Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  She turned away from him in a sudden fury. She walked to the window and then whirled around to face him. Miguel could almost see the stage directions printed on the script. Nora registers hurt anger—God, had it always been this false between them?

  “You just walked out on the contracts in New York,” she said scathingly. “Are you doing the same thing to me now?”

  “I didn’t mean to break up your party in New York,” Miguel said in a flat voice. “I just found I couldn’t take it.”

  “Even if there were nothing else,” Nora said in a rush, “don’t you owe me something?”

  “Maybe I do, Nora. But I think I’ve given it.”

  She laughed harshly at him. “Do you? Stop and think about it, Mike. How long have I waited for you? How long?”

  “Is that what you were doing?” he asked mildly. “Is that what you call waiting?”

  “What are you trying to throw up to me now?”

  “Nothing. For God’s sake, nothing. Let’s stop this.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “You don’t need me, Nora. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “So thanks, and tip your hat and that’s all. Is that it?”

  He nodded sadly. “You can’t regret the wasted time any more than I do. We should have known better.”

  She threw her head back angrily and said shrilly, “You really are beyond belief I”

  “Nora, I’m trying to keep my temper.” His hand and arm throbbed and there was a headache beginning to pulse painfully behind his eyes.

  “You’re trying. You!” She walked to the dresser and picked up the music box he’d bought for Dorrie at Orly. “I worked, Mike. I worked like crazy to get them to give you a job somewhere we could be together. I begged them to hire you.”

  Miguel studied her pale face. He could feel himself growing more tense. “Was it so hard to convince them?”

  She came toward him stiffly, still holding the music box. “Yes,” she said. “It was. You’re a has-been, Mike. They didn’t want to take a chance on you. And I made them do it—”

  His lips felt stony and there was a dead lump in his chest. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m glad you told me.”

  Her expression changed and she said contritely, “Oh, darling, I didn’t mean that. It isn’t true.”

  He looked at her coldly. “It’s true, all right.”

  “I said I’m sorry.” She moved toward him and he put out his bandaged hand to hold her off.

  “Mike, please—“ She sounded frightened.

  “That was the clincher, Nora.”

  “It isn’t true, Mike. I swear it. I don’t know why I said it.”

  “If it were a lie, Nora, I’d know it. Just as I always knew inside me you were lying to people like Victor about Alaine—and to me about Tom. But you weren’t lying this time.” He turned away from her. “Why don’t you just go now?”

  Nora stood rigidly. All the studied gracefulness and well-groomed good looks were gone. Her fingers imprisoned the music box like talons. “It’s Alaine, isn’t it, Mike?” she said gratingly. “After all this time it’s still that prissy little bitch.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” he said slowly. “But Alaine has nothing to do with this.”

  “You’ve seen her,” Nora accused. “You were with her last night.”

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t seen her. Not yet.”

  “Then you aren’t going to,” she said angrily.

  Miguel studied her for a long moment. Then he said, “That was a wrong thing to say, Nora.” He opened the telephone book and began searching for Alaine’s number. He found it and picked up the phone.

  “If you do this, Mike—“ Nora said threateningly.

  He nodded at her, listening to the ring. Alaine answered. He thanked God she was home. He said, “Allie? This is Mike. I m in San Francisco. Yd like to come out for a few minutes. Is it all right?”

  Alaine didn’t sound surprised. He wondered if Tom or Becky had told her he was home. She said impersonally, “Why, all right, Mike. Dorrie will be very pleased.”

  “In about forty-five minutes?” Miguel asked, looking at Nora.

  “That will be fine.”

  “See you then,” he said, and hung up.

  Nora looked down at the pretty enameled box in her hands. “You planned it this way,” she said. “From the beginning.”

  “I wish I could say yes to that. But I can’t.”

  “This is for her, isn’t it?” Nora asked shakily, looking at the music box.

  “It’s for Dorrie,” Miguel said, holding out his hand. “Give it to me, Nora.”

