Tales for a Stormy Night (7 page)

“You’ve been on your way to suicide a long time. I’m going to help you.”

“Oh no,” George moaned.

“Oh yes. Think about it, kid, the way you’ve been carrying on. Can’t you just hear the old man saying, ‘I should’ve put the gun away. I never should’ve left it where he could get at it.’”

Oh God, George thought, please God, help me. “Pa!” he called out, with the only responding sound the twitter of nesting birds. “Liz!”

“For just once we’re going to be real close,” Al mocked, coming on.

And at that instant, from the oak tree just outside the window, a bird sounded one last high burst of song.

Al started at the sound and jerked his head. George scarcely knew the impulse, but he leaped at the farmhand, striking the gun from his hand and following it to the floor. Even from there he started firing, the first shots wild, but one finding Al as he plunged toward him. The boy emptied the gun into the fallen body. Then he flung the revolver from him and groped his way through the smoke. Downstairs, he called the county sheriff’s office and waited, his mind as empty as the gun.

The sheriff came a few minutes before his father and sister, and he told what he had done while a deputy intercepted the family outdoors. He repeated the circumstances, and took the sheriff to his father’s desk to show him where the gun was kept. It had been taken out in haste the moment of his father’s departure, George realized, for the rolltop was up and the strong box gaping. The sheriff shook his head, studying the boy, and George thought vaguely that the truth was not so apparent to the sheriff as it was to him.

Then the sheriff went upstairs, and George heard a car drive out. Presently another, or the same car, drove in again. His father must have taken Elizabeth somewhere. To the Bergsons’, he thought. The old man came in. He didn’t look at George where he was sitting on the daybed in the parlor. He went to his desk and stared at it without touching anything. He, too, was thinking George had taken the gun and gone upstairs to find Al, the boy reasoned.

The sheriff came down. “Sorry, Orbach,” he said to George’s father.

The old man looked at him.

The sheriff rubbed his neck. “He was marrying your daughter, was he?”

Orbach nodded, his face a dumb mask of pain.

“You got to believe me,” George said then. He knew he was whining, but he couldn’t help it. “He’d of killed me. I didn’t take the gun,
he
did.”

“I believe you, boy,” the sheriff said. “Maybe this is all for the best. I just got an alarm on that guy at the office. Murder, while committing robbery. I think he was holing in here.”

The old man raised his head and cried out: “It is not all for the best!”

George forced himself to his feet, a terrible realization striking through his sick relief. “Pa! Did you know about him? Did you know that?”

His father lifted his eyes and his voice to the ceiling: “There’s things we are not meant to know. God’s mercy should not be thwarted by the vengeance of men. Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord.”

George stumbled from the room and then outdoors.

“Let him go,” he heard the sheriff call. “He’ll come back in soon.”

But George did not go back. They may not understand him in the army, not knowing all these things. But his buddies are agreed on one thing: he makes a good soldier.

1953

“I
T’S A FINE STORY
we’ll have to tell, and them meeting us at the boat to hear it.” She let the drapes fall into place and turned from the window brushing the dust from her hands. “‘What did you see of New York?’ they’ll ask. ‘A galaxy of lights,’ I’ll tell them. ‘A reflection of the sky under our feet from a dusty window, and four of the dirtiest walls which ever surrounded an actress.’”

“And an actor,” he added from the bed. “I’m an actor as well as your husband.”

“Wasn’t I the stupid girl to accept an arrangement like that?” she said, coming near him.

He looked up at her and lifted an eyebrow. “Accepted? Promoted it, and me the silly gobeen to fall in with the scheme when I could’ve married the daughter of a jewelry merchant.” He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. “Aye, and maybe come to New York on a buying trip—with an expense account.”

She sat down beside him on the edge of the bed. “It wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t a success, Denny.” She picked up the newspaper and read aloud for at least the tenth time: “‘The great Irish Players have invaded Broadway and taken over its heart.’”

“I’d rather a chance at its pocketbook,” Denny said. “But the truth of the matter is we read our contracts in Dublin. We’ve ourselves to thank for the terms we took. So what are we grousing for?”

