Young Mr. Keefe (15 page)

“Then—” He put his hand on her arm.

“Then give me time!” she sobbed. “Give me time to forget things, and help me. Be considerate and patient, and help me!”

“I try,” he said gently. “But there's some sort of curtain between us now. Something's stopping us—”

She bowed her head further, letting her forehead slide down along the cool glass. “Please … please don't talk to me any more. Please just leave me alone.”

He went back into the kitchen and poured himself another drink. It was like all their quarrels—aimless, oblique, beginning nowhere, ending nowhere.

Later, she came into the kitchen in her robe. “Do you mind if I drive home to-morrow for the day?” she asked him. “I'll drive you to work. Then go on in the car.”

It was a short drive to Helen's home, forty miles down the valley. “All right,” he said. With her short brown hair loose, in her light cotton robe, her tanned face and small body had a frail, sculptured look. She stood there, swaying a little—the way a few drinks always made her do—and smiled at him with a strange apologetic smile. “Are you sure you don't mind?”

“No. Why do you want to go?”

She looked away from him. “I want to think. I want to go home and think things out.”

“Sure.”

He took a cigarette from his pack and reached for the kitchen lighter.

“Be careful of that lighter,” she said. “It throws out sparks.”

“I know.”

He smoked his cigarette, then put it out and followed her to bed. After he had switched out the light, he pulled the pink sheet tight around his throat. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

He huddled there, afraid to move, afraid that moving the slightest inch would start the shivering, the trembling he felt inside him. When, much later, he did move, the trembling started, but by that time Helen was asleep.

The next morning, she had driven to Rio Linda, but that evening she did not come back. Around seven, the telephone rang. “Jimmy?” she said. “I'm still here. Daddy's sick. We're a little worried. Would you mind if I spent the night?”

“No,” he said, “that's all right.”

He had suspected that she was not telling the truth, but the next day, at his office, she had telephoned him again. “Daddy's much worse … he's had an internal hæmorrhage. The doctor's terribly worried. Jimmy—I'm afraid he's going to die!”

“Would you like me to come down?” he asked.

“Could you? Could you come down to-night on the bus?”

“All right.”

That night when he arrived at the Warrens' house in Rio Linda, Helen met him at the door. “He's upstairs,” she said. “Go up and see him.”

Mr. Warren lay in bed in the half-darkened room. He was not a large man, but in the big bed he seemed even smaller, shrunken. In sleep, his face was fallen and old. Mrs. Warren sat beside him with a pile of yellow knitting in her lap. “Hello, Jimmy,” she whispered. She reached up and brushed his cheek with her lips. “He's still asleep … he had a pill.”

“What is it?” he asked her.

“It's a duodenal ulcer. Dr. Manger says he must have been suffering from it for years. They're afraid to operate—his heart. Poor Walker! He never mentioned anything to me.”

Mr. Warren opened his eyes once, closed them, then opened them again.

Jimmy took his heavy, veined hand. “Hello, sir,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Me?” Mr. Warren said. “I'm feeling fine, just fine. Did somebody tell you I wasn't? It's just these women—Helen and her mother—trying to make an invalid out of me.”

“Don't let 'em do it, sir.” Jimmy smiled.

“Yes,” Mr. Warren said. “It's tough to live in a houseful of women. Was that the way your house was, Jim?”

“Well, there was my dad, sir—”

“Oh, yes. Do I sound fuzzy? I'm running a little temperature. Your dad's a fine fellow, Jimmy, a smart man—”

“Thank you, sir.”

Mr. Warren closed his eyes. “Arlene!” he said. “Arlene! Are the children in?”

Mrs. Warren rose and stood beside him. “Yes, Walker, everything's fine.”

“It's going to rain—”

“There, there, you're just having a dream.”

Mr. Warren opened his eyes once more and looked at Jimmy. “I'll be up and around to-morrow, wait and see,” he said. “Just running a temperature, that's all.”

Mrs. Warren placed her hand on his forehead. “Hush, Walker,” she said. “You need rest … lots of rest. Go back to sleep.”

When Jimmy got downstairs, he found Helen curled on the sofa, weeping. She was close to hysteria. “He's going to die!” she sobbed. “He's going to die! I know he's going to die!”

