Answer as a Man

by Taylor Caldwell

  A few days later a New York banker appeared in the office of Henry McWilliams and offered him a certified bank check for sixty thousand dollars, provided he would send a letter to Jason Garrity stating “On reconsidering your fee owed to me, I am presenting a bill for two hundred dollars. The publicity was invaluable to me. Thanks for your patronage. Call upon me if you have any other problems. I will be glad to serve you. Cordially yours …”

  “Who?” asked Henry curiously.

  “You’ll never know,” said the banker. “Accept or not.”

  Henry accepted with avidity. He made out the bill for two hundred dollars to Jason, signed it, sealed and stamped it, and gave it to the banker, who mailed it. Henry thought: Bankers are more clever than lawyers. They’re much more closemouthed.

  He acquired much respect for Jason, and more respect for his benefactor. He wondered who he was.

  Jason telephoned his lawyer in enormous relief. “Thank you, Hank, thank you! You’ve saved my life! Two hundred dollars, your bill! I’ll pay the rest, that I will, in time.”

  Mr. McWilliams was tempted. But that friend of Jason’s—maybe he would be valuable in the future. “No, Jason,” said Henry. “Paid in full. God bless you.”

  He felt very magnanimous.

  Belleville, which did not like Jason, had meanly rejoiced over his troubles with his family, and his rumored financial predicament, and above all, over the tragedy of little Herbert Crimshaw, while pretending to stunned horror. Patricia, formerly ridiculed, was the object of hypocritical sympathy.

  The city was disappointed at the verdict in Philadelphia. (“All politics,” it was said.) Nor was it much appeased when “the loony” was sent away “to a prison school,” which was false, of course, and Sebastian was enrolled in a school “far away.” It was said that St. Amelia’s was a “correctional institution.”

  33

  Anita Schofield was in hysteria when her husband returned from Philadelphia, and he was aghast at the unusual sight.

  Elizabeth was there, helplessly pleading with her mother, and the first thing that Chauncey thought, with a terrified heart, was that Anita “knew.” Elizabeth, comprehending his terror, silently shook her head and winked. But her large blue eyes were concerned, her smooth face worried, for all her deliberate composure. She wore a white linen dress that managed to remain unwrinkled in spite of the humid day and the clutching of her mother’s frantic hands. The pretty drawing room was airless, and too bright with sun; Elizabeth’s pale hair shone in it like silver gilt, polished and glossy in its coils.

  Elizabeth said in her charming voice, when her mother had subsided in her chair, “Chauncey, it seems that when Mother went to the bank to buy up Mr. Garrity’s paper, Mr. Sunderland informed her ‘someone’ had already done it. Yesterday. Gary Winslow confirmed it. He and Mr. Sunderland protest they don’t know who, but we think they are lying.”

  “God,” said Chauncey. He was sick. “Clem!”

  “No,” said Elizabeth. “She accused Mother; such language. I hope Central was not listening in. Then she came over personally. Vulgar thing. I thought she was refined—at least she pretends she is.” Elizabeth put her hand to her mouth to suppress an involuntary laugh. The young woman had a sense of humor. “Such a scene. I thought they would come to blows; the servants were crowding to the door as if they were attending a prizefight.”

  “I think that the bankers are lying. An anonymous party, eh? I don’t believe it.”

  “Mr. Sunderland also visited Mother, just an hour ago. His agitation seemed genuine. Mr. Winslow called Mother back; he was also agitated. Seemed genuine, too. The sale was made through the New York City Bank, and they refused to name their client. They say it was no one in Pennsylvania; I forced them to give me that much information. Mr. Sunderland was heartbroken, really. He anticipated such a profit. And Mr. Winslow’s chagrin was honest, I think. Banks are not averse to profits.”

  “That ‘someone’ gave someone a huge profit! Bankers can’t resist. Funny business.”

  “Clem Lindon doesn’t love you anymore, Chauncey. She accused Mother of lending you money to buy up the paper, after she had told you, specifically, that she was interested in it and she was going to buy it herself, and you had seemed pleased. She departed breathing flames and vowing vengeance. Mr. Sunderland swore to her you were not ‘guilty’ and calmed her down after an hour’s visit to her—in tears, he said. But Mrs. Lindon says she isn’t convinced. She talked to Gary Winslow too, by telephone, here in this house.” Elizabeth cleared her throat delicately. Her blue eyes lifted. “What drama. Too bad you missed it, Chauncey. Worthy of Sarah Bernhardt. Mother and Mrs. Lindon. The windows rattled.” Elizabeth implied her entertainment, in spite of her concern for Anita.

