The Man Who Lost the Sea (4 page)

He then did nothing for a moment but watch Lulu’s face. Lulu’s face remained utterly expressionless, because Lulu had gone utterly numb.

“Now then, you want to liquidate all of these bonds, Mr. Llewellyn? I see. Well, I’m afraid it will take a while. If you’d be kind enough to wait over there …” Lulu looked up at the big clock on the wall in panic. It was a minute or so of the bank’s closing time. A brassy clang had started echoes all up and down the vast marble interior, and when he glanced towards the big door where he had came in he saw that the brass gates had been closed. The guard was herding people out a smaller door at the side of the building.

“Oh dear, I can’t. I can’t,” he gasped. “I’ve got to get the potatoes on!”

“Miss Fisher,” said Mr. Skerry flatly.

Startled, Lulu said, “What?”

But before he could make a more disastrous blunder a homely ageless fat girl with thick glasses appeared at the other end of the desk and said, “Yes, sir?”

“Take these bonds and list the numbers on a receipt for Mr. Llewellyn here,” said Mr. Skerry. “Mr. Llewellyn, can you come back tomorrow at about this time? We’ll have everything taken care of by then.” He added quickly, as if to override a protest (which Lulu would not have dared to interpose) “Not today, not today. There just isn’t time. These things take a while, you understand? Miss Fisher, get his address. You can wait over there,” he said to Lulu and pointed with his frown.

Lulu went ‘over there,’ which was a long leather bench against the opposite wall. Near it was a much smaller desk than Mr. Skerry’s, where Miss Fisher sat enthroned. In front of her was an electric typewriter. She had the bonds at her elbow and was turning them over one by one with her left hand while her right danced frantically and apparently unnoticed on the top rows of keys.

Lulu watched her with awe. She had a flexible bulbous nose almost exactly like Ivy’s, and he felt comforted. The tip of Miss Fisher’s nose was the only remotely familiar thing in this cold busy place.

Much sooner than he would have thought possible, she was finished. She took down his name and home address and work address and asked him if he had a car registration—which gratified him—or any identification at all. He showed her his pay signature card, and she seemed satisfied. Then the guard with the grey uniform let him out the small door, and he hurried home to peel the potatoes.

It took Mr. Skerry just three phone calls and forty minutes of his costly time to discover the identity of the bonds’ rightful owner. Shortly after that Ivy Shoots sat in the chair at the end of his desk. He had to tell her three times in a row and then show her the bonds before she could believe her ears.

Lulu got up and dressed as quietly as he could. Maybe the difference was all in him, but Ivy had seemed painfully quiet all evening and he didn’t like it and he wanted to get out of the apartment before he had to talk to her. But he got only as far as the bedroom door when her voice brought him up short.

“Lulu.”

Slowly he turned back. He said, “I’m late already. It’s half past …”

“That’s all right. I want to talk to you.” She turned on the lamp on the night table. “Lulu, anything to do with money, you ought to ask me first.”

He didn’t say anything. He found that he felt no fear, but only a fierce secret happiness. The money wasn’t important, getting caught wasn’t important. The important thing was stealing the bonds, and she couldn’t change that. He hoped she would hurry up and get through accusing him, because he wanted to be at his cage at the hospital. He wanted to hear the people all around him talking, and be able to say silently, how long has it been since you stole three and a half pounds of negotiable bonds?

“It was really too silly of you. You just don’t understand these things, Lulu. Do you know you came
that
close”—she showed him how close with a thumb and forefinger—“to getting arrested for
stealing
those bonds?”

Lulu made no reply, offered no defense. He simply poked out his lower lip and looked at his shoes. He didn’t know what to say.

“You told yourself I was keeping all that money for myself, didn’t you?” she said. “Isn’t that what you thought?”

He remained silent.

“Oh dear, I suppose I can’t blame you. I just never dreamed you’d misunderstand and you never said anything. It seemed the best way. You’ve got to believe me, Lulu! You do believe me?” She looked at him and sniffed unhappily, and blew her nose. “No—I guess you don’t. Wait—I’ll prove it.”

He looked at her, and what she read in his face he had no way of knowing. But she scrabbled at her throat so roughly and suddenly that she tore off one of her shoulder-straps. She pulled out the key to the steel box by its ribbon, and put it in the keyhole and opened the box, and took out the top paper without looking at what she was doing and gave it to him.

“You take this with you when you go back there this afternoon, and give it to Mr. Skerry. He’s a nice man, and he’ll take care of everything.”

Lulu looked down at the paper, and then quickly back at her. “It’s called an assignment form. It signs over most of the bonds to
you, Lulu. They’re yours. Don’t you understand? I worked it out to the penny—how much I’ve made, how much you’ve made, and all the expenses we shared. That’s your money, Lulu. Only you’ve got to believe I wanted you to have it all along.”

He looked at the assignment form, and slowly put it away in his breast pocket with the receipt that Miss Fisher had given him at the bank.

“You could have gone to jail, Lulu, you silly. For stealing your own money. Imagine you—
stealing!
”

He looked at her and at the black box. Suddenly he began to tremble. Something about him made Ivy pick up the bed-clothes and clutch them to her breast. “Lulu!”

He whirled and ran out. He was panting even before he began to run. He pursed up his lips painfully and his cheeks went round and flat, round and flat, like a little plump bellows. His eyes began to water and his throat hurt him.

He hadn’t stolen anything. He felt cheated, betrayed, lost.

