The Henderson Equation

by Warren Adler

  Reactions to the new phenomenon spawned overreaction and decisions were made emphasizing areas where the News and television were not competitive. One of these was the province of sex. Television news, inhibited by the watchdog FCC, dominated by a basic provincialism and fear of government reprisal, was both cautious and circumspect in its coverage. But the News, which had built itself as a maverick, had always set aside columns for titillation, reporting in gossipy terms the couplings of movie stars and the peccadillos of the rich and powerful. Stories about these juicy tidbits of scandal were concentrated on page 3, whose operation fell to Nick, the junior deskman.

  Each day, Nick would confer with Al Pinelli, fat and perpetually breathless, who was on permanent assignment to the area of adulterous divorce scandals. It was a role he played with great seriousness, believing that he was actually the legal reporter for the News. Pinelli had built a vast network of informants—divorce lawyers, judges, court clerks, private detectives, prostitutes, policemen—most of whom would, for pin money or spite, tattle on those who made the best grist for the page 3 mill.

  To Nick it had become a game, the high point of the day, as he gleefully picked over the catalog of dying marriages that Pinelli, with an air of self-importance, would provide. The objective was to find a divorce involving some well-known figure. Heirs and heiresses, particularly if they could be traced to well-known products, were particularly good material.

  At first it had seemed to Nick a harmless, almost trivial pursuit. Many times, according to Pinelli, the adultery account was merely trumped-up legal maneuvers, a collusion of both parties. Besides, as long as the human aspect remained locked in ink and pulp, legitimized by public acceptance, the stories seemed fictional, unrelated to real people. It was only when the human wreckage came in over the transom that Nick learned the full extent of editorial power, the power to torture and destroy, as it did one day in the guise of Mrs. Brett Carter.

  It had seemed a routine story. A Mrs. Carter was being sued for divorce on the ground of multiple adulteries by her husband, Brett Carter of the pharmaceutical Carters, the company that made a well-known brand of prophylactic. What could have been better grist? Pinelli wrote and Nick edited the stories which had developed into a big city-room joke, replete with scores of imaginary headlines alluding to the Condom King and his “royal screwing.” The euphemisms used to describe the product provided pinnacles of challenge for both Nick and Pinelli that sent waves of laughter down the copy chain.

  Mrs. Carter, according to the legal briefs obtained by Pinelli, had been diligently traced by private detectives. They had documented a pattern of incipient nymphomania. All of the better East Side hotels were cited as scenes of her trysts, promoting an avalanche of calls from desk clerks, upset that their hotels had been omitted. Nick had let Pinelli write beyond the allotted words. It was, after all, the quintessential phenomenon of its genre.

  To Nick, Mrs. Carter had the same reality as a character in fiction. She was real only in his mind. He suspected that the stories were inflicting pain on a real person but he could not visualize its depth except as it related to him. And since he was uninvolved emotionally, he could understand only the comic overtones, not the human considerations. Later, he would actually seek such a state of uninvolvoment, deliberately avoiding the human subjects of a story. Humanness destroyed objectivity, he was to learn.

  But curiosity was a strong temptation. When Pinelli told him he had set up a meeting, Nick had wondered about his motives.

  “What good is the work, if you can’t see the results?” Pinelli had explained.

  “Like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime,” Nick had observed.

  Pinelli looked at him curiously. “Wanna come?”

  Nick shrugged indifferently. His courage had faltered.

  “Afraid?” Pinelli leered.

  It had been a challenge. Nick reluctantly accepted.

  Mrs. Carter had agreed to meet at Volks, a German restaurant on the corner of Third Avenue and Forty-second Street, under the still existent El. Arriving first, Pinelli chose a booth in the rear which provided a measure of privacy. They ordered beers, and watched the door for Mrs. Carter’s arrival. She came deliberately late, it seemed, a slim, hesitant figure, holding herself straight as she moved toward them.

