“You mean you think that Lisa and Anthony really loved each other and should have counted the world well lost if they’d been caught out?”
“Don’t laugh at me, Nate,” said Margery.
“I’m not laughing, darling,” he said. “I was just thinking that you must be the only person in town to put a nice connotation on the Pappas mess.”
“Whenever I watched them,” Margery said wistfully, “I got to thinking how a lot of people just shove love away from them. Lisa and Anthony didn’t push it away when it came to them. They hung on for all they were worth and said to hell with everything. It’s more than I did, Nate, when things got bad for us.”
Nate stroked her hair and kissed her temple. “That’s not important now, dear,” he said. “The only thing that’s important is that you are well.”
The tears began to run down Margery’s cheeks as they did so easily these days.
“Sometimes I can’t bear to think of it,” she said. “All the years I wasted. I left you alone and you were so kind and gentle and patient.”
“Don’t cry, darling,” said Nate. “And don’t think about it anymore. As you can see, I survived very nicely. I guess I knew all the time that you’d come back to me.”
“Oh, Nate, honey, I’ve got so much to make up to you.”
He put his fingertips to her lips. “Not a bit of it,” he said softly. “All I want is for you to be well again and strong and happy.”
“I’ll be well, honey,” she said, and her eyes began to grow heavy as the sedative began to work in her.
“Sleep now, darling,” said Nate. “I’ll be right here next to you all night long.”
Margery sighed and drew closer to him and at last she slept.
Chapter XII
“Oh, the sonsofbitches!” cried Lisa Pappas. She threw her raincoat on the floor and put her fists up to her temples. “Oh, the lousy, miserable sonsofbitches!”
Anthony leaned against the mantelpiece over the fireplace in his living room and smoked with long, slow inhalations.
“So they sacked Chris, did they?” he asked
“You’re goddamned right they did,” said Lisa. “Sacked him and paid him off as if he were some stupid millhand.”
“Well, I hate to say it,” said Anthony. “But it’s true. You can’t win them all, Lisa.”
“Oh, shut up,” she yelled. “You sound just like some goddamned sanctimonious native.”
“Where’s Chris?” asked Anthony.
“He stayed behind to talk to Arthur Everett and some other men about a job,” replied Lisa.
“Well, cheer up, darling,” said Anthony. “People are always screaming for teachers. Chris shouldn’t have any trouble.”
“Oh, Anthony,” wailed Lisa and threw herself against him. “It was dreadful.”
Anthony circled her with one arm and carefully dropped his cigarette into the fireplace before he put his other arm around her.
“There, there,” he said. “It’s all over now. Sit down and tell me about it. It couldn’t have been as dreadful as all that.”
But it had been. The auditorium at the high school had been jammed. Chris and Lisa came in late and sat together in the back row of the hall. Lisa felt as if every eye in the place were fixed on her but Chris sat back comfortably and merely waited. That afternoon he had had a talk with a man named Donald James who worked for the State Teachers’ Association.
“Listen, Pappas,” James had said. “How badly do you want to stay in Cooper Station?”
“Not badly at all,” answered Chris. “As long as I can teach I don’t care where I go.”
“Well, there isn’t a school superintendent in northern New England who hasn’t heard about what this town is trying to pull on you. Since this thing started, we’ve had thirty-five inquiries about you, and there is one that’s great. One town down in Massachusetts wants you for three levels of English at forty-five hundred a year.”
“How come?” asked Chris suspiciously.
Donald James smiled. “There’s nothing like a martyr, Pappas,” he said. “Here’s a town about to crucify you on the cross of public opinion and here’s another town who says, ‘No, wait. We are good, broad-minded people. We’ll take him.’ Makes them look damned good in the eyes of the rest of the world.”
And now Christopher Pappas smiled.
“For forty-five hundred a year, I’ll be any kind of martyr they want,” he said.
“Okay,” said James. “Just take it easy tonight. Let the whole damned town do the talking. You just sit there and take it.”
So Christopher Pappas leaned back in his seat and watched Doris Delaney Palmer mount the steps that led to the stage and he listened while a hush fell over the crowd.
“We are here this evening,” said Doris Palmer in clear, hard tones, “to discuss whether or not a recent action by the majority of the Cooper Station Board of Guardians was or was not ill advised.”
The crowd moved a little, and murmured, and Lisa felt her face getting hot.
“As I am sure you are all aware,” continued Doris, “one of the principal functions of the Board of Guardians is to protect the welfare of our children, their health, morals and education. If they fail in this duty, the townspeople may vote to reverse their action which they feel threatens the children’s welfare.”
In the front row of the auditorium, Polly Sheppard sat with her hands clenched tightly together.
Goddamn you, she thought savagely, Goddamn you to hell.
But it was another thought, one which she did not like to admit she had at all, that tortured Polly.
You may ruin Christopher Pappas, thought Polly. But you’re not going to ruin Jim. I’ve worked too long and too hard at becoming someone in Cooper Station to have it all shot to hell for the sake of one schoolteacher.
