Gentleman Called (6 page)

“I have a very good reason for not asking him. He has not been reared to be frank about such things with his mother. She may win then?”

Jimmie realized that was exactly how the old lady wanted it.

“Let me put it this way,” Jimmie said. “Her chances are sufficiently good that I would recommend a reasonable settlement out of court.”

“Nonsense!” the old woman cried. “I will not hear of it. Shame on Teddy for putting you up to it. Why, that would settle nothing.”

“Am I right that no matter which way the court settles, you will be satisfied?”

“If we lose, we win,” she said. “You understand me thoroughly, Mr. Jarvis. I do not wish to raise someone else’s bastard, but I’d rather have one of Teddy’s than no child at all.”

“I was thinking of the family,” Jimmie said. “There’s bound to be publicity. I don’t suppose you would try to persuade your son to marry the woman?”

“I have very little inclination that way. Besides which, it would not settle anything either. I want you to fight this thing, Mr. Jarvis. I want you to use all your skill toward winning. No quarter, no mercy, no shame. You understand that?”

“It is the only way I can serve both you and your son,” Jimmie said, “whatever your separate motives.”

To lose a hard-fought battle in the court, Jimmie thought, would strengthen the child’s authenticity: this, he took to be the driving force behind old Mrs. Adkins. There was small purpose to trying to explain to her the fallibility of juries in such cases.

“As you pointed out, Mr. Jarvis, there will be publicity. I am prepared for it, however it distresses my poor boy. I am sure it will not distress Miss Daisy Thayer. It may even bring her one of those seals of approval by which Hollywood certifies the genuineness of a woman. Have you seen her?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I don’t mean talked to her. I mean viewed her, cased her, whatever that word is which police use.”

“I know what you mean,” Jimmie said.

“How do you know what she’ll look like before a jury?”

“I’ve not got that far, Mrs. Adkins. As a matter of fact, I am at the moment casing you.”

The old lady liked that. She nodded approval. “You need more than one evening for that, young man. I’ve had a look at her myself, you know. A perfume counter is in the public domain.” She sighed then. “I should not be surprised if Miss Thayer is also. Well. You may go now, Mr. Jarvis. I shall expect to see you again soon.”

As soon as he had left her Jimmie realized he had managed no stronger persuasion with her than had Teddy. He shuddered to think what a lifetime in this household could do to any man.

A
T NINE-THIRTY THE NEXT
morning Jimmie was waiting outside his office door for Mr. Wiggam. The senior partner was not especially pleased to start his day with the Adkins affair, but Jimmie cared not: he was starting and ending his with it.

“You see, sir, Teddy wants to settle out of court. His mother seems to think it would be better to fight it through the courts. But the peculiar twist to this thing is, sir: Teddy maintains his innocence. His mother rather hopes he will come out guilty.”

“Nonsense,” Wiggam said.

“No sir. I spent the evening with her. Very simply, she would like a grandson in or out of wedlock. And if the court says Teddy’s the father, she would be willing to take that word over his.”

“Well, Jim,” Wiggam said after a long moment’s thought, “we’re Georgianna’s lawyers. If he hoped to settle it quietly, young Teddy should have got himself an attorney. Curious he didn’t, isn’t it when you stop to think about the situation? Why did he tell Georgianna at all?”

“Miss Thayer wants a hundred thousand dollars,” Jimmie said. “Adkins doesn’t have it. I suspect he misjudged his mother—thinking she would come across. By the way, how much does he contribute to his mother’s support, Mr. Wiggam?”

“Five thousand this year. I set the figure myself.”

“So I was given to understand. Having been a guest in the house, I’d be curious to know how you arrived at the figure, sir.”

“Very simple. I took the expenditures of the previous year, and divided the amount by the average number of people living within the family household. Primitive arithmetic.”

Jimmie agreed. Twenty people had sat down to dinner. To reverse Wiggam’s mathematics, multiply five thousand by twenty. Sufficient to run the average house! “Isn’t ‘primary’ arithmetic the word, Mr. Wiggam?”

Mr. Wiggam made one of his rare excursions into humor. “When I do it, it’s primitive.”

Jimmie smiled. “Is he a good business man, Adkins?”

