Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Which she certainly must have known. Or she wouldn’t have made the offer.”

  “She happens to like me! Is that so peculiar? Anyway, I paid our share. Our rightful share.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I see.”

  “I happen to want to lead a happy life,” she said. “And that means getting along with people, doing my share. Not getting into fights with my neighbors. You, of course—you don’t care about such simple little things. You’re so superior, so special. You don’t care how many people you antagonize, how many friends you make us lose. By being such a smarty. You and your—”

  “Me and my what?”

  “You and your—sister. Your sick jokes. Imitations, tricks. You’ve never learned that people don’t enjoy being tricked, deceived, led on.”

  “I catch you in a lie. And you drag up a dead girl.”

  “You caught me in a lie. What about your own?”

  He continued turning pages of the checkbook. “Cash—a hundred dollars. Cash—two hundred dollars. Cash—a hundred dollars again. Jesus, Nancy, these were all on the same day. And look at the next day—five hundred more, another hundred. What the hell—”

  “For things!” she cried a little wildly. “Things we needed, things for the house. Things—”

  “This is the final balance? Twenty-nine hundred? All that’s left of the seven thousand we had in May?”

  She sobbed and sat down hard in a chair. “I’m going to sell some more stock.”

  “And what happens when we run out of that?”

  “It won’t be we who run out of that,” she said. “It will be I who runs out.”

  He looked at her briefly. “You’re quite right,” he said. “But in the ‘we’ I was including your children.” He returned to the checkbook. “And here’s another check to dear old Dr. Harding. We’ll be paying him, I suppose, for the rest of our lives. How long has it been? Five years—of unnecessary psychiatry?”

  “Unnecessary! How can you say a thing like that, when you know it’s the only thing that gives me any comfort, and help, the only thing that’s kept me alive.”

  “Nonsense. All you’ve ever needed was an ounce or two of self-discipline.”

  Sobbing, she buried her face in her hands.

  “Self-discipline,” he repeated. “With a little self-discipline you wouldn’t have got yourself into this God-awful mess!” He waved the open checkbook at her. “But no, instead you spend thousands of dollars on a doctor, when the only thing wrong with you is that all your life you’ve been a spoiled, undisciplined child. You spend fifteen hundred dollars to butter up your lousy neighbors—simply because you haven’t got the self-discipline, the guts, to say no.” He paused. “I’ve just changed my mind,” he said. “Your psychiatry isn’t unnecessary. You need it all right. It’s just been God-damned unsuccessful.”

  “I hate you,” she said softly. “I hate you.”

  He closed the checkbook. He walked across the room to the desk, replaced the checkbook in the drawer, and closed the drawer. He stood there for a long time looking down at the smooth and polished top of the desk. Then he said, “Nancy—where are we?”

  “What?”

  He crossed the room again and sat down opposite her, and she looked up at him with a blank expression, her face tear-streaked. “Where are we?” he repeated. “A few hours ago I thought I knew where we were. Now I don’t.”

  She continued to look at him.

  “I’m sorry I said those things,” he said. “I love you.”

  She said nothing.

  “And now the money’s running out. What are we going to do about it?”

  “You’ve got your portrait …”

  He nodded.

  “How much are you charging her for that?”

  “It will depend.”

  “What? Depend on what?”

  “How much she pays will depend on how much she likes it.”

  She put her head back against the high, curved arm of the chair. “Oh, God,” she said. “I might have known. I might have known you’d make some sort of arrangement like that. Typical. How could you do that when you knew how broke we are.”

  “But I didn’t know,” he said patiently. “Till just now.”

  Against the arm of the chair she rolled her head back and forth.

  “Anyway,” he said. “It’s close to being finished—I think. When it’s done, I’m going to get to work on some new pictures. Get enough things together to give Myra—” He was silent again. Then he said, almost absently, “It’s just that I thought there’d be enough money to last us for at least two years.…”

  “Go ahead and say it. That it’s my fault there isn’t.”

