The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 6

  “Have you ever been abroad?” I was unexpectedly asked.

  “No, but my parents have,” I said. “They’ve spent many years in Europe.” I remembered my father ill in steerage and my mother’s rocks from the Zuider Zee—one of those winds from the heath of memory by which the Fates see to it that we pay as we go by being most miserable when most happy.

  Archie bore down on us with Martinis, singing a song of which the words were both revolutionary and bawdy. His mother beamed. She approved of what he had brought home, thanks largely, I think, to her impression that my family were old New York Dutch, a delusion with which it seemed to me for the moment wisest not to tamper. She asked me whether I knew any of the Roosevelts. After we had chatted in this vein of old friends for a bit, she excused herself and vanished into the back reaches of the house, trailing the hope that I would come to the party they were giving on Saturday next. “Oh, he’ll come, Mater,” Archie said, speaking again from a remote corner of the room where he was now slouched over a telephone. He was busy inviting other friends of his, though having just agreed with Hewitt that the guest list was far too long already.

  I sank into one of the chairs to savor my good fortune. I seemed to have struck my pick into a fine vein indeed. “It’s one of Mater’s ghastly affairs,” Archie was saying into the phone as he snicked away some ashes from a cigarette, “but the Dreisers are coming, and just possibly Fabian. Come and disintegrate with the group.”

  This was it! The urbane drawl, the prattled wit, the indifference to the answers at the other end—supplying just the right tincture of snobbishness—were the sort of thing one had had in mind. All I could see of Archie was his back as it shook with laughter over news of some companion given, it seemed, to pouring coffee on his Shredded Wheat, but that was practically all there ever was of Archie’s mirth in the way of outward signs: nothing showed in his face, which expressed at best a wry amusement with the race of man.

  He finished his calls and then we talked for an hour about schoolwork and related concerns. When I rose to go, he saw me to the door. There, as he opened it, he said in a lowered voice, “Look, could you let me have a ten or so till the first of the week? I’m a bit squeezed, and if Mater … I mean would you mind awfully?”

  Mind, of course I didn’t mind—then or a few days later when, his financial skies seeming not to have cleared in the interval, he touched me for another twenty. By that time I had tasted the lavish hospitality of the house in the form of the Saturday soirée, but there was more to my willingness than gratitude. It seemed perfectly part of the pattern for a rich American family to have a son who was a ne’er-do-well, or “rotter,” up to his ears in gambling debts best concealed from his mother; it went with the stereotype.

  When by the end of the school year, however, Archie had sponged close to two hundred smackers with no sign of reimbursement, my enchantment with the world of fashion began to slacken, and my feeling toward Archie palpably to sour. At that time my own family had tough sledding, due mainly to some newly arisen complaints of my father’s calling for a procession of neurological specialists, each more baffled than the last, and so I decided to hit Archie for my money. At one of his mother’s spring garden parties I took him aside and asked him point-blank when he was going to pay me back. He looked at me in surprise, as though there were some incongruity, even a breach of etiquette, in the spectacle of a guest dunning a host. Perhaps there was. But school term was over, and I had just resumed full-time work on the garbage truck, a fact which reminded me again of how hard-earned my money was. Something else had happened that set my back up. While driving along on the truck, I had seen Archie emerge from a restaurant at the head of a gay little group, flinging bills to menials bowing in his wake. This seemed to me to exceed the limits of permissible rottenness, and I vowed to see myself repaid by hook or by crook.

  His mother—still calm in her faith that I hailed from Eastern elements so secure in their breeding that they could reverse custom and send their children West to school—invited me to her annual Fourth of July lawn party—over Archie’s dead body, as he had become thoroughly disillusioned with me. I made a tight-lipped point of coming, knowing it would be my last chance to buttonhole him before the fall term—perhaps my last chance ever, for he had spoken of changing to Dartmouth, a threat which, as it turned out, he made good. Early in the evening I saw my chance, and strode across the grass to join him on a stone bench on which I found him momentarily alone. “Look,” I said, “I need my money, and I need it now.” Archie rose as one caught in mid-gesticulation at another guest, in this case a young girl named Nellie Winters who was sweeping toward us on a billow of tulle. After being introduced, I sought a clump of rhododendron behind which to collect my thoughts, and from whose protective foliage I could hear Archie tell the girl, “He’s a wet smack.”

