“I’ve got a consignment of raw silk, worth thousands; it’s been stuck in Honolulu for months. Can’t unload it in Frisco. I’ve had an offer from a dealer on the Islands, considerably below its original value, let alone any profit. It looks like a case of take what I can get or lose the whole thing. This deadlock will go on forever. I’ve already drafted the cable accepting the offer, I have it in my pocket right now.”
I braked, and we were there.
He got out.
“Do you think I’m being childish, Jean?”
“You’re only being very human,” I said, “and that’s all any of us can be.”
He went in.
I sat there in the car.
He came out again.
We drove off. I didn’t ask him anything. After a while he took the cable blank out of his pocket, and turned it over on its reverse side, and penciled a new message to his Honolulu agent. I couldn’t help seeing the six words; they were printed capitals: “Tell him to go to hell.”
The Chief Executive himself intervened unexpectedly less than twenty-four hours later and the whole thing was arbitrated and called off between sunup and sundown. Loading and unloading recommenced for the first time in six months. His own closest advisers hadn’t known what his intentions were, the papers said.
Our consignment beat every other into San Francisco; by getting there first it turned into a windfall. He got exactly double what it would have brought originally. A short drive to a shabby furnished-rooming house, a climb of the stairs, had turned a profit of two hundred thousand dollars. He told me those were the exact figures.
I sat there waiting for him, cigarette in my hand, light-blue swagger coat loose over my shoulders. I never went up any more. I don’t know why. I never asked him any more. I don’t know why. He’d come down again, and he’d tell me little things, each time. I always wished he hadn’t. My heart would cringe.
“He knew my mother died when I was fourteen.”
I hadn’t known how old he’d been myself.
“He knew that it was the sight of the beautiful silk kimonos and wrappers she wore that really made me go into the silk export and import business later on.”
“Was it?”
“Yes, but I hadn’t remembered that myself until now.”
My heart cringed and curled up all around its edges.
I sat there waiting for him, rust-colored swagger coat loose over my shoulders. I never went up any more. I never asked him any more. He’d tell me little things. I always wished he hadn’t.
“Do you remember that night we all went to the Embassy Club to celebrate Louise Ordway’s birthday? Very much against our wills, I might add. And your shoes were new and they burned you after dancing, so you took them off under the table to rest your feet? And the other dancers kicked them around the floor, you never got them back again, and Tony had to carry you out to the car in your stocking feet?”
“He—he knows about that?”
“They’re in the window of a rummage shop over in the pawnshop district, one-twenty Norfolk. They can’t be seen from the street. They’re behind a very large secondhand banjo.”
I drove by there the next day, and got out. I could only see the banjo, nothing else.
I went inside.
“You have a pair of gold kid evening sandals in your window. Could I see them, please?”
“No, miss, not that I know of. I think you must be mistaken.” He went to the window and looked, from the inside; and I at his shoulder.
You couldn’t see them from the inside either. Just the back of the banjo, and a welter of rag, tag, and bobtail. I felt good.
He plunged his hand in and disemboweled the welter, just so as not to lose a possible sale, and they came up.
He scratched his head, open-mouthed. “I didn’t know I had them myself,” he gaped.
I sat down and tried them on. Quadruple A heels on a double A last, size three; feet so damnably small, mine were, they belonged in Mandarin China. They went on like a glove.
I kicked them off so agitatedly they looped in the air, and ran out of there for my life.
I sat there waiting for him, plum swagger coat over my shoulders. I never went up any more. I never asked him—
“Do you remember that bundle of love letters I wrote your mother when I was courting her—no, you wouldn’t.”
“You’ve told me about them, though. When she was in school in Switzerland. She always kept them, tied in ribbon, even after she married you. So you kept them yourself, after she was gone—”
“I wasn’t sure where they were. It’s so many years now. We were—talking about her, I don’t know how it came about. He told me they’re in our safe-deposit box at the National Security Bank. I must have put them in there seventeen years ago. He told me the ribbon is blue. He told me there are forty-eight of them. She was away nearly a year, and I wrote her once a week— I must go there and look—”
I put my hands to my ears for a moment. He was at the wheel, so the car kept straight.
“A diamond and ruby necklace I once gave her, it’s in there too. I remember it now. Ten diamonds, he said, but only nine rubies. One ruby was lost, and we never replaced it—I must go over there,” he said again.
What for? The ribbon will be blue, I thought. There will be forty-eight letters. One ruby will be missing.
“Do you know what the number of our safe-deposit box is?”
I thought he was asking me in ordinary conversational inquiry.
“No, do you?”
“No,” he said.
Then he said, “He says it’s 1805.”
I phoned the custodian of the vaults at the bank, in the morning.
“This is Jean Reid. Could you give me the number of our safe-deposit box, please?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Reid,” the custodian said. “I’ll have to call you back, for identification purposes, at the residence listed here before I can give out any such information.”
I waited, and he did, but it took some time.
