The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (26 page)

“As I remember, this went on a few years after he got out of high school.”

“He never went to college?”

“No. Either he didn’t want to, or he couldn’t afford to. I think he had an offer of an athletic scholarship or two, but when the schools found out he was hustling, the offers were withdrawn. Anyway, Green Hills, which then had only a golf course, put in some tennis courts. They began looking around for a pro. They couldn’t find anybody they really wanted. The first-class pros all were established elsewhere and didn’t want to change. Jeff was young for the job, but he put up a big, cocky front, and he’d developed quite a name. So they took him on.”

Reeves finished his bourbon and ordered another.

“I’d known Jeff around the tennis circuit, and he took me on as his assistant. The son of a bitch squeezed me, though. I had to give him ten percent of all revenue I made giving lessons on my own. All under the table. He was a man who had his eye on a buck at all times. I can’t fault anybody for that. I suppose it’s our Great American Ethic. But there are limits to everything …

“Anyway, Jeff caught on as a pro at Green Hills. He had a hell of a lot of charm when he wanted to turn it on. Especially with women. They really went for him. He was a damned good-looking man, virile and sexual. He knew how to smile at them and flatter them. I don’t know, he had this quality that women found irresistible. Some of them, and I’m talking about some of the club women, couldn’t wait to get in bed with him when their husbands were gone. For his part, he was an animal when it came to sex. He couldn’t get enough. But, along with this, he had one hell of a cruel streak in him, too.”

“Yes? In what way?”

“With women. Especially after he’d been drinking. He was a sadistic bastard when he was drinking, Sometimes he would actually beat up a girl just for kicks. I know. I was about his age, and two or three times we went out on double dates, until I couldn’t take him anymore. And once, a girl, a waitress, took him to court.
She showed the marks of her beating, but she couldn’t convince the judge that Jeff had done it, and he got off.

“His friends, and he didn’t have many, called him the drunken Indian. He had a little Indian blood in him from way back, and he never let you forget it. He loved to put on this superpatriot act, claiming he was the only real hundred percent American in town. He’d run off at the mouth after he’d had a few, calling other people wops, spicks, niggers, Jewboys, what have you, insulting them to their faces. All this got him into trouble in this bar or that, and he had his face pushed in a couple of times.” Then he looked at Peter and said a little thickly, “Hell, I don’t know why I’m talking so much. Your old man isn’t going to give a damn about all this, Mr. Proud. Why don’t I just shut up …”

“No. Go on. I’m interested now. And forget the Mr. Proud thing. My name is Pete.”

“Pete. Yeah. Let’s see, where was I? Did I tell you about Marcia Curtis?”

“No.”

“Well, she was a member of the club at the time. The daughter of William Curtis, president of the Puritan Bank and Trust. This was around 1940. She was just a kid then, about nineteen, and just about the loveliest and sweetest young girl you’d ever met. Everybody around the club, and I’m talking about the people who worked there as well as the members, was crazy about her. She had more dates than she could handle, and I’m talking about the richest boys in town from the best families. Unfortunately, she was crazy about tennis. And when she met Jeff Chapin, boom. She went for him, head over heels. After that, she wouldn’t look at anybody else …

“Like I said, Jeff was no fool when it came to the buck, and he saw his main chance. He played her for all she was worth. And she must have loved his performance in bed. She simply couldn’t get enough of him. They both knew if her old man found out about it,
Jeff’d be fired from the club. So they met at out-of-the-way places, motels, places like that. Then one day they just ran away and got married, and came back and confronted the old man with it. What’s that French expression they use …”

“Fait accompli?”

“Yeah. Anyway, it was too late for anyone to do anything about it. The club was a pretty stuffy place, and the board didn’t like the idea of one of their hired hands running off and marrying one of the members, so they fired him and gave me his job. Even though he was the husband of Marcia Curtis, and technically was now a member of the club, they wouldn’t even list him as such. Now her father threatened to disown her for a while. But Jeff was out of a job, and they had no visible means of support. He could go back to being a tennis bum again, but there wasn’t enough money in hustling, especially since he now had a young wife to support.

