“Cover him. Leave him alone.”
Somebody dropped a blanket over Eddy’s back. Then he heard them leave the room and shut the door. Tough guys. Mothers.
They like me, he thought. People always do—or did. That’s why they trusted me. Nice guys like Richard trusted me. And I killed him. I always say, why am I here? I never raped anybody or broke into a house or mugged anybody, did I? But still, I killed Richard as surely as if I had mugged him on a rainy night outside of his front door. Richard, and how many others? How many? Well, I guess I know how many funds I dipped into. I’ve had enough time here to tally them up. I killed something in every one of them, even if their names didn’t get into the newspapers, even if they’re not exactly dead. Still, something must have died inside them. Trust. Richard gave into my hands everything he had in the world, almost. Yes, I would have paid them all back, I always say that, too, don’t I? I mean every word of it, and I would have done it, only there wasn’t time. Still, that’s like saying, after you’ve run somebody over with your car, I really meant to stop.…
God, if I had it all to do over again! If I could get out and do something, not just lie here and think and think and be sorry, while life races on outside.
And he saw Richard Tory plainly as if he had been standing here in this godforsaken room, saw the golden, athletic look of him, the dapper clothes, the open, naive, friendly face. That poor soul, looking down on the empty street in the middle of the night in the dark. Looking down. Letting go.
For a long time Eddy lay there. After a while he got up, made himself ready for the night, and then lay down again, praying now that sleep might come without dreams, to relieve him, if only until morning, of the pain.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Why don’t we change the subject?” Ben suggested
The two brothers had been having a wild argument all through dinner. It had been Martin’s idea to invite Ben to the house in Belgravia. Connie had objected, certainly not to being in the company of her brother-in-law, who had just arrived for a semester of study at the London School of Economics, but to dining here at this house, in this lofty hall with the stiff new butler in attendance.
“He’ll be far more comfortable at a restaurant,” she had proposed.
Nevertheless, Ben was here, as earnest as ever, and perhaps a little ill at ease with the complicated array of silverware in front of him.
“Brokerage fell way off on Wall Street after the crash,” Martin said. “Investors were scared. The only business that’s really holding up is the leveraged buyout.”
Ben’s eyebrows rose. “A poor excuse, especially from a man who already has more than enough of the world’s goods.”
Martin gave a short laugh. “What’s ‘enough’? Does anyone ever have it, even in academia?”
“Yes,” Ben said, repeating then, “Why don’t we change the subject?”
Martin never wanted to change a subject once he’d gotten his teeth into it. Like a bulldog, he hangs on to the end, to the final word, Connie thought. Bored, she took another spoonful of raspberry sorbet, sliding the satisfying sweetness over her tongue, and concentrated on her surroundings, which were also satisfying.
The entire house had been restored to its early-nineteenth-century splendor. From the Palladian windows to the classical moldings and the crystal drops that festooned the chandeliers like flounces on a ballgown, all was perfection. Beyond the dining-room doors she could see into the hall, where statues stood in marble niches and the floor was laid with enormous squares of marble, cream and beige. Everywhere in the house there was more marble, which Connie loved, on tabletops, and on bathroom walls. Between one drawing room and another, interior columns copied the temples of ancient Greece. Nowhere but in Britain would one find a house like this one. There was surely nothing like it in the States, she declared silently. Whenever she was abroad, she liked to refer to her country as Europeans did: the States.
“We get rid of dead wood. We tighten production when we buy out,” Martin was saying.
“That’s why we’re doing so well in world markets,” Ben countered sarcastically. “Why, damn it, our whole manufacturing capacity is oozing away across the Pacific!” And making a sweep of his arm in the direction of that ocean, he upset a water goblet. His embarrassed gaze fled toward Connie.
“Oh, heck, sorry! Clumsy. Sorry.”
The butler hastened to mop up with a napkin.
“It’s nothing. Don’t think about it,” Connie said. Oddly enough, given their cool nonrelationship to one another, she pitied the man’s embarrassment. Besides, it was only water, and thank goodness, not red wine.
“Coffee in the little rose room,” she directed then.
In the rose room, so named because of the carpet and the seventeenth-century still life over the mantel, a genial fire snapped behind the screen, accentuating by its heat and brilliance one’s awareness that outside these walls a dingy, wet fog was creeping, chilling the streets.
Martin shivered and held his hands toward the flame. “I wish to hell I didn’t have to go flying back home,” he grumbled.
“I wish you didn’t either. Why must you?” asked Connie. “Of all times to go flying off, with Melissa coming from Paris to be with you, and the reception at Lady Bartly’s that you know I’ve been dying to go to.”
“I told you, I’ve got a deal on. What else? It’s finally gotten all its pieces together after a year and a half, and the principals want to close it fast before Christmas. I’m not taking chances with any more delays or slipups. Anyway, I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
Connie became suddenly alert. “You’re not talking about that man Bennett’s deal, are you?”
Martin nodded.
“Are Davey and Lara still one of the pieces? Are they?”
“They are, and struggling to the very end.”
“I thought the deal was dead.”
“What made you think that?”
