Nothing That Meets the Eye (36 page)

There was a groaning “Oh-h.”

And several incredulous “Huh?”s.

“Oh, Winnie!” Rose's face had twisted up. She put out her hand as if she were going to collapse, and Winnie caught her in his arm.

“What you mean, Winnie?” a voice asked.

“I mean, I don't have the money anymore. I lost it all. In cash. It fell in the river. So I guess I'm just the same old failure you folks know, anyway—and I don't guess Rose and I'll be leaving Bingley.”

It took the big crowd about a full minute to realize what Winnie had told them. Winnie had never felt so low, so worse than worthless, so unworthy of living. There they stood, he and Rose, clinging to each other, defeated again, and before the whole town for every eye to see.

Suddenly Cal Whiting said in a loud voice, “Well, folks, I think it's a cause for celebration that Winnie isn't leaving Bingley. What's gone is gone, so let's go on up to my house and have the party like we planned!”

Everybody agreed to that. Winnie was whisked like a straw up on the shoulders of the two or three men nearest him, and carried up Main Street and then over on Walnut toward Cal Whiting's house. Winnie lost sight of Rose, and in all the jostling and singing he couldn't call out for her. On the big Whiting lawn stood four or five long tables loaded with punch bowls, sandwiches, cakes, cookies, doughnuts, and candy, enough to feed the whole town, Winnie thought. All the kids from the orphanage were there, too, and Sister Josephine, smiling at him in a way that made Winnie sure she hadn't heard the bad news yet. Sister Josephine came right up to him as soon as the men put him down from their shoulders.

“Winnie—”

“Sister Josephine, I lost the money. I just told everybody about it,” Winnie said in a small voice.

“I heard about it already from a little boy.” Sister Josephine took his hand and pressed something into it. “I hope you'll keep the watch now, Winnie. I never gave it back. It's been waiting for you.”

Winnie closed his hand around the watch. “Thank you, Sister Josephine.”

Then they began to ply Winnie with strawberry punch and chicken sandwiches and devil's food cake, until Winnie had to retreat to a corner of the lawn for self-preservation. Rose came after him. She didn't say anything to him, just stood beside him. She was smiling, though not in the same way she had on the dock before she found out about the money.

“Are you very disappointed, Rose?” he asked her.

“I don't think I'm disappointed at all. I think today is the happiest day of my life, Winnie.”

Winnie looked at her patient face. He had the feeling he'd suddenly been reprieved from death. But he felt he didn't deserve that, either. “You know, Rose, on the ferry this morning, just before I lost the money, I sort of saw myself—I mean, saw that I've been looking for failure in one way and another all my—Rose, listen for a minute.”

“Come on and join the party, Winnie. We can talk later.” Rose pulled at his hand.

“But I have to finish this. I want to say—”

She turned loose of his hand, and he watched her go over to one of the tables, graceful and happy-looking, almost like the day he married her. Winnie stayed where he was in the corner of the lawn. He felt strange and wonderful suddenly, as if he were twenty or thirty years younger himself.

He was having another revelation: he saw all his life leading up to this moment, all the years of doubt, of hopelessness, of hard, unrewarded effort, leading up to this moment when all the people who he hadn't known were really his friends were showing him that he had everything that he could possibly want in abundance. And that warmth around his heart now, the certainty that Rose loved him and that everybody in town loved him, what else had he been seeking all his life? What more could anybody want? Winnie wasn't worried about anything anymore. Winnie felt—he was almost ashamed even to think it about himself—successful.

A DANGEROUS HOBBY

A
ndrew Forster, thirty-seven, married, the father of a fourteen-year-old girl and a topnotch salesman of the Marvel Vacuum Company, had developed a curious hobby. He would call up women, give them a long, slow, subtly flattering line, make a date with them (sometimes it took two dates, if the woman did not permit him on the first date to call for her at her house), and then he would rob them of some possession small enough to be put in his pocket.

Sometimes it was no more than a silver cigarette lighter or a ring of middling value that he picked up from a dressing table; but it satisfied him, and after his petty thievery, he dropped the women. He was never, so far as he knew, suspected. His courteous, serious, intelligent manner put him above reproach. After all, his job was selling, and the first thing a salesman had to do in order to get into a living room to demonstrate a vacuum was to sell himself. This Andy Forster could do superbly well.

And of course he picked his victims with care. They were all women with careers or professions, and all were single, though this last did not matter too much. One had been an actress, one a fairly well-known journalist, another a dress designer. He had boned up on their careers and current activities so that he could sing their praises in his very first telephone conversation.

To the dress designer he had spoken about his fourteen-year-old daughter who, he said, was determined to be a dress designer herself, and though he realized it was an unusual request from a total stranger, could he possibly meet her and talk with her for fifteen minutes or so somewhere? He had made sure he had seen the actress's last play and could therefore talk about it with conviction. He had especially admired the journalist's piece on such and such, and had some flattering questions to ask her. He had never been refused an appointment.

