Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  "Phones, man, phones!" said David. "It's the twentieth century—we've got all kinds of gadgets."

  "I never make local calls. Only long distance. Coffee?"

  "Sausage and eggs—"

  "Just toast and coffee."

  "Your book, Hunter," said Sara, pouring coffee. "I just got around to reading it last week. It's well, it's not very cheerful, is it?"

  "Cheerful!" Hunter set the coffee mug that was halfway to his mouth back on the table with an audible thud. "Cheerful! Sara, for God's sweet sake when are you going to grow up? Acquire even a surface layer of sophistication? No! It wasn't cheerful. What a word! 'Cheerful.'"

  "Stop being superior and putting everyone on the defensive, Hunter. Maybe it is a lousy word. Maybe I meant something a little different. Perhaps I meant 'hopeful' or something like that. I'm not a writer. I just paint."

  "Pretty little flower baskets?"

  "Stop it, you two!" said David. "You're headed for another one of your knock-down and drag-outs. If Hunter wants to be desolated and gloomy, let him. And if Sara wants to be nonconformist and square, let her. Brethren, love one another—"

  "We do manage to have at one another," said Hunter. "But always remember, Sara, I love you dearly. God knows why."

  "I know why." She flashed a quick grin across the table at him. "I'm the voice of your better nature—"

  "Sara, there'll be violence in a minute," said David. "Hunter admits to no better nature. What's wrong with the one he has?"

  "I like it." said Hunter. "Easy on the eggs, chum. I'm having a sort of midafternoon dinner. At your boss's house, incidentally."

  "Bradford Willis?"

  "Yes. Known to me in my extreme youth as Uncle Brad." He looked at David, and frowned. "What's the matter? You look dubious—"

  "You're seeing things—" Before David could continue, the telephone ringing from its place on the mantel stopped him. When he answered it he did not at first recognize the voice that said, "David?"

  "Yes—"

  "This is Brad Willis."

  "Oh—good morning!"

  "David, I need help in locating the only hard-working dilettante I know of. He was due in town this morning—"

  "Hunter Travis. He's right here drinking coffee."

  "Good! May I talk to him?"

  David handed the telephone down to Hunter. It was impossible not to hear Hunter's end of the conversation.

  "... Just got here, Brad.... Two or three days, I hope. Have to check up on David and Sara among other things.... A very charming young lady, if naive... I'll tell him.... That will be perfectly all right, Brad... Not a bit. Forget it.... We'll make it anytime you say. Actually, it probably would be better if I came to the office. Mother wants me to ask you about drawing up a deed of gift for her property in Chestnut Hill. Some kind of nursery-school project... Two

  o'clock tomorrow's fine…I can have a yak with my publishers

  in the morning...Making a start on one, yes…Father? He's fine. He's in Istanbul at the moment.... I'll do that.... See you tomorrow. Cheers."

  Hunter replaced the receiver and put the telephone back on the mantel with exaggerated care. Sara broke the silence. "What's the matter, Hunter? No dinner?"

  "No dinner." He came to the table, took a cigarette from the pack in front of David, and looked at the other over the flame of a lighter. "You're not surprised."

  "No," said David.

  "You've found out?"

  "Yes."

  "Brad tell you?"

  "No, he's never mentioned it. I was in the office late Friday after they'd all left. There was a phone call—"

  "Oh, God, one of those—"

  "From what the receptionist tells me, they're almost routine—"

  Sara leaned forward. "What is it, you two? What's wrong, Hunter?"

  "Just the cheerful circumstance of Brad Willis's wife on another bender."

  "'Another' bender?"

  "She's an alcoholic. A periodic."

  Sara turned to David. "I didn't know—"

  "I know you didn't, Sara. I'd have told you eventually. I was just so damned upset I didn't want to talk about it. Brad's the kind of guy you grow fond of—"

  "And Peg's that kind of a woman," said Hunter.

  "The poor man! I've never even seen him, but I feel sorry. Can't they do anything about it, Hunter? Doctors, psychiatrists—"

  "It's not all that simple, Sara. I suppose they've tried. A psychiatrist would have a field day with Peg. And probably be useless. For every one good reason the average alcoholic has for drinking, she has three or four. You know the background, David?"

