Strangers on a Train

by Strangers on a Train (2021) (retail) (epub)

  “Now what’s Palm Beach got to do with Miriam?” she asked finally.

  “Miriam wants to come with me there. Protection for a time. And I couldn’t bear it.” Guy clenched his hand. He had a sudden vision of Miriam in Palm Beach, Miriam meeting Clarence Brillhart, the manager of the Palmyra Club. Yet it was not the vision of Brillhart’s shock beneath his calm, unvarying courtesy, Guy knew, but simply his own revulsion that made it impossible. It was just that he couldn’t bear having Miriam anywhere near him when he worked on a project like this one. “I couldn’t bear it,” he repeated.

  “Oh,” was all she said, but her silence now was one of understanding. If she made any comment, Guy thought, it was bound to remind him of her old disapproval of their marriage. And she wouldn’t remind him at this time. “You couldn’t bear it,” she added, “for as long as it would take.”

  “I couldn’t bear it.” He got up and took her soft face in his hands. “Mama, I don’t care a bit,” he said, kissing her forehead. “I really don’t care a row of beans.”

  “I don’t believe you do care. Why don’t you?”

  He crossed the room to the upright piano. “Because I’m going to Mexico to see Anne.”

  “Oh, are you?” she smiled, and the gaiety of this first morning with him won out. “Aren’t you the gadabout!”

  “Want to come to Mexico?” He smiled over his shoulder. He began to play a saraband that he had learned as a child.

  “Mexico!” his mother said in mock horror. “Wild horses wouldn’t get me to Mexico. Maybe you can bring Anne to see me on your way back.”

  “Maybe.”

  She went over and laid her hands shyly on his shoulders. “Sometimes, Guy, I feel you’re happy again. At the funniest times.”

  five

  What has happened? Write immediately. Or better, telephone collect. We’re here at the Ritz for another two weeks. Missed you so on the trip, seems a shame we couldn’t have flown down together, but I understand. I wish you well every moment of the day, darling. This must be over soon and we’ll get it over. Whatever happens, tell me and let’s face it. I often feel you don’t. Face things, I mean.

  You’re so close, it’s absurd you can’t come down for a day or so. I hope you’ll be in the mood. I hope there’ll be time. Would love to have you here, and you know the family would. Darling, I do love the drawings and I’m so terribly proud of you I can even stand the idea of your being away in the months ahead because you’ll be building them. Dad most impressed, too. We talk about you all the time.

  All my love, and all that goes

  with it. Be happy, darling.

  A.

  Guy wrote a telegram to Clarence Brillhart, the manager of the Palmyra Club: “Owing to circumstances, impossible for me to take commission. My deepest regrets and thanks for your championing and constant encouragement. Letter following.”

  Suddenly he thought of the sketches they would use in lieu of his—the imitation Frank Lloyd Wright of William Harkness Associates. Worse yet, he thought as he dictated the telegram over the phone, the board would probably ask Harkness to copy some of his ideas. And Harkness would, of course.

  He telegraphed Anne that he would fly down Monday and that he was free for several days. And because there was Anne, he did not bother to wonder how many months it would be, how many years, perhaps, before another job as big as the Palmyra would come within his reach.

  six

  That evening, Charles Anthony Bruno was lying on his back in an El Paso hotel room, trying to balance a gold fountain pen across his rather delicate, dished-in nose. He was too restless to go to bed, not energetic enough to go down to one of the bars in the neighborhood and look things over. He had looked things over all afternoon, and he did not think much of them in El Paso. He did not think much of the Grand Canyon either. He thought more of the idea that had come to him night before last on the train. A pity Guy hadn’t awakened him that morning. Not that Guy was the kind of fellow to plan a murder with, but he liked him, as a person. Guy was somebody worth knowing. Besides, Guy had left his book, and he could have given it back.

