“Don’t be silly.”

  “But you’d pop Johnny’s.”

  They stared at each other in the rainy late afternoon.

  Prescott told himself irrelevantly that he had not fallen in love with her on this job. Anyone who fell in love with her would have to share her with every stray in Greater Los Angeles. But he liked her and respected her and admired her; she was a fine human being. Only she carried it too far.

  And yet he had no answer for her. “Good God,” he said, “do you know what you’re asking?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know exactly. But I know you can’t come with liver and fish heads six days a week and on the seventh come with a hangman’s rope. You can’t say, ‘I gave him every chance,’ unless you really did.”

  The brief sun had disappeared again in the mist and smog. The street was muddy and gray before them. Behind them the thin woman came to the door and opened it, shooing the children in with an unexpected harsh snarl in her voice. Prescott felt disturbed and alien, out of his proper setting and out of his depth. But he still could find no answer for her. You could not come with liver and fish heads six days a week and with a hangman’s knot on the seventh. You could not put limits on love—if love was what you chose to live by.

  “All right,” he said. “We don’t call the cops, is that it?”

  She smiled a crooked smile. “Let’s try to get along without the police as long as we can.”

  The thin woman stood in the doorway and said good-bye and watched them down the steps, and the children pressing around her flanks watched too. Prescott waved, and the woman smiled and nodded in reply. But none of the children, solemnly staring, raised a hand. After a moment he was angry with himself for having expected them to.

  Maiden in a Tower

  The highway entering Salt Lake City from the west curves around the southern end of Great Salt Lake past Black Rock and its ratty beaches, swings north away from the spouting smoke of the smelter towns, veers toward the onion-shaped domes of the Saltair Pavilion, and straightens out eastward again on the speedway. Ahead, across the white flats, the city and its mountains are a mirage, or a mural: metropolitan towers, then houses and trees and channeled streets, and then the mountain wall.

  Driving into that, Kimball Harris began to feel like the newsreel diver whom the reversed projector sucks feet first out of his splash. Perhaps fatigue from the hard day and a half across the desert explained both the miragelike look of the city and his own sense that he was being run backward toward the beginning of the reel. But the feeling grew as he bored townward along the straight road, the same road out which, as a high school boy, he had driven much too fast in a stripped-down Ford bug with screaming companions in the rumble seat. They must have driven back, too, but he remembered only the going out. To see the city head-on, like this, was strange to him.

  Middle-aged, rather tired, but alert with the odd notion that he was returning both through distance and through time, he passed the airport and the fair grounds and slowed for the first streets of the city.

  Twenty-five years had made little difference. The city had spread some, and he was surprised, after the desert, by the green luxuriance of the trees, but the streets were still a half-mile wide, and water still ran in the gutters. It was really a good town, clean, with a freshness about it that revived him. Circling the Brigham Young monument, he nodded gravely to the figure with the outstretched hand, and like a native returning, he went through the light and turned around the button in the middle of the block and came back to park before the Utah Hotel, careful to park well out from the curb so as not to block the flowing gutter. They gave you a ticket for that. It tickled him that he had remembered.

  The doorman collared his bag; a bellhop climbed in to take the car around to the garage. Still running pleasantly backward into the reel, he went into the unchanged lobby and registered, and was carried up the unchanged elevators to the kind of room he remembered, such a room as they used to take when they held fraternity parties in the hotel, back in Prohibition times. During those years he had been on a diet for ulcers, and couldn’t drink, but he had retired religiously with the boys, gargled raw Green River redeye, and spat it out again in the washbowl, only for the pleasure of lawbreaking and of carrying a distinguished breath back to the ballroom and the girls.

  He shook his head, touched for a moment with his giddy and forgotten youth.

  Later, fresh from the shower, with a towel around him, he picked up the telephone book, so dinky and provincial-seeming after the ponderous San Francisco directory that he caught himself feeling protective about it. But when he found the Merrill Funeral Parlors in the yellow pages he sat thinking, struck by the address: 363 East South Temple. On the Avenues side, just below Fourth East. He tried to visualize that once familiar street but it was all gone except for a general picture of tall stone and brick houses with high porches and lawns overtaken by plantain weeds. One, the one Holly had lived in, had a three-story stone tower.

