Mile High (24 page)

“Every job has its on-the-job problems, Miss Palermitano,” Willie said.

“Yeah,” Carmela answered.

“But, on the other hand, every cloud has a silver lining.”

“Yeah?”

“I want you to take this little check—it's for fifteen hundred dollars—and I want you to sign this little paper—one of those formalities—”

“It's okay, Rhond?” Carmela asked.

“Baby, how can you lose? He's also paying all expenses.”

Carmela signed the paper. Then she looked at the check. “Gee, thanks, mister.”

“Enjoy your rest here,” Willie told her with kind interest. “Order whatever you want, and if you feel like having your hair done every day, you just pick up that phone and order it.”

Carmela smiled gratefully. “First I got to get this plaster cast offa my head,” she said.

Danny West was fourteen years old and in his freshman year at Gelbart, to which his mother had agreed to send him with much trepidation because it was a “mixed” school, i.e., Protestants were allowed to attend. Irene was driven to see him once every week and obeyed his instructions meekly not to enter the school grounds more often than once a month. They met at the back of an ice cream parlor in town.

That March, after she had returned from her regular weekly visit, Irene found a letter waiting at the 55th Street house. It was typewritten. It said: “Dear Mrs; West: It is time you knew you were married to a pervert who beats and tortures prostitutes for his pleasure. He has nearly killed a prostitute named Carmela Palermitano. She is now in serious condition at the Midtown Hospital in New York, quite near your house, suffering from multiple fractures. Very truly yours, A Friend.”

That night she and Edward dined alone and she told him about the letter, saying it was insane and frightening.

“‘Let me see it,” Edward said.

He read the letter. He folded it and put it in his wallet. “This is outrageous,” he said. “This little letter is going to the postal authorities tomorrow.”

“Can they trace it?”

“That remains to be seen. I am
very
upset about this. Irene, in the future I think it best that you do not touch any mail that comes for you. We may be able to keep the sender's fingerprints intact that way. That is to say, your fingers might smudge his prints.”

“But, darling, the mailman will have handled it and heaven knows how many people at the post office.”

“That is true. Well, I can only say that this is a rotten, desperate thing to do to a man and his wife—as fruitless a gesture as it is.”

The next day West had Willie transfer the Palermitano girl from the Midtown to a good, small hospital in Brooklyn so that she would be nearer her family. He leaned hard on the postal authorities to no avail. He retained the typewriter expert, Martin Tytell, but aside from Tytell's opinion that the message had “probably” been written on an old-fashioned Oliver machine having a circular keyboard and showing weak stems on the
t
, the
f
and the
j
, there was no clue to the identity of the sender.

“This could be a Communist trick, you know,” Willie said.

“How?” Edward shot the question.

Willie shrugged. “They have to break you. If they can get at you through Irene—if they could smash your marriage—”

Edward said, “I won't accept that theory yet, but I most certainly will not rule it out.”

In April the second terrible disaster of the year fell upon the Wests when Walter Wagstaff and Clarice were lost at sea in a storm off Palm Beach. Their deserted sloop went aground below Daytona. No trace of them was found. Edward chartered a Ford Trimotor and he and Irene flew to the scene, where Edward took personal charge. Both the Navy Air Arm and the Coast Guard did everything they could. At last they gave up hope, and Irene asked Bishop Nolan to sail with them out into the deep water all along the coast, where he consecrated the ocean and asked for the Lord's mercy on their souls.

Irene was distraught. She couldn't bring herself to leave her father's house so soon. She was shockingly grieved and shocked to see that death could possibly come so unexpectedly to a woman as religious as she. She kept thinking, too, that if Danny hadn't been at school for his first time away from home, she and Edward would have gone to Palm Beach with Clarice and Daddy and would have been aboard that sloop with them and Danny would have been an orphan boy.

