Wayfaring Stranger

  “You’re turning down the invitation because of me?”

  “We don’t need guys like Wiseheart in our lives,” I said. “Let’s eat on the screen porch. It’s a fine evening.”

  Two hours later, Hershel’s black Cadillac pulled up in front of the house with Hershel behind the wheel. Linda got out and headed up the walk, her expression as flat and filled with portent as an overheated pie pan. “Hello, Linda Gail,” Rosita said, opening the screen door. “You look very nice.”

  “Would you kindly tell me why you have turned down an invitation for the four of us to the River Oaks Country Club, an invitation I already accepted?”

  “I didn’t know Mr. Wiseheart had called you,” Rosita said.

  “His wife did. She seemed very polite and cultured. I assumed we were all going. She called back and said it was too bad y’all wouldn’t be available and that perhaps we could do it another time. Fat chance.”

  I walked into the living room from the kitchen. Hershel had followed his wife inside. He was trying to smile in the way people do when a situation is so intolerable and without solution that you wish to flee the room.

  “It was me who turned down the invitation, Linda Gail,” I said. “I don’t think this is a man to get mixed up with.”

  “Who are you to make decisions for what we do?”

  “I didn’t,” I replied.

  “We should have called you, Linda Gail,” Rosita said.

  “Well, ‘shoulda coulda’ seems a poor excuse, if you ask me,” Linda Gail said, on the verge of tears. In my mind’s eye, I saw a little country girl in a dime store being pulled away from a display counter her mother couldn’t even afford to look at.

  Rosita turned around so I could see her face. She raised her eyebrows.

  “I’ll call Mr. Wiseheart back now,” I said. “Is noon on Saturday fine with everyone?”

  Linda Gail pulled a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed it at her nose. “I always have hay fever in the fall,” she said. She squeezed the Kleenex into a ball and dropped it back into her purse. “Yes, noon on Saturday is just fine, thank you very much.”

  THE COUNTRY CLUB’S main building was palatial, the St. Augustine grass a deep blue-green, more like an inland Mediterranean bay than a lawn. The red clay tennis courts, the swimming pool, the manicured golf course seemed testimony to the secret rewards that awaited the adherents of a benevolent patrician deity. “Oh, my,” Linda Gail said in an almost erotic tone as we drove through the gates.

  “Yeah, this ain’t no hog farm,” Hershel said.

  “Would you not talk like that, please?” she said.

  The dining room that had been reserved by Roy Wiseheart and his wife, Clara, overlooked a tennis court where two players in white trousers, one of them a world-ranked professional, were whocking the ball back and forth, glazed with sweat, both playing with smiles that could have been part of a toothpaste promotion. Our table was covered with immaculate Irish linen and set with silver bowls of red roses and Flora Danica dinnerware. The Wisehearts greeted us at the doorway as though our arrival marked a special occasion. Neither seemed embarrassed by their theatrical behavior. I remembered Grandfather’s warning about dealing with people who were not our kind.

  The differences between the husband and the wife were soon apparent. Roy Wiseheart was trim, his hair copper-colored and neatly combed, his handshake controlled, his eyes clear, his appearance younger than his years, his expression marked by curiosity rather than by design. There was nothing relaxed about his wife. At the table, there was a tic in her cheek, an irritability in her eyes that gave you the sense that you were the cause of her unhappiness. The fingers of her right hand were constantly moving, the thumb touching each of the tips. She also gave you the disquieting conviction that whatever you said next would prove an unfortunate choice.

  She had gold hair and wore a brocaded white dress with small gold buttons. More important, she wore white gloves that she didn’t take off. She kept looking sideways at Rosita.

  Her eyes were a liquid blue, her face unnaturally pale to the point of being bloodless, the cheeks rouged. She ate in very small bites, as an anorexic might. She tried to feign interest in the conversation, but her eyes dulled over whenever she looked down at her plate. I had the feeling that Roy Wiseheart’s marital situation was one no man ever wants to find himself in.

