Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Nancy slapped her sharply across the face. “Stop it!”

  Maggie burst into tears. “It’s true,” she sobbed. “It’s true!”

  “It isn’t true.” Nancy sat down on the bed beside her and said, “I’m sorry.” She touched Maggie’s hand. “We’re both letting ourselves get hysterical about this. We’ve got to be calm and sensible and—rational about this. After all it’s simply something that’s got to be done. Unless—”

  “Unless what, Mother?”

  It was an awful thought: the child was only fifteen. She looked at Maggie. Just the other day she had thought: how pretty she is—a pretty young woman already. Now, her face twisted with grief, her dark hair damp and mussed, she seemed no more than a baby herself. But was it such an awful thought, really? Such things must have happened before, even to children of good families. “Unless you marry him,” she said.

  “Marry him!” Maggie cried. “I hate him! I never want to see him again. I hate him, hate him, hate him!”

  “Oh, be quiet!” Nancy said. “If you hated him so much, why did you let him? And more than once, from what you’ve told me!”

  “I didn’t hate him then! But I hate him now!”

  Well, perhaps that made some sense; Nancy didn’t know at this point. “So you can’t marry him,” she said. “And you can’t have the baby. So what else is there to do but this?”

  Now Maggie’s dark little head went up. “I won’t go alone, though.”

  “You’ve got to.”

  “I’m scared. He’ll hurt me—I know he’ll hurt me. Mother!”

  “He’ll give you an injection. You won’t feel a thing.”

  “How can I go to some doctor when I don’t even, know his name?”

  “Maggie, you don’t seem to realize that what he does is a—” She had started to say “crime” but swallowed the word. “Is highly illegal,” she finished, “in this state.”

  “Mother, I’m so scared!”

  “I know you are. I just keep thinking—that we should bring Mr. and Mrs. Mason in on this—that they should know. After all, Wally—”

  “If you did that, you’d have to bring Daddy in on it too,” Maggie said. “You don’t know Wally’s father. He’d be on the phone in three seconds, wanting to talk to Daddy.”

  “Yes, you’re probably right. Yes, we’ll just have to do it on our own, my dear. We girls.” She smiled grimly.

  “Mother? Will you go tonight? To the drugstore? To get the call?”

  “No! You’ve simply got to do these things alone: It’s the only way they’ll do it. They want to talk to the woman who’s—who’s going to have the baby.”

  “But if you went tonight, Mother, just to answer the phone—how would they know?”

  She supposed that was true. “Well, all right,” she said. “I’ll do that much for you, Maggie. I’ll go tonight. But the night it happens—Saturday night—there’s got to be no question about it. You go alone.”

  Maggie nodded mutely.

  “I suppose there’s no question but that it was Wally Mason,” Nancy said after a moment.

  “Mother, I told you he was the only one. Honest!”

  “Not that it makes a shred of difference at this point,” Nancy said and stood up. “Oh, how could you be such a stupid girl, Maggie?” she said. “How could you be so—stupid?”

  That evening, after supper, Charlie came into the kitchen, where Nancy was finishing with the dishes. “I hope you don’t mind these long posing sessions at Tessa’s house,” he said.

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “It isn’t all posing, needless to say. I have to spend a lot of time, in between posing, talking to her—or playing gin rummy with her. Sometimes we go over to the club and play tennis. She gets very tense during the posing, and these other things seem to relax her. Afterward, I can sometimes get her to pose for a little while longer. She’s really a very tied-up woman.”

  “Yes … I suppose.”

  “But the picture’s coming along pretty well, I think. Would you like to come up to my room and take a look at it?”

