“You son of a bitch,” I said.
He sat up. “What?”
“You son of a bitch,” I repeated slowly and distinctly. “To do that to anybody. Especially you, the way you lay every woman you can get next to, including everybody’s sister.”
“Wait a second. We’re not talking about them. We’re talking about my sister.”
“What about your sister?”
“Do I have to tell you?”
“No,” I said, “you don’t. Maybe I know more about her than you can tell me.”
I knew as I said it that I shouldn’t have. Knew it even before Ben moved catlike out of bed. He switched on the lamp, and we stood almost face to face. There was no little smile on his lips now. “You and Mia,” he said in a choked voice. “You double-crossed me!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. I can see it on your face. You know what’s going to happen now, and you don’t like it, do you? You had a great time laughing when I was getting shot up by the Commies, but you’re not laughing now, are you? When was it? How many times was it? You ought to know! You’ve probably got it marked down somewhere so you could shove it up me when you were good and ready. Well, you better be good and ready now!”
“Shut up,” I said. “Are you trying to tell everybody in the house that your sister went to bed with a man? Why don’t you think of her?”
“I’m thinking of her, all right. Her with her new car and fancy riding horse and everything else her papa can give her if she just looks at him. Oh, I’m thinking of her, the little bitch. I’m thinking of what’s going to happen to her when the family gets this. Goddam if she doesn’t end up in a convent. That’s where she belongs—in a convent, praying to God to forgive her for being what she is!”
I was staggered by his foaming fury. His face worked, his chest heaved as if he had run a fast race. “You’re out of your mind,” I said. “You sound like something out of the Middle Ages. Where do you come off to talk like that about Mia? She hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“I’ll be the judge of what’s right and wrong!”
“All right, be the judge. But I’m telling you she hasn’t done anything wrong. Not with me she hasn’t.”
He wiped his hand dazedly over his forehead. “You’re lying.”
“Have I ever lied to you before?”
“That’s what I don’t know. That’s what I have to find out.” He looked distractedly around the room. “I’m going over to that hotel right now. She’ll tell me herself if anything happened. I’ll know when I look at her if she’s telling the truth.”
He picked up his trousers from the floor, and I knocked them from his hand. “You’re not going anywhere now. You start a racket at that hotel now, the whole town’ll be in on it. You can talk to her tomorrow morning in private. Maybe you’ll have cooled down by then. You’ll know what a damn fool you’re being.”
He stood undecided, gnawing his lip, and I finally shoved him back on the bed before he could resist. “Go on to sleep,” I said. “You’ve had too much to drink, anyhow. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
I turned out the light and lay down, and the blackness between us crackled with unspoken thoughts. Yet I knew his thoughts while he did not know mine. I must kill him, I thought. I have no means of doing it, but I must kill him before tomorrow. I have no means of doing it, so I must wish him dead, and wish it so deep and sure that he will be dead tomorrow.
That was what I thought before I fell asleep to be awakened by the smoke and the flame that destroyed him.
NINE
I had invested part of my uncle Charles’ two hundred dollars in the rental of a car, and on its rear seat I piled my clothes, some books, and a few other odds and ends which, I supposed, would be essential to my housekeeping. I was up in my room dumping the contents of my desk drawers into a carton when Margaret walked in and stood there watching me.
“So you’re quite serious about this,” she said.
“Quite,” I said politely. It was a surprise to see her there, because I knew she was supposed to be attending one of her precious courses that morning, and she made a fetish of never missing a session. She was an inveterate course-taker. Ever since her graduation from college she had been making the rounds of Columbia and N. Y. U. and The New School, soberly drinking tepid draughts from the founts of wisdom. Soberly was the word for it. There was no passion in her for any subject, no matter how intently she took notes on it. Her feeling for anything in art or music or philosophy or science or whatever she happened to be concerned with for the time being was, I think, very much like her feeling for the household accounts she kept. She liked, at the end of the week, to point out that she had a favorable balance in those accounts; she had managed so capably that there was always a dime or a dollar left over. So in her study of the arts and sciences she liked to know that she had a favorable balance in her cultural account. She could thus argue the nice virtues of Constable over Inness, or Mozart over Bartók, or Proust over Dickens—to name at random some of the more unlikely arguments I had with her—not with fervor, but with a cool display of critical terminology that was awesome to behold. It was not that Constable or Mozart or Proust moved her; it was that she knew they were Right, and she knew why. She had the attitude of those people so often to be seen in art galleries, the ones who stop and cautiously study each picture in turn, as if they were grading them. She was a great one for grading things, as long as the proper authority had instructed her on the basis for the grade. I had the feeling, watching her as she stood knitting her brow with concern, that she was acting on good authority now, and I promptly discovered that I was right.
“Father is furious about your taking that money from Uncle Charles,” she said.
“I can’t help that. I needed it.”
“Well, you didn’t have to go to Uncle Charles for it, did you? You might have asked me.”
“I might have,” I said, still as polite as could be, “but would you have given it to me?” and when she was silent, unable to manufacture the ready lie, I said, “It looks as if I didn’t have much choice, did I?”