  She threw it against the wall with all her strength. It shattered with a twanging note that hung mournfully in the air.

  For some reason the willful destruction of the pretty little music box moved him to more real anger than he had felt since finding Nora in the hotel. He felt the blood drain away from his face and he stood up. “That does it, Nora,” he said.

  He watched her turn and walk out of the room, her back rigid. As the door slammed, the telephone rang. It was a moment before he could pick it up.

  “Hollywood calling Miss Nora Ames,” the operator said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Miss Ames isn’t here now.”

  “What time do you expect her?”

  “I don’t,” he said, and put the receiver down carefully.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  He sat for a time looking at the pieces of the music box on the floor, the tiny shards of enamel, the dented cylinder, the uncoiled spring. So this was the way it ended, after twelve years. In a while, when her anger dissipated itself, Nora would regret it. But regretting something wasn’t the same thing as repairing it. He thought now, as he had in the arcade at Orly, that it was indeed a mistake to go back. The past was dead and should stay that way. You couldn’t breathe new life into the corpse of an old emotion, you couldn’t rekindle old loves.

  He lit a cigarette and studied his bandaged hand. If thy right hand offend thee—smash it against a wall. If your life disgusts you, drop it off a bridge....

  He shook himself and stood up. He walked to the dresser. The sealed telegram lay there. He had forgotten it. Clumsily, because his hand was stiff, he opened it.

  It was from Karl. It said: BOOK SALVAGEABLE IF YOU WANT TO WORK HOW ABOUT IT PENITENT?

  He jammed the wire into his coat pocket and began to laugh helplessly. Saved by the goddam bell. Now all he needed to know was the simple answer—the answer that had escaped him for thirty-three years. He looked at his tired reflection in the mirror. Do you want to work? he asked himself. You haggard bastard, do you? His image looked back at him, sullen as Sinanthropus, and, he thought, about as intelligent.

  He walked out of the room and down the hall to the elevator. He was thinking now about Jean Murray. He’d behaved like a son of a bitch last night. Right on course, as always. The excuses floated feebly to the surface of his mind but he found he could not really accept them and they sank again into the turgid flow of thought. She was promiscuous? What was he? She used him to gratify some defiant need of her own? He still remembered with distaste that crack about beating Nora Ames’s time. But what right had he to criticize her for that? He used her more brutally than she did him. It wasn’t her fault he could find no real satisfaction in it.

  Outside, in the courtyard, he paused to look at the sky. The wind had died down a bit and the sun was warm. The sounds of the city impinged on his consciousness, but vaguely, in a dreamlike montage.

  The great affair was over. He should be feeling the loss. Instead there was nothing, not even any real regret. Instead he thought of his family. There was cause enough for regret in all that without adding the long affair with Nora. But he felt nothing.

  As he drove toward Seacliff, he wondered what he would say to Alaine. He could think of nothing. It seemed to him that a knife-blade had fallen across his life in the last few hours, severing the long-suffering raw nerves
that bound him to his past. It was a kind of rebirth, for better or worse.

  He was naked as a newborn child now. No job, no money to speak of, no love. He was a blank matrix now, without anticipation, without feeling.

  He remembered the old urgencies that had once dominated his life and they seemed hollow. The fear of death that had driven him to take Aldyth, the terror of loneliness that had made him want Nora, the assault on the senses and the desire to compete with his father that made him want Becky, and the desire for stability and a second chance that had caused him to marry Alaine—gone, now. There was nothing left. And there was a kind of lethal peace in this emptiness he was feeling now. He honestly didn’t know if he wanted to disturb it. For a moment, he considered turning back and not seeing Alaine and Dorrie at all but then he realized that the reaction was a hangover from before—from the hit-and-run time. That was all over and done with, too.

