In the Still of the Night: Tales to Lock Your Doors By

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Shall I bring you another drink, Mr. Coleman?”

  Mark did not answer, annoyed that the young man was still there.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “Bring me the drink, André. Straight up. No rocks this time.”

  Kitty, indoors and checking people’s glasses, looked around for Tom Wilding, the agency’s lawyer and Mark’s longtime friend, thinking to send him out to persuade Mark in. He wasn’t in sight either. There were sixty or seventy people in clusters about the room, and yet it wasn’t crowded. She could see everyone. The apartment—on Central Park West—was the top floor through of a building that had gone up in the 1920s. The Colemans had kept its decor to the fashion of the day. Mark called it late Scott Fitzgerald.

  Aware that her feet hurt but that she was going to have to carry things entirely on her own, she put on a jaunty air and moved among the guests. She encouraged the successful authors to hold forth and gave a squeeze to the arm of a listener who hadn’t made it yet as much as to say, All this can be yours too. Among those whose careers were modest and who chose the company of their own kind, she would linger long enough to bring the conversation to where she could recount the meteoric success of an author—not present, but a name everyone recognized—who’d been living hand-to-mouth on minuscule advances until Kitty took her in hand.

  Tom Wilding watched all this from alongside a pillar in the dining-room archway. He knew the script. He also saw the young man in a white coat that was too big for him take a single drink out onto the terrace. So that would be where Mark was and why Kitty was carrying herself around with a brave tilt to her chin. What an actress she was: a royal presence moving among her subjects. Kitty avoided mirrors, he thought, and never looked behind. Therefore she didn’t know—or didn’t have to admit to caring—what people thought of her.

  In a broad sense, Wilding had been watching Kitty for a long time, almost twenty-five years, from the time, he suspected afterward, she made her choice of whom to go after, him or Mark. To admit the truth, he had been briefly attracted to her, beguiled by her vivacity and those big blue eyes. He remembered taking a long look into them on the eve of her marriage to Mark. Whatever he saw then, it was not the Kitty of today. Nor was Mark the man he liked to remember. In those days Mark was considered one of the best young literary agents in New York. His authors loved him. Even publishers loved him, which might be the key to his eclipse—if that was what it was. Wilding had always considered himself lucky to have acquired the Mark Coleman Agency as a client for the legal firm in which he was then a junior partner. He hadn’t known how lucky. Today he could live on the income from it. Which was the reason he could take the gaff from Kitty that he did. He often wondered how Mark took it. But he also wondered sometimes if Mark knew what he was taking.

  About to light a cigarette, he thought of going out with it and joining Mark on the terrace. Kitty hated the smell of cigarettes. Wilding smiled at his motivation, but he proceeded on his way outdoors. Before he reached the terrace, he saw a scuffle going on there, a flash of the white coat and then the crash of glass as the young man flailed, trying to get his balance. Wilding ran to help him; so did others, the whole party rising to its feet.

  Both of the French doors shattered, and shards of glass seemed to explode. Wilczynski was instantly aglitter with them, and Mark still went after him and tried to pull him up by his lapels with the manifest intention of hitting him again. He threw off Wilding’s attempt to get hold of him. “Get out of here, Tom. Keep out of this!”

  It was Kitty who intervened and pulled Mark away. Wilding took Wilczynski through the gaping, gasping guests to the nearest bathroom. He had several cuts on one side of his face, the slivers of glass still in some of them. On the other side his jaw was swelling, a possible fracture. “Can you talk?”

  “No.” Which meant that he didn’t intend to, Wilding thought, not to Coleman’s attorney certainly.

  “We’d better get you to an emergency hospital,” he said, a proposal he hoped would assuage the man. “First aid is going to do it, but let’s get it from a professional.” He took him through the kitchen and out by the back hall. Their topcoats were jammed among others on a rack in the foyer. Wilding said he’d come back for them later. In the cab, which crept through the fog westward toward Roosevelt Hospital, he tried again to find out what had happened.