“But then the war came along. As I said, Jeff was this big superpatriot kind of guy, and he immediately enlisted in the Marines. He was sent to the Pacific and was wounded in the side, shrapnel in the hip or something, and in the process got himself a few medals. I’ll say this. Even if he was a bastard, he was gutsy when it came to courage. The Marines gave him a discharge and he came back a big hero, his name in the papers, big parties thrown for him, everything. Her father was pretty embarrassed. He gave Jeff a desk in the rear of the bank, and a big title, and I guess a big salary. The year after that, the old man died and Marcia came into a lot of money …”

“When was that?”

Reeves wrinkled his brow, then shook his head. His voice was even thicker now.

“Can’t remember, exactly. Around ’44, I think, maybe ’45. Anyway, they moved into this big house on Vista Drive, and both of them lived it up. Jeff bought this fucking big Packard Clipper, and he loved to drive around town and show it off. And it wasn’t
always Marcia who was with him. Once in a while he was seen riding around with some other broad. I told you from the beginning he was a womanizer, and being married to this lovely girl didn’t change anything. Then they had a baby—a little girl, I think. Couple of months after that, Jeff and his wife went away for a weekend at this cottage they had on Lake Nipmuck. It was in the fall sometime, and this crazy damned fool had been drinking, and he decided to swim the lake. According to the newspapers, Marcia tried to stop him but couldn’t. He caught a cramp somewhere out in the middle and drowned, and they dragged the lake for him and finally found him. That’s about it. His wife still lives in the same house, up on Vista, as far as I know …”

As he drove away, he thought of the kind of man he had been in his previous life.

If Reeves was to be believed, he had been a first-class bastard indeed. If you accepted the justification for reincarnation, he had much to atone for. The law of karma was that, given another chance, a man improved himself, made amends, refurbished the old soul into something a little better in this life. If he had hurt others before, he helped those like them in this life. Karmic rectification. A man gets another chance, and he redeems himself for sins done in his past life.

He thought again of the Lake Dream. Only two nights ago, he had again been haunted by it in his sleep. He remembered that he had been drunk when he had come out of the cottage. He remembered the red bruise marks on young Marcia Chapin’s neck and shoulders. She had been angry enough, that night, to murder him in cold blood. Why? Was a physical beating enough to drive her this far? Or was this the last straw, so to speak? The dream seemed to indicate there had been other similar beatings. He remembered the way he had been treading water and looking up at her in the boat, and recalled what they had said.

“I’m sorry. I mean it. I’m sorry.”

“I know. You’ve been sorry so many times before.”

Now he began to see some light—enough, at least, to make an educated guess as to what had happened.

In the next two weeks he saw Ann frequently. They played more tennis. He took her to dinner several times, and once to a play at the Riverside Civic Center. Twice he had dinner at the Chapin home. Marcia Chapin was polite to him, but distant. Now and then he caught her studying him curiously. She inquired about his work—how it was going, and when he would be through with it. He told her blandly that it was taking longer than he had expected. He had to classify a large number of small subtribes, members of the larger Indian federations and confederacies in southern New England. They all had their distinct villages and sachemdoms.

She assumed that since he was on a short sabbatical, he would have to be back at UCLA in time to prepare and grade examinations for his students. When would that be? she inquired. The first week in June, he told her. He explained that he could set up the examinations so that he need only go back for a week, or perhaps not at all.

He had the definite impression that the sooner he left Riverside, the better she would like it.

One Sunday morning, Ann called him.

“Pete, how would you like to take a ride?”

“Where?”

“It’s a place called Peaceful Valley. About forty-five miles from here.”

“Sounds positively bucolic. Do we take a picnic lunch?”

“No,” she said. “This isn’t going to be any picnic. Just the opposite. If I had my way, I’d rather not go. It’s something I just got roped into.”

“What do you mean?”

“My grandmother’s there. Grandma Chapin. She stays at a rest home there. I told you about it. Mother usually goes out there every Saturday, but she isn’t feeling too well this morning, and she asked me to go in her place. I haven’t been there in over a year, and I hate to go alone.”

“Okay. When shall I pick you up?”

“I’ll pick you up. And Pete?”

“Yes?”