And Mr. Skerry was nicer to him on Friday afternoon than anyone had ever been since his aunts died. He told Lulu that he now possessed a very respectable sum of money which he’d do well to—direct quote—“let that fine woman take care of for you.” When he got no reaction from Lulu—who had gone numb again—he sighed and helped him deposit most of the money in a savings account and some of it in a checking account.

He even showed him how to make out a check and keep up the stubs. He really took a lot of trouble over Lulu, who absorbed perhaps a fifth of what he was saying and ultimately escaped into the sunlight again.

He found Friday’s shopping list and blindly went through the routine of marketing and getting home, the stairs, the key, the putting away of the groceries. Then he went into the living room and sat, or collapsed, into his chair in the corner by the radio.

He was confused and despairing, lost especially in the once securely-blueprinted stretches of the future. More than anything else, he wanted back what he had lost—this apartment, this routine, Ivy’s protective handling of everything. His hand strayed to the radio dial
but he could not switch it on because of the envelope which was propped against it. The envelope had his name on it in Ivy’s quick accurate handwriting. Wondering, he tore it open and unfolded the sheet of letter paper within and squared himself away to read the communication through. He read every word in quick succession without grasping the letter’s meaning at all. He was just getting the feel of the words the first time around. Then he started over, reading each sentence slowly for the meaning alone.

The last paragraph contained several crooked lines and words crossed out here and there and squinched up so that reading them took time. Lulu read the last part four times, and then he drew down the paper and glared at the radio. “I am not!” he barked in the same furious voice with which he had frightened Ivy by accident once.

 … 
a very good person who could not do a bad thing if you tried
. “I am
not!
” he shouted for the second time. He stamped across the room and back again, and what he felt uncurling somewhere in the region of his solar plexus was a new thing, a frightening thing. It was anger—and nothing that he had ever experienced in his entire life up to that instant had made him feel enraged before.

He scooped up the letter and glared at it. Next to that one infuriating statement—which he again denied out loud—the only other thing the letter had to say to him was the desperate, pleading request that urged him not to go away.

Leaving Ivy—leaving the only home he had—was something that would never have crossed his mind in thirty years’ trying. But when Ivy said it, and said it over and over, it exploded inside him. “I will so,” he told the piece of paper solemnly. “I will so leave.”

And he did. He really did. He filled two paper shopping bags with his clothes and left on Saturday afternoon instead of going to the movies as he had planned. He got a furnished room right across the street from the hospital and down the street from the bank and up the street from the movies.

On Monday they called him in to the main office arid sat him down, in front of a telephone with the receiver off. He picked the receiver up and listened to it, and sure enough it was Ivy, calling him up at work for the very first time. She sounded terrible, with her squeaky pleading, her frequent sobbing, and another one of her head colds. He just listened in complete silence until there was a pause, unable to think of anything to tell her that would make even a little sense to himself.

He finally said, “No, no, I can’t. You hear, I can’t no more.” He put the receiver on its cradle and sat there looking at it. He found he was trembling. He thought he ought to tell her at least that he wasn’t sick or in any awful trouble. He picked up the phone again
but it only buzzed at him. Ivy was gone out of it. He recradled the receiver.

The hospital cashier glanced at him, and then came over. “Anything wrong?” he asked.

Lulu stood up and wiped his upper lip with the hack of his hand. “I can take care of myself,” he said almost belligerently.

“Why, sure you can,” said the cashier, backing off a pace. “You just didn’t look so good, that’s all.”

“Well, I’m not going back there,” said Lulu.

“Okay, okay,” said the cashier, holding up placating hands. “I just wanted to help.”

“No sense ever asking me no more,” said Lulu. He shambled back to the receiving desk, leaving a very puzzled young man staring after him.

For a few weeks, getting adjusted to living alone took up so much of Lulu’s life and thoughts that he had no time for his sins. Living in furnished rooms and eating in restaurants are not always completely simple matters even to the intelligent, and Lulu was a babe in. the woods almost from the first. Keeping cash on his person was a habit he found complicated and very difficult to acquire.

He used his checkbook constantly, for a ten-cent cup of coffee, a sandwich, and once even for a newspaper so he could check the radio programs. Finally the manager of the restaurant where he ate came over to him with a sheaf of his checks and asked him plaintively to cut it out.

“Write a big one any time, and keep the cash in your pocket and use what you want. Okay? You got my girl spendin’ a hour and a half every week listin’ your checks in the deposit slip.”

Lulu blushed painfully and promised to do better. To his amazement he found that he could. He tried the same thing at the grocery, where he had been writing a check every night for two soft rolls and six slices of liverwurst for his lunch. He wrote a check for ten dollars, and used the cash for a week. The proprietor was pleased and even increased the thickness of the liverwurst slices as a token of his esteem.

He passed Ivy twice in the street. She did not speak to him, and he was speechless even at the thought of her.

His new life wove in one unexpected thread. The second day of his liberation he was in a booth in the restaurant, and had just finished his soup when he became aware of someone standing next to the table. He looked up and there was Miss Fisher from the bank.

She said timidly, “I do beg your pardon. But I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I shared this table with you. There are no other seats in the restaurant …”

He got up hastily and made room at the little table and saw that she had the salt and he even stacked her cafeteria tray on top of his out of the way. When she was organized she looked at him with a wan thank-you smile that became recognition. “Why, it’s Mr. Llewellyn!”