“Why did you promise on the phone you’d never see him again?”
She stood quite still, looking down at her hands. Then, with a vehemence that startled me, she swung round on Bill.
“Tell him,” she said. “It’s the least you can do.”
Until then I’d been too put upon by my own anger, my own sense of disaster. I’d come to catch them as lovers. That was my preconceived notion. Now her sudden, sharp exclamation pulled me out of myself and made me realize that the tension in the shabby little room hadn’t been caused by me. It had been there before I came in. It was a tension between the two.
“Go on,” she said. “Tell him.”
Bill sat down again in the wicker chair. It creaked, the way it had always creaked ever since I could remember. Now he was sitting, I could see his face more clearly. It was forlorn, like the face of a little boy who was lost.
“What do you want me to tell him?”
“You know what I want you to tell him. The truth.”
“God, you’re a little stinker, aren’t you?”
“Bill!”
“Okay.” My son looked up at me savagely. “Take her, Pop. Clasp her to your bosom. Elect her Miss Rheingold. Virtue is triumphant.”
Jean dropped into a chair. She put a hand up to cover her face. Bill shot her a ferocious glance.
“Me,” he said. “I’m the villain with a black moustache down to my navel. I begged her to see me just once again—on my bended knees. You should have seen me telephoning on my bended knees. It was quite a stunt. She said okay. Oh, it took her about thirty-six hours to come around to that. But she said okay, but the little boy better be good. I said I’d take her for a drive and to our place on the shore. She’d never heard of Fire Island. I guess they don’t have any ocean in Shropshire. I got Captain Reilly to bring us over. Jean didn’t know he wasn’t waiting. She thought she’d be home for high tea. You should have seen her when she heard the dreadful truth. Eliza on the ice-floe had nothing on her. Running up and down the beach. It’s a wonder she didn’t swim for shore. But now you’ve licked her transportation problem—good old dog Tray.”
He flung out his arm. “Take her, Nanny. Whisk her home to purity. Pack her in the deep freeze for your exalted lord and master.”
He stopped speaking. Jean still sat with her hand over her face. The silence was as painful to me as an aching tooth. For suddenly, incongruously, for the first time I really felt their love for each other. It was something beyond my depth. I’d never experienced anything like that. With Felicia and me, it had been quiet, orderly, even placid. But this was different, like a gale blasting over the dunes.
By then I was all mixed up. My good intentions were blurred.
I said: “Okay, we might as well get started. The boat’s waiting.”
Jean got up instantly, folded the blanket on to the chair and crossed to me.
I said: “Okay, Bill. Come on.”
My son didn’t move. He laughed his sudden, sharp laugh. In that atmosphere it ripped like a buzz saw.
“Me?” he said. “You kidding? I’m staying here. I might bump against her in the boat by accident. I might contaminate her.”
“Bill!” Jean swung round to him. “Bill, I’m sorry!”
“Fine, fine.”
“Bill—please. Please don’t hate me.”
My son gave me a leering wink. “Hark at her. Sweetness and light and cake—that’s what she wants. Don’t worry, cookie. When Ronnie gets home, he’ll buy you another set of emeralds. You can train them not to hate you.”
Jean seemed to shrivel. She was as insubstantial as a leaf. I put my arm round her shoulders.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
I took her out on to the porch and slammed the door behind me on my son and on the subtle, insidious, bitter memories of Felicia.
I took Jean back to the mainland in the boat and then drove her home. Once in a while she tried to talk, to explain. She was obsessed with the desire to explain. “Mr. Duluth, if only I could make you see …” I saw all right. I saw more plainly probably than she did or Bill. They loved each other, and it couldn’t happen. Whatever wild ideas Bill had, it just couldn’t happen. That’s all there was to it. I was ashamed of my earlier disgust at her. She’d married Ronnie because she’d been sold a bill of goods. At nineteen, she couldn’t be blamed for that, and now she was trying to do a good job as Mrs. Ronald Sheldon. I had been wrong about her. She wasn’t Basil’s daughter. She was Norah’s daughter, and she was struggling against something tougher than Norah had had to struggle against. This wasn’t going to be licked by any egg-money. I felt sorry for her—almost as sorry as I felt for Ronnie.
