The Burden of Proof (17 page)

Stern, forty-five years after the fact, found the thought of this woman as imagined, with her sunken eyes and small breasts, disturbingly provocative.

But his youth in America in the fifties had contained nothing so exotic.

The Puritans reigned once more here, and sexuality seemed to be a particularly unbecoming trait for a dark foreigner, a suspect impulse like fellow traveling.

Lust was one more wild hunger that he willingly constrained for future satisfaction, even with Clara, with whom he would not have slept before their wedding but for her insistence that they were more likely to enjoy the honeymoon if they could leave this particular anxiety behind. And so, two weeks before the ceremony, in Pauline Mitfier's parlor full of Oriental brocades and Viennese glass, with all the lights still burning for fear that someone in the house might notice, Clara had wriggled from her girdle and her hose, lifted her skirt, and lain back on her mother's red divan. For many reasons, that had struck Stern as an act of astonishing trust. And he? He was terrified and, because of that, also somewhat affronted, angered by the indignity 'of these shabby mechanics.

Thirty-one years later, those emotions remained real to him, near at hand in the dark auto, the peculiar residue of a night of high feeling in which he had been confused and stimulated and put out. But he had proceeded; he remembered that as well. He had fiddled interminably to release his erect penis from the bindings of his trousers, and Clara Mittlet had become the first--the only--woman in his life.

Stern had first seen Chicago when he was thirteen, near the end of the overland passage his mother and Silvia and he had made from Argentina.

That journey had been impelled by his mother's involvement with a man named Gmengehl, a lawyer who had been showing her great interest since, it seemed, the moment of his father's death. Gruengehl was a figure in one of the few anti-Peronist unions, and following his jailing, his friends and colleagues had swept into his mother's house to help them pack, their mute for exile already arranged. In 1947, with displaced persons throughout Europe claretring for entry to the United States, and Argentina's diplomatic ties to the U. S. questionable after the war, legal immigration was problematic. Instead, they traveled by train to Mexico City, and then were driven across the border, looking like one more family of braceros. In Brownsville they boarded a train North.

Stern even so young, had known that Argentina was not his destiny. His father, a physician, had left Germany in 1928 and forever mourned that the Nazis prevented his return.

Papa always unfavorably compared life in Argentina to what he had known before: the quality of goods, of music, of building materials, of people was sadly lacking in his eyes. Jacobo, whom Stern so admired, had become an ardent Zionist and preached from the time Stern was nine or so the glory of Eretz Israel. When Stern stepped off the train in Chicago, he believed his life had started. They went on to Kindle County, where cousins of his father's were waiting, but Chicago would always be what he thought of as America, with its massive, soot-smeared buildings of brick and stone and granite, full of smokestack arms and sullen, teeming throngs, the land of Gary Cooper, of steel, skyscrapers, automobiles. He recognized in every face that day the striving.children of immigrants.

More than four decades later, Mr. Alejandro Stern returned, a man of prominence with his own troubles. On the fifth floor of the Chicago Exchange, he sat in the walnut conference room at Maison Dixon, thumbing through documents he could not comprehend. Outside, the vast trading room of MD burned on, eighty young men and women, casually dressed, each behind a telephone console blinking with the action on twenty lines, and a pillar of cathode-ray tubes. Across these glowing screens darted figures, flashing by briefly like fish in the sea, a matrix of dollars and cents, beans and oil, fast markets and bulletin items, high, low, open, volume, change. The telephones chirped like crickets, and different voices occasionally gained ascendance. "Anybody here want to buy old bonds at 6 plus? .... It's moving, it's moving."

"I'm going to hedge you up on the D-marks."

Between calls, these young people, working customer and managed accounts, would offer to the entire room a hip, sardonic commentary. One fellow whined in a mock accent of some kind, "Oh, the market, she is just like a woo-man, first she wants you, then she don't, she won't never make up her mind." An attractive young blonde beside him inclined her middle finger in response.

