“Stephen, I can’t imagine what you are talking about!”
Mom always pretended she hadn’t the least idea that the bulk of her fortune was in diamonds and gold bricks in the vault of a bank in Zurich.
Stephen found himself standing, although he didn’t remember getting up. He also found that he had sweated through his shirt, and he heard himself saying in a strident whisper, “Christ Almighty, does she think she can take it all with her?”
He was now in a phone booth, calling Mom’s suite at the Royal Shores of Palm Beach.
“Thank God, Precious, you didn’t wait, you went home.”
“Naturally, Stephen, I knew you wouldn’t expect me to wait in West Palm Beach for five hours or even one.”
“No, no. Mom, I just wanted to be sure. So what are your travel plans now?”
“I may be a little late for your Sunday brunch. Why don’t you change it to a buffet supper? Would that put you out too much?”
“I’d just have to call up about a dozen people.”
“You mean it would be too much, then?”
“Precious, has anything for you ever been too much for me, Mom?”
“Stephen, as we both know, you have always been a paragon of filial devotion. Then it is understood. If you’re tied up with preparations for the buffet supper, just have a limousine waiting at Idlewild to meet me.”
“Mom, it’s not Idlewild any more, it is Kennedy Airport.”
“To me it remains Idlewild. Understood?”
“Oh, yes. Precious, I understand completely, I was just afraid that—”
“And, Stephen, one thing more.”
Her voice had dropped to a level that was still firm but slightly less militant.
“What thing. Mother?”
“I trust not a thing but a person. This Miss Sue Coffin whom you mention to me as a young woman, well, she couldn’t be still too young, that you are perennially ‘going out’ with, as you put it, as if you thought I could not see through euphemisms, however transparent. Are you still going out with Miss Sue Coffin whom, for fifteen years, now, Stephen, since we buried your dear father, you have described to me as a successful young career woman in some sort of promotional field?”
“Oh, yes, her! I am still seeing Sue Coffin, oh, yes, I see her regularly. Mom.”
“I presume that you mean upon a nightly basis. Now, Son, I have become increasingly disturbed by the fact that you have been ‘going out’ for fifteen years, slightly more than fifteen, I believe, with this young woman whom I have yet to enjoy the possible pleasure of meeting. Stephen? When I fly up to Manhattan for the buffet I shall expect to be granted that pleasure and an opportunity to discuss this situation with her in private, and before I hang up I wish to know if she is connected with the Nantucket Island Coffins with which all the socially acceptable Coffins are connected?”
“Oh, now. Mom, I wouldn’t be going out all this time with a Miss Coffin that wasn’t a socially acceptable one, you know that, I wouldn’t dream of it, ever!”
“Son, this extra-marital alliance with a woman, socially acceptable as the Nantucket Coffins, must be legalized, Stephen, and I insist that she be produced, that she be presented to me at the buffet on Sunday. Now I’m exhausted, there’s nothing more to discuss. I love you, Stephen. Good night.”
Produce her, produce her, produce her, out of a hat or a sleeve, why, my God, Sue Coffin is—
Yes, there had, indeed, been a fleeting association of a slightly intimate nature between a Miss Sue Coffin and Stephen but that association had been terminated long since when she had married an advertising executive for whom she’d worked and they’d moved to San Francisco, why, even Christmas cards from her no longer came in, the last card he’d received from her was an engraved one bearing her married name and announcing the birth of twins, giving the date of their nativity and their weight at that occasion and a scribbled statement from Sue Coffin Merriwether saying “Proud mother is happy as a lark! Fond greetings. Sue.”
Not happily as a lark did Stephen emerge from the phone booth, in fact he staggered from its stifling enclosure as though about to collapse. A discreet hand clasped his elbow, steering him toward a door marked EXIT beyond which possibly there existed some reviving fresh air…
On the long ride home Stephen’s usually well-ordered mind seemed to be getting the wrong sort of feedback for the input. It was not continuing along a chosen groove but was abruptly skipping onto a series of little tangents. It was as if somebody had monkeyed with a perfectly but too delicately tooled computer. No matter how finely a machine of this sort is tooled, even if it is hand-tooled by artist-craftsmen—
“Wow!” said Stephen aloud. He said it loudly enough for the chauffeur from the rental limousine service to glance back and enquire, “Something wrong. Sir?”
