Guy went back into the living room where he and Bob Treacher were finishing their late breakfast. Bob had flown down to New York a day ahead of him, and Guy had invited him for the weekend. They were talking of Alberta and the men they worked with on the Committee, of the terrain, the trout fishing, and of whatever came into their heads. Guy laughed at a joke Bob told in French-Canadian dialect. It was a fresh, sunny November morning, and when Anne got back from her marketing, they were going to take the car to Long Island and go for a sail. Guy felt a boyish, holiday delight in having Bob with him. Bob symbolized Canada and the work there, the project in which Guy felt he had entered another vaster chamber of himself where Bruno could not follow. And the secret of the coming child gave him a sense of impartial benevolence, of magical advantage.
Just as Anne came in the door, the telephone rang again. Guy stood up, but Anne answered it. Vaguely, he thought, Bruno always knows exactly when to call. Then he listened, incredulously, to the conversation drifting toward the sail that afternoon.
“Come along then,” Anne said. “Oh, I suppose some beer would be nice if you must bring something.”
Guy saw Bob staring at him quizzically.
“What’s up?” Bob asked.
“Nothing.” Guy sat down again.
“That was Charles. You don’t mind too much if he comes, do you, Guy?” Anne walked briskly across the room with her bag of groceries. “He said Thursday he’d like to come sailing if we went, and I practically invited him.”
“I don’t mind,” Guy said, still looking at her. She was in a gay, euphoric mood this morning, in which it would have been difficult to imagine her refusing anybody anything, but there was more than that, Guy knew, in her inviting Bruno. She wanted to see them together again. She couldn’t wait, even today. Guy felt a rise of resentment, and said quickly to himself, she doesn’t realize, she can’t realize, and it’s all your own fault anyway for the hopeless muddle you’ve made. So he put the resentment down, refused even to admit the odium Bruno would inspire that afternoon. He determined to keep himself under the same control all day.
“You could do worse than watch your nerves a bit, old man,” Bob told him. He lifted his coffee cup and drained it, contentedly. “Well, at least you’re not the coffee fiend you used to be. What was it, ten cups a day?”
“Something like that.” No, he had cut out coffee entirely, trying to sleep, and now he hated it.
They stopped for Helen Heyburn in Manhattan, then crossed the Triboro Bridge to Long Island. The winter sunlight had a frozen clarity at the shore, lay thin on the pale beach, and sparkled nervously on the choppy water. The India was like an iceberg at anchor, Guy thought, remembering when its whiteness had been the essence of summer. Automatically, as he rounded the corner of the parking lot, his eye fell on Bruno’s long, bright blue convertible. The merry-go-round horse Bruno had ridden on, Guy remembered Bruno saying, had been royal blue, and that was why he had bought the car. He saw Bruno standing under the shed of the dockhouse, saw everything of him except his head, the long black overcoat and the small shoes, the arms with the hands in the pockets, the familiar anxiety of his waiting figure.
Bruno picked up the sack of beer and strolled toward the car with a shy smile, but even at a distance, Guy could see the pent elation, ready to explode. He wore a royal-blue muffler, the same color as his car. “Hello. Hello, Guy. Thought I’d try and see you while I could.” He glanced at Anne for help.
“Nice to see you!” Anne said. “This is Mr. Treacher. Mr. Bruno.”
Bruno greeted him. “You couldn’t possibly make it to the party tonight, Guy? It’s quite a big party. All of you?” His hopeful smile included Helen and Bob.
Helen said she was busy or she would love to. Glancing at her as he locked the car, Guy saw her leaning on Bruno’s arm, changing into her moccasins. Bruno handed Anne the sack of beer with an air of departure.
Helen’s blond eyebrows fluted troubledly. “You’re coming with us, aren’t you?”
“Not exactly dressed,” Bruno protested feebly.
“Oh, there’s lots of slickers on board,” Anne said.
They had to take a rowboat from the dock. Guy and Bruno argued politely but stubbornly about who should row, until Helen suggested they both row. Guy pulled in long deep strokes, and Bruno, beside him on the center thwart, matched him carefully. Guy could feel Bruno’s erratic excitement mounting as they drew near the India. Bruno’s hat blew off twice, and at last he stood up and spun it spectacularly into the sea.
