In the Still of the Night (17 page)

He drove to school and got to see Father Moran in his office. The priest shook hands with him, not the usual start of a student interview. He knew a troubled young person when he saw one. He told David to move his chair so the light wouldn’t shine in his face.

“I got to thinking after yesterday’s brouhaha,” the priest said, “one of those what-if questions. What if, after hiding out overnight, Iscariot had showed up at the foot of the cross and said, ‘Lord, forgive me.’”

David grinned. There was nothing to say and yet there was a lot.

“What can I do for you, Crowley?”

“I did a bad thing, Father.” David told his story, even to having thrown the condom into the wind.

The priest lifted an eyebrow. “Standard equipment,” he growled. It was the only comment he made until David was finished. Then, after a few seconds of thought: “And when you find her?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “I just want her to know I’m sorry for what happened to her.”

“Even a decent lawyer would advise you against self-incrimination.”

“I don’t care!” David all but shouted.

“By the grace of God, I’m not a lawyer,” the priest said. He took the phone book from the bottom drawer of his desk. “Let’s start with the nearest hospital to where this misfortune occurred.”

Within the half-hour he had the name and address for Alice Moss. When she hemorrhaged with the miscarriage, she had taken herself back to St. Vincent’s Hospital. It was where she worked on the custodial staff.

“If you didn’t hear me scream,” the woman said after she’d thought about it, “how were you going to hear if something else happened to me?”

“I don’t think I wanted to hear anything,” David said.

Mrs. Moss scraped a bit of congealed egg from the table with her thumbnail. They sat in the hospital’s employees’ cafeteria, where midafternoon traffic was light. She did not in any way resemble the face behind the scream. Her salt-and-pepper hair hung in a clump at the back of her head. Her eyes were tired. She seemed confused, slow, but her question was on the mark. She twisted uncomfortably on the metal chair. “I don’t like you coming to me like this,” she said. “I’d just as soon never know you.”

“I’m sorry,” David said.

“You said that already and I believe you’re telling the truth. But I think you’re sorry over something I’m not real sure I feel the same way about. That lawyer got me all confused, telling me how I feel when I don’t feel that way at all.” She concentrated on
ST. MARY’S COLLEGE,
the lettering on the breast of his sweater. “David—Mr. Crowley …”

“David’s fine,” he said.

“I’m not saying what I want to say, and maybe I should keep it to myself.” She drew a deep breath and looked at him directly. “I didn’t want to have a baby at all, but I’m a church person and I felt I had to go through with it. Mind, I could have been killed myself last night, I know that …”

“I do too,” David said.

“And maybe that would have been murder, but I still couldn’t call the other thing murder. I was thinking when I came back to work this noon: wasn’t I lucky on both counts?”

Before the next Christian Ethics class David told Father Moran about his meeting in the hospital cafeteria.

“Did she forgive you?”

“I think so.”

“You’re lucky, my lad,” the priest said. They reached the classroom door. “I have a word of advice for you, Crowley. One word….” He waited.

“Yes, Father?”

“Abstinence.”

K
ITTY FOUND HIM FINALLY
. He was out on the terrace, no place to be on such a night. He stood, his hands on the parapet, his face to the wind and the strange billowing fog. At times the whole galaxy of lights that shone across the park from Fifth Avenue vanished from sight. Mark leaned over the parapet and looked down, unaware—or not wanting to acknowledge—that his wife had come out from the party to look for him. The apartment was full of guests, most of them agency clients and among those some of the most successful writers in the country, and Mark was out on the terrace.

“I’ve been looking all over for you. People are asking where you are.”

“Who?” he said over his shoulder.

“Oh, God. You’re in one of those moods. I’m sorry if I interrupted you with Jonathan, but I could see him getting restless. He has no patience. I didn’t want him to leave the party.”

He mumbled something she didn’t hear.

“If you must know, I didn’t want him hurting your feelings.”

“Or me hurting his. Or isn’t that possible?” He half-turned toward her. “I was going to ask him if now that he has all that money, we can call him the Root of all evil. You interrupted just in time.”

“Are you drunk?” He had played upon the author’s name, Jonathan Root, and referred to the recent book contract Kitty had negotiated for him, seven figures.

