Escape the Night (7 page)

It puzzled and disturbed him, eroding his sense of place: the grandfather Phillip saw was the father he had only fantasized. Knowing too well the void which Allie left, Phillip sought to help ease Peter's hurt by re-creating moments of the childhood John Carey had denied him. Yet he was awkward with Peter—remote or overeager—the timing of his approaches subtly wrong. Hating his own childhood, he had no sense of children.

“Hey, Prince Charming, want to play catch?”

He had found Peter stretched on the floor of his bedroom, raptly arranging green plastic soldiers in close-order drill.

“Peter?”

His nephew glanced up. Phillip plucked a red handball from his pocket and began tossing it in front of him. “I just bought this for you—let's go out back and break it in.”

Peter looked uncertain. “I promised Grandpa I'd play these with him.”

“Just for a minute—your grandfather's not here yet.” Phillip smiled awkwardly. “Maybe you'll grow up to be like Lou Gehrig, okay?”

“Who's that?”

“My favorite baseball player—he played first base for the Yankees.”

“Did you see him?”

Phillip nodded. “That was before they had television. But your grandfather took me to see him once.”

“Grandpa did?”

“Yes.”

“Is he dead now—the man?”

“Lou Gehrig? Yes, he's dead now.”

Peter edged closer to his toys. “I'd better wait for Grandpa.”

“Maybe he won't come …”

“
John Peter Carey!
” John Carey burst through the door and past Phillip, trailing Bushmills and tobacco. “You've started without me.”

Peter's eyes crinkled in a great smile. He reached to hug his grandfather, face buried in his neck.

Staring down at the rubber ball in his hand, Phillip felt once more the solitude of childhood. He left unnoticed.

Alone in his office, Phillip Carey began pondering the meaning of his nephew.

He had been fiercely glad at Charles's leaving. As if on cue, HUAC's unnerving presence had diminished with Charles's own. Now their authors were less often called to hearings, Van Dreelen & Carey seldom mentioned. Only Charles was followed by strangers: to Phillip's relief, the unsettling Englehardt had not called on him again. For a while his fears diminished, too: now heir-apparent to John Carey, he plunged into the vacuum with new decisiveness, claiming power and responsibility. Less often bypassed, he felt himself grow: writers, producers, agents and paperback publishers—the men who had called Charles—now looked to him for answers.

John Carey did not seem to notice.

Unable to divine his father's feelings, Phillip wavered in his own, haunted by Charles's unspoken presence. At times, emerging from his office, he would find himself staring down the familiar corridors—cubbyholes filled with white-shirted editors, money-green rugs, walls lined with literary awards set between photographs of now-dead employees once favored by John Carey—as if he were a stranger. Finally, he asked his father whether he, who had served the firm when Charles left, would receive it when his father died. John Carey's face went cold. “I'd like to feel that you're here because you wish to be,” he answered stiffly. “A thing belongs to those who love it most.”

He made no further answer.

Phillip's attempts to gain his father's favor redoubled until he grew exhausted; his tiredness resulted in a heedlessness in things outside John Carey's reach. He drank too much, spent more money than he had, slept with hat-check girls and actresses until he forgot their names. He liked to dominate them, using his money as leverage to make them do as he wished, sometimes in pairs or to each other. As they performed, eyes blank and joyless, Phillip would fantasize the hurt faces of abandoned boyfriends—hicks from Kansas or Ohio who had begged their favors in the dark and hoped for marriage—witnessing their debasement at his hands. Afterwards he would shower and leave, trembling at his needs and the memory of his mother, rising in porcelain perfection from the grave of his subconscious.

He began imagining Alicia Carey.

He had mounted a stringy modeling student on a mattress in a dingy four-story walk-up in the East Village, face averted from his own act. As she moaned he could not recall her features, felt his erection die of guilt inside her, cold fear crawl across his stomach. His mind could stir no images, no act or woman which could save him. Then he thought of Allie Fairvoort.

