Death of an Old Sinner (12 page)

“Minnie can’t afford it either,” Fallon said grimly.

Jimmie thought that attitude a great mistake on the part of Fallon. It was the enemy of an open mind. On the whole, it was a good thing for the District Attorney that he had a man like Jasper Tully. But then what D.A. would be worthy of his office if part of him wasn’t a Jasper Tully, Jimmie decided, remembering how often the investigator had made him look good.

“T
HERE ARE MESSAGES COMING
from all over the world,” Mrs. Norris greeted Jimmie when he reached Nyack toward evening. “And a basketful from Washington. Mrs. Joyce has been answering the phone all afternoon.”

“I suppose there’ll be people tonight,” Jimmie said.

“By the tens and hundreds. Would you like a drink in your room while you dress?”

“Couldn’t we all take time for one in the living room?”

“Your father’s been laid out there.”

“Oh,” said Jimmie, “of course. I’ll have it upstairs.”

The smell of flowers permeated the house. It was heathenish, Jimmie thought. He beat his retreat upstairs as soon as he could. Mrs. Norris had managed to rub a bit of Presbyterianism off on him.

“She’s a plainer woman than I thought,” the housekeeper said, bumping the door closed behind her when she brought the whiskey and ice.

“If you mean Mrs. Joyce, I think she’s beautiful.”

“I mean there’s no fancy trimmings about her. She speaks her mind and thinks straight.”

“Oh,” said Jimmie. “That she does.”

Mrs. Norris stood on one foot and then the other. She was not waiting to be offered a drink, Jimmie thought, having brought but one glass. Finally he asked: “Is something troubling you?”

“No, of course not. You’ll have your dinner buffet off the kitchen. Mr. Jamie…how will you introduce her to people tonight?”

“Helene? Why, as Mrs. Joyce. How else?”

“You couldn’t say…‘my fiancée’?”

“My God,” said Jimmie, “You have been impressed! Or is it respectability you’re worried about?”

Mrs. Norris folded her arms. “If I was worried about respectability, I’d have been out of this house a long time before now.” She turned on her heel and stomped to the door.

Jimmie called to her: “Mr. Tully will be here soon. He’ll be spending the night.”

“And my sister and brother-in-law are coming. Where will I put Mr. Tully?”

“In father’s quarters. That’s how he wants it.”

Jimmie wondered, dressing, if there had been any discussion between Helene and Mrs. Norris to warrant such a suggestion. He drained his glass and paused on his way downstairs to see which room she had put Helene in. It would tell better than words Mrs. Norris’ estimation of the woman. It could not have been higher. The light shone from beneath the door of the north bedroom, and if he was not mistaken, it was from there that the smell of wood smoke was coming: the housekeeper had lighted the fire in the grate. Jimmie tapped on the door.

“Come!”

He opened the door a bit and stuck his head in. “Are you decent?”

“If clothes will do it, enormously. Come by the fire—or the window. I’m torn between them.”

“I’m not,” said Jimmie, taking her in his arms and holding her close. The kiss was long and soft with but the faintest stirring of passion at its end, so that Helene withdrew and took his hand to lead him to the window.

“It’s changed,” she said, speaking of the river with the sky’s color on it, “from when last I looked.”

Jimmie looked at her only. “ ‘How many loved your moments of glad grace…The sorrows of your changing face.’ Damn. I’ve forgot a whole patch of that.”

Helene smiled and squeezed his hand. “The people’s candidate. You are an egghead, Jimmie. What will they do to you?”

“I don’t even know what I want them to do to me. It all seems so long ago, that afternoon in Albany. I wanted very much to be governor then. Now I want the leisure to live a little, quietly, and hear wood fires crackling and remember full poems and not snatches of them. And I want terribly to make love to you.”

“We are both so vulnerable to each other now, darling.”

“Does love hurt you that much, Helene?”

“I have been looking at the face of someone out there. I loved a boy and lost him, and a man loves me whom I respect and whom I yield…Jimmie, there is something I must tell you about Madeline Barker and the Judge.”

“You have no idea,” he said with all the cold hurt he could manifest, “how much jollier I’ll find that story with a drink in my hand. I’ll be in the kitchen with Mrs. Norris. When your boy out there disappears, you might like to join us.”