“I suspect he’s no more than adequate,” Wiggam said. “We let him in on the administration of the estate a few years ago. It was an unhappy event. My own suspicion is he earns only what he needs. And I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with that.”

“It’s rather admirable if it works,” Jimmie said.

Wiggam said nothing. It was not his notion of enterprise.

“Did you know Adkins as a young man, sir?”

“I’ve been trying to think of my earliest recollection of him,” Wiggam said. “I think it rather typical: he was in swaddles. The nurse had left him for a moment in charge of his sisters. They were in a perfect fury over him, poor lad, pulling him, one from the other, and he screaming…”

“Perhaps you remember him to better advantage later,” Jimmie suggested.

“I’m afraid I remember the same sort of squabble on an adult level next,” Mr. Wiggam said. “When it came time for him to go to college the girls came home from the ends of the earth in order to have something to say about it. Very dominating women in that family. In the end, Georgianna, his mother, put that up to me also. It was very simple, really. His father was a Harvard man. What better solution than send the boy there?”

“Do you know, sir, this is the first time I have heard the father mentioned?”

Wiggam sat in a moment’s silent contemplation at the end of which he said: “Poor old Ted. I’d forgot him myself. Very quiet man. He died just after Teddy was born.”

Jimmie was tempted to ask if it was in childbirth, but he said nothing. He doubted Wiggam would be amused.

“I don’t suppose I’ve seen Teddy a half-dozen times since, all told, certainly not to talk to,” he summarized with dwindling patience. “Somebody must know him.”

Jimmie knew he had been dismissed. No doubt somebody did know, he thought, and he wanted to know him better himself, considerably better before going into court to defend his honor. He went back to
Who’s Who.
The information on Teddy was meager, but at least it indicated Harvard, 1924, and membership then in the “Skiddoo” Club.

He sat back and thought over his acquaintanceship among Harvard alumni. Finally by the intermediation of a mutual friend, he was in touch with a Skiddoo man of the class of ’24.

J
IMMIE MET MARTIN RIDER
at the Harvard Club in late afternoon. It was not until they found a picture in the 1924 class publications that Rider could place Theodore E. Adkins. Jimmie thought the face of his client, by that picture, oddly unchanged in over thirty years. A curious thing about Rider: while he could not remember Teddy, he recognized the family name immediately. “They’re the Tripp Gold Mines people.”

It conjured a strange picture for Jimmie: little round Teddy sitting by a water’s edge, panning gold. He mentioned it to his companion.

Rider laughed. “It’s a long year past since that family did any of their own panning. But now, you know, you’ve almost brought Adkins back to me, the sense, the feeling, an intimacy of him. What the devil is it now…?”

He went over the Skiddoo Club book and suddenly he leaned back. “Oh, my God, sure. I remember him now. You know how it is with fellows that age—boasting about the women in their lives? And that was the twenties. Well, little Teddy Adkins used to turn up at our bull sessions with the most fantastic stories of his conquests. And no matter how we bated him, he stuck by his stories.

“So, of course, kindness not being especially characteristic of boys that age, we set a trap. A couple of the fellows followed him on one of his twilight excursions. They followed him to the edge of the river—a place well off the road—but there he took off every stitch of his clothes and sat down. Naked, with his arms and legs folded, he sat for a solid hour like a bare Buddha. Then he got up, dressed, walked into town, stopped at a soda fountain and had a Green River, and then came back to the dorm. The spies got home about ten minutes ahead of him and we were waiting for him. But he came in and looked around.

“‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and I can see him to this day, apple cheeks, a tuft of blond hair…‘I regret to say I have nothing to report tonight. I have been stood up. One hour I waited at our usual rendezvous, and made a feast, alas, only for the mosquitoes. Oh, the perfidy of woman!’ He always did have an old-fashioned way of talking. And you see, we’d had the rug pulled out from under us. Or maybe it was our leg, both legs. I’ll tell you this, Jarvis. We left him alone after that.”

“You believed him?” said Jimmie.

“Let’s put it this way, we respected him, and even if we didn’t admit it, we were probably a little scared of him. Looking back on it all now, I’d be inclined to say he was as canny as he was imaginative. He probably knew he was being followed. He put the only silencer possible on us. Like Lot’s wife, we were stricken dumb. But think of the nerve it took to do that, man.”

