Billy Bathgate

SIXTEEN

A moment later a beautiful dark green four-door convertible came into the square, and it took me a moment to realize Drew was driving it, she didn’t quite stop but drifted past me in low gear, I heaved my valise into the back, stepped on the running board, and as she put the car into second and picked up speed I vaulted over the door into the seat beside her and we were away.
I didn’t look back. We went down the main street past the hotel, to which I said my secret goodbyes, and headed for the river. I had no idea where she had gotten this baby. She could do whatever she wanted to do. The seats were light brown leather. The tan canvas top was folded back on chrome stanchions so that most of it was recessed in a kind of well. The dashboard was made of burled wood. I sat with my arms on the door and the back of the seat and enjoyed the luxury of the sun shining as she turned to me and smiled.
I will say here how Drew Preston drove, it was so girlish, when she shifted she sort of leaned forward with her white hand on the gearshift knob, her slender leg draped in her dress rode down the clutch and she put her shoulders down and bit her lip in the concentration of her effort and shoved her arm straight ahead from the elbow. She wore a silk kerchief tied under her chin, she was happy to have me in her new car, we rattled across the wood bridge and came to the intersection where the road went east and west and she turned east and Onondaga was a church spire and some rooftops in a nest of trees, and then we went around a hill and it was gone.
We drove that morning down among the mountains and between lakes that lapped both sides of the road, we passed under canopies of pine and through little white villages where the general store was also the post office, she drove hard, with both hands on the wheel, and it looked like such pleasure that I wanted very badly to take a turn driving, to feel this great eight-cylinder machine moving under my hands. But one thing I hadn’t yet had in my gang training was auto-driving instruction and I preferred to act to myself as if I knew how to drive and didn’t care to than actually have her broach the subject, I wanted equality, the last and most absurd wish of this affection, I think now what an outrageous boy I was, with what insatiable ambition, but I had to have known it on this morning on our drive through the beautiful state of our wilderness, I had to have realized how far I had come from the streets of the East Bronx where the natural world was visible only in globules of horse manure pressed flat by passing tires, with dried seeds pecked at by the flittering flocks of street sparrows, I had to have known what it was to breathe the air of these sun-warmed mountains alive and well and well-fed with a thousand dollars in my pocket and the heinous murders of the modern world the inuring events of my brain. I was a tougher kid now, I had a real gun stuck in my belt, and I knew in my mind I must not be grateful but take what I was given as if it was my due, I felt there would be a price for all this and since the price would be in a currency too dear for life, I wanted to make it worth my while, I found myself angry at her, I kept looking at her imagining what I would do to her, I admit I entertained some mean and sadistic pictures born of my bitter boy’s resignation.
Yet of course when we stopped it was because she stopped, she glanced at me and gave a bel canto sigh of capitulation and suddenly pulled off the road, bouncing along between trees and over tree roots, and jerked the car to a stop barely out of sight of any passing cars in a grove of tall high trees through which the sun flashed dappling us in moments of heat, moments of shade, moments of brilliant light, moments of dark green darkness, as we sat there looking at each other in our isolation.
The thing about Drew was she was not genitally direct, she wanted to kiss my ribs and my white boyish chest, she held my legs and ran her hands up and down the backs of my thighs, she caressed my ass and sucked my earlobes and my mouth, and she did all these things as if they were all that she wanted, she made small editorial sounds of approval or delectation, as a commentator to the action, little single high notes, whispers without words like remarks to herself, it was as if she was consuming me as an act of eating and drinking, and it wasn’t designed to arouse me, what boy in that situation needed arousal? from the moment she stopped the car I was tumescent, and I waited for some acknowledgment from her that this was in fact part of me too but it didn’t come and it didn’t come and I flared through my need into an exquisite pain, I thought I would go mad, I became agitated and discovered only then her availability, that in all of this she was only waiting for me to find her absolute willingness to be still and listen to me for a change. This was so girlish of her, so surprisingly restrained and submissive, I was not artful but simply myself and this brought forth from her a conspiratorial laughter, it gave her the pleasure of generosity to have me in her, it was not an excitement but more like a happiness of having this boy in her, she wrapped her legs around my back and I rocked us up and down in the back seat of the car with my feet sticking out of the open door, and when I came she held her arms around me tight enough to stop my breath and she sobbed and kissed my face as if something terrible had happened to me, as if I had been wounded and she was, in an act of desperate compassion, trying to make it as if it had not happened.
Then I was following her stark naked through the brush into this noplace of such great green presence she had chosen arbitrarily or by happenstance, with her gift for centering the world around herself, so that it was all very beautifully central in my mind, the place to be, following her flashing white form around trees, under tangles, avoiding the whip of branches, with a brilliant chatter of communities of unseen birds telling me how late I was to have found it. And then we were going generally downward, and the ground became swampy and the air close and I found myself slapping at stings in my skin, I had wanted to catch her, tackle her and f*ck her again, and she was doing this to me, taking me into furies of mosquitoes. But I came upon her squatting and ladling handfuls of mud over herself and we applied this cold mud to each other and then we walked like children into the sinking darkness of forest, hand in hand like fairy-tale children in deep and terrible trouble, as indeed we were, and then we found ourselves at this still pond as black as I had ever seen water to be and of course she waded in and bid me to follow and my God it was fetid, it was warm and scummy, my feet were in wet mats of pond weed, I treaded water to keep my feet from sinking and couldn’t crawl back out fast enough, but she swam on her back a few yards and then came crawling out on all fours, and she was covered with this invisible slime, her body was slimed as mine was and we lay in this mud and I punched into her and held her blond head back in the mud and pumped slime up her and we lay there rutting in this foul fen and I came and held her down and wouldn’t let her move, but lay in her with her breath loud in my ear, and when I lifted my head and looked into her alarmed green eyes in their panic of loss, I grew hard again right in her and she began to move, and this time we had the time, by the third time it takes its time, and I found the primeval voice in her, like a death rattle, a shrill sexless bark, over and over again as I jammed into her, and it became tremulous a terrible crying despair, and then she screamed so shriekingly I thought something was wrong and reared to look at her, her lips were pulled back over her teeth and her green eyes dimmed as I looked in them, they had lost sight, gone flat, as if her mind had collapsed, as if time had turned in her and she had passed back into infancy and reverted through birth into nothingness, and for an instant they were no longer eyes, for an instant they were about to be eyes, the eyes of soullessness.
