An American Dream (28 page)

“Oh, bother, don’t try to talk,” she said.

“Watch the brandy on your heart,” Kelly murmured.

“I don’t want to hear about brandy,” Bess said. “I drink Scotch with bores, coke with great-grandchildren, and save brandy for ghastly hours.”

“Please stop it, Bess,” said Kelly.

“No. Weep, both of you. Scream your heads off. The most heavenly girl in the whole glorious world has been plucked from us. I can’t keep it in.”

“She was a peach,” Ganucci said in his hoarse voice.

“You hear,” said Bess, “even this old wop can tell you.”

Kelly put his head in his hands for a moment, and then raised his face. He was a big man with a smooth body and very white skin, not pale but white, a full buttermilk white with shadings of pink, all flesh. One had the impression he was a bit wide in the middle, but the transition was so smooth his body looked to have a perfect shape for his head. He had a large head which began with a small pointed chin, went up to an urbane button of a nose, and on to a broad forehead. Since he was half bald, the length of his forehead seemed equal to the distance from his eyes to his chin. He looked at times like one of those very handsome babies who at the age of three months come out a stout hearty fifty-five years old. Actually he was sixty-five, and physically impressive, for he gave off the fortified good humor which is to be found in the company of generals, tycoons, politicians, admirals, newspaper publishers, presidents, and prime ministers. He had in fact a pronounced resemblance to a particular president and particular prime minister, but then for fact Kelly had two separate manners, one, British; the other, American; you had to learn to distinguish. The British was clipped, jolly, full of tycoon; he might have you knifed but dependably you would receive a full twinkle as the order went down. The American was hard in the eyes—they turned from green to gray, and his face went cold—those eyes would buy you, sell you, close you out, walk past your widow; they measured you face to face, they were dirty Irish—they would put dirty sand in your concrete.

His voice, however, was rich, an instrument; it purred with good fun. Only at the end of a sentence would he give a turn to the meaning and put you away. I had heard people say he had the charm to capture anything alive if he liked it—he had never liked me. “Have some brandy, Stephen,” he said now.

“I’ve been doing little but drink.”

“Shouldn’t wonder. I’ve had a quantity myself.”

In the silence which followed he waved Ruta aside, went to the bar, put a little Rémy Martin into a large snifter and passed it to me. As he did, his nail gave a glancing tick off mine, and left an electric sense of loss much as if a beauty had brushed my hand and delivered a message to my back of fine mysteries yet to discover. I held the glass, but the promise to Deirdre was on me; I took no sip. Now, another small silence developed. So I sat there holding my glass, living in the pall which comes the moment there is silence at a wake; that happiness which arrived for a while talking to Deirdre now disappeared.

“You know, Mr. Kelly,” said Ganucci, his voice whispering over its way like a fist rubbed down the bark of a tree, “I started as a poor man.”

“By God, so did I,” said Kelly out of a reverie.

“And I’ve always felt like a poor man,” said Ganucci.

“Don’t know that I have,” said Kelly.

“I still feel like a poor man in this regard—I love class. Your daughter had the class of the angels. She could treat you as an equal, simple as that. That’s why I came to pay my respects tonight.”

“I’m honored that you’re here, Mr. Ganucci,” said Kelly.

“That’s nice of you to say. I know there’ve been all kinds of people here this afternoon and this evening, and you must be tired, but I came here to tell you this: I’m a big man in certain people’s eyes, only I don’t kid myself, you’re a bigger man, you’re a very big man. I came to pay my respects. I’m your friend. I would do anything for you.”

“Darling,” said Bess to Ganucci, “you’ve written your letter. Now mail it.”

“Darling,” said Kelly, “is this the night to be rude to Mr. Ganucci?”

“I’m ready to explode,” said Bess.

The telephone rang. Ruta got up again to answer. “It’s Washington,” she said.

“I’ll take it in the other room.”

The moment Kelly was gone, Ganucci said, “I’m not even rude to the little colored fellow who shines my shoes.”

“Well, he’s the future, darling,” said Bess.

“That’s right,” said Ganucci, “and you and me are dead.”

“Some of us are more dead than others, pet. There are weeds and roses through all the world.”

“No,” said Ganucci again to Bess, “you and me are dead.”

“Weeds and roses,” Bess replied.

“You know what the dead are,” said Ganucci. “They’re concrete. You’ll make a good bump on Route 4 in New Jersey.”

