Run to Death

by Patrick Quentin

  As we stood there together in the bedroom, his meager description of his new life soon wore out. I was both too close to him and too alienated from him to be able to ask baldly what he had come for. I let him curve and edge his way toward it as best he could. He went back to talking about his new friends and then mentioned a special one of them—a girl.

  “She’s brilliant. A real talent. A little too highbrow for you, of course. Sylvia Rymer. She wrote a long novel in verse. Ronnie took her up. Almost published it. That’s how we got to be friends—I mean, through talking about Ronnie at a party. She’s had several poems in the Literary Review and—She’s a wonderful person. I’ve never in my life met such a wonderful person.”

  Bleakly, I thought: Now he’s fallen in love with some dreary vie de Bohème female and is going to want to marry her. Sylvia Rymer! I had a dim memory of an interminable Whitmanesque manuscript that had drifted around the office a couple of years ago. I dug in my heels. Here, at least, I would make a last-ditch stand.

  He hadn’t been looking at me. Now he turned abruptly to face me head on.

  “That’s what I’ve come about, Pop. Please, listen to me. This is the most important thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ll never ask for anything else. I swear it. But I’ve got to do this. Sylvia’s got a Guggenheim. She’s going to Rome.”

  “She is?”

  “She’s leaving in two months. She’ll be over there a year. Pop—let me go, too. Please, let me go. I won’t need any more money over there than you’re giving me now—maybe, even less. It’s only the fare. I’ll go on a freighter. It’s only a few hundred bucks. It’s— Pop, if you knew what it’d mean to me to get out of this country, to make some sort of contact—”

  His eyes, shining with his new enthusiasm, were heart-breaking to me. He went on, talking excitedly, parroting, almost certainly, Sylvia Rymer. But what did that matter? His emotion, even if it had been acquired from someone else, was genuine enough. Rome was the only really alive capital in the world today, he said. American artists of all sorts were flocking there. It was the Paris of the fifties. If only he could get there, he would expand. He knew it. Sylvia knew it.

  I listened with the painful anxiety of indecision. This, at least, was less disastrous than a marriage. But what should I do? Wasn’t it irresponsible and dangerous to let him do everything he wanted? Hadn’t I, through love and fear of losing him completely, drifted much too far already? Was the right thing, perhaps, to say to him what I had never dared say and hardly dared admit even to myself—that his violent and inexplicable rejection by his mother might have brought him to a point where he needed psychiatric aid?

  He was holding the sleeve of my robe. He hardly ever touched me. The unfamiliar feeling of his fingers brought a sudden rush of affection, confusing the issue.

  “Pop, will you? Will you let me go? I know I haven’t been much of a son. We’ve got mixed up, had fights, but—”

  There was a knock and Leora came in. She had a telegram in her hand. She brought it to me, elaborately ignoring Bill. “Pardon the interruption, Mister Duluth, but this just came. It’s a cablegram.”

  I took it and, as she left, opened it. I read:

  ARRIVING IDLEWILD L.R.T. FLIGHT #124 AT NOON TODAY WITH NEW BRIDE AND COVEY OF IN-LAWS. BE THERE TO MEET ME WITH PSHAWMS AND TIMBRELS. LOVE. RONNIE.

  The very idea that Ronnie, the perennial bachelor, should have married was in itself enough to stagger me. The fact that he would be at the airport in a few hours made me, for a moment, almost forget Bill and his problems.

  Then, of course, I remembered.

  Glancing up, I said, “I’m sorry, Bill. But it’s from Ronnie. Can you believe it? He’s got married. He’s arriving at Idlewild any minute. I’ll have to get ready.”

  If surprise hadn’t made me less intuitive than usual, I would have realized that this was the worst thing I could have done to my son with his baffling and exasperating fixation against Ronnie. At the mention of Ronnie’s name, his young body stiffened. The square blond face, which nature had designed to be so calm and candid but which was so haunted and vulnerable, was quivering with an intensity of anger that was almost rage.

  “Ronnie!” he cried. “My God! I come to you with the most important decision of my life. And all you can think of is The Great Ronnie. You have to go creeping and crawling to the airport to meet The Great Ronnie.”