  David shook his head. "No."

  Hunter sat down, picked up his refilled coffee mug, and said, "In fairness to Peg I'm going to give it to you."

  "Perhaps Brad wouldn't appreciate our talking about it."

  "I think in one sense he'd be grateful. Sooner or later he'd have to tell you himself. He very desperately wants people to understand. There aren't many who can. You can—and God knows, I can."

  "All right—"

  "Remember, David, our friendship—that is the family's— with Brad goes back to the time when Brad was a student in law school. My father met Brad by chance, liked him, did what Brad's doing with you—took him under his wing. When Brad got his degree my father was the one who arranged for him to go with Abernathy. Right after that the State Department tapped my father on the shoulder. And Brad, of course, more or less skyrocketed; a few, damned few lawyers, go ahead as fast as Brad did without stepping on toes. Abernathy—he's my mother's maternal uncle, by the way—wasn't too well, and he loaded a lot on Brad's shoulders. I'm telling you all this, even if you happen to know some of it already, so you'll see how close to the situation my father and mother were, and why I happen to know so much about it...."

  CHAPTER 43

  After his talk with Hunter, Brad Willis walked slowly from his study to the chill, gray loneliness of a Sunday-morning living room before shades have been raised, ashtrays emptied, the untidy residue of a previous day's life cleared away. It had been stupid to ask Hunter to dinner when he had called yesterday. He had extended the invitation on a flimsy hope born of the circumstance that Peg, that morning, had "seemed" to be snapping out of it.

  He stood staring into the dead ashes in the fireplace. You're too old to be hopeful, he told himself grimly. He passed a hand over his face, trying to wipe the tiredness from his eyes. "And too young to give up," he added aloud.

  He wondered idly who the "Sara" was that Hunter had mentioned, obviously under the impression that David had told him about her. He hoped she was a vegetable, brought up on a farm, illiterate, and with no psychological complexities. It might be dull for the boy, but it wouldn't mean long wakeful hours at night and a prodding, subconscious worry all day like the throb of an aching tooth.

  Two ashtrays on the coffee table overflowed and he threw the butts into the fireplace, then picked up and folded the soft woolen blanket that trailed crazily from divan to floor, and plumped the pillows into shape. Oblivion had hit Peg suddenly last night, before she could make it into the bedroom. He could only take her shoes off gently, loosen her dress, and cover her warmly with a blanket. Later, he knew, she would wake up, go to the kitchen for another drink, and then manage to undress and get into the bed beside his before it knocked her out.

  He managed to sleep in brief fidgeting naps before he heard her come into the room and get into bed. He covered his face with his hands, as though even there in the dark the pain could be seen, when he heard her mumble, just before she fell into a stuporous sleep, "Brad—Brad—"—a cry in the night he could not answer because she had gone beyond hearing any answer.

  Now, this morning, everything was quiet; it would be an hour or more before she would waken. When she did, she would go into the kitchen and pour a glass of milk. There was a poignant hurt to Brad in her pathetic confidence that he did not know the milk would be liberally laced with whiskey, that he was unaware that the bott
le out of which she would pour this morning drink was hidden in some one of a half-dozen places he had long since discovered. For a long time he had brought coffee to her bed those mornings when he was at home, but stopped the practice when he realized there was real cruelty in making it necessary for her to try to hide the fine tremor of her hands, the swollen eyelids, the sniffles and choking hoarseness that were invariable symptoms of one of her hangovers. "Hay fever" she would say, and use her handkerchief or a cleansing tissue as an excuse to turn away from him. Nowadays he waited until the alcohol in the milk had taken hold and stilled the tremors that he knew shook her inwardly as well as outwardly, and when he could—on mornings when he did not have to go to the office —he waited for her to seek him out.

  He drew back the draperies and raised the shades, letting a thin sliver of early sun cross the floor. After he had laid and lighted a fresh fire, he decided he felt better, then smiled wryly. "I can put a stop to that," he muttered. "I can end this 'feeling better' just by wondering what in hell I'm going to do." He dreaded these periods of reappraisal, of sending his mind back into the past, searching for some answer that might lie there, trying to find the causes or reasons, finding plausible ones but finding no way to overcome them, no way to replace them with new causes and new reasons that would make reality a bearable burden for Peg, instead of something she could carry only a short time before laying it down and fleeing.