Yet a few moments later she was smiling and kissing me and hugging me as if I had done something dear, brought her a flower or something.
When we staggered upright globs of mud fell from us, she laughed and turned to show me the back of her, absent in darkness, as if she had been cleaved in half, with the front of her shiny and swollen into sculpture. Even her golden head seemed halved. There was nothing for it but to go back into the pond, and then she swam further out and insisted I come after her, and the water grew cooler, it was deeper and it went on behind a bend, I swam with her stroke for stroke, giving her my best YMCA crawl, and we came out on the bank on the far side, washed clean of mud and somewhat less slick.
By the time we got back to the car we were dry, but putting clothes on was uncomfortable, as if we were covering extreme sunburns, we smelled of pond scum, we smelled like frogs, we drove off trying not to lean back in the seats and several miles down the road we came to this motor court and rented a cabin and we stood together in the shower and washed each other with a big cake of white soap and stood holding each other under the water, and then we lay on the top of the bed and she curled herself along my side with my arm around her, and perhaps created with that nuzzling gesture the moment of our truest intimacy, when by some shuddering retrenchment of her being she matched me in age and yearning for sophistication, like a boy’s girlfriend, only two bodies between us and a long life ahead of terrible surprises. So I felt a kind of fearful pride. I knew I could never have the woman Mr. Schultz had had, just as he hadn’t known the woman Bo Weinberg had known, because she covered her tracks, she trailed no history, suiting herself to the moment, getting her gangsters or her boys in transformative stunts of the spirit, she would never write her memoirs, this one, not even if she ever lived to an old age, she would never tell her life because she needed no one’s admiration or sympathy or wonder, and because all judgments, including love, came of a language of complacency she had never wasted her time to master. So it all worked out, how protective I felt there in that cabin, I let her doze on my arm and studied a fly drifting into its caroming angles under the roof and understood that Drew Preston granted absolution, it was what you got instead of a future with her. Clearly she would not be interested in the enterprise of keeping us alive, so I would have to do that for both of us.
The rest of that day we drove down through the Adirondacks until the hills softened, the land took on a groomed look, and in the early evening we rolled into Saratoga Springs and came down a street that had the insolence to call itself Broadway. Yet as I looked there was something appropriate too, the place looked like old New York, or as I imagined it must have looked in the old days, there were very civilized shops with New York names and striped awnings lowered against the evening sun, the people strolling in the street didn’t look like Onondagans at all, there was not one farmer among them, there were lots of fine cars in the traffic, some of them with uniformed chauffeurs, and people clearly of the monied classes sat on the long porches of the hotels reading newspapers. I thought it odd at the height of the evening that nobody had anything better to do than read newspapers, until we checked into our own hotel, the Grand Union, the finest of them all with the longest broadest porch, a boy took our bags, another drove off to park the car, and I saw that the newspaper of choice was the Racing Form, at the front desk there was a stack of them with the next day’s date at the top and the next day’s card for the handicappers to go to work on. And there was no news in it except horse news, in the month of August in Saratoga nobody was interested in anything but horses, and so even the newspapers conformed, giving only horse headlines and horse weather and horse horoscopes, as if the world was populated only by horses except for the scattered few numbers of eccentric humans who gathered to read about their important doings.
As I scanned the lobby I did detect one or two persons whose interest in horses might not be sincere, a couple of badly dressed men sitting in adjoining armchairs and only glancing at their papers when I noticed them. The clerk recognized Miss Drew and was pleased she had finally arrived, they were getting worried about her, he said, smiling, and I realized she had rooms for the whole month of racing whether she used them or not, it was a place she would come to at this time of year whether Mr. Schultz said to or not. We got upstairs into this grand suite of rooms that immediately made me realize what small and modest resources the Onondaga Hotel had offered, a great basket of fruit lay on a coffee table with a card from the hotel management, and there was a side bar with a tray of thin-stemmed glasses and decanters of white and red wine and a bucket with ice and a cut-glass square-cornered bottle with a little chain hanging over it with a nameplate that said BOURBON, and another that said SCOTCH, and a big seltzer bottle of blue glass, and light streamed through these long paned windows that came practically down to the floor, and big slow-turning fans hanging from the ceiling kept the air cool and the beds were immense and the carpets thick and soft. Oddly enough all of this made me think not too highly of Mr. Schultz because none of it depended on him.
Drew took delight in my reactions to this luxury especially as I tested the bedsprings with a backward lateral body fling, and she fell on top of me and we rolled one way and then the other in a playful wrestle in the guise of which we really tested each other’s strength. She was no slouch, though I pinned her by the arms soon enough so that she had to say, “Oh no, not now please. I’ve planned this evening, I want to take you to see something marvelous.”
So we dressed for the evening in our summer whites, I in my slightly wrinkled linen double-breasted suit she had ordered for me from her store in Boston, and she in a smart blue linen blazer and white pleated skirt. I loved it that we dressed in our adjoining rooms with the doors opened between us, I loved the assumption of advanced relationship in our preparations to be seen together. We came down through the hotel lobby of evening idlers including my two shabby friends, and when we stepped outside the evening was warm with the heat rising from the pavement into the cool sky, so she suggested we walk.
We crossed the avenue and I noticed that the policeman directing traffic wore a white short-sleeved shirt. I couldn’t take a police department seriously that dressed like that. I didn’t know what it was, this marvelous place she wanted me to see, but I thought I had better stop drowsing in dreamland. It would have been lovely to be with her still in the deep woods, but we were going past stately lawns and in the shadows of big black shade trees with enormous homes behind them, this was a well-developed and serious resort, it was tempting not to look beyond her, so dazzled by her brilliant offering as to forget the circumstances, and not one person we passed on the street failed to notice her and to react to her, which made me foolishly proud, but we were holding hands and the warmth of her hand alarmed me, it suggested her pumping blood, it created in my mind visions of terrible retribution.
