Читать книгу September Remember - Eliot Taintor - Страница 7

The windshield wiper jerked two precisely uniform arcs against the rain that came out of the darkness like water out of a great hose, directed at the car by a gigantic, prehensile thumb. Clockwise. Counter-clockwise. The narrow rubber arms always seemed to hurry, but always moved with infuriating regularity. Clockwise. Counter-clockwise. Avery Rickham found himself wishing that the damn contrivance would over-reach itself, go past the neat curve with a fine spurt of energy, or fall short in comprehensible human fatigue. In this petty struggled between Man and Nature, his sympathies were all with the erratic violence of the storm. He was seized by an irrational hatred for the cunning mind that had set this absurd gadget to cope with the wild sweep of wind and rain.

He was a man given to sudden irrational hatreds. Glorying in them. Ashamed of them. Dominated by them. A big man, hunched into the front seat of the small roadster, his knees jutting above the dashboard, his heavy shoulders braced but sagging against the leather seat. He had a dark, defiant face. Irregular features. Arresting in their odd emphatic angularity. Strong dark hair. Desolate dark grey eyes.

Clockwise. Counter-clockwise. Rick had only to reach out his hand and turn a plastic button and the busy arms would stop in their tracks with a protesting squish. But he could not reach out his hand. He could not summon even that meager amount of physical or mental energy. His last dime’s worth of tenacity had been spent in getting into this car with Joe. He felt like a man sliding into a foxhole, hiding from the enemy—only the enemy was himself.

Joe had pulled him out of jail early this morning for “Drunken and Disorderly Conduct.” Christ, had they booked him for “Assault and Battery” too? He couldn’t remember. And he couldn’t forget.

Fear gripped him. Fear worse than anything he had known in his long years in the bush. Worse even than the time when he had come back from his first mule trek to locate a fresh stand of sapota trees and the half-drunk native chicle foreman had started bragging. He had begun by boasting that he was not afraid of snakes, he was not afraid of crocodiles, he was not afraid of tigres. The next minute Rick could foresee that he would reach a resounding and dangerous climax and yell that he was not afraid of gringos! This would not be so good. It would not be good at all. Especially as the man had an old Colt .44 and Rick was unarmed. There had seemed hardly room between the living green walls for Rick to turn his mule, but he had twisted quickly in his saddle and looked the native in the eye.

“Are you never afraid of yourself, hombre?”

It had worked. With a cry of terror the man had somehow kicked his mule past Rick and pounded ahead along the narrow trail. When Rick finally overtook him he was sitting quietly on his mule, a chastened mestizo.

Poor devil. Rick understood the native’s terror now. He had hated the world in those days but he had not hated nor feared himself. It was hell not knowing what you had done. Or what order you had done what in. You could sleep off most of the physical agony of a hangover. His head was still pounding but his stomach had quieted to a sort of groggy queasiness. Only the mental nausea had not diminished. He could not remember. And he could not forget. Isolated incidents kept swimming at him like the shadows of sharks on the floor of the ocean, but something came first … something pleasant … not part of this green seaweed and shark-fin nightmare … and yet part of it.

Gail! Gail had put her arm through his and lifted one eyebrow in a way that made her look disturbingly like her mother. She had wanted him to go with her to a cocktail party, “Not every gal,” she teased, “has a father who pops out of a jungle and …”

“You make me feel like Tarzan!” Rick had laughed, but the moment had been enormously important to him.

