Seventh Avenue (24 page)

“I . . .” He started to say something, but his tongue was thick and felt like a piece of cracked leather.

“We’re in it together,” Eva said, after a long silence. Her eyes darted nervously around the room. “Nobody’s said ‘to have and to hold . . .’ but it doesn’t much matter.”

He took hold of her hand and ran it along the side of his face as though it were the beginning of an enticement, cold and bloodless and without joy.

“Eva . . . Eva . . . you should have told me you were pregnant.” She pulled her hand away and picked up her drink.

“I had some crazy idea about telling Herb that it was
his.
But that would have meant, well . . . and I was in the third month, so it was too late. But you see, when he came close to me and touched me, like I was an old possession that he’d suddenly found again, I couldn’t . . . It was a case of you or him and maybe a question of character, of trying to do the decent thing. Of thinking to myself: ‘I’m cheating on both of them if I do it. And me, I’m lost somewhere in between in a kind of spittoon.’ I kept thinking of a spittoon I’d seen in a western where dirty old cowhands used to stand with a foot on the brass bar rail and aim at the spittoon. And God, it made me sick. Maybe I wanted to make up to him for all the times I’ve lied about where and who I was with and telling the truth to make up for lies is like forcing poison down someone’s throat. He only wanted to touch me, and I suppose I should have let him, but the thought nauseated me.” She pointed an accusing finger at Jay: “It’s what you’ve done to me” - he turned his face as though to avoid a slap - “the way you’ve made me feel. With Herb when we first got married I had to be the boss, do the leading, and I never much liked it and after I met you, well it was different, fantastic . . . I didn’t have to be the man. At first I hated the idea of letting you take over because there was something humiliating about being told to sit at the foot of the table and then I realized that I liked the idea - talk about knowing yourself, I didn’t know or understand the first thing about myself - that it had to be
your
way.”

She stood up, her eyes glassy and her face twitching, and he got up after a minute and dropped some money on the bar and followed her out.

The hotel apartment he had rented for her was expensive and well-furnished. There were two rooms, and a small kitchen in an alcove off the sitting room, which was a low-toned dove gray with a white ceiling and fussy wainscoting of embryonic swans and ducks. Three armchairs, a settee in gray velvet, and two end tables with lamps completed the room. A reproduction of an eighteenth-century pastoral scene somewhere in rural England hung over a defunct tiled fireplace; on the wall opposite there was a faded picture of the ruined façade of a classical building. What the room lacked was even the suggestion of character; in fact, it was this total lack of any distracting feature that in the end distracted the eye and forced it to search feverishly for a place to rest. Jay opened a closet and showed her about twenty expensive dresses he had bought her. Her eyes rested on a gray Persian lamb coat, also new. She put it on and looked at herself in the full-length mirror behind the bedroom door.

“My trophies. You get away with murder, and you get presents. Who says that crime doesn’t pay?”

“What’s the point of holding it against yourself? You wouldn’t have told him if you’d known . . .”

She threw her head back and laughed.

“But that’s exactly what I would have done. I couldn’t save the man’s life even if I wanted to.”

She brushed past him and walked into the sitting room. Two bottles of whiskey, like sentinels, stood on the mantelpiece, and there was a bucket of ice on a table and a bottle of soda. She poured them drinks and swallowed hers before he took his from her.

“Well, what’s it to be?”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“Do you want to make love or don’t you? It’s your money, honey.”

“Just what the hell are you talking about?”

He started for the door angrily and had his foot in the corridor before she rushed to stop him.

“Jay, please don’t walk out on me. Please don’t . . . I can’t help myself.”

His face was ashen and his eyes cloudy and he bit his lip to control himself.

“Honestly, Eva, I can’t bear to listen to you. Do you think I don’t know it’s my fault . . . It’s on my conscience. I love you.”

She pushed the door closed and led him to the settee.

“I’ve got you in my bones and when you say . . . I feel like my stomach’s been cut open, and my guts are hanging out.” He sighed fitfully. “I’ve made a wreck of everything. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not sorry for myself or for you . . . It’s just that you’re my life and . . .”

