by Belva Plain
“Where shall we hang our hats for the year? I’m wondering.”
“Kentucky?” Pam spoke tentatively. “There’s nothing much more to be done in the house. It’s quite livable.”
“No.” Eddy was decisive. “I don’t want to go there, to the community where we’ll be making our home, until all this is behind us. Maybe it’s foolish of me, but I’d rather not. I want to start fresh.”
“You can always stay with us,” Connie said. “In the city or the country, or wherever you want.”
“Thanks, Connie. I’d like to visit for short stays, but to be frank, your house is always full, and I don’t particularly care to run into Wall Street types right now.”
“There’ll be no parties, no guests at all, whenever you are there,” she assured him.
“My mother’s?” Pam proposed. “Goodness knows there’s enough room for us in that old barn of a house.”
“No. Your mother’s embarrassed by this mess. She’s too much of a lady to say so, but she is, and I won’t do that to her.”
“Well, you’ve always got us in Ohio,” said Lara, “if you can stand a noisy household.”
“What I’d really like is to get far away. I wish we could go to Europe.”
“Why can’t you?” asked Lara.
“I’m out on bail. I can’t leave the country.”
“Oh,” said Lara, flushing, “I didn’t think.”
No one spoke for a moment, and then Eddy said quietly, “I guess we’ll just move where the spirit sends us.”
Like a fugitive, he thought. Moving around.
So the months passed. Eddy and Pam spent a few weeks at the Bergs’ Palm Beach house when no one else was there, and a few weeks out of season at a half-deserted inn on Nantucket. They flew back and forth to Lara’s and found themselves most comfortable there in the easy atmosphere of the cheerful family. As much as possible they avoided New York; on its streets, in its theaters and restaurants, they were sure to meet people whom Eddy did not want to meet. Whenever, at Rathbone’s summons, they had to be in the city, they stayed at the Hotel Pierre, for the apartment had been emptied out and its contents trundled away to Kentucky in two enormous vans.
Rathbone telephoned in shock one day. “Eddy! What the hell have you done? You know you weren’t to remove any of your possessions! The receivers came in and found everything gone—”
“I wasn’t supposed to remove my possessions, and I didn’t. All of the stuff there was Pam’s. It never did belong to me. I can show you the documents, legal documents. Incidentally, she has a buyer for the apartment too.” Eddy chuckled. “I’d like to have seen that receiver’s face when the super opened the door, and they walked through twelve empty rooms.”
This was the one bright note in a long, dim year.
Vernon Edward Osborne, having lost his case on appeal, was given three days to report to Allenwood Federal Penitentiary.
Rathbone, at the sentence, asked permission to take his client there himself. “For,” as he had explained to Eddy, who had protested that he didn’t want to be a bother to Rathbone, “the alternative is to go to the U.S. marshal, be put in handcuffs, and maybe spend a couple of days first at the Metropolitan Correctional Center before they take you to Allenwood in chains. Not a pleasant prospect.” Eddy closed his eyes as if he were seeing himself in chains. “We’ll leave at the crack of dawn to get there early. That way you’ll have a chance at the better jobs and room assignments.”
“Jobs?” Eddy had not thought of jobs.
“All kinds. Kitchen work, cutting grass, office work, or the library. Anything and everything.”
Eddy turned to Pam. “I don’t want you to come along.”
“Not me?” she cried.
“No. I don’t want you to see me in that place.”
“Families do visit,” Rathbone said gently.
“No. I forbid it, Pam. I don’t want you to remember me all our lives like that. I don’t want that picture in your mind. I’m going to tell my sisters too. Just write to me. And Henry says you can phone. But don’t come, any of you.”
“Eddy, I don’t care what you say, I’m going to visit you.”
They spent the last night in a suite at the Hotel Pierre. Pam ordered flowers as if this were a bridal night, and a feast of a dinner with champagne in the suite. Afterward they sat together in front of the television set, watching a comedian who wasn’t funny. Eddy lay with his head on her lap while she stroked his hair.
