Genius

by Patrick Dennis

  “I don’t know,” Heff said. Lopez fetched him a blow that sent him halfway across the patio where he fell in a heap. For a small man he packed quite a punch.

  “I don’t know, I tell you. I haven’t seen him since last Sunday. I haven’t eaten since then. They’ve taken the house. I’ve been sleeping in the park. I . . .”

  “Still stickin’ to dat old script, eh? Okay, let’s try again.” Lopez swept him up off the ground and slapped him across the face.

  “Please don’t. I tell you I . . .” Then he fainted.

  “Stop it, Lopez,” Starr said. “The boy’s telling the truth. He’s been left in the lurch by his father the same as we have.” Almost tenderly, he revived Heff and told St. Regis to give him a meal and put him to bed. “I also owe the boy a good deal of money.”

  “Owe him money? After what his ole man done you kin say . . .”

  “Once and for all, Lopez, he cannot be blamed for his father’s shortcomings any more than my poor Emily can be blamed for mine. I employed him. He did his work well. I shall now pay him, and I don’t wish to hear any more about it.”

  Starr also covered Bruce’s bad check to El Paseo. “But I can’t take this, Mr. Starr,” Bill Shelburne said. “You don’t owe this debt.”

  “Yes, Mr. Shelburne, in a way I do. If I’d been a better father to my child—paid some attention to her, been with her, shown her the ins and outs of life as it is lived other than on the Main Line—there wouldn’t have been a Bruce van Damm. She would have seen through him immediately, not that I did myself. I was too busy thinking of Leander Starr and not busy enough thinking of Emily.”

  As for Emily, other than a perfectly understandable humiliation, she got over Bruce in short order. Caroline’s candidate, Dick, arrived with a pretty, square-cut diamond ring as well as a receipt for it, and even I must admit that he wasn’t bad. He may have lacked the dark good looks, the boyish charm of Emily’s most recent attachment, but everything about him was genuine.

  Starr gave a party in honor of the young couple and even had El Paseo do the catering. “I’ve done so well out of all of Emily Starr’s engagements,” Mr. Shelburne said, “that I really ought to propose to her myself.”

  “Happy?” I asked Emily while Clarice was jockeying Caroline for a few good Philadelphia introductions and Lady Joyce for some good London names.

  “Yes. Really I am, Mr. Dennis. I feel like an awful fool, of course.”

  “Not nearly as foolish as you would if you’d really married Bruce.”

  “No, not nearly. I’m used to Dick. I’ve known him forever. He’s comfortable. Not exciting, but comfortable.”

  “When you’ve been married as long as I have, you’ll find that comfort beats excitement six ways from Sunday.”

  “And I hate to admit it, but all along Mother knew best.”

  “Your mother, if you’ll forgive my saying so, is a consummate ass.”

  “Perfectly true. But still she was right. Right about what was best for me.”

  “Well, she had a fairly eventful first marriage herself. Talk about excitement.”

  “But she didn’t learn anything from Daddy. I did.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as I’m not going back to Philadelphia and have Mummy’s big wedding with the bishop and the marquee on the lawn and settle down in Wayne. Life à la Daddy is too rich for my Morris blood, but life à la Mummy is too poor for my Starr blood. Dick and I are going to be married simply and quietly. Then we’re going to take a year off—maybe two—and bum our way around the world seeing things and people we’ve never seen before, learning things. . . .”

  “That’s nice if you can do it. Lovely. But isn’t it going to be rather expensive?”

  “That’s all taken care of. Daddy did it.”

  “Daddy did what?”

  “This.” She opened her purse and proudly displayed a certified check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Attached to it was a note in Starr’s wild scrawl. “Blessed child—I’ve never given you anything. Now I give you this. Take it and live a little. Daddy.”

  My knees literally gave way. On Tuesday Starr had received a hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars. On Wednesday he had paid out a hundred thousand of it to the people connected with his abortive film. And now this. Just what he was planning to give Mr. Guber was an interesting question.

  “I . . . I hope you’ll be very happy,” I said.

  “I know I will. And now good-by. Back to Philadelphia on the midnight plane,” she kissed me, “but not for long.” And then she was gone.

