Hard Rain Falling (40 page)

It was two in the morning when she called. Her voice sounded strange and distant, as if she were turned away from the mouthpiece.

“What’s the matter?” he said angrily. “Where are you? Why did you leave the baby alone?”

“I’m...in a phone booth,” she said. She giggled.

“
Why did you leave Billy alone?
”

“I’m not...alone,” Sally giggled. “We’re in here together.”

“Who? Who?”

“Me...and this big, black
nigger
.” Jack heard a distant muttering, and Sally’s voice saying, “Why not call you that? That’s what you are. That’s what I wanted. A big...black...
nigger
.”

“What the hell’s going on!” Jack yelled.

“We’re in this phone booth,” Sally giggled, her voice suddenly loud, intimate, her mouth pressed up against the instrument. “We’re sort of, well, fucking in here.”

Jack hung up the telephone very quietly. He thought about the man with Sally, who probably did not care whether Sally was “using” him or not as long as he got what he wanted. Try as he might, Jack could not hate or even dislike the man. But when Sally showed up several hours later, alone, he was waiting for her. He had most of her clothes packed into her set of matched luggage.

“You’re leaving,” he said. “You’re not staying here any more. I’ll take care of Billy. You get out. Get a divorce. Stay away. I don’t want to see you.”

She looked at him strangely. She seemed all right, just a little tipsy. “What’s the matter?” she asked in a husky voice.

“You called me, remember?”

She looked puzzled. “I called you?”

“Yes. Now, here’s your stuff. All packed. I’ll call a cab for you. Here’s some money. I got paid today.”

“Yes, well, but—” she began, but he cut her off.

“So get out of here. You can’t have your furniture until I get some. Go on, get out.”

That was the end of the marriage. Even as he threw her out he knew that she had been going through things probably worse than anything he had faced, but he could not let that stop him. Billy could have died while she was going through it; he could have begun to feel the emptiness Jack remembered so well, and Jack would not have that. He felt pity for Sally, but pity was not enough.

Jack arranged for a young girl to take care of Billy days, and he took care of him nights. He did not go out at all for several months. He knew what he was doing was not the best thing for Billy, but he could think of no alternatives. When the divorce, from Reno, came through, he did not contest it, and there was no question of alimony or mention of the child. He didn’t learn about that part of it until the very end, when they came to get Billy. It was very simple, Sally explained to him coldly, dressed in an expensive suit Jack could never have afforded to buy; all she would have to do was go to court and they would award her the child. She was going to marry again, and her new husband would be—of all people—Myron Bronson. Bronson stood slightly back of Sally, not speaking, while she explained everything to Jack. Bronson had gotten his divorce at the same time she had gotten hers. The courts, faced with deciding between an ex-convict without a wife making only a few dollars a week, and the wife of a millionaire, well, you can see who would get the child. So why not, coldly, just hand him over.

Jack was stupefied. “But I want him,” he said to her.

Her expression did not change. “So do we.”

And that was that. Except for Myron Bronson’s visit. By this time, because he was alone, Jack had moved into the Swiss Hotel on Broadway and was back working nights a block away. They met in the bar downstairs from the hotel. Bronson looked the same: gray hair, gray mustache, beautiful tasteful clothes, gentle eyes. He tried to explain to Jack.

“I didn’t want to do this. Really. She came to me when you...threw her out. I’ve been in love with her for years. I’m surprised you didn’t know.”

Jack tried to muster up some hatred for Bronson, but he could not. “Look,” he said. “Is Billy okay?”

Bronson smiled softly. “Yes, he’s fine. I love him, too. I always have. I want you to come and see him. But when she’s not there, please.”

“I will,” Jack said. “I’ll come soon. I want to see him.”

“You have to understand,” Bronson said, “she’s not really to blame. She couldn’t live like that. It’s not your fault, either. You two just shouldn’t have ever known each other.” There was a glass of whisky in front of him, but he left it untouched. “You know, now that she can do anything she wants, and the baby will be cared for, she stays home. With the pressure gone, it’s all different.”

“Nobody’s fault again,” Jack said. “Nobody’s ever at fault. Not the way you see things.”

“No,” Bronson said, a little surprised. “I suppose not. Not really.” He averted his eyes. “I want to adopt Billy.”

“All right,” Jack said. “Go ahead.”

“I won’t offer you any money.”

“No. Don’t. I’d take it if you did. Look, all I’m good for is fighting. You know? Do you want to fight me? Would that be okay?”

“No. I won’t fight you.”

“Is there anything I could say that would
make
you fight me? Anything I could call you that you couldn’t take?”

“No. Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Then that’s it.”

“I guess so.”

After Bronson left, Jack reached over and picked up his glass of whisky. He did not feel as bad as he should have. He sat there for a long time, watching the cars go by outside, sipping at Bronson’s good Irish whisky.