“Don't talk like that,” he said gently. “He's not going to die. He said he feels fine now …”

“Don't you know him? He says he feels fine—but he's in terrible pain. Oh, oh, oh! He's going to die! Daddy's going to die!”

“Please, Helen,” he said. “You mustn't think that—”

She turned to him angrily. Her face was white and streaked with tears. “
He is going to die!
” she screamed. “Can't you understand that? Don't you have any feeling? Don't you even care?”

Later, he had gone for a walk. He walked aimlessly, up and down the lighted streets of Rio Linda. Finally, he went into a bar and had a drink. When he got back to the house and opened the door, Helen stood at the head of the stairs. Her face was expressionless as she started down. “Well,” she said, “he's dead.”

He couldn't believe her. “That's not true—”

She ran down the stairs and across the hall to where he stood and slapped him. “What do you mean, it's not true?” she cried. “Of course it's true! He's dead! And where were you? Getting drunk!”

Mrs. Warren hurried down the stairs after her. Helen turned to her mother. “He says I'm lying! He says Daddy isn't dead!” She turned away from him and ran into the living-room.

“What?” Mrs. Warren said. “What do you mean, you dreadful, dreadful boy?” Her pale eyes blazed at him. “I suppose, in your house, death is nothing! Well, in our house, it's not like that! My husband is dead. Now get out of my house! Go back where you came from! Get out of my house, you drunken wastrel!”

The little doctor came running down the stairs, carrying his bag. “Arlene,” he said. “Now, Arlene! Be brave. He's out of his pain now, Arlene.” He put his arm around Mrs. Warren's shaking shoulders and led her through the house, out into the garden.

Jimmy stayed in Rio Linda for the funeral. Afterwards, he and Helen drove back to Sacramento. They drove in silence.

Once he turned to her and said, “Would you like to take a trip? Go away somewhere for a few days?”

“To the Caribbean? Take another honeymoon?” she asked bitterly. “No, thank you.”

It was about a week after the funeral. Jimmy went out alone to a small neighbourhood bar a few blocks from the apartment, and had several drinks in rapid succession. Had he known then? Had he planned it that way, engineered the end himself? Perhaps. He rolled the bartender for another drink, won, and drank it. He remembered looking up at the Pepsi-Cola girl on the poster behind the bar—“Refreshing, but not filling,” she said. He lifted his glass and drank to her. Someone, with a soft, stubby pencil, had indicated more explicit features on her body. “Here's to the girl who refreshes without filling,” Jimmy said.

The bartender winked. “I could sure fill her up,” he said.

Jimmy picked up the dice, dropped them in the can, and shook it. “Call it,” he said.

“Odd.”

“Even.” The dice spun across the bar again. “Looks like this is my lucky night,” Jimmy said.

When he got back to the apartment, Helen was standing in the bathroom brushing her hair. (Why was it, in every picture of her, she was brushing her hair—her short brown hair standing out about her head, snapping with electricity under the brush, lifting to meet the brush like a dark cloud of smoke?) She was wearing a full skirt and a light peasant blouse.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello.”

He went to her and put his arm around her waist. “Here's to the girl who refreshes without filling—but the trouble is she's never willing,” he said.

She stiffened. “Please let go,” she said.

“Miss Pepsi-Cola—” He tried to kiss her.

“Let go!”

“Helen, please …”

She looked up at him. “Are you going to rape me?”

“Helen, for Christ's sake—”

“Are you? Just like him?”

“For God's sake, will you stop comparing me to him! I'm your husband!”

She tried to pull away. “No! You are him!”

“Shut up,” he said. “Shut up, damn you!”

“Yes!” Her eyes were filled with terror. “Oh, help!” she cried. “Help!”

“Listen to me!”

She began pounding his chest with her clenched fists. “Let me go!” she screamed. “Hurting—oh, help!”

His arm slid up her back, and, as she twisted, struggling to get away from him, his fingers caught in the double strand of pearls at her throat. The beads snapped, fell, scattered and rolled across the tile.

His arms went limp. She turned and ran out, through the living-room and out the door. In the mirror was only his own face.

