Golden Age of the movies, why Lonny Trout was a fighter’s fighter, and then I suggested that we drive up to Albany.
That is what we finally did. I experienced again the pleasure of driving up the heights of the only perfect river in the world, the river that never floods, never dries up, and yet never seems to be the same twice. Albany we reached, by stages, in about three hours.
I had always liked the city, too, which is not as commonplace as it may look to the casual traveler, particularly when the legislature is in session. If there is anything Manhattan has overlooked, it settled here.
After registering under a name I dreamed up with some care and imagination, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Phelps-Guyon, we went out and spent a couple of hours over food and drink, some entertainment and a few dances on a good, not crowded floor, at a damnably expensive night club. But it was an evening with a definite touch of spring, snatched from the very teeth of the inner works, and exceedingly worth while.
We had breakfast at about noon, and shortly afterwards started a slow drive back to the city, by a different route. It was a different river we followed again, of course, and of course, I fell in love with it all over again; and of course, Pauline helped.
It was late Saturday afternoon when we reached the neighborhood of 58 East, Pauline’s apartment building, so early she
admitted she had time and lots of it. We went to Gil’s. Pauline played the game for about three rounds. I thought Gil was stuck when she asked to see Poe’s Raven, but he brought out a stuffed bluebird or something, well advanced in its last molting, and explained it was Poe’s original inspiration, personally presented to his close friend, Gil’s great-grandfather. And then I remembered it was a long time, all of three months, since I’d explored Antique Row.
That is Third Avenue from about Sixtieth Street all the way down to Forty-second, or thereabouts; there may be bigger, better, more expensive and more authentic shops scattered elsewhere about the city, but the spirit of adventure and rediscovery is not in them, somehow. I once asked, on a tall evening in a Third Avenue shop, for the Pied Piper of Hamlin’s pipe. They happened to have it, too. I forget what I did with it, after I bought it for about ten dollars and took it first to the office, where it seemed to have lost its potency, and then home, where somebody broke it and then it disappeared. But it wasn’t Third Avenue’s fault if I hadn’t known how to take care of it properly.
This afternoon Pauline and I dawdled over some not very interesting early New England bedwarmers, spinning wheels converted to floor and table lamps, and the usual commodes disguised as playchairs, bookshelves, and tea carts. All very sound and substantial stuff, reflecting more credit to the ingenuity of the twentieth century than to the imagination of the original craftsmen. It was interesting, some of it, but not exciting.
Then at about half-past seven, with some of the shops closing, we reached a little but simply jam-packed place on Fiftieth Street. Maybe I had been in here before, but I couldn’t remember it and neither, seemingly, did the proprietor remember me.
I rummaged about for several minutes without his help, not seeing anything I may have missed before, but I had a fine time answering Pauline’s questions. Then after a while somebody else came in and I became increasingly aware of the dialogue going forward at the front of the shop.
“Yes, I have,” I heard the dealer say, with some surprise. “But I don’t know if they’re exactly the type you’d want. Hardly anyone asks for pictures in here, of course. I just put that picture in the window because it happened to be framed. Is that the one you wanted?”
“No. But you have some others, haven’t you? Unframed. A friend of mine was in here a couple of weeks ago and said you had.”
The customer was a big, monolithic brunette, sloppily dressed and with a face like an arrested cyclone.
“Yes, I have. They’re not exactly in perfect condition.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “May I see them?”
The dealer located a roll of canvases on an overhead shelf, and tugged them down. I had drifted down to the front of the shop by now, constituting myself a silent partner in the proceedings. The dealer handed the woman the entire roll, and I practically rested my chin on his left shoulder.
“Look them over,” he told the woman.
He turned his head, frowning, and for a fraction of a moment one of his eyes loomed enormously, gazing into one of mine. Mine expressed polite curiosity.
“Where did you get these?” the customer asked.
She unrolled the sheaf of canvases, which were about four by five, some more and some less, and studied the one on top from her reverse viewpoint. It showed a Gloucester clipper under full sail, and it was just like all pictures of clippers, unusual only for a ring of dirt, like an enlarged coffee ring, that wreathed the vessel and several miles of the ocean. To say it was not exactly in perfect condition was plain perjury. The ring, I thought, was about the size of a barrelhead, and that would be about where it came from.
“They were part of a lot,” the dealer guardedly told her. The big woman cut loose with a loud, ragged laugh. “Part of a lot of what?” she asked. “Material for an arson? Or is this some of that old WPA stuff they used to wrap up ten-cent store crockery?”
“I don’t know where it came from. I told you it wasn’t in the best of shape.”
She thrust the one on top to the rear, exposing a large bowl of daisies. Nobody said anything at all, this time; I just closed my eyes for a couple of seconds and it went away.
The third canvas was an honest piece of work of the tenement-and-junkyard school; I placed it as of about fifteen years ago; I didn’t recognize the signature, but it could have been painted by one of five or six hundred good, professional artists who had done the same scene a little better or a little worse.
“Pretty good,” said the shop proprietor. “Colorful. It’s real.”