“Is that the one which starts to go to Tuxedo Park?” asked Bess.

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“Dreadful road,” said Bess.

Ganucci started coughing again. “Listen, please don’t call me a wop.”

“You
are
.”

Kelly returned. “It was Jack,” he said to me. “He said to send you his regards and commiserations. He also said it was an awful shock to him, and he knows you must be feeling awful. I didn’t know you knew him.”

“We met in Congress,” I said.

“Of course,” said Kelly.

“As a matter of fact, I met Deborah because of him.”

“Yes, yes, now it’s back to me. I remember she even said something to me about you then. She said, ‘You better watch
out—there’s a half-Jewish fellow I’m crazy about.’ ‘More power to you,’ I said. Would you believe it—I was opposed to Jack at the time. I was wrong. I was so damn wrong. And wrong about Deborah. Oh, Christ,” he bellowed suddenly, in a shock of sound, like an animal receiving the blow of a bullet. “Excuse me,” he said, and left the room once more.

“Well, now we’d better be going,” said Bess.

“No,” said Ruta, “he’ll be very upset if you’re not here when he comes back.”

“You know him well, do you, dear?”

Ruta smiled. “Nobody knows Mr. Kelly well,” she said.

“Nonsense,” said Bess. “I know him inside out.”

“Is that so, Mrs. Trelawne?” Ruta asked.

“Darling, I was his first big fling. He was only twenty-four, but a treasure chest. I got to know him. How I got to know him. Inside out. I’ll tell you, my dear,” she said to Ruta, “he won’t marry you.”

“Oo la la, Mrs. Trelawne,” said Ruta.

“Be a honey, and put a cold compress on his neck. Tell him I have to go.”

The moment Ruta was gone, Bess turned to me and said, “Watch out, baby boy, Barney’s up to mangling you tonight.”

“Barney Kelly don’t go in for blitzes,” said Ganucci.

“No, Mr. Ganucci. You don’t either, I’m sure. You just make a little money on dope and prostitutes and dropping wops into boiling asphalt,” said Bess.

“Passé,” said Ganucci, and coughed.

“Very afraid of popping off, aren’t you?” Bess said next.

“The dead,” said Ganucci, “are concrete. They’re part of the sidewalk. That’s the way it goes.”

“No,
tesoro
, you’ll go through an accounting. They’ll bring you to your patron saint, and your saint will say, ‘Eddie Ganucci is unspeakable. Hang him on a hook.’ ”

Ganucci sighed. His stomach made an unhappy sound, something
kin to the leak and gurgle in an old washing machine when the water is being changed. “I’m a very sick man,” he said gloomily.

It was all too unhappily true. He sat there in a funk of gloom, we sat in silence, and a pestilence came up from Ganucci, a ripple of the worm of life trapped in a cement given off by itself. Death had already invaded him. Just as one hears in the yawp of a bird seized by a larger bird one squawk of agony sucked in from the nerve of nature itself, so now Ganucci gave off an essence of disease, some moldering from the tree of death. I knew his smell up close would be an event, one of those odors to which there is no end, a gangrene in the firmament. I wanted a drink, wanted it with my tongue against my teeth; as if alcohol, and alcohol alone, could clean the particles which traveled from Ganucci’s breath to mine.

“Let
me
tell a story,” said Ganucci. “I had a parrot once friends gave me. They taught the parrot how to talk. ‘Eddie Ganucci,’ that bird would say, ‘you’re full of it, you’re full of it,’ and I’d say, ‘Polly, that kind of talk is going to get you the oven some day.’ And the parrot would say, ‘Ganooch, you’re full of it. You’re full of it’ And I’d say, ‘Polly, keep talking and you’ll find the way,’ and the parrot said, ‘you’re full of it,’ and got sick and died. That’s a sad story.”