  Wilczynski took away the towel he was holding to his face. “I’m not going to sue or anything like that, Mr. Wilding, so you don’t have to worry.”

  Wilding held up a hand to forestall his saying anything more in that vein. “My concern at the moment is to get you to a doctor, and I don’t think you should think about noble gestures in your present condition.”

  Wilczynski didn’t speak for some time. He touched his jaw tentatively and winced. Then: “When I took a drink out to him, I thought at first—he looked as though he was going to jump off the terrace. Maybe it was all in my mind, but I started to talk him away from the ledge, saying how people like me needed him, things like that. When he realized what I was talking about, he came over and told me to put down the tray. He wanted to know what I’d suggest instead of the big jump. I wasn’t going to say anything, but the way she’d humiliated him in front of me, I just let go: ‘You don’t have to take that shit, sir.’ And whammo.”

  “I get the picture,” Wilding said.

  “I guess I’m lucky not to be on my way to the morgue.”

  Wilding said nothing.

  “He shouldn’t have asked me a question like that,” Wilczynski said and buried his whole face in the towel.

  The attorney waited until almost noon the next day expecting Coleman to call him. Then he called Coleman. “Any word from Wilczynski?”

  “No.”

  “What got into you, Mark?”

  “He maligned my wife.”

  “Just what did he say?” Wilding wanted his version.

  “If I could remember, I wouldn’t repeat it.”

  “You could be in serious trouble, Mark. Twenty-eight stitches. There could be disfigurement.”

  “I’d hate to see that happen. He’s got a nice face—homely, but a good face. And he’s a good writer if he could stay with it.”

  “I think you ought to apologize to him, Mark.”

  “Kitty says no, that I’d lose face. Which is pretty funny when you think about it.”

  “I’d better talk to Kitty,” Wilding said reluctantly.

  “She’s waiting for you. Hang on. I’ll switch you over.”

  Kitty came on the phone full force. “Most lawyers I know would advise a client to stay clear of the victim, whether it’s an accident case or whatever. Our lawyer, it seems, commits us to instant liability.”

  “Would you have had him bleed to death out there on the terrace?”

  “Was there nobody in that whole crowd who knew anything about first aid?”

  “Twenty-eight stitches, Kitty. That’s beyond first aid.”

  “You made sure of it, rushing him to the hospital. Just tell me where things stand now. Give it to me in words of one syllable.”

  Very slowly, making sure of his own composure, he explained the situation as he saw it. He knew very well that Kitty’s point did have cold-blooded merit.

  “So what’s the big deal? He’ll apologize.”

  “Kitty, just in case the worst happens and he does decide to sue, I want to apprise you of the way I think it might go. If it were ever to come to trial, whoever represented Mark would have to plead him mentally disturbed. Counsel would ask leniency, and the judge might grant it on condition that he undergo psychiatric care.”

  “He’s been seeing a psychiatrist for years.”

  Wilding hadn’t known it. So much for psychiatry, he thought. “Well, let’s see what the apology will do. The warmer it is the better. And you might ask Mark to let me know if Wilczynski also apologizes.”

  “He will,” Kitty said. “He’s jealous of me and he adores Mark. We shouldn’t represe
nt him at all, much less make a household pet of him. He’s like every poet I ever heard of, arrogant as Lucifer and nothing you can do for him is ever enough.” Her voice became a purr of sarcasm. “But Mark has a conscience about impoverished talent. The more impoverished, the greater the talent.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Wilding said.