EPILOGUE

On the Beach at St. Tropez

1963

Myron Bronson sat under the beach umbrella waiting for his bridge partners to come in from their boats. It was very hot and sticky, and even with his sunglasses on, he had a slight sinus headache. The heat and the late afternoon sun gave the water a bronze look, and the clusters of white boats sat without reflection on the tame water. Billy was playing with some other children down the beach, and Bronson watched with pleasure. Billy’s curly hair was almost white from constant exposure to the sun, and his body was tanned almost black. He looked like a little Dane. Bronson thought about his own outdoor childhood in the Rockies and on the Utah desert, and again he wondered if it was not time to go back to America. If they went back now, Billy could start in the fall, at a public school. It would be difficult for him at first—already he spoke more French than English—but Bronson was confident that Billy’s good nature and his beauty would see him through the first hard weeks of re-Americanization. Bronson wanted Billy to grow up in America, in the West. Some day, when Billy was old enough, he was going to learn who his real father was, and Bronson wanted him to be able to understand. He did not want Billy to despise, or, even worse, feel sorry for his real father.

Bronson was sixty years old, and he was beginning to expect that he would die before Billy grew to manhood. He would sometimes wake up at night and feel it all slipping through his fingers. In all his life, he was beginning to understand, he had learned only two things: how to earn money, and how to enjoy himself. There had always been a cheap streak in him, a yearning for the fashionable, the flashy, the hip; and he had learned how to turn this to his advantage, to use it for his pleasure instead of as a source of guilt. Well, that was something. But it was not enough. What he really wanted was to endure, to live forever. It was the penalty you paid for living for pleasure, for yourself. You lived so beautifully that when you came to die...

But Billy. He hoped Billy would grow beyond him. Of course, right now he was just a sweet little boy, and it was silly to worry about his future so much.

Still, it sometimes made him bitter to think that his Billy would grow up in a world where one man’s chances of survival were no better than the next man’s; where for the first time in history the rich were not protected. Bronson knew he had “no right” to hate this, but he hated it anyway. Yet he could not help admitting to himself that he got a spiteful sense of pleasure out of it, too. Mankind, after millennia of struggle, finally perfects a weapon long enough, sharp enough, to stab through all the massed ranks of infantry privates and slice its way into the fat bellies of the generals. But perhaps Billy would be one of the generals or the politicians, or just another of the flabby rich, the cigar dropping from his mouth as he first comprehends that the shelter isn’t deep enough, the air not pure enough, the food supply not big enough, to outlast this final poisoned, burnt-out, earthly suicide. And then again, perhaps Billy will be still a child, and Myron Bronson will have to hold him while he dies....

A huge man wearing a tiny bathing suit emerged from the water, dripping and shaking himself. He walked up the beach toward Bronson’s table. He was one of the bridge players, a man whose family fortune was in graniteware, and there was talk that he might be a candidate for the Senate from his home state of Illinois. Bronson looked at the barrel chest covered with hair, the ballooning belly overhanging the narrow black strip of bathing suit, the hairy muscled legs. He looked up at the man’s shiny face, his rubbery lips, his tiny brown eyes. He was an incredible fool, impervious to doubt, a terrible bridge partner who always overplayed his hand and then looked like a hurt puppy when he got beaten, as he almost always did. He sat down next to Bronson and ordered a drink from the waiter.

“Lemme catch my breath,” he said. “God, I got to quit smoking.”

“Everybody’s quitting,” Bronson said. He watched Billy run down toward the water, and saw his governess get up from her table, hesitate, and then sit down again, as Billy swerved and ran back up to the other children. Billy would not drown here, not at St.-Tropez. The children here were so well cared for that nothing could possibly happen to them. No one had to worry about his children. That was all paid for.

“Where’s Sally today?” the man wanted to know. He was wiping his face with a towel and not looking at Bronson. Bronson had seen him the other night, leaning against Sally in a corner of the garden, pressing her up against a wall, but it had not bothered him. He knew the man wanted to sleep with Sally, but he had also heard Sally, that night in their bedroom, snort and say, “I wouldn’t want that fat hog on top of me.” Anyway, Sally was sleeping with her first husband these days, and had no time for anyone else.

“Oh, she’s off on a yachting party,” he said. “She’ll be back by dinner.”

The man made a face. “That actor feller?”

Bronson nodded. He began to shuffle the cards; the other two players were coming up out of the surf now, and as soon as they were dry, the game would begin. They all played together ever afternoon. Almost everybody else played poker, but these four preferred bridge.

Of course, the trick was to get rid of Sally and still keep the boy. She did not want to go back; she had had enough of America. She had finally come into her own, living in Paris, surrounding herself with a circle of writers and artists and a few of the more intelligent young French movie people. She was happy in Paris, and she did not want Billy to go to American schools. She wanted him to go to Switzerland, to boarding school. She did not even call him Billy; she called him Myron. She wanted to change his name legally, but Bronson managed to keep putting it off.

It was really too bad about Sally. She was only thirty-two, but already she was getting brassy and overdone; what had once been charming in her was now grating, at least to Bronson. Billy did not like her any more, either. She would pick the strangest times to be motherly. The only person Billy really loved, in fact, was his French governess. He would feel very bad about leaving her. But it was necessary. The question was, how to get rid of Sally? It was a definite problem. He would have to give it a great deal of thought. He would have to make sure he was doing it for the boy’s sake, and not just to satisfy some urge in himself to hurt her. He hoped that wasn’t it.

“Okay, let’s cut for partners.”

Myron cut, and drew the potential senator. It managed to spoil his entire afternoon. He really enjoyed bridge, and he hated to see his partner make such a botch of it.

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