by Amanda Cross
“Are you going to share your literary thoughts?” Charles asked.
“Yes, I am,” Kate said. “May I offer you this solution for your need of revenge; can I persuade you that it is as cruel and satisfactory as killing Jay would be?”
“Let’s hear it.”
“If this will satisfy you, I will promise never again to see, talk to, meet with, or in any way correspond with Jay. He will be out of my life and I altogether out of his. You have kidnapped his daughter instead of a painting. You’ve brought it off and driven Jay and me apart again; that is your ransom. Let that be enough revenge. Let Jay and me go, separately. You can drop him off wherever you like. Knowing how I feel, he will not try to get in touch with me again. I will walk out to my car, drive off, and that will be the end of it. I will tell no one but Reed what has happened; Reed, I can give you his word and mine, will tell no one. Is it a bargain?”
“Nicely put. And I even believe you. I’m even willing to let you convince me that Reed will take no action, and that you will pick up your life exactly as it was before Jay entered it some short time ago. But it doesn’t satisfy me. Sorry. I’ve had too many years to brood on this.”
Charles looked at Fred, who nodded and went outside, perhaps to keep watch, perhaps for some reason Kate could not understand. “I’m not going to kill Jay. You’re right about that. I’ve thought of something more suitable, some way to even things up between us. Did you notice that I limp?”
“No,” Kate said. “I’ve hardly seen you walk. Do you limp?”
Charles slid off his stool and paraded up and down in front of Kate. One leg dragged somewhat behind the other; it had to be raised with a special effort and then put down again. Charles had got rather good at this, so that he did not lurch as much as, Kate supposed, he had shortly after the injury.
“I see,” she said. “How did it happen?”
“In prison. Things like this happen in prison. I’ve had operations; I’m to have another. It’s easier with a cane, but I left it at home today.”
Kate knew what he was going to do. “Don’t,” she said. “It will serve no one; it will hardly satisfy you; it is evil; it will only do harm.” But she could tell he wasn’t listening.
“You go,” he said to Kate. “Walk out the door, wave to Fred, get into your car, and drive off. You can tell Reed what has happened, but I have your word it will go no further. Even it if does, of course, you can do nothing. Jay won’t talk, and there is no evidence. Fred and I will be certain there is no sign here of our presence, even if you should lead someone to this place. But I’m sure you won’t. I’m glad to have known you, Kate.”
He looked at her. He seemed to think of offering his hand, and decided against it. “Don’t blame yourself for anything. You have saved your father’s life, if not the intactness of his body. Always remember that. And do go and find him again one day soon. He needs you. He’s an old man, like me, though neither of us looks it. If I had a daughter, I would want to know her in my last years. Go.”
Kate hesitated. Sometimes it is possible to know exactly what can be done and what cannot be done. And yet, down from the stool, standing, she spoke once more. “As you know,” she said, looking straight at Charles, “I profess literature.” She paused, giving him time to tell her to shut up and go. He, too, paused and said nothing. Kate spoke.
“There is a sonnet of Shakespeare’s—no, I won’t offer you the whole sonnet, I don’t even remember more than the first two lines: ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none,/They do not do the thing they most do show.’ One can never know exactly what Shakespeare meant, but certainly he understands that revenge is a powerful emotion, but that once the power to take revenge is definitely yours, the proof of that power is that you no longer need to hurt. Which is the best revenge.”
She turned and went out. Fred stood outside and watched her walk up to her car. She did not turn to look back. Reed will never believe that I quoted Shakespeare, she thought. Who would believe it? But perhaps Reed would, after all, understand how words that demand to be uttered fly into the mind—anyway, into Kate’s mind.
So Jay was out of her life. She would never know if he was to be shot in the leg or not. It was over. Reaching the car, she sat for a moment before starting the engine. Then, slowly, she fastened her seat belt; slowly she turned the car around. As she drove onto the Sawmill River Parkway, as she planned what she would say to Reed, she recognized that already the drama in that abandoned ice cream parlor was taking on the quality of a dream.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hereafter in a better world than this,
I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.