  He drove down Fulton Street toward the ocean, along the northern edge of Golden Gate Park. Children were running along the sidewalks, shouting in the sunlight. He drove slowly, not fighting the traffic as he usually did. At Twenty-ninth Avenue he turned north and drove through the district of white-faced flats and houses toward the curve of Seacliff Drive. He found Alaine’s number without any trouble. It was a low white house.

  Dorrie met him at the door. For a moment he didn’t recognize her. She had grown so in the last year and her hair was cut short. It was dark, dark as his own—not blond like Alaine’s.

  She greeted him with the kind of grave courtesy one reserves for privileged strangers and a hand seemed to tighten around his heart.

  He picked her up and said tentatively, “Hello, daughter.”

  She put her arms around his neck and said, “I’m glad you’re home, Daddy.”

  Miguel carried her into the living room. Alaine was standing there waiting for him. She was wearing a yellow skirt and cardigan with a gay scarf knotted at her throat and she looked like a girl. Miguel said, “You’re looking well, Allie.”

  “It’s good to see you, Mike,” she replied. Her voice was friendly, impersonal. This isn’t going to be easy, Miguel thought.

  He put Dorrie down and said, “She’s getting to be a young lady, Allie.”

  “I’m ten,” Dorrie said proudly. “Today.”

  Miguel felt suddenly lumpish and stupid. How could he have forgotten Dome’s birthday! September 6. He thought of the shattered music box and inwardly he cursed Nora.

  He looked appealingly at Alaine. “I’m up to my usual standard of ineptness, Allie.”

  “Do you want to see the table for my party?” Dorrie asked. “All right,” Miguel said.

  Dorrie took his hand and led him into a dining alcove. Miguel could hear someone in the kitchen preparing food.

  “That’s Suzie,” Dorrie said, “she’s making a cake for me but I’m not supposed to know.” When she laughed, Miguel thought, her eyes were just like Allie’s.

  Dorrie led him around a table set with favors. “I’m having five guests,” she said. “And look up there.”

  A piñata hung from the ceiling, decorated with brilliant paper streamers. Miguel was lost in a sudden flood of memories. Concha had always had a piñata for his birthdays. The olla filled with candies and toys to be broken by blindfolded children with a stick. Miguel watched Dorrie moving around, arranging the place tags on the table, and there was a tightness in his throat. Maria’s heritage and his was Dorrie’s too. She looked up at him and said in childishly accented Spanish, “Está todo bien, papacito?”

  Miguel looked over at Alaine standing in the doorway watching them. “That, too, Allie?”

  “She wanted to learn Spanish,” Alaine said. “She’s done well, don’t you think?”

  Miguel nodded, watching his daughter and too full of emotion to speak. He thought of the years he had spent regretting his heritage and now it was Alaine who had seen to it that his daughter was not deprived of what was truly hers. It was a kind, big thing that not one woman in thousands could have done—to keep the personal bitterness apart and offer his child such a gift.

  Dorrie said, “You’ll be staying for the party, Daddy?”

  “I don’t think so, Dorrie,” he said, still shaken.

  “Won’t you stay, Mike?” Alaine asked. “You’re welcome.”

  He shook his head and walked into the living room again. Alaine followed him. He studied her angular good looks and thought that the years had changed her very little.

  “She’s a fine girl, Allie,” he said. “You’ve done very well with her. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you. For everything.”

  “Thank you, Mike.” Alaine said.

  He sat down and Alaine asked him if he’d like a drink. He said no, thanks. She asked him about the new book.

  He handed her Olinder’s telegram. “I saw Karl in New York,” he said.

  She looked up from the wire. “Are you going to rewrite it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet.” She was wondering about the Hollywood thing, he knew, but he didn’t want to talk about that quite yet. Instead he said, “I saw Tom last night, Allie.”

  Her eyes were cool and gray as he remembered them. “Yes,” she said. “I know. He called me.”

  “The old uncle is doing great,” he said.

  “I’m glad you went to see him, Mike.”

