Intimate Victims (3 page)

Ultimately he dropped out of school because he was failing his subjects. He entered an easy money phase, dreaming of scheme after scheme for making a small fortune overnight. He became a bootlegger for students who were tired of drinking beer in “dry” Columbia, supplying them with whisky he bought in Jefferson City. His profits from this enterprise were considerable, until his customers noticed the whisky was weak-tasting, the seals on the bottles tampered with. He got rid of the remainder of his watered-down stock at drunken frat brawls, where he would show up near the end, when the supply was diminishing. Then he abandoned that business for a part ownership in a Hoagie-Pizza stand. His partner was not nearly so forgive-and-forget as the customers for his whisky. He was forced to make up the shortage in profits, when it was discovered, and forced to sell his half at a loss. There were other ventures, each one a worse failure than the last; each one involving more loss of face.

His mother was still in Enemy Camp, and the Kappa Pi’s were still superior. He accepted this finally, as a fact. The frustration that accompanied it filled him with a longing for a way around the fact. Until he met Lois Cutler, his only resort was to imitate and hate the Kappa Pi’s, to collect their injustices and to love them.

The night Harvey met Lois Cutler, he had just happened to wander over to the Kappa Pi house to visit his mother. He had just happened to wear evening clothes (rented), on the pretext that he was dropping in on the graduation dance at the University gym. The campus was busy with all sorts of dances; it was the last night of school. Harvey feigned great surprise at the elaborate festivities he found underway at Kappa Pi. Elbowing his way through the couples dancing to the twelve-piece orchestra, he went directly to his mother’s suite on the first floor. He knew she would not be there, that she was undoubtedly hovering over the punch bowl in the main room, or making the wallflowers feel wanted, but he assumed an important air as he headed for her suite — an “all-business” attitude. He intended to sit in her parlor and smoke a cigarette, then slowly, unobtrusively, blend with the crowd. When he came upon his mother, he intended to say, with a certain pique in his tone: “I’ve been looking all over for you!”

• • •

He was surprised to find his mother’s suite occupied. The occupant was talking on the telephone in his mother’s bedroom. Harvey sat down on the couch in the parlor and lit a cigarette.

“All right, Daddy, I promise,” a girl’s voice was saying. “I cross my heart … What? No, he didn’t try to get
me
drunk. No, Daddy. I told you, he flunked geology and he felt bad because he won’t graduate.”

The girl was talking about Tub Oakley, Harvey knew. He guessed she was a Stephens College girl. Tub always dated Stephens girls. They usually had money, for one thing; for another, it was not easy for Tub to get a date with acceptable sorority girls. He was too fat and too short. Stephens girls usually dated Tub to get to fraternity parties where they could meet more men. Stephens was not coeducational.

“Daddy,” the girl said, “I told you I never went out with him before! How was I to know he’d get so drunk! No, I promise. I cross my heart and hope to die … What? … I don’t want
you
to die either, Daddy … What? … No. I promise I won’t go home with him. I’ll take a taxi. Hmm? … Now? Long-distance?”

The next thing Harvey knew, the girl was singing in a high little squeaky voice.

Then the girl giggled for a few seconds … “I miss you too. Hmmm? Oh, a mile’s worth … All right, a trillion, million miles worth. Don’t worry. I cross my heart, Daddy.”

Harvey was beginning to feel uncomfortable and curious. He leaned forward and peered around the corner of the parlor slowly. The girl’s back was to him. She was sitting on his mother’s bed, the phone cradled in her arms, her head bent to her shoulder, squeezing the phone’s neck in place. Her hands were caressing her arms. She had long yellow hair which spilled down a very white, bare back. She was wearing a lemon-colored net gown, ankle-length, and high-heeled gold slippers.

“Here’s a kiss,” she said. She made a smacking noise with her lips.

Harvey leaned back. He heard her say, “See you tomorrow night, Daddy. God bless me and God bless you, keep each one and keep us two … I will, Daddy … I won’t, Daddy. I promise. Bye-bye!”

