The Henderson Equation (26 page)

But curiosity was a strong temptation. When Pinelli told
him he had set up a meeting, Nick had wondered about his motives.

"What good is the work, if you can't see the
results?" Pinelli had explained.

"Like a criminal returning to the scene of the
crime," Nick had observed.

Pinelli looked at him curiously. "Wanna come?"

Nick shrugged indifferently. His courage had faltered.

"Afraid?" Pinelli leered.

It had been a challenge. Nick reluctantly accepted.

Mrs. Carter had agreed to meet at Volks, a German
restaurant on the corner of Third Avenue and Forty-second Street, under the
still existent El. Arriving first, Pinelli chose a booth in the rear which
provided a measure of privacy. They ordered beers, and watched the door for
Mrs. Carter's arrival. She came deliberately late, it seemed, a slim, hesitant
figure, holding herself straight as she moved toward them.

Deep circles rimmed her eyes, and even her careful makeup
could not obscure the relentlessness of time and humiliation. She slid in
beside them, ordered a martini, lit a cigarette, and delicately picked a crumb
of tobacco from her lip. Confronting her at this distance, with the pain of her
affliction so apparent, Nick wanted to run, his courage drained. Pinelli, in
contrast, seemed impervious, perhaps by his own convoluted logic having
attributed to the woman an evil intent, deserving of punishment. Smugly sipping
his beer, a fat avenging angel, he had suddenly become detestable. "It's
too late to plead for myself," she said, taking a deep puff on her
cigarette. It was obvious that the ordered martini was not the first drink of
the day.

"There was nothing personal in it, Mrs. Carter,"
Pinelli said. "We were just doing our job."

The woman looked at him with contempt, her lip trembling.
"Your job? Is it your job to destroy my life?"

"We just reported facts."

"Facts?" She held back anger, seeming to search
for the reasons she had come. Was she, too, curious?

"It was all carefully documented," Pinelli said.
Nick remained silent, watching the woman's eyes lower as she sipped deeply on
the martini.

"I kept saying to myself: Why are they doing this?
What is the reason for my punishment? I could understand my husband's
vindictiveness--he, at least, was entitled to his pound of flesh. But you?
Surely you can't be that devoid of compassion."

"It has nothing to do with compassion," Pinelli
said.

"No. No, I guess it doesn't," Mrs. Carter
corrected after a long pause. "That seems too much to ask." Nick
watched her, searching for the clue to her motives, the beer congealing in his
stomach. It had been a mistake for him to come.

"You said on the telephone you had something to add to
your story," Pinelli said. "We thought perhaps you had something to
say in your own defense. Really, Mrs. Carter, we'd be happy to print your side
of it." He winked at Nick.

"My side of it?" She finished her martini and
looked around helplessly for the waiter. Pinelli caught his eye and pointed to
her empty glass.

"I have no defense," she said. "I have lost
my children, my security, my self-respect, my dignity. I don't even know if I
have the strength to pick up the pieces of my life. I doubt very much if I can
ever recover." Self-pity was rising out of her like steam.

"People forget," Nick said, compelled to offer
solace, feeling stupid in her presence.

"Forget?" Her persistent questioning exclamations
were grating, as if she were helplessly trying to communicate in a foreign language.
The waiter brought another martini. She picked up the glass and sipped deeply.

"Who are you to judge me?" she said, trying to
resummon pride.

"We didn't judge you, Mrs. Carter," Pinelli said
in mock frustration. "We simply report what interests people."

"Oh," she said bitterly. "Is that what you
do?"

"That's our job," Pinelli said, as if he were
addressing a child. "We didn't create the situation. We merely told it.
Right, Nick?"

But Nick persisted in his silence. He felt the woman's
wretchedness. Why have we done this? he asked himself. He wondered why Pinelli
could not feel the same guilt.

"Why did you come?" he asked the woman gently.

The woman, perhaps feeling his softness, dissolved into
tears. They ran down her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them away.

"I thought," she began, swallowing to clear her
throat. She paused, fighting for composure. "I thought I would like to see
those who are punishing me, judging me. What do you know about me that you must
hurt me, hold up my life as a public entertainment? I've done nothing to hurt
you."

