Escape the Night (8 page)

Charles stared back at his father, measuring the force of his intentions. In a low voice, he said at last, “Have it your way.”

Silently, he took the manuscript from his father's hand. Phillip turned away.

The next day Ruth Levy asked Charles to come home with her.

“Look,” he told her. “I didn't …”

She put her finger to his lips. “I know.”

It was sweet and intense.

The voice of Charles Carey broke the silence.

“Have it your way …”

On a drizzly December night, in his rented room on R Street, Englehardt winced with the hurt he knew was Phillip's.

The tape clicked off. Abruptly, he felt pain becoming anger.

His deep absorption in the Careys had not yet filled the emptiness inside him: he wished to be the unseen hand, felt but not discerned, that would make Phillip Carey's future different from his past.

Remembering the notes of Phillip's fantasies, stolen from his analyst, his flesh tingled with their closeness.

The Careys were his secret life. For four years, he had done the flagging work of HUAC, returning at night to the reports and photographs and soft, taped voices of his borrowed family, to love and hate and take pride and pity, safe behind a screen. He did not find this odd: he knew that most men were at heart voyeurs, who felt seeing women's bodies in a magazine the same quick, guilty thrill of peering through a window. He simply had what his solitude made him need: a place inside the window, where voices could be heard.

The voice he heard was Phillip Carey's.

With Phillip, he had delighted in Charles's departure: the public lessening of HUAC's interest in the firm had been his private signal to John Carey that this son was better gone. Now he let his presence show only in the men who still watched Charles, to mark him a pariah. But his secret bugs and wiretaps remained: he watched John Carey's love for Peter grow, heard the murmured telephone calls that signaled Charles's adulteries, felt the doubt and loneliness that haunted Phillip's days and nights, increased by the women he could never love.

Like Phillip, he did not know the contents of John Carey's will.

John Carey spoke of it to no one.

Now, as the old man had predicted, HUAC's strength was fading fast: two months prior to this night, the Committee's Chief Counsel had suggested closing “some of our more tired inquiries …”

Atop the list was Charles Carey.

Englehardt stalled for time; his response was tortured and cerebral: he knew that he could not reach Charles Carey through his politics. Only in his personal life, as the father of a son he loved too much to abandon his brittle wife, did Charles show true weakness.

Englehardt felt his own weakness growing with each night.

The Chief Counsel had given him five more months to complete the Carey file.

Part of him knew, even as he felt the pain of separation, that this was a necessity. The Careys were too seductive and yet too distant from his true career; it was time to find a patron much more permanent and powerful than this farce of a Committee. He would close accounts with Charles, leaving Phillip to his prize of power, to seek his own.

But he recognized, on the tape which had just ended, that Charles Carey was moving closer to his father, just as this sweet, secret time of listening was drawing to a close.

Without much hope, he picked up the reports that had accompanied the tapes.

As always, they were neatly typed, a written schedule of Charles's life. But once more their gloss was fool's gold, reflecting nothing but a father's love for a small blond boy with a name too weighty for him to shoulder: John Peter Carey, the second …

Angrily, he flipped its pages.

The last page stopped him with a jolt.

As if rising from the printed word, Charles Carey turned in the doorway of the apartment building belonging to the slim, dark woman, Ruth, and kissed her.

Suddenly, Englehardt knew from months of listening to their conversations, knew before Charles Carey did, that Ruth Levy would be different. And, as he did, he saw at once that he might use this latest woman against Charles, in the way he would feel most deeply: to ensure that his father's favor, and thus his will, would settle on the younger son.

His means would be Peter Carey—the price of an adultery too humiliating for his mother to ignore.

All he needed were a few final months: enough time for Charles Carey to fall in love.

After that first night together, Charles began returning often, to be with Ruth.

