Mile High (42 page)

“Mayra says? Did you find yourself a Negro to do your thinking? Are you an ant?”

“In many ways. I am industrious and patient. I have a keen attention span. Are you an ant?”

“No forced humor, please.”

“As for being a Communist—if I were one I'd have to give all my money away. Don't you think?”

“Is your wife a Communist?”

“No. She has over four thousand dollars in the bank. And she's a painter and she examines the world piece by piece.”

“Can you arrange your affairs so that you could practice architecture in the United States?”

“Theoretically, yes.”

“I have acquired three large tracts of land. One is between Washington and Baltimore. The second is in the Midwest. The third will serve Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nevada. I want new cities to be built on the land and a first-class feeder plane or monorail system devised that will keep them safely decentralized.” He watched Walt closely. Walt was wide-eyed with fascination. West said, “I've averaged out at about one hundred and eighty dollars an acre, and if the labor force can move in at the moment the housing and the factories are ready, we'll get forty thousand an acre for the industrial sites and a relative markup for the homesites plus the banking and construction business. Do you want the job?”

Walt and Mayra went walking along the high path to the Hammetschwand lift and he told her about the offer. There wasn't much either of them could think to say against it because it was precisely the work Walt had been pointing toward since he and Derek had gone into business. There would be a lot of traveling among the three sites, but Derek could handle that until the baby was born, and while they waited for that, while they got an American office together they could find a house on Long Island somewhere near Mama. In fact, the more they talked about it the better it sounded. They decided Walt should seize the chance. He said he would have to leave for a few days to look over the land sites with his father's partner, the former Congressman Rei, who was a Midwest banker, but he'd be back by Saturday, and they would leave for good by Monday noon to return to New York. He said she probably wouldn't see much of his father, who, Willie said, spent much of his time in his rooms, but Willie looked forward to entertaining her, and there were movies every night, bowling, indoor tennis and squash and swimming and a lot of heroic visions to be painted. Mayra said that sounded fine.

Congressman Rei had done such a great deal to advance the cause of international aviation that Walt looked forward eagerly to meeting him. In the twenties and thirties, to an almost legendary degree, the congressman and his widely publicized personal pilot, Captain Guill Rael, had flown great and greatly reported distances in the Rei Ford Trimotor, almost always with a passenger list of the most delicious sort of celebrities. And these feats of glamour had kept aviation in the forefront of the news. The plane would show up in Havana, Mexico, Canada, throughout the Caribbean, and Rei had a press agent waiting at every stop. What was not as widely known as his keen interest in aviation was his even keener interest in the importation of narcotics. Every plane the congressman ever had could carry up to sixty kilos of heroin or cocaine in concealed compartments, and the consignments always whooshed past the customs in a blur of celebrity dust.

On the morning of Walt's departure to join Congressman Rei for a tour of the new city sites, he and Mayra were greatly surprised, when they entered the car that was to take them to the pad, to find Edward West seated there, dressed for travel. “I have business in Chicago and Washington,” Mr. West said. “I do not want State to upset General de Gaulle in any way.” Mayra saw them off, waving at the helicopter as it rose into the sky, then set off toward the West airport at Hawk Bay.

At lunch time she called Willie, but the room did not answer, and Gubitz, the concierge, told her he thought Mr. Tobin was busy with the mechanics at the car collection in the Palace Hotel. He asked if she would like him to locate Mr. Tobin, but Mayra said not to bother him. She decided not to have lunch in her apartment because she wanted to feel what it would be like to have an entire dining room brigade available to serve her alone, so she went to the dining room, where she chose lightly from the enormous menu. At three o'clock, six vague and formless hours after Walt and his father had flown away, she slung her portable painting kit over her shoulder and set out along the mountain trail to the Hammetschwand lift and the magnificent view.

