“Di, I don’t think it’s … anything she’s ashamed of.”
“Obviously,” he said with a bitter smile. “She’s of the most vulnerable breed in the world—an idealist. Somebody sold her some good reasons. I respect her too much to accuse her of having cheap motives. But she can get into a cheap situation from the best of motives, even as you and I, Katherine. And she wouldn’t be stable enough to take a public flogging. Who would? God knows what it would do to her.”
“Have you told Claire all this?”
“Of course not.”
“Are you being fair to her?”
“I am going to tell her the whole thing as soon as we are en route, Kat, when she can’t try to do anything about it. She’s got more fight than is good for her. She acts first and thinks later. We’re getting on a ship late tomorrow afternoon at Port Everglades, en route to Lisbon. Tomorrow evening, when she can’t turn the ship around, I’ll tell her. By the time we get to Lisbon she should be settled down. Am I keeping you here too long? There’s one other thing I want to say. I told you all this for two reasons. I guess you can guess the second one.”
She stared at him blankly, then with a growing comprehension and horror. “Oh, no, Dial! They couldn’t do that to …”
“Those people down there are blinded by their own righteousness, Katherine. But they are not going to go out and select a victim on the basis of rumor. Coombs is a fanatic, but I don’t think he’d turn his army loose on anybody without proof which satisfied him. That’s why they’ve been able to get away with these floggings. In the case of Natalie, they had the proof. I checked it with her. I’m saying that you and Jackie Halley should avoid … I don’t know how to say this … the appearance of evil. You shouldn’t, either of you, do anything which could be interpreted the wrong way. I say this with complete seriousness, Kat. Somebody with a lot to gain out of that bay fill is out to smash the committee completely. They want to take the heart out of everybody in any position to publicly oppose the bay fill. That’s the pattern. That’s what the rest of you are up against. Believe me, they’ve taken the heart out of me.”
“I … I remember what that girl said. There were five of them, dressed in black, wearing black hoods. All they said was ‘Repent, repent.’ They were still trying to find out who the men were when she moved away. She was a nurse, wasn’t she?”
“Having an affair with a married doctor. That was the rumor.”
“I have to get back. I’m late now.”
“Do you understand?”
“Of course I do, Di.”
“Natalie has money of her own. She’d have just moved out of my house. She wouldn’t leave, probably because of the man. I’m trying to keep myself from being the outraged father. I don’t want to make moral judgments. I’ve lived in a lot of glass houses. If she’d had more security, maybe she wouldn’t be in this mess now. I didn’t give it to her. Maybe I could have. Maybe I was too lazy, emotionally. Katherine, keep an eye on her. She respects you.”
“I’m fond of her.”
She was late getting back to her desk. When she had a chance she asked McGowan if Jimmy Wing had looked in.
“Not today. I would have seen him. And he’s not good enough for you anyway.”
“It’s not like that, Dennie. Really. It’s not like that at all.”
He winked at her. “Maybe not for you, sweetheart. But I say it is like that for him.”
At quarter of twelve Burton Lesser and Leroy Shannard came in. Swarthy little Doctor Felix Aigan was with them. The three men were laughing at something as they came in. Doc and Leroy were in sports shirts. Burt wore a necktie and a linen jacket, and looked sweaty. This is three-fifths of the opposition, she thought. Ordinary men in a small southern city on a hot day. There is nothing menacing about them, nothing which could be involved in spying on a young girl or threatening her with flogging by hooded men. She felt the smile of welcome on her mouth.
“Gentlemen?” she said briskly.
“Katherine, dear, check Mr. Martin for us, will you?” Burt Lesser asked.
She picked up her inside phone and punched the button for Martin Cable’s secretary. “Helen? Mr. Lesser, Mr. Shannard and Doctor Aigan are here.”
“We’re early, Mrs. Hubble,” Doc Aigan said.
“Send them right on back,” Helen said.
Katherine hung up and smiled and gave them the message. Leroy said, “Got yourself a burn, Miz Katherine.”
