Death of an Old Sinner (3 page)

“Within the hour,” she said, getting up. She gave Jimmie a great wink, always the mark of the “wee sup” in her. “And don’t you worry about a thing, Mr. James.”

The old man stomped out of the room ahead of her. “I’ll be in my study when you’re ready,” he said.

“It’s not as bad as I made it sound, Mrs. Norris,” Jimmie confided when the General was gone. “But I can’t have him making a touch this early in the month. What do you suppose he does with his money?”

“Fancy cars…and things,” she said with Presbyterian ferocity.

Jimmie poured himself another drink, a long one, and took it up to his room. There he showered and changed into slacks and a wool shirt. Without a doubt, the old fellow needed something to occupy him, or better, a trip around the world. No, that was worse. He was quite capable of kicking up an international incident, of embarrassing the State Department as well as an ambitious son. There was a considerable file somewhere in the Pentagon on a roaring contest between Major General Jarvis and his Russian counterpart—the Russian drinking martinis, the General vodka. “You might say we got him home by an underground air-lift,” a State Department wag had put it. Oh yes, quite capable of mischief was the General, and the hell of it was, the older he got, the greater his capabilities.

T
HE GENERAL WAS SURE
he smelt the reek of conspiracy as he left the room ahead of Mrs. Norris. Caution. Every move weighted with caution. There was no gamble in the younger generation—all of them huddled behind the inevitability of the atom. Nothing to be ventured, no frontiers, no enterprise. Only caution. No wonder the boy had still, by report, the bulk of his inheritance from his mother.

The General slammed the door of his study and looked up at his unsung relative. “Catch hold of a star, old boy! You and I are going for a spin.”

He kicked up the fire; then, taking an ashtray and his pen knife, he scraped some carbon from a burnt log. This he diluted with a drop of water, added a drop of iodine and finally some black ink. It would not do for the finished product—if there was going to be a finished product—but for the first experiment, it might do very well.

He had brought from the attic a fine red leather notebook, a diary, the binding scarcely faded by time. Inside, the excellent paper was yellowed ever so slightly, and the ink was fading through the years to a lighter brown. The diary he was by no means ready to touch—if ever he was going to touch it. He opened it to a half-empty page: the temptation was delicious. He put it by for the moment, locking the diary in the bottom drawer of his desk. He put the key beneath the frame of the President’s picture.

He locked himself in his study then and took from a folder an old letter of his ancestor’s; it had been written from England in his own hand, the subject a routine matter of diplomacy. The General, with military precision, took a nibbed pen in hand, dipped it into the concoction in the ashtray, exercised his arm on the desk, a circular motion, and added a postscript to the letter. “And Sylvia sends deep love,” he wrote, adding a replica of the President’s signature. He counted to five and blotted it, securing thereby a paleness to his taste. The ink, he thought, surveying the whole, was almost as good an imitation as his handwriting. Ah, but that was incomparable! Not for naught now, had he been stood long hours at the law clerk’s desk as a boy, and made to imitate the briefs of the family firm, even as in his day, his father before him, and his grandfather, and likely, even granduncle. That he had deserted the law for the military was directly attributable to the distaste his clerking days gave him for the law.

He washed out the ashtray in the sink and then dabbed his finger with a bit of iodine to account for the smell of it, although in truth the smell was much like that of the diary itself. Well, he must look up the formula for ink in those days…if he was to need the ink. He had but turned the key in his door and sat down again at his desk when Jimmie knocked.

“Come in, come in, lad,” he said, as though the key were never turned against a soul.

Jimmie looked down at the folder of old papers. “Don’t tell me somebody’s interested in them?”

“Oh, I’m sure the Library of Congress would house them if they were offered.”

“I suppose we should do that,” Jimmie said. “After all, they are state papers.”

“For the most part they’re rubbish, like all state papers,” the old man said. “But look at this.” Without a tremble of his hand, though his heart gave a sudden pounce, he pointed to the line he had forged a few minutes before.

Jimmie read it and lifted his eyebrows. “Who was Sylvia?”

“My very question,” the old man said. “I’ve been three days searching for her in that trunk up there. Read that again.”