In one desperate week after his wife’s death in childbirth he had put all their money in trust for this daughter who had survived; arranged for Adelaide’s sister, Emily, to look after her; resigned from his position as consulting engineer in a New York firm and found a field job with a chicle company in Campeche. For nearly eighteen years he had knocked about the world on roving assignments with one of the big oil companies between jobs with the chewing gum firm. For nearly eighteen years he had tried to forget Gail’s existence, except for the month he had spent at home when she was five and found he could not stand New York nor the engaging child who was too close a replica of Adelaide. After that he had fulfilled his paternal instincts by sending her occasional odd presents—a few ancient Mayan pottery whistles one of his archaeological pals had dug up and given him in exchange for a tip on the location of a burial mound, serapes woven by Indians and dyed with crude brilliant colors, jadeite beads from the tomb of a high priest who had made difficult astronomical calculations in Yucatan before the Saxon barbarians had learned to multiply and divide. Strange gifts for a little girl in a brownstone house in the East Sixties. Gifts that Gail had proudly displayed to him recently, arranged in a special cabinet in her room, while he stood beside her and cursed himself in his heart for a selfish fool. At that, it had not been any belated sense of responsibility for her but a worse than usual bout of malaria and a better than usual offer from the Home Office that had brought him back to New York.

“You will go with me?” Gail had insisted and Rick had known that she was asking for more than a chance to show him off to her new friends. She was seeking his approval of those friends. The moment was important to her too.

Emily had made it quite clear that she considered the Mantons impossible people. “Paul is good looking,” she had admitted reluctantly, “but his mother is in some fashion business and they belong to what I believe is known as Café Society.”

Rick had brushed Emily’s remarks aside—she was obviously old-fashioned and narrow in her social judgments—and found a sweet new brand of happiness in Gail’s appeal to him. It was a fine proud feeling.

And she had been lovely, coming gaily down the stairs to meet him in a short black dress with a white fur jacket slung over her shoulder and a silly white flower on a scrap of black veiling tilted over one eye. The costume had definitely not been chosen by her Aunt. Rick had felt both annoyed and touched by Gail’s attempt to appear smart and alluring and her achievement of incongruous innocence. If she had been any other woman in the world he would have looked her over as a cute little trick and missed the innocence completely. Hell, he couldn’t have other men looking at his daughter like that. In baffled concern he had vowed to protect her, to warn her somehow, but all he managed to say was, “Isn’t it sort of hot for that fur thing?”

Gail had laughed the way women laugh when men act as if clothes had anything to do with the weather. “Of course it is,” she agreed as they stepped into the slanting September sunlight, “but I wanted Daphne Manton to see it.”

The Manton apartment on the East River had been as full of phony notables as a gossip column. “That’s Daphne Manton,” Gail had waved excitedly at a slim woman with blued hair curled in a crisp high pompadour, “Doesn’t she look French? Paul and I call her Madame de Maintenon and she always wears that special shade of blue to match her hair. Even her fur coat is that color. It’s famous as the ‘Manton Blue’.”

Mrs. Manton had put a possessive arm around Gail and turned to Rick. “Isn’t your daughter a darling, Mr. Rickham, and so photographic! I’ve been trying to get her to model some of my ridiculous hats—but of course her Aunt disapproves. Really you know the Powers’ Model List reads like the Social Register these days.”

Rick had taken a martini from a silver tray, downed it at one gulp and reached for another glass. He had dismissed Emily’s opinion of these people as old-fashioned. Now he had found himself defending her attitude with quick anger behind his words, “I’m afraid I quite agree with Gail’s Aunt. In my day nice girls never allowed their photographs to appear in the papers and certainly not as advertisements.”

“Oh Daddy, how quaint!” Gail had laughed and he had not liked the sound. There was a false high note in it.

“But don’t you see,” Mrs. Manton had persisted, her curly blue head tilted to one side as she studied Gail with shrewd appraising eyes, “it’s her air of innocence that is so engaging.”

Rick had felt fury pounding in his veins. Damn this woman for seeing and putting a commercial value on the very quality in Gail he had just discovered and determined to protect. He had reached for another cocktail. “Apparently I have been too long in the bush to understand your civilization!” He had handed Mrs. Manton her world with emphatic irony. “The Indians in Central America defend their daughters.”

“What a thrilling life you must have had, Mr. Rickham!” Daphne Manton had side-stepped the impact of his anger and left him feeling like a sententious grey-beard. “Indians fascinate me. I feel the way D. H. Lawrence’s women do about primitive men. But I suppose Indians today are quite dull and dirty, and civilized men are merely dull. You must tell me about them sometime. Gail has been talking of nothing but her father for days.”

