Читать книгу September Remember - Eliot Taintor - Страница 10

“Hey, Joe, the ten of diamonds was good in dummy.” Kibitzer Crunden pointed the stub of a cigar over Joe’s shoulder. He was a large amiable guy, who always managed to grab the seat behind the regular bridge players and followed the game with vociferous attention.

“Sorry, partner.” Joe reached in his pocket for change. They had passed the lagoon in Bruce Park, where Hank said you could catch blue crabs, and were nearing the ugly bulk of the Power Plant. No time for another hand.

“Joe’s got flounders on the brain. Or is it ducks, Joe?” His partner kidded good-naturedly.

Joe let it ride. He’d had Rick on his mind all day, but he couldn’t tell these fellows about Rick—or about himself for that matter. They’d look at him with embarrassed, evasive eyes. Kibitzer Crunden would shake his bald head and puff out his fat cheeks, and go home and pour himself a double shot and say to his wife, “Always thought that Joe Kelly was a queer duck.” Damn funny thing how you could play cards with the same bunch of men morning and evening for years and not know what made them tick. He could state their names, occupations and bridge habits. Tom was a corporation lawyer, with grey hair, a distinguished nose, and an aversion to raising an opening bid unless he had at least four trumps, headed by an honor, and a couple of aces on the side. Dick was a smooth young-looking broker with a perpetual tan toning into his light-brown hair and carefully informal tweeds. Dick had a weakness for Blackwood’s four no trump even before you settled on a suit. Harry was a mild, middle-aged banker, with a modest, almost apologetic mustache, and a tendency to take unnecessary finesses. It didn’t add up to much. Oh, he knew where they all lived, their approximate incomes, their wives’ first names, the age and sex of their children. It still didn’t add up to enough. Not enough to make you feel you could tell any one of them what was going on inside you. Didn’t they care? Didn’t they have any curiosity? Or were they afraid? Were they deliberately—perhaps desperately—sticking to the safe surfaces of life because they were afraid? As if trouble were contagious, as if by admitting the existence of insecurity they might jeopardize their own safety. So that when someone they “knew” went off the deep end, got arrested for drunken driving, landed in a divorce court, or jumped out of a window, they averted their eyes and hugged tighter to their little rubber boats.

Joe watched Harry putting the cards neatly into their case, leaving a quarter on the window ledge for the brakeman. Tom was reaching for an important-looking pigskin briefcase on the rack over their heads. Dick was adjusting the brim of his brown felt hat. He looked at Joe’s battered green object with a lifted eyebrow. “How about taking up a collection and buying Irish a new fedora?”

“You boys don’t understand.” Joe studied his hat with seriocomic pride. “This hat is just about perfect. No old newspaper man would be seen dead in a bandbox item like Dick’s. There’s a regular technique for getting ’em in proper shape like aging Roquefort cheese. If you’re in a hurry you can do a pretty fair job by buying a package of dust, covering thoroughly and letting stand one week, then, being careful not to shake off any dust, you put the hat out on the back porch in the rain. If you are unlucky enough to run into a stretch of bright weather I have discovered that by holding the hat under a shower for half an hour you can achieve quite a realistic effect. Of course, a few grease spots help if artistically applied, especially around the band, and it is wise to ravel the ends of the ribbon a bit. Nothing really equals kicking around the bottom of a car, preferably a model T, for three or four months, but, as I say, gentlemen, this hat is practically perfect, considering the fact that I have only worked on it for two years.”

“Joe’s a sketch, all right,” Kibitzer Crunden commented, as if he were forgiving him for the ten of diamonds.

Sunlight still glanced off the pond across from the Riverside station where the kids skated in winter, but the community garden patches that ringed it looked ragged now, with only a few sprawling tomato vines and sturdy green rows of broccoli. Joe climbed the steep wooden steps, crossed the bridge and went down another long flight to get his car. They were nice guys all right, but they didn’t seem real. Not the way Hank and Sylvia and Kidd Whistler and all the other A.A.s did, even the ones you only saw once or twice at meetings and never said two words to again. You knew what made them tick. They were the kind of friends you made in college or in the last war, like Rick and Jim Bradway. The kind you never expected to make again. That was it. It was like going through Belleau Wood together. You were fighting the same damn enemy. You had the same hopes and fears, defeats and victories. If Rick could get it—the sense of companionship, of not going it alone. The allin-the-same-boat feeling. Not each one in a separate rubber boat like the guys on the train. Hiding something. Hiding themselves. The way the A.A.s would get up and talk at meetings, really let their hair down, made other contacts seem thin and superficial. Other people shadowy.