“You never talked about it.”
“Do I usually discuss my deals with you?”
“Do you usually make deals that involve my sister?”
Martin lit a cigar. He took a few puffs on it, removed it, examined the soggy tip, replaced it in his mouth, and talked around it.
“Connie, I kept you out of it on purpose. I foresaw the possibility of trouble, although I hoped there wouldn’t be any. The one thing I wanted to avoid was a family squabble. That’s all we needed on top of everything else.”
“So you thought sneaking was the better way.”
“That’s a damn nasty word, sneaking!”
“All right. Disguising, then,” she said sharply.
A picture seemed to rise out of the fire and hover there before her eyes: Bennett in the mink coat; all the clever men in their dark suits sitting around the table in the Westchester house; superimposed somehow upon these were Lara and Davey standing over Peggy’s bed.
“How can you do this?” she cried. “Forcing people … You might as well hold a gun to their heads.” And she heard Lara’s voice pleading, almost, “Don’t let this come between us, Connie.” This, then, was why Lara hadn’t told her anything either.
“Gun, gun, bullshit. Know what you’re talking about before you say things like that, Connie. You make a fool of yourself otherwise. Davey’s stockholders voted in our favor, and that’s that. It’s not my fault if he can’t see reason.”
“Whether it’s reasonable or not isn’t the point. Davey’s worked for years to build that business, and you’re taking it away from him.”
“Don’t be an idiot. He’s been offered more than he could earn if he worked in that place for the next fifty years.”
“He doesn’t care, Martin! Why can’t you get that through your head? Davey and Lara are different from you and me. They don’t want the money.”
“The more fools they.” Martin turned to his brother, who had withdrawn into the copy of Country Life that lay on the table next to his chair. “This is quite apropos of what we
were saying at dinner. You should approve of Connie’s brother-in-law, Ben. He’s got this dinky little business that he hates to let go of even though it’s to his best advantage.”
Ben laid the magazine down. “An inventor of surgical instruments?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I met them at your wedding. We spoke a few words together.”
“They’re the salt of the earth,” Connie cried. “Both of them.”
“Connie,” Martin said impatiently, “I never said they weren’t.”
“Then why don’t you leave them alone?”
Sighing, Martin made a gesture of resignation. “She doesn’t understand business,” he told Ben.
“Business or businessmen?” replied Ben. “There’s a difference.”
“So? What are you driving at now?”
“I may be a professor of economics, but I still can’t understand why businessmen want to wreck American business. To say nothing of the human factor, the cruelty.”
Connie broke in. “Then you’re on their side? Lara and Davey’s?”
“I would have to be,” Ben said quietly, “thinking the way I do.”
No one was speaking when the butler brought in the coffee service and set the silver tray between the twin sofas at the fireplace. An odd melancholy settled in the room.
When the man had left them, Connie answered Ben, “You’re surprised. You never thought I could be on the same side as you.” And she saw that he was too startled, perhaps too embarrassed, to find the quick reply. “Come,” she said, “be honest. You haven’t liked me much. I don’t mind if you say so.”
He found words. “It’s possible that I didn’t know you.”
“I don’t say that I’m always on your side. Probably I am only because this is very personal. After all, it concerns my sister. And I want to see justice done.”
“Well, Martin, what about that?” asked Ben.
“Connie is dramatizing. We are not in never-never land. This is a practical world, and the man’s been outvoted, that’s all there is to it.”
Bitterness was a taste in Connie’s mouth. “You don’t care. You take away the thing he built, and you break his heart. And you don’t care.”
Martin tossed the cigar into an ashtray. “If you want to know what I think, I think you’re all crazy. Making much ado about nothing.”
Ben got up and stood with hands in pockets like a child about to recite in class; he had, too, a child’s clear, open gaze, belying the beard and the creased forehead. He began to recite.
“ ‘And they shall build houses, and inhabit them;
And they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.
They shall not build, and another inhabit;
They shall not plant, and another eat.’
“Do you remember, Martin? Friday nights and Papa reading in the front room after the Sabbath dinner?”
“Please,” Martin said wearily. “Please. Spare me.”
“Isaiah. He was our father’s favorite prophet, Connie. Papa must have known the book by heart. Well, a good half of it, anyway.”
“And you must know the other half,” Martin said. “Lord, how can two brothers be so unlike?”
Ben began to walk toward the door. Martin grabbed his arm.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Ben, where are you going? Do we have to let this get personal?”
“No, no. I’ve got early classes tomorrow, that’s all. But this is between you and Connie, anyway. Thanks, Connie, for the good dinner. Thank you both.”
When they had seen Ben to the door, they went upstairs.
“Speaking of ‘holier than thou,’ ” Martin remarked.
“I didn’t think he was. As a matter of fact, I liked him tonight. I never thought I would, especially.”
“Because he agreed with you. Why else?” Irritably, Martin began to undress, talking as if to himself, pacing from closet to bathroom and back again. “I wonder how early the airline offices are open. And how the hell am I going to get a seat? There must be a couple of thousand students going home for Christmas. I wish I had our plane here. Just my luck the damn thing has to be in for overhauling. Just when I need it.”