A boy with smooth dark hair had come toward them and greeted Gail with a casual, “Hi, darling.”

Gail’s face had lighted with a warm happy smile and she had given her father’s arm a quick, confident squeeze. “Daddy, this is Paul.”

Rick had stiffened. He had been absurdly angry at Daphne Manton. The woman was a fool, but he admitted that except for her influence on Gail he might have found her an attractive and amusing fool. This was different. This was like two continents facing each other across a narrow channel, armed and ready to fight. This boy was handsome—too handsome. His mouth was petulant and there was no openness in his face. No stability.

Clockwise. Counter-clockwise.

“Lansing Patterson … Lansing Peterson … what the hell was that guy’s name at Harvard?” Rick spoke out loud.

Joe’s laugh filled the small car, silenced the pelting rain and the sucking sound of the windshield wiper. “You mean the fellow who was always chasing chorus girls? Gosh, I haven’t thought of him in years … last time I heard he was trying to beat Tommy Manville’s record. What in the world put him into your head?” Joe turned from his intent concentration on the slippery black road and looked at Rick curiously for an instant, but Rick didn’t answer.

He was back at the Manton cocktail party watching Gail cross the crowded room with Paul … Paul who was like someone Rick had known … Paul who was not necessarily a playboy just because he reminded Rick of Lansing Somebody-or-other at Harvard. Rick had gulped another drink and told himself he wasn’t being fair but his instinctive, violent dislike and distrust of Paul Manton could not be silenced—and weren’t instincts sound, protective mechanisms, coordinated memories, warnings of experience, and wouldn’t man do well to heed them as animals do?

Daphne Manton had taken Rick’s arm authoritatively and herded him about the room like a small sheep dog driving a large ram. Titles crackled around him like dried grass. Slightly seedy titles. A Georgian Prince, a Polish Countess, an ex-ambassador, recalled because he had disagreed with the President’s foreign policy before Pearl Harbor, the divorced wife of an English Earl, who had been in Hollywood and was beautiful in a tired, scornful way, a thin Frenchman with an old name and a new aptitude for getting along on the shady side of American business, two Russian Princesses, a man who knew Washington-behind-the-scenes, two more Russian Princesses. Mrs. Manton gave Rick rapid by-lines as she introduced her guests.

Rick had grabbed another martini. Didn’t the woman know that Russian Princesses come a dime-a-dozen! Hadn’t she ever heard of the Soviet Union! Didn’t she realize that anyone could jam an apartment with this type of riff-raff simply by providing free drinks! Hell, if Daphne Manton liked this crowd, thought these people cosmopolitan, that was her affair. But it wasn’t Gail’s. How could Adelaide’s daughter be impressed by this spurious bunch, this cheap notoriety? The more upset he had become about Gail the more he drank and the more he drank the more upset he became about Gail. He had watched her, laughing with Paul and a group of younger people, a cocktail glass in her hand, her voice too shrill, her manner too provocative.

God damn it. She looked as cheap as the rest of them. He ought to grab her by the nape of her neck and drag her out of this place. Instead, he had reached for another martini. The liquor was catching up on him. In Belize and Playa Carmen he had been able to pour it down, get roaring drunk, if he liked, and sober up and carry on with his work. But there had been an increasing and alarming number of times the past two or three years when he had needed several stiff shots in the morning. The “hair of the dog” idea was bad stuff. He’d been half-cockeyed or sunk with the jitters through three or four successive working days. And since his return to New York even a few drinks seemed to hit him. Hit him hard. And fast. He—Avery Rickham—who not so long ago had been known as the best “holder” in the cantinas of Central America. And his hangovers had changed. You could stand a “head,” but how could you cope with the choking mental depressions which had engulfed him recently. He’d better watch out. He’d had plenty now, but you couldn’t take a party like this without drinking. One of the Russian Princesses had been telling him about the rubies her mother had lost in the Revolution. He didn’t believe a word of it. She’d probably been born in the Bronx … in the Zoo. That was funny. Damn funny. He had laughed and the Princess had batted long eyelashes at him in startled inquiry.