  What would have happened if he had said "No" that afternoon years before when Lawrence Travis, just before leaving for Switzerland on his first State Department assignment, had failed him at the office and said, "Can you drop in at the apartment after work? We'll give you sandwiches and a drink. We're in a mess. The movers come in the morning, and we're going to Marcia's mother's for a few days before leaving for Switzerland."

  A man didn't say "No" to someone who had done what Lawrence Travis had done for him. He laughed and said, "Dropping in on moving day usually means work."

  "This will," said Lawrence. "But not the kind you mean. I have a problem I'd like to leave in your hands. Nothing back-breaking, but it concerns someone of whom Marcia and I are very fond."

  "I'll be there as soon as I can get away."

  The Travis's apartment door had been unlocked when he got there, and when no one answered his knock he walked into the chaos of the day before moving. He picked his way gingerly over cartons, packing boxes, piles of books, and around furniture that had been pushed into unfamiliar locations to facilitate the rolling up of rugs. He found Marcia Travis in the dining room wrapping chinaware and packing it into a barrel. Her hair, shorn down to short, fair curls, fell over her forehead, smooches of dust were scattered over her face, and her eyes, clear blue under brows darker than her hair, held a look of near panic. "We'll never make it, Brad. We'll have to postpone the van." She had a brusque, clipped manner of speaking; her accent showed clearly the childhood and girlhood spent in England.

  "One of the spheres of hell that Dante overlooked was moving day," said Brad.

  "Of course. I never thought of it before."

  "Where's the boy?"

  "At my mother's. Out of the way, thank God."

  "And Larry?"

  "In his den, sorting books. There comes a time in moving when one has to stop sorting and start packing, sorted or not. Do go explain this to him."

  He found Lawrence Travis in blue mechanic's coveralls, bent over a case of books, and said, "Your wife says pack, don't sort."

  Travis straightened up. "Thank God, you're here. Now I can stop for a while. Marcia on moving day is not the woman I thought I'd married. Sit down." He cleared books from the seat of a chair. "How would a drink go?"

  "Down—and good."

  At that time Lawrence Travis had been a slender, light-skinned man, shorter than Brad, his eyes dark and deceptively soft and guileless. His speech, unless sparked by emotion, was slow, and the gentle cadences of the South of his birth were still evident in it. Today he was heavier, black-ribbed glasses lending a solemnity not quite deserved; behind them the eyes were sharper and gave clearer evidence of the comprehensive intelligence, the lightning-quick workings of his mind. But to Brad Willis he remained the man who had given him his first break—the slender, quiet man of that winter dusk in a cluttered den.

  On that day he had gone out and returned with long drinks, than sank into a chair, groaning loudly. He took a long swallow, groaned again, and said, "I'd better get down to the meat of this thing before my client gets here."

  "Here?" Brad looked around the disordered room.

  "By design. She'll eat sandwiches from the drainboard with us—you will too, I hope—and if she twists our arms we'll let her pitch in and help. It's what she needs. Right now one more law office, one more breath of legal stuffery, and she'd probably crack."

  "I see."

  "You will in a minute, at any rate. Do you remember the Montgomery case of three months back?"

  "Yes. I read about it. I don't suppose anyone in New England missed it. I even recall that they dusted off the standing type of a routine lead—'Mystery surrounds the death of a Boston couple,' etcetera, etcetera."

  "You recall the pictures?"

  "Yes. He was a Negro; she was white. And there was a daughter."

  "My client. Our client, I should say. A particular favorite of Marcia's and mine since she was in diapers. Curt Montgomery, the father, and I come from the same part of the country, northeast Louisiana, right in the heart of the murder belt. My family came out of the galleon first, when I was very young, by the grace of God and relatives in the North. Curt and I didn't know each other, but when he was on the run— and he was—a mutual friend gave him our address. He didn't have a dime, not a crying dime, when he got here. We took him in—he got what he called a 'li'l piece of a job'—and after we made him go to night school for a year he was O.K. and stuck it out until he had full high-school credits.