  Mark, at his own desk in his office, hung up the phone after listening in. It was something he was not in the habit of doing, but neither was he in the habit of throwing punches, not since the age of thirteen. He looked at his bruised and swollen knuckles and tried to think why such a blazing fury should have erupted in him. No answer came. He had known there was no love lost between Kitty and Wilczynski, but André had kept it under cover until last night, when, Mark had a sneaking suspicion, he had deliberately provoked the boy into letting go. But to say that Wilczynski adored him was one more of Kitty’s exaggerations. And yet the very idea of it made him both sad and pleased—sad that he had struck him and pleased that someone among the agency’s clients still held him in esteem. So why had he struck him? Still no answer. He could ask his psychiatrist—if he had one. Kitty’s lies of convenience were a commonplace, but why it was convenient for her to tell Tom Wilding that he had been seeing a psychiatrist for years was one more thing he was at a loss to know.

  He wrote André a note in longhand and mailed it himself when he went out to lunch. Kitty was furious. Not even a photocopy, with the machine sitting right outside his office door. “You should have spoken to me sooner,” he said.

  “I thought we agreed you were not to apologize,” she said.

  “Did we?” he said blandly. “Then I changed my mind.”

  “So did I. But I’d like to know what you wrote.”

  “I apologized.”

  Kitty turned on her heel.

  Tom Wilding went out of town that afternoon. He had already told Kitty before the party that he would be away for a few days attending his son’s wedding. It was a bittersweet occasion for Wilding because it brought him together again with his former wife, whom, despite her desertion and remarriage, he still loved. During the flight he pondered from time to time how that could be, given his anger, jealousy, pain, and humiliation, the embers of which still flared up now and then. He had not even realized when it was happening. He had been on the Coast a great deal and, the children in college, Irene had gone back to school and taken her master’s degree. He’d been very proud of her. There was in his musings a barely conscious comparison of his situation with Mark Coleman’s. He was comparing apples and oranges, he told himself. Irene had not emasculated him, although he felt it at the time, and he had put together another life without her. The Colemans were somehow bound together in their needs. They had simply switched places. Supposing Irene had stayed with him and got a law degree? He laughed at himself and rang the stewardess for another Scotch.

  The next afternoon, while the wedding party was at the church rehearsing, he and Irene sat before a fire together. She had not changed save for the scattering of gray in her soft brown hair and a few new laugh lines. There came a moment when she looked at him with warm concern in a way that made him ache, remembering. “And how is your life, Tom?”

  He was all but overwhelmed by the urge to tell her of his loneliness and what her leaving had taken from him. “I’m enjoying it,” he said, and the temptation passed.

  Whenever he thought about the Colemans between then and his return to Manhattan, he would wind up trying to pinpoint the place and time when their rise and fall intersected, where in plain fact Kitty had taken over and Mark had let go. She had come to New York wanting to be an actress and was in acting school when Mark met her. She started in the office working part-time in the Dramatic Rights department; Mark thought it would give her confidence as an actress to learn something of the business end of things. He was jubilant when she was able and wanted to take over the department. That wasn’t long after they were married. Her next step upward was becoming a member of the firm, and after that the question arose whether the agency name shouldn’t be changed to include hers. She was adamant that it remain the Mark Coleman Agency. By then she might have thought she was the Mark Coleman Agency. Equality seemed never to have entered her mind. The only good word she had for the women’s movement was for those of her clients who wrote about it. Wilding tried to remember what Coleman was like in negotiations at given times along the way. More and more, he could see now, Mark had left the gritty bits to him, the legal expert. Kitty, to the contrary, would tell Wilding what she expected and, outrageous as it might seem, she almost always got it. She was an exhausting negotiator. Only once recently had he been with both Colemans in the same negotiations, and by then Mark had lost much of his personal prestige and his perspective. He insisted on explaining to Kitty points that she knew better than most of the people present. She listened him out, however, and smiled with cold defiance at anyone less patient than herself. She would defend him to the death from others, Wilding thought, and then turn on him and savage him herself.

  One of the first things he did when he was back in the office was to find out if there had been an exchange of apologies. He would rather have talked to Mark, but it was Kitty who had promised he would apologize. “Mark wrote him,” she said, “and purposely didn’t show the letter to me. What do you think of that?”

  “Understandable,” Wilding murmured.