“I don’t mean to be coarse,” I said, “but I think we’d better remember what our situation is. I’m going to let go of your hand now.”
“But I like to.”
“We will again. Please let go. I’m trying to tell you something. My professional opinion is we are being shadowed.”
“Whatever for? Are you sure? That’s so dramatic,” she said, looking behind us. “Where? I don’t see anyone.”
“Will you please not turn around? You won’t see anything, just take my word for it. Where is this place we’re going? The cops in this town, when the money comes up from New York, they can’t be relied on.”
“For what?”
“For the protection of law-abiding citizens, which you and I are pretending to be.”
“What do we have to be protected from?”
“From the likes of us. From mob.”
“Am I mob?” she said.
“Only in a manner of speaking. At the most you are a moll.”
“I am your moll,” she said, considering it.
“You are Mr. Schultz’s moll,” I said.
We strode through the quiet evening. “Mr. Schultz is a very ordinary man,” she said.
“Did you know he owns the Brook Club? He’s well connected in this town. You get the feeling he doesn’t trust you out of his sight?”
“But that’s why you’re here. You’re my shadow.”
“You asked for me,” I said. “That means they would watch both of us for good measure. He’s married. Did you know that?”
After a moment she said: “Yes, I think I did.”
“Well where does that leave you? Do you have any idea? I want to remind you he made a mortal mistake when he took Bo out of the restaurant with you there.”
“Wait,” she said. She touched my arm and we stood facing each other in the dark beside a tall hedge.
“You think he’s ordinary? Everyone who’s dead now thought he was ordinary. The night you came out of your room. Do you remember me putting you back to bed?”
“Yes?”
“They were getting rid of a body. That fat guy with the cane. He stole some money. Not exactly your salt of the earth. I mean I’m not suggesting it’s a loss to the world. But it happened.”
“You poor boy. So that’s what that was all about.”
“This nose: Mr. Schultz had Lulu slug me to explain the spots on the rug.”
“You were protecting me.” I felt her cool soft lips on my cheek. “Billy Bathgate. I love that name you chose for yourself. Do you know how much I love Billy Bathgate?”
“Mrs. Preston, I’m so nuts about you I can’t see straight. But I’m not even talking about that, I’m not even beginning to think about that. It was not a good idea to come here. I think maybe we ought to get out of this town. The man kills regularly.”
“We should talk about it,” she said and she took my hand and we came around a corner past some tall shrubbery to a brilliantly lit pavilion with people streaming into it and cars pulling up as if to a concert.
We stood under a tent lit by bare bulbs and watched these horses being walked around a dirt ring, each horse had a small velvet blanket across his back with a number on it, and people standing with printed programs in their hands were able to read about its lines and specifications. They were young horses, they had never been raced, and they were up for sale. Drew explained things in a soft voice, as if we were in church. I was extremely agitated and almost hated her for bringing us here. She couldn’t concentrate on what was important. Her mind didn’t work properly. I noticed of the horses their coats were glossy, their tails combed, and some of them lifted their heads up against the leash or halter or whatever it was their handlers held them by, and others walked with their heads looking at the ground, but they were all incredibly thin-legged and rhythmically beautiful. They got led around by the nose, and were bred for business and trained and raced, their lives weren’t their own but they had a natural grace that was like wisdom and I found myself respecting them. They produced a nice strawy tang in the air, the smell of them amplified their great animal being. Drew gazed at them with a kind of stunned attention, she didn’t say anything but merely pointed when a particular horse attracted her as even more powerfully breathtaking than the others. For some weird reason this made me jealous.
I noticed of the people examining the horses that they were very nattily got up in horse-theme sporting wear, the men with silk cravats, more than one with a long cigarette holder like President Roosevelt’s, and they all had a certain nose-in-the-air carriage that made me square my shoulders. No one was as beautiful as Drew but they were her long-necked people, all very straight and thin, with an assurance bred into them, and I thought it would be nice to have a program showing their lines and specifications. At any rate I began to relax somewhat. I calmed down. This was an impregnable kingdom of the privileged. If anyone from the rackets was here he would be highly visible. I felt from the one or two discreet glances given me that though I wore clothes of Drew’s rich good taste and had taken the trouble to put my studious fake eyeglasses on, I just about pushed them to the limits of their sniffing tolerance. The thought passed my mind that Drew knew what she was doing in her own way of making the world, just as Mr. Schultz did, without sufficient thought.
After a turn or two around the ring, the horses were led out through a passageway into what appeared to be an amphitheater, as far as I could see from my angle of vision, with an audience in tiered seats and an announcer. Drew motioned to me and we went outside and around to the lighted front entrance, where the chauffeurs stood beside their cars, and came into the amphitheater and saw the same horses from a height under the stagey lights of the auction ring while the announcer or auctioneer proclaimed their virtues. And then they were held by the bridle in front of his podium while he directed the bidding, which came not as far as I could see from any of the people in their tiered seats but from employees like himself stationed here and there in the crowd who communicated the bids offered invisibly and in silence by the patrons on whose behalf they acted. It was all very mysterious and the sums were astonishing, going up in leaps and bounds to thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars. These numbers frightened even the horses, many of whom saw fit to drop manure behind them as they were walked into the ring. When this happened a Negro man in a tuxedo appeared with a rake and shovel and quickly removed the offense from sight.