His appearance, when he arrived at their doors or when he stood up with a quizzical expression, not quite sure they were the right women, to greet them in a tearoom or a cocktail lounge, was even more reassuring than his voice on the telephone. He was about five-ten, a trifle overweight though not soft, conservatively dressed, and his cheeks were pink and firm, suggestive of clean living. His manner was quiet and soft-­spoken, but not unpleasantly so. He gave an impression of being somewhat in awe of the particular woman he was with, or at least of being extremely respectful of her. His conversation was always intelligent, since Andy kept himself well informed on many subjects.

He always had his car with him, a big impressive company car but with no insignia of the company on it, and at the end of the tea or the two-drink-apiece cocktail date (that was all women dared to have with a strange man, it seemed) he had so won the women's confidence that they invariably accepted his offer to drive them back to their apartments or to wherever they were going. His robberies were usually committed during the second meeting. In two instances he had made third dates, after the robberies, as a kind of challenge to fate. But the missing articles had not even been mentioned.

“How do you know so much?” they would ask him, fascinated by his explanation of the failure of the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War.

Then Andy would tell them that he had been going to be a professor of history, or of physics, or of geography, or of oceanography, but had his mind changed for him by his wife, who had said (when he was twenty-two and just about to get his degree) that she would never be happy as the wife of a college professor, because their salaries were so low.

This pitiful story, told with manly understatement and absence of resentment, made women feel extremely sympathetic, and they loudly decried the selfishness and pettiness of their own sex. They were different, of course. Just see how they could talk on an equal footing with a man, how this man listened when they spoke, and seemed to value them as a person, not just a female to jump into bed with. The furthest Andy went in familiarity was to touch their elbows as they crossed a street or got into or out of his car.

As a matter of fact, an injury Andy had received in the Korean War had made him impotent, and psychologically also he had given women up now, beginning with his wife, who had in a sense given Andy up a decade ago. His wife, Juliette, was home to cook his dinner every evening, but as likely as not she went out after dinner to work at some hospital—volunteer work or paid work, it didn't matter to Juliette. She was a registered nurse, slender, quietly efficient, with the energy of two men in her short, compact body. Juliette never talked about her work. It was simply her whole world and she could not wait to get back to it after her minimal attentions to her husband and daughter.

Andy was bright enough to realize that he hated women, though he had not realized it until after the Korean injury. That incident had made him realize that he had hated Juliette and very likely all other women for nearly the past ten years. He had once loved Juliette, but she had let him down—stupidly and without mercy let him down. And yet she was the mother of his daughter Martha, whom he adored.

In the evenings, every evening, Andy read, and he read until nearly three
A.M.
He was a poor sleeper. Sometimes even between three and seven
A.M.
when he got up, it seemed he did not sleep at all, merely rested his eyes beneath closed lids. Twelve years ago he had bought an
Encyclopedia Britannica
, and he was eighty percent through it now. Usually he read this in the evenings, propping the heavy volumes against the wall as he lay on his stomach in bed. When Juliette finally crawled into the bed on the opposite side, he simply tried to ignore her.

The loot from his encounters with women he put into a leather briefcase stamped with the Marvel Vacuum Company's trademark, which he kept at the back of his bottom drawer. Nothing was more certain than that Juliette would never look into that drawer: his bottom drawers for as long as he could remember had amassed, as if by their own power of attraction, unmended socks, shirts with missing buttons, shorts too worn out to wear but not worn out enough to be discarded, pajama tops with no pants, and vice versa. Andy did his own button-sewing and sock-mending, when he troubled to do it.

The briefcase now contained the actress's wristwatch, a sculptress's ring, the dress designer's silver twelve-inch ruler, the journalist's Javanese cigarette box studded with garnets, a thin gold necklace from a violinist of the New York Philharmonic, a pretty little silver pencil whose owner he had forgotten, a perfume bottle of blue glass enclosed in filigreed silver, a topaz ring he had picked up from the top of a toilet tank in the bathroom of a slightly tipsy nightclub singer who hadn't minded drinking a good deal in her own apartment, a Tanagra figurine that he kept wrapped in a handkerchief, and an antique silver flask of pocket size.

Andy had in mind giving many of these things to Martha when she would be twenty-one or so and out of college, and perhaps even out of the house, if she were married by then. He would bestow the presents slowly over the years, in a way that would excite no suspicion in Juliette, he hoped. She paid so little attention to what he did that it was hard to imagine her being suspicious of anything.