He remembered lying in bed in the darkened apartment, waiting for her. It was after midnight. Finally, he heard the key. The door opened and he saw her, framed in the light, her wide skirt swirling around her. Then the door closed. Saying nothing, she stepped towards him, and when she reached the bed, she looked at him, and, gradually, in the darkness, he made out the shape of her head, though her face was obscured.

“Are you awake?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I'm going home to-morrow.”

“For good?”

“Yes.”

Some sort of searchlight turned on his brain for a moment then, came out of a cloud, swirled in the protoplasm, and dissolved in darkness. “For a while,” he said, trying to make his voice steady, “I thought you were going to stay for ever. Is the honeymoon over?”

“Yes.”

She sat in one of the chairs and lighted a cigarette. Her hand, holding the match, trembled. “I've talked to Mother on the phone,” she said. “We had a long talk. About everything. She wants me to come home.”

“All right.”

They sat in silence, on opposite sides of the room, Helen smoking, he sitting cross-legged on the bed, watching her. Intermittently, as she drew on her cigarette, her small, sculptured face was lighted with a yellow glow. Somewhere in the night then, he remembered, there had been a scream of tyres and brakes on the street outside, and a wild peal of laughter from a car, then the loud roar of the hot-rod engine. In the beat, the pause, that followed, he thought: I must think only of thunder, only of nothing. Or home. I could think of home.

Blazer stood over him in his dripping trunks and shook his wet hair. “Are you drunk, Keefe-o?” he asked.

“Yes,” Jimmy said. “I'm afraid so.”

Claire said, “Oh, Jimmy! What are we going to do? We've got to get back.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“I know how to sober him up,” Blazer said.

“How?”

“Like this.”

Blazer lifted his gun out of his knapsack. “This revolver is one of the best little weapons made,” he said. He aimed it across the water. “Now listen to this!” He pulled the trigger.

Distractedly, in the disorder of echoing and re-echoing that occurred, Jimmy wondered if they had all been killed. For in the hollow of the mountains, the report refused to die.

They stood there—for with the sudden sound he had jumped to his feet—the three of them, like statues, marooned, fogged in by noise. The silence, shattered, lay about them like pieces of broken crockery. A ripple developed across the lake, expanded, sank, and disappeared. Another echo came, pounded, and came again. In Jimmy's head, everything seemed to rock. The trees seemed to shake their branches, their Christmas ornaments tossed off.

Claire's eyes were filled with tears. “Oh, Blazer!” she cried. “Why did you have to do that?
Why did you?
”

Jimmy tried to say something. “Well,” he said finally, “that does it.”

He knelt and was sick.

PART TWO

8

The apartment on Russian Hill had a spectacular view. It was on the top floor, and, on three sides, it was solid glass from floor to ceiling. To the east, across roof-tops, was the Bay Bridge, stretching towards the white-dotted hills of Berkeley and Oakland. To the north, from the living-room, was the bay—the Marina, Alcatraz, and Tiburon in one direction, Mount Tamalpais and the Golden Gate in the other. To the west were more roof-tops, fringed by the trees of the Presidio. Everyone said that Claire and Blazer had been lucky to find it.

Actually, they had not found it. Junius Denison, Claire's father, had found the apartment for them, through a friend, Winston Applegate, an officer in the Crocker Bank. The apartment, and the building it belonged to, had been owned by Mr. Applegate's mother. After the senior Mrs. Applegate died, her son took over the building and managed it as part of her estate.

Originally, Mr. Applegate had planned to have his mother's furniture stored, but, under Mr. Denison's persuasion, he had agreed to leave it for Claire and Blazer to use. The furniture had been collected by Mrs. Applegate on a series of trips to the Orient; it was low, lacquered, ancient, and serene. Two painted Chinese screens separated the large living-room into two areas, one for sitting and one for dining; in this room, the only Western touch was the concert and grand piano in one corner. The floor was bare, highly polished wood. The bedroom floor was covered with thin sea-grass mats. Before Claire and Blazer moved in, Mr. Applegate took out considerable insurance on the furnishings in the apartment. This had proved wise. Already, at one of Claire's parties, a precious tea chest from an ancient dynasty had been sat upon and destroyed.