Lou Baker’s voice, hoarse and muffled, spoke to him through the tube.
“Who dat?” she said. An old game.
“Us chickens,” he said.
“Foley’s chick flew the coop,” she said, and then the door buzzed before he could answer. He lunged for it, but too late. It buzzed again. Inside, he propped the bottle in the bucket of sand, still there in case of an air raid, paused to take off his trench coat. The hall was hot. Her apartment was five flights up, on the top floor. The buzzer sounded again, and then he heard, clear at the top, the sound of a hall door opened up—and left ajar. Hearing that sound, Foley was glad he had come.
Near the top of the last flight of stairs he could hear the shower drilling on the curtain. Had they just got up? He stood there a moment, cooling off. The draft through the door smelled of roasting meat. Leg of lamb.
He did not knock on the door but said, “Knock-knock-knock,” and the drumming of the shower on the curtain stopped.
“That you, old man?” said the voice, and Foley heard the curtain rings slide on the bar. Through the open bathroom door he got a whiff of the steam-laden air. “Come on in,” said the voice, although he hadn’t answered, for who but Foley, of all the people they knew, would have nothing to say, nothing really memorable, after all these years?
He stepped into a room that was without carpets, almost bare. On the walls were the shadows where pictures had once hung. A set of springs, without the legs or the frame, covered with material that had once been curtains, sat on the floor in the window corner, boxed in with orange crates. A lamp sat on one. In the other was Lou Baker’s library. A raddled copy of Petit Larousse Illustré, a Webster’s Collegiate with the Greek roots in Greek, a copy of Proctor’s novel, in her own translation, and a 1921 Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Years ago, twenty maybe, Foley had browsed in the catalogue. He never seemed to tire of the pictures of watches, and spring-wind trains. There was all the raw material, Lou Baker had said, that was needed to write the great American novel—and twenty years ago they were sure she was writing it herself.
“How are you—mon vieux?” the voice went on, adding that last little touch for Foley, who had not been mon vieux, or very much else, for twenty-five years. Through the bathroom door Foley saw the white foot on the tub, and the grape-colored bruise where a young marksman had shot himself. The foot looked the same, but the leg above it looked thin.
“I’m a little warm,” Foley said, and hung his coat in the closet.
“You’ll find my wife in the kitchen,” the voice continued. “Think she left something burning out there.” And Foley was relieved. That sounded familiar. Telling you before you thought it what you think.
“I’m glad you found a girl who could cook,” Foley said, slipping the bottle from the paper bag. “Most of my old friends had to settle for girls with nothing but jobs.”
The feet stepped out of the tub, but they did not come to the door. They remained on the tile floor, facing the mirror, and Foley said, “If you’ll excuse me, think I’ll step back and present a little hair oil to your wife.”
“You’ll find her bangs hanging on the towel rack,” the voice replied. Seemed to be about the same, Foley thought, and yet—He walked through the door to the room at the back, where two card tables, covered with paper napkins, were set up with candles and places for five. Five? “I’ll be with you in a moment, old man,” the voice put in, as Foley had paused there in the doorway.
“Take your time,” Foley said. “I understand the importance of that first impression.”
“I made that one earlier,” the voice said, and Foley crossed the room toward the kitchenette, a closet-sized hole clouded with smoke from burning meat. He held the bottle out before him, stepped to the door, and saw that she had been waiting there for him, her face carefully smeared with grease and flour for the gravy, her eyes smarting with smoke tears. A dripping fork in her right hand, a potholder in her left, she spread her arms wide, indicating that he should kiss her. He did. Strands of hair were stuck to her sweating brow. Would he wipe the falling hair from her eyes? He did. She turned and poked the meat she had allowed to burn while waiting for him. He stood there, his face set in what he hoped was an expression of admiration, while a very old record dropped on the turntable of his mind. Love’s old sweet song. Same old Baker. Same old refrain.