“I’ll never learn,” she said ruefully.
Doc Aigan said, “I’ll have my girl drop off a sample of stuff for you to try, honey. Supposed to make what little melanin you got in your skin do a better job for you. A good house puts it out so it ought to be okay. Matter of fact, I’d like a report on how it works for you.”
“Thanks, Doctor. If it works on me, it’ll work for anybody. I can get blistered looking at a colored photograph of a sunset.”
Aigan hurried along on his short legs, his sandals slapping the terrazzo, catching up with Burt Lesser and Leroy. She turned and watched the three of them. Doc was an affable little man. Burt was a neighbor. Leroy Shannard had been Van’s attorney, and he had been very understanding and helpful when he had handled Van’s estate. Van had designed Doc’s home. All three men had been at Van’s funeral.
“Miss?” a voice was saying. “Miss?”
She turned and saw a man standing in front of her desk. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“All I want is to rent a box like to put something important in, Miss.”
“You’ll want to talk to Mrs. Harper,” she said. “The lady with the white hair behind that counter over there to your right, sir.”
As she watched Mrs. Harper greet the man and give him an application form, she thought, All I want is to rent a box like to hide in for a while. I don’t want to think about the kind of a world where men like Aigan and Shannard and Lesser could know something about what is happening to Dial Sinnat, and approve of it.
When it was time to go to lunch and Jimmy had not yet appeared, she waited five minutes into her short time allowed and then went back across the street, hoping he would show up before she had to return to work.
Fifteen
“I REMEMBER YOU, MR. WING,” Ernest Willihan said. “You interviewed me a long time ago when you were still in school, a reporter for a school paper. You reported the interview accurately and still managed to make me sound like an idiot. I predicted a newspaper career for you at that time. What brings you to St. Pete?”
Willihan was a brown and totally bald man in his forties. The tilt of his eyes and the baldness gave him a slight Oriental flavor. They talked in a small untidy office with a single large window overlooking a long concrete wharf owned by Stormer and Willihan—Marine Research and Development. Willihan’s smile was inverted and his eyes were bright with amusement.
“Maybe I ought to do a feature on this setup, Mr. Willihan. What happens to public-school science teachers.”
“You could get some of your material from your boss down there, Ben Killian. We’ve done some work for him. Tank tests on experimental hull designs. His little boat works there has done some fascinating things. It isn’t commercial, of course. If you are interested in us, we wear two hats. We’re an independent testing outfit for small boats, motors and boating devices. That’s the bread and butter. Also, we are developing a few ideas of our own. That’s feast or famine.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“Right now we’re fiddling with a sonar rig for small boats which can be set to give a warning buzz when the bottom shoals to within X feet of what you need to float the boat, thirty to forty feet off your bow. When the bugs are out of it, we hope to license it to somebody who can knock the unit price down below five hundred bucks.”
“Sounds better than teaching.”
“There’s more money. There’s no politics. But I miss the kids. I tell myself someday I’ll go back into it. You hit me on a good day, Mr. Wing. Want a guided tour?”
> “I’d like that, but I’ll have to take a rain check on it. I came to ask you about something else. We’re about to have a bay fill hassle down in Palm County.”
“What do they want to fill now?”
“Grassy Bay again.”
Willihan shook his head sadly. “Every place seems to have to make the same mistake, just as if it had never been made before. The fast buck. It’s an illusion, Wing. Can’t they come and see and understand what’s happened to St. Petersburg Beach and Clearwater? Or what’s happening to Bradenton and Sarasota? This whole coast used to be a shallow-water paradise. Spoiling it is so idiotic. A friend of mine made a very neat analogy about it. Once upon a time there was a mountain peak with a wonderful view, so that people came from all over to stand on top of the mountain and look out. The village at the foot of the mountain charged a dollar a head to all tourists. But so few of them could stand on top of the mountain at the same time, they leveled the top of the mountain to provide more room and increase the take. This seemed to work, so they kept enlarging the area on top of the mountain. Finally they had a place up there that would accommodate ten thousand people, but by then the mountain was only forty feet high, and suddenly everybody stopped coming to see the view. This convinced them people were tired of views, so in the name of Progress and a Tourist Economy, they turned the flattened mountain into a carnival area, and every night you could see the lights and hear the music for miles around. They still attracted customers, but it was the kind of people who like carnivals instead of the kind of people who like beauty.”
