by Howard Fast
“Do you mean that you’ll put him in jail overnight?” Sally asked woefully.
“The cells are clean. You can come along with him, if you want to, Mr. Castle.”
Dickie looked at his father pleadingly, but Castle shook his head. “You’ll take good care of him. I’ll be down tomorrow.” And turning to Dickie, “Consider it a lesson in propriety.”
“Oh no,” Sally pleaded. “Does he have to go to jail?”
“The sergeant said bring him in. I don’t know where else he can sleep downtown. We won’t book him until Mr. Castle sees him tomorrow.” Then Oscar said to the other officer, “Take him out to the car and make him comfortable.”
Tears in her eyes, Sally watched Dickie walk out with the officer.
“Go back to bed,” Castle said. “I’ll come up in a few minutes.”
She obeyed him without further question. She always obeyed him.
Castle took out his wallet and removed two hundred-dollar bills.
“This is not a bribe,” he said, “and split it with the other officer. It’s a small gratuity for the way you’re running this. You could have come down hard and you didn’t. He needs a lesson. Tell the sergeant I’ll see him tomorrow.”
Castle stood in the foyer for a few minutes after the police car had driven off, reflecting on the fact that during all the years of a very active life, he had never been arrested. He felt a touch of sorrow for his son, thinking that this was not the first time Dickie had been in trouble and it wouldn’t be the last. Anyone who was so bereft of common sense that he would come on to a straitlaced Italian working-man’s fifteen-year-old daughter would walk into anything. He didn’t particularly like Dickie, who had come to him at age twelve, after five years of separation. They never talked, father and son, the way he had seen it done in movies, and that had never troubled him.
Finally, he went up to the bedroom.
Sally, still in her robe and sitting on a chaise, asked a question she had rehearsed several times in her mind: “Why did you let them take him away, Richard?”
“What else could I do?”
In her mind, Sally had formed another question: Why didn’t you go with him? But she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Instead, “What did he do, Richard? Was it bad?”
“He swore he didn’t rape her or do anything else except tug on her arm to keep her in the car. They were parked alongside a stone wall. She jumped out of the car into the wall and scratched her face.”
“Then why did they take him away?”
“I don’t know all the details, Sally. Tomorrow, we’ll go down to the police station and work it out.”
Sally nodded, slipped out of her robe, and crawled into bed. She had already dried her eyes and removed the little makeup she used, and when Richard lay down beside her, she folded herself into his arms. He held her to him for a few minutes and then asked her whether she was cold.
“No. You know, the air-conditioning gets stronger at night. Shall I turn it down?”
“No, I’ll let your body warm me.”
Her body did warm him, but he felt that his soul was encased in ice. It was an odd feeling, for he had never thought of himself before in terms of having a soul.
Nineteen
Mary Greene and her husband, Herbert, had left the Castles’ shortly after Harold Sellig had excused himself to join his wife at the hospital. Herbert admitted to Mary that the dinner party had not been half bad, certainly not as boring as he had expected it to be. Mary was driving. She slowed down and said, “That’s being ungracious. You always make a thing out of seeing the Castles, as if you were doing them some great extraordinary favor.”
“And you’re slowing down to order me out and make me walk home. Is that it?”
“It’s a thought. No, there’s something wrong with the car.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the car. You’re in low gear.”
“Thank you. And one day, you’ll be the designated driver.”
“But you never drink. It’s an act of pure charity.”
“What? My not drinking?”
“No. Your driving.” He added, “And my eyes are getting rotten. I dislike night driving.”
“And my eyes?”
“You’re nine years younger than I.”
“Oh, I know. As a matter of fact, you do remind me of that now and then. I should warn women about marrying a man a decade older than they are: He can’t drive at night because his eyes are getting bad. He can’t lift things because his back is going. He can’t remember things because his memory is going—”
“My memory is fine, and you know it. As for my back—have I ever whimpered about my back? All right, I enjoyed tonight. Sally Castle is one of the prettiest women I have ever seen—”
“Oh, thank you. When do men grow up?”
