The Far Side of the Dollar (19 page)

B
EFORE DRIVING OUT
to the Harley farm, I had made an evening appointment with Robert Brown and his wife. They already knew what had happened to their daughter. I didn’t have to tell them.

I found their house in the north end of the city, on a pleasant, tree-lined street parallel to Arthur Street. Night had fallen almost completely, and the street lights were shining under the clotted masses of the trees. It was still very warm. The earth itself seemed to exude heat like a hot-blooded animal.

Robert Brown had been watching for me. He hailed me from his front porch and came out to the curb. A big man with short gray hair, vigorous in his movements, he still seemed to be wading in some invisible substance, age or sorrow. We shook hands solemnly.

He spoke with more apparent gentleness than force: “I was planning to fly out to California tomorrow. It might have saved you a trip if you had known.”

“I wanted to talk to the Harleys, anyway.”

“I see.” He cocked his head on one side in a birdlike movement which seemed odd in such a big man. “Did you get any sense out of them?”

“Mrs. Harley made a good deal of sense. Harley didn’t.”

“I’m not surprised. He’s a pretty good farmer, they say, but he’s been in and out of the mental hospital. I took—my wife and I took care of his son Mike during one of his bouts. We took him into our home.” He sounded ashamed of the act.

“That was a generous thing to do.”

“I’m afraid it was misguided generosity. But who can prophesy the future? Anyway, it’s over now. All over.” He forgot about me completely for a moment, then came to himself with a start. “Come in, Mr. Archer. My wife will want to talk to you.”

He took me into the living room. It had group and family photos on the walls, and a claustrophobic wallpaper, which lent it some of the stuffiness of an old-fashioned country parlor. The room was sedately furnished with well-cared-for maple pieces. Across the mantel marched a phalanx of sports trophies gleaming gold and silver in the harsh overhead light.

Mrs. Brown was sitting in an armchair under the light. She was a strikingly handsome woman a few years younger than her husband, maybe fifty-five. She had chosen to disguise herself in a stiff and rather dowdy black dress. Her too precisely marcelled brown hair had specks of gray in it. Her fine eyes were confused, and surrounded by dark patches. When she gave me her hand, the gesture seemed less like a greeting than a bid for help.

She made me sit down on a footstool near her. “Tell us all about poor Carol, Mr. Archer.”

All about Carol. I glanced around the safe, middle-class room, with the pictures of Carol’s ancestors on the walls, and back at her parents’ living faces. Where did Carol come in? I could see the source of her beauty in her mother’s undisguisable good looks. But I couldn’t see how one life led to the other, or why Carol’s life had ended as it had.

Brown said: “We know she’s dead, murdered, and that Mike probably did it, and that’s about all.” His face was like a Roman general’s, a late Roman general’s, after a long series of defeats by barbarian hordes.

“It’s about all I know. Mike seems to have been using her as a decoy in an extortion attempt. You know about the Hillman boy?”

He nodded. “I read about it before I knew that my daughter—” His voice receded.

“They say he may be dead, too,” his wife said.

“He may be, Mrs. Brown.”

“And Mike did these things? I knew he was far gone, but I didn’t know he was a monster.”

“He’s not a monster,” Brown said wearily. “He’s a sick man. His father was a sick man. He still is, after all the mental hospital could do for him.”

“If Mike was so sick, why did you bring him into this house and expose your daughter to him?”

“She’s your daughter, too.”

“I know that. I’m not allowed to forget it. But I’m not the one that ruined her for life.”

“You certainly had a hand in it. You were the one, for instance, who encouraged her to enter that beauty contest.”

“She didn’t win, did she?”

“That was the trouble.”

“Was it? The trouble was the way you felt about that Harley boy.”

“I wanted to help him. He needed help, and he had talent.”

“Talent?”

“As an athlete. I thought I could develop him.”

“You developed him all right.”

They were talking across me, not really oblivious of me, using me as a fulcrum for leverage, or a kind of stand-in for reality. I guessed that the argument had been going on for twenty years.

“I wanted a son,” Brown said.

“Well, you got a son. A fine upstanding son.”