  The ceiling fan made a wuz-wuz-wuz sound because one of its four blades was missing. If the fourth had been there, he would have been just a little cooler, he thought. One of the taps in the john leaked, the clamp on the reading light over the bed was broken so it hung down, and there were fingerprints all over the closet door. And the best hotel in town, they told him! Why was there always something wrong, maybe only one thing, with every hotel room he had ever been in? Some day he was going to find the perfect hotel room and buy it, even if it was in South Africa.

  He sat up on the edge of the bed and reached for the telephone. “Gimme long-distance.” He looked blankly at a smudge of red dirt his shoe had put on the white counterpane. “Great Neck 166J . . . Great Neck, yeah.” He waited. “Long Island . . . In New York, lunk, ever hear of it?”

  In less than a minute, he had his mother.

  “Yeah, I’m here. You still leaving Sunday? You better. . . . Well, I took that muleback trip. Just about pooped me, too. . . . Yeah, I seen the canyon. . . . Okay, but the colors are kind of corny. . . . Anyhow, how’s things with you?”

  He began to laugh. He pushed off his shoes and rolled back on the bed with the telephone, laughing. She was telling him about coming home to find the Captain entertaining two of her friends—two men she had met the night before—who had dropped in, thought the Captain was her father, and proceeded to say all the wrong things.

  seven

  Propped on his elbow in bed, Guy stared at the letter addressed to him in pencil.

  “Guess I’ll have only one more time to wake you for another good long while,” his mother said.

  Guy picked up the letter from Palm Beach, “Maybe not so long, Mama.”

  “What time does your plane leave tomorrow?”

  “One-twenty.”

  She leaned over and superfluously tucked in the foot of his bed. “I don’t suppose you’ll have time to run over and see Ethel?”

  “Oh, certainly I will, Mama.” Ethel Peterson was one of his mother’s oldest friends. She had given Guy his first piano lessons.

  The letter from Palm Beach was from Mr. Brillhart. He had been given the commission. Mr. Brillhart had also persuaded the board about the louver windows.

  “I’ve got some good strong coffee this morning,” his mother said from the threshold. “Like breakfast in bed?”

  Guy smiled at her. “Would I!”

  He reread Mr. Brillhart’s letter carefully, put it back in its envelope, and slowly tore it up. Then he opened the other letter. It was one page, scrawled in pencil. The signature with the heavy flourish below it made him smile again: Charles A. Bruno.

  Dear Guy:

  This is your train friend, remember? You left your book in my room that night & I found a Texas address in it which I trust is still right. Am mailing book to you. Read some in it myself, didn’t know there was so much conversation in Plato.

  A great pleasure dining with you that night & hope I may list you among my friends. It would be fine to see you in Santa Fe & if you possibly change your mind, address is: Hotel La Fonda, Santa Fe, New Mex. for next two weeks at least.

  I keep thinking about that idea we had for a couple of murders. It could be done, I am sure. I cannot express to you my supremest confidence in the idea! Though I know subject does not interest you.

  What’s what with your wife as that was very interesting? Please write me soon. Outside of losing wallit in El Paso (stolen right off a bar in front of me) nothing has happened of note. Didn’t like El Paso, with apologies to you.

  Hoping to hear from you soon,

  Your friend,

  Charles A. Bruno

  P.S. Very sorry for sleeping late and missing you that A.M.

  C.A.B.

  The letter pleased him somehow. It was pleasant to think of Bruno’s freedom.

  “Grits!” he said happily to his mother. “Neve
r get grits with my fried eggs up North!”

  He put on a favorite old robe that was too hot for the weather, and sat back in bed with the Metcalf Star and the teetery-legged bed tray that held his breakfast.

  Afterward, he showered and dressed as if there were something he had to do that day, but there wasn’t. He had visited the Cartwrights yesterday. He might have seen Peter Wriggs, his boyhood friend, but Peter had a job in New Orleans now. What was Miriam doing, he wondered. Perhaps manicuring her nails on her back porch, or playing checkers with some little girl neighbor who adored her, who wanted to be just like her. Miriam was never one to brood when a plan went askew. Guy lighted a cigarette.

  A soft, intermittent chink came from downstairs, where his mother or Ursline the cook was cleaning the silver and dropping it piece by piece onto a heap.

