Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  She remembered the doll he had brought her from California, a boy doll instead of a girl doll, and the bicycle that was a boy’s instead of a girl’s, and he said that he had “forgotten” when her mother had pointed out the error and made him correct it. She remembered, too, the time he had wanted to give her a Shetland pony because they had seen a little boy riding a pony. By then she must have known, even if subconsciously, because she had protested that she didn’t want a pony—which had not been true before but had become true with the offer—and it was then that she had asked him to build her a studio like Eloise Tassman’s.

  A part of her decision to become an artist had been based upon her childhood belief that artists were always women—like Eloise Tassman—and that a studio was something inviolately feminine, a haven of escape from the world that was trying to make little girls into little boys.

  Her later memories were more positive evidence … those weekends when her father made her come to Washington from Mount Oak to meet his businessmen friends … forcing her to spend that summer working in his office … wanting her to go to Wharton Business instead of art school. She had fought against Wharton but her victory had been no victory at all. It had ended in the compromise of Prather and the promise that she would study industrial designing. Always, he had talked to her about her plans for the future—when she would join him in the factory—as if he were continually forgetting that she was not his son.

  There had been a hundred nights like tonight when he had drawn her into the library and forced her to take a man’s role, asking her for a man’s advice and a man’s counsel. She had always played the part as best she could, pretending an interest that she had never felt, but now there was the terrifying suspicion that, like an actor too long identified with a single role, she had lost herself in the part she had played, that her father had finally won, that despite her resistance he had imposed a maleness upon her that now could never be escaped, that something had been killed within her and could never again be brought to life.

  No, no, no … that wasn’t true … she was a woman! It was only because it was Paul … there was nothing wrong with her … it had happened once …

  She flung herself on the bed and, with the same abandoned submission that overwhelms an alcoholic no longer able to sustain a vow of temperance, she did what she had promised herself a thousand times that she would never do again. Purposefully, she opened the floodgates of her mind and let herself be overwhelmed with the one memory that proved what now so desperately needed to be proved.

  Her memory, drawn from an artist’s sharp observation, brought back the undeniable reality of that evening in Maine when she had seen him for the first time. She denied herself the quick memory of the climax, lingering over all the little preliminaries, tracing the chain of linked circumstances that had made it happen—the preamble of the drunkard sipping his first drink of the night, the narcotic addict’s slow ceremony of the preparation.

  It had started with Barbara Hough. It was Barbara who had invited her to come to Maine and talked her into taking that lithograph class under Eric Linksman. It was Eric who had shown her two lithographs to Marybelle Hudson, who wrote children’s books, and it was Miss Hudson who had been responsible for her being invited to a cocktail party at the Maine summer home of Jefferson Clark, the Philadelphia publisher.

  The crush of the crowd at Jefferson Clark’s party had been so great that she had been swept away from her host after his first blank greeting. All evening she had waited for Marybelle Hudson to fulfill her promise to arrange a talk. Finally, with the special loneliness of accepted disappointment, she had let the swirling tide of the crowd carry her aimlessly toward the quiet backwater of the porch. Then, alone, she walked down the path toward the shore.

  Now, forcing hesitation, delaying, she lingered over the last of those preliminary memories, sketch notes caught with the needle-sharp focus of her artist’s eyes … the cerulean and lemon-chrome greenness of iris leaves beside the path … the black-blueness of a delphinium spike palette-knifed against the blue-blackness of the night sky … the overpainted wraith of the insect swirl around the bare lamp bulb at the end of the wharf … the viridian-edged waves that were breaking in the pool of light.

  She had been watching the waves when she heard footsteps on the wharf and had turned to see him walking toward her, materializing out of the night, tall and dark, loose shouldered but tight-hipped, moving with the easy grace of a powerful animal and, when he spoke, his voice carried that same suggestion of enormous suppressed strength. But she remembered neither what he had said nor what she had answered. Her memory was an artist’s memory, of the eye and not of the ear, and what had been preserved in her mind was a page from an infinitely detailed sketchbook, recording every line and plane of his face.

  Front-seen, it was square-cut and block-jawed, strong-boned, the face of a young Highland warrior in an old portrait. In profile, however, his features were an odd denial, not roughly chiseled as the front view suggested but drawn with a clean, dry-point line. It was a face of contradictions—stubborn strength set against sensitivity, reasoned intelligence against unreasoned instinct, courage against shrewdness. Seeing him there on the wharf she had been momentarily torn between approval and caution, but more attracted than repelled even in the beginning, and after the beginning there had been only attraction.

  “I’ve been watching you,” he said and she knew that it was true, as true as all of the other things that she had imagined into reality.

  They found the little sloop moored to the wharf and the night wind carried them soundlessly out into the dark water and around the headland that shut away the lights of the house and the sound of the dance music.

  There were a hundred memories of that hour on the water, subconsciously recorded then to be sharply recalled later, but none so vividly remembered afterwards as what he had said when the moon came up. They had joked about it looking like a chromo postcard—the defense of bathos—and then he had said roughly, “Damn it, I wish I were ten years younger.”