He looked as if he was about to strike her. He didn’t, though. He turned to me:

“Forgive us. We shouldn’t do this. It’s embarrassing.”

His wife stared at him in unforgiving silence. I tried to think of something that would break or at least soften the tension between them:

“I didn’t come here to start a quarrel.”

“You didn’t start it, let me assure you.” Brown snickered remorsefully. “It started the day Carol ran off with Mike. It was something I didn’t foresee—”

His wife’s bitter voice cut in: “It started when she was born, Rob. You wanted a son. You didn’t want a daughter. You rejected her and you rejected me.”

“I did nothing of the sort.”

“He doesn’t remember,” she said to me. “He has one of these convenient memories that men have. You blot out anything that doesn’t suit your upright idea of yourself. My husband is a very dishonest man.” She had a peculiar angry gnawing smile.

“That’s nonsense,” he protested. “I’ve been faithful to you all my life.”

“Except in ways I couldn’t cope with. Like when you brought the Harley boy into our home. The great altruist. The noble counselor.”

“You have no right to jeer at me,” he said. “I wanted to help him. I had no way of knowing that he couldn’t be reached.”

“Go on. You wanted a son any way you could get one.”

He said stubbornly: “You don’t understand. A man gets natural pleasure from raising a boy, teaching him what he knows.”

“All you succeeded in teaching Mike was your dishonesty.”

He turned to me with a helpless gesture, his hands swinging out. “She blames me for everything.” Walking rather aimlessly, he went out to the back part of the house.

I felt as if I’d been left alone with a far from toothless lioness. She stirred in her chair:

“I blame myself as well for being a fool. I married a man who has the feelings of a little boy. He still gets excited about his high-school football teams. The boys adore him. Everybody adores him. They talk about him as if he was some kind of a plaster saint. And he couldn’t even keep his own daughter out of trouble.”

“You and your husband should be pulling together.”

“It’s a little late to start, isn’t it?”

Her glance came up to my face, probed at it for a moment, moved restlessly from side to side.

“It may be that you’ll kill him if you go on like this.”

“No. He’ll live to be eighty, like his father.”

She jerked her marcelled head toward one of the pictures on the wall. Seen from varying angles, her head was such a handsome object I could hardly take my eyes off it. It was hard to believe that such a finely shaped container could be full of cold boiling trouble.

I said, partly because I wanted to, and partly to appease her: “You must have been a very beautiful girl.”

“Yes. I was.”

She seemed to take no pleasure even from her vanity. I began to suspect that she didn’t relate to men. It happened sometimes to girls who were too good-looking. They were treated as beautiful objects until they felt like that and nothing more.

“I could have married anybody,” she said, “any man I went to college with. Some of them are bank presidents and big corporation executives now. But I had to fall in love with a football player.”

“Your husband is a little more than that.”

“Don’t
sell
him to me,” she said. “I know what he is, and I know what my life has been. I’ve been defrauded. I gave everything I had to marriage and motherhood, and what have I got to show for it? Do you know I never even saw my grandson?”

Mrs. Harley had said the same thing. I didn’t mention the coincidence.

“What happened to your grandson?”

“Carol put him out for adoption, can you imagine? Actually I know why she did it. She didn’t trust her husband not to harm the baby. That’s the kind of a man she married.”

“Did she tell you this?”

“More or less. Mike is a sadist, among other things. He used to swing cats by their tails. He lived in this house for over a year and all the time I was afraid of him. He was terribly strong, and I never was certain what he was going to do.”

“Did he ever attack you?”

“No. He never dared to.”

“How old was he when he left?”

“Let me see, Carol was fifteen at the time. That would make him seventeen or eighteen.”

“And he left to join the Navy, is that correct?”

“He didn’t go into the Navy right away. He left town with an older man, a policeman who used to be on the local force. I forget his name. Anyway, this man lost his position on the force through bribery, and left town, taking Mike with him. He said he was going to make a boxer out of him. They went out to the west coast. I think Mike joined the Navy a few months later. Carol could—” She stopped in dismay.

“What about Carol?”

“I was going to say that Carol could tell you.” The angry smile twisted and insulted her mouth. “I must be losing my mind.”

