Dean stared at the dead phone in his hand and replaced it slowly in the cradle. He switched off the light in the kitchen and walked into the dim living room and hung up the phone on the desk. Truly was standing before the fireplace, the statue come to life, adjusting the cardigan over her bare shoulders.
“It’s late,” she said. “I really must be getting home.”
Dean walked outside with her numbly. Fog was heavy in the thick pine trees and it was cold on the driveway. Dean shuddered.
He watched Truly open the door of the Mercedes, then turn slowly toward him. He said hollowly, “That was Ruth.”
“I know. I listened in on the phone in the library.”
Dean was so numbed that he was not even surprised by her confession. He said, “Oh. She wanted to patch things up.”
“Yes. I heard.”
Dean was watching her closely, with more interest. He felt like slapping her face, but he was also curious. “So that’s why you came into the kitchen. You wanted her to know there was a woman in the house.”
“Yes.”
Dean stepped closer to her, trying to see her expression, but it was too dark. “O.K.,” he said. “What gives? You got me floundering around like a schoolboy. I don’t know the answers. Suppose you tell me. What gives?”
Truly answered softly, “I started telling you once.”
“You mean that line about I’m a different sort of character and no gentleman and all that sort of business?”
“Yes.”
He said suspiciously, “I’m not a wrestler, baby. I’m not something to show off for laughs.”
She put out a hand and touched her fingers lightly to his shoulder. She said huskily, “I made up my mind about you when you were on the boat.” She paused, then whispered, “My God, Dean, must I always be the aggressive one?”
He put his arms about her waist and could see her eyes, but he was still baffled and suspicious. “This is a pitch of some kind and I don’t get it.”
“This is not a pitch, as you call it. I’m playing for keeps, Dean.”
“Aw, wait a minute. You? You can’t mean it. Maybe a shack job, sure. It’s hard knowing what a gal like you might want. But playing for keeps — ”
She shoved herself away from him and cried, “I guess you’re just too dense to understand. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake. Good night, Dean.”
She turned away to get into the car, but he grabbed her roughly and pulled her back. He stared into her eyes for a moment and when their lips touched she shuddered and crushed herself to him and clung to him fiercely. Dean kissed her wildly, the excitement mounting and pounding in his brain. At last she shoved him away and whispered, “I don’t trust myself. Please, Dean. Honestly, I don’t play that way.”
“Sure,” he said. “You really do play it square and I have been dumb. Dumb and blind.”
“Not any more?”
“No. It’s just — this is so hard to believe. You. Truly Moore.”
She clung to him again. “I love you, Dean.”
Before he could recover she turned away and slipped into the car. She flipped on the lights, flooding the driveway. He leaned over and kissed her throat and mumbled, “You really go after what you want, don’t you?”
“When I know what it is. I haven’t known before.”
“It’s a funny thing, but neither have I. When will I see you again?”
“Any time,” she laughed. “Any time you say.”
“Tomorrow isn’t too soon?”
“It’s hardly soon enough. I’ll be waiting. Good night, darling.”
He stood in the driveway for a long while after she had gone. Fog settled damply in his red hair and on his broad shoulders, but he was beyond noticing. He stared blankly into the dark, his mind still numb. He could not accept immediately what had happened.
He thought of it in bed that night and all the next day at his office. There was only one line of thought that made sense, yet it was hard to believe. Truly had taken a liking to him, then had fallen in love and had gone out of her way to let him know it. She had also let him know that she was not interested in a casual affair. Marriage? he wondered. It was unbelievable, it was fantastic, but there was no other answer. Truly Moore and Dean Holt. Truly Holt. He liked the sound of that. It meant prestige that he could never acquire for himself with his dollars or his business.
He was so overwhelmed by what had happened that he was bursting to talk it over with Freeman, but a remaining shred of native caution was prodding at his mind. He secluded himself in his office and just before closing time that day he considered the relationship between Truly and her brother. He thought of it as he would an angle in a business deal, the only way he could look at it. He put together all the gossip he had heard and the little he had witnessed and it all spelled out the fact that Truly was much too fond of Steve. Perhaps she even felt an overpowering physical attraction for him. If that were true, then she could also be repelled by that attraction and, being a woman of good intelligence, had decided to put a definite end to it. What better way to achieve that goal than to select a man who was the exact opposite of her brother? Dean had filled the role and she had chosen him to act out the rest of it.
He had the right answer for a moment and in a brief instant even saw it clearly for what it was, but his powerful ego was forced to reject it. No one could use Dean Holt for a pawn, particularly a woman and especially one such as Truly Moore. Acceptance of such a preposterous idea would destroy his vanity. No, that could not be it. There was, finally, but one answer: She had fallen in love, she knew what she wanted, and she was, as she said, playing for keeps. He took that answer to his heart and it warmed him and pounded in his blood, and before the day was over it had enveloped him body and mind.
He gave Ruth but a slight, passing thought. Thinking of her disturbed his conscience somehow, so the devil with Ruth and her companionship and also her six hundred acres. What Truly owned made Ruth’s acreage look like small change. He dropped her from his mind, though not without a faint touch of regret and a feeling of nostalgia for what had been.