She jumped when she came out of the bedroom and saw him sitting there.

Harvey stood up and bowed. He introduced himself. He apologized for being unable to help overhearing her telephone conversation. Then he offered to see that she got home all right. She accepted this offer, along with Harvey’s offer of a soda en route. Harvey escorted her from the Kappa Pi house with a sense of deep satisfaction. If there was any Kappa Pi he hated more than all the rest, it was Tub Oakley. If there was any Kappa Pi he longed to show up above all the others, Oakley was that Kappa Pi.

“Shouldn’t I try to find Tub and tell him I’m going home with you?” Lois Cutler asked.

“He’s probably upstairs getting sick,” said Harvey. “Anyway, he doesn’t deserve any courtesy. Never mind his excuses, it was very bad form.”

“That’s what Daddy says.”

“Did you call him long distance just to ask what to do?”

“I always consult Daddy.”

“Are you from Kansas City or St. Louis?”

“Pennsylvania,” she said. In his mind, Harvey was adding up the minutes — estimating the phone call’s cost.

“Daddy and I are extremely close,” Lois Cutler said. “So it seems.”

“He’s such an old silly,” she said.

“That’s very nice,” Harvey told her.

He looked down at her. She was not a very pretty girl. Her eyes were a trifle too close together, and her lips were as straight as a boy’s. Her hair was really golden, though, and she had very bright green eyes, that were now lit with high pleasure. “A silly old silly,” she purred, “and I
loves
him!”

Instead of the soda, they went for beers to one of Columbia’s tawdry cafes, on the fringes of the university campus. She had just been graduated from Stephens, and she was eager to return to Pennsylvania — to Daddy. She was unable to concentrate for very long on any subject besides Daddy. Around her neck, a tiny gold locket contained a picutre of Hayden Cutler. From her jeweled brocade clutch bag, she produced another, a larger one which showed him full-length, leaning against a white Citroen DS 19. (Harvey had no trouble identifying the car; it had been on one of his April lists.) Daddy was a dapper, laughing gentleman, with a thick head of white hair and a beefy youthfulness.

“Isn’t he cute?” Lois wanted to know. “He’s a very nice looking man.”

“Him works too hard,” Lois said to the photograph, pouting and slapping it with her finger. “Him works his fingers to the bone!”

“What sort of work does he do?”

“He has a seat on the New York Stock Exchange,” Lois said. “Him’s a biggy old Wall Street daddy doll.”

Harvey found that he was not bored or even repelled by the subject of “Daddy,” even though he was beginning to suspect that Tub Oakley’s geology grades might not have been the sole reason he had gotten drunk. Harvey had never seen anyone of Lois Cutler’s type in such a vulnerable position, unless she were intoxicated. At first, he listened to her palaver about Daddy with the excited feeling that at any moment she would realize she had been talking about nothing else. He expected that then she would be embarrassed and apologetic, and attribute her uninhibited confidences to the fact that Harvey made her feel unselfconscious. When he realized no such thing was going to happen, he took a new tack. He began extolling her utter devotion to “Daddy,” hoping to shame her into some sort of awareness of the fact she was the next thing to neurotic about her father. He expected her to say during a pause, which he tried desperately to effect: “I guess you think I’m crazy or something.” But there were no pauses. The subject of Daddy was an inexhaustible reservoir. Unable to fight it, Harvey joined it. He found himself not only interested in Daddy, but vaguely delighted by the unabashed Lois, who poured out her feelings to him, and whose hands were whiter, whose hair was longer and more shining than any other girl Harvey had known — and whose penetrating eyes Harvey found himself looking into without flinching.

• • •

When Harvey and Lois reached the dormitory at Stephens late that evening, small knots of other couples stood under the eaves embracing. While Harvey was deciding whether or not to kiss her, she pulled him under the porch light.

“I’m going to do something I’ve never done before,” she said.

He felt like kissing her, but he wondered how such small lips would feel. He did not think it would be much of a kiss.