  Now this expression suddenly characterized the whole kit and caboodle here. I had since first being awed by them glimpsed enough of the Real Thing—tea at a professor’s house, a drink with a classmate whose family supported the local symphony—to know that the Winklers were ersatz. One did not in circles of true quality hear terms like “wet smack”; they went with “Mater” and “swanky” and all the gimcrack rest. But we mount the ladder of sensibility rung by rung, passing through levels in which we use words like “swanky” and “brunch” before attaining those from which they will be seen as the semantic stigmata of a lower order, and unthinkable on our lips.

  I remained in cover a moment to rally my forces and decide on a course of action. At the end of the drive I could see the off-duty policeman handling the parking problems always entailed by the Winklers’ parties, proof again of their coarse prodigality. Sight of this cop did nothing to soothe my ruffled spirits, for I remembered seeing Archie on a previous such evening slip him something from the wallet I had helped stock. Seething among the shrubbery—from behind which my hand had plucked a drink from a passing tray, to the consternation of the waiter bearing it—I debated taking my grievance to Mater herself. I rejected that idea. Mrs. Winkler had once related having seen in her Caribbean travels a peasant flog a donkey with a rooster. Well, I would not flog the mother with the son. Not that she herself enjoyed anything like the prestige she once had in my eyes. Far from it. I now saw the vixen, even the dragon, lurking behind the Gracious Hostess. Consider, for instance, the dinner served that night.

  A famous beauty in her day, Dolly Winkler still liked to gather around her specimens of her successors, whom, nevertheless, she resented and possibly even loathed for being still young. She loved to show up the new set as examples of diminishing élan, of a generation lacking the physical and sartorial style that had characterized her own. The menu that night might have been sadistically chosen as a sort of obstacle course over which the competition were challenged to show their poise, if any. First there was artichoke, a boiled whole for each, to be disassembled leaf by messy leaf, dipped in drawn butter, and dragged across the teeth. The debris of that removed, there came fried chicken and corn on the cob. What remained of composure vanished among the heads bowed over slathered ears and the sound of kernels exploding like shells in the summer air. Butter ran down the chins of women reaching for napkins by now themselves hazards to cleanliness. Still there was no respite. Dessert was watermelon—great wedges of it to be eaten by the damp beauties around whom, on the grass, lay scattered pips like the black seeds of Dolly Winkler’s hate. It was the one time I heard guests ask for the bathroom as though they intended to bathe in it. All this while Dolly Winkler toyed with a little white meat and nibbled a grape or two from the centerpiece overflowing with fresh fruit.

  It was no doubt from the black seeds of my own anger, well watered by cocktails, that the plan sprang which I now suddenly conceived for recovering the money due me. I would steal it back.

  From the time or two Archie had invited me up to his room to wait with a drink while he took a shower, I knew where he kept his wallet. It usually lay on top of his bureau w
hen he wasn’t carrying it, and he wasn’t carrying it now as far as I could judge from a hard look at his white linen jacket. I recalled his having had to dart into the house for it that night before paying the policeman. After dinner, my confidence in this project perhaps enlarged by the table wine I had taken aboard, I joined the file of guests repairing to the house in search of bathrooms, of which there was no dearth there. I went directly to the second floor, in the hallway of which I leaned negligently against the wall, like a man awaiting his chance at the chamber occupied by two women audibly laughing and splashing tap water. After making certain the floor was otherwise deserted, and hearing no newcomers trooping up the stairs, I went on tiptoe to the open doorway of Archie’s room.