“They don’t have to grow up if they marry the right woman.”
“Deeper and deeper, Herb.”
“All right, I don’t like rich men. That’s generic. I’m what they call an old lefty. I have a reputation for that, which I feel I must preserve. The voices of reason become quieter and quieter. And in apology for my remark about a woman being beautiful, I did like Sister Brody. She is something. If there were a million like her, the world would change its axis.”
“And the monsignor?”
“Ah, there’s a man I’d like to talk to and get his careful guard down. A very interesting man. Do you know him well enough to invite him to dinner?”
“I think so. But we can’t afford Abel Hunt.”
“A great man in his own right,” the professor acknowledged. “The French understand that food is the essence of civilization, not computers but food, and when food is like what we ate tonight, we perform an exercise in civilization.”
“Wow!” Mary exclaimed. “That’s the most astonishing explanation for stuffing yourself that I ever heard.”
“Thank you. But to get back to Donovan and Sister Brody, there’s something happening in that church of yours that boggles my mind. I recall that years ago when Heywood Broun joined the Catholic Church, his Wasp friends came down on him like a ton of bricks, and his answer was that when the Church Militant begins to march, you’ll feel the earth shake.”
“Wow again. But who was Heywood Broun?”
Herb sighed. “Who was Heywood Broun? Not surprising in a country with a twenty-four-hour memory, but you’re a teacher of children, a molder of young minds—”
“Herb! Get off it!”
“All right. He was a lefty newspaper columnist at the old New York World, if my memory serves me. My dad never missed his column.”
“May he rest in peace. Meanwhile, you’re right and wrong about what is happening to our church. We have a pope who is a great and brave man, and he has shaken the world a little, and we have a lot of people like those two you met tonight. We also have a lot of people who are not like them and would like to toss them out on their derrieres, given the chance. Someday, God willing, the Liberation Church and the Catholic Church may become the same thing—maybe someday.”
They were at home now, and Mary steered the car into the garage. Theirs was an old Victorian house, which they had bought years before for thirty-nine thousand dollars and since then poured a goodly part of their savings into it. Now hardly a week passed without some Greenwich realtor begging to sell it for a million dollars plus. Such was the fate of real estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. At some point, starting about two decades ago, for reasons both arcane and evident, Greenwich had become the place where rich people preferred to live. Evident was the fact that it was only an hour from New York by car, less by train. Arcane, because no one ever can explain why a suburban town becomes The Place.
Both Herbert and Mary loved the house the first time they saw it; Mary because it reminded her of her childhood home in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Herbert because of the porch, an old-fashioned porch that covered the whole front of the house and half of each side as well. The porch induced euphoric d
reams of a time gone by, when people sat on their front porches and nodded and exchanged the time of day with their neighbors, while other people in buggies drove by. Of course, he was not old enough to have seen any of this, except in films and old engravings; nevertheless, it captured his heart and he refused to have the porch screened in and insisted on rocking chairs and wickerwork couches and grass rugs.
As they came onto the porch this evening, there was his cigar where he had left it, and as he picked it up, Mary said, “Oh, no, you’re not going to smoke that wretched thing now before we go to bed.”
“Not from your tone—absolutely not.” He returned it to the ashtray. Inside the house, the telephone was ringing.
“I’ll get it,” Mary said. “Who could be calling at this hour?”
