Cirak's Daughter

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “I don’t think I could do it, Jenny.” Harriet Compton laid her knife and fork with painstaking exactness across her empty plate. “I guess it’s time I told you something.”

  “I know.” Jenny recalled something else: those long, loving hands fondling the wornout cribbage board. “You knew my father, didn’t you?”

  “I was the woman your mother wouldn’t let him marry.”

  “Oh.”

  This was the one step Jenny’s intuition hadn’t been able to take.

  “Rather a shock, isn’t it?” Harriet Compton tried to force a smile. “I’m not exactly your classic figure of romance, am I? I understand your mother was a very pretty woman.”

  “She still is.”

  Except for the peevish droop to the mouth formed by eighteen years of lamenting that her husband had left her for another.

  “I didn’t take your father away from you, Jenny. That’s the God’s honest truth, no matter what you’ve heard. I didn’t meet James until—well, until after he’d had his last flop and started calling himself James instead of Jason. That must have been when you were about seven years old. I never even knew there’d been a child until five years later.”

  “How did he ever get around to telling you?”

  “It happened pretty much by accident, if you want the truth. I used to subscribe to a lot of out-of-town newspapers so that I could go bloodhounding through the financial pages. James was browsing through them one Sunday morning, sprawled out on the sofa with his shoes off and his shirt half-unbuttoned. James never stayed properly dressed for long if he could help it. He told me that was one of the reasons he couldn’t stand living with your mother. She wouldn’t let him be comfortable.”

  Harriet caught herself. “I’m sorry, Jenny. I didn’t mean to get on that subject. Anyway, James was scrabbling through the papers and throwing the pages all over the floor as he always did, when he suddenly yelled, ‘Good God, Hat, look at this! That’s my daughter.’ You’d won first prize in a school essay contest, and they’d run your picture with a little squib about your being the daughter of Jason Cirak, the late producer. James thought it was hilarious that they’d written up the article as if he were dead. I didn’t think it was so funny, myself.”

  The accountant cleared her throat. “Jenny, I was forty-one years old when I met James. He was the first man I’d ever loved. Until then, I’d been too preoccupied with family problems to think about romance for myself. The trite old story of the self-sacrificing spinster with an invalid mother to support. Any woman who can’t fight her way out of that box is either a fool or a self-made martyr.”

  Her lips tightened. “Mother was gone by then, and I was left alone to realize I’d spent all those years living somebody else’s life instead of my own. When James told me he loved me and wanted me, I can’t tell you what it meant. I even had a wild hope that if we married right away, I might still be able to bear his child. Well, we couldn’t so we didn’t.”

  “Thanks to my mother.”

  Then Marion Plummer Cirak had paid back her husband’s new love even more savagely than she’d realized. Was that what constituted justice?

  “I don’t know, Jenny. I’m not blaming your mother. In a way, James queered his own pitch. She might have given him the divorce if he hadn’t been dumb enough to tell her why he wanted it. Who’s to say he didn’t mean things to turn out as they did? Subconsciously, I think James was scared stiff of getting himself involved in another wife-and-family situation because he’d made such a mess of the first one.”

  She smiled wistfully and shook her well-coifed head. “What James wanted was to be babied himself. My maternal urges found plenty of outlet, believe me. For a long time I thought James himself was enough; but when I found out he actually had a daughter living, it all welled up again. I wanted you, Jenny. I wanted to take care of you, help you choose your clothes, tie your hair ribbons, cook your breakfast. I wondered how you’d talk, what color you’d choose for your bedroom wallpaper, all sorts of foolish things. I cut that picture out of the paper and carried it around in my wallet. I had it with me the day James and I finally flew to Haiti and got him a quickie divorce so that we could be married, after it was too late to matter much one way or the other. James Compton, it says on the license. Compton was my name, you see, and James had gotten used to being addressed as Mr. Compton when he was staying at my place.”

  “So you’re my stepmother! And—you’re not making it up about the picture?”