  Nancy opened a cupboard door. “Oh, dear,” she said, “we’re all out of cigarettes. I’d better run down to the drugstore and pick up a carton.…”

  She hurried out to the car, got in it, and drove to the drugstore. It was, as Genny had said it would be, reasonably crowded, but the telephone booth in the back was unoccupied. The thought that it might not be had occurred to her in the car. She went quickly to it, entered it, and closed the door. She stood there, inside, where a little fan had started blowing, and pretended to be searching for a coin deep in the bottom of her purse. Suddenly the telephone rang, with—it seemed to her—a terrifyingly shrill loudness, beside her ear. She picked up the receiver quickly and said, “Hello?”

  “Is this Sylvia?”

  “Yes!”

  There was a little click, and the connection went dead. She had wanted to say just a few more words. She had wanted to say, “Is it safe? Can you tell me?” That was all—just that. But it was over, and it was over so quickly that she could not now have said for sure whether the voice had been a man’s or a woman’s. She replaced the receiver and stood there while the little fan stirred her loose hair, thinking, dear God, what am I doing? What am I doing to my daughter? After a while she realized that someone outside was politely tapping on the door of the booth.

  Genny McCarthy’s life was supported by threads as silky and lacy as those of a spider’s web. She was held suspended in this network of fragile filaments like a dying fly. The threads, and their interlacing, represented lines of communication—telephone lines or lines of talk, information gathered in, spun out, and gathered in again. It was an endless process, but it maintained her position at just a bit off dead center of the design. There was a trick, though, to the gathering and dispersal of information. Certain strands of information could betray you. If you mishandled them, you could bring the whole construction crashing down on your own head. You had to protect yourself. Multiple confidences were easy to manage. You could disguise sources, obliterate certain sections of the story’s path. But Nancy Lord had said to her, “You’re the only person I’ve told, Genny.” It was horrid to be trapped like this. She had to tell someone.

  “Of course she said it was for a friend,” Genny said to Bob that night at dinner. “But it’s either for her or—more likely—for that cocky son of theirs.” But Bob was in his usual state, drunk, and didn’t seem to care. He didn’t even seem to hear what she was saying.

  9

  “Oh,” she said, startled. “I didn’t recognize you, doctor!”

  It was a bit of a jolt, running into your psychiatrist—in a tropical-print sport shirt and white Bermuda shorts—in the supermarket. He looked actually very natty. “Somehow I never expected to see you here,” Nancy said.

  He grinned at her, lifted a package of cereal from the shelf, and placed it in his cart. “I’m here every Saturday morning,” he said. “Just another domesticated American male, you see.” He ran a finger along the row of cereal boxes and selected another package. “Kids like this one,” he said.

  “Have you tried this kind?” Nancy suggested, pointing to a blue-and-orange box. “It’s something new, and my children love it.…”

  “On your recommendation, we’ll give it a whirl,” he said, and he added the blue-and-orange carton to his basket. “You missed our appointment on Thursday, Mrs. Lord,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. I know—”

  “I was a little worried. I almost called you, but I decided that if anything were wrong you’d call me.”

  “Yes. Well, it’s just that this week has been such a—hectic one, doctor,” she said. “With the children out of school and everything—there’s just been so much going on. And I completely forgot the appointment. I’m sorry.”

  “I understand,” he said. “As long as nothing was the matter.”

  “And Charlie’s been so busy—you know he’s working on this portrait, and�
��well, there’s just been so much going on.”

  “Of course. And by the way, I’d like to meet your husband at some point, Mrs. Lord.”

  “Oh, yes. And I’m sure he’d like to meet you, doctor. But—”

  “But what?”

  “He is so awfully busy at the moment. And besides—well,” she said uncertainly, “I don’t think Charlie quite sympathizes with me for going to a—someone like you. He always tends to laugh at me about it, and—”

  “He laughs at you?”

  “Not laughs. Not really. He’s never said anything outright. But I think he thinks I’m a little silly, a little foolish. He doesn’t understand why I need any sort of—treatment. Oh, he’s willing to believe that I believe I need it. But he just doesn’t see why I need it—if you see what I mean.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “I mean I’m really afraid he’d just laugh at me if I told him that you wanted to talk to him. Maybe not laugh. But I don’t think he’d—want to very much. You see, Charlie has such an optimistic nature. His theory is, if anything is troubling you or bothering you, all you do is laugh it off and think about something else, and whatever is troubling you will go away.”

