You Live Once

by John D. MacDonald

  I reported to the Warren plant, to Harvey Wills, the plant manager, on a rainy April day thirteen months ago, as the new assistant production manager. I was flushed with brand new promotion and raise, though apprehensive about the personnel, even though Tory Wylan, my personal spy and friend in the home offices in New York had told me it was a good group.

  It turned out to be fine. Ray Walt was a sweetheart. He gave me my head and we worked well together. Ray was transferred in January, and Dodd Raymond came in. Before Ray left he told me he’d tried to get me promoted to his job, but the home office and Harvey Wills both thought I was a little too green for it. He told me, though he didn’t have to, to keep my guard high with Dodd Raymond. He said Raymond was smart and ambitious, and had the reputation of always having a fall guy handy when something went sour. I thanked him.

  Harvey Wills called me up to his office the day Dodd arrived, both to meet him and to give him the guided tour. Dodd shook hands the right way, said the right things, dressed the right way, and let me call him Mr. Raymond just one time. I wondered if Ray had been wrong.

  But a week after Dodd reported I had a personal letter from Tory Wylan. He confirmed what Ray had told me. He filled in the details of some raw situations Dodd had been mixed up in. He’d trampled some good men and he’d come out on top. Tory wrote that Dodd had some of the top management fooled. The proof was in the fact that Dodd had been able to get a transfer to his own home town—a thing that was strictly against C.P.P. policy.

  So, had I not been forewarned, maybe I would have thought Dodd a nice guy. He knew the business and stayed out of my hair. I protected myself by starting a work journal, dictating into it all orders he gave me.

  After he and his wife got settled he had me to their place for drinks and dinner, with his wife and his mother. That was the beginning. That’s how I started to get mixed up in the lives of Dodd and Nancy Raymond. Were it not for Dodd, and his being a home town boy with a considerable social pedigree, I would never have gotten to meet Mary Olan, much less endure the motel fiasco and later find her body in my closet. Dodd threw me and Mary Olan together, because he needed a cat’s paw.

  He had spotted me on the beach and he came on over. In grey suit and necktie he looked far too dressed up for Smith Lake.

  “Hello, Marilyn, Clint. Certainly is a beautiful day up here. Getting hot as hell in town. Clint, can I talk to you a minute?”

  It had more of a heavy-boss flavor than I liked, but I excused myself and walked over near the boat house with him.

  “What’s up?”

  “There’s nothing new about Mary. I dropped Nancy off at Mother’s camp. Clint, I’m really worried about her. This isn’t like her. She invited most of these people here.”

  “They seem to be doing fine.”

  “Did she act all right when she dropped you off?”

  “She was fine and dandy, Dodd. Just like I told the police you sicked on me.”

  “Don’t be like that, boy! Hell, they asked me. I had to tell them.”

  “You’re pretty jittery.”

  “Mary is one of my best friends. You know that.”

  Sure. One of his best friends. And he thought he was pulling the wool over Nancy’s eyes in fixing it up so Mary would date me and the four of us could make a nice jolly foursome. But I knew, as he didn’t know, that he wasn’t fooling Nancy a damn bit. Mary, in her own special way, had been making a fool out of Dodd Raymond. Maybe she actually wanted him. Or maybe she had been merely getting even for his unthinkable disloyalty in marrying a stranger without asking her permission first. I hadn’t been able to figure out which it was. I only knew that he wanted Mary Olan and that I had been a handy device to keep her within range. Mary had been seven years younger than Dodd. But they had known each other well before he had moved away from Warren. How well I could only guess.

  “How is Nancy taking it?” I asked maliciously.

  “She’s upset too, naturally. But let’s leave my wife out of it for the time being, shall we? You don’t seem to give a damn about Mary, Clint.”

  “She’ll turn up,” I said.

  “When you get dressed why don’t you drive over to the camp? Mother will be pleased to see you. We can have a few drinks and talk this thing over.”

  I said I would. It would be pleasant to see Nancy, at least. When the sun had dried me I said goodby to Marilyn, who pouted at me for leaving. There was no need to say goodby to anyone else.

