The short winter afternoon was ending. It was time to take Clive home. For a minute they sat in the car watching him as he moved slowly, almost at a shuffle, up the hill, fumbled with the key and let himself in at the door of his gracious house.
“My God, Dan, how sad.”
“Yes. But how he’s changed. As dry and sharp-tongued as he used to be, now he’s absolutely soft. I don’t recognize him. Is it the illness or the woman?”
“Some of each, I suppose.”
At the highest point in the road, where through the bare trees the city’s lights were beginning to show, Dan slowed the car.
“My father worked down there, too,” he murmured, “and his father before him.”
Sally touched his arm without speaking, for she understood that he was already mourning the death of Grey’s Foods.
“I’m flying to Scotland the week after next for five days,” he said. “I have to see about a new product, some sort of mincemeat. Pie stuffing. I’ll be back long before Christmas, of course.”
“So you haven’t quite given up?”
“We’re not buried yet, although I daresay we will be soon, but as long as we’re above ground, I’ll keep on feeding the business.”
“You have what they call guts, Dan Grey.”
“The first of the year. By then, things will come to a head.”
She could have reminded him of his promise that if by then Tina had not improved, they would make some kind of drastic new effort by the first of the year. She could have told him that only yesterday morning when Happy had come by on an errand and found Tina having a frightful tantrum about going to school, she had gently suggested that perhaps they should see a doctor. “Have you taken her anywhere?” Happy had asked, and when Sally had answered, “Not yet,” she had repeated the name of Dr. Lisle. “She’s supposed to be excellent,” she had said, and Sally had not replied.
She could have told him all this, but she did not. The day was growing cold and dying. The year was dying. Let it go quietly. After this new year, as Dan had predicted, things would come to a head.
Chapter Fourteen
December 1990
Ian raised the grimy shade and looked out at the parking lot. A wind was coming up so hard that he could almost hear the creak of the Happy Hours Motel sign as it swung. It was only a quarter to four, but the day had ended and the tinselly Christmas festoons around the property were already lit.
He hated an afternoon assignation. It lacked the festive excitement of the night that could give charm to even such a tawdry and depressing place as this.
Roxanne was sitting up in the bed shivering. “It’s as damp as the inside of a goddamn icebox. You’d think they could at least give you some heat for your money.”
Her clothes, as always, had been tossed on a chair. He picked up her new mink coat and read the label of a fashionable New York furrier. This coat was a decided improvement over the one he had given her.
“Here, wrap it around yourself,” he said brusquely. “By the way, didn’t you tell me you had stopped swearing every second word?”
She laughed. “I only swear when I’m with you. With you I can be myself.”
He knew he was supposed to acknowledge the intimacy in some endearing way. But because a somber mood had come upon him, he did not do it. After coitus, man is sad. He remembered having read that in the original Latin when he was in school and snickering over it with his best friends. In all the years since then, he himself had rarely experienced any such sadness, and certainly not after Roxanne. Nevertheless, here it was, a cloud before his eyes and a weight on his shoulders.
Like a robed queen, she now sat wrapped in fawn-colored fur with a narrow gold collar gleaming at the V-neck. After the satisfaction of desire—and make no mistake, Ian, he told himself, you were just as eager as she was—she had settled in for a long, cozy talk.
“Get up,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I have to go home in time for dinner. We’re having guests.”
“I thought you were staying with your father at Red Hill for this week. We went up there last night. I took this afternoon off to see the dentist, ha, ha.”
Roxanne had not yet brought herself to say “Father,” as Happy did. Perhaps it was because she had her own father. Yet Happy had one, too, whom she called “Dad.” More likely it was that Roxanne was too much in awe of Oliver to say the word. Most people were in awe of Oliver, even when he was at his most kindly.
“We’re driving up there tonight after the guests leave.”
