Day of Wrath (15 page)

When we got to Central Parkway, I turned west, skirting
the half of the city above Twelfth. I still didn't know where I was going.
In a way, I suppose, I was waiting for Grace to tell me. But she just huddled
in front of the heater, rubbing her hands together and humming little scat-like
tunes. I figured she was content to end up wherever I took her. Which gave
me the sinking feeling that she'd made this kind of trip before. Say every
night at closing time. To every point on the compass. With who  ever
was left in the bar. I was as vain as the next man, but I certainly didn't
credit myself with attracting a girl as young and as offbeat as this one
was—a girl who seemed to be habitually bopping along to the soulful sound
of some old Philco, tuned to a station that only she could hear. Besides,
I didn't feel any heat coming off her. She'd been friendly, and in her
own goofy way, kind of disarming; but she seemed as cold inside as she
was on the outside. Which only made me more certain that what we had in
common was the contents of my wallet. If she was a whore, she had a hell
of an act. If she was just an oddball looking for company and a few extra
dollars—which seemed more likely—she was still a strange fish.

When we hit the Fairmount hillside, she helped bring the
question into focus by skipping a beat in her songs and saying, "You live
around here?"

"Pretty close."

She went back to her humming, and I decided to say it
outright.

"You want to come home with me?"

She looked up as if she'd heard the schoolbell ring. "Of
course. That was the idea, wasn't it?" She gave me a searching look and
I started to feel very old.

"
What's your problem?" she said.

I glanced over at her and asked, "What's my name?"

"You're the detective who likes Billie Holiday," she replied,
as if that were a sufficient answer. "Don't be a goof. I like the way you
look. I like this raggedy old car. And I'm going to like what happens when
we go to bed."

"You always do what you like?"

She stared at me as if the question made no sense.

"Shit, yes. Don't you?"

I didn't answer her. She kept looking at me and I kept
looking at the road. She finally said, "What is your problem? Is it my
age? I'm twenty-two. Or I will be in July. Want to see my driver's license?"

I shook my head.

"Then what is it?" She didn't give me a chance to reply.
"I'll tell you what your problem is. You think too much with this"—she
tapped her head—"and not enough with this." She put her hand on her groin.
"I know. I used to be just like you. When I came to school here three years
ago, I was all head. I went to classes and did my homework, and when a
boy put his hands on my tits, I pretended I didn't like it. I pretended
I was learning about music, too, by reading books and listening to lectures.
But jazz isn't learned in a classroom. And life isn't either. It's got
to be lived on its own terms. And you can't do that by pretending?

She sounded twenty-one, all right. I didn't bother to
point out that you can't discover what life's terms are by doing everything
that you want to do, either. It would have been too easy to say, aud, besides,
as clichéd as it was, there was a good deal of truth in what Grace had
said. It wasn't a very complicated truth, and you had to be young to feel
it fully. Young and enthusiastic. Listening to her made me feel a little
adolescent fire in my own veins. And it also reminded me of just how powerful
and attractive the feeling of freedom can be, when you are
twenty-one. Or fourteen, like Robbie Segal.

"Well," she said to me. "Are we going to your place? Or
are we going to pretend that you're too old to want to fuck me? And that
I'm too young to want to be fucked?"

When she put it that way, I
couldn't see where I had much of a choice.

Afterward, I could see it. And feel it, too. Guilt, thick
as ether, seeped into my body, leaving me with a numbed, heavy heart. Grace
would have said, "If you couldn't handle it, you shouldn't have done it."
And she would have been absolutely right. I sat beside her in bed, smoking
a cigarette and thinking miserably of how far I had traveled from the days
when doing what you wanted to do had seemed the essence of life.

I fell asleep, holding that melancholy thought to my breast,
and woke up—a good eight hours later—to the taste of Grace's mouth
on my lips. From the way my body responded to that kiss, I thought, "You
could have been wrong last night." The phone saved me from sin by ringing
suddenly and stridently on the bedstand.

"Let it go" whispered Grace.

But I pulled away and sat up-like a soldier at reveille.
Glanced at the clock, which was showing eleven-thirty, and knew at once
who it was. With Grace nibbling my shoulder, I sloughed off the last of
the night and picked up the receiver.

"Harry?"

"Yes, Mildred," I said. "It's me."

"
I've been worried," she said a little frantically. "I
tried getting you at the oflice, but there wasn't any answer."

I pried one of Grace's spidery arms from my chest and
said, "I overslept. I had a late night."

Grace fell back on the bed with a laugh. Mildred must
have overheard her, because I could hear her stiffening up on the other
end of the line—a sound like a rubber raft being inflated. "I see," she
said.

"Mi1dred," I said in my soberest voice, "I was looking
for Robbie last night. And I may have gotten a lead."

"Yes?" she said and her voice became warm and eager. "She's
all right?"

Grace said, "Who's Robbie?" And I tossed a hand at her
to shut up.

"Harry?" Mildred said again. "Is she all right?"

She was trying. I could hear it in her voice—a sliver
of patience, put there like a tab in a shirt collar to give it shape and
steadiness. I wanted desperately to give her something in return. But the
best I could do was say, "I think so. I'll find out more this afternoon."

She didn't say anything. I think she was afraid to speak.
Afraid all her fears would come tumbling out uncontrollably, as they had
on the previous day.

"You're doing well," I said to fill the silence. "You're
doing better than anyone could expect, Mildred. But you've got to hold
on a bit longer."

"I don't know—"

I didn't let her finish. "You're a tough lady and you
can I do it."

"Perhaps," she admitted. "Madge Rostow came to visit me
yesterday, did you know that?"

"
I knew."

"I didn't think I could talk about this with anyone but
you," Mildred said with a curious detachment. "I just didn't think I could
do it."

