She closed her fingers on his wrist with hysterical strength and shut her eyes tightly and said, “It makes me feel ill. Oh, God, Sam! What are we going to do about it? Did you talk to him? Did you find out about Marilyn?”
“I talked to him. Right at the end I lost my temper. I tried to hit him. I was tremendously effectual. I tried to hit him while he was sitting down. I could have tossed a tennis ball at him. Underhand. His damn forearms are as big as my thighs, and he’s as quick as a weasel.”
“How about Marilyn?”
“He denied it. But he denied it in a way that was the same as telling me he did it.”
“What else did he say? Did he make threats?”
For a moment Sam was tempted to keep the story of Cady’s wife to himself. But he plodded through it, trying to do an unemotional job of straight reporting, looking down at the green bay water. Carol did not interrupt. When he looked at her it was as though she had suddenly, tragically become an older woman. At thirty-seven he had taken great pride in her agelessness, at the way she could look a consistent thirty and, at special times, a gay and miraculous twenty-five. Now, with shoulders slumped, and face all bones and gauntness, he saw for the first time how she would look when she became very old.
“It’s hideous!” she said.
“I know.”
“That poor woman. And what a slimy way to threaten us. By indirection. Did Nancy find out who he was?”
“She didn’t notice him until toward the end. When she saw us talking, she guessed. When I threw my ridiculous punch, she knew. After he drove away we talked. She made good sense. I think I’m very proud of her. She willingly broke tonight’s date.”
“I’m glad. Isn’t Tommy nice?”
“Quite nice, but don’t start talking as if she’s eighteen. He’s better material than Pike. And she seems to be able to handle him well. I don’t know where she learned.”
“It isn’t something you learn.”
“I guess she inherited it from you, honey. There I was, minding my own business, looking around for a place to sit in that cafeteria and …” He was trying to be light, but he knew it was falling flat. Her head was bent and he saw the tears clinging to her black lashes. He put his hand on her arm.
“It will be all right,” he said. She shook her head violently. “Drink your beer, baby. Look. It’s Saturday. The sun is shining. There’s the whole brood. We’ll make out. They can’t lick the Bowdens.”
Her voice was muffled. “You go back and help. I’ll stay here a little while.”
After he picked up his brush he looked back. She looked small out on the dock. Small, humbled and dreadfully afraid.
Five
HE HAD MET CAROL on a Friday noon in late April of 1942 at the Horn and Hardart Cafeteria near the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. He was in his final year of law school. She was in her senior year in the undergraduate school.
Seeing no seats on the ground floor, he had carried his tray up the stairs. It was almost as crowded upstairs. He looked across the room and saw an exceptionally pretty girl alone at a wall table for two. She seemed to be reading a textbook. Had it happened a year earlier he would never have gone over and balanced the tray on the corner of the table and said, “Do you mind?” He was not particularly shy, but at the same time he had always been awkward about approaching a girl he did not know. But it was 1942 and there was a new and reckless flavor in the world. Standards were changing quickly. He had been hitting the books hard, and it was April and there was the smell of spring, and this was a very pretty girl indeed.
“Do you mind?”
She gave him a quick, cool glance and looked back down at her book. “Go ahead.”
He unloaded his tray and sat and began to eat. She had finished her lunch and was eating cheesecake, taking very small morsels onto her fork, making it last. As she showed no intention of looking up, he felt perfectly safe in staring at her. She was good to stare at. Long black lashes and good brow and high cheekbones. Curiously harsh black hair. She wore a green nubby suit and a yellow blouse with meager ruffles at the throat. He thought forlornly of some of his more extroverted friends, and how blandly and confidently they could open a conversation. Soon she would finish her cheesecake and coffee and be gone, perhaps with another cold little glance. And he could sit alone and think of what he should have said.
Suddenly he recognized the text she was reading. He had used it when he was an undergraduate. Durfey’s Abnormal Psychology. After several mute rehearsals, he said with the greatest possible casualness, “That course gave me a bad time.”