  “Well, as you say, I do have the portrait,” he said. “And I’m sure she’ll like it.” Again her face was empty. The whole room seemed empty. They were floating in space somewhere and he was listening to his own voice speaking. “We’re not in the poorhouse yet,” he said. “So don’t worry. It will all work out. Something’s always worked out, hasn’t it—before? Of course, when your father dies—”

  “Oh!” she cried sharply.

  “You’ve mentioned it often enough yourself, Nancy.”

  “But how can you—how can you say a thing like that to me? How can you say you want my father to die?” She jumped to her feet.

  “Now, listen, I only meant—”

  “You!” she screamed at him. “You do want him to die, don’t you? You’ve always wanted him to die. You can’t wait for him to die. You don’t love me. You never did. You only married me for my father’s money. Everybody else knows it. I’ve always known it. Why won’t you admit it? Admit it!” She turned and ran out of the room—a queer little knock-kneed run in her slim skirt—and up the stairs.

  When he first heard that Cathy was dead he had wanted to rush out—out of the room, out of the house, out of the street, out of the city—and never stop till he gained the fields, where he could be alone and lie down among sumacs and sweetfern. But of course he had gone nowhere, except to Nevada to bring her home. He had, though, a few days afterward, taken a long drive in the car, out Sunset to the beach, and up along the highway that skirted the other beaches running northward: Malibu, Topanga … He had stopped the car at one point and walked down a rocky path to the beach and had walked far down the beach to the ocean’s edge, then turned upward along the beach with the heavy wet sand soaking his business shoes. He had walked a long way on the beach, not really knowing or caring where he was going, wondering what in the world about this beach had reminded her of Nahant. It was nothing like Nahant. People on the beach had looked at him very peculiarly—in his suit and flapping necktie.

  That was what he was doing now—not walking, but driving his car up and down dark streets, not noticing where he was going. He turned into the throughway at one point and drove toward Connecticut, until he saw a sign that said “Last Exit Before Toll” and realized that he didn’t have a cent of money with him. So he took “Last Exit Before Toll.” “Last Exit Before Toll,” he realized with grim amusement, was as far as he could get from home without money. Then he continued along dark, curving, hilly streets, past substantial houses with lighted windows, lighted porch lamps, lighted gate lanterns, past low stone walls, high dark shrubbery, clipped hedges, manicured lawns. The clock in the car said half past ten when he turned toward Tessa’s house, saw from the road that her lights were on, and turned into her long graveled driveway.

  Bruno met him at the door. Beyond the front hall, in the lighted library, Vivaldi was playing softly and he could see Richard stretched on the floor playing with the cat. At least that problem has been solved, he thought.

  “La Señora is out for the evening, I’m afraid,” Bruno said. “An old friend turned up unexpectedly.” He gave Charlie a slow, almost mocking wink. “Is there a message?”

  “No,” he said. “Just something I forgot to tell her. It’s not important. Good night, Bruno.”

  He went back down the wide stone s
teps to his car.

  He drove home and put the car in the garage and went upstairs. Nancy’s bedroom door was closed. He went into the room she had fixed up as his studio, turned on the lights, and uncovered the canvas. Then, for several minutes, he worked with black, black toned with white, filling in an eye. Then he stepped back to look at it. The single eye gave him a strangely appraising look. With a bit of cloth and turpentine he quickly removed the wet paint, erased the eye until the face was a mask again.

  It wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to him; finishing the picture only meant that he would never see her again. Queer, but painting someone was like killing someone in a way.

  11

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this when you first discovered it, Mrs. Lord?” Dr. Harding asked her.

