“Mentally, that old man could take us both on at the same time. Here are pictures of the house, front yard, back yard.”
He looked at them. He felt a flutter of excitement in his belly. “That old tree. I remember that old tree.”
“You were only four years old, and you were there for only two weeks.”
“Two weeks is a long time when you’re four.”
“He’s dying and he wants to see you, Sidney.”
“I accept the credentials. Now I need some answers.” She gave a little shrug of her readiness and acceptance. She looked at him steadily and then her eyes veered away. He sensed that her unease was a residue of the few moments when her sensual response to his casual roughness had, perhaps, undermined her confidence in an unexpected way. With that act he had forfeited the chance of any communion which would be unconditionally mild. There was an edge of awareness, an alertness of the female animal, a concealed aura of speculation.
“How did he find me?”
She named the firm he had employed. “A man named Fergasson found you. He traced you through Veteran’s Administration records to Jacksonville. He found out about the agency, and about Mr. Wain and … your wife. That whole mess. He talked to Thelma.”
“How is she? It’s sort of an automatic question. I
don’t care too much. I guess I don’t care at all. How is she?”
“Alive and well. She’s a prostitute. I guess she works indirectly for Jerry Wain.”
“What about Wain’s face?”
“He had some surgery. It didn’t help.”
“And this Fergasson probably did me a big favor, getting everything all stirred up again.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. He said he was closing out the insurance claim on the bomb thing. He looks like some sort of a clerk.”
“How long ago did he start looking for me?”
“Four months ago.”
“That costs a lot of money.”
“Your grandfather is very anxious to see you before he dies. Then Fergasson found you here and took a picture of you and came back to Bolton with it and showed it to us and told us where you were and what you were doing.”
“A picture of me!”
“With some sort of telescope thing, I guess, standing in the used car lot, talking to a customer.”
“How did he trace me here, from Jacksonville?”
She frowned. “Maybe he told Tom. I don’t know.”
“But that’s the main point!”
“Don’t be angry, Sid. I remember him saying he traced you to Atlanta, and he said something happened there that put you on the run again. He told us you would run if we went at it the wrong way.”
“So the old man sent you?”
“I … I guess he thinks I can make you understand how much he wants to see you. And he didn’t think there would be any danger in it, for you. Nobody has ever come to Bolton, looking for you. And you never told Thelma anything about having a grandfather. Thelma knew you had a brother named George somewhere, but she didn’t know where.”
“But the old man knows where?”
The woman shrugged. “He was easy to find.”
“And now what?” he asked.
She looked at him appealingly. “I love that old man. He sent me to bring you back. I want you to come back with me, just so he can see you and talk to you.”
He stood up in his agitation, pacing. “Why should I go see that old man? What did he do for me? What did he do for my mother? My God, I wasn’t too young to understand some of it. I figured the rest out later. He passed judgment, didn’t he? He played God. He had some money. What was he doing while she was dying? Telling himself he was punishing her?”
She raised her voice. “And who are you to play God and punish him?”
It startled him. He stopped and looked down at her. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you know what guilt is? Haven’t you ever felt any?”
“Of course.”
“Tom Brower has lived a long time with a tremendous burden of guilt. He denied his only daughter. He lost his grandsons. Maybe he has a compulsion to try to explain himself to you.”
“He could never explain it.”
“He deserves the chance to try.”
In the silence he sat down again, slumped, sipped his drink, glowered into space. After a long time he said, “I’m through here. I have to go somewhere else anyway.”
“Please come back with me.”
He stared at her with an ironic and knowing intensity which made her visibly uneasy. “All right, Nurse.”
“He wants to talk to you and George, and he wants to divide up his money between you.”
“That’s nice.”
“He has two and a half million dollars, Sid.”
He stared at her and his dry mouth sagged open and he stopped breathing.
He ordered food from the motel restaurant. Steak sandwiches. Coffee. With the making of his decision, he was aware of her relaxation, her mood of celebration, her flushed pleasure in a mission performed.
And she wanted to know about him. He told her bits of it. “After I was at that house about two weeks, my old man came and got me. I guess nobody expected that. Why should he burden himself with a little kid? My grandfather wasn’t there. The lady tried to stop him. He pushed her and she fell down. He hustled me out to the car. I remembered I’d left that box under my pillow. I started to yell and beg. He gave me a good thump on the head and shoved me into the car and away we went. I was used to knots on the head. I got them from him and I got them from dear brother George. I was at the end of the list. I had nobody I could kick around. I used to dream about going back to live at my grandfather’s house. But he never came and got me again. Where was he when I needed him?”
“He looked for you. He had people looking for you. But he couldn’t do as much of that as he wanted. It was thirty years ago, Sidney. Depression. He was fighting for survival. He was trying to hold things together, fight off disaster.”
