He stood with her on the corner outside the taproom. He saw the little sport car parked across the street. It was clean and shiny, and the moonlight seemed to give it a silvery gleam. It glimmered like a jewel against the shabby background of shacks and tenements. He thought, It don’t belong here, it just don’t fit in with the picture.
He looked at Loretta. She was waiting for him to say something. He swallowed hard and mumbled, “Wanna go for a walk?”
“Let’s use the car.”
They crossed the street and climbed into the MG. She started the engine. He leaned back in the seat and tried to make himself comfortable. He felt very uncomfortable and it had nothing to do with the seating arrangement. She saw him squirming and she said, “It’s such a tiny car. There isn’t much room.”
“It’s all right,” he said. But it wasn’t all right. He told himself he didn’t belong in the car. He wanted to open the door and get out. He wondered why he couldn’t get out.
The car was moving. He said, “Where we going?”
“Any place you’d like. Would you care to ride uptown?”
He shook his head abruptly.
“Why not?” she asked.
He didn’t have an answer. He had his arms folded and he was staring straight ahead.
“I can show you where I live,” she said.
“No.” His voice was gruff.
“It isn’t far away,” she urged mildly. “Just a short ride. Not even twenty minutes.”
“I don’t want to go there.”
“Any special reason?”
Again he couldn’t answer.
She said, “It’s very nice uptown.”
“I bet it is.” He spoke between his teeth. “A damn sight nicer than it is down here.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” His hands put a tight grip on the edge of the seat. “Do me a favor, will you? Quit trying to put things on an equal basis. You’re from up there and I’m from down here. Let’s leave it that way.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. That’s stupid.”
“All right, it’s stupid. But that’s the way it is. So just drive toward the river.”
The car moved faster. It came onto Wharf Street and he told her to turn north. They went north for several blocks and presently he told her to park up ahead. He pointed to a wide gap between the piers. It was a grassy slope, slanting down to the water’s edge.
It was mostly weeds and moss, not much more than a mud flat, and during the day it was nothing to see. But under the moon it was serene and pastoral, the tall weeds somehow stately and graceful, like ferns.
“Very pretty,” she murmured. “It’s nice here.”
“Well, it’s quiet, anyway. And there’s a breeze.”
For some moments they didn’t say anything. He wondered why he’d directed her to this place. It occurred to him that he used to come here when he was a kid, coming here alone to feel the quiet and get the river breeze. Or maybe just to get away from the shacks and the tenements.
He heard her saying, “It’s so different here. Like a little island, away from everything.” Then he looked at her. The moonlight poured onto her golden hair and put lights in her eyes. Her face was entrancing. He could taste the nectar of her nearness.
He told himself he wanted her, he had to have her. The need was so intense that he wondered what kept him from taking her into his arms. Then all at once he knew what it was. It was something deeper than hunger of the flesh. He wanted to reach her heart, her spirit. And his brain seethed with bitterness as he thought, That ain’t what she wants. All she’s out for is a cheap thrill.
The bitterness showed in his eyes. He spoke thickly. “Start the car. Let’s get away from here.”
“Why?” She frowned slightly. “What’s wrong?”
He couldn’t look at her. “You’re just fooling around. Having yourself a good time.”
“That isn’t true.”
“The hell it isn’t. I been around enough to know what the score is.”
“You’re adding it up backward.”
“Am I?” He glowered at her. “Who do you think you’re kidding?”
She didn’t say anything, just shook her head slowly.
He pointed to the key dangling from the ignition lock. “Come on, start the car.”
She didn’t budge. Her hands were folded loosely in her lap. She looked down at them and said quietly, “You’re not giving me much of a chance.”
“Chance for what?” His voice was jagged. “To play me for a goddamn fool?”
She looked at him. “Why do you say these things?”
“I’m only saying what I think.”
“You sure about that? You really know what you’re thinking?”
“I know when I’m being taken. I know that I don’t like to be jerked around.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Sure I trust you. As far as I could throw a ten-ton truck.”
She smiled again, but there was pain in her eyes. “Well, anyway, I tried.”
He frowned. “Tried what?”
“Something I’ve never done before. It isn’t a woman’s nature to do the chasing. Not openly, anyway. But I knew it was the only way I could get to know you.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry you’re not interested.”
His frown deepened. “This on the level?”
She didn’t reply. She just looked at him.
“Damn it,” he murmured, “you got me all mixed up. Now I don’t know what to think.”