"Well, now you've seen us," Pinelli said with
contempt.

"Yes," she replied.

"Disappointed?" Pinelli sneered.

"No," she said, looking into Pinelli's pouchy
face. "You're exactly as I pictured you. Monstrous. Crude.
Indifferent." Her voice rose.

"You cunt," Pinelli exploded.

The words hit her like a hammer blow. She seemed to
collapse within herself. Tears cascaded down her cheeks.

"This is ridiculous," Pinelli said. "When
they can't do anything else, they cry."

"You callous bastard," Nick hissed, his voice
rising. Pinelli, taken aback, clenched his fat fists.

"You fall for this fucking whore's line?" he
said, pointing to her as if she were inanimate. The woman reached for her bag
and began to fumble with the clasp. Her fingers shook. Nick wanted to reach out
to help her but she quickly stood up, and without turning, ran from the
restaurant.

"Don't bleed for that scum," Pinelli said. Nick
turned and faced the fat Italian face, a thin film of sweat forming on his
forehead. Pinelli looked back at him with contempt and spite.

"You're too goddamned lily-livered for this business,
Nick."

It was all so antiseptic to view Mrs. Carter's fate from
the vantage of the city desk, surrounded by familiar faces, bathed in the
sounds of typewriters and telephones. Surely there could be no real Mrs.
Carter, tissues and cells that breathed, that suffered ecstasy and despair. She
was only words. Until now!

"You shouldn't have come," Pinelli said.
"They'll try almost anything to gain your pity."

"And it doesn't bother you at all?"

"Me? Why should it bother me? It's a story."

He remembered feeling the backwash of his own disgust,
wondering what he would be like years from now, frightened that he might become
like Pinelli. I'll quit before that happens, he told himself.

The years that followed seemed beyond recall, a time of
stagnation. What he could recall of it was only the shape of his paralysis, the
curve of the well-worn rut as he performed his life by rote.

He did not dwell much on Charlie in that time, a fading
memory of his diminishing youth. Life with Margaret and Chums seemed without
movement, repetitive. Perhaps a time bomb had been ticking, for suddenly
Charlie exploded again into his life.

It came as a telephone ring in the middle of the night in
midsummer. "Nick?" his voice said urgently.

"Charlie?"

"Yeah, kid."

"My God."

"It's a hell of a thing to lay on you, kid. But can
you meet me at the airport? I'm taking the first plane out. Should be there
around eight-fifteen." There was a long pause. Nick could hear Charlie's
heavy breathing at the other end.

"What's happening?"

"It's my mother. She's dead. My father just
called."

"Sorry, Charlie." He could feel the effort to
reply, then a kind of muffled gasp. "Eight-fifteen."

"Okay, kid." He heard the phone click at the
other end.

"Jumping through the old hoop." It was Margaret,
still turned toward the wall. He steeled himself for the acid comment, perhaps
a mirror of his own thoughts. "You haven't seen the son of a bitch for
nearly five years, then he calls in the middle of the night and old dumb Nick
jumps to attention."

"He sounded pretty bad. I couldn't turn him
down."

"Is he drunk?"

"No," he shot back, resentful. "It's his
mother. She died."

"The loony from Hempstead?"

He ignored the retort, feeling her alertness, not wishing
to precipitate an argument. Ignoring her, he got out of bed and began to dress.

"Call the office for me," he said, when he had
finished a hasty shave.

"You're a damned fool, Nick," she hissed. "A
goddamned patsy."

"He's my friend."

"Some friend."

He was, in fact, joyful. Charlie had invoked the bond of
friendship, had never lost his faith in its strength.

He circled the LaGuardia entrance a dozen times in his
aging second-hand Chevrolet before Charlie appeared. Watching him approach,
Nick noted changes in his friend's appearance. He had gotten stouter and his
hair had begun to grow grey.

"Thanks, Nick," Charlie said, flashing the
remembered smile as he slid in beside him. Nick maneuvered the car into Grand
Central Parkway. For a long time Charlie remained silent. Then the loosening
process began with trivia. How's this? How's that? How are things going? How
about McCarthy?