The tall, square brunette intently went on to the next one. It was another Gloucester clipper, this one going the other way. It had the same magnificent coffee ring that they all did. And the next one was a basket of kittens. “My Pets,” I am sure the nice old lady who painted it had called this one. Anyway, the show was diversified. Clipper artists stuck to clippers, backyard painters did them by the miles, and the nice old lady had certainly done simply hundreds and hundreds of cats. Our gallery had them all.
“I’m afraid you haven’t got anything here that would interest me,” said the woman.
The man tacitly admitted it, and she resumed the show. Two more pictures passed without comment, and I saw there were only two or three more.
Then she turned up another one, methodically, and I suddenly stopped breathing. It was a Louise Patterson. There was no mistaking the subject, the treatment, the effect. The brothers and sisters of that picture hung on my walls in Marble Road. I had once paid nine hundred dollars for one of them, not much less for the others, all of which I had picked up at regular Patterson shows on Fifty-seventh Street.
The customer had already slipped a tentative finger in back of it to separate it from the next canvas and take it away, when I cleared my throat and casually remarked: “I rather like that.”
She looked at me, not very amiably, swung the picture around and held it up before her, at arm’s length; it curled at the edges where it wasn’t frayed, and it had a few spots of something on it in addition to the trademark of the outsized coffee ring. It was in a frightful condition, no less.
“So do I,” she flatly declared. “But it’s in one hell of a shape. How much do you want for it?”
The question, ignoring me entirely, was fired at the dealer.
“Why—”
“God, what a mess.”
With her second shot she doubtless cut the dealer’s intended price in half.
“I wouldn’t know how to value it, exactly,” he admitted. “But you can have it for ten dollars?”
It was the literal truth that I did not myself know what a Patterson would be worth, today, on the regular market. Nothing fabulous, I knew; but on the other hand, although Patterson hadn’t exhibited for years, and for all I knew was dead, it did not seem possible her work had passed into complete eclipse. The things I had picked up for a few hundred had been bargains when I bought them, and later still the artist’s canvases had brought much more, though only for a time.
I beamed at the woman. “I spoke first,” I said to her, and then to the dealer: “I’ll give you fifty for it.”
The dealer, who should have stuck to refurnished porch furniture, was clearly dazzled and also puzzled. I could tell the exact moment the great electric light went on in his soul: he had something, probably a Rembrandt.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s obviously a clever picture. Extremely sound. I was intending to have this lot appraised, when I had the time. This is the first time I’ve really looked at the lot, myself. I think—”
“It is not a Raphael, Rubens, or Corot,” I assured him. He leaned forward and looked more closely at the picture. The canvas showed two hands, one giving and the other receiving a coin. That was all. It conveyed the whole feeling, meaning, and drama of money. But the proprietor was unwrinkling the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas, where the signature would be rather legibly scrawled. I began to perspire.
“Pat something,” he announced,
studying it carefully, and the next moment he sounded disappointed. “Oh. Patterson, ‘32. I ought to know that name, but it’s slipped my mind.” I let this transparent perjury die a natural death. The large brunette, built like an old-fashioned kitchen cabinet, didn’t say anything either. But she didn’t need to. She obviously didn’t have fifty dollars. And I had to have that picture. “It’s a very superior work,” the dealer began again. “When it’s cleaned up, it’ll be beautiful.”
“I like it,” I said. “For fifty bucks.”
He said, stalling: “I imagine the fellow who painted it called the picture Toil. Something like that.”
“I’d call it Judas” Pauline spoke up. “No, The Temptation of Judas.”
“There’s only one coin,” said the dealer, seriously. “There would have to be thirty.” Still stalling, he took the canvases and began to go through those we had not seen. A silo, with a cow in front of it. A nice thing with some children playing in the street. The beach at Coney Island. Depressed at stirring no further interest, he declared, “And that’s all I have.” To the brunette, and smiling glassily, I said: “Why don’t you take the Grand Street Children, for about five dollars? I’ll take the Judas.”
She unchained a whoop of laughter that was not, as far as I could make out, either friendly or hostile. It was just loud. “No, thanks, I have enough children of my own.”
“I’ll buy you a frame, we’ll fix it here, and you can take it home.”
This produced another shriek, followed by a roar.
“Save it for your fifty-dollar masterpiece.” This sounded derisive. I asked her, with a bite in it: “Don’t you believe it’s worth that?”
“A picture that is worth anything at all is certainly worth a lot more than that,” she suddenly blazed. “Don’t you think so? It is either worth ten dollars or a million times that much.” Mentally I agreed with this perfectly reasonable attitude, but the shop proprietor looked as though he did, too. And I had to have that picture. It wasn’t my fault I had only sixty odd dollars left after one of the most expensive week ends in history, instead of ten million. “But what do I know about paintings? Nothing. Don’t let me interfere. Maybe sometime,” there was another bloodcurdling laugh, “I’ll have the right kind of wallpaper, and just the right space to match the Grand Street Children. Save it for me.”
The Big Clock Page 4