Bread Upon the Waters (54 page)

“Mr. Strand,” Rollins said, “I have a letter for you. From Jesus. I went home for the weekend and he asked me to give it to you.”

“How’s he doing?” Strand asked as he put the letter down on the table. “Is he behaving himself?”

“In my family there ain’t no choice. He’s doing fine,” Rollins said. “He’s the new household pet. He’s working in my brother’s garage pumping gas. He got word last week that the trial is set for January seventh, but it doesn’t seem to worry him much. Miss, Mrs. Gianelli, I mean, if there’s anything I can do for you around the school, remember, I’m right here.”

“I’ll remember.” Eleanor had taken off her coat and was looking around the room critically. “It’s not very grand, is it?” she said when Rollins had left.

“It looks better when your mother is here.”

Eleanor laughed and came over and hugged him, this time a real embrace. “You don’t change, do you, Dad? Now,” she said, “what I’d like is a nice, strong cup of tea. Show me where things are in the kitchen and sit down and take it easy. You know”—her tone became serious—“you don’t look as well as you might. You’re not overdoing things, are you?”

“I’m fine,” Strand said curtly. He led her into the kitchen and sat down while she set about making tea. “Now,” he said, “I think you ought to tell me about yourself. I talked to Giuseppe yesterday.”

She sighed and turned around from the stove. “What did he tell you?”

“Just that you had left and he didn’t know where you were and you told him not to expect you back.”

“That’s all he told you?”

“He hung up on me.”

“Well,” Eleanor said, “at least he’s breathing.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that they’ve been threatening his life. Our lives.”

“Good God. Are you serious?”

“
They’re
serious. A week ago they planted a bomb on our porch and blew out all the front windows and the door. We were out at the time. Next time, they’ve told us, we’ll be in when they visit.”

“Who’re
they
?”

Eleanor shrugged. “Pillars of the church. The mayor, the police chief, the mayor’s brother-in-law, who runs a construction company that does work for the town, a couple of lawyers who run the judges…You name them, they’re
they.
Giuseppe came in there and in a couple of months he dug up enough on the whole crowd of them to put them in jail for a century. He got Watergate fever. He sounded as though his so-called investigative reporting was saving the whole nation from an invading army. It was all the usual small-town stuff and it
had
been going on since the Civil War and people lived with it all right and they just got annoyed with us northerners, and Italian northerners to boot, coming in and starting a fuss. But then he got onto some federal cases and the threatening telephone calls in the middle of the night started to come in. I tried to get him to see that pinning a fine on a man who’s being paid twice over for laying a sewer line wasn’t worth getting killed for, but he’s stone-headed stubborn and now after the bombing he’s out for revenge, too. He’s bought a shotgun and he sits in the living room in the dark with it across his lap. And the sad part of it is that he’s not a particularly good newspaperman and the paper probably could be put out better by a parcel of high school kids. As for me, things I had to do for the paper were demeaning, they were so trivial. We made a mistake, I told him, and I didn’t believe in being party to a double suicide because of it. I gave him one day to think it over after we got the last telephone call. I told him I was going whether he was coming with me or not.” She had been speaking flatly, without emotion, but now her face worked and her voice choked a little. “He said he didn’t need the one day. So I left.”

“What a rotten story,” Strand said. He stood up and went over to the stove, where Eleanor was pouring water from the kettle into the teapot, and put his arm around her. “I’m so sorry.”

“Marriages break up every day,” she said. “For worse reasons. Where’s the sugar?”

He took down the sugar and they sat at the kitchen table with their cups in front of them. “Why didn’t you let me know before? Where’ve you been all this time?” he asked.

“I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going back to him before telling everybody the happy news,” Eleanor said. “That took some time. Then I wanted to find a place to live and get a job, so nobody would have to worry about my being a burden on the community up in the frozen North.”

“Have you found a place to live and a job?”

She nodded. “My old firm. I start on January second. And they’ve raised my salary. And my name’s on the door. Maiden name. Eleanor Strand, Assistant Vice President.” She grinned boyishly. “In my case absence made the corporate heart grow fonder.”

They drank their tea in silence.