  “I was full of Dutch courage.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No,” he said. “I guess not. I’m glad I saw him, too.” He took a cigarette from the ceramic box on the table and lit it. “I saw Becky, too.”

  Alaine nodded slowly. “She told you about Luis.”

  “Yes,” Miguel twisted the cigarette between his fingers. “I’m sorry you didn’t know him, Allie. He was quite a guy.”

  A silence fell between them and Miguel felt lost and hopeless. You didn’t just walk out of the life of a woman like Allie and then back in without a by-your-leave. And was it what he wanted? He studied the soft curve of her cheek, the smooth heavy texture of her hair. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to come home.

  “I was in Rapallo,” he said. “I thought of you.”

  “Is it still the same?”

  “Just the same. Beautiful.”

  She sat quite still, watching him. It seemed to him that there was in her expression the same guarded wariness he had seen in Katharine’s. The look of a woman seeing a danger.

  “It’s hard to go backwards, Allie,” he said.

  “You can’t,” she replied. “Don’t you know that yet?”

  “I’m finding it out. There’s no chance, then?”

  “Not to go back, Mike. You can’t recapture things that have passed you by.” She fell silent and then, after a moment, she asked, “What are your plans? Are you going to stay in this country for a while?”

  “I really don’t know yet, Allie,” he said slowly. “I think I’m going to the mountains for a day or so. There’s something I have to do. Something I should have done a long time ago. Then I’ll see.”

  “The Spur, Mike?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I think I am, too. Maybe it will make up for a few things.” Dorrie came in and said, “Daddy, can’t you stay for the party, please?”

  “No, baby,” he said. “I really can’t. But I have something for you.”

  “A present? From Europe?”

  Miguel said, “I had something else for you. It got—broken. But this is from Europe, too.” He unfastened his collar and took off his mother’s medallion. Alaine was watching him. Did her eyes seem brighter and did he imagine he saw something like tears? It didn’t matter. He held the medallion so that Dorrie could see the miniature of the Holy Virgin. “This belonged to your grandmother,” he said. “It’s yours now.” He fastened the chain around her neck and kissed her.

  “I have to show Suzie!” Dorrie cried excitedly.

  He watched her go, thinking: I never should have left her. I
’ve missed so many of the good years.

  Alaine said, “And when you come back from The Spur, Mike? What then? Hollywood?”

  “No, Allie. I won’t go south under any conditions, but what I do depends on you, I think.”

  She stood up and walked to the window, her back to him. “Are you trying to ask for something, Mike?”

  “I was never very good at it, was I? Yes, I’m asking for something.” He stood behind her and touched her shoulder gently.

  “People get lost, Allie,” he said quietly. “People get lost and you can’t blame them for it. You can only pity them and help them find their way. You can’t lead them and you can’t drive them. All you can do is help. I need your help. I think you know that. I want to come home, Allie.” He turned her around and saw that her eyes were closed and there were tears on her cheeks.

  “Why, Mike?” she asked. “Because you pity me?”

  “Because I love you,” he said. “Because I don’t know how to love anyone else.”

  He lifted her face and for a moment she tried to turn it from him. He remembered the warmth of her body against his, the soft tender cries of her lovemaking, the loneliness of those days when he cut himself off from her and made her walk through his life as a stranger.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I don’t want to be hurt again.”

  He released her and said, “Wait for me, Allie. And I’ll prove it to you.”

  “All right, Mike,” she said faintly. “I’ll be here.”

  Dorrie burst through the door and saw him taking up his trenchcoat. “Are you going so soon?” she protested.

  “I’m sorry,” Miguel said.

  “I never get to see you. When will you be back?”

  He looked at Alaine and said, “Soon, Dorrie. Very soon.” Alaine walked to the car with him. The warm autumn sunlight was bright on the white face of the city and there was a tang of salt in the air. He stood, not touching her, and said to Alaine, “A day. Maybe two.”