“I courageously stopped a runaway horse carrying the only daughter of the richest man in Europe.” Adler shrugged. “Naturally, he demanded to be allowed to discharge the obligation by rewarding me somehow and—”
“Oh, bosh!”
“Watch it. You’re sounding more British than American.”
“How did you get the commission, Derek?” She asked him in bed, while dancing, during friendly quarrels and once while they were making love. She pushed, pressed and cajoled. She got tough. She got hysterical. Her purpose was so much stronger than his that, at last, as she had known he would, he got bored with the inquisition and told her (swearing her to eternal secrecy on the pain of their loss of everything held dear) who Walt was, who his father was, how Walt operated as his own client and how they might just keep on expanding forever.
The only thing that impressed her was that Walter, her friend Walter, her guest, her companion, the man she had introduced to her friend, was the son of Edward Courance West.
“Do you have any idea who Edward Courance West is?”
“Sure. I read the American Weekly.”
“Bosh! No matter what you read—by God, I think he owns our newspaper!—no matter what you’ve heard, you couldn’t remember it and put it all together and see it in one piece.”
“What am I, an obit writer?”
“To begin with, he’s the richest man in the world.”
“Big deal. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”
“Walt is his son? I mean, you know how I love Walter West, but—”
“I didn’t say he was Walt’s father.”
“You did too.”
“I said Walt said the man was Walt’s father. Walt may be a secret masochist.”
“Bosh!”
“You’ve got to quit these obscenities, Jane. No kidding. Besides, Walt’s father is a complete nut.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“He and McCarthy and about a dozen other hustlers are practicing right now to put everybody in jail. By me that’s a nut. And I am beginning to have the horrible feeling that I must be some kind of a nut myself for telling you that that nut is Walt’s father.”
So Jane told Mayra and Mayra took it big. Mainly because she hadn’t known, and she was hurt and angry because Walt hadn’t told her. And because Walt hadn’t told her (because he didn’t feel he should recognize his father if his father hadn’t recognized him) Mayra decided that Walt must certainly have thought that she would lunge at his money if she knew, and she got into a sick rage, lost her head and bolted. A firm in Beauchamp Place came into the flat and in two hours had emptied it of everything except Walt’s packed suitcase. She left London on the three-o’clock flight to Rome, where she stayed for two nights in a hotel off the Via Condotti. Then, through a restaurant cashier, she found an apartment off St. Agnes in Agony Street, behind the Piazza Navona, and grimly set to work to see if she could paint herself out of any memory of ever having known the son of a bitch.
She left complete demoralization behind in London. Walt strolled from the bus in Sloane Street to Hans Place, whistling merrily off-key, carrying two bottles of pink (Swiss) champagne because it was the luniversary of the day they had met, trooped lightly down the outside staircase, let himself into the flat—and she was gone, the place was stripped and his suitcase had been packed untidily. He called Derek Adler.
“Mayra’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“She moved every stick out of the apartment except my packed suitcase.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. When I left this morning she was—she was—”
“Hysterical? Angry?”
“No! She was very happy. She was ecstatic.”
“Maybe she got a cable from home. Somebody could be dying. Maybe she had to fly out.”
“And take all the furniture and twenty-three paintings, fahcrissake?”
“Take it easy. Let me think.”
“I don’t want opinions. If you don’t know where she is, that’s all I want to know.”
He slammed the telephone down. He called C. L. Pick in New York. Mr. Pick was in Washington but Mr. Heller was there. Would Mr. West speak to Mr. Heller? He asked Heller for a detective agency in London. Heller said he’d have someone call him from London. Walt said please rather have them send their best man or men to him at 19, Hans Place instantly, basement apartment. Heller asked if the matter were serious enough to require legal assistance. Walt said no.
Derek sat Jane down and pulled a chair across from her so that she would have to face him. “Everything’s busted wide open,” he said.
“Where?”
“Mayra’s gone. She cleaned out the flat. Everything’s gone.”
“Why?”
“You tell me.”
She began to cry, and she didn’t cry easily.
“Did you tell her about him?”
She nodded, sobbing.
“When? I mean, Jesus, when did you have a chance? I didn’t tell you until one o’clock this morning.”
“Ten o’clock—no, a quarter to ten—this morning.” She looked at him, frightened and appealing. “I thought she’d be proud! I never thought she’d leave him just because—”
“Some mess. I don’t even know what to do. Anyway, it’s not your fault. He told me not to tell anybody and I did. It’s my fault, honey.”
“Now you quit that, Derek.”
“We’ll just have some coffee and wait here. No booze. We’ll need clear heads.” He poured them each a short glass of whiskey. “He’ll come here and we’ll tell him what happened.”
“Oh, Derek!”
“It’s okay. I can always write a musical about the rector of Stiffkey.”
“It’s pronounced Stew-key.”
“For that matter, Walt can always shoot himself.”