  “Then all our plans are smashed,” said Chauncey miserably. “The Inn-Tavern, Ipswich House, the new hotel, and the thousand acres of land—all gone up in smoke. Ruined.” He sat down near his wife, and his green eyes flared inimically, as if she were to blame. “Stop that noise, Anita! Did you talk to anyone in New York, or here, about buying Garrity’s paper? Someone who has two million to spare?”

  “Good God, no!” Anita shouted. “No one but you and the bankers! I’m not a fool! Elizabeth didn’t even know. Only you! If anyone did any talking, it was you!”

  “You know me better than that. I’ll go and see Clem.”

  “She says,” said Elizabeth, her eyes sparkling with amusement, “that if you ever darken her door again, she’ll set her dogs on you. Doberman pinschers. She means it, too. She’s looking for a scapegoat in spite of the bankers’ denials. You’re it, Chauncey.”

  “The woman is mad, the whore is mad!” wailed Anita, seeking her husband’s clammy hand contritely.

  “I wonder if Garrity knows,” said Chauncey.

  “He hasn’t a friend in the world who possesses two million dollars—or even an enemy, except Mother and this horrible Clem. Mr. Mulligan is in no position to buy out Mr. Garrity,” said Elizabeth. “I wonder who that ‘someone’ is. At any rate, Mr. Garrity is ruined.”

  “So are we,” said Chauncey.

  “You weren’t invested.”

  “No. Only anticipating. And that’s worse.”

  Mr. Edward Sunderland was in a dilemma. He knew Gary Winslow personally and he was Anita Schofield’s esteemed trustee and banker. He had believed Gary was acting on behalf of Anita when he bought—at a huge profit—Jason’s paper. When Gary told him, yesterday, that Jason’s paper had been sold to an anonymous buyer through the New York City Bank, he had been shocked. Mr. Sunderland was well aware that that bank could put pressure on Gary’s bank; three of its directors were on the board. (Mr. Sunderland kept the secret; after all, bankers do not tell their clients everything.)

  Jason now had to be told the situation, for Mr. Sunderland’s bank had held considerable of Jason’s paper, and the Philadelphia banks also. Mr. Sunderland’s duty and responsibility was to inform Jason. He did so, by discreet letter, and immediately afterward found he had to depart on urgent business in Pittsburgh.

  “We found it necessary, Jason,” he wrote, “to sell your paper to the New York City Bank. You already owed one hundred thousand dollars in interest and were twelve months in arrears. We carried you as a friend, hoping and believing in your ultimate solvency. In the last month, however, we were pressed to show a better cash balance, and we reluctantly sold your paper. Time was of the essence. Only an extreme emergency forced us to do as we did, believe me. I had warned you you were overextended.”

  Jason, on receiving this letter addressed to his office, found himself unable to move due to shock and stunned disbelief. He felt himself ruined, a beggar. His whole world crashed about him, leaving him on the verge of an abyss with an unseen enemy who was trying to make him fall to his death. He was prostrated, incredulous. Things didn’t happen that way! He literally could not move. A whole life’s work come to nothing! He was reduced to his boyhood poverty. His shares in Ipswich House and what investmen
ts he had owned he had put up as collateral. The unseen enemy could sell him out at a moment’s notice, call in his paper, and he was not in a position to redeem it! And he owed interest. Despite the unseasonably hot September day, he was dripping with cold sweat. He saw the house of his childhood and youth vividly, smelled the stenches of the street. It was always winter there, and he felt the cold blasts and saw the black icy nights. He was running, again, to deliver newspapers, and his mother’s laundry; his nostrils were filled with the harsh odor of soapsuds. He heard the dolorous dripping of faulty eaves; he was shoveling snow and shivering. His hands were frozen in his thin mittens, his feet numb, his nose wet, his ears aching, his muscles twinging, his chilblains itching and smarting. The bell of the church tolled.

