Ex Officio

by Donald E. Westlake

  “You’ll make it,” Holt promised. “So I’ll put you down for the first week in March.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Done,” Holt said, and put that last forkful of fish into his mouth, and it was ice cold. He added wine, which was supposed to be cold, and sat back to say, “You still have the world’s best cook.”

  “She stays with me,” Brad said, “because she gets to do a series in a woman’s magazine after I die.” Then he shook his head, and said, “I can see what’s going to happen now. Name a subject, any subject, and it will go straight into a morbid reference.”

  “How about my boy Gregory?” Holt said. “We got a letter from him yesterday, first one in a month or more. He asked to be remembered to you.”

  “I remember him,” Brad said, grinning. “How does he like the Navy?”

  “According to the letter, he hates the Navy, but not as much as he hates the Mediterranean. And he loves his family, but not as much as he loves Audrey White.”

  “Audrey White. Isn’t she related to somebody somehow?”

  “I think she’s a cousin of a fellow that married a niece of Sterling’s wife,” Holt said, Sterling being Brad’s other brother.

  “Of course, Jim White! Didn’t he die?”

  Holt gave a rueful smile and said, “I’m afraid he did, yes.”

  “There, you see? We just can’t talk about anything. Come take my blood pressure and go home to your wife.”

  Holt had had no coffee, but he didn’t protest. Then, on their way out of the room, they met the maid, coming in with the coffee. Brad looked surprised, and said, “My God, you never got your coffee!”

  “That’s all right,” Holt said, nodding to the girl to take it away again. “When I’m going to drive, I’m better off without coffee.”

  Brad looked at him sharply, saying, “It is another symptom, isn’t it? Forgetting things.”

  “Possibly,” Holt admitted.

  “And not a good one, either. It’s lingered. Are there any books on this subject?”

  “Strokes? There are some, yes.”

  “Do you have any?”

  “One or two. You want to borrow them, I suppose.”

  “Know your enemy,” Brad said, smiling, but with an edge to his smile.

  “Evelyn is stopping in tomorrow,” Holt said. “I’ll give them to her.”

  “Fine.”

  v

  EVELYN ARRIVED AT ABOUT three, and Holt had no doubt that her always seeming to show up just at the wrong time to be invited to a meal was not haphazard, but deliberate, a part of that self-effacement that threatened to make the girl completely invisible before long. Holt, who was still ruminating on that instant character analysis given him by Brad yesterday, wondered why Brad didn’t stick a couple of those darts under Evelyn’s skin, get her moving again. But perhaps he did, and they just had no effect.

  In any event, it was another sunny day, and this time Holt saw to it that he steered the girl into a room with sunshine in it. He had strong feelings that she should be kept from dark corners as much as possible. He browbeat her into taking tea, he forced Margaret to join them in order to give the occasion as social a patina as possible, and then he told her the situation:

  “Brad more than likely has had either a slight stroke or a lesser form of the same thing. His blood pressure is up a little, but it isn’t bad. He seems to have had no permanent effects from this one except a very slight tendency to forget things, and that will probably disappear in time.”

  Evelyn, sitting there as prim and plain as though she really were an Avon lady, knees together, holding her teacup in one hand and the saucer in the other, said, “You said, from this one. You expect it to happen again?”

  “It can. There’s a fifty-fifty chance. I want to run some tests on him. I’ve booked him into the hospital for three or four days starting Tuesday, the sixth of March. That’s a week from this coming Tuesday, will you tell him that?”

  “It’s quite serious, then,” she said quietly.

  Margaret, who hadn’t wanted to be present because of her tendency to be overly receptive to other people’s pain, said, “I asked Joe about it last night, Evelyn, and he promised me it’s really unlikely to be serious.”

  “It can be serious,” Holt said, he felt he had to say, “but we’ve caught it early and we should be able to protect Brad from the worst effects of it.”

  “From dying, you mean,” she said.