“You’re a darling for doing this.”

The truth was, he was glad of the chance. He had planned to visit the old lady sooner or later, but that would have been tricky. He’d have to explain why he, a stranger, would have any conceivable interest in visiting her. Going with Ann solved that problem.

He was curious about Ellen Chapin. As far as he knew, she was the only flesh-and-blood relative of Jeff Chapin himself. And of course, in a crazy kind of way, she was
his
mother. Still, he felt no particular excitement at the prospect of seeing the old lady. He saw her as just another swatch in the patchwork quilt of Chapin’s identity, part of the life and times of his earlier incarnation. And she had never appeared in any of his hallucinations.

The Valley Rest Home was set back a considerable distance from the main road. It was fronted by a series of terraced and manicured lawns spotted with small flower gardens and arbors through which cut meandering walks lined with metal benches painted white. It was a chill, blustery day, and none of the elderly residents was outside. The institution itself consisted of several dormitory-like buildings of mellow brick softened with creeping ivy.

They went into the administration building.

“We’d like to see Mrs. Ellen Chapin,” Ann said to the girl at the reception desk.

“Are you relatives or friends?”

“I’m a granddaughter. He’s a friend.”

The girl checked a card file.

“You’ll find her in Room 106.”

They went down the deeply carpeted corridor, past a florist shop, a gift and bookshop, a small drugstore, and a beauty parlor. The place had an expensive and opulent look. He reflected grimly that Marcia Chapin had taken care of her mother-in-law very well. She probably figured,
the bastard is dead, and I killed him, and I guess it’s the least I can do
.

There were a number of elderly residents sitting in the recreation room. Their faces were wizened and desiccated, their bodies arthritic, their eyes blank. They sat in beach chairs or at glass-topped tables, and a number of them were staring at a television set, watching a late afternoon soap opera. The old people watched it with glazed eyes, and Peter felt they really didn’t know what was going on, they weren’t really following the story at all but were simply staring at the screen because it was there. As he walked past, none of them even had the curiosity to turn their heads and look at him.

He felt sorry for them all. He wanted to light up their vacant and hopeless faces. He wanted to tell them they would all get another chance.

“I hate this,” Ann whispered to him. “I always feel like crying when I come here. If I ever get that old, they’ll never put me away in a place like this. I’ll kill myself first.”

The door to Room 106 was open. They stood in the open doorway for a moment, watching.

Ellen Chapin was sitting on the edge of the bed. A plump, middle-aged nurse was spoon-feeding her some kind of cereal mush or baby food from a bowl. The nurse had a little difficulty aiming the spoon.
The old lady was babbling something at the same time she was trying to eat. A little of the mush dribbled down her chin.

“There we are, Mrs. Chapin,” said the nurse cheerfully. “That’s it. That’s very nice. Very good.”

The old woman’s babble was totally incoherent. She wore a flowered robe that seemed to engulf her slight figure. Her shoulders were narrow and huddled, the line of her back crooked as she sat on the bed. Her legs were sticklike and ribbed with huge varicose veins. Her face was seamed and chalk-white. Only her eyes, bright blue, seemed to be alive. Childlike, unblinking, they fixed themselves on the nurse, as though trying hard to perceive her instructions.

“That’s it, sweetie. You’re doing very well today.”

The nurse’s voice was gentle. Neither the nurse nor Mrs. Chapin saw them standing in the doorway. Ann rapped gently on the door. The nurse turned, but Ellen Chapin continued to stare straight ahead.

“I’m Ann Chapin, her granddaughter. This is Dr. Proud, a friend.”

The nurse put down the bowl. “Please come in. I’m Miss Hagerson. I’ve met your mother many times.”

Ann nodded toward the old lady. “How is she?”

“About the same. Still in a world of her own, poor dear. But of course she’s been this way for a long time.” The nurse smiled. “You know, your grandmother is really very sweet. Never gives us any trouble.” She turned to Mrs. Chapin. “You never give us any trouble, do you, dear?”

The old woman was still unaware that they were in the room. Her vacant face was turned away from them, and her mouth continued to move. Peter watched her. Again he thought, this was my mother once. He felt nothing in particular, except pity.