  “Yes. Well, that theory works for some people.” he said, glancing down at the shopping list in his hand.

  “It always seems to work for Charlie,” she said.

  “Anyway, will I see you this coming Thursday at our usual time?”

  “Definitely,” she said.

  “I’m off for the frozen-foods department,” he said.

  “It’s three aisles over, on the left. Do you always do the marketing?”

  “I have a working wife,” he said. “Well, see you Thursday.”

  “Yes. Good-bye doctor.”

  “Good-bye.” He started to wheel his wagon away from her, then stopped and turned. “By the way,” he said, pushing it back toward her, “have you ever thought of working, Mrs. Lord? Your children are pretty much grown—”

  “What in the world could I work at?” she asked.

  “Why, I should think there would be a lot of things you could do. You’re an intelligent woman with a college degree. My wife doesn’t have any more than that. She works in the programming department of a television network. She makes a very nice salary and loves her work.”

  “I’ve simply never thought of working,” Nancy said.

  “It might not be a bad idea,” he said. “Think about it, anyway. And I’ll see you Thursday.” He pushed his shopping cart away, down the aisle, toward the frozen foods.

  They didn’t always talk about Tessa Morgan. She was forever asking him questions about himself. She wanted to know all about his home, his wife, his work. He had told her a great deal, and she was a good listener. To talk to her about himself was another way to get her to sit still. He had told her about Myra Mirisch, and what had happened, and, that Saturday morning, she had suddenly said, “Lord Charles—why don’t you let me finance a show for you?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I mean it,” she said, sitting up straight and breaking the pose. “I’ve got a lot of money. All I do when I’m not working is try to think of ways to spend it. To hell with Myra Mirisch. We can rent space anywhere, can’t we? Nobody needs to know that I’m the one behind it.”

  “You’re very generous, Tessa—but no. Really, no.”

  “Why not? Too bloody proud?”

  “No,” he said. “The thing is—I know now that Myra Mirisch is right. I don’t have enough work for a show. I can’t have a show until I have more work. But thanks anyway, Tessa. No, the only trouble now is—”

  “How to break it to your wife.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I can’t help you there.”

  “Of course you can’t. No, I’ve got to—”

  “Hey!” she said. “Let me see the picture now. Can I? Please?”

  “Absolutely not. Not till it’s finished.”

  “I’ll show you my sketch of you.”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “I’ve never known a more uncompromising man,” she said, sitting back again, pretending to sulk.

  From behind his easel he smiled at her. “My wife once said that I have a habit of being uncompromising about unimportant things,” he said.

  “What did she mean by that?”

  “Oh, it was about a row we got into with some neighbors back in California,” he said. “It was a stupid sort of row to get into, I guess. But I had a point, and I stuck to it, and everybody misunderstood what my point was, and everybody got mad. I suppose I should have given in—maybe it was an unimportant point. But it seemed important at the time.”

  “Everything seems important at the time. What was it?”

  “It was a few weeks after the assassination. We were at a party that some neighbors gave in Encino, and people were talking about what a monster Lee Oswald was. And I suddenly said that I didn’t think he was such a monster. I said I felt sorry for him—that I understood him. I said Oswald was kind of an American tragic hero, maybe even more of a one than Kennedy was, because he was hung up on so many of the things that the rest of us are hung up on. But he had more guts than the rest of us because he decided to do something about it—even if it was a huge, meaningless, pointless gesture. I said that all of us knew we were hung up on something, but Oswald helped define what a big and terrible thing that something was. And he tried to do something, which is more than most people ever try. I said I thought this was heroism—heroism of a certain kind. Of course, nobody understood what I was saying. Everybody was horrified—shouting at me, saying I was recommending that Presidents be murdered. They began calling me a Communist. I began calling them God-damned fools—”

  “Scrappy little boy,” she murmured.

