The Girl in the Face of the Clock

by Charles Mathes

  Stock market analysts were so pleased by the synergy when OmbiCorp took over Armex Patterson, the Canadian electronics conglomerate, that OmbiCorp’s stock shot up eight points. Perry Mannerback, however, claimed that all he had been interested in was a small string of movie theatres that Armex Patterson owned in Manhattan. “Now I can go to the movies right around the corner from my office any time I want to,” he boasted to the Wall Street Journal, “and I get in for free!”

  Not only did everything that Perry Mannerback touch turn to gold, he had a talent for attracting loyal, talented employees besides.

  His executive secretary, the fiercely protective Miss Fripp, typed a hundred and ten words a minute, kept him stocked with gummy bears, and wouldn’t let him go out without buttoning up his coat.

  Leonid, the Russian chauffeur, was so grateful for Perry Mannerback’s kindnesses to him and his family that he would regularly stop the car in the middle of a busy avenue, rush into a store, and come back with an ice cream cone or lollipop for Perry that he had bought with his own money.

  But perhaps the most valuable employee of all, Jane had discovered to her surprise, was the tall, unpleasant man whom she had mistaken for Perry Mannerback that first day. His name was Theodore B. Danko. He was OmbiCorp’s president and chief executive officer, the man who actually ran the company.

  According to the Gang of Five—a group of OmbiCorp secretaries who were happy to have someone new to gossip with around the water cooler—Danko had started in sales and risen to vice president of the North American marketing division under Perry’s father. When Reginald Mannerback died twelve years ago, Perry had selected Danko over several more senior people to run the company, “because he looked like a quarterback,” Perry had once said.

  It turned out to be yet another brilliant decision for all the wrong reasons, in typical Perry Mannerback fashion. Ted Danko was a shrewd, efficient, and utterly ruthless executive, enough of a buccaneer to navigate OmbiCorp through the treacherous waters of international business, yet enough of a politician to deal with a loose cannon like Perry Mannerback.

  Jane had met Danko formally for the first time yesterday, her fourth day on the job. Up to this point, she and Perry had stopped by OmbiCorp’s Sixth Avenue offices only briefly each morning for gummy bears and grant checks. It seemed that Perry Mannerback hated business and spent most of his time having adventures and giving away money through his foundation. The past week had been a blur of fun, feature films, and selfless philanthropy (at one point Jane had watched in amazement as Perry Mannerback spent three hours reading stories to toddlers in a Harlem day care center, and then, unable to find his pen, wrote a fifty-thousand-dollar check with a crayon).

  Finally, though, Perry had had to spend a few hours at OmbiCorp’s Sixth Avenue offices with Miss Fripp, signing documents and correspondence, about the contents of which he didn’t seem to have a clue. As he and Jane were escaping they had run into Danko accidentally in the hallway outside Perry’s enormous office.

  There had been an awkward moment of silence. Clearly, the two men didn’t see one another often. Perry had then introduced Jane to Danko as his new assistant and inquired how things were going with the business, crossing his arms and assuming a very serious businessmanlike expression for the occasion—rather like a little boy putting on his father’s hat and frown.

  “I’m glad you asked, Perry,” Danko had replied smoothly. “Things are doing very well. Sales are up in Europe and we’re taking advantage of the monetary problems in the Far East to buy raw materials. Happily, Asia has never been a market for our products, isn’t that right?”

  “Oh, yes,” Perry had said. “Absolutely.”

  “So you don’t think we should try to penetrate the Asian markets?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “You mean, then, that we should?”

  “Gee. Is this something I have to decide right away, Ted?”

  “No, Perry. Take your time. Take as long as you want. You’re the boss.”

  Danko’s face hadn’t changed in any aspect as he spoke. His voice carried no inflection. However, his cold gray eyes betrayed him, at least to Jane. There was more than cruelty in those eyes. There was contempt. And something else, something frightening. Danko did not merely think Perry Mannerback a fool, he despised him. He hated him with a passion.

  “What do you think we should do, Ted?” Perry had asked, oblivious.