That was the whole show. I saw as much as I wanted to see in about three minutes but Drew couldn’t get enough of it. Up behind the stands where we were, there was a constant traffic of people wandering around and looking each other over in a kind of unconscious imitation of the horses circling the ring below. Drew met a couple she knew. Then a man came over and soon she was in a small group of chatting friends and she made no reference to me whatsoever. This put me in the frame of mind of the shadow I was supposed to be. I was full of scorn, the women greeting one another appeared to kiss cheeks but in fact laid them together for a moment side by side and kissed the air beside each other’s ear. People were glad to see Drew. I had a sense of an adenoidal group resonance. There was some giggling I imagined was directed at me, an entirely unreasonable assumption, which I also realized, but it made me turn away and lean on a railing and look down at the horses. I didn’t know what I was doing here. I felt all alone. Mr. Schultz had held Drew for some weeks, clearly I was a strong enough novelty only for a couple of days or so. I had made a mistake to reveal my fears. Fears did not hold her interest. I had told her about Julie Martin’s death and it was as if I had said I had stubbed my toe.
Then she appeared at my side and gave me a sideways hug and we looked together down at a new horse being led into the ring and in thirty seconds I was back in abject love. All my resentment dissolved and I reproached myself for questioning her constancy. She said we ought to have some supper and suggested we go to the Brook Club.
“You think that’s smart?” I said.
“We will be what we’re supposed to be,” she said. “The moll and her shadow. I’m starving, aren’t you?”
So we took a cab to the Brook Club and it was really an elegant place, with an awning all the way to the curb and beveled-glass doors and leather-padded walls, a horsey kind of place in dark green with little shaded lamps on the tables and prints of famous racehorses on the walls. It was somewhat larger than the Embassy. The host looked at Drew and wasted no time in showing us to a table right up front near a small dance floor. This was the man I was supposed to contact if I had to but he looked right through me and Drew did all the ordering. We had shrimp cocktails and aged sirloin steaks and hash browns, and chopped salad with anchovies, I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. She ordered a bottle of red French wine, which I shared with her, though she had most of it. It was so dark in the club that even if friends of hers from her horsey set were there they couldn’t have seen far enough in that low and heavily shadowed light to recognize her. I began to feel good again. There she was across the table from me, we were cocooned in our own light, and I had to remind myself I had had intercourse with her, that I had had carnal knowledge of her, that I had made her come, because I wanted to do this all over again, but with the same yearning as if it had never happened, with the same questions about her, and wonderings and imaginings of her physical quality, as if I was looking at an actress in a movie. This was the moment I began to understand that you can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.
And then musicians came out on the bandstand and they were my friends from the Embassy Club, the same group, with the same skinny lackadaisical girl singer who pulled at the top of her strapless evening dress. She sat on a chair to the side and nodded in time to the first number, an instrumental, and I caught her eye and she smiled and gave me a little wave, bobbing her head in time to the music all the while, and I felt very proud to be recognized by her. Somehow she communicated my presence to the other members of the band, the saxophonist turned to me and dipped his horn and the drummer laughed to see the company I was keeping and he twirled his sticks at me and I felt right at home. “They’re old friends,” I said to Drew, over the music, I was happy to be able to reveal the dimension in me of Man About Town, I felt in my pocket to make sure I hadn’t lost Mr. Berman’s thousand dollars, I thought it would be appropriate to buy the band drinks when they finished the set.
Drew toward the end of the dinner was a little bit looped, she sat with her elbow on the table and her chin propped in her hand and gazed at me with an aimless smiling affection. I was very comfortable now, the darkness of a nightclub is sustaining, it is a kind of shelter of controlled darkness as opposed to the open darkness of the real night with the weight of the whole sky of unfathomable possibilities, the music seemed so clear and figurative, they were playing standards, one after another, and every lyric seemed meaningful and appropriate and every melodic line of the solos had the clarity of a sweet truth. And as it happened one of the songs was “Me and My Shadow,” which made us laugh—Me and my shad-ow, strolling down the aven-ue was its sly lyric, and it came to me that a kind of message was being sent of the conspiracy we all made together, I half expected Abbadabba Berman to scuttledance into the room, it was the old thing, as usual I never felt safe from Mr. Schultz when I was separated from him, Drew’s idea to come here was a good one, if we were being watched we were doing the right thing having dinner in his club, getting the money back to him as loyalists would, this was his realm and because it made me feel closer to him to be here I wasn’t afraid anymore.
I decided to worry no longer and make no decisions but trust our fate to Drew’s impulses, to put myself at her disposal like a real companion in Mr. Schultz’s interest, she knew more than I did, she had to, and what I perceived as her impracticality had the power of her nature. She really did know her way around, and for all her recklessness she was still alive. She was, in fact, quite safe in Saratoga. I was, in fact, looking after her for Mr. Schultz. I didn’t know whose idea it had been that she come here, but I felt now that she could as easily have initiated this trip by claiming not to want to leave Onondaga as Mr. Berman could have by insisting that she should.
But then people began dancing on the little dance floor in front of our table and when she wanted to dance with me I strongly suggested that it was time to go home. I paid the bill but got her advice on the tips, and on the way out I left money with the bartender for the band’s drinks. We took a cab back to the Grand Union Hotel and went prominently to the separate doors of our adjoining rooms and, once inside, met giggling at the open door between them.
But we slept in our own beds and when I woke in the morning I found a note on my pillow: She had gone to have breakfast with some friends. She said I should buy a clubhouse admission and meet her for lunch at the track. She gave me her box number. I loved her handwriting, she wrote a very even line with round letters that were almost like printing and she dotted her i’s with little circles.
I showered and dressed and ran downstairs. The two men were not there. I found real morning papers in the lobby newsstand and took them with me to the front porch and sat and read them all in a big wicker chair. The jury had been chosen. The defense had used none of its peremptory challenges. The actual trial would begin today, and the prosecutor was quoted as saying he thought it would take a week at the most. The Daily News had a picture of Mr. Schultz and Dixie Davis conferring with their heads together in a corridor outside the courtroom. The Mirror showed Mr. Schultz coming down the courthouse steps with a big fake smile on his face.
