Where the Dark Streets Go

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Brogan said: “Would you have any objection to telling us where you were last Friday morning from—say dawn till noon?”

  “It is none of your damned business, if I may say so, sir. Three days a week, including Fridays, I rise at eight, my housekeeper brings me breakfast at eight-thirty and by nine o’clock I am in my studio on the top floor of the house I live in. Two days a week I go to Wall Street—Wallenstein and Warren. I have not varied that routine in five years.”

  “I’ve heard of Wallenstein and Warren,” Brogan said with a sheepish attempt at a smile. “I’ve got my routine too, and the men at the top like me to stick to it.” He got up and held out his hand. “No hard feelings, Mr. Wallenstein?”

  Wallenstein shook the hand. McMahon noticed that afterwards Brogan flexed his fingers.

  To McMahon, Brogan said: “Thanks, Father. Keep in touch.”

  The priest and Wallenstein walked to the parking lot in silence. Wallenstein had picked him up at the rectory and insisted on driving him back there. Before he turned the key in the ignition, Wallenstein sat a moment playing his fingers over the steering wheel, meticulously clean fingers, such as McMahon would not have expected in an artist. In a banker, yes, however. “A curious thing about the police,” Wallenstein said, “they’re human like the rest of us, but they don’t mind our knowing it. They would have no place in a civilized society.” He glanced at McMahon. “Tell me about this Lavery girl. She has the most striking face I’ve seen in a long while.”

  McMahon was nonplused at the directness of the man. Civilization, no doubt. He was caught in a civilized trap, and one to which his own vulnerability was hinge. Certainly he was not going to comment on Nim’s beauty. “She came to me thinking that Muller might have been the man she knew.”

  “So you said. One might wonder why she did not go to the police.”

  “Very civilized,” McMahon said curtly.

  Wallenstein smiled. “Would you mind giving me her address, Father McMahon?”

  “I don’t think that’s my place,” he said, but saying it, and remembering Nim’s and his last exchange, he realized that he might be assuming something that it was truly not his place to assume. Nim might want a liaison with Wallenstein. It was himself who did not want it for her.

  “Perhaps then you might arrange a meeting among the three of us? You would go to dinner with me, let us say. I should like to see her painting. That’s a twist, isn’t it? But I am right in supposing her to be a painter, am I not?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is very difficult for a woman to get a decent gallery. That’s gauche of me. And I’ve not seen her work. But her recognizing that Kandinsky on my wall—it’s never been exhibited, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” McMahon said almost sullenly. He forced himself to throw off his petulance. Then it occurred to him that he would need a fairly strong pretext for contacting Nim again himself, and he knew that he wanted to. “When?”

  “I’m free tonight if it can be arranged,” Wallenstein said.

  “I’m not.” He had to chair a meeting for the school funding committee at six, and he had not yet prepared the agenda. But how he longed to foreshorten those meetings. “At least not until after seven,” he amended.

  “That’s fine with me. I assume you can contact Miss Lavery?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Wallenstein turned on the car motor. He gave McMahon his card. “Leave the message with whoever answers and I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.”

  McMahon sent Nim a telegram when he got back to the rectory. Then he put her, Wallenstein, Muller, the whole affair firmly out of his mind and concentrated on his parish duties. But in the afternoon, he managed his promised visit to Phelan.

  He had been transferred to a semiprivate room. A detective McMahon had not seen before was on duty. The occupant of the other bed was a dark Puerto Rican, one leg in traction. Phelan’s eyes were closed. So were the detective’s. McMahon visited first with the patient in traction and his voluble family who were trying vainly to keep their voices lowered. The man had fallen down an elevator shaft. That much McMahon was able to understand. He promised to tell Father Gonzales to stop by on his next rounds.

  The detective opened his eyes when he heard McMahon’s voice. McMahon laid his hand on Phelan’s wrist. “Dan, are you awake?”

