by Packer, Vin
She stared out the window at the Hudson River. Every day she looked out at the blue water and the great liners snuggled into their berths, and the George Washington Bridge glistening off in the distance, and every day she sadly remembered the Shepleys’ old apartment on Riverside Drive, with a view of the river from every window, and a private elevator which opened right inside the Shepleys’ foyer, and ceilings which were very high and graced with crystal chandeliers.
Where they lived now, between York and East End Avenues the view looked out on rooftops and smoking incinerators; the block was filled with teen-agers playing stickball and standing in knots listening to transistors, and men washing their cars on Sundays, and old ladies looking down on the scene from the windows above, leaning on pillows they’d dragged from their beds. The nearest park was Carl Schurz, filled with dog-do and noisy children. The East River, with its tug boats and tankers, would never be the Hudson.
She went back to the chair near the bed, and sat down, placing Esquire on the small table beside a glass that contained thermometers; she put Playboy on her lap, and wetting her fingers to make the pages move more easily, she began thumbing through it, humming a little tune from Hello Dolly. Her favorite line in the song was, “You’re still glowing, you’re still growing, you’re still going strong"; she always thought of other people thinking of her, when she heard it.
Natalie Shepley was a tiny, brown-haired woman who wore turquoise-blue “owl” sunglasses with light blue prescription lenses. If she shopped at Klein’s on Fourteenth Street, she always carried a large Bonwit Teller shopping bag, in which she put her purchases; before she sold any of her better apparel at thrift shops, she removed the labels to sew them into dresses, suits, and coats she had bought at Klein’s or Ohrbach’s or Gimbels.
She kept up on things.
She read Dorothy Manners and Suzy Knickerbocker and Craig Claiborne and Angela Taylor; she knew who Marlon Brando was dating, and who the Carter Burdens were inviting to dinner at their apartment in the Dakota, and she saved recipes for dishes like Tripe à la Mode de Caen, and she made mental notes of what Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney had worn to La Caravelle, and that Beatrix Wilhelmina Armgard, princess of the Netherlands and heiress presumptive to the throne, sipped Americanos at social gatherings.
She had a blond wig, and she watched “Hullabaloo” and David Susskind; she bought Time on Tuesdays and Life and The New Yorker on Fridays; she saw all the French and Italian movies, and she went to Wednesday matinees. She never hesitated to say that she was forty-six, for it was her conceit that she could easily pass for thirty-eight.
All the scientists at the Richmond Institute in New York City were Ph.D.’s, but she was the only wife who asked for Dr. Shepley when she telephoned there, and Clinton Shepley was the only one from the institute who was listed in the New York telephone directory as Dr.
“Remember Rip Van Winkle, Billy?” she said, as she flipped through the pages of the magazine. “When he woke up, the world had passed him by. That won’t happen to my boy … Of course, thank God, you’re not asleep … You know more about the world, right now, than your own father knows … Don’t I read everything to you? … And we have such good talks … If you ask me, you wouldn’t have enjoyed being a scientist. It’s a good way to starve … You have too much life in you, anyway. Grandpa Shepley always said you were more like him than Clint was; do you remember him saying that? I remember your brother, I remember Charles doing imitations of Grandpa Shepley saying, ‘Billy is a chip off me, and Charles is a chip off Clinton.’ I think that was a fair statement.”
Charles and his imitations. You never thought Charles was paying any attention to the rest of the world, and then one fine day Charles would open his mouth and John Kennedy would come out, or Frank Sinatra, or even Billy.
Natalie Shepley folded the magazine back on “The Playboy Advisor” page and paused to light a cigarette.
She said, “Billy? I’m going to read from the advice column, darling. It’s a good way to keep up on things. The boys write in all sorts of questions … Now, here’s a young man, a D.W. from right here in New York, and he has a very stimulating question … Are you ready, Billy? It seems he received an engraved calling card with the initials P.P.C. written on the bottom. He’s writing to Playboy to ask what that means … I wouldn’t have known either … Well, the answer is very interesting, darling, and we ought to file it for future reference. Now, bear with my French, darling. Who would ever dream I’d been to Paris, France, the way I slaughter the language! It seems that P.P.C. means pour prendre congé. That’s French for ‘to take one’s leave,’ darling. Would you have known that? It seems that the sender is either moving or will be out of town for an extended period of time. He has sent D.W. his card with that written on it, so D.W. will know — I wouldn’t have known in a million years, and that’s the truth.”