“Where’s Manton?” he had asked suddenly, catching another martini from the butler’s tray. He’d like to meet Manton. What sort of a guy would stand for a party like this going on in his place? He had asked Emily about Paul’s father but she had been vague, having heard only that Mr. Manton had made a pile on Wall Street.

The short fat man who knew Washington-behind-the-scenes had laughed. “Oh, you wouldn’t catch P.J. at one of his wife’s shindigs. He’s off fishing. Always off fishing … or shooting. Belongs to clubs in Florida, clubs in Maryland, clubs in Canada.”

Smart guy, Manton, Rick had thought. He didn’t have to stick this party either. He could grab Gail and get the hell out. He had pushed his way toward her. She was perched on the arm of a “Manton Blue” couch, with Paul sprawled on a cerise cushion at her feet, his head just touching her knee.

“We’re leaving,” Rick had said, “now.” He had realized his tone was wrong from the look that came over Gail’s face.

“Not me,” she had said and leaned closer to Paul.

Her face had been a perfect target. Before Rick knew what he was doing he had slapped it. Quickly, as a cat slaps.

The noisy room had become abruptly silent. The ambassador was gone. The divorced countess was gone. The Russian Princesses were gone. Gail was gone. Rick had been dimly aware of Gail rushing from the room, her hand to her cheek, of Paul hurrying after her, of Gail in a small voice saying goodbye to Mrs. Manton. With magnificent fatherly aplomb he had paid no attention. He had finished another martini without haste. Daphne Manton and the man who knew Washington-behind-the-scenes were standing in front of the mantel looking at him. Suddenly he had remembered that Gail had said this fat fellow was taking Mrs. Manton out for dinner. Rick had gotten to his feet nonchalantly, found his hat and coat, made his farewells with careful politeness.

In the street the cool night breeze from the East River had cleared his head for a moment. He must find Gail. He had asked the doorman if he had seen a girl in a black dress with a white fur jacket. The doorman had called a cab for her and had added that “the little lady seemed in a big hurry.” God, he thinks I’m an old fool chasing after a kid. Rick had considered socking the doorman in the nose, but it hadn’t seemed worth the effort. What he needed was a drink.

Had he gone to the Monks Club first, or to those three or four bars in the middle fifties? He hadn’t been in the Monks Club since the night before he sailed for Central America. He had left it plastered then. He had entered it in worse shape last night, but not too drunk to sign a check for his back dues. “Pay your dues in toto is a gentleman’s moto,” he had shouted. The words had seemed to rhyme. To be hilariously funny. He had pulled his check book out this morning and studied the stubs. There were two made out to the club. He must have cashed the second to buy drinks at the bar for the late revelers. Late revelers. That was it. He must have gone to those bars in the middle fifties first.

He rolled his head from side to side on the leather upholstery of the car as if the physical act might shake loose his memory. It seemed to function only intermittently. Had he lost it when he left the Mantons’? The devilish part of these alcoholic blackouts was that he always suspected the worst. Magnified his evil deeds. He couldn’t remember making any effort to find Gail. Had he even thought of her after talking to that doorman?

Was it because he had made no effort to find her that he had drawn a blank? Or vice versa?

There had been a big dark prostitute somewhere around 48th Street and 7th Avenue. They had argued about her price and she had finally agreed to meet him outside a hotel on 8th Avenue. And then stood him up.

There had been Jimmy Smith at the Monks Club. He could remember welcoming Jimmy vociferously, although he had never particularly liked the fellow. Jimmy had seemed only pleasantly squiffed just the way he used to be in the old days. Carrying a load, but not getting emphatic about it. Rick had been emphatic all right. He had bet a guy when the war would end and the guy had quibbled about the terms. Rick had started to fight him. Good old Jimmy had stopped the fight by offering to buy them both another drink.

There had been the sailor on 42nd Street. He could remember places but not time. Time and Time and Time and Time.