After a week of hopeless searching, Edward simply had to get back to his duties at the bank, but Irene pleaded to remain at Palm Beach. He went to New York without her. She returned without announcement three weeks later, tired and weak, and found a typewritten letter waiting for her on the silver tray in the hall at West Wagstaff. It was a registered letter, so it had been separated from the mountain of messages of commiseration. “Dear Mrs. West:

It was too bad you did not follow up the information concerning your husband's brutal abuse of the prostitute Carmela Palermitano, I have enclosed in this envelope a key to the apartment of Miss Alouette Tazin (the only such name in the telephone directory), who lives on Park Avenue in a flat that is paid for by your husband, who visits her on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons between five and seven o'clock. See for yourself. Use this key. However, you may choose not to believe me again. Therefore, why not visit the prostitute Carmela Parlermitano at the Sante Croce Nursing Home at 1192 Smitter Street, Brooklyn. Ask her who mutilated her. With all my best, I am, Sincerely yours, A Friend.”

Irene telephoned Edward at the bank. He was not there. It was a Wednesday afternoon. She fought sin. She fought fear and faithlessness. She locked herself in her sitting room and knelt to pray. She prayed that this overwhelming temptation to evil would depart from her. She prayed for forgiveness for betraying Edward, though loving him as much as she did, by believing what a poison-pen letter, already once denied, told her. She could not win over herself. She telephoned the Sante Croce Nursing Home in Brooklyn. She asked if Miss Carmela Palermitano was a patient there. She was. She telephoned the Midtown Hospital. She asked for the records division and inquired if they had recently treated a patient named Carmela Palermitano. They had.

Irene had herself driven to the nursing home. It was twenty minutes to six when she got there. Miss Palermitano was wearing a stiff white casque. Her right arm lay straight along her side, fat and ridged with white plaster from her wrist to her elbow. Her face was pale and there were black rings under her eyes. She didn't speak when Irene came into the room, as she pulled up a chair beside the bed and sat so that her eyes were at the level of Carmela's eyes.

“I've come from Edward West,” she said.

“How is he?”

“He—is—fine.”

“I'm gladda see you. Evvey time somebody comes from Eddie West I make a little more money. I have nothing but troubles since he put me in here, believe me. I got a brother who was knocked off. My mother … my mother went to bed, she won't get out. As far as I'm concerned, the whole thing started with Eddie West.”

Irene closed her eyes, and it took all her strength to open them again. “Do you hate him?”

“Why should I hate him? That's what he does—he can't help it. He's like a queer or something. He paid me. I knew what he liked. What the hell?” They sat silently, then Carmela began to put two and two together. “You his wife, honey?”

Irene nodded.

“Then you got a real problem, lady,” the sad-eyed patient said.

Irene sent the car away. She walked. Later it began to rain so she went into a movie house. When they stopped showing, it was a quarter to twelve. She walked. The street clock above a jeweler's said twenty-five to two. She got in a cab and asked the driver to take her to a hotel. “What kinda hotel?” he asked.

She sat for a moment to try to think of a hotel. “The Ritz. On Madison,” she said.

“In Manhattan?” the driver asked incredulously.

The clock in the hotel lobby said twenty after two. She paid for the room for two days in advance. When she awoke the sun was shining. Her wrist watch said one-twenty. She remembered what Edward liked to do to women. She dressed and walked to St. Patrick's and gathered peace in the dimness. Then she went back to the hotel. The hotel clock said five minutes to seven. She went to bed. She awoke at four-twenty the next morning, got dressed and went walking. She ate lunch at 96th and Broadway, surprised at her appetite. At two o'clock she went into the beauty salon. At four o'clock she changed her clothes at the 55th Street house, dressing with care until she was satisfied with how she looked, then she rode up Park Avenue in a taxi. Half-way there she began to pound heavily on the seat of the cab. “Hey, lady,” the driver said, “watch that seat. I'm an independent.”

She pushed the doorbell and heard it ring clearly inside the flat. No one answered. She took the key out of her purse and opened the door. She did not try to walk softly. She moved toward the guttural gasping sounds that were leaking from the room directly ahead of her. Then a shrill woman's voice cried out, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Irene opened the door. Edward's naked body was lax above a mass of arms and legs and hair. Irene pulled a chair beside the bed and sat as she had at the Sante Croce Hospital, her eyes almost on a level with the closed eyes of a gasping slack-jawed girl. The girl's eyes opened. “Jesus Christ!” the girl said. Irene fell to her knees beside the bed—her eyes level with the girl's eyes, level with Edward's eyes as his head turned—and weeping silently, began to recite the act of contrition aloud, her hands clasped in front of her. Edward spun his body like a log, rolling away from her off the bed, half falling on the floor. Somehow he scooped up his underwear, shirt, trousers and one shoe and bolted out of the room.