Bess had her handkerchief out. “The room is absolutely foul,” she said. I went to the French windows, opened them, and stepped out on the terrace. It was a good respectable terrace, perhaps thirty feet long and twenty feet deep, and I walked out to the end of it and looked over the parapet, a stone railing about forty inches high, taking the gift of looking down to the street, all thirty and more stories of vertical fall, a swoop and stop, drop and ledge, fall again, down some eternity of measurement to the wet pavement below, and a desire started up in me again, faint as the first tuning of a bow in an empty hall. The moon was pushing through scud, and drifts passed over its face. I knew the longer I stayed at this parapet
the more I would be tempted—fresh air lifted to my head like a lyric, I could not have enough of it. And I had a sudden thought, “If you loved Cherry, you would jump,” which was an abbreviation for the longer thought that there was a child in her, and death,
my
death, my violent death, would give some better heart to that embryo just created, that indeed I might even be created again, free of my past. The wish to jump was clean, keen and agreeable, nice as the nicest things I had done, and I could not quit yet—I had the feeling that to go back in the room would be equal to deserting what was best in me: I had a thought then to get up and stand on the parapet, as if to dare the desire by coming closer to it would be logical, and the dread which followed this thought had a pure thrill like the moment in adolescence when one realizes one is finally going to get it, get sex—but what a fear! I was trembling. And then as if I were entering a great calm, like that calm I found the moment I began to run up the slope of the hill in Italy, I stood on a deck chair, and took the half-step up to the parapet. It was a foot wide, room enough to stand, and I stood on it, my legs a jelly, and felt some part of the heavens, some long cool vault at the entrance, a sense of a vast calm altogether aware of me. “God exists,” I thought, and tried to steal a look down the fall, but was not ready, not so much of a saint was I, the street rose up with a crazy yaw of pavement and I looked away, looked back at the terrace just a step down on the other side, was about to get off, and had a knowledge that to quit the parapet now was too soon—the desire to jump would be only more powerful. “But you do not have to jump,” said the voice in my mind, “just take a walk around the parapet.”

“I cannot take even one step,” I answered.

“Take one step.”

I pushed my foot forward, scraping it forward inch by inch; my will, divided against itself, was quivering from the effort: I looked ahead and was frozen. For I was in the middle, fifteen feet from the corner of the terrace, fifteen feet of walk on a parapet one
foot wide, and a fall of thirty stories on my right; then I would have to turn the corner, and walk another twenty feet back to where the terrace ended at the wall of the suite. It was beyond my strength. Yet I took another step, still another. I could do it perhaps. And then the wind came up with a sudden blast—like the impact of a trailer truck as it goes by—and I almost lost my balance: the fall to the street was sharp as a blade, Shago’s blade, and I jumped off, back to the terrace, and looked at the French windows to see Kelly standing in them. “Here,” he said, “come on in.”

His face made visible by the light of the room, there was nothing in his expression to indicate he had seen me on the parapet, and perhaps he hadn’t, perhaps he had come out an instant after I dropped back, or had been unable to see for the first moment in the dark, but there was a grin on his face, one hard hearty grin like the look of a man who has penetrated a riddle. And as we went inside, a force came off him, clear as a command. It was telling the others to go. Free as a free flight of paranoia through the storm, the lights in the room dimmed on this thought, then came up again.

“Yeah,” said Ganucci, “it’s late. Want a ride in the elevator?” he asked of Bess. Her face was a staging of masks, a collapsing of cakes and powders until the bone stood out. It was just a glimpse, some vision perhaps of how she saw herself, but the war looked to have been fatal. “Yes, I’ll go,” she said to Ganucci.

Kelly stood at the door. He would walk them to the elevator.

Ruta was nervous when we were alone. She had obviously a great deal to say and very little time to say it in. But I was breathing relief. The three steps on the parapet had left me weak, yet the weakness was agreeable, I felt as if I had come up out of a deep sleep. Of course whatever I had accomplished on the parapet, there was the muted uneasiness of knowing it had not been finished. But I was back at least in the room, Kelly was gone for a minute or two, there was respite: on this hearth, at this moment, Ruta was nearly
equal to an old friend. But then a look from her sharp as a whiff of ammonia awakened me completely.

“Ruta, your double life seems to be over.”

“That is too bad,” she said. “I like a double life.”

“You didn’t mind picking up after Deborah?”

“Oh, your wife was not neat. Rich girls are pigs. But I am not just a maid, you know.”

“No, I should be aware of that.”

“Of course, I am nothing official. I just have concentration to do a job. Barney wanted me to do it, so I did it I kept an eye on things.”

“Just what?”

“Oh, some of your wife’s activities.”

“But how long have you known Barney?”

“Some years. I met him in West Berlin at a nice party. Never mind.”

“And now you are …” I was about to say, “a most extraordinary little spy.”