“You looking for the same thing I am, Buddy?” the sailor had asked. Pete. That was the sailor’s name. A good, humorous name. A good, humorous sailor.

Rick had had an inspiration. They would go to a hotel and inquire if their wives had returned. They might get away with something. No harm in trying anyway. They figured that Rick, being in civilian clothes, had better do the talking.

A small, dapper clerk in a shiny blue suit had leaned over a desk at the end of a narrow entrance hall. To his right was an old-fashioned elevator, occupied by a yawning colored boy, and a steep stairway covered with a dusty red carpet.

“Has my wife come in yet?” Rick had begun. “The tall red-headed one,” he had added, seeing that the clerk was about to ask the name.

“No sir, she’s not in yet,” the clerk had replied without a flicker of curiosity.

And there they were. They had tried again, plus a cigar wrapped in a dollar bill, but no soap. Rick wasn’t sure how many hotels they had gone into, each dingier and more disreputable than the last. It had seemed like a bright idea. But it hadn’t worked out.

There had been two girls talking to a man on a street corner. The man had done a quick fade-out when Pete had barged up to them and grinned, “Our wives, Buddy.” The blonde with the red sandals had grabbed Pete.

“Dora always goes for the Navy,” the other girl had said, slipping her arm through Rick’s. He had brushed it away angrily. Now it came to him suddenly that the gesture must have reminded him of Gail’s when she had asked him to go with her to the Mantons’ cocktail party. The girl had given him a resentful look and then laughed uneasily. Hell, she’d get more dough out of this big guy than Dora would out of her sailor. Dora was a softie, always cutting rates for men in the Armed Forces and calling it patriotism.

“How much?” Rick had asked.

“Ten bucks.” The girl had added a fiver to make up for him shoving her away.

The sailor and the blonde were turning into a mouldy-looking hotel, with a pretentious lobby that had obviously seen better days.

“Dora and me—I’m Lucille—got our own private rooms here.” H. Peculiar Henry! She sounded as if she were actually bragging about it! Rick had followed her down a dark hallway, smelling strongly of insecticide. There was nothing here to remind him of a long, clean white corridor in a New York Hospital down which he had run headlong, scattering interns and nurses in his flight from the closed door of a delivery room eighteen years ago. Nothing except that damn disinfectant. Smells and music were like elephants. Twin white elephants that never let you forget. He had laughed harshly and Lucille had given him a startled, apprehensive glance.

The girl had pulled her dress over her head and tossed it on a chair before Rick finished pushing the old-fashioned bolt on the door. Her body was slim with hard, compact, little curves. But she looked cold. “Even an American whore can be hot.” The phrase had slipped into his mind. He had sat on the edge of a low sagging bed, trying to undo the knot in his tie, trying to remember who the hell had said that.

It was old Bill Baker of Bakersville, on Baker’s River, in Baker County, Virginia. Bill had been on the prowl for a school teacher with a voluptuous figure and an unfortunately prudish attitude. Betty—somebody—in Puerto Barrios. The local tarts, sitting around the Boca Dorada saloon in their flimsy pink, blue, cerise dresses, had made no headway with Bill Baker. Every time the half-breed guide, who acted as a pimp on the side, approached Bill hoping to start a deal with, “This whore in blue dress say she like speak you private,” Bill would fix his drunken stare on the plank ceiling and chant, “I wanta get my mits on Betty’s tits,” baffling the pimp and his stable of part Indian, part Spanish, mostly negroid wenches.

“El Senor like buy rounda drinks, si?”

“Sure thing.” Bill would pull out his wallet and order the best imported Mexican Cuahtemoc for the whole crowd. He was generous but he was adamant. Presently the pimp would try again.

“Excuse, Meester Baker, this whore in yellow dress say she like speak you private.”

Neither the question nor the answer had ever varied. Bill’s ludicrous refrain would boom out again. But el Americano del Norte made them all laugh, and he bought plenty of beer.