  I knew the layout here perfectly. There was a lamp burning in the room, and the billfold was quite visible on top of the bureau. I should have preferred less illumination for my work, but then I suddenly thought of sauntering freely into the bedroom toward the bathroom adjoining it, as a guest accustomed to feeling at home here. It would be a perfect explanation were I to be seen going in or out. After another glance around to make sure no one was around, or coming, I walked up to the dresser, picked up the billfold and opened it. I was in luck. It was a goodly sheaf of currency that met my eye, some tens and at least one twenty I saw as I folded and thrust them into my pocket. Perhaps sixty or seventy dollars in all. That left a balance of well over a hundred dollars due me, which I should never see again unless I supplemented my theft with some valuables easily salable in a pawn shop. A wristwatch lay ticking on the bureau surface, and nearby was a gold cigarette case. Should I pocket them, Raffles-like, as a rough equivalent of the host’s remaining obligation? Could one take something possibly having sentimental value even though one had a moral right to it? These questions raced through my mind as my heart pounded and my throat tightened. Hearing voices on the stairway again, I turned and shot toward the door. Standing in it, and blocking my passage, was nothing less than the figure of Hewitt.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I thought Archie wouldn’t mind my using his bathroom.”

  “What were you doing at the dresser?”

  “Tidying up.” My voice squeaked out this inanity as my head throbbed. It felt like a balloon about to burst.

  “What is it?” Hewitt glanced down at my pocket, in which my hand still clutched the bills.

  “I’m only stealing what’s mine.”

  “Then you were.”

  “Look, Hewitt. This man owes me two huh—huh—huh—”

  I wondered whether if I brushed past Hewitt the other components in this fantasy would dissolve into thin air, and whether my legs would postpone their metamorphosis into rubber until I had managed to gain the street.

  “What would you—I mean if you were in my …?” The words trickled like a weak liquid down my throat. Hewitt turned to look toward the stairs, at the foot of which could be heard Archie himself in a gay banter with some guests.

  “Archie!” he called.

  “Yes?” Archie’s head appeared at a turn of the landing.

  “Would you come up here a moment, please?”

  We stood rooted in our respective positions while Archie joined us, frowning inquiry. Hewitt waited until another pair of laughing women had locked themselves into the bathroom before saying: “Mr. Wanderhope was at your dresser. Perhaps you’d better take a look at your wallet.”

  My hand detained Archie.

  “I took the liberty of helping myself to what you owed me—or the interest on it,” I said, recovering my tongue at sight of the culprit who had driven me to such extremes. Archie laughed through his nose, shaking his head. Being a rotter, he at least refrained from holding others in moral scorn. Indeed, he seemed to derive a certain pleasure from another’s venality, as narrowing the disadvantage against him.

  “You really are a dose, aren’t you, Wanderhope?”

  “You’re in a poor position to judge, I’d say.”

  “Shall I call the police, sir?” It was the first time I had heard Hewitt address his master with that vocative. Perhaps the occasion had rallied in him some dwindling vestiges of dignity. “There’s one right outside, of course.”

  “The traffic cop. Yes.”

  “No,” I bleated.

  “Why not?” There was an impish gleam in Archie’s eye; I felt that he was not so much toying with the idea of summoning the law as tormenting me with the threat of it.

  “Would you want a scandal?” I said, with such a threatening tone as I could manage. “Because I’ll drag everything out. How much you owe me, what a dead beat you are. Giving parties like this while other people have to … Medical bills …”

  I had given Archie in the course of pleas for reimbursement an inkling of my family’s cash picture, and it may have been the memory of this ingredient in the crisis, as well as my threat publicly to arraign his wastrel ways, that made him desist. A story in the morning Tribune about a gay Hyde Park party ending in a shabby night court altercation could not have been to his liking any more than to mine. He may have visualized me bolting through the crowd amid bromidic cries of “Stop thief!”

  “Go on, beat it, Wanderhope,” he said. “And don’t ever show your face around here again.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  As I made my way down the staircase, a fierce flare of rebellion—perhaps peasant rebellion—made me fling the last word over my shoulder. Pausing on the landing I called up: “I hope you’ve learned your lesson. You with all your—This neighborhood—One admires these houses, oh, sure. Till one has a chance to see what goes on in them!”

