Mile High

by Richard Condon

  Across the plaza, through the pointillising snow, they could make out the diffused outline of a large automobile. A tall, thin man was walking away from the car, moving slowly through the thick light. They could see him wave and shout, but the wind took the words away. Walt ran toward his father crying, “My wife just told me we’re going to have a baby!” Mayra could see Mr. West’s gaunt face grimace in sharp revulsion as he envisioned a mottled black baby, but the face recovered its cold aloofness almost at once. It was a long face with a large, sharp, pitted nose framed by thick white eyebrows, and a straight, thin, blue-toned mouth, like a carving designed to conceal human expression, a face that had been carved out of America’s fantastic economic originality until, in countless ways, its owner had become the Lenin of capitalists, the Nijinsky of banking and the Rudolf Valentino of money. He was old and very thin, old and very tall, old and very cold.

  Walt moved like a supplicant, stopping ten feet short of his father. Mr. West, Mayra noticed for the first time, had with him a large dog, the largest dog she had ever seen. The dog neither followed nor preceded his master. He was with and beside him, silent and frightening, as Mr. West glided forward just as silently for a mooring with his son—the first time they would ever have touched each other. He lifted a yellowed hand, pulled out of a goose-down-packed glove, a claw of bones and veins, a quest of long fingers and enlarged knuckles that were sculpted unnaturally under the incredible lights. They shook hands. Mayra moved in to join them, commanding dignity from her body as she heard the huge beast growl. Mr. West did nothing to still the dog. Walt put his arm around her. “This is Mayra, Father,” he said proudly.

  She made herself think of the Ashanti. She was a gift to this house from Kwaka Adai and from the kings before him. This man was the head of his house, so it was for him to smile and welcome her, then she would be free to smile. She could feel his revulsion for her as clearly as she could hear the revulsion of his dog, as though she were being impaled upon it. He stared at her zinc-orange skin, looking across what Mama had called chocolate-to-the-bone like a taxidermist at work. He said, “My mother was very dark.”

  “So is mine,” Mayra answered.

  The man seated inside the car opened its door and called to them. “I’m Willie Tobin,” he said in a musical voice that had no gender. They turned. They walked to the car. Walt introduced Mayra to Willie, then himself. The great Irish wolfhound waited until Mr. West climbed into the car, then he leaped aboard and sat erect between the jumpseats. Mayra had to slide across the jumpseats, moving under the dog’s long, ferocious muzzle. Walt seated himself as Willie fixed the beaver robe snugly around Mr. West’s legs. As the car glided forward all of them sat primly, hands folded on laps. The large car made the small circle around the central flower bed, then moved at five miles an hour down the slope through the brightly lighted snow toward the Grand Hotel.

  Walt broke the silence nervously, “Do you have many miles of road on this side of the lake?” Mr. West did not acknowledge the question, but Willie came in smoothly under the tiny pause and said, “We have about four hundred yards of road, actually.”

  “Not much for a big car like this, is it?” Walt asked. “How many miles do you have on the car?”

  Willie spoke to the driver through a tube. “How many miles on this car, Hayward?”

  “Fifty-seven, sir.”

  “That’s extraordinary,” Walt persisted. “How old is the car?”

  “How old is the car, Hayward?”

  “Four years, sir.”

  The car stopped at the hotel entrance. The driver helped Mayra out, then Willie. Willie took Mayra’s arm and moved her into the hotel’s revolving door. They were greeted by Herr Zendt, managing director of the Grand Hotel, who wore a frock coat and striped trousers. He welcomed them with a Swiss-German accent. The concierge helped Mr. West remove his outer clothing while his assistant struggled with Mr. West’s galoshes. Behind Herr Zendt two stuffed chamois and a mountain goat, festooned with edelweiss and posited upon a papier-mâché boulder, faced the reception desk and the ceiling-high key rack.

  “But this is just like a hotel!” Mayra exclaimed.

  “My dear lady,” Herr Zendt replied, “it is a hotel.”

  “Haven’t you ever been to the Swiss Bürgenstock?” Mr. West asked Mayra.

  “No.”

  He turned to Walt. “Have you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I think you should have explained all of this to your wife.” He walked past them and disappeared into the main hall as Willie said smoothly, “Shall we meet in the bar in just one hour? We’re far out in the country, but we adore dressing for dinner.”

