Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In her room, she thought, Because he has always been a thief. Always, always, always. Why had she always hidden it from herself? Why had she always refused to admit it? As the twig is bent, she thought. The twig of Harold had been bent from the beginning. Nickels from her dresser. Bills vanished from the change purse in her bag. Unfamiliar toys in his bedroom as a little boy. A football helmet in the garage that had come from—somewhere. Little things. A snowstorm paperweight. “Where did that come from, Harold?” “That? Oh, I just found it, Mom.” But things had to come from somewhere. A flashlight. A compass that said “Made in Germany.” A piece of rose quartz. Dimes, nickels, dollar bills. And, of course, the one time she had openly suspected him, openly accused him, he had been lucky and she had been wrong—the microscope from the sixth grade. “Where did you get that, Harold?”

  “The science teacher gave it to me.”

  “Why would your science teacher give away a microscope?”

  “He gave away a lot of them, Mom!”

  She called the sixth-grade science teacher. “Yes, Mrs. Lord,” he said, “we got some new microscopes for the lab. I gave away nine old ones—to the first nine boys who raised their hands.”

  That episode had reassured her. The notion that he would ever steal had been imaginary. But she had been wrong because it had been true always. And it was too late now. That was the final truth she had to face: it was too late now. Nothing could be done now. Once upon a time, perhaps, but not now. It would go on and on. It would go on always. Where had it come from, this thing in him? Oh, she knew perfectly well. It came from her father; he was a throwback to her father. Everything she hated about her father had skipped a generation and landed on her son. So it was finished, he was finished, she was finished with him. Someone else would have to cope now, for his life, as far as she was concerned, was over. She would banish him to the far side of the moon and let him stay there. Oh, yes, I should have let him get caught, she thought. But it’s too late now to worry about that also. Too late because I helped him. I helped him, and so now I am just as guilty as he. I can worry about that no longer, because that is also over, done with, finished.

  Besides, since about three o’clock that afternoon, Nancy had had something far more serious to worry about.

  Someone was tapping on her door.

  “Come in.”

  “Nancy,” Charlie said quietly, “what’s wrong?” And, when she said nothing, merely continued staring at her cold reflection in the mirror, he said, “I seem to be asking that question a lot these days, don’t I?”

  “Yes. The question never changes. Only the days change,” she said.

  He hesitated, trying to understand what that answer meant. Then he said, “Honey—good news. Tessa called. She isn’t canceling the portrait. It was all that damn maid’s doing again.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, that is good news, isn’t it?”

  There were times, of course, when she legitimately could not pose for him. She had a series of house guests who came and went. There was nearly always someone staying with her, and it was invariably a man. Some of the men who came to visit her wore reasonably famous faces; others were, as far as Charlie could tell, nameless gentlemen whose occupations were never clear to him. Sometimes she would make oblique reference to her current guest. “See if he wants anything,” she would say to Minnie. Or, “Is he up yet?” None of them ever stayed very long—three or four days at the most. Their departures were, he gathered, often preceded by stormy scenes and, at times, violence. After one of them he noticed an ugly cut under one eye, which she had endeavored to conceal with makeup.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “Oh, we had a little roughhouse here.”

  “Nice friends you have.”

  “Don’t be stuffy,” she said.

  On certain mornings Charlie would arrive to find a man’s suitcases piled this way and that on her front step. The grim-jawed man would stride out of the house, hurl the suitcases into the back of his car, and drive off without a word. Inside, the house would be filled with tiptoeing servants and whispered talk, and there would be a message for him that Miss Morgan would be unable to pose that day.

  She would be in her room, unavailable to anyone except the one person whom she would summon to be with her during those hours behind closed doors. If she closeted herself with Minnie, then Bruno would fret, certain that Minnie was using these private hours to fill Tessa’s head with “poison” about him. If she selected Bruno—and she chose her companions randomly for these periods—then Minnie would sulk, knowing that Bruno now had a chance to answer her poison with poison of his own. Lately Bruno had been making all sorts of buttering-up little advances to Juanita to curry her favor. But where Juanita’s affections lay, since she spoke no English, was always uncertain. There was something almost gallant about the way Tessa seemed to survive these embroilments and to emerge from them a day or so later looking cheerful—ready to pose again, ready to play tennis or gin again, ready to talk, ready for another house guest.

