Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Perhaps it was only, and just simply, the drink. And not any guilt. None of them had been in the bar—where they were all supposed to meet him for cocktails—and perhaps if one or two of them had been it might never have happened. She and Grant, Ron, were still upstairs just finishing changing to come down. So were the Spicehandlers. Cathie, who was upstairs too, apparently had heard his voice as he and Bonham had come through the gate and along the drive and up the steep stairs, and recognizing the sound of trouble in it had come running down. But she was either too late, or too inconsequential. He and Bonham had ordered a drink at the end of the bar, and after knocking back half of his first one Finer had ordered a second. The bar was already crowded with cocktail hour drinkers, guests in the hotel and customers from town, and when Sam the barman had not served his drink immediately, Sam Finer had hurled, slid, his low-slung heavy still-half-filled glass down the long bar like one of those pucks in those mechanical ten-cent bowling machines, sending bottles and stemmed martini glasses flying and smashing among the startled and convivially drinking cocktail customers. “I ordered a goddamned drink down here! And when I order a goddamned drink down here I expect to be goddamned served down here! And fast!” Bonham had had hold of him by this time, but this did not erase or dry the stains and drippings from the shirtfronts and dresses down the long length of the bar. René kept two big Jamaican bouncers around the place, although they had almost never been needed in the history of the hotel, and as usual now when they were needed neither was around. René had got there as quickly as he could. “You bet-tair get your frien’ out of ’ere fast, Al!” he said. He was furious. “I call ze cops ozzerwise.”— “Whatta you think I’m tryin to do?” Bonham had said, still holding onto the struggling and cursing Finer who was trying desperately to get back at the bar and the barman where he felt he had been so roundly insulted. Finally Bonham had got him out onto the veranda and to the steep set of steps, where René’s Jamaican ‘doorman’ in his Haitian general’s uniform came running up to them to help Bonham get Sam Finer down them. Finally the two of them had got him down the steps onto the driveway, but there he had broken away from them. By this time just about everybody in the hotel had heard the racket and come running, among them Ron and Ben who had recognized Finer’s voice and hoped to help, Lucky and Irma coming right behind them. The Jamaican doorman was a big man, almost as big as Bonham if not as big around, but he was startled and off his pace because he had never had to handle anything like this. Attacking the doorman at the Grand Hotel Crount was as unheard of as someone attacking the doorman at Sardi’s or Pavilion, but that was just what Sam Finer was doing. After breaking away from the two of them, he stood breathing a second or two, then rushed straight for the big doorman who had moved to stand like a guardian in front of his stairs, Finer trying to get back up the stairs and punching at him with all his power, and there was a lot of power in his stocky broadshouldered body. The first time the doorman just pushed him back away, taking a couple of hard punches to the head while doing it. Finer came in again, and this time the doorman started punching back, although it was plain he wasn’t much of a real fighter and did not appear to be particularly enjoying himself. He still looked as if he couldn’t believe what was happening as he wiped some blood off a cut on his cheek.

  In all Finer came at him four or five times, cursing and yelling almost incoherently all the time and actually appearing to be enjoying himself hugely. And all the time Bonham was standing back behind him saying, “Sam, Sam. You don’t know what you’re doing. This is the Crount. For God’s sake, stop it. This is the Crount! This isn’t the docks. Stop it.” Up on the veranda all the bar customers had crowded to the railing to watch, even those with still-wet shirtfronts and damaged dresses. Nobody had ever seen anything like it at the Grand Hotel Crount. When Ron, who was standing right beside her, tried to push his way through to get down the steps to help stop it, Lucky grabbed his arm, but she needn’t have. He was stopped by a famous New York columnist who was staying at the Crount, and who had been a good friend of his in New York for many years. “You know those people?” Lucky heard him say in a low voice.

  “Yes. They’re friends of mine. I want to stop it.”

  “Stay out of it,” the columnist said in the same low voice. Though not a big man he shouldered himself in front of Ron.— “He’s right,” Lucky said from behind her husband.

  His columnist friend nodded. “There’s nearly a dozen newspaper guys and columnists and Time-guys around here, locals as well as New Yorkers. This’ll be all over New York—as well as Kingston—by the morning edition. Keep your name out of it, for God’s sake. They’d love to drag your name into it. Especially those Time-guys.”

  “He’s right,” Lucky said again, and felt relieved when Grant’s, Ron’s, her husband’s arm relaxed within her hand.

