Mile High (29 page)

Edward got up and began to pace, asking piercing questions, giving orders to begin to set up the information network that would reach into every country on earth and would earn him many tens of millions of dollars as well as becoming the shield that would protect him from the enemy. He stood before Willie and vowed upon his beloved mother's name and spirit that he would fight Russia to his last breath and that before he was done he would bring her crashing down to her knees broken and dying. He vowed on the Constitution of the United States, which he had always preferred for oath-taking over the Bible, to sacrifice himself, his reputation and his entire meaning to the world in pursuit of that cause.

He took three powerful sleeping pills from Willie, for the first time voluntarily, and sat, drugged and upright, in a high-backed chair until midday the next day. Most of that time Willie sat across from him, adoring him.

In 1932, working it all out with the West public relations people so that the conferences could take place on the same day, Yale and Harvard simultaneously offered Edward honorary degrees—Yale, Doctor of Humanities; Harvard, Doctor of Laws. Total press silence was imposed after the arrangements had been settled, but Willie had driven to Gelbart to visit Dan over a weekend and had confided the news to him, and within three days the ancient, collapsible Professor Gelbart himself was removed from some entombed glass case by the trustees of the school and somehow transported from New England to the West National Bank in New York. He was wheeled into Edward's office by his great-grandson, one of forty-six. Professor Gelbart was said to be one hundred and three years old, but he could still speak quite clearly. He congratulated Edward on winning his G in life and was wholeheartedly happy about the dual degrees that were about to be conferred upon him. Then he asked, simply and irresistibly, if Edward would come back to Gelbart on the day before he would receive his degrees from Yale and Harvard to accept Gelbart honors first, at the side of his own graduating son. Yale and Harvard withdrew their plans for Edward for that year.

The Gelbart degree became
the
commencement news. By the act of accepting Dr. Gelbart's invitation Edward raised $1,319,812 for the building fund of the school, to which he added two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Commencement Day was organized among the press, newsreels, radio, wire services and trade journals of those industries in which Edward Courance West was a leader, and for the student body and alumni, for June 17, 1932.

In April 1931, for the second time in his life, Edward had almost fallen in love. He thought of it as “almost” because he had pledged in his heart that there could never be a love that might even seem to equal the love he had felt for Irene. The girl's name was Mary Lou Mayberry. She was a showgirl in the Cotton Club revue, which was a great big joke on the management of the club because she was
not
a nigger. She had proved that to him the first night they had been together. For one thing, she did not have purple fingernails or gums. His own mother had had purple fingernails and she was as white as the Virgin Mary (in a racial sense). His mother had been quite dark, Sicilian dark. Mary Lou had exactly the same coloring as his mother, the same long ectomorphic body with the same swelling, full chest. Mary Lou, just as his mother had, dreamed of becoming a dancer someday. Mary Lou, it was revealed under probing, was a Sicilian herself. She had been reluctant to say that at first, she had told him, because she was sure he wouldn't like Sicilians. She couldn't speak the dialect because she was second-generation and had grown up in California. Her parents were dead. Around the Cotton Club (he was there only twice) she spoke in the patois of Harlem as protective coloration so that her bosses wouldn't find out she was not a nigger, which would make her lose her job. She was a terribly exciting girl and like some insane gamefish in bed. He thought she was deeply in love with him until June 16, 1932.

He had established her in an apartment on Madison Avenue, at the corner of 70th Street, that he had had decorated by José Maria Sert, which Willie Tobin had leased under the fictitious name of Professor Julian Smith. Edward visited the flat—an elegant graystone private building having two other luxury flats, no doorman and a self-service elevator—only after Mary Lou finished work uptown, so that no one made him Mary Lou's great and good friend. As had been the policy since Baby Tolliver had run a private little cathouse right under his nose, Mary Lou had been assigned a chauffeur (male) and a secretary (female), who took her to work and back and who stood guard over her in one way or another throughout each twenty-four-hour day. Mary Lou loved it. At the Cotton Club she was much more important than the star of the show.

