by Howard Fast
Donovan interrupted him: “No, Mr. Castle! I can’t have you confessing to me.”
Castle’s smile was unexpected. “You’re right. You know what Groucho Marx said, ‘I wouldn’t join a club that would have me as a member.’”
“I don’t mean it that way,” the monsignor said softly.
“No, of course not. Do me one favor, let me write out a check for your church.”
Donovan looked at him searchingly. “Why?”
Castle shrugged. “I feel I’m in deep shit up to my neck. Something happened to me tonight. I never talked like this before. I dumped on you; I don’t dump on people. On Wall Street, I’m one crafty, nasty son of a bitch. That’s what I am and I’m no damn different now, but I’m tired. I’m just so fuckin’ tired.”
“Will it help if you write me a check?”
“Yes.”
“All right. I’d like to help. Make it out to St. Matthew’s Church.”
Castle went to his desk, took out a checkbook, and wrote the check. He handed it to the monsignor.
“This is for ten thousand dollars,” Donovan said.
“I won’t miss it.”
“Thank you.”
“For Christ’s sake, don’t thank me.”
“I must, Castle. It will do a lot of good.”
“I’ve spent a lifetime hating do-gooders. I still do. I haven’t changed.”
The monsignor and Sister Brody left. Sister Brody kissed Sally and said she would see her again. The monsignor thanked Castle for a good evening. When he and the nun were in the car, driving back to the neighborhood where their church was located, Sister Brody said, “I suppose you have no intention of telling me what went on between you and Castle?”
“That’s an excellent supposition.”
“I have the right to be curious, considering what I’ve heard about the man.”
“Everyone has the right to be curious. We can thank God for that.” Then, after a moment, he added, “Castle gave me a check, made out to St. Matthew’s, for ten thousand dollars.”
“What! I don’t believe you.”
“Sister, Sister.”
“Ten thousand dollars—that’s wonderful.”
“I argued against it. I didn’t want to take it.”
“You argued against it? For heaven’s sake, do you know how much we need that money, how much we can do with it, how many hungry mouths can be fed, how much food and medicine we can send to El Salvador and Guatemala—”
“Sister, please don’t lecture me! I happen to know exactly what we can do with it.”
Thirteen
Harold Sellig drove away from the dinner party to join his wife at the hospital. He was full of good food, two glasses of wine, the lingering taste of the Cuban cigar, and a heavy load of guilt. He felt that he should have been with his wife at the hospital, that she was facing perhaps the most serious crisis of her life and that he had allowed her to go and keep a vigil alone because he selfishly desired to make a clinical study of a very rich man and his trophy wife. He had gone with her urging and with Dr. Ferguson’s assurance that the operation was a “lead-pipe cinch.” Harold said he had no idea of what a lead-pipe cinch was, and Dr. Ferguson had carefully explained that in ancient times—some fifty or sixty years ago—underground utility connections were sealed with hot lead. Harold had grown up with a father who never understood him, and when he married Ruth, Dr. Ferguson had adopted him as the son he never had.
On board the aircraft carrier, off the coast of Vietnam and amid the screeching, banging hellish noise of an aircraft carrier in action, Harold, as a naval historian, found solace in the antique game of pinochle, which he played with two sailors from the engine room, who taught him the game. He brought the game home with him, and some of the best hours of their marriage were spent with Dr. Ferguson, playing pinochle, a game that can only be played with grim seriousness and loving anger.
He and Ruth had frequently argued about and discussed “Jewish guilt.” She held that it was genetic, but Dr. Ferguson rejected that view and said there was a limit to how much you could blame on the genes. He put it to the series of misfortunes that spelled out Jewish history, but Ruth insisted that the whole idea of the victim carrying the burden of guilt was fallacious. Harold dutifully excised from his speech any mention of guilt; nevertheless on occasions such as this, he wallowed in it.
It was a half hour past ten when he reached the hospital, parked, and went to the waiting room, where he found Ruth, drawn and tired, talking to a young redheaded man, who was introduced to him as David Greene.
“You’re Herb’s son?”
David nodded.
“How’s it going with Seth?” Harold asked Ruth.
“Not good,” she said bleakly.
Harold put his arms around her and kissed her. She tightened the embrace and clung to him. That spelled out her condition to her husband. She was not a clinging woman.
“What happened?”
“Dad’s back in the operating room.”
“Why? What happened?”
“I don’t know what happened. But they called the surgeon back and Dad’s in the operating room again.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
Harold turned to look at David.
“I don’t know much more than that, Mr. Sellig. I was with my girlfriend, Nellie Kadinsky, when Dr. Loring called her and told her to meet him here, at the hospital. She’s his scrub nurse, and he said it was an emergency. I drove her here, and I’m waiting for her.” David hesitated, not knowing what else he should say. He felt he had no right to pass on Nellie’s comments about the operation, and he knew it would only make things worse for Ruth Sellig.
“What kind of an emergency? Did she say?”
David shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Harold drew Ruth over to a couch, and she huddled against him. He knew enough about bypass operations to realize that stopping the heart twice in a matter of hours was no small thing. What would Seth Ferguson’s death do to Ruth? Her relationship with her father was, he felt, stronger than their own relationship. When she whispered, “Hal, what will I do if he dies?” and he assured her that Seth would not die, it was like the cold wind of death flowing over both of them. He hated hospitals. He had spent hours in the ship’s hospital of the carrier. Terrible things happen on an aircraft carrier, things that the public is never informed of. Every landing of a plane was a passage with death, and Harold remembered a visit to the bomb hold, where there was enough explosive to blow away an entire country; and there the stink of death was not a smell but a vibration thick as molasses, and that was the way it felt in this waiting room now.
He simply could not ask Ruth whether she had read any of the manuscript or the changes he had made in it. That would be like asking her whether she had touched base with death.
“How long since the surgeon was here?” he asked. “Did you see him?”
“For a moment.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Just that there were complications and that he had to hurry off.”
There was nothing to say that Harold could think of, and Ruth was silent, her mind filled with memories of fishing in the Long Island Sound when she was a small girl, when she was eleven and twelve, the two years after her mother had died of cancer. They kept a small rowboat at Tod’s Point, that strange finger of land that Greenwich was so proud of, and they would go bottom fishing with no poles, just string lines, and occasionally they would hook a flounder or blowfish, throw back the blowfish and take the flounders home. Those were wonderful days, and sometimes they would just sit and drift with the incoming tide, and she would read to Seth, while he smoked his pipe and allowed the delicious smell to drift past her.
Those are death thoughts, she told herself with annoyance, and said to Harold, “He’ll make it, won’t he? Tell me that he’ll make it.”
“Of course, he’ll make it.”
It was more than an hour since Harold ha
d come there, and as they spoke, Seth Ferguson was already dead, and Dr. Loring was firming up his resolve to go to the waiting room and inform Ruth that her father had passed away.
He entered the waiting room, still in his green gown, and stood looking at David and Harold and Ruth. Then he walked over to Ruth.
“I’m so sorry. We tried everything we could. His heart was too weak. I’m sorry.”
Fourteen
While Harold and Ruth Sellig and David Greene were waiting to hear the results of Dr. Ferguson’s second operation, Frank Manelli and Abel Hunt were in the emergency room, on the ground floor where Christina had been taken to have her arm x-rayed.
They were alone in the small waiting room. The emergency room at the hospital was not a very busy place at this hour, and they had a bit of time to talk without Christina’s presence. Manelli was still pushing to go on out to the Castles’ place, and Abel was still trying to cool him off.
“Like I said,” Abel told him, “you stay out of this. What are you after? Revenge? This is a part of a kid’s growing up. She learned something about people. Lessons are painful but necessary.”
“I don’t buy that.”
“If you want revenge, sue him.”
“I don’t sue people. You know what it costs to sue someone?”
“We’ll go to the cops,” Abel assured him. “That’s punishment enough. They’ll go out to Castle’s place and arrest the kid, and Castle will have to post bond. The kid will have a record.”
“He probably has a record already. I’m pissed off. I want to put my hands on that little bastard.”
“Good. Then you’ll be arrested, too.”
The arrival of a young intern with Christina and the X rays put an end to their conversation. “Nothing broken or dislocated,” the intern told them cheerfully. “She has a sprained shoulder, and we’ll give her a sling. I’ll give you a couple of patches to change the ones I put on her face. Just scratches. She’ll be fine. Some swelling around the arm, nothing else. She’s very beautiful. The scratches won’t leave any scars, so she’ll be just as beautiful.”
Christina squirmed with the praise. As with any fifteen-year-old, the sling was a sort of status symbol. She had already decided to say nothing to anyone about what had happened. The sling would add to the mystery.
From the hospital, they drove to the police station, down Mason Street almost to the Sound. There is a ridge that runs for miles along the Connecticut coast, at times near the Long Island Sound, at times a mile or two away from it. The business section of Greenwich, where the police station is located, is down from the ridge and closer to the Sound, just a few minutes drive from the hospital at that time of the night.
While Greenwich is considered one of the wealthiest towns in America, to New York City what Beverly Hills is to Los Angeles, it is far larger than Beverly Hills, sixty thousand people, running the gamut from the outrageously rich to the middle class and then to the poor—which gives its police a peculiar problem—ultrarich neighborhoods where they have to tread very carefully. If you think of cops in terms of tarnish, they are by no means untarnished.
Sergeant Yeats was at the desk, and after he listened to Frank and studied the two angry men and the sad-faced girl thoughtfully, he asked her, “How do you feel now, Christina?”
“It hurts. In more ways than one.”
“You state that you were not raped. Was there any attempt at rape?”
“He came on to me …” She hesitated. “I think he wanted to.”
“How do you feel about letting this pass?”
“No way!” Frank exclaimed.
“Has the kid ever been charged?” Abel asked.
“Yes, he’s been in trouble. But I’m asking your daughter,” he said to Frank.
“Whatever my dad says,” Christina replied.
“You want him arrested, Mr. Manelli?”
“Damn right.”
“OK. I’ll send a couple of officers out there, and they’ll bring him in. I have to tell you that the old man is a decent guy. He supports our Silver Shield drive generously. I’m not trying to make an exception; we get a good deal of this here in town, and generally it’s simply a fine—as long as the parent cooperates and makes the kid work for it.”