Beer. That was an idea. Rick had rung for the bellboy and ordered half a dozen bottles at the exorbitant prices of twenty-five cents per. Lucille had brought two tumblers from the washstand, concealed behind a faded green baize screen. She had sipped hers, made a face and given it up. Looking impersonally at her slim legs and flat stomach, she had observed that girls who went in for booze got fat and flabby in no time. “Beer,” she had added solemnly, “don’t do a girl no good.”

“No good for you, no good for me,” Aleece had said of cognac. Was that the difference between a French whore and an American? This kid didn’t give a damn how stinko he was. He had been a kid himself in Paris just after the Armistice. “Tu ne peut pas m’aimer parce que j’ai trente quatre années et j’ai habité avec un Australien.” Wonderful logicians, the French.

Aleece had been his third. The first had been a brown-haired, intellectual girl he had picked up after a Harvard-Yale game, near the Touraine in Boston. She had worn a tweed suit and sturdy oxfords and he had actually taken her for some guy’s date when he first spoke to her. Dolly Seymour had been his second. He had been stationed in Winchester and been given two days’ leave in London before embarking for France. She was a little like Dora, he thought. She had made a vow not to take anyone but a man in uniform till the war was over.

The first three. Silly business counting them. Adolescent. “Americans are sexually adolescent,” a Russian General had proclaimed in a high class bordello off the Nevskiy Prospekt, run by a Madame Miroir.

“The mirror is man’s worst invention,” Rick had said out loud.

Lucille had looked at him as if he had suddenly lost his mind. “What’s the big idea?” she had asked nervously. This guy had acted queer from the start. She had sidled off the bed and pulled her dress from the back of the chair.

“Mirrors make you think about yourself all the time,” Rick had explained patiently. “Ever hear about Narcissus looking at his own image in a brook and falling in love with himself? Mirrors cause a man to love himself. Or hate himself.” Rick was wound up now. He had lifted the last bottle of beer, not bothering to pour it into a glass. “Mirrors are the reasons for complexes, neuroses, psychoses, drunkenness and suicides.”

Lucille had grabbed her shiny black purse containing Rick’s ten bucks from the chipped bureau, unbolted the door and slid out.

He ought to get the hell out too. But he had thrown himself back on the bed and roared with laughter. H. Peculiar Henry, but she was funny with her scared rabbit eyes. In the next room a radio had blared out suddenly.

“Come to me, I’ve waited so long for you,

Come, I’ll sing a wonderful song to you,

Come, come, because I love you so.”

A Friendship sloop in a little land-locked harbor in Maine. A slim colt of a girl. He had never touched her. Everyone in the town thought that he had. All the fishermen and the postmaster and the storekeeper were sure that he had. But he never had.

It was her forehead that had bowled him over. The direct, clean line of it, straight up at the sides like a Greek temple with the perfect arch at the top. “And seen strange lands from under the arched white sails of ships.” Her forehead had the arrogant curve of a billowing mainsail, coming into port at dawn. A skinny girl, asleep in the cockpit. And the wind over salt water. And the scent of spruce and pine off the hot damp land. The old tune had jogged his memory and his nose had taken it up. The twin white elephants were busy.

“Stay just as you are,

Don’t ever change,

You’re divine, dear.”

A tall, honey-haired girl with a figure like the Winged Victory. The widow of a Division Manager in the United Fruit Company, she had hated the tropics, but from a perverse inertia had stayed on after her husband’s death. Rick had alternately loved and fought her for two years, drunk and sober. He mostly drunk, she mostly sober, but neurotic. Neurotic as hell. Which mattered most—the Winged Victory or the little girl in Maine, who hadn’t even warmed him when she sat in his lap? Christ, he has maudlin. And he didn’t honestly know the answer … “C’est curieux, la vie.”

“C’est curieux, la vie.” Before the Australian, Aleece had had “un grand amour avec un Anglais,” who had written her a letter which she kept at the bottom of her jewelry box. “It is only you I love and I am marrying a nice English girl tomorrow. C’est curieux, la vie.”