“No, no, no, just—”
(Just what, and why three “no’s”? Must be really upset; have a feverish feeling.)
He knew how to take his own pulse and the hands of his watch were luminous so he could time it. He was alarmed at how it was racing. One hundred and twenty a minute!
The new rental limousines were equipped with liquor cabinets. Why did Stephen open it so stealthily, since he had already pressed the button that shut him off, sound-wise, from the chauffeur?
I guess I must be afraid of getting a liquor problem like Dad’s.
He was trying to remember what he had been thinking about when he had silently uttered “Wow” a short while ago as he had followed the chauffeur out of Kennedy. Was it because the chauffeur’s elegantly tapered back was—
Wow!
In the liquor cabinet was a half-full bottle of bourbon, a good brand of it. Old Nick. Stephen helped himself to half a tumbler and by the time they were passing serenely into the outskirts of Queens, the other side of LaGuardia, Stephen had, with no conscious plan to, lowered the soundproof panel between himself and the chauffeur.
He knew that he was in a dreamlike, an almost trancelike condition.
“What’s your name?” he asked the chauffeur in a slurred voice.
“Tony,” said the chauffeur.
“Ah, Italian, are you?”
“That’s right.”
“Love Italy,” said Stephen, “beautiful, beautiful country, beautiful people. You know—”
“Know what. Sir?”
“I’ve got a mother.”
“Me, too. I got a helluva Mama.”
There was something soothing, almost caressing, about the voice of the young Italian chauffeur, and in response to those qualities in it, Stephen sloshed some more Old Nick into the tumbler which he had just drained.
“You’ve got a helluva Mama and I’ve got one hell of a Mom. Do you notice the difference?”
“Not sure what you mean. Sir.”
“How much time have you got for me to explain?”
“My time is yours, at your expense, but it’s yours.”
The voice of the young Italian chauffeur had undergone an indefinable change.
“Well, taking you at your word’s value,” said Stephen, “drive off the highway at the next turn and let’s have a little talk. About Moms and Mamas.”
Stephen felt a slight lurch as the limousine turned off the highway but felt nothing more until the car had stopped.
Through eyes with lids that drooped, Stephen looked about.
The personable young chauffeur had parked the limousine in a place to which the nearest lighted building was at least half a block away.
Without invitation from Stephen, the chauffeur now entered the back seat of the limo and sat rather close to Stephen. He was not only young and good-looking but there was a redolence about him, a musky fragrance.
After a few moments’ silence, he said to Stephen, “The next move’s up to you.”
“Strange remark,” Stephen said in his slurred voice, now very deeply slurred.
Another few moments of silence but not altogether inactive. The Italian’s left knee had swun
g open to encounter Stephen’s right knee.
There was a wild clicking on and off of multi-colored buttons inside Stephen’s head, along with electronic noises. This disturbance suddenly descended to his stomach and he began to make retching sounds.
“If you’re gonna puke, stick your head out the window. Not so far, okay. I’m holding your ass.”
When Stephen had vomited, he sprawled back into the lap of the chauffeur. After swabbing his mouth and chin with his monogrammed handkerchief of fine Irish linen, a customary sort of adjustment to his position in the world took precedence over all other circumstances, and to the chauffeur, still holding him on his lap, he said in a tone inherited from his mother, “Young man, I believe you are taking liberties with my person!”
“Me? Liberties? Person?”
“Yes, I am a person. In fact, I am a member of the Wall Street law firm of Webster, Eggleston, Larrabee and Smythe. I am in Register, Social, and headed for Dun and Bradstreet’s.”