She felt that, turned him around, ran her flour-coated fingers through her hair, then placed the palms of both hands on her bony hips. A characteristic gesture, the fingers arched and spread, as if covered with something sticky, dating from her Montana childhood—dating from a time when they had been. Foley had seen the photograph. The snapshot of a bony little girl standing in a flower patch. The palms of both hands, as if they were dirty, on her bony little hips. “I’d just done it in my pants,” she’d explained. “I guess I do it when I’m embarrassed.”
Embarrassed, she raised the floured hand, waved it at the room. “We just decided the hell with it,” she said and gestured at the tables set up for five people. She meant the hell with their troubles. That was also Lou Baker, dating from way back. “Oh, the hell with it, Foley,” she would say in the flat, cigarette voice that seemed to get the most out of a small range of profanity.
Then she coughed, and he said, “Here’s the cherry-flavored phlegm-soother you ordered,” and placed the square bottle of Jack Daniel’s in her hands. Turning it slowly, she stopped to gaze at the old man himself, a snapshot on the label.
“The old bastard,” she said affectionately and wiped a thumb across his face, as if to see him better.
“I suppose you know the rules of the house, old man”—and there he was, in one of Lou Baker’s peignoirs, a wet towel looped around his neck. Shaved head bent over, hooked over like a buttonhook at the top. Hunched. From leading, then ducking. Crouch of prize-fighter with a violin player’s face.
“Right at this point,” said Lou Baker, coughing, “he might be curious to hear that this house has rules.”
That was Lou Baker. That was what a man who had spent a night with her might expect. But it did not touch Proctor. An almost silly smile made a mask of his face.
“The rules of the house, old man,” he continued, “are not to put corn on grape, or grape on corn, or pour corn on the uninvited guest.” He smiled at Lou Baker. “Madame Swann’s Way is serving Médoc tonight, and our distinguished guest, well known for his palate, would vomit down his corset at the thought of corn on grape.”
Foley turned to the tables, the five places, and Lou Baker said, “If I’d known that I’d invited some pickled gentiles to a quiet Jewish wake—”
“If you hadn’t known,” said Proctor, bowing, “there’d have been damn little pleasure in it.”
They’ll never make it, Foley thought, they’re both too goddam clever and independent. “Who is this pickled gentile?” he said, thinking the right gentile might help things.
From the kitchen Lou Baker said, “When you called I thought it must be Friday. You never call on anything but Friday. Then when you said anniversary, I got it—”
“You mean, I got it,” said Proctor. He had gone back to the bathroom. He began to sing, softly, “ ‘I got five dollars, got two shirts and collars—’ ”
“So when we got it,” Lou Baker said, “I thought what the hell—let’s have a party.”
“A great idea,” said Foley—and waited.
“So I called up Dickie,” Lou Baker said and came toward Foley with two whisky glasses, gave him one, walked with the other to the bathroom door. Foley neither sniffed nor studied its color but tossed it off and felt his eyes water. As the glow spread upward into his chest he said without turning, “So you called up Dickie?”
“He’s coming,” said Lou Baker. “He’s bringing Chateau Lafite and someone else’s wife.”
Had they both been drunk? Kind of reunion you thought about when drunk. Let bygones be bygones, etc. Why not? Dickie wouldn’t let them.
“A very nice corn, old man,” said Proctor. “Calls for a very nice grape.”
“Well, if we must have a gentile,” Foley said.
“It was his suggestion,” Lou Baker replied.
Where was she? Just standing in the other room. Dialogue between the top and the bottom of the stairs.
“I must say, old man,” put in Proctor, “I’ve been making suggestions for about thirty years. Some of them pleasant. First one she ever took.”
“Took another one last night,” Lou Baker said, and Foley wondered what man could stand it. Maybe Proctor. Maybe he was just the man for that.
“I know we’re crazy, old man,” Proctor said, “but I didn’t know that he was. Think that fooled me. Like to puzzle it out.”
“If you want to know the truth,” Lou Baker said, “I called him just to shame him. Wealthy socialite and heel seen out whoring with the enemy. Honest to God, I didn’t think he had the guts.”
