by Packer, Vin
“Wednesday’s not far away. Margaret will be going into New York for her Italian class.”
“Who says it’s not far away? Neal, I miss you.”
“Then stop by the clinic tomorrow and pick me up for lunch.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Around twelve-thirty.”
“I love you, Neal.”
“I love you, Penny.”
Did he?
• • •
Neal Dana took a right off 9W and drove his English Ford Consul down a winding hill into the town of Piermont, New York. Then he swung onto River Road, heading for Grandview-on-Hudson, in between Piermont and Nyack.
Dr. Dana (Ph.D.) was a psychologist attached to the Rock-Or clinic in Nyack. It was a private clinic, primarily an outpatient setup, but there were resident patients in the thirty-bed hospital, and seven private cottages on the grounds housing three patients each.
Rockland Countyites called it “Wethead Haven” because of the high percentage of alcoholics treated there, but the clinic had its share of catatonics, paranoids, and other schizophrenics, as well as miscellaneous neurotics who were teetering on the brink of psychosis.
It was an expensive clinic. Until a year ago, Rock-Or accepted no charity cases. Largely through Neal’s efforts the rule had been relaxed to admit a few in residence and many more for consultation.
Penny’s brother, Forrest Bissel, a chronic petty larcenist with a prison record, had been one of the first charity patients assigned to Neal. Forrest was twenty-two, one year younger than Penny. Both of them had been “battered children,” or children who had been beaten by one or more adults—in Penny’s and Forrest’s case, by Clarence Bissel, their father.
Penny still lived with her father in a small apartment in downtown Nyack. The mother was dead. Forrest had a room in Piermont, where he worked for Continental Can.
If Neal Dana had rehabilitated Forrest Bissel, Penny Bissel had rehabilitated Neal Dana. She had changed him from a middle-aged psychologist with the bitter regret that he was not an M.D. to a young man in his early forties who was just beginning to realize his potential as a therapist. And a writer—there was that now, too. Penny had convinced him that his long study of the psychological meaning of everyday mannerisms could be made into an interesting book.
On this first Monday in May he had finally done something about it.
He would have liked to celebrate this small triumph over his own self-doubts. He would choose to celebrate it by buying a bottle of champagne and enjoying a leisurely dinner while he detailed the day’s happenings, then brandy on the upper porch overlooking the Hudson, watching the lights of traffic on the graceful, low-slung Tappan Zee bridge and the shore lights of Tarrytown … then bed, and the easy, warm lovemaking of two people a little high and awfully happy.
But Margaret was on a perpetual diet and refused to “waste calories” on alcohol. She never cleared the table before he was finished, but she always sat there politely, impatient to clear; she ate quickly and talked very little during a meal. Afterward she always had a project to attend to: something she was learning, or fixing, or beginning, or finally getting around to. They made love often, but not for long any more. Horizontally, Margaret was not very much different from the way she was vertically. She was efficient, controlled, and courteous.
She never failed to brush her teeth and gargle when it was over.
The house was at the top of a long, winding hill. It was small, more like a cottage, yellow with white shutters and a certain precious dollhouse look to it. Red roses climbed a trellis along one side. It was encircled by woods, and behind it was a small, round swimming pool, a white wooden summer house with built-in benches, and Margaret’s extensive vegetable garden and flowerbeds.
Neal Dana shifted gears for the steep climb and honked his horn as the sign at the bottom of the hill directed, to warn anyone starting down that you were starting up. The neighbors’ new Doberman pinscher came snarling across their wide lawn to give chase to the car.
• • •
“How did it go, dear?” Margaret’s new brown dress matched her hair.
“Fine!” he said. “I’m going to do an outline.”
“Marvelous, Neal! … Do you want plain squash with your steak, or squash with onions and tomatoes?”
“Oh, I don’t care.” He put his briefcase on a chair and looked at his mail. “I wish Minnie Nickerson would do something about her dog.”
“Decide how you want your squash. The coals are ready, dear.”
“It’s only quarter to six, Margaret.”
“Do you mind awfully? I have my language records to work on after dinner, and I want to finish the Goodavage book.” “Will I have time for a shower?” “A quick one. Don’t putter, Neal.”
He left the bill from Abercrombie unopened. He had ordered a velours shirt from there for Penny. Margaret paid the bills, but she never opened anything addressed to him. He would sneak the envelope into his briefcase at some point and send a check from the office.
It had been risky to charge and send that way. The receiver’s name and address were probably marked across the sales slip. Neal realized it had been too risky to be accidental; a part of him wanted Margaret to know, was inviting a showdown.
Not yet.
It was too soon. He had only known Penny for six months. There was a twenty-year age difference. There was his position at Rock-Or. There were nineteen years of marriage. There was—Lord, so very much involved. What was he doing, anyway, even thinking about Penny and himself that way?
“Plain squash or squash with onions and tomatoes?” Margaret asked.
“I don’t care.”
“Which one?”
“Plain squash.”
“Well, you don’t have to bite my head off, Neal.”
• • •
There was always a clean cloth on the table, and linen napkins.
