The Baxter Letters

by Dolores Hitchens

  “You can’t mean it.”

  “You better bet I mean it.” Tom’s face looked tight with scorn, the topaz eyes all lit with angry light, alive under his thick brows. “I’ve never been more serious in my life. We’re beggars, Jeff. We’re clowns, singing for pennies. And he’s got a tiger by the tail. A rich tiger. I don’t care who the tiger is. I want a part of the loot.”

  “If there had been more to send, Uncle Bax would have sent it.”

  “How crazy can you get? He’s keeping the big bag for himself. And to Bax you’re still that green little kid he left here all those months ago. The kid too inexperienced and naive to even dream of asking where those beautiful dollars were coming from. Or to think there might be more. Hundreds and thousands more.”

  “Perhaps we’ll be upsetting something very delicate that Bax has working just so.”

  “Big deal. Did he ask if you had something working when he interrupted your life?”

  “I … I just don’t know.” She was trembling. She sat down on the bed.

  “Think about it. I’m going to the kitchen for one of those cans of beer I brought from the deli.” Tom stalked out of the room.

  She sat there, still trembling, and tried to argue with what Tom had said. But try and evade it as she would, she had to admit that to Uncle Bax she must still seem that silly and gullible child from the boondocks. He had betrayed his unchanged opinion of her by the suggestion that she now might be sophisticated enough to want to blow the three hundred on a glamorous dress.

  He had no idea of how deeply sophisticated she had become, and with a flash of stricken insight Jennifer realized that the depth of her sophistication went far beyond that of dress, of cosmetic upkeep, or of any surface fixing whatever. These were trivial things. She was truly knowing now, in all ways; and then a rush of self-revelation swept through her and she felt, for the first time in her life, degraded.

  She sat there tight as a drawn wire, filled with revulsion.

  What on earth is happening to me?

  Where am I?

  What’s wrong?

  I’ve gone crazy.

  There’s nothing dirty between Tom and me. It’s all loving and clean. We talked about marriage for a long time and finally we both concluded, freely and independent of each other, that the formal legalizing of a relationship is silly. It’s bowing to outworn conventions. It’s stale and lifeless, and it takes away from the loving relationship all of its spontaneity.

  We kept our love fresh and free. Didn’t we?

  She rubbed something like gooseflesh off her trembling arms, and forced the path of her thoughts away from this strangeness, this feeling of being smutted and soiled, back to what Tom wanted to do to Uncle Bax.

  I won’t argue within myself about Tom and me. I won’t argue with the side of me that wants to pick at things. That area of my life is settled, set into a way that can’t get unraveled or tarnished or lost. It’s what I’ve always wanted. And I want it still.

  There’s something even better on the horizon, whispered the ghost of that niggling little voice; but Jennifer looked stubbornly at her inmost thoughts and told herself that if she had to, she would give up the job with Mr. Dunavan. If there had to be a choice—

  Right now I have to think of a way to argue Tom out of this determination that there is more money to be forced out of Uncle Bax.

  Tom could be right in his facts, she admitted to herself, but she had to discourage him anyway.

  She began to busy herself with putting the scattered stuff on the bed into order, as though by doing this she could bring order to her ideas.

  The old shoebox gave off scents of stale corners, of storage in musty tropical lockers, ship’s hulls, and amid soiled clothing. She put the two photographs side by side; and then she thought, staring at them: they prove something. The photograph taken with the fiercely imperious general showed Bax as a follower, a flunky. If, during the preparations for taking the picture, the general had turned to Bax and had said, “Let’s take this with you kissing my boot,” there was no doubt whatever that Bax would have obliged. His shifty look was almost cringing. The other man had all of the power, the strength, the ruthlessness, and Bax was his dreary little attendant.

  “Who was he, Bax?” she whispered involuntarily, searching all over the mounting for any trace of a name, a location, a date.

