Cynthia

by Howard Fast

  “Cynthia?” Lucille asked for the fortieth time.

  “Are you going to keep that up all morning?” I demanded, a little irritated. “What do you expect to happen?”

  “I expect someone to know Cynthia.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s why they call you Dad,” Lucille said. “It’s not the way you look. Mostly, you don’t even look grown up—”

  “What!”

  “Come on—you know what I mean. You’re very nice-looking, Harvey, and you even look a little bit like that actor—what’s his name?—George Gizzard.”

  “Grizzard, you mean, George Grizzard.”

  “Well, it’s something like that, isn’t it? And you do resemble him—”

  Well, it’s very hard to get angry with a girl who tells you that you resemble a good-looking actor, because the truth of it is that no one looks like an actor except another actor.

  “—but you feel old, Harvey.” She buttonholed a boy tall enough to be a basketball player, and he had an artificial daisy in each ear. “Where’s Cynthia?”

  “Cynthia? Man, this is a big meadow.”

  “Well, where is she?” Lucille insisted.

  “Well, you know—she doesn’t have a station. She could be anywhere. It’s a free country.”

  “Have you seen her?” Lucille insisted.

  “Hey, Dolly,” he called out to a light brown Negro girl, who wore a crown of woven pink carnations, “where’s Cynthia?”

  The girl with the carnations waved a languid hand. “Beautiful,” she said, “it’s all beautiful with elements and beingness.”

  “Cynthia,” I reminded her.

  “Isn’t she here?”

  “Look, Dad,” said the basketball player, pointing to a couple with their arms entwined, swaying to the beat of the music, “that’s Don Cooper. He and his girl are writing a show—way out, off Broadway, cuts like a knife—cuts right in where the decay is and out it comes. Cynthia promised to back it for him when it’s ready. So you want to know where Cynthia is—ask them.”

  “Thanks, chum,” Lucille said. “I’ll say a prayer for you to score high. Fifty shots in the next game.”

  “Bless you, bubby,” he grinned.

  “Well?” she said to me as we walked toward the songwriter.

  “There you are,” I nodded, “You wouldn’t want me to marry anyone as smart as you. I’d be out of it from the word go.”

  “Just so long as you know, Harvey.”

  “I know.”

  The songwriter had a yellow beard. His girl had the word love spelled out in lipstick on each cheek. They were both about nineteen. When Lucille asked them about Cynthia, they studied her very carefully and then they studied me, and then the kid said, “What’s Dad here?” nodding at me.

  “What do you mean, what am I?”

  “You fuzz?”

  The girl said, “He’s the new look if he is. He’s a doll. Come over here, Doll.” It was the first word of encouragement I had received since I set foot on the damned meadow, so I wheeled my bike over to her. She took out her lipstick and painted a five-petaled flower on my forehead. We gathered a small crowd at first and then they drifted off. She painted the word love on one cheek.

  “Harvey, you’re sweet,” Lucille said.

  “He’s not fuzz,” the boy said.

  “How do you know?” I asked him.

  “He’s an insurance investigator,” Lucille said. “Show him your credentials, Harvey.” I showed my credentials.

  “What about Cynthia?”

  “Well,” I said, “she walked out of her apartment on Monday. Here it is Sunday. No one had heard a word from her since.”

  “Do you blame her?”

  “I don’t blame her. But suppose she’s in trouble. Who’s going to back your show?”

  “What makes you think she’s in trouble?” the girl asked.

  “Look, Dad,” the boy began, but the girl stopped him and said with some asperity, “He’s absolutely right. Who else is going to back your show? If you’re an insurance investigator, where’s your beef about Cynthia?”

  “She’s insured.”

  “That’s a cold-blooded attitude, if I may say so.”

  “Why?” Lucille demanded. “At least we’re trying to find her and help her if she’s in trouble.”

  “She’s right,” Don admitted.

  “You got any idea where she might be?” I asked.

  “No one has. We’ve been trying to reach her all week. We decided that if there was any place she’d be, it would be out here at the Be-in.”