  Because she had committed herself too much to him right from the beginning—that was it. It was not true, as Charlie said, that she had no pride or gumption. She had plenty of both. When she took a stand on something she maintained that stand. Didn’t he know what she had gone through with her father—and with her mother too, of course—when she had first announced that she intended to marry him? She would like to remind him that there had been that scene. He was only twenty-one, fresh from college, headed for the army—no job, no prospects of a job. They had told her she was out of her mind, that it was only sex, not love, that all he wanted was her money. They had said worse things than that. But she had stuck to her guns. She had not given in to them. She had married him, regardless, and didn’t that take guts? She had made that terribly deep commitment to him at the start, and she had gone on committing herself to him, making sacrifices—for him, for them, the marriage, their children. She had encouraged him to do what he wanted, let him do what he wanted, backed each of his decisions always. The commitment—the part of her handed over to him, placed within him—was now enormous. She had pledged almost twenty years of her life to him. And so she was certainly not now going to let her marriage collapse—whatever happened. She was not going to let them say, “You see? This is what we told you would happen twenty years ago. We told you so.” She had not even betrayed him to her father on the telephone when he gave her that awful news. “It’s really Charlie’s business, Daddy,” she had said. “Not yours. I really don’t know anything about it.” No, she had never betrayed him, ever. And besides, she did love him. Loved him, pitied him, needed him, clung to him like a barnacle—the image frightened her suddenly—on the hull of a sailboat. He might have been a rock, but he was a sailboat, and she was his barnacle. It was useless even to ask herself if she loved him now. She had to love him.

  “Mrs. Lord?”

  “I’m sorry—I was woolgathering.”

  “I said, why didn’t you tell me about your daughter’s condition when you first knew about it?”

  “Frankly, I didn’t think of it,” she said.

  “You reveal a great many unimportant things to me, Mrs. Lord. You hide the important ones.”

  Was he going to scold her? That was what Seligman always used to do—scold. It was the thing she disliked most about Seligman. “It was a personal matter,” she said. “I didn’t see why I should—”

  “Did you know, or bother to find out, that an abortion can be performed legally in New York? The law is quite specific. It can be performed if a committee of three doctors testifies that continued pregnancy would endanger the mother’s health. The law has been interpreted rather broadly, however, to include endangering the mother’s mental as well as physical health. In view of your daughter’s age, I don’t think it would have been impossible to have got such a committee to agree. One member of the committee is supposed to be a psychiatrist. I might have been able to help.”

  “Would you have, doctor?”

  “The question is now hypothetical, isn’t it? You’ve already had an illegal operation performed. I’m not going to say I would have. I simply say I might have. If you had come to me, a great deal of the risk might have been spared. And a great deal of the expense, I might add.”

  He was scolding her. His eyes on her were very stern. She looked at her hands in her lap and fiddled with her gloves.

  “Your daughter is a very lucky girl,” he said. “At least she’s alive and well. You’re a very lucky woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was your husband’s attitude? Did he recommend the course you took?”

  “Oh, Charlie doesn’t know anything about it,” she said.

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  “Of course not. I—”

  “But why not?” he asked her, leaning forward in his chair. “And why of course not?”

  “Oh,” she said, picking up a glove, “Charlie is so—so rigid about things sometimes. He always talks about ‘doing the right thing.’ If I told him, he’d just want to do the right thing. He’d want to get the boy’s parents in on it, for instance, and—well, try to work out the right thing. He’d probably want them to get married or something. Anyway, he’d turn it into a big production, get everybody involved—”

  “Sometimes the right thing is the more difficult thing, isn’t it, Mrs. Lord? The more complicated thing.”

  “Yes, but with things like this—”

  “Do you leave him out of decisions often, Mrs. Lord? By simply not telling him that situations exist where decisions might be called for? Particularly a situation like this one, where his own child—”

  “That’s not fair! In this case, I wanted to—”

  “He wants to do the right thing. You prefer to take the quick and easy shortcut.”

  “Yes! Exactly!”

  “A very dangerous shortcut in this case. What if the girl had died?”

  “Don’t talk like that!”

  “An abortion such as the one your daughter had performed is a crime,” he said. “Sponsoring such an abortion is also a crime. You are now guilty of a crime, Mrs. Lord.”

