Where Is Janice Gantry? (14 page)

“Glad you could make it,” I told her.

She hitched closer to me. “I think I am too, Sam.”

She told me about Peter Varden, about how they had married when they were too young—just seventeen and nineteen. Her people and Peter’s uncle had helped them out, so he could get his degree from Duke. By carrying a heavy work load he had graduated a month before turning twenty-one. He had gone into an insurance office in Richmond. He was doing quite well. When she was four months pregnant and they were in the midst of house hunting, they said he had fallen in the office and had been taken to the hospital. She learned he had slipped on a freshly waxed tile floor and hit his head on the corner of a desk. The blow had not fractured his skull, but it had ripped a vein. They operated to relieve the pressure of the hemorrhage. He had regained consciousness after the operation, but had gone quickly into coma and had lived a little over a week and then died.

“I was a mess, Sam. I just couldn’t cope. I went back to Dayton and lost the baby there, and I went right down to skin and bones. If somebody asked me what time it was, I’d burst into tears. If there was a sudden noise, I’d jump seven feet, screaming. It seemed like such a damn foolish way for a man like that to die.

“One day something changed inside me. As if something went click. I hadn’t been able to sleep, but suddenly I was able to go to bed and sleep. Lord, how I slept! Twenty hours at a stretch, take a long walk, eat like a lion and go right back to bed. I guess I had realized I had to go on living, finally. So I went back to Richmond. I went to work for John Pennwalter, Peter’s uncle. He has four expensive dress shops. Now I’m assistant manager of one of them. I work in all four, though. I do some modeling, and buy a lot of the sportswear for all four shops, plan sales and ads and write some copy. There’s always enough to do.”

“It sounds like a good thing for you to be doing, I guess.”

“In a sense, yes. But I don’t want to do it forever. The situation of being a widow hasn’t been the easiest thing in the world, Sam.”

“How come?”

“It was pretty sickening in the beginning. We’d had good friends, and the real good ones handled it just right, and they’re still friends. But some of the others! Ugh! I don’t have any illusions about myself, Sam. I’m better looking than the average gal. By nature I’m sort of frank and open and friendly, and too many times men seem to think that my manner is some kind of a sexual approach. The slimy ones gathered around after I went back to Richmond. They were married, of course. They put it in a lot of vague and fancy ways, but the general idea was that I’d turn into a nervous wreck if I was suddenly deprived of the privilege of going to bed with somebody, and they would be glad to take care of things, in a very discreet way. Damn it, I am a very moral kind of person. I resent being taken for a slut. And some friends suddenly stopped being friends. After the third or fourth mealy proposition I invented the right answer, ‘Sure’,” I would say. “ ‘Thanks a lot for thinking of me. But let’s bring your little wife into this while it’s still in the planning phase, so we won’t run into any conflict of schedules. One of us
will take Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the other Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and we’ll all take Sunday off. Why don’t I phone her right now? I’m telling you, Sam, they look at you with what I guess is called mixed emotions.’ ”

I laughed and she joined me. It felt good to laugh that way, riding north through the night, laughing with a lovely girl.

“Your turn, Sam,” she said. “You were married once, you said.”

“But she took off. She’s married to somebody else.”

I wanted to tell it to Peggy more carefully than I had told it to other people. We went up through Sarasota and across the Ringling Bridges and out Longboat Key to the Colony Beach Club. I parked and we walked around by the pool and into the big bar lounge and on to the second room where Charlie Davies was playing a gentle and skillful and romantic piano for two couples dancing slowly in the shadows, and a half-dozen other people at the tables. It had been almost a year since I had seen Charlie. This was the slow pace of summer, pleasant, nostalgic.

I took Peggy back to a table near the window wall that fronts on the Gulf beach. The wind had shifted enough to put a small curl of surf on that beach, sparkling with phosphorescence. The coconut palms were floodlighted. We settled for a pair of tall rum collins. Rum is a good summer drink. Charlie moved into
I’ll Be Seeing You.

“Golly!” my girl said.

“Like it?”

