Young Mr. Keefe

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Young Mr. Keefe

  Stephen Birmingham

  PART ONE

  1

  The apartment was ready. Now there was nothing to do but wait for them, and they were always late. He knew they would be late to-night. Their habitual lateness was by no means innocent. It was as though, secretly, they hoped that being late would make their presence all the more exciting when they came. They were like that. They enjoyed planning the effect they would have on other people.

  He looked at his watch. It said six thirty-five. He decided to check it, and went to the telephone and dialled. Presently, a voice said, “At the tone, the time will be six thirty-seven, Pacific Daylight Time.” Cradling the telephone between his shoulder and his ear, he adjusted his watch. Then he replaced the receiver. They were over half an hour late already.

  Jimmy Keefe was tall. He was twenty-four, with a long, rather thin face and black hair. He was slender, but looked as though he had once been heavier. He had been drinking coffee, cup after cup, ever since coming home from work that afternoon, while he cleaned the apartment. As a result, his hands felt a little tense and jumpy. He began to fidget with little things—arranging the silver ash-trays on the coffee table, the stack of freshly purchased magazines. He had bought Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle. He had bought these magazines for a reason. He plumped up the pillows on the sofa. He moved back and forth across the room, and made periodic stops, looking around with indecision at the appearance of everything. He lighted a cigarette with one of the silver table lighters and took several deep puffs. He rested his cigarette on the edge of an ash-tray, and then, because it was freshly polished, removed the cigarette quickly, took it into the kitchen, and rested it on the edge of the sink. In a blue dish, on the counter, he had placed the broken pearls.

  The kitchen faced Capitol Avenue. The street was quiet now. From the open window, he could hear the pounding sound of the springboards at the public plunge in the park three blocks away and the gentle splashing sound of the lawn sprinklers next door. Then he heard the sound of the newsboy’s bicycle tyres as they spattered through the puddles that the sprinklers made along the sidewalk. It had been a hot June day; it was still hot, but the trees—sycamores, live oaks, and magnolias—along Capitol Avenue created a long, shaded tunnel with their branches. The street was broad and flat and cool. The slanting California sunlight was almost completely excluded.

  At number 3360, across the street, Jimmy watched the newsboy’s bicycle stop with a squeal of brakes. The afternoon paper was tossed on the front steps of the big grey-shingled house. A woman, in shorts and halter, appeared from around the side of the house, and picked up the paper. She was carrying a round fat pitcher decorated with red cherries and green leaves, in which ice cubes and chunks of lemon swirled. Iced tea, probably, Jimmy thought. She glanced at the headlines, put the paper under her arm, and disappeared around the house. In California, Jimmy thought, all life exists in the back yard. The newsboy parked his bicycle in front of the apartment house and walked up the walk to the front door with a stack of papers under his arm. He disappeared within, and Jimmy could hear him, downstairs, stuffing papers into the seven letter boxes.

  The apartment house consisted of two floors, built around a central courtyard, Spanish style. The first-floor apartments opened on to the courtyard. The second floor opened on to a balcony that ran around above the courtyard and that was approachable by a flight of rough-hewn redwood steps. Although Jimmy’s apartment was smaller than most of the others, it rented for more because it was on a corner. It was called a “studio” apartment—with a large all-purpose living-room, a kitchen, and a bath. The sofa opened into a double bed at night. The furniture, which came with the apartment, was California modern—blond wood, formica, glass. The arm-chairs in the living-room were upholstered in a rough, tweedy, brick-coloured fabric that was shot through with gold threads. The walls were painted slate grey, and the two huge picture windows in the living-room were draped with a heavy rust-coloured fabric imprinted with green tropical leaves. Jimmy considered going downstairs to get his paper, then decided against it.

