The Tight White Collar (22 page)

Jess Cameron met with his colonel and together they decided what had to be done. Eventually, they sent Captain Hastings' things to his wife with a letter saying that while in the performance of his duty, the captain had been killed by a fall from a truck and all the reports ever filled out tallied exactly with the words read by Gwenyth Hastings.

“It's your ass and mine if we ever get caught,” said the colonel.

“I know,” replied Jess.

“Can't have men knocking themselves off right under our noses, though,” said the colonel. “Looks bad. Besides, his family'll feel a lot better if they think he was killed in action.”

“Yes,” said Jess.

But afterwards, he couldn't get Philip Hastings out of his mind.

Your fault, Cameron, he thought. You could have saved him. A little time, a little kindness, that's all it would have taken. But I had no time, he argued silently with himself. And kindness? During a war kindness is time consuming and I had no time. You killed him, Cameron. You might just as well have held the gun up to his head yourself. But I didn't know. I didn't realize that he was as sick as he was. Okay. Okay. Forget it. Forget it.

In July 1945, Gordon Cameron dropped dead of a heart attack only minutes after he had finished delivering a baby in the Cooper Station hospital. By the time Jess heard of it on an island in the Pacific, his father had been buried for nearly a month. Richard Strickland's father, Joshua, had taken care of everything and when Jess finally returned home it was to a clean, well-ordered, empty house. There were fresh flowers in all the vases and milk in the refrigerator, but the first thing Jess noticed about the house was the single brass plate on the front door. He discovered later that after Gordon Cameron had died, the townspeople had formed a committee to remove the brass plate that had had two names lettered on it and to replace it with the one that now read,
Jesse M. Cameron, M.D.
In the fashion of northern New England in general and Cooper Station in particular, neither Jess nor anyone else ever mentioned what had been done. But Jess knew that even without his father, the town still wanted him for its doctor, and the town knew that Jess would stay.

He started right in on his father's old schedule the day after he was discharged from the army. He spent his mornings at the Cooper Station hospital and he had office hours between two and four every afternoon and from seven to nine o'clock every evening. By the time Jess had been home less than six months, it was as if he had never been away at all and the thought that he might ever leave Cooper Station was as ridiculous as the idea that someone might try to transplant the giant oaks that had been on his front lawn for over a hundred years. Jess worked hard and well and as the years passed he reread many times the letter that his father had written and left for him only a few weeks before he died.

“This is my town and they are my people,” Gordon Cameron had written. “Please be good to them, Jess. Everything that has been said of them is true, in part. They are sometimes narrow, vicious, cruel and very small-town indeed, but they are also loyal and once in a great while they will surprise you with their greatness and their nobility. No matter how you find them, remember that most of them have belonged to me and I to them and that from birth your life has been interwoven with their lives. I know that you won't come back to us the same as you were when you left. War changes ideals and values but if I'm sure of anything, I'm sure that you will be able to find peace here and I know that you'll do a good job. The house is yours, of course. Jess, fill it for me with the laughter of my grandchildren.”

Dr. Jess Cameron looked through the patch of sunlight that came through his window. He looked out across the wide, elm-shaded lawn that was his to the street beyond. The street, too, was his.

My town, my people, my ass, he said angrily, silent. Then aloud he called, “Marie!”

She opened his office door quietly. “Yes, Doc?”

“Pack a couple of bags, will you please? I'm going down to the city for a few days.”

He got into his car and headed for the highway that would take him, eventually, to the city of New York. As he passed the town line he glanced at the sign there that read, You ARE NOW LEAVING COOPER STATION. PLEASE COME AGAIN, and he almost snorted aloud.

The sign was another Cooper Station enigma. There might be no words of welcome at the entrances of the town but there were cordial words of farewell.

It's as if they were implying that it's all right to say goodbye nicely as long as you've managed to wangle your way into town in the first place, thought Jess sourly.

He wondered what his father would have said about Chris and Lisa Pappas and whether or not Gordon would still have claimed to find the qualities of greatness and nobility which he had seen in his town. Would Gordon, like the great majority of Cooper Station, have been glad to be rid of the Pappases so that neither anyone nor anything any longer marred the calm surface of the town? Jess was not sure, for while Gordon had been a champion of right over wrong, he had also been a pacifist and he had loved Cooper Station second only to his wife and his son. And what would Gordon Cameron have thought of Lisa Pappas and Anthony Cooper?

