My Son, the Murderer

by Patrick Quentin

  Peter and Iris arrived soon and so did Bill. Although he knew Ronnie liked his guests to dress, my son was wearing a grey-and-white check sports coat and slacks, proclaiming, presumably, his new Bohemianism, but his manners were impeccable. To me, who knew him so well, they were almost insultingly perfect. He said all the right things to Ronnie, acknowledged his new godmother and her family with elaborate courtesy and then bowed out of the picture, sitting down, very young, blond and scrubbed, next to his aunt Iris, to whom he was devoted.

  Dinner was a success, owing largely to Ronnie, who was dazzlingly happy, and to Iris—one of the few really good actresses I know who are equally fascinating off stage. Almost immediately afterwards, the reading of the play was announced. While Basil Lacey went upstairs to get his manuscript, Ronnie turned to his wife and said:

  “My dearest, your father has vetoed the younger generation at this reading. Why don’t you take your godson and entertain him in the library? Get to know Bill Duluth, and you will be on your way to understanding that alarming phenomenon, the Young American Male.”

  Jean flushed. So, unexpectedly, did Bill. But they both got up and left the room. Basil arrived soon afterwards with the manuscript. Ronnie gave a little briefing speech and the play-reading began.

  Oddly enough, it was the plain Lady Phyllis Brent rather than Mrs. Lacey who sat herself possessively at Basil Lacey’s side. Whatever her anomalous position in the household, it seemed the established fact that it was she and not Mrs. Lacey who was the Genius’s Muse. Mrs. Lacey, looking a little lost, as if she longed for her knitting, chose a chair in a corner.

  The play was called “Death’s Dateless Night”. Quotations from Shakespeare as titles always annoy me as being, if nothing worse, presumptuous. But, although Ronnie’s enthusiasms and mine almost always differed, I was prepared to like the play. For some time, as Basil Lacey’s high, pedagoguish voice read on, I remained in uneasy doubt, then my doubt turned to perplexity, then I was quite at sea.

  The plot, if there was one, concerned a group of people in an English country house who talked interminably about their own rather rarefied depressions and, in the middle of act two, began to realize that they were all dead. It was an Outward-Bound idea, decorated with elaborate rhetoric and a defiant poetic obscurity. It might have been a work of considerable literary merit. I was no judge on a first hearing. But certainly it was hopeless for a commercial Broadway production. It was interminable too. By the time Basil had finished reading it was after one.

  Ronnie, for all his enthusiasm, had flawless manners. He didn’t put Peter or Iris or me on the spot. He brought us all drinks and talked himself with rapid delight, discussing various points with Basil and drawing Phyllis Brent, who was fanatically admiring, into a conversation which, on the surface, made it seem as if the reading had been a triumph. Peter and Iris ventured a few unconvincing words of praise, but Ronnie stopped them long before there was any awkwardness.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want any of you to make a snap judgment. It’s not an ordinary script. I want you to think about it. That’s all. We’ll get together in a couple of days.”

  From then on, deftly, he veered the conversation to something else. Soon it was time to leave. I went off to the library to find Bill.

  The door was shut, but, since Ronnie’s house was almost like home to me, it never occurred to me to knock. I opened the door and went in. Bill and Jean Sheldon were sitting at the far end of the room on a long couch. Jean had her legs tucked up under her. They were both in profile to me. They were looking straight into each other’s eyes.

  There was nothing clandestine, nothing even remotely “guilty” about their pose. Their hands, for example, weren’t even within a yard of each other. But their concentration, and the very set position of their young bodies, were unusual enough to charge the whole big, rather bleak room with a kind of charmed intimacy that was somehow shocking.

  I said, far louder than necessary: “Hey, Bill, time to go.”

  To my astonishment and dismay, neither of them moved. They just hadn’t heard me.

  “Bill,” I called again.

  Then both of them, very slowly, turned so that they were facing me. I say “facing me” rather than “looking at me” because I am sure that, for several seconds at least, they were not even seeing me at all.