“There’s more people who like carnivals,” Jimmy said.
“A fact the beauty-lovers find it hard to stomach.”
“Anyhow, because of the pending battle, we want to be ready to run profiles of the key figures. I ran into some problems on one of them. She’s always in the middle of our conservation battles. Some people told me you might be able to give me the background that she won’t give. Doris Rowell.”
Willihan frowned at the wall over Jimmy’s head. He picked up a slide rule and began to toy with it. “As a newspaperman, Mr. Wing, I’d think you’d have come up against the fact that when people refuse to talk about themselves, there’s generally a reason.”
“As a newspaperman, Mr. Willihan, I resent historical blanks. I can’t leave them alone. It’s a compulsion.”
“You better leave this one alone.”
“I won’t, of course. I’ll keep digging. If you won’t talk about her, it will just take a little more time and effort. And if it’s anything discreditable, I might learn it from … a less sympathetic source than I think you are.”
“If she’s of value to the conservationists down there, Wing, and if you’re opposed to the fill, you’d just hurt your own cause by printing something which happened a long time ago.”
“It’s going to be a rough fight down there. If somebody else comes up with whatever it is you won’t tell me, I ought to be in a position to make it look better than they want it to look. She’s on the committee opposing the fill. Everybody on that committee is going to be under fire.”
Willihan swiveled his chair and looked out at the wharf. “It happened a long time ago and it seemed a lot more important then than it does now. I guess it would still seem important to a lot of people, though. She committed the ultimate academic sin, Wing, and was caught in the act and was thrown out of a world where she probably belonged. I might as well tell you about it. If you’ve traced it to me, you could discover the rest of it. It happened in 1939. I was a senior at Minnesota Polytech. She was on the faculty. She was married to Doctor Harris Rowell, but she used her maiden name for professional purposes. Dr. Doris Hegasohn. She’s Swedish. She’d done her undergraduate work at Stockholm, and gotten her master’s and doctor’s at Polytech. She and Rowell were both instructors on fellowships when they married. She was a damned interesting-looking woman, very dynamic and impatient and intellectually merciless. Rowell was a very frail, rather unearthly man, a brilliant scholar. Doris was a competent translator. By 1939 Rowell had been an invalid for four or five years. She was teaching classes, doing research, writing papers and taking care of her husband. Maybe it was too much of a strain. Maybe she was too ambitious. She was making a name for herself and fighting for a full professorship, which would have eased some of the financial strain on them. Rowell needed special treatment beyond what they could afford. That year a man from Budapest was a guest lecturer. One of his associates was engaged in the same area of research as Doris was. The papers he had published were not available in English. Hungarian was one of the languages in which she was reasonably competent as a translator of scientific documents. Once the guest lecturer got on the trail of what had happened, a special committee was appointed to investigate. They found out she had taken a really enormous amount of the Hungarian’s findings and published them as her own. They backtracked and found a long cribbed section in her doctoral thesis. By the time they were ready for a confrontation, Rowell was dying. There was a flurry in the newspapers. They rescinded her two graduate degrees, fired her out of the profession. It is the final crime in learned circles, stealing a man’s work and publishing it as your own. She made no attempt to defend herself. She immediately became a pariah. No one in university circles would care to have anything to do with the woman. Rowell died. There was insurance, and, I believe, a small income from her people. She ‘retired’ to Palm County. I saw her on the street and recognized her. It would have been strange if she had gone anywhere in the country and not have been recognized by one of us who were there at the time. It was one hell of a scandal, Wing. When I saw her she was becoming very fat, but I knew her.”
