by Warren Adler
Myra’s house came into view on his right. He signaled the driver to pull into her driveway. What the hell, he thought. It was time to reduce the tensions, remove the anxieties. He’d tell her he’d drop the Henderson story, although he foresaw problems with Gunderstein and now Martha Gates and Robert Phelps. He should have let it die aborning. Besides, he could always hide behind the veil of inconclusiveness, the absence of an airtight second source.
In every war there is an appropriate, even honorable time to retreat. Nothing should ever be measured in absolutes, he told himself. Let Myra have her little victory. There were a thousand subtle ways to scuttle the machinery, gum up the works. A new tactic was called for now. Let it appear as surrender. He would simply call off the confrontation . . . for the moment.
Standing in her doorway, he felt light-headed, suffused with warmth. Wasn’t he taking things far too seriously? Hell, he chuckled to himself, he’d make her a buddy, one of the boys. They’d cement their new friendship by pissing side by side in the urinals.
The maid seemed hesitant, but let him in, leading him to the den, paneled, filled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases which he recognized as part of Mr. Parker’s extensive library. Two wing chairs faced a large fireplace. Between them, on the floor, was a thick animal skin. He sat down on one of the chairs and crossed his legs, looking about the room, enjoying the smell of recently burnt wood, stirring old boyhood memories of forests and mysterious nights around the fire.
He noted two brandy snifters near the legs of the opposite chair, indicating a cozy night spent peering into the fire. On the floor above him, he heard hurried movements, voices, then the sound of footsteps on the stairs. It was an intrusion on his part, he agreed, but necessary. Better to clear the air immediately.
Myra breezed into the room, her dressing gown rustling. Her hair looked freshly combed but her makeup was incomplete, still shiny, as if she had been interrupted while applying the finishing touches. She wore a thin smile and her eyes seemed nervous.
“Nick,” she said, forcing a lightness, betrayed by the way she held her arms, hands buried in the pockets of her dressing gown, tight to her body, the bulges in the shiny material indicating fists.
“It’s a lousy trick, Myra. A compulsion,” he said, smiling at her confusion. He noted that she had refused to sit down, as if by standing she would emphasize the transitory nature of this visit, hasten his departure. He sensed her discomfort, but was not deterred. The news he brought, he thought, would be well worth the visit.
“I’ve been thinking over the Henderson thing, Myra,” he began, deliberately leisurely. She watched him woodenly. “I believe Henderson, despite what he says, was mixed up in this Diem thing.” He felt compelled to say that, to give her further evidence of his sacrifice. Could she find a measure of her own guilt? He hoped so. “But I’ve decided to drop it.”
He watched her face brighten, the smile, held tightly, loosen and broaden, although the hands remained fisted in her dressing gown. Did he detect a deep sigh, tension giving way?
“Thank goodness, Nick,” she said.
“You’re the boss.” She was, indeed.
“It’s never been that way with us, Nick.” In a way that was true. She seemed to be clipping her sentences, urging his departure. He was disappointed at her reaction, expecting more gratitude. Surely she could see the immensity of his decision?
“I’ll have to do some fancy stepping as far as Gunderstein is concerned.”
“You can handle it, Nick.”
“I’m sure you don’t want us to go overboard the other way, Myra. You wouldn’t want us to overkill him with kindness.”
“No, I was only concerned about a kind of reverse bias. I just didn’t want you to lose your objectivity about him.”
He heard the echo of Mr. Parker, although that old gentleman would also have seen through the narrow, quite inaccurate definition of the word.
“I never intended to.”
“He’s our kind of folks, Nick,” she said as if compelled to justify herself. “His is the kind of leadership we need. He stands for the same things as we do. I’ve talked to him. He’s a warm, compassionate man and I’d hate to see us ruin him just on the verge of his greatest triumph. Nick, he deserves the chance. I’m convinced of that.”
“I’ll grant you that he’s got great political acumen.”
“More important, Nick, he knows what this country needs.”
“You understand, Myra, that our dropping the story doesn’t mean that it’s dead by a long shot.”
“We’ve calculated that.” It was the first time she had used the collective pronoun, a portent of her complicity. “If the conservative press breaks it, it will backfire in their faces. Imagine throwing stones at their darling CIA. Actually it would raise his stock with their readers. We’d only worry about the Times, but their approach might be far more cautious, as it was in the last go-round.” She checked herself, as if she hadn’t expected to say so much.
“It’s not important now, Myra. You sound as if you’re planning his campaign strategy.”
“Does it?” She smiled. “I’d better be more circumspect.”
“It definitely wouldn’t do to flaunt your bias, Myra. Now that we’ve made this decision, you should be cooler about it.”
“If I can’t be honest with you, Nick, then with whom?”
Remembering Margaret’s conversation, he wondered if she really believed that. Her ability to slip into a skin of self-righteousness was maddening. Finally, he stood up. Her reaction seemed mechanical, distant, as if she had expected it all along. Once again, he had exaggerated his expectations. He noticed that her eyes were staring nervously at the two brandy snifters on the floor. He imagined that she wanted to bend down and pick them up, her passion for neatness offended.