“As long as you arrest him and put the fear of God into him.”
At this point Frank had cooled down considerably, and they left the station house and drove back to Chicka-hominy, dropping Abel off at his house.
Abel’s wife, Delia, his son, Joe, and his two daughters, Sarah and Helen, were still up, sitting at the kitchen table and waiting for him. Delia had coffee ready, and there was raisin pound cake on the table.
“How about some ham and eggs?” Abel said. “Sunny-side up. How about that, Delia, my own sweet love?”
“You mean you didn’t eat at the party?”
“I am starved.” And turning to his kids, he said, “How about you all get upstairs to bed. Gossip, gossip. You’d all sell your britches for a little juicy gossip.”
“I don’t wear britches,” Sarah said.
“And we just wanted to hear how Christie is. See?”
“Christie’s just fine.” Delia was already setting up the pan and preparing to slice ham. “You know, Honeybunch,” Abel said, “that I don’t eat at a party. I can’t eat when I’m doing the cooking. I taste. And you’re letting the pan get too hot.”
“Just don’t teach me how to cook,” Delia said.
“No way, never,” Abel agreed.
Fifteen
Nellie, changed into her street clothes, went to the room where David was waiting for her. Harold and Ruth were still there, Ruth crying and Harold with his arm around her. Nellie went to them and asked whether she could help. Rising, Harold took her aside.
“My wife would like to see him, her father.”
“Yes, I can understand that. They took him into the pathology room, and she can see him if she feels strongly about it.” Nellie spoke in a whisper. “But it wouldn’t be good now. Tomorrow, after the undertaker removes the body—well, Dr. Ferguson will look better.”
“What undertaker?” He had no idea how one went about a burial.
“Dr. Ferguson was a Protestant?”
“Yes—if he was anything. He left instructions to be cremated, I believe.”
“Protestants usually use Halley, I mean if you do it here in Greenwich. That’s—” She spelled it out, and Harold jotted it down. “You don’t have to do anything tonight. I have a couple of sleeping pills here. Try to get her to take them. In the morning, you can call Mr. Halley, and he’ll call the hospital and pick up the body.” She gave him a small bottle with two yellow pills in it. “She can take both of them. Mr. Halley will tell you exactly what to do, and when you can both go over there and look at the body. But take your wife home now, if you can talk her out of going to the pathology room.”
Harold told Ruth what Nellie had said, and she agreed; he helped her rise. His manuscript was stuffed into the large purse she carried, and he wondered briefly whether she had even looked at it.
When they had left, Nellie turned to David. “You poor kid. I plucked you out of bed in the middle of good love-making, and now you’ve been sitting here for hours.”
“It’s all right. She had someone to talk to.”
“You didn’t mention anything I said to you—about him having flubbed it?”
“Goodness, no.”
“Thank God. There was some bleeding internally, but that didn’t do it. His heart stopped, and we couldn’t start it again. There was just too much damage. Dr. Loring is sitting in his office now, getting drunk and still in his operating clothes—and, David,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I’ll marry you.”
“What? What on earth!”
“If you’ll have me?”
He threw his arms around her and kissed her. “Will I have you? Will I ever! But what—?”
“Death. It’s as simple as that.” She clung to him.
Sixteen
Harold drove Ruth home. Sitting beside him, Ruth managed to say, “Don’t talk to me, Hal. I just want to be inside of myself and remember.”
“Inside of myself and remember” lodged in Harold’s mind, and he looked at his wife as if he had never seen her before. Just as he had been the son Seth Ferguson never had, Seth Ferguson was the father he never had, His father, his own father, had a savage distaste for everything he did, writing, joining the navy, becoming a part of the Vietnam tragedy, his rejection of religion, his contempt for wealth, and in all these things he had found a soul mate in Seth Ferguson. He was not a weeping person and he found it almost impossible to cry; yet now his eyes welled with tears and he wished in his heart that Seth Ferguson still existed somewhere. He remembered one of the many conversations with Seth, when Seth had mentioned that he didn’t want to be put in any damn coffin and be food for the worms. “And I don’t want any of this nonsense about an afterlife. God Almighty, the sheer boredom of it!” How strange that he had used that expression! “Just incinerate me, and don’t keep the ashes.” That was the word he had used, incinerate.
Yet there had been one conversation where Seth had backed off and said to Harold, “I must admit, Hal, that one thing keeps me from being a card-carrying member of the atheists’ society—and that’s the damn human liver. The more I study it, the more I’m confounded. It defies every process of evolution and natural selection. Do you realize that the liver performs over five hundred functions that we know about and more that we haven’t discovered yet. Liver tissue consists of thousands of tiny lobules, arid these are constructed of hepatic cells, and these are the basic metabolic cells. The liver function involves the digestive system, excretion, detoxification, blood chemistry. It produces bile for the process of fat digestion, it stores glucose—and God only knows what else it does, and I could sit here all evening listing other functions that we have already discovered, and there’s just no way, absolutely no way, that I can conceive of this as a result of natural selection.”
