Jailbird (26 page)

So when my mother could not help laughing, she made tiny, pure sounds like a music box—or perhaps like bells far away. It was accidental that they were so beautiful.

So—forgetful of where I was, I now filled my lungs and tightened my throat, and to please my old girl friend, I reincarnated the laughing part of my mother.

It was at that point that Arpad Leen and Frank Ubriaco came back into the living room. They heard the end of my song.

I told Sarah that I had to hang up now, and I did hang up.

Arpad Leen stared at me hard. I had heard women speak of men’s undressing them mentally. Now I was finding out what that felt like. As things turned out, that was
exactly what Leen was doing to me: imagining what I would look like with no clothes on.

He was beginning to suspect that I was Mrs. Jack Graham, checking up on him while disguised as a man.

I
COULD NOT KNOW THAT
, of course—that he thought I might be Mrs. Graham. So his subsequent courting of me was as inexplicable as anything that had happened to me all day.

I tried to believe that he was being so attentive in order to soften the bad news he had to give me by and by: that I was simply not RAMJAC material, and that his limousine was waiting down below to take me back, still jobless, to the Arapahoe. But the messages in his eyes were more passionate than that. He was ravenous for my approval of everything he did.

He told me, and not Leland Clewes or Israel Edel, that he had just made Frank Ubriaco a vice-president of the McDonald’s Hamburgers Division of RAMJAC.

I nodded that I thought that was nice.

The nod was not enough for Leen. “I think it’s a wonderful example of putting the right man in the right job,” he said. “Don’t you? That’s what RAMJAC is all about, don’t you think—putting good people where they can use their talents to the fullest?”

The question was for me and nobody else, so I finally said, “Yes.”

I had to go through the same thing after he had interviewed and hired Clewes and Edel. Clewes was made a vice-president of the Diamond Match Division, presumably because he had been selling advertising matchbooks for so long. Edel was made a vice-president of the Hilton Department of the Hospitality Associates, Ltd., Division, presumably because of his three weeks of experience as a night clerk at the Arapahoe.

It was then my turn to go into the library with him. “Last but not least,” he said coyly. After he closed the door on the rest of the house, his flirtatiousness became even more outrageous. “Come into my parlor,” he murmured, “said the spider to the fly.” He winked at me broadly.

I hated this. I wondered what had happened to the others in here.

There was a Mussolini-style desk with a swivel chair behind it. “Perhaps
you
should sit there,” he said. He made his eyebrows go up and down. “Doesn’t that look like your kind of chair? Eh? Eh? Your kind of chair?”

This could only be mockery, I thought, I responded to it humbly. I had had no self-respect for years and years. “Sir,” I said, “I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Ah,” he said, holding up a finger, “that
does
happen sometimes.”

“I don’t know how you found me, or even if I’m who you think I am,” I said.

“I haven’t told you yet who I think you are,” he said.

“Walter F. Starbuck,” I said bleakly.

“If you say so,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “whoever I am, I’m not much anymore. If you’re really offering jobs, all I want is a little one.”

“I’m under orders to make you a vice-president,” he said, “orders from a person I respect very much. I intend to obey.”

“I want to be a bartender,” I said.

“Ah!” he said. “And mix
pousse-cafés!”

“I can, if I have to,” I said. “I have a Doctor of Mixology degree.”

“You also have a lovely high voice when you want to,” he said.

“I think I had better go home now,” I said. “I can walk. It isn’t far from here.” It was only about forty blocks. I had no shoes; but who needed shoes? I would get home somehow without them.

“When it’s time to go home,” he said, “you shall have my limousine.”

“It’s time to go home now,” I said. “I don’t care how I get there. It has been a very tiring day for me. I don’t feel very clever. I just want to sleep. If you know anybody who needs a bartender, even part-time, I can be found at the Arapahoe.”

“What an actor you are!” he said.

I hung my head. I didn’t even want to look at him or at anybody anymore. “Not at all,” I said. “Never was.”

“I will tell you something strange,” he said.

