Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “I can’t come up there, Cathy.”

  “Get a plane, Charlie. Please.”

  “Listen. Specifically, where are you? In a bar, or—”

  “No, I’m in my hotel room. And it’s a beautiful, very Old World hotel. Crystal chandeliers. Boys with brass buttons on their jackets. A string quartet in the salon. Beautiful—napery.”

  “Cathy, please do something for me? Go to bed now, and get some sleep. In the morning, come on home.”

  “I’m never coming home.”

  “What about the office?”

  “Charlie—you’ll love it here. I’m serious now, if I ever wasn’t. Charlie, Reno is funnier than Los Angeles—honest! They’ve got this river here, and this bridge—and all the divorcées throw their wedding rings off the bridge into the river; it’s a tradition. Every day they dredge that river for rings, and nobody’s ever fished out a single one. Charlie, come as fast as you can. There’s so much I want to talk to you about. I’m sober now.”

  “I’ve got appointments tomorrow, and—”

  “Those appointments can wait. I know what those appointments are. Have Madeline postpone them. Have I ever asked you to do anything when I didn’t mean it, Charlie?”

  He hesitated. “No, but—look, Nancy’s going to have the baby any minute. I can’t run off and leave her tonight just because—”

  “You’re right,” she said in a flat voice. “Of course you can’t.”

  “Come home tomorrow and we’ll have a long talk—about everything.”

  “You knew it wasn’t working—with Reggie.”

  “We’ll talk about that too, if you like, when you get back.”

  There was no answer.

  “Cathy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you do as I say? Get some sleep?”

  “Charlie,” she said, “will you ever forgive me?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive you for,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “You wanted to be an artist. I made you be an advertising man. That’s the terrible thing I did to you.”

  “You’re being silly, Cathy. Silly and morbid. I wanted to—”

  “No. You didn’t want it. I wanted it. I said head for the top, reach for the stars. But that was a lie and a cheat, Charlie. I never let you reach for any little old stars, Charlie dear. I let you reach no higher than—than the ceiling of this awful little room I’m in, no higher than the forty-watt stars in this little room.”

  “Cathy.…”

  “It’s the truth. But why did I do it? Was it because I didn’t think you were good enough, Charlie? Was that it? Didn’t I believe in you enough?” There was a silence and then she said, “Yes, it’s the truth. Forgive me.”

  “Cathy, will you please do as I say?”

  “Charlie, my boy.… Oh, Charlie my boy.…”

  “Will you, Cathy?”

  “You thrill me, you chill me.… What do you say? Oh, I remember. Yes. Say good night to Nancy for me. Tell her—no, never mind.”

  “Promise me?”

  “Yes.…”

  “Good girl.”

  “You know, of course, that I never wanted to be born,” she said.

  After he hung up the phone Nancy had looked at him intently for a minute or two, the unfinished crossword puzzle in her lap. Then she said, “I think you should go to her.”

  “Don’t be silly. She’s had some sort of blow-up with Reggie. She’s drunk. In the morning she’ll have forgotten that she even called me.”

  “I still think you should go to her.”

  “I’m not going to leave you, Nancy, when the baby’s due.”

  “I heard you tell her it was due at any minute. That’s not true. It isn’t due for at least another three weeks. I think you should go.”

  “It could come early—you know that.”

  “Well, if it did, which it won’t,” she said, “I can take care of myself. I know what to do, who to call—”

  “Who would stay with Harold if something happened?”

  “I could get someone very easily,” she said. “Within five minutes.”

  “I’m just not going to leave you here all alone at a time like this, and I told her so. She understands.”

  “I’m only telling you what I think you ought to do.”

  “Well, I don’t see why. I don’t see what good it would do.”

  “Sometimes you can be so selfish.”

  “Selfish! I don’t see what’s selfish about—”

  “You’re not going because you don’t want to go, Charlie. Don’t use me as your excuse. And you know she wouldn’t call you like that if it weren’t for some terribly important reason.”