For the first time in her three visits, there was no one in the Berghaus. The colored post cards were in the racks. The bar stood gleaming inside the plate glass window and the tables were set for the snack lunches that were so rarely served, but there was no staff. The sun had begun to hint at departure within the hour but its low angle and her high place gave her magnificent color and light and shadow in the forest and snow below her. She felt alone on top of the world, and because it was a temporary feeling, it gave her a sense of exultation, as though she had survived alone the hydrogen bomb, the viscous pollutions of water and air, and the voraciousness of politicians. It made her sad for Mama and Walt, because it was an exalting game to play. Then she set up the easel, propped up the canvas and began to think about what she would paint.

She watched the colors shift and heard the low wind and began to sketch the complex of Bürgenstock buildings far below. She worked quickly and surely. Very soon it was clear what she had set out to do. Then she heard the voice behind her. It said, “Why did you marry my son?” She turned in fright because the voice was very frightening, not only in its unexpected suddenness. Mr. West was standing on the shallow porch of the Berghaus, ten or twelve yards away. He wore a coachman's hat and a half-cape overcoat that had a collar he had pulled around his face, whose lower part was already muffled in a heavy black wool scarf. His face was beyond paleness. It was dead white. His mustache was white on white. She stared at him. He spoke again. “Why did an Italian-speaking nigger marry my son?”

“That only matters to Walt and to me,” she said. Her voice shook. Her eyes were widely opened. She gripped the paint brush with both hands as though it were a railing upon a very high, swaying place.

“You deserve to be punished for what you've done,” the cold-eyed old man said. He stood stiffly, with his head and torso thrust slightly forward, his ungloved hands clenched tightly, his arms rigid at his sides, and each time he paused he chewed on his lower lip. “My family is the most honored American family in this country's history, which means it is the most honored in the world. You are a nigger. You have shamed my family's name.” His voice carried harshly across the hastening darkness. They did not move toward or away from each other. “You are a nigger Communist. Niggers are sex-crazy. My son had a life that was meant to be devoted to God, and you dragged him into your bed, and you must be punished for that. Punished in this life.” She could watch the thin line of spittle march out of the left side of his mouth. “I had photographs taken of what you do with him. I have over a hundred photographs of every bed you've dragged him into and I know. I know niggers are sex-crazy, and I have the proof of what you did with my son, whose life was meant to be spent in the service of God.”

She thought of wide spaces of blue sky and deep sunlit depths of crystal water to clear her mind of panic. She concentrated on remembering that Willie Tobin had said that there were cowpaths going down from the mountaintop into the valley behind her. She tried to resolve that she would not run from him. He was an old man. She was Ashanti.

“You should be beaten until your bones are broken and you bleed from every orifice of your body. Until you scream with pain and want to die. Then you should die. You must be cast down from the heavens. From this mountaintop. That is my right and my duty, to cast you down from the highest place into the pit, where you will enter hell to receive eternal punishment for thinking only of satisfying your body, for using your body again and again and again for pleasure under a white man of God. Because you degraded my son and degraded my name and because you live for your body and its insatiable appetites.”

He began to move toward her slowly. His eyes were glassy, shiny but not shining. His eyes seemed to be looking inward as he moved toward her, and the spittle was freely running out of the side of his mouth. She tried not to cry out, but she did. She tried not to run away from him, but she was spun by the force of her fear and sent running away from him with her hands clasped over her ears. The winter dusk was closing in, but she came upon the clearly defined path immediately. She did not look back. Two miles down toward the valley the long, high ridge on which Bürgenstock West was settled stretched out, and as she began to run, its lights came on like a beacon. Fifty yards down the path she halted to look upward and back, but no one was behind her. He was no longer on the mountaintop, but she didn't know how the other paths on the mountain ran or if he had ways to head her off, so she ran. She fell over bushes and ran into trees as she descended. She was more apart than together when she reached the level of the ridge. She couldn't remember when the dogs were set loose to roam the estate, so she kept running, gasping for breath, but she didn't weep, and twenty yards before she reached the entrance to the Grand Hotel she stopped and did her best to put her hair in place and catch her breath. She walked slowly and with dignity to the revolving door, entered the hotel and asked Gubitz to find Mr. Tobin and ask him to join her, if he could, in her apartment.