After six weeks of selling vacuums all day and coming home to a more or less silent wife, Andy would begin to feel restless and start planning a new adventure. One afternoon in mid-May he entered a telephone booth in the Bronx to call a woman anthropologist named Rebecca Wooster, whom he had seen one Sunday afternoon on a television program. She had just returned from the West Indies and Central America, where she had been making studies. Andy had found her number in the telephone book, but the number had been changed, the operator said, and she gave him the new one, which he made a note of, and dialed. A woman's voice answered, and when Andy ascertained that she was Miss Wooster, he continued in his usual style.

“My name is Robert Garrett.” (He never gave his real name.) “I hope you'll forgive me for calling you out of the blue like this, but I saw you on television a few Sundays ago, and I've been—well, I've been thinking ever since about some of the things you said. I'm something of an amateur anthropologist myself, and I'm working on a theory just now using psychological rather than racial grouping. I'd like very much to ask you a few questions, that is, if you've got half an hour to spare—and I'd be very grateful to you if you could possibly spare the time to look over the outline I've made. It's just a matter of three pages.”

He went on for another few minutes in a slow, earnest way, giving her time to respond now and then with a word or two that showed she was following him, in fact listening with interest. He had seen in the television show that she was a warm and friendly woman, patient with the questions that had been asked her at the end of the program, some of which had not been very pertinent. Finally, he apologized for taking so much of her time with the telephone call, and put in a modest plea that she would grant him a personal interview, however brief.

“Why, I think I can manage that,” she said in her slow, pleasant voice. “How would tomorrow be? Say around five-thirty?”

“That would be fine,” Andy replied. “Really I'm very honored, Miss Wooster.” He asked for her address, she gave it to him, and they said good-bye cordially.

Andy was punctual the following afternoon, bringing with him a folded map of the world on which he had drawn various circles, some overlapping, to indicate his “psychologically similar groups.” Most of it had no validity at all, he knew, but he had made the circles as best he could after consulting a few sociology books. He also had an “outline” of three typed pages.

Miss Wooster lived on the fourteenth floor—actually the thirteenth of a rather formal building on Park Avenue. She received him in a foyer as soon as he stepped out of the elevator. Andy introduced himself with a little bow, and they went into a large room that looked like a living room except for a massive desk near the window.

“You say you're not an anthropologist by profession,” Miss Wooster began after they had seated themselves on the sofa.

“No. I work for a company that compiles reference books for the public library, not a very interesting job, I'm afraid, but it gives me a chance to read a lot.” He got up with a murmured apology and walked in an awestruck way toward her bookshelves, on which stood, among the books, a dozen or more small sculptures and jeweled pieces of primitive art. “I hope you don't mind,” he apologized. “These fascinate me, and I've never seen anything like these except in a glass case in a museum.”

She got up, smiling with pleasure at his interest, and they talked and examined the pieces for fifteen minutes. What interested Andy most was a Mayan ornament of hammered gold, all a-tinkle with small gold pendants, each weighted with a tiny green stone. It was small enough to fit into his jacket pocket, and he had only to wait for the proper time to whisk it there, perhaps when Miss Wooster would turn to answer the telephone on the desk. Andy hated to resort to asking for a glass of water, though sometimes he had done so. At any rate, if he did have to ask for water, there did not seem to be any servant about who might get it for him.

“Well, let me see the outline you were talking about,” Miss Wooster said, seating herself in a chair near the bookshelves. “I have an appointment at six, I'm sorry to say, but I couldn't arrange it any later.”

Andy glanced at his watch, saw that it was 5:47, and said, “I'll make it as brief as I can.” He crossed the room for his briefcase, and from among pamphlets concerning Marvel vacuums removed his map of the world and his three-page outline. Then he took a deep breath and began, slowly, but in a way that did not permit Miss Wooster to interrupt him.

A smile of incredulity, perhaps of amusement, was growing on her lips.

“You may think—I suppose I am incompetent to make such a study,” he finished.

“No. It's quite interesting. I admire your enthusiasm.” She had looked over his outline. “But I think you're wrong about the Adonis and the Chinese. I mean, the similarity you spoke of . . .”

Andy listened carefully as she talked and as the minutes ticked away. He wondered if he could get the Mayan piece on his first visit and if not, could he persuade her to let him see her again. Immediately, he forced the doubt from his mind. To doubt was fatal. At any rate, she was not telling him that his idea was absolutely off the beam, or unworthy of being written about.

A bell rang in the hall.

“Oh, dear, that must be my appointment,” Miss Wooster said, getting up. “It's a bit early. Excuse me, Mr. Garrett.”

Andy stood up, smiling. He couldn't have planned it better. Miss Wooster went into the foyer to speak over the telephone to the caller downstairs, and Andy quickly pocketed the Mayan piece, making sure that the gap it left would not be noticed until he was out of the house.

When Miss Wooster came in again, he was slowly putting his papers back into his briefcase.