Jimmie read it aloud this time: “And Sylvia sends deep love.” He picked up the letter then and read it through. He gave it back. “Think you’ll find her, father?”

His son’s absolute and doubtless assumption of the letter’s having been written, postscript and all, a hundred years before, tickled the old man almost to ecstasy. He needed now to guard himself carefully. “If I find her, Jimmie, it might make a different man of our—forebear.”

“I don’t think a change could hurt him, do you, father?”

“I do not. Nor do I think it would hurt you, his coming into the news again.”

“Take it easy on that, father.”

“I shall but tell the truth as I find it,” the old man said piously.

“I think it’s a fine undertaking, father. Really, in view of the work to be done on your own memoirs, this is very generous of you.”

“I hope to be paid for it if they’re published, you know. This is not altogether altruism.”

Jimmie grinned. As though he had not known this to be back of the old boy’s housekeeping. “Every cent he earns is yours, father. By the way, was Judge Turner in touch with you in the last day or so?” This was the question he had not dared ask downstairs.

“Uh-huh.” The old man put away the folder.

“Well?” said Jimmie.

“Something about the Irish parade on St. Patrick’s Day. I think he wanted me in the stands. I’m too busy now for that nonsense.”

Well, Jimmie thought, going to the door without a word, if he was not going to help him, at least, involved in the family papers, neither would he hurt him. “As you like, father, as you like.”

The old man cocked his head round at him. “Are you disappointed?”

“Of course, I’m disappointed! I’m about to run for governor of the state. My name is Jarvis. I’d like a hundred thousand or so Irishmen to remember it because General Jarvis saluted when they went marching by!”

“A hundred thousand or so, and every last holler of them with a flag in his hand! It’ll be worse than the queen’s coronation.”

“All right, father. Thanks just the same.”

The old man snapped his fingers and then held out his hand, without turning round or rising from his desk. “I’ll need some money to get my decorations.”

“Where are they?”

“Eighth Avenue somewhere, I think. I have the ticket.”

“Oh, my God,” said Jimmie, “they’re in hock!”

The General swung around. “You would be surprised, my boy, at what good company that puts me in.”

T
HE NEXT DAY, IT
being her afternoon off, Mrs. Norris rode into New York with the General. For all her deprecations of the Jaguar, she was quick enough to leap into it, he thought. She swathed her head—hat and all—in a scarf, locked her hands like a safety belt across her stomach, and gave a nod of her head for him to drive on.

“I suppose you’re on your way to Brooklyn?” he said.

“I am, to my sister’s,” Mrs. Norris said. “You can drop me at the subway.”

The General nodded. “How are the Robinsons?”

“Well enough for getting on. They always ask after you, sir.”

“Do they?” said the General, and he wondered just what Mrs. Norris would say if she knew that he too would be seeing at least one of the Robinsons later in the day. Little she knew what a friendship had started on her introduction of Robbie and him the summer before. Robbie was an expert on horses, and therefore had a fair acquaintance with where and when the best of them were running. And that was but one of the Scotsman’s useful hobbies, although it was the only one to date of which the General had taken advantage. “He’s a printer, is he not?” the old man said for the sheer pleasure of deceiving her.

“Aye, and with his own shop and journeymen under him. Prospered he has with hard work. He came over an immigrant, too.”

The General squinted round at her. “You look the soul of prosperity, Mrs. Norris.”

She loosed one hand from the other long enough to show the fingers of the glove. “Darned and stitched, sir, but respectable.”

“As a lily,” said the General, disgusted with the alarm she took if there was the slightest chance he might refer to the fortune she had tucked away.

“Put me down at Fifty-ninth Street, sir.”

The General gave the car a kick into high gear to be the quicker shed of her, and not another word was said between them.