  “Oh, God,” he said aloud. And then a strange deep voice seemed to echo in his ears, a harsh derisive voice: “There is no God.” There was a sound of inhuman laughter.

  Jason put his hands over his face and wept.

  Worse than anything he had experienced was a sense of stupendous loss. He felt absolutely alone, desolate, abandoned. He was a child, and his father had deserted him, never to return. He was driven to a wilderness, silent and utterly arctic, where no life existed and his was the only beating heart, and no sun arose over windy spaces on the edge of black soundless seas. He thought vaguely: I am in hell, isolated from God.

  It seemed to him that the same inhuman laughter assailed him again, coming from enormous distances, from the end of the world. And the emptiness alone had meaning, and the rest was delusion.

  “Curse God and die!” the voice said in a wind like a hurricane.

  Jason felt that he was literally dying; his eyes held no vision and his body was powerless. He felt that he had left his flesh and was floating in a sightless void, and the void was in him as well as without. There were drums beating somewhere, a roar that curiously contained a dread presence, a presence frightful beyond imagining, tremendous and puissant, beyond human minds to comprehend, merciless, grandly intelligent and all-knowing, immortal, and riding storms and holocausts.

  Jason experienced a terror he had never known before, a terror of ultimate oblivion, a terror not born of flesh but of the soul. For he found himself succumbing to evil.

  It was fear that saved him—a fear of what, he did not know. He came to himself, dazed, paralyzed, but in touch with reality in some measure. The old familiar walls were around him, the pictures, the rug, the chairs, the files, and the windows which opened upon a placid sun. There was a ringing of a telephone somewhere, the sound of footsteps, a laugh, a voice, the smell of grass and trees, a warmth, a breeze, the hum of an elevator. Dear and normal sounds! Jason was rescued—he sensed that; but from what he was rescued was hidden from him. I had a nightmare, he thought.

  His telephone rang, and he reached out to it, dimly amazed that he had recovered the dominance of his hand.

  A cultured masculine voice said, “Mr. Jason Garrity? Good afternoon, sir. My name is Manley Morrison, president of the New York City Bank.… Are you there, sir?… Good, I thought we were disconnected by Central.

  “Mr. Garrity, I know you heard the news, that my bank had bought your paper, for a sum in the neighborhood of two million dollars. Hello? Yes. We have a bad connection, I am afraid. My bank sold your paper to a client, an anonymous client whose name I fear we cannot divulge. You’ll know the person in time.

  “I will write you a letter today, giving all details. You will pay the interest on the paper—no increase in interest, hah—in care of this bank. I will convey the money to the proper person—What?… Does the person intend to call in the paper immediately? I regret I do not know. It is out of our hands, sorry.… Why did we sell your paper? Why, sir, the person wanted it specifically, and I do not know why.”

  The enemy, the enemy, thought Jason. Who? Chauncey Schofield with his wife’s money? Probably. Curse him. He’s won at last.

  His hand shook as he called Lionel to summon him to his office. He closed his eyes in exhaustion. He did not, in his extremity, notice that Lionel’s face was grim and drawn and that his freckles were like a ginger snow over his face. “Sit down, Lionel. I have something to tell you. Bad news.”

  “I know it all,” said Lionel. “Well, talk away. I’m ruined, too.”

  He listened to what Jason told him. Jason’s voice was weak but steadfast, and his gray eyes never left Lionel’s face, condemning. He talked for a long time, and Lionel stared fixedly at him, not moving, expressionless.

  “So, it is probably your friend Schofield who did this to me, with his wife’s money. You are involved with him. You are in the plot.”

  “No,” said Lionel. He lit a cigarette and screwed his face up, and Jason noticed for the first time his appearance of shock. Lionel’s fingers trembled.

  “Don’t ask where I heard—I won’t tell you, Jase. I heard—that’s all. Clem Lindon and Chauncey—damn their souls—tried to buy up your paper, each of them separately. It was already sold.” Lionel permitted himself a fiendish smile. “They’re at each other’s throats.” Lionel paused. “Chauncey’s satisfied with my own paper, for what it’s worth, and it isn’t worth much. At least he says he is. We’re both in the same boat, Jase.”

  Jason sat up. “I don’t believe it!”