  "He was always clever with his hands, and he talked himself into a job with one of the best known manufacturers of prosthetics in the country—Addison and Hyatt, near Medford. He also had a clever, inventive mind and he came up with something unusual for an artificial foot and ankle joint. When the firm claimed he had invented it on their time—he had, of course—and wouldn't give him royalties, he quit and started in business for himself, and took, on the side, the agency for another manufacturer. He never became wealthy, but he prospered." Travis paused to rattle the ice in his glass and take another swallow of the drink. "Meantime he had married."

  "This is the cliff-hanger?"

  "In a way. I know very little about the woman he married —and what I do know I don't like. He met her when he went to her home to fix an artificial limb for her father, and train him to use it. The marriage was a mistake from the start. And obviously to the finish. Neither one of them was equipped for the rigors of a mixed marriage in this country.

  "Their little girl, Margaret—Peg—was a lovely child. She's a lovely young woman. The mother was a domineering, possessive, ambitious hellcat."

  "If she was ambitious why did she make the one marriage calculated to hold her back?"

  "Who knows, Brad? Perhaps she felt that by marrying a Negro she was assuring herself of the upper hand."

  Brad laughed. "It just ain't so, Larry."

  "I know." Travis chuckled, then sobered. "Anyhow—to get back to the Montgomerys. Curt was light-skinned, about your complexion, only with dark eyes. The mother had red hair, fair skin, blue-green eyes. One is forced to admit her beauty. The child reversed the usual pattern and inherited all her mother's physical characteristics except the eyes. Her eyes are Curt's. She could pass—and did pass, at her mother's screaming insistence—when she entered Smith College."

  "And then—Oh! Good God!"

  "Yes. But by the time she entered college, life in the Montgomery household was pretty much constant hell. Curt was drinking; so was the mother. Perhaps not habitually, but too much. There were epic quarrels, I gather, just short of actual vio
lence. At least, when the child was around—"

  "Why didn't he leave the bitch?"

  Travis shrugged. "Again—who knows? For one thing, he adored the child. For another, there may have been a certain ego-satisfaction in having a white wife. Good God, Brad, who knows what holds thousands of couples together? When I first started in practice I worked like hell on a divorce for one couple, and I'd no sooner get it set up for court than they'd reconcile and it would start all over."

  "Abernathy won't handle divorce, thank God."

  "That's not all to the good. It's graduate work you'll never get in a university. Back to our client. Curt was a sweet man. I mean, in the true sense of the word. Gentle under ordinary circumstances, kind, and there wasn't a child he didn't love, didn't identify with. I've seen him after he had been to a hospital and fitted some youngster with an artificial limb. He'd glow with happiness, skip around, do a little dance step to show how well it would work in time. He never lost his southern speech. 'Lawd!' he'd say. That was a mighty happy chile. A mighty happy chile.'" Travis was silent for a moment. "Curt was my link with the past, my 'lest we forget.' When his wife heard little Peg use one of the Deep South idioms she had picked up from her father, she'd slap her across the mouth."

  "May I interject something here, Larry?"

  "Certainly."

  "The child adored her father."

  "Of course. He told me that one time when he returned from a business trip—she was still very small—instead of jumping up and down with joy or laughing, she climbed into his arms, and sobbed. She hated her mother, I'm sure, although she may not have recognized that hatred. But, like Curt, she was helpless. That woman, Brad, was like a juggernaut—"

  "I know. I've run into them."

  "To get to the time when Peg was due to enter college. Peg had been an outstanding pupil, straight A's, all that. Smith accepted her—and her mother insisted that she go over the line."

  "Parents visit students who are in colleges that close at hand. How did she manage that?"

  "The story to the college was that Peg's parents were separated. The mother came up on special occasions: Curt didn't. But she came close to making one fatal mistake. Her first plan was to say that she was a widow, that Peg's father was dead. Peg went into a screaming, hysterical rage, rushed out of the house, and went to her father's shop. At first, she refused to go back, but he 'gentled' her into it. 'You got to get that education, honey,' he told her. 'You just be patient. Life ain't easy, but you just get that college education; then mebbe you and me can find us a place together. Mebbe we can take off together. You do what your mother says and keep things peaceable. You stick with it, honey; then you'n me'll see about things.' Her mother backed down on the widow story."