  And their faces were terrible to me because they were enraptured. That was the only word for it. Their eyes were shining. Their lips were half parted. It was how Romeo and Juliet must have looked after their first meeting at the Capulets’ ball.

  I remember my feeling of hopelessness and doom. I’d never seen young love so naked, so completely innocent of shame or embarrassment.

  And I thought: There’s nothing worse than this that could happen.

  All this, of course, lasted only a few seconds. Before I could say anything more, Ronnie came in behind me. He put his hand on my arm.

  “Time to get our children up to their respective nurseries, old boy.”

  I remember thinking: My God, all’s lost now. But Bill and Jean had more or less recovered themselves. At least Bill had the self-control to get up and come towards us.

  “Good night, Ronnie. A fine party. It’s good to have you back.”

  From Ronnie’s friendly smile I was sure he had noticed nothing. Bill went with me out into the hall, where Peter and Iris were waiting. We all left together. Peter and Iris invited us back to their place for a nightcap. I refused. So did Bill.

  As they got into their car, Iris said: “My God, Jake, what a script!” She turned to her husband. “Peter, darling, did it make any sense to you? You’re the clever one; you understand, highbrow plays.”

  “I suspect, my dear, that it’s the biggest bluff since the invention of falsies.” My brother shrugged at me. “You and Ronnie can publish it if you want to as a great work of art, but doesn’t he have enough sense to know there isn’t a producer on Broadway who’d give it houseroom in his scrap-basket?”

  “Ronnie gets carried away,” I said.

  “Straight up into the wide blue yonder this time,” said Iris.

  “I suppose it’s because he married the daughter. Jake, dear, you’ll have to cope with him. I couldn’t face it. neither could Peter. Tell him we’re terribly impressed and all that, but— really! Oh, dear, can’t anyone write a good straightforward play with a great fat part for a lovely, ageing actress? What strange people! That Phyllis—who on earth is she? The wife seems like a charming little girl, though. But why so young, Jake? I didn’t think Ronnie was that type of person.”

  “Who knows what type of person who is?” I said.

  “Well, you’ve got something there. Jake, dear, you’re sure you won’t come for a drink?”

  “I guess not, thanks. I’m all in.”

  “Who wouldn’t be, after that script? Well, good night, sweetie, see you soon. Good night, Bill, darling. Why don’t you ever come and see us. you little monster?”

  Peter and Iris drove off. I was left standing on the pavement with Bill. His hands were in his trouser pockets. His blond hair gleamed in the light from Ronnie’s hall fanlight. I’d never felt more at a loss, more tongue-tied with him.

  I said: “About Rome, Bill. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

  “What, Pop?”

  “About Rome.” Almost before I realized what I was doing, I said: “I guess it’ll be all right for you to go, but I’ll call you soon.”

  “Rome? Oh. yes. Sure. Okay, Well, good night. Pop.”

  He didn’t look back at Ronnie’s house. He didn’t look at me. He just went off down the street like a sleep-walker.

  When I got home to bed, I didn’t sleep for a long time, thinking about what I had seen in Ronnie’s library, trying to make myself believe that I had exaggerated its importance and worrying in general about my failure as a father. Inevitably, that led to my old and dread night pursuit of considering my failure as a husband.

  For months I had been relativel
y free of Felicia, but that night the waking nightmare returned in full force. As always, it began with the image of my wife sitting on the window-sill, smoking the cigarette. One of the witnesses at the police precinct house had said : "She seemed quite calm as if she were sitting in a deck-chair on the beach, enjoying the sun. Then she flicked the cigarette away, stood up, still quite calm, straightened her skirt and jumped." Of all the testimony, that was the part which haunted me. And, as once again I saw her, in my mind, standing up, straightening her skirt and plunging off the sill, the same corroding questions came rushing back. Why? What had gone wrong? How had I managed to fail her without even glimpsing the fact that anything had been wrong between us?

  And there, stretched out like a map, were the seventeen years of our married life. Somewhere, if only I could find it, there must be a clue. But in countless nights I had never been able to track it down.