“Infidelity,” Jess remembered his father saying, “makes for nothing but guilt and unhappiness and anyone who goes in for it is a fool.”

But what of loneliness? wondered Jess as he drove toward New York. Lisa thought she was in love with Chris because she was lonely. She got pregnant by him because she was lonely. And she was unfaithful to him because she was lonely. Jess remembered his father and his house the way they had been after Amy Cameron died, and he was sure that Gordon would have understood. Just as he had always understood about Marie Fennell and the way he would have understood about Philip Hastings. He would, perhaps, even have understood his son who rushed through the night toward the anonymous city, running from the fact that all his years of caution had failed to protect him from loneliness, because Jess had been in love with Margery Cooper from the first day that Nathaniel had brought her home. And, Cooper Station being what it was, there was nothing for a man like Jess Cameron to do but to run away and try to forget for a little while that he had not built his defenses strong enough and that he was as vulnerable as anyone else after all.

Then it was autumn. Not obviously, colorfully autumn, but autumn with just a little edge to the air in the morning and a sudden relief from humidity so that if you had been born in northern New England you knew, without actually seeing a change, that summer had passed. Autumn had come and Lisa and Chris were gone from Cooper Station and practically everybody said that it was just as if they had never come to town in the first place. There had been a little trouble and a few arguments over the Pappases but now they were gone and everything was just as it had always been. If people who had been friends for years had turned on each other over the question of Christopher Pappas, they mended their differences and there was nothing in the fabric of friendship to show that there had ever been a tear in it in the first place.

There was a new teacher at the high school by the name of Thomas Porterfield. Mr. Porterfield was married to a slightly bucktoothed woman who had been a teacher herself before her marriage and who, as Doris Delaney Palmer put it, certainly understood all the problems connected with teaching and living in a town like Cooper Station. The Porterfields were the parents of two children aged twelve and fifteen who had inherited their father's quiet ways and their mother's teeth.

“A nice family,” said most of Cooper Station.

“There's nothing wild and irresponsible about Mr. Porterfield,” said Doris Palmer. “He taught at the same school sixteen years before coming here and the only reason he wanted this job was to get his family out of the city.”

“They're a nice, quiet family,” said Callie Webster and rented a small house she owned down by the river to the Porterfields.

It was hard to imagine that Chris and Lisa had ever lived in Cooper Station at all. For a little while Christopher Pappas had been like a pebble tossed into the quiet waters of Cooper Station but eventually the pebble ripples had reached the outer edges of town and had disappeared from sight.

In the first days after Chris and Lisa had left Cooper Station, a little smile had hovered on Doris Delaney Palmer's face whenever she passed Anthony on the street and there had been a wise, all-knowing look in her eyes, and she had stopped him several times to impart news of the activities of the Board of Guardians to him.

“What the hell do I care whom you've hired to replace Pappas?” he had demanded.

And Doris Delaney Palmer smiled her little smile and said, “Do forgive me, Anthony, but I
did
think it mattered to you about who was teaching at our schools.”

That was something else that annoyed Anthony. The way she had started calling him Anthony right after the Pappases had left town. It had always been Mr. Cooper before but suddenly he had become Anthony, her dear friend.

Fuck you, dear Mrs. Palmer, thought Anthony whenever she spoke to him. But he was invariably courteous to her out loud, and what puzzled him was that he did not want to be. He wanted to tell her to go straight to hell and to cut her dead on the street, but after the first time she had called him Anthony and said that she thought the teaching staff at the high school did matter to him, he had found himself tolerating her, even being nice to her, and every time he was more and more annoyed with himself.

Goddamned old bitch, he thought viciously whenever he had to speak to her.

“Tell me, Anthony,” she had asked him chummily, “what do you think of David Strong?”

“I don't know as I've ever given David Strong any thought at all,” Anthony had replied.

“Well, what I mean is, don't you think there's something a little queer about him?”

“Dear Mrs. Palmer,” said Anthony. “I've never had the time to concern myself with other people's sex lives.”

Doris's little smile was already on her mouth.

“No,” she said, “I don't imagine you have.”

Anthony made himself chuckle. “You are the discerning one, aren't you?” he asked, sickened with his own coy words.

“Not really,” said Doris Palmer. “Adam says that I'm hopelessly naïve.”