Monica hadn’t understood that. Lots of wives didn’t seem to understand. Hell, you couldn’t blame them for not trusting a man who had sworn off over and over again and then reached for a bottle. Monica had reason enough for not believing in him. He’d heard other men say that their wives resented the time they spent going to meetings and on A.A. calls. Monica had said they were losing all their friends because he was in White Plains or New York every night and he had said, “What friends has a drunk?” But Monica hadn’t liked it. She hadn’t liked his telephoning at the last minute when they had a dinner date with the Crundens that he had to stay in town to help Sylvia Landon out of a jam. Funny, because it was Monica who had saved the Saturday Evening Post article on A.A. and given it to him in the first place. Stop thinking about Monica. Think about Rick and Hank.

Joe turned his car down the steep grade of Buxton Lane. He hoped they had had luck today. Hoped Hank’s slow, easy humor had calmed Rick down. Rick had been in an ugly mood. Hell, he had probably hopped a train by now and was raising Cain with Gail.

Rick was on the side porch, his long legs stretched out in a rickety deck chair, as Joe came up the steps. He flourished the latest copy of Life angrily. “Of all the God damn stinking sheets,” he shouted, “typical of your whole moronic civilization. Here, look at this, Joe. Life goes to a party. So what? If they want to run a picture magazine, okay. The dopes who go to the movies every night and think with their eyes can have it. But why the lengthy captions? Why the smart, wise-guy, pretentious, long-winded comments? That’s what gripes me.” He threw the magazine down in disgust.

Joe laughed, but he was worried. Rick apparently was still in an alcoholic mood. He picked up the derided copy, smoothed out the slick heavy paper and pointed to another spread. “You’re prejudiced, Rick. They run some damn good stuff. And they’re a swell advertising medium.”

“Advertising!” Rick snorted.

“Okay. Okay,” Joe grinned, “I’m not going to let you get started on that now.” They had sat up all one night with a bottle of rum in a native hut in Santa Cruz de Bravo, arguing about advertising. Rick had stated grandiloquently that advertising was robbing the American people of initiative, was producing canned mentalities and moreover was destroying the souls of a lot of honest ex-newspaper men. “Meaning me?” Joe had asked. “Meaning you, Saint Augustine.” Rick had shaken his head mournfully. “You were a good guy at Harvard, a good guy on the old Sun, and look at you now. If advertising doesn’t finish the job, Paradise Pix will.”

“What we need,” Joe said now, “is a drink.”

Rick looked at him, startled. Probably he meant some damned soft slop. But Joe led the way to the kitchen and started a kettle of water, measuring out coffee and telling Rick where to find the cups.

“Sound idea,” Rick approved. “They serve coffee before meals in a lot of places. Silly the way Americans think coffee has to follow a meal.”

“You talk like one of the left-bank boys after the last war,” Joe said, “but you did a good job cleaning these babies. That’s a sizable blackfish, all right.”

“Eight and a quarter pounds.” Rick’s voice boomed with pride. Fishermen, radio commentators, and actors have no false modesty, Joe thought, but a fisherman’s boasting always seemed naïve and somehow engaging. “Hank says it’s the second biggest he ever saw in these waters,” Rick went on. His long face had color on the high cheekbones. It had been yellow as a winter apple yesterday.

Leave two men alone in any kitchen with no female interference and the resultant meal will usually have the taste and tang of food cooked over a camp fire. To add to the illusion Joe suggested that they take their plates and the coffee pot out on the side porch. Crickets filled the early darkness with their autumnal chirping and a light breeze stirred the maple leaves.

“Stick around and we’ll take you duck shooting as soon as the season opens,” Joe said. “Look, Rick, I’ve been thinking about you all day. Why don’t you move out here with me for a while? I’ve got plenty of room now to put you up and it’s a hell of a lot easier to cut out liquor in the country than it is in New York.

It was decent of Joe. Damned decent. But it wasn’t the answer for him. This country seemed tame after the bush. The fishing had surprised him but you couldn’t get away from the fact that the place was only an hour from New York. The town of perpetual cocktail parties. The town where people seemed to think that the only possible form of hospitality was to offer you a drink. “How about stopping in for a highball tomorrow?” or “Drop in for a martini before dinner.” Every old friend he had run into had wanted to celebrate their reunion with a drink. Every new man he had met in business had immediately suggested hoisting one.

