Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  “You know better than to come here,” Meany said.

  “I didn’t think you’d be here.”

  “You see me.”

  To Meany I must have looked in the pink, so when he said, “Now get out,” he no doubt meant it as a request, although his usual flat and oddly powerful voice said he had recuperated further than I’d imagined a man his age could.

  My voice quavered when I said, “I just came to turn in the keys.” I added, in a steadier tone, “I still can’t move very fast, so don’t try anything.”

  “Or what?” Meany asked. The sub was not bright and cheery any longer.

  Jake stepped between us and turned me gently but firmly towards the door. He said, “Just don’t say anything more.” His voice quavered, too.

  “I’ll mail your deposit,” Meany said to my back.

  Jake herded me through the door like a sheepdog herds an errant ram. He helped me into the cab of my truck. Through the open window I said, “Wait a minute. How is he going to know where to send the check?”

  Jake said, “If he hasn’t figured it out, let me handle it when Meryl gets back.”

  “But what if he knows where I am?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

  He said, “Nothing; let’s not get paranoid.” And as he climbed in the truck he said, “How old is that man, anyway?”

  “All I know is, he won’t see sixty again.”

  “Jesus.”

  When I inserted the key in the ignition I realized I hadn’t left the Bobwhite Court keys.

  *****

  Jake confided that Meany scared him, but not because he was an alien species. “I see something of myself in him,” he said.

  “‘Not I,’ quacked the noisy duck.”

  “What do you think made me an MP?”

  I said, “Different. One half of you wants to take on the whole health care system and make it rational. The other half wants to write fantasies. And never the twain shall meet.”

  “Whereas,” Jake said, “Meany sails a course that requires no tacking. The wind’s always at his back.”

  “Which isn’t doing him much good these days. He’s lost the one person that made him realize he was human.”

  “And you’re responsible for that, my friend. I’d be more afraid than I am, if I were you. I’d not want to be the object of a bear-sized hate.”

  When Mary Clare heard about the encounter she was of the same mind. “I suggested once you get out of La Morinda. Now you’d better get out of Moraga too.”

  “Just supposing I went to work in Berkeley. Would that be far enough away?”

  “I won’t rest easy until he’s put away somewhere.”

  “Like jail?” I said. “The chances of him going to jail soon, or for very long, are miniscule.”

  “What have I got us into?” she asked. She leaned against me, asking to be held.

  I held her close. “If it hadn’t been for Meany, I’d never have met you.” Which was true in about four different ways.

  My next session with the DA I told him that the encounter with Meany had changed how I felt about him—I was afraid. Ted Walleke said, “It’s not like he’s a Mafia don, you’re just talking about an angry old man.”

  Yes, Mr. DA, an angry old man who never had time to be angry before, whose life had never been brought to a stop by recuperation and the threat of prison time. “What if he does anger the way he does subdivisions or shopping malls?”

  Walleke thought I was paranoid. His good-looking sidekick thought I was prudent. Jake had a sensible suggestion about a way out—if we could sell it to Mary Clare’s probation officer.

  five

  Jake had one of those ideas out of the blue. He and Amanda owned a mountain cabin off Route 50, near a wide place in the road called Strawberry. “Go up there,” he suggested. “Take Mary Clare.”

  I shook my head. “Great idea, lousy timing. I gotta work. She has to go to Boston. —Is your cabin nice?”

  “Literally a stone’s throw from the South Fork of the American River. Deer, owls, raccoons, trout. There used to be a kid next door, his dad was the local tow truck operator, he called me ‘Daddio.’”

  “You thrash him?” I asked.

  Jake shook his head. “He called everyone Daddio. Except his mother; he called her ‘Mummio.’”

  “Maybe we could borrow the place for a honeymoon.”

  Jake said, “You’ve asked her?”

  “Not yet. I’m working up to it.”

  “First you tell her.”

  I said, “Tell her what?”

  He said, “You know.”

  I didn’t hide out; I ended up doing nothing about Meany. Jake pointed out that doing nothing was one of the somethings you could do. He argued against Ted Walleke’s contention that Meany wouldn’t seek vengeance. “He’s capable of it.” I took to lifting my hood before I drove anywhere, looking for wires that hadn’t been there the last time I looked.