He swelled inside the thin woman as she became his brother's wife, her arrogant disdain turning to desire, the imagined boyfriend of his fantasies now Charles, staring in stunned humiliation as Alicia Carey cried for Phillip to take her and his rhythm became a mindless pounding and he came, screaming. As the woman dressed he saw she had green eyes.

He paid her to rinse her hair ash-blonde.

She would dress in heels and black stockings, begging Phillip to do anything he wished. She banked the money he gave her. He paid her more for sodomy. When she took her savings and went back to marry her boyfriend in Texas, he wept.

He felt utterly alone.

In this despairing void, Phillip grew superstitious, until he felt the absent Charles in the silence of his father. Peter was the symbol of Charles's succession.

Slowly, against his will, Phillip Carey began to fantasize his brother's death.

It would be an accident; Phillip would be sad. Twinned with his surviving son by mourning, his father would reach out to him …

Phillip recoiled from himself in horror.

He went to a psychiatrist.

Repeating his fantasies aloud, he heard the man's pencil scratch across his notepad: in his mind the daydreams, written, became the forecast of his brother's death. The pencil kept on scratching …

Phillip Carey bolted from the office.

His mind festered with apologies he could not speak: to Charles for the deathly images dancing in his brain, to Peter for the heartache they would bring. Remembering Englehardt, he tried hoping that the clicking sounds he still heard on his telephone issued not from men, but from the reprimand of conscience against his fevered imaginings. In his guilt, from a feeling of unworthiness too deep to express, loneliness became a self-protection.

No person could be allowed too close, for the evil he might see.

Caught between self-loathing and the perfect image of his mother, he could not unmask himself to women who were peers, or reach for one to marry. Ruth Levy, in bed with Charles shortly after his return to work, called it “Phillip's prostitute-madonna complex.”

Charles Carey had found sweeter consolation.

When Charles first met Ruth Levy, shortly before he left Van Dreelen & Carey, he would have laughed at the idea of sleeping with her: he did not then know that John Carey would use her to lure him closer to the forsaken conflict with his brother.

Hostage to his love for Peter, he had been discreet in finding women, worrying about Phillip or the men who followed him, and the poison they might plant with Allie. He was fearful of divorce: perhaps when Peter was older, less victim to his mother's moods. And he found that there were women—editors and actresses, writers and bored wives—who would take him on his own terms.

Ruth Levy had not been one of them.

She had come to his office that first day, severely dressed and still clutching her résumé, his friend's sister: thin-faced like Levy, with those same marmoset eyes that seemed to look through him. She covered their intensity with staccato speech and quick, birdlike gestures that betrayed the cigarettes hidden in her purse and a metabolic rate so high that she could burn off calories while perched at a desk. She had black unruly hair, long legs and no breasts to speak of. Her nose was thin, her skin ivory, and her eyes shone with an intelligence that made her seem terribly serious, yet oddly pretty. She had graduated
summa
from CCNY: Carey figured she was a Spartacist, at least, furious about the Rosenbergs and Sacco and Vanzetti and never smiled. When he told her that, in bed two years later, she laughed until her small breasts shook.

“Jesus, Carey, you are such a
smug
bastard!”

He smiled as she rifled her purse for a cigarette. “Well, most of it was true.” Mocking her nasal cadences, he began, “‘Harry Luce is
such
a fascist—I just couldn't stand it over at
Time
. And those
maps
, those silly, fucking right-wing maps: Italy carved up like a pizza, with the Christian Democrats getting a thirty-two percent wedge and the Communists nineteen and all the pepperoni, painted red and located near Milan, where your fucking friend
Clare
would never go because the workers smell bad and speak no English …'”

“
I
never said that.”

“You were going to—next week.”

She smothered him with a pillow.

From behind it came his muffled sounds of gagging. “Do you give up?” Ruth demanded.

“Christ, yes,” he gasped. “I thought you didn't believe in capital punishment.”

“Only for sexual purposes.” Abruptly, she drew the pillow down over his chest and lay across it, holding his bemused face in her hands. “Did you know that I loved you before we ever met? From your picture in Bill's yearbook, when I was fourteen.”