“Not as drunk as I’d like to be.”

“You’re going to catch cold out here, and we don’t need it this time of year. Please, darling.”

November, with all the cheerful holidays coming up, he thought. He turned and faced her, his elbows on the parapet. She looked glamorous—and was!—a white beaded dress, one shoulder bare, the little sway of self-assurance, and those very blue eyes that, except for the sparkle, were to be seen only in his mind’s eye at the moment. “It’s you that’s going to catch cold,” he said. “Go in and enjoy your party.”

“It’s not my party. It’s our party.”

“No, Kitty. That mixed bag in there is all yours. I don’t like to see people eating their hearts out.”

“That’s pure imagination, and you’re wrong. Success rubs off. Believe me. Look at me! Am I not the perfect example? If you’ve got it, you’ll get it. I’m going in now and I want you to come with me.”

“In a few minutes.”

“Damn you,” she said and whirled around to almost collide with André Wilczynski, a young writer, mostly of poetry, who was both client and sometime employee. When he served as waiter on such occasions as this, Mark called him their poet in residence.

Wilczynski tried to hold the door for Kitty and at the same time balance the martini on his tray. He, too, had been looking everywhere for Mark. Kitty snatched the glass from the tray. “Let him come inside for it if he wants it.”

Kitty swept indoors. Mark turned back to watch the fog. When the doors closed between him and the party, he could hear the singing wheels of the traffic below and the rev of a heavy motor when the bus pulled away from the stop at Seventy-fourth Street. Looking down, he could see the doorman—like a tin soldier blowing a thin whistle with a little toy taxi creeping into view.

“Shall I bring you another drink, Mr. Coleman?”

Mark did not answer, annoyed that the young man was still there.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Bring me the drink, André. Straight up. No rocks this time.”

Kitty, indoors and checking people’s glasses, looked around for Tom Wilding, the agency’s lawyer and Mark’s longtime friend, thinking to send him out to persuade Mark in. He wasn’t in sight either. There were sixty or seventy people in clusters about the room, and yet it wasn’t crowded. She could see everyone. The apartment—on Central Park West—was the top floor through of a building that had gone up in the 1920s. The Colemans had kept its decor to the fashion of the day. Mark called it late Scott Fitzgerald.

Aware that her feet hurt but that she was going to have to carry things entirely on her own, she put on a jaunty air and moved among the guests. She encouraged the successful authors to hold forth and gave a squeeze to the arm of a listener who hadn’t made it yet as much as to say, All this can be yours too. Among those whose careers were modest and who chose the company of their own kind, she would linger long enough to bring the conversation to where she could recount the meteoric success of an author—not present, but a name everyone recognized—who’d been living hand-to-mouth on minuscule advances until Kitty took her in hand.

Tom Wilding watched all this from alongside a pillar in the dining-room archway. He knew the script. He also saw the young man in a white coat that was too big for him take a single drink out onto the terrace. So that would be where Mark was and why Kitty was carrying herself around with a brave tilt to her chin. What an actress she was: a royal presence moving among her subjects. Kitty avoided mirrors, he thought, and never looked behind. Therefore she didn’t know—or didn’t have to admit to caring—what people thought of her.

In a broad sense, Wilding had been watching Kitty for a long time, almost twenty-five years, from the time, he suspected afterward, she made her choice of whom to go after, him or Mark. To admit the truth, he had been briefly attracted to her, beguiled by her vivacity and those big blue eyes. He remembered taking a long look into them on the eve of her marriage to Mark. Whatever he saw then, it was not the Kitty of today. Nor was Mark the man he liked to remember. In those days Mark was considered one of the best young literary agents in New York. His authors loved him. Even publishers loved him, which might be the key to his eclipse—if that was what it was. Wilding had always considered himself lucky to have acquired the Mark Coleman Agency as a client for the legal firm in which he was then a junior partner. He hadn’t known how lucky. Today he could live on the income from it. Which was the reason he could take the gaff from Kitty that he did. He often wondered how Mark took it. But he also wondered sometimes if Mark knew what he was taking.