From the bathroom Proctor said, “He’s got more guts than all of us. He’s lived for twenty years on absolutely nothing else.”
“If you call that guts,” said Lou Baker.
“I do,” said Proctor. “It takes guts to live on nothing. More guts than I’ve got. I’ve got to believe in something, hang on something—”
“In case you wonder,” Lou Baker said, “he’s talking about Richard Olney Livingston, heir to the tin-plate fortune and four or five hundred fresh hat-check girls.”
“You want to know what I think?” Proctor said.
“No!” cried Lou Baker. “My God, no!”
“I think Dickie would have shot him,” Proctor said. “I really do.”
“Shot who?” said Foley, his mouth a little dry.
“The Senator from Wisconsin,” Proctor said softly, and Foley could hear him slipping his belt through the loops in his pants.
“You see, Foley,” said Lou Baker. “He’s really crazy. He used to just sound it, but now he’s made it. I might as well tell you that’s why I love him. I love crazy men.”
As if he hadn’t heard a word of that, Proctor said, “If I had his guts I’d have shot him myself.”
“Will you shut your big mouth?” Lou Baker said. “Will you ever in God’s name learn to shut it? You think I want to go back and go through all that again?” She left the front room and swept past Foley, turned the kitchen faucet on.
“I’m just too goddam dialectic, Foley,” Proctor said. He came to the door of the bathroom, stood there buttoning his pants. Foley noted easy way he used the thumb and little finger. Pair of tweezers.
“We’ve got to think,” Foley said. “We’ve got to try and put two and two together—”
“Do we?” said Proctor.
“You see what I mean?” called Lou Baker. “What the hell can you do with him but love him?”
A mocking smile on his face, Proctor said, “Perche vuol mettere le sue idea in ordine?”
“That sounds like Mussolini,” Foley said.
“A smart man,” said Proctor.
“And a dead one,” said Lou Baker.
“Well, nobody need worry,” Proctor said, “about me.” He winked at Foley, but the eye behind the lid did not look at him or recognize him, and Foley turned away, already worrying.
“Anyhow,” said Lou Baker, changing the subject, “when he said yes, what the hell could I say? I’d asked him to dinner. I couldn’t tell him it was a joke. Then he asked me if he could bring anything, and I said, oh, a bottle or two of Haute-Brion, thinking that might make him see it was a joke. ‘Livingston Reserve up country in bomb-cave,’ he said. ‘How about Chateau Lafite?’ ”
“Chateau Lafite is all right by me, Lou,” Foley said.
“What I mean is—” Lou Baker said, but stopped there. The buzzer was sounding. With the potholder she had picked up Lou Baker walked through the house. While the buzzer sounded she pulled up the front blind, peered down at the street. “Does he think he’s going to leave his car parked there?”
“You like to discuss that with him while he’s waiting?” Proctor said.
Lou Baker stayed at the window. She tipped her head back for a look at the sky. It crossed Foley’s mind, just crossed it, that she might not open the door. She didn’t have to. He could still be turned away. What sweeter triumph than to turn him from her door, not answer his bell? But when the buzzer sounded once more she backed from the window, coughed to clear her throat, and faced the speaking tube.
“Dickie?” she said, and they all heard the voice of the man with guts. The playboy who had lived on nothing for twenty years. Then they heard—as through the needle of an old gramophone, the horn missing—the honing voices of a barbershop quartet singing, “The wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.”
“Honest to Christ,” said Lou Baker, “wouldn’t he though!” And they stood there together, facing the door, waiting for him.
What might have happened, Foley wondered, if he had come alone? The woman who stood there, filling the door, a gray-haired, almost massive matron, made it difficult to see the man who stood behind her, her chaperon. He wore a coonskin cap, an eager-beaver expression, carried a sack that rattled with bottles and a tape recorder in an alligator case. A saddle-leather pistol holster slanted across his flat chest. He gazed at them over the woman’s shoulder.
“The man who strikes this woman, I’ll shoot like a dog,” he said.