  Deep circles rimmed her eyes, and even her careful makeup could not obscure the relentlessness of time and humiliation. She slid in beside them, ordered a martini, lit a cigarette, and delicately picked a crumb of tobacco from her lip. Confronting her at this distance, with the pain of her affliction so apparent, Nick wanted to run, his courage drained. Pinelli, in contrast, seemed impervious, perhaps by his own convoluted logic having attributed to the woman an evil intent, deserving of punishment. Smugly sipping his beer, a fat avenging angel, he had suddenly become detestable. “It’s too late to plead for myself,” she said, taking a deep puff on her cigarette. It was obvious that the ordered martini was not the first drink of the day.

  “There was nothing personal in it, Mrs. Carter,” Pinelli said. “We were just doing our job.”

  The woman looked at him with contempt, her lip trembling. “Your job? Is it your job to destroy my life?”

  “We just reported facts.”

  “Facts?” She held back anger, seeming to search for the reasons she had come. Was she, too, curious?

  “It was all carefully documented,” Pinelli said. Nick remained silent, watching the woman’s eyes lower as she sipped deeply on the martini.

  “I kept saying to myself: Why are they doing this? What is the reason for my punishment? I could understand my husband’s vindictiveness—he, at least, was entitled to his pound of flesh. But you? Surely you can’t be that devoid of compassion.”

  “It has nothing to do with compassion,” Pinelli said.

  “No. No, I guess it doesn’t,” Mrs. Carter corrected after a long pause. “That seems too much to ask.” Nick watched her, searching for the clue to her motives, the beer congealing in his stomach. It had been a mistake for him to come.

  “You said on the telephone you had something to add to your story,” Pinelli said. “We thought perhaps you had something to say in your own defense. Really, Mrs. Carter, we’d be happy to print your side of it.” He winked at Nick.

  “My side of it?” She finished her martini and looked around helplessly for the waiter. Pinelli caught his eye and pointed to her empty glass.

  “I have no defense,” she said. “I have lost my children, my security, my self-respect, my dignity. I don’t even know if I have the strength to pick up the pieces of my life. I doubt very much if I can ever recover.” Self-pity was rising out of her like steam.

  “People forget,” Nick said, compelled to offer solace, feeling stupid in her presence.

  “Forget?” Her persistent questioning exclamations were grating, as if she were helplessly trying to communicate in a foreign language. The waiter brought another martini. She picked up the glass and sipped deeply.

  “Who are you to judge me?” she said, trying to resummon pride.

  “We didn’t judge you, Mrs. Carter,” Pinelli said in mock frustration. “We simply report what interests people.”

  “Oh,” she said bitterly. “Is that what you do?”

  “That’s our job,” Pinelli said, as if he were addressing a child. “We didn’t create the situation. We merely told it. Right, Nick?”

  But Nick persisted in his silence. He felt the woman’s wretchedness. Why have we done this? he asked himself. He wondered why Pinelli could not feel the same guilt.

  “Why did you come?” he asked the woman gently.

  The woman, perhaps feeling his softness, dissolved into tears. They ran down her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them away.

  “I thought,” she began, swallowing to clear her throat. She paused, fighting for composure. “I thought I would like to see those who are punishing me, judging me. What do you know about me that you must hurt me, hold up my life as a public en
tertainment? I’ve done nothing to hurt you.”

  “Well, now you’ve seen us,” Pinelli said with contempt.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Disappointed?” Pinelli sneered.

  “No,” she said, looking into Pinelli’s pouchy face. “You’re exactly as I pictured you. Monstrous. Crude. Indifferent.” Her voice rose.

  “You cunt,” Pinelli exploded.

  The words hit her like a hammer blow. She seemed to collapse within herself. Tears cascaded down her cheeks.

  “This is ridiculous,” Pinelli said. “When they can’t do anything else, they cry.”

  “You callous bastard,” Nick hissed, his voice rising. Pinelli, taken aback, clenched his fat fists.