“I’d no notion of the difference in costs. Did you?”

“Well, I’d some intimation of it. But I put it far back in my mind, I was that eager to see New York.”

“I did the same thing,” she admitted. “But instead of a feast day, here’s our one day off in the week turned into a fast.” She plucked a thread from his coat. “Why do you lie down with your coat on, Denny? There’s more lint on you than there is on the blanket.”

He got up and went through the motions of brushing himself. “If you’d part with that $20 you laid away, Peg, we could own the town tonight.”

“What $20? Didn’t I pay the rent with it?”

“Was that what you paid it with?”

“They weren’t taking a smile on deposit, or a turn of the ankle…”

“All right, all right. I’d the notion you hid it, and paid it out of mine. You’ve done that to me before, you know, Peg—putting away for an emergency. An emergency? Ha! A catastrophe wouldn’t pry it from you.”

She threw her head back in impatience. “Just answer me this: didn’t we owe the twenty out of yours to the stage manager?”

“We did and I intended to still. He’s relatives living in Bronx, Brooklyn, and Ballyqueens, and us with no more here than my cousin Richard.”

“What again was it Richard said when you rang him up, Denny?”

Denny paced the length of the room and back, mimicking Richard’s voice: “‘We must go out to our supper together one night while you’re here,’ he says. ‘I’ve no more than a bachelor apartment and it’s no place to be bringing your bride.’”

“By that did he mean him taking us or us taking him out to the supper?”

“From what I remember of Richard, all we’d do is go hungry together. Peg, are you sure about paying back the twenty? I thought…”

“Yes, I’m sure. Was I to get a receipt from him?”

“It’s only your temper makes me suspicious.”

“It’s the short temper goes with the long appetite.”

“That settles it.” He snatched his hat from the dresser. “I’m going to have a look at Richard and his bachelor apartment. If there’s a breath of prosperity about him, I’m going to claim an early inheritance.”

“What am I to do while you’re gone?”

He tossed his wallet on the bed beside her. “Here. There’s 50 cents in it and a St. Christopher’s medal. If I’m not back in an hour, eat on the one and pray on the other.”

“Don’t do anything desperate, Denny,” she called as he reached the door. “And give me a kiss to sustain me.”

“It’s me that’ll need sustaining. Ain’t I leaving you the 50 cents?” But he gathered her into his arms.

“We’ll both have nourishment from that,” she whispered after the kiss. “And Denny, remember, our troubles are no more than’ll be behind us when this day is over.”

“Or ahead of us till we get on the boat again.”

A few minutes later he was halfway across town, shortening the distance between the West Fifties and the East Fifties in long determined strides. It was warmer outdoors than it was in the hotel, which was the way of a late October afternoon, he thought. To staple his courage at its peak he recalled his own boyhood and his cousin Richard’s. They were of an age, and the one woman raised them both, Denny’s mother, for Richard’s passed away when he was an infant. He reminded himself of the shoes that were bought for Richard when he got a pair, and the chop that was slivered in two when there was but one on the table. That was no more than fair in a charitable house, he thought. But Richard’s behavior in manhood was small thanks for it. He shipped on the first boat he could for America, and thereafter sent word but no evidence of his success, while Denny divided his actor’s pittance between the old lady and his own dreams.

His small confidence in Richard rose when he reached the block of the address. It fell again when he saw the side of the street Richard lived on. He climbed the steps of the dilapidated brownstone and watched an overdressed and overweight woman come from the rear of the hall in answer to his ring. It wasn’t a bachelor apartment that one ran, he thought.

“Is Mr. Tully at home, madame?” he asked. “Mr. Richard Tully.”

She let the door swing open, presumably for him to enter, and went to the stairs. “Dick?” she called out like a harbor whistle. “Dicky Boy!”

There was no answer from the dim passageway above, only a board creaking in a building that might have trembled with the trot of a mouse across the floor.

“It’s no sign he’s not there, not answering me,” she said, turning around on Denny. “What is it you want with him?”

“No more than a civil word,” Denny said. “I’m his cousin from Ireland.”