  “No, Jenny. It’s still on my dressing table back in Baltimore. There didn’t seem to be any point in bringing it with me this time.”

  15

  “All these years. I can’t believe it.” Jenny shook her head, then emitted a little snort of laughter. “I hope I wasn’t too much of a disappointment to you.”

  “You’re everything I expected you’d be. Of course I’ll admit I already knew a lot about you. I’ve kept track of you as best I could without giving myself away and making trouble for you with the Plummers. I even went so far as to hire private detectives to spy on them and make sure you were being adequately taken care of. James thought I was crazy.”

  “I can imagine.” Her mouth felt dry.

  “It’s not that you didn’t matter to him, Jenny,” her stepmother pleaded. “James knew Marion’s family, that’s all. If he hadn’t been sure the Plummers would look after you, he’d never have abandoned you.”

  “Do you honestly believe that?”

  Harriet Compton looked her new stepdaughter squarely in the eyes. “Jenny, I can’t lie to you any more. I simply don’t know whether I believe it or not. James was a fascinating, adorable man, and I loved him as I’ve never loved anybody else in my life, but I never shut my eyes to the fact that he couldn’t be trusted the length of this room.”

  Jenny shifted her eyes. “So Uncle Fred was right.”

  “No, James wasn’t a crook, if that’s what you’re getting at. He never stole a penny, in the strict sense of the word. He hated responsibility and loved to make a splash, so he needed lots of money. He couldn’t endure the tedium of a steady job for more than a week or two at a time, so he lived by his wits.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?

  “With James, it could mean anything. For instance, he once took a job running a mimeograph machine. That was after he’d faced the fact that he was washed up in films. Anyway, his second night on the job, he stayed overtime and ran off ten thousand copies of a chain letter. You know what those are, I presume?”

  “Those idiotic messages you’re supposed to make umpteen copies of and send along to other people so the trolls won’t get you. Aunt Martha has a nutty neighbor who’s always passing them on to her. But there’s no money involved.”

  “That’s because asking for money in chain letters is now illegal, thanks partly to James. It wasn’t, when he got his big idea. What he did was to sign six different names and addresses at the bottom of his letter, explaining that the receiver was to send a dollar to the top name on the list, then make six copies of the letter, dropping the name he’d sent the dollar to and adding his or her own name at the bottom of the list. By the time the sender’s name worked its way to the top, the six receivers would each have sent the letter to six more, and so on. All in all, everybody was supposed to receive a total of $46,656, which wouldn’t be a bad return on a dollar investment, you have to admit.”

  “But at that rate, you’d soon run out of names,” Jenny protested.

  “How right you are, but you’d be surprised how many people didn’t think of that.”

  “Whose names did Father use?”

  “His own, naturally. He rented post office boxes or accommodation addresses in six different places under six different aliases. Then he sent out his ten thousand letters at random all over the country, taking names and addresses from telephone books at the public library. Postage was much lower then, so it didn’t take any great investment to launch his scheme. He’d made it all back by the end
of the first week.”

  “But surely the whole ten thousand didn’t reply?”

  “Oh, no. Some were too lazy, I suppose, and some realized the flaws in James’s arithmetic. I doubt if a single chain out of the ten thousand stayed intact for long. That’s why they were ruled a violation of postal regulations, because they promised more than could logically be delivered. But by the time that ruling came through, James’s six names were long gone from the lists, and he was sitting pretty on a pile of dollars.”

  “Didn’t he know what he’d done was wrong?”

  “James didn’t see it that way. He argued that everybody’d been given a sporting chance to make money, which was all he’d given himself in the first place, and that nobody could lose more than one dollar plus postage. I’m sure he never felt a single twinge of conscience about what he’d done. James did have a pretty accommodating conscience, I must admit.”