  “Look,” he said. “She’s had a blow-up with Reggie, that’s all. All she wants to do is tell me about it, and there’s not a damn thing I can do.”

  “I don’t think that’s all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She stood up rather heavily from the sofa—heavy with the weight of their child within her. The crossword puzzle slid to the floor, and she stooped to pick it up.

  “I’ll get that—”

  “I’ve got it,” she said, retrieving it. “I mean I just don’t think that’s all.”

  “What else is there?”

  “I happen to know what’s wrong with her and Reggie, for one thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “She’s cold. She won’t sleep with him.”

  He stared at her. “Well, where the hell did you get that piece of information?” he asked her.

  “Reggie told me,” she said simply.

  “Well, he’s a God-damned filthy liar! Why would that son of a bitch—”

  “Why would he lie about it? Why would he tell me if it isn’t true?”

  “Because he wants to break up the partnership, that’s why!” he said fiercely. “That’s been patently obvious for quite a long time. That damned stuffed-shirt son of a bitch just wants to break up the partnership!”

  “Why would telling me a thing like that break up the partnership? It would seem to strengthen the partnership, if you ask me.”

  “What? You’re not making any sense, Nancy. You’re talking like a damned fool.”

  “Are you going to call Reggie and tell him where she is?”

  “She doesn’t want Reggie to know where she is. She doesn’t want to talk to Reggie. She wants to talk to—”

  “Yes, to you. But you won’t go. So I think the least you ought to do is call Reggie and tell him where she is.”

  “I don’t want to talk to that bastard! What kind of a man would make a filthy insinuation like that about his wife—and to you, of all people—about my sister!”

  She looked quickly down at the puzzle in her hand. “A sister who loves her brother too much,” she said. “Is that what you mean?”

  He could only stand there, staring at her.

  Almost immediately she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  But it was too late: she had said it. “No,” he said quietly, “you shouldn’t have. But you did. And I suppose you had to do it, didn’t you? You had to make it dirty. It was something wonderful, but it was something you couldn’t understand. So you had to spoil it. You had to make it something dirty and ugly, and awful, and unclean, and smelly. Is this from Reggie too? It must be. The two of you, with your little heads together, making something rotten and ugly out of something that was once—just very nice.”

  She had turned and gone out of the room into the bedroom.

  He had sat in the living room of their apartment, trying to read, trying to pick up the newspaper story where he had left off, but he couldn’t read. He got up at one point and fixed himself a drink. But when he had it fixed he couldn’t drink it and poured it down the kitchen sink. Then he simply sat there. Shortly after midnight the telephone rang. Thinking it would be Cathy again, he reached for the telephone, but this time almost angrily. It was not Cathy, but it was a man’s voice telling him over
long distance that his sister had “been pushed, jumped, or had fallen”—that was the expression he kept using—from her bedroom window on the ninth floor of her hotel.

  The next morning he flew to Reno to bring her home. Home was Los Angeles, where she had wanted to go—the silly city with the outrageous drive-ins and the lovely beaches. He hadn’t wanted to, but they had made him go up to her room in that hotel. It was a dingy, terrible hotel in a dingy, terrible part of the city, and he had been taken up to the room in a noisy elevator by an oily-skinned assistant manager with a waxed moustache who smelled of peppermint and hair lotion and who kept sucking on a wet-looking cigarette. The room he showed Charlie—small, brown, its walls mottled with the stains of ancient plumbing problems—had a radiator that danced its own private little jig against one wall as the steam traveled through its veins. Strauss from the string quartet in the salon below shimmering the prisms of the chandeliers. The room had nothing at all to do with Cathy.

  “Come over here and look at something,” the assistant manager said, moving to the window.

  Charlie had not wanted to look out the window, but he did. He had gone to the window and looked out, just once, just briefly, at the street below. Then he turned away and leaned against the wall, feeling ill.

  “Notice anything?”