She kissed his forehead.

It had happened by degrees. Hiring her, Charles watched as she took on the thankless piecework of editorial assistants, screening calls for Phillip, arranging Black Jack Carey's lunches, shuttling manuscripts to Charles at his home, and writing polite turndowns to the hopeless authors of unsought masterpieces, like the widow from Kansas who, traumatized by seventeen rejections, threatened suicide should Van Dreelen & Carey refuse to publish her love poems to her dead son. “She's probably got him in the 'fridge,” she shuddered to Charles. “Jesus, the
pain
out there.”

“It's scary,” he agreed and then, remembering Levy's mother, he added softly, “But these people never do, you know.”

“What?”

“Kill themselves.”

Her mouth curled downward: for an instant she looked almost forlorn. “Why did you hire me?” she asked. “Was it my brother?”

“No.” He smiled. “It was because I figured you were either a genius or a tower sniper. I was curious which.”

“And what do you think now?”

“That I hired a good editor by accident.”

Assigned to Phillip, she could not find a novel that would please him. Gradually, she turned to Charles for encouragement as she battled the mind-numbing avalanche of manuscripts, winnowing, sorting, stacking and restacking, carting more stacks home on the subway to read at night until her nerves jangled with bad coffee and she realized that the page swimming in front of her had been there for an hour. “Don't worry,” he told her. “Some night you'll open something wonderful by a writer no one's ever heard of, and by next year everyone else will know it's wonderful, too—even Phil.”

Seven months later, from yet more memoirs of beagles and beastly parents, she pulled the sad, achingly beautiful novel of a young girl's coming of age in a harsh Georgia town. She read it twice and took it to Charles, hugging the manuscript in front of her. “It's so
good
. It's been turned down five places, and this lady is
so
good.”

Standing in his library, she seemed almost to quiver with love for the book. “What's it about?” Charles asked. He frowned as she told him. “Tough to sell, I'm afraid. Who've you shown this to?”

She flushed. “No one.”

“Not Phillip?”

She looked away, body taut and strained, holding the manuscript like a baby. “I thought it had a better chance with you.”

He stared at her. “That isn't very smart, you know.”

She nodded, still looking down. “I know.”

“Then you also know that for me to intercede would make life difficult for you.”

Her eyes flashed back to him. “I don't care about that.”

“Don't you? I thought you wanted a
career
in publishing, not a coffee break.”

Her eyes held his. Softly, uncharacteristically, she asked, “Please?”

Six days later Charles went to John Carey's office. Ruth's manuscript sat on his father's desk, Phillip at his side. “We've read the novel,” John Carey told him.

“Then you must know that it's too fine to ignore.”

“It won't sell,” Phillip cut in. “And I don't appreciate that Miss Levy didn't clear this with me. Frankly, I'm for unloading both of them.”

Charles turned on Phillip. “Ruth Levy has the sense to let us know what's good, instead of trying to tell us what we want to hear. You'd be foolish not to keep her.”

Phillip eyed him curiously. “What does she …”

John Carey raised his hand, still watching Charles. “Does this mean you wish to resume taking some responsibility for what we publish?” he asked softly. “Because you can't just come and go, meddling as you please.”

Charles hesitated. “Exactly what do you propose?”

“I won't have you throwing notes over the fence. Instead, you're going to do something that's never been done. You'll have your own imprint—the authority to choose and edit five books a year with ‘A Charles Carey Book' printed under the firm name, so that you can succeed or fail in front of God and everyone.
That
is my condition for publishing every single book you want.” John Carey thrust Ruth Levy's manuscript across the desk. “Including this one.”

Charles read the hurt and surprise on Phillip's face, the determination on John Carey's. “You forget I'm Typhoid Mary,” he answered. “You and Phil may bore them, but HUAC's still trailing me around.”

John Carey shrugged. “McCarthy went too far—these people can't do much now, beyond getting on your nerves.” His voice grew harsh. “You still can work at home, Charles. But unless you work on this for
me
, Miss Levy no longer works for anyone.”