  Harriet Compton started to laugh. “Some of his escapades were funny, like the Kvizitsia episode. James happened to wander into a little antique shop on Third Avenue in New York where he saw this unspeakable blob of an old oil painting. He was standing there, drinking in the exquisite awfulness of it, as he described it to me later, when a woman dripping mink and diamonds came in. Seeing him staring at the painting, she came over and started looking, too. James was never what you’d call shy, so he remarked, ‘Perfect, isn’t it?’

  “‘Superb!’ the woman gushed. ‘Er—I’m afraid the artist’s name escapes me for the moment.’

  “‘That, madam, is a real Kvizitsia,’ James informed her. That’s a Yiddish word that had come up pretty often while they were filming The Refugees. It means inquisition, literally, but it’s used to refer to anything that’s a complete and utter disaster. The antique dealer knew, of course. James said the man was killing himself in the background laughing, but this woman in the mink looked ever so impressed.

  “‘What do you think he’s asking for it?’

  “‘I’ve been wondering that, myself. Nothing like what it’s worth, I’d expect.’ James thought that was a fair enough statement, because the dealer must surely be asking something, and the painting wasn’t worth a plugged nickel. By this time, the woman’s tongue was practically hanging out.

  “‘Do you plan to make him an offer?’ she asked.

  “James put on a big act. “Well, you don’t find something like this every day.’ That was true enough, too!

  “‘I’ll say five hundred,’ she told him.

  “‘My dear lady!’ said James.

  “‘A thousand.’

  “‘Two?’

  “Two-five.’

  “‘Three?’

  “‘Four thousand, and that’s my final offer,’ the woman snapped.

  “With that, James gave her a gallant bow as only he knew how to do. He was an awful ham, Jenny. ‘It would be most ungentlemanly of me to outbid so charming and determined a connoisseur,’ he told her.

  “So believe it or not, the woman opened her pocket-book right then and there and forked over four thousand-dollar bills to the dealer. James flagged her down a taxi, helped her into it with her genuine Kvizitsia, then went back into the shop and held out his hand. The dealer plunked two of the thousand-dollar bills into it, they both had a good laugh, and James went strolling on his merry way.”

  Jenny couldn’t help laughing, too. “I suppose anybody that rich and that gullible is asking to be taken.”

  “When the heavens rain manna upon you, don’t put up an umbrella. Hold out a tub. That’s what your father would have said. James never pulled the same one twice. He didn’t have to.”

  “So that’s how he made his fortune.”

  “Not so you’d notice it, young woman. James couldn’t keep a cent in his pocket long enough for it to burn a hole through. I’ll admit your initial capital came from some rather unusual sources, but the profits on it were legitimate enough. As soon as I found out James had a daughter, I made up my mind you were going to be properly provided for, Plummers or no Plummers. From then on, whenever James came home bragging that he’d hauled off another little deal, I made him fork over half of whatever he had on him, right then and there. That money went into what we called our Jenny Fund.

  “I got your portfolio started with some good, safe municipal bonds. After I’d built up a decent backlog of blue-chip securities, I began to speculate. Maybe it was because I was investing for you instead of myself, but everything I touched paid off. I’m not denying James and I did all right, too, but you came first. When the money started to pile up, I established that trust, not to beat the tax man as your Uncle Fred no doubt suspected, but to screen the connection between you and your father.”

  “Why did you do that, Aunt Harriet?”

  “I had to, Jenny. I never knew when James might stumble over that fine line he drew between right and wrong and land himself in the soup.”

  “Which he finally did,” Jenny said bitterly.

  “Jenny, I hope you’re not blaming me for what happened. I never tried to keep James tied to my apron strings. He was a born roamer, but I figured he’d always come back sooner or later. If he didn’t, that was my tough luck. I’d taken him for what he was, not for a lump of silly putty I could squeeze into any shape I wanted.”

  Harriet rubbed a long-fingered hand over her eyes. “Loving somebody isn’t all moonlight and roses and splitting up as soon as the violins start playing a little bit off-key. It’s damned hard work, if you want the truth. Anyway, that’s beside the point. As to why he was killed, I’m sure it wasn’t because he’d got involved in anything crooked for the sake of the money. We were financially secure by then, and he knew it. Nor can I see him deliberately putting himself in danger. James liked the fun of the game, whatever the game might be, but he was fond of his own handsome skin, too.”

  “Then what was he doing in Meldrum? Can you tell me that?”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t guessed. James wanted to make a comeback as Jason Cirak. He’d been talking a lot about the grand old days when he was a famous producer, how he’d been wasting his time, frittering away his talents these past years, and all that jazz. He’d gotten an idea for another film, and he was using Meldrum as a testing board, manipulating people to see how they’d react.”

  “But you can’t do that to human beings,” Jenny protested.

  “James could. He treated the world the way a baby treats its teddy bear. People were his toys. He wasn’t nasty about it, of course. If they wouldn’t play the way he wanted the game to go, he’d simply go off and find himself a new set of playmates.”

  “Then since he hadn’t left Meldrum, he must have thought the game was still going his way,” said Jenny slowly. “Only—it wasn’t.”

  This wasn’t easy, having to accept a father who’d used a planet for his playpen and a stepmother who’d never known her before but had cared enough to build a future for her. Harriet had done what her father hadn’t had the stability or her mother the energy to do. If she’d had to choose among them, which would she have picked?

  “No, it wasn’t.” Harriet Compton was sitting with her head bowed, as if in farewell to the rover she’d managed somehow to stay in love with all these years. “Maybe a sudden death wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to your father, Jenny. He’d never have made it back as Jason Cirak. He’d left the screen a failure. He’d been away too long, and he was out of step with what’s being done today. And James would have hated being an old man. From Peter Pan to Pantaloon with nothing in between—” She brushed away the years with a sweep of her long-boned hand.

  “But it left me so terribly alone, Jenny. I even missed the phone bills.” She managed a wry chuckle.

  “James had a habit of calling collect from wherever he happened to be and talking for hours. He’d phoned me only the night before he died, full of beans and dropping mysterious hints about how well the new project was going. He wanted me to meet him in New York the following weekend so he coul
d tell me all about it. That wasn’t unusual. James often expected me to charge off somewhere or other at a moment’s notice. He never liked being separated from me too long. I didn’t like it much, either.”

  She stopped for a moment to get her voice back under control. “And two days later I got a copy of the Meldrum Times. I’d started taking the local paper when James moved here. I figured he’d be in it sooner or later, but I hadn’t expected a front-page story saying he was dead.”

  There was another pause. “I couldn’t do much myself for fear of its reflecting on you. As you know, he’d been passing as James Cox, a childless widower. So I sent Joe Delorio up here to clear out his personal possessions and had the body shipped back to Baltimore as soon as the police would release it. Then we had a private funeral, just my Jimmy and me and a few old friends.”

  Harriet blew her nose on her napkin and wiped away the tears. “He’s buried in our family plot down there, next to my twin brother, who died when we were young. I always thought it was a pity Harry couldn’t have known James. After that, there wasn’t much else I could do. I was furious at that stupid verdict, of course, but I hesitated to stick my own oar in until I heard through our lawyers that you wanted to come here and take possession of the house. I had to act then. How did I know you weren’t walking straight into whatever situation had caused your father’s death?”

  “But that suede jacket? Where did that come from? Was it—”

  “No, it wasn’t James’s. I picked it up at a thrift shop, if you want to know. It was an idea James had had once about how to get his foot in somebody’s door for some reason or other. He was always tossing off these gems and then forgetting all about them; but I have a long memory. Anyway, I was coming back from the lawyer’s office, racking my brain about what to do, and there was the jacket in the window of a second-hand clothing store, so I went in and bought it. Somebody’d spilled grease or something down the front. I decided blood would be more artistic, so I slopped a piece of raw liver on top of the stains. Not a very nice thing to do, but I wanted to scare you into either clearing out or letting me stay. You were all I had left, you see.”