Mary Lou's bodyguards had been engaged by Willie. The only possible flaw in the plan to shield Edward's identity would be if Mary Lou told the secretary or the chauffeur or anyone else who her lover was, but that certainly didn't seem likely. The girl was head over heels in love with him, and he had explained clearly and well why it was necessary for his name to remain secret, and what difference did that make anyhow?

As time went on and Edward remained raptly interested in the girl, Willie became more and more restive.

On June 16, at a quarter to one in the morning, as Edward was changing from dinner clothes into street clothes after a pleasant dinner and evening with Clare Padgett, first Horizons investor and now president of the investment bank for whom he had made such a historic connection, Willie arrived at the 55th Street house greatly agitated. “I have some very bad news, Ed,” he said and had difficulty in getting even those words out.

“What is it?” Edward's voice was querulous. He was due uptown in forty minutes. And he considered himself beyond other people's conceptions of what was bad news. Except for Dan. “It isn't Dan?” he asked.

“No.”

“What is it, goddammit?”

“It's Mary Lou.”

“What? What happened?” He was suddenly enormously interested.

“I have just come from one of my regular, routine conversations with the driver. As you know, we pay each of the two of them a little extra on the side, as it were, as though it weren't a part of their salary, to keep an eye on the other one. It's just good security, if you know what I mean.”

“What is the bad news?” Edward had grown pale and seemed all at once very tense.

“He offered to prove to me tonight that Mary Lou has been having this lesbian relationship with Miss Williams, the secretary we've had on the job.”

Edward swayed as though stricken by a rush of fever. His face became mottled, more lack of any color than its accent. He breathed with difficulty and his eyes became filmed with fixed horror. He moved diagonally and sideways like a drunk crab toward the bathroom, but he couldn't get there in time. He vomited on the floor, then sat on the carpet beside the pool he had made, falling heavily, then leaning back against the wall. “I have to be alone, Willie,” he said in a ghastly voice. Willie left the room and the house. He watched the house from across the street.

Edward contemplated this information called by Willie “bad news” when he knew well that his money and his power had placed him far behind common annoyances like that, and he saw it as the worst blow of his life. The second worst blow, then. Worse than the loss of Irene. Worse than what Goff had said to him that last day at the bank. Second only to the nightmare of his mother fleeing from him with her arms around that woman—and all of this had come back to him as the blade of a guillotine falls upon the neck. As he sat on the floor, dazed and unclean with vomit, he imagined he could see his mother's note, gigantic as a billboard, floating upon a shimmering ocean: THIS IS GOODBYE. I AM LEAVING YOU FOR A WOMAN. I LOVE THIS WOMAN. I AM A WOMAN LOVER AND I HATE YOU. GOODBYE. His father had cradled his own head in his thick arms on the kitchen table and Eddie had read the note. He had read it again and again and he had snatched his father's arms out from under his head and had screamed at him to tell him what the note meant.

He had never believed that the note had been written to his father. It had been written to him. She would never have bothered to say goodbye to his father. She felt nothing for him. Hate was too intense a recognition for his father from his mother. She had written to
him
. All that time she had hated
him
. She had run away from
him
, leaving him powerless and without meaning—without any power to help himself, without any meaning to anyone else in the world.

Edward screamed beside the pool of vomit and pulled himself with desperate need to his feet. He changed his clothes. He looked at the clock. It was two-seventeen. Where had Willie gone? He left the house and walked from 55th to 70th Street—Willie following a block behind. Edward was talking to himself and to his mother, telling her this was the end, that she should never again frustrate him into heartbreak, that he had tried to withstand from her more than any creature of God's was meant to withstand. He entered the elegant graystone building, took the elevator up to Mary Lou's apartment, let himself into the flat with a key and murdered her brutally.