  Why hadn’t he left for Mexico today? The next idle twenty-four hours were going to be miserable, he knew. Tonight, his uncle again, and probably some friends of his mother’s dropping over. They all wanted to see him. Since his last visit, the Metcalf Star had printed a column about him and his work, mentioning his scholarships, the Prix de Rome that he hadn’t been able to use because of the war, the store he had designed in Pittsburgh, and the little annex infirmary of the hospital in Chicago. It read so impressively in a newspaper. It had almost made him feel important, he remembered, the lonely day in New York when the clipping had arrived in his mother’s letter.

  A sudden impulse to write Bruno made him sit down at his work table, but, with his pen in his hand, he realized he had nothing to say. He could see Bruno in his rust-brown suit, camera strap over his shoulder, plodding up some dry hill in Santa Fe, grinning with his bad teeth at something, lifting his camera unsteadily and clicking. Bruno with a thousand easy dollars in his pocket, sitting in a bar, waiting for his mother. What did he have to say to Bruno? He recapped his fountain pen and tossed it back on the table.

  “Mama?” he called. He ran downstairs. “How about a movie this afternoon?”

  His mother said she had already been to movies twice that week. “You know you don’t like movies,” she chided him.

  “Mama, I really want to go!” he smiled, and insisted.

  eight

  The telephone rang that night at about eleven. His mother answered it, then came in and called him from the living room where he sat with his uncle and his uncle’s wife and his two cousins, Ritchie and Ty.

  “It’s long-distance,” his mother said.

  Guy nodded. It would be Brillhart, of course, asking for further explanations. Guy had answered his letter that day.

  “Hello, Guy,” the voice said. “Charley.”

  “Charley who?”

  “Charley Bruno.”

  “Oh!—How are you? Thanks for the book.”

  “I dint send it yet but I will,” Bruno said with the drunken cheer Guy remembered from the train. “Coming out to Santa Fe?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “What about Palm Beach? Can I visit you there in a couple weeks? I’d like to see how it looks.”

  “Sorry, that’s all off.”

  “Off? Why?”

  “Complications. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Account of your wife?”

  “N-no.” Guy felt vaguely irritated.

  “She wants you to stay with her?”

  “Yes. Sort of.”

  “Miriam wants to come out to Palm Beach?”

  Guy was surprised he remembered her name.

  “You haven’t got your divorce, huh?”

  “Getting it,” Guy said tersely.

  “Yes, I’m paying for this call!” Bruno shouted to someone. “Cheeses!” disgustedly. “Listen, Guy, you gave up that job account of her?”

  “Not exactly. It doesn’t matter. It’s finished.”

  “You have to wait till the child’s born for a divorce?”

  Guy said nothing.

  “The other guy’s not going to marry her, huh?”

  “Oh, yes, he is—”

  “Yeah?” Bruno interrupted cynically.

  “I can’t talk any longer. We’ve got guests here tonight. I wish you a pleasant trip, Charley.”

  “When can we talk? Tomorrow?”

  “I won’t be here tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” Bruno sounded lost now, and Guy hoped he was. Then the voice again, with sullen intimacy, “Listen, Guy, if you want anything done, you know, all you have to do is give a sign.”

  Guy frowned. A question took form in his mind, and immediately he knew the answer. He remembered Bruno’s idea for a murder.

  “What do you want, Guy?”

  “Nothing. I’m very content. Understand?” But it was drunken bravado on Bruno’s part, he thought. Why should he react seriously?

  “Guy, I mean it,” the voice slurred, drunker than before.

  “Good-by, Charley,” Guy said. He waited for Bruno to hang up.

  “Doesn’t sound like everything’s fine,” Bruno challenged.

  “I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”

  “Guy!” in a tearful whine.