  For, from the beginning, our romance had seemed such a simple, such an idyllic affair. I knew it had been so for me. I had fallen in love with Felicia the first day I saw her. I had only been working for Ronnie a few months and he had taken me back to 58th Street for drinks. Felicia had been there with Angie. They had both belonged to some literary club and Felicia had dropped in to discuss something or other. I had thought her the loveliest and the most gentle girl I had ever met.

  She was three years older than I and was living alone in New York. Her parents had died, leaving her a bit of money. At twenty-two, full of the idea that a man should support his woman, the money had intimidated me. But, since we were both, it seemed, so obviously in love, the money issue somehow faded out of the picture. We were married in a month and a year later Bill was born.

  We were neither of us particularly sociable and settled down to a life of almost complete sell-sufficiency. We saw no more even of Ronnie and Angie than was necessary, and Peter and Iris found us immeasurably dull. Peter always called us the “indissolubly weds”. And that’s what I thought we were.

  Felicia, of course, had never been a demonstrative person. Her quietness, her refusal, in spite of her beauty and intelligence, to push herself forward, were taken by some people for coldness. But to me her unassuming strength was the rock on which our relationship was founded. I not only loved her; I respected what had seemed to me her immense integrity. So did Bill. Ever since he was a baby, he had worshipped her. There had never been a quarrel; never even a misunderstanding.

  And then, after seventeen years, the jump…

  The day was long past when I used to tell myself that something terrible must have happened to her from outside, something so bad that even she couldn’t face it. For I knew, as surely as I knew anything, that if something from outside had happened she would have confided in me. She knew there was nothing I wouldn’t understand and want to share. But she hadn’t confided in me. She hadn’t even left me a note. She had killed herself without bothering to let me know why—and that could only mean that the failure had been in me.

  Had I somehow expected too much of her strength? Had I somehow crushed her under the weight of my love and trust? As I lay in bed, those same old barren questions challenged each other.

  I turned on the light and lit a cigarette. It didn’t help. All that happened was that I found myself worrying again about Bill. If Felicia had been alive, if the jump had never happened, Felicia would have known how to handle this potential catastrophe between Bill and Ronnie’s wife. If Felicia had been alive and Bill had not lost his bearings, he could probably have solved the situation himself.

  But now it was up to me—and what was I going to do? Send Bill off to Rome? Wasn’t that the safest way? But, if I let him go to Rome, that meant I would lose him for good, and I hadn’t yet learned to love anyone else.

  Maybe it’ll be all right, I told myself, and an exhausted desire to avoid any decision stole insidiously through me. After all, nothing had actually happened. If I did nothing … If I waited a while …

  I turned out the light and, on this ignoble level, finally went to sleep.

  4

  For several days I didn’t call Bill and he didn’t call me. I felt easier in my mind. Ronnie didn’t come into the office for a while. He telephoned to say he was “having the lime of my life, old boy, playing fairy godmother at Cartier’s and Bergdorf Goodman”. Basil Lacey’s three novels, which we were committed to publish, arrived from England. Two of my assistant editors read them, one of them being impressed, the other categorically loathing them. Since I was busy on other things, I gave them to my secretary. Maggie Staines, who was happily married to a mathematics professor at N.Y.U. and, through the years, had become my closest crony, reported on them in a couple of days.

  “George is crazy about them.” George was her husband. “But then you know how George is. Finnegan’s Wake is his favorite light reading. Personally, I may be wrong, but I think they’re phony—but just the sort of phony to trap Ronnie, who is, let us face it, with all his flair, a teeny bit gullible.”

  I read the books myself then and remained maddeningly undecided. They had the same quality as the play. They were enormously difficult, enormously erudite with a glitter that either was or wasn’t bogus. I don’t think I would have published them off my own hook, but it didn’t worry me that we were committed to them. With Ronnie’s money behind us, the firm could easily afford to boost them. But I was disappointed and more than a little anxious because Ronnie had never gone as overboard as this before on any of his geniuses. He had never, for example, married their daughters.