  There was a Thermos of martinis in the refrigerator—a large Thermos, freshly made. He took this out and poured himself a drink in a jelly glass. Then, with his drink in one hand and his cigarette in the other, he went back into the living-room, picked up a magazine and tried to read it. He found little that interested him in Mademoiselle; he put it down again. He got up and turned on the radio. “Welcome to the Burgemeister Ballroom,” a woman’s voice said. “Brought to you through the courtesy of Burgemeister Beer …” He turned it off again and looked at his watch. He found himself suddenly wishing that they wouldn’t come, or that he had arranged to meet them somewhere else. He wished he had told them the truth, that he would rather be left alone. Then he wondered if perhaps they had come while he was out buying the gin for the martinis. What if they had come, rung the bell, waited, and finally decided to go on without him? Then he thought no, they would have left a note. Or broken in. Or scrawled a message in lipstick on his window. He thought it was quite possible that they weren’t coming at all, that something else had come up, or that they had forgotten entirely. He realized that the parties and plans lately had all had a quality of indefiniteness, of indecision. Whichever way the wind happened to blow, whichever way the day happened to dawn decided which thing would be done that day. And it didn’t matter if you decided not to do it after all—if you invited people to your house for the evening and decided to go to a movie instead. Everyone understood. No one expected you to be where you said you would be, at the time you said you would be there.

  This plan, for example, had been made coming down in an elevator of the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, a week ago. They had all had cocktails, and someone had invited them all somewhere, but they were not going to go. They were going, instead, to a new place in the International Settlement, where a girl did a strip tease to the hula, and Claire Gates had suddenly turned to him and said, “I have it—the idea!”

  “What is it?” he had asked.

  “Next week-end—let’s go camping. Let’s pack knapsacks, take sleeping-bags, citronella, and go up to the mountains. Around Tahoe or Squaw Valley, and find a little lake. There are lots of little lakes up there. We’ll swim in the nude and sleep under the stars, and do all sorts of things.” She turned to her huband. “What do you think, Blazer? Won’t that be fun?”

  Blazer had agreed. “We’ll drive up to Sacramento Friday night,” Claire had said. “We’ll pick you up at your apartment and go out to dinner. Blazer and I will stay at a motel somewhere, and then we can all get an early start Saturday morning. When we get to the mountains, we may never come down!”

  “I have a sleeping-bag,” Jimmy had said.

  “So do we,” Claire said. “Blazer and I will bring the food.”

  “Will Helen be back then?” Blazer had asked. “Will we finally meet the mysterious Helen?”

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy had said vaguely. “I doubt it. But we three can go anyway.”

  “Honestly, that wife of yours!” Claire had said. “We’ve been seeing you for weeks and we’ve never once laid eyes on her. When I meet her, I’m certainly going to scold her for leaving you alone and uncared for so long. Where is she now?”

  “Still at her mother’s.”

  “Oh.”

  Remembering all this now, he wondered why he had let himself be carried along into their plan, when it had involved such an elaborate scheme of pretence, pretending that Helen was still here. Buying the magazines, cleaning and polishing, arranging flowers in a vase, trying to make the apartment look the way it had before. While all the time, in his dresser drawer, there was a growing file of letters, from her l
awyer and his lawyer …

  He suddenly felt tired. He stood up and went into the kitchen and filled his glass once more, carefully. He drank a little, and the warmth of the liquor relieved him somewhat. He sat down at the kitchen table and picked up the telephone. Perhaps telephoning would cheer him up. Some of the numbers he called were numbers that he was fairly sure wouldn’t answer, but, after two martinis like that, it was pleasant to have someone to talk to, even if that someone was only Long Distance. In the end, he didn’t reach anybody. It was Friday night, and three hours later in the East. His friends were at dances or parties, or at the club for dinner, or in Europe for the summer. He talked, indirectly, with several maids, mothers, butlers, in many cities—heard the clipped, cultured voices of Park Avenue women, the slow drawls of negro servants. There was some difficulty with a Tampa number—a boy from his class at college—and the operator would call him back. He put the phone down and poured himself another drink from the Thermos. If Claire and Blazer didn’t come soon, he thought, they would find him drunk. He decided to give them another half-hour. If they didn’t come by seven-thirty, he would go out to a drugstore for a sandwich and then to a movie. They could go to hell. He lighted another cigarette with the enamelled kitchen lighter. Be careful, Helen used to say, that lighter throws out sparks.