Mrs. Norris took the BMT, and the moment she descended the subway steps she felt her mood improve. She should not allow the old gentleman to so annoy her. He did it deliberately. She settled in the waiting car and gave herself up to watching all the mad people of New York sprinting from one train across the platform to another. She made bets with herself at every express stop. Once she had so forgot herself as to cry out: “Half a bob on him in the red socks!” It had got her into conversation with a Yorkshireman who was, alas, on his way to Kansas City. She sighed now, remembering him. His last words had been: “I hope we meet again, lass!” Many a long year it had been since anyone called Annie Norris lass, and the truth when she faced it was that except for her squabbles with the General there was very little excitement in her life any more. Ah, but that would change with Master Jamie’s going back into public life. She began to think of ways she could hint at the matter to her sister without violating the confidence.

Her brother-in-law, whom she always called Mr. Robinson was, to her surprise, home when she arrived. And it was much to her pleasure. He was ever a cheerful man, where her sister Mag seemed given more every year to complaining.

Mr. Robinson took her coat and said into her ear: “You’ve roses still in your cheeks, Annie, never mind the frosty pow.”

“The frosty pow,” she repeated, running her hand over the white strands of her hair. “You’re handsome as ever yourself, Mr. Robinson. It’s the ride in the car—in the Jaguar if you please—that flushed my cheeks.”

“Is it paid for yet?” said Mag.

And somehow Mrs. Norris resented the question although she was herself responsible for the information. “We’re doing very nicely in the family, Mag. And there are certain omens in the wind that we may soon be doing better.”

“Oh-ho?” said Mr. Robinson, pulling his chair closer to Mrs. Norris. “Would it be the young one or the old bird that’s bringing that to the nest?” There was something in his question and his way of asking it too direct for Mrs. Norris’ tastes, and her brother-in-law saw it immediately himself. “Aren’t you going to give your sister a cup of tea to warm her?” he cried to his wife.

“You’re home at a queer hour, Mr. Robinson,” Mrs. Norris said.

“How else would I get to see you?” he said with a wink. Was it, Mrs. Norris wondered, that she was getting old and skeptical? That wink seemed to have been a strain on Mr. Robinson. For the first time in all the years of their acquaintance she doubted the sincerity of his cheerful banter. And look at Mag; she was wrinkled as a bag of cheese while he was blooming. But after a while, Mr. Robinson bringing out a bottle of what he called “Boggy Dew,” Mrs. Norris thought it was all in her imagination.

“I remember,” said Mr. Robinson when the drink was down, “your old gentleman was talking of writing his memoirs. Lively enough wouldn’t you say they might be?”

“Lively enough to shame us all,” said Mrs. Norris.

“You don’t tell,” said Mag, with her first pep of the day.

“He’s been reading them to her,” said Mr. Robinson with a wink.

“He’s neither reading nor writing them, thank God for our respectability.”

“Sometimes,” said Mag, wrinkling her nose with disappointment, “I wonder if your respectability hasn’t got in the way of your chances.”

Mrs. Norris squared her shoulders. “My chances of what, pray?”

“Oh, for the love of heaven, don’t be starting to snipe at each other. Wouldn’t the two of you like to go to a motion picture?” Mr. Robinson put his hand in his pocket.

“It might improve our dispositions,” Mag said forlornly.

“Aw…” said Robbie, the twenty dollar bill already in his wife’s hand, “I’m like all the victims of the con men. Get me once and you got me forever. You do this to me every time, the two of you. I must be off now.” He came in again, putting on his coat. “Is it politics your old gentleman’s going into, Annie?”

“Well, there’s been politics in the family for generations. You know that, Mr. Robinson.”

“Whatever Mr. Robinson knows or doesn’t know,” he said, leaning down between the two women to kiss the cheek of one and then the other of them, “the information didn’t reach him by the lips of Annie Norris.”

T
HIS WAS TO BE
the General’s first visit to Mr. Robinson’s place of business although he had had a standing invitation for some months. His interest in the dapper little man had been first provoked by Robbie’s knowledge of foreign cars which ran to such refinements as special models and the people who owned them, and then of course, there was the matter of horses, on which he was also an expert. Beyond these interests, Robbie had yet another, and that one the General had never expected to find useful to himself, English Royalty. But when he picked the printer up at the appointed hour, he came around to the subject as soon as possible.

“Do you remember telling me about your collection of royal crests and coats of arms and whatnot?”

“I remember,” Robbie said.

“And charting a course to them for some obscure American descendants?”