  I drove down the lake shore road to the sign which said, in copper and stained wood, RAYMOND. Each year Dodd’s mother moved up to the small, comfortable camp at the lake with her nurse as soon as the weather was warm enough, leaving, this summer, the big house in town for Dodd and Nancy rather than closing it up. I imagined that it was a relief to Nancy to have the house to herself. Mrs. Raymond was an imposing, stone-faced, white-haired woman in her sixties, confined by arthritis to a wheelchair. She had positive opinions, and achieved emphasis through repetition. In her scale of values the fact that I worked for Dodd put me on almost the same social footing as the brawny Irish nurse who lifted her in and out of her wheelchair.

  I parked the car in the drive and went around to the front where I knew they’d be. The shoreline is steep at that place. There is a patio on the lake side, and steep wooden steps that go down to the shallow beach. Dodd had changed to bright yellow shorts, and he had a can of beer in his hand. Mrs. Raymond sat in her wheelchair in the shade of a big beach umbrella. Nancy was stretched out on a padded chaise longue with wheelbarrow handles and wooden wheels. Her smile was what I had come to see.

  “Well, young man,” Mrs. Raymond said, “I suppose they’re all running around in mad circles up at the Pryors’ now that it’s too late.”

  The final two words gave me a jolt. “Too late, Mrs. Raymond?”

  “Of course it’s too late. White slavers.”

  “Please, Mother,” Dodd said. “Can I get you a beer, Clint?” I nodded.

  “White slavers,” Mrs. Raymond said firmly. “You don’t hear much about them. They keep it out of the papers. You wait and see. Even if they didn’t get her this time, they’ll get her next time. You wait and see.”

  Dodd came back out of the kitchen and handed me a cold beer. “Mother has them crouched behind every bush.”

  “You can make it sound ridiculous all you want. You can jeer at me. But did they ever find the Cornwall girl? Did they? Did they ever find the slightest trace of her? No, and they never will. After what they do to them they’re ashamed to come home,” she said darkly.

  “Maybe she just decided to go on a trip or something,” Nancy said.

  “Ha!” said Mrs. Raymond. Nancy’s opinions always got a similar response. I suspected that Mrs. Raymond resented Nancy not only because she had married an only son, but because after some six years of marriage Nancy had yet to come up with a grandchild for her.

  Nancy was wearing a figured grey sunsuit thing, with a sort of skirt effect. She stretched and said, “Gosh, the sun is making me sleepy. Anybody want to walk on the beach?” Her glance swept across me meaningfully and I rose to the hook.

  “I’d just as soon.”

  “You two go ahead,” Dodd said casually. A bit too casually, I thought.

  We went down the steep wooden stairs, Nancy first. She is my favorite candybox blonde. Small perfect delicate features, silky floating hair. She has a thin little-girl voice with overtones of a lisp cured long ago. However, there is a level honesty and intelligence in her blue eyes that keeps her from being insipid. Her figure is flawed, if you can consider it a flaw. I have no doubt that she does, because her clothes, even the sunsuit, are styled to de-emphasize the flaw. She is very long-waisted. Her torso, discernible through any clothing, is long, ripe, muscular, perfectly formed. You see such torsos carved in old marble a lot oftener than you see them on people. Were her legs in proportion Nancy would be six feet tall. But the lovely torso rests on short heavy legs. They are shapely, but they do not fit. Understand, it
is not something you see immediately. After you see her a few times you begin to realize that though she is lush indeed, the proportions are subtly off. Then you see why. Her hips are too far from her head, and too close to the ground.

  We walked to a pine log a hundred yards up the beach.

  “He’s pretty upset,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Clint, do you have any remote idea what could have happened?”

  “Not the slightest.”

  “It’s damned funny. I … I hope she never comes back.” Nancy said that shyly. We could not talk together of Mary Olan without constraint. She became shy when she remembered the way she had talked the second time we had all gone out as a foursome. Sober, Nancy would not have confided in me—I had been a stranger.