She glanced over at him, as though surprised to find someone at the table. “Did it.” She looked back at her book. It was not a question. It was an end to all conversation.
He floundered on, saying, “I … I objected to the vagueness of the field. They use labels, but they don’t seem to be able to measure … things.”
She closed the book slowly, keeping her finger in it at her place. She stared at him and at his plate. He wished he had ordered something with more dignity than franks and beans.
“Don’t you know the rules?” she asked frigidly.
“What rules?”
“The unwritten rules. You are not supposed to try to strike up a conversation with the coeds at this great university. We are drab, shabby, myopic little things you men students call bookbags. We’re all beneath your lordly notice. If a dear fraternity brother makes the social error of bringing a bookbag to a fraternity function, he is looked on with loathing. So suppose you whiz on out to Bryn Mawr and try your luck out there.”
He felt his face turn sweaty red. She had opened her text again. His awkwardness turned slowly to anger. “All right. So I spoke to you. If you don’t want to talk, say so. But being pretty doesn’t give you any special right to be rude. I didn’t establish the unwritten rules. I don’t date the coeds here because it so happens that I’m engaged to a girl in New York.”
There was no sign she had heard him. He stabbed at a frank and it jumped off the plate into his lap. As he replaced it she said, without looking up, “Then why try to pick me up?”
“That’s pretty damn arrogant, isn’t it?”
She stared at him and pursed her lips. He saw that her eyes were so dark a brown they were nearly black. “Is it?”
“Arrogant and also self-conscious. I have no intention of picking you up. And if I did have, brother, I’m cured.”
And she grinned at him, a wide gamin grin that mocked him. “See? You admit you had the idea.”
“I did not!”
“It’s almost impossible for most people in this world to be the least bit honest and candid. You certainly don’t look the type.”
“I’m completely honest with myself.”
“I doubt it. Let’s see if you can be. Imagine that when you came out with your forlorn little gambit, I’d risen like a hungry bass. And we have a real earnest talk about the course. Then you see I’m sort of toying with this cheesecake and then you go and get me some more coffee and I react as though you’d cut your way through a wall of human flesh to bring me emeralds. And then we leave together, and let’s say you have a two-o’clock class and we’ve dawdled around so long you only have five minutes to get there. Now be honest. We stand out in front. And I say, with a suggestion of a simper, it’s been so terribly interesting. This is your chance to be honest. Would you cut your two-o’clock just to walk me back to my sordid little dormitory?”
“Certainly not.” She looked at him with that infuriating smile. He searched his own mind. He sighed.
“Okay. Yes, I would. But there’s something inaccurate and unfair about this.”
She put her hand out. “Congratulations. You are quasihonest. I’m Carol Whitney.” Her handshake was firm and she withdrew her hand quickly. “And, for your additional information, I am engaged to a very wonderful guy who, at the moment, is down in Pensacola learning to fly. So there will be no simpers and no fluttering lashes.”
&
nbsp; “Sam Bowden,” he said, smiling at her. He nodded at her book. “That course gave me a rough time.”
“Nice recovery. I think I like you, Sam Bowden. I happen to be doing very well in it. How long ago was this rough time?”
“Couple of years ago. I’m in the law school now. Last year of it.”
“Then what?”
“Something to do with the war, I suppose. Claire insisted I finish out and get the degree, instead of doing what she called something foolish. Her father has a factory in Jersey and he’s loaded with war contracts. Claire has been campaigning to have me go in with him. He’s willing, and he guarantees a deferment. I haven’t decided. We’re going to be married as soon as I get the degree. Does everybody tell you a personal history?”
“I’m a sympathetic type. Bill and I are going to be married as soon as they pin the Navy wings on him. I’m no heiress to a defense plant in Jersey, but even if I was I couldn’t keep him out of this thing. He’s all hopped up. I guess I wouldn’t try.”