  “I can study the situation, if you like, and make a recommendation.”

  “That’s good. That’s very good, Ted. Make a study and recommend something.”

  “I’ll do that,’ said Danko without a trace of emotion in his voice. “Thank you, Perry. I don’t know how we’d manage without your guidance. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting. A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Sailor.”

  Then he turned on his heel and marched away.

  “Nice man,” Perry had said, beaming, clearly delighted to think he had solved another problem.

  The incident had left Jane with an unsettled feeling in the pit of her stomach. Certainly, Perry needed someone like Danko to run his business. Perry couldn’t match his socks on a regular basis, let alone make the kinds of day-to-day decisions that a huge corporation like OmbiCorp depended on.

  But Jane knew instinctively that Danko’s animosity posed a real danger for her new employer. Perry seemed so vulnerable and helpless against such a man—and this was what had left Jane feeling so unsettled. She had taken this job to learn if Perry Mannerback might have destroyed her father. Now, after only a few days, she was beginning to feel as protective of him as Miss Fripp!

  “I live in the penthouse,” said Perry proudly as the elevator came to a stop, jolting Jane back to the present. He was wearing a plaid vest today, which was too busy a combination along with his striped shirt and patterned bow tie, but on Perry it all somehow seemed to fit. “Mine’s the best apartment in the building, isn’t it, John?”

  “Yes, it is, Mr. Mannerback,” said the white-gloved attendant with a smile.

  “I have to get that article in Time magazine for Aunt Eunice,” Perry continued, fixing the elevator operator in his eager gaze. “The one all about sex chat rooms on the Internet. Did you read that article, John?”

  “No, Mr. Mannerback.”

  “But you remember Aunt Eunice, don’t you? The one who gets stoned out of her gourd every year at Thanksgiving? She’s always telling everyone what a sex maniac she is, which is why I think she’ll be interested in this article.”

  “I’m sure she will be, Mr. Mannerback,” said John. He opened the metal gate, then the outer door.

  “Come on, we’re here,” announced Perry Mannerback, urging Jane out of the elevator and directly into the vestibule of the most spectacular apartment she had ever seen.

  A huge silver chandelier carved with stags’ heads and grape-leaves was suspended into the room from a ceiling at least twenty feet high. The floor was alternating squares of black and white marble. An elegant limestone staircase wound its way to a second floor. Eight superb grandfather-type case clocks, graduating in size from three feet to eight, flanked one wall. An antique Brussels hunting tapestry graced another. A ballerina painted by Degas posed en pirouette above a walnut hall table.

  In the rooms ahead Jane could see a center table with an enormous arrangement of fresh flowers, stunning Oriental carpets, important paintings, and windows looking out onto the grand buildings of Central Park West across the green expanse of the park itself.

  Amidst this glory, however, all Jane could focus on was the sound.

  It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, high and low, near and far: a pervasive rhythmic pulsating, like a million butterflies beating their wings or an ocean of bubbles bursting in time with one another. Jane turned to the right, then the left, but still couldn’t grasp what it was or its source until one of the grandfather clocks began to chime the hour with a low dong.

  “Isn’t that a beautiful
sound?” said Perry Mannerback, tilting his head up and closing his eyes.

  Jane looked at her wrist. According to her watch, it was a little before six o’clock. Perhaps she was a little slow. The days with Perry Mannerback sped by, though Jane still didn’t know exactly what she was supposed to be doing to earn her extravagant salary.

  A second grandfather clock began to chime. Then from the other room, a clear bell began to ring. Then another, and suddenly the air was vibrating with what a poet had once needed to coin a word to describe: tintinnabulation. The ringing and the singing of a hundred different bells and gongs. More joined in. And still more. On and on it went.

  Jane looked over to Perry Mannerback, who was standing in the center of the elegant entryway, his eyes closed in bliss. The tolling of the hour went on for nearly a minute, then began to taper off until all that was left was the rhythmic pulsing that Jane had noticed before. Now she knew what it was—the ticking of a thousand clocks!

  “I hear you collect clocks,” said Jane, pointing out the obvious.

