The Chapman Report, page 29
They both sat. “I took complete notes at the interview,” she went on hastily. “Every question, every one of my answers. It was very thorough.”
“It was, eh? You blushed?”
“Believe me, I felt like it. But I told the truth, the whole truth—”
“So help you God?”
“Oh, yes. But I had them down in a sort of shorthand I use. I started transcribing them for you, and suddenly Harold was sick last Monday night—a hundred and two fever—and I’ve had my hands full with him ever since. But he’s better today. I can get on it soon.”
“You couldn’t hire someone to dictate to?”
“Mr. Foster, I wouldn’t let anyone on earth hear or see these notes—except you. Why, it’d be like undressing in front of a stranger.”
“I suppose.” His eyes were bright again and his fat lips moist. “So I have only a week more here. Give me a date.”
“What’s today? Saturday. I’ll still be busy nursing Harold tomorrow, but I’ll start Monday and work right through. I should have them by next Wednesday or Thursday. I’d say Thursday, to be absolutely certain:”
“No sooner?”
“I’ll try, but—”
“All right; we’ll make it definite—definite Thursday night, here in my room. I’ll work out something with Alma. You come at seven and plan to have drinks and dinner and put in a long session.” He looked at her a moment. “I hope it’s good.”
“It will be.”
“I already called Irving Pinkert and told him the whole thing about the three-parter. He’s impressed, like I promised. So see that it’s juicy.”
“I hope it is, Mr. Foster. I’m not Madame Du Barry.”
He placed his pudgy hand on her knee and rubbed it. “All women are Madame Du Barry,” he said sententiously, and Ursula nodded, half believing it, and thought of New York.
But, soon after, driving westward on Wilshire Boulevard, her preoccupation with New York dimmed as the distance she put between Foster and herself grew. New York was winning every battle but the last one, and the last one was Harold. He was finally fixed fully in her mind, and when she reached Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, she turned off toward his new office, determined to surprise him by settling the decoration of his suite once and for all.
The white building, with its colonnades, was one of the few in the block that housed neither analysts nor internists. The black directory with white lettering, beside the elevator, was populated by public-relations counsels, business managers, and several enigmatic corporations. Not having visited the building since the week Harold had moved in, Ursula had forgotten the floor. She found Harold sandwiched between an importer and a talent agency, and took the self-service elevator to the second floor.
The office was the third from the elevator. On the frosted glass—impressively, she had to admit—was the black lettering: “Harold Palmer and Co., Certified Public Accountants.” The “Co.,” she knew, was merely a sop to proper status. Harold would have preferred “Ltd.” had he not felt it too ostentatious. Except for a tax student who came in to help two months of the year, Harold’s operation was one-man.
Feeling all benevolence, like those massive clubwomen who delivered baskets to the hundred most needy each Christmas day, Ursula opened the door and went into the reception room of “Harold Palmer and Co.” What met her eye stunned her. When last she had visited the office, the once she had done so, there had been a sagging maroon sofa, a faded slip-covered chair, and a nightmarish Orozco reproduction askew on the wall, all furnished by the landlord until his tenant could become settled. But now, by some magical transformation, the landlord’s pieces had disappeared, and what replaced them might have graced an interior decorator’s window on Robertson Boulevard. The room sparkled with youth and newness and lightness, like a Scandinavian starlet devoted to outdoor living. The two low-slung sofas, the chairs, and desk, were Danish modern, the wood bleached walnut and the fabric gray print. A single deep red rose, in a long-necked Swedish-glass vase, stood on the coffee table between copies of Realite and Verve. On the walls were fragile lithographs, signed in pencil, by Dufy, Matisse, and Degas. Ursula stood speechless. Whatever had happened proved but one thing—here, at least, she was expendable.
Still in small shock, she crossed to the private office door and rapped sharply.
“Yes?”
“It’s Ursula.”
“Come in!”
Ursula opened the door and went in. The first sight that met her eyes was the young lady’s behind, large, ungirdled, wanton, disgusting. The young lady was bent across Harold’s desk, lifting the lid from the carton of coffee on a tray that also contained wrapped sandwiches smelling of hot beef and gravy.
