Beggarman, Thief (35 page)

“Grim,” Robinson said. “Grim and beautiful. You ought to go there some day.”

“I plan to,” Wesley said.

“What college you go to?” Robinson asked.

“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” Wesley said.

“I would go to Stanford,” said Robinson. “If you could get in. Marvelous people out there.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Robinson peered at him nearsightedly through the steel-rimmed glasses. “You said you were Alice’s cousin?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know she had a cousin,” Robinson said. “Where you from?”

“Indianapolis,” Wesley said promptly.

“Dreadful place. What’re you doing in New York?”

“Visiting Alice.”

“Oh, I see. Where do you stay in New York?”

“Here,” Wesley said, feeling as though the man were excavating him.

“Oh.” Robinson looked around at the small room gloomily. “A little cramped, I’d say.”

“We make do.”

“It’s a convenient location. Near Lincoln Center and all …” Robinson seemed depressed. “Where do you sleep?”

“On the sofa.”

Robinson stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “Well,” he said, sounding more depressed than ever, “I suppose … cousins …”

Alice came in, bright as a rosebud, with her party contacts in place, so she wouldn’t look like a secretarial mouse, as she had explained to Wesley other times she had gone out on dates.

“Well,” she said gaily, “have you two gentlemen had a nice chat?”

“Fascinating,” Robinson said gloomily as he heaved himself to his feet. “We’d better be going. It’s late.” Alice must be pretty hard up, Wesley thought, if Robinson was the best she could do, a man who spent his life digging up shards. He wished, despairingly, that he was twenty-seven years old. He was glad he wasn’t going to be around when Alice had to explain to the archaeologist just what sort of cousins they were.

“Wesley,” Alice said, “there’re two roast beef sandwiches and some beer in the icebox if you get hungry. Oh—I nearly forgot—I found the address and telephone number of the man you were looking for—Mr. Renway, who was a shipmate of your father’s. I called him today and he said he’s looking forward to seeing you. I got his address through the National Maritime Union. It’s right near here, in the West Nineties. He lives with his brother when he’s not at sea. He sounded awfully nice on the telephone. You going to see him? He said he’d be in all day tomorrow.”

“I’ll see how I feel tomorrow,” Wesley said ungraciously and Alice gave him a reproachful look.

Robinson helped Alice on with her coat, and said as they went out the door, “Remember Stanford.”

“I will,” Wesley said, thinking, the reason he’s so keen on Stanford is it’s three thousand miles away from Alice Larkin.

He had no idea what time it was when he was awakened, as he slept under the blanket on the sofa, by the sound of murmured conversation on the other side of the front door. Then there was the click of the key in the lock and he heard Alice come in, softly, alone. She came over silently to the sofa and he felt her staring down at him, but he kept his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. He heard her sigh, then move away. A moment later he heard her door shut and then the sound of her typewriter.

I wonder what she expected me to do? he thought, just before he fell back to sleep.

«  »

Calvin Renway reminded Wesley of Bunny Dwyer. His skin was coffee-colored, almost the same as Bunny’s when Bunny had been out in the sun all summer, and he was small and delicate-boned and the muscles of his arms showed sharply in his short-sleeved flowered shirt and his voice was gentle, with an underlying permanent tone of politeness, as he welcomed Wesley at the door of his brother’s home, saying, “Well, this is a nice day, the son of Tom Jordache come to visit. Come in, boy, come in. The nice lady on the phone said you’d be coming up, come in.”

He led Wesley into the living room and pushed the biggest chair a couple of inches toward him and said, “Make yourself comfortable, boy. Can I get you a beer? It’s past noon, time for a beer.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Renway,” Wesley said.