This whole business had been Clive’s idea, and it was a nuisance. Still, the poor guy had never asked for anything, and actually wasn’t asking for much now. Maybe he was thinking that this Christmas season was to be his last. And he imagined Clive sitting there in front of a fire, reading.
“This Christmas will be my first of those family get-togethers that you dread so much. But don’t worry, I shall be perfect,” Roxanne said with a little gesture, fingertips to her lips as if kissing, that she often made.
This, too, annoyed Ian. “Come on, will you get moving? I have to go pay the bill, and I can’t while you’re still in the room.”
“Okay, okay.” She yawned, stretched, and slid naked out of the bed. As she bent over to pick up her clothes, as she fastened the brassiere in the back with arms akimbo and breasts outthrust, as she raised her arms to put on her sweater, every slow, graceful motion was as studied as those of a striptease performer.
“You don’t show yet,” he said.
“Of course not. It’s only two months.”
Three weeks ago she had informed him that she was pregnant, and he was still having moments when he was sure he had dreamed it.
“Are you certain it’s no mistake? For God’s sake, are you certain?” he pleaded.
“I told you I went to the doctor. It’s no mistake.”
“I meant, whose it is,” he said, swallowing his disgust at the words.
“You’ve got some nerve asking me that again, Ian.”
“I have a right to ask. We’ve only been together three times, once that night at your house, and twice here.”
“One is enough, my friend. And what is this third degree, anyway? Look at the man! I haven’t been with him for the last three months. How could I? Use your head. Yes,” she said, clasping a velvet band on her hair, “it’s been a short, short honeymoon.”
“Don’t,” he said.
It was revolting. And he stared back out the window where Roxanne’s BMW was parked in full sight. “He treats you pretty well, doesn’t he?”
“What are you looking at, the car? Yes, he does. He treats me better than you did when you had the chance.”
“Don’t,” he said again. And he saw Clive lying in the hospital, fastened down by all those tubes, saw Clive lying in a coffin, and whirled around crying out, “I am so ashamed, Roxanne!”
She was repairing her lipstick. When she was finished blotting it carefully, she answered him.
“It’s a little bit late for that now, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what, Ian. Your trouble is too much conscience. If you had married me when you could have, we wouldn’t be in this pickle now.”
Fear drained him. He could feel it pouring through him like ice water, descending into his vitals. “Doesn’t he—won’t he question the dates?” he asked.
“No. I’ve had to let him fool around a little whenever he felt a bit better, but he barely could. It was all in his head. It was nothing. But he doesn’t know enough to realize that. Anyway, this is the last thing he’d ever suspect.”
“I feel like dirt, Roxanne.”
“You might at least say something glad about the child I’m going to give you. You must have been wanting one all this time. Most men do.”
“Women think more about it,” he said, dodging around the subject. “Of course, I hope it will be well, and that you will be, too.”
“You haven’t suggested an abortion, I notice.”
“It is not my ch
oice.”
She pressed the subject. “You could act a little bit glad about the baby.”
Fool. How could he be glad? “It’s the situation, Roxanne. I’m terribly, terribly worried.”
They stood there facing each other, ready to go and yet held back. Yes, he was thinking, I have wanted a child. But not hers. There lay the bitter irony. If it should turn out to be the finest boy in the world, it still would not be his, it would be Clive’s. And if Clive should die, she would marry again in a couple of years. Transformed as she now was, the beautiful widowed Mrs. Grey would have no shortage of takers. His thoughts moved swiftly, as swiftly, he thought grimly, as the nanoseconds in Clive’s physics books. Suppose, for some reason, she did not want to marry but preferred to cling to him? He would be trapped and tied to her. She would have a hold upon him till the last day of his life or beyond, when the hold would be transferred to Happy. At that last thought, he groaned inside.
“You look like death,” she said.
“Right now I feel like it.”