“Well, the way you make it sound! You know darned well I’ve always given you whatever money you asked for, if it was for something sensible.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know.” On my dresser was the picture of Mia and the old photograph of my mother taken at her début. I fitted them carefully into the carton and looked around the room. There didn’t seem to be anything more to take. I hefted the carton, and Margaret said with outrage, “Put that thing down. Put it down and sit yourself right on that chair, so that for once in my life I can talk to you sanely and intelligently. I’m entitled to that much, aren’t I?”
I had time enough. I put down the carton and waited while Margaret worked her hands together in a way altogether unlike her. “Look at me,” she said. “I’m so upset about this I’m no good at all.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I wish I could believe that. Oh, maybe you are. I don’t know. What is this all about, Danny? Is it because Ben’s dead now, and he always meant so much to you?”
“No.”
“Then what is it? Don’t tell me that all that nonsense in the papers actually means anything to you. My God, people are killed in accidents every day of the year; it’s nobody’s fault if their lives aren’t saved. You must know it wasn’t your fault in Ben’s case. We all know that. Even Father himself admits that the Gennaros couldn’t have been nicer, and they’re the only ones who matter in this. They’d feel awful if they knew you were acting this way—taking a pointless job and moving away from your family. That’s the truth, isn’t it? You know how Mia would feel about it.”
“No. All I know is how I hope she’ll feel about it. Anyhow, I’ll find out soon enough. I’m driving up there this afternoon.”
“I’m glad of that. Now that Ben’s gone she’s probably the only person in the world who can make you listen to reason. I know I can’
t. Why is that, I wonder,” she said with real bewilderment. “What is there between us, Danny, so that no matter how hard I try I can never seem to get through to you?”
Willingly or not I found myself moved by the depth of her feeling. I said, “Maybe it’s because you’re never really trying to get through. You and Father both do the same thing. You take your own ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, and you try to fit them on me even when they don’t make sense. You don’t have a direct wire to heaven, Peg, but from as far back as I can remember you’ve acted as if you did. That’s pretty hard to live with sometimes.”
“That’s not fair! Because I went to the trouble—!”
“You see what I mean? You’re doing it now.”
“Oh, you’re impossible. You think I’ve been hard to live with? Well, you’ve been quite a handful yourself since Mother died. Maybe you don’t know it, but there’ve been times when I was actually terrified of you. And I don’t mean your outlandish ideas or the way you go around the house like a tiger in a cage. I mean physically terrified. Times when I’d be talking to you—or when I’d watch father talking to you—and I’d have the feeling that any second you’d jump right at us. Maybe you don’t remember, but when you were a kid—when we were living at Maartenskill—you once hit me so hard in a temper that I was afraid to go near you for a month afterward. That’s a fine thing to live with, isn’t it?”
“I’m sure it isn’t. Then why make a fuss if I want to get away from here?”
“Because that doesn’t solve anything, damn it. Do you think I can just let you walk out of here and never worry about you any more? It would be wonderful if I could, but I’m not made like that. I can’t help worrying about you. I can’t help thinking how nice it would be if you decided to act like a normal human being. If you just took yourself in hand and stopped being so emotional about everything and acting on any impulse that struck you.”
“Like Austin?”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little bit like Austin.”
“But not like Ben?”
“What does that mean?”
“Peg, when you were going with Ben—when you were wearing his pin and seeing him so much—were you in love with him?”
“I don’t see how that can possibly concern you.”
“Take my word for it, it does. Were you in love with him, Peg?”
Willingly or not, she was moved to take my word for it. “Yes, I suppose I was.”
“Just suppose?”
“It’s hard to tell now. He was very attractive, and that was something. And he had—well, I guess you’d call it glamour. You know that. Wherever you went with him you were always in the center of things. He was the one people wanted to meet. And there were photographers taking your picture, and magazine articles with your name in them—it was the kind of things a girl might be in love with when all the while she thought she was in love with the man.”
“Is that what you realized when he asked you to marry him, and you turned him down?”
“It might have been part of it.”
“What was the other part?”
“What difference does it make?”
“It does. You don’t have to talk about it if you really don’t want to, but it’s important to me. You don’t have any idea how important.”
“Oh, all right, if you insist. The other part happened to be that he was the most conceited thing on two legs. God forgive me for saying it, but he couldn’t be near another woman for two minutes without making a fool of himself. I went through plenty because of that, and he thought it was funny. It never struck him that it could be humiliating for me to be in a roomful of females with him and know that he was simply deciding which one to take to bed. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could see living with the rest of my life.”
“I can’t blame you.”
“Well, he could. We finally had quite a scene about it. My God, how well I can remember that scene. It was absolutely beyond his comprehension why I should want to strip him of his royal prerogatives. He was completely, sincerely amazed that there was anything on the face of the earth that he might not do if he chose to do it. After all, he was Ben Gennaro, wasn’t he? I tell you, it was like talking to a lion in the jungle and telling him he ought to give up eating raw meat. That was the feeling I had.”