“Could she have friends in academic circles, people who would know about what she did at Minnesota, and not have it make any difference?”
“No. It’s a small, careful world. An insurance executive would not risk being friendly with a convicted arsonist. The relationship would be too open to misinterpretation. And there wasn’t any two sides to the case. She was nailed. Also, I guess you’ll have to admit she isn’t the sort of person to inspire loyal friendship. She has all the personality of a snapping turtle. But she’s got a fine mind. I used to go out there and talk to her. We got along. She was at ease with me because I knew what had happened to her, and nobody else in town did. She’s made her own kind of adjustment, Wing. It would be very nice if she could be left alone.”
“I can understand why she doesn’t talk about the past.”
“People still wonder about her. I was at a conference in Atlanta last year. When a biologist from Johns Hopkins heard where I went to school he asked me if I was there when they trapped the Hegasohn woman, and then he wondered out loud what had become of her. I didn’t tell him. You could make a story of it, Wing. It would be, in a different sense, like those reviews of famous crimes of the century. But it wouldn’t be a decent thing to do.”
“Thank you for being so cooperative, Mr. Willihan.”
“Remember one thing, please. She’s a clever woman. She’s clever enough to have been able to fake her way back into the profession with a new identity. But she didn’t. She accepted banishment. She made a moral decision to live with it. I have to respect that.”
“She’s been doing odd jobs for marine biology groups working in the area.”
Willihan frowned. “They’d be upset to find out who has been helping them. Even though it might be a perfectly straightforward relationship, if it came out it would cast a shadow on whatever they’re publishing. I know how ridiculous that sounds, Wing, but every profession has its own stupidities. Research programs are conducted with the assistance of grants from foundations and institutions. Boards of directors are too easily alarmed. They’d be dubious about backing any further work on a project where Doris Hegasohn had been involved, even if the only employment they gave her was brewing tea for the field workers. I suppose they think of her and use her as a trustworthy layman.”
“I guess that’s the relat
ionship.”
“Can you stay and have lunch with me?”
“Thanks, no. I have to be getting back.”
Willihan smiled as he stood up and held his hand out. “I don’t know why I have to feel so protective about that fat old harridan. I think she liked me. You usually like the people who like you. And that, I suppose, is just one of the general forms of stupidity.”
Jimmy Wing went from the waterfront offices of Stormer and Willihan to the St. Petersburg Times offices. He checked the annual index for 1939, and then viewed the microfilm projections of the pertinent dates. He jotted down the dates and page numbers involved, and left an order with the library girl for photocopies, paying in advance for reproduction and mailing charges.
As he drove south in the heat of midday, he found himself remembering a flight down the coast in a private airplane three years back. He often remembered it as he drove the Tamiami Trail. Jimmy had been on the port side of the four-passenger aircraft, directly behind the pilot. The sun had been setting as they left Tampa International. The pilot flew at five thousand feet about a mile offshore, following the contour of the coast. The great dark mass of the silent land stretched off toward the east, toward an invisible horizon. The Gulf was a silvery gray and the land was blue-gray. Stretching all the way down the coast, almost without interruption, was the raw garish night work of man, the crawl of headlights, bouquets of neon, sugar-cube motels, blue dots of lighted pools. When the trip was almost over, just before the plane turned inland to land at Palm County Airport, Jimmy Wing had seen it all in a fanciful way which he had never been able to get out of his mind. The land was some great fallen animal. And all the night lights marked the long angry sore in its hide, a noisome, festering wound, maggoty and moving, draining blood and serum into the silent Gulf. Now Doris Hegasohn Rowell had given him a name for it. The plague of man. The sore was spreading. The dark earth endured this mortal affliction. Dead bright junk circled the moon, orbited the planet, hundreds of bits of it. Every living vertebrate, from a newborn rhino to a white-muzzled chipmunk, carried radioactive material in its bone marrow. Men were digging burrows in the ground, hiding away food and water, waiting for the skies to scream, for the earth itself to shudder, die and begin to rot.
A Flash of Green Page 24
