Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  “At times—yes. At times, no. This afternoon, yes, if you would let me come along, Miss Goldmark?”

  She hesitated a moment, her eyes flickering across the gold band on my left hand. “I know you’re alone in the city, Mr. Clancy—” she began slowly.

  “My wife died two years ago,” I said. “I’m very much alone in this city, Miss Goldmark.”

  “Oh?”

  We sat in silence for a little while then, until she said, “Please come with me. I would enjoy that.”

  I nodded, and she saw what must have been in my face and asked me whether something was wrong. “No—no.” I shook my head.

  “Is it because—?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Shall we go now?”

  She got up, and we left the place and went out into the cool sunshine of the campus and then walked Over to Broadway and the subway. It was a fine, brisk day, with a clean wind blowing in from the west, the best kind of a day in New York; and since we had plenty of time before the showing, Phyllis suggested that we walk to the next stop before we take the subway. We walked south on Broadway, and when I looked behind me twice, I tried to do so casually. But I imagine she noticed. When we got into the subway train at 103d Street, only one man entered our car with us. The car was almost empty, and the man who had entered with us went to the other end of the car and seated himself facing us. He was middle-size, ordinary in appearance, neatly dressed in gray sharkskin and gray worsted topcoat, and involved in The New York Times. His paper was opened to the financial section, and he was studying the stock listings intently.

  “I saw you looking behind you,” Phyllis said to me.

  “Yes?”

  “Did you feel we were being followed, Mr. Clancy?”

  I smiled and shook my head. Phyllis shivered, and for a while she was silent, and then she said,

  “Please look at the man across the car—the one with the newspaper and the gray topcoat.”

  “What about him, Miss Goldmark?”

  “I must sound like a fool. I saw him yesterday. I think he is following us, Mr. Clancy. I’m sorry. Do I sound like a hysterical fool?”

  “You don’t sound hysterical.”

  “Could he be following us, Mr. Clancy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  At the museum, Phyllis went to the powder room, and I had an opportunity to call Centre Street. I asked for my exchange and asked them whether I or Miss Goldmark was being tailed.

  “Not today. Where are you?”

  “The auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art. In twenty minutes, they are showing The Great Dictator. I am seeing it with Miss Goldmark. When it breaks, we will stand in front of the museum for at least five minutes. I will try to persuade her to have dinner with me. If she agrees, we will go to the Blue Ribbon, a small German restaurant on Forty-fourth, between Sixth and Seventh. I think we’ll walk.”

  “Did you see the tail?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Description?”

  “Caucasian, fifty, small blue eyes, brachycephalic, five-eight, dimple in left cheek, white-collar type, gray sharkskin suit, black shoes, gray worsted coat, white shirt, blue pinstripe, dark blue tie with diagonal sky-blue stripe, black gloves.”

  “After dinner?”

  “I imagine she’ll want to go home. I’ll take her home, if possible.”

  “Are you sure you were tailed?”

  “I told you what I know. I’m not sure of anything.”

  But I was more certain when the man in the subway car took a seat at one side of the museum theater. Phyllis did not notice him, which was just as well. She enjoyed the film; if she had noticed him, she would have been too nervous to relax and have a good time. I found that I wanted very much for her to relax and enjoy herself, which was rather strange, for I would have said that my interest in her was controlled, narrow, and limited. I had seen the film before. I like Chaplin, but I am not one of those who turn him into a cult or the be-all and end-all of films. Anyway, I had too many things to think about, and I found myself thinking about my wife. I didn’t want to think about that.

  The man in the gray sharkskin suit left before we did, so Phyllis did not see him again; and when the picture was over, we stood in front of the museum for a little while. I suggested dinner together, and as I had suspected she would, Phyllis protested and said that she ought to go home, and that her mother was expecting her, that she had work to do; but her demurrer was without conviction. As with so many women who have no assurance in their femininity, she had to be doubly assured that she was wanted. She was full of anxiety, and I suggested that she call her mother. It was my own need, I pointed out. I ate all my dinners alone. Then she agreed and went inside to call. I smoked a cigarette. Across the street, in the parking garage facing the museum, I noticed a man; not the one in the gray sharkskin; this one stood like a pro, and downtown was written all over him. They are good men but obvious.