After a while she asked him softly, “Tell me, did you really do anything so very terrible?”
“Hell, no.… I mean … I suppose … Well, I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, as he had already said a few dozen times before.
“It’s going to be terrible without you.”
“The time will pass.” He wanted to comfort her and himself too. “It will go by faster than we think, and we’ll have the rest of our lives after that.”
“We’ll miss this.” She put his hand on her breast.
Her breasts were warm, full, and firm under the lace negligee. He felt her body move beneath him, coaxing him to move, too, either to turn over on the sofa or else to get up and go with her to the bed. He wanted what she was waiting for; he always did want it; but the prospect of the long time, two years at the least—if he was lucky—was so daunting, unthinkable, and so chilling that he felt incapable of response.
“We need something to remember,” she murmured in his ear. “Something to last us.”
“Darling, I don’t think I—”
“Yes, yes. You will. Don’t you know I know how?”
So he followed her to the bed, lay down, and waited.
“No hurry. Just relax. We have all night.” Her hands, soft and burning, moved upon him. “And if you fall asleep, that’ll be all right too.”
But he did not fall asleep. Slowly, slowly … Just let everything go. That’s it. All the fantasies. The seduction, the lure. Was there ever a woman like this one? She was insatiable. There was no end. Her voice. Her words. And a tremendous power leapt within him at last; it surged, was satisfied, and surged again. He had no idea how long they were there together.
There was a Latin saying about man’s sadness afterward. Always he had wondered about that, having never experienced such sadness. But tonight was different, he thought, when, after Pam had fallen asleep, he had gotten up and gone into the other room. The circumstances were rather special tonight, after all.
It was not yet midnight, and the city lay sparkling, wide awake below and beyond the window. Limousines were moving down Fifth Avenue, transporting people to late, gala functions. On Madison they would be going northward instead, transporting other people uptown to their silken homes. Eddy stood there staring at the cars, at the park, and at planes that crossed the night sky, bringing yet more people to this fabulous capital of the world. And he thought about the day when he had been a newcomer here himself, a nobody with almost nothing in his pockets. In the morning he would be leaving it with nothing at all in his pockets, unless one counted what he had given away to Pam.
Suddenly the city with all its glamor seemed to him like a place he had never known and would never know again. He shook himself. The feeling was too strange, too eerie, for this night. “I’m giving myself the creeps,” he said aloud. And then, “Hey, Eddy Osborne, get hold of yourself! You’re down, but you’re not out yet.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On a dark day in Thanksgiving week an early snow lay glistening on the lawns of Cresthill. It was Connie who had placed the bronze sculptures and the eighteenth-century folly at the foot of the parterre. It was she who had begun a neighborly tradition of inviting as many as could come for lunch on the Sunday after the holiday. There was something picturesque, she thought, something charming, in the sight of families arriving with their children, the little girls and the very tiniest boys wearing lace-collared velvet and looking like a chic advertisement in Country Life or Vogue. Last year Thérèse had worn ruby velvet with
matching shoestring bows in her dark hair.
On this particular Sunday there was another kind of gathering in the house. Shortly after lunch the men had started to arrive, and so far Connie had counted fifteen of them around the conference table in the red leather library. Obviously, some tremendous deal must be approaching its climactic hour to have brought all these bankers, lawyers, accountants, and principals together. From past experiences she knew that they might well be here all day, which would mean dinner, and then possibly late into the night, too, which would mean pizzas. These country meetings were always held at Martin’s house, although the DeWitt house was only half an hour’s drive away. Very likely, Caroline didn’t want the cigar smoke in her house, Connie thought with some amusement.