  Dodd had set up the first double date. There had been undercurrents of tension that I didn’t understand. Mary and Dodd would begin to close Nancy and me out of the conversation by talking of old friends during the old days in Warren. Then they would remember their manners. Mary’s attitude toward me had been casual and friendly, but to Nancy she was patronizing. Nancy had kept her claws unsheathed just enough so they showed. I chalked that up to the normal stress you would expect between wife and old gal friend. I even assumed that Dodd had decided, since he was going to stay in Warren for some time, that the best way to smooth things out was to throw wife and old gal together and rub the edges off.

  For my part, I was pleased. My social contacts in Warren were limited. The guys on my same level in the firm were out there in Brookways, well wifed and bairned. They had me out a few times for dinner. During the evening people would be drifting in and out, and some of them were lovely ladies. But each of the lovely ladies had a husband who just happened to be somewhere else that evening, and a place like Brookways—even if you had the inclination, which I most certainly haven’t—is no place to make passes amid the married set. Compared to Brookways, a fishbowl is a mountain retreat.

  There were, of course, the gals in the office. But C.P.P. regards such goings on with a paternalistic frown.

  Warren is a tight community. I was part of the new influx of postwar population, and a professional transient at that. The old part of town drew its skirts tightly around itself, talked about the dreadful habits of the “new element,” and quietly raised its standard of living with the money we were bringing in. So I had battered myself into apathy with workouts at the Y, with sheafs of work I brought home from the office, with library books that I had never gotten around to reading before. When restlessness got its sharp little fangs into me, I’d roam the Saturday bars. That is a forlorn pursuit, eyeing the tight-skirt little drabs in the neighborhood joints, or the enameled Vogue-like birds of prey in the dollar-a-cocktail lounges, nursing their pale poison during the five o’clock ritual of appraisal and rejection. The jukes hammer your head and your need is a sickness to be assuaged only by predictable shame.

  During my five transient years I had come to learn that the more complex the civilization grows, the more violent are the effects of loneliness. I had learned why C.P.P., G.E., Dupont, Alcoa, Ford, General Motors, Kodak and all the rest of them wanted us safely married. Still, there were a lot of us still single, minds honed keen by Sheffield, Towne, Stanford, Harvard Business, M.I.T., and by day we made things run and move and grow. But by night we paced the neon sidewalks where nylon whispers on hips and ankles, and lipstick shows black when the light overhead is red.

  A few times I had reached the point where the act of marriage became a goal in itself, apart from any specific woman. Marriage to a faceless being who was nevertheless all too vivid from the neck down, who by warmth and closeness would still the gnaw of the blood.

  Thus I was grateful to Dodd for being willing and able to give me this chance to enter a world previously denied me. Mary Olan opened a door and the city changed. Sewell, through Dodd, sponsored by Olan, became acceptable. They saw to their indubitable surprise that I unerringly chose the correct fork, that my shoulders were unpadded, that I tied my own bow tie, that I could carry on a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with helical gears, cutter grinders and industrial abrasives. I soon learned that the old line families thought Dodd’s career with C.P.P. rather daring and eccentric. With law, medicine and banking open to him, he had become a technical man. Works down at one of those new plants beyond the river, doing God knows what. It’s really charming that he could arrange to be sent back home. They ship them around like cattle, you know. That little wife he found somewhere or other actually seems rather sweet. And it seemed so dreadfully obvious that he would marry the Olan girl. Much as I was amused and irritated by the attitude of Old Warren, I was sophomorically delighted to become known and accepted.

  It was on my second date with Mary Olan that Nancy Raymond, inhibitions liquidated, bared her distressed soul. A woman with a top sergeant voice had phoned me at the office and given me my orders regarding a party she was giving at the Locust Ridge Club. I checked with Dodd and he said it had been his suggestion. I was to pick up Mary and the four of us could go together. When I phoned Mary I found out that she had been given her orders too.

  It was an April Saturday night, a cocktail party for about forty in a private room at the club, then dinner and dancing. My appearance with Mary Olan made it essential that each one of the other guests meet me, categorize me and put me on a mental list for future parties should I pass inspection.

  Nancy looked charming in a dinner dress that was exactly the right color and cut for her—a slate blue that enhanced her eyes and emphasized the incredibly fine texture of her skin. After I had been punted from group to group with rugby precision, I found myself in a restful corner with Nancy.