“Do you think if I called him and spoke to him it would help?”

“You can call him,” Eleanor said, “but it won’t do any good. He won’t come back up here with his tail between his legs and have to confess to his brothers that he’s a failure, that he’s lost their money, and have to beg to be taken back in the family business by them. He’d rather come back in a casket.”

“What are you going to do about him?”

She looked steadily at him. “I’m going to try to forget him. If I can’t, I’ll go back and get blown up with him.” She stood up. “Now,” she said, “I’d like to freshen up a bit. Which is my room?”

“Here, I’ll show you.” They went through the living room and Strand picked up the bag and led her toward the bedrooms. On the way along the hall, they passed the small cubbyhole which was Strand’s bedroom.

“Why can’t I sleep here?” Eleanor said.

“That’s my room.” He opened the door to the master bedroom. “And this is your mother’s. Yours while you’re here.”

Eleanor looked at him. He hoped that the look he saw in her eyes was not pity. “Oh, Dad,” she said, throwing her arms around him and weeping on his shoulder, “isn’t everything
awful
?”

The little spell of tears was quickly over and she said, “Forgive me,” and he left her unpacking her bag. He went into the living room and saw Romero’s letter lying on the table and picked it up. He gazed at it for a moment, sure that whatever was in it would not add joy to his day. He slit the envelope and took out the two pages. It was written on paper that had Rollins Garage, Repairs and Body Work at the top. The handwriting was small and round and neat and easy to read.

Dear Mr. Strand,

This is just to thank you for everything that you and Mr. Hazen tried to do for me. I see now that you were wrong to help me and I was wrong to let you do it. Whatever side you and Mr. Hazen and Mr. Babcock and all the others are on, I’m not on it and never could be. I’d come out a fake gentleman and all my people would see the fake and they wouldn’t come near me for the rest of my life. That isn’t what I want, Mr. Strand. Going to prison, if that’s what I have to do, will fit me better to understand my own people and do something with them and for them than ten years of fancy schools and snooty universities could do. I have to educate myself, my own way. I’ll read the books I want and draw my own conclusions and they won’t be the conclusions I’d come away with from Yale or Harvard or anyplace like that. The libraries are open and if I can’t find the book I want in them I can always steal it. When I remember the look on your face when I told you how I got the set of Gibbon I burst out laughing even now.

I know you think I’m sick or something harping on Puerto Rican, Puerto Rican. But you wouldn’t have done what you did for me for any white boy in your class, no matter how smart he was. What you did for me you did because whatever I was, I wasn’t white. At least by your standards. I’m no good at taking handouts and I’m glad
I
figured out that was what I was doing. Finito.

I know what you’ll say—that Rollins doesn’t mind taking handouts and that he’ll turn out to be a successful citizen, a credit to Dunberry, to his family, his race, and the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Just because we both have dark skins doesn’t mean we’re the same. His family made the big jump upward long ago and all he has to do is climb higher. I’m in the mud at the bottom of the pit and there isn’t a ladder around anywhere in sight.

One thing you deserve to know. The letters Hitz stole were from Caroline. They were love letters. It started as a joke, but then it stopped being a joke. At least for me. I thought she meant what she was saying. It turns out she didn’t. I went out to her college the day after Thanksgiving because she said she’d like to see me and I told her I was coming. She wasn’t there. I was left standing with my suitcase in my hand like an idiot. When you see her tell her she better not play jokes on any other fellows.

For the first time in the letter, which was more clearly written than anything written for his classes all term, Strand saw the hurt, scorned adolescent in the last paragraph. There were only two more lines.

If you’re a friend of Fatso Hitz, you tell him that if I go to prison he better hide when I get out.

Yours sincerely, Jesus Romero

Another battle lost, Strand thought. To be expected. Young as he was, Romero had recognized his predestined role in life—the Goth outside the gates, too proud to conspire from within. History, after all, was on his side. Strand sighed, rubbed his eyes wearily. Then folded the letter neatly, put it back into the envelope and tucked it in his jacket pocket. One day he would show it to Caroline.