Cigar smoke was seeping out of the library now, past closed doors and into the adjoining sitting room where Connie had been asked to man the one telephone line out of the five in the house that had been left open. She had been provided with a short list of acceptable callers and was to summon Martin only if one of them was on the line. Yes, this deal had to be something extraordinary, she reflected, for Martin had been unusually tense during the last few weeks; his left eyelid had kept twitching.
Restless now, she got up and went to the window. Far down the slope a bright orange spot slid across the snow where Nanny was pulling Thérèse on her sled. And Connie had a curious recollection of being pushed down a little hill in a cardboard carton; it might have been Lara who had pushed her or, perhaps, her mother. How Peg would marvel today at the grandchild to whom all this splendor belonged, these wide, quiet fields and this great house! As always, Connie felt a wave of confused emotions: tenderness and fierce protectiveness, disappointment because Lara’s child was beautiful and Thérèse was not, shame at having so mean a thought, and pride because Thérèse was so advanced for her age and had such an appealing personality. She might look like her half sister, but she would never be woebegone like Melissa.
Fresh snow began to sift through the sky in dry, slow flakes, whitening the parked cars. More cars were arriving. Here came Preston’s old station wagon with a dented fender. You’d think it would bother him to ride around in a car like that. But he himself was immaculate, his thick hair ruffling in the wind as he strode across the drive, his lean face reddened by the cold. He would be perfect in an advertisement for country tweeds. Why, Connie thought, do I always imagine how people would look in photographs? No matter. Preston belonged indefinably to the American aristocracy. Like Eddy’s wife, Pam. You had to be born to it.
Poor Eddy, in that awful place. She had gone once with Lara to see him, and their presence had upset him terribly; it had crushed his pride. But over the telephone he still talked with his old bravado, as if he really hadn’t done anything much, as if everyone were making too big a fuss about it, anyway. Two years ago he had been here with them, happy and boisterous, loaded as usual with gifts. Just there near the front door he had parked and called the butler to help him carry Thérèse’s dollhouse. Poor Eddy. And she remembered him presenting her with the Mercedes on the day of her wedding, bidding for a Matisse at a spectacular auction, answering respectful questions at a fashionable dinner party.
What had it all meant in the end? A strange, sick feeling of loss swept through her, as if there were no purpose in anything. And Connie shook herself as if to rid herself of a dismal foreboding.
Now came a white Rolls-Royce. When the chauffeur opened the door, she saw white leather upholstery, at which she frowned. Flamboyant. No taste. This had to be Franklin Bennett, the famous Franklin Bennett. Martin’s description fitted the broad, bulky man in the ankle-length mink coat who emerged from the car. Dreadful. And she frowned again.
The day dragged. She returned to the sofa and the Sunday newspaper. Delphine whimpered, wanting to be on the sofa with Connie, and she picked her up, thinking again what a picture that would make, the chintz sofa, the red poodle, and herself in her sea-green knitted suit. You often saw photos of women with their dogs in their drawing rooms or libraries. Her mind went suddenly to the day they had bought Delphine. “Why, I can almost fit her into my pocket!” Richard had exclaimed. She could hear the exact tones of his voice this very minute, although ten years had gone by. And she wondered what might be happening in his life now. It was strange to think how once his life had been joined to her own. The shy young man, holding the tennis racket, said, Are you Miss Osborne? And now here she sat in Martin’s house with Richard’s dog on her lap.
I dozed, she thought, when she was jarred awake. The low rumble of male voices that had been barely audible from the other side of the heavy doors was erupting into angry argument, now plainly heard.
“God damn it! Are you saying we’re crooks? Is that what you’re saying?” Unmistakably, that was Martin.
The answering voice, a youthful one, was just as loud, but even and controlled. “I did not say that, sir. I did not.”
“You used the word fake, and I didn’t like it. God damn, I didn’t like it.”
“I said, if you remember, that this money is fake stuff. These bonds are promises based on other promises that people may not be able to keep. So it’s not real money. It’s worth about as much, in my opinion, as Monopoly money.”