  That tower! With all the Jazz Age Bohemians crawling in and out. Havelock Ellis, Freud, Mencken, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, Love’s Coming of Age, The Well of Loneliness, Harry Kemp, Frank Harris. My Lord.

  He was flooded with delighted recollection, they were all before him: reed-necked aesthetes, provincial congnoscenti, sad sexy yokels, lovers burning with a hard gemlike flame, a homosexual or two trying to look blasted and corroded by inward sin. Painters of bile-green landscapes, cubist photographers, poets and iconoclasts, scorners of the bourgeoisie, makers of cherished prose, dream-tellers, correspondence-school psychoanalysts, they had swarmed through Holly’s apartment and eddied around her queenly shape with noises like breaking china. He remembered her in her gold gown, a Proserpine or a Circe. For an instant she was slim and tall in his mind and he saw her laughing in the midst of the excitement she created, and how her hair was smooth black and her eyes very dark blue and how she wore massive gold hoops in her ears.

  He wrote the number down and tucked it in the pocket of the suit laid out on the bed. But when he had dressed and gone down and was walking up South Temple past Beehive House, Lion House, Eagle Gate, the old and new apartment buildings, he began to look at numbers with a feeling that approached suspense, and he searched not so much for the Merrill Funeral Parlors as for the house with the round stone tower. Finally he saw it, lifting across the roof of a mansion gone to seed, and in another thirty paces he could see the sign and the new brass numbers on the riser of the top porch step. It was the very house.

  Quickly he looked around for landmarks to restore and brace his memory. Some of the old maples and hickories he remembered along the sidewalk were gone, the terrace rolled down with an unfamiliar smooth nap of grass. The porch no longer carried its sagging swing, and porch and steps had been renewed and painted. The door was as he remembered it, with lozenges of colored glass above it, and the door-knob’s massive handful was an almost startling familiarity. But inside all was changed. Partitions had been gutted out. The stairs now mounted, or levitated, a spiral of white spokes and mahogany rails, from an expanse of plum-colored carpet. Instead of the cupping old parquetry his feet found softness, hushedness. The smells were of paint and flowers.

  He was eyeing the stairs when a young man came out of an office on the left and bent his head a little leftward and said softly and pleasantly, “Yes, sir. Can I help?”

  Harris brought himself dryly back to what he had driven eight hundred miles to do. He said, “I’m Kimball Harris. My aunt, Mrs. George Webb, died day before yesterday at the Julia Hicks Home. They telephoned me she would be here.”

  “We’ve been expecting you,” the young man said, and put out his hand. “My name is McBride.” A brief handshake, a moment when the young man regarded Harris with his head tilted. “Did you fly in?” he asked.

  “Drove.”

  “All the way from San Francisco?”

  “I slept a few hours in Elko.”

  “It wasn’t so bad, then.”

  “Oh, no,” Harris said. “Not bad at all.”

  In his mind was a faint amusement: this young man might have been left over from one of Holly’s parties. He looked better equipped to write fragile verses than deal with corpses.

  “She’s in the parlor just back here,” McBride said. “Would you like to see her? She looks very nice.”

  That would be young McBride’s function, of course. He would be the one who made them look nice. “Maybe later,” Harris said. “I expect there are some details we ought to settle.”

  “Of course,” McBride said. “If you’ll just step in here. We can look at caskets after a minute. You have a family cemetery plot, I believe? It will only take a minute for this. The details you can leave to us.” He held the door wide, standing gracefully and deferentially back, and ushered Harris through.

  A very few minutes seemed to settle the details. They rose, facing each other across the desk coolly glimmering in muted afternoon light. “Now would you like to see her?” McBride said.