“He survived pretty good.”
“He didn’t really get out of the woods until about 1939. And he didn’t know where you were.”
“My old man took me and George to another city, I don’t even know where. And he got another woman. I can remember calling her Hilda and getting a good smack across the mouth. I was supposed to call her Ma. We moved again and that town was Youngstown, Ohio. I remember
member the dirty snow in the winter. The schoolyard was paved with brick. My old man worked at Youngstown Sheet and Tube. He and Hilda drank a lot and beat on each other. When they were like that, you stayed out of the way. When I was nine, George took off. He left. He was fifteen. When I was eleven, something broke and fell on my old man at work and killed him. I couldn’t cry for him. Hilda got a good piece of money out of it. As soon as he was buried, she sold the junk furniture and took me to Florida. God only knows why she took me along. She had a ball. I met a lot of brand new uncles I’d never heard about. I woke up one day and she was gone. I tried to hitch back to Youngstown. It was the only place I knew. I made it. They picked me up, made me a ward of the court and put me in a foster home.”
“Didn’t you tell them about your grandfather?”
“It had been a thousand years since I’d spent those two weeks in his house. I was only four. I didn’t even know the name of the town, and I knew he had to be dead by then. I left the foster home when I was sixteen. I looked a little older. I bummed around, went out West. When I was eighteen I got onto one of those magazine crews and learned the hard sell, and found out I could do it. Working my way through college, I told them. I hooked myself on my own story, so I would work a while and go to school for a while. I got a high school diploma and the equivalent of about two years of college before I was drafted. I made platoon sergeant in Korea. I got along well with the lieutenant. Ben Tedds. He had a piece of the dealership in Jacksonville, and we talked about it, and afterwards I went in with him. And met Thelma there. And Thelma met Jerry Wain.”
She studied him. “And now you are terribly hard and cynical.”
“Don’t patronize me. I might be just that.”
“How about the money to the man who was injured when your car blew up?”
“I might not make that same kind of gesture now. And he wouldn’t have sold his legs for what I was able to give him.”
“And you’ve been perfectly happy to just … keep running?”
“And you’ve never run from anything in your life, Nurse?”
“That isn’t fair! It isn’t the same thing.”
He laughed at her. “So I was on target. Tell me about it, Nurse.”
“It isn’t any of your business.”
“Then you can go back to Bolton by yourself.”
She stared at him. “You can’t mean that.”
“I can make decisions for trivial reasons. Why not? It isn’t that important to me. You want it all one way, Paula. You want me to strip while you pass judgment. The hell with that.”
After a moment she nodded. “All right. It’s a dreary story. I grew up in Bolton. I wanted to be a nurse. I had two years at Syracuse before I went into training. I trained at New York Presbyterian. I met a man named Judson Heiler there. He was brought in with a very bad leg fracture. He’d walked in front of a cab after leaving an advertising agency Christmas party. He was very charming and clever and witty and complex. And weak. And I was very young and earnest and credulous and idealistic and very strong. It was perhaps the world’s worst marriage. Worse for him than me, I guess, but I didn’t think so at the time. He tried to fight my dominance. I wanted to make him over, make him as earnest as I was. He fought me with women and liquor and unreliability. He kept getting fired. I had to go back to work. Finally, something about my strength or his weakness, made him impotent. And he started writing bad checks. That’s a familiar psychiatric pattern, but I didn’t know it at the time. I sued for divorce. He got in a few jams and then got a suspended sentence, and then did it again in a big way and got sentenced to five years. The divorce went through. I petitioned to get my maiden name back. I went to Albany and worked in a hospital there. But I was emotionally exhausted. I couldn’t endure all the intrigue. Well, over a year ago I heard about Tom Brower. I went home. None of my people are left now. I guess he’s my people now. I live in. I care for him. He’s paralyzed from the waist down. He’s a keen and courageous old man, Sid.”
“You found a place to hide.”
“If you want to put it that way. Jud gets out next week.
He hasn’t behaved well in prison. He served the whole five years. He hasn’t anyone. I’ve never felt right about the whole thing. Tom explained it to me. I felt guilt. Some of it had to be my fault, I guess. Tom made me come down here to bring you back. I didn’t want to do that. I was afraid. And he made me write to Jud and ask him to come and talk to me. I didn’t want to do that either. But he said I can’t hide from everything. I suppose hiding is a part of running. But you know … talking about you, with Tom, neither of us can really understand why you’ve had to hide. Mr. Fergasson seems to accept it. I guess it’s a part of the world we don’t know.”
“You think I over-reacted?”
She frowned. “Almost too much melodrama.”