  I said, “Ronnie’s back. What do you expect me to do?”

  “Me? I should expect you to do anything! What about Rome? For pity’s sake, can’t you make up your mind?”

  His sudden furies always infected me.

  “What the hell do you think I am—a slot machine, installed here to dole out dollars to you whenever you get a crazy whim? How can I possibly make up my mind about Rome now?”

  He stuck out his lower lip. “How long will it take you to think?”

  “How do I know?”

  “But Sylvia wants to know. Sylvia—”

  “Sylvia will have to contain herself and write a couple more poems for the Literary Review to soothe her savage breast.”

  Suddenly I was ashamed of losing my temper, and my old aching love took possession of me. I put my hand on his sleeve. His arm was quivering but he didn’t draw it away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s no point in getting mad with each other. I’ll think it over seriously. And I’ll let you know in a couple of days. I’ll call you.” Then I remembered. “You’d better leave me your number.”

  He stood, glaring at me. Then with crude theatricalism, he swung around to the bed, took out his pen, and, in huge, sprawling figures, wrote his telephone number across the back of one of the pages of the novel manuscript.

  “There it is. That’s where you can always find me. Call whenever you deign to feel in the mood. And, meanwhile, give my love to your little friend—to Ronnie Hitler Stalin Napoleon Casanova Sheldon!”

  He pushed past me to the door, went through if, and slammed it.

  I heard the front door slam, too.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I didn’t think any more about Bill. I knew it would only depress me. I got my car out of the garage and drove to Idlewild.

  I was, perhaps, too fussy and possessive about Ronnie. But the fact that he had married without giving me the slightest warning hurt me a little and filled me with vague misgivings. Intimately as I had known him for almost twenty years, I had never seen Ronnie even halfway to the altar. Dozens of women, eyeing the Sheldon millions, had made every known play for him, but with an infallible instinct for self-preservation, he had always managed to avoid any emotional entanglement and slip back into his own, oddly monastic isolation. The right wife, of course, would be wonderful for him. But the right wife for a very rich, oversensitive man with a romantic dread of competing with his own bank balance is not to be found on every street corner.

  I tried to visualize the new Mrs. Sheldon. I failed completely.

  At Idlewild, the plane had already arrived, but the passengers were still in customs. Standing by the gate through which they would emerge, was Angie Sheldon, Ronnie’s sister who kept house for him.

  Angie was older than Ronnie, a pale, rather shapeless woman whose clothes were always expensive and never quite right. I had known her and even been fond of her for as long a time as I had worked with Ronnie, but her personality had never really impinged on me. She had been passionately devoted to Felicia and she was supposed in her youth to have had a tragic love affair with a Latin American who died and whose photograph, sulky and Valentino-ish, stood on a table by her bed. But neither of these achievements managed to give her any marked characteristics. She was just Angie who was always there, good old Angie who worshiped Ronnie and who presided conscientiously and rather clumsily as hostess at her brother’s frequent parties.

  When she saw me, she gave me her vague, weak-eyed smile. “Hello, Jake, I suppose you got a cable, too.”

  “Yes. What an event! Who on earth has he finally settle
d for?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.” Angie twisted the gloves in her hand, which was the only hint that she might be flustered or anxious. “He’s hardly dropped me a line since he’s been gone. It’s so unlike him.”

  That was one of the few positive traits of Angie’s character which registered with me. Only the greatest cataclysm could induce Ronnie to write a letter. But whenever he did anything that was particularly typical of him, Angie would say, “It’s so unlike Ronnie.” I wondered how she would take the intrusion of a new woman into Fifty-Eighth Street. I glanced at her heavy, kindly face, at her rather wispy hair, and at the grandiloquent blue mink coat, but there was nothing to give me the slightest clue.

  And then the people started to stream through the barrier.

  I saw Ronnie almost at once. He was wearing a dark suit and a black Homburg hat and he was carrying a furled umbrella. He looked, as always, far handsomer and more assured than anyone else and also immensely British. I might have guessed that a five-month stay in England would have done that to him. He was walking with his hand on the elbow of a woman. They were some distance away and the woman looked almost absurdly dowdy. That was my first impression. Then Ronnie saw us and waved the umbrella.