  “No.”

  “I was the first one to point it out,” the man said. “Nobody else noticed it. But she didn’t jump from this window. She couldn’t of. She landed on top of the marquee, and she couldn’t of if she jumped from this here window. She went up to the roof to do it.…

  Always head for the top.

  “I thought it was kind of considerate, you know? Doing it so she’d land on the marquee, and not on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.…”

  Even if you lose, lose with splendor.

  “I don’t think it’s really possible to love another person too much,” Tessa had said when he had finished. “Though there are times when you think it’s too much.”

  She had looked at him with such intensity, with her black eyes so vivid and enormous, that he had suddenly had a picture of what he would place in the two white hollows that were still her eyes on the canvas. He saw pupils composed only of shades of black, and he had picked up his brush. But she closed her eyes at the moment and, just as quickly, the vision fled.

  “Can you open your eyes again?” he asked her. “Can you look at me again the way you just did?”

  “No,” she said and shook her head. With her eyes still closed she said, “What did your wife say afterward?”

  He sighed and put down his brush. “We never talked much about my sister after that,” he said. “We’ve almost never mentioned Cathy since.”

  Only once, several years afterward, did Nancy mention Cathy’s name. It was when she was pregnant again—this time with Carla. “I’ve been thinking of names,” she said. “If it’s a girl, I was wondering if, perhaps—Catherine.”

  “No,” he said. “I appreciate the thought, Nancy—I really do. But I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”

  “I was also thinking of some variation on your name,” she said. “But I don’t like things like Charlotte or Charlene.…” They had settled on Carla.

  “Maggie’s spending the night with a friend,” she said to him that evening.

  “Oh, fine.”

  Upstairs in Maggie’s room she checked over the contents of the little shopping bag—nightgown, toothbrush, slippers, brush and comb. Maggie sat glumly on the edge of the bed, her chin in her hands.

  “Here’s the envelope,” Nancy said, showing it to her. “I’m putting it right on top. Give it to her first thing.” She checked her watch. “It’s eight-forty. We’d better go. I’ll drive you over and drop you off at the corner.”

  Maggie rose slowly from the bed and stood facing the wall. “What am I going to do for money, Mother?”

  “Money? There’s a thousand dollars in cash in that envelope!”

  “I thought I was supposed to order something at the drugstore. I was going to have a hot-fudge sundae. How am I going to pay for that, Mother?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Nancy said and fetched some change.

  “You don’t need to bite my head off, Mother! I’m doing what you want me to, aren’t I?” She flung her white raincoat over her shoulders.

  They went down the stairs.

  “Have fun, Maggie,” Charlie said.

  “Good night, Daddy.”

  In the car beside her mother Maggie said, “‘Have fun!’ Did you hear that? It’s okay for him to say, ‘Have fun!’”

  Nancy could say nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say. They drove in silence all the way to the drugstore. Then she said, “Maggie, we love you! I love you so! It’s going to be all right, darling—I promise you. I wouldn’t let you do this if I didn’t love you so.”

  “Well, good night, Mother,” Maggie said despondently and started to get out of the car.

  “Give me a kiss, darling.”

  She clutched her daughter tightly to her and kissed her on both cheeks. “Call me in the morning—as soon as you can.”

  “What are you crying for, Mother?” Maggie got out of the car.

  Nancy watched her for a moment from the car—watched her as she walked slowly, resignedly, the shoulders of her poplin raincoat in a sullen hunch, toward the crowded, brightly lighted drugstore. Then she could bear to watch no longer, raced her motor, and drove off blindly down Locust Street.

  At the dark bottom of Roaring Brook Lane, where the jungly growth of sawgrass and cattails and scrub willows began, the peeping frogs had taken up their summer evening chorus in the swamp. A car was parked there, on the grass, its headlights off. The two boys sat inside the car, with the windows up to protect them from invasions of mosquitoes, talking and drinking beer.