It was still absurdly early when I dropped her off at 58th Street. Only ten-thirty. Neither of us had eaten. Neither of us was aware of the fact.
At the door she held out her hand. She looked terrible, pinched and colorless.
“Mr. Duluth, you’ve been so kind. You’re like Mother. You’re one of the good people.”
Before I really knew what I was doing, I had put my arms round her and was kissing her. Her lips were fresh as petals against mine. I wanted her to be comforted. That was all I could think of.
She drew away. I felt bleak, as if I were the one who was suffering.
“Jean, you’ll be all right?”
She nodded. “Yes. There’s only one way to make it all right, isn’t there?”
She’d left her handbag at Felicia’s cottage. It was Johnson’s night off and the maids slept out. Angie was spending the night with friends at Westport. I had a key. Ronnie’d insisted on giving it me years ago. I let her in. I waited on the pavement until the door had closed behind her.
Ronnie came back the next day. His session with Gwendolyn Sneighley had gone very well.
7
He called in at the office on his way from the airport to 58th Street. It was about four-thirty in the afternoon. He was in high spirits. He had Gwendolyn Sneighley’s new manuscript with him.
“It’s magnificent, old boy. Best thing she’s ever done. God, is that one a weirdo! For two whole days there was a cobweb in her hair. Complete with spider. I swear it. I saw the spider twice. How’s my wife?”
“She’s fine,” I said.
“That son of yours been showing her a good time?”
“We’ve all been at it.”
“And Basil? Nose still to the grindstone?”
“I imagine so. I haven’t seen any of the upstairs faction.”
“Sneighley read all his books and the play. She’s wild about them. Greatest English talent since Lawrence. That’s what she says. She’s writing an essay on him for the Yale review— and she wants to co-produce the play with me. She’s got Givot all enthused about directing. She came up with me so we could get everything marching vite. What d’you think of that, old boy? Sucks to you, isn’t it?”
He was beaming his satisfaction. “Sneighley and Lacey! You may do all the work around here. But sometimes I crash through, don’t I? Tone, my boy. That’s what I bring to the list. Lovely toney tone.”
He slapped me on the back. “Well, stick to it, old fellow. I’m off with little glad cries to plunge into the bosom of my family.”
He chucked Maggie under the chin. I’d never seen him so skittish. “You shouldn’t be happily married, Miss Staines. What Jake needs is a good bedworthy secretary.”
He threw the Sneighley manuscript down on my desk. “Here, read it. You’ll hate it. both of you with your low, common, commercial minds. But read it for the record. And—oh, yes, one little domestic note. If La Sneighley should call— and she is very given to calling publishers—don’t drop any ill-advised references to Mrs. Sheldon. All that has to be sketched in at the proper times by yours truly, Ronald Sheldon, Trainer of Genius.”
He went whistling off.
I was just leaving the office when he called. His voice was so changed that I didn’t for a moment know who it was.
“Come here,” he said. “At once.
”
“Ronnie? What’s the matter?”
“Goddamit, don’t ask stupid questions. Come.”
I felt uneasy. There was so much to feel uneasy about. I went round to 58th Street. Johnson let me in. Angie was in the hall. She was wearing a black sequined cocktail dress and bedroom slippers. Like Ronnie, she never appeared in public unless she was perfectly turned out. The bedroom slippers, even more than her pale indeterminate face, hinted at disaster, as if a ship were sinking.
As the butler went away, she said with a vague wringing of hands, “I was in the hall when Johnson let Bill in. He said he wanted to see Jean. I never realized … It wasn’t my fault. Really it wasn’t. It was so unlike Ronnie to blame me. And in front of Johnson! ”
So it’s happened, I thought. Angie was fluttering like a heavy barnyard bird.