“What the hell is this?” said the shocked girl. “How the hell did you get in here, fahcrissake?” Irene's fingers disengaged themselves from each other and took an iron grip on the girl's wrist, pinning her down while she continued the prayer and then concluded with “Hail, Mary, full of Grace—.” The confused, naked girl lay there and struggled to get free, her breasts moving violently from side to side like one-eyed spectators at a very fast tennis game. Then she gave up the struggle. She closed her eyes tightly and gritted her teeth against the humiliation. Then she spoke urgently. “Baby, listen. I got to douche. I mean I'll be in trouble if I don't.” Irene stopped praying and stared. “No kidding,” the girl said. “This is serious. I'm a very fertile chick.”

Irene let go of the girl's arm. She stood up. The girl scuttled off the bed and ran out of the room. Irene followed her slowly. She passed the girl, who was knocking persistently on a door. “Eddie, open up. It's me. Eddie! Open up! I got to douche!” Irene ran out of the apartment.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Eddie was on the phone to Tobin. The girl said “Gee, I'm sorry, Eddie.”

“It's not your fault, Alouette,” he said grimly. Into the phone he said, “Willie? Be at the Palm Court at the Plaza in thirty minutes.” He hung up. “I'm going to send you a little check by messenger, Alouette. It will be here by noon. Can you be packed and out of here by five tomorrow?”

“But, honey, what's the difference? She knows. I mean, why should we quit?”

“‘Read the check I'm going to send, then get out of here by five. Okay?”

“Where'll I go?”

“Try Hollywood. You'll do great in Hollywood.”

“Honey, I don't know anybody in Hollywood.”

“I'll send you train tickets and a letter of introduction with the check. Okay?”

She shrugged. “Okay. Listen, who knows? I might make a great little actress.”

Willie was waiting when he got to the Plaza. He had ordered a bottle of ginger ale and two glasses. He told Edward that Carmela Palermitano had called him to say that Irene had been to see her in the hospital. Edward sent Willie to get to West Wagstaff as quickly as he could and told him to get a police escort to make sure. “Irene likes you. She trusts you. If you can get her talking, you might just save her from making a terrible mistake.” Edward's back-chamber Gelbart accent had gotten thicker with the emotional strain.

Irene got to West Wagstaff after Willie arrived there. She had been talking with a priest, who had said that she must continue to live with Edward because marriage was forever. She wanted to talk to the cardinal. She said it didn't seem possible that any intelligent, humane religion would force her to allow herself to crumble into ashes to be scattered over the ice of their feelings so that Edward wouldn't slip. “But what can I do, Willie?. I have this sense of duty and this contract to respond positively. Is all that merely a substitute for what passes for thinking with atheists?”

Tobin was helpful just by listening. She was able to push out some of the shock and shame and the crippling pain of betrayal that had come to her as quickly as a train wheel comes to the leg that it severs on the track. At the end she said she would agree to meet with Edward if there were only the two of them and if Edward was prepared to listen to her ultimatum.

They met at the seal pool in Central Park at eleven o'clock in the morning two days later. Willie was able to watch them from above as they greeted each other stiffly, as they walked slowly and awkwardly around and around the circular pond.

“… I have even talked to the cardinal, who says exactly what Father Corkery says. But I cannot. Perhaps a year from now. Do you know what those letters called you, Edward? And they were accurate. A pervert. You paid a woman to beat her, and you almost killed her by beating her for your sexual—sick, insane emotional—pleasure. I might have been able to adjust to infidelity. But that isn't any form of love.”

He was ready. “Would I beat a woman? You know me. Would I beat a woman for such reasons? Have you inquired what she had done to me, Irene? Have I ever as much as raised my voice to you? She inflicted the most incredible and unexpected pain on my—on me, and I struck out reflexively. She fell. She hurt me, but almost entirely she hurt herself.”