He met Truly that evening and took her to dinner in a candlelit corner of Monterey’s Mission Inn and she made him feel as if they had been lovers for years.
After that he met her every evening after work and they covered the better dining and dancing places of the Peninsula and talked constantly. He began calling her from his office at noon and again had a daily order placed with a florist. She became a part of his thinking pattern and, if matters had not been running so smoothly with Freeman in command, would have interfered disastrously with his business. He knew it and chuckled over it and even enjoyed the idea that anyone could change his business habits.
It was one afternoon he realized that he had fallen in love. Truly had met him at his office and they had driven out with Vince Moroni to look over some of her acreage just south of Watsonville. It was marginal land and had never grown a really good lettuce crop. Vince Moroni was to pass judgment on whether she should change to another produce crop or sell the small parcel. Dean had lately been giving her advice and had also passed on a few words of wisdom for Steve’s benefit. It cost him nothing and it made her happy.
The two of them stood on the edge of a country lane and watched Vince walk over the flat land and stoop over now and then to inspect the soil. He returned to the road to tell Dean, “I dunno. Maybe she’s good, maybe she’s bad. It’s hard to tell so quick.”
Dean said, “Maybe more intensive fertilization — ”
“Uh-huh. Could be. But I look her over more and then tell you.”
“You can come back tomorrow.”
“No. I got it on my mind now, I stay here and look. You go along.” He grinned and said, “I got friends everywhere. The wop in that next farmhouse she’s a friend of mine. I get a ride back. You go along.”
“O.K. We’ll see you later, Vince.”
“You betcha.”
They got into Dean’s car and left Vince b
y the side of the field. It was a beautiful day and Dean was in no hurry to return to Salinas. He drove along a farm road that wound south and east of Watsonville and emerged finally on 101, the main highway. He turned south toward Salinas, driving slowly, enjoying the afternoon with Truly at his side. He kept up a rapid-fire stream of conversation, pointing out good land and bad fields and giving a little history of each. He had been born and raised in the area, had rarely been away from it, and knew every inch of it. Truly listened with interest, knowing that she was learning one of the main sources of his success, his knowledge of the land.
Dean could see the fairgrounds in the distance and his eyes swung across a field to the left and were suddenly hard and cold and the smell of poverty was strong in his nostrils. He slowed the car, then turned from the highway onto a deeply rutted dirt road. He braked to a stop at his father’s gate and backed the car around until it was again pointing toward the highway. He pulled on the emergency brake, but left the engine running.
Truly frowned at him questioningly, then looked toward the sagging fences covered with berry vines and the poor land and the weedy vegetable patch and the rusting jalopy and then at the shack of patched tins, sagging and broken, a thin spiral of smoke rising from the stovepipe in the roof. She saw the old man standing in the doorway in trousers as patched as the house, his arms in an old heavy mackinaw and a dirty blanket thrown over his shoulders, in spite of the hot day. He was watching them and then was slowly walking toward them.
Truly felt a sudden chill. “Why have you stopped here?”
Dean said nothing. He watched his father walking through the dirt, the ice deepening in his eyes. The old man stopped near a fender and peered venomously through the windshield. He said something that could not be heard. Dean touched the buttons and ran down the windows and Truly could smell the old man even at that distance and wrinkled her nose.
The old man said, “This ain’t no check day, be it?” Dean shook his head and Bart Holt stared in at Truly. He was puzzled as his rheumy eyes swung back to his son. “You got somethin’ extry fer me?” Dean again shook his head and the old man barked, “Then git the hell offen my land.”
He backed away, puckered his lips, and spat on the fender. He cackled happily and turned about and walked slowly back to the house. He went inside and slammed the door.
Dean released the brake and the car rolled forward on the dirt road. When they came to the stop sign at the highway he again pulled on the emergency brake. Without glancing at Truly, afraid to look at her, he said, “That was my father.”
She caught her breath sharply and let it out in a whisper. “Oh, God.”
Dean continued staring blindly through the windshield as he said, “That’s where I was raised, in that shack. My mother was no better than the old man you just saw. She’s dead now. I don’t know what keeps him alive. Spite, I guess. He hates me. It’s mutual. I’ll tell you something. If the law allowed me to, I’d let him starve.”
She breathed again, “Oh, God.”
“You’d never understand a thing like this. He’s my father only because of an accident of nature, like a lot of fathers. But there he is, my father, my old man, Bart Holt.”
Truly stared at him wide-eyed and said, “But hatred, Dean. You can’t really hate each other.”
“Oh, yes, we do. That business about blood being thicker than water is a lot of malarkey, at least where we’re concerned. You just saw a completely no-good bum. He even begrudged the bread I had to eat. It was pennies that could have been spent on booze. He hated me for being born, just as I hated him for having created me, as soon as I was old enough to know. He hated me even more when I became successful.” He paused, then asked huskily, “Can you understand that?”
She shook her head. “A man like that, I should think he’d have been proud.”
