Black money (17 page)

"What impressed you, Mrs. Tappinger?"

"I thought he was good-looking, in a strong masculine way."

There was bright malice in her eyes. "We faculty wives get tired of pale scholarly types."

Tappinger countered obliquely: "He was an excellent student. He had a passion for French civilization, which is the greatest since the Athenian, and a wonderfully good ear for French poetry, considering his lack of background."

His wife was working on another glass of champagne. "You're a genius, Daddy. You can make a sentence sound like a fifty-minute lecture."

Perhaps she meant it lightly, as her consciously pretty smile seemed to insist, but it fell with a dull thud.

"Please don't keep calling me Daddy."

"But you don't like me to call you Taps any more. And you are the father of my children."

"The children are not here and I'm most definitely not your father. I'm only forty-one."

"I'm only twenty-nine," she said to both of us.

"Twelve years is no great difference."

He closed the subject abruptly as if it was a kind of Pandora's box. "Where is Teddy, by the way, since he's not here?"

"At the co-operative nursery. They'll keep him till after his nap."

"Good."

"I'm going to the Plaza and do a little shopping after lunch."

The conflict between them, which had been submerged for a moment, flared up again. "You can't."

He had turned quite pale.

"Why can't I?"

"I'm using the Fiat. I have a two o'clock class."

He looked at his watch. "As a matter of fact I should be starting back now. I have some preparation to do."

"I haven't had much of a chance to talk to your wife"

"I realize that. I'm sorry, Mr. Archer. The fact is I have to punch a time clock, almost literally, just like any assembly worker. And the students are more and more like assembly-line products, acquiring a thin veneer of education as they glide by us. They learn their irregular verbs. But they don't know how to use them in a sentence. In fact very few of them are capable of composing a decent sentence in English, let alone in French, which is the language of the sentence par excellence."

He seemed to be converting his anger with his wife into anger with his job, and the whole thing into a lecture. She looked at me with a faint smile, as if she had turned him out: "Why don't you drive me to the Plaza, Mr. Archer? It will give us a chance to finish our talk."

"I'll be glad to."

Tappinger made no objection. He completed another paragraph about the occupational sorrows of teaching in a second-rate college, then retreated from the shambles of the lunch. I heard his Fiat put-put away. His wife and I sat in the dinette and finished the champagne.

"Well," she said, "here we are."

"Just as you planned."

"I didn't plan it. You did. You bought the champagne, and I can't handle champagne."

She gave me a dizzy look.

"I can."

"What are you," she said, "another cold fish?"

She was rough. They get that way, sometimes, when they marry too young and trap themselves in a kitchen and wake up ten years later wondering where the world is. As if she could read my thought, she said: "I know, I'm a bee-eye-tee-see-aitch. But I have some reason. He sits out in his study every night till past midnight. Is my life supposed to be over because all he cares about is Flaubert and Baudelaire and those awful students of his? They make me sick, the way they crowd around and tell him how wonderful he is. All they really want is a passing grade."

She took a deep breath and continued: "He isn't so wonderful, I ought to know. I've lived with him for twelve years and put up with his temperament and tantrums. You'd think he was Baudelaire himself, or Van Gogh, the way he carries on sometimes. And I kept hoping it would lead to something, but it never has. It never will. We're stuck in a lousy state college and he hasn't even got the manhood to engineer a promotion for himself."

The shabby little cubicle, or maybe the champagne that had been drunk in it, seemed to generate lectures. I made an observation of my own: "You're being pretty hard on your husband. He has to go out and cut it. For that he needs support."

She hung her head. Her hair swung forward like a flexible ball. "I know. I try to give it to him, honestly."

She had reverted to her little-girl voice. It didn't suit her mood though, and she dropped it. She said in a clear sharp voice she had used with her son the day before: "We never should have married, Taps and I. He shouldn't have married at all. Sometimes he reminds me of a medieval priest. The two best years of his life came before our marriage. He often tells me this. He spent them in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, not long after the war. I knew nothing of this, of course, but I was just a kid and he was the white hope of the French department at Illinois and all the other sophomores said how wonderful it would be to be married to him, with his Scott Fitzgerald good looks, and I thought I could finish my education at home."