  “I suppose you think I’m the whore of the world,” she said to Charlie one day after one of her friends had departed.

  “No,” he said easily, picking up his brush. “The way you choose to lead your life is your business, Tessa.”

  “Why do I do it, do you suppose?”

  “Why do you do what?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Why do I sleep with one man after another?”

  She was looking at him and he studied her eyes. On his canvas, her eyes were still two white holes. The eyes were going to be the hardest thing to capture. They always were, but hers were going to be even harder. “I haven’t a clue,” he said finally, “unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless it’s something so simple as—you’re looking for the right man.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “I suppose it is that simple. But, like so many simple things, it turns out to be terribly complicated.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love your wife, Charlie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Always have?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I believe you,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, I think I do. I think you’re the kind of man who, even if you don’t really love your wife, has something that binds you to her. I don’t know what it is. Need, maybe. I’ve been in love, but I’ve never had that other thing—whatever it is.”

  “You’ve been married too,” he said.

  “Thrice,” she said, suddenly putting on a British accent. “I am thrice wed. But I shan’t let you hold that against me, Charles. You must realize that my three husbands have had a total of fourteen wives between them. I made bad choices. I married Bluebeards. But I’ve been in love many more times than that—always with Bluebeards, though.”

  He laughed. “Try not to move your hand,” he said. “It’s lovely where it is.”

  “I thought I was in love with that man, the one who left yesterday.”

  “Were you?”

  “Thought I was,” she said. And then, “He’s married too, you know. Another Bluebeard.”

  “Ah.…” he said.

  “Jesus, I hate actors!” she said suddenly. “They’re such small, mean, contemptible, selfish, rotten little bastards!”

  “I thought his face looked familiar,” he said, thinking that she was referring to the latest man.

  “Hmm? Oh, him,” she said. “No, I meant me. Why did I have to be an actor?”

  “Don’t you enjoy it?”

  “Enjoy it? I hate it, every minute of it. I only do it for the money—absolutely nothing else. I hate making films—I always have. I’m terrified every minute when I’m working. I start gulping pills, I smoke too much, drink too much—the only time I can do a decent scene is when I’m half crocked; that’s the truth. I scream at people, throw things, have crying jags—by the time I’m finished with a picture, I’m a wreck. I’m ready for a hospital—like this place.”
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  “You think of this place as a hospital?”

  “That’s what it is, at the beginning. This place or any other place I go. Then after a while I begin to think, like today, why am I here? Why am I here in this place, in this town? There’s no reason.”

  “It’s a beautiful house, this beautiful pool—”

  She shrugged. “This beautiful house and this beautiful pool could be anywhere. Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter where I am—ever. This place doesn’t mean anything more to me than any other place. I don’t belong here—or anywhere. There’s only one place where I belong.”

  “Where is that?” he asked her.

  “Inside a cake,” she said with a little smile.

  “A cake?”

  “Yes, a cake,” she repeated. “They’d put me inside these big cakes, you know—made of something like plaster—and they’d put the lid on, and carry me in inside it. Then I’d come jumping out with nothing on. At men’s smokers in Chicago, at VFW lodges in a lot of places. I loved the VFW lodges. And I was very good at it, jumping out of cakes. Oh, sometimes I had some sort of costume on. One was a harem outfit and they called me Lauren of Arabia. In my Spanish dress I was Barbara of Seville. And so I became rich and famous. May I move my hand now? It’s getting full of pins and needles.”

  “Yes, you may move your hand,” he said.

  She picked up her pad and the pencils with which she had been sketching him. “Yes, I am the whore of the world,” she said. “I need a husband, Charlie. A husband, not another Bluebeard.”