  “That, too,” Holt said, and immediately regretted it when he saw Margaret give him a quick disapproving look.

  Evelyn had caught it, too, and she looked at him in bewilderment, saying, “What else did you mean?”

  “Well, any illness, I meant,” he said lamely.

  “Oh,” she said faintly, her eyes widening. “This is the sort of thing that can paralyze people, or make them drooling idiots, or drive them insane. Isn’t it?”

  “If we don’t protect ourselves against it,” Holt said, trying to reassure her.

  “Can we protect ourselves against it?”

  An over-simplification would have settled the discussion right there, at least for the moment, but Holt was unable to do that condescending sort of reassurance. “We’re coming to it early,” he said, “which is always good. And there are things we can do.”

  “But we can’t be sure.”

  “As with everything else in life, Evelyn,” Holt said, “we can’t be sure, no.”

  Evelyn looked from Holt to Margaret, her face even paler than usual, her cheekbones more prominent. “God help him,” she said.

  3

  THE THEATER WAS BAD enough, but Evelyn knew that dinner afterward, in a restaurant with a bordello motif, would be worse. And she was right.

  “How many?” the captain asked, and George answered, “Six.” A large enough group to be cumbersome, but too small to hide in.

  Marie, naturally, made trouble about the table. They were such a large and conspicuous group, and Marie had such a large and conspicuous voice, that Evelyn would almost have wished at that second for a bulletin from the hospital to whisk her away. Perhaps a nice false alarm?

  Marie had said, a few days ago, “Of course you’ll stay with us,” so there was nothing to be done about it, even though Evelyn would have preferred to be alone, to stay at a hotel these four days in New York. She’d wanted it for no real reason that could be defined or justified, but only because if one were alone there was still some faint possibility of something happening. Something vague, unpictured, unplotted for. Unlikely, too, of course, but nevertheless possible. Staying with George and Marie defeated all possibility.

  But argument had been out of the question. Marie was not to be denied, not by anyone, certainly not by her husband or her sister-in-law. The only times Evelyn ever felt any true kinship these days with the odd gawky grown-up her brother George had turned out to be was when one or the other of them was being bullied by Marie, who handled them both with the same briskness, like a Red Cross lady handing out doughnuts at the scene of the flood.

  So Evelyn had come obediently over to George and Marie’s apartment today after seeing Bradford settled into the hospital for Uncle Joe’s tests, and when she’d gotten here it had turned out Marie’d decided a show and late dinner would be the best thing under the circumstances for poor Evelyn. Evelyn disagreed, and was as usual irritated at being classified “Poorevelyn” eternally in Marie’s mind, but Marie chose to hear none of Evelyn’s objections, and so they’d all gone out to see some terrible musical comedy full of shiny men and women wearing fierce smiles as they ran and danced and sang and struck poses and yelled their confident smart-aleck lines at one another.

  And now they were in the restaurant, giving their drink orders, sitting around the table of Marie’s choice. The three other members of the party consisted, one and two, of a couple Marie knew because she’d gone to Bryn Mawr with the wife, and three, of a man from George’s office who’d recently been divorced. The man was painful to be aroun
d, partly because the divorce had obviously not been his idea and partly because he didn’t give a damn about Evelyn but clearly felt he should go to bed with her in order to prove to his ex-wife he could get along on his own.

  Evelyn found it impossible to retain the names of any of these people in her head, but it didn’t really seem to matter. They knew who she was, and that was all that counted. Marie had announced at the beginning of the evening that Poorevelyn was in town because her grandfather was in the hospital for a few days for a check-up, and of course Poorevelyn’s grandfather was Youknowwho. (He was George’s grandfather too, naturally, but George was a known quantity and therefore to be discounted; besides, Poorevelyn actually lived with The Great Man.)

  The couple, Marie’s friends, were ravenous for anecdotes they could retail to other people on other occasions, and the man from George’s office tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to convert his self-pity into the appearance of concern for Evelyn, the result being that he kept talking as though Bradford were at death’s door, an implication that didn’t help Evelyn at all.