  “This is sure a nice club,” Linda Gail said. “This dishware is something else, too.”

  “We’re happy you could join us,” Wiseheart said. “Mrs. Holland, you have a hint of a British accent. Were you educated overseas?”

  “I grew up in Spain. I had a British tutor. My father was a linguist at the University of Madrid.”

  “Really? How did you come to meet Mr. Holland?”

  “He rescued me from a rather bad situation.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Hershel was there, too,” Linda Gail said. “If we’re going to tell our stories, let’s tell the whole thing.”

  “Beg your pardon?” Wiseheart said.

  “I was in the camps,” Rosita said.

  “You were a prisoner of the Nazis?” he said.

  “You could call it that.”

  “Could we change the subject?” Clara Wiseheart said, drinking from her water glass as though cleansing her throat of an unwelcome taste.

  “I hope y’all like Houston. It’s an up-and-coming business community,” Wiseheart said. “I expect one day it will be like New York City on the plains.”

  “It’s mighty big, that’s for sure,” Linda Gail said. “I bet the jobs go begging. In Bogalusa you could either work at the gin or slaughter chickens.”

  Clara Wiseheart touched her temple as though a vein had burst inside her head. She gestured at the waiter. “Please serve dessert now and bring coffee for those who are having it,” she said. Then she stared out the window at the tennis courts, as though willing herself through the glass.

  Wiseheart turned his gaze on me and Hershel. “You fellows have gotten the attention of quite a few people. They say your welds may be the best in the business. If you ever think about expanding or merging, I’d like to talk over a couple of possibilities with you.”

  “Merging with your corporation?” Hershel said.

  “You’d still be in charge of your company. You’d just be under a bigger umbrella. Small business is old business.”

  “What do you think, Weldon?” Hershel said.

  “We’re loners, Mr. Wiseheart,” I said.

  “Nobody is a loner in the oil and natural gas business,” he replied.

  Clara Wiseheart opened a cigarette case that was either sterling silver or white gold. “Can we talk about financial matters somewhere else?” she asked.

  “I’m like you, Clara,” Linda Gail said. “I can’t get my mind focused on business matters. Know why? My father owned a dry goods store and talked about nothing else. My mother would stuff cotton balls in her ears when he’d get started.”

  Clara Wiseheart’s back straightened. “Excuse me a moment,” she said. She went out the door, lighting her cigarette, her hand trembling.

  Linda Gail looked about uncertainly. “What I meant is a lot of business things are surely over my head,” she said. “I hope I didn’t say anything wrong.”

  “Clara has migraines. It has nothing to do with our conversation,” Wiseheart said.

  “You want me to go talk to her?” Linda Gail asked.

  “That’s very kind, but you don’t need to do that,” he said. He pushed away his plate and looked at me. He smiled good-naturedly. “My analysts say those modifications you did on those German machines are extraordinary. Maybe my people could replicate them, maybe not. I’m an oil producer, not a welding contractor. I hear you all might start up a drilling operation. Come in with me and I’ll back your play. I mean to the hilt. You can write yo
ur own ticket.”

  Hershel waited.

  “We’re not interested,” I said.

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Sure as God made little green apples.”

  “Do you mind telling me why you’re so resistant to a perfectly reasonable business proposal?” Wiseheart asked.

  I held my gaze on his and said nothing.

  “Say something, Hershel,” Linda Gail said.

  “Weldon got us the capital, hon.”

  “You’re the one who got the welding machines. I think we owe Mr. Wiseheart an answer to his question,” she said. “I think it’s impolite to turn into a possum on a gum stump when somebody just wants information from you.”

  I stood up and put my hand on the back of Rosita’s chair. “Thanks for the lunch. Please tell Mrs. Wiseheart good-bye for us.”

  Wiseheart lifted his hands in resignation. “It’s been my pleasure,” he said.