She had a small apartment on Waverly Place, a few blocks from Washington Square. Sometimes he would meet her in the square at dusk; she waited beneath the ornate arch—spotlights grazing its white marble, the park and trees dim shadows—looking lonely and slight and vulnerable, until he came. She smiled and took his arm, and they would walk, talking and laughing, intoxicated by borrowed freedom, through the hustle of Macdougal Street for dinner at the Minetta Tavern, or up Cornelia to Bedford Street and Chumley's—its entrance still an unmarked door from its speakeasy days—and sit in a dark corner listening to the loud talk of poets and artists and hangers-on, or to the Lion's Head, passing Jimmy Walker's home on what Charles called “the best block in Manhattan,” St. Luke's Place, a narrow, cobblestoned street flanked by gaslights and over-arching trees, its south side a row of scrubbed brick town houses from which Ruth selected favorites, all lined up in perfect symmetry, their black, wrought-iron railings rising with the steps to carved oak doors. Sometimes they might walk to the end of the Wharton Street Pier, watching the Hudson flow south toward Ellis Island, where Ruth's great-grandfather had arrived from Russia. Once, at the foot of the pier, she took his picture.

Always they would go to Ruth's.

Charles knew that they were still being followed, and resolved not to care.

He loved recapturing the feel of a single woman's apartment, the smell of perfume and candle smoke, the clutter of books, antique lamps, recordings of Beethoven and Bach and manuscripts strewn on the bed and on top of her refrigerator. Finally, against all odds and knowing their incongruity, he loved
her
.

Naked, she was comic as a child, laughing as their passion overtook them, and joyous after. “You're beautiful,” she would say then, and her open, unforced wanting touched him beyond anything he'd known. Losing her awe of him, she learned something of his childhood and the humiliation of his marriage. She made love to him, and made him laugh. He grew to understand her humor and fear and radicalism, her uncanny sensitivity and the way she lectured herself aloud, “Come on, Ruthie, shape up,” as if she were her own parent. She had never satisfied her father. Her mother had killed herself when Ruth was thirteen.

They could speak of this, he found, as they could speak of her brother with a shared affection that brought them closer. Levy and Charles remained warm friends, perhaps warmer for a shared affection too fraught with the possibility of sadness to be easily discussed: Charles knew that Levy, knowing, understood that Charles lived with such complexity because he truly cared for Ruth.

“What do you think?” he often asked her. He listened more than talked, smiled when she swore, saw the harshness she affected for what it was. “This city dries women out,” he told her. “They fight the hustle and competition and men who only want to screw them until they turn to leather, all drive and double martinis and ‘he's such a schmuck.' I suppose it has to be.” He smiled a little. “You're one of the smartest people I know, Ruthie—be as tough as you like and take no shit from anyone. Just don't defend yourself so bitterly there's no softness left to defend.”

She took his hand. “These men are so
afraid
,” she said intently. “There's no one else like you.”

He smiled at her certainty. “Then it's for me to guard the sweetness in you.”

She touched his face. Abruptly, she smiled. “And listen to my shit, Carey.”

He laughed out loud.

Feeling good for her, he grew better for himself. They dissected the manuscripts she worked on, sniffed out clues for helping her career, selected the first Charles Carey books. She bought Bombay gin for his martinis, insisting when he asked to pay that each drink advanced her “Zionist plot” to become editor-in-chief. He delighted in her outrage and outrageousness. She fumed about “those racist pricks in Little Rock” and the withdrawal from Suez; demanded that he tithe ten dollars a month to orphans in Korea—“Christ,” she blurted, “put your
wife
to work if you can't afford it,” then clapped both hands over her mouth until she saw his laughter; raged at publishers in general—“inbred morons too stupid to work for banks”—and Phillip Carey in particular. “I'd rather ball Franco,” she bristled one evening after a deliberate pass by Phillip. “
He's
the one having us followed—why else would he do that? He doesn't
like
women, I can smell it.” After that, with the spooky prescience of the wounded, she dubbed him “Phillip Krafft-Ebing” and speculated on his private life. “I've got it,” she told Charles over dinner at Sevilla. “At night he visits a hooker in the Bowery and then goes home, smears himself in his own shit, jumps into an ice-cold shower and slaps his hands with a rubber hose, screaming, ‘Bad! bad!'” She grinned, pleased with herself. “What do you think?”