  Down below Sam Finer had backed off and was preparing to charge the big but befuddled doorman once again, still shouting his almost incoherent, hysterical phrases about they couldn’t kick him out of this fucking place, who the fuck did they think they were, he had a suite in this fucking place; and it was here that Bonham finally took a hand. With that infinitely patient, dogged look of a man in a rainstorm with no place to go that Lucky had seen on his face so many times before, he stepped in and half-turned Sam Finer around and as delicately as a ballet dancer dipped him, very lightly, on the side of the jaw. Finer went down like a sack of cement. Bonham stood looking at him sadly for a moment as if he had just done something he had promised himself he would never do and then, ignoring the excited crowd up on the veranda completely, bent and picked up the short but heavy Finer as if he were a child, flung him over his shoulder lightly and started walking out down the curving drive toward the gate where the taxis were. For perhaps the second or third time since she had known him Lucky’s heart went out to him completely. Around her the excited talking people, herself and Ron, and Ben and Irma included, started to move back inside to their interrupted drinking, several still complaining about their wet shirts or dresses. Cathie Finer wasn’t talking. Lucky got her by the arm and made sure she came with them. Just as she turned to go in she saw Jim Grointon coming up the drive looking puzzled. As he passed Bonham who was still carrying the insensate Finer, he stopped and said something, but the giant Bonham did not pause or say one single word to him and trudged on stolidly, patiently with his burden in the man-in-a-rainstorm way toward the waiting taxis.

  The upshot of all of it the next day was almost inconsequential. Bonham did not show up at all, nor did Orloffski, as if they felt this a better policy. But around eleven Sam Finer showed up looking sheepish and wearing a big blue knot on the side of his jaw that Bonham had given him and a very slight blackeye the doorman had managed to inflict, and went straight to his suite where Cathie was waiting for him. He immediately called up Ron and Ben on the hotel intercom phone, and so the six of them congregated in Sam Finer’s suite. Sam could not go and speak to René himself, he was too embarrassed, so Ben and Ron were to be the intermediaries for him with René.

  “I just can’t,” he said, “I’m just too damned embarrassed. Anyway, he’ll listen to you guys much better than he’d listen to me. The very sight of me would probly make him throw me out before I could even say a word. Boy, did you ever see such a wallop?” he said proudly, fingering the lump on his jaw. “It was perfect. Just absolutely perfect. Just hard enough to do the job, not hard enough to hurt anything. A perfect punch. Christ, he could of killed me if he’d wanted. Him? It was just exactly perfect.” His hero-worship for Bonham, which Lucky knew from Ron that he had had at least since Grand Bank, had not at all diminished but rather, had increased. So that if Bonham had had any fears about losing his further $10,000 investment (which was what Lucky had suspected, in her anti-Bonham heart) he need not have worried; more likely, his action had only further insured the additional investment. “What a guy, hunh? Did you ever see such a guy, hunh?” Sam said with eyes that glowed with admiration.

&nb
sp; So Ron and Ben were the intermediaries for Sam Finer with René. Lucky went along because Ron asked her to, she being René’s oldest friend amongst them. And because she consented to go, she asked Irma to come along too. So the four of them accosted René—trapped him, was the more likely word—in the quiet, noontime-deserted bar. Ron was the spokesman.

  But Lucky was sick of all of it, and sick of all of them. Except maybe for Ben and Irma. Kids’ games: hitting and fighting and apologizing and going out sailing and trying deliberately to kill sharks: fucking damned kids’ games. These were not any of them, these, sail-diving people, the kind of people she wanted even to spend even a small part of her precious future life with. And Cathie Chandler—Cathie Finer—could look after her own damn problems; she had got herself into them. Lucky Videndi—Lucky Grant—had her own goddamned problems to cope with. But in any case Ron was the spokesmen.

  “Ronnie, I ’ave nev-air ’ave such a t’ing ’appen in my place!” René came back furiously. “Nev-air! Not in zee ’ole seven years I am ’ere! W’at you expec’ me do?”

  “Look,” Ron said doggedly. “All I’m saying is it isn’t going to do you any good to throw him out. That’s all. We’ll all be leaving here in a very few days on the cruise anyway.”