“I hate hats anyway!” he said with a glance at Guy.
Bruno refused to put on a slicker, though the spray dashed now and then over the cockpit. It was too gusty to raise sail. The India entered the Sound under engine power, with Bob steering.
“Here’s to Guy!” Bruno shouted, but with the odd hitch of repression and inarticulateness Guy had noticed since he first spoke that morning. “Congratulations, salutations!” He brought the beautiful, fruit-ornamented silver flask down suddenly and presented it to Anne. He was like some clumsy, powerful machine that could not catch its proper timebeat to start. “Napoleon brandy. Five-star.”
Anne declined, but Helen, who was already feeling the cold, drank some, and so did Bob. Under the tarpaulin, Guy held Anne’s mittened hand and tried not to think about anything, not about Bruno, not about Alberta, not about the sea. He could not bear to look at Helen, who was encouraging Bruno, nor at Bob’s polite, vaguely embarrassed smile as he faced front at the wheel.
“Anybody know ‘Foggy, Foggy Dew’?” Bruno asked, brushing spray fussily off a sleeve. His pull from the silver flask had pushed him over the line into drunkenness.
Bruno was nonplussed because no one wanted any more of his specially selected liquor, and because no one wanted to sing. It also crushed him that Helen said “Foggy, Foggy Dew” was depressing. He loved “Foggy, Foggy Dew.” He wanted to sing or shout or do something. When else would they all be together again like this? He and Guy. Anne. Helen. And Guy’s friend. He twisted up in his corner seat and looked all around him, at the thin line of horizon that appeared and disappeared behind the swells of sea, at the diminishing land behind them. He tried to look at the pennant at the top of the mast, but the mast’s swaying made him dizzy.
“Some day Guy and I are going to circle the world like an isinglass ball, and tie it up in a ribbon!” he announced, but no one paid any attention.
Helen was talking with Anne, making a gesture like a ball with her hands, and Guy was explaining something about the motor to Bob. Bruno noticed as Guy bent over that the creases in his forehead looked deeper, his eyes as sad as ever.
“Don’t you realize anything!” Bruno shook Guy’s arm. “You have to be so serious today?”
Helen started to say something about Guy’s always being serious, and Bruno roared her down, because she didn’t know a damned thing about the way Guy was serious or why. Bruno returned Anne’s smile gratefully, and produced the flask again.
But still Anne did not want any, and neither did Guy.
“I brought it specially for you, Guy. I thought you’d like it,” Bruno said, hurt.
“Have some, Guy,” Anne said.
Guy took it and drank a little.
“To Guy! Genius, friend, and partner!” Bruno said and drank after him. “Guy is a genius. Do you all realize that?” He looked around at them, suddenly wanting to call them all a bunch of numbskulls.
“Certainly,” said Bob agreeably.
“As you’re an old friend of Guy’s,” Bruno raised his flask, “I salute you also!”
“Thank you. A very old friend. One of the oldest.”
“How old?” Bruno challenged.
Bob glanced at Guy and smiled. “Ten years or so.”
Bruno frowned. “I’ve known Guy all his life,” he said softly, menacingly. “Ask him.”
Guy felt Anne wriggle her hand from his tight hold. He saw Bob chuckling, not knowing what to make of it. Sweat made his forehead
cold. Every shred of calm had left him, as it always did. Why did he always think he could endure Bruno, given one more chance?
“Go on and tell him I’m your closest friend, Guy.”
“Yes,” Guy said. He was conscious of Anne’s small tense smile and of her silence. Didn’t she know everything now? Wasn’t she merely waiting for him and Bruno to put it into words in the next seconds? And suddenly it was like the moment in the coffee shop, the afternoon of the Friday night, when he felt he had already told Anne everything that he was going to do. He was going to tell her, he remembered. But the fact he hadn’t quite yet told her, that Bruno was once more dancing around him, seemed the last good measure of excoriation for his delay.
“Sure I’m mad!” Bruno shouted to Helen, who was inching away from him on the seat. “Mad enough to take on the whole world and whip it! Any man doesn’t think I whipped it, I’ll settle with him privately!” He laughed, and the laugh, he saw, only bewildered the blurred, stupid faces around him, tricked them into laughing with him. “Monkeys!” he threw at them cheerfully.