The woman laughed first, covering her face with her gloved hands, her head wagging, and Lou Baker threw her arms up, crying, “Dickie, my God!”
“I thought I’d take a few precautions,” Dickie said, not advancing. “You never know who you might run into these days.” He rolled his eyes like Groucho, licked his lips, and gave the woman a push.
“You certainly must love him,” Lou Baker said, taking the coat and hat the woman was holding, “or maybe you just know him. Maybe you know what to expect.”
“I never saw him in my life till one hour ago!” the woman said. It was clear she had been waiting, for that hour, to tell someone. What if the people where they were going were all like that? Foley could see that question had been on her mind. “I’m soooo relieved!” she said. “Just coming over here, in that car, I felt so silly—” She looked to see if they understood that. They did. Her tailored suit was gray, and very becoming in spite of the dimensions of her figure. “Wheeeewwww!” she said, not so much from the climb as the close call.
“Where in the world did you find him?” Lou Baker said as Dickie went off with the bottles.
“All I know is, Mrs.—”
“Proctor,” said Lou Baker. “This is Mr. Proctor, and this is Peter Foley.”
“I’m Mrs. Pierce!” Mrs. Pierce said, blushing. “You wouldn’t believe it, but I really am. Married, I mean. And for thirty years!” She threw up her hands.
“Well, you’re awfully kind to come to our party, Mrs. Pierce,” Lou Baker said.
“He said the more the merrier,” Mrs. Pierce said, “but I really didn’t know—” She questioned their faces.
“We’re having a little anniversary,” Lou Baker said, but she paused there, wondering what Dickie had told her.
“That’s what he said, and so far as I can gather”—she smiled at them—“so far as I can gather it’s to do with Paris. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” Lou Baker said, relieved herself. “We were all in Paris just fifty years ago.”
“Isn’t it the truth?” Mrs. Pierce said. “Just the plain and simple truth?” She looked at Foley as a man who might know.
“It’s a long ways back there all right,” Foley said.
Dickie came in and said, “Maybe I didn’t have one hell of a time!” He turned the coonskin cap so the tail hung in front of his face.
“Oh, I guess we all had a wonderful time, didn’t we?” said Mrs. Pierce.
“I mean today,” said Dickie.
“Well, I would say that in the past hour—” Mrs. Pierce said and lidded her eyes. That didn’t help, so she opened them.
“Now just where did you meet?” Lou Baker said.
“I used to be a hostess, honey,” Mrs. Pierce said. “I’m still with Air France, and when the news got around about the man who—” She stopped, looked at Dickie, and couldn’t go on.
“I’m a boy, but a man at heart,” Dickie said and held up his nails, blew on them, then polished them on the tail of the cap.
“I know how you feel, Mrs. Pierce,” Lou Baker said.
“About the man who wanted, who said he wanted, a girl who had been in Paris in the twenties. Now if she’d been in Paris in the twenties she was no girl now!” Mrs. Pierce said.
“I didn’t say young or old,” said Dickie. “Just girl. There’s old girls and then there’s young girls.”
“Well, that was just what I got to thinking!” Mrs. Pierce said. “And if that was what he wanted, why, I’d been a girl in Paris myself. I was there chaperoning one of those awful college groups!”
“You’ll pardon me,” said Dickie, “but Mrs. Proctor is a prominent Delaware Group alumna. Author of that handy pocket guide ‘Sex on Shipboard,’ including some harbors, each volume with index to—”
“So you answered the call, Mrs. Pierce?” said Lou Baker.
“I must have been simply out of my mind, but I did! I didn’t know at all what he wanted, but I said I would speak to him and ask him, and he said all he wanted was a girl who had been there in twenty-nine. In May, he said, of twenty-nine. And you know, I was. I really was. So I said if that was all he wanted”—she gave him a look, and he leered—“if that was all he wanted, why, I would be free till half-past ten. There’s no train or bus out where we live after eleven. Just joking, I said, Mr. Livingston, what in the world will I tell my husband, and he said to say that I’d been out drinking with some refugees. Exiles, I think he said, and refugees!”