“I won’t understand it,” I said.

“Everyone here tonight remembers having seen you, but they’ve never seen each other before,” he said. “How would you explain that?”

“I have no job,” I said. “I just got out of prison. I’ve been walking around town with nothing to do.”

“Such a complicated story,” he said. “You were in
prison
, you say?”

“It happens,” I said.

“I won’t ask what you were in prison for,” he said. What he meant, of course, was that I, and Mrs. Graham disguised as a man, did not have to go on telling taller and taller lies, unless it entertained me to do so.

“Watergate,” I said.

“Watergate!” he exclaimed. “I thought I knew the names of almost all the Watergate people.” As I would find out later, he not only knew their names: He knew many of them well enough to have bribed them with illegal campaign contributions, and to have chipped in for their defenses afterward. “Why is it that I have never heard the name Starbuck associated with Watergate before?”

“I don’t know,” I said, my head still down. “It was like being in a wonderful musical comedy where the critics mentioned everybody but me. If you can find an old program, I’ll show you my name.”

“The prison was in Georgia, I take it,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. I supposed that he knew that because
Roy M. Cohn had looked up my record when he had to get me out of jail.

“That explains Georgia,” he said.

I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want Georgia explained.

“So that’s how you know Clyde Carter and Cleveland Lawes and Dr. Robert Fender,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. Now I started to be afraid. Why would this man, one of the most powerful corporate executives on the planet, bother to find out so much about a pathetic little jailbird like me? Was there a suspicion somewhere that I knew some spectacular secret that could still be revealed about Watergate? Might he be playing cat-and-mouse with me before having me killed some way?

“And Doris Kramm,” he said, “I’m sure you know her, too.”

I was so relieved not to know her! I was innocent after all! His whole case against me would collapse now. He had the wrong man, and I could prove it! I did not know Doris Kramm! “No, no, no,” I said. “I don’t know Doris Kramm.”

“The lady you asked me not to retire from The American Harp Company,” he said.

“I never asked you anything,” I said.

“A slip of the tongue,” he said.

And then horror grew in me as I realized that I really did know Doris Kramm. She was the old secretary who had been sobbing and cleaning out her desk at the
harp showroom. I wasn’t about to tell him that I knew her, though.

But he knew I knew her, anyway! He knew everything! “You will be happy to learn that I telephoned her personally and assured her that she did not have to retire, after all. She can stay on as long as she likes. Isn’t that lovely?”

“No,” I said. It was as good an answer as any. But now I was remembering the harp showroom. I felt as though I had been there a thousand years ago, perhaps, in some other Ufe, before I was born. Mary Kathleen O’Looney had been there. Arpad Leen, in his omniscience, would surely mention her next.

And then the nightmare of the past hour suddenly revealed itself as having been logical all along. I knew something that Leen himself did not know, that probably nobody in the world but me knew. It was impossible, but it had to be true: Mary Kathleen O’Looney and Mrs. Jack Graham were the same.

It was then that Arpad Leen raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. “Forgive me for penetrating your disguise, madam,” he said, “but I assume you made it so easy to penetrate on purpose. Your secret is safe with me. I am honored at last to meet you face to face.”

He kissed my hand again, the same hand Mary Kathleen’s dirty little claw had grasped that morning. “High time, madam,” he said. “We have worked together so well so long. High time.”

My revulsion at being kissed by a man was so fully automatic that I became a veritable Queen Victoria! My rage was imperial, although my language came straight from the playgrounds of my Cleveland adolescence. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded to know. “I’m no God damn woman!” I said.

I have spoken of losing my self-respect over the years. Arpad Leen had now lost his in a matter of seconds, with this preposterous misapprehension of his.

He was speechless and white.

When he tried to recover, he did not recover much. He was beyond apologizing, too shattered to exhibit charm or cleverness of any kind. He could only grope for where the truth might lie.

“But you know her,” he said at last. There was resignation in his voice, for he was acknowledging what was becoming clear to me, too: that I was more powerful than he was, if I wanted to be.