“Thank you, my dear, I love you,” Herb replied, dropping down on the wicker sofa and stretching his legs. It was a beautiful, clear night, a full moon high in the sky, and the temperature about seventy degrees. He was a contented man, he told himself, and his lot was all that any man could desire. He had a wife he loved, a daughter who was either upstairs in bed or in the arms of some young lover and who was a pre-med sophomore at Yale, and a son who was a solid, decent young man—all of it so different from Castle, who had fathered a young scamp, already making a nasty reputation in town. He thought about Castle now and admitted to himself that in all truth he had misjudged him. Castle had been a charming host, offered the best of food and drink, as well as a Cohiba, something he had never smoked before. And his wife—well, she was obviously a trophy wife, but a real strawberry blond, and one had to give him credit for buying the best in the market. She was sweet and gentle and obedient; and while he loved Mary, no one ever gave her points for obedience, although she had her moments of sweetness. She was a handsome, sharp-nosed Irish Catholic, and his mind went off, wondering why so many Jewish men, like himself, married second-generation Irishwomen; and then his thoughts turned to Harold Sellig, an interesting man, no one you would think of as a Vietnam veteran. He had read one of Harold’s best-sellers that had been made into a successful film, enriching its author beyond measure, a book dismissed by Herbert as a contrived adventure-romance of no particular worth. His own books on linguistics had sold a few thousand copies and brought him a few thousand dollars, pedagogical tomes, yet he felt no envy and liked the fact that Harold Sellig looked so much like pictures he had seen of Gilbert K. Chesterton. Sellig’s theory of universal guilt fascinated Herbert. Some months ago, Sellig had sent him a more recent draft of the manuscript; but as with so many manuscripts sent to him, he had put it aside and never read it. He decided that he would read it now.
At that point in his musing, Mary came out of the house, her face bleak. Thinking immediately of some family tragedy, Herbert leaped to his feet and went to her. “What happened?”
“Seth Ferguson is dead.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He died tonight on the operating table.”
Herbert embraced her. “That good, sweet man.”
“Hold me tight, Herb, very tight. I love you. Don’t ever die on me. I’ll never forgive you if you do.”
“I promise,” he said.
“Sellig said Seth had talked of the operation as a lark. He’d be back in the office in a week. Have you Kleenex or something in your pocket?” He gave her a handkerchief, and she wiped her eyes.
“How old was he—seventy or so?”
“Too young to die,” Mary said.
“Who called?” Herb asked her.
“David. He’s staying over at Nellie’s place, and they both want to come here for breakfast. It’s Saturday and Nellie’s off. David says they have important matters to discuss with us.”
“Oh?”
“I think they’re going to tell us that they want to get married.”
“Come on. You’re jumping to conclusions. He’s only twenty-one, and he has a year of college to finish. She’s older, isn’t she?”
“Twenty-three or twenty-four.”
He shook his head. “We’ll see. Seth Ferguson, what a loss, what a shame!”
“Come to bed, Herb, I want to crawl into your arms.”
Twenty
By midnight, Frank Manelli’s anger had cooled. His three kids were in bed, and he sat in the kitchen with his wife, Connie, drinking hot chocolate and munching one of her delicious raisin-and-oatmeal cookies. She had read somewhere that hot chocolate, made with milk, was a beneficial thing at bedtime. Frank was tired; usually he was in bed by ten and up at six, but this was Friday night, and he was determined to take no calls the following day, unless it was the most dire of emergencies. “And say a prayer that nothing happens tonight, no flooded bathrooms, no broken pipes. I’ve had it today.”
“You got it,” Connie agreed.
“They don’t even call doctors anymore in the middle of the night.”
Smiling, Connie nodded. “You know what Father Garibaldi said to me? He said that plumbers and electricians were the rock of civilization, and without them, our civilization might well collapse.”
“Come on.”
“And speaking of doctors, Dr. Ferguson died tonight.”
“No! Where did you hear that?”
“Bella Santini called me. Her daughter’s a nurse at the hospital.”
“Why?” Frank growled. “Why? Why is it always the good guys?”
“God has his reasons.”
“I’d like to have a few words with that God of yours.”
“He’s your God, too, Frank, and Sunday they’re having a mass for him, and I want you to go. You missed the last two Sundays.”
“I had emergencies.”
“You have too many emergencies on Sundays, Frank. I hate to bug you, but you do.”
“All right, all right, I’ll go.”