When Jane had telephoned to tell her who Walt was, Mayra had felt cold hostility cover her like hair spray and hold her in a rigid net. He was the son of the West Foundation. They’d been together for three months and she had thought they’d been everything it was possible to be to each other, but he had been afraid she would find out who he was, because she was black and he was ashamed of her. So many things he did habitually began to convince her more and more that he had just been using her until he got tired of using her. Like the way he was so cheap, pretending to like Swiss champagne more than French, or always taking buses, or having two suits of clothes to his back, all so she wouldn’t think he was that rich man’s son and try to take him the way he figured that’s what she’d do the minute she found out. And the way he babbled about astrology, and theosophy and faith cures and nature healing, just like he was some goddam idiot who never got out of grade school and who had to cover up and show off like a little boy how smart he was, all so she wouldn’t know he was that rich man’s son with a mess of colleges behind him. And how he never knew anything about the West Foundation. And the way he’d look at her Foundation check when it came on the first of every month and keep turning it over in his hands and looking at both sides of it and saying he’d get it cashed for her. Then when she packed his goddam bag she found all three Foundation checks tucked right in there, never used, like he thought his rich goddam honkie father could trace them to a nigger girl if he cashed them.
The agency men found her in thirty-two hours. Walt chartered an Executive Jet and went to Rome. Mayra had been in her new flat in the Via Parione for fifty-three minutes and was already painting hard, thinking hard, not a stitch unpacked, when he knocked at the door. She knew someone was making a mistake, knocking at the wrong door, so she answered it.
“What the hell happened?” Walt said. Her jaw dropped. She stood and stared. “What made you run out of London like that?” He entered the apartment and she offered no resistance. He shut the door. “Christ, Mayra, you scared hell out of me,” he kept on. “You should have left a note or something.” Mayra began to cry softly. He put his arms around her and she let her for
ehead rest on his lapel and she bawled. They got it all straightened out in about ten minutes. She found out what his father felt about him and she began to get clues about how he felt about his father and she forgot all about all the things she had dreamed up against him, felt sorry for him on the one hand and very proud of him on the other, but most of all, gloriously most of all, she knew who he was, not by name, not by baptismal label, but who he was.
There was also an indirect consequence of their reconciliation. West & Adler, Consulenti à Di Georgio e Bonetti was formed by a Roman lawyer retained by Pick, Heller & O’Connell together with estate agents who found a large very desirable piece of property on the far side of the Villa Borghese. Derek and Jane Adler flew in from London to set up offices and crews that would duplicate the construction of the building being designed in London, insofar, that is, as Roman building laws would permit the design without modification.
CHAPTER SIX
After her first show, after she could speak pretty good Italian, after the new architectural offices were established and Derek was commuting from London, after everything was simply marvelous and simply couldn’t possibly get any better, Walt spoiled everything by demanding that she marry him. The more he pleaded and bullied and wheedled, the more certain she became that she would not marry him. She spent seven months fighting off his maniacal resolution, and once when they were in a desperate argument in the street she pointed up at the street sign proclaiming St. Agnes’ agony and yelled at him with muscular Italian therapy that it wasn’t only Agnes who was feeling pain. But he wouldn’t stop and she couldn’t stand it any longer, so one day while he was at the office she hired two men with a truck and broad shoulders and they packed everything in the flat in the Via Parione, including her new paintings, for shipment to Paris to an address she was to cable them. She left only Walt’s packed suitcase.
She flew to Geneva, then took the train to Paris, where she found an apartment on the first day in the Avenue de Neuilly, which she rented in the name of a notaire so that Walt’s detectives couldn’t find her. She remained in the flat for four months, leaving only to shop for food in the neighborhood, and then heavily veiled. At the end of that time she felt she had almost forgotten him. She had accumulated twenty-seven new paintings in all, and the afternoon she met with the dealer she thought most capable of handling her show, she was tagged by Walt’s people, who followed her home. Walt rang the doorbell at nine-twenty the next morning, and his appearance almost broke her. He was thin and sick-looking, almost dead-looking—just large eyes and sunken white cheeks and thick, hanging ketchup-colored hair.
“Walt! My God!”
“I’d like a cup of Bovril.”
“Bovril?”
“Don’t you have any?”
“How did you find me?”
“I just had people covering the trompe-l’oeil dealers in Europe.”
“In Europe?”
“We got a line on your being in Paris from your letters to your mother, but they had no return address on the envelope and I was quite strict with the people about not daring to open them. But we knew you were in Paris from the postmark, and we knew you were in Neuilly, but we couldn’t seem to pick you up until you showed at the gallery. May I come in?”
She stood aside for him and he entered the flat wearily. She closed the door and she knew that she had not forgotten him at all. She threw her arms around him and kissed him tenderly, then hungrily, and she cried.
After five weeks he had responded to her cooking. He moved his single suitcase in with her, turned rosy again, was extremely careful about not mentioning marriage, and everything was wonderful again. Derek came up from Rome and they established West & Adler, Consultant à Elaine Hewlett et Grellou, and bought a marvelous, large piece of property on the Boulevard Jourdan through the land agents for West to West Ltd. Mayra had refused to marry him, but she had aided his career vastly. Three offices, three rather huge building development complexes that would alter the housing standards of thousands, and a total of seven realty-architectural-administrative companies had been formed because of her. She told Walt that maybe if they lived long enough in the goddam argument it could mean advanced housing for all of Europe.