“Like a man getting his legs blown off?”
“But after all this time, over two years, two and a half years, would he still care that much?”
“I spoiled his face. I humiliated him. I put him in the hospital, and his wife and daughters and social buddies could read that it happened to him because he messed with somebody’s wife. Nobody has more pride than a hoodlum. Just as long as I’m walking around, it’s a score unsettled. I guess I wasn’t taking it seriously enough in Atlanta. I was living in a cheap motel. I woke up in the middle of the night with a headache. Two men had sneaked in, rapped me on the head, taped my mouth full of socks, taped my wrists and ankles. They whispered greetings from Jerry Wain, apologized that they had to give it to me the hard way, doused me with lighter fluid, lit me and walked out.”
“Dear God!” she whispered and closed her eyes. Her face was grey and sweaty.
“But they made a little mistake. It was plastic tape. Heat melted it. They tossed the match onto my legs. They came loose seconds after my friends left. I rolled off the bed and dived through the window, sash, glass and all, and rolled the fire out in the wet grass. It was raining. The specialists didn’t hang around to make certain it worked. They knew it had to work. But it didn’t. A kid untaped my wrists. Firemen put the fire out. I said I’d been smoking in bed. By dawn I was two hundred miles from there, and I’ve been very careful ever since.”
“I didn’t know it was …”
“What am I supposed to do? Go back and talk Wain out of it? Ask for police protection on a permanent basis? What can that wise old man figure out for me, with your help?”
“We thought of one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Money can make a hiding place. A private island somewhere. Body guards. Alarm systems. You don’t have to be out in the middle of people.”
He shook his head. “The mystery man of the islands, his personal radar searching the horizon day after day. Come off it, Nurse.”
“Is your way better?”
“I’m alive. Maybe if I inherit money and get my name in the papers, Wain can solve my problems. He can send some friends to kick my spine loose. You see, the unforgivable thing about it, from Wain’s point of view, was that it was a woman worth, at the most, a mild argument. She’s in the right business now.”
“Was she really that bad?”
He held the bottle to the light. “Enough of this and enough of the ice for one more apiece.”
“All right. But you might have to help me find my room. Was she that bad, really, Sidney?”
“A week after we were married I began to suspect I had nothing. A man who marries a showcase wife deserves just what I got. She came to Florida to get a divorce. I wanted to parade her around. I wanted the populace to drool. It’s a poor basis for marriage. She had the sexiest figure I ever saw. I wanted people to say, “There goes that successful young car dealer and his gorgeous wife.” I was climbing, and she was a status possession. A week after I married her, I began to realize that behind all that glandular equipment was somebody I didn’t know and didn’t even like, a bone-lazy, dull-minded, self-adoring woman. Greedy and empty and sullen. She could spend a whole day fixing her hair twelve different ways, trying on everything she owned, posing for herself and patting herself and caressing herself. She wanted passes made at her. Passes made her feel beautiful. But she was almost completely indifferent to what came after the passes. She could perform adequately, but it bored her. But I couldn’t stop wanting
her. I couldn’t look at her without wanting her. She knew it. It was like a sickness. She used it, too, to get the things she wanted. It started to go sour when she got bored with getting all her reassurances from me. I knew she’d begun to roam. I couldn’t catch her at it. But I still wanted her. I had the idea that if I could catch her, it would cure the sickness and I’d be free of her. I found out she was meeting Jerry Wain. It took me three careful weeks to set it up so I could walk in on it. I caught them at a hotel at Jacksonville Beach. I learned later he owned a piece of it. It was a Saturday afternoon. Late. They were naked and a little bit drunk, and she was performing a little special service for him. When I came in, she jumped back away from him, her eyes rolling like a scared horse, and she was making a constant whining sound. As I was cornering him, I didn’t even know he was hitting me. I didn’t feel wild. I just felt careful and remote and workmanlike. I kept him in the corner and watched the way his face blurred and split and changed. I don’t know how long. When I let go of him he just slid down the wall and fell over onto his side. You wouldn’t have recognized him. I squatted and felt his pulse. When I knew he was alive, I yawned. That’s a funny thing, isn’t it? I couldn’t stop yawning. I went to the bathroom door. She’d locked herself in there. I could hear her gasping and whining and throwing up in there. I yawned again, because I knew I wouldn’t give a damn if I never saw her again. And I didn’t. I knew Wain had a very quietly rough reputation, but I didn’t think too much about it until that fellow tried to move my car, the day before they let Wain out of the hospital. Thelma must make a pretty fair whore. She’s got the build, and the dull mind and the greed. She isn’t evil. She’s just a stupid animal.” He drank half of his drink and looked at Paula. She sat with her face in her hands. “Too much of it?” he asked.