  They moved through the crowded hugeness of the main hall, filled with hundreds of pieces of furniture, enormous paintings, Lobmayr chandeliers, with everything arranged to accommodate transient ghosts who had come to the mountain from a past that was so far away only Edward West could remember it. Herr Zendt showed them into the lift and Willie waved goodbye. “It is a very great honor and pleasure to have you here,” Herr Zendt said as the door closed. “Your brother we have known for many years, Mr. West.”

  “Is my brother here now?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Is he expected tonight?”

  “Not any more tonight. Tomorrow he comes in with the helicopter in the morning. But the dogs will be loosed soon. No more landings tonight.”

  “The dogs?” Mayra asked blankly.

  “Oh, yes. Magnificent. We have nine killer shepherds. They make security like nothing else.”

  Herr Zendt showed them through the rooms, explained that their baggage had been unpacked, showed them the three balconies that looked out over the lake fifteen hundred feet below, then bowed himself out, walking backward. As soon as he had closed the door Walt grabbed her and whirled her. “How could you keep such a wonderful secret?” he asked. “When will the baby arrive?”

  “I don’t know myself,” Mayra said. “Maybe only six more months.”

  “You know what? You’re blushing.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “What a day, what a day! I went and collided with two generations at the same split second. Isn’t Father magnificent? What presence! What authority!”

  “And what a dog,” Mayra said. She patted his cheek with one hand and opened the balcony window with the other. They stepped out upon the balcony and into the horrendous brightness. “Man, now we know how night ballplayers feel,” Mayra said. Sixty yards away a man wearing a shining black raincoat came out of the woods followed by two large dogs. “Probably the fire patrol,” Walt said.

  “I’ll bet.” She was thinking that maybe Mama shouldn’t have told her what she had told her about Edward West, because that had been a long time ago, but it sure had changed the way she looked at things.

  When they went into the bar at the end of the main hall Mr. West had been transformed into charm itself by Willie’s magic pills. The bar was seventy feet long and thirty-five feet wide, with a dance floor in the sunken crook of the L shape around which two dozen tables were placed. The room was paneled in polished dark wood. The back bar was long and high, lined with a large mirror and fronted with terraces of bottles. Mr. West and Willie stood at the far end of the bar. The gigantic Irish wolfhound, which no one ever seemed to acknowledge to be there, sat beside Mr. West, facing the door, and as they entered the room, he rose to his feet and growled. Willie had a Manhattan cocktail in front of him and was gazing up at West’s white cropped head with indulgent hero worship, giggling at some joke that Mr. West could not possibly have made. In the far corner behind them stood a tall, overdecorated Christmas tree.

  Mr. West flushed deeply as he stared at Mayra moving toward him in a dress of white St. Gall lace with amethyst ribbons and an amethyst sash, glorifying the glorious color of her skin. She seemed as dark as he remembered his mother, and she moved like a dancer. She was very beautiful.

  The barman poured champagne for the guests
and filled Mr. West’s glass with Henniez water. They lifted their glasses and clinked them together. Walt wished them all a merry Christmas.

  Mayra walked with Willie along the main hall to the dining room, following Walt and his father at about twenty paces. She watched them. They seemed to be having a disagreement. Walt shrugged and Mr. West seemed to flare, then the double doors to the dining room were opened ahead of them by the maître d’hôtel. As they came up to the door he began to move backward rapidly, guiding them to their table. He was the famous Smadja, imported from La Chasse Rouge in Paris. This was his great specialty. He had memorized the placement of the tables and could almost sprint backward among them, beckoning Mr. West onward as ego had beckoned St. Paul, never colliding with an obstacle on the course.

  There were two huge rooms in L-shape having sixty one tables for one hundred and seventy five diners who would never arrive, each table set with crystal glasses, jade service plates, silver and many flowers.

  The family group was seated at a round table placed off-center in the room, toward a corner that was flanked with high French windows. The sommelier poured champagne. His assistant filled Mr. West’s glass with Swiss Henniez water. The wolfhound sat at Mr. West’s left hand.