She went on in a tone of self-reproach, “I tried to be subtle. Or clever. Or whatever it was. Like today on the docks, when I used the camera. But deep inside myself I knew the real reason I wanted your picture.”
He looked away from her.
She said very quietly, “I wanted to keep you with me. I had to settle for a snapshot. But later, when I left the camera on the table, I was strictly a female playing a game. What I should have done was say it openly, bluntly.”
“Say what?”
“I want you.”
He could feel his brain spinning. He fought the dizziness and managed to say, “I’m not in the market for a one-night stand.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. You know I didn’t mean it that way.”
For some moments he couldn’t speak. He was trying to adjust his thoughts. Finally he said, “This is happening too fast. We hardly know each other.”
“What’s there to know? Is it so important to find out all the details? The moment I met you, I felt something. It was a feeling I’ve never had before. That’s all I want to know. That feeling.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know. I know just what you mean.”
“You feel it too?”
“Yes.”
They sat there in the bucket seats of the MG, and the space between the seats was a gap between them. Yet it seemed they were embracing each other. Without moving, without touching her, he caressed her eyes and her lips, and heard her saying, “This is all I want. Just this. Just being near you.”
“Loretta—”
“Yes?”
“Don’t go away.”
“I won’t.”
“I mean, never go away. Never.”
She sighed. Her eyes were closed. She murmured, “If you really mean it.”
“Yes,” he said. “I want this to last.”
“It will,” she said. “I know it will.”
But it wasn’t her words that he heard. It was like soft music drifting through the dream. And the dream was taking him away from everything he’d known, every tangible segment of the world he lived in. It took him away from the cracked plaster walls of the Kerrigan house, the noises of the tenants in the crowded rooms upstairs, the yelling and bawling and cursing. It took him away from the raucous voice of Lola, and the empty beer bottles cluttering the parlor, and his father snoozing on the sofa. And in the dream there was a voice that said good-by to Tom, good-by to the house, good-by to Vernon Street. It was a murmur of farewell to the tenements and the shacks, the thick dust on the pavements, the vacant lots littered with rubbish, the yowling of cats in dark alleys. But there was one dark alley that refused to accept the farewell. Like an exhibit on wheels it came rolling into the dream to show the rutted paving, the moonlight a relentless lamp glow focused on some dried bloodstains.
His eyes narrowed to focus on the kin of the number-one suspect.
His voice was toneless. “Tell me something.”
But he didn’t know how to take it from there. It was like a tug of war in his brain. One side ached to hold onto the dream. The other side was reality, somber and grim. His sister was asleep in a grave and she’d put herself there because a man had invaded her flesh and crushed her spirit. He told himself he had to find the man. Regardless of everything else, he had to find the man and exact full payment. His hands trembled, wanting to take hold of an unseen throat.
She was waiting for him to speak. She sat there smiling at him.
He stared past her. “You like your brother?”
“Very much. He’s a drunkard and a loafer and very eccentric, but sometimes he can be very nice. Why do you ask?”
“I been puzzled about him.” He looked at her. “I been wondering why he comes to Dugan’s Den.”
For some moments she didn’t reply. Then, with a slight shrug, “It’s just a place where he can hide.”
“What’s he hiding from?”
“From himself.”
“I don’t get that.”
Suddenly her eyes were clouded. She looked away from him. “Let’s not talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“It isn’t pleasant.” But then, with a quick shake of her head, “No, I’m wrong. You have every right to know.”
She told him about her family. It was a small family, just her parents and her brother and herself. An ordinary middle-class family in fairly comfortable circumstances. But her mother liked to drink and her father had his own bedroom. She said they were dead now, so it didn’t matter if she talked about them. They had an intense dislike for each other. It was so intense that they never even bothered to quarrel, they hardly ever spoke to each other. One night, when her brother was seventeen and had just got his driver’s license, he took their parents out for a ride. He came home alone with a bandage around his head. The father had died instantly and the mother died in the hospital. Within a few weeks Newton began to have fits of hysterical laughter, wondering aloud if he’d done it on purpose, actually doing them a favor and giving them an easy way out. A bachelor uncle came to take charge of the house but couldn’t put up with Newton’s ravings and strange behavior and finally moved out.