  “Yes, I think you do.”

  “All this fighting that goes on—Bruno and Minnie and Richard and Juanita. It’s so crazy—that I have to have it, but I seem to have to have it.”

  “I wasn’t sure you were aware of it,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. But there’s nothing I can seem to do about it. I could fire them all, but they’d just be replaced by a pack of new ones, just the same. A husband would put a stop to them, though—if he was a real husband. He’d stop them just by being there. A husband would be good for that, and other things.” She studied the sketch in front of her, holding it at arm’s length, eyeing it critically, closing first one eye, then the other. “Charles Lord,” she said. “Charles Lord. Lord Charles. Lord Charles, has anyone ever told you that you have the face of a very young boy? You have a young boy’s face, Lord Charles. You’re about—sixteen.”

  He laughed and said, “Hey, cut it out—you’re making me self-conscious.”

  “And you’re so lucky,” she said.

  “Really? Why?”

  “Because you have a place to go to,” she said. “You’ll leave here, go home, to your wife and your children and your supper. But I’ll leave here, and go into the house, and up the stairs to—nothing at all. You ’ave a proper ’ome to go to, you do, Lord Charles,” she said in a cockney accent now, speaking to the sketch. “Ah, you’re a bloody lucky chump.”

  “Sweetie? It’s me,” Genny McCarthy said in a breathless voice. “Is the coast clear? Can you talk?”

  “Yes, Genny, I can talk,” Nancy said.

  “Well!” Genny said, letting out a gasp of breath, as though she had been running a long distance. “I’ll say this, sweetie. This is just about the toughest job the McCarthy Service has had to tackle, but I think I’ve finally got some information for you.”

  “Good. Go on,” Nancy said.

  “Well, to begin with, there’s a place in Switzerland where it’s legal. It’s also legal in Japan—very safe; they do it in hospitals.”

  “That’s no good, Genny. This—person can’t go to Switzerland or Japan. I told you, her husband doesn’t know.”

  “Anyway, that’s the first thing this friend of mine recommends. Because it’s—well, the safest. But I’ve also come up with someone—through a friend of my friend—who will do it here. He’s a real doctor, this friend says, who believes in it, and he does it on the side, in his house, I guess. He puts you to sleep, and he’s supposed to be very clean and safe, and he charges an arm and a leg.”

  “What’s his name?” Nancy said.

  “You never know his name. My friend doesn’t even know his name, she says, and she won’t even give me the number to call. But she called it, and it’s okay, and if your friend wants it I’ve got all the information she needs.”

  “Good … good,” Nancy said.

  “Got a pencil?”

  “Just a minute.… Go ahead,” she said, holding the pencil poised over the back of an envelope.

  “The name to remember is Sylvia. Just Sylvia. I don’t think it’s anybody’s real name—just a password they use.”

  “Go on,” Nancy said.

  “The place to remember is the drugstore on Locust. You know where it is? Well, if your friend is interested, she’s to go to the drugstore tonight a little before nine o’clock. The drugstore is usually pretty busy around that time, because it’s right after the movie lets out next door. She’s to go to the pay phone booth at the back of the store and go inside and pretend to be making a call.…”

  “Yes.”

  “At nine o’clock sharp, that phone will ring. She’s to answer the phone and someone will ask her, ‘Is this Sylvia?’ All she’s to do is say, ‘Yes.’ That’s all. That’s the signal that she’s agreed. The person calling will then just hang up. Then, on Saturday night, she’s to go back to the drugstore and take a stool as near to the front door as possible and order something—a Coke, whatever. At nine o’clock sharp, again, a blue Pontiac sedan will drive up in front of the drugstore, and she’s to go out and get right in the back seat. She is to be absolutely alone. A woman will be driving the car. The woman will say, ‘Sylvia?’ Your friend will say, ‘Yes.’ That’s absolutely all. There is to be no conversation in the car. Your friend will give the woman the money, in cash, and then will lie down in the back seat of the car so she won’t know where she’s going. The woman will drive her to where the doctor is—it’s somewhere in Jersey, I think, but I’m not sure. Oh, I forgot—she’s to bring a nightgown in a shopping bag, not a suitcase, and whatever else she needs. The same woman will drive her back in the morning and leave her off in front of the drugstore. That’s all there is to it. Sounds simple. It also sounds scary.” Genny laughed. “Golly, I’ve even got myself scared, telling you about it! Me—old Barren Bessie!”

  “Genny,” Nancy said quickly, “are you sure this man is safe? Are you sure he won’t—”

  “Sweetie, how can I be sure? My name hasn’t even come into it, and incidentally, for God’s sake don’t let it! All I know is that this friend of my friend swears by him, and says he’s the next best thing to Switzerland or Japan.”

  “Well,” Nancy sighed. “Thank you, Genny. Thanks very much.”

  “You’ve got all the information?”

  “Yes.…”

  “Don’t you want to know how much it will cost?”

  “Oh, yes, I guess I’d better know that,” Nancy said.

  “One thousand simoleons. I told you it was an arm and a leg. All I can say is for that price it had better be good.”

  “Yes.…”

  “So you tell your friend to go to the drugstore tonight.”

  “Yes, Genny. Genny—” she said, “by the tone of your voice I know you think it’s me. I swear it isn’t. If it were I’d tell you.”

  “Aw, sweetie—look, I don’t care who it is. I’m just so sorry some gal’s got herself in a jam. And look—this friend of my friend says that if she’s just missed her second period, this is the safest time, so I really hope it all works out for her—your friend.” For some reason, idiotically, Nancy remembered that this was the silly euphemism her mother always used for her period—her “friend.” “I have my friend,” her mother would say.

  “It’s just that the circumstances—the situation is such that she can’t have it,” Nancy said. “It’s got to be this way. It’s the only possible—”

  “I understand.”

  “You’re the only
person I’ve told, Genny.”

  “Sure,” Genny said. “Well, let’s you and I just forget we had this discussion. It’s your friend’s problem now.”

  Nancy hung up the telephone and sat there for a moment, reading the odd series of words she had written, strung together, on the back of the envelope: “Sylvia … drugstore … pretend … blue Pontiac … Saturday 9 P.M. … Sylvia … nightgown … Japan … $1000.” She folded the envelope carefully. Then she stood up and went up the stairs to Maggie’s room. She tapped on the door. “Well, I think I’ve got some information for us,” she said in a dead voice, coming into the room.

  Maggie, who was sitting tailor-fashion on the top of her bed reading a magazine, looked up and said, “What kind of information?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Nancy said, snatching the magazine away from her. “What kind of information do you think?” Then she told her.

  After she finished, Maggie sat silently frowning. Then she said, “Will you come with me, Mother?”

  “No, I can’t come with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a part of the arrangement. You have to go alone. I’m sorry.”

  Maggie threw her a quick, terrified look. “I don’t want to go alone! I’m scared to go alone! I won’t go alone!”

  “You got yourself into this alone. You can damn well get yourself out of it alone,” her mother said.

  “It wasn’t me! It was Wally! It was his—”

  “Be quiet. You told me you let him. You took the risk. You can just take the next risk.”

  Maggie’s report card, with the dreary parade of marks across it, lay on her desk. That had begun it—the report card and the note that had come with it. That had prompted Nancy’s talk with Maggie, out of which had come Maggie’s confession.

  “Well, I won’t go alone!” Maggie repeated. “There’s this girl I know who says you can do it with a knitting needle—”

  “Quiet! Don’t let me hear you talking about anything like that! Do you want to die of blood poisoning? And who are you talking to about this, anyway? I told you not to tell a soul!”

  “You see?” Maggie cried. “You don’t care about me! You don’t care about me at all! All you care about is what the neighbors would say! The McCarthys, the Willeys, the Mayhews, the Phelpses—”