  He started to run toward us and fell upon us, scooping Angie off the ground, pounding me on the shoulder, the British Ambassador characterization completely abandoned. He was, as always on reunions, like a big, clumsy, sentimental retriever.

  “Angie, darling. . . . Jake, old boy . . . well, well, well. . . .”

  The woman was hovering at our side. She was small and probably forty and seemed somehow to be deprecating herself. In those first moments it didn’t occur to me that she was enchanting-looking. I was only conscious of the fact that she wore cotton stockings, flat shoes, a terrible British coat with a piece of beige fur at the neck, and one of those straw hats like milkmaid bonnets which, I supposed vaguely, had disappeared in the thirties. I thought: It isn’t possible. Ronnie can’t have married—this!

  Ronnie disentangled himself from Angie and put his arm around the strange woman, grinning at her affectionately.

  “This, my dears, is my mother-in-law, Norah Leighton. She comes from Shropshire; she’s forever sitting behind silver teapots, saying, ‘It’s milk and sugar for you, isn’t it?’ and she thinks if you don’t watch out, Indians will scalp you on Madison Avenue.”

  Norah Leighton flushed like a little girl. The heightening pink on her fair skin brought out the beauty I hadn’t noticed before. She looked like a rose.

  “Ronnie’s always teasing me,” she said. “You’re Angie, aren’t you? And you’re Jake. I’m delighted to see you. And I don’t think that about Indians on Madison Avenue at all.”

  Leighton, I thought. The name was familiar. Then I remembered. Basil Leighton was the British author whose American book rights Ronnie had cabled me to pick up.

  A party of three more people had joined us. One of them was a bareheaded, goateed man of around sixty in a wool cape suggestive of Scottish moors; the second was a short, middle-aged woman with cropped gray hair, an ugly face, and eyes as alert as a fox terrier’s; the third was a small, dark-haired girl whom I took to be a schoolgirl.

  “Here they are.” Ronnie turned to the man. “This is my father-in-law, Basil Leighton.” He indicated the woman. “This is the Honorable Phyllis Brent. And this—” He stepped forward and, bending, kissed the little girl adoringly, almost reverently, on the forehead. “This is Jean—this is Mrs. Ronald Sheldon.”

  At the risk of making myself sound clumsily imperceptive, I must admit that it had never for a moment occurred to me that the little girl could possibly be Ronnie’s wife. At a first glance she had looked no more than twelve. Even now, as Ronnie drew her forward, I saw that, once again, the English style of dress was partly to blame. She was wearing a little felt hat like an inverted bowl which could easily have been part of some school uniform, and her navy blue suit, which bore no resemblance to her figure, almost succeeded in concealing the fact that her breasts were mature.

  Jean Sheldon looked at Angie and me from very straight blue eyes above a straight nose and rather grimly pressed lips. She neither smiled nor registered hostility. She was lovely, I realized, in a delicate, virginal way. But, in my embarrassment at the difference in their ages, I could only think: She’s young enough to be Ronnie’s daughter. And, for an instant, Ronnie, who had always been to me the epitome of good looks and eternal youth, seemed suddenly and rather pathetically worn.

  Ronnie introduced Angie and me. Mrs. Sheldon put out her hand. I took it. The clasp of her small fingers was surprisingly firm and strong as a boy’s.

  “You see, Jake—Leightons come by the dozen.” Ronnie was beaming at me—the retriever naively, almost absurdly proud of the game he’d brought back for his master. “They’re all so fascinating that I couldn’t resist any of them. Angie, darling, you can squeeze them all into Aunt Lydia’s penthouse, can’t you? You’re so clever at things like that.”

  He chattered on with Angie, making plans. I had seen Ronnie through many enthusiasms, but I had never seen him as carried away as this. I looked at the quiet little group of Leightons standing around him. How long were they going to stay? Forever?

  I didn’t quite know why, but the sense of misgiving which I had felt on the way to the airport increased.