“What’s that?” he said. He wanted to guide her back from the light a bit, but when he stepped back, she pulled his sleeve again.

“No, stay right there.” Then she fumbled in her clutch bag until she came up with a wrinkled piece of paper. “I’m going to show you something.”

She was not going to kiss him after all.

“It’s the beer,” she said. “I’ve never shown this to anyone before. That old silly wrote it.”

“Your father?”

“Himself!” she giggled.

“It’s a poem.”

“Well, let me see it.”

“First I want to tell you that he’s such a silly old silly. He scribbled it on a menu at 21 in New York City. He took me there before I left for school last fall. We had frogs’ legs and wine, and wine, and wine. It’s his silly old wine poem.”

“They’ll be calling curfew any minute, Lois.”

Behind them, a thin boy with intense eyes was comforting a weeping blond with the promise that he would tell Kathy the truth about them, the moment he arrived home.

“Just remember it’s a silly old daddy wine poem,” Lois said. Daddy said I should show it to every boy I go out with. But I never have. For reasons that will become obvious when you cast your eyes upon old silly’s silly.”

She handed it to him, and pressed her fingers to her lips, giggling again. “I copied it off the menu and typed it up,” she said.

“Isn’t that an old silly, though?”

“Can I write you?” said Harvey Plangman.

• • •

All of that was two months ago.

Between then and now Harvey had spent his time managing Woolworth’s five-and-ten, pocketing a good quarter of the inventory, and corresponding daily with Lois Cutler. He fantasized their honeymoon visit to his mother, the Citroen DS 19 they had borrowed for the cross-country trip parked outside the Kappa Pi house. Even Tub Oakley (who was in summer school trying to pass geology) was impressed by the volume of mail that came from Lois to the Kappa Pi house, addressed to Harvey. Harvey had not bothered to mention the fact he was neither a university student, nor a Kappa Pi. He had borrowed a set of maternal and paternal grandparents from the wedding announcements in
The New
York Times,
and he had killed off his father, a colonel, in World War II. His letters to Lois were as filled with “embellishments” as hers with references to Daddy. As the weeks wore on, a change came over Harvey Plangman. The more he lied, the more he wished his lies were true. He began to brood over the unfairness of the fact they were not true. He began to feel protective toward his lies, almost as though they were little living creatures whose existence depended on him. He became slightly reticent and suspicious, and in the fantasy of his honeymoon visit-to his mother, he was always compelled to go out on the steps of the KP house and shout, “All right, boys, please get away from the car!”

Another facet of this change was the thought that certain people were on to him — here and there he would run across one of them. They looked at him in a peculiar way.

That cool July evening, at the Princeton Inn, where he was meeting Lake Budde, it was the girl at the desk.

While he waited for her to finish her conversation, his eyes fell to a small basket of matchbooks set out on the counter, each one with PRINCETON INN marked on the cover. Harvey Plangman prided himself on never pocketing a place’s matchbooks, never once giving a place the satisfaction of thinking that he would like to show off their matchbooks. Instead, for a dollar, Harvey sent away periodically for 30 matchbooks from famous hotels and niteries. He sent his dollar to a P.O. box in New Orleans, copied from an advertisement in the
St. Louis Post Dispatch.
That way, he not only had matchbooks from places he would probably never visit, he also saved face by never being seen in the act of picking up one for a keepsake. Yet, anyone who knew Harvey Plangman at all, knew he was never without a matchbook from a famous hotel or restaurant.

Harvey edged over closer to the girl behind the counter, as the gentleman she was talking with moved away. “Yes?” she said.

“I beg your pardon,” said Harvey, bowing, “would you be good enough to inform me of the location of your telephone booth?”

She pointed to it. “Right over there.” “Thank you
most
kindly.” “You’re welcome.”

She was looking down at his hands. He realized he had been standing there cracking his knuckles. He dropped his hands to his sides. Then he said, “Oh, by the by,” with a casual air, “one other thing.” “Yes?”