“The name’s Calvin, Wesley,” Renway said. “I sure was surprised when that nice lady called and said you’d be looking for me—I haven’t seen your father for all these years—you ship out with a man and he means something special to you that you carry with you all your days, and then he goes his way and you go yours—ships that pass in the night, as you might say—and then a big young man rings your doorbell—by God the time does pass, doesn’t it?—I never got married, never had any son, to my sorrow, a seaman’s life, one port after another, no time to court a woman and the ones who want to enter into wedlock”—he laughed heartily, gleaming white teeth in the wide, kindly mouth “—not the sort you’d want as the mother of your kids, if you ever could be sure, if you know what I mean. But there’s no mistaking about you, boy, the moment you appeared at the door, there was no mistake, there was Tom Jordache’s kid, yes, sir, I bet he’s proud of you, a big strong boy, with Tom Jordache printed all over your face.…”

“Mr. Renway—Calvin, I mean—” Wesley said uneasily, “didn’t the lady tell you over the phone?”

Renway looked puzzled. “Tell me what?” he said. “All the lady said to me was, ‘Are you the Mr. Renway was once on the same cargo vessel with Tom Jordache?’ and when I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, the same,’ she said, ‘Tom Jordache’s boy is in town and he’d like to talk to you for a few minutes,’ that’s all she said and asked if my address was the same she got from the Maritime Union.”

“Calvin,” Wesley said, “my father’s dead. He got murdered in Antibes.”

“Oh, Lord,” Renway whispered. He said nothing more, but turned his face away to the wall, silently, for a long minute, hiding pain, as though somehow it was a breach of manners to show unbearable sorrow publicly. His long dark hands clenched and unclenched in an unconscious spasm, as though his hands were the only part of him that hadn’t learned the lesson that it was useless to let the world know when he was hurting.

Finally, he turned back to Wesley. “Murdered,” he said flatly. “They sure do away with the good ones, don’t they? Don’t tell me the story, boy. Some other time. It can wait, I’m in no hurry for any details. It’s kind of you to come and tell me what happened—I could’ve gone on for years without knowing and I might be in a bar in Marseilles or New Orleans or someplace, drinking a couple of beers and talking about the old days when we crewed together on the
Elga Anderson,
maybe the nastiest vessel on the Atlantic or any other ocean, when he saved my life, in a manner of speaking, and somebody would say, ‘Tom Jordache, why he died ages ago.’ It’s better this way and I thank you. I suppose you want to talk about him, boy—that’s why you’re here, I take it …?”

“If you don’t mind,” Wesley said.

“Times were different then,” Renway said. “On ships, anyway. They didn’t call us blacks those days or mister, we were niggers and never forget it. I’m not saying your father was a special friend or a preacher or anything like that, but when he passed me in the morning, it was always, ‘Hi, bud, how’re they treating you,’ nothing special, just a normal human greeting, which was like a band playing those days on that nasty ship, the way just about everybody else was treating me. Your pa ever mention the name Falconetti to you?”

“I know something about him.”

“The nastiest man I ever had the misfortune to come across, black or white,” Renway said. “Big bull of a man, terrorized the crew, he beat up on men just for the animal pleasure of it and out of meanness of spirit and he said he wouldn’t let no niggers sit down in the same messroom with him and I was the only black on board and that meant whenever he came into the room, even if I was in the middle of supper, I’d have to get up and go out. Then your pa took him on, the only one out of a crew of twenty-eight who had the guts to do it—he didn’t do it for me, Falconetti’d been bugging Bunny Dwyer too—and your pa gave him the licking of his life, maybe he went too far, like the other men said, he shamed him every day, whenever they happened to pass each other, your pa’d say, come over here, slob, and punch him hard in the stomach, so that that big bull of a man would be left standing there, with people watching, bent over, with tears in his eyes.

“One night, it was dark and stormy, waves thirty feet high, in the messroom Falconetti quiet as a lamb, your pa came and got me and took me back to the messroom, the radio was on, and he said, ‘We’re just going to sit down like gentlemen next to this gentleman here and enjoy the music’ I sat myself down next to Falconetti—my heart was beating, I can assure you, I was still scared—but nobody said as much as boo and finally, after a while, you pa said to the man, ‘You can go now, slob,’ and Falconetti got up and looked around at the men in the room, none of them looking at him, and he went out and up to the deck and jumped over the side.