  The power behind his voice had suggested that he could make any wish come true, even that one, but it was then that he flattened the mainsail to the backwind of the headland and, silently, they sailed around the point and back to the lights and the music and the crowd.

  He disappeared as he had come, into the night. There was no chance then to ask him his name nor, since he could not be pointed out, any way to ask anyone else who he was.

  Five days later, back at the art colony, bending over her sketch-board, she had sensed a presence and looked up to see him watching her. There had seemed no need to ask how he had found her, only to accept the fact that he was there. Without command or decision she had closed her sketchbook and they had walked away together, lingering in the pine-smelling coolness of the woods when the sun was still high, then wandering the shore after it was shadowed by the mountain, coming finally to the Inn where he had told her he was staying for the night.

  They had eaten together in the dining room but there was no memory of food, only the blur of racing time, and then walking down the road toward the terrifying inevitability of reaching the door of the house where she was living. The terror had become reality and he had left her and she was standing alone in the darkness of the front hall. He had not kissed her, only reached out to touch her hand, but as it had fallen away it had accidentally brushed her thigh.

  Now, lying on the bed, her hands clenching the coverlet, what she remembered was not so much a true memory as the recollection of an incredible fantasy. The touch of his hand had been the plunging needle of a hypodermic syringe, flooding her arteries with a stimulant so overpowering that she had lost all semblance of self-control. Her body had become a self-thinking entity, cut free from her brain, and without the direction of volition she had followed him to the Inn.

  That was what must have happened because she had no conscious knowledge, then or afterward, of how she came to his room at the Inn, only that there had b
een a time when he was kissing her and crushing her to him and her child’s flesh had become a woman’s flesh, suddenly ripened by the narcotic of desire to a tremulous anticipation that hovered between ecstasy and terror.

  It was terror that triumphed. His arms were steel bars that held her away from him … “Lory, it can’t be—no, no, no—you don’t know what you’re doing!”

  And then she had been caught up in a spasm of trembling that must have shaken loose the knotted ends of every nerve in her body for, even when she was in the car and driving alone through the night, there was a sense of disembodiment. Before, there had been only her flesh and afterwards only her brain, her body disowned by the disgrace of its animal passion.

  But afterwards, long before now, there had been a fading away of the stain of convicted vulgarity that her body had smudged across her child’s mind, replaced by the all-important knowledge that once she had been a woman … once … and that what had once been would sometime be again. It couldn’t have been destroyed that night … no, no, no … it was something too powerful ever to be destroyed!

  Her clenched fingers opened in another outpouring of her endless night-after-night confession of what a fool she had been, running away like the child that he had thought she was, not waiting to prove that she was the woman he had made her become … not knowing who he was, nor where he had come from, nor where she could ever find him again, only that one tiny barest scrap of knowledge about him. Walking the shore that afternoon, she had asked him to tell her his name and he said that his name was Cash McCall.

  Seven

  1

  In the kitchen of the Hotel Ivanhoe, it was the calm before the storm. Wednesday was the big day, the Wharf luncheon on top of everything else. All morning long there had been a gradually up-building swirl of activity. Now it was that moment of almost suspended animation while the cooks and their helpers stood by, watching the swinging doors to the Fontainebleau Room, waiting for the first rush of orders.

  Max Nicollet, impersonating an avenging god on an inflated self-contained throne, darted his black eyes about the scene searching for a worthy object upon which to practice a warm-up rage. Finding none, he did the best he could and bore down on the shining cart that a waiter was cautiously moving toward the service elevator. Snatching off the enormous silver cover of the tureen—in itself no mean feat of strength—he bent over and dilated his nostrils to catch the savory odor steaming up from the Crab Ivanhoe that was destined for the luncheon in the Velvet Room.

  Clapping back the cover with the crash of a giant cymbal, he threatened to impale the waiter with his bristling mustache and demanded, “What is wrong? You tell me! What is wrong?”

  The waiter quavered.

  “You are not proud to serve this?” Max challenged.

  The waiter did his best to execute the demanded assignment of simultaneously registering both pride and fright.

  Max was not satisfied. His big hands carried out the orders that his voice barked. “Push in the stomach! Straighten the back! Square the shoulders! Now you are better. No more do you look like the man who carries slops to the pigs.”

  With a well-placed slap of his bear-paw hand on the waiter’s bony behind, Max propelled him toward the elevator. Then, dusting his hands with satisfaction, he rolled back toward the stoves, a behemoth threatening to crush everything in its path.

  2

  Easing her foot from the throttle, Lory Austen let the Cadillac glide toward the changing light, caught the flash of green, glanced right and made the left turn onto Lancaster Avenue, heading for downtown Philadelphia.