“I know.” I tried to think of how to put the question to her and decided that the direct way was the best way. “Peg,” I said, “did you ever go to bed with him?”
Her face reddened. “Well, I like that!”
“Did you? I’m not trying to draw moral judgments, Peg. I just have to know.”
“Why?”
“Because I do. Look, you’re the one who said you were never able to get through to me. But you’re doing it now. And I swear to you, it has only to do with me. It has nothing to do with you at all.”
“You mean all this about Ben and me?”
“Yes.”
She thought that over with open bewilderment showing on her face, and then she laughed shortly. “I suppose I’ll never understand you to my dying day, will I? Here I am trying to make you listen to sense, and suddenly I’m off somewhere digging the skeletons out of my closet. If that isn’t—oh, what’s the difference. No, I never slept with Ben. I’m probably one of the few women in his life who can make that claim. You seem surprised by that. I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.”
I wasn’t thinking about her. I was thinking about the way Ben Gennaro had so beautifully blocked my every means of escape from him.
Margaret said with strained jauntiness, “But I must admit that I can’t claim all the credit. As a matter of fact, there was one time—do you remember when he came out of the Veterans Hospital and we went up to Albany for the governor’s reception?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it was quite a reception, quite a gala time for all. What with the bands and the hand-shaking and cheering it must have gone right to my head. So there I was alone with him in his hotel room afterward, telling him I was receptive to anything he suggested, making a perfect fool of myself the way I offered myself to him. And he certainly let me know I was a fool. He was furious about it. As his bride-to-be I had better get rid of any such ideas. They might be all right for the slut he’d have sent up to him an hour later—oh, he didn’t say that, but you know what I mean—but they were shocking to find in the virginal creature he intended to marry. And he meant it.”
“I’m sure he did.”
Margaret said with quick suspicion, “He didn’t tell you different, did he? He didn’t tell you that we—”
“No. He never said anything about it one way or the other.”
She laughed again, that same sharp little laugh that was more a choked gasp than a laugh. “That’s something, isn’t it? Ben Gennaro, ever gallant. He didn’t have any flaws, did he? Outside of his sexual proclivities, that is, and I imagine that most men regard them as a virtue, too. It’s too bad in a way. Since you got to know him, Father’s always been drawing comparisons between you, and that can be hard to bear sometimes, can’t it? But things’ll be different now. Believe me, they will, Danny. You’ll find that out for yourself if you just give yourself the chance.”
“Why?” I said. “Have you been talking to Father about it?”
“Not yet. But I will. I’ll do it tonight.”
She was, to use her own phrase, getting through to me a little too well for my own comfort. I picked up the carton again. “Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ve been talking to him all my life. I’m not signing off now so that you can take over for me.”
Brooklyn lies on the opposite bank of the East River from Manhattan, and, as the wily Romans would have it, he who lives on the opposite bank of your river rivalis est. So I drove through the land of my rivals with care, getting lost a few times and being in no way helped by the natives of whom I sought directions. It was a weathered and shabby land, the principal industry of which seemed to be the prolific breeding of t
he young. Every street was full of them, playing ball or loud games of tag, making way for the car with slow contemptuous indifference, or loitering against the houses and watching the wayfarer with hostile incuriosity. And it was a flat land, too. In Manhattan the eye ranged up and down naturally; here it had to range in a horizontal line or else meet nothing but the sultry sky overhead.
A few blocks away from Voorhees’ shipyard, where the skyline suddenly became a tangle of cranes and masts and kingposts, I turned into a comparatively quiet street and pulled up before a building which advertised furnished rooms for rent on a sign swinging before it. It was a building no better or worse than any around it—a depressing-looking place to see, and, I suspected, even more depressing to live in—but price was my only consideration. I was not in the market for a suite at the Plaza.
The landlady had a fascination all her own. She was an enormously fat and shapeless woman wearing small, motherly steel-rimmed spectacles which rode halfway down her blobby nose. Her eyes behind them glinted with malice, her voice was clarion, and she had a heart of pure brass. But more noteworthy than any of this was her hair. There was not much of it left, but what there was had been dyed a brilliant orange, an outrageous orange that was like no color possible in nature. And she chain-smoked cigarettes, using for the purpose a holder six inches long, which dipped and swung wildly as she spoke around it. Her name—and it could not have been more felicitous—was Waterhouse. Mrs. Ethel Waterhouse. She was a widow and alone in the world, she informed me, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t take care of herself. She damn well could. Was I married?
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Well, so much the better. I never have any luck with the marrieds I get in here. Walk in with a paper suitcase and a five-and-dime ring, and as soon as the girl gets knocked up, he’s off and running, and she’s left with a heartburn and a full belly. The better-looking the man the quicker the heartburn, that’s how it seems to go. I got no use for those marrieds. If you said you had some little thing out in that car you wanted to carry lovey-dovey over this here doorstep, I wouldn’t even want you in the house. That your car?”
The Winter After This Summer Page 12