  “She’s not here,” the girl said.

  “We’ve been watching all day.”

  “Asking.”

  “I mean searching for her.”

  “Goddamn it,” the boy said, “she’s disappeared.”

  “Fled,” the girl said. “You ever met her father and mother? Fled. Fled.”

  “What was she hung up on?” I asked them.

  Beardsley, Charlie Brown, The Village Voice—”

  “Civil rights,” the girl said.

  “Hermann Hesse.”

  “English music hall songs.”

  “You really think she’s in trouble?” the boy asked.

  “Computer dating,” the girl said.

  Chapter 5

  I half-expected that at ten o’clock on a Monday morning, I would find her sober if hung over; but such was not my good fortune. How many Alice Brandon had had, I can’t say. As she was drinking vodka, the odor was not overwhelming, but her center of gravity swayed pleasantly, and she said slowly and precisely, “Dear Mr. Krim—how very good of you to return! You are enchanted with me. Wouldn’t that be a laugh? Do you know, after you left I decided that you looked more like Lawrence Harvey, only he is better looking, you know, and I think it’s only because you have the same name—”

  “Harvey Krim, Mrs. Brandon.”

  “Naturally.” She was wearing a crepe at-home rig in a combination of lavender, violet and magenta, and she insisted that I have breakfast with her.

  “I had breakfast. Coffee will be fine.”

  “Orange juice—half-vodka? Dear Mr. Krim, please don’t allow me to drink alone at this hour of the morning.”

  The breakfast room was a glassed-in, heated terrace, with bridges and roofs for scenery, Italian tile on the floor, and a breakfast table of cast aluminum and thick glass. A mixture of white and hybrid lavender roses were the order of the day, and I told myself that with a minimum of effort, I could fall into the habits of the rich. I wondered aloud why Mrs. Brandon did not enjoy it more.

  “Because my husband’s a louse, Harvey boy. Any more questions?”

  The butler, Jonas, was serving coffee and eggs and sausages and bacon—the last three items I declined and she was drinking her nourishment—and the comments on his boss’s character appeared not to disturb him at all.

  “A few.”

  “Then hold them until this creep gets out of here. I mean Jonas Biddle, butler. I can’t stand butlers, least of all this one. He’s Brandon’s intelligence service, only he’s stupid.” She turned to the butler and told him flatly, “Oh, get to hell out of here, will you, Jonas.”

  His face set, he marched out.

  “Why does he take it?” I asked her.

  “He’s paid to take it, Harvey. I would adore for him to quit—but he takes it. You’re not touching your orange juice.”

  “At this hour of the morning it would destroy me.”

  “Poor boy—I’ll use it.” She picked it up and took a healthy drink. “Ask, Harvey.”

  “Computer dating.”

  “What the devil is that? Oh—you mean that compatibility thing with the computers. Cynthia was very big on that.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose she figured she could meet someone who did not know she was E.C.’s daughter. The same way she gave herself the nickname ‘Jake.’ She told everyone at Ann Bromley College that Jake was her name. It was the one name E.C.
thoroughly hated.”

  “But why the computer? Certainly she met enough boys.”

  “Harvey—have you ever explored the male market today? It is not to make a girl explode with joy. E.C. has a summer place at Green Farms—”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The east end of Westport, Connecticut. Actually, it’s in trust for Cynthia from her mother, and it’s more like a jail than a place of joy. So tell me where Cynthia meets sympatico boys? Just tell me?”

  “Her father’s friends?”

  “Some day you must meet her daddy’s friends and their offspring.”

  “Your friends?”

  “I drink my friends, Daddy-o. Ah, come on, Harvey, have one orange juice.”

  When I got downstairs, Sergeant Kelly was waiting for me in his neo-police Brooks Brothers tweeds, and he said, “Well, what have you got to say now, Krim.”

  “You know,” I told him, “when they set up a police state here, Rothschild and you will be president and vice-president.”