  “The man who mixed these martinis belongs at White Sands,” I said.

  Nancy was looking beyond me at Dodd, standing with Mary Olan in a group of eight. Mary, laughing heartily, had taken Dodd’s arm.

  “Skoal,” Nancy said and thumped two-thirds of a cocktail down her throat in two gulps and handed me her glass. “Please, mister.”

  I brought her a new one. She took half of it, said, “To White Sands,” and downed the second half.

  “Easy, my lady. These can be poison.”

  “Hah! Fade me again, Clint boy.”

  “I will not be a party to self-destruction, Nance.”

  “I’ll get it my own self.”

  “Okay, okay.” It was not happy to watch. I wondered if our Nancy were a lush. I decided no. Female lushes carry the mark on them. Their faces coarsen, their features thicken, they grow fur on the larynx. So it had to be the Mary Olan situation, and an intensification of the strain I had noticed on the first date.

  The four of us ate at a table for six with another couple. I was between Nancy and a hollow-eyed brunette with a staccato bray of a laugh which made her husband, across the table, wince visibly each time she tinkled the chandeliers with it. Nancy had somehow managed to get a double martini at the table. When Dodd reached over for it, she wrapped her hand around it. She had reached the glazed state, monosyllabic, practically inert. After too many awkward holes in the conversation, Mary Olan began to carry the ball. She did it well, too. Conversation bounced and pranced, passing back and forth in front of the dead eyes of Nancy Raymond. Mary kept hauling me in by the heels, but I still found time to whisper to Nancy that she should eat something. Her great slab of rare roast beef arrived and was removed untouched.

  We were on coffee when she stood up abruptly. The conversation stopped and Dodd started to stand up too. “Not you,” she said to him with great clarity. “Have to walk. With Clint.”

  He gave a little nod and I went off with Nancy. She walked with rigid dignity until we were outside and then clung tightly to my arm. There had been a misty rain earlier. The stars were covered and the grass was wet. We could see by the light from the club.

  “Special service,” she said. “Walking drunk ladies.”

  “Where do we walk?”

  “
Round and around. Hooo. Dizzy as a bee.”

  We walked in silence back and forth across the wide grounds near the tennis courts. She kept lifting her head high and breathing deeply. We must have walked for fifteen minutes and then she said, “Sit down now. Over there.”

  We went over to some benches beside the tennis courts. In the faint light the nets had a forlorn sag, the asphalt courts gleamed wetly. I used my handkerchief to wipe the dampness from a bench. We sat down and I lit our cigarettes.

  “Clint, you ever try to … to match yourself against a great tradegy, tradegy … hell, tragedy.”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “That Olan bitch. Her mother went crazy. Murdered her father. Dodd told me all about it when we were married. He wanted to marry her. No she says. Can’t do. Insanity. Very tragic. I ask Dodd if he still loves her. No, no, no. Kid stuff. All over. Sure. Loves me. Just me. We’re fine. Good marriage, Clint. It was. Then he starts wondering if he can get back here. Mother all crippled up. Lots of old friends. Me, damn fool me, I say why not. So a year ago he starts working angles. Pulls strings. Real careful. Back we come. Warren! I hate it. Oh, how I hate it. You see, she’s here. And it isn’t dead. It never was. Not with her and not with him. Oh, I got the picture. She won’t play. She won’t sneak. Very noble. He wants to see her, it’s got to be right out in a open. Like this. Where she can work on him. Make me look bad. Pat the little wife on the head. Take him back just so she can show her muscles. Lots of money but a cheap bitch anyway, you know?”

  “I don’t think it’s like that.”

  “Oh you don’t! What do you know anyway? You’re the patsy. You don’t take her out. You just make her handy so she can work on him. And I can’t do a damn thing. I can’t say we don’t go out with you two. That makes me look worse even. I have to stand still for it. I have to just wait and watch everything blow up. Good sport. Good old Nancy. Fine! Clint, you could fix it. If only she’d just … If you could make her … No, I can’t say that. Won’t say that. Won’t ask you to do anything like that.”