“I can’t manage it here, Joe,” Rick said. Flee alcohol, that was it. He could go to the mountains of Colombia, where he knew a tribe of Indians who drank only ritualistically, at planting and harvesting. He could catch a boat next week. The fall fiesta would be over by the time he got there and he would see no liquor until spring. That would give him six months start anyhow. “I’ve got to have a different set-up. Different scenery. Different associates.”

“New associates. Right,” Joe said, “That’s what A.A. does for you. I’ve got more honest-to-God friends in A.A. than I’ve had in all the years since college. But why new scenery? It’s been tried plenty and it never works out. I heard of one fellow who went to an island in the South Seas and a storm washed a keg of rum ashore. Another guy shoved off to the Arctic to escape booze and a bunch of explorers came along and taught him to eat the alcohol jelly from his stove. He killed himself. Kind of extreme cases, maybe, but they prove my point. You can’t run away from liquor—or yourself.”

“The hell you can’t. I’m going.”

“You tried it once, Rick, and look what happened.”

“What do you mean?” Rick was angry now. There was a point beyond which even Joe’s friendly concern seemed a damned intrusion.

“You know what I mean, Rick.” It was a difficult business to say what he had to say, but Joe didn’t hesitate. “You ran away after Adelaide died. You left your kid. Shifted your responsibility to your wife’s sister. That was adolescent behavior. No matter how you look at it.”

“I saw that Gail was comfortably fixed,” Rick said defensively. He was holding on to his temper, but he didn’t like this. He didn’t like it a little bit.

“Comfortably fixed! Hell. Does a child need a parent? Death took her mother. Self-pity got her father. I’m giving it to you straight, Rick, because it’s my guess that is why you started drinking. You feel guilty about it, yourself. Only you don’t want to face it. You were yellow in nineteen twenty-five. Are you going to be yellow again? Walk out again just when Gail needs you? Just when she has found a father? Can’t you think about her for a change? Except to get angry and threaten to bust up her life the way you did this morning.”

Rick got up with a jerk that sent his chair clattering. He strode to the far end of the porch and back, pushing chairs and tables aside as if he were hacking his way through the bush with a machete.

“God damn it, Joe, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what I did to Gail when I was drunk Tuesday.”

“Whatever you did,” Joe said slowly, “it couldn’t equal what I did.”

Jim Bradway had gone back to Joe’s apartment with him for a night- cap after one of those business sessions with an out-of-town client which involved going the rounds of all the fancier night clubs. It was the fourth straight night Joe had been out “drinking on account,” as the agency called it, and the liquor and late hours had piled up on him. They had turned in through the dark garden on East Fifty-third Street and climbed the stairs to Joe’s apartment. Joe could see the living room as it had looked when he switched on the lights. He had never wanted to see it again. It was a pleasant room. A man’s room with large leather chairs, clipper ship prints and, between the high French windows opening on the small garden, shelves and racks reaching to the ceiling. They were filled with trophies—silver cups Joe had won for public speaking at the Loyola High School and for track at Harvard, a German helmet, and his collection of guns. Jim and he had both been pretty tight when he had started showing them off—a pair of pearl-handled dueling pistols he had picked up in Virginia, an old Tower musket, a Civil War sword, a Spanish fowling piece with a butt inlaid with silver, a German 8 mm. Mauser from the last war, and his first rifle, a twenty-two Stevens single shot, the executioner of many a squirrel.

“You didn’t shoot Gail,” Joe said now, stretching his right hand out and aiming his forefinger at Rick like a pistol. “You didn’t point a Colt .45 at a guy you loved like a brother.” Jim had been the kind of a friend Rick was. Not the kind you play bridge with on a train. The kind you’d been through hell with. They had been in the same outfit overseas, but Jim had taken a job in Chicago and hadn’t moved to New York till after Rick left, so Rick had never met him. They would have liked each other, Joe thought. They were both big men, uncomfortable in cities. “You didn’t think you were back in Belleau Wood. You didn’t forget that a gun was loaded. You didn’t pull a trigger and see your pal fall … look up at you … with … with a calm surprise in his eyes … no….” Joe’s voice was almost a whisper now, “no reproach in those eyes … just surprise. You didn’t yell at him to get up and quit horsing around. You didn’t see his eyes go … queer. You didn’t turn cold sober and take his pulse and find him dead.”

Rick took another turn on the porch. Emily had sent him a clipping about the “accidental shooting,” as the papers called it. It had happened a year or so after the crazy Hollywood chicle job and by the time the mail caught up with him, Rick had thought it too late to write Joe. Anyhow, what the hell could you say in a letter? What the hell could he say now for that matter? He put his hand awkwardly on Joe’s shoulder.