When Kate reached home, walking slowly from the garage, moving instinctively, as she had driven, she neither chose to talk nor desired the drink Reed offered her. She sat on the couch, huddled into herself. Reed sat down beside her, pulled her against him and held her in his arms.
“Just tell me you’re all right,” he said. “You can shake your head yes or no.”
But Kate was able to say that she was quite as well as ever. “Nothing violent happened,” she said. “It was a lot of words. There were two men with guns, but there are so many guns on television that these seemed like ordinary props. I’m very tired.” She said no more.
After a time, when she had again refused food or drink, he helped her into bed and, lying beside her, offered silent support. They were silent for what seemed to Reed like hours; then she fell asleep.
Later, when she woke up, leaping, it seemed to her, from a dream, Reed woke with her. “How goes it?” he asked.
“I’m really okay,” she said. “Nothing happened. Only talk, endlessly, from Charles. On and on he went.”
Reed did not ask who Charles was. He assumed him to have been the man on the telephone, the man obsessed with Jay. Reed did not ask anything. When she was ready, she would tell him. But he found his mind fixed on the two guns she had mentioned. So there had been another man, as Reed suspected there would be, another man besides Jay. It took more discipline than Reed had ever remembered mustering not to ask questions. He knew he must wait; it was necessary for her to speak, of course, therapeutically and practically. But he would wait.
“I’m hungry,” Kate said.
“An omelet?”
“Lovely.” They moved to the kitchen. “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” Kate said, looking at the kitchen clock. “Do you know what it’s like?” she asked, as Reed got out the pan and butter and eggs. “It’s like having been in an auto accident where only fenders were dented. Frightening, but no one was hurt, so why go on thinking about it? And yet, one remembers the moment of impact; one relives it.”
She seemed suddenly to realize she was terribly thirsty. Going to the sink, she ran the water and drank many glasses of it, as though she had crossed a desert.
“Here’s the omelet,” he said.
But she ate only a bite or two before putting down her fork. “I might as well tell you,” she said. “Briefly. I’ll fill in the empty spaces later. Is that all right?”
“Fine.” He sat down beside her and took her hand; she smiled at him, a sad smile but he found it encouraging.
“We perched on stools; literally perched. Jay, and Charles, and me, and Fred. He was the other man with a gun. I felt he would have liked to use his gun, but he didn’t. Charles talked. And talked and talked and talked. He said Jay had lied about his, Charles’, part in the killing of a guard. He said a lot besides; I’ll get to it eventually. This is what I want to tell now. Is that all right?”
Reed nodded. “Just what you want to tell,” he said.
“Charles is an art thief; always has been. He tried to get Jay and my mother to direct him to works of art he might steal—works in the houses of the Fanslers’ rich friends. Jay and my mother refused, so he went to my Fansler father. Here’s the hard part.” She paused, and Reed was not sure if she would go on. Neither, obviously, was she.
But she went o
n. “My Fansler father knew. About me and Jay and all. He knew almost from the beginning; Charles told him. Charles threatened to make the love affair public; he would keep quiet, he said, for leads to valuable paintings. So my Fansler father led Charles to a couple of very expensive pictures in exchange for Charles’ silence. Do you understand, Reed? My Fansler father knew all along. And he never let on. He never said anything to my mother, or so it appears. He always accepted that I wasn’t his daughter. And you remember what my brothers said about my right to inherit? He still left me my share of the money knowing I wasn’t his daughter. He left me an equal share. In his way, I guess, he loved my mother as much as Jay did. Maybe more.”
Reed pushed the plate with the omelet gently toward her, but she shook her head. “That’s all there is,” she said. “That’s the main part of the story.”
He guessed there was more. There had to be more. Threats to Jay if not to her. Threats to Jay that had to affect her. She would talk about it in good time; she had to talk about it, to him or to someone else; a therapist, perhaps, or her friend Leslie.
They sat quietly for a time. Reed gave her a glass of ice water, and she drank it. Then they went back to bed. Reed reached out to hold her, but she turned away, not unkindly, and seeming to want to lie by herself. He held himself awake until he could tell by her breathing that she was again asleep.
Kate went to work the next day. She took up her usual life and must have appeared quite normal to those she encountered during the day. To Reed she seemed to be grappling inside her head with recollections of her hours in the ice cream parlor, but she had told him little more of those hours beyond trying to convey the condition and the, well, atmosphere of the ice cream parlor. She described the stools they had sat on for so long. He asked only what Charles looked like, a question he thought inessential enough not be hectoring.
Kate looked puzzled for a moment. “He looked like Jay,” she finally said. “Not exactly, of course. But they seemed the same height and the same shape and the same age. They were at college together,” she added, as though that explained anything. Reed did not press the point. Kate had once mentioned to him that Queen Elizabeth the First had dealt with immediate threats by waiting, by letting time pass. Kate had apparently determined to follow that prescription.
As the days passed, Kate seemed to return to her usual self; she even began to chatter again, even quoted Shakespeare: “ ‘If this were played upon a stage now, I would condemn it as an improbable fiction,’ ” but she did not speak of that “improbable fiction” in any detail. The only references she made to her having been a prisoner in the deserted ice cream parlor were to more than once observe that there had been no violence, despite the guns. She sometimes repeated, without being asked, that nothing dramatic had happened. “Not while I was there,” she would add, opening grounds for speculation as to what she feared had happened after she left, speculation that Reed restrained from giving voice to.
When some weeks had passed, and Reed feared that the memories of that time in the ice cream parlor had been repressed, or that their importance had been denied, Kate astonished him by announcing her intention to go down to Jay’s apartment, the one they had visited, the one he still had the right to occupy. She thought she would look around; just to see if Jay was all right. She rather wanted to know if he was still living there.
“May I go with you?” Reed asked. He intended to accompany her with or without her consent, but he hoped for her consent.
“Why not?”
“We could, of course, telephone first.”
“I thought of that. I’d rather go. He’s either there or not. I don’t know what I would find to say on the telephone.”
Reed guessed that she wanted action, not talk. She wanted to do something, make some move. He would have felt the same. He had, in fact, been wondering about Jay and trying to decide if there were any steps he should take to discover Jay’s condition, or his situation. On the other hand, Kate might never want to see Jay again, might not want Reed instigating any search, and that possibility had to be respected.
And so the next afternoon they set out to visit, if not Jay, Jay’s apartment. It occurred to Reed that were Jay not there, and were they to request again to see the empty apartment, the superintendent might find this repeat visit more than a little suspicious and certainly peculiar. If Jay were not at home, Reed decided, they must either just depart or depart and leave him a note. At least they might learn from the doorman whether Jay had recently been seen on the premises. Reed feared, on Kate’s behalf, that Jay might have moved out, left for some faraway, unknown destination. But Reed said nothing of this. She had probably thought of all the same alternatives he had been pondering; it was unnecessary to mention them now.
When they arrived at the apartment house, the door was guarded by a different man, one who had not been there at their former visit. They both smiled on greeting him, glad of that.
“Yes?” he said, in the manner of all such guardians of the gates. “Mr. Jason Smith,” Kate said, omitting the Ebenezer. Suddenly she felt afraid. She did not know whether she was frightened of finding him there or of finding him gone.
“Your name?” the doorman asked. “Reed and Kate,” Kate said. She had learned that it was better not to expect their surnames to be easily understood or repeated. Americans now lived in a first-name culture, and it was no use insisting on a formality that simply delayed whatever one was trying to accomplish.
The doorman called to Jay’s apartment on the house phone. He rang for several minutes; he was just about to declare Mr. Smith out, when the house phone was answered.
“Reed and Kate are here,” he said into the phone.
