The Girls of Cincinnati

by Jack Engelhard

  “Stephanie called.”

  I looked at her.

  “At least she said it was Stephanie.”

  I kept looking at her.

  “But it sure didn’t sound like Stephanie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it didn’t sound like Stephanie.”

  But anyway, I was supposed to await her phone call and not, absolutely not try to get in touch with her. She’d get in touch with me. She had been very strict about that, according to Mona. Mona didn’t know the story so it figured, her not understanding why Stephanie’s voice had changed. She had probably been stabbed there.

  So it was back to that, back to waiting. I waited the day, the night, another day another night, until the call finally came and it was Stephanie. It was Stephanie. I could hardly hear her – she sounded as though she were holding a hand over the mouthpiece, muffled.

  But that was understandable. “Can you meet me?” she said without so much as a hello or a how-are-you.

  Also understandable.

  “Stephanie?”

  “Can you meet me?”

  “Where? When?”

  She mentioned the deserted parking lot a couple of blocks from deserted Fleischman Park at a deserted hour, one a.m., all of which made sense for someone who did not want to be seen. Perfectly understandable. She didn’t even want me to see her face. “You have to promise not to look at me,” she said.

  I was to stay in the parking lot, kill the lights, turn down the rearview mirror, wait for her to pull up, open the back door to let her in without looking at her, and we’d communicate that way, with her sitting in back, me in front, awkward of course, but understandable.

  “I promise,” I said.

  She was adamant about my not setting eyes on her.

  There was one more rule. If for some reason I couldn’t make it, I was not to contact her at home.

  Understandable. I knew the situation.

  Chapter 34

  Maishe said, “Something smells.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He couldn’t put his finger on it – except that it was SURPRISING.

  “I mean, just like that – out of the blue.”

  I said most of my life was JUST LIKE THAT.

  “Out of the blue?”

  Most of his life was out of the blue.

  “No,” he said. “Most of life follows a pattern. This isn’t Stephanie’s pattern. All this…SCHEMING.”

  He suggested I drop the whole thing.

  “Let’s go to New York,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Look at you, Eli. YOU’RE stuck in a pattern.”

  Maishe said he was going to New York. With or without me.

  Chapter 35

  I waited. She couldn’t have picked a more desolate spot. Abandoned cars, tires, not even a street light within four blocks. Avondale. Now a ghetto. A bar two blocks away and even that was abandoned. Finally, it wasn’t the silver Jaguar X12 that pulled up, and this was understandable. In fact the car was pretty beat up, whatever it was. But all right.

  She parked behind me. I watched her get out, her face completely covered with a black and red shawl. She halted when she noticed me staring so I quickly turned my head, which prompted her to move in and then enter the back seat in one athletic leap. She fairly bolted in. I had the rearview mirror turned down as she instructed. I felt her eyes watching me but the funny thing was, I didn’t feel Stephanie’s eyes. They were someone else’s eyes, also understandable because Stephanie WAS someone else.

  Nothing was happening.

  I was reluctant to speak; wrong choice of words might take her away, given how skittish she had become.

  “Stephanie?” I said.

  Still nothing. I started the car and slowly drove around the parking lot as if I were just trying to relax the two of us and casually passed by her car, about 30 feet away – but even from that distance and even in the dark it was unmistakable. Those were Kentucky license plates…

  * * *

  The Reds were doing all right and Dad saw that as a good sign. I stayed with him for a week and he never asked me what had happened. This thing about RANDOMNESS was more Dad’s than Beckett’s. Dad didn’t ask questions. He expected anything to happen. I had been stabbed twice in the chest when I turned around. I lunged to intercept the knife but Sonja managed to get in two stabs amid a flurry of strikes. She was saying all sorts of things but I couldn’t make out the language. Something about seeing people as they really were INSIDE, and that now it was my turn. She was very pissed off. So was I. Not at her coming at me with that knife and trying to cut the life out of me as much as having this person do all this, and consumed by all this, this hatred, for NO REASON – that I could think of. There probably were people who had a legitimate right to go after me with a knife and I would have been horrified all right, but not ticked off.