“Ha!” Proctor said suddenly and startled all of them. They turned from Mrs. Pierce and looked at him. Foley had a feeling that he had heard it—that Proctor, somewhere, had previously said it—but it had not been Proctor. No, it had been Lawrence. Lawrence in the diner just outside Bakersfield. The night he had not watched his language, argued with the cook in the diner, and later that night, in a lemon grove, had tried to bum his hand in a smudgepot. That had been like Lawrence, but the “Ha” had been out of character.
“Why, Mr. Proctor,” Mrs. Pierce said, edging around so the light was behind her, “don’t tell me you’re the Mr. Proctor all this talk is all about!”
Proctor said nothing. What she said didn’t seem to register.
“Mr. Proctor,” Dickie said, “is the current public enemy number one. One of two—or is it three?—one of the three surviving Americans. Visitors will please not taunt the exhibit or throw ground glass into the cages.”
“Well, I certainly do like your—pluck,” Mrs. Pierce said. She had been about to say nerve, but had remembered, just in time, that Proctor was described as a man who suffered from a failure of it. “Isn’t it simply ghastly,” Mrs. Pierce said, feeling pluck herself. “I mean, really?”
“There’s a heartwarming rise in the sale of Mother’s Day cards,” Dickie said.
Mrs. Pierce gazed at him soberly. “I certainly do admire a man who will stand up to—it.”
“You’ve got the gender right on the head,” said Dickie.
“I mean, really,” she said, “don’t you really think so?”
On her upper lip Foley could see the beads of sweat. Keeping a stiff one. Wondering what the hell she had got herself into. Nest of ex-Commies? Bathroom full of C-day bombs, wireless sets, small, laundromat-size brainwasher, and set of Russian folk songs, sung by Cossacks, for broadcasting over Voice of America.
“In spite of the rules of the house,” put in Foley, so casually he noticed his hands were shaking, “I suggest a little corn be laid under the grape.”
“Let us now milk the Phoenix, poor bird!” cried Dickie and followed Lou Baker out of the room to where the french windows opened on the river view. “Oh, my America!” he cried. “My Harpies Bazaar! Or is it Three-D movies?”
Lou Baker led him off.
“Hasn’t it been just a scorcher?” Mrs. Pierce said; then, catching Foley’s eye, “I really thought he must be crazy. I really did. I guess we’re all mad these days.”
“God help all of those who aren’t,” said Lou Baker. She was back with Dickie and the drinks.
“ ‘This itself was their madness,’ ” Foley intoned, “ ‘that they would not join Dionysus in his madness.’ ”
Turning, Proctor said, “Who said that?”
“Something Greek,” said Foley. “Forget where I read it.”
“It’s certainly Greek to me,” said Mrs. Pierce and turned to Dickie, who bowed, kissed her hand, then sang:
“Thank ya, fathurrr
Thank ya, mothurrrr
Thank ya for meetin’ up with one anothurrrr.
Thank the horse that pulled the buggy that night,
Thank ya both for bein’ just a bit tight—”
He took from his pocket a small atomizer, sprayed his throat.
“You folks must be in show business,” Mrs. Pierce said and looked at them with admiration.
“You’re not far off, lady,” said Dickie.
“Do I smell something burning?” Mrs. Pierce wheeled slowly, sniffed the draft from the kitchen.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Dickie. With her drink, Lou Baker left. “And now, if I may have your attention,” he went on, and screwed his head around, to the left, then the right, like a man about to pass around some dirty postcards. “I have here,” he continued, slipping his hand beneath his coat, “a simple cure for the troubles, great and small, that threaten the lives of us vanishing Americans.”
Foley waited for him to take from the holster a toy gun. One of those jeweled and flashing weapons that the small fry brandished, then fired, from the rocket ships and bucking broncos in the arcade of every chain store. But Dickie held off a moment, checked the room at his back with a look that was not feigned, then thrust out at them the Colt revolver with which Proctor had shot himself.