  I was even more disturbed when Ronnie finally burst into the office in his tornado manner. After catching up in a staggering two hours on everything we’d been doing in his absence, he introduced the subject of Basil Lacey.

  “Well. Jake, old boy, I’ve fixed Basil up. I’m giving him Aunt Lydia’s penthouse rent free and guaranteeing him a thousand a month for ten years.”

  He had suspected that this announcement would horrify me. I could tell it from his face. But he hid his determination not to be affected by me behind a casual flippancy.

  “Don’t worry, old boy; this isn’t on the firm; this is on me personally. All my life I’ve been looking for the right talent— the talent that can’t support itself and that needs a Maecenas. My God, what’s the point of being a bright, cultured stinking millionaire like me if I can’t do something really important with my dough once in a while? Maybe I’ll give him more later on. But I think a thousand a month’s enough to start on. Don’t want to coddle him, you know. By the way, have you read the novels? And what about the play? Have you talked to Peter and Iris?”

  I never hedged with Ronnie about manuscripts. I told him my suspicions of the novels and the play. I told him, too, more vaguely and politely, that Peter and Iris, though impressed, didn’t feel “Death’s Dateless Night” was for them.

  I wasn’t surprised that I was completely unable to dampen his enthusiasm. Ronnie, on his “geniuses”, was as immovable as a rock.

  “So the play’s too lofty for Peter, is it? Too bad. But I understand. In fact, I’m rather relieved. It gives me a chance to produce it myself. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And as for you and the novels”—he grinned at me broadly —“much as I love you, old boy, what about Gwendolyn Sneighley?”

  I had guessed he would mention Gwendolyn Sneighley. She was an extremely difficult lady in Georgia who had sent us a manuscript ten years before. I had been going to reject it, but Ronnie had gone wild over it and insisted upon publishing it. Subsequently she had given us three more novels which had won awed critical respect and put her up in the category of America’s greatest living talents.

  By bringing up Gwendolyn Sneighley, Ronnie, of course, had won and he knew it. After outlining an elaborate and expensive pre-publication press campaign for Basil’s first novel, he invited me to dinner and put on his homburg hat.

  “Well, I’m off to wave my magic wand. Today, it’s Phyllis. She’s going to be reconditioned from toe to top-knot.�
��

  “Who is Phyllis anyway?” I asked.

  “Isn’t she fantastic?” Ronnie beamed. “She’s one of those marvelous British products—the spinster dedicated to genius. Matter of fact, she’s very grand, daughter of an earl and all the trimmings. Years ago she fell besottedly in love with Basil’s first book and moved in on them. She had a little income. And it’s on her money that they’ve been living ever since. Rather terrifying, isn’t she? But she’s got a heart of gold and Basil couldn’t operate without her. He insisted on her coming along —and of course I was delighted.”

  He was at the door. He waved.

  “Dear old Phyllis. She’ll take some expert marketing, though. Only a genius could do anything constructive to those English hips. But I’ll lick it. You know me. Up to anything. Jack-of-All-Trades Sheldon.”

  He left the office. In a fit of depression, I began to see exactly why he had found the Laceys so irresistible. In spite of—or because of—his great wealth, Ronnie had lived in a very restricted circle, moving among people relatively the same as himself. The Laceys were something brand new to him— something ideally suited to appeal to his generosity, his love of novelty and, whether he knew it or not, his vanity. Here were not only a beautiful girl and her “genius” father but an earl’s daughter thrown in—all of them fascinatingly different, all of them penniless and all of them, apparently, more than willing to accept whatever there was to receive. No wonder he had fallen into the trap of becoming their savior.

  Perhaps I was too gloomy in calling it a trap. Perhaps the Laceys’ tongs were not what I thought they were. Perhaps Ronnie’s trip to England had netted him nothing worse than a wife who loved him and a group of adoring in-laws.

  But I didn’t like this new, almost intoxicated enthusiasm which, to use Angie’s phrase, was “so unlike Ronnie”. And I didn’t like my memory of Basil Lacey’s bland, “modest” smile.

  I didn’t think about Jean and Bill because I forced myself not to.