“You certainly pick a mood place, my large friend, ol’ Sam.”

Yes, I’d picked a mood place. And I remembered that I had been going to bring Sis to this same place, long ago, and somehow we’d never made it.

The pang of guilt was sharp as a blade.

I knew I had no right in the world to be having as good a time as I was by merely being with this Peggy girl. But I did
not see how I could turn it all off. Selfishness is sometimes totally inadvertent. Even as I felt guilt and a kind of shame about being able to have thrust Sis out of my mind, I knew it was going to happen again, and I would feel the same guilt again, and it would keep on like that for just as long as the situation continued. This girl had a magic talent for gaiety.

“Something wrong?” she asked suddenly.

“No. Why?”

“You were way off somewhere, and I had the feeling you didn’t like it there.”

“I didn’t. I better come right back here. I like it here.”

(Good-by, Sis, for a little while. You would be the very first to understand that it isn’t disloyalty to you, or callousness. It’s bewitchment.)

By unspoken consent we dropped the personal history bit and lived in the present. And it was a very good present to be in if you want a good place to start something fresh and new. We talked nonsense. We danced a few times and she followed my cumbersome lead so well she made me feel as if I knew how. Charlie Davies came over to the table between sets and I introduced him and told him I had lowered my standards to the extent that I was now escorting tourist women to low dives. She told him she was paying me a dollar a day for the escort service and was beginning to feel cheated. Charlie and I talked of some of the old places where I had heard his piano, the Sarabar, the Dolphin, the Elbow Room. He said I was staying away so long these days he was afraid he’d forget my name. Peggy told him she had some plans that would get me back maybe every night for a while. When he asked her what she’d like to hear, she named good ones. Later, after we had become the only customers left, we went and sat at the stools at the showbar piano, and had that one for the road while Charlie sang the late, late ballads. Peggy knew how to listen, and she liked the right things.

We went back to an all night restaurant in town, for steak
and french fries, and some black coffee to take the impact off the rum. And somehow it was once again time to go into history when she reminded me of where my personal saga had been interrupted.

“She sounds like a brat,” Peggy said.

“It wasn’t that. She just couldn’t live the way she would have had to live.”

“Then she didn’t love you.”

“She thought she did. She believed she did. So maybe that is as good as the real thing—or as close as she could get to love.”

“But there’s one thing I don’t understand, Sam.”

I could sense it coming, but I said, “What?”

“Couldn’t you have just … stayed in pro ball?”

“For the money and the happy marriage. I was thrown out of pro ball, Peggy.”

She looked very startled. “Why?”

“They didn’t feel they could trust me.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

I sighed. “Here it is, then. A game with the Browns was coming up in Cleveland. She always went on road trips. But we had a hell of a battle about nothing at all, so she didn’t go. On Saturday night I left the hotel in Cleveland and went bar hopping, feeling sore and reckless. Somewhere during the evening, after things got dim, I found myself at a table with two strangers and I was arguing the point that any one man on a team could throw a game, provided it was a close enough game. Suddenly I got slipped three hundred bucks, three one hundred dollar bills under the table. A great light dawned. I rolled them up into a little ball between my palms and dropped them into the nearest drink and asked them if they wanted to go outside and discuss it. They didn’t want to. So I left. We won the next day. The hangover didn’t affect my play. I don’t think I thought once of those two guys. A week later I found myself summoned to Mr. Bert Bell’s office.

There I identified pictures of the two guys who had propositioned me. I didn’t know they had followed me from the hotel, waiting until I was well along before moving in on me. And they didn’t know they were being followed by two ex-FBI men who watched the whole deal. There were lawyers there too. It was all explained carefully to me. I had agreed to report any such attempt. Not only hadn’t I reported it formally, I had not told any of the guys about it. I still don’t know why. Keeping the pro game clean is a great responsibility. I could no longer be trusted. I could not prove that I was not just hanging back waiting for a better offer. I had protected those men by not reporting them. The season was nearly over. I’d be paid for the full season. But stay away from the squad, Brice. And no contract next year. Try to fight it, and you’ll only hurt the game and accomplish nothing. Bell shook my hand. He felt sorry about the whole thing. So did I, but that’s the way it was. I suppose they were right. But I could never have … sold out to anybody.”