“You’d better go up to him. It’s terrible. Jake, it’s terrible. I’m going out. I’m leaving for the evening. I…”
Going out in the bedroom slippers? I wouldn’t be surprised. I went upstairs to the living-room with Angie coming cautiously behind me. I’d thought, for some reason, that Bill would be there, but he wasn’t. Jean was by the window. She glanced at me and then glanced away. I glanced away too. Ronnie was standing at the mantel. He was trying to look leonine and thunderous as a czar. The effect was spoiled by a slight rotundity of the stomach. I hadn’t noticed before that he’d put on weight in England.
For a moment he glared at me without speaking. Then, in a clipped, icy voice, he announced:
“I came back here to my own house. I let myself in with my own key. I went up to my own living-room. I found my wife in the arms of your son.”
His lips parted in a sneer that made his face a fox’s mask. “I want you to know that I ordered him out of the house! I want you to know that if ever he shows his dirty little nose in here again Johnson has instructions to call the police.”
As always, when things were bad, when I needed vitality, I felt the old weariness slipping over me. I glanced at Jean who was looking blindly in front of her. So she’s let me down again, I thought. Would I never learn that, once my back was turned, she was as shameless as Bill? Was I always going to let her make a sucker out of me?
“Well,” said Ronnie, “I’ve told you what happened. I’m waiting to hear what you have to say for yourself.”
I was worried, miserable for Ronnie, furious with Bill. But Ronnie had spoken to me as if I was a eunuch hired to guard his harem, and, before I could check myself, resentment at the injustice of his attitude flared up in me. I’d done my best. What else had I been doing for ten days? Why should I be blamed?
“I repeat,” he said. “I’m waiting to hear what you have to say.”
Goaded, I snapped: “Why the hell should I have anything to say?”
It was an infantile way to have reacted and I regretted it as soon as I’d spoken. But it couldn’t be taken back, and suddenly Ronnie was quivering, literally quivering, with rage.
“So! So that’s all the gratitude I get. I pick you up out of some sordid Y.M.C.A. existence. I buy you a publishing house. I keep the firm going single-handed with my own talent—my own money. For years I treat you like a friend, an equal. And the moment I turn my back, you encourage your filthy brat of a son to come mauling my wife.”
He flung out at me a theatrically pointing finger. “Don’t you worry. I know now. I know exactly how things stand. Tomorrow morning, every cent I own, every red cent, is going to be pulled out of Sheldon and Duluth. See how you like it then, limping along on your own little shoestring. You’ll be bankrupt in a week.”
Jean turned from the window. Her face was white with astonishment and shock as if she couldn’t believe he had talked to me that way. I was afraid she was going to speak. There’d been enough damage already without her trying to champion my cause.
I said: “Keep out of this, Jean.”
I stood looking at Ronnie. For a moment I had been stunned, but only for a moment. Now I wasn’t angry any more. Because I understood Ronnie so well, that preposterous, childish, utterly unjustified tirade was as transparent as glass. All his life it had been his dread that people only liked him for what they could get out of him. Through the years, I alone had been able to convince him of my genuine affection. Now, thanks to my brat of a son, all that had been changed. Bill had hit him in his most vulnerable spot. He had turned him into the classic figure of farce—the old rich husband hoodwinked by the pretty young wife. For Ronnie, with his touchy pride, that was a position of unendurable humiliation. So I, Bill’s father, had automatically become the arch-enemy, the fiend, the Judas. He would show me! He would destroy me! Out of the window with Sheldon and Duluth!
He meant it, of course. At the moment, there wasn’t any calamity in the world that he didn’t wish on me. But it wouldn’t last. Later he would almost die of shame.
I said: “Bill’s been impossible. I admit that. He needs some sense kicked into him and I’ll do it.”
Unexpectedly Jean took a quick step towards me. “Mr. Duluth, at least you’ve got to understand. There’s nothing to blame Bill about. He’d only come to say good-bye, to say he was sorry about everything. We were only kissing good-bye.”
She was gazing at me with all the candor in the world. Here it was again, the same old pretty, naive explaining. You at least, Mr. Duluth, have got to understand. I didn’t want to understand. I was sick and tired of understanding. Who cared any more whether Jean Sheldon was technically innocent or not?
I opened my mouth to say something. I don’t know what.