  The old-fashioned brown embossed cardboard mounting gave no hint of a photographer’s name, nor of the city where the picture had been made. This could have been by special order, she thought. The general should have been far too important a man to permit a photographer’s name to intrude, nor to need the location identified.

  She could imagine, sitting with the picture in hand, just the sort of ugly little jobs which the general had given Bax to do.

  In the second picture, and the one which she had subconsciously taken as the sequel, Bax had grown in stature. He was smiling and confident. He stood as an equal; almost, Jennifer thought, with an air of proprietorship, beside the haughty woman. The woman’s eyes, like the general’s, stared straight into the camera. There was no trace of shyness, of embarrassment or of flinching. The look was full of power and repose.

  Who was she?

  She had belonged with the general, Jennifer decided. The two of them made a pair.

  Tom came into the room carrying a white sheet of paper. “Here we are. I sketched it out for you. You’ll have to put in the endearing touches that prove to Bax that it’s really his niece who’s writing.” Tom handed her the paper brusquely.

  She stood up, walked to the window and read it. “Tom, this is just crazy!”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You said a thousand!”

  “I’d already told you we were clowns, singing for pennies. And all at once, sitting down to write the letter, it came to me that if Bax is going to pay at all he’ll pay whatever we ask. The letters have to go. That’s pretty obvious. There has to be a certain order for the delivery, for some reason we don’t know. For some reason we might be damned well better off not knowing—”

  “But this amount you’ve put here—”

  “Ten thousand? I’ll bet old Bax will heave a sigh of respect. He’ll figure you’re at last showing signs of being your uncle’s niece.”

  “Or it could destroy whatever it is he’s doing.”

  “What do you think Bax is doing, Jeff?” Tom’s glance had filled again with scorn, a blazing contempt. “Knitting aprons for the natives, to hide their nakedness? Setting up kindergartens? Teaching them how to milk a cow so their kids get more calcium, and such stuff?”

  “I’m no such fool!” she cried, stung with hurt.

  “Well, for God’s sake, let’s admit that Bax is a crook and that we’re cooperating in his crookedness. And that we’ve done it for pin money. Our venture into charity is over. As of now. I think you ought to write the whole thing out by hand. No typing. So Bax can see it’s all your idea.”

  “What on earth would we do with ten thousand dollars?”

  "You’d be surprised.”

  She felt lost. Tom was not giving in to her; he wasn’t going to change in this determination to get more money out of Bax. In fact, if she waited, she sensed that the amount might even go higher. And a stab of panic warned her that disaster waited in this thing somewhere. “You … you talked it over with Sean. Didn’t you?”

  Tom shrugged, but said without hesitation. “So what? Does it make any difference? I don’t think.”

  “You said that you would deliver any other letters—”

  “And I will. Just get busy and write this damned note so that we can get it on the plane for Nueva Brisa. Take your time. Make it sound like you, so that Bax won’t have any doubts.” He hesitated, then touched her shoulder, letting his fingers cup and settle against the shape of the bones inside. And she felt herself wanting to draw away. Tom went to the door and then without looking back, on toward the other part of the apartment.

  She sat down at
the old desk propped in the corner. She took out a sheet of notepaper and picked up a pen. It seemed to her that in the last hour dizzying things had happened, that the world was crooked and off-center. She was in strange country and she was afraid. Against the wall she could see the image of Mrs. Appleton clutching the edge of the table in the restaurant, and she could hear a ghost-whisper of Mrs. Appleton’s voice saying, “Terror is a great leveller!”

  I have to see that woman again, Jennifer thought. Not tomorrow, not taking the chance that she’ll show up at the lunch break. I have to know now.

  I have to think of something to tell Mr. Dunavan, why I’m not bringing the papers to him tonight.

  She reached for the phone extension beside the bed.

  I’m going out to Far Rockaway instead.

  Chapter 11

  Mr. Dunavan sounded busy and distracted when he came on the phone. “Who? Oh, Miss Hamilton! I’ve been expecting you back here.” He must have looked at his watch. “It’s getting late.”