  Phyllis returned, and we walked over to Sixth Avenue and then downtown. The evening sky was gray-blue, wild and turbulent, as it sometimes is in March, with small clouds in passage like demented geese and with long slanting spears of sunset coming from the side streets. Phyllis responded to the weather; she shed the anxiety. She had a small but trim body, and she walked well with long, sure strides, and her face was alive and comely. She was unself-conscious until she caught me looking sideways at her, and then she blushed, something she did easily.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me, Mr. Clancy,” she said suddenly. “I couldn’t bear that.”

  “Of all the damn things to say!” I burst out. “Good God, how do you fall into saying something like that, Miss Goldmark?”

  “I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  “Angry? Angry hell! I just don’t make any sense of what you said. I had a good time this afternoon. Didn’t you?”

  “Of course I did. I loved the picture. And it was very pleasant to be with you.”

  “Then why all this about feeling sorry for you?”

  “I don’t know. It was just something I said.”

  “Don’t ever say it again when I’m with you.”

  “No——”

  “Remember that!”

  “I’ll try to remember.” Her small, hesitant smile flickered on her lips.

  We ordered dinner. The restaurant was not expensive, not beyond the means of an assistant professor, and the food was good. We were both of us hungry after our walk and the cold evening air, and I found myself feeling alive. It was a particular and simple feeling—but strange to me for a considerable time. It didn’t change when she talked about me and about my wife.

  “You said you eat alone so much,” Phyllis remembered. “Don’t you have any family, Mr. Clancy? Or perhaps you don’t want to talk about personal matters?”

  “I would be delighted to talk about anything you want to talk about, Miss Goldmark. Or do I know you well enough to call you Phyllis? Do you know that in any other part of these United States, or if we were in any other occupation, I guess I mean, I would be calling you Phyllis and you would be calling me Tom. Still, I imagine that on the faculty of Knickerbocker, we could go on with Miss Goldmark and Mr. Clancy for another year or two?”

  “We could.” She smiled.

  “Would you call me Tom? I’ll call you Phyllis, if that’s all right.”

  “Yes, it’s all right.”

  “Very good then. Phyllis. I don’t mind talking about personal matters. I have a brother who is an army colonel, stationed in Korea. He has a wife and two children, whom I have never seen. I haven’t seen him for seven years. He considers me an impractical person, an egghead and a fool. My feelings toward him are neutral. I have a sister who is married and lives in Philadelphia. Her husband has the largest Buick agency there, and he’s well-fixed, and they have no children. I see her about once a year. My father and mother are dead. I was born in Brooklyn Heights, raised there, went to New Utrecht High School, discovered I had considerable mathematical aptit
ude, won a scholarship at N.Y.U. Engineering, majored in physics, got my degree in 1941, and enlisted in the Army—” It trailed off there. She was watching me intently and thoughtfully.

  “You are a strange man, Mr. Clancy. Tom.”

  “We all of us are, Phyllis. Strange men, strange women. Two-bit philosophers, saints and idiots——”

  “There were never any children? In your marriage, I mean?”

  “I was married only a few months before my wife got sick. She died of leukemia.”

  “How terrible!”

  “Yes—” What does one say? Death is terrible; the death wrapped in the mystery of ignorance, fear, and perhaps our own human viciousness, is a little worse.

  I took Phyllis home at about nine—she lived on 174th Street, between Broadway and Fort Washington Avenue—and then I rode back downtown to my two rooms in a brownstone, converted, on West Sixty-eighth Street. It was a good enough place, as such places went, a high-ceilinged room about twenty by sixteen, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom about eight by ten, but it was filled with the taste and thought and dreams of a woman who had been dead two years and would dream no more. It was also inhabited by my memories of her, and it fed my aloneness and frustration. I had thought of leaving it, but it was not just an apartment that was sick; it was myself, and I would take my own cud of bitterness with me wherever I went.