She grunted. “Number Eight at the rear.” Without waiting to see him up she waddled out of sight, the lamp jingling as she passed the table on which it stood.

Denny climbed the stairs two at a time. In the upstairs hall there was the smell of dust and disinfectant, and only enough light from a wall fixture to be reflected on the tarnished numerals. He knocked at Number Eight, and then called out his cousin’s name. His own voice bounced back at him. He thought himself a fool then to expect that any man would stay in a place like this when he could be out of it. Since nothing stirred within or without, he tried the door. It opened as though it recognized him.

The whole feeling of Richard came back to him when he touched the wall switch and saw the room. For all its tacky furnishings it was as neat as a star, and he could hear his mother’s pleading with him as he had heard it so often as a boy: “Denny, just look at Richard’s room. Couldn’t you take a page from his book and gather your things in a piece?”

“To hell with Richard’s room,” he said aloud and laughed at his childishness. He moved from one piece to the next trying to feel comfortable and thinking about what he should say at that moment if Richard walked in—or anyone else for that matter. There was only one reason to leave a door open: you were expecting someone who hadn’t a key. “I’m just leaving,” he said, testing the words. “I’m looking for a scrap of paper to leave Richard a note.”

With that intention he went to the one table in the room with a drawer in it and drew it open. He found a writing tablet and a stub of a pencil. Flipping open the cover of the tablet, he found a note already on the first page, and in the neat round letters Richard had mastered while he was making O’s the shape of raisins.

With no other thought save that it might reveal the hour of Richard’s return, Denny read the note. Indeed, he had read it before he had time for intentions:

Jimmie

Sweet William in the second

Dick

Well, he thought: there’s small change in Richard. He had come to America on a horse—a 40-to-l shot in the Grand National, and without so much as paying back the pound he had borrowed to put on her nose.

He was about to tear a back sheet from the tablet when something fluttered from between the pages. Fascinated, he watched it waft to the floor: a $20 bill.

In an instant he blessed temptation and pocketed the money. He grabbed the pencil and scribbled:

Dear Richard

I’ll be home ahead of Sweet William. But don’t wait up for me or the twenty.

Your cousin,

Poor Dennis

He reached the street without sight or protest of the landlady. Striding across Manhattan again he began to think of how he would explain to Peg. She did not know Richard, and was therefore entitled to her qualms. Altogether, he decided, his best chance would be if she had not tempered her hunger. He had not been gone the hour yet.

When he reached Eighth Avenue and turned down it toward the hotel, he found himself heading straight into a man who seemed to have no more power to avoid their colliding than he did. They dodged and swayed as though one was the mirror to the other until they were noses apart. Even their recognition of each other was simultaneous. “Dennis!”

“Richard!”

“How the hell are you?” cried Richard.

“Were you visiting us?” Denny asked, thinking of more than his health.

“I stopped by for a minute’s palaver with your lovely lady.” He nudged Denny with his elbow. “Ah, laddie, you must’ve plucked her from the very top of the tree.” Denny began to think of the fun it would be to treat Richard on his own $20. Before he got the invitation out, however, his cousin added: “Well, I must be off till the next time. I’m in a terrible rush to see a man on a transaction.”

You’ll be in a greater rush after seeing him, Denny thought, but he said: “You’ll be getting in touch with us Richard.”

“Oh, I will that. Or you with me, Dennis. Good day to you. And welcome to New York.”

Denny watched him hurry out of sight, and then quickened his own pace. New York was half the size of Dublin, he thought, for all its population. He tipped his hat to an old lady selling flowers at the hotel entry and gathered his thoughts again to the persuasion of Peg on the twenty. He was halfway through the lobby when it occurred to him that she would be easier persuaded if the money were not in one piece, and a flower for her hair would ease the introduction. He turned around and started back to the door. But the old flower woman was not likely to have that much change. He swung across the lobby to the cigar stand and asked the clerk to break down a $20 note for him.

The clerk snickered. “It’s a bill,” he said. “In this country, my friend, you call it a $20 bill.”

“Bill,” Denny mused aloud, fondling the crisp money for an instant. “Sweet William.”