A saxophone had broken in from the radio in the next room. How flat a sax is after a cello. As flat as Lucille after Aleece. Now a violin began to show off. That was cheap. Like organs in movie houses and chimes except in churches. To use decent, beautiful things for shoddy purposes … for advertising cathartics. Cheap announcers, cheap tenors, cheap little musicians … cheap whores. Lucille had a decent body but a cheap, soap-opera mind. God, how she had looked at him when he started talking about mirrors. He laughed again at her frightened, stupid, brown eyes … millions of voters had eyes like Lucille’s … eyes with no mind behind them … timid eyes, begging for security, welcoming paternalism in any form—fascism, communism, Fourth Term.

A cartoon in the old Masses showing a couple of prostitutes soliciting two men, and the caption, “Of What Truth Are These Things The Lies?”

What the hell was wrong with a society where lies and cheapness flourished? What had happened to America since Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said that a man’s greatest satisfaction came from doing a good piece of work and leaving it unadvertised? Mirrors and cities. Self-admiration. Advertising. Mass production and mass dependency. Blackout curtains at the windows of ratty hotels and monstrous office buildings and Park Avenue apartments only a “Realtor” could call homes. Scared city dwellers listening behind blackout shades for the sound of a plane in the night. Great silver bombers swooping out of the sky like fate … like an instrument of evolution. London … Berlin … New York … gone like the cities of the Mayas he had seen with the jungle growing over them till from his plane they were just bumps against the sky. The Tower of Babel was a great story—Christ, what a story. Only no one had ever paid any heed to it … like War. He’d made the world safe for Democracy along with the rest of his generation … and look at it now. “We did it before and we’ll do it again.” Time and Time and Time and Time. Add a bombing plane to the Tower of Babel and you’d have something. Bombing planes swooping, circling … his mind had been circling something all night and veering away from it. Something important.

A knock at the door. God, he had forgotten to bolt it when Lucille went out. Was she coming back with another customer? It might have been five minutes … or five hours since she left. His watch was in his vest pocket. He reached for it now. Hell, Lucille wouldn’t knock. It might be the police … places like this were probably raided once in a while, just for the effect in our highly moral, hypocritical, whore-and-mirror civilization. There ought to be a fire escape off the one narrow window … if he could make it. He pulled on his shoes as noiselessly as possible … if he didn’t move they might think the room was empty and go on. But the knock was repeated and a voice whispered, “Hi, Buddy. You still there?” Thank God, it was Pete.

“Come on in, Sailor,” Rick had called. Pete was a good guy. He was glad to see Pete.

They had gone to a couple of bars and Pete had kept tilting his cap further and further over his left eye. It had reminded Rick of something … something his mind refused to remember. They were drinking beer with Rye chasers. “Not Rye with beer chasers,” Pete would insist solemnly as if the distinction made a vast difference. He had a trick, when he wanted to make a point, of whistling out of the corner of his mouth and, at the same time, bringing his arm back and with the descending whistle swooping his right hand and pointed forefinger downward, like a dive bomber. It was humorously emphatic. He did it to describe the little yellow bastards swarming over an American cruiser off Guadalcanal, zooming out of the sky like Jap beetles.

Rick had said the Army doctors thought he was too damn old to get into this fight. Anyhow, he still had a splinter of shrapnel in his leg from the last one. He pulled up his trouser and showed Pete. Funny, how you wanted to do the same damn thing over again. He’d give his shirt to get out to those islands and shoot hell out of the Japs. Pete said it sure was hell all right, only most of the time his ship had been on the receiving end. He had a burn on his shoulder as big as a fish where they’d grafted skin from his own ass. Lousy stunt to pull on a guy. But the docs would let him go back pretty soon now. And things would be different. You could bet your sweet life they would.

Rick had moved an empty beer bottle, a glass, and a mustard jar around the sloppy counter. Pushing them carefully into position. The bottle was a German machine gun nest. The mustard jar was their artillery position. The glass was his squad moving forward under fire from both sides. He was back in Chateau Thierry fighting “les sales Boches.”