“Who is he?” Bob whispered to Guy.
“Guy and I are supermen!” Bruno said.
“You’re a superman drinker,” Helen remarked.
“That’s not true!” Bruno struggled onto one knee.
“Charles, calm down!” Anne told him, but she smiled, too, and Bruno only grinned back.
“I defy what she said about my drinking!”
“What’s he talking about?” Helen demanded. “Have you two made a killing on the stock market?”
“Stock market, cr—!” Bruno stopped, thinking of his father. “Yee-hoo-oo! I’m a Texan! Ever ride the merry-go-round in Metcalf, Guy?”
Guy’s feet jerked under him, but he did not get up and he did not look at Bruno.
“Awright, I’ll sit down,” Bruno said to him. “But you disappoint me. You disappoint me horribly!” Bruno shook his empty flask, then lobbed it overboard.
“He’s crying,” Helen said.
Bruno stood up and stepped out of the cockpit onto the deck. He wanted to take a long walk away from all of them, even away from Guy.
“Where’s he going?” Anne asked.
“Let him go,” Guy murmured, trying to light a cigarette.
Then there was a splash, and Guy knew Bruno had fallen overboard. Guy was out of the cockpit before any of them spoke.
Guy ran to the stern, trying to get his overcoat off. He felt his arms pinned behind him and, turning, hit Bob in the face with his fist and flung himself off the deck. Then the voices and the rolling stopped, and there was a moment of agonizing stillness before his body began to rise through the water. He shed the overcoat in slow motion, as if the water that was so cold it was merely a pain had frozen him already. He leapt high, and saw Bruno’s head incredibly far away, like a mossy, half-submerged rock.
“You can’t reach him!” Bob’s voice blared, cut off by a burst of water against his ear.
“Guy!” Bruno called from the sea, a wail of dying.
Guy cursed. He could reach him. At the tenth stroke, he leapt up again. “Bruno!” But he couldn’t see him now.
“There, Guy!” Anne pointed from the stern of the India.
Guy couldn’t see him, but he threshed toward the memory of his head, and went down at the place, groping with his arms wide, the farthest tips of his fingers searching. The water slowed him. As if he moved in a nightmare, he thought. As on the lawn. He came up under a wave and took a gasp of water. The India was in a different place, and turning. Why didn’t they direct him? They didn’t care, those others!
“Bruno!”
Perhaps behind one of the wallowing mountains. He threshed on, then realized he was directionless. A wave bashed the side of his head. He cursed the gigantic, ugly body of the sea. Where was his friend, his brother?
He went down again, deep as he could, spreading his ridiculous length as wide as he could. But now there seemed nothing but a silent gray vacuum filling all space, in which he was only a tiny point of consciousness. The swift, unbearable loneliness pressed him closer, threatening to swallow his own life. He stretched his eyes desperately. The grayness became a brown, ridged floor.
“Did you find him?” he blurted, raising himself up. “What time is it?”
“Lie still, Guy,” Bob’s voice said.
“He went down, Guy,” Anne said. “We saw him.”
Guy closed his eyes and wept.
He was aware that, one by one, they all went out of the bunkroom and left him, even Anne.
forty-six
Carefully, so as not to awaken Anne, Guy got out of bed and went downstairs to the living room. He drew the drapes together and turned on the light, though he knew there was no shutting out the dawn that slithered now under the Venetian blinds, between the green drapes, like a silvery-mauve and amorphous fish. He had lain upstairs in the darkness awaiting it, knowing it would come for him finally over the foot of the bed, fearing more than ever the grip of the mechanism it set in motion, because he knew now that Bruno had borne half his guilt. If it had been almost unbearable before, how would he bear it now alone? He knew that he couldn’t.