I left the hotel and went along Broadway till I found a drugstore with a phone booth. I got a handful of change and asked the operator for the number Mr. Berman had given me. To this day I don’t know how he was able to secure a number for a phone the phone company didn’t know anything about, but he answered on the first ring. I told him we had gotten into town as scheduled, gone to the yearling sales, and were going to have a day at the races. I told him Mrs. Preston had met some of her friends here, silly people with whom she had nothing but silly conversation. I said we had had dinner at the Brook Club but that I hadn’t felt the need to identify myself to the man there because everything was going fine. I told him the truth about these things, knowing that he would know it already.
“Good for you, kid,” he said. “You want to parlay some of your expense money?”
“Sure,” I said.
“There is a horse who will be the number-three position in the seventh race. That will be a good bet with handsome odds.”
“What’s his name?”
“How do I know, look at your program, just remember the number three, you can remember a three can’t you?” He sounded testy. “Whatever you earn you can keep. You take it with you to New York.”
“New York?”
“Yeah, get yourself on a train. We’ll need you to do some things. Go home and wait there.”
“What about Mrs. Preston?” I said.
At that moment the operator cut in and asked for another fifteen cents. Mr. Berman had me give him the phone number I was calling from and told me to hang up. I did and almost immediately the phone rang.
I could hear a match striking and then the exhaling of a lungful of smoke. “That’s twice now you mentioned people by name.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But what do I do about her?”
“Where is the tomato at this moment?” he said.
“She’s at breakfast.”
“A couple of friends of yours are on the way. You’ll probably see them at the track. Maybe one of them will even give you a lift to the train station you ask him nicely.”
This is what I thought as I strode the streets of Saratoga, around the block and then around again, as if I was going somewhere, as if I had a purposeful destination: They had given me all that money, clearly more than I could use up in a day or even two, it was a week’s big-time spending, hotel bills, restaurants, and paying for the play bets Drew Preston might want to make. Something was different. Either they really did need me in New York, a kind of advance man of the return to town, or they wanted me where I would not be in the way, but something had changed. Perhaps with Drew out of sight, Mr. Schultz had been persuaded of the danger she represented, perhaps his alienation was merely a reflection of hers, Mr. Berman seemed to think Mr. Schultz was perilously in love, but as I thought about it, after the first week or so when they were together in my company, Mr. Schultz ignored Drew more often than not, she became more like his display, an embellishment that added to his presence rather than someone he doted upon or squeezed the hand of, or seemed to deeply care about in the fond and foolish way people in love comport themselves. Whatever decision had been made, it seemed to me only expedient to assume it was of the nature of nightmare. I am proud of this boy I was, thinking through his cold dread, and you know the quickest thinking is the thinking of the body, and the body thinks surely, errorlessly, because it is not soaked in character as the brain is, and my best guess was of the worst that could happen, because I didn’t remember coming in from the street or going through the lobby, but I found myself becoming aware that I was in my room and I was holding my loaded Automatic in my hand, I was holding my gun. So that was what I thought. The worst was he had turned against her, he needed more death, he was using up his deaths so quickly now he needed them faster and faster. What would she say, what would she do to him, if he wasn’t able to protect himself, pinned down by the law, with the gang flying apart like a bomb had hit, and he abandoned and alone like one of those bombed screaming children of China, with the rubble falling down around him?
It was peculiar that Mr. Schultz knew everything about betrayal but the way it worked, in the freedom of the joyfully voracious spirit of all of us, or else why would his Abbadabba take the trouble to give me a horse? Mr. Schultz lacked imagination, he had a conventional mind, Drew was right, he was ordinary. Nevertheless I now faced enormous executive responsibilities, I had to bring things to pass, I had to engage people to do things I thought they ought to do and from a position of no authority whatsoever. As I thought about it, men in movies who got things done had assistants and secretaries. On a card right in front of me was the Grand Union Hotel’s list of services, including a masseur, a barber, a florist, a Western Union office, and so on. I had an entire hotel at my disposal. I steeled myself and picked up the phone and in my lowest, softest voice, affecting the kind of nasality of speech of Drew Preston’s friends, I informed the hotel operator that I wanted to reach Mr. Harvey Preston at the Savoy-Plaza in New York, and if he was not in residence to find out from the operator there his forwarding number, which might, perhaps, be Newport. When I hung up my hand was shaking, I, the juggler extraordinaire. I assumed it would take some time to locate Harvey, undoubtedly in bed somewhere with the company of his taste, so I called Room Service and they very respectfully took my order, which was honeydew melon and corn flakes and cream, scrambled eggs and bacon and sausages and toast and jelly and danish pastry and milk and coffee, I just went right down the menu. I sat in a wing chair by the open windows and tucked my Automatic behind the cushion and waited for my breakfast. It seemed to me very important to remain quite still, as one does in a very hot bath, so as to be able to endure it. Mickey would be driving and probably it was Irving with him because whatever they wanted to do would require precision in Saratoga, and perhaps patience, and something deft and sad in its effect rather than outrageous. I liked them both. They were quiet men and bore no ill will toward anyone. They didn’t like to complain. They might inwardly demur but they would do their job.
I thought of what I would say to the elegant Harvey. I hoped he would be near a phone. It could even be white. He would hear me out having had the most perfunctory concern for Drew’s safety over the summer because of the steady flow of charge account bills or canceled bank checks that had undoubtedly come to him in the mail. I would represent myself as transmitting his wife’s wishes. I would be very businesslike. In my mind at the moment I had no personal interest at all in Mrs. Preston, certainly nothing that would tinge my voice with love or guilt. Not that I could ever feel guilty toward Harvey. But apart from that, I had lost in this situation any capacity at all for the eroticized affection, it wanes pathetically in terror, I not only could not remember making love with Drew, I could not even imagine it. She didn’t interest me. There was a knock on the door and my breakfast was wheeled in and the very cart it came on was gatelegged out under its white linen cloth into a dining table. All the food was served in or under heavy silver. The melon was set in a silver bowl of ice. I had learned last night from Drew not to overtip and got the bellboy out of the room with aplomb. I sat feeling my gun in the small of my back and stared at this enormous breakfast as if I carried Bathgate Avenue where I went, with all the sweet fruits of the earth spilled on my plate. I missed my mother. I wanted to be wearing my black-and-white Shadows jacket. I wanted to steal from the pushcarts and hang around the beer drops and catch a glimpse of the great Dutch Schultz.