He did get her more coffee and they did leave together and he said, “I’ll walk you to the sordid dormitory.”
“No flashy convertible?”
“Nope. I’m one of the laboring classes.” He fell in slow step with her. “The first two years were gravy. Then my father died. With summer jobs and part-time jobs I’ve managed to hold on. I quit working for this last three months because I’ve got enough to finish out if I’m careful, and I want to put all the time I can into the books. It makes a funny situation when patriotism has to conflict with the dollar.”
“How do you mean?”
“My brother and I have to help support my mother. Her income isn’t enough. He’s got a wife but no kids. Mother lives with them in Pasadena. And George is about to get drafted. That’s a good reason I couldn’t trot off and sign up. The allotments from two G.I.s would be pretty slim.”
“So the Jersey plant looks good.”
“Or at least a commission if I could work it.”
“I haven’t got a sou. I’m an only child. Mother died ten years ago. Dad is able to send enough to keep me going. He’s worked in the oil fields all his life. Whenever he’s been able to scrape enough together, he goes into a wildcat operation, and the holes are always dry, but he never gives up.”
When they reached her dormitory he asked the crucial question. She hesitated and then said, “Yes, I’ll be eating there tomorrow at the same time.”
By the end of a week they were spending every free moment together. They talked of everything under the sun. They told each other it was a perfectly platonic relationship. They told each other often of their love and loyalty for Bill and Claire. And they said Bill and Claire could not possibly object to an honest friendship between a man and a woman. Though he stole time from his books, his mind was quicker and fresher than it had ever been, and he could work with so much efficiency that he knew he was doing well. They had no money. But it was spring in Philadelphia and they walked endless miles and sat in parks and talked and talked and talked. Just an honest friendship. It was not significant that when he saw her walking toward him, his breath would catch in his throat.
He wrote and phoned Claire dutifully. She wrote to Bill and read him Bill’s letters, and when she skipped over personal passages he was filled with a dark fury. He said Bill seemed like a nice guy. He was convinced Bill was a braggart, a mental lightweight, an incurable and perennial juvenile. As revenge he read Claire’s perfumed letters to Carol. And was embarrassed at how superficial Claire sounded.
It came to the inevitable turning point in a small city park at midnight on a gentle, starry night in late May. They had talked about the war and about childhood and music and pine trees and the best breed of dog. Then she said she had an eight-o’clock and they stood up, facing each other, and her face was faintly illumined by a distant street lamp. There was a most curious silence and he put his hands on her shoulders. She moved vividly and completely into his arms and the long hungry kiss stirred them so they swayed and lost balance. They sat on the bench and he held her hand during a long and wonderful silence, while she tilted her head far back and looked directly overhead at the stars. They kissed again and their need and urgency increased until she pushed him gently away.
“It’s going to be pure horror telling Bill,” she said.
“And Claire.”
“Pooh to Claire.”
“And to Bill. It’s an easy math problem. We make two happy and two unhappy instead of four unhappy.”
“The world’s oldest rationalization, darling.”
“Please say that again.”
“The world’s old—”
“Just that last word.”
“Darling? Gosh, I’ve been calling you that for weeks, but not out loud. And there are lots of other words. Let’s cover the whole list. You first.”
They stayed up all that night. They got their degrees. The rings were mailed back. They were married. They were utterly and sublimely convinced that no two people in the history of mankind had ever been more in love or more perfectly suited to each other in every way. It was a quiet civil wedding. An unexpected check from her father financed them while he sought and obtained a commission and reported to Washington for duty. The rented room in the brick house in Arlington was a special and personal heaven.
She went to the West Coast with him and they shared the three weeks he waited there at Camp Anza for shipment. George had been in the Army six months by then. Carol charmed Sam’s mother and sister-in-law, and it was agreed she should move in with them rather than go to Texas to be with her father. She was seven months’ pregnant when he left, and he was very glad she was with his mother and Beth.