  Clara Wiseheart was nowhere in sight when we walked out of the clubhouse. I could hear Linda Gail breathing through her nose. “What in the name of Sam Hill has got into y’all?” she said. “Do you realize what you just threw away?”

  “It’s all right, Linda Gail,” Hershel said.

  “It is not all right,” she replied. She looked at the marble floors, the high ceilings, the huge bouquets of flowers on the tables, with the expression of a woman being driven from Eden. “Weldon Holland, I can’t believe what you just did. Who put you in charge?”

  “I don’t think you quite appreciate Mrs. Wiseheart’s estimation of us,” I said.

  “So she’s a little snooty. If you want snooty, go back where I grew up,” Linda Gail said.

  Trying to understand her statement was like tying a knot inside your head.

  “There’s a reason she wears gloves,” Rosita said.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “She doesn’t want to touch people like us, Linda Gail,” Rosita said. “Maybe she doesn’t want to touch a Jew who was in a death camp. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to touch the silverware the Negroes have touched. Maybe she doesn’t like being seen at the same table with what she would call ‘common people.’ The possibilities are many.”

  “I don’t think that’s true at all, not for one minute,” Linda Gail said, pouting. “If you ask me, some people have wild imaginations.”

  IT WASN’T OVER. As I was to learn, patience and latitude and even humility are paradoxically the handmaidens of wealth, because virtue is costly only for those who own nothing else. It was a warm Sunday night, the pecan and live oak trees perfectly still, black-green against an autumnal moon. Fireflies were lighting in the darkness, like cigarettes that sparked and died inside their own smoky tracings. Roy Wiseheart pulled a red and metallic-gray Packard into our driveway. I went outside before he had a chance to cut his engine. I leaned down to the passenger window. “We’re done, sir,” I said. “That’s an absolute.”

  “How about giving me a chance to talk?”

  “Nope.”

  He held up his hand, his fingers spread. “Five minutes,” he said.

  “I don’t like your politics, and I don’t like your racial attitudes, Mr. Wiseheart. I don’t like the way your wife was looking at Mrs. Holland, either.”

  “My wife lost her sister to Huntington’s disease and thinks she’ll die the same way. She has an obsession with germs. She’s erratic and unpredictable and tried to burn our home down. Her behavior has nothing to do with you, your friends, or Mrs. Holland.” He turned up the underside of his wrist and glanced at his watch. “I’m flying to our home in the Bahamas in one hour. Do you and your wife want to come? I’m madly impressed by both of you.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “The fishing is great. Get in. What have you got to lose?”

  “I think I’ll say good night instead.”

  His hair was neatly clipped, his face egg-shaped without a sag in it, his complexion flawless. He had the confidence and serenity of a man who understood the world and did not contend with it. He turned off his engine. “There are no secrets in our line of work,” he said. “You and your partner are laying the underwater line to the first oil rig to drill more than one mile from the American shoreline. The rig is being towed into place as we speak, over in Louisiana, south of Vermilion Parish. In ten years that part of the Gulf will be lit with oil rigs from one horizon to the other. You and Pine can be stringing pipe to every one of them.”

  “You hire industrial spies, Mr. Wiseheart?”

  “I don’t have to. They come to my office every day. I throw most of them out. You say you don’t like my politics? Would you care to explain to me what my politics are?”

  “Thanks for coming by,” I said, and started to walk away.

  He got out of the car, a bottle of champagne in his hand. “I bought this for my brother-in-law’s birthday, but he hates my guts and told me to get out of his house. So I’m going to drink it for him. Join me.”

  “I’m a closet teetotaler.”

  He broke the neck off the bottle on the car bumper, the foam running down his hand and wrist. He poured into his mouth, staining his chin and shirt. “If I just swallowed a piece of glass, it’s your fault,” he said. “Come on, take a drink. You’re a bloody fire-eater. Don’t pretend you’re not. I can see it in your eyes. We’re cut out of the same stuff.”