  “He kept no copy of it—wrote it in longhand. Is that also understandable? And no word from André in the meantime, at least according to Mark. What’s going on there, I’d like to know?”

  “Let them sort it out between themselves, Kitty. Give it a little more time.”

  “Tom, the more I think about it the more bizarre the whole situation seems to me. It isn’t like Mark to engage in fisticuffs. Between you and me, I can’t see him doing more than telling André to keep his opinions to himself: I suppose what I’m saying is, I don’t think I was the issue at all.”

  “I don’t know what to say to that. Why don’t you give his psychiatrist a ring and have a confidential talk with him? He might find your input useful.”

  “I suppose I could do that,” she said. “I’m glad you’re home. How was the wedding?”

  “All brides are beautiful. It was very nice.”

  That afternoon Wilding got André Wilczynski’s phone number and called him. A purely personal concern, he explained.

  “No complications,” the writer said of his wounds. “How is Mark?”

  “I wish I could tell you. I’ve been out of town and out of touch with him.”

  “Why don’t you try and help him, Mr. Wilding? That man’s in trouble. Do you know what he wrote to me? I haven’t answered it yet, I don’t want her getting hold of it and twisting what I say into what she wants me to say. That’s pretty complicated, isn’t it?”

  “What did Mark say?”

  “He said he was hitting out at himself, and I just got in the way.”

  “That is complicated,” Wilding said. “A very peculiar traffic jam.”

  Wilczynski laughed, and Wilding was glad that he could—in more ways than one.

  Coleman had surprised himself in writing as he had to André. It was almost as though he had let out something from his soul in automatic writing. But reading it over, he had known it was the truth and sent it off. When days passed and he had not heard from the young writer, he wondered if he had made a fool of himself. Or worse, if he had not compromised Kitty. When Tom Wilding called him and suggested lunch, he was sure something had gone very wrong. They had not had lunch alone together for years.

  They met at the Century Club and had a drink at the bar before going into the dining room. Mark’s hand trembled as he conveyed the glass to his lips, and he said again something he had already said far too many times about the first drink of the day: “It’s nice to be drinking again.” He turned to Wilding. “You’ve heard me say that before maybe?”

  Wilding laughed and admitted that he might have.<
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  “Does Kitty know we’re having lunch?”

  “Not unless you told her,” the lawyer said. “There’s nothing heavy on the platter, so relax.”

  Mark could feel the relaxation happening. He turned his glass around and around by the stem and said, after a moment, “I wonder if these things aren’t doing me in. I forget things. I say things I don’t mean. Sometimes I even say things I do mean. I flare up—as you may have noticed. I blame Kitty …”

  “For what?”

  Coleman shrugged. “For more than she ought to be blamed. God knows, she takes good care of me.”

  Wilding took a chance. “Is that good?”

  “Have you been talking with Wilczynski?” It was said not seriously but with a twinkle reminiscent of the old Mark. Then: “I thought he might have answered my letter by this time. I suppose you know, I did apologize.”

  “He’ll answer. He intends to.”

  “But when? Kitty wants to see it in writing.”

  At the table, when Coleman had his second drink in hand, Wilding said, “Mark, I’m going to make a suggestion. Give this thing time. Take a few days off and get away from the office …” He paused, seeing alarm in Coleman’s eyes.

  “Why?”

  “I was thinking how much good it did me to get away and see the family, people I hadn’t seen in years.”

  “I see too many people. I’m sick of people and I’m sure a lot of them are sick of me.”

  “Then how about this: Go up to my place on the Cape. This time of year it’s nothing but sea and sand and stars. It’s as pure a place as you’ll find on earth.”

  Mark was instantly thrust back in place and time to the graceful sand dunes along Lake Michigan where he’d grown up, Carl Sandburg country, a poet all but forgotten, as were most of the poets of his youth. He blinked at Wilding across the table and said, “I’ve just had a short trip—back home to Indiana.”