“No pieces with fat on them, dear,” Margaret said, passing him her plate.
He served her some of the charcoaled steak, a helping of squash, and some new potatoes.
“Put three potatoes back, dear … Tell me what the editor said.”
“I’m going to do an outline.” “Neal, I said put three back.”
“I put two back. You’re not going to eat just one little potato?”
“Put the other back. I am going to eat just one.” “All right, here.” “Thank you.”
“I think I’ll get a contract and an advance.”
“I couldn’t be more pleased.”
“Not much of an advance. A thousand dollars, fifteen hundred.” “That isn’t much, is it?” “They don’t pay much.”
“Doubleday? They’re one of the biggest publishing houses in the world.”
“Publishers in general. They don’t pay much.”
“Dear, they do pay considerably more than that. I read where they paid Harold Robbins something like four hundred thousand for just an idea.”
“Margaret, I’m not Harold Robbins. I’m not Jacqueline Susann, either.”
“There ought to be a happy medium between one thousand and four hundred thousand all the same.”
“They pay more for novels.”
“I wonder what they paid for Our Crowd?”
“It isn’t the money that’s important, is it?”
She looked across at him and smiled, closed her eyes and opened them, and said, “Of course not.”
Margaret always winked with both eyes at the same time. As much as Neal had studied the psychological importance of everyday mannerisms, that was one of Margaret’s everyday gestures he couldn’t figure out. Was she begging “enough!” in a very civilized way, or indicating that when she opened her eyes whatever it was that had been there before she closed them, wouldn’t be there any more?
The latter, perhaps, for she was changing the subject now.
“There’s something missing, and you haven’t even commented on it.”
But he wanted to talk ab
out what had happened at Doubleday. He said, “Of course the thousand wouldn’t be all I’d get if the book were successful.”
“Don’t you wonder where Sinister is?”
Sinister was their parrot. He amused Neal, but Neal could live without him. He required live worms in his diet, which Margaret kept in a jar in the refrigerator, and if he felt left out of things he whistled and sang at the top of his lungs and called out, “I’m Sinister! I love the view!” “Where is he?” Neal said.
Margaret broke into baby talk. “Him’s at the vet’s. Him is getting a pedicure and him’s getting a dip, and him has to stay overnight.”
It was totally un-Margaret to speak that way; in the five months they had owned Sinister, Neal had never recovered from the shock of hearing her purr and whine when she talked to or about the bird.
It was hard for Margaret, of course. She was forty now. She had never been able to carry a baby. She had made four tries before her gynecologist discouraged the idea of her ever having children.
Both Neal and Margaret had been disheartened by it. But it was worse for a woman. Neal supposed that was why she kept herself so busy with all her projects and why she fussed so about her figure. You couldn’t blame her for being self-absorbed. Unlike Neal, she received no gratification of the sort he found in his work, in helping people. Gardening and cooking and keeping house could be stretched just so far … So Margaret studied languages and measured herself and fawned over Sinister, and read books on astrology and the occult.
Neal said, “Is he at Dr. Halliday’s?”
“Yes. Him knew, too. Him trembled all the way over there.” “He’ll be all right.”
“You didn’t even notice him was gone.” “I’m sorry, dear.”
Back to her normal tone then. “Neal, how’s that little girl whose brother you helped?”
“Penny Bissel? I suppose she’s fine.” “Do you ever see her?”
“She drops in from time to time. In fact, I think she’s coming by the clinic tomorrow … What made you think of her?” “I spoke to him the other day in town.” “Forrest?”
“Is that his first name? I was in Piermont. He passed me on the street.”
“He knew who you were?”
“Oh, yes. He gave me a very nice hello.”
“Forrest Bissell said hello to you?”
“Yes … And he asked how you were.”
“I see … Strange.”
“He’s a Scorpio.”
“What?”
“He’s a Scorpio.”
“Margaret, you’re not making any sense!”
She did that same thing again with her eyes, closing them and then opening them. “What are you yelling at me for, Neal?”
“I’m sorry … I just don’t understand.”
“He was born October twenty-seventh, that’s all. Which makes him a Scorpio.”
“Margaret, how would you know when Forrest Bissel was born?”
“You’re overreacting, Neal.”
“Well, did you have a long conversation with him or what?” “I do believe you’re jealous.”
“Margaret, he is not a very reliable character, that’s all. He has no business starting conversations with you!”
She smiled. “He didn’t start a conversation, Neal. I overheard him telling some man that he was saving his money to go to Europe: that he was going to leave on his birthday, October twenty-seventh … that’s all.”
Neal didn’t say anything. His heart was beating fast.
Margaret said, “I wish you liked astrology better.”
“Why?”
“Because one day I might surprise you.”
But he was not listening to her now. He was thinking that if a part of him did want a showdown, a much larger part didn’t, because for a moment in their conversation he had imagined they were on their way to one, and instantly he had told himself to deny everything, and then end things with Penny Bissel for once and for all.
• • •
He should do that anyway.
He told himself so while he was upstairs in his study, sorting through the material for the book.