Willie followed Edward back to the 55th Street house, and when he was sure he was safely within, took a cab to his own apartment and called Congressman Rei in Chicago. He gave the names and addresses of the chauffeur and secretary and explained that he felt it was something of a rush job. That done, he had but one thing on his mind. Edward had to get to the commencement exercises at the Gelbart Academy, because an extraordinary concentration of the national press would be there.

He went to the 55th Street house at a quarter to eight in the morning, bringing the early editions of the newspapers. He went directly to Edward's room. The room had been aired and the messes cleaned up by the valet. Edward was asleep, in his pajamas. When Willie touched him on the shoulder he came awake at once and said, “Oh, my God! Oh, God, what a terrible dream. I couldn't get put of it. I couldn't get out.”

With sad, sympathetic eyes Willie handed him the newspaper. “That dream happened, Eddie. It's real.” Edward took the paper and stared at it. His hands were shaking violently. “What am I going to do?” he asked.

“There's only one thing you must do. The Gelbart commencement exercises are today and you have got to be there.”

Edward began to weep. Willie went quickly to bolt the doors. Eddie stopped weeping. He stared at Willie through his pale blue eyes. “They'll trace the apartment to you,” he said. “They'll try to put the blame for this on you.”

Willie shivered. He said, “There is nothing to trace, and I have called Congressman Rei about the chauffeur and secretary, just to be sure.”

“Oh,
God
, Willie!”

“It's my fault, Eddie. If you can ever forgive me. It's not your fault, not any of this. It's all my fault.”

“What are you saying?”

“I got a written operative report yesterday afternoon late. I didn't open it or read it. I don't know why. I suppose I was busy with something.”

“What do you mean?”

“I opened it this morning. It was all there in black and white. The chauffeur and the secretary were both Communist agents. The woman seduced Mary Lou to try to drag information out of her.”

“But she didn't know anything!” Edward screamed. Willie went to the bathroom and returned with a glass of water. He gave it to Edward, then shook two large red pills out of a vial he had in his vest pocket.

The sun was bright and hot upon the open platform facing Gardner's Green at the Gelbart Academy. The flashbulbs of the massed news cameras seemed more blinding and insistent than the sun. The microphone had been lowered to the level of Dr. Gelbart's blank, serene face as he read from the parchment scroll sitting in a wheelchair.

“Here, then,” he read, “is the meaning of America, hallowed upon an altar within the spirit of Edward Courance West. He has lived out before the very eyes of our world the multiple meanings of the humanities. Here, then, beside us, in our midst, always welcoming our touch, is America itself in the meaning of Edward Courance West, this Atlas whose shoulders lift up and support the significances of our modern society, arching our glorious future above him, keeping it for us, lifting toward a heavenly tomorrow for all because of his deeds. A titan of democracy, the quintessence of all that truly
is
America—Edward Courance West!”

The applause was deafening. The color commentator had taken over from Dr. Gelbart on his switched-over microphone to combined networks and eighteen Canadian stations. Dan stood beside his father, proud and tall at eighteen years of age, his eyes shining. Edward had stood up with slow majesty made the more majestic by more of Willie's red pills. He felt superhumanly tall. Professor Gelbart's quavering voice, electronically amplified, rang like the Liberty Bell in his ears. He stepped forward and bent over, genuflecting humbly on one knee so that Professor Gelbart might slip the silken sash over his doctoral robes, then he stood and faced the microphone to deliver his address (now anthologized), “Hope Is a Promise That Is Always Fulfilled, Hope Is Our Mighty Land,” that had been written for fifteen hundred dollars by a striving poet, so poetic and so American that he had once been named as Librarian of Congress.

Edward fell apart in the tiny bedroom of the suite Willie had arranged for them to use at a village tavern some miles away from Gelbart toward New York. Before they left the commencement festivities he had had the chance to tell Dan that his father was very ill and that this must be kept secret. Willie asked Dan if he would take the train to New York alone, then meet them aboard the
Aquitania
, which would be sailing at eleven o'clock that night for Southampton and Cherbourg.

“Where are we going?”

“Your father wanted you to have a grand tour of Europe.”