  “Stop it! What else could I do? I was—”

  “Now that I know what you have done, I could report you to the authorities, Mrs. Lord.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “What if I said I would? What would you do?”

  “I’d kill you!” she said. “That’s what I’d do! I’d kill you!”

  “With what?” he said, smiling at her. “With this?” He pushed a silver letter opener across the desk to her.

  “Oh, go to hell!”

  “Come on in,” Bruno said. “She’s been asking for you all morning. Why don’t you wait in the library, and I’ll see if I can track her down. Today she says she’s getting herself organized, and you know what that means.…”

  Over the weeks Charlie had become quite familiar with Tessa’s house. Though it was known locally as “the Melville estate,” the word “estate” referred mostly to the considerable acreage the house sat upon. The house itself, though comfortable, was not particularly large or even imposing. It was a low, rambling, white-painted Colonial with thirteen or fourteen rooms, surrounded by shrubbery, lawns, gardens, and a large terrace heavily shaded in summer by a grape arbor. Inside, though it might once have been, the house now could never be described as being in any way fancy, or rich, or even presentable.

  Perhaps it was because the house had been leased or rented for so many years to a series of tenants, or perhaps Tessa’s own seething household had been totally responsible for its appearance. But one’s first impression of the interior was of complete disarray and, second, of disrepair. Charlie had become accustomed to the signs of wear and tear that existed everywhere, and Tessa never seemed to notice them. The living room was the only room that her staff made any attempt at keeping picked up, and of course this was relatively easy since it was a room she almost never used. Though it was large, with a high, carved-plaster ceiling and antique marble fireplace, and five tall windows, Charlie had long ago noticed its flaws—the huge, roughly bell-shaped stain in the center of the rug, the bombé sofa with the missing leg that was propped up with four brick
s, the piano that could no longer be properly played, since, as Tessa explained, a pitcher of Manhattans had been spilled across the keys, the drapes, which, though they were originally made from an expensive lavender silk taffeta, were now sun-rotted and water-stained, torn and papery. Once, when Charlie had tried posing her there and had wanted to adjust the light, he had tried closing the curtains. They moved raspingly on rusted traverse rods, and unfolding, sent forth a fine snowstorm of dust. There were two pink-satin chairs with wisps and tufts of upholstery emerging from their arms. There was a large section of gold wallpaper that had come unbonded at the ceiling and had been repaired, with only slight success, with Scotch tape. There was a French mantel clock that hummed electrically as it spun a little carousel of gold spheres but, since it had lost its hands, no longer revealed the time of day. There was a gold-shaded lamp with a blue Chinese base that spat and emitted angry sparks from a frayed cord whenever it was turned on.

  The library, a room that Tessa often used, was a different story, because Tessa was a woman who, upon entering a room, managed somehow to stir it quickly into chaos with what she was doing, and then left it. Perhaps it was because Tessa never entered a room without a purpose. When she left a room, the evidence behind her spoke eloquently of what that purpose must have been. That morning, for example, she must have gone into the library for the purpose of drying her hair or doing her nails or, probably, both. Perhaps she had chosen the library because there was a good, solid shaft of sunlight pouring in from the east window and from the glass doors that led out into the garden beyond. Traces of the hair-drying, nail-manicuring operation were all around the room. On the leather chair were two blue bath towels, and the electric hair dryer lay upon the floor. Her plastic hairbrush, comb, and tortoise-shell hand mirror were on the desk, along with an opened bottle of nail polish, several damp and pink-stained cotton balls, tweezers, a nail file and orange stick, a jar of hair spray, a wadded Kleenex, a jar of hand cream, cigarettes smoked and unsmoked, matches, and the unfinished setup of a Canfield game. Charlie cleared away the damp bath towels and sat down in the leather chair. The mahogany top of the small table was traced with a pattern of interlocking white rings, and on it stood a silver Paul Revere bowl, somewhat tarnished, wearing the inscription: