World's End (68 page)

It was while he was crawling, his hands and knees gone dead as his feet, that he heard the first tentative whimper. He paused. His
mind was fuzzy and he was tired. He'd forgotten where he was, what he'd done, where he was going, why he'd come. And then there it was again. The whimper rose to a sob, a cry, a plaint of protest and lament. And finally, shattering and disconsolate, beyond hope or redemption, it rose to a wail.

There was no reason to have come in at all, really. Orders were traditionally slow this time of year, and even if they weren't, even if another world war broke out and they had to cook aluminum and cast aximaxes around the clock, they wouldn't have needed him anyway—except maybe to sign the paychecks every other week. He was superfluous, and no one knew it better than he. Olaffson, the production manager, could have handled ten times the volume without even switching his brain on, and the kid they'd found to replace Walter in sales and advertising was a natural. Or so they told him. Actually, he hadn't even met the kid yet.

But Depeyster liked the office. He liked to stretch out for a nap on the leather couch in the corner or cogitate over a paperback thriller in the rich spill of light from the brass desk lamp with the green glass shade. He liked the smell of the desk, liked the sound of the electric pencil sharpener and the way the big walnut chair tilted with the small of his back and glided across the carpet on its smooth silent casters. In the afternoons, he liked taking a two-hour lunch or slipping off to play a round of golf with LeClerc Outhouse—or, when the weather permitted, sailing up to Cold Spring for a Beefeater's martini, straight up, at Gus' Antique Bar. Best of all, though, he liked to get out of the house, liked to feel productive, useful, liked to feel he'd put in his day like anybody else.

Now, idly fanning the pages of a magazine and sitting over a cup of stone-cold coffee, he lifted his gaze to the window and the parking lot beyond, and saw that it was raining. Again. It seemed as if it had
rained every day now since that freak snowstorm two weeks back. The plow had left a snowbank five feet high at the far end of the lot, and now there was nothing left of it but a broken ridge of dirty ice. All at once he had a terrible premonition: the rain would turn to sleet, the roads would ice up like a bobsled run and he'd be stuck here, away from home, and there'd be no way to get Joanna to the hospital.

He jerked open the drawer and fumbled with the phone book. “Weather service,” he muttered to himself, “weather service, weather service,” and he paged through the book and muttered until he gave it up and had Miss Egthuysen dial for him. Bland and indifferent, the recorded voice came over the wire with a crackle of static: “Rain ending late this afternoon, temperatures in the mid to high thirties, slight chance of overnight freezing in outlying areas.”

In the next moment he was pacing around the desk, half-frantic with worry, fighting the temptation to call home again. He'd called not five minutes before and Lula, in her laconic way, had done her best to reassure him. Everything was fine, she told him. Joanna was resting. She didn't think she should be disturbed.

“Her water hasn't broken yet, has it?” he asked, just to hear his own voice.

“Nope.”

There was a silence over the line. He was waiting for details, an update on Joanna's condition, today was the day, didn't she know that for christ's sake? Didn't she know that Dr. Brillinger had called it, right down to the very day—to
this
very day? The only reason he'd come into the office in the first place was because Joanna said he was making her nervous poking his head in the door every other minute. Pale to the roots of her hair, she'd squeezed his hand and asked him if he wouldn't feel better at the office, the diner, a movie—anything to make the time pass for him. Just leave a number, that's all. She'd call him. Not to worry, she'd call.

“Nope,” Lula had repeated, and he began to feel foolish.

“You'll call me,” he said. “The minute anything happens, right?”

Lula's voice was deep and rich and slow. “Uh huh, Misser Van Wart, soon's anything happen.”

“I'm at the office,” he said.

“Um-hm.”

“Okay, then,” he said. And then, for lack of anything better to do with it, he'd dropped the receiver back in its cradle.

No, he couldn't call again. Not already. He'd wait half an hour—or no, fifteen minutes. God, he was jittery. He looked out at the rain again, trying to mesmerize himself, clear his brain, but all he could think of was ice. His hands were trembling as he reached into his breast pocket for the envelope of cellar dust, dipped a wet finger in it and rubbed the fine ancient dirt over his front teeth and gums as if it were a drug. He prodded it with the tip of his tongue, rolled it luxuriously against his palate, worked it over his molars and ground it between his teeth. He closed his eyes and tasted his boyhood, tasted his father, his mother, tasted security. He was a boy, hidden in the cool, forgiving depths of the cellar, and the cellar was the soul of him, avatar of Van Warts past and Van Warts to come, and he felt its peace wash over him till he forgot the world existed beyond it.

And then the phone rang. And he jumped for it.

“Yes?” he gasped. “Yes?”

Miss Egthuysen's airy voice came back at him. “Marguerite Mott on line two.”

Marguerite Mott. It took him a moment. The tang of the cellar dust began to fade and the familiar contours of his office came back to him. Yes. All right. He would talk to her. He punched the button.

“Dipe?” Her voice was a distant crowing.

“Yes? Marguerite?”

“We've got it.”

He was at a loss. Got what? Had Joanna delivered already? He had a sudden vision of Marguerite, in her champagne cocktail dress and white pumps, holding the baby by its feet as if it were something she'd pounced on in the bushes. “Huh?” he said.

“The property,” she cried. “Peletiah's place.”

All at once it began to take hold of him, flowering in his brain like a whole long double row of Helen Traubels opening their sweet compacted buds in a single unstoppable moment. The property. The Crane property. Desecrated by Communists and fellow travelers, lost to the Van Warts nearly his whole life—the fifty wild undeveloped and untrammeled wooded acres that were his link to the glorious past and the very cornerstone and foundation of the triumphant future.
And she was telling him that now, at long last, it was his. “How much?” he asked.

Marguerite gave a little laugh. “You won't believe it.”

He waited, the smile growing on his face. “Try me.”

“Sixty-two and a half.”

“Sixty—?” he repeated.

“Dipe!” she crowed. “That's twelve-fifty an acre! Twelve-fifty!”

He was stunned. He was speechless. Twelve-fifty an acre. It was half what he'd offered the old long-nosed son of a bitch—twenty-two fifty less than what he'd been asking. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it. Peletiah's grave isn't even cold yet and already the kid needs money—what's he going to do, buy a truckload of pot or something?”

“It's not pot, Dipe”—she cleared her throat—“but the catch is he's going to need the money right away.”

“No problem.” Christ, he practically had the ten percent down in his pocket, and Charlie Strang down at County Trust would write him a note for six times sixty thousand. Without even blinking. “I knew it,” he repeated, crowing himself now. “So what was it? Gambling? Women? What the hell does that little shit need with sixty thousand?”

Marguerite paused for dramatic effect, then lowered her voice. “Listen, he didn't want to tell me—not at first. But you know how I am, right?”

He knew. She'd probably taken out her false teeth and gummed him into submission.

“It was that boat. The ecology thing? You know, the one that had that accident in the paper two weeks ago or so?”

“The
Arcadia.”

“Yeah. Well listen, I mean I don't know much about it, but apparently it was pretty well beat up—Sissy Sturdivant says there was this hole you could drive a Volkswagen through in the bottom of it and god only knows how much water damage. …”

The light of perfect understanding settled on him and Depeyster found himself grinning. He anticipated her: “So he's going to put up his own money for repairs, right?”

“Uh huh. That's what he says.” She paused. “He's a weird kid, you know—and I don't just mean the way he dresses. It's almost as if there's something not right with him, know what I mean?”

Hallelujah and amen. There was something not right with his daughter too—with half the kids in the country—and he could have curled the ends of her wig with what he knew about it, but he didn't answer. He was savoring the rich irony of the whole thing—his money going to repair the
Arcadia
—and then, in the next instant, he was thinking about Walter, about the funeral and the cold driving rain that fell without remit as they lowered him into the ground. Tom Crane was there, looking half-drowned, and a tall, flat-chested blonde with a ski-slope nose who must have been Walter's wife. Mardi showed up too, though she wouldn't deign to come with her father—or be seen with him either. She stood off on the far side of the group gathered around the open grave, huddled under a torn beach umbrella with a ragtag crew of hippies—the spic she ran around with and a nigger kid dressed up like the Fool in
King Lear.
There was no minister, no service. Hesh Sollovay read something—some atheistic hogwash that gave everybody about as much comfort as the rain did—and that was that. No ashes to ashes, no dust to dust. Just dump the poor kid in the ground and forget it.

They said he'd been dead twelve hours or more by the time they found him. It was late in the afternoon, when the storm was already on its way out to sea and everybody was busy digging out. Eighteen inches had fallen, and it had drifted to three and four times that. No one thought a thing of the buried car, and if it hadn't been for a couple of sixth-graders building a snow fort, they might not have found him at all—at least until the rain cut the drifts down. The plant was closed, the schools were closed, everything was closed, and all anybody could talk about that afternoon was the
Arcadia
gone aground at Gees Point and how the police were looking into reports of sabotage. Depeyster and LeClerc and one or two of the others were actually celebrating the sad and untimely demise of that noble craft with a good fire and a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck when the call came about Walter. No one made the connection. Not at first. But Depeyster knew what had happened, knew just as certainly as if he'd been there himself. Walter had done it, done it for him.

Depeyster had wanted to cry. Standing there in the hallway, the cold black receiver in his hand, LeClerc and the others gaping at him from the parlor, he felt stricken. Walter had sacrificed himself. For
him. For America. To strike a blow at the dirty little kikes and atheists who'd poisoned his childhood and somehow got a stranglehold on the whole great suffering country. It was a tragedy. It really was. It was Sophocles. It was Shakespeare. And the kid was, was—he was a hero, that's what he was. A patriot. He'd wanted to cry, he really had, thinking of the waste, thinking of Walter's sad and doomed life and the sad doomed life of his father before him, and he felt something high in his throat that might have been the beginning of it and something in his chest too. But he wasn't in the habit of crying. Hadn't cried probably since he was a child. The moment passed.

“Dipe?” Marguerite was still on the line.

“Hm?”

“You there?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I went blank there for a minute.”

“I was saying, do you want me to go ahead with it?”

Of course he wanted her to go ahead with it. He wanted it more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life. Except for a son. His son. Due today. “Yeah, sure,” he said, glancing at his watch. Fifteen minutes. Maybe Joanna had been trying to get through, maybe he'd missed her, maybe—“Listen, Marguerite, you take care of it. Got to go. 'Bye.”

And then he was dialing home.

The rain had stopped. The roads were clear. Depeyster Van Wart, twelfth heir to Van Wart Manor and the imminent acquirer of fifty pristine ancestral acres marred only by a single flimsy ramshackle structure the wind might have blown down on a good day, paced the worn gray carpet of the Peterskill Community Hospital's maternity ward. Joanna was somewhere inside, beyond the big double swinging doors, strapped down and sedated. There was a problem with the delivery, that much he knew, that much Flo Dietz—Nurse Dietz—had told him as she flew through the door on one of her hundred errands to god knew where. The baby—his baby, his son—was in the wrong position. His head wasn't where it was supposed to be and they couldn't seem to turn him around. They were going to have to do a C-section.

Depeyster sat. He stood. He looked out the window. He rubbed
dirt on his gums. Every time the double doors swung open he looked up. He saw corridors, gurneys, nurses in scrub suits and masks, and he heard sobs and shrieks that would have made a torturer wince. There was no sign of Joanna. Or of Dr. Brillinger. He tried to occupy his mind with other things, tried to think about the property and the satisfaction he'd have in leveling that tumbledown shack and how he'd ride with his son in the first light of morning, before breakfast, when the world was still and their breath hung on the air, but it didn't work. The intercom would crackle, the doors would fly open, and he was undeniably, interminably and irrevocably there, in the hospital, watching the second hand trace its way around the great ugly institutional clock and staring at the pale green walls as if at the interior of a prison cell. He ducked his head. He felt as if he were going to throw up.