“Heavens!” gasped Mrs. Pierce and stepped out of the line of fire.
The gun had been well kept. The barrel and the stock were shiny with oil. Proctor neither stepped forward nor fell back, but his good hand, which held the cigarette, crossed his front and pulled at the lobe of his ear. Foley thought it might be shock. Proctor rocked his head, slowly, as if there might be water in that ear.
From the kitchen Lou Baker called, “We should have gone for a taxi ride. Before we’d eat or drink we’d always ride in a taxi.”
Dickie cracked the gun open, blew through the barrel, then snapped it shut. The stunt had not come off. What had he expected? Something positive. Something from Proctor. But Mrs. Pierce said again, “My heavens!” and Foley said nothing. Proctor stood there silently pulling the lobe of his ear.
“It’s an awfully quiet party,” Lou Baker said and came to the door of the room with her drink. She saw that Dickie’s whisky, untouched, still sat on the plywood tray. But she did not see the gun; he stood with his back to the door. “I see that Mr. Livingston is observing the rules of the house,” she said. “Upset stomach?” Dickie slipped the gun back into the holster and reached for his drink, but Lou Baker had caught the movement. “I miss something?” she said.
“Just a few dirty imports for us boys,” Foley said.
“Mrs. Pierce,” Lou Baker said, moving up, “are they showing you those awful wiggly-part postcards?”
“Boys will be boys, honey,” Mrs. Pierce said, seeing in Foley’s face that this was not funny. “But nothing you didn’t enjoy more thirty years ago!” Mrs. Pierce rolled her eyes, sucked air between her teeth, and let her upper half shake as if she had been tickled.
Coming up fast, Lou Baker said, “Is it charades, or just none of my goddam business?”
“Right the second time,” Dickie said and buttoned his coat.
She studied his face, the still young-looking face of an aging juvenile delinquent, pimpled along the jaw and boyishly clean-cut. She turned from him and looked at Proctor, who dusted his ashes in his empty glass, sprinkled them on his ice cubes, returned the cigarette to his mouth.
“It’s the Colt,” he said calmly. “You know, the one I shot myself with.”
Foley could see Lou Baker stiffen, like a cat, before she relaxed. She watched Proctor stir the cubes in his glass with his finger, then she said casually, “Well, just so it isn’t loaded.”
“Mal-hurrrrr-oooozemahn,” said Dickie matter-of-factly, “that is the case. They don’t sell slugs for the old cannon in the pawnshops no more.”
“There’s two rules of the house,” said Lou Baker, turning to Mrs. Pierce, “no corn on grape is one, and all guns have to be turned in at the door.”
“I know just how you feel,” Mrs. Pierce said. “It’s always the empty gun that kills somebody.”
The drink he hadn’t touched, Dickie raised to his lips and finished off. For the length of time it took him to do that, his Adam’s apple pumping up and down, Foley was sure that he would put down the glass, then politely leave. With or without Mrs. Pierce, but with the upper hand, and the gun. He had never been a man to take Lou Baker seriously. It brought up the old question of the Livingston prerogative.
Dickie finished off the whisky, stirred the ice cubes, then, in a strangely detached manner, as if answering traffic questions, he said he would observe the rules of the house. Without removing his coat he unstrapped the holster, pulled the belt from his back, and tossed the outfit on the bed.
“Couldn’t we all take a ride in a taxi?” Lou Baker said. She looked at Foley, but he had no money; she looked at Proctor, and he said, “In a taxi on the boulevard Raspail, Dr. Hemingstein professed to be bored.”
“Do you realize,” Lou Baker said, “almost twenty-five years. What is twenty-five years?” She turned to Mrs. Pierce.
“It’s a long time, honey.”
“I mean, what do they call it?” Lou Baker said. “When it’s twenty-five, what do you call it?”
Mrs. Pierce looked at them sadly, one at a time, then she slowly smiled. “I suppose you mean silver,” she said. “It’s silver for twenty-five years.”