  Phelan opened his eyes and McMahon waited for the detective to leave them alone. Phelan followed the man’s departure until he was out of sight. “You’d think they’d have to go to the bathroom once in a while, wouldn’t you?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Thoughtful. I guess that’s the word. I’ve been lying here trying to figure out what it’s all about, my marriage, my life that’s been handed back to me in a glass tube.”

  McMahon pulled up the chair the detective had been sitting in. But he put his foot on it, the newspaper under his shoe. He wanted to be able to see the man while he talked.

  “I wonder what else they could give me in a glass tube?” Phelan said with grim humor.

  “A lot of your trouble’s up here,” McMahon said, pointing to his head. “That’s where to work on it.”

  Phelan glanced at him and away. “Priscilla told you all about us. I keep forgetting that. I guess I want to.”

  “She told me the problem, yes. But she wants to find the solution to it. She loves you.”

  “Enough to give me up, do you think? To let me go?” This time Phelan looked at him.

  “You’d rather do that than try to fix the problem?”

  “It would be better for both of us. She needs somebody like…him. I’m thirty-one years old, Father. I got as far as two years at City College. I had a scholarship to St. Victor’s Seminary in Pennsylvania. My mother wanted me to be a priest so badly she turned me off it.”

  “How badly did you want it?”

  “Quite a lot. But I was scared—this thing, you know. I was scared of getting kicked out, I guess.”

  “And now you want your wife to kick you out.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “What do you do for a living, Dan?”

  “I’m a grip—a movie stagehand when I work. And when I don’t work, I’m a stagehand at home. You know what I’d like, Father? Another chance at St. Victor’s. Look, if God gave me another crack at life, why not at the seminary? It wouldn’t be the first time the church annulled a marriage on those grounds.”

  “That wouldn’t solve your problem, Dan, and now you’ve added a history to it with this mess.”

  “Look, Father, this mess has castrated me. No problem—except Priscilla.”

  “When you’re up and around again, you may feel differently. Mind now, I’m not saying you should stay married. That’s something we don’t have to meet for a while. I’ll make a bargain with you: promise me you’ll see a doctor I’ve got in mind, and I’ll make inquiries about St. Victor’s. If there’s any chance, the doctor’s word would go a long way in your favor.”

  “Let me think about it,” Phelan said.

  “I’ll think about it too,” McMahon said.

  “Priscilla doesn’t need me. She’s got the house and some other real estate.”

  “She needs you.”

  “How?”

  “Let me ask you a question, Dan: why did you marry her?”

  Phelan stared at the chart at the bottom of his bed. “Mother love.”

  “All right. There’s lots of reasons people marry. For her it could have been vice versa.”

  “But for her it’s not enough. She wants another kid so she’d have two of us.” He pounded his fist on the bed. “For Christ’s sake, Father, get me out of it!”

  What God has bound together, let no man put asunder. McMahon said, “Take it easy, Dan. I’ll stop by tomorrow.”

  12

  NIM WAS WATCHING FOR them from the window high above. When McMahon stepped from the car she called out to him and waved. The children of the street gathered around Wallenstein’s black Jaguar an
d examined it with awe: a horse would scarcely have given them more pleasure. Wallenstein kept a tight smile going, more teeth than heart, McMahon thought. One youngster, seeing the priest go up the steps, jerked his thumb at the car. “Agente funerario.”

  He waited at the top step. The hall door was propped open. Nim came swinging down the stairs, a blur at first of yellow and red. She slowed down and became a picture. Which was not her intention. She was shy of the man who waited there. “Good evening, Father McMahon.” He had come dressed as a cleric, fortified in the armor of God.

  “I’m sorry I was such a fool,” he said of their last meeting.

  “Comédie Humaine,” she murmured. “Did he recognize Stu?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are we celebrating?”

  “Experience. I’ll explain that later. He hopes to be invited to view your painting—after dinner.”

  Nim tossed back her hair as they went out the door. “That will depend entirely on the celebration.”

  Some of the boys who had gathered around the big car whistled, and one, a gamin of twelve or so, skipped to the door ahead of McMahon and opened it.

  Nim stuck her tongue out at him as she swept in.