Helene lifted her chin and did not move or speak until he was gone. Jimmie could not have felt more miserable; he had thought this sort of thing was over between them, the raising of ghosts whenever he neared the subject of matrimony.

Mrs. Norris took one look at him and got a tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator. “Aw, lad,” she said, “you’ve no sense of tactics at all.”

“What the devil do you know about it?” Jimmie cried.

The gardener who, on necessary occasions, doubled as houseman, wandered in then to say there were callers paying their respects in the living room. When Jimmie returned to the kitchen, Mr. Tully had arrived and was warming his hands at the grate. Helene was slicing bread.

“The course of true love never does run smooth,” the investigator was saying over his shoulder, and unaware of Jimmie’s presence.

“To say nothing of the course of false love,” Jimmie said.

Tully screwed his ugly head around and squinted at him. “What, my boy, is false love—is there such a thing?”

Jimmie was hooked on his own hasty cast. “Love of self,” he said, somewhat steadying his position.

“Oh, that runs smooth as butter,” Tully said. “The trouble is it never gets a man anywhere. Now as I was about to say, it seems the General and his fair lady had a tiff after he rushed home to her from Brooklyn. He couldn’t have got there before nine, and at ten-twenty-five he was on Third Avenue and Fifty-first Street where he caught a cab down to his club.”

Jimmie repeated the address, and that of the parking lot—Sixtieth and Second. “There’s a lot of city in there, Jasp.”

Tully nodded. “One side or the other, he did a bit of walking. Then when he got to his club he complained at the bar to a gentleman named Webster Toll, that his fair lady had refused to go on a trip with him.”

Jimmie and Mrs. Norris exchanged glances. No word of the proposed trip had ever come to them, but it might have been the reason for all the cash, whatever its source.

Helene put the bread in a basket and suggested they eat something before more people arrived. Tully finished his account at the buffet: “The General wound up saying he was not jealous, that it was beneath him to be jealous, certainly of a man like that. Now who would you say he was talking about?”

Jimmie shook his head. “It could have been anyone from the Secretary of State to…”

“To Johnny Rocco?” Tully prompted. Then he went on to outline his own speculations about the old Johnny Rocco, whose career he had checked up on that afternoon. The Rock had been a very dapper fellow in the twenties, and more than one gentleman of means had invited him to his party—providing he brought enough whiskey, of course.

Jimmie, having made exactly the same speculation, had to admit the possibility of such an association. He himself had not been old enough to remember, however.

“You forget,” said Mrs. Norris, “I was around then, too, and of an age to remember, and I can tell you there was no man by that name ever in your father’s house. The first time I ever heard of this Rocco person was when you, Master Jamie, were District Attorney.”

“Well,” Tully said, “that cancels out another afternoon’s work.” He looked around the table, the buffet… “What kind of a family is this, a wake without a drop of whiskey?”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Norris, “I was getting the ice when you came.”

“Never mind the ice,” said Tully with a wink at Helene, “it’s already broken.” He lifted his glass when they all had one: “To the old gentleman, God rest him. Whatever else he’s done to it, he’s certainly brought some new light into my life.”

“I think I can say the same,” said Mrs. Norris, and God knows it was true, she thought. It was only Thursday on her way to Brooklyn that she was contemplating how little exciting ever happened to her nowadays. And right now she could truly say she had not felt better in many a long year. But thinking of Brooklyn she was reminded of the Robinsons. Poor Mag…Strange, until Thursday, if she admitted the truth now, since almost the day she met him, she would have said, “Poor Mr. Robinson.”

Helene and Jimmie drank and ate without comment.

“I
REMEMBER HIM WHEN
…”

“Do you remember the day he…”

“Let me tell you about when he came back from…”

Such were the whispered commencements to conversations all over the house. A military guard had taken up the watch, and the living room, the library, the hall, the stairs were crowded with people remembering the General and the various milestones of his busy life. It was great tribute to the old man, Jimmie thought, that there was more subdued laughter than letting of tears.

He was on the stairs himself, his arm in the clasp of an ex-envoy to Sweden, when what he called “the political contingent” arrived. He had expected Judge and Mrs. Turner, but for them to come in the company of Big Mike Zabriski and Miss Barker seemed poor taste to Jimmie. But then taste was an uncommon word in politics. Jimmie found for the diplomat a contemporary with whom to share reminiscences, and went down to Mrs. Turner who opened her arms to him and gave his cheek a tearful kiss.