She looked over the partition at the kitchen sink. "That, I certainly have."

"You married very young."

"Seventeen," she said. "The terrible thing is, I still feel seventeen inside."

She touched herself between her breasts. "With everything ahead, you know? But nothing is."

For the first time the woman was coming through to me.

"You have your children."

"Sure, I have my children. And don't think I don't do my best for them and always will. Is that all there is, though?"

"It's more than some people have."

"I want more."

Her pretty red mouth looked pathetically greedy. "I've wanted more for a long time, but I've never had the nerve to take it."

"You have to wait for it to be given," I said.

"You're full of sententious remarks, aren't you? You're fuller than La Rochefoucauld, or my husband. But you can't solve actual problems with words, as Taps thinks you can. He doesn't understand life. He's nothing but a talking machine, with a computer instead of a heart and a central nervous system."

The thought of her husband seemed to nag her continually. It was almost making her eloquent, but I was growing weary of her boxed-in tension. Perhaps I had brought it on, but basically it had nothing to do with me. I said: "This is all very interesting, but you were going to talk about Feliz Cervantes."

"I was, wasn't I."

Her look became meditative. "He was a very interesting young man. A hot-blooded type, aggressive, the kind of man you imagine a bullfighter might be. He was only twenty-two or three - so was I for that matter - but he was a man. You know?"

"Did you talk to him?"

"A little."

"What about?"

"Our pictures, mostly. He was very keen on French art. He said he was determined to visit Paris some day."

"He said that?"

"Yes. It's not surprising. Every student of French wants to go to Paris. I used to want to go myself."

"What else did he say?"

"That was about all. Some of the other students turned up, and he shied away from me. Taps said afterwards - we had a quarrel after the party - he said that I had been obvious with the young man. I think Taps brought you here to have me confess. My husband is a very subtle punisher."

"You're both too subtle for me. Confess what?"

"That I was - interested in Feliz Cervantes. But he wasn't interested in me. I wasn't even in the room as far as he was concerned."

"That's hard to believe."

"Is it? There was a young blonde girl from one of Taps's freshman courses at the party. He followed her with his eyes the way I imagine Dante followed Beatrice."

Her voice was cold with envy.

"What was her name?"

"Virginia Fablon. I think she's still at the college."

"She quit to get married."

"Really? Who was the lucky man?"

"Feliz Cervantes."

I told her how this could be. She listened raptly.

While Bess got ready to go shopping I moved around the living room looking at the reproductions of a world that had never quite dared to exist. The house had taken on an intense interest for me, like a historical monument or the birth-place of a famous man. Cervantes/Martel and Ginny had met in this house; which made it the birthplace of my case.

Bess came out of her room. She had changed into a dress which had to be hooked up the back and I was elected to hook it up. Though she had a strokeable-looking back, my hands were careful not to wander. The easy ones were nearly always trouble: frigid or nympho, schizy or commercial or alcoholic, sometimes all five at once. Their nicely wrapped gifts of themselves often turned out to be homemade bombs, or fudge with arsenic in it.

We drove to the Plaza in ticking silence. It was a large new shopping centre, like a campus with asphalt instead of lawns where nothing could be learned. I gave her money, which she accepted, to take a taxi home. It was a friendly gesture, too friendly under the circumstances. But she looked at me as if I was abandoning her to a fate worse than life.

20

SHORE DRIVE RAN along the sea below the college in an area of explosive growth and feeble zoning. It was a jumble of apartment buildings, private houses, and fraternity houses with Greek letters over the door.

Behind the stucco house numbered 148 a half-dozen semidetached cottages were huddled on a small lot. A stout woman opened the door of the house before I reached it.

"I'm full up till June."

"I don't need lodging, thanks. Are you Mrs. Grantham?"