  Wallenstein, almost elegantly casual in dress and manner, proved himself a host of similar bent. He took them to the Trattore Gatti on Fortieth Street. Over cocktails which, he said, he drank with practiced disapproval—as an aside, he expounded on the martini as being much less a duller of the palate than sherry—he drew them out on their tastes in food. Nim liked everything except liver.

  “Especially paté.” Wallenstein said. “It’s like coating your tongue with velvet.” They agreed to his ordering the dinner for all of them.

  With the second martini they had oysters, with the pasta, oil and garlic sauce only, the poor man’s spaghetti, McMahon thought, but with such a difference here—a Soave wine. When the osso bucco came, Wallenstein unbuttoned the cuffs of his British suit and turned them up while he disjointed and served the knuckles. The maître d’ came to watch a craftsman at work. The waiter showed the claret bottle, but McMahon missed the label, leaning over to hear Nim whisper, “Dago red.”

  What had they talked about? McMahon wondered afterwards. He became a little drunk, as much with the food and the talk as the drinks, and he thought about the pleasure it would give him to recite the menu in every detail to the monsignor. He talked of Lili Boulanger and the trenchant music she had composed, so young, so ill. Wallenstein was delighted with his use of the word, trenchant, to describe music. “I knew this dinner would pay off,” he said, but with such deliberate overexposure of self-interest that it seemed ingratiating. And Nim talked about her tutelage as a painter under Stuart Robinson. Trenchant, she felt, was a good word for his approach to art also. Then, in a kind of haze, McMahon heard her tell of her father’s test as to whether she was an artist. He had taken her to see a Professor Broglio with whom he had studied as a boy.

  “He wanted to know by what right I thought I had sufficient talent.”

  “Sufficient talent for what?” Wallenstein asked.

  “To measure in dollars and cents,” Nim said. “That’s how to calculate a woman’s work. A man’s can be a long-term investment.” She was lucid if not faultless in her syllogism.

  Wallenstein clicked his tongue at the cynicism. “And what did the professor say?”

  “He said, ‘Lavery, how do you know you cannot play the violin?’ ‘I just know it,’ my father said. ‘Any fool would know it the moment I picked one up.’ ‘Any fool but you,’ Professor Broglio said. ‘If you had it in you to play the violin, you would know it. It would only be a matter of learning how.’”

  “Bully for him,” Wallenstein said. “Father McMahon has told you that I would like to see your painting?” Suave as Soave, McMahon thought.

  He pondered these fragments of their dinner talk as they drove downtown again. Both the beguilement and the booze were wearing off. The man was an enigma, and the whole experience of having sprung an evening such as this from a five-minute intrusion into his parlor seemed a kind of madness. Will you come into my parlor, said the spider….He glanced at Nim who sat between them on the wide seat. She was holding herself, prim as a spinster, as Miss Lalor might, touching neither of them with arm, elbow or thigh.

  “Contrast, the only true measure of enjoyment,” Wallenstein said, turning into Fifth Street.

  “I don’t think my neighbors would appreciate the esthetic,” Nim said. “But it suits me fine.”

  “Aren’t you afraid, living here?”

  “Sometimes. But not of my neighbors.”

  “Of what?”

  She shrugged. “I guess of the people who come here to get away from respectability.”

  “Like me, for example.”

  “I hadn’t thought of you that way.”

  “You are right. I am not that respectable,” Wallenstein said, all quiet as though McMahon was not in the car at all.

  Nim, with the forthrightness McMahon admired in her, said: “Do you really want to see my painting, Mr. Wallenstein?”

  He took his eyes from the street for a moment and turned toward her. “Only if you want me to.”

  So, McMahon decided, whether he liked it or not, he had to give Wallenstein the benefit of the doubt.

  Nim turned on all the lights and took her canvases from the rack, setting out three or four of them at a time, propping them against the beams, a chair she had brought from the kitchen, and the rattan rocker. McMahon and Wallenstein sat on the edge of the bed.