About as naïve as a two-bit whore on a fifty dollar day, thought Anthony savagely, and smiled at Doris.

In his moments of honesty, Anthony admitted to himself that the only reason he tolerated Doris Delaney Palmer at all was to keep her from talking. He knew women of her type. All it would take would be a few innocent-sounding dropped hints and all of Cooper Station would be gossiping about Anthony. He could hear her now.

“We were lucky to get the money to pay off Christopher Pappas,” she would say. “Thank heavens for the few generous public spirited citizens we have left in Cooper Station.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she would say with that infuriating little smile of hers, “but I can't tell you who it was. I gave my word.”

“Well, as you can imagine, it was someone with means,” she would say. “Three thousand dollars isn't pin money to most people, you know.”

Then Cooper Station would begin to wonder. It hadn't been Nathaniel Cooper, certainly, for he had fought to keep Pappas. Jim Sheppard didn't have that kind of money and if Doris Delaney Palmer did, she wasn't about to part with a nickel of it. It was common knowledge in town that Doris Palmer would argue over the price of a pound of hamburger. Well, who did have three thousand dollars to throwaway? Anthony Cooper? But why would Anthony Cooper want to get rid of the Pappases? He'd been having himself a time all summer with Lisa Pappas. Everybody knew it. Why pay to get rid of a good thing? Unless there was trouble. And if there was trouble, who was to make it? Christopher Pappas? Never. He was the prototype of all cuckolded husbands. The last to find out, if he ever found out at all. Then what kind of trouble? Trouble with a woman in Cooper Station meant one of three things: the husband had discovered his wife's infidelity, the wife had run off with her lover and abandoned her children or the woman was pregnant by the lover. And since it was obvious that neither of the first two was the truth, then it would follow that Lisa Pappas was pregnant with Anthony's child.

No, thought Anthony wearily, he'd keep on being polite to that bitch Doris Palmer. Just supposing the doctor was wrong and he wasn't going to die, he might want to settle down permanently in Cooper Station, and if and when he did, he wanted to do it in comfort and dignity, as the last of the Coopers, the heir to a decent name and a respectable fortune. He definitely did not want to become a legend.

“Anthony Cooper? Huh. Respectable enough now in his old age, but I remember when he was younger.”

Anthony could hear the voices of the town and he kept right on putting up with Doris Palmer even while he laughed at himself and called himself the most improbable victim of blackmail on Earth.

The thing that Anthony would never have admitted out loud, either in Cooper Station or with his circle of New York friends, was that he enjoyed being a Cooper of Cooper Station. Out loud, he scoffed often and openly.

“The Coopers?” he would say to whatever pretty woman he happened to be with. “Don't be impressed, my dear. A decadent lot, we are. My Uncle Nathaniel and my Aunt Margery stay up there in that big house of theirs, locked away from the world and each other by their idiot child, and here I sit, drinking my life away and writing only to keep myself in liquor. Oh yes, I have to work for a living, you know. Textiles are dead in northern New England. Everything's moved down South except the Cooper Mills and they're losing money hand over fist.”

He never mentioned that although the Cooper mills were not what they had once been, the money that had been accumulated by his father and grandfather and wisely invested was more than enough to keep any future Coopers for all time and keep them very well.

“No,” Anthony often said, “I'm the last of them and it's a good thing, too.”

But Anthony enjoyed being a Cooper. He enjoyed being the young heir, the one Cooper who had gone away and made something of himself apart from the mills and he enjoyed it when interviewers and book reviewers mentioned that he was of an old New England family, a respected, old, wealthy family, a family with roots and traditions and a name to be upheld.

Anthony didn't want Cooper Station saying,. “The last of the Coopers? Don't be funny. Down country somewhere there's a Greek schoolteacher's wife with a child by Anthony Cooper. That's where the last of the Coopers is. Not here.”

Then a week after Lisa had gone, Anthony met Polly Sheppard on Benjamin Street.

“Hello, Anthony,” she called from across the street in that high, carrying voice of hers. She crossed over to meet him, the same Polly who had been so cool toward him when Lisa had still been around.

“How are you, Anthony?” she asked, all smiles.

“I'm fine, Polly,” he replied suspiciously. Ever since his first encounter with Doris Delaney Palmer after the Pappas incident, he had been suspicious of nearly everyone he met.