“Let’s go, Sailor.” Suddenly Rick had shoved the beer bottle and mustard jar together so that they struck the glass. It fell on the floor and smashed. They could hear the bartender grumbling as they lurched into the street.

The dim-out gave Broadway a malevolent air, but it wasn’t as late as Rick had expected. A night club with a striped canopy and a doorman in the costume of the Russian Imperial Guard was just closing. Why had he wanted to punch a doorman in the nose? Where had there been three Russian Princesses batting mascaraed eyelashes at him and chattering about the rubies they had lost in the Bronx Zoo? He had looked around him bewilderedly. People in evening dress were complaining about the scarcity of taxis. Rick had heard Pete’s sharp whistle, seen his arm zoom gaily. Then Pete had clutched the post of the canopy and been sick in the gutter. A woman had shrieked in dismay. A young man in an opera cape and a high silk hat had said in a loud disgusted tone, “No wonder we’re losing in the Pacific if that’s what our sailors are like.”

Rick’s fist had shot out. The young man had crumpled to the sidewalk. Women had screamed. Men had milled around … not turning on him … this wasn’t any free-for-all. The doorman had shrilled his whistle. Taxis had honked. People had scurried into them. Pete had swayed, turned, yelled, “Scram, Buddy, scram!”

Rick had stood there looking at his fist with a puzzled, triumphant smile. He remembered now. He had done what he had been aiming to do … he had smacked the whole cheap, phony Café Society in the face. Hard. Intending to hurt. Not as a cat slaps. God, that was it. That was what he had done.

Two policemen had come shouldering through the crowd, asking brief questions. Someone had picked up the young man, dusted off his opera cape and hustled him into a taxi. Someone had pointed at Rick. One of the cops had him by the arm.

“You hit a guy, Buddy?”

“I hit my daughter!” Rick had stared at the policeman in baffled misery.

“The bird is nuts,” the cop had remarked to his companion, and tightened his hold on Rick’s arm. “You better come along quietly, Buddy.”

Rick had been quiet. He was sobering fast now. He was quiet in the police car. He was quiet when they got to the police station, where a sleepy Sergeant had taken his name and address. “Drunk and Disorderly. Assault and Battery,” the Sergeant wrote in the blotter as the cop who had brought Rick in stated the charge. It seemed reasonable enough to Rick … but irrelevant. Of what truth are these things the lies?

He had hit Gail. He had to see her. But he couldn’t call her from a police station at four a.m.

Would they let him call anyone? “Joseph Augustine Kelly,” he had said, “at the Harvard Club.” He had had lunch with Joe. He had ordered a couple of old-fashioneds and Joe hadn’t touched his. Funny damn thing for Joe Kelly to be on the wagon. Only Joe had insisted he wasn’t on the wagon … he just wasn’t drinking today. He had made quite a point of it. Rick couldn’t see what difference it made what you called refusing a drink. But Joe was an advertising man, maybe he thought labels mattered. Maybe they did. He had been on the wagon himself for fifty-nine days once … that was the longest he’d ever been able to stay off liquor, though he had aimed at a year several times. God damn booze anyhow. He was through. He’d never have another drink as long as he lived. Never. We did it before and we’ll do it again. Time and Time and Time and Time.

The Sergeant had said, “We’ll let you call him in the morning. Better sober up first.” But he hadn’t refused. Perhaps the Harvard Club had had an effect. Lucky as hell Joe had mentioned that he was staying in town for a meeting last night. Luckier still that Joe was Irish and a Catholic. Joe had known how to pull wires. Rick still couldn’t get all the details straight. The guy he had socked evidently didn’t crave publicity either. He was the son of a well-known lawyer and had been out on a party without his wife. The story had been killed in the newspapers. Had they taken Avery Rickham’s name off the blotter? He had heard the phrases—Drunk and Disorderly—Assault and Battery. He had seen Joe paying his fine. For what? Disturbing the Peace. Boy, was that a laugh. Disturbing the Peace … in September, 1943.