At noon, after I packed my bag and left it downstairs with the bell captain, I asked directions to the racecourse and made my way there on foot. It was about a mile from the hotel down a broad boulevard of dark three-story, deep-porched houses, one after another. In the front yards were signs that said park here and the residents stood in the street and tried to wave the passing cars into their driveways. Everyone in Saratoga was trying to make a little money, even the owners of these grand gabled houses. Most of the traffic was heading for the track’s own parking lot, at every intersection cops in their short-sleeved shirts were waving it on. Nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry, the black cars moved at a stately pace and nobody blew their horns or tried to improve their position, it was the most mannerly traffic I had ever seen. I looked for the Packard even though I knew I wouldn’t find it. If they set out in the early morning, even with Mickey driving it would take them to midafternoon to get here. All at once I saw the green roof of the grandstand, like some pennanted castle in the trees, and then I was on the grounds, and the day was festive with people streaming to the gates under their panama hats and sun parasols, they carried field glasses, men were hawking programs, the place was not as big as Yankee Stadium but grand of scale nonetheless, it was a wooden structure painted green and white, it had the air of a distinguished old amusement park with flower beds lining the paths. I stood on line for a clubhouse ticket and was told they would not let me in as an unaccompanied minor, I wanted to take out my Automatic and shove it up the guy’s nose, but instead I asked an elderly couple to buy my ticket for me and walk me through the turnstile, which they were gracious enough to do, but it was a humiliating recourse for the trusted associate of one of the most deadly gangsters in the country.
Then when I climbed the stairs to the stands and came out to my first glimpse of the great oval track I felt immediately at home, it was that delicious shock of looking down from a deep shade to a green field in the sun, you got it from a baseball diamond or from a football gridiron, and now I saw the racecourse had it too, that sense before the sport begins of the glory of the day to come, the palapable anticipation of a formal struggle on a course as yet unmarked, with phantom horses racing to the finish line in a pristine brilliance of air and light. I felt I could handle myself here, I enjoyed the unexpected confidence that comes of recognition.
So there I was burdened with my deadly serious reponsibili-ties on this fine day when it seemed as if the whole society was coming to gamble, and the common people would do their betting on the grounds and stand in the sun by the rail to see what they could of the actual race, which was the homestretch, while the well-to-do bettors sat in the shade of the raked wooden stands so they could see somewhat more of the course, there were the boxes right at the front edge of the stands which had been bought for the season by politicians and men of wealth and fame, but if unoccupied on any particular day could be bought with a bribe to the usher to be used on a contingency basis, and finally, set back on a separate tier above the grandstand, was the expensive clubhouse where the truly sporting came to sit at tables and have their luncheon before the start of the day’s races. I found Drew up there alone at a table for two with a glass of white wine in front of her.
I knew of course no matter what I told her she would not dream of leaving before she’d had her fill of the horses. I knew too that if I spoke of the danger she was in or acknowledged my fear her eyes would wander, her mind would wander, she’d drift away in her mind and spirit and the light I held in her eye would dim. She liked my precocity. She liked my street-tough self, she liked her boys gallant and bold. So I told her I had a sure thing in the seventh race and I was going to bet everything I had and make enough dough to keep her in bonbons and silk underwear for the rest of her life. It was supposed to be a joke but somehow it came out in a constricted voice, with more fervor than I intended, like a declaration of my childish love, and the effect on her depthless green eyes was to set them brimming. And now we both sat there in silence and great sadness, it was as if she knew from her own system of reckoning everything I didn’t dare tell her. I couldn’t look at her but turned my gaze to the track out there in the sun, a long wide beautifully kept raked-dirt oval track with white fencing, inside of which was an inner oval track of grass with obstacles for the steeplechase races, and inside that were plantings of red and white flowers and a pond with real swans paddling around, and all of it set in a vast verdant countryside with the foothills of the Berkshires far to the east, but I only saw oval, and ran my eyes around the closed track as if it were an endless bulkhead, as if I had not all the air of the world to breathe but the stifling diesel fumes in a tugboat deckhouse, and every moment that we had lived since that night was my hallucination, a moment’s reprieve from the great heaving sea lunging up from itself to gulp at the night’s prey, and people of my barest acquaintance who were dead had not yet died.
Little by little the tables filled up, though neither of us was hungry we lunched on cold salmon and potato salad, and finally the mounted men in red hunt coats came onto the track and the trumpet blew and the horses with their jockeys paraded at a slow pace past us to the far turn where the starting gate had been set up, and the first of the day’s races went off, as they were to do thereafter every half hour, every thirty minutes or so a race went off, a mile or more or sometimes less around the broad raked-dirt track, you saw them perhaps for a few moments out of the starting gate and then unless you had glasses they became a rolling blur, as if one undulant individual animal was rippling around the far stretch of the track, and it was moving not all that quickly and only when it came into detailed view as horses again, in urgent and walloping whipped exertion, did you understand what a great distance they had run in what little time, and they were swift as devils as they galloped past you and crossed the finish line in front of the stands with the jockeys standing up then in their stirrups. And there was much excitement and importuning and shouting and screaming during the race, but it was not the kind of noise and cheering you got at a baseball game when Lou Gehrig hit a home run, it was not a joyous life sound and did not continue past the moment of the first horse’s finish, but died off suddenly as if someone had thrown a switch, with everyone turning back to their charts to give the next half hour to the new bets, and only the winners still buzzing with happiness or gloating over their winnings, the flesh of the horse the least of anyone’s concern, except perhaps the owner stepping into the winner’s circle in front of the stands to pose for pictures with the jockey and the horse in its garland of carnations.