I confirmed this for him. “I know her well,” I said. “She will do whatever I tell her, I’m sure.” This last was gratuitous. It was vengeful.

He was still a very sick man. I had come between his God and him. It was his turn to hang his head. “Well,” he said, and there was a long pause, “speak well of me, if you can.”

More than anything now, I wanted to rescue Mary Kathleen O’Looney from the ghastly life the dragons in her mind had forced her to lead. I knew where I could find her.

“I wonder if you could tell me,” I said to the broken
Leen, “where I could find a pair of shoes to fit me at this time of night.”

His voice came to me as though from the place where I was going next, the great cavern under Grand Central Station. “No problem,” he said.

T
HE NEXT THING
I knew
, I all alone, having made certain that no one was following me, was descending the iron staircase into the cavern. Every few steps I called ahead, crooningly, comfortingly, “It’s Walter, Mary Kathleen. It’s Walter here.”

How was I shod? I was wearing black patent leather evening slippers with little bows at the insteps. They had been given to me by the ten-year-old son of Arpad Leen, little Dexter. They were just my size. Dexter had been required to buy them for dancing school. He did not need them anymore. He had delivered his first successful ultimatum to his parents: He had told them that he would commit suicide if they insisted that he keep on going to dancing school. He hated dancing school that much.

What a dear boy he was—in his pajamas and bathrobe after a swim in the living room. He was so sympathetic and concerned for me, for a little old man who had no shoes for his little feet. I might have been a kindly elf in a fairy tale, and he might have been a princeling, making a gift to the elf of a pair of magic dancing shoes.

What a beautiful boy he was. He had big brown eyes.
His hair was a crown of black ringlets. I would have given a lot for a son like that. Then again, my own son, I imagine, would have given a lot for a father like Arpad Leen.

Fair is fair.

“It’s Walter, Mary Kathleen,” I called again. “It’s Walter here.” At the bottom of the steps, I came across the first clue that all might not be well. It was a shopping bag from Bloomingdale’s—lying on its side, vomiting rags and a doll’s head and a copy of
Vogue, a
RAMJAC publication.

I straightened it up and stuffed things back into its mouth, pretending that that was. all that needed to be done to put things right again. That is when I saw a spot of blood on the floor. That was something I couldn’t put back where it belonged. There were many more further on.

And I don’t mean to draw out the suspense here to no purpose, to give readers a
frisson
, to let them suppose that I would find Mary Kathleen with her hands cut off, waving her bloody stumps at me. She had in fact been sideswiped by a Checker cab on Vanderbilt Avenue, and had refused medical attention, saying that she was fine, just fine.

But she was far from fine.

There was a possible irony here, one I am, however, unable to confirm. There was a very good chance that Mary Kathleen had been creamed by one of her own taxicabs.

Her nose was broken, which was where the blood had come from. There were worse things wrong with her. I cannot name them. No inventory was ever taken of everything that was broken in Mary Kathleen.

She had hidden herself in a toilet stall. The drops of
blood showed me where to look. There could be no doubt as to who was in there. Her basketball shoes were visible beneath the door.

At least there was not a corpse in there. When I crooned my name and my harmlessness again, she unlatched the door and pulled it open. She was not using the toilet, but simply sitting on it. She might as well have been Using it, her humiliation by life was now so complete. Her nosebleed had stopped, but it had left her with an Adolf Hitler mustache.

“Oh! You poor woman!” I cried.

She was unimpressed by her condition. “I guess that’s what I am,” she said. “That’s what my mother was.” Her mother, of course, had died of radium poisoning.

“What happened to you?” I said.

She told me about being hit by a taxi. She had just mailed a letter to Arpad Leen, confirming all the orders she had given to him on the telephone.

“I’ll get an ambulance,” I said.

“No, no,” she said. “Stay here, stay here.”

“But you need help!” I said.

“I’m past that,” she said.

“You don’t even know what’s wrong with you,” I said.

“I’m dying, Walter,” she said. “That’s enough to know.”