  “I kept trying to make my point, but nobody would listen. The more I said, the worse it sounded to them. Finally our host literally ordered us out of the house. Afterward our friends would hardly speak to us. They kept spreading it around that we were Communists. It was that night, driving home from the party, that Nancy made that remark—about how rigid I was about things that didn’t matter.”

  “Yes.” Tessa nodded.

  “I still think it did matter, though. I think Lee Oswald was in a box—the kind of box most of the rest of us are in. A lot of us don’t know we’re in it. He knew it. Most of us don’t try to get out. He did. He killed the President, but it was the only way that poor, suffering bastard could think of to get out of that box.”

  “My box was a cake.”

  He smiled at her again. “But you came bursting out in all your glory, and look where you are now.”

  “Sometimes I think I should have stayed inside the cake. I used to think, when they were carrying me in, what fun it would be not to come out. Just stay inside there, all curled up and comfortable, and not come out.”

  “The Veterans of Foreign Wars would have torn the cake to pieces to get you out,” he said.

  “I know,” she said and shivered. “They did. It’s getting chilly. Let’s go inside.”

  He had talked to her too about his sister Cathy, and about the partnership, and about the good times they had had, and about their success.

  “How did she die?” she had suddenly asked him.

  He had started to say, “I don’t want to talk about it, Tessa. I never talk about it.” Most people, in fact, never asked that question. But Tessa repeated the question so earnestly that he had told her.

  It had been a Sunday evening. It was almost exactly fifteen years ago, because Nancy had been pregnant with Maggie. He and Nancy had been sitting in their apartment, the one on Wilshire. Dinner was over and he was reading the paper. Nancy had been doing the crossword puzzle and had just asked him for a word to fit some definition when the telephone rang. It was long distance calling for him. He had said, “Hello,” and then, when he recognized her voice, “Hey, where are you, Cathy?”

  “Oh, Charlie!” she said. “I’m in the most marvelous pl
ace. You’ve got to come—come quickly.”

  “Where is this marvelous place?”

  “It’s called—just a sec, let me look at what it says on this match-book. It’s called Reno, Nev. I just sort of stumbled on it, you might say, and I love it. You’ve got to come.” She giggled softly. “And I’m a little drunk,” she said.

  “What the hell are you doing there?”

  “I really don’t know, exactly,” she said. “But I started—”

  “I hope it’s not for the reason I think of when I think of Reno,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “There really isn’t any reason why I’m here, Charlie. Early this morning I got into the car and I began to drive. I drove and drove and drove. I drove until I couldn’t see the road anymore, and then I stopped. Where I stopped turns out to be Reno—Reno, Nev., as I told you before.”

  “Does Reggie know where you are?”

  “No. I don’t want Reggie to know where I am. Ever again. Oh, I can’t stand him!” she said. “I can’t stand being married to that damned”—her voice broke—“that damned stuffed shirt. Charlie, why didn’t you say, ‘Don’t marry a stuffed shirt.’”

  “You never gave me a chance,” he said. “Now, listen—”

  “So I drove and drove,” she repeated. “Funny—I thought I was driving east, to Arizona. I wanted to see the Painted Desert. But I must have been driving north, because here’s where I am. But it’s much prettier than the Painted Desert. It’s a beautiful city, Reno! So come—come quick.”

  “Cathy, you’re drunk. Now, listen to me—”

  “Oh, did I forget to tell you I was drunk? Yes, I’ve been having a little liquid courage. Courage to help me face the ordeal I face.”

  “What’s the ordeal, Cathy?”

  “The ordeal is—well, there’s a man here who’s a very big manufacturer of oars. I’m trying to make a deal with him, you see—oh, no. It isn’t funny. My puns don’t work anymore. Nothing works anymore. The ordeal is—leaving Reggie. Everything. Charlie, I need to talk to you. Please come.”