He was hearing his father’s voice: Your brother’s wife! That slut … And your own wonderful wife, Elizabeth … I should have thought you’d gotten that sort of thing out of your system before you married.… I lived a clean life, I had my fun, although not with my brother’s wife. And after that, your mother was the only one.…
That was Father in one of his lofty Victorian moments. As if Victorians actually lived the way they talked! And still, his father would be rightly horrified by this.
“If you ever let anybody know and Clive finds out, you’ll kill him,” he said.
“Are you crazy? What do you think I’m going to do, put an announcement in the paper?”
Her eyes were hard. She was angry at him, and he understood why. A pregnant woman wanted attention and praise, some acknowledgment from the father of the coming miracle. And he remembered Dan’s pride.
So he said to her very gently, “Don’t be angry at me. A part of me is glad about the baby, while the other part is what you see. I only meant, don’t even confide in your sister. Don’t trust anybody. Can you imagine what will happen if this leaks out? Father and Clive and Happy—”
Now she interrupted. “For her sake alone—not to mention Clive, whom I care about more than you may believe—I’d be careful. I’m not as rotten as you may think I am.”
He interrupted, “I don’t think you’re rotten, Roxanne!”
No, she wasn’t a “good” person like Happy or Sally, but she certainly wasn’t “bad,” either.
“She’s been very nice to me, giving me her recipes and everything, when she could have snubbed me. You don’t have to worry, Ian.” She tossed her head. “Besides, if you don’t believe how good I can be, you sure as hell know that I know where my bread is buttered.”
This was the more familiar side of her, and he nodded. “Oh, I’ve no doubt you do. None at all.”
She frowned. “Speaking of that, though, how is my bread going to be buttered if Clive should die?”
“Don’t bury the man yet, please.”
“I’m not doing anything of the kind. But people die. And he’s sick, and I’m having a baby, so I ought to know.”
“What you’re asking me is what’s in his will,” Ian said bluntly. “I don’t know what’s in it. Ask him.”
People were not supposed to think about wills—although of course they did and always had done so—until someone died. Then they found out what had been left to them.
“That’s a hell of a thing to ask a man in the shape he’s in. Don’t tell me you have no idea what he’s done about it. You do have an idea and you just don’t want to tell me.”
To Ian, the subject was most distasteful. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “he’s always said that he wanted to leave something to Tina, and I suppose he must have added Susannah.”
The words had dropped inadvertently from his mouth, and in that very moment, he knew he had made a big mistake.
“The hell you say! Whatever he’s got goes to me and my kid. Those girls have their own father, not my kid’s father.”
My kid’s father. Trouble had already started. Most certainly there would be no Grey’s Foods stock for Roxanne if Clive should die. That stock was to be handed down, to be kept for the Greys’ own blood, from generation to generation. So the question was how much Clive owned outside of the stock. He had always been a saver, and as a money man, he had undoubtedly made good investments. But he had also spent a fortune on that house. It was quite possible that he had spent himself dry. Infatuated to the point of madness, it was even probable. In that case, his widow—But why do we speak as if he were dead or even soon to die? He might live to ninety, for all we know—in that case, he would leave her the house, but you can’t eat a house, nor can you live on the interest you’d get from selling it, live well enough to satisfy her, that is, now that she had had a taste of plenty. Ian’s head was spinning. Roxanne would sue! Sue whom? Why, the father of her child, of course, Mr. Ian Grey.
He began to sweat. There in the chilly room, with his overcoat already on, he burned. Now suddenly this new possibility overshadowed every other trouble. What had been gloomy gray was now blackest black. His fear of losing the forest deal with its bag of gold and his fear of Amanda’s raid on the company treasury had shrunk in comparison with this possible, or probable, menace of Roxanne.
She burst into tears. “Ian! I’m scared. What’s to become of me if Clive dies? I don’t want to leave the house, everything will be taken away, I’d lose everything, I’d be like Cinderella at midnight.” And she flung herself at him, weeping against his shoulder. “I know you think that’s all there is to me, just two greedy hands, but you do know, don’t you, that I’ve been good to him? I don’t only take, I give. I make him happy. You can ask him, he’ll tell you how very, very happy he is.”