“Marrone!” said the chauffeur. “Didn’t you tell me to drive off the highway at the next turnoff?”
“If I did, I assure you it was to have a discussion of our respective mothers, not to be subjected to liberties with my—person…”
“Blow that out of your ass!” said the now-outraged Italian, as he dumped Stephen off his lap and opened the back door of the rental limousine.
“The person you are is a goddamn closet queen.”
“And what is a closet queen, that curious expression?”
The chauffeur grinned.
“A queen in a closet with a broomstick up his butt,” replied the chauffeur, slamming the back door shut and returning to the wheel.
Of course this bizarre experience was somewhat blurred in his recollection when Stephen woke late the next morning with a violent headache. He recalled only that a rental limousine chauffeur had made suggestions to him of a presumptuous nature on the drive back from the airport.
It was, when he woke, much too late to call off the Sunday brunch; in fact, there was barely time to prepare the Bloody Marys. He had all the ingredients for Eggs Benedict and since old Nat’s young bride was on the guest list, Stephen was confident he could engage her as an assistant chef.
He was just out of the needle-sharp shower, drying off vigorously, and reaching for his paisley silk robe when the doorbell rang.
“Just a mo!” he shouted in the hall as he got himself into the robe and secured about his throat a snowy new scarf, arranging it as an ascot.
The bell rang again and again he called out “Just a mo” as he inspected himself in the full-length mirror on the door’s interior surface.
He inspected himself two ways, head on and in profile, and was far from displeased, particularly by the way that the paisley silk so gracefully delineated, in profile, the masculine but prominent buttocks that Dame Nature had gifted him with.
“It’s me, it’s Maude. I came a little early because I thought you might need a woman’s hand in the kitchen.”
But Stephen was not looking at her, he was looking at her companion, a boy in blue jeans, no taller than Maude but with a—
Again the word “Wow!” exploded in Stephen’s head.
“Oh, this is my kid brother. Clove,” Maude was saying. “I just stopped off at the ‘Y’ to pick him up ‘cause it’s important you and him get to know each other before the others get here, especially Nat.”
(Wow!)
“Now you two just leave the kitchen to me an’ go get to know each other. Oh. Is your Mom up from Palm Beach?”
“Plane—delayed—she—”
“What a bitch,” Maude said with great cheer in her voice. “I mean the plane delay.”
Stephen found that he had not gone into the living room, as he had naturally intended, but had returned to the bedroom. He heard the door being closed, not by himself.
“Sis is right, we should get to know each other if you’re gonna put me up here.”
Stephen found himself rattling a bit, uttering words without due process of thought.
“I think I must be sort of unnerved this morning.”
“Over your Mom coming up to check on you, huh?”
“There’s nothing for her to check on, nothing at all, but her visits disturb the routine. Hey, now, what are you doing?”
“Peelin’ the material,” said the boy. Clove, breathing on Stephen’s neck and running his hot little hand down the gracefully, just-enough-swaybacked curvature of Stephen’s spine and right onto that ellipsis of his posterior which Stephen had only a few minutes past admired vinth such satisfaction in the mirror-back of the front door.
“Good stuff, whacha call it?”
“I just had time to put on my silk robe, and this white cravat, before your sister and you arrived at the door.”
Maude’s kid brother’s hot little hand was still feeling the material, as he had put it, but with increased pressure.
“Would you mind going into the kitchen to bring me a Bloody Mary, a—double?”
“Now you’re talkin’, baby. Ill bring both of us doubles, and when I come back, you are gonna forget all about your Mom’s check on yuh.”
A cunning idea abruptly occurred to Stephen.
“Clove?”
The boy glanced back at Stephen from the door.
In a husky whisper, Stephen said to him: “Clove, don’t ask me why right now, but when Mom arrives, I want you to get her aside and tell her that you are a secret.”
“What kinda secret you mean?”
“Clove, I can make it worth your while if you go through vwth this little conspiracy right. I want you to convince Mom that you are a secret child of mine, born fifteen years ago, and your Mom was a Miss Sue Coffin from Nantucket Island.”