  “You know that little park between Morris and Evergreen?” Buck Holzer was saying.

  “Sure, I know it.”

  “In the public men’s room there—that’s where they hang out. It’s simple, but you need two guys. So, all you do is, one guy wanders over there at night and goes inside and sort of hangs around. The other guy hides outside. One of them asks you if you’re interested. You say you’re interested. He takes you outside behind the bushes. You make out like you’re going to drop your pants. Just when he’s getting excited the other guy sneaks up behind him and cracks him over the head with this.” Buck Holzer patted the fat leather-covered club on the seat beside him. “We grab his wallet and beat it—it’s simple. When they come to, they never call the cops because they don’t want the cops to know that’s where they all hang out. Well,” Buck Holzer said, “so howza-bowza, honey chile?”

  “Sure,” Harold said, draining his beer. “Why not?”

  Genny McCarthy had certain standards. Some things were simply beneath her dignity to do, however tempted to do them she might be. Somehow, though it had certainly occurred to her, she simply could not accept the idea of driving past Walgreen’s drugstore on Thursday night at nine o’clock in order to see exactly who showed up. All day Thursday she had toyed with the idea and rejected it. It was too demeaning, somehow, for a woman of her considerable social position. But of course, when—on Thursday night, and again on Saturday—she saw the Lord’s car drive out of the driveway across the street at a few minutes before nine, she had got nearly everything she wanted, got it without stirring from the chaise longue by her bedroom window.

  10

  “Darling, thank God you’re all right,” Nancy whispered as she followed Maggie up the stairs on Sunday morning. They went into Maggie’s room, and Nancy closed the door behind them. Maggie lay down heavily, still in her poplin raincoat, across her bed, her face against the pillow cover. Nancy sat down quickly beside her. “Was it a clean place?” she said. “Did things seem sterile?”

  “Oh, Mother—I feel so awful. Do we really have to talk?”

  “Where did she take you? Where did you go?”

  “H
ow should I know? I was lying down in the back seat, like you told me. Oh, Mother—please! I just feel awful.”

  “Was it—a long ride?”

  “Pretty long. I guess so. I think the woman was trying to mix me up. You know? So I wouldn’t know where we were going. I think we went over one bridge twice, because I saw the lights of this bridge, up above, and then I saw the same lights a little later. At one toll gate a man said ‘What’s the matter with the girl?’ The woman said, ‘She’s carsick.’ That’s all she ever said.”

  “What was the doctor like? Was he—”

  “I didn’t even see him, Mother. They gave me a shot, like you said, and that’s the last I remember.”

  “Who is ‘they’? Who gave you the shot?”

  “There was this nurse there.”

  “Did she sterilize everything?”

  “I didn’t look. I never look when I get a shot, you know that!”

  “What kind of nurse? A nurse in uniform?”

  “Yes. Of course. How else would I know she was a nurse?”

  “Maggie, I’d just like to know,” Nancy said. “What kind of place did they take you to?”

  “Just to a house.”

  “Did you have a room? Was it—”

  “Yes, I went upstairs. There was a room.”

  “Was it a nice clean room? Tell me about the room.”

  “Oh, Mother, it was just a room. It had a bed in it. Do you want me to describe the room? It was just—a room.”

  “Well,” Nancy sighed, “then what happened when you woke up this morning?”

  “I woke up first in the night. I think. It was dark and I felt awful.”

  “But this morning—”

  “The nurse came in. She said it was time to go. She brought some breakfast for me. It was still dark outside. Oh, and Mother, it was the most awful breakfast. Just some tomato juice and these awful dried-out English muffins. They were cold, too, like they’d been in the refrigerator or something, and the butter on them had been melted but it was all hard again and—you know, greasy? You’ve never seen such awful English muffins, Mother. I could almost hardly eat them!”

  “Well—” Nancy said, turning away, thinking that the most she would ever know about it would be the condition of the English muffins. “Just thank God you’re all right, Maggie,” she said.