And I knew what Mr. Berman meant, what mattered were the numbers each animal carried around the track, the numbers on the big boards facing the stands that showed the odds at post time. The horses were running numbers, animated odds, even to the very wealthy squires who bred them and bought them at the yearling sales and owned them and raced them and won purses with them.
But all these impressions came to me through the corners of my eyes, as it were, and on the edges of my attention, as I left Drew and came back to her, and then took her down to her box and left her there, and went looking everywhere on all the levels for the hoods I knew and the hoods I didn’t know, because this was not the exclusive horse show of the night before, this was a grand convention of all the idlers of the world, I saw people pushing their two dollars under the grate who clearly were busted, people in the sun by the rail in their undershirts clutching their tickets that were the one way they could get out, whatever it was, to get out of it, I had never seen such pale faces come to enjoy a day, and everywhere on every tier, in every aisle, were the men who knew what others didn’t and talked from the sides of their mouths and nodded the knowing nods of commerce, this was such a seedy stand of life, such a grubby elegance of occupation, with the drinkers of tall iced drinks or shots of neat all wanting too much from life and losing too much to it as they stood on the betting lines to try again in their democratic ceremonies of gain and loss on the creaking tiers of these old wooden stands.
All I asked of Drew was that she not go down to the paddock to see the horses before they came onto the track, that she sit in her box, which was numbered and known, just near the governor’s box at the finish line, and content herself looking at them through her binoculars.
“You don’t want me to bet?”
“Bet what you want. I’ll go to the window for you.” “It doesn’t matter.”
She was very thoughtful and still and made a quietness around herself that I felt as a kind of mourning.
Then she said, “You remember that man?”
“Which man?”
“The one with the bad skin. The one he respects so.”
“Bad skin?”
“Yes, in the car, with the bodyguards. Who came to the church.”
“That man. Of course. How could I forget such skin.”
“He looked at me. I don’t mean he was forward or anything like that. But he looked at me and he knew who I was. So I must have met him before.” She pursed her lips and shook her head with her eyes cast down.
“You don’t remember?”
“No. It must have been at night.”
“Why?”
“Because every night of my life I am a damn drunk.”
I pondered this: “Were you with Bo?”
“I think I must have been.”
“Did you ever tell Mr. Schultz?”
“No. Do you think I should have?”
“I think it’s important.”
“Is it? Is it important?”
“Yes, I think it might be.”
“You tell him. Would you?” she said and raised her binoculars as the horses of the next race came at a walk onto the track.
A few minutes later a uniformed messenger came up to the box with an enormous bouquet of flowers in his hand and they were for Drew, a great armload of long-stemmed flowers, and she took them and her face colored, she read the card and it said From An Admirer, just as I had dictated, and she laughed and looked around her, up into the stands behind her, as if to find whoever it was who had sent them. I called to an usher and put a folded five-dollar bill in his hand and told him to bring a pitcher of water, which he did, and Drew placed the flowers in the pitcher and put them on the empty chair beside her. She was cheerier now, some people in the next box smiled and made appropriate remarks, and then another uniformed messenger arrived, this time with a floral arrangement so large it came with its own wicker stand, like a little tree with flowers like stalks of popcorn, and big green fan leaves mixed in and bell flowers of blue and yellow with little tails, and the card said Ever Yours, and now Drew was laughing with that shocked happiness of people who get Valentine’s Day greetings or surprise birthday parties. I can’t imagine, she answered when a gentleman leaned over and asked her what the occasion was. And when the third and fourth even larger deliveries were made, the last a display with dozens of long-stemmed roses, the whole box was transformed with flowers, she was surrounded by them, and there was considerable amusement and interest in the boxes around her and people stood up in their seats to see what was going on and there was a flurry of interest that spread through the stands and people started to come over from all directions to ask questions, to make remarks, some people thought she was a movie star, a young man asked her if he ought to be asking for her autograph, she had now more flowers around her than the winner of a cup race, she held them and was surrounded by them, and even more important, she was surrounded by the people who came up to see what all the excitement was about. Some of them were her friends from the horse set, and they sat with her and made jokes, and one woman had her two children with her, two little blond girls with bowl haircuts who were dressed in white dresses and bows and white anklets and polished white shoes, nice shy little girls, and Drew improvised little corsages for them to hold, and a photographer appeared from the local newspaper and took flash pictures, everything was going so well, I wanted those children to stay there, I asked the mother if they would like some ice cream and ran off to get some, and while I was at it I ordered from the clubhouse bar a couple of bottles of champagne and several glasses, flashing my roll and dropping Drew’s name so that the bartender wouldn’t give me a hard time, and soon she was entertaining right there in the box amid her flowers, and I stood back a step and saw that even some of the race officiais on their horses glanced up from the track to where she was, it was as if the queen was present in her flower-bedecked box with little girl attendants and people lifting their glasses in her honor.
So all that was as good as it could be, still to come were deliveries of boxes of candy from the hotel chocolatier, I just didn’t want her alone, I had other things up my sleeve if I needed them, I stood back and looked on my work and it was good, all I had to do was make it go on, how long I didn’t know, another race’s worth, another two, I thought it unlikely that members of the profession would want to perform at a crowded racetrack, that they would want to add to the history of a great track the story of an inexplicable assassination, and it would be clear to them if they checked the hotel first that her things were not packed, that she was not running, but how could I be sure of anything if I didn’t know everything, I wanted a moving shield around her, like a fountain of juggled balls, like a thousand whirring jump ropes, like fireworks of flowers and the lives of innocent rich children.
So that was the situation, and I suppose it was during the fifth race, the horses were in the far stretch and all the glasses were raised, and how could I not know that among thousands of people one pair of binoculars down along the rail in the sun was turned the wrong way, how can you not know in the instant’s deflected ray that you are looking down a tunnel into the eyes of your examiner, that through the great schism of sun and shade and over the cupidinous howl of the masses, you are quietly under the most intimate study? I turned and raced down the wooden staircase to the ground level and made my way past the tellers’ cages, where a surprising number of bettors waited, listening to the public-address announcer’s account of the race even though all they had to do was walk a few steps outside to see it for themselves. Everywhere on the ground was a litter of cast-off pari-mutuel tickets, and if I had been a few years younger I would probably have gone around and picked them up just because there were so many like things on the ground that could be collected, but the people who were hunkering here and there, turning the tickets over and picking them up and throwing them down again, were grown-ups, wretched pathetic losers scrounging around for that mystical event, the winning ticket mistakenly cast aside.