Natalie Shepley sighed and took a puff on her cigarette; then she closed Playboy and put it on the table beside Esquire. She picked at her fingers a few seconds, and finally she stood up and went to the closet to get her handkerchief from the pocket of her beaver.
She said, “I’m not fooling you at all, am I, Billy? We never did succeed in keeping things from each other, did we?”
She wiped a tear from her eye and blew her nose, straightened her spectacles, and walked back to the chair by the bed. She put out her cigarette and sat down in the chair, holding her handkerchief ready in her hands. “Well,” she said, “your father and I were having breakfast this morning, and the telephone rang, and your father got up from the table and answered it, and it was your brother. It was Charles. He was calling from Far Point. Well, Billy, I heard your father say, ‘Oh, absolutely not, Son!’ and then, ‘You know better than that!’ and I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew that Charles had found out that I promised Pi Delta Pi that silverware … Remember, Billy? I read you the letter I wrote them, signing your father’s name. You remember. We talked about it … I did it for his own good, darling. I did it for Charles’s own good. Pi Delta Pi is famous for not taking legacies. Now, darling, I would have done the same thing for you, though I don’t think I would have had to, because we had more money then, and those fraternities have their ways of finding out down to the last penny what the family has…. You were another dish of tea from Charles, too. You were fraternity material, which Charles was not, though I tried my hardest to convince him that he was fraternity material, so he wouldn’t go through Rush Week with a complex…. Oh, darling, I meant well, it was — “
Natalie Shepley had to remove her glasses and wipe her eyes, blow her nose again, and muster control. “With your brother still on the phone, your father called in to me and said was I responsible for any such letter, and I said I most certainly was not responsible. Your father said was I positive, and I said of course I was positive, how could anyone not be positive about a thing like that, so your father told your brother, he told Charles, that someone was playing a prank on him…. Billy, you know I begged them in that letter to keep my offer of the silverware in strictest confidence, those were my very words, darling.”
She poured herself a glass of water from the pitcher beside the thermometers, and took a few sips before she could continue. Billy gave no sign of life, save for his breathing. His eyes had the glazed look of a fish at the end of a hook. She smoothed the sheet around his waist and patted his cheek. “You’d think a national fraternity would respect a confidential matter,” she said, “but the long and the short of it is that someone told Charles, and when your father was finished reassuring Charles that he had written no such letter, that I hadn’t either, he came back into the dining room, and he said, ‘Natalie, why in the name of God didn’t you let the boy go on his own steam?’ … I could never fool Clint, either … Darling, I just sat there and had a cry. I’m in tears right now, too, Billy. I don’t know if you can tell that or not, but my eyes are filled with tears right now … Then your father said, ‘The Pi Pi who told him is trying to take
it back now, but I doubt that we’ve heard the end of the matter, Natalie. I think this is only the beginning of a very unhappy experience for Charles.’
“Billy, I told your father that we should pray that it is the end of the matter, that we should never admit that we wrote any such letter, and, darling, your father was not very nice to me at all, not at all nice. ‘We didn’t write the letter!’ he shouted at me. ‘You wrote the letter.’ I said that I wrote it for Charles’s own good, and that I did not think very highly of a fraternal organization which would break a trust, and your father said, no, I wrote it for my own good. Which just,” sobbing, forcing herself to go on, “just doesn’t,” pausing, handkerchief at her nose, “make sss-ssen-sense.”
Then Natalie Shepley let the tears flow out of her eyes and roll down her cheeks onto the Thermo-weave covering Billy, and she put her arms around her son and hugged him to her.
“Oh, Billy, what is Easter going to be like now?”
William Shepley had no answer to that one, either.