  A great, heavy loneliness dizzied him then, just for a moment. He looked into his glass and wondered if the loneliness would end at the bottom of it. He tried talking to Helen. “My God,” he said softly to the empty room. “My God, you didn’t have to do this. We could have tried again. It didn’t have to end in a mess like this.” He tried to hide himself in thought of other things. He took another walk around the apartment. His knapsack and sleeping-bag were rolled in a corner of the living-room, ready to go. Oh, hell, he thought, hell, we’ll have fun. We’ll have fun, if they ever come. He would have one more drink.

  It was nearly two hours later when they finally came. He had fallen asleep on the sofa, his head resting on his forearms, his glass beside him on the floor. They came and interrupted a dream he was having in which Helen figured only slightly, as the audience, more or less, to something he was doing. He tried, half asleep, to continue the dream, to see what was happening. It was dark, and there were Chinese lanterns blowing wildly around a white house, his mother’s house in Connecticut. The lanterns were set up for a wedding. He was playing with a calendar, tearing the pages from it, one by one, and as he tore off each page the wind took it, whipped it away. April, March, February. Then he realized that he was going through the calendar backward, back six months to his own wedding day. Helen laughed. He turned the calendar over and began again. Claire and Blazer pounded on the window. Through veils of sleep, he heard them try the front door. It was locked, and so they walked back along the balcony to the window, raised the screen, and climbed in.

  “He’s asleep,” Claire said.

  “No, he’s not,” Blazer said, “he’s just faking. Wake up! Wake up, Keefe-o! We’re here!”

  Jimmy rolled over and looked at them. Blazer wore a faded pair of suntans and a baggy Shetland sweater. Claire had pulled her blonde hair back and tied it in an orange scarf. She was wearing a white blouse and Bermuda shorts.

  “Well,” Jimmy said, “where the hell have you been?”

  “Are we late?” Claire asked innocently. “We drove like the wind.” They both flopped down on the couch beside him and stretched their legs in front of them. “We drove like the wind, didn’t we, Blazer?”

  “I went out a while ago. I came back and thought maybe you’d come and gone without me.”

  “Poor little boy!” Claire said in mock baby talk. “Poor little lonely, neglected boy! Thought he’d been left out of the party—so he had a little party of his own.” She picked up the glass and sniffed it.

  “What took you so long?”

  “Well, first of all, we had trouble getting over the Golden Gate,” Claire said. “They’re tearing up the highway for miles and miles, and then we ran into an accident on Route 40—”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Jimmy said. “What highway are they tearing up?”

  “Don’t try to pin me down!” Claire said. “Of course it’s a fib, but why make me admit it?” She looked around the room. “So this is the apartment,” she said. “It’s very nice—bigger than ours, don’t you think? And your furniture is in sensational taste. I love that lowboy with stirrups for handles.”

  Jimmy laughed. “I bought it for a song in a very, very old motel in Salinas. The driftwood lamp came across the continent on a prairie schooner.”

  “There was an accident,” Blazer put in. “That part is true three people killed. It was awful.”

  “Nobody knows how to drive in California.”

  “And then we stopped somewhere to eat,” Claire said.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” Jimmy said. “I’ve been waiting to have dinner with you. It’s now nine o’clock, and you’ve already eaten.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have wanted to eat where we ate. The carhops were all dressed to look like jockeys with little short skirts. Their buttocks were absolutely flapping in the breeze. We decided there must have been a house rule banning girdles.”

  “And requiring chewing gum.”

  “We had two lovely, leathery hamburgers.”

  “Mine had a hair in it—”

  “And mine had a few bristles from a suède brush—”

  “And the waitress went off duty while we were waiting for our check.”

  “And of course,” Claire said sadly, “Blazer’s been horrible to me all the way up. We’ve been parked in front of your building for the last hour—squabbling.”