Out in front of the stands I immediately felt the heat of the afternoon, the light was blinding, and over the shoulders of shouting people I saw a blur of horses thundering past. You really heard them too, you heard the footfalls, you heard the whips in their sibilance. Did the horses run to win or to get away? I found Irving and Mickey at the rail looking for all the world like citizens of sport, with checked jackets and binocular cases hanging from their shoulders, and in Mickey’s case a panama covering his bald skull and a pair of sunglasses masking his eyes.
“Faded badly in the stretch,” Irving said. “All legs, no heart. You run a speed horse like that no more than six furlongs, if you’re kind,” he said and tore several tickets in half and put them in a nearby receptacle.
Mickey trained his glasses on the stands.
“Her box is just short of the finish line,” I said.
“We can see that. All it lacks is the Stars and Stripes,” Irving said in his whispery voice. “What is going on up there?”
“He’s very happy to see her.”
“Who is?”
“Mr. Preston. Mr. Harvey Preston, her husband.”
Irving looked through his glasses. “What does he look like?”
“A tall man? Older.”
“I don’t spot him. What is he wearing?”
“Let me look a minute,” I said and I tapped Mickey on the shoulder. He gave me his glasses and when I focused them she came into view so close in her anxious glance behind her that I wanted to call out I was here, I was down here, but the charm of my life held because as she stared, there indeed was Harvey coming down the stairs waving at her and a moment later he was in the box with his arms around her and she was hugging him, and they held each other at arm’s length and smiled, he was saying something, she was genuinely happy to see him, she said something and then they both looked around them at all the flowers and he was shaking his head and holding his palms up, and she was laughing, and there was this milling crowd around them and one man was applauding as if in appreciation of the large gesture.
“Ain’t love grand,” I said. “In the madras jacket with the maroon silk foulard.”
“The what?”
“That’s what they call those handkerchiefs where the tie ought to be.”
“I see him,” Irving said. “You should have told us.”
“How was I to know?” I said. “He showed up at lunch. This is their season here. How was I to know they practically own the damn town.”
A few minutes later the whole box seemed to rise, a levitation of people and flowers, as Drew and Harvey proceeded toward the exit. He was waving at people like a politician and ushers hurried toward him to make themselves useful. I kept my eyes on Drew with her flowers in her arms, I don’t know why but she seemed to move through the crowd with such care that I thought of a woman with child, that was my impression from this distance without the benefit of binoculars, that was my blurring impression. When they had disappeared down the passageway I moved with Irving and Mickey through the field crowd back under the stands past the betting cages and stood on the far side of a hotdog counter and we watched the party come down the staircase and Harvey had a car waiting right there, they had let it in through the gates where no cars were supposed to come, Drew turned and stood on her toes to look around, she was trying to find me, which was the last thing I wanted, but Harvey got her into that car fast, and jumped in after her, I had told him no cops, but a couple of state troopers stood there in jodhpurs and gun belts crisscrossed on their chests and those smart olive-drab felt scout hats complete with leather thong ties under their chins, these guys were on duty mostly for decoration, in case the governor showed up or someone like that, but they were large and incorruptible, I mean what could they give you in return, a highway? and the situation was ambiguous, I didn’t like the frown I saw on Irving’s face, if they had the idea that she was scared and running we were both in terrible trouble.
“What’s this all about?” Irving said.
“Big-shot stuff,” I said. “These guys have nothing better to do, that’s all.”
Moving quickly without running, Irving and Mickey left the park through a side entrance and moved to their own car. They insisted I come with them and I didn’t feel I was in a position to argue. When we got to the Packard, I opened the door to get in the back and was shocked to see Mr. Berman sitting there. He was still up to his tricks. I said nothing and neither did he, but I knew now it was his passion I was dealing with. Irving said: “The husband showed up.” Mickey got us into the traffic, and he picked up the car within a block and we followed it at a discreet distance. I was as surprised as anyone when it gathered speed and headed south out of town. They weren’t even stopping for her things at the hotel.
Quite suddenly Saratoga ended and we were in the country. We drove behind them ten or fifteen minutes. Then I looked through the side window and realized we were abreast of an airfield, planes, single and double wings, were lined up parked like cars. Harvey’s driver turned in there and we went past the entrance and pulled off the road under some trees where we could see the hangar and the runway beyond it. A wind sock at the end of the runway hung limp, just the way I felt.
There was a terrible silence in the car, the motor was left running, I could feel Mr. Berman calculating the odds. They had driven up to a single-engine plane whose door was open just under the wing. Someone already inside was extending his arms to help them climb in. Again Drew turned to look behind her and again Harvey stepped into her line of vision. She still had flowers in her arms.
“Looks like the little lady has pulled a fast one,” Mr. Berman said. “You didn’t see this coming?”
“Sure,” I said. “Like I knew Lulu was going to bust me in the nose.”
“What could she be thinking?”
“She’s not scared, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “This is the way they travel in this league. The truth is she’s been ready to move on for a while now.”
“How do you know? Did she tell you that?”
“Not in so many words. But I could tell.”
“Well that’s interesting.” He thought a moment. “If you were right that would certainly change the picture. Did she say anything about Dutch, was she angry at him or anything?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. She doesn’t care, it doesn’t matter to her.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
“Nothing. Like she left a brand-new car at the hotel. We can take it, it won’t matter to her. She’s not after anything, she’s not naturally afraid like most girls you’d meet or jealous or any of that. She does whatever she wants, and then she gets bored and then she does something else. That’s all.”
“Bored?”
I nodded.
He cleared his throat. “