“It didn’t make your pa popular with the other men; they said it’s one thing to beat up on a man, but it’s another to send him to his death like that. I’m not a vengeful man, Wesley, but I didn’t go along with that talk—I kept remembering how I felt sitting down next to that nasty man, with the music playing, and him not saying a single word. I tell you it was one of the greatest, most satisfactory moments of my life and I remember it to this day with pleasure and I owe it to your pa and I’ll never forget it.”

Renway had been talking in a kind of singsong chant, with his eyes almost closed, as though seeing the whole thing over again, as though he was not in the neat little living room in the West Nineties in New York City, but back in the hushed messroom among the silent, uncomfortable men, tasting once more the moment of exquisite pleasure, safe, protected by the courage of the father of the boy sitting across from him.

He opened his eyes and looked thoughtfully at Wesley. “I tell you, boy,” he said, “if you turn out to be half the man your father was, you should bless God every day for your luck. Wait here a minute.” He stood up and went into a bedroom that gave oft the living room. Wesley could hear a drawer opening, then closing a few seconds later. Renway came back into the living room carrying something wrapped in tissue paper. He took off the tissue paper and Wesley saw that he was holding a small leather box, inlaid with gold. “I bought this box in Italy,” Renway said, “in the town of Florence, they make them there, it’s a specialty of the town. Here.” He thrust it toward Wesley. “Take it.”

Wesley held back. “It’s your box, Calvin,” he said. “It must have cost an awful lot of dough. What do you want to give it to me for, you didn’t even know I was alive until yesterday afternoon?”

“Take it,” Renway said harshly. “I want the son of the man who did what he did for me to have something I cherish.” Gently, he placed the box in Wesley’s hand.

“It’s a beautiful box,” Wesley said. “Thanks.”

“Save your thanks for a time they’re needed,” Renway said. “Now I’m going to put on my coat and I’m going to take you up to One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street and I’m going to feed you the best lunch money can buy in Harlem in the city of New York.”

The lunch was enormous, fried chicken and sweet potatoes, and they drank a lot of beer with it and Renway put sorrow aside for a time and told Wesley stories about Glasgow and Rio de Janeiro and Piraeus and the Trieste and said his brother kept after him to quit the sea but whenever he thought of living on land and never seeing a new town rising up from the sea as they made port, he knew that he could never bring himself to stop wandering on good ships and bad ships across the length and breadth of the oceans.

When they said good-bye, he made Wesley swear that whenever he heard he was in town he would come and have a meal with him again.

Going downtown in the subway, with the gold-inlaid, hard leather box in his pocket, Wesley decided he was going to throw away his list. I’m going to quit while I’m ahead, he told himself, feeling a weight lifting from his heart.

CHAPTER 3

Rudolph was sitting on the deck in front of the house he had rented, looking out over the high dune at the stretch of white beach and the rollers of the open Atlantic. It was a mild, mid-September morning and the sun was pleasantly warm, reflecting off the script of Gretchen’s screenplay that he was rereading. Next to him, stretched out on an air mattress in a bathing suit, lay Helen Morison, who had a house farther down the beach, but who spent several nights a week with him. She was a divorcée, who had come over to him at a neighbor’s cocktail party and introduced herself because she recognized him. She was a friend of Gretchen’s. They had become acquainted at one of Ida Cohen’s Women’s Liberation meetings, where, according to Gretchen, Helen Morison’s ironic, efficient manner of presenting facts and programs was in marked contrast to Ida’s wild lunges at the perfidy of the male sex. Helen had no enmity toward the male sex, Rudolph had noted. “Quite the contrary,” he had told her and she had laughed and agreed. The fact that she was living on Mr. Morison’s alimony and sending her thirteen-year-old son to an exclusive, all-boys’ Episcopal school, also at Mr. Morison’s expense, did not seem to trouble her. Rudolph, who knew how often his own actions hardly reflected his principles, never pressed the point with her.