"Got it all figured out?" Margy Allison, Dixon's chief operating officer, had returned for a moment to check on his progress. She had been in this business most of her adult life, almost exclusively for Maison Dixon, and, apparently, still found it thrilling. Nothin' to it, she seemed to suggest, as she motioned to the stacks of paper around Stern--even a silly old Okie gal could git it. Margy loved to do routines like that, for the amusement of her friends up North. An M. B. A., she preferred to come on like an oilfield roughneck. 'Mar-gee,' she would say, when introducing herself. 'Hard g. Hard girl."

"I believe we shall need an accountant," Stern told her.

Margy made a face. She was the paymaster in these parts and a legend for her tightfistedness. Every time she signed a check, she told you what a dollar used to buy in the country.

"I can put all that stuff together for you."

She was capable, no question, but unlikely to find the time. With the advent of overseas trading, and night sessions of the markets, Maison Dixon was open twenty-four hours a day, and there were problems to solve at every juncture. At her door at any hour, there was usually a line: clerks and secretaries and boys up from the floor in the unstructured jackets with the large square plastic badges on the pockets. Stern, accordingly, told her she could not afford to spend the hours this job would require.

"If you're billin' us your usual hourly rate, Sandy, I can afford a lotta time." She smiled, but her point, of course, was made. "I'm sure you got one of those hotel rooms like you usually do when we're payin, big enough to hold the opera with the elephants. We can take this whole mess there and look it over. Assumin a' course"--Margy hooded her shadowed eyes--"you're willing to chance bein alone with me." She cast herself in a vampy role, a female sexual braggart. It was part of her 1ov routine, coming on tough and crude, like the kind of woman you imagined finding smoking a cigarette at the bar of some mid-city lounge.

Stern had no idea where the truth resided, but she had laid it on thick with him over the years, perhaps as a way to flatter him, or simply on the assumption he was harmless.

Now, of course, the mere suggestion inflamed his new libidinal itch.

Being himself, he changed the subject.

"Do any of these records, Margy, have anything to do with the house error account?" He had Dixon's recent phone call in mind.

"They want that now, too?" Margy, nearly as irritated as Dixon by the government's persistence, went off at once to find a clerk to gather the records. This was why he traveled to the documents, Stern thought.

Something else was always needed.

Stern took it that, sometime in the past twenty years, Margy had been one of Dixon's women. She was far too attractive not to have drawn Dixon's attention. But it had not gone along happily. The amount of surmise and conjecture which Stern had quietly made about thais matter surprised even him. Gradually, he had filled in the blanks, tested these guesses against what was observable, and taken them as true. He had long assumed that Margy had waited interminably for Dixon to leave Silvia; that she was somehow the focus of the crisis that had erupted years ago when Silvia briefly ejected Dixon from the household; and that she had declared the struggle lost when Dixon moved back in with his wife. For a year or two, Margy had disappeared to work for another house. But there really was no way to run MD without her. Even Silvia would have recognized that.

Instead, she was offered Chicago as a domain of her own, and the title of president of half a dozen of the subsidiaries, not to mention an enormous annual salary. So she had labored under those terms, devoted to Dixon's business, and probably still to him, the deprived and rejected heroic woman of one of the country ballads she had grown up humming. That was whom Margy reminded you of--those downhome ladies who stood onstage, with their twangy voices, their coiffed hair and stage makeup, sad and glamorous, hard and wise.

Eventually, the clerk arrived. The records of the house error account were laid on the table with the rest. Stern glanced through the papers, but he knew he was getting nowhere. Every time Stern found himself facing a room full of documents, he cursed the avarice that led him to do what was decorously referred to as white-collar work, and to a clientele of con artists in suits and ties who hid their crimes by laying waste to forests.

Margy reappeared in time, placing her face against a brightly manicured hand and leaning languorously on the metal door-frame. His bemusement was apparent, but Margy smiled indulgently; she had always liked Stern.