There was then a pause, while the doorman listened to the response. He turned to them when he had hung up the receiver and reported: “He says will you wait twenty minutes and then come up. He was asleep.”
“Thank you,” Kate said. There was a comfortable lobby, but Kate had noticed the last time they were there that Jay’s windows looked out on a small garden, one probably reserved for tenants. She asked the doorman if they might sit there.
He hesitated, but evidently decided they were not of the vandalizing sort, and they were visiting a tenant who could have taken them down there if he had wanted to. He pointed to a door leading to the garden, and dismissed them.
The garden was pleasant, with benches and gravel walks. They sat down on a bench. “I hardly know what to expect,” Kate said.
“Or what to hope for?” Reed asked.
“I haven’t a clue what to hope for. Except that he’s in one piece.”
“Why shouldn’t he be? You said there was no violence, no gunshots.”
“Not while I was there. I don’t know what happened after I left. There were rumblings.”
“Do you want to tell me about it before we ascend, so that I may have a clue what you two are talking about?”
“I’ve already told you the main facts; they’re really all that I learned. But I’ll repeat them.” Kate paused, gathering her thoughts; then she rattled off the facts revealed during the session in the ice cream parlor, as though she were reciting a catechism: “Charles told my Fansler father about Jay being my father; Charles has always been an art thief, and blackmailed my Fansler father into leading him to a couple of valuable pictures; he stole them and received ransom, which was all he had intended to make on the deal. He claims that Jay lied in his testimony about the killing of the guard; he says he did not shoot the guard. That’s about it,” she added, after a moment’s reflection; “I doubt you now know what to expect from Jay any more than I do.”
She found she could not tell Reed that Charles had threatened to shoot Jay in the leg; to destroy his knee. She wanted to forget that, forget that such a thing could happen, forget that she cared so much that Jay might be injured. He had after all lied to them, told them made-up stories, put them in danger. Why should she care if he was shot at, crippled? Well, she would care whoever it was, s
he told herself. And that was true. But she cared more than in that general way, and she hardly knew why.
They waited half an hour, to give Jay plenty of time to prepare for their entrance. Then, back in the lobby, they rang for the elevator, entered it, pressed the button for Jay’s floor. Every action seemed weighted with meaning as, Kate thought, in one of those terribly arty, slow films where every frame was designed to have a powerful effect. But it was usually dark in those films, she thought. She wished her mind would settle down, to say nothing of her pulse, which was, at least to her ears, audibly racing. They left the elevator and rang Jay’s bell.
Jay, when he opened the door, looked freshly showered. He had closed the door to the bedroom; as he ushered them into the living room Kate saw that he walked easily, with no impediment whatever. And what terrified her then was the realization that if she was ninety percent relieved, she was ten percent disappointed. Part of her wanted him to have suffered. Well, why not face it? Perhaps one needed to have been part of such a scene as that in the ice cream parlor really to know oneself.
Jay waved them to seats and asked if they wanted anything to drink: tea, water, Scotch—those were all he could offer—oh, and instant coffee. They said they were fine.
“Perhaps in a little while,” Reed said, hoping to indicate this was not intended to be a short or quick visit.
Jay, too, sat down. “I’m not going to say I’m sorry for what you went through,” he said to Kate. “You must know how horrified I was by the whole thing. I could hardly have handled it worse, from the minute I knew he was after me.”
“But he didn’t kill you after all,” Kate pointed out. “He didn’t even shoot you,” she added, glancing at his knees.
“It’s something odd about long-planned revenge,” Jay said. “When the chance finally comes to destroy the object of your long obsession, you don’t do it. There are various reasons for this. One is that you don’t want to take away the reason for your hatred. There may be a simple recognition that killing your enemy won’t change anything in the past. There may be a sudden refusal to risk the possible consequences of murder or assault with a gun. I’ve been reading about it, up at the Columbia library. I got a pass to read there, but not to check out books.”