  The next day we were sitting in the patio casually plotting how Starr might make the best use of his remaining money when the strangest of the many strange visitors of Casa Ximinez arrived. She was a woman who looked to be somewhere in her fifties, but it would be hard to tell. Although she was meticulously neat and clean, the mark of poverty was upon her. It is a look that anyone with a modicum of observative power can spot on the street, in buses and subways, in parks and cafeterias, and it becomes more pronounced with time. It is a colorless look. The clothes, even if brand new, are no-color clothes—rusty blacks, tobacco browns, muddy grays—that become more and more poverty-stricken with wear. With time the colorlessness spreads to the wearers themselves, to their skins and their hair, to the way they stand, sit, and walk. There is a diffidence and a resignation to them. This woman was a textbook case. She advanced slowly, ploddingly, toward us. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m looking for a certain Mr. Starr—Leen-der Starr.”

  “I am Le-an-der Starr,” the old maniac said grandly.

  “I’m Mrs. van Damm. Mrs. Rose van Damm.”

  Even Starr was nonplussed. Finally he was able to say, and rather foolishly, “I—I see.”

  “I’d like to have a word with you,” she said. Then she cast a questioning look at my wife and me.

  “I think, Mrs. van Damm, that there is very little we will have to say to one another, and certainly nothing that you cannot say before my dear old friends Mr. and Mrs. Dennis.”

  Taking this as more or less—mostly less—of an introduction, I shuffled to my feet and gave an embarrassed little bob of my head. My wife, from her chair, nodded and murmured nothing too. Then she said, “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. van Damm?” She did, heavily and hopelessly.

  “The—the reason I come to you, Mr. Starr, is I think you’re the one can tell me the most about Brucie. I don’t understand all of it, but I figured you’d know something.”

  For once Starr didn’t ham it up with a gala performance of outraged dignity. Instead he said, and rather quietly for Starr, “Well, madam, I am sorry to tell you that your son is in con-sid-er-able trouble. With a restaurant, with his landlord, with my daughter, with the Mexican Government, and with me.”

  She took that in slowly, absorbed it, nodded, and said, “Go on, please.”

  “He has lied and cheated and passed bad checks. He has apparently stolen a valuable automobile in the States and—even worse—he has attempted to sell it down here. If you want to know where he is at the moment . . .”

  “I know. I just been to see Brucie.”

  “Well then,” Starr said, but not unkindly, “there is little more I can tell you, except that it looks bad. Very bad. There is always the American Embassy. . . .”

  “I been there too. I wasn’t able to get very far with the—uh—party I talked to. I just wanted to come here and apologize, like, for Brucie. He’s not really a bad boy, Mr. Starr.”

  The classic phrase. What poor, mystified, bedraggled mother of what thug, mobster, thief, mugger, extortionist, or murderer doesn’t invariably say, “He was always a good boy.”

  “But Brucie was always odd, like. Quiet, like, and inside of himself. Even when he was a little boy in Bridgeport, he never played with the other neighborhood kids. Instead, he was always trying to be something better than he was. It’s prob’ly my fault. If his dad hadn’t of died maybe I could of stayed home and looked after him a little more.
But I don’t know. His brother Davie made out okay. Married, owns his own home and his own service station. My girl, Rosalie, she settled down with a nice nursery-farm boy. . . .”

  I could hear Bruce van Damm all over again: “. . . always lived in Fairfield County . . . my brother David is in automotive engineering . . . my sister’s gardens . . . her conservatory . . .” Nothing had quite been a lie.

  “Brucie was always a nice-lookin’ boy, clean-cut. People liked him. He didn’t have no trouble getting good jobs. Office jobs, I mean. Not like the rest of us. But then he never seemed satisfied. Spent all of his money on fancy clothes, a tux, even. ‘Where can you wear ’em?’ I’d ask him. And he was always sending off for books. Not stories, like. Nothing anybody would wanta read. There was one that cost a terrible lot, and it was nothing but a list of high-society people in New York. I can’t recall the name.”

  “The Social Register?” my wife suggested unhappily.

