CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Eddie was on the phone to Tobin. The girl said “Gee, I’m sorry, Eddie.”

“It’s not your fault, Alouette,” he said grimly. Into the phone he said, “Willie? Be at the Palm Court at the Plaza in thirty minutes.” He hung up. “I’m going to send you a little check by messenger, Alouette. It will be here by noon. Can you be packed and out of here by five tomorrow?”

“But, honey, what’s the difference? She knows. I mean, why should we quit?”

“‘Read the check I’m going to send, then get out of here by five. Okay?”

“Where’ll I go?”

“Try Hollywood. You’ll do great in Hollywood.”

“Honey, I don’t know anybody in Hollywood.”

“I’ll send you train tickets and a letter of introduction with the check. Okay?”

She shrugged. “Okay. Listen, who knows? I might make a great little actress.”

Willie was waiting when he got to the Plaza. He had ordered a bottle of ginger ale and two glasses. He told Edward that Carmela Palermitano had called him to say that Irene had been to see her in the hospital. Edward sent Willie to get to West Wagstaff as quickly as he could and told him to get a police escort to make sure. “Irene likes you. She trusts you. If you can get her talking, you might just save her from making a terrible mistake.” Edward’s back-chamber Gelbart accent had gotten thicker with the emotional strain.

Irene got to West Wagstaff after Willie arrived there. She had been talking with a priest, who had said that she must continue to live with Edward because marriage was forever. She wanted to talk to the cardinal. She said it didn’t seem possible that any intelligent, humane religion would force her to allow herself to crumble into ashes to be scattered over the ice of their feelings so that Edward wouldn’t slip. “But what can I do, Willie?. I have this sense of duty and this contract to respond positively. Is all that merely a substitute for what passes for thinking with atheists?”

Tobin was helpful just by listening. She was able to push out some of the shock and shame and the crippling pain of betrayal that had come to her as quickly as a train wheel comes to the leg that it severs on the track. At the end she said she would agree to meet with Edward if there were only the two of them and if Edward was prepared to listen to her ultimatum.

They met at the seal pool in Central Park at eleven o’clock in the morning two days later. Willie was able to watch them from above as they greeted each other stiffly, as they walked slowly and awkwardly around and around the circular pond.

“… I have even talked to the cardinal, who says exactly what Father Corkery says. But I cannot. Perhaps a year from now. Do you know what those letters called you, Edward? And they were accurate. A pervert. You paid a woman to beat her, and you almost killed her by beating her for your sexual—sick, insane emotional—pleasure. I might have been able to adjust to infidelity. But that isn’t any form of love.”

He was ready. “Would I beat a woman? You know me. Would I beat a woman for such reasons? Have you inquired what she had done to me, Irene? Have I ever as much as raised my voice to you? She inflicted the most incredible and unexpected pain on my—on me, and I struck out reflexively. She fell. She hurt me, but almost entirely she hurt herself.”

“No.”

“How else could it be?”

“I have been to see her three times at the hospital. She is mentally retarded. She can respond only to money. I paid her. We talked.”

“You paid her and she told you what she thought you wanted to hear. That is her work!”

“No. She explained that there were quite a few girls who wanted to turn lump tricks, as they are called in your milieu, because you were known to pay so very well. She sees nothing wrong in it. She said that was the way you liked to make love. She was being very considerate of you, she thought.”

“You’ll have to believe her or me. A whore or the man you’ve lived with for fifteen years.”

“I believe her.”

“Then why are we here? Why are we talking?”

“Because we have a son. And because we are Catholics. I tell myself that if you were an alcoholic or a paralytic I would stay with you and love you and that, in those terms this—this disease you have—” She had to turn away from him and pretend to watch the seals for a while.

He said, “I will put myself in the hands of a psychiatrist.”

“Will you?”

“Immediately.”

“Are you ready to tell a man all the secrets of your life, all the terrible things you have done somewhere that have brought you to the need to maim women with your fists?”

“What do you mean?”

“Edward, do you have any conception of what psychiatric treatment is? A doctor has to know everything so that he can help you.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

“Oh, Edward, Edward,” she sobbed.

“Has anyone—I mean beyond those letters—has anyone even suggested that I could have anything to hide?”

“I think it is I who must go to a psychiatrist. I have the habit, but I will not continue the habit with a priest. I told him what you had done and he insisted that my place was with you.”

“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, Irene.” He tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away with a gasp of fright, as if it were the touch of a leper. “We’ve got to give all this a chance to heal, Irene,” he pleaded.

But he had been warned. He would not go near any psychiatrist. They had designed all of this to box him in, to force him to walk toward the converging lines of the triangle, where they would have their psychiatrist waiting to pump him of every shred of information, preserving all of it in his own voice on recordings so that they could expose him on the national networks and, by pulling him down, bring communism to America.

“Why don’t you beat me?” she said in a broken voice that was loud enough and so hopelessly entreating that it startled people at the railing ten feet away, who turned to stare with shock. Edward reversed their course, holding her elbow, walking them away from the seal pond. She let herself be led. “The difference between you and me is that if I had known that you had to beat a woman, I would have urged you to beat me. You would have accepted that as a fair, a safer offer. But if I had needed to beat someone almost to death, it would not occur to you to askme to beat you. But that was four days ago. I understand you now. I can see that you want to be beaten and I shall beat you. Not with my hands, not with a club—I’m not strong enough to please you—”

“Irene, don’t talk like this! You’ll make yourself ill.”

“You had better listen to me, Edward, because I am going to hurt you more than you have hurt all those poor little whores in the darknesses of your life.” They stopped walking. There was no one near them for many yards around. “I remember somebody you told me was the lowest slime alive. Do you remember that?”

“Now, please, Irene—”

“I am going to find him. And I am going to be with him everywhere that people gather to hate each other in this rotten city.” She was entirely unpracticed in hitting people, so she did it badly, even gracelessly. She pulled her right hand far back and looped it in a long arc and crashed her palm into his face.

It excited Willie Tobin more than he had ever been excited as he watched them through binoculars from his Fifth Avenue window.