  “Come on, I’ll show you,” said Perry, bursting with excitement. “Come on!”

  Jane followed him past the huge flower arrangement in the inner hall to the living room. If the vestibule had been spectacular, this room was positively incredible, a good fifty feet long and another thirty wide, furnished exquisitely with English antiques, plush sofas, Tiffany table lamps. It was the clocks, however, that dominated everything.

  Clocks sat on the marble ledge above the huge fireplace. Clocks crowded the Delft-tiled windowsills. Clocks packed the enormous breakfront. Clocks filled the shelves between the windows looking out over Central Park.

  One corner of the room had a collection of old-fashioned “anniversary” clocks under glass domes. Another corner teemed with carriage clocks of every size. The walls were hung with regulator clocks. Scores of brackets held scores of bracket clocks. Table clocks sat on every table. Mantel clocks occupied every mantel. There were clocks with human faces and clocks with painted scenes. There were big clocks that had pendulums and tiny clocks that fit into nutshells. There were ormolu clocks, lantern clocks, cartel clocks, and skeleton clocks. Against every inch of wall space not taken by a window or a Renoir were fine long case clocks with gold and silver faces standing at attention, like an army awaiting orders.

  “Do you like clocks?” asked their general.

  “I sleep next to one,” said Jane weakly. “He wakes me up in the morning.”

  “Me, too!”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  A door on the far side of the room opened and a squat woman in a white uniform marched out.

  “Perry Mannerback, what you doing here?” she demanded angrily, her hands on her hips. “You supposed to be having cocktails with Aunt Eunice. You supposed to be there for dinner. She call twice.”

  “I’m just here to pick up something, Olinda. This is Jane Sailor, Olinda. Jane’s my new bodyguard-assistant. Olinda winds all the clocks. And she takes care of me, don’t you, Olinda?”

  “Olinda going take care of you with a skillet, one these days,” said Olinda, shaking her fat fist. “You get out fast and go see Aunt Eunice.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you eat your vegetables tonight at dinner. You hear me, Perry Mannerback?”

  “I will, I will.”

  Olinda muttered something in Spanish that sounded unmistakably like a curse, then huffing with disgust disappeared back behind the door through which she had come.

  “Come on,” said Perry, laughing. “We better get that magazine and scram out of here before you have to give Olinda a karate chop or something. I think it’s in my study.”

  He was already in motion. Jane followed her employer though the long room. At the far end, he opened a pair of double doors. Two big, beautiful Irish setters excitedly rushed up to meet them as they entered a smaller room (this one only four times the size of Jane’s entire apartment). Perry squatted down, gave the dogs hugs, and happily let them lick him all over.

  There were clocks here, too, though not as many as outside. Mostly they sat on end tables and on the gigantic Louis XV rococo and gilt bronze desk that dominated the room. On three walls were floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with leatherbound books. The ceiling was elaborately detailed plasterwork, and the wood of the bookcases matched the paneling on the single exposed wall behind the desk.

  It was the painting on this wall that took Jane’s breath away. It was about six feet high and perhaps seven feet across. The subject was a naked woman sitting on a staircase. She stared out defiantly at the viewer, her bare chest arched forward. In between her carelessly parted legs was a garishly glazed ceramic clock without hands that Jane recognized right away.

  It was Grandmother Sylvie’s clock. It was just as hideous as Jane remembered: blue columns, red base, yellow central dial. No wonder she had decided to keep it in the basement. And she knew very well the worn wooden stairs with too-high treads on which the nude sat, too. They were the stairs from Aaron Sailor’s loft on Greene Street, the stairs he had fallen down eight years ago.

  “My father painted this,” said Jane in a subdued voice.

  “Isn’t it great?” demanded Perry. “A clock with no hands. It says something about the fleeting nature of existence, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so,” said Jane, somehow doubting that philosophy was why this painting had appealed to Perry Mannerback. Was he one of those guys who bought Playboy for the stories? Perry might be a little boy, but he was a little boy who had been through three wives, Jane reminded herself. She was a little disappointed with him for wanting such a painting. And perhaps with her father for having painted it. There was something blatantly sexual about this nude that Jane had never seen before in Aaron Sailor’s work. It was almost a portrait of lust.