  “Zees guy is mishuga,” René said stubbornly. “I mean her. A real mishugena. I nevair like ’eem. From zee firs’ second ’ee harrive. Nev-air. Oy a bruch! I know ’eem that he make only tsorres w’en I firs’ time see heem. I honly let ’eem in zee ’otel because eet’s you. You an’ Lucky.”

  Ron—whose methods and modes of play Lucky knew as well as her own by now—nodded solemnly and sympathetically. Then he turned over his holecard ace, as she had already figured out he would. “It will only make you more bad publicity if you throw him out, though, René. As it is, it might be a small item in a couple of columns. You throw him out and it’ll get at least twice the play. Some of them could drag it on for a whole week of items if you do that.”

  “Zat’s true,” René said thoughtfully. “H’I not theenk of heem zat.”

  “Especially those Time-guys. You know how they love to knock anybody off who’s up on top. And you’re up on the very top now, with the Grand Hotel Crount.” Then he added, as she had also just anticipated, his clincher. “And I can promise you, promise you, that my friend Leonard won’t even mention it. Not one word in his column. That I can promise you. But if you kick him out— . . .”

  “Hokay,” René said. He made a vastly Gallic shrug of defeat, of rather admiring defeat. “You win zee ’and. You ’ave zee ass in zee ’ole. Like always. I know you, Ronnie.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger several times, significantly. “You always ’ave zee ass. Hor you don’ play. Hokay. But you tell zat mishugena ’ee stay out of zee bar at cocktail ’our. Hafter dinner, maybe hokay. But not hat cocktail ’our. H’I can’t ’ave ’eem zere hat cocktail ’our now, hafter zat. Hand not hafter dinner eezair, prefer-ably. But certainement pas not zee cocktail time.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell him,” Ron said. “And thank you, René.” He grinned. The delegation bought a drink all around to celebrate. Then they left.

  The funny thing was that it, the confrontation with René, could all have been avoided, because the next day Sam Finer got a call from New York that he was needed urgently in New York on business, business that simply would not wait or he stood to lose—Sam did not tell them how much he stood to lose. But it was clearly a vastly greater sum than the $10,000 he still intended to invest with Bonham. He left that night.

  They had been out nearly all day on Jim’s boat, going west and south as far as Wreck Reef and the Hotch Kyn Patches to dive on both of these, nearly eighteen miles out in all, so they had left at 10:30 in the morning, taking a packed-up lunch with them, everything once again all paid for by Sam Finer. When they returned at nearly seven in the evening, the call had been coming in regularly every half hour since noon for Mr Finer. After he had taken it in his suite he and Cathie had drinks with all of them (including Bonham and Orloffski whom he had telephoned at the boat yard) at one of the furthest tables down the big veranda, so as not to intrude on the to him off-limits bar. There simply wasn’t any choice. He had to go. The next plane out was the nine o’clock jet to New York, and he had already had René get him on it. There was no possibility that he could get back before the cruise began. He would have to be in New York at least a week, and possibly two weeks. Even if he could get out of New York in one week, it would be impossible to try and meet them in the Nelsons since there were no jet flights to the Nelsons’ one tiny airport. And if they left in two or three days as planned, by the time he island-hopped down in an ordinary plane they would already be on their way back to Ganado Bay. “And I know you guys, Ron and Ben, are just hangin around here now, waitin to start,” he said in his gruff, so often thoughtful, kindly way. So it looked like he would just have to miss the trip—this trip—altogether. “But there’ll be others” he said sadly. “God, how I hate to miss this maiden trip! But there’s no reason you should miss it, Cathie. There aint no earthly reason on earth for you to go back to New York with me. You’ll just spend your time hangin around some damned hotel. If you want to, I think you ought to go ahead and go.”

  Lucky thought she had detected a slightly sly note in Sam Finer’s proposition to his wife, but she was not at all prepared for Cathie’s answer.

  “All right, I will!” Cathie Finer said cheerfully. “I’ve been looking forward to this trip almost as much as you have, Sam darling. And as you say, there’s nothing for me to do in New York.”

  So that was settled. And Sam Finer didn’t seem surprised. But Lucky was surprised, and she thought most of the others were too, certainly Ron was, and Ben and Irma. Al Bonham on the other hand had a strangely noncommittal look on his big moonface.

  They all saw him off on the nine o’clock jet. Sam Finer had already ordered up his big private limousine, but even that wasn’t big enough for all of them. So, after telling René to hold dinner for them, Lucky once again found herself riding in the middle of the front seat of Jim’s old jeep, between Jim and Ron, once again with an arm across the back of both their seats to hold on against the jouncing. This time she was wearing a skirt. Ben and Irma—once again—rode, and hung on wildly, in the back. The others rode in the limousine with Finer.