She was quick to reach across the narrow table and place her hand on mine. “I’m sorry, Sam. I’m very sorry. I’m sorry most of all that it still hurts, doesn’t it?”

“I tell myself it doesn’t, but I guess it always will. They shouldn’t smash you so completely for one little hunk of stupidity. But what else could they do?”

“What else indeed? Can’t you think of at least ten men who would have gotten off with a reprimand?”

“I don’t think about that, Peggy.”

“One passing quarterback who can fake well and run when he has to, is worth how many defensive tackles?”

“Get off that bit, Peggy.”

“I’m sorry. It just makes me mad, that’s all.”

“I tell myself that a grown man should not be concerned about a game which is concerned with moving an oblong leather inflated object from one end to the other of a pasture one hundred yards long.”

“It is as valid as the things most men concern themselves with.”

“It’s a ball game, and the hell with it.”

So we got back into the car and rolled south toward Friday morning. I parked again in Turner’s drive.

“Now we walk for our health,” she said. We walked north, after hiding her purse and shoes between the roots of a pine. We walked all the way to Orange Beach, and sat on a cement picnic bench. She had seemed subdued during the walk.

“What time is it, Sam?”

“Twenty after four.”

“In a little while we can start feeling virtuous about being up so early. Won’t that be nice?”

“I can hardly wait.”

She turned toward me. “Sam, I am cursed with a logical mind. It’s something no woman should have. And so I have to ask you a question.”

“Like what?”

“You went through that laborious routine with the shell this morning. You came sidling up like a bison on tiptoe.”

“I’m a very deft guy.”

“But you thought I was Charity. So right from the beginning, when you were plotting the shell routine, you thought I was Charity.”

“And if I did?”

“She does swim there often in the early morning. And she does collect shells. So, with her, the shell thing might have been more effective.”

“Probably.”

“Were you trying to set up some kind of romance, Sam?”

“What would you think of such a project?”

“I think it would be damn dirty.”

“In what way?”

“You would have heard she’s … well, she’s a dish, I
guess. And, because of the way he likes to live, probably bored and lonely.”

“I’ve seen her, but from quite a distance. Nice build.”

“So it’s summer and you haven’t got anything better to do, so why not try to take a hack at the vulnerable wife of the rich recluse. He’s better than twenty years older than she is. And it might have worked.”

“But it turned out to be you.”

“Sam, I don’t want to think you capable of that sort of—sly attempt at adventure.”

“So, because you are a bright girl and you do have a logical mind, you probably have some kind of a second guess.”

“The man who tried to rob their safe is loose. Newspaper people have been trying to bother them. Anna told me about the police tramping all over the place Tuesday, the day before I arrived. A silly little man stands guard all night.”

“I’d forgotten about LeRoy.”

“He had some wise words of warning about how I shouldn’t be wandering around in the night, not with a criminal loose in the area. I thanked him and told him he was doing a splendid job, and just keep on guarding like crazy. Anyway, a girl is missing too. My darn logical mind has been hopping back and forth between the idea that you were making a play for Char, and the idea you wanted to just strike up a conversation and ask her some things, maybe.”

“Which would you like it to be?”

“Don’t tease me, Sam.”

“Do you love your stepsister?”

“I guess I feel a certain loyalty to her. But we haven’t got very much in common. She’s quite strange. I don’t know.”

“Have you got time to listen to a long story?”

“I have to be back to work in two weeks.”

I hesitated, thinking of ways I should edit the account, shift the emphasis, spare her some of my more lurid guesses.
But with a mental shrug I decided she would have it cold and straight.

I talked the world gray, and talked the first edge of the sun up.

Then I waited for comment. She looked at me solemnly. “Do you love that Gantry girl?”

“You are a dandy. Of all the things you could have said.… You know, that’s quite a departure for a girl with a logical mind. What’s more, it’s very revealing, in a flattering way.”