She kissed him lightly on the mouth and then there was the sound of a rattle deep in his throat as though a machine had broken, and he began to moan with a destructive force that nearly crippled him.

“Sorry,” he said. “Only once before . . . and that was a long time ago and for a different reason. Or maybe it was the same reason. When somebody else’s life was ruined.”

“It’s okay.” She rubbed his back affectionately. “You do have some guts and character. People live through tragedies, I guess. It changes them, but they go on when they’ve got a reason to go on . . .”

“It’s summer and we should be happy, having some fun. Crazy the way things work out. When you haven’t got a penny, money is the big problem, and the obstacle to get over - and, when you do make some, all sorts of other things take its place.”

“Couldn’t we go away for a while?”

“I only wish I could, but I’ve got to keep on top of the business and to see how the new sites are taking shape. It’s full time.”

“A few days?”

“I’ll try.”

She hugged him, and his body relaxed. They were together and she knew that whatever he was, whatever he stood for, if he was anyone, if he had any scruples, that she would be pulled along by him and that there was no way one could swim out of a maelstrom, one simply had to accept the fact that one would be drawn into the eye, and the hideous acceptance of this fact, whether one protested or submitted, had no bearing on the final and inevitable outcome. For good or ill, Jay had become her family, the center of her universe. Without him her life would be unendurable, a misshapen and warped controversy with time, a divorce from reality so deadly in its consequences that she might as well never have been born.

When Jay had had a few days to consider the situation he came to the conclusion that his brother’s betrayal - and he was convinced that it was a betrayal - of his secret had somehow arranged destiny, or rearranged it, and had been the direct cause of Eva’s confrontation with her husband. His first impulse was to beat Al’s head in, but by the time he saw Harry Lee, he managed to simulate a degree of calm.

Harry’s office was a study in muted stripped pine - a small desk overlooked the frantic commerce of Thirty-Ninth Street, and if you stretched your head, you could see the wide junction it made with Seventh Avenue.

Harry poured him a drink and put his feet on the desk.

“Frankly, I’m puzzled,” he said. “Haven’t you got enough on your plate, without looking for trouble?”

“I want to be my own supplier. I’ve got my own retail outlets . . . what do
i
need a middleman to get twenty percent?”

“It’s an entirely different kind of operation . . . manufacturing. You don’t know a thing about it. And I don’t like partners.”

“You’ve got a factory in Syracuse that isn’t paying.”

Harry sucked an ice cube until it melted in his mouth.

“How do you know it’s not paying? Everything
i
do pays.”

“This one don’t. You’ve got two hundred people sitting on their behinds because they haven’t got enough work. They make for Marty . . .”

“Did he say . . . ?”

“Not a word . . .”

“I’ll cut his balls off if he’s opened his mouth.”

“You’ve got a lot of faith in him.”

“He’s my son-in-law, isn’t he?”

“But the fact is he’s a great salesman. He could sell glasses to a blind man. The trouble is, he makes a shitty dress, and he doesn’t know how to run a business, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t valuable.”

“So what happens? He makes for you exclusively . . . is that what you’re suggesting?”

“No, he makes for me and the trade as well, but the stuff he makes for me is exclusive . . . originals, no knock-offs.”

“You ought to write for the Marx Brothers, Jay. Who ever heard of a five-dollar exclusive?”

“Eva’ll design them. But what she designs for me she doesn’t sell to the chains. They’ll have to buy the knock-offs, and you can make them in a better-priced dress.”

“
But that’s turning everything upside down.”

“That’s the gimmick. If you get a runner in a cheap dress, you can do it for the higher-priced stores. The whole point is that you’ve got to give the public what it wants - cheap or expensive, so long as it’s what they want.”

“Don’t quote my own words at me. I’ll say one thing for you, Jay: you may be a nut case, but you’ve got some good ideas.” He picked up the telephone and said: “Lemme have the Syracuse factory records.”

A few moments later there was a soft tapping on the door, and Al walked in carrying two ledgers and a sheaf of production schedules in a manila envelope. Jay had his back to him.

“
You wanted these, Mr. Lee?” Al said, holding up the books.

“
Yeah, that’s right.”

Al walked over to the desk, and his eyes bulged when he saw Jay. He stood riveted by the side of the desk, his mouth slightly open.