No, no, she told herself. I don’t mean that at all. Lisa is my friend. I don’t mean it at all.
But she did and she knew she did.
After all, Polly rationalized, it wasn’t as if Lisa hadn’t brought a good deal of this on herself what with her carrying on with Anthony Cooper right under everybody’s nose.
Then Polly almost laughed out loud at herself. If everyone at Cooper Station who had ever “carried on” were to be run out of town, it wouldn’t take long for Cooper Station to revert back to the forests from which it had sprung.
She glanced over at Jim, who sat next to Nathaniel Cooper, and the first thing she noticed about him, as she always had, was his head of thick, red-gold hair. But where once the sight had fascinated and intrigued her, it now angered and disgusted her. Jim and his damned attention-getting hair. It was the thing that had trapped her from the very beginning.
And now this! thought Polly angrily. I wish to hell I’d never heard of Chris and Lisa Pappas. If I hadn’t mentioned him to Jim, he would never have suggested him to Arthur Everett and none of us would be in this mess now.
“However,” Doris Delaney Palmer was saying, “we are prepared to deal with Mr. Pappas in all fairness. Not one of us is about to do an injustice to anyone else.”
You sanctimonious old bitch, thought Jim Sheppard.
But he knew by now that he was not going to stand up and fight her in front of the whole town. If there was one thing Jim was not, as he put it, it was anyone’s fool. He knew when he was licked. A few minutes before the town meeting Doris had come to him in the anteroom.
“If you fight to keep Pappas,” Doris had told Jim, “the town will reverse the board’s decision and you know what chances you’ll have at the next election.”
“That still won’t get you out of the fact that Chris Pappas has a signed contract.”
“No, it won’t,” agreed Doris. “But it will get you off the Board of Guardians.”
“What about Nate Cooper? I don’t think he gives a damn one way or the o
ther.”
“Neither do I,” said Doris. “But if you’re as smart as you’re supposed to be, there would be two of us with the town and there won’t have to be a vote.”
“Even if I agreed with you,” said Jim, “I still don’t see how we can get rid of Pappas now.”
“We are going to offer him the three thousand dollars we would pay him to teach and we are going to offer it to him in public and in a lump sum.”
“What if he won’t take it?”
“He’ll take it,” said Doris with her little smile. “I know his kind.”
“But are the townspeople going to stand for it?” asked Jim. “After all, it’s three thousand dollars down the drain and the whole thing to do over again with a new teacher.”
“The money isn’t coming out of the town’s funds,” said Doris. “It’s been donated by a private citizen.”
“Who?”
“One, as they say, who prefers to remain nameless. Let’s just say a Good Samaritan.”
“Does Nate Cooper know?”
“No.”
And it’s probably a good thing that he doesn’t, thought Doris. Old Honest Nate wouldn’t like it a bit if he knew.
“So in all fairness to Mr. Pappas,” Doris went on, “we are prepared to buy his contract from him for the full three thousand dollars.”
The crowd shuffled noisily and the murmuring grew louder and into distinct words and phrases.
“What are we paying him for?”
“But he hasn’t worked for it.”
“Jesus, that’s a lot of money.”
“Doesn’t he know when he’s not wanted?”
“Just let him get out of town.”
Lisa’s face flamed all over again as she related these scraps of overheard conversation to Anthony.
“Can you imagine it?” she demanded angrily. “Just paying him off like a stupid millhand.”
Anthony opened a can of beer.
“And Chris accepted the money?”
“Of course,” said Lisa. “What else could he do?”
“He could have demanded his rights,” replied Anthony. “He could have insisted on his right to teach. He had a contract.”
“I suppose that’s what you would have done,” flared Lisa.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I would. I’ve never been the type for the noble gesture any more than Chris has.”
Lisa was suddenly very angry.
“Leave Chris out of this,” she said. “Who are you to talk about anyone else?”
“No one, my love,” said Anthony. “No one at all.”
“And don’t call me your love,” said Lisa. “You don’t care about me and you never did. I was just somebody to spend the summer with. You don’t even care about the baby.”
“Oh, yes,” said Anthony calmly. “The baby. Are you going to tell Chris about the baby?”
“He already knows,” said Lisa.
A little prickle whispered across the back of Anthony’s neck.
“He knows that you think it’s mine?” he asked carefully.
Lisa looked at him with an expression that was almost a sneer.
“Don’t worry, Anthony,” she said. “Your secret is safe with me. It’s only in books like the ones you write that people are so honest that they tell each other everything.”
And my other secret is safe, too, thought Anthony and lit a cigarette so that part of his face was shielded from Lisa’s gaze.
Anthony blew out smoke in a cloud and thanked God that he’d been smart enough to give Doris Delaney Palmer the three thousand dollars in cash.
“How do you know you can trust me with all this money?” Doris had asked coyly.
“Because you want Chris and Lisa Pappas out of Cooper Station almost as badly as I do,” Anthony had replied.
But, of course, Doris Delaney Palmer was not the kind to let him off as easily as that.