  “That’s great. The Lieutenant always wanted to be president. Only don’t think we are playing for marbles, Harvey boy. Four well known torpedoes have joined the tourists who feel that this is Fun City. They are all Texas kids: Jack Selby, who calls himself Ringo, Freddy Upson, otherwise known as the Ghost, Billy the Kid, who has the reputation of having performed twenty-seven contracts, and Joey Earp, who calls himself the Descendent, maybe because he watches TV between executions.”

  “All right. So you are being invaded. Is that any reason to give me the business out here on the sidewalk?”

  “No one is giving you the business, Harvey. You know, you are paranoid about cops.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “I’m not. Now listen—these are four boys from Texas and none of them are Syndicate. They’re a part of the Fats Coventry mob, which is very big down there and bases itself in Houston. The Syndicate wants in there, and Fats has been too tough for them.”

  “I also remember the Alamo.”

  “Don’t be a wise guy, Harvey.”

  “Well, what the hell shall I be? Why don’t you and Rothschild get off my back and stop with the True Detective stories. I got my work to do.”

  “That’s just it, Harvey. Your work. Where Valento Corsica is—that’s where we think your Cynthia Brandon is, and that is where these four hoodlums are headed and there is something very big coming up, and the Lieutenant thinks you are smart—”

  “Tell the Lieutenant I am stupid,” I said, trying to make it sound like a snarl. Kelly grinned. I turned my back on him and walked away.

  When I got to my office, it was 11:30 A.M., and Lucille was waiting for me. Mazie Gilman, outside, said it was my sister.

  “Do you have a sister, Harvey?” Lucille asked me. “I really know so little about you.”

  “Sister!” I said. “You know, it’s the way that YMCA mind of yours works. You couldn’t just say you were a friend. Did the library fire you?”

  “No, the library did not fire me. And it would be YWCA, and a sense of propriety—something you would hardly understand—made me say I was your sister.”

  “And here you are.”

  “And here I am, Harvey Krim, because I have eleven days of sick leave coming to me and a perfect attendance record, and do you know what I thought of just when I was falling asleep—and I would have called you right then and there, but I thought perhaps mercifully you had gone to sleep at a reasonable hour—”

  “Yes,” I interrupted.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, I know what you thought about when you were falling asleep and do you realize that if everyone talked like you the structure of the English language would disappear.”

  “I don’t think that’s very kind.”

  “Well—all right. You thought about computer dating.”

  She dropped into a chair across the desk from me and faced me earnestly. “Harvey,” she said, “do you know this is a very fascinating job you have. Of course you thought of computer dating. We both thought about it. But why?”

  “Because as much as you might like a super highway, you make out with a little dirt road when there’s nothing better.”

  “Oh, Harvey,” she grinned. “You do clutch at fancy metaphors, don’t you. Of course, you’re wrong. If one must travel the big highway, one finds it.”

  “One does.”

  “Oh, yes, Harvey. It’s not at all as complicated as you make it out to be. It’s just a question of point of view. From one point of view nothing at all makes sense. E.C. Brandon’s daughter disappears. She is seen in Central Park holding hands with that Count—what did you say his name was?”

  “Valento Corsica, alias Count Gambion de Fonti.”

  “Yes, Mr. Corsica, who is the heir to the Syndicate—or Mafia. Which is it?”

  “You take your choice.”

  “Then she doesn’t show up at the Be-in. Do you know, Harvey, if I were Cynthia, I would let nothing short of disaster keep me away from the Be-in. Don’t you see—a Be-in complements someone like Cynthia, wholly, perfectly.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, because everyone needs love, Harvey, and Cynthia needs it so desperately.”

  “Everyone?” I asked her.

  “Of course everyone. Now just listen to me for a moment, Harvey.” She was more excited than I had ever known her to be. Her face was flushed, and her honey-colored hair, loosely tied behind her neck, glowed in the shaft of sunlight that came through the one window with which my office was blessed. She was so painlessly, unconsciously beautiful that I almost interrupted her again, this time to ask her to marry me. Fortunately, I regained my senses.