  “Something has come up. A … a sort of personal thing.” She choked over the lie. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. And tomorrow I’ll bring the papers to put into the vault.”

  “You’re not coming back here today?” He was worried and alert, his tone sharpening; and she knew how his face would have changed, the reserve, the blankness that approached boredom washing out of it. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes. I’ll explain tomorrow.”

  “Be careful.” He waited, and she knew that he must be puzzling over the change in plans, the meaningless switch in her attitude. “And you’d better speak to your roommate.”

  “Yes,” she choked, “I’ll do that.”

  “Do you want my home phone number?”

  “All right. Fine.”

  “And call me if anything at all seems out of the way. Do you understand? Anything.” He waited for her answer. The worry he felt for her came over the wire, his voice in her ear close and protective, and she thought for a baffling moment of how well she had come to know him, really, without knowing anything about his past at all. She knew what every change in his voice meant, and how he looked when he talked in certain ways. And how he glanced at people when he spoke to them. And how he always looked at her.

  A bitter, aching feeling of loss rose in her, coming from God knew where, no sense to it at all, no reason behind it. She felt in that moment that something irrecoverable was being swept away. But she hadn’t lost anything.

  Had she?

  I should never have left the farm and my dad, she thought, blinking away tears that didn’t make sense. I never quite know where I am, except that I’m miles out of place, and out of my depth.

  “I’ll write down your phone number,” she stammered, “and I promise, if there’s anything odd happening here at all, I’ll call you.”

  “Well … I guess that will have to do. I wanted to see you, somehow. I guess I just wanted to be sure that you …” He broke off and there was an instant of silence. “You aren’t changing your mind about the job, are you?”

  “No. Of course not. I told you how I felt about that.”

  “Funny. I just keep wondering.”

  Why should he be so ready to suspect that she was going to back out? Didn’t he believe what she had told him? And then with a flash of understanding she saw that even as she had learned to know him, he knew her. He knew that there was some deep discord in her life, that she was living in a way she didn’t like; something in her manner told him this.

  She wrote down the phone number and hung up.

  The piece of notepaper lay there, ready for her to write the letter to Bax. But right now she had to think about this new thing, this new knowledge out of nowhere. She didn’t approve of herself, and she hadn’t approved of herself ever since she had moved here and started calling herself Mrs. Burch. Mrs. Thomas Burch. And she might never regain that feeling of being at peace with herself without drastic changes being made.

  She leaned on the desk and put her head in her hands.

  When you made a decision, an important decision, you stuck with it. You didn’t wishy-washy around, changing your mind. Wasn’t that what her dad had taught them?

  The inner voice mocked, your dad did a lot of switching around himself, remember?

  I want to think it all out and be firm again, she told herself bleakly. But right now I just don’t have the time. I have to go all the way to Far Rockaway and even though I’ve never been there I know it’s quite a ride because of the map in the subway trains. And on top of everything else I have to do some doubling back and changing trains here and there to make sure that I’m not followed.

  She stood up from the desk and went to the bed and picked up Uncle Bax’s letter to Mrs. Appleton and stuffed it into her purse.

  She stole out into the hall. Tom was in the kitchen, rinsing glasses at the sink. There was no sign of Sean. She let herself out of the apartment into the shadowy hall, and headed for the elevator. She kept thinking that Tom would go to check up on her at the desk in the bedroom, and come out here looking for her, but nothing happened. The elevator dropped into place from above, and an elderly woman was in it, one of the tenants on one of the floors higher than they, and the woman nodded and smiled, the kind of smile people give each other in the city, a smile that said, I acknowledge that you’re here in the elevator with me but that’s as far as we go.