  Evelyn never liked to be rude, but there were times when it was physically impossible to be anything else, and her only defense at the restaurant was to answer the couple in monosyllables and the pseudo-sympathetic man not at all. It still took them far too long, though, to begin to leave her alone.

  But they finally did, not so much because of Evelyn’s lack of cooperation as because Marie got bored with the conversation and switched it to other channels. It turned out that she and the other wife were involved together in a broad array of charitable concerns, mostly taking place in what they called “disadvantaged” parts of Brooklyn and Queens, and their efforts with “these people” had produced an inexhaustible fund of condescending anecdotes, at each of which the three men dutifully laughed, and all of which served to reinforce the notion that “these people” were charming in their outlandish way but desperately needed discipline. Evelyn picked at her food and waited for it all to be over.

  The maneuverings after dinner were unsubtle to the point of caricature, and ended with George and Marie going off by themselves, leaving Evelyn to be taken home by the other man. In the cab, his desperate search for subject matter led him into further doleful sympathizing about Bradford, Evelyn finally having to rescue them both by asking him about his work, about which she cared nothing. She knew that her brother worked for a company that made film for television, mostly documentaries, plus commercials, and that his title there was Producer, which seemed to mean that he decided whether or not other people would do such-and-such. He himself appeared to do nothing, but only to make decisions about the activities of others. The whole movie/television world that George had drifted into made Evelyn nervous, at least partly because vague gentle George seemed too ill-equipped to survive in it, and she wanted to know no more about it than was absolutely necessary.

  But more premature condolences about Bradford were even worse, so in the cab Evelyn steered the conversation to work, and happily the man took the bait. Men forced to talk with women they feel they should seduce but don’t really want to usually wind up talking about their jobs anyway—probably because they wish they were doing them at the moment—so it was a relief to both of them to have him earnestly explaining to her the difference between above-the-line and below-the-line costs.

  He insisted on riding up in the elevator with her, full of pseudo-gallantry and a kind of forlorn desperation, and his attempt to kiss her outside George’s apartment door was clumsy and ill-timed. Evelyn fended him off, but then he became blindly determined, his expression nothing but grim as they grappled in the small vestibule outside the apartment door. His patent lack of interest in her made him more determined to feign or create interest, and he became more difficult to get rid of than someone who honestly lusted after her. She finally had to ring for the elevator herself and tell him she would ask the operator—an elderly Puerto Rican with steel-framed spectacles—for assistance if he didn’t stop.

  He shifted at once to contrition, and then to explanation, his apologies blending into the beginning of a long meandering hopeless story about his ex-wife. The arrival of the elevator at last cut the story off without any sort of point having been reached, and he asked if he might call her. Knowing it was safe to say yes, that he wouldn’t call her ever, she told him he might, and he backed aboard the elevator with a complex rueful embarrassed smile and was taken away.

  It was now shortly after two, and the people at the hospital had told her she could visit Bradford at ten, so she set her small travel alarm for nine and went straight to bed, where she lay sleepless a long while, thinking of death and Bradford and her parents killed together in a plane crash and her war-killed husband Fred and how the options narrow when all around one the important people keep dying off. And now Bradford was in the hospital, and the suggestion of life without him too was out in the open and had to be looked at. It was true that Uncle Joe had assured her this hospitalization was for the check-up only, but it was nevertheless also true that Evelyn was twenty-six and Bradford was seventy, and some day he would die and she would go on living.

  She heard George and Marie tip-toe noisily in at three-thirty, and not long after that she fell asleep at last, and when the alarm shrilled at nine o’clock she struggled up out of sleep as though from a drug, her mind confused and uncertain, her body heavy and sluggish and unwilling to obey her commands.

  Dressing and washing took longer than usual, it remained very difficult to focus her attention or make her body move with any speed. It was quarter to ten when she was at last ready, and she went through the apartment to find no one else about. George was off to work, of course, but where was Marie?