  Tonight, I made coffee, smoked a cigarette, read an article on fusion, read a chapter of Fermi, showered, and went to bed. I lay with my thoughts for company, and I know it was past two in the morning before I slept.

  The following day, I sat in on Phyllis’s lecture—“Concerning Light as a Particle”—and afterwards we had our sandwich and coffee together again. She seemed to look forward to this and to gain a degree of her own restrained pleasure out of it. After lunch, I had a meeting with Professor Gorland, who said that for appearances’ sake, and considering that I could handle it, he would like to give me a seminar of twelve students. I asked him for a day or so to think it over. Then I worked in the library for about an hour, and as I left, I ran into Professor Vanpelt.

  “The top of the afternoon to you, Clancy,” he said.

  “How do you do, sir,” I nodded.

  “A fat flower in the acres of ivy—I do well, Clancy. Are you a drinking man? Surely, with that name, you will join me for a drop of the stuff?”

  “It’s my pleasure,” I agreed, and we walked over to Broadway to a bar where Vanpelt was no stranger. He ordered gin and bitters, and I took scotch on ice. He asked me how I liked Knickerbocker, and I said it was too soon to decide. Then I asked him about Alexander Horton, since he had brought up the subject the day before.

  “Horton, huh? He had a Victorian romance—for want of a better word—with your Miss Goldmark. She’s Jewish, you know.”

  “I had guessed it,” I said soberly. I was Clancy, without feelings or sensibilities. “You say he disappeared?”

  “Whisked away,” Vanpelt grinned, watching me carefully. He was a glutton and fat, but under the fat, hard and shrewd.

  “Well—I mean you’re making a mystery out of it.”

  “Great mystery. It’s all there.”

  “What did you mean yesterday?”

  “Just needling, Clancy. I meant nothing at all. You don’t intend to disappear the way Horton did, do you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh? Tell me, Clancy, what kind of work did you do up there in Rochester?”

  “Rochester?”

  “Weren’t you telling me that you were on the research staff at Consolidated Dynamics?”

  “Was I?”

  “Well, word gets around. I suppose it was on this top secret kick.”

  “Not at all,” I smiled. “I worked with heavy water.”

  “Heavy water. That’s enlightening.”

  “We’ll talk about it some time,’’ I nodded. “I’m afraid I must get back to my work now.”

  “Chew some mints. Gorland is bugged on hard water. Hard water—heavy water. Very good, yes? Have a mint.”

  I took a mint and tried to pay for the drinks, but he wouldn’t hear about it. Then I went back to the science building, to the tiny office that had belonged to Alexander Horton, and called my exchange at Centre Street.

  “Are we on tape?” I asked.

  “You’re being recorded, Clancy. Go ahead.”

  “I want a full run down on John Vanpelt, full professor at Knickerbocker, science department, age about fifty, weight about two-twenty, possible slight foreign accent—his Gs seem to click with a K sound, blue eyes, bald on top, gray sides and back, one gold cap, upper left, a glutton over food, which might indicate a habit. I’ll have a picture of him tomorrow.”

  “That’s all?”

  “For the time being,” I said.

  Then I went to Gorland’s office and asked whether he had a picture of Professor Vanpelt that I might borrow.

  “Really, Mr. Clancy,” he said, “we’re operating a school, you know. We don’t keep dossiers with photos attached.”

  “Yes, of course,” I agreed. “Possibly in a yearbook—or something of the sort.” Gorland sighed and hunted on his shelves and came up with a small picture of Vanpelt in Knickerbocker’s scientific quarterly.