Jimmie nodded. But it was not the sort of tale one told a jury by way of assuring them of a man’s innocence. And it did seem a bit thick that one who started life so cannily should fall easy victim to the scheme of Miss Thayer. Still, the episode showed a ken of the ways of men, not of the wiles of women.

“Any other recollections of our friend?” he asked.

“He had a flare for dramatics,” Rider said.

“Redundant,” said Jimmie.

“I remember his habit of getting sick on every visitors’ day. He could even manage a temperature.”

“At the merest thought of his sisters, no doubt,” Jimmie said.

“That’s right!” Rider cried. “We used to call them—what’s the play with the three sisters in it?”

“The Cherry Orchard,”
Jimmie suggested.

“No. Shakespeare,
King Lear.
”

“Goneril, Regan and Cordelia,” Jimmie recalled.

“I remember one of his papers in English Lit about them. He could be very amusing. He undertook to prove the young one—the one that’s supposed to be the old man’s angel child—Teddy set out to prove her the arch villainess of literature. It was her sickening sweetness that made a weakling of the old man. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a play. That was his thesis. You might be able to find that. Do you mind my asking—are you writing a book about him? I know—you’re ghosting his autobiography.”

Jimmie grinned. “Not quite.”

His companion shrugged. “Most everybody who can afford it is having it done these days. Maybe it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis at that.”

Jimmie got up. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said. “No. It will be in the papers soon I expect. He’s the defendant in a paternity suit.”

“Little Teddy Adkins? Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Just what is it that surprises you?”

“Why, that he got caught, man. He’s smarter than that.”

“That’s just fine,” Jimmie said.

He decided to walk home to see if he could pace some order into his mind. It began to look as though there were at least two faces to Theodore Adkins, and juries were not notoriously partial to two-faced defendants.

M
RS. NORRIS POWDERED HER
nose and shook a few drops of lavender on a handkerchief which she tucked into her bosom. In an association she had clung to for well over fifty years, she could remember her mother calling her “her wild Annie” and pulling her head into her bosom a minute before taking the comb to the snarls in her hair. The smell of lavender had been as deep in her mother’s breast as though it were grown there.

She was putting on her tea apron when the doorman phoned up and said that Mr. Adkins was in the elevator. “But Mr. James is not home,” she said, without thinking to whom she said it.

“Is it a chaperon you want? I’ll come up myself when I go off duty in a few minutes.”

“Just polish your brass buttons, young man,” Mrs. Norris said.

The doorman, who had managed to slip past retirement age without calling attention to it, tittered.

Mrs. Norris hung up the phone in disgust. A couple of moments later she opened the door to a smiling Mr. Adkins. He stood, his hat in hand and a portfolio under his arm. “I promised Mr. Jarvis some papers at my earliest convenience. I hope it’s at his—or yours—to admit me now, Mrs. Norris?”

“Mr. James is not at home, but I expect he will be before long. It is after five, isn’t it?”

Adkins consulted a gold watch which he took from his vest pocket. “Five twenty-seven. I rather assumed he would leave his office at five.”

He gave his portfolio into Mrs. Norris’ hands and took off his topcoat. She had no choice but to put him and his portfolio in a chair. After all he was a client, and an affable man. But neither she nor her master liked to be called upon without advance notice, and Mr. James had not mentioned his coming. She lighted a lamp and then took a match to the fire set in the grate. Mr. Adkins bounced to her side, and saved her the stoop before she was well into it. In fact they were both suspended for a few seconds halfway between a squat and a stance, face to face. Mr. Adkins lifted his nose and fairly rolled it up in a sniff.

“Heather!” he cried. “Or is it lavender?”

“Lavender,” Mrs. Norris said, but the word “heather” had scored with her nonetheless, and she remembered his having told her he had been in Scotland as a boy. Or had he been transported only by the tales of a Scottish nurse?

He put the match to the paper and kindling, and then stood back, turning his hands about before the sudden flames; his eyes seemed absolutely sky blue, and sparkled with the firelight. “I have been thinking of Scotland—and of you, Mrs. Norris—since last we met. You’ve not been back for a long time, have you?”