  Still in bed. Evelyn pushed their bedroom door open a foot or two, and there she was, sprawled on her back across the king-size bed she shared with George. She was only partly covered by the sheet and blanket, and she was sleeping in the nude, her rather small breasts both exposed.

  What was there about the room, or the air, or the posture of the sleeping woman, that cried out the fact of recent intercourse? Whatever it was, there was no doubt in Evelyn’s mind that Marie and George had finished their evening with sex, nor that Marie had found it exciting and satisfying. It seemed strange to think of her gawky brother stretched out atop that long slender body, but he must perform acceptably. George and Marie would be married four years next month, and whatever their problems—Marie tended to bring them up with witnesses present—sexual incompatibility didn’t seem to be among them.

  Abruptly, Evelyn felt such a violent envy of Marie and such an urgent impersonal sexual craving that her hand trembled on the doorknob and she teetered on the brink of losing her balance and falling forward onto the pale green bedroom carpet. She clutched at the doorjamb, and stood blinking and swaying a few seconds, until her equilibrium returned. Then she shut the door again, quickly and silently, and moved away to lean against the wall and give herself up to the trembling, which all at once became tears.

  She pressed her hands to her face and turned to the wall, leaning hard against it. “Oh, Fred, Fred,” she murmured, in bitter reproof, in hurt and disappointment. “Oh, Fred.”

  ii

  IT WAS TEN PAST ten when Evelyn walked into the private room at the end of the long corridor, and Howard was already there, his papers spread all over the bed and the tray and the table and the second chair. Bradford and Howard were deeply involved, the way they always were when working on the memoirs, and Howard looked up with distracted eyes to say, “Oh. Let me clear off a chair for you.”

  “No, that’s all right,” she said. “As long as Bradford has somebody to be with him, I’ll go get myself some breakfast.”

  Howard jabbed a casual thumb at Bradford, saying, “They’re supposed to take him away at ten-thirty. I’ll come down and join you.”

  “Fine,” she said, and smiled brightly at Bradford. “How are you this morning?”

  “Bored. How do you expect a man
to be?” Inactivity always strained Bradford’s sense of humor.

  “That means you’re healthy,” Evelyn told him, and went away to take the elevator back down to the first floor, where there was a cafeteria half full of nurses and interns and Gray Ladies, making Evelyn almost the only one in sight not in some kind of uniform.

  It was possible to order bacon and eggs but not, as it turned out, a good idea. Evelyn was still picking at her plate a quarter of an hour later when Howard came down. He waved to her as he went over to get something to eat, and she pointed at her empty coffee cup. He nodded.

  Howard Lockridge was Bradford’s nephew, the younger son of Bradford’s brother Sterling. Howard was thirty-seven now, a tall and stocky man with a prematurely balding head that gleamed ludicrously in all lights. His glasses had round wire frames, and the lenses also gleamed, making his head predominantly a triangle of reflected light, glasses and brow, with a slightly chubby face lost beneath it.

  Howard was a senior editor at Random House, which was publishing Bradford’s memoirs, in seven projected volumes. The first three volumes had already been published, and all had received generally good reviews except for the inevitable few critics who took the opportunity to criticize Bradford’s political record rather than the book he had written. The first volume was called The Grass Roots of Power, and told about Bradford’s father, Solomon Lockridge, who had been a politician of some import on the local level in Pennsylvania in the first two or three decades of this century, and told also of Bradford’s own entrance into politics, winning a seat in the House of Representatives early in the Depression.

  The second volume, The Politics of Hunger, concerned itself with the New Deal years of the thirties, during most of which Bradford was a Congressman from Pennsylvania. The book ended with his first winning a Senate seat on the eve of the Second World War. The war itself, and the first part of Bradford’s Senate career, were covered in the third volume, The Trumpets of War, which had been published just two months before.