  I had to concede he put on a fine show. “We’re fixing to have some pie and go to bed,” I said.

  “No matter whether we ever do business or not, I want you to understand something. I didn’t know about your wife’s background. I’m sorry if I offended you all in any way. I’m not an anti-Semite. There might be people in my family who are, but I’m not one of them.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “One other thing: Neither Truman nor Roosevelt would bomb the train tracks going into the extermination camps. You didn’t happen to vote for that pair, did you?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “You like motion pictures?”

  “Anyone who doesn’t like motion pictures is probably spiritually dead.”

  “I make them. Check it out,” he said. “See you around, Mr. Holland. For reasons of personal integrity, you just turned down a fortune. If I had ten like you, I could own half the country.”

  I TOOK A PECAN pie and a bottle of milk out of the icebox and fixed plates for Rosita and me at the kitchen table while I told her everything Roy Wiseheart had said.

  “He’s a man who gets what he wants. He’ll be back,” she said.

  “He’s not totally unlikable.”

  “Are you rethinking his offer?”

  “I don’t see the advantage. There’s another problem, one I didn’t mention. A friend of mine flew with Wiseheart in the South Pacific and told me a disturbing story about him. The squadron leader’s plane was hit, and Wiseheart was supposed to escort him back to base. Instead, he went down on the deck after another kill. The plane he splashed turned out to be an unarmed trainer. Two Zeros came out of the clouds and blew the leader out of the sky.”

  “That’s a terrible story.”

  “Maybe he thought he was protecting his leader. But my friend said Wiseheart had four kills and needed a fifth in order to be an ace.”

  “What’s the expression your grandfather is always using?”

  “Don’t borrow trouble.”

  “Good words to remember. Let’s go upstairs.”

  The house had a big attic fan. When we shut all the windows except the one in our bedroom and turned on the fan, the entire house creaked, and within minutes our bedroom was airy and cool. There was a magnolia tree in full bloom outside our window, and I could hear raindrops ticking on the leaves. Rosita undressed with her back to me, then got under the sheet.

  “You’re still shy with me,” I said.

  “That
’s what you think, buster.”

  “You’ve been watching too many American movies,” I said.

  She looked into my face. “Did you have a bad dream last night?”

  “I dreamed about Hershel. He was buried alive and I couldn’t pull him loose from the ground.”

  “Are you worried about him?”

  “I’m worried about his wife.”

  “She’s not a bad girl.”

  “She’s easily used. Most Southerners are. We give power to the worst among us.”

  Rosita turned off the light on the nightstand and pulled the sheet off her. “Come here,” she said.

  “When did you start giving orders?”

  “Just now.”

  “Bad idea,” I said. I got up from the bed and took a pair of scissors out of the desk drawer. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  I went downstairs in my pajamas and into the backyard and cut a huge yellow rose from a bush and went back upstairs and sat on the side of the bed and laid the rose on her stomach.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I felt like it,” I said. Then I kissed her on the mouth and forehead and on each of her eyes.

  She rested her hand on the back of my neck and gazed into my face. “You’re an honorable and brave man, Weldon. For that reason you’ll always be feared and rejected by the world.”

  “I don’t think the world is particularly interested in people like me.”

  “Hershel isn’t educated, but he understands the goodness in you. It’s not the kind of goodness that people acquire. It’s of a kind that certain people are born with. Hershel will always remain loyal to you. His vulnerability lies in his belief that people with education and money are better than he is. He doesn’t understand that he’s the same good man you are.”

  “You’re pretty smart.”

  She lifted a lock of my hair from my eye and pushed it back over my forehead. “People will try to use your goodness against you,” she said. “I made you accept the invitation to the country club. I was foolish. Regardless of what Wiseheart told you, I saw the look in his wife’s eyes. It was iniquitous. We never should have had contact with either of them.”