  “Oh, so that’s it.”

  “He’s been just awful,” she said. “He had me in tears.”

  “She’s a psychotic crier,” Blazer said. “She’s a compulsive weeper. A manic depressive.”

  “Blazer says I’m a manic depressive. Well,” she said, turning to him, “did it ever occur to you to be just a little bit nice—”

  “Just because I pointed out that she was driving like a madwoman,” Blazer said.

  “But would he offer to drive instead? Oh, no—he was too tired! All he could do was criticize, and—”

  “She always starts talking about me in the third person,” Blazer said. “As though I weren’t here.”

  “Isn’t he horrible?”

  “Isn’t he horrible!” Blazer mimicked.

  “If my mother ever heard how he talks to me!”

  “Now, speaking of your mother—”

  “Listen to him talk about my mother!”

  “You haven’t even given me a chance!”

  Jimmy stood up. “Drinks, quick,” he said. “Drinks for both of you!”

  Their quarrels weren’t real quarrels. It was a familiar pattern to Jimmy. He had heard them, bickering like that, in hotels, bars, restaurants—anywhere—and the purpose of it all was really only to entertain the people they were with, or, possibly, to amuse each other. They pretended that this was the consistency of their marriage, and yet, Jimmy noticed that when the quarrelling grew dull, or the accusations grew flat, they seemed to sense it together, and stopped. Jimmy now rose and patted Claire on the shoulder affectionately. “I think Blazer’s a complete bastard,” he said. “I’m totally on your side—because you said you admired my furniture. Now, I want to show you the largest jug of martinis in the world. You’ll have to drink them because they’re all I have.” He went into the kitchen and brought out the Thermos and three cocktail glasses.

  “What in the world is that?” Claire said.

  “A gallon Thermos. For our trip.”

  “But it will be so heavy!”

  “Let’s lighten it right now.” Jimmy filled the glasses. “I must admit I tapped it while I was waiting for you.”

  Blazer lifted his glass. “Here’s to the trip,” he said.

  Claire sat back deep in the sofa cushions and sighed. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I fe
el as though I’d spent the whole day on the Pennsylvania Railroad—on a flatcar—with thousands of little tramps. I feel so dirty. I feel as though I should put some Mum on. Do you have any?”

  “In the bathroom, yes.”

  “Well, never mind. You’ll have to bear me as I am. I hate bugs.”

  “Bugs?”

  “Yes. California bugs. Our windshield is smeared with them. I don’t remember Connecticut having so many bugs in summer.”

  “It’s the valley,” Jimmy said. “They breed in the tules—in the marshes, out in the delta.”

  “Ah—”

  “And it’s hot,” Blazer said. “Christ, it’s hot. It’s much hotter here than in San Francisco.” He pulled off his sweater.

  “Valley again.”

  “How do you stand it?” Claire asked. “Why don’t you come to San Francisco with us?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “I’ve got a job here. Remember?”

  “Oh, yes. A job. How dull. Why don’t you quit work and just play? Live on the Keefe millions.”

  “What Keefe millions?”

  “Don’t tease me,” Claire said. “I know all about the Keefe millions.”

  Jimmy looked at her. “I don’t think that’s very funny,” he said.

  “Sorry. Why are you ashamed? After all, we’re all from the same, shall we say, background? The flowering of New England and all that.”

  Jimmy laughed dryly. “I notice Blazer works,” he said.

  “Oh, I know, I know.” Claire let her blonde hair in the orange scarf fall back lazily across the back of the sofa. She looked up at the ceiling. She was in her bored Katherine Hepburn mood, sucking in her cheeks and blowing a long thin stream of smoke from her lips. “I’m so glad you came to California, Jimmy,” she said. “We were wretched here among all these primitives, until you came. It’s a shame we didn’t get together until a month ago.”

  “When are we going to meet that wife of yours?” Blazer asked suddenly.

  “Well,” Jimmy said quickly, “her mother’s sick—as I told you—and—”