  With that I went out, quickly but without panic. On the sidewalk I turned sharply and, breaking into a trot, headed for the trolley I customarily took into this part of town. I made my usual transfer at Halsted Street, rode south to Seventy-third, and walked the three blocks to where I lived.

  My mother was waiting for me in the window.

  five

  My first assault on the strongholds of fashion had failed. But recognition of the fact implied no intention to capitulate or regard withdrawal as anything but temporary. Of that many-bastioned world I had scaled the wrong wall, that was all; a moment to lick my wounds, reconsider my target, and off once again.

  Meanwhile an interval with a Dutch Reformed girl seemed in the making. Her name was Greta Wigbaldy, and she was a niece of my father’s late partner. Blonde as the butter she would have been churning had her parents remained in the Netherlands, she stood sufficiently detached from our present background to see me as I saw myself, a sort of reverse Pilgrim trying to make some progress away from the City of God, and she was sexually spirited enough to require a word other than “seduction” for her share in the pleasures which (my taste for public parks being now sated) we took on the miles of beach that are Chicago’s other civic feature. There were haunts where even as one kissed one was drunk with the classic shoreline: the tall apartments beneath whose windows these night waters broke, the Babylonian hotels with names like Windermere and Chatham whose lights inflated the heart. There was a necklace of moons strung on a strand called Michigan Boulevard, which swept northward through the Gold Coast and out to the suburbs of Evanston and Winnetka, where the last mansions waited.

  “You’re always a hundred miles away,” Greta said one night. We had left the rocks and the parked cars with their embracing shadows and were walking along the beach, deserted except for one other couple we saw, their coat collars turned up like ours against the October cold. We passed a pier with its haunting sound of waters plashing among rotting piles, and came to a bathhouse, the knobs of one of whose doors I tried without success. We stood with our hands in our pockets before a peeling poster. It seemed a lithograph of two naked figures locked in a Priapic clasp, till scrutiny of its accompanying text revealed it to be an illustration of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for a rescued swimmer.

  Trudging back along the sand, we encountered two other members of our congregation, climbin
g down out of the high rocks and suggestively encumbered with blankets. They were Pearl Hoffman and Jack Dinkema. A shy attempt of Pearl’s to avoid the meeting was shaken off by Jack, who drew his arm from her grasp and came over to greet us heartily—for reasons I could well understand. He had no automobile, and escorted his dates to these lovers’ lanes by trolley. The ride back which he saw in me undoubtedly inspired the invitation, extended with great warmth, that we be his guests in a late snack. He knew an all-night bakery where you could get doughnuts so fresh they lay in an indigestible lump in your stomach till morning, so we all piled into my car and made for it.

  The term “my car” is a misnomer too, for that matter. The Oldsmobile I drove was Wigbaldy’s. Greta’s father was a building contractor for whom things were going more than well, an expansive man typical of what we mean by Dutch gemoedelijkheid, and I had scruples about putting his generosity to ends of which he could scarcely have approved. But Greta overrode them, rather irritably. “What difference does it make how we get to where we’re going? You don’t have qualms about what we do in the parlor, do you? Well, it’s his house the same as it is his car. Why is one abusing hospitality and not the other?” This was only one glimpse she gave me of the thoroughly practical morality of women in matters of “the heart,” once they are committed. Another was the solution of this ever-vexing problem of rendezvous which she now proposed. It took my breath away, like her love-making.

  Wigbaldy had begun by erecting single houses, mostly bungalows, on vacant street lots. Now he had acquired backing for a twenty-acre development of thirty or so medium-priced “homes” to be disposed with conscious rusticity among winding roads and named Green Knoll—though no relief of the flat terrain was apparent to justify this designation. The pilot house was up by early spring and was instantly furnished for display as a Model Home and thrown open for public inspection one Saturday morning. The day-long file of visitors brought out by advertisements in the real estate sections of newspapers augured well for the Green Knoll project. Wigbaldy celebrated by taking us all out to dinner, which ran late into the night, frustrating again the young lovers. Greta now put forth her mad proposal.