“Just a safeguard,” he said. “The number that you asked me for is 1805, one-eight-oh-five.”
I sat there waiting for him, fawn swagger coat over my shoulders. I never went up, I never asked. He didn’t tell me any more. I was glad he didn’t—
I sat there waiting for him, green swagger coat over my shoulders—
I sat there waiting for him, black swagger coat over my shoulders, as I’d already sat waiting so many times before. So many times that I’d lost count of them by now. Before that same doorway, before that same house. The street stretching away in front of me, two narrowing lines slanting together. The houses lining it shortening until they seemed to sink into the ground. Everything seen darkly, as though a puff of charcoal dust had been blown over it and then softly rubbed in.
Overhead, stars; seeming to contract and expand, like peculiar living pores in the sky. They were a part of it. They came to mean it.
Down below, me; alone in a car, sitting very still. I didn’t move for minutes at a time. Once in a while I’d see a little smoke drift over the top of the windshield and float away into the dark on the other side. And that was from me. And once, I think, I turned my wrist over and glanced at it, holding it close to the dashboard, but I don’t remember now what time it was. And I don’t think I knew even then; I did it just from habit.
But other than that, I didn’t move at all. I sat there waiting, very still.
Then suddenly I saw him in the doorway, and he must have already been there a minute or two before I caught sight of him. For he was standing immobile, he hadn’t just come to a halt. The outlines of his body were stale from purposeless standing, as though if you stood too long in one place, in this element called night, you began to be absorbed by it, worn away around the edges.
I pushed the car door open for him, to save him the trouble of doing it for himself. He didn’t seem to see me do it, or if he did, he didn’t seem to know what it was for. He didn’t come any closer.
He took a groping step at last. And it was the wrong way, it would have led him away from me, had he followed it out.
“Father,” I said. “I’m over here. Here I am.”
For a moment I almost thought there was something the matter with his eyes. Either that it had been so dark in there he couldn’t get used to the street or—
Then he turned waveringly and came my way. And I saw that it wasn’t his eyes. It was his face there was something the matter with. His whole face. It was as though there had been an explosion directly in front of it a minute ago, and the concussive recession, the flattening out, the stunned bleach it had received, hadn’t worn off yet. Or almost as though the thing were still lighting it up; there was a phosphorescent pallor to it, like one of those watery reflections of light cast by a mirror.
He couldn’t find the door gap. I saw him feel for it along the top frame of the door with dancing hands, and miss. And it was right there before him.
“You’re sick, you’re ill,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
“Help me in,” he said.
I pulled him in, and he sat down heavily beside me. The whole chassis rocked a little, it was so final, so definitive, so expiring a descent.
I saw him fumble toward his collar, so I quickly opened it for him and drew his tie down out of the way.
“Be all right,” he whispered with difficulty. “Don’t pay any attention.”
I took out his own handkerchief, and held it to his forehead, for a moment at a time, now here, now there, now in another place.
“You’re like a ghost,” I said.
“I am,” he breathed. “I am one.”
Suddenly he let his face topple forward, over the wheel. He was sitting by the wheel, for I’d moved over to let him in beside me. It came to rest in the space between the spokes, and it was as though he were staring downward through it to the floor of the car. His hands came down inertly on the wheel rim, on either side of it, and it was as though he were driving, guiding the car, all sodden and slumped over like that, and peering downward at the floor.
His body shook once or twice, but no sound came from him and no tears fell. It must have been so long since he had cried, he couldn’t express weeping any more.
My arm went around him, and I clung to his shoulders for a moment. The two of us inclined forward like that now, not one.
“Nothing,” he said. “Don’t take any notice.”
He straightened back again into sitting position.
“Was it something he said?”
He shook his head. Then he said, “No,” but far too long afterwards. It was the disjointed segments of a lie.
“It must have been. You were all right when you went in there. You don’t have things like this happen to you.”
I could feel hysteria rising in me. A fevered fright, kindled from him.
“What’s he done to you? Tell me what!”
I caught him by the coat lapels and began to shake him like an importunate child. I began to cry a little, with baffled anger at not knowing.
“Tell me. You’ve got to tell me. I have a right to know.”
“No.” Then he said, “Not this.”
“I have. I’m Jean— Look at me. Answer. What did he say to you, to make you look like this, and act like this?”
“No,” he said exhaustedly. “I can’t tell you. I won’t.” He let his head go back on the top of the seat and stared upward, bereft.
“Then I’m going up and ask him myself! I’m going to make him tell me, if you won’t!”
The car door cracked to and fro, and I was out.
He raised his head violently from its sloped position. And then in sudden fright that only spurred me on the faster, he cried out sharply after me, “No, Jean, no! Don’t go near him! For God’s sake, don’t go up there—I don’t want you to know, I don’t want you to know!”
I darted inside the doorway. I ran sobbing up the stairs, my sobs keeping time with my staccato steps; sobbing in indignation and protective defiance of whatever it was that had done this to him. All fear forgotten, rushing to meet fear and grapple with it.