“Why?” she had asked. “I thought you were rather fond of the Pappases. Well, Lisa Pappas anyway.”
Anthony wanted to strike her. “Do you want the money or not?” he demanded.
“Well, of course we do,” said Doris.
“Then take it and let there be an end to all this,” said Anthony. “You have your reasons and I have mine.”
Thank God it’s over with, thought Anthony as he turned to face Lisa. They’ll go away and I’ll go back to New York and we’ll all have escaped a mucky mess.
Chapter XIII
“Well, thank God that’s over with,” Richard Strickland said to Jess Cameron the morning after the town meeting. “Now we can all go back to being what we were before. A nice, quiet community where nothing ever happens.”
“Richard,” said the doctor impatiently, “sometimes you are a complete fool.”
Richard Strickland was shocked. “What’s the matter with you, Jess?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Jess and walked off toward his house.
But later, that afternoon, after the last patient had left his office, Jess sat quietly, his chair tilted back into a patch of sunlight. He was nervous and restless and he not only knew why but also knew what he was going to do about it. He was going to go down to New York where he would get quickly and thoroughly drunk and sleep with a different whore every night. Then he would sober up and come home and perhaps then he could put up with himself and Cooper Station for another six months.
Jess Cameron was one of the few people he knew who could say that he had had a completely happy, normal childhood.
“If Jess Cameron ever turns into a Freudian mess,” said Florence Strickland who prided herself on the fact that she kept abreast of things, “he’ll never be able to blame it on his parents. Amy Cameron was a saint and although Gordon had his moments, he wasn’t far behind her.”
When Jess was small, his mother used to sing in the kitchen and she had always had time to answer questions and play games and draw pictures. She played Chopin waltzes on the piano and she laughed a lot. Jess could never remember having seen her angry and he had never heard her raise her voice.
“Gordon, dear,” she would say to the husband who idolized her, “don’t shout so. Tell me quietly. Tell me what happened.”
Gordon Cameron was a big, heavy man with a mustache and a large head covered with gray hair. Jess could not remember the time when his father’s hair had not been gray. Gordon Cameron could be any kind of man, depending on the patient he happened to be treating at the time. He could be gruff, gay, pleasant, mean, smiling, sneering or sympathetic as the situation demanded.
“You could have been an actor, Dad,” said Jess. “How come you chose doctoring?”
Gordon looked sharply at his son.
He can really make his eyebrows beetle, thought the boy, delighted with this trick of his father’s.
Gordon Cameron lit his pipe and sat down heavily, emitting his usual groan.
“God, it’s enough to put a man in his grave, all this running around after babies and kids who swallow pins and men who get their arms caught in haying machines,” said Gordon. He looked silently at his son for a long moment, then he said, “I guess I’m a doctor because there didn’t seem to be anything else I wanted to be. A man’s got to do something, and by that I don’t mean just anything. He has to do something with his life that brings him a feeling of peace and happiness not only while he is doing it, but also when it is done. There was a philosopher once, French fellow if I remember right, who said something about every man having to cultivate his own garden. Get what I’m driving at?”
“I think so,” said Jess, who did not really understand at all but who enjoyed the words his father used.
“The way I figure it,” said Gordon, “I was put here on Earth for a bigger purpose than just taking up space. One day, when I was just a bit older than you are now, it came to me that th
e best reason for anyone being here at all is to help out the fellow who’s here along with him, and the way that seemed best to me was doctoring. So here I am, cultivating my garden in my own way, the way that suits me best. Dragging babies into the world and chasing after damned fools who get careless.”
Jess spoke with the impulse of the very young which is to please a beloved elder.
“I think I’ll be a doctor, too,” he said, and was surprised when his own words filled him with decision and a kind of peace.
“You just wait awhile, boy, before you go deciding anything like that,” said his father. “You’ve plenty of time.”
But, excellent actor though he was, Gordon Cameron could not keep the look of happiness from flooding his eyes when his son spoke.
Jess finished his premedical courses at the state university. In August, of the same year, his mother died.
Amy Cameron had been spending the summer at the family cottage on one of the northern lakes and one day she had taken her husband’s sailboat and had gone out on the water, alone. She was caught in one of the heavy storms that come so quickly and furiously to northern New England in August, but she managed to pull up to one of the small islands in the lake to wait out the storm. She reached home finally, safely and soaked to the skin. A few days later she confessed to Gordon over the telephone that she had managed to catch a rather heavy cold, but when he arrived at the lake the following weekend she had pneumonia and within three days she was dead.
In September, Jess left his suddenly old father in the very old Cameron house and went to Cambridge to enter the medical school at Harvard, and he wondered if it were really true, as he had heard Gordon tell so many patients, that time and work would eventually heal all pain.
Gordon Cameron was the first person Jess had ever seen who was the victim of a thorough, overwhelming loneliness, and he wondered what people who were younger, less strong and more frightened than his father did in defense against the dictatorship of loneliness.
The Tight White Collar Page 17