He was shipped out in early May of 1943, and came back to the States in September of 1945, Captain Bowden, deep brown from forty days on the blue canvas hatch cover of an A.P.—came back to a world much changed. George had been slain in Italy in 1944. And his mother had died two months later. Carol’s father had died in an oil-field accident in Texas, and after burial expenses and sale of his possessions, there had been fifteen hundred dollars left. Sam requested and received his separation in California. He moved into the small rented house in Pasadena and became acquainted with his wife and the daughter he had never seen. Two weeks after he arrived they attended Beth’s wedding. She married an older man, a widower who had been kind to the women living alone.
And two weeks later, after long phone conversations with Bill Stetch, they were in New Essex, in a rented house, and Sam was boning up for his bar examinations. And on Christmas Eve Carol announced, with mock outrage and pointed comments aimed at all military people in general and one Captain Bowden in particular, that she found herself a tiny bit pregnant.
Sam painted the hull of the boat in long strokes, half hearing the chatter of the children. Good years. The best of years. Much love, and a success that was gratifyingly steady though not in any special sense spectacular.
He was glad when Carol left the dock and began to work. Bucky, without anyone noticing, had decided to paint the underside of the hull. He had a big brush and he liked to get it full of paint. He had been painting directly over his head. Carol yelped when she saw him. Bucky was a uniform ghastly white, a clown in total makeup. They all stopped painting and got rags and turpentine and worked on Bucky. He was full of shrill resentment and wiggled incessantly. When he was reasonably clean, all the kids went over to change at the Boat Club and swim off the dock there. Carol and Sam finished the painting job.
On Monday morning, after he had finished his mail and switched some of his appointments around, Sam made an eleven-o’clock appointment with Captain Mark Dutton at New Essex Police Headquarters. Police Headquarters adjoined City Hall, and Dutton’s office was in the new wing. He was Captain of Detectives, an ordinary-looking man in an ordinary gray suit. Sam had seen him two or three times before at civic functions. Dutton had gray hair and a quiet manner. He could have been a broker, insurance agent, advertising man—until
he looked directly at you. Then you saw the cop eyes and the cop look—direct, skeptical and full of a hard and weary wisdom. The small office was neat. A glass wall looked out over a bull pen where more than half the desks were empty, and the walls were lined with tall gray files.
After they shook hands and Sam was seated, Dutton said, “This is the same thing Charlie Hopper saw me about?”
“Yes. About Max Cady. Charlie seemed to think that you people would be able to … badger him. I don’t want to ask special favors, you understand. But I think he’s dangerous. I know he’s dangerous.”
“Charlie is a politician. The first aim is to make people happy. The second aim is to make people think they’re happy.”
“You didn’t promise him anything?”
“We pulled Cady in and held him while we checked.”
“Charlie told me. He isn’t wanted anywhere.”
“No. Like they say, he’s paid his debt to society. He can account for the car and the money. He’s not indigent. Because of the nature of the only conviction on his record, we set up a card for him in the known-deviate file.”
“Captain, it’s possible that he could be wanted somewhere. I mean if you could take some further action.”
“What do you mean?”
Sam recounted Cady’s story of the abduction and rape of his ex-wife. With the precision of a trained legal mind he was able to recall and include all pertinent facts. Dutton pulled a scratch pad closer and made notes as Sam talked.
“No last name?” Dutton asked.
“No, but it shouldn’t be difficult to find her.”
Dutton looked at his notes. “She can be found. Let me ask you this. Do you think Cady was making this story up—to give you the shakes?”
“In my profession, Captain, I’ve listened to a lot of lies. I’d say he was telling the truth.”
Dutton frowned and tugged at his ear lobe. “This is a shrewd animal you’re dealing with. If it’s the truth, he knows he gave you enough facts so she can be found. So he must be very damn well sure that she’s too cowed to sign a complaint. Also, I’ve run into some of those hill people. They aren’t inclined to go to the law for help even when they aren’t cowed.”
Cape Fear Page 7