When Newton was nineteen he married the housekeeper, a woman in her middle forties. She was a short and very skinny woman and her face was dreadfully scarred from burns in a childhood accident. No man had ever looked twice at her and she did her best to please Newton but that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted her to be harsh and nasty and downright vicious. He was always trying to agitate her, trying to make her lose her temper. Whenever that happened he seemed delighted, especially when she’d claw him or throw dishes at him. After seven years she couldn’t take it any more and she went to a lawyer and got a divorce. A few months later Newton married a Hungarian gypsy, a fortuneteller, a tall, bony, beak-nosed woman who already had several husbands in various parts of the nation. She was in her early fifties and used liquid shoe polish to keep her hair black. Sometimes she’d get very thirsty and drink the shoe polish. At other times she forced Newton to give her large sums of money so she could buy cases of expensive bourbon. He had an income of sixty dollars a week from his father’s insurance money and some weeks the entire sixty dollars went for liquor. Loretta was working in a dental laboratory and making forty a week and couldn’t keep much for herself because Newton and the gypsy woman were always asking for money.
When Loretta was twenty, she married a young dentist. For a while they lived in a small apartment. But she was always worried about Newton, she had a feeling there was a bombshell in him and sooner or later it would burst. Her husband kept telling her to forget about Newton but she couldn’t do it, and eventually she insisted on moving back to the house. He refused. They argued. The arguments became worse. Finally he walked out on her. She blamed herself, and got in touch with him, told him she was sorry, and asked him to come back. But she didn’t really want him back. By this time she was very confused and she wasn’t sure what she wanted. She was really relieved when the dentist told her it was no use trying a reconciliation, he cared for her very much but he had enough sense to know when a thing was ended. He advised her to get a divorce. She got the divorce and went back to live in the house with Newton and the gypsy woman.
It wasn’t easy, living there with them. They were drunk most of the time, the gypsy woman made no attempt to keep the house clean, and the sink was always stacked with dirty dishes. There were empty bottles all over the place. Sometimes the gypsy woman would hurl the bottles at Newton’s head. At other times she’d try to crack his ribs with a broom handle. On one occasion she hit him very hard and broke two of his ribs. He sat on the floor, grinning at her, telling her that she was a fine woman and he adored her.
Loretta told herself she couldn’t stay in this madhouse. But she had to stay. She had to look after Newton. He was getting worse, drinking more and more. One time he went out and purchased a skeleton costume. In the middle of the night the gypsy woman heard a noise in the room and woke up and saw the skeleton and began to scream at the top of her lungs. The skeleton moved toward her, laughing crazily, and she passed out cold. After that night, she walked around with a blank look in her eyes. Some weeks later she caught cold, neglected it, developed pneumonia, and died. At the funeral Newton had another of his laughing spells. Then, for some months, he was all right and he got a job in an agency selling foreign automobiles. He worked very hard, and kept away from liquor. He was extremely considerate of Loretta, and extravagantly generous. For Christmas he gave her the little British car, the MG. They had a very nice Christmas dinner, just the two of them. He was gracious and quietly gallant. She was so thankful, the way he was behaving these days. She was so proud of him. But less than a week later he had another laughing spell. And the next day he quit his job. And then he began to drink again.
“When was that?” Kerrigan asked.
“About a year ago.”
“When’d he start coming to Dugan’s?”
“Just about then.”
He told himself to continue the questions. But something stopped him. It was the expression on her face. Her eyes were dry and yet it seemed she was weeping.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t look so sad.”
She tried to smile, but her lips trembled.
He said, “I know it ain’t been easy for you.”
Her head was lowered. She put her hand to her eyes.
Suddenly he felt the pain she was feeling. His brain pushed aside all thought of Newton Channing, all aspects of the grim issue he’d been trying to settle. The only thing he knew was the yearning to hold her and hold her and never let her go.
And again he was immersed in the dream that took him away from Vernon Street.
His voice was a husky whisper. “Look at me.”
She took her hand away from her eyes.
He said, “I want to take care of you. From now on.”
Her lips were parted. She held her breath.
“For keeps,” he said.
She was staring at him. “You know what you’re saying?”
He nodded slowly. But his thoughts were spinning and there was the flashing of a warning light. He didn’t know what it meant. He told himself he didn’t want to know.
“It’s gotta be for keeps,” he said. “It can’t be any other way.” And then blindly, in a frenzy of wanting her, needing her, he reached out and took hold of her wrists. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “We won’t quit. We’ll do it tonight.”
“Tonight?”
His eyes were feverish. “I know where we can get a license.”
“But—”
“Just say yes. Say it.”
She went on staring at him. Then very slowly she turned her head and gazed out past the shoreline, looking at the moonlight on the river. For a long moment the only sound was the lapping of the water along the bank.
And then there was the sound of her voice saying, “Yes.”