“It's just delightful. Care for dessert?”

“No, really.”

He toyed with his fork. “I guess I know enough to feel sorry for him, though I manage to forget that.”

“But he came on with me to hurt you, Charles.”

“Then you hurt
him
worse than you'll ever know.” He smiled. “Forget him, Ruthie—he'll not do that again. I expect it's HUAC still following me, hoping I'll bump into Khrushchev or Bulganin, and distressed that you're a woman. Besides,” he added casually, “I love you.”

Her eyes glistened. He looked at her across the table. Her hand touched his arm, then pulled back, as if from a flame. Softly and seriously, he said, “I really do.”

Her mouth quivered. “And Peter.”

He looked away. In a monotone, he said, “And Peter, too.”

They rarely talked about his son. But the fact of Peter was like a compass, defining the boundaries of speech and possibility. “She'll do nothing as long as no one rubs her face in us,” Charles once remarked of Allie; it was understood that fear of Allie's taking Peter from him imposed limits on his movements. Sometimes, with remembered youth, Charles would race his Jaguar through the rolling Connecticut countryside as she gasped her reluctant fear and admiration, at other times they ventured uptown—to see Olivier in
The Entertainer
, or Nichols and May at Down in the Depths; as months passed, and Peter or his work on Charles Carey books would keep him home at night, he missed her with more intensity. But he never stayed the night. They never talked of marriage. She never called his home.

And then, late one spring evening, when Charles was slaving over a manuscript and Allie had left for their summer home in Maine, his telephone rang. “I want to see you,” Ruth said. “Please, for a minute.”

Her voice jarred him from thought. “What time is it?”

“Past ten. Keep working—I'll come there.” She paused. “If it's okay?”

He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. Peter had been in bed since seven:
Wind in the Willows
was heavy going for a four-year-old, he had nearly dropped off before Charles finished. The cook and maid had long since retired.

He had not seen Ruth for ten days.

“Charles?”

“All right—yes. I'll leave the front door open.”

She found him in the library. He was stretched out on the couch, wearing a tennis shirt, chinos and moccasins, blue-penciled manuscript pages scattered all around him. The light from the overhead chandelier made the circles beneath his eyes look deeper. His hair was mussed. Gently, she closed the double door behind her, walked to the couch and kissed him. “You look like hell.”

He shrugged, smiling. “It's been like this since I joined the Roller Derby.”

She switched off the chandelier.

A dim lamp at the end of the couch gave them light in a cocoon of darkness. She stood before him, mockery vanished. Silently, she began to undress, dropping her things behind her, one by one, until she was naked. Her thick hair fell on her shoulders.

“Peter …”

“Is sleeping.” She held a finger to her lips. “Quiet, Carey. This is a house call.” She knelt by the couch and began unbuttoning his shirt. “Sit up a minute.”

He paused, thinking of Peter. She took his face in her hands. Her breast grazed his shirt. “I've missed you, Charles … missed you so much. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

His back arched from the couch.

She pulled off his shirt, seeking his left nipple with her mouth. His eyes closed. “Jesus …”

“… has nothing to do with it.” Her mouth slid along the thin auburn line of hair to his stomach, her hands to the buckle of his belt.

Her hair smelled like violets. “Look, let me …”

“No, love. Enjoy it.” She pressed her cheek against his lap. “As I do you.”

Tenderly, lips brushing the shaft of his penis, she took him into her mouth.

Upstairs, Peter awoke, rubbing his eyes. The room seemed very dark. “Daddy?…”

No one answered.

His mouth was dry. “Can I have a drink of water, Daddy?”

The silence frightened him.

He stumbled out of bed, found his red terry-cloth robe where he had thrown it on the miniature captain's chair and put it on, too sleepy to tie it. Charles had left the nightlight on in Peter's bathroom. He went in, filled the water cup, and drank in short, thirsty gulps. Putting down the cup, he looked around him, and listened.