  “Before I came here, I stopped off at the Library, Harvey—”

  “You said you were on sick leave.”

  “Of course. I let everyone know I had a dreadful headache and was only stopping by for a moment.”

  “Perfidy!” I exclaimed. “From Lucille Dempsey, white, Presbyterian New England American—”

  “Oh, Harvey, that was a white lie. Really, you are the most difficult person to understand or talk to.”

  “I am?”

  “Do listen to me now. I stopped by at the Library, where we have a social studies room, and there we keep a file of computer oddities and social influences. I Xeroxed the three major dating service applications, and here they are. Two of them are for age eighteen to thirty, and the third is for age eighteen to twenty-seven. Most people are quite conservative and are inclined to take these things as a joke, but I have learned that they are a very thriving business. Their purpose is very direct and simple—to bring together men and women who have various tastes and desires and status yearnings in common.”

  “I know all that,” I protested, “and it doesn’t take us one step closer to the question of where Cynthia is.”

  “Doesn’t it? Well, look, Harvey, everyone thinks they know all about this computer dating. But sitting here for the past hour and waiting for you, I have been going through these questionnaires. Don’t just brush them off. They are quite extraordinary. They not only allow for similarities, they also point up dissimilarities—so that people can come together as complementary factors. And that’s not as crazy as it sounds. Just think of the attraction you have for me—”

  “I am thinking about it,” I said.

  “So they analyze compatibility on the basis of difference as well as similarity. Take for instance, analysis of character. This one forces you to analyze yourself—so that you can project the image of yourself as you see yourself—”

  “I always thought the gift was to see ourselves as others see us.”

  “Very true, Harvey, but here the point is not to reveal the utter truth but to match A with B. Do you understand—to match?”

  I stared at her very thoughtfully and nodded. “Go on,” I said.

  “All right. Now here we have nineteen words, as follows: athletic, restless, studious, taciturn, reckless, stubborn, optimistic, nervous, lonely
, ambitious, sociable, reserved, generous, egotistical, moody, meticulous, visionary, and affectionate. You are asked to choose the six that best describe you. Now I suppose the justifying psychological base is that one will choose less of himself than what he desires from a mate—”

  “Which doesn’t mean a marriage that will work.”

  “Of course not, Harvey—I don’t think anyone knows what on earth all this means, and as far as I am concerned it’s a gimmick. Absolutely a gimmick. But right now, I am trying to be helpful—”

  “Go on, Girl Detective.”

  “Well, take this status business. The questionnaires try to place the people in status slots. They ask if you have a credit card. They list various cars—Continental, Cadillac, Plymouth, Ford, Chevvy, Rambler, XK-E, Volkswagen, Triumph, Mustang—which is your choice?”

  “I wonder what Cynthia would make of that—”

  “Or Valento Corsica. Now suppose you begin the week with two hundred dollars in your pocket. How much of it are you likely to spend on the following: dates, tips, books, records, movies, car rentals, live theater, cosmetics, travel, cabs?”

  “Interests? Hobbies?” I asked.

  “All of it here. Most of the tests ask you to rate yourself by declaring an order of preference. Consider the following interests—medicine, law, music, literature, accounting, golf, history, current events, war now, past war, drama, skiing, skating, ice, wheels, teaching, bridge, poker, canasta, French, Italian, German, Greek, swimming—and so forth and so on. Which is number one and which is number two and which is number three—do I make any sense at all, Harvey?”

  “More and more. How do they get a sort of emotional compatability, or doesn’t that interest them?”

  “That’s not reversible, Harvey. That’s direct. They all ask race—Caucasian, Negro, Oriental. But one of them does reverse it. What do you prefer? They list all the major religions and ask you to choose one, but then two of them supply a second identical listing for you to choose your date’s religion. They have four categories of height and again, most of them have an identical list for preference. Also with age—two lists. By the way, just how rich would this Valento Corsica be?”

  “You name it.”

  “Richer than E.G. Brandon?”