  “You fall for this fucking whore’s line?” he said, pointing to her as if she were inanimate. The woman reached for her bag and began to fumble with the clasp. Her fingers shook. Nick wanted to reach out to help her but she quickly stood up, and without turning, ran from the restaurant.

  “Don’t bleed for that scum,” Pinelli said. Nick turned and faced the fat Italian face, a thin film of sweat forming on his forehead. Pinelli looked back at him with contempt and spite.

  “You’re too goddamned lily-livered for this business, Nick.”

  It was all so antiseptic to view Mrs. Carter’s fate from the vantage of the city desk, surrounded by familiar faces, bathed in the sounds of typewriters and telephones. Surely there could be no real Mrs. Carter, tissues and cells that breathed, that suffered ecstasy and despair. She was only words. Until now!

  “You shouldn’t have come,” Pinelli said. “They’ll try almost anything to gain your pity.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you at all?”

  “Me? Why should it bother me? It’s a story.”

  He remembered feeling the backwash of his own disgust, wondering what he would be like years from now, frightened that he might become like Pinelli. I’ll quit before that happens, he told himself.

  The years that followed seemed beyond recall, a time of stagnation. What he could recall of it was only the shape of his paralysis, the curve of the well-worn rut as he performed his life by rote.

  He did not dwell much on Charlie in that time, a fading memory of his diminishing youth. Life with Margaret and Chums seemed without movement, repetitive. Perhaps a time bomb had been ticking, for suddenly Charlie exploded again into his life.

  It came as a telephone ring in the middle of the night in midsummer. “Nick?” his voice said urgently.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yeah, kid.”

  “My God.”

  “It’s a hell of a thing to lay on you, kid. But can you meet me at the airport? I’m taking the first plane out. Should be there around eight-fifteen.” There was a long pause. Nick could hear Charlie’s heavy breathing at the other end.

  “What’s happening?”

  “It’s my mother. She’s dead. My father just called.”

  “Sorry, Charlie.” He could feel the effort to reply, then a kind of muffled gasp. “Eight-fifteen.”

  “Okay, kid.” He heard the phone click at the other end.

  “Jumping through the old hoop.” It was Margaret, still turned toward the wall. He steeled himself for the acid comment, perhaps a mirror of his own thoughts. “You haven’t seen the son of a bitch for nearly five years, then he calls in the middle of the night and old dumb Nick jumps to attention.”

  “He sounded pretty bad. I couldn’t turn him down.”

  “Is he drunk?”

  “No,” he shot back, resentful. “It’s his mother. She died.”

  “The loony from Hempstead?”

  He ignored the retort, feeling her alertness, not wishing to precipitate an argument. Ignoring her, he got out of bed and began to dress.

  “Call the office for me,” he said, when he had finished a hasty shave.

  “You’re a damned fool, Nick,” she hissed. “A goddamned patsy.”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “Some friend.”

  He was, in fact, joyful. Charlie had invoked the bond of friendship, had never lost his faith in its strength.

  He circled the LaGuardia entrance a dozen times in his aging second-hand Chevrolet before Charlie appeared. Watching him approach, Nick noted changes in his friend’s appearance. He had gotten stouter and his hair had begun to grow grey.

  “Thanks, Nick,” Charlie said, flashing the remembered smile as he slid in beside him. Nick maneuvered the car into Grand Central Parkway. For a long time Charlie remained silent. Then the loosening process began with trivia. How’s this? How’s that? How are things going? How about McCarthy?

  “And you, Charlie?” Nick asked, cautious in the timing.

  “On the plane coming up I thought about how I might answer that question, kid. Since I got the call, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. You know I haven’t been to see them since our last visit. Oh, I call occasionally, and listen to the old man. It absolutely tears me up. The damned waste. I just couldn’t face it alone, kid.”

  “So here is good old Nick.”

  He caught the sarcasm and grabbed Nick’s arm.

  “You’re damned right, kid,” he said. Then, after a pause, “I suppose you think I’m a bastard.”