But she couldn’t paint and cook and defend herself all at the same time. They were married on September 27, 1958, at the Chelsea Registry Office in London, with the Adlers as witnesses. They went to a restaurant in Basil Street, where they drank champagne but ordered no food, and Walt played the piano and sang to them until Derek was inspired to make a Bauernschmaus. So they bought two magnums of champagne and climbed into what Adler called his Rentley, a hired Humber, and swanned into Soho to buy sauerkraut, pork, paprika, sausages, onions and carrots, while Derek assured everyone that a Bauernschmaus was merely a light Szekely Gulyas. It took an hour and a half to cook and two hours to eat, then the bride and groom were returned to the basement flat in Hans Place, which Walt had generously leased from Mayra during the almost two years they had been away from England.
The cablegram arrived on December 15, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Walter Wagstaff West.
Walt tore open the envelope and flattened out the message sheet. He looked, grew pale and dropped the cable. She picked it up. “It’s from my father,” he said shakily. “Read it to me.”
“Hawk Bay, New York. Nine twenty-two—”
“No, no. The message.”
“‘Cordially invite you and your bride to spend Christmas Day with your brother and myself at Bürgenstock West and to remain here to see in the great promise of the new year. Mr. Tobin will telephone you to make all arrangements. Your father, Edward Courance West.’”
Walt walked unsteadily to a large chair and sat down. “Now, what did he do that for?”
“It’s natural. Christmas, and you have a new black bride.” She sounded easy, but she was frightened, and she didn’t know why this was.
“We won’t go.”
“I wish you would. I’d like you to meet Mama.”
“Let’s fly Mama over here.”
“You know she won’t fly.”
“But what can I say to him?”
“Hell, honey, you’ll think of something.”
“I’m going to call Dan.” He picked up the phone and put the call through to Washington. “After all these years of being go-between Dan ought to know that I’ve finally been called in to meet my father about a month before my thirtieth birthday.”
“Well, sure.”
“I hope it’s not too late.”
“Baby, why should it be too late?”
“I don’t need it now the way I used to need it when I was a kid.”
“But you’re curious. You’ve got to be curious.”
“That’s what it is. That’s what it’s reduced itself to-just curiosity. When your own father is one of the most important men in the world, how can you help being curious about just meeting him? Right?”
“That’s right.” The telephone rang and Walt picked it up instantly.
“Dan? Walt. Hey, what do you think happened to me? I just got a cable. Father sent me a cable inviting Mayra and me to spend Christmas and New Year’s with him at Bürgenstock West.”
“He did? But—how come?”
“I thought you might know.”
“No. In fact I can’t think of anything that would be a bigger surprise. He must want to ask your wife if she’s a Communist.”
Walt laughed. “Do you think I ought to go?”
“Of course not.”
“You don’t?”
“Listen, Walt. You’re in love, you have an exciting career going for you, everything is coming up roses, so what the hell do you all of a sudden need an insane man on your side for? Forget it. You’re safe where you are. Stay safe.”
“But just the same, Dan, I—”
“So you’re going anyway?”
“Well, I—”
“Okay. I know. I mean, really, it’s okay. You were raised to answer that way. Nothing you c
an do about it.”
“It’s not that, Dan—”
“When do you leave?”
“Well, I suppose we’ll have to leave tomorrow to get there by Christmas Eve, because we want to spend some time with Mayra’s mother in New York.”
“I can’t get there Christmas Eve, but I’ll get there on Christmas Day. I have to see for myself what it all looks like. You can’t be there all alone with that son of a bitch, because he’s sick and he wishes no one well and if he makes any effort at all, on anything, in any direction, its only for one reason—to feed his sadistic insanity.”
“That’s pretty strong stuff, Dan.”
“I know. I wish—ah, what the hell. I’ll look forward to seeing you and meeting your bride on Christmas Day.”
Walt hung up.
“What was pretty strong stuff?” Mayra asked.
“Oh, Dan and Father had some family fight. It’s nothing that won’t be all fixed up by Christmas.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
When the big West plane stopped and Mayra looked out the window she saw Mama waiting. And Mayra wasn’t ready for that. Mama thought she had married a fair-to-struggling young architect, and now a big Learstar slides in from across the ocean and only two people get off, one of them li’l Mayra. Mama stood straight and looked just great, but there was gray in her hair. She looked just beautiful, but she wasn’t the young Mama that Mayra always thought she was. She had a stack of Christmas parcels in her arms and she was smiling wide, getting ready to be happy, carrying it all off as though she was always getting driven out to meet her daughter stepping down out of a private, transatlantic plane. She had on a mink stole and she wore it over a gorgeous red dress, her long, slim legs rising above red shoes. There stood Mama. Mayra grabbed Walt and said, “There she is, that beautiful black lady!” She shrieked with happiness and buried her head in Walt’s chest.
Mile High Page 28