  Guy started to speak, but the line clicked and went dead. He had an impulse to ask the operator to trace the call. Then he thought, drunken bravado. And boredom. It annoyed him that Bruno had his address. Guy ran his hand hard across his hair, and went back into the living room.

  nine

  All of what he had just told her of Miriam, Guy thought, did not matter so much as the fact he and Anne were together on the gravel path. He took her hand as they walked, and gazed around him at the scene in which every object was foreign—a broad level avenue bordered with giant trees like the Champs-Elysées, military statues on pedestals, and beyond, buildings he did not know. The Paseo de la Reforma. Anne walked beside him with her head still lowered, nearly matching his slow paces. Their shoulders brushed, and he glanced at her to see if she were about to speak, to say he was right in what he had decided, but her lips were still thoughtful. Her pale yellow hair, held by a silver bar at the back of her neck, made lazy movements in the wind behind her. It was the second summer he had seen her when the sun had only begun to tan her face, so her skin about equaled in pigment the color of her hair. Soon her face would be darker than her hair, but Guy liked her best the way she was now, like something made of white gold.

  She turned to him with the faintest smile of self-consciousness on her lips because he had been staring at her. “You couldn’t have borne it, Guy?”

  “No. Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t.” He saw that her smile stayed, tinged with perplexity, perhaps annoyance.

  “It’s such a big thing to give up.”

  It vexed him now. He felt done with it. “I simply loathe her,” he said quietly.

  “But you shouldn’t loathe anything.”

  He made a nervous gesture. “I loathe her because I’ve told you all this while we’re walking here!”

  “Guy, really!”

  “She’s everything that should be loathed,” he went on, staring in front of him. “Sometimes I think I hate everything in the world. No decency, no conscience. She’s what people mean when they say America never grows up, America rewards the corrupt. She’s the type who goes to the bad movies, acts in them, reads the love-story magazines, lives in a bungalow, and whips her husband into earning more money this year so they can buy on the installment plan next year, breaks up her neighbor’s marriage—”

  “Stop it, Guy! You talk so like a child!” She drew away from him.

  “And the fact I once loved her,” Guy added, “loved all of it, makes me ill.”

  They stopped, looking at each other. He had had to say it, here and now, the ugliest thing he could say. He wanted to suffer also from Anne’s disapproval, perhaps from her turning away and leaving him to finish the walk by himself. She had left him on one or two other occasions, when he had been unreasonable.

  Anne said, in that distant, expressionless tone that terrified him, because he felt sh
e might abandon him and never come back, “Sometimes I can believe you’re still in love with her.”

  He smiled, and she softened. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Oh, Guy!” She put out her hand again, like a gesture of beseeching, and he took it. “If you’d only grow up!”

  “I read somewhere people don’t grow emotionally.”

  “I don’t care what you read. They do. I’ll prove it to you if it’s the last thing I do.”

  He felt secure suddenly. “What else can I think about now?” he asked perversely, lowering his voice.

  “That you were never closer to being free of her than now, Guy. What do you suppose you should think about?”

  He lifted his head higher. There was a big pink sign on the top of a building: TOME XX, and all at once he was curious to know what it meant and wanted to ask Anne. He wanted to ask her why everything was so much easier and simpler when he was with her, but pride kept him from asking now, and the question would have been rhetorical anyway, unanswerable by Anne in words, because the answer was simply Anne. It had been so since the day he met her, in the dingy basement of the Art Institute in New York, the rainy day he had slogged in and addressed the only living thing he saw, the Chinese red raincoat and hood. The red raincoat and hood had turned and said: “You get to 9A from the first floor. You didn’t have to come all the way down here.” And then her quick, amused laugh that mysteriously, immediately, lifted his rage. He had learned to smile by quarter inches, frightened of her, a little contemptuous of her new dark green convertible. “A car just makes more sense,” Anne said, “when you live in Long Island.” The days when he was contemptuous of everything and courses taken here and there were no more than tests to make sure he knew all the instructor had to say, or to see how fast he could learn it and leave. “How do you suppose anybody gets in if not through pull? They can still throw you out if they don’t like you.” He had seen it her way finally, the right way, and gone to the exclusive Deems Architectural Academy in Brooklyn for a year, through her father’s knowing a man on the board of directors.