  “I had first visited the original Bürgenstock in 1913, you see,” Mr. West said, plunging without pause into one of his most cherished stories. Over the years his Gelbart Academy accent had become stronger, almost identical with the undershot pronunciation of the mandarin, Professor Gelbart himself. “It was quite different from what you see here, you may be sure. Not a painting in sight and the main hall packed with wicker furniture that was painted blue and red. Horrible. And no plumbing. Then, in 1929, just before and just after Walter was born, I spent considerable time there, and it had been beautified in an extraordinary manner. When the season ended I persuaded Herr Frey to allow me to lease the Grand Hotel with staff and I stayed on there alone—except for visits from Willie, here—and found I liked it very much.

  “I saw at once, of course, that the Bürgenstock is simply the most beautiful place in the world. I had many business friends who had recreated the usual European castles here in America. Deering’s Vizcaya, Vanderbilt’s Biltmore—very perfect, by the way—San Simeon. I confess I was drawn to the concept, but I also admired Rockefeller’s Kykuit and Edsel Ford’s charming Cotswolds visitation, though I thought it small. But above all I wanted a functioning unit that would exist to serve me. It had to pull its own weight, so to speak. I love the Bürgenstock. I think of it as a place my mother would have loved. My wife loved it. Just as you will fall in love with it tomorrow when you see it fifteen hundred feet above the lake on this cliff, with that long ridge descending from the mountaintop, with the sweet, green Swiss valley falling away into the other side.”

  “It took Mr. West four and a half years to dig that valley,” Willie said.

  “The site wasn’t too hard to find,” West explained. “There was the mountain, the ridge, the cliff and most of the lake, but no valley.”

  “It cost Mr. West two million dollars to make that valley,” Willie said.

  “We enlarged the lake,” West said in a slightly louder voice, glaring at Tobin, “and we had to put blue industrial dyes into it to match the Lake of Lucerne. We used fill from the valley to build the golf course, where, I am proud to say, some of our great professionals have been delighted to play. We have fifty-two buildings on the estate, and I keep my automobile collection in the Palace Hotel.”

  “Sixteen hundred and eighty-one cars as of last Friday,” Willie added.

  “But do note the valley tomorrow. Wait until you see the sweet little dummy farmhouses and hear the dear sounds of cowbells morning and night when the herds would be ascending or descending to and from their mountain pastures. This isn’t dairy country, of course. Too wooded. But I’ve gotten the wonderful cowbell effect without the cows—electronically, through carefully placed amplifiers.” The maître d’hôtel was hovering. Mr. West nodded to him. The maître d’hôtel snapped his fingers and waiters converged on the table bearing paté of beaver.

  “I’ve had two Presidents of the United States here,” Mr. West continued, “and three Vice-Presidents. The Secret Service people have told us that we have dream security. It isn’t possible for a stranger to get on or off the property within a thirty-one-mile radius.” Mr. West directed his explanation to Mayra. “That is, without being electrocuted or shot or blown up or torn to pieces by the dogs.” He shifted his gaze away from Mayra. “We are a superbly functioning Swiss unit here. I have my two hundred and thirty-nine Swiss hotel artists, just as the Pope has his Swiss Guards. But all that to one side. Bürgenstock West exists for the most important reason of freezing the years between 1913 and 1929. To keep my wife alive beside me as happy as she was at the Bürgenstock of long ago, to have her here with me as she was before Walter killed her by being born.”

  Walt and Mayra were in bed at 9:42 P.M., having declined to attend a Victor Mature movie which was being shown at the Palace Hotel.

  “Were you having a little trouble on the way to the dining room?”

  “It was pretty disgusting stuff, actually,” Walt said.

  “What did he say, honey?”

  “He said it was a terrible disappointment to have me in his house at Christmas and to find me unfit to say Mass.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I told him I’d say Mass if it would amuse him, and I said that if he’d invited me to his house when I’d been a priest I would have said Mass right around the clock for him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The news that Edward Courance West’s younger son had been ordained in the priesthood after service in the Korean war had made a large forty-eight-hour splash in the papers. Walter even cooperated to keep the comment strident because he hoped it would flush his father out, but West remained silent and invisible. Then, to get out of the spotlight, he called on Dan to use his influence, and Walt was whisked out of sight to become pastor of a tiny parish in the back country of New Mexico, to work with a congregation of Mescalero Indians. He and his flock got along fine. Walt was a good priest and because he was rich, he provided, as a good shepherd should—a new hospital, community tools, a roof for the school. He was happier than he had ever been. People were calling upon him for love and service. He expanded and fulfilled himself.