  Why, he takes pride, Harris thought. He probably stands back estimating his effects like a window dresser. Mister McBride, the Mortuary Max Factor. “All right,” he said, “though it’s not as if I had any tears to shed. I haven’t seen her for twenty-five years, and she’s been senile for ten.”

  McBride guided him around the unfamiliar stairs to where the plum carpet flowed smoothly into what had evidently once been a dining-room. “She does look nice,” he said. “Very sweet and peaceful.”

  Which is more than she did alive, Harris thought, and went forward to the table with the basket of chrysanthemums at its foot. To remind himself that this was his mother’s sister, his last near relative, made him feel nothing. Not even a deliberate attempt to squeeze sentimental recollections out of the past and remember suppers at Aunt Margaret’s, Christmas visits at Aunt Margaret’s, times when Aunt Margaret had unexpectedly given him a quarter, made the wax figure any dearer or realer. His indifference was so marked that he separated it and noticed it, wondering with a tinge of shame if he was callous. He supposed that if he had been attached to the dead woman he might think her peaceful, touching, even terrible. All he could think as he looked at her was that she looked well-embalmed—but then she had probably been close to mummified before she died.

  Old Aunt Margaret, never very lovable, never dear to him in his childhood, and in his maturity only a duty and an expense, thrust her sharp nose, sharp cheekbones, withered lips, up through the rouge and lipstick and was, if she was not a total stranger, only old Aunt Margaret, mercifully dead at eighty-three. Harris did not even feel the conventional disgust with young McBride, who tampered with the dead. Considering what he had had to work with, McBride had done reasonably well.

  Back in the hall again, he stood looking up the spiral stairs, apparently as unsupported as the Beanstalk, and remembered a time when Holly and three room-mates—which three didn’t matter, they changed so fast—came down the shabby old steps arguing about the proportions of the perfect female figure, and he met them on the second landing, and like a chorus line they raised their skirts and thrust out their right legs before him, clamoring to know which was the most shapely. An undergraduate Paris and four demanding goddesses. He had picked Holly; why would he not?

  McBride was in the office doorway. “We’ve just redone the whole place,” he said. “It was the home of a Park City silver king originally, but it was all run-down.”

  Harris was still looking up the stairs. McBride’s words were no more important than the decorative changes, but upstairs there was something that was important, that pulled at him like an upward draft.

  “I used to know this house twenty-five years ago,” he said, “Some people I knew had an apartment on the third floor.”

  “Really? The front one or the back?”

  “Front. The one with the round tower window.”

  “Oh, yes,” said McBride. “We haven’t done much to that yet—just painted it.”

  “I wonder,” Harris said, and made a little shrugging deprecatory motion and felt irritably ashamed, like a middle-aged man recalling last night’s revels and his own unseemly capers and his pawing of the host’s wife. It was fatuous to want to go up there, yet he did.

  “Go on up if you want,” McBride said. “The only thing, there’s a woman laid out there.”

  “Well, then …”

  “That wouldn’t matter, if you don’t mind. She’s … presentable.”

  For a moment Harris hung on the word, and on the thought that McBride’s professional vanity was one of the odder kinds, and on a little fit of irritability that a corpse should intrude upon a sentimental but perfectly legitimate impulse. Then he put his hand on the mahogany rail. “Maybe I will.”

  The second-floor hall, at whose doors he had knocked or entered, was as much changed as the ground floor, but up the second flight of stairs he mounted into a growing familiarity. And he climbed against the pressure of a crowd of ghosts. The carpet ended at the stairhead; he put his feet down softly and held back his breath with the wild notion that he heard voices from the door of Holly’s old apartment. Up these stairs, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred times, through how long? a year? two years? he had come with books or bottles or manuscripts in his hands and (it seemed to him now) an incomparable capacity for enthusiasm in his heart. From the high burlap-hung windows of the apartment inside they had let their liquid ridicule fall on the streets of the bourgeois city. He half expected, as he moved into the doorway, to see their faces look up inquiringly from chair and couch and floor.

  But in the room there was only the dead woman, and she was not looking at him.