“You’ve made the right decision, Nick,” she said, lifting her eyes, for the first time removing her hands from her pockets, the fists gone. She thrust an arm through his and moved with him out of the den. “It’s a great relief to me. It proves that we’re not all that cold-blooded, are we, Nick?”
“That was never the issue, Myra,” he protested lamely, conscious that he was trying to avoid any hint that he was pandering to her.
“We do have a responsibility to this country, Nick.”
“And to the truth,” he said.
“Absolutely.”
He let himself be led through the hallway, toward the front door. Stopping for a moment, he pulled a paper from the pile on the table near the door. As he did so, he felt a brief tug, almost a physical magnetism, that channeled his vision toward a familiar leather purse lying beside the papers as if it belonged there, was comfortable being there. Its initials, that odd eccentricity, the J and the L in antiquated script flourishes, encapsulated the story, the cause of Myra’s nervousness, the mute evidence of his betrayal. So Jennie was the conduit! He covered his sudden shock by a kind of stage business with the newspaper, as if he might be surprised by a story on the front page.
“What is it?” she asked, unsuspecting.
“I thought I saw something amiss here.” He folded the paper and put it under his arm, turning toward her, feeling his upper lip quiver. She held out her hand, a farewell gesture. He took it mechanically in his, which had started to sweat. He cursed his own impotence, feeling the cutting edge of the castrator’s knife.
“You’ll have no regrets, Nick,” he heard her say sweetly as the door closed behind him.
17
The heavy blow to the side of her head had sent her spinning across the main living room of the old Parker house. She fell in a heap, her hair awry, her stocking torn. Charlie stood over her, remorseless, glass in hand, his eyes dancing with drunken rage and madness. Then he had sent the glass where she had fallen.
He had run toward the telephone, lifted the receiver as she screamed to him: “Please, no, Nick.”
But Charlie had by then grabbed a whiskey bottle by the neck, removing the cap with his teeth as
he upended it between his lips, sucking it, like a baby with a bottle, the liquor pouring over his chin. He rushed into the den, wobbling, his shoulders banging against the jambs as he slid the heavy doors shut. They heard the click as he locked himself in.
Nick rushed to help her off the floor. She stood unsteadily, rubbing the side of her head where the blow had fallen, brushing her dress, uncomfortable at the indignity of her condition.
“You took him out too soon, Myra,” he admonished. He had been surprised when she told him only the day before that she was bringing him home.
“He seems better, Nick,” she had said cheerfully on the phone. It was an uncommon call. “And I feel so damned guilty about leaving him there.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“Doctors,” she said with undisguised contempt.
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
An unholy alliance, he and Myra. By then it had stretched over two years, this descent into the pit, as Myra would characterize it in hurried whispers each time Nick carted Charlie back home to the Parker house. Because his condition was masked by drunkenness it was hard to tell how lucid he would be once the effects of the alcohol wore off. At first he was contrite, ashamed. Then nothing mattered. One simply stood aside and watched. To be a watchdog was futile. Charlie was simply descending into a private hell, his own mind. Sometimes Nick would be in at the beginning. It might start as an allegedly innocent drink at Matt Kane’s self-named authentic Irish pub, a noisy contrivance, beer-soaked, screamingly ethnic, where the American Irish might imagine that outside the door was the old sod. It had, though, the same odd ambience of Shanley’s, the same reddening Irish faces, the same startling eloquence and self-pity.
Quickly, Charlie became a celebrity in the netherworld of Matt Kane regulars. They were a motley assortment: tired waitresses, their big butts perched ominously on the bar chairs, loquacious government intellectuals whose obnoxiousness increased in proportion to their intake, the failed and lonely, some, like Charlie, worldly successful, others merely worldly. The bartender’s name was Murray, wildly incongruous, he remembered, since there couldn’t have been a single Murray in all of Ireland. For five bucks, he would keep an eye on Charlie while Nick walked the two blocks back to the Chronicle, picking up the reins of leadership that Charlie had by then cast aside. At first he had tried euphemisms, little evasions, white lies, to hide Charlie’s condition from the Chronicle staff. But the stragglers at Matt Kane’s soon spread the word, and what people had thought was merely an indisposition on the part of their executive editor was now specifically diagnosed.
At first he had tried to be a loyal friend and companion, dutifully spending the time at Charlie’s side until the wee hours of the morning, then steering his friend to the car and planting him at his doorstep. But that soon proved debilitating. He had not yet learned to exist on four hours’ sleep and Margaret was using the evidence to increase the pressure for separation.
“I think you’re carrying this too far, Nick,” she would say, turning in her sleep, heavy-lidded and annoyed because she had been awakened.
“I owe it to him.”
“I suppose,” she would grunt, rolling heavily from side to side to find her comfort again. “But I think you’re a damned fool.” She might have thought he was joining in the drinking. There was always a slight odor of alcohol, a brief dab since he rarely let himself have more than three drinks a night while Charlie guzzled to insensibility.