  Back at the house on Fifty-Eighth Street, off Park, which Ronnie had inherited from his father, we all had champagne and then lunch. Angie, in her inconspicuous manner, had somehow arranged it with Johnson, the butler, and the cook so that the lunch was as high-caliber as if it had been planned days before. Somehow, too, she managed to get all the unexpected newcomers’ baggage installed in the big upstairs apartment and their sleeping quarters arranged without any undue fluster.

  Ronnie was in an extravagantly gay mood. But my feeling of misgiving did not leave me. Even for Ronnie, with his unaccountable and sometimes perverse streak of whimsy, to arrive completely unheralded with a new bride and three new in-laws was almost incredibly irresponsible. And, with an evasiveness which seemed ominous, he hardly mentioned the marriage. All his lunchtime talk was about Basil Leighton who was, in fact, the author Ronnie had told me to buy up and whose works, embarrassingly, I had not yet had time to investigate.

  Ronnie’s great contribution to the publishing firm had always been his hunches. While I went stolidly on building up what seemed to me a sane and balanced list, Ronnie would stay more or less out of the picture until, suddenly, he would discover a “genius” and go overboard for him. In the history of Sheldon and Duluth, he had discovered a dozen or more “geniuses,” at least five of whom had paid off and only two had been disastrous mistakes. That, for any publisher, was quite a handsome average.

  It was now immediately clear that Basil Leighton was his new discovery.

  “It’s amazing, Jake. Here’s this man. He’s written three novels—three of the most sensitive, the most perceptive, the most startling books I’ve read in years. They’ve all been published in England, but not one of them caused the faintest ripple. Can you believe it? There was this man—this unusual figure, this genius—starving to death with his womenfolk in some terrible thatched cottage in the middle of nowhere. It’s a scandal, the worst scandal in British literature since Johnny Keats. But all that’s over now.” He beamed as dazzlingly as the dazzling silver and porcelain of his own lunch table. “This man is going to be put on the map. A couple of years and Sheldon and Duluth will have established a new D. H. Lawrence.”

  I was used to Ronnie’s reckless enthusiasms, and prepared to take them seriously. But I was not used to the reaction of the Leightons. I had always heard that the English are easily embarrassed, particularly if their poverty or their personal merits should be publicly advertised. But the Leightons seemed to take Ronnie’s rhapsodies in their stride. Basil, looking without his cape very thin and bright-eyed and intelligent, sat with a wineglass in his hand, smiling a faint, “modest”
smile. The Honorable and, as yet, unidentifiable Phyllis Brent jabbed a match to a cigarette that had gone out in her mouth and snapped, “Greatest damn talent in England and it took an American to realize it.” Leighton’s wife and daughter went on eating in silence as if the fact of Leighton’s genius was so well established that another reference to it was no more noteworthy than a reference to the weather. Perhaps it was oversensitive of me to think they were patronizing Ronnie, but that’s what I felt.

  Ronnie saved his climax for after lunch, when we had moved into the huge, famous living-room, filled with the loot of his collecting mania which had always irritated Felicia—the almost overwhelmingly good Braques, the Picasso wood-and-plaster collage, the Benin figures, and the whole wall of Tamayos.

  Ronnie gave everyone liqueurs and announced that Basil had written a play. It was, needless to say, a masterpiece, and Ronnie wanted my brother Peter, who is a Broadway producer, to hear it.

  “Jake, old boy, I know they’re terribly busy people, but could you get them for dinner tonight? Basil could read the play. I’m busting. I just can’t wait.”

  I knew Peter and Iris were desperate for a new play. I was pretty sure they would jump at almost any suggestion. I said I’d call them.

  “Wonderful. We’ll have a party. But it’s got to be the whole family. We’ve got to have Bill. He’s got to meet his godmother.”

  My spirits quailed somewhat at that. Bill was indeed Ronnie’s godson, and Ronnie knew nothing about the latest breach between us which had happened after he had left for England. Furthermore, with a sweetness that always touched me, he had made a point of ignoring Bill’s surliness and always went out of his way to woo and charm him. I knew Bill would make a fuss about coming and I also knew Ronnie would be terribly hurt if my son didn’t turn up to pay his respects to the new Mrs. Sheldon. Because I was embarrassed, I took it out in anger against Bill. The little brat! For once I’d force him to face his social obligations.