“Oh,” said Martin, icy cold now, “it’s Monopoly money that we’ve been paying you, is it?”
“No, sir, I’ve been properly paid, and I know that. All I’m saying is, a lot of people in this country are going to end up not being paid at all.”
Other voices entered into the commotion. To Connie’s alarmed ears it sounded as if one man, the one with the youthful voice, was in opposition to all the others. She had never imagined that these eminent men would create such a tumult.
“This mountain of debt will someday crush the whole country—”
“Shit! Why don’t you cut out the shit!”
“You’re still wet behind the ears—”
“… millions now, but there’ll be a day of reckoning!
“… this firm was founded by my forebears when your grandfather was in his crib.” That was Preston’s voice.
“… fucking bastards, throwing obstacles in the way of every fresh idea—”
Connie was thinking, “Even when Pop was drunk, he didn’t talk like that.”
“… greed, brutal greed, is all—”
There was a crash, as of a fist hitting a tabletop. “Why the hell don’t you shut up?”
“Calm down, will you? Go home—”
“That’s the best idea yet.” This was Martin again, calmer now. “We’re getting nowhere like this.”
And Preston said, “Go home, McClintock. Think things over, and we’ll talk tomorrow at the office.”
Piqued by curiosity, Connie went to the window again, to see a young man with coppery hair go running down the steps into a car and, with a crunch and spurt of gravel, speed away. She had always had excellent recall of people, and was sure she had seen him before.
Quiet resumed, and after another hour or so the meeting broke up, and Martin, with Preston, brought the man in the mink coat to Connie. Martin made the introductions.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Franklin Bennett. His eyes touched her from head to foot. “Well, Berg, you sure know how to pick them. Nothing like a young woman to make you feel like a rooster again. How old are you, Connie?”
Appalled, she answered, “Thirty-four.”
“My wife—my new wife’s—younger. Twenty-seven. You remind me of her a little. Say, Berg, you’ve got a beautiful spread here. How many acres?”
“Forty-three.”
“Oh, boy—worth a bundle, this close to New York.”
“Well, it’s home,” Martin said modestly. “We like it.”
“Why the hell wouldn’t you? So, I’ll be going.” Bennett turned to Connie. “You must have heard that racket. Young son of a bitch lost his marbles.”
“I regret,” Preston said, “that the disturbance came from someone in our firm.”
Bennett was magnanimous. “Well, it’s not your fault. I’ve had to fire plenty of rising stars in my time, you can bet. The main thing is, we’re getting somewhere.” He reached for the door. “Got to be going. Can’t keep the young missus waiting too long.”
When the door had closed behind Bennett, Preston sighed in disgust. “What a horror that man is!”
Martin remarked that his biography would be fascinating, to which Preston answered that it would be if anyone dared to write the truth.
“He was reared by his grandfather on a Kansas farm after his parents died,” Preston explained to Connie. “But he had no intention of staying there. His first job was at a cereal factory in the shipping office, but he didn’t stay there long either. It only took him eleven years to become the company president. He’s climbed, he’s clawed, and he’s got eyes in the back of his head. Incidentally, Martin, I hope you’re going to fire McClintock tomorrow. That was inexcusable.”
“I know,” Martin said. “It’ll be a nasty job, all the same.” And he explained to Connie, “McClintock lost his wife in that bus accident upstate last summer.”
“But he’s outlived his usefulness,” Preston said.
“I know,” Martin said again.
“Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed as soon as Preston was out of the door.
“Who? Not Preston?”
“Yes, yes. Oh, I don’t really mean it, but damn, he always expects me to do the dirty work. I’m the one who had to fire three hundred brokers after Black Monday, while he acted the gentleman.”
Fire. They always knew when Pop had been fired, by the drag of his steps coming slowly and heavily up the stairs. Then he’d stand in the doorway, looking around from one to the other, and he’d cough before he got the words out. A shiver of pity ran through Connie.