“You make me feel like a heel, Joe. Human reactions are pretty low when you come right down to it. I’m sorry as hell for you but it makes my own troubles seem damn small potatoes—the whole business of Gail pretty easy to cope with after what you’ve been up against.”

Joe shook himself like a dog coming out of deep water. “That was more or less the idea,” he grinned. “I figured it might make you feel better, so I took the plunge. And believe me it was a plunge. I’ve never been able to talk about it to anyone till this minute—except Monica. And that was different. That was plain, continuous hell for both of us.”

“Where’s Monica now?” Rick asked. He had heard that Joe had married Jim Bradway’s widow. It had sounded like a screwy idea but natural, in a way, he supposed. Tragedy could bring two people together as well as propinquity. The nearness of sorrow was a closer thing than any geographical accident. It had been that way with him and the Winged Victory. They were both unhappy people. The sadness behind her triumphant beauty was what had first attracted and then annoyed him. Joe didn’t answer for a long minute. Come to think of it he hadn’t mentioned Monica the other day at lunch and she obviously wasn’t around now. Rick kicked himself for asking.

“She took Jimmy out to California. He’d had pneumonia and the doctor thought the change would do him good.” Joe paused. “That’s the story for publication. She went before Christmas last year and God knows whether she’s ever coming back. Hell, I’m not blaming Monica for getting out after two years of my coming home drunk night after night till she was scared I’d kill her son in one of my crazy fits of remorse. He’s a good kid—only he looks exactly like his father—the same trick of pulling his mouth down at the left corner, the same quick way of using his hands. It used to drive me bats.”

Like Gail and Adelaide, Rick thought. You couldn’t stand seeing likenesses and special gestures repeated. If Joe had a son would he pull at his cowlick the way Joe was doing now?

Joe took a snap-shot out of his wallet and tossed it over to Rick. By the brief light of a match Rick peered at the group—a slim dark-haired woman with an alert narrow face, a sturdy small boy intent on holding the head of an Irish setter toward the camera. Behind them were tall fluted columns and a large brick house.

“Where was it taken?” Rick asked inadequately, not knowing how you could comment on a wife and stepson who had walked out on a guy.

“Jim Bradway’s house back of Greenwich. That’s where we lived, God bless us. It was about the size of the Country Club and about the only thing Jim left. He’d been getting a big salary, but they hadn’t saved a nickel. You know how it goes. I thought the least I could do was to help Monica stay in the place if she wanted to. And she did. So I paid the taxes and the upkeep for a couple of years. Then after we got married I tried to persuade her to sell the house but she was crazy about it and Jimmy had grown up there. She thought he’d miss it. I don’t know. He seemed to like me a lot. Hung around me all the time. I could have taken him fishing here. He could have had a dinghy at the Yacht Club.”

Falmouth and the husky little catboat Rick’s father had taught him to sail. Long sun-splashed days squinting at the peak of a sail on an old gaff rig, nosing her closer to the wind, or spilling the wind in a puff, then letting her out on a reach. Long hours sitting on the rickety dock at low tide, his short legs dangling, his stubby fingers struggling with knots, achieving neat half-hitches, bowlines and squares, being properly scornful of grannies, splicing with awkward determination, and his father a patient oracle with a pipe and an occasional coveted nod of approval. Grandfather Avery had been a romantic, adventurous figure but Rick thought now of his taciturn, circumspect father with sudden understanding—and envy. He and Joe were missing something all right. Most likely you could never have that special companionship with a girl, but Joe might have done things with that sturdy kid of Monica’s. No wonder young Jimmy had followed Joe around. Monica must be a fool. It was a damn shame. Joe the gregarious, Joe the life of the party, Joe the joker with the quick insight and sympathy was a lonely guy. Lonely as Rick, the angry tilter at windmills.

“Look, Joe, if that invitation still holds I’d like to park out here with you for a while.”

Joe’s face lit up. Even in the dimness Rick could feel rather than see the change in his expression, could hear the warmth come back into his voice. “Well, now I’ve an even better idea….” Joe developed his plan with growing enthusiasm. There was an apartment over the boathouse-garage some former owner must have put in for a chauffeur; he could fix it up and camp out there weekends. He’d like to spend a couple of nights in town anyhow. Then Rick and Emily and Gail could take over the house for a few months. That is, if Rick thought it would work out. If he could persuade Emily and Gail to try it. They could pay Emerald’s wages and let him eat with them when he came out.

“Hell, we’ll rent it.” Rick seized on the idea with eagerness, seeing a boyish Gail in faded dungarees sitting on the rickety dock splicing rope with slim red-tipped fingers.