Jimmie took the hand Madeline Baker offered him. But in the middle of her sympathetic gaze her eyes caromed off his check and fastened on someone behind him. She excused herself and as he turned, he saw her make a mercurial journey to Helene.

Mrs. Turner was watching also. “So she’s here, too,” she said.

“Mrs. Joyce is a dear friend,” Jimmie said.

The Judge was solicitous of his wife. “Madeline will manage, my dear,” he murmured; and practically in the same breath so that Jimmie had no opportunity to speak his annoyance, the Judge went on: “Touching story in the afternoon papers, Jimmie, about your father’s managing his medals before dying. Very like him, don’t you think?”

“Rather,” Jimmie said.

“That was Madeline’s release, by the way.”

By the way…Jimmie thought. The Judge was trying hard to ingratiate Madeline with him of late. Then it occurred to him: what the devil was Madeline doing, giving a release to the papers about General Jarvis’ death? James Jarvis did not belong to his party body and soul, family and fortune.

“Yes, just like the man I best remember—duty first, death second,” the Judge went on.

Jimmie tried hard not to be harsh on him. Many a wise man spouted gibberish in the presence of a corpse which by some little chance of fate was not his own. Jimmie excused himself, laid his hand a moment on Big Mike’s shoulder, passing, so that he would not need to pause there for more such morbid sentiment.

Mike’s contribution echoed after him: “Well, it comes to all of us. The older the better, I say.”

“You didn’t know your Mrs. Joyce and I once were intimates, did you, Jimmie?” Madeline smiled as he joined them.

“I may have heard it and forgotten,” Jimmie said coldly. He was wondering at the moment if ever she had written anything on a subway wall.

“You haven’t really changed, Helene. Only I have changed,” Madeline mourned.

“It is hard to discern it with chameleons,” Helene said. “And long ago I ceased to care. Only you and the Turners cherish painful recollections. Poor Jimmie, he knows nothing of what we’re saying.”

Madeline threw back her head as though to laugh, but remembered in time the occasion of this meeting. “You mean to say you haven’t told him of our Bohemian days?”

Jimmie was distinctly uncomfortable. It was like two women undressing before him; one at a time would be interesting, but two was nihilistic.

“I don’t cherish mine with that much affection,” Helene said. “I lost something very dear to me.”

“So did the Turners,” Madeline snapped.

“But look what they gained in you, my dear. To lose a daughter and gain another?”

“For God’s sake put away your arrows,” Jimmie said.

Helene laid her hand on his arm. “No, Jimmie. Let’s count them now, but not in front of all these people. Couldn’t we go into your study?”

Jimmie did not like to take them there. It was a place he wished to keep inviolate. But he had little choice. Nor was he placated much when both women paused in their baiting of each other to compliment him on it. He lit cigarettes for them and filled a pipe for himself. “I can’t stay long,” he murmured.

Helene smiled. “Like they say, that’s the story of my life.” She lifted her head: “Very well, I shall be both brief and blunt. When I was an artist’s model—more years ago than I care to number—I had a friend who ran away from her high-born kinsmen, from a house that was as cold as her father’s justice. Her name was Margaret Turner. And she had a college friend named Madeline who doesn’t belong in the story yet except for a chance introduction. Margaret and I shared everything—including my assignments as an artist’s model. After a while I was married…common-law we called it, but in my mind it was binding. How ironic it is, when I think of it now, that I am the one accused!”

Helene got up and started to pace back and forth. Madeline watched her rather as though she thought she might plunge for escape. Jimmie pulled at his pipe.

“Perhaps you can guess the rest, Jimmie? I was faithful to the faithless. I lost the husband to my friend, and both of them to Paris, where as the story goes, they are living happily ever after.” She whirled around on the other woman. “Now comes Madeline, a veritable Joan of Arc. Perhaps you’ll account your contribution?”

“It’s very simple,” Miss Barker said, “I was the one who told.”

“Not that simple, it isn’t,” Helene said. “She came searching for her friend to me, and soon pretended herself my friend, and got the story from me. The Judge paid you, didn’t he?”