“Jim and I were talking about you just last night,” said Polly.

I'll bet you were, thought Anthony bitterly.

“We were wondering if you'd like to come to dinner one evening next week,” said Polly. “We're both terribly interested in writing, you know.”

“Is that so?” said Anthony. God, how he hated people like her.

“Yes. When I was in college, I wrote a novel,” said Polly and laughed out loud at herself. “I never did anything with it, though.”

Oh, Christ, thought Anthony. The next thing I know she'll ask me to look it over for her and tell her what I really think. And to forestall her he asked her the question he'd really wanted to ask in the first place.

“Have you heard from Lisa?”

“As a matter of fact, I had a letter from her just the other day,” said Polly.

Anthony waited, but she did not offer to tell him what Lisa had said.

“Poor little thing,” said Polly. “It couldn't have been easy for her.”

“What does that mean?” asked Anthony, annoyed almost beyond endurance with Polly's phony expression of sympathy.

“Well, the moving and all. Getting settled in a new place and Chris starting a new job and putting the children in school and everything. And of course, feeling the way she does must have made it all the harder.”

“What do you mean, feeling the way she does?” asked Anthony and for the first time in his adult life, he felt a twinge of concern for someone else.

“Why, she's sick for hours every single morning,” said Polly. “It's been like that with every single baby she's carried. She gets morning sickness and there isn't a thing Jess could do.”

“Why not?” demanded Anthony and felt a quick rage toward the doctor. “They've got cures for practically everything else.”

“I know,” said Polly. “And they've got some kind of drug for that, too, but it just doesn't take on Lisa.”

And then, very slyly Anthony thought, Polly let him have it.

“You didn't seem surprised when I mentioned Lisa being pregnant,” she said. “I didn't think she'd told anyone but me. Even Chris doesn't know, or at least he didn't when they left here.”

Anthony could think of nothing to say, and Polly went on.

“Will you come for dinner next Tuesday?” she asked. “I'd love to have you look at my novel. For kicks, I mean. You'll probably get a big laugh out of my scribbling.”

“Yes,” said Anthony, helplessly, “I'll come.”

It was deadly. Jim Sheppard was a typical suburbanite.

“Have one of these!” he said, extending a glass toward Anthony. “Man, this'll put hair on your chest.”

Anthony sipped his Martini.

“Ten to one,” said Jim proudly.

They had roast beef for dinner and Anthony wondered if anyone in Cooper Station ever served anything to guests except roast beef, potatoes and green peas. The wine was a rose that almost made him gag and when it was over Polly dragged out her bulky novel as if serving him up some rare dessert.

“I'll take it along home with me,” said Anthony. “I'm too full of food to start in on it now.”

Polly giggled. “I suppose you'll laugh your head off,” she said. “I never showed it to anyone but Lisa, and Jim, of course, before we were married. Lisa liked it and said I ought to get it published, but I never bothered to try.”

Again, Anthony felt the unfamiliar twinge.

What the hell is this? he thought.

But he didn't have a ready answer. He only knew that when he had thought of Lisa reading Polly's novel and trying to make deep remarks about it, he had felt a stab of pain. In a quick second he had seen her bent over the manuscript, her long hair falling across her face the way it did when she was preoccupied. And he remembered the way she nibbled at the thumbnail when she was reading.

I'll have to read this in a hurry, he thought, and then we'll have a good laugh over it.

And then the ache hurt him again and he thought, What am I thinking? Lisa and I are never going to laugh together about anything again.

“Of course, it isn't as if I took Lisa's comments seriously,” Polly was saying, as if nothing could possibly have passed through Anthony's mind since she had last spoken. “Lisa was a sweet enough girl, but she was always reading beyond her depth.”

Anthony felt his jaw clench as if the simple action would lock out memory and pain. He could remember Lisa with her forehead wrinkled a little, her fingers twisting a bit of her long hair.

“I don't know, Anthony,” confessed Lisa. “Dostoevsky is supposed to be a great writer and all that, so I guess there must be something wrong with me. He just doesn't reach me.”

Anthony laughed. “What do you mean, he doesn't reach you?”

“Well, I just can't believe that life is all that sad and full of his kind of people. All grubby and futile and all that. Maybe all those Russians were like that. I tried to read Tolstoy once, and he was all sad and futile, too.”