  Once the big jet was off the ground and had disappeared off into the brightly moonlit nighttime sky, they all—all except Sam Finer—had a drink in the airport bar. A slightly sad, but nonetheless gay, celebratory drink over poor old Sam’s departure. It was then, during this drink, that Cathie Finer informed the Grants and the Spicehandlers that she would not be coming back to the hotel to dine with them. She was sick and tired of the hotel food and she had eaten so much fish the past few days she didn’t want to look at fish again. She would take the limousine into town and have dinner at one of the two or three better restaurants in town with Bonham and Orloffski—with Al and Mo, was the way she said it. After, they might go and gamble a little. So there was no point in them waiting up for her. Unless, of course, they should all want to meet them later at the little, illegal, ‘casino.’ None of them did want to. So yet once again Lucky found herself riding homeward—hotelward—in the middle of the front seat of Jim’s jeep, with one arm holding on behind Jim’s seat and back and the other clutching on behind her husband’s.

  And that was the pattern that things took, in the next days. Somehow she always seemed to find herself between Jim and Grant—Jim and Ron. Bonham and Orloffski did not finish up the schooner in two days as they had expected when Sam Finer left (later Lucky thought she guessed why), and said it would be at least two more days of work, say five days in all, before they could pull out and put to sea. Cathie Finer stopped going out on the catamaran, and spent her days in town, presumably at the schooner. She stopped eating at the hotel too and took her meals in town, presumably with Bonham and Orloffski, although in fact Orloffski did not seem to be much in evidence, whenever s
he did appear at the hotel with Bonham, in the car she had rented in place of the limousine. And Ben and Irma, having only these few final days left in Kingston before leaving it for good since the return from the cruise would go to the north shore and GaBay, decided to rent a car and take a three days’ trip around to see some of the remaining sights they had not seen. So that left just the three of them, going out in the catamaran in that same hot baking sun every day. Herself and Jim and Ron. Herself, between Jim and Grant, Jim and Ron, Jim and her husband. And Grant, Ron, had not changed his stubborn mind or his method, had not changed his attitude toward—or his self-appointed role of open friendship for—Jim Grointon. Sometimes Lucky was sure that the people in the hotel were talking. Especially with the reputation Jim enjoyed locally.

  She had been proud of Grant, of Ron, when he had handled René like he had over Finer. Even though it had all been over such a poorly, low-ass, low-class gang and group of people, she had still been proud of him and the suave way he had handled it. But at the same time it had reminded her once again of the equally suave, smooth, tricky pokerplayer’s way he had as easily handled herself over the matter of Carol Abernathy. As René had said, ’ee always ’ad zee ass in zee ’ole. He did, by God. And always had had. That had infuriated her anew, and she found herself for perhaps the third time now looking at her husband—whom she once had thought, once had believed she knew—with new eyes.

  She had meant to invite Ben and Irma on the night she gave her spaghetti dinner. She herself had gotten as sick of fish in the past weeks as Cathie Finer had. Fish had always been her favorite food, and she had always claimed she had never had enough—could never get enough—of it. But now she had to admit this claim could no longer be maintained. And she had had the idea to cook up a good old serious Italian sauce that she knew so well how to make well, and have a good old spaghetti dinner. All of the better suites at the Crount were equipped with tiny kitchens, René’s idea, in case any of the more select guests were gourmets and amateur chefs who might want to cook in for themselves, so there was no problem there. René and Lisa of course could not come as they had to be with and supervise the hotel’s dinner. But she had certainly meant to have Irma and Ben. However, the day—the night—she had planned it for, and invited them all for, was the night they were supposed to return from their three-day trip. And they did not come back that night. She didn’t know why. Naturally, she did not invite Cathie Finer, mainly because she did not want to invite Bonham, and she did not want to invite Bonham because she did not want to have to invite Orloffski. Anyway, her feeling for Cathie Finer had changed considerably in the past few days since she had become convinced that Cathie was sleeping with Al Bonham. (That was why the boat work had slowed up.) How in hell could anybody, even a bitter Cathie Chandler—Cathie Finer—sleep with Al Bonham? Jim Grointon maybe; yes. But Bonham? or Orloffski?