Harold appeared less gray and concave than usual. He waved his arm. “Hi!” He seemed as pleased and afraid as a schoolboy caught smoking. “This is a surprise.”
“I’ll bet,” said Ursula frostily.
The young lady, unhurried by the intrusion, straightened at last, and her buttocks were no less large. She turned slowly, smiling. Her healthy, polished-apple face, like the light-walnut modern furniture in the office, assaulted Ursula with its unused freshness. Her hair was straw yellow, and braided too cutely, and her blue eyes were startled saucers. Her mammary development, beneath the lemon sweater, was indecent, and Ursula was pleased to see that she had thick legs. She looked like a hundred Helgas, a prize Aryan cow, and one of the Hitler Yugend in white middy blouse and navy skirt doing gymnastics in a Nuremberg stadium.
“…my secretary, Marelda Zigner,” the hateful goat was saying. “This is Mrs. Palmer.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Palmer,” said Marelda Zigner, offering two vivid dimples. Her accent was faintly Teutonic, and Ursula knew that she would not let go of it for years. Marelda turned back to the goat. “Is the lunch enough, Mr. Palmer?”
“Fine, Marelda, fine. You better go out and have yours.”
“I will, please.” She smiled at Ursula. “Excuse me.”
Ursula’s eyes followed the swaying mammaries out of the office, and Ursula glared at the goat.
“Who in the hell was that?” asked Ursula.
“My new secretary,” Harold appeared surprised. “I told you about her last week.”
“Don’t tell me she also types?”
“Marelda’s worth any three I ever had. Those German girls are remarkable—meticulous, neat, efficient—”
“And size forty-two.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” She waved her hand at the furniture. “When did all this happen?”
“The furniture? Delivered yesterday. You were so busy, with the Fosters here and all, and it was making me nervous, especially since I landed the Berrey account. I didn’t want him to come up here and think I was a bum—so Marelda and I went out—”
“Marelda?”
“Yes. It was my good fortune that she’d taken a course in interior decoration at a school in Stuttgart—”
“So she fixed you up all Nordic? Well, we’ll see—”
“I thought you’d like it, Ursula. I’ve had a dozen compliments this morning.”
“It’s utterly incongruous. It doesn’t go with you. It looks like a honeymoon cottage, not a dignified business office.”
Harold’s left eye jumped nervously. “I kept waiting for you.” He indicated one of the sandwiches. “Will you have something?”
“I’m not hungry.” She scanned the furniture again. “This must have cost a fortune.”
“Not really. You know those Germans. Very frugal. And… and now that I have Berrey—well, we don’t have to draw on your savings.”
“So now you feel independent.”
Harold stared at her quietly. “Don’t you want me to?” She felt nervous and confused. “Of course, I do. I just don’t want you to act foolishly. Well, I’d better be going.”
“What made you come by? It’s the first time—”
“The second time. I just wanted to see how my husband spends his day. Like any wife. Is that wrong?”
“No. I’m pleased.”
She had reached the door. Some instinct, long dormant, came alive. She turned, and tried to smile. “I almost forgot, Harold—I’m going shopping; is there anything special you’d like for dinner?”
The novelty of the question, the importance it gave to his reply and to himself, disconcerted him. “I…I haven’t thought.”
“Never mind. I’ll dream up something good.” She pointed to his tray. “Eat before it gets cold. And chew it well. You know your stomach. I’ll see you later.”
She opened the door and went out, very erect, bosom high, so that Marelda would know the formidable nature of the democratic opposition.