He envied Bruno for having died so suddenly, so quietly, so violently, and so young. And so easily, as Bruno had always done everything. A tremor passed through him. He sat rigidly in the armchair, his body under the thin pajamas as hard and tense as in the first dawns. Then on the spasmic snap that always broke his tension, he got up and went upstairs to the studio before he actually knew what he intended to do. He looked at the big sleek-surfaced sheets of drawing paper on his work table, four or five lying as he had left them after sketching something for Bob. Then he sat down and began to write from the upper left-hand corner across, slowly at first, then more and more rapidly. He wrote of Miriam and of the train, the telephone calls, of Bruno in Metcalf, of the letters, the gun, and his dissolution, and of the Friday night. As if Bruno were still alive, he wrote every detail he knew that might contribute to an understanding of him. His writing blackened three of the big sheets. He folded the sheets, put them into an oversized envelope, and sealed it. For a long while he stared at the envelope, savoring its partial relief, wondering at its separateness now from himself. Many times before he had written passionate, scribbled admissions but, knowing no one would ever see them, they had never really left him. This was for Anne. Anne would touch this envelope. Her hands would hold the sheets of paper, and her eyes would read every word.
Guy put his palms up to his own hot, aching eyes. The hours of writing had tired him almost to a point of sleepiness. His thoughts drifted, resting on nothing, and the people he had been writing about—Bruno, Miriam, Owen Markman, Samuel Bruno, Arthur Gerard, Mrs. McCausland, Anne—the people and the names danced around the edge of his mind. Miriam. Oddly, she was more a person to him now than ever before. He had tried to describe her to Anne, tried to evaluate her. It had forced him to evaluate her to himself. She was not worth a great deal as a person, he thought, by Anne’s standards or by anyone’s. But she had been a human being. Neither had Samuel Bruno been worth a great deal—a grim, greedy maker of money, hated by his son, unloved by his wife. Who had really loved him? Who had really been hurt by either Miriam’s death or Samuel Bruno’s? If there were someone who had been hurt—Miriam’s family, perhaps? Guy remembered her brother on the witness stand at the inquest, the small eyes that had held nothing but malicious, brutal hatred, not grief. And her mother, vindictive, as vicious of spirit as ever, not caring where the blame fell as long as it fell on someone, unbroken, unsoftened by grief. Was there any purpose, even if he wanted to, in going to see them and giving them a target for their hatred? Would it make them feel any better? Or him? He couldn’t see that it would. If anyone had really loved Miriam—Owen Markman.
Guy took his hands down from his eyes. The name had swum into his mind mechanically. He hadn’t thought of Owen at all until he wrote the letter. Owen had been a dim figure in the background. Guy had
held him of less value than Miriam. But Owen must have loved her. He had been going to marry her. She had been carrying his child. Suppose Owen had staked all his happiness on Miriam. Suppose he had known the grief in the months afterward that Guy himself had known when Miriam died to him in Chicago. Guy tried to recall every detail of Owen Markman at the inquest. He remembered his hangdog manner, his calm, straightforward answers until his accusation of jealousy. Impossible to tell what really might have been going on in his head.
“Owen,” Guy said.
Slowly, he stood up. An idea was taking form in his mind even as he tried to weigh his memories of the long, dark face and tall, slouching figure that was Owen Markman. He would go and see Markman and talk with him, tell him everything. If he owed it to anyone, he owed it to Markman. Let Markman kill him if he would, call the police in, anything. But he would have told him, honestly, and face to face. Suddenly it was an urgent necessity. Of course. It was the only step and the next step. After that, after his personal debt, he would shoulder whatever the law put upon him. He would be ready then. He could catch a train today, after the questions they were supposed to answer about Bruno. The police had told him to be at the station with Anne this morning. He could even catch a plane this afternoon, if he was lucky. Where was it? Houston. If Owen was still there. He mustn’t let Anne go with him to the airport. She must think he was going to Canada as he had planned. He didn’t want Anne to know yet. The appointment with Owen was more urgent. It seemed to transform him. Or perhaps it was like the shedding of an old and worn-out coat. He felt naked now, but not afraid any longer.
forty-seven
Guy sat on a jumpseat in the aisle of a plane bound for Houston. He felt miserable and nervous, as out of place and wrong, somehow, as the little lump of the seat itself that clogged the aisle and spoilt the symmetry of the plane’s interior. Wrong, unnecessary, and yet he was convinced that what he was doing was necessary. The difficulties he had hurdled in getting this far had put him in a mood of stubborn determination.