“Don’t kid yourself. Every step I took forward made him look worse. At first, he liked it when I brought a couple of bucks home now and then and bragged about me around the bars. But when the money got bigger and bigger, then I was too far out of his class and made him look bad with his boozy pals, and then he really hated me. Once I tried to help him by offering him a job. He broke the bottom off a beer bottle and was going to kill me with it. That’s the kind he is. That’s the kind of background I come from.”
He fell into a moody silence and Truly stared thoughtfully into space for a moment. Then she looked at Dean and said gently, “You know, I’ve never really understood until now just how far you’ve traveled. It’s even a longer, rougher road than my father had to take. Not many men would have made it. I admire you for it.”
“I’m still part of it, that shack and the old man and his crumby piece of ground. I can smell it on me.”
“No,” she cried.
“It’s in my blood. Sometimes I go out of my way to hurt people. If anyone gets in my way I enjoy smashing them, just for the hell of it. Do you think that’s good?”
“No,” she answered. “But now I know the reasons why you do a lot of things. You’ve had to fight your way out of a pit. The thing is, though, you’ve made it. You’ve accomplished even more than I realized. Look at me, Dean.” He swung his eyes to hers and she said, “A lot of people today seem to think that ambition is something amusing. A man is expected to do his work and try to better himself, but it isn’t good taste to struggle too hard and put up a fight about it. That’s become rather comical. And too much importance is placed on background, where a man comes from. I admire a man who knows how to fight and I respect him even more if the road he has to travel is longer than others.” She was completely sincere as she said, “You’ve come a long, long hard way and I love you for it.”
He snapped his fingers and sat up straighter. “That’s it,” he cried.
“What?”
“That’s why I had to stop here. It was something I felt. I didn’t know why then, but suddenly I had to show you my father and where I came from.” He reached a hand toward her as he said, “Now I know why I did it. I just realized something. I’ve fallen in love with you.”
Truly’s features softened as she leaned toward him. She put her arms about his neck and whispered in his ear, “I’m glad you stopped, if that’s what it took to make you realize you love me. You have no doubts?”
He put an arm about her shoulders and pulled her hard against his chest and rubbed his lips in her blonde hair. “None,” he said fiercely. “Absolutely none.”
Chapter Fourteen
NORMALLY, it would have taken Dean weeks or months to propose marriage. The legal aspect of marriage had little meaning to him. He had, however, a healthy respect for the fact that marriage, whether good or bad, wove the lives of two people together in a pattern that could, and often did, spell disaster. He and Ruth had both possessed that same intuitive reluctance to take such a step until the way was well paved for success and happiness ahead of time.
He still possessed that same reluctance, but another factor had been added. He had forced himself to believe that Truly had actually fallen in love with him, yet there remained a nagging doubt far back in his mind. It was not quite believable that a woman such as Truly (or what passed for her image in his mind) could step down from the heights and walk happily hand in hand with Dean Holt. He had a strange feeling that if he tried to make reality of what seemed to be a dream, it would all vanish in a puff of smoke. So he had to know and he had to know at once, even if he ran the terrible risk of being laughed at.
He took certain precautions, however. He returned to the vacuum plant and saw Truly off in her car, then went into his private office, telling Freeman first that he did not want to be disturbed. He paced the floor of the office, chain-smoking cigarettes, and waited until he felt Truly had had time to reach Steve’s house in Pebble Beach. He put through a call, but was informed by one of the maids that Miss Moore had not yet arrived. He left his name and telephone number and waited anxiously for her return call.
She did not call back until the day�
��s business was through and only Freeman remained in the outer offices, checking: over his sales books. Then she asked curiously, “What is it, Dean? Aren’t we meeting for dinner this evening?”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure.”
“Then you should be on your way home by now.”
“I — ah — I had a little business to wind up here.” He tugged nervously at his collar and felt perspiration gathering on his skin. “Look, Truly — ”
“Yes?”
He stared at the telephone and swallowed hard and then said bluntly, “Damn it all, Truly, will you marry me?”
There was silence on the wire and then what he had feared did happen; she started to laugh. He heard her laughter ringing in his ear and his shoulders went limp and perspiration gathered heavily on his forehead and his face was pale with deep red blotches at his cheekbones. He almost dropped the phone, but then he could hear her saying something.
“What?” he asked. “What were you saying?”
“But the telephone,” she laughed. “Good heavens, darling, couldn’t you have asked me later? Honestly, though, I should have expected this from you. Do you know what you are? You’re just a scared boy. You were afraid the answer would be no, so you hadn’t the courage to face me.”
“Well, I — ”
“You should have more confidence, Dean. After all, this is the first time in my life I ever deliberately set out to bag a man. Haven’t I been rather obvious about it?” She paused, then said softly, “The answer is yes, darling. I will be very happy and very proud to marry you.”
Dean had no idea what the rest of the conversation was about. He remembered something about meeting her later, but his next recollection was walking out of the office with a wide, silly grin. He went into the sales office and sat down on an edge of Freeman’s desk. Freeman looked up from his books, noticed the grin, and sat back to smile at Dean.
Hunger and the Hate Page 26