Benita’s Selby’s journal. Sunday, May 31: “I’m sitting by the pool of the Villa Neapolis. I finished a five-page letter to Mom. I felt guilty about my abrupt note of yesterday, and I know what these letters mean to her. She has only a son and a daughter to hear from, not counting her sisters, and Howie hasn’t time to write, so if I don’t who will? I told her we are all expecting a short vacation when we get back, and then I will find out about a specialist and take her to Chicago for X-rays and examination. It’s very hot by the pool, but the heat is not like the Midwest but drier. You don’t perspire as much. There are half a dozen people in the pool. I have on the halter and shorts I bought in Milwaukee, and sun lotion all over. There’s a young man across the pool sitting and reading, and a couple of times I caught him looking at me. I must look a sight with this lotion. Dr. Chapman is at the umbrella table behind me with Cass and Horace. Cass is feeling better today. Dr. Chapman is still talking about Dr. Jonas. At breakfast, he saw an article and architect’s drawing about an enormous new marriage-counseling clinic being built near the ocean, which Dr. Jonas is going to manage, and Dr. Chapman was furious. I don’t blame him for the way he feels about Dr. Jonas, which is only human, because I read some of the reviews that Dr. Jonas wrote. Dr. Chapman asked me if I had seen Paul, and I told him I saw Paul go out early carrying a tennis racket and tin of balls. It occurs to me you can’t play tennis by yourself. Who is Paul playing with? The young man across the pool is looking at me again. I think I’ll take off my sun glasses and finish this later. .”
* * *
Always, before, when Mary McManus had played tennis with her father on Sunday mornings, he had seemed marvelously youthful to her. Even after a hard-fought set, in the most intense heat, his sparse hair lay neatly in place, and his strong face remained dry, and his breathing regular. His white tennis shirt and shorts were always spruce and creased and dapper.
But today, going to the net to retrieve the two balls—she had double-faulted on her first serve—and picking them up, she observed him through the mesh as he stood at the far base line, and she saw that he had changed. He’s old, she told herself with incredulity. His hair was out of place, in wet knots; his face was beet red with sweat; his chest heaved beneath his damp, wrinkled shirt; and his belly was distended in a potty, unathletic way that she had not noticed before. He’s an old man, she told herself again. But why shouldn’t he be? He’s my father, not my boy friend.
She walked slowly back across the baking asphalt court, her thick white tennis shoes making squashing and sucking sounds on the surface, toward her base line. Calculating backward, Mary tried to fix on the period when these weekly Sunday games at The Briars’ Country Club had begun. Probably in her last year of junior high school, she decided, shortly after she had started taking lessons. Her father had always taken her along to the club, those Sunday mornings, and settled her on the terrace with a Coke, and gone below to play his doubles match, two out of three. One Sunday, Harry Ewing’s partner had telephoned that he was held up, and Mary had been invited to play alongside her father. It had been a thrilling morning—she had acquitted herself stoutly and was highly praised—and soon after, her father had abandoned his weekly doubles to concentrate on singles with Mary. Except for those periods when he was out of the city on business, or one of them was ill, the weekly Sunday game had been continued all of these years.
Even after her marriage to Norman, when she had been so anxious for her father to know that she was not forsaking him, she had gone on with the Sunday match. At first, of course, Norman had been invited to join them, so that she and Norman alternated against her father. But Norman, able as he was at most sports, had neither the finesse nor the training for tennis. As a youngster, he had batted the ball about on various cracked public courts, and he still wielded the racket like a baseball bat. He was not a match for Harry Ewing, nor even for her, and though Mary encouraged him and complimented him, he eventually withdrew. Now it was his custom to sleep late Sunday mornings, while she enacted the traditional liturgy with her father. Most often, Norman was at breakfast when they returned home, and she was twice as attentive as usual in the afternoons.
“Are you all right, Mary?” Harry Ewing called out.
Mary realized that she had been standing at the base line for some seconds. staring at the two balls in her hand. “I’m fine!”
“If you’re tired, we can call it quits.”
“Well, maybe after this set, Dad. What’s the score?”
“Five-six. Love-fifteen.”
She had lost the first set, three-six, and now she decided to lose this one, too, and have it over, legitimately or not. Sometimes, in the last half year, she had felt that with extra exertion she could soundly drub him. Her game was sharp, and recently, she had been covering the court more slowly. But somehow she had never been able to bring herself to run him around and humiliate him. Especially on a day like today—when he was old.