  Then, without warning, five months after he had been installed, his father began to write long letters to him; intimate, fervent, embarassing letters that repeated over and over how much it meant that his son had taken holy orders, then had expanded that mission of his life into beatitudes of meaning for Edward West’s mother and Edward West’s wife, who were then in heaven glorying in the presence of God, rejoicing with Edward West in the knowledge that Walt was allowing all of them to serve him through a devout son. Walt was elated all through the first three letters, but even they were fairly morbid stuff. Had Walt and his father lived normally together through even a part of their lives, Walt might have considered discussing the letters with the family doctor, but as it was, this great legend of America had finally and formally acknowledged that he was Walt’s father, and the young man was inundated, almost drowned by his gratitude for this. By the time the fourth letter arrived he was receiving a series of direct orders about which there could be no question but of obedience. Mr. West ordered Walt to pray for his immortal soul. Very soon the letters specified the combinations of litanies that were required. The litanies became so complicated that Walt was sure that his father had called upon the hundreds of obligations among bishops, mothers superior, cardinals, the entire curia (including the Pope), for obscure, long, wearying and obfuscating forms of prayers. Finally Walt found that he had become a walking prayer wheel within a numbing wall of confusing words and entreaties and supplications for the salvation of the soul of his earthly father. By his seventh month in the little church beyond Fort Stanton he was devoting three hours to praying each morning and four hours each night, in
addition to saying extra daily Masses for his father’s salvation. The church was no longer a church for the Mescaleros. It belonged to a congregation of one, whom he had never seen.

  As the brutalizing demands for more and more complicated prayers poured upon Walt, his father would compromise him further by donations for the reservation through the Department of Indian Affairs, then by bestowing scholarships upon the young people (which were made so easily available that the number of Walt’s flock was halved and the labor force of the community seriously threatened as the young people went off to find the world, temporarily subsidized). But the greatest bribe of encumbered money was required to be spent for baroque stations of the cross, shipped from Italy, and fantastically huge, painted statues of the Virgin with bright blue glass eyes, shipped from Cuba. Throughout the constant redecoration of the tiny, remote, country church—gold leaf on the ceilings, marbleization of the pews and the floors, gold-plating of the altar rails—the Indian congregation conveyed to Walt their clear impression that no continued hard work would be necessary by them, that their priest’s historically exalted father was prepared to endow them with everything from the cradle to the grave; and Walt’s purpose as pastor was effectively destroyed. In the fourteenth month after he had arrived in the parish Walt suffered a complete nervous collapse and had to be hospitalized in an institution above Denver for more than three months. He never returned to the parish or to the priesthood or to any religious service of any church.

  Later, in Paris, he told Mayra, “My father has developed the tremendous power of controlling people from a great distance. He can’t be accused of cruelty because he is too far away to be really aware of what he is doing. But what he did to me, and must do to others, was the ultimate in refined cruelty. He pressed upon my need for him to take me to him as his beloved son until I had prayed myself out of whatever faith I had éver had. But as I prayed I gradually saw something that enabled me to understand him. I saw that if he really did believe that my mother and his mother had this direct access to God in heaven, then he could not have believed so desperately that he needed my prayers for his salvation. If he had loved his wife, if he had loved his mother, and if they had loved him, then he should have had the faith that they would intercede for him. And as I prayed I remembered popes and princes of the church and bishops and monsignori who had clustered around his money. I remembered the cities of religious buildings he had caused to be built. I remembered that he was such a great benefactor of the church and of individual arms of the church that armies of priests and nuns and lay brothers throughout the world must have been instructed to send up millions upon millions of prayerful pleas, supervised prayers and Masses for the salvation of his soul. And yet, despite all of that tugging at the sleeves of the robes of God, he demanded seven hours of hopelessly complicated prayers from me each day—from me, the son he despised. So I saw that he must have done something unalterably evil and that he must have a scalding reason for fearing damnation throughout eternity. He must have sinned beyond all sinners and he must dread the everlasting fires of his most Catholic hell.”