• • •
But Easter was going to be fine as far as Charles Shepley was concerned. He whistled while he walked through campus town that warm March morning on the day of The Divine Comedy. He bought a cup of coffee at the Unmuzzled Ox, and did not even cruise the coat racks or look for tips left on empty tables. Nor would he have to sell his stereophonic phonograph when he went home for Easter. He had a far more lucrative source of income now. He had Hagerman right in his hip pocket, on tape.
After Hagerman had blown his top in the study hall last night, he had come down to Shepley’s room and told Thorpe to get out. His hands had shook, and he had wet-lipped the stinky cigarette he was smoking, and while he was talking to Shepley, pacing back and forth like a rat caught in a maze, Charles had reached down under the bed and snapped Thorpe’s Webcor over to Record.
— Shepley, we can straighten this thing out right now.
— How?
— Not by going to Blouter, Shepley.
— That’s where I’m going, when Blouter gets back.
— It was a gag, Shepley.
— Ha! Ha!
— A gag.
— Har de har, har, har … If my father promised this fraternity silverware to pledge me, this fraternity had better go shopping for silverware, because the gift has just been rescinded.
— Shepley, Shep — look, I said that it was just a gag. — I’m still going to ask Blouter.
— Shep, listen to me. I don’t want you to MENTION THIS TO BLOUTER!
— What’s the difference, if it’s just a gag? Mike could use a good laugh, couldn’t he?
— Shepley, Shep — can’t you take a little kidding?
— You weren’t kidding, Hagerman. You were lying, but you weren’t kidding.
— I said I was lying. I said that, Shep.
— So what’s the difference?
— Blouter doesn’t want the pledges running to him over every little thing. What do you think Blouter’s going to think of you?
— I don’t care…. It doesn’t sound so little, either.
— It’s LITTLE, Shepley! A little joke, was all. Are you going to make an ass of yourself in front of Blouter? Can’t you take a little joke?
— Is it big enough to get me out of The Divine Comedy, Hagerman? — To what?
— You heard me, Hagerman. I want out.
— You want me to make an exception of you, is that it?
— That’s it.
— Always the exception, huh, Shepley? Always looking for an out.
— Always, Hagerman…. What about it? — I don’t believe that you actually mean that. What kind of a man are you?
— Yes or no, Hagerman.
— Is that what you really want?
— Shall I put it in writing for you?
— You won’t go to Blouter?
— No.
— Did you tell Thorpe about this? — No.
— You didn’t tell anyone?
— Not a soul.
— Okay, Shepley. Okay.
Then Hagerman had left, after arranging for Shepley to bluff participation in The Divine Comedy, and Shepley had slipped the tape off the recorder, substituted another for it from Thorpe’s drawer, and put the tape in the pocket of his tweed jacket.
“What’s with Hagerman tonight?” Thorpe had asked, when he returned to the room.
“We’ve got separate itineraries now. We won’t be going together tomorrow, Dan.”
“Shep, he’s got it in for you.”
“Yeah.”
“I just saw his face when he came out of here, Shep.” “Uh-huh.”
“You’re pretty cool. Have you forgotten Osmond?” “Not at all.”
Shepley had insomnia most of the night, falling asleep only toward dawn, then jerking awake to remember his plan. First, to go to campus town, where he would call home and verify what he already knew: that Hagerman had been lying. Then, to stop in at the Co-op Book and Record Store, to see if the tape had taken…. Next on the agenda was the confrontation with Hagerman. For it had not been long last night until Charles Shepley realized that anything important enough for Hagerman to cancel an Inferno itinerary over also had a price, particularly when it was on record.
So Charles Shepley left the Unmuzzled Ox and set off for the Pi Delta Pi house, with the morning sun and this colossal piece of luck to warm him, ready to haggle with Hagerman.