What was there to say? But before I had time, Ronnie had swung round to her.
“So you were kissing good-bye. That’s touching, I must say. Kissing good-bye—after what?”
She turned that same straight gaze on him. I felt a kind of morbid anticipatory pleasure. Let her get bawled out for once in a while. Let her meet her match instead of a sentimental old fogey like me. It would do her good.
She said: “Kissing good-bye—after nothing, Ronnie. Nothing happened. I told you that.”
“What did you tell me? What the hell did you tell me?”
“That Bill loves me. He can’t help it. There’s no crime to it, is there? People can love people. I’m sorry it happened. I handled it stupidly. I—I don’t know much about those things.”
That was the sort of weapon with which she could undermine me. But she didn’t undermine Ronnie. “You don’t know much about those things? Nobody told you in Shropshire, I suppose, that it isn’t done for brides to take lovers in their first month of marriage? Or maybe it is done there. Maybe it’s a quaint old custom of the Welsh Marches.”
Jean made a hopeless little gesture with her hand. “Nothing happened between us. I keep telling you. Nothing happened and nothing’s going to happen. It’s all over. It never even began. There’s no need to make these scenes.”
“No need to make a scene when I come into my own living-room and find you wallowing in the arms of a snot-nosed little boy?”
“We were only kissing good-bye.”
“I just happened to come into the living-room just as you just happened to be kissing good-bye?”
“Yes, Ronnie.”
“And. curiously enough, nothing had happened before?”
“No.”
“Why should I believe that?”
“Because I tell you.”
Suddenly Ronnie spat out the word: “Slut!”
Fury had so misshapen his face that I could hardly recognize him. He looked coarse and avaricious and horribly feminine like an old, evil crone. It was dreadful for me to see him like that. For his sake, more than for Jean’s, I had to stop this.
I said: “Leave her alone, Ronnie.”
He spun round, glaring: “Why?”
“Just leave her alone.”
“For God’s sake,” he said, “are you hot for her too?”
I felt as if he’d hit me. I started to speak, but Jean broke in with a voice like
a whip.
“Ronnie, how dare you talk that way to Mr. Duluth! ”
Her eyes were blazing. Ronnie swung back to her.
“You? You dare to dare me? You cheap little chicken-house cleaner. You daughter of a…”
“Ronnie, I’m warning you.”
He gripped her arms. “All right. You warn me. What are you warning me about? That you’ll tell me the truth for once in a while? Why not? Why the hell not? We might as well hear it and have done with it. Why did you marry me?”
“Ronnie, please…”
“For my money? Is it conceivable that you could have married me for my money?”
“Ronnie…”
“But that’s a sordid reflection on your dainty character, isn’t it? Jake must be outraged at such a barbarous accusation. You married me because you loved me. That’s what you said, behind the pigsty in dear old Shropshire—so of course it has to be true. No wonder you could so heroically resist temptation? Tell me. Was it a temptation? Are you in love with Bill Duluth?”
I wished I was anywhere else in the world. Jean stood rigid and silent in his grip. I watched her, fascinated, thinking: She’s going to admit it and everything’s going to be lost. But, surprisingly, she didn’t say anything at all. And, just as surprisingly, Ronnie relinquished his grip on her arms and swung back to the mantel. He stood there, clutching his hands into fists. It had taken me twenty years to know that Ronnie could be like this. To all intents and purposes, he was insane.
“You wait,” he said. “You just wait. All of you. I’ll fix you. Every damn, sniveling, lying, parasitical little roach of you. I’ve had enough exploitation. I’ll put you all back where you came from, where you belong—each of you in your own individual gutter. I’ll…”
He spun round to the mantel. He picked up a Dresden figure of a blackamoor. With all his strength, he crashed it down against the marble of the hearth.
I said: “Ronnie, for God’s sake…”
His eyes flashed at me. “Get out of here.”
“Ronnie.”
“You heard me. You! With a wife who jumped out of a window and a son who goes rutting after your benefactor’s bride! Go home and put your own house in order. And then start looking for a job.”
My Son, the Murderer Page 6