He wouldn’t be very happy if he could hear all this.
Deep, frightened sobs came from her chest; she was panicked. And he patted her back, soothing and murmuring.
“Nobody needs to ask. He tells people all the time.”
“Just when I’ve gotten used to everything, I have to think about losing it all.”
Unable to disengage himself from her leaning weight and her clinging arms, he stood there. And in spite of all the claims that were tearing at his brain, there was room for some faint pity; she had been plucked from the mud and placed on top of the mountain. No wonder she feared the fall. And he stood there, still stroking her back and murmuring. “You’re way ahead of yourself. You’ve no need to be afraid.”
She raised her head, reached for the handkerchief in his breast pocket, and dried her eyes, still sobbing, “I love you, Ian. I always will.”
Mechanically, as if his hand were moving of its own accord, he kept on stroking her back. He was beginning to arrange his thoughts, not even looking at her.
You treat a problem logically, as in geometry. This results from that, and that from something else, and so it goes until you grasp the answer. Now, here what is needed is money enough to keep Roxanne quiet in any and every circumstance. What is needed is to buy out Amanda because if we do not, the result is obvious. So we get back to the forest deal. Now that, miracle of miracles, Dan’s given up, the only holdout is Clive, who is convinced, and no doubt he’s right, that the sale will break Father’s heart. But Clive doesn’t know that there’s something else that would make a far bigger crack in Father’s heart.… That’s what has to be prevented, and Roxanne is the only one who can do it.
“I love you so, Ian. You don’t know how much.”
That’s right, he thought, I don’t know. Everything is in flux. Where money is the issue, who can know?
“I want to talk to you,” he said. “Let’s take off our coats and sit.”
“I have to get home. He’s been sitting there alone all day, waiting for me, poor soul. I hardly ever leave him now. He needs me and I feel so guilty about him anyway. He thinks I’ve gone to the dentist and the
n to take my sister to lunch. She’s back from school. I’ve got to hurry home.”
“This won’t take long if you pay attention. Clive must have told you something about business. About the people who want to build that new community in part of Grey’s Woods.”
“Well, you’ve told me something, and I’ve read a little about it in the paper. Clive hasn’t said much. I know you’ve been wanting him to agree with you, that’s all.”
“All right, I’ll explain more.”
When he had given her the outline of events, making them as simple as possible, she exclaimed, “Who the hell is this Amanda person anyway, that you’re all afraid of?”
“We’re not afraid. We just don’t want to be tied up in the courts for ten years.”
“Why can’t your father talk some sense into her?”
That was a very good question. That Father, with all his prestige and his very bearing, which commanded so much respect in public places before he had even given his name, could not deal with an impetuous, eccentric young woman like Amanda was a puzzle.
“He has a bad heart, and the worst thing for him is to get involved in an argument” was his reply, all of which was true. “So you see,” he concluded, “how important it is that Clive not delay the forest deal. That way, we’ll get the money to satisfy Amanda, and—” Here he gave Roxanne a long, serious, significant look. “There’ll be plenty for you whether Clive dies or lives. Either way—and may he live long—we’ll establish a trust for you and you’ll be taken care of for life.”
Her eyes were wide and glowing, while a little smile went quite out of control and spread across her face.
“But only, only,” he warned sternly, emphatically and for the third or fourth time, “if you can get Clive to go along. Now, get home and do it. I’m sure you can. You’ll know how.”
“Don’t worry. He does everything I ask, and he’ll do this, too.”
Let us hope, he said to himself. Otherwise, he would have two albatrosses around his neck, Amanda and Roxanne both. Hungry for money, that’s all they were. Hungry for money. The curse. The root of all evil. Believe it or not, he didn’t even care about having that pot of gold for himself anymore. He needed it only to get rid of them.