  Wallenstein said nothing at first, but got up now and then to see a particular picture from another angle. He moved the lamps around to his own satisfaction. “Set that one aside,” he said now and then so that when she had shown some thirty canvases in all and said herself that it was enough, he had picked out ten that he wanted to look at again.

  McMahon found himself looking inward more than at the pictures. He simply could not relate. It distressed him, for he had wanted very much to see and like Nim’s work. Why, God knew, but suddenly he was remembering the picture of the Sacred Heart that hung in the Morales house, and he wondered what they had done with the effigy of Muller.

  “Have you shown at all, Miss Lavery?” Wallenstein could not have been more formal, McMahon thought, forcing himself back to the present.

  “In a couple of group shows on Tenth Street,” Nim said. “I’ve sold three paintings.”

  “From this period?” He indicated the pictures he had wanted set aside.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “Fortunate buyers. You ought to have a gallery, young lady.”

  Nim sat down in the rocker, smiling a little, a remote look in her eyes. It was not so much remoteness, McMahon decided then, but more, as she glanced toward her work, a private involvement. Finally she said, “I was thinking. I’m not that young—as your young lady, and I was glad I’m not.”

  A strange thing happened: At a little sound from Wallenstein, McMahon looked at him. The man’s eyes were watery. Wallenstein got up from the bed and went to Nim, and taking her hand, he lifted it briefly to his lips.

  “I weep for myself, you know that, don’t you?” He blew his nose. “Well. I am not an entrepreneur, but I do have friends. Thank you very much.” He turned abruptly to McMahon. “Shall I drop you at the rectory, Father?”

  “Please stay, Father McMahon,” Nim said, “just for a little while.”

  McMahon said, “I’ll walk home, thank you. I often walk the streets at night.”

  “That’s where the message is,” Wallenstein said, and put out his hand.

  McMahon felt the almost hurtful clasp of a hand you would have thought would go limp in yours. He remembered Brogan flexing his fingers.

  At the door Wallenstein paused. “May I ask, Miss Lavery, what does your father think of your painting now?”

  “My father?” Nim said. “I’ve never shown it to him.”

  “Why?”


  Nim shrugged and thought about it. “I guess it’s my own kind of revenge.”

  “I like you,” he said. “I wish we could be friends.”

  McMahon was not looking at them, only listening, but he could imagine Wallenstein’s eyes on him, the guardian of honor.

  When she closed the door after he had gone down the first two flights, Nim went to the window and looked down. He would have looked up, for presently she waved.

  McMahon stared at the one painting facing him, blues and black and many greens: a fish? a raft afloat in the changing sea? a coffin?

  Nim came and stood beside him. “What are you thinking?” She nodded at the picture.

  “Just wondering…” He did not want to admit his literalness.

  But she knew it anyway. “What do you want it to be?”

  “Is that the criterion?”

  “It’s as good as any,” she said. “I’m that way about music, poetry. Stu used to say that most artists are conservative about every art except their own. Please take off the collar. I want to call you Joe.” She put away the canvases. “I suppose you’ve guessed by now, I mixed them up, but every painting he selected came out of the time Stu and I were together.”

  McMahon put his collar and the stud in his pocket. “What do you think that means?”

  “One of two things,” Nim said. “Either he knew Stu and isn’t admitting it—or he knows painting and I’m good.”

  “I prefer that interpretation.”

  Nim smiled. “I’d suggest a drink, but gin would be sinful after a meal like that. Wasn’t it the most?”

  “It was a lot,” McMahon said, “and for once I didn’t hate myself, piling it in.”

  “Why do you hate yourself for that? Penance?”

  “Pride. The handout. You know, nothing but the best for the priest, free. I’m afraid pride is my hangup on the road to—wherever I’m trying to go.”

  “Nothing but the best for the artist,” Nim said with a defiant thrust of her chin, “and he damned well deserves it. Mr. Wallenstein got his money’s worth out of both of us tonight, Joe. Maybe he cries easier than I think he does, but tears aren’t anything money can turn on.” She laughed. “It can’t turn them off either.”