“Where’s the company plane?”
“Preston has it in Vail. He’ll be flying back for the closing tomorrow.”
“Don’t you think we need a new one for ourselves, Martin? We have to get to Mykonos for the Byrds’ house party next month and if ours isn’t ready by then, it’ll be awkward because I’ve offered Bitsy Maxwell’s whole group, and the hairdresser, and—”
“All right, all right! I’ll order a plane, for God’s sake. I’ll charter one.” Martin stopped in front of the dressing-table mirror, before which Connie was sitting removing her makeup. “Look at me. I look like hell.”
Two deep lines had carved themselves into his cheeks, lines that she had really not been aware of until this minute, in the glare of the makeup light.
“Well, don’t I look like hell?” he demanded.
“You look tired, that’s all.”
“This business is wearing me down. I’m getting to be an old man before my time.”
“Well, I always tell you not to work so hard, but you won’t listen.”
“Get off that subject, will you? I have to work. You spend so much that no matter what I earn, it’s never too much. Huh! Barely enough, I should say. Ten million it cost me to do up the Fifth Avenue apartment, and now there’s this place. There’s never any end to it. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I do now. You’re the last one to talk to me about working so hard.”
She sprang up from the bench. Astounded and hurt by what she took to be an implication, she screamed at him. For the first time in their life together, she was really furious.
“Just because your first wife was a dowdy, dreary mess who didn’t spend, a joy killer who doesn’t even know how to bring up a daughter—”
“Leave her out of it!”
“Well, that’s what you meant, isn’t it?”
“Nah, I don’t know what I meant. Yes, I do know. This whole damned evening was a bomb. Ben, with his holy conscience making me feel like a—like a thief or something. And you—you fall right in with him. I never would have believed it.”
“I didn’t ‘fall right in with him.’ But I have a right to agree with anybody I want when I choose. And he made a point. That business about one person planting and another one eating. He was right.”
“Oh, back to Lara and Davey again, of course. Lara and Davey, all evening. Maybe that’s the reason I feel so wrung out.”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, I don’t. I’m tired of being nagged about them.”
“I never nag, and you know it. I’m too smart to nag,” she said coldly.
“Well, good. I’m glad to hear it. And now I’m tired. I want some sleep.”
In the morning there would be no time to talk. Then he would be gone, and the next day in New York, the deal would be closed. In Ohio, Lara would be waiting with Davey for the telephone to ring with the news. Probably, they would be waiting at home in the little den; Peg’s photograph was on the table near the telephone. There would be snow on the ground outside, and a white glare coming through the window.
“Martin, Martin, listen to me. I don’t want to fight with you. But listen. It’s only a piddling little company. There’s no reason why that man Bennett has to grab it, with all he’s worth.”
“It’s not so piddling. I’ve told you ten times that it fits into the whole combine; he wants it, and I’m not going to upset a multimillion-dollar deal and look like an ass besides, just because that stubborn, stupid fool happens to be my brother-in-law.”
“He is stubborn, I agree, and so is Lara. And personally, in their position, I might go along with the offer and be glad about it. But that isn’t the point.” She felt herself floundering. Surely he must understand what she meant! And she pleaded. “You said yourself that Bennett’s a horror. Preston said s
o too.”
“One doesn’t have to admire everybody with whom one does business.”
A sense of futility overcame Connie then, as Martin, with his back turned, went searching through his tie rack. And she cried out, “I’m not going to let you hurt them, Martin! I’m not! How can you be so hard!”
He whirled upon her. “I? Hard? You can say that after all I’ve done for them, for the child?”
“Yes, it was wonderful, but that has nothing to do with this.”
“You’re right, it hasn’t. This is a question of money and nothing else.”
She stared at him. This man, who almost never turned down an appeal, and the daily mail was flooded with them.…
“Money,” she said. “I remember what you said about poor Eddy, how greed undid him. And now what arc you doing?”
“You’re comparing me with Eddy? After he swindled people? Filed false returns? God damn you, Connie, this I never could have expected to hear!”
“I didn’t accuse you of anything like that, did I? But if you make people wretched, if you destroy them in their hearts, I don’t see that it matters much whether what you did is legal or not.”
Her words had enraged him. She hadn’t meant them to, had meant rather to touch him, but the effort had misfired and failed.
“You and your hard-luck family! Your brother and your sister … nothing but trouble.”
“That’s not true. And at least we care about one another. We talk to each other, not like you and your brother Ben—”
“Now leave me alone. I’ve heard enough,” Martin said. “I need some rest. I’m sleeping across the hall.”
The door closed sharply behind him.
She wanted, she needed, to fling herself onto the bed and cry out her frustration. And for a moment she stood undecided. But then she would look frightful in the morning, with her eyelids puffed red above dark rings. Frightful. And she had promised to take Thérèse to see Santa Claus; after that there was a luncheon at the Savoy with some delightful English ladies whom she had just met. No, no, Connie. Cream your face as you always do. Drink some hot milk, climb into bed, and swallow the tears. Be sensible.