"And you, Charlie?" Nick asked, cautious in the
timing.

"On the plane coming up I thought about how I might
answer that question, kid. Since I got the call, I've been doing a lot of
thinking. You know I haven't been to see them since our last visit. Oh, I call
occasionally, and listen to the old man. It absolutely tears me up. The damned
waste. I just couldn't face it alone, kid."

"So here is good old Nick."

He caught the sarcasm and grabbed Nick's arm.

"You're damned right, kid," he said. Then, after
a pause, "I suppose you think I'm a bastard."

"I figured you'd call me when you needed me."

"You're fucking A." It was an anachronism, from
the war.

"Fucking A," Nick repeated. He was conscious of
unintended sarcasm.

"You know how it is, kid," Charlie said. "I
have no life now beyond the
Chronicle."

"I understand it's going great guns."

"Beyond anyone's wildest dreams. We're about to buy
out our principal morning competition. Imagine, we'll be the only morning paper
in the capital."

"Sounds like you're on top of the world."

There was a long silence as they watched the landscape
recede. There were more houses visible now along the highway. In some spots
they could see endless lines of exactly replicated homes.

"It's draining me, Nick," Charlie said suddenly.
"It's crushing me to death." There was a long pause. "You can't
imagine the responsibility. You can't know what it's like. It's the kind of
thing that eats you alive."

Nick remained silent. There seemed no adequate response.

"All those words," Charlie sighed. "I should
be there now."

"It'll be there when you get back," Nick said.

"What will?"

"The
Chronicle,"
Nick said.

"I am the
Chronicle,"
Charlie responded.
Nick shrugged, not comprehending.

They turned off at a sign marked Hempstead. The edges of
the town had expanded. New stores had sprung up. The streets were crowded now.
Traffic choked the town's center.

"Progress," Charlie sighed.

They pulled into Charlie's parents' street. The white house
seemed small and faded now. The front lawn had been carefully trimmed but the
paint on the front of the house was chipped and fading. Walking toward the
house, they could see the irreversible signs of wood decay and the warp of the
door, gone awry on its jamb.

The bent, yellowed man who opened the door was gnarled like
a petrified tree. Despite the years of absence, nothing seemed to have changed
in the placid way father and son greeted each other.

"The Princess is gone," the older man said, tears
welling in the deep sockets of his eyes. They followed him through the hallway
to the living room, now musty, the furniture worn and shabby. The old man stood
for a moment blinking as he looked at his wife's chair.

"It's all over now, Pop," Charlie said quietly.

"We'll have a nice cup of tea," his father said,
"then we'll visit her at the funeral parlor. I wouldn't like to leave her
alone too long."

They drank tea in silence from cups Mr. Pell had assembled
on the low table in front of the worn couch.

"Did she suffer, Dad?" Charlie asked, his voice
suddenly hoarse.

"The Princess never suffered," Mr. Pell said.
"Not for one minute." He looked at his son, squinting in the yellow
light of a single lit lamp. The shades were drawn.

"What are you going to do now, Dad?" Charlie
asked. Nick watched him trying to hold back tears.

"I haven't thought about it," Mr. Pell said
quietly.

"I'm glad it's over," Charlie said.

"Glad?"

"At this point, it's hard to tell who was crazier. You
or her." He seemed deliberately cruel. Mr. Pell ignored the reference. It
had long been a source of irritation and estrangement. They drank their tea
silently. When Mr. Pell had cleared the cups, they went out again. The air had
heated up, although the house, the windows shaded from the rising sun, had been
cool.

Mrs. Pell was laid out in a small room of the funeral
parlor in an elaborate coffin lined with red velvet. She was painted in the
manner in which they had last seen her, a hideous white mask over a shrunken
face. It was a caricature of humanness, the face of a doll with a fixed
horrible expression of concealed misery. Charlie turned his face away in
disgust.

"Doesn't she look beautiful?" Mr. Pell asked.

"Why don't you close the lid?" Charlie asked. He
made no motion to reach for the coffin's lid.

"She loved you," Mr. Pell said.

"It's all over, Dad," Charlie whispered, almost
as if he were afraid the dead woman would hear. "You don't have to
pretend."