  That evening, I let myself into my apartment on Sixty-eighth Street and flicked on the lights in the living room, and two men were sitting there. One of them sat in the captain’s chair that Helen and I bought during our honeymoon on Cape Cod. He was the hard-boned kind; they prefer chairs that are not upholstered. He sat erect and stiff and alert, a small, thin, narrow-faced man, neatly dressed, and holding a big Luger on me. The other sat on the couch. He was two hundred pounds of broad shoulders and muscle gone to middle age, the whole meaty slab of neck and shoulders overbuilt and sagging, the size seventeen neck holding up the head of the all-American boy athlete, crew cut graying, cheeks flushed with alcohol instead of buoyant health, and one big ham hand holding a .45 service model that he didn’t need. He was over my weight. But he held the revolver carefully as he grinned and made me welcome in my own home.

  “Surprise,” he said. “Just like in the movies.”

  “Just like in the movies,” I nodded.

  “Stop clowning and see if he has a gun,” said the one in the captain’s chair. “Around and behind him, Jackie.” The accent was Spanish or Portuguese.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Brown,” a reply of respect mixed with the need on Jackie’s part to deny that he was a muscle-bound dolt. He moved around behind me, lightly and gracefully, and ran his hand under my arms and across my pockets. “No gun,” he said.

  “I thought so. What would they say at Knickerbocker, a professor who carried a gun? We have searched your place. Where is your gun, Mr. Clancy?”

  I shrugged.

  “Sit down there, Mr. Clancy,” he said, pointing to a Hitchcock chair that had been a wedding present to Helen from her grandmother. I sat down and waited. Mr. Brown did the speaking. He asked me why they were there.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “Can’t you guess, Mr. Clancy?”

  “I suppose I could guess. I could go on guessing all night. Is that what you want me to do?” I noticed now a bulging accountant’s brief case next to Mr. Brown’s chair.

  “No, we don’t have all night,” he replied, putting the Luger into a shoulder holster. Then he said to his helper, “Put your gun away, Jackie. This is not an ape we are dealing with. This is a cultured man, a civilized man. I have been looking at your books,” he explained to me. “Culture is not synonymous with a knowledge of physics, as we both have reason to know. But look at a man’s books and you are looking into that man’s soul and mind. Know a man by what he reads. The word makes the man.”

  “Most of the books belonged to my wife,” I said.

  “I admire Americans. Faced with a personal compliment, they become cynical and vulgar. They are obligated to a certain image of themselves. But we are not here to talk about books, Mr. Cl
ancy. We are here to bribe you. After all, we are not diplomats. Why go through a diplomatic exchange of nonsense? I believe in coming to the point. My employers feel that every man has his price. In this brief case beside me are seven thousand five hundred twenty-dollar bills. It is clean money, not stolen and not recorded, and it can be spent with impunity. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars—they have decided that is your price.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Naturally. Who would not be? When your federal taxes are considered, this is a fortune—believe me. Men have done terrible things for such an amount of money.”

  “And what am I supposed to do for it? What am I being bribed for?”

  He shook his head. “There is no need to discuss that. I do not propose to be led into any tiresome discussion of ethics. I do not ask, will you take a bribe? The bribe is given to you. You have no choice in the matter—none. I ask you no questions—because we know all that it is necessary for us to know. We know where you go and what you do. And when we pay for something, we get value in return for our money. Is that plain, Mr. Clancy?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not plain.”

  “It is plain to us, Mr. Clancy. Now just remain where you are for a little while. The money is in the brief case.”

  With that, they both rose, walked to the door, went through and closed the door behind them. Just as simple as that. I locked the door behind them, bolted it and went to the brief case. It was stuffed full of packages of twenty-dollar bills. I did not doubt that there were exactly seven thousand, five hundred bills.

  It was nine o’clock. I called my exchange at Centre Street and told them what I wanted. I told them that I would wait thirty minutes, then leave my apartment, walk to Columbus Avenue and two blocks north to Seventieth Street. I would be on the southeast corner, and I would like a cab cruising east across Seventieth to pick me up. I would also like a good man in the cab. I also asked them to reach Commissioner Comaday and said that I would see him in his office when I got to Centre Street.