  “This is stupid,” I said, but then I found myself compulsively studying cars in the rear view mirror. The days kept coming and we reached that last gasp of summer, when the Pacific high pressure system just hangs there, blocking the fog and the breezes. To kill more time we relined the brakes on the Triumph, and then rebuilt the clutch. As the most pampered TR3 west of the Sierras, we hoped it didn’t blow a gasket or eat a piston.

  And while we tinkered, Mary Clare took the last hurdle in stride, she went to court. The day would hardly have been noted except that she took me along for moral support. It took fifteen minutes to scrub all the grease out of the cracks and lines of my hands. She was sentenced to what she and the DA had agreed on, assigned a probation officer, the probation period started. Her probation officer had already been clued in about the trip to Brandeis, so there was nothing left to keep Clare in Moraga. She test drove the car and said it was almost too good, both the new clutch and brakes were giving her whiplash.

  I went to Jake’s barber in Orinda, Bienvenida pressed a tropical worsted, and I took Mary Clare to dinner in The City, a storefront restaurant that did French haute cuisine as if they had red velvet hangings and a snooty maitre d’hôtel. We drank Kir while we ate gougères and then pâté on baguette. Never mind the rest, I told Jake. I didn’t want to make him jealous.

  I took her hand across the table. I told her my dream about the chemise gown and the string of diamonds. “My father would approve of your dream,” she said. “That’s exactly how he wanted me to dress.”

  I wanted so much that everything turn out perfectly for her I squeezed her hand too hard. When she winced I said, “I’m sorry, baby.”

  She saw the mist in my eyes. She squeezed back and said, “You’re one of the good ones, Bobby, one of the decent people in this world.”

  We were sharing a crème brûlée and a split of Sauternes to finish off the meal; we were the last persons in the restaurant. I said, “Does that mean you love me?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “I mean really really love me.”

  She said, “Tonight there’s not an ounce left over for anyone else. You’ve become the sunrise and the sunset of my life.”

  The owner, who had waited on our table, discretely placed the bill where I might notice it and retreated to let us play out our love duet.

  “Let’s go home and make love, sweetheart.”

  “I want to go up to Coit Tower and make out first,” she said, sparkling like a teenager who suddenly realizes she’s beautiful. It was a perfectly clear night and San Francisco wore a black chemise dotted with a million sequins. She wanted to carry the memory back with her, the something (besides me, she emphasized) that would guide her back to the Bay Area.

  “I know a better place,” I said, and took her across the Bay and up in the Berkeley Hills, where we could see the three bridges and clear up to Twin Peaks and Sutro Tower, its red warning lights blinking. The Bay Bridge lights were a necklace reflecting on the still Bay waters in colors like Yellowstone hot springs. In the middle
of the necklace were Buena Vista and Treasure Islands, where we could make out two small ships moored, frigates or destroyer escorts, and out at the end of some dock at Richmond, a lighted tanker loading fuel. The Chevron refinery was burning off gas and the tower from which the flame erupted looked like a Titan’s torch.

  “I wish I had binoculars,” Clare said.

  “You won’t be needing them,” I said, and pulled her across my lap, her back to the steering wheel, and kissed her deeply. When we drove back to Moraga everything about the Pritchett house was perfectly still except the guard crickets all around, and they sounded love calls ardently and often. We were the only clumsy creatures about: a knee hitting the wall one time, an elbow another, springs playing an obbligato to breaths sucked in and exhaled gutturally. Possibly my back had succumbed to the Kir, Bordeaux and Sauternes of dinner, or maybe it deferred to love, but it wasn’t until farmers were rising in Iowa to milk cows that I said to my sleep-bound partner, “When shall I wake you?”

  “Who’s going to wake you?” she mumbled.

  “Tell me when.”

  I gathered up all the clothes I’d dropped on the floor, including the suit Bienvenida would find in the closet and press again, cluck-clucking and giving me broad grins. I walked down the hall, hearing the sonorities of sleeping adults and youngsters. It was close to the waking hour right there in Moraga when I got into bed and waited to be sandbagged by the cessation of want.