"You want me to help you out? I really am willin. We'll do like I said. Get the hell out of here. Gimme fifteen minutes. ' '

It was more than an hour and a half, but eventually one of the messengers had brought down four transfer cases of documents and loaded them into Margy's car. She tore off down the Loop streets for the Ritz.

She handled her automobile, a red foreign model, like a stock-car driver. His mother had been high-strong, hysterical. Clara was soft and dignified. That, to Stern, comprised the familiar range for female behavior. This woman, if truth be told, was stronger than he was. She could sprint an obstacle course faster or hold out longer in the face of torture. Watching her behind the wheel, he felt admiring and daunted.

This evidence of Margy's capacities was, Stern .suddenly thought, instructive about Dixon. It was a mistake to see him merely as some smutty conquistador seeking notches on his gun, butterflies for his collection. Dixon valued women, trusted them, counted on their counsel.

In a woman's presence, his charm and humor, and an enormous, almost electrical human force beset him. Even Stern, whatever his innate sense of rivalry, felt he liked Dixon more. And women responded to Dixon's attention. It was one of the symmetries of nature.

Of course, this interest was not detached. With Dixon, one was always well advised to remember the base elements.

The markets, the pits, tense, fast, trying, were full of coke-heads and types lost in the bottle; Dixon's release was more natural: fucking. The quickest zipper in the West, someone had once called him. Not that Stern was often treated to the details. He was the brother-in-law, Silvia's blood ally, and Dixon had better sense than to test Stern's loyalties. But no one, least of all Dixon, could make a complete secret of so persistent a preoccupation.

Occasionally, his pure delight overcame him, and he confided to Stern, as he did to so many other men. Dixon, for example, engaged in a personal sport in which he kept track of the exact number of women he saw in a day who inspired his most basic fantasies. 'Thirty-one,' he'd say to you, as you were greeted by a hotel clerk. 'Thirty-two,' when he looked out the window to see a woman getting on a bus. At the Rose Bowl one year, amid the coeds and cheerleaders, he claimed to have reached two sixty-three by half-time, despite giving complete attention to the game.

Usually, the extent of Dixon's interest was less amusing.

Stern had been with him at the airport, passing through the metal detector, when Dixon emptied his pockets into the tray meant to receive valuables and tossed in a package of prophylactics as naturally as a pack of gum. This was a few years ago, when such items were still not the subject of polite discussion. From subsequent commentary, Stern took it that in these matters of personal hygiene, as in so many other things, Dixon was a pioneer, meticulous about. protecting himself long before the current mania. But the security guard, a young woman, reddened noticeably far more horrified than if Dixon had pulled a knife. Even Dixon, walking toward the airport gate, was chagrined. 'I should just have my thing coated in plastic." Like a membership card or a snapshot. Neither abstinence nor restraint apparently suggested themselves as alternatives.

Witnessing these misadventures, Stern attempted to evince no interest.

But he paid attention. Who wouldn't? It 'sometimes seemed as if he could recollect the details of each one of Dixon's randy stories. And Dixon, never one to miss a point of vulnerability, had made note of Stern's penchant long. before. Once, when the two of them were traveling in New York, Dixon carried on with special animation with a young waitress, a smooth-featured young Puerto Rican woman of haunting beauty who seemed to be responding to Dixon's sly smiles and lascivious humor. He watched her trail away from the table and caught in Stern a look not much different from his own.

'Do you know what it feels like to touch a woman that age?"

'Dixon, please." 'It's different,' 'Dixon!'

Stern recollected that he took his knife and fork to what was on his plate with particular vigor, chewing with bovine single-mindedness. But when he glanced up, Dixon was still watching, shrewd and handsome, made merry by the sight of the disturbance he had caused.

At the hotel, Margy made herself at home. She had kicked off her shoes before the bellman had dropped the cases, and .threw the straw-colored silk jacket to her tailored suit on the bed. Grabbing a menu, she called room service for dinner, then ack of gum. This was a few years ago, when such items were still not the subject of polite discussion.