Yes, ideally an enthusiastic and pretty young girl should be there to have the nightcaps with him and tell him he was going to be famous, and then make love with him for a long time. But that was fantasy-land, like those science-fiction stories Margaret enjoyed, in which a man would take the elevator in his apartment building to the wrong floor and find himself entering a new life with his name on the door of another apartment and another wife and family waiting for him, or a man would wake up with a different face, a new nationality, everything about his life changed.
Neal knew well from his years at Rock-Or that there were many neurotics who could not be happy except in the anticipation of change. The change itself meant nothing to such people; when they would make it, the next wish would be to change again.
Why was he even entertaining these ideas?
He was like some schoolboy enlarging on a fantasy until reality was forced out of proportion.
The more he saw of Penny Bissel, the more he was indulging the fantasy and letting go of reality.
Yet as he sat at his desk looking out at the moonlight on the river, he heard reality beneath him, and it made him wince with displeasure.
“Dove c’è qui un buon ristorante?” the voice on the record said.
“Where is there a good restaurant?”
“Dove c’è qui un buon ristorante?”
“Non c’è nessuno che parli inglese?”
“Is there anyone who speaks English?”
“Non c’è nessuno che parli inglese?”
He had a sudden vision of Penny running toward him in the field that day they had driven up to Bear Mountain, how they had run toward each other through the tall elephant grass, and the scent of the sun in her hair when he caught her to him and her fingers held on to his shirt, both of them laughing so hard.
“Avanti!”
“Come in!”
“Avanti!”
Once, in his office, she had said to him, in the middle of some idiotic diatribe he had been making about Forrest’s unconscious wish to be punished as his father had beaten him when he was a child, “Neal? How long will it be before you’ll touch me?”
He had kissed her that day for the first time, near-to-crazy at the way it made him feel, hardly able to stop, or to care that someone could happen into his office and find them like that.
She had said afterward, “I knew, Neal.” “What?”
“How it would be with us. That it would be like this.”
Remember? She was wearing a long-sleeved white wool dress with a pin made from a penny on the collar.
She had pennies on everything, her handkerchiefs and sweaters and even one on the door of her father’s car. Neal had bought her a coffee mug in New City with a penny on it.
“Un uovo alla cocca.”
“A boiled egg.”
“Un uovo alla cocca.”
Tomorrow, he’d take her to the ‘76 House in Old Tappan for lunch.
CHAPTER 3
Wednesday night.
Archie’s glasses were lost. While they searched the apartment for them, the phone rang.
Archie said to Dru, “I’ll get it. May I tell whoever’s calling that we’re on our way out?”
“Why ask me?”
“Because it’ll be for you,” he said. “It always is.”
“Archie, don’t act so put-upon. I didn’t lose your glasses, you lost them.”
But the call was not for Dru; it was Archie’s father.
“How are you?” Archie said without much enthusiasm.
His father said, “If I felt any better I’d be in jail for rape.”
Archie made an effort to laugh. Years ago, when Archie had been in analysis, his father’s perpetual braggadocio on the subject of his sexual prowess had frequently tied Archie’s stomach in knots. Most of his fifty-minute hours had been spent reliving the anxieties he
had felt as the young son of a self-proclaimed Don Juan.
Now Archie was more bored than anything else by it, and still resentful at what it had done to his mother. After the divorce, she had never remarried, and she had gone to her grave pretending to everyone, including Archie, that the stories of Frank Gamble’s infidelities were exaggerated. They weren’t, but she imagined her word was accepted. It was a way of saving face. When Archie was a boy he used to hear her tell his father: “I know you’re seeing other women, but don’t flaunt it. Don’t embarrass me before my friends.”
While Archie talked to his father, he studied his reflection in the Constitution mirror above the telephone stand. He remembered when he used to find gray hairs among the coal-black ones on his head; now the reverse was true. At forty-two, could he still claim he was prematurely gray? He decided that his friends who weren’t gray probably darkened their hair.
“… had a visitor today,” his father was saying. “Female, naturally, but a very special female.”
“Good for you. Look, Dad, Dru and I are on our way to the country. Did you call about something in particular?”
“Don’t you want to know who my female friend was?” he said.
“Who?”
“Guess.”
“Come on, Dad. I don’t have time.” “Liddy.”
Archie reached in the pocket of his blazer for a cigarette. “Oh?”
“Is that all you have to say? Oh?”
“How is she?” He found a match and lit the cigarette.
“She’s the same Liddy. I’ll never know how you let that slip through your fingers.”
Archie’s father wasn’t fond of Dru. She wouldn’t flirt back with him the way Liddy would.
Archie said, “Is she planning to stay in New York?” Dru came out of the bedroom carrying his glasses. She walked across and Archie bent down so she could put them on him.
“Oh, yes. She has an apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street.”
“Alone?”
“Well, as alone as a woman like Liddy will ever be.”
“Good for her.”
“She asked about you.”
“Uh huh.”
“Wanted to know if you were happy.” “Ummm.”
“I said you might not be happy, but you were cheerful.” “You have a lot of insight,” Archie said dryly. “Are you going to see her, son?”