The kitchen phone rang, and Connie grabbed it, listened a moment, and said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Weatherall, but he’s sleeping and he’s exhausted, and I just can’t wake him.” A pause. “Yes, I can understand. You can try an all-night service. I’m sorry.”
“What?” Frank asked.
“She can’t turn off her sprinkler system, and she says everything will be flooded by morning.”
“I hate this damn town!” Frank exploded. “It’s a place of rich, stupid assholes.”
“Frankie, don’t talk like that, even when the kids are not around.”
“Yeah. And when it rains all night, what’s the difference? She lives way out, almost at Banksville, thirty minutes. I came into her place one morning, about eleven. Her sink had a drip. Her husband was in New York. There was a guy in her bed, and she comes out in a robe that left nothing to my imagination. The guy in bed is on his face, the sheet pulled up, and she tells me her husband didn’t go to New York today. Then this guy speaks to her with a foreign accent. I know her husband don’t have no foreign accent. He says the drip is driving him crazy. She don’t give a damn what I see or know.”
“And you had a good look at her, of course.”
“Connie, what do I do? Close my eyes? I look, that’s all. You know that.”
“I know, I’m sorry, Frankie. I have no right to criticize you. I just lied like a trooper.”
“Better than Clinton, I tell you that.”
“I’ll go to confession.”
“Jesus God, Connie, you never done anything wrong in your life. Every week, it’s confession.”
“I do things wrong. If I were a good mom, I’d have known that Christie had a date with the Castle boy, and I would have kept her home.”
“Come off that,” Frank said. “You’re a good mom, the best, and I love you.”
“Yes, and what are you going to do about Dickie?”
“I don’t know. Twenty years ago, I would have beaten the shit out of him, and I guess I’d still be in jail.”
“Twenty years ago, you had just come back from Vietnam, and Christie wasn’t even born yet.”
“I thought of suing him and his father, but Abel says that any kind of a la
wyer charges at least three hundred an hour—can you imagine? Two hundred seventy dollars more than I make an hour. The kid’s spending the night in jail, and that’ll teach him something, and I don’t want no feud with Castle, and I like his wife. She’s dumb but pretty—”
“I never knew a woman you didn’t like.”
“Is that bad? I’m Italian, you want me not to like women? I don’t come on to them. You know that. And Dickie—what the hell, Christie’s all right. I’ll just drop the charges. I’ll go to mass with you and the kids, day after tomorrow, but no confession. What am I going to tell the priest, that I’m Italian? He knows that.”
Twenty-one
Dickie sat alone and forlorn in the holding cell at Greenwich police headquarters. It had been a quiet night, and in the course of things, there was little common crime in Greenwich, often no more than a dozen arrests in a week, most of them for drunken driving or petty theft. When it came to millions of dollars, the criminal record was longer and more interesting, but the movers in this increasing list of multimillion-dollar crimes and litigations never saw the inside of Greenwich police headquarters.
Dickie was frightened, because he had no idea of what awaited him. He had tried to glean some information from the two officers who had arrested him, but they were close-mouthed and gave little. The one instance he had experienced in his past was for disturbing the peace, when he and three of his friends had too much beer and had marched down Greenwich Avenue at two o’clock in the morning, when Greenwich Avenue is like a graveyard, shouting and singing at the top of their lungs. Then they were picked up, taken to the police station, where their parents were called to come and get them and pay their fines. This time was different. Dickie knew that he was being charged with assaulting an underage girl. He knew very little about the law, but the word assault terrified him. He never read newspapers, but watching network television, he had seen many an assault case punished with years of imprisonment. What would he do if they sent him to jail for five years? Five years was an eternity. He had heard, via TV and film, about young men made slaves of the tougher prisoners, raped and beaten, and sometimes killed. Whether this would happen to him in a Connecticut prison, he did not know, but his imagination ran wild. He was seventeen, too old to be tried as a juvenile? He didn’t know.