• • •
Hagerman had not slept well either, despite a Compazine, a Librium, and two Doridens. His bedside table looked like the Valley of the Dolls. When he had managed to convince himself that he had nothing to worry about, that it was obvious Shepley believed he had invented the silverware story, and would be satisfied to drop the whole thing if he could get out of The Divine Comedy, Hagerman had drifted into sleep only to be blasted awake by Burroughs’ snoring. Then all the anxieties returned; then the sands of his security shifted back and he was adrift again, with palpitations and his insides twanging, and all the horrid remembrances of Len the Man and Peg Beauty parading across the screen of his mind, and the incubus of Blouter holding the power to deactivate Hagerman, and Shepley with the ammunition to trigger it.
He could just hear Peg Beauty:
“Peter, what did you do this time?”
And Len the Man:
“He didn’t do anything in particular. It’s never anything, in particular; it’s everything in general, starting with the fact he’s little and ugly and doesn’t know Number two has to try harder.”
Actually.
Len the Man had actually come out with that one when Peter had been sent home from Sunstone Military Academy.
Oh, he was smiling; you don’t use the toothpaste for people who can’t brush after every meal and not smile; you’re always on if you’re Len Lovely; if you have a headache, you don’t take it out on the kid, even if the kid is the reason you have the headache. Goldfinger smiles in the face of all obstacles and pushes on.
Hagerman had finally carried his pillow down to the Pi Pi living room. He had sat on the couch smoking cigarettes and waiting for his stomach to stop dancing, and he had picked up a copy of yesterday’s Far Point Record to take his mind off all of it. On the front page there was a picture of a Mrs. Matilda Holt from Valley Stream Road in Far Point; she was sitting in a chair with antimacassars on the arms, leaning into a GE radio with a dazed smile on her face, holding in her lap a huge photograph of a soldier with lieutenant’s bars on his shirt.
MRS. MATILDA HOLT HOLDS A PICTURE OF HER SON, MARINE LT. JOSEPH HOLT, WHILE LISTENING TO RADIO IN HER FAR POINT HOME. INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPH BY WABC RADIO WAS BEAMED HERE YESTERDAY. A WIDOW, MRS. HOLT LIVES FOR SON’S RETURN.
“We always underestimated Joey,” she said. “You know how it is sometimes with kids. They don’t seem to be going anywhere.”
Joseph Holt was going somewhere last Saturday. He was going across a river in the Mekong Delta 115 miles southwest of Saigon. He was going into Cong country.
“The other kids used to call him Turtle,’ “ Mrs. Holt recalled, “because Joey was always sticking his neck out, but we called it getting into trouble, because that’s what it always came down to in the end.”
Joseph Holt was sticking his neck out again; he was getting into trouble again. Plenty of trouble. The kind of trouble that could easily kill him.
“Joey’s father and me didn’t know what a brave boy we had.”
Six Cong guerillas soon knew what a brave boy Joey Holt was; it was the last lesson they were ever taught. Joey taught it to them with an M14 rifle, and plenty of good old American guts!
“When Joey comes home, he’ll be king in this house.”
He’s king to the Cong right now. He’s the reason they don’t sleep so well these days. Joey Holt is the reason we sleep better, knowing he’s —
Hagerman had slapped the newspaper to the floor and ground out his cigarette. He had curled up on the couch and put the pillow in against his stomach where it ached, and then he had taken deep breaths, which sometimes helped his attacks of anxiety, and in a little while he felt the tension start to taper off…. Shepley believed him; Shepley was not going to make an ass of himself by going to Blouter. He had let things grow way out of proportion again, was all; weeping Jesus, Hagerman, don’t let every little thing grab you this way; steady, Hagerman; slow down, buster; soothing himself as he had often done when he was a kid, holding himself and whispering softly to himself in the dark, until he was fast sleep.
Then his ‘copter was disabled by ground fire, and he crash-landed in Victor Charlie territory, and in the night a white phosphorus mortar shell exploded, and the valley erupted in recoilless cannon and machine-gun fire and the flash of shells. He stuck it out, the green beret cocked jauntily over one eye; he braved the hail of fire to rescue the ‘copter’s pilot; he sprinted past a spray of bullets, while choppers and planes went after him. And when he woke up with the sun in his eyes, dive bombers were coming to the aid of the besieged band of men he led; he was safe and sure, and rubbing his eyes, Hagerman smiled.