“Okay,” she said. She tossed a ball aloft and went high on her toes and into it, whacking down hard with her racket. The ball streaked an inch above the net, and then bounced. But Harry Ewing had it on the rise, off his forehand, and slammed it cross-court. Mary twisted to her right, watching the ball nick an inch into the alley and out, and then she ran after it.
“What was that?” he called. “Out?”
She snapped the ball off the asphalt with her racket, and caught it. “Right on the line,” she said. “Love-thirty.” She double-faulted on her next service, and her father advised her to let up a little on the second ball. Then, with the set at match point, they rallied briskly, until she charged the net, and he passed her for the win.
With relief, she congratulated her father and went into the subterranean women’s locker room, welcoming the cement chill, and washed her face and neck and held her wrists under the faucet. After combing her hair and freshening her makeup, Mary locked her racket in its press and climbed the stairs to the terrace.
Harry Ewing, still red-faced and breathing heavily, was seated at a metal table, waiting. She sat dutifully beside him, observing by her watch that it was near eleven and wondering if Norman was awake yet.
“Well, you gave me quite a run for my money, young lady,” Harry Ewing said. “I’ve worked up an appetite.”
“When it’s hot like this, don’t you think doubles would be more sensible?”
“Nonsense. When they put me out to pasture, I’ll take up doubles again.” He snapped his fingers at the colored waiter clearing the next table. “Franklin—”
The colored waiter bobbed his head. “Yes, suh, be right there, Mistah Ewing.”
“I have worked up an appetite,” Harry Ewing said to his daughter. “Are you going to eat anything?”
“Mother’ll be angry about lunch. I’ll have lemonade.”
The colored waiter came with his pad, and Harry Ewing ordered lemonade for Mary and a plate of thin hot cakes with maple syrup and iced tea for himself.
As Mary watched the waiter leave, she saw Kathleen Ballard come up the stairs from the courts, followed by a tall, attractive man. They were carrying rackets, and Kathleen was wearing a short, pleated tennis skirt. Mary guessed that they had been playing on one of the rear courts, which were out of sight. Her escort said something, and Kathleen laughed.
“Kathleen—” Mary called out.
Kathleen Ballard stopped in her tracks, searched for a familiar face to go with the voice, and finally located Mary McManus. She lifted her hand in greeting, said something to her escort, and then they both approached.
“Hello, Mary.”
Harry Ewing pushed himself to his feet.
“You know my father, Kathleen,” said Mary.
“We’ve met. Hello, Mr. Ewing.” She stood aside to expose Paul Radford fully. “This is Mr. Radford. He’s visiting from the East. Mrs. Ewing—” She caught herself. “I’m sorry. Mrs. McManus, I should say, and Mr. Ewing.”
The men shook hands. Kathleen insisted that Harry Ewing be seated, but he remained standing.
“Where’s Norman?” Kathleen wanted to know.
“He’s been working like ten dray horses,” said Mary quickly. “He’s so exhausted, we felt he should have one morning.”
“Now there’s a perfect wife,” said Paul to Kathleen. Kathleen beamed at Mary. “I won’t disagree,” she said to Paul.
After a few moments, they moved on to an empty table nearby, and Mary was alone with her father.
“Who is he?” asked Harry Ewing.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Mary, “except he’s attractive.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“I don’t mean like a movie star. I mean like a frontier scout—the tall in the saddle type—except—” she glanced off— “he looks like he also reads by the bonfire.”
Presently, the lemonade appeared, and then the hot cakes and iced tea. While her father ate, Mary drank the lemonade and surreptitiously spied on Kathleen and Mr. Radford. They were sitting close to each other, he packing his pipe and speaking and she listening attentively. There was an air of intimacy suggested that gave Mary a wrench of loneliness. She and Norman had not been together like that, not really, since their brief honeymoon. She missed Norman now, and didn’t give a damn about tennis, and wished that Kathleen had seen her with Norman.
Harry Ewing had eaten as much of his hot cakes as he wanted, and now he shoved the plate aside and brought the iced tea before him, stirring it “I suppose,” he said, “Norman told you about the trial.”