  “Yes, ma’m. That’s the one. And then there was even this big English book he found secondhand, all about lords and ladies. And fancy catalogues. And then there was this old book about the van Damm family, and Brucie was always trying to see if we was relatives. He even found out that we were, but like I told him, it’s a big old Dutch family. Then he moved to New York and got mixed up with a whole lot of rich loafers didn’t hafta work or do much of anything but go around to a lot of fancy clubs and like that. . . .”

  Again I could hear the debonair Mr. van Damm discoursing on that eccentric relation of Tuxedo Park and electric-car notoriety, on how he had discovered one of my novels in the Knickerbocker Club library. Everything he had said about himself had been technically true. He had simply known when and where to stop.

  “. . . next thing I know he’s moved into a place with this fancy New York society fellah. Barney somebody . . .” This, I gathered, would have been the elegant and orchidaceous Lucien Brooke Barney and the “funny little hole in the wall in Gracie Square.” Mrs. van Damm plodded onward with the sordid story that was so obvious to everyone but her. “Brucie stopped comin’ home—not even for Chrissmuss—and began running around with a bad crowd. . . .” Many people, less down-to-earth, better acquainted with the gossip-column elite, and more easily impressed than Mrs. van Damm, would have considered it a very good crowd—the best. I sided with her; my wife and I had met Lucien Brooke Barney & Co. “. . . . then this Barney fellah all of a sudden turns against Brucie for no reason . . .” Well, to be eminently fair, it seemed to me that a ten-thousand-dollar automobile, some valuable pictures, and a lot of clothes and jewelry did constitute a pretty good reason to be annoyed. And hell does have a fury greater than a woman scorned. It was all so clear—that gold cigarette case, the standard equivalent of a wedding ring in Mr. Barney’s circle; the big star-sapphire hoop scheduled to be reset for Emily’s finger; the sick, slick, Pavel Tchelitchew painting that Bruce “might just unload to the right collector down here.” My heart went out to this pathetic mother bravely, blindly trying to blame herself or life or society or bad companions or anything for the mess her son had become.

  “So I come here from the . . . from the jail, Mr. Starr, to ask you not to be mad with Brucie. He just couldn’t help himself.”

  Starr cleared his throat. “I’m not angry, Mrs. van Damm. I’m sorry. Sorry for you. Even sorry for the boy. But now I’d like to ask you just what you intend to do about getting your son out of all this.”

  “I already had a letter from this Barney fellah’s lawyer.” She took a carefully folded sheet of paper from her shabby plastic handbag and showed it around almost proudly as though it might have been a royal grant. “He says that if Brucie sends back the auto and . . . and some of Mr. Barney’s other things, that’ll be okay. Mr. Barney don’t wanta make Brucie any trouble.” I glanced at the letter written on the one hundred per cent rag paper of an ancient New York law firm whose founders could never have dreamed that any client of theirs—and surely not a Barney—would ever be involved in anything quite so messy. Through the chilly legalese it was easy to read that while Lucien Brooke Barney would have loved nothing more than lots of trouble for Bruce, the law firm was just as anxious to avoid that sort of trouble’s attendant publicity for Mr. Barney. “He was meaning to return them right after he got . . .” Even Mrs. van Damm couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. She colored and choked and worried at her purse with her plain, square working woman’s hands.

  “What about the . . . uh . . . what about the other . . . uh . . . problems, Mrs. van Damm? The debts, the bad checks? Passing a bad check is a prison offense in Mexico.”

  “That’s just it, Mr. Starr. It’s a lot of money—a whole lot. More’n five thousand dollars in debts, and then there’s the fines and paying the lawyer. It’ll come closer to ten and . . . and . . .” Her big brown eyes—the same fine eyes she had handed down to Bruce, if nothing else fine—filled with tears. Her face began to crumple. “Mr. Starr, we’re poor people. I work in a cafeteria. I got nothing put by. I had to borrow the money from my younger son to come down here. They’ll send B-Brucie to prison—to a dirty Mexican prison—and I . . . I can’t do nothing about it.” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed hopelessly. My wife and I sat paralyzed with pity and embarrassment, not even daring to look at one another.