  The two dogs came over to sniff Jane’s scent and lick her hands as Perry rummaged through his desk for the magazine he was looking for.

  “I’ve never seen this painting before,” Jane said after a moment, unable to take her eyes off the nude.

  “I was just walking down the street and saw a picture of it in the window of this gallery on Madison Avenue,” said Perry, closing the final drawer of the desk and turning his attention to a basket of papers underneath a gilded French library table. “I went right upstairs and bought it. That’s when I met your father. He was there with the dealer lady, and we discussed art and everything. And the fleeting nature of existence.”

  “I wonder who the model is. She’s very beautiful.”

  “I don’t know her,” said Perry, suddenly shooting bolt upright. “I have no idea who she is. No idea whatsoever.”

  “I didn’t say …”

  “It’s just a painting of a woman,” Perry declared indignantly. “It was the clock I was interested in. Only the clock. I never met her. I have no idea who she is, none at all.”

  His denial was so overstated that Jane again wanted to laugh at what a dreadful liar he was. Only this wasn’t funny.

  “Those are the stairs of my father’s loft that she’s sitting on,” Jane pressed. “The stairs he fell down.”

  “Oh really?” said Perry Mannerback, his voice even louder and more unnatural. “Is that so?”

  “Yes, that’s so.”

  “Come on,” he said, abandoning his search and walking hastily to the door. “Aunt Eunice is probably having a conniption. She’ll have to find out about sex chat rooms on her own. I’ll have Leonid take you home after he drops me off.”

  Jane followed him back through the vast living room filled with clocks, the smiling red dogs bringing up the rear. Perry began chattering about Aunt Eunice, clock dials, Mars Bars—obviously anything to change the subject.

  But now Jane knew for certain that Perry Mannerback knew more about her father than he was telling. What did he know? Why was he lying? And who was the woman sitting naked on Aaron Sailor’s stairs?

  Six

  The next day, Perry Mannerback
arranged for Aaron Sailor to be brought from the nursing home in Great Neck to the head trauma unit of Yorkville East End Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for tests.

  On the way to Aunt Eunice’s apartment at the Dakota the previous evening, Jane had mentioned in passing how the aide at Royaume Israel had dropped Aaron Sailor out of bed and that he had mysteriously begun to speak. She had done so merely to make conversation and break the tension that had developed between her and Perry because of the painting in his study. Naturally, she hadn’t revealed what her father had been saying, only that he had begun to talk. Perry hadn’t even seemed to have been listening.

  Jane had arrived at the OmbiCorp office at ten o’clock the next morning—her second Friday on the job, the first being last week at the circus—ready for another day of philanthropy and fun, fully prepared to pretend that the incident with the painting had never happened.

  Instead of dashing off as usual, however, Perry had sat her down on his big office sofa, fixed her in a serious, puppy-dog gaze, and asked if she would permit him to get Aaron Sailor the medical care he deserved.

  Jane’s first reaction was horror. Aaron Sailor was gone. Nothing would bring him back, certainly not more doctors, more tests. What could she say, however? Please don’t try to help my father? Don’t even go through the motions, just leave him there in Great Neck, warehoused in the dark?

  Dealing with all the bureaucracy that such a move required would take forever, Jane had protested. It was already taken care of, Perry had answered. It would cost a fortune, she had said. Perry had replied that he had a fortune. Miss Fripp then promptly appeared with some papers for Jane to sign. By the time the feature at the Armex Patterson Fifty-seventh Street Cinema got out at three o’clock, Aaron Sailor had been brought in by ambulance from Long Island for a week at one of the foremost cranial-injury treatment centers in the world.

  “Now, don’t you worry about a thing,” said Perry as they pulled up in front of MoMA, where he had a board of directors’ meeting that afternoon. “I’m sure the doctors at Yorkville East End will be able to help. They took out my tonsils and Dad’s gallbladder. They’re the best.”