"Did talking to her help?" I asked her.

"I don't know. Yes, I think it did. Today I don't feel
quite as alone."

"That's good."

"Perhaps," she said again. "I don't like telling other
people my problems. It seems so . . . cowardly."

I knew what she meant. I hadn't been raised on a street
like Eastlawn Drive for nothing. I'd absorbed some of that fierce sense
of propriety, too. And I hadn't rebelled against that propriety without
picking up some of Grace's larkish brand of selfishness. As I sat there
with the girl lying beside me and Mildred searching for words on the phone,
they seemed to me to be two halves of the same mysterious whole.

I said something about her being more courageous than
cowardly. But that was beside the point.

"
I don't know why," she said, "but I feel as if I've violated
a trust. Do you know what I mear1?"

I said, "You've stopped pretending everything was all
right. And on a street like yours, that's a hard thing to do."

"I feel like I've let them down. I could almost see it
in Madge's eyes. She was sweet and supportive, but she was frightened,
too. I actually ended up telling her everything was going to be all right."
She laughed delicately. "I think that's what made me feel better."

It was a strange way to find hope—to curtsey your way
into it, like greeting royalty. But in that mandarin world of hers, perhaps
it was the only way of finding it. Politeness, the show of neighborliness,
were as much the cornerstones of Eastlawn Drive philosophy as the unreal,
prideful show of prosperity. And if it took seeing Madge Rostow losing
her cool for Mildred to feel obliged to recover her own stamina,. that
was all right, too.

"I'll call you when I have some news, Mildred," I said.
"You'll be fine until then."

"
Yes," she said without conviction, "I'll be all right."

I hung up the phone and turned to my other problem, who
was lying naked beside me. She was so skinny her ribs showed through the
flesh like a child's green bones.

"Don't you ever eat, Grace?" I said.

She rubbed her Hat tummy. "I'm dieting."

I laughed out loud. "For God's sake, why?"

She turned on her elbow and one small breast fell against
the pillow. "I don't like to put anything into my body that isn't natural."

"What about me?"

She grinned. "That's high-grade protein. Anyway, if I
had to give that up, I'd find a different diet."

I gazed at her with amusement.

"I thought we'd spend the day in bed," she said lazily.

"I've got to go to work."

"Won't it wait?"

I glanced at her again and said, "I'm afraid not."

She sat up as if she'd been shot from a cannon. "O.K.,"
she said. "I get the message. Time for Grace to go."

 
Life on its own terms apparently didn't preclude
childish displays of temper when those terms weren't to your liking. I
mentioned this to her and she snarled at me.

"Well, what's so goddamn important, anyway?"

"A girl named Robbie Segal."

"Is she the bitch in that photograph in your coat pocket?"

I gave her a look and she stared right back at me.

"I went through your coat last night," she said with brazen
nonchalance. "I took some money, too."

I shook my head.

"
Nothing's for free, Harry," she said with a shrug. "And
I've got to live."

"Then you owe me something," I said, pointing a finger
at her.

"I owe you dick," she said. "However, I like you. So I'll
do you a favor." She pulled the sheet up to her hips and said, "That girl
in the picture . . . I've seen her before. She was with some kid—a guitarist
for The Furies—in The Pentangle on Sunday night. She seemed to be having
a real good time," she added a little nastily.

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean she was drunk on her ass and hitting on anything
wearing pants. It was almost funny, seeing how young and cherry she was.
Real pretty but not too cool. The kid she was with practically had to sock
her to get her out of the bar."

"I described Bobby Caldwell to her and said, "Was he the
one?"

She nodded. "He's a good guitarist, too. I felt bad for
him. He had to cut the last set short just to keep her from taking her
pants off."

I said, "Was Theo Clinger there, too?"

"No," she said.

But she said it too quickly and forcefully, as if she'd
been expecting me to ask her about Clinger and had already prepared an
answer. She hadn't liked Robbie Segal. I could hear that in her voice.
Which would make lying that much easier.

"You like Theo?" I asked her.

"I love him," she said passionlessly. "He's a great musician.
And he's been very good to me. He gave me a place to live when I had nowhere
else to go. He took care of me and taught me something important about
life and music."

"And what was that?"

"
That you make it up yourself from what's inside you."

"
You wouldn't want to tell me where the guru could be
found, would you?"

Grace stared at me for a moment, then wormed away across
the bed and reached down and picked up her skimpy bra and panties. Silently
she began to dress. I watched her for a second and felt a little bad that
we were ending like this—like two strangers in a hotel room with folding
money on the dresser. And then thought that this was probably the only
way it could have ended with Grace. Her face told me that. She was so used
to this scene that she didn't even look disappointed. Just a little restless
and abstracted, like a workman packing up his tools at the end of a bad
day.
 

IT WAS ALMOST TWELVE-THIRTY WHEN I DROPPED Grace off on
the sunny Mt. Adams sidewalk. We hadn't said much to each other as I drove.
She'd quickly lost herself in that private world of hers—humming a bar
of jazz, improvising a snatch of lyrics, drumming her fingers on the black
straw purse. And I had been too busy thinking about Robbie Segal to pay
this other lost girl much attention. It wasn't until I actually dropped
her off on Monastery and watched her walking away in her feathered hat
and tight print dress—her skinny legs wobbling on tall black heels—that
I realized that I hadn't said goodbye to her. I thought about calling her
back, but deep down and in spite of the way she'd helped me, I knew that
I didn't really want to be involved any further with Grace. So I let her
go without a word. Watched herdrift up Monastery to St. Gregory's—skimming
her hand across the glistening metal tops of the parking meters—and when
I lost her in the heavy, black shadows of the monastery, I slipped the
Pinto back into gear and drove down the hill to town.