I came to the door, that door, and I beat shatteringly at it, and then I seized the knob and opened it for myself, before he could tell me yes or no, or come or stay. I wasn’t waiting, I wasn’t asking permission to come in; I was taking it.
He raised his head slowly to look at me, and that was the only move he made. That slight upward move of his head. So little did he move otherwise that the hand that had been clamped like a bracket to the side of his head, to the temple, as if in pensive melancholy, remained there erect in position, still curved to the shape his head had given it, but holding nothing now but space.
He didn’t speak. The shadow of his uptilted hand fell glancingly across the lower part of his face, creating an irregular patch of dimness, as if just in that place he hadn’t shaved.
“What’ve you done to my father?” I flared. “What’ve you said to him?”
He didn’t speak.
I closed the door behind me. “What happened up here just now?”
His hand dropped at last, and the patch of shadow swept from his face.
“Don’t ask me that. Go on your way. Go with him. Go home with him now.” He said it soothingly, the way you speak to a fretful child.
My voice became shriller. “I can’t. I can’t live with him like that. You’ve done something to him up here. You have to tell me, have to tell me, have to tell.”
He’d risen from the chair, but whether in defensive timidity at my outburst or in obstinate hint to me to go, I couldn’t tell. “I’ve done nothing to him.”
“You have. It must be you. Who else? He wasn’t that way before he came into this room, and now that he’s come out—”
He didn’t speak, just stood behind the chair now, clutching at the top of it.
“I’m his daughter. I have a right to know. How can you look at me and see me standing like this before you? What kind of man are you?”
He didn’t speak.
I dropped down suddenly before him and caught at his coat.
“Get up. Get up off your knees, child.”
“Just this one thing. Just this one thing more. I can’t stand to see him like that.”
He tried to pry my hands away, but without embittered violence. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
I wouldn’t rise, he couldn’t get me to. His hands played uselessly about my shoulders.
“Until I’ve told you, you don’t know how better it is not to know.”
I tugged at his coat, and could feel my face writhe in supplication.
“I begged you. I told you both not to come back here. From the first—”
“That doesn’t matter. I don’t want to hear it. He came.” My voice was hoarse. “Now speak. Tell me. What was it?”
He sighed in capitulation. I felt myself rise to my feet, guided unobtrusively by him. We were standing now, face to face.
“He came here to ask me a question. And I answered it.”
“That isn’t— That can’t be all,” I faltered.
Then he added, “More fully than I meant to.”
He moved sideward a little, as if to withdraw from me. I moved sideward in turn, to face him once again.
“What? What was it?”
“A question about business, such as all his other questions have been.”
“I know that. He told me when he left. But that’s not enough. What was the question? What was the answer?”
“He asked me about some long-term transaction that he had under contemplation. He asked me whether it would be to his advantage to pursue it or to let it lapse.”
He stopped.
If my hands didn’t reach out physically to clutch at him, he must have felt the mental gesture as powerfully. I did myself.
His voice went lower. “I saw the picture—of the undertaking. I told him it didn’t matter, one way or the other. He asked how that could be. He wouldn�
��t be content with that, he pressed me. I told him again to let me be, not to ask any further about it. He wouldn’t heed me, he persisted. He’s a cleverer man than I am, by far. When he wants something, he knows how to get it. He got me to tell him over again, and in telling him over, I told too much, I told the part I hadn’t wanted to tell.”
He sighed wearily.
“Then tell me too, just as you told him. You can’t stop now. You’ve gone too far.”
“He said, ‘But it has two possible conclusions, this transaction?’ I said unguardedly, ‘It has. Six months from now.’ He nodded. ‘It will take at least that long to pay off. I know, I realize that. But then, which will be the one more favorable to me? That is what I want to know.’”
He breathed deeply again. I didn’t breathe at all.
“I said, ‘Neither.’
“He said, ‘That can’t be so. If there are two possible conclusions, they can’t be both alike. One must be to my advantage, one not.’
“I said, ‘Neither.’
“He said, ‘If both are to my advantage, one must be at least more so than the other. If both are to my disadvantage, one must be at least less so. If only by a hairbreadth. Tell me which.’
“I said, ‘Neither. Not even by a hairbreadth. There is no other answer.’ He caught me gruffly to him, and he shook me, and the words that his prying had already loosened, slipped out. ‘It will take six months to reach a conclusion. And you will not be here.’”
He shut his eyes for a moment.
“And then when he understood, I saw the look on his face that I see on yours now. A look that I’ve never seen before, and that I hope never to have to see again. The look of a death that has come too soon, before the body is ready for it. And then he began to bargain with me, as if for something over which I had some say.
“‘Five?’ he said. ‘Five months from now?’
“He read my silence.
“‘Four?’
“I didn’t answer.
“‘Three?’
“He saw my eyes.
“‘Two?’
“I shook my head.
“‘One, then. One, at least!’
“He was pleading for something it was not in my power to give him.
“‘When, then? When?’
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 14