  Lionel shrugged. “Believe it. I’m going to sell Joan’s jewels to save my paper. They won’t cover it, and Sunderland said he ‘can’t’ renew my loan.”

  Jason’s eyes bulged. Suddenly he burst out into wild laughter, and tears ran down his face and he rocked himself in his chair, slapping his arms.

  “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” said Lionel. “Chauncey’s out for revenge, and I’m handy. I did nothing to him—”

  “You were his friend!” Jason’s voice was hoarse with his Hogarthian mirth. “Hoist with your own petard!”

  Lionel was still. “What do you mean by that?”

  “My instinct tells me you were both out to ruin me.” Jason’s gray eyes glittered. “You, married to my sister!” And now his eyes were deadly and piercing and filled with hate. “You—my friend! I wouldn’t save you if I had a million dollars, Lionel. I would see you starve. And I forbid you to see Bastie anymore, and forbid Joan, too, and he’s not to visit you. I have means to enforce that.”

  When he was alone, Jason felt bereft and full of sadness. Lionel was dead to him, irrevocably dead—his oldest friend.

  For several minutes he forgot to think of his own plight. Pictures of the young Lionel all about him, whistling, laughing, carefree no matter the circumstance, meeting Jason at the snowy dawn, helping him to deliver papers, sharing his meager lunch, singing.

  34

  Saul Weitzman’s shop was burned down on October 3, 1917; it was arson. “Dirty Kraut!” a placard said. Saul contemplated the black ruins and crimson embers, with Jason, and wept silent tears. His landlord gave him notice to vacate his little cottage immediately. Jason offered him shelter in his own house; Saul had only a black cardboard suitcase. Saul gave his treasured plates and silver and furniture and Venetian glass to the widow who had been dispossessed from the rooms over the shop. He also gave her all he had in the bank.

  “You need it and I do not,” he said. He had withered and seemed smaller, an ancient man, unusually silent these days. He sat with Patrick, who could get up from his bed only a few hours a day now, and in silence they communicated, men centuries old. Saul gave Patrick his medicine, and they wept together, feeling the weight not only of years but also of affliction.

  The house was heavily quiet now. Of the children, only Nicole remained, and she would wander into Patrick’s room and sit down near Saul—a childish crone among gnomes. Saul had the whimsical thought that she was older than they, aeons older. She seemed to brood over millennia reflectively and uncomplainingly, and was accepting and of unearthly patience. She dined with her father, and he found the small girl’s company infinitely comforting, though she talked little. A maternal presence, he thought, and was moved
profoundly.

  She talked little of her brothers and less of her mother, and when she did it was as if they were away on a holiday. She talked of Fatima, of the miracle of the sun, as if it were expected. She talked about the Blessed Mother’s prophecies, prophecies of doom to the world, and prophecies of Russia—“Russia will spread her errors all over the world with dread results, and upheavals involving all mankind.”

  Jason listened indulgently. “Superstition. Nickie, Russia is engaged in a desperate struggle in the war, an ally, under the czar. What ‘errors’ can she spread? Her people are starving and dying on battlefields. Russia is the weakest of our allies.”

  Nicole replied seriously, “I believe the Blessed Mother.”

  “Do you believe, Nickie, in the miracle of the sun, dancing?”

  “Yes, I do, Papa. Ten thousand people were there.”

  “Optical illusion. Do you understand what the newspapers say?”

  “I am not a child, Papa.”

  No, you are not, my darling, Jason thought. He said, “Russia! Impotent. We might as well talk about a ‘banana republic,’ as Teddy Roosevelt calls it, as about Russia. Just about as powerful. And as remote, and as influential. Exiled socialists, and stupefied peasants, poor souls.”

  “But I believe the Blessed Mother, Papa. Satan uses what comes in hand.” Nicole spoke positively. “Satan is the prince of this world.”

  “He’d have a hard time seducing Russia! Tens of millions of devout peasants!”

  Nicole laid down her fork, and her beautiful gray eyes, wide and dominating her plain face, filled with a great light. “The Blessed Mother cannot lie, Papa. And Satan uses the most … most … unlikely people to cause confusion. I read the Holy Bible, also.”

  “Reverend Mother! God forbid.”

  Nicole serenely buttered a slice of bread. “I will be Reverend Mother one of these days. I am going to enter the Carmelite order.”