  She had seen her father’s face when she had looked to the right and his expression had again confirmed what she still found it so hard to believe—that his determination to sell the company had actually survived the night—and, even more miraculously, that it had so quickly changed him into such a very different person. She could not remember ever having seen him so happily carefree as he was this morning. The remarkable change had been evident at the breakfast table and the fear that it might be a transient thing, easily lost, had caused her to invent the excuse that she wanted to see her publishers and prompted the suggestion that she drive him to Philadelphia. He had accepted with an enthusiasm only slightly dimmed by the two hours that he had spent at the office. Even that loss had been quickly recouped after she had picked him up and they were on their way.

  The night flying horrors of her imagination had been so completely banished that there remained only the filmiest wisp of daylight doubt that the sale of the company would completely break the hold of her father’s domination. She could see now, measured by his relief, the terrible weight that the company had put upon him. That was why he had clung to her—to satisfy the simple human need of having someone to whom he could talk. When the company was sold, the son-wish would die. There would no longer be need for the outlet of those midnight talks. He would be free of the fears and worries that had made him cling to her and she, in turn, would be free of the trammeling ties that had bound her to him and to Suffolk.

  But there was still that restraining final need for clinching confirmation—that when the company was sold he would willingly set her completely free—and she asked, “Do you know what I think you should do?”

  “What?”

  “Take Mother and go on some land of wonderful trip—maybe around the world.”

  “What about you?”

  “I think it’s something you should do by yourselves, just the two of you.”

  She waited, breath-held and tense, and then she heard him say, as wonderfully casual as if there had been no real decision involved, “Might not be a bad idea at that. Something I’ve always had in mind doing. Never had the time before.”

  “And, Dad, it would mean so much to Mother. You can’t imagine how much.”

  “Yes, I suppose it would,” he said in soft speculation. “We’ve never had time to do very many things together, your mother and I. Always been too tied down with the company.”

  “You’ll be free now,” she said—but the echo of her words was distorted to the exultant shout that it was she who would be really free.

  A memory thrust itself forward as if it had been waiting for this moment, the recollection of a brief item in last month’s Art News noting that Eric Linksman, with whom she had studied that summer in Maine, had established his studio at Fiascherino on the Ligurian Coast of Italy and was accepting a limited number of advanced students.

  That was it! She would go to Italy. Eric would snap her out of this slump she was in … Eric and the kind of people he always gathered around him. That was what she needed, the inspiration of companionship with her own kind, those wonderful sessions they used to have under the trees in Maine … nights around Eric’s fireplace … her brain exploding fireworks and the sparks coming right out of her fingertips when she sat down at the drawing board. Of course she would go! Why not? She could do what she wanted now … her own money … there was nothing to stop her.

  She turned to her father, ready to confide her plan, but found herself interrupted by the strangeness of having thought of Maine but not, until this afterthought, of Cash McCall. It had never happened before and, exultantly, she realized that now he, too, was something of which she was free. All that cancerous memory that had grown like some terribly abnormal thing in the soft tissue of her mind had been ripped out and thrown away.

  “Lory, I’ve been thinking,” her father said.

  She voiced a wordless sound of inquiry.

  “You know, last night I was talking about getting two million for the company?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe that’s a little high. Might get it, of course—know more after I talk to Will Atherson—but I’m not going to hold out for it. As long as I can get a fair price—maybe a million seven or a million eight—I’m going to sell. Confound it, now that I’ve made up my mind to do it I feel like getting it over with. What do you think?”

  “As a minority stockhold
er, I vote yea.”

  He answered with a low chuckle. “You’re wonderful, Lory, wonderful. No president could ask for a better minority stockholder. All right, it’s decided. Passed unanimously.”

  “Unanimously,” she said, and the lift of her voice was the sound of freedom confirmed.

  3

  Gil Clark came to the edge of the Square and, looking across, saw the Hotel Ivanhoe through the bias-weave veiling of a sudden shower. He was arriving too early for his twelve-thirty luncheon appointment with Cash McCall, but the impulse that made him hesitate and then step back under a sheltering doorway was something more deeply rooted than an awareness of time.

  His mind had been in a state of bubbling ferment ever since his meeting yesterday with Harrison Glenn, but the turbid distillate would not come clear no matter how many times he ran it through the hot still of his brain. Over and over again, he had reminded himself of what Harrison Glenn had said—that Corporation Associates had a professional obligation to help Grant Austen get the best possible price for the Suffolk Moulding Company—yet he could not conquer his aversion to allowing the company to fall into the hands of someone like Cash McCall.

  Harrison Glenn had been right, of course, in his warning against a prejudgment of McCall … but damn it, the man even lived at the Hotel Ivanhoe! That alone was enough to brand him for what he was. The Ivanhoe was the vulture’s roost, the jackal’s lair, the hangout for the quick-money crowd. That’s where you saw them … the chiselers and gougers, the sharpies and the tax-money boys, the operators. They’d all be there this noon … five-dollar lunches in the Fontainebleau Room … folding-money tips. Expense didn’t matter to them … what the hell, it was deductible, wasn’t it?