"I never buy door-to-door, it that's what's on your mind."

"All I want is a little information."

I told her my name and occupation. "Mr. Martin at the college gave me your name."

"Why didn't you say so? Come in."

The door opened into a small, densely furnished living room. We sat down facing each other, knees almost touching. "I hope it isn't a complaint about one of my boys. They're like sons to me," she said with a professionally maternal smile.

She made an expansive gesture toward the fireplace. The mantel and the wall above it were completely taken up with graduation pictures of young men.

"Not one of your recent boys, anyway. This one goes back seven years. Do you remember Feliz Cervantes?"

I showed her the picture with Martel-Cervantes in the background, Ketchel and Kitty in the foreground. She put on glasses to study it.

"I remember all three of them. The big man and the blondie, they came by and picked up his stuff when he left. The three of them rode away together."

"Are you sure of that, Mrs. Grantham?"

"I'm sure. My late husband always said I've got a memory like an elephant. Even if I hadn't, I wouldn't forget that trio. They rode away in a Rolls Royce car, and I wondered what a Mexican boy was doing in that kind of company."

"Cervantes was Mexican?"

"Sure he was, in spite of all his stories. I didn't want to take him in at first. I never had a Mexican roomer before. But the college says you have to or lose your listing, so I rented him a room. He didn't last long, though."

"What stories did he tell?"

"He was full of stories," she said. "When I asked him if he was a Mex., he said he wasn't. I've lived in California all my life, and I can tell a Mex. when I see one. He even had an accent, which he claimed was a Spanish accent. He said he was a pureblooded Spaniard, from Spain.

"So I said, show me your passport. He didn't have one. He said he was a fugitive from his country, that General Franco was after him for fighting the government. He didn't take me in though. I know a Mex. when I see one. If you ask me he was probably a wetback, and that's why he lied. He didn't want the Immigration to put him on a bus and send him home."

"Did he tell any other lies?"

"You bet he did, right up to the day he left. He said when he left he was on his way to Paris, that he was going to the University there. He said the Spanish government had released some of his family money, and he could afford to go to a better school than ours. Good riddance of bad rubbish is what I said."

"You didn't like Cervantes, did you?"

"He was all right, in his place. But he was too uppity. Besides, here he was leaving me on the first of October, leaving me stuck with an empty room for the rest of the semester. It made me sorry I took him in the first place."

"How was he uppity, Mrs. Grantham?"

"Lots of ways. Do you have a cigarette by any chance?"

I gave her one and lit it for her. She blew smoke in my face. "Why are you so interested in him? Is he back in town?"

"He has been."

"What do you know. He told me he was going to come back. Come back in a Rolls Royce with a million dollars and marry a girl from Montevista. That was uppity. I told him he should stick to his own kind. But he said she was the only girl for him."

"Did he name her?"

"Virginia Fablon. I knew who she was. My own daughter went to high school with her. She was a beautiful girl, I imagine she still is."

"Cervantes thinks so. He just married her."

"You're kidding."

"I wish I were. He came back a couple of months ago. In a Bentley, not a Rolls, with a hundred and twenty thousand instead of a million. But he married her."

"Well, I'll be."

Mrs. Grantham drew deep on her cigarette as if she were sucking the juice from the situation. "Wait until I tell my daughter."

"I wouldn't tell anyone for a day or two. Cervantes and Virginia have dropped out of sight. She may be in danger."

"From him?" she said with avidity.

"Could be."

I didn't know what he wanted from Virginia: it was probably something that didn't exist and I didn't know what he'd do when he found out that it didn't exist.

Mrs. Grantham put out her cigarette in a Breakwater Hotel ashtray and dropped the butt into a handle-less teacup, which contained other butts. She leaned toward me confidentially, heartily: "Anything else you want to know?"

"Yes. Did Cervantes give you any explanation about the people who took him away?"

"This pair?"

She laid a finger on the picture in her lap. "I forget what he said exactly. I think he said they were friends of his, coming to pick him up."