  Starr got wearily to his feet. “Don’t cry, Mrs. van Damm. Please. I’ll be back in a moment.” Except for Mrs. van Damm’s sharp, dry sobs, there was silence. Starr returned almost immediately, a package in his hand. “Here, Mrs. van Damm,” he said, placing it on her lap. “Take this please.”

  She looked up with streaming eyes. “Wh-what is it?”

  “It’s a hundred thousand pesos—about eight thousand dollars. Use it to get your boy out of here.”

  “Starr!” I cried. “Are you . . .”

  “Shut up!”

  “M-Mr. Starr,” the woman said, “I can’t.”

  “Yes you can. You must. There’s nothing very much else for you to do, is there?”

  “Mr. Starr, you don’t know what this means to me.”

  “And you don’t know what it means to me. St. Regis!”

  “Yes, Mr. Starr,” St. Regis said, bobbing into sight at the doorway.

  “Will you please be good enough to put my guest into a taxicab? Come Mrs. van Damm.”

  “Mr. Starr, I’ll pay you back. I swear I will.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “If I have to work all the rest of my life.”

  “Of course you will. And now good-by and good luck.”

  “Mr. Starr, you’ve saved my boy. I can’t just leave like this without . . .”

  “Oh yes you can. I despise prolonged leave-takings.”

  “But Mr. Starr . . .”

  “To the taxi, please, St. Regis. Good day.” A moment later and we were alone.

  “Starr,” I gasped, “you are out of your mind?”

  “Probably.”

  “But this was your nut, your nest egg, your eating money until you got started again and that woman . . .”

  “That woman, my dear Dennis, could very easily have been my mother.”

  There really wasn’t anything to say, but I said it anyhow. “Starr, will you please tell me just what you’re planning to do now. You began with a hundred and thirty-odd thousand free and clear. A hundred went to pay off on a movie you don’t even own—don’t know where it is . . .”

  “An honest debt. Would you want me to stick a lot of poor Mexicans for their time and trouble and money?”

  “Another twenty-five thousand went to dower Emily who needs it about as much as . . .”

  “Who told you that?”

  “She did.”

  “After all, dear boy, she’s my only child. I’ve never done anything for her—never even seen her. It seemed the very least I could do—a gesture, really.”

  “Some gesture! And then this last final gesture—eight thousand bucks to spring a little he-whore like Bruce van Damm, plus anot
her three to cover his bad check to El Paseo. That leaves you . . .”

  “I’ve always envied your head for figures, dear Patrick. That leaves me flat. Well, I’ve always said that having a lot in your pockets ruins the hang of a suit.”

  “But Starr, what about your future? What about settling with the government so you can go back to making movies in the States?”

  “Oh, don’t bore me with all that just now, dear boy. At the moment I have such a pleasant sense of well-being that . . .”

  “Well-beingue?” Mr. Guber had stolen across the patio. “And you certainly should have. I’ve just been talkingue to the department over longue distance—amazinguely good reception. And a very good reception, too, Mr. Starr, when it came to presentingue your particular problem.”

  “Which particular problem is that, Irving?”

  “Why, your back taxes. What else? I couldn’t quite get them to settle for ten cents on the dollar, which was my original intention, but they did strike a compromise that you should find very attractive after I explained how you’d taken so much of your lottery winningues to pay the poor slavingue people in Valley of the Vultures and all. But my chief gave me full authority to settle your whole indebtedness, six per cent interest and all, for a flat . . .”

  “They’re not going to settle for one red cent, Irving. The money’s all gone. I’m as poor today as when I came into the world.”

  “Home for the holidays. Shirl and the . . . What?”

  “You heard me, Irving. It’s gone, gone, gone. Every last centavo. And you know what, Irving? I don’t really give much of a damn.”

  “Are you crazy or somethingue? One hundred and thirty-six thousand ferblundgit dollars you had, and now it’s . . .”

  “Gone, gone, gone, I repeat.”

  “Starr, you derschlugeneh meschugeneh! Practically I’m knockingue myself out for you to get a decent settlement, and now you go and tell me . . . I ought to get extradition papers and haul you back to . . .”

  “Go right ahead. But let’s travel first-class and you will make arrangements for the luggage and my body servant?”