  Only I wasn’t the only person awake in Moraga. I heard the throaty rumble of a large and powerful V-8 engine passing the house, backing off down the hill. In a while I heard the same engine climbing slowly up the hill, under minimum engine load. In a while the passage down and the passage up were repeated.

  The Pritchett’s house is on a street like the crossbar between goalposts. It doesn’t go anywhere except to connect the other two streets; there’s no block to go around. So if you were checking out the house you would go up and down the hill like that.

  When I got to the living room Jake, in a summer bathrobe, was standing at the front window, looking through the blinds. He shushed me. “Stay out of the headlights.”

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “It’s two men in a sedan.”

  “What kind?”

  “Big Buick—Riviera, I think.” The car came down the hill once more. “Would you get me the binoculars in the left-hand corner of the hat shelf in the hall closet?” Jake asked.

  When I handed them to him he looked through gauze curtains, standing back from the blinds, adjusting the focus. We waited longer than it took for the car to go up to the top of the street and come down again. Then we waited that amount of time again. I said in a normal voice, “They’re not coming back.”

  “Probably nothing,” Jake said.

  “That what you really think?”

  Jake tried to sound offhand, though we both assumed the men were patrolling this house. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a lover’s quarrel, not in this neighborhood.”

  I said, “Good thing Clare’s going.”

  “Who says they’re after Clare?”

  “Not me,” I said. “I just don’t want her to worry.”

  “We should put your truck in the garage.”

  I said, “I suspect they can get in the garage if they want.”

  After a moment’s silence Jake said, “Well, I’m up for good.”

  “I haven’t been to sleep yet. But if I lie down, I’ll never get Clare up.”

  “I’ll get her up, in time to say goodbye to Amanda.”

  “What a pal.”

  *****

  I woke to Clare nudging me. I would have grabbed her, but she held a cup of coffee, and there was another on the night stand. I said, “The quantity leaves something to be desired, but the quality of sleep was primo.”

  “Me too.” She squinched up her eyes with a smile.

  We ate together for the last time, all but Amanda. Mary Clare assembled her bags at the front door and Jimmy carried the biggest out to the car. He wanted to carry them all, but Jane had become enamored of Mary Clare too, and she would do her share. When everything was loaded, Clare came out of the bedroom with several packages wrapped in purple tissue and tied with white satin ribbon. She handed the one on top to Jake.

  He said, “I’m going to wait till Amanda comes home before I open it.”

  “Give her this one then.”

  Jane opened her package, and brought out a coral necklace, one of Clare’s that she’d admired one day when she was sitting cross-legged on Clare’s bed, taking lessons in how to be a woman. She cried for two seconds and flung her arms around Clare. “I couldn’t,” she said.

  “They’re too orange for me,” Clare said. “But they really go with your coloring.”

  “Oh dad,” Jane said.

  Jimmy was more reserved. Clare gave him a sterling silver money clip from Dunhill. She said, “I know you’re going to make lots of money someday, and you must keep it neat.”

  She gave Jake a kiss, and he said, “You remember the phone number here?”

  She rattled it off.

  “If you have the slightest problem, call from the nearest phone. If it’s too far away, reverse the charges.”

  “What if I’m in St. Louis?”

  “Call.”

  I leaned in under the canvas top that Jimmy and Jane had scrubbed almost white and gave her a long kiss.

  “You rat. You just want to make sure I come back.”

  “But of course.”

  The motor was running and she released the brake when she said, “Tell Jake about it. Tell Jake he can put it in his book about the witch, how you put a spell on me.”

  The TR3 purred up the hill and I watched until she turned left at the corner and was out of sight.

  There And Back

  one

  Bienvenida found me standing in the middle of the kitchen, not remembering why I’d come into the room. She put her arms around me and guided my head to her shoulder. “Pobretico,” she murmured, “hermanitico,” using the Costa Rican diminutive. “You are like a mama cat, they have took away your babies.” And after a moment of stroking the back of my head, she said, “I got to find some platanos, make you some proper Costa Rican beans.” She took off her apron and grabbed her purse.