  On the way to the subway Jennifer tried to plan a route, a devious twisting that would enable her to switch trains about twice without losing too much time. She hurried down the steps of the subway entrance, found a map on the concrete wall below, planned what she should do. From far away came the racketing of trains; the smells were heavy, stale. For the moment she was alone down here except for a half-dozen or so teenagers at the far end of the platform. They were clowning around, loud with laughter. The noise they made was somehow comforting. No one followed her down the steps before the next downtown train arrived. She looked back as the train moved; there seemed to be shadows on the stairs, a face looking, but the train plunged into gloom and the watcher—if there was a watcher—was left behind.

  The house was close enough to the beach to have the kind of sparse beaten foliage characteristic of such yards. There was a low fence, painted white, and the house, Jennifer thought, had once been a kind of pink, pretty perhaps, now rather shabby. She looked behind her at the street before opening the slatted gate. The whole place, in spite of the sea wind, had an air of twilight tiredness, as though city workers had brought home with them the scent of subways and the crush of crowds. Jennifer shut the gate behind her and went up the cement walk to the porch. The door was set in deeply under overhanging eaves.

  She tried to think of what she must say. Mrs. Appleton was not going to be glad to see her. A door slammed in her face was to be expected, some harsh words thrown in too, perhaps. She pushed the button beside the door, clutched the bulging purse like a shield, and waited tensely. When the door opened noiselessly, there was Mrs. Appleton, her eyes big in the shadows behind the screen, and she said in a tone of disbelief, “You came after all. You came after I asked you not to come.”

  “I’m sorry. Truly I am,” Jennifer told her. “There are some things I simply have to ask. Please don’t send me away. I was most careful coming here. No one followed me.”

  Mrs. Appleton’s eyes searched the street behind Jennifer. “You tried to be careful, no doubt.” She was silent then, listening perhaps. “Well … since you are here, it is better that you come inside at once.” Her hand touched the latch and the door opened a little. The pane in the door reflected the day dying in far skies. “Come in.”

  “I don’t want you to think that I came to deliver a letter, that Uncle Bax sent instructions or anything like that.” Jennifer was in a high-ceilinged hall where the light was dim, all dark wood and dark wallpaper and an old white dog who stood wagging a tail at her, snuffing from something like asthma, short bowed legs betraying a touch of dachshund
in his ancestry. “I came because I had to. I mean, myself.”

  She had said it all so badly, she knew.

  “We have all had excellent motives,” Mrs. Appleton said, giving a last wary look at the street before shutting the door. “And in the end they made so little difference.”

  “I don’t want anything bad to happen.”

  “No. Neither did we. Or at least, I didn’t.”

  Mrs. Appleton at home was not the neatly suited anonymous figure of the city. She wore a gingham shift and a faded denim apron, and she seemed to carry the scent of soap and furniture polish. Stray locks of graying hair clung to her cheeks. “Please come in here,” she said. She led the way into a parlor. Before she turned on the lights she drew the heavy draperies at the windows. The room was junky and old-fashioned, but the things were solid and had a feeling of permanence, as though they had sat for a long time in their places. She motioned Jennifer toward an overstuffed chair. The old dog came to be petted.

  Mrs. Appleton sat down too. It seemed to Jennifer that the woman’s overwhelming fears of that noon had worn away, or perhaps the pitch of fright she had endured had been too intense to carry further.

  “You must speak quickly and to the point,” she said. She snapped her fingers at the dog and he went obediently to lie beside her feet. “I am not planning to stay here tonight. I must go soon.”

  “I’ll try to be brief,” Jennifer promised. “The first question is, What do you think would happen if a large amount of money was demanded of my uncle for delivering the rest of the letters?”

  Mrs. Appleton’s brows went up. This was plainly far outside any speculations she had made concerning Jennifer’s errand. “Money?” A lot of money? From Baxter? I think not.”

  “You don’t think that my uncle would give it?”

  “No, I don’t. He’s very clever—or, he used to be clever—at keeping what he had for himself.”

  Jennifer waited, but this seemed to be all that Mrs. Appleton wanted to say on the subject. “You told me today that your cousin, Mr. Shima, had decided to trust me with the story of what happened long ago. I’m asking now—won’t you please tell me that story?”