  “I figured you’d call me when you needed me.”

  “You’re fucking A.” It was an anachronism, from the war.

  “Fucking A,” Nick repeated. He was conscious of unintended sarcasm.

  “You know how it is, kid,” Charlie said. “I have no life now beyond the Chronicle.”

  “I understand it’s going great guns.”

  “Beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. We’re about to buy out our principal morning competition. Imagine, we’ll be the only morning paper in the capital.”

  “Sounds like you’re on top of the world.”

  There was a long silence as they watched the landscape recede. There were more houses visible now along the highway. In some spots they could see endless lines of exactly replicated homes.

  “It’s draining me, Nick,” Charlie said suddenly. “It’s crushing me to death.” There was a long pause. “You can’t imagine the responsibility. You can’t know what it’s like. It’s the kind of thing that eats you alive.”

  Nick remained silent. There seemed no adequate response.

  “All those words,” Charlie sighed. “I should be there now.”

  “It’ll be there when you get back,” Nick said.

  “What will?”

  “The Chronicle,” Nick said.

  “I am the Chronicle,” Charlie responded. Nick shrugged, not comprehending.

  They turned off at a sign marked Hempstead. The edges of the town had expanded. New stores had sprung up. The streets were crowded now. Traffic choked the town’s center.

  “Progress,” Charlie sighed.

  They pulled into Charlie’s parents’ street. The white house seemed small and faded now. The front lawn had been carefully trimmed but the paint on the front of the house was chipped and fading. Walking toward the house, they could see the irreversible signs of wood decay and the warp of the door, gone awry on its jamb.

  The bent, yellowed man who opened the door was gnarled like a petrified tree. Despite the years of absence, nothing seemed to have changed in the placid way father and son greeted each other.

  “The Princess is gone,” the older man said, tears welling in the deep sockets of his eyes. They followed him through the hallway to the living room, now musty, the furniture worn and shabby. The old man stood for a moment blinking as he looked at his wife’s chair.

  “It’s all over now, Pop,” Charlie said quietly.

  “We’ll have a nice cup of tea,” his father said, “then we’ll visit her at the funeral parlor. I wouldn’t like to leave her alone too long.”

  They drank tea in silence from cups Mr. Pell had assembled on the low table in front of the worn couch.

  “Did she suffer, Dad?” Charlie asked, his voice suddenly h
oarse.

  “The Princess never suffered,” Mr. Pell said. “Not for one minute.” He looked at his son, squinting in the yellow light of a single lit lamp. The shades were drawn.

  “What are you going to do now, Dad?” Charlie asked. Nick watched him trying to hold back tears.

  “I haven’t thought about it,” Mr. Pell said quietly.

  “I’m glad it’s over,” Charlie said.

  “Glad?”

  “At this point, it’s hard to tell who was crazier. You or her.” He seemed deliberately cruel. Mr. Pell ignored the reference. It had long been a source of irritation and estrangement. They drank their tea silently. When Mr. Pell had cleared the cups, they went out again. The air had heated up, although the house, the windows shaded from the rising sun, had been cool.

  Mrs. Pell was laid out in a small room of the funeral parlor in an elaborate coffin lined with red velvet. She was painted in the manner in which they had last seen her, a hideous white mask over a shrunken face. It was a caricature of humanness, the face of a doll with a fixed horrible expression of concealed misery. Charlie turned his face away in disgust.

  “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” Mr. Pell asked.

  “Why don’t you close the lid?” Charlie asked. He made no motion to reach for the coffin’s lid.

  “She loved you,” Mr. Pell said.

  “It’s all over, Dad,” Charlie whispered, almost as if he were afraid the dead woman would hear. “You don’t have to pretend.”

  Mr. Pell looked up from his contemplation of the face of the madwoman and shook his head.

  “I never pretended.”

  “Christ, I can’t stand this,” Charlie exploded.

  “Easy,” Nick said, gripping his arm. Charlie turned from the coffin and walked out into the corridor.