  But this was annoying. That a STRANGER should have it in for you like this.

  Hatred ought to be something you EARNED. Deserved. Just like love.

  The randomness was what ticked me off.

  But even randomness wasn’t really random. It was systemized according to the law of averages, which had an order all its own. The more people you saw the more likely you were to run into one of every kind, and I had finally found my sickie, a woman who singled me out as her cause, her struggle, her kampf. How many girls had I interviewed for telephone solicitor? Hundreds. Among them came a Stephanie, and a Sonja. Law of averages.

  After those couple of stabs – and I didn’t know how seriously they had penetrated – we grappled until I overcame her and shoved her out of the car. She still held the knife. I punched her in the mouth, which prompted her to let go of the weapon. Then I had her by the neck and began tightening my grip. She managed to say: “Me too? Just like New York?”

  So I let go.

  “That bullpen,” Dad said in admiration.

  There were times when I could lose myself in a game and find myself living and dying with each ball and strike. But other times I’d find myself riveted to Dad’s radio and then realize that five innings had gone by without my noticing. Two people who should have paid a price, gotten the CHAIR, the guy who plotted Lou’s death, and Sonja, the girl who had ruined Stephanie – both were alive and well and living in Cincinnati, including the wife-beating neighbor upstairs and all the other wife-beaters and child molesters. I couldn’t figure it out. There was no getting at them. The guy who had killed Lou had committed the perfect crime because he had committed no crime, technically. Sonja? Stephanie would never testify against her and I was helpless to bring her in on account of that thing in New York, which would bring me in as well, if I were on the books. I probably was. Maybe not. I just didn’t know.

  But it just didn’t make sense, how things worked out. I wondered how many other people had done all sorts of things and were never punished and HELL, that included me! Was that my punishment, to know that among us walked evil – evil that was never recompensed? You were brought up to believe that good merits good and evil merits evil and you knew more people were a shade off, when it came to the good. But you never imagined that BLOODSHED, for example, went unpunished. Made you think. Made you wonder about what was around you. What secrets people had.

  To say that life was unfair, well, that was trite, of course, but we were beyond that, into something much darker, more than randomness, outright chaos IF IN THE EYES OF JUSTICE THERE WAS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL. Here on earth, you mean, the good perish, evil prevails, and to top it all off, there may not even be an afterlife! Then what? Then those bumper stickers are correct: Life sucks and then you die.

  Dad sat there in the big cushy chair glancing over his scorecard. The game was over. Always a letdown. There was comfort during the game. Kept you busy, even if you were diverted. Kept you serene knowing that something important was happening that wasn’t really important. Win or lose he never said a word after the game. Took a shot of cognac a
nd went straight to bed.

  “Good night,” he said.

  “Good night, Dad.”

  Did he know that I’d been stabbed? Did he know I was his son? Probably not. I arrived straight from the hospital. He saw me. Made me a cup of tea. I often wondered if he knew I was his son. Not that I was complaining. It was better this way. I just wondered.

  The injury hurt after the second day, when the sedation wore off. I felt myself burning up inside.

  If I knew Sonja, she’d write it off as an accident – and maybe she was right.

  Yeah. Everything was an accident. Really it was.

  Chapter 36

  I decided to write her a letter. In this age letter writing was a trifle more advanced than smoke signals – what with phones, faxes and e-mails – you never thought of taking pen in hand. As for me, I’d thought of every which way to reach her, even preparing to climb up the outside walls to her room, and until now it hadn’t dawned on me to WRITE HER A LETTER.

  My first letter was very long and very poetic and very romantic, and so touching; a regular Robert Browning. Our circumstances, come to think of it, weren’t that much different. I even vowed to heal her with the abundance of my love. I even said it didn’t matter how disfigured she was…

  Fortunately I didn’t mail it, nor the second, nor the third, fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh attempts. To tell a woman how you really felt…it just wasn’t the American way. I certainly wasn’t trained in that direction. I was never any good at whispering sweet nothings, especially when I didn’t mean it, and now, from lack of exercise, even when I did. Everything came out so mushy you wanted to puke.

  Maybe I inherited that from my father, that aloofness.

  So I kept whittling away at this letter like that story about Fish Sold Here, where a man walks into the shop and says to the owner, “Why the word fish? Everybody knows they’re fish.” Agreed. “And why sold? Of course you’re selling.” Agreed. “And why Here? Where else?” Seeing the logic, the owner took the sign down.

  I didn’t reduce it that far, to obliteration, although I did think, I did assume that she knew my feelings for her. I shouldn’t have to tell her. Except that I remembered her telling me that you can’t assume, you must tell a woman. They’re funny that way, even the beautiful ones – imagine, then, the ones damaged beyond recognition. But she ought to know that nothing so superficial could make a difference to me. I did not care how she looked.

  The letter I finally sent said this:

  Dear Stephanie:

  Cut the crap.

  Marry me.

  Chapter 37

  Harry’s son-in-law, Stanley Blair, the accountant, was made vice-president, second in command, which dropped Fat Jack down a notch even though he was still manager – but now with almost no chance of taking over the business. Call it FAMILY. Call it POLITICS. That’s the way it was, and I felt bad for Fat Jack, who was actually more family to Harry Himself than this stiff-necked, antiseptic, nose-to-the-figures, bottom-line-loving Stanley Blair. Fat Jack ran the place with a kind of bravado and flair and improvisation that was as out of style as the corner grocer. Harry Himself was now completely removed from store operations. He only came in so he wouldn’t have to be home. Fat Jack had to get everything okayed by Stanley Blair.

  Which he did, about one out of ten times. Nobody but nobody intimidated Fat Jack. This got him in hot water, as when he ran an Anniversary Sale and Stanley Blair, downstairs in the showroom, in front of everybody, asked him whose anniversary it was and Fat Jack said he didn’t know, what’s the difference?

  “What’s the DIFFERENCE?”

  “All right. It’s my wedding anniversary.”

  “Things are going to change around here.”

  That’s where I came in after a week’s absence, and it always seemed to be like that when you were gone and came back…things changed. Fat Jack whispered: “Better hurry on upstairs before he starts on you.” Fat Jack wasn’t the whispering kind, and not only that, but he seemed to be losing weight. Or maybe it was just his diminished status that made him appear thinner and less robust. Slim Jack? Skinny Jack? It just didn’t go. Fat Jack or nothing.

  Stanley Blair did start on me. Got himself an efficiency expert from Connecticut, very friendly jokey kind of guy, to take a look around the place, see where some chopping could be done, asking questions, only asking, no decisions being made, don’t worry, nobody’s getting fired, we’re only doing this to promote efficiency and corporate EXCELLENCE, result being that half the salesmen were fired, first to go was Morris Silver, and Mona was not for long either, terrific person that she was, HEIRLOOM of the company that she was – but she wasn’t CARRYING HER WEIGHT.

  I handed in my resignation to Fat Jack. He refused to accept it – “Hang in,” he said.

  But he quit before I did.

  “Who needs this bullshit?” he said. “I got money. Even if I didn’t, who NEEDS THIS BULLSHIT?”

  I asked to see Harry Himself and was given an audience. His office was the same as before. So was he. Only in addition to the feebleness I had detected earlier, this time he was also gloomy. He was a handsome man. Beautiful silver hair. Full face, dramatically lined. You expected him to roar – especially by reputation. But he spoke softly.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” I asked him.

  “What’s going on?”

  “That guy is tearing this place apart.”

  He shrugged. “He’s the boss.”

  “He is?”

  “Yes he is, and he knows what he’s doing.”

  “He does?”

  “I’m sorry if you’re unhappy.”

  “Everybody’s unhappy. Fat Jack just QUIT!!”

  “Stanley’s my son-in-law.”

  “Fat Jack was your son, wasn’t he?”

  “Business is business.”

  Life goes on.

  There was a part of him – I could see it in his eyes – that agreed with me. He had simply been swept away by the tide of everything that was TODAY. Automation. Bottom-line. Even the ethics had changed. The small larcenies, the little white lies, the wheeling and dealing, the handshake that was as good as a contract, the loyalties to the people who had come up with you that were the bedrock of the American retailer were things of the past. Harry Himself was a thing of the past. You couldn’t feel sorry for him, of course. He had those millions stashed away. But maybe you felt sorry for the loss of the impromptu vigor that had created the Harry Monocles. There were no more entrepreneurs. There were no more pioneers.

  What we had now were the Stanley Blairs.

  Stanley was astonished to learn that we were still operating out of a Criss-Cross Directory.

  We were not using an updated DATABASE that more accurately PROFILED our prospects.

  I had told him that zip codes were all we needed. Give me the zip code and I give you the person. As every direct marketing man knew, the zip code itself WAS the profile, told you not only where the person lived but how he lived, how much money he made, his religion, his hobbies, where he spent his money, on what he spent his money, and even his thoughts. As peripatetic as this nation was, people still lived among their own and if this was stereotyping, well then, yes, that’s what it was. That’s what it had to be if you didn’t want to start selling refrigerators to the Eskimos or Oriental Rugs in Price Hill.

  Stanley brought in a guy to computerize the boiler room, and by the way, no more boiler room. Stanley warned against using that term. This was TELEMARKETING. The room was refurbished, very attractively. New desks were brought in, a new air-conditioning unit was installed. Drapes were hung, the floors were carpeted.

  All that for the computers. The people? Gone. The computers would now do the dialing and the soliciting.

  No salesmen were allowed upstairs.

  I was gone way before then.

  Lou Emmett had died just in time.

  Chapter 38

  Three weeks after I sent the letter a silver Jaguar pulled up outsid
e my apartment in Mount Adams. It was a Sunday. The summer heat had burned off to a fall chill. Early morning, the sun was shining, kids were outside riding their bikes.

  I had shaved. I never shaved on Sundays but this Sunday I had as if in expectation.

  She sat in the car. I waited for about 15 minutes. Then I stepped out. I was afraid she’d take off. But she didn’t. She got out, straightened, put her arms around me and held me close, very close, and just held me like that, sobbing and holding and not letting go.

  Then we walked in.

  “I thought you’d be in New York by now,” she said.

  “Maishe told you?”

  “He said you were both going to New York.”

  “Not me. Not until I heard from you.”

  “But he went, didn’t he?”

  “I guess he did. Never thought he would. But he did.”

  “Maybe you should have gone with him.”

  “No.”

  She laughed. “Some letter you wrote.”

  “Sorry. It was the best I could do.”

  Now she began crying again. “That was the most beautiful love letter any woman ever got. If you only knew what it did for me, Eli! It…it…it did everything. I’ve been in tears ever since.”

  “Well that’s no good.”

  “Oh yes it is.”

  She had much on her mind, being cooped up like that all this time, and had really vowed never to show her face again – until that letter. I let her do most of the talking. Every few minutes she’d burst into tears. Mostly on account of the letter. She said nothing about suicide attempts. She said nothing about how it happened, how Sonja lured her, how Sonja attacked her. She did say she was a thoroughly changed person, and I could see that for myself. The original Stephanie never cried. The original Stephanie was never so forthright, so giving. She came plain out and said the only thing that kept her going was the hope that we’d get together, through the fear of how I’d react when I saw her, how terrifyingly ugly she’d become.