“
Why, if it is
n’t .
. .”

“
You can go now,” Jay said without looking up.

Al picked up the books and started to take them away when Harry grabbed his arm.

“You’re supposed to leave them not take them away,” he said.

“
Don’t confuse him, Harry. He confuses easy.”

“Yes, Mr. Lee,” Al said with a quiver in his voice and closed the door softly behind him.

“So that’s the way it is,” Harry said. “Funny, I didn’t get that impression when he asked for a job.”

“We’re not the best of friends . . . never have been. It’s like that with brothers - sometimes.”

Harry’s face screwed itself into something that might be called a
smile; it was more a rearrangement of the deep
sun-encrusted
lines.

“
I could give him
the push,
if you like.”

For a violent man, Jay exercised some restraint in the face of this open invitation. Revenge is mine, he thought. He’d build up Al before he cut him down. A strange expression of puzzlement crossed Jay’s lips for a fleeting moment. Perhaps Al hadn’t known about him and Eva - perhaps he had told her about Neal innocently? The possibility existed. He and Al were brothers, after all, flesh and blood of the same union. Why should he be the one to stick his knife in when he could not be quite sure? Hadn’t Al abandoned his pride and self-esteem by using him to get a job, by riding along on his coattails? Wouldn’t he have done the same thing, if their positions had been reversed? There was also his mother to consider. She would be sure to ask him to help Al, and if Al lost his job suddenly, she would know that Jay had interfered.

“
He’s all right,” Jay said. “I don’t love
him,
that’s all.”

“
You’ve got my
sympathy .
. .”

“
Why? I don’t get it. Isn’t he doing his job?”

“Yeah, he’s fine. Pretty good bookkeeper in fact. Conscientious. It’s only that I had a brother, dead now, and I can appreciate your position. We started out together in business. He was older, by four years, and the only reason we joined forces was because neither of us had enough money to start on his own. It lasted two years.”

“What happened?” Jay asked. He had never suspected that Harry had ever had a problem in his life.

“I drove him out of the business. I got what I wanted and I got rid of him. He ran the production side, and very well at that, but he didn’t know the first thing about selling or design, and he was colorblind. So for this he got fifty percent. Who needs a partner to run a factory? You get yourself a manager, pay him a salary and
fartig.
He started telling me what to do, what to buy. An absolute idiot in business . . . he kept trying to pull his money out after the first six months.

“All he could think about was that his thousand dollars was outside a bank. It cost me money to get rid of him, much too much. I raised five thousand dollars from the bank and gave him twenty-five percent of the net profits for five years.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knew I was gonna make a quarter of a million in my first five years? Almost seventy grand, the sonovabitch cost me. He never worked a day in his life after he left. Put it in the stock market and got out with half a million in 1928 on my advice. I told him to put it in government bonds or else he’d lose it in 1929. He thought it was God talking, so he did it. The crazy thing was that when the crash came he was sitting on the sidelines with all his
gelt
while brokers were jumping out of windows. But the market was in his blood, and he used to go down there every day to watch the tape and keep on top of the prices. You’d think he’d be laughing, but it aggravated him to death. He’d hustle into the Corn Savings Bank every day to find out if they were going broke - he had a small savings account there, and the manager would reassure him, even offer to give him his money back to put in a safety deposit box, but my brother wouldn’t have the nerve to ask him, especially when the manager knew he had half a million. Finally, he went down, the Monday after Black Friday, and found out that the bank had folded up.

“That night he went home and told his wife about it and she said: ‘So you lost five thousand dollars, does it matter? Harry gave you good advice. We’re still rich. We’ll never want for anything.’ He flopped down in a chair, white as a ghost, and said: ‘It don’t matter that I’ve got a half million, my luck’s changed, I’m jinxed. You see it’s Harry’s five thousand that I lost, the money he gave me when we broke up. I never even touched the money, and everything I made was because of that money. It don’t mean a thing that I’m rich . . . the five thousand was everything.’ The same night he had a stroke and died in bed.

“My sister-in-law and I became friendly again and I put her into a few special situations in 1932. I hate to tell you what she’s worth today. The brokers wait for her to buy before telling their other customers. When she goes short, Dow Jones is down a point on the day. She’s got a seat on the exchange, and she’s a silent specialist in steel. Brothers . . . partners, they’re a joke.” He sighed philosophically. “What do I need a partner for, tell me, Jay?”

“Because you like to make money, and I can make it for you. When I get through, I’m gonna have the biggest retail combine in the country, and I have to get into your end of it now. It’s a pattern I’m building: stores, factories, property, and then when we’re nice and big, we go public and open at fifty on the market.”

“It sounds very nice . . . it sounds possible too. But I’m sixty-two. I’m tired of knocking my brains out. I don’t have to, but this showroom is me. If I can’t have a place to hang my hat, I’d wind up in the bughouse. So I come in every day and work . . . not as hard as I used to, but a decent few hours. I can’t stay in Miami all winter, cause the sun fries my brains. California bores me, Europe I been to three times. So I may as well spend the time here.”

“Six factories you’ve got that are busy all the time. The one in Syracuse’s a dog. You let me do what I want to with it, and you’ll see a dream come true. Right before your eyes.”

“You want to buy it?”

“You know goddam well that I haven’t got the capital.”

“I get fifty-one percent of everything from the factory.”

“You get forty, and you can’t make an executive decision without my say-so.”

“I’ll say one thing for you, Jay. What you don’t have in brains, you make up in nerve.”

“Forty percent . . .”

“For a year.”

“Two. I’ve got to have two years.”

“Eighteen months.”

Jay extended his hand and shook Harry’s.

“Two years, it’s a deal.”

“Okay. I must be getting old. I give you my factory on your terms, and all I get is a handshake.”

“And youth.”

“I’m a gambler.”

“An investor.”

“Can’t even win an argument with you.”

He and Jay chinked glasses. The scotch warmed Jay and made him slightly dizzy. He had been in over his depth, and he had not merely survived, but won. The elation he felt turned a bit bitter in his mouth when he thought about Eva.

“One other thing. Eva’s on five thousand a year, as of now.”

“Are you paying, or am I?”

“We both are, partner.”

“Oooh, I hate the sound of the word,” Harry said, as though he had been burned with a match.

“You’ll get used to it.”

“
You want me to do anything about that little family matter?”

“
No, leave it to me.”

Jay spent the rest of the morning visiting the far-flung outposts of his embryonic empire. He noted with satisfaction the progress made on each site. What had formerly been wild tracts of uncultivated land, and in the case of Hempstead a swamp that had to be filled in, now loomed in the distance, in the guise of concrete façades, new pillars of civilization. Prophets brought the Word, Jay the Dress . . . thou shalt not live by silk alone was his message to the underpaid and drably accoutred women, victims of America’s black decade of depression. Like a beaten giant given a magical balm, the country slowly shook off its economic wounds and throbbed with new life. Jay, the heir to the Phoenician traders, brought the possibility of glamour to America’s glamour-starved women.

When he reached the site in Great Neck, a complex of shops and office buildings, he observed a large truck with dredging equipment near the outer perimeter of the center. A man wearing a wide-striped gray suit turned when he blew the horn to get past. When the man saw it was Jay, he opened his arms expansively. Jay pulled over, then got out.

“Hiya, Jaya,” Topo shouted, as though greeting the prodigal. “I ain’t seen yuh for a munt.”

“Been pretty busy, trying to lick everything into shape . . . I expect to be open in six weeks.”

“You a magician.” He put his arm affectionately round Jay’s shoulder. “C’mon let’s have a coffee.”

They walked across the main highway to a shiny steel-shelled diner and sat down in a booth. Topo ordered iced coffees for them and offered Jay a stogie. The diner was empty, and the air was heavy with cooking oil.

“
How the hell you smoke that
cheap
rope is a mystery to me.”

“It’s what yuh get used to. Like at home. I ohways drink coffee with chicory. Not trying to save money. It’s the way I been brought up.” He sipped the coffee noisily through a straw. “We’re all pretty grateful to yuh for what yuh done.”

“I don’t think I’ve done very much. Getting you the contract was just good business. Your boys are better than the other thieves. They would’ve held us up for at least six months.”