  Before she got to the door I pointed to the purple and white package on the window sill above the sink. She gasped, her hand to her mouth. She knew instantly what it meant. She took it and sat down in the breakfast nook. She had trusted Mary Clare with secrets of her past, some sad, some sensuous; she had made a niche in her heart for Clare, like a niche for a saint’s statue, and now her idol was gone. Her lips moved, eyes closed, I suspect a prayer for Clare’s safe return, and only then did she open the package. She showed me the contents of the little white box with nothing more than a tear for comment. They were drop earrings, crescent moons of beaten gold. Like the coral necklace given to Jane, they were something of Clare’s Bienvenida had admired in passing. She immediately removed the studs from her ears and replaced them with the new earrings, making her an instant queen.

  She bounced up, planted a kiss on my cheek, and was out the back door, calling “Platanos,” over her shoulder.

  She had no sooner cleared the porch when Jake came through the door from the dining room. “How about a cappuccino?” and without waiting for a reply fired up the espresso maker. Everyone was thinking food would salve my soul. I said, to prove I wasn’t grieving, “I was thinking about Mary Clare and Amanda, why they didn’t hit it off.”

  “Southern belle versus Jewish princess. Bound to be a clash.” He explained that Amanda was the only daughter of Texas Supreme Court Justice Samuel Husted Wirth. “Amanda grew up believing that, beneath his judicial robes, Justice Wirth was a marble statue, and that he wore a fig leaf.”

  The coffee maker interrupted us with its high-pitched scream, as Jake steamed a pitcher of milk.

  “How come Mary Clare got along so well with Bienv
enida?”

  He said, “I don’t know. Both Amanda and Mary Clare spoke a little Spanish with her, you know. According to Bienvenida, they both speak very bad Spanish, nothing like the pure Spanish of Costa Rica, but Bienvenida would correct Mary Clare, whereas she wouldn’t dare correct Amanda. See?”

  Mindful of Howie Manheimer’s deadline, I thanked Jake and took the cappuccino into the spare room and sat at my typewriter, to work on my résumé. Between sips I added my travels through Mexico, labeling them a sabbatical, and to cover the years since I left the University, I put: “Self-employed, Consultant in Environmental Sanitation.”

  When I had a satisfactory draft I drove over to Walnut Creek and bought a new typewriter ribbon, Wite-Out, and some of that silly putty you use to clean typewriter keys. As I walked in the back door after my errand, Jake burst into the kitchen.

  “Clare’s on the line,” he said.

  I took the call in the den. “Where are you?”

  She was in Placerville, at a pay phone in a truck stop. “I think I’m being followed.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Big, an ugly iridescent green; A General Motors car.”

  “Two men in it?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “You got enough gas to get back here?”

  “I just filled up.”

  “Turn around and come back. Don’t stop for anything.”

  “Oh, Bobby, you’re scaring me.”

  I said, “You’ll be all right. It’s probably nothing, but it might be.”

  “Do I really need to come back?”

  I said, “I would if I were you.”

  I looked up and Jake was in the doorway. “—Hold on a sec, Clare.”

  I turned to Jake. “Any other thoughts?”

  “Not for her,” he said. “I’m calling the Highway Patrol as soon as you get off the line, but for God’s sake don’t tell her that.”

  I told Clare if she wasn’t back in two hours I’d send out the Mounties to look for her. She allowed as how she could do it in two if she didn’t drop below seventy-five, but if she got a ticket it would make her way late. We settled on two and a half hours.

  As soon as I put down the handset, Jake picked it up and dialed information. He wrote down the number for the Highway Patrol office in Placerville and depressed the hook, then dialed them. It took him a long time, even with his precise way of speaking, to convince the dispatcher that he had a legitimate concern. He couldn’t give the Buick’s license number nor Clare’s, so it was going to be hard to identify the right pair. The third time he repeated himself—without a trace of irritation in his voice—I quit listening. He brought me back from a brown study when he jumped up and stretched. “God help us if the Russians invade,” he said.