C
HRISTMAS WAS ON A
Monday and the holiday began at noon on Friday. Strand and Eleanor could drive down from the school and still be in time to meet Leslie’s TWA plane at Kennedy. Hazen had called during the week and Strand had told him that it wasn’t necessary to send the car to Dunberry. Caroline was flying into Kennedy around one o’clock on TWA and would wait in the terminal and the whole family would drive out to East Hampton together. Hazen had spoken to Romero and said the idiotic kid still insisted on not cooperating when he went into court on January seventh. He had also told Hazen he was satisfied with Mr. Hollingsbee and didn’t want Hazen to waste his time coming out for the trial.

“The kid’s hopeless,” Hazen had said wearily, “and nothing any one of us can do is going to help him. Oh, well—see you on Friday afternoon.”

It had been pleasant having Eleanor around the house although Strand could see that it was only with considerable effort that she maintained an appearance of calm cheerfulness. He knew it was for his sake and was grateful for it. He tried not to notice the way she jumped up and ran to the phone when it rang and the tension in her voice as she said hello. But it was never Giuseppe on the line and she never called Georgia. Late at night, when she thought he was asleep, he could hear her prowling around the house.

Twice when she was out of the house, he had tried calling Giuseppe but Giuseppe had hung up on him each time. Strand didn’t tell Eleanor about his attempts.

She had asked for all the news of Caroline and Jimmy. Leslie had written her a letter, which she had received just before she left Georgia, and she knew of Leslie’s triumph with her two paintings and of her extending her stay in Paris. She said Leslie had sounded like an excited young girl in her letter and that it had been amusing and had touched her. She said she always knew her mother had a real talent and was happy it had finally been recognized, even if it was only for two paintings so far. “You watch,” she told Strand, “she’s going to work like a demon now, you’ll be lucky if she takes enough time off to make you a cup of coffee in the morning.”

Strand had carefully edited the news about Caroline and Jimmy. The burden of waiting and dreading to hear from Giuseppe, or, even worse, from someone else on the paper, was enough for her to bear, Strand thought, without her having to worry about her sister and brother. So he showed her Caroline’s letter in which she wrote about being voted the Homecoming Queen. She laughed as she gave the letter back to Strand. “She’s come out of the cocoon with a bang, my little sister, hasn’t she?”

“You might say that,” Strand said. If he had shown her the letter from the biology teacher’s wife and the letter from Romero, and she discovered just how great the bang was, he doubted that her reaction would have been quite so pleased.

As for Jimmy, Strand merely said that he’d gone to Hollywood on a new job and was making a lot more money than he had been getting on the old one. He also told her that Jimmy had become a fancy dresser and was becoming accustomed to three-martini lunches.

Eleanor made a wry face when she heard this. “Onward and upward, I guess. Winning all hearts and minds on the way. At least he isn’t turning into a complete bum, as he gave every sign of doing when I was in New York. Does he send you any money?”

“We don’t need it,” Strand said shortly.

Eleanor looked at him gravely. “You could stand a couple of good suits, too, you know.” But she left it at that.

The drive into Kennedy from the school in the old station wagon was an agreeable one. The weather was fine, there was very little traffic, Eleanor was a good, careful driver, and they had time enough so that they could stop off and have a leisurely lunch outside Greenwich at a very nice inn whose advertisements Eleanor had seen in
The New Yorker.
Both she and Strand were amused by the glances they drew from the other diners as they came in—admiring for her and either envious or disapproving for him.

She squeezed his hand and whispered, “They think you’re an irresistible old man sneaking off for a dirty weekend with your secretary.”

“Maybe I’ll try that one day,” Strand said, laughing. “Being irresistible. Only I’ll have to hire a secretary first.” But when she went into the ladies’ room to comb her hair he thought of Judith Quinlan and the girl on the train with the young man in the fur coat and wondered just what a dirty weekend was like and if ever in his life he would have one.

When they went down to the exit from Customs to wait for Leslie and Linda to come out, they saw that Caroline was already there. Caroline squealed as she ran toward them and hugged first her father, then her sister. “Daddy,” she said reproachfully, “you never told me. I thought she was still languishing in Georgia. What a great surprise! Where’s your beautiful husband, Eleanor?”