  She lay on a wheeled table, with beside her one stiff chair and a tabouret bearing a bowl of flowers, all of it composed as if for a macabre still life. Looking toward the window across the woman’s body, he saw how the gray light of afternoon blurred in her carefully waved hair.

  For a minute or two, perhaps, he stood in the doorway, stopped partly by the body and partly by the feeling of an obscure threat. He must summon and gather and re-create his recollections of this room; he was walking in a strange neighborhood and needed his own gang around him.

  In Holly’s time the tower bay had held an old upright piano, its backside exposed to the room like the hanging seat of a child’s sleepers. Afternoons, evenings, Sunday and holiday mornings, there had been loud four-hand renderings of “Twelfth Street Rag,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Mood Indigo.” On at least one Christmas morning they had even sung carols around it, syncopating them wickedly. That was the morning when he brought Holly the facsimile copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—a mutinous book full of mottoes for their personalities and their times.

  But what he remembered now, hanging in the doorway, was how in some lull in the bedlam that always went on there they had found themselves smiling foolishly at each other by the piano and she had put up her hands to his face and kissed him sweet and soft, a kiss like a happy child’s. He realized now that he had recalled that kiss before, waking or sleeping, and that the memory of it had acquired a kind of caption, a fragment of the world’s wisdom contributed to his adolescent store by a returned Mormon missionary: “Das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan,” that remembered moment said.

  How they had flocked and gathered there, debated, kissed, lied, shocked and astonished and delighted each other, there in the tower with Holly at their center, there by the vanished piano: poets and athletes, Renaissance heroes, fearless Stoics and impassioned Epicureans and abandoned Hedonists, girls with the bloom on their loveliness, goddesses with Perfect Proportions, artists and iconoclasts, as delighted with their own wickedness as if it had meant something.

  He felt the stairs in his legs, the years in his mind, as he went in softly past the woman who lay so quietly on her back, and when he had passed her he turned and searched her face, almost as if he might surprise in it some expression meaningful to this wry and confusing return.

  She was a plain woman, perhaps fifty. McBride had not yet made her look nice with rouge and lipstick. She lay in a simple black dress, but she had a Navajo squash-blossom necklace around her throat. It struck him as a remarkable piece of realism—perhaps something she had especially liked and had stubbornly worn even past the age when costume jewelry became her. It gave her a touching, naïvely rakish air.

  Yet she shed a chill around her, and her silence spread to fill the room. Hardly a sound came through the stone walls. In the old days there had always been the piano banging, the phonograph going, two or six or sixteen voices making cosmic conversation. And he never remembered daylight in the apartment. Holly had affected a romantic gloom; the windows were always shrouded by the artistically frayed burlap, and the light was from lamps, most of them low on the floor and some of them at least with red globes in them. And always the smell of sandalwood.

  Like a Chinese whorehouse. He shook his head, pitying and entranced, and sat down on the window seat overlooking the reach of South Temple. Directly across was a Five Minute Car Wash with a big apron of concrete and a spick dazzle of white paint and red tiles. In the times he remembered, that lot had held a Peewee Golf Course where men in shirt sleeves, women in summer dresses, young couples loud with laughter, putted little white balls along precise green alleys and across precise circles of green artificial grass and over gentle and predictable bridges and causeways into numbered holes.

  “Look at them,” Holly said to him once as they sat in the tower looking down at the after-dinner golfers moving under the bright flood-lights. “Toujours gai, my God. Some day I’m going to build a miniature golf course with fairways six inches wide and rough all over the place. I’ll fill the water holes with full-sized crocodiles and sow the sandtraps with sidewinders. How would it be to hide a black widow spider in every hole so that holing out and picking up your ball would earn you some excitement? What if you sawed the supports of all the little bridges nearly in two?”

  Live it dangerously. It was strange to recall how essential that had seemed. Go boom, take chances. He touched the casement windows, thinking that this was the pose, sitting right here and looking out, that Holly had assumed when Tom Stead painted her in her gold velvet gown.

 

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