About to light a cigarette, he thought of going out with it and joining Mark on the terrace. Kitty hated the smell of cigarettes. Wilding smiled at his motivation, but he proceeded on his way outdoors. Before he reached the terrace, he saw a scuffle going on there, a flash of the white coat and then the crash of glass as the young man flailed, trying to get his balance. Wilding ran to help him; so did others, the whole party rising to its feet.

Both of the French doors shattered, and shards of glass seemed to explode. Wilczynski was instantly aglitter with them, and Mark still went after him and tried to pull him up by his lapels with the manifest intention of hitting him again. He threw off Wilding’s attempt to get hold of him. “Get out of here, Tom. Keep out of this!”

It was Kitty who intervened and pulled Mark away. Wilding took Wilczynski through the gaping, gasping guests to the nearest bathroom. He had several cuts on one side of his face, the slivers of glass still in some of them. On the other side his jaw was swelling, a possible fracture. “Can you talk?”

“No.” Which meant that he didn’t intend to, Wilding thought, not to Coleman’s attorney certainly.

“We’d better get you to an emergency hospital,” he said, a proposal he hoped would assuage the man. “First aid is going to do it, but let’s get it from a professional.” He took him through the kitchen and out by the back hall. Their topcoats were jammed among others on a rack in the foyer. Wilding said he’d come back for them later. In the cab, which crept through the fog westward toward Roosevelt Hospital, he tried again to find out what had happened.

Wilczynski took away the towel he was holding to his face. “I’m not going to sue or anything like that, Mr. Wilding, so you don’t have to worry.”

Wilding held up a hand to forestall his saying anything more in that vein. “My concern at the moment is to get you to a doctor, and I don’t think you should think about noble gestures in your present condition.”

Wilczynski didn’t speak for some time. He touched his jaw tentatively and winced. Then: “When I took a drink out to him, I thought at first—he looked as though he was going to jump off the terrace. Maybe it was all in my mind, but I started to talk him away from the ledge, saying how people like me needed him, things like that. When he realized what I was talking about, he came over and told me to put down the tray. He wanted to know what I’d suggest instead of the big jump. I wasn’t going to say anything, but the way she’d humiliated him in front of me, I just let go: ‘You don’t have to take that shit, sir.’ And whammo.”

“I get the picture,” Wilding said.

“I guess I’m lucky not to be on my way to the morgue.”

Wilding said nothing.

“He shouldn’t have asked me a question like that,” Wilczynski said and buried his whole face in the towel.

The attorney waited until almost noon the next day expecting Coleman to call him. Then he called Coleman. “Any word from Wilczynski?”

“No.”

“What got into you, Mark?”

“He maligned my wife.”

“Just what did he say?” Wilding wanted his version.

“If I could remember, I wouldn’t repeat it.”

“You could be in serious trouble, Mark. Twenty-eight stitches. There could be disfigurement.”

“I’d hate to see that happen. He’s got a nice face—homely, but a good face. And he’s a good writer if he could stay with it.”

“I think you ought to apologize to him, Mark.”

“Kitty says no, that I’d lose face. Which is pretty funny when you think about it.”

“I’d better talk to Kitty,” Wilding said reluctantly.

“She’s waiting for you. Hang on. I’ll switch you over.”

Kitty came on the phone full force. “Most lawyers I know would advise a client to stay clear of the victim, whether it’s an accident case or whatever. Our lawyer, it seems, commits us to instant liability.”

“Would you have had him bleed to death out there on the terrace?”

“Was there nobody in that whole crowd who knew anything about first aid?”

“Twenty-eight stitches, Kitty. That’s beyond first aid.”

“You made sure of it, rushing him to the hospital. Just tell me where things stand now. Give it to me in words of one syllable.”

Very slowly, making sure of his own composure, he explained the situation as he saw it. He knew very well that Kitty’s point did have cold-blooded merit.

“So what’s the big deal? He’ll apologize.”

“Kitty, just in case the worst happens and he does decide to sue, I want to apprise you of the way I think it might go. If it were ever to come to trial, whoever represented Mark would have to plead him mentally disturbed. Counsel would ask leniency, and the judge might grant it on condition that he undergo psychiatric care.”