Clove’s eyes narrowed to a look of shrewd contemplation. He had a definite attraction to deception as a practice in life. Of course he did not comprehend at all the purpose of this particular deceit but that it involved a trick about to be played on someone was immediately appealing.
“Just lemme git all this straight. You are my secret daddy? And my mom, she’s also a secret named—”
“A young lady named Sue Coffin who died at your birth. Clove.”
“Jeez, this is heavy, but when you say you’ll make it worth my while, I reckon that I can handle it for you okay. Now you stay in here, rest on that bed there, and I’ll fetch a couple of doubles. I’ll be right out and then we can git it together in more detail. Daddy.”
As the door opened briefly for Clove’s kitchen errand, Stephen heard from near, but as if from far, the doorbell ringing again.
“Never had such a hangover, wow…” he murmured to himself, falsely, as he removed the paisley silk robe and toppled onto the bed.
Easily an hour had passed by the time Stephen emerged gradually and uncertainly from his bedroom in which he had ingested easily three and probably more Bloody Marys, fetched him by the Ganymede younger sibling of Nat Webster’s adolescent bride from the Arkansas Ozarks.
He did not begin to know what faced him in the living room: he knew only that the entire complement of his colleagues in the Wall Street law firm of Webster, Eggleston, Larrabee and Smythe were there assembled, each with his respective spouse.
“Well, I want you to know—” he heard himself saying, in a slow and slurred voice as he joined the abruptly hushed assemblage.
Nat Webster, the old hound dog, was first to speak up.
“I don’t much think you want us to know a goddamn thing which we don’t know already.”
“I want you to know I passed out in the bedroom and I don’t know how it happened.”
Nat Webster was on his feet.
“If you’ll drop by the office tomorrow about noon, I think your official paper of resignation from the firm will be ready for signature. Is that understood, Ashe?”
Then he marched to the door, calling back “Come on, Maude!”
Maude bestowed a sisterly kiss on Stephen’s blanched cheek as
she responded languidly to this summons. Then she lisped loudly and sweetly,
“Thanks for putting up Clove, so much better for him than life at the ‘Y’.”
“Maude!” shouted Nat Webster from the door.
She blew a kiss at the lingering guests and undulated into the hallway.
Eggleston, Larrabee and Smythe were all on their feet now and their wives, conferring together in whispers, were getting into their furs.
Clove had now entered. He closed the fly of his jeans with a loud zip.
Smythe was last to leave the Sunday brunch. He came up close to Stephen, still standing stunned in the living room center, and delivered these comforting words.
“Too bad, boy, you had to blow it like this.”
His butt-pat, which followed, was of a fondly valedictory nature.
Vertigo took sudden hold of Stephen, he tottered in several directions, but finally fell backwards into the arms of Clove.
“Bed, bed, before Mom,” he heard himself imploring before it all went black.
It could not be said that Stephen emerged altogether from black when he recovered consciousness in his elegantly appointed bachelor bedroom. However the black was not total, unrelieved black, although the room was not lighted by the least lingering vestige of daylight through his dormer windows. Day had withdrawn as completely, and, to Stephen, as precipitately as had his future association with the law firm of Webster, Eggleston, Larrabee and Smythe. Still, as the pupils of his eyes expanded, he could detect those sometimes-comforting little irregular glimmerings of light on the river East, which the windows of the bedroom overlooked, as well as the more assertive challenges to dark that were offered by city-bound Sunday night traffic on the Triboro Bridge.
“Jesus K. Morris BROTHERS!”
This extraordinary exclamation was not provoked by a reassessment of his future with Wall Street and its legal aspects but by a very precisely located physical sensation, one bitch of a pain where he had never experienced one before.
Hard upon this outcry of distress, Stephen heard from the hallway (thank Cod the door was closed!) the voice of his nearest and dearest still living relative, none other than his mother, her voice, yes, but not at all under its usual cool restraint.