When she got upstairs Gubitz telephoned. He said that he had located Mr. Tobin in the Palace garages and that Mr. Tobin would be happy to join her in a half hour.

Willie was in the blandest good spirits when he arrived, apologetic that he had been tied up in the garage all day and hadn't been able to lunch with her, but looking forward to a gala dinner. He explained that two really fascinating cars had joined the collection that morning and that he just had not been aware that so much time had sped away.

“I went up to the Berghaus this afternoon to paint a little bit, and a sad and frightening thing happened.”

“What happened?”

“Mr. West followed me up. He must have come up just about ten minutes after me on the big elevator, and he said a lot of sick things. Like he said he was going to punish me. What's the matter?”

Willie was looking at her with dismay that was mixed with anxiety and even consternation. “Mayra, dear,” he said “when did this happen?”

“About an hour and a half ago.”

“But it couldn't have happened an hour and a half ago.”

“Why not?”

“Mr. West is in Chicago with your husband.”

“He is like hell.”

“Yes. He is.” Willie wet his lips. He rubbed his hands together. “Now, there is nothing to be concerned about here. You're pregnant. You've been traveling a great deal unexpectedly and you've had all kinds of contrasts. The fact is this sort of thing happens with many pregnancies.”

“Not this sort of thing. But, okay, never mind. We'll let it go. Where can I call Walt?”

“They're all at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.”

“Will you put the call in for me?”

“Certainly.” Willie glided across the room to the telephone and gave the instructions to Gubitz. They waited somewhat uneasily for ten minutes, then Gubitz reported that Mr. Edward West and Mr. Walter West were out of the hotel. “They're probably out looking over the housing site,” Willie said. “In fact, I'm sure that's where they are,” he said, holding his hand over the mouthpiece.

“Please ask when they'll get back.”

Willie asked. “They'll be back for dinner,” Willie said after Gubitz had fed the question to the hotel in Chicago.

“May I speak to the hotel, please?”

“Certainly.” Willie extended the phone.

Mayra spoke to the desk clerk and asked him to be certain to leave word that Mr. Walter West was to call his wife as soon as possible.

Mayra said, if Willie didn't mind, she thought she'd rest for a little bit while she waited for Walt's call. Willie started to reassure her again that it most certainly must have been a trick of light and the wind, and she listened so patiently and nodded so compliantly that he lost heart and began to leave, asking her to call him, please, after she had talked to Walt and saying that he hoped they could have dinner together.

Walt called at eight o'clock, which was seven o'clock Chicago time, three and a half hours after she had come down from the mountain, four and a half hours after she had been threatened by Mr. West.

“Walt?”

“Yes, honey?”

“How's everything?”

“Just fine.”

“Your daddy with you?”

“He's in the hotel, not with me, but down the hall somewhere.”

Mayra shut her eyes tightly. Then she spoke again after a long pause. “Were you out to look at the site?”

“Just got back. Marvelous piece of land.”

“Walt?”

“Yes, love.”

“Did your daddy go out to the site with you?”

“No. We had an early lunch, then he decided to take a nap and make some calls. He's too old to go tramping around the countryside.”

Her eyes popped open. “What time you finish lunch?” she asked.

“About twelve-thirty. Why?”

“You just get back?”

“Yeah. Just now.”

“Been in to see your daddy since lunch?”

“No. Say, what kind of a crazy conversation is this?”

“Don't pay me no mind. I just wanted to talk. The words don't matter, do they? So long as we just can talk. I guess I'm lonesome.”

“Well, not for long, you won't be. This is Wednesday. I'll be back Saturday. We'll be having dinner with your mama on Monday night in New York.”