Charlie did make valiant attempts to return to work each morning, a white hulk, hands out of sight to hide the shakes, beads of sweat on his forehead as he struggled for concentration, a pot of coffee at his side.
“You’re killing yourself, old friend,” Nick would say, feigning light-hearted disinterest.
“I’ll get over it, Nick.”
“Not unless you break this cycle.”
“I will.”
“Why don’t you get away, Charlie?” he would sometimes plead. “You and Myra. Take a trip somewhere.”
He would look up, eyes blazing with hatred.
“With that bitch? Are you crazy?” It was the focal point of his rage, an obsession. Soon he gave up the pretense of working, hardly able to survive through the first editorial conference and he was off to Matt Kane’s, usually arriving before the barstools had been taken off the bar.
Because it had happened by degrees, there was always the hope that Charlie might snap out of it, as from a periodic bender. He had learned from his experience at the News that there was a rhythm to these episodes. At the News, when a man called in sick, his colleagues would nod knowingly, calculating that the absent peer would emerge in a few days physically ravaged but psychically refreshed. But Charlie, although he tried, could not emerge. Not that he was without courage. Sometimes he would make it almost to the point of the budget meeting, then shamefacedly mumble some excuse and disappear out of the city room, trailing his jacket as he walked heavy-stepped toward the elevators.
After months of this behavior, Nick had expected Myra to call, to consult. But she remained aloof. And yet he sensed that he could feel her eyes staring down at him from one of the upstairs windows of the house as he led Charlie to the front door, putting the key into the lock and turning it quietly, pushing the door aside for Charlie to stumble through. Perhaps she was too ashamed, humiliated, although it seemed a measure of her confidence that she assumed he was handling Charlie’s editorial duties with some skill. Apparently she always had confidence in that.
Finally she had come into the office. Nick had found her there sitting at Charlie’s desk, looking vaguely confused, trying desperately to wear a pose of authority. She was sitting stiff and prim in Charlie’s chair, staring at an opened copy of the morning paper. He had seen her first through the glass, a pitiful figure, paralyzed with fear, immobilized by the sudden reality of being in Charlie’s place.
He would always remember his own resentment at seeing her, wondering if Charlie had finally been unable to get out of bed. He looked at his watch, calculating that Charlie’s driver might be just hauling him awake and throwing him into the shower. It had come to that by then. He went into Charlie’s office, feeling vaguely annoyed.
“Myra,” he said, feigning surprise, masking his real feelings. She looked up at him, her helplessness undisguised.
“I feel I owe it to my father,” she said apologetically, “to be here.” She was hesitant, confused. He watched her without pity.
“Is he very bad this morning?” he said, forcing himself to be gentle.
“It’s hard to tell,” she said. “He’s beyond communication.” She lit a cigarette and Nick noted that the ashtray was already filled with half-smoked lipstick-tipped cigarettes. “I’m determined that my father’s work shall not go down the drain,” she said, her voice strained. Then, turning to face him, “I need your help, Nick.”
He nodded. There was not much else he could do. Suddenly the telephone rang on Charlie’s desk, startling her. She looked at it dumbly, her resolve fading swiftly as she watched it without reaching for it. He could see her panic, and made no move to rescue her. It rang again. She stamped out her cigarette and stood, stepping back from the desk, as if the telephone were something threatening, evil. It rang again, persistent, urgent. Was he being cruel not to pick up the receiver, end its ringing? It had become one of those frozen moments of regret and years later he had wondered if it might have been a cause for secret contempt. And yet it was the very first time that he could sense the feel of her power over him, despite her hesitancy, her helplessness.
He could never recall whether the telephone had stopped of its own accord, for Charlie’s voice had intruded, crackling with anger, startling them both, as he emerged through the office door, a shaky pale figure, dapples of red flush painted on either cheek.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he shouted at her. Faces in the half-filled city room looked up, embarrassed. Some turned a
way, perhaps sensing some future retribution for being a witness to the event.
“I will not let you destroy this paper,” she said, the strength in her voice ebbing. He was beginning to feel some compassion for her.
“You get the fuck out of here,” Charlie shouted.
“Charlie,” Nick said, the words sticking in his throat as he made a move toward him. But Charlie moved, as if his very survival had been challenged.
“You keep out of this, Nick.” He turned again toward Myra, now cowering, a cornered helpless animal. “I want you the fuck out of here,” he shouted again, his arm outstretched, shaking a finger, pointing to the door.
“You’ve no right.”
“You get out of here.”
“I will not,” she said, summoning every ounce of her defiance.
“You get out of here or I’ll kill you. I swear I’ll kill you, you miserable bitch.” His hand reached for some object on the desk, a small paperweight, which fell from his hand as it left the support of his desk. Nick jumped toward him, reaching to restrain him. But he managed to shake himself free and swing out at her, as she covered herself with her arms, expecting a blow to fall.