“I doubt that, Mrs. Brown. It takes time to get used to these shocks and changes.”

“More time than I have. More time than I’ll ever have.” She rose impatiently and went to the mantelpiece. One of the trophies standing on it was out of line with the others. She reached up and adjusted its position. “I wonder what Rob thinks he’s doing in the kitchen.”

She didn’t go and find out what he was doing. She stood in an awkward position, one hip out, in front of the empty fireplace. Under her dowdy black dress, the slopes and masses of her body were angry. But nothing that she could do with her body, or her face, could change the essential beauty of the structure. She was trapped in it, as her daughter had been.

“I wish you’d go on with your story, Mrs. Brown.”

“It hardly qualifies as a story.”

“Whatever you want to call it, then. I’m very grateful for the chance to talk to you. It’s the first decent chance I’ve had to get any information about the background of this case.”

“The background hardly matters now, or the foreground either.”

“It does, though. You may tell me something that will help me
to find Harley. I take it you’ve seen him and Carol from time to time over the years.”

“I saw
him
just once more—after that, I wouldn’t give him house room—when he came home from the Navy in the winter of 1944–45. He claimed to be on leave. Actually he was absent without leave. He talked himself back into Rob’s good graces. Rob had been terribly let down when he left town with that ex-policeman, the bribery artist. But my gullible husband fell for his line all over again. He even gave him money. Which Mike used to elope with my only daughter.”

“Why did Carol go with him?”

She scratched at her forehead, leaving faint weals in the clear skin. “I asked her that, the last time she was home, just a couple of months ago. I asked her why she went and why she stuck with him. She didn’t really know. Of course she wanted to get out of Pocatello. She hated Pocatello. She wanted to go out to the coast and break into the movies. I’m afraid my daughter had very childish dreams.”

“Girls of fifteen do.” With a pang, I thought of Stella. The pang became a vaguely formed idea in an unattended area of my mind. Generation after generation had to start from scratch and learn the world over again. It changed so rapidly that children couldn’t learn from their parents or parents from their children. The generations were like alien tribes islanded in time.

“The fact is,” I said, “Carol did make it into the movies.”

“Really? She told me that once, but I didn’t believe her.”

“Was she a chronic liar?”

“No. Mike was the chronic liar. I simply didn’t believe that she could succeed at anything. She never had.”

The woman’s bitterness was getting me down. She seemed to have an inexhaustible reservoir of the stuff. If she had been like this twenty years before, I could understand why Carol had left home at the first opportunity, and stayed away.

“You say you saw Carol just a couple of months ago.”

“Yes. She rode the bus from Lake Tahoe in June. I hadn’t seen her for quite a long time. She was looking pretty bedraggled. God knows what kind of a life he was leading her. She didn’t talk much.”

“It was a chancy life. Harley seems to have lost his job, and they were on their uppers.”

“So she told me. There was the usual plea for money. I guess Rob gave her money. He always did. He tried to pretend afterwards, to me, that he gave her the car, too, but I know better. She took it. Apparently their old car had broken down, and they couldn’t live at Tahoe without a car.”

“How do you know she took it if your husband says she didn’t?”

She showed signs of embarrassment. “It doesn’t matter. They were welcome to the car.” It was her first generous word. She half-spoiled it: “We needed a new one, anyway, and I’m sure she did it on the spur of the moment. Carol always was a very impulsive girl.

“The point is,” she said, “she left without saying goodbye. She took the car to go downtown to the movies and simply never came back. She even left her suitcase in her room.”

“Had there been trouble?”

“No more than the usual trouble. We did have an argument at supper.”

“What about?”

“My grandson. She had no right to put him out for adoption. She said he was her baby to do with as she pleased. But she had no right. If she couldn’t keep him, she should have brought him to us. We could have given him opportunities, an education.” She breathed heavily and audibly. “She said an unforgivable thing to me that evening. She said, did I mean the kind of opportunities she had? And she walked out. I never saw her again. Neither did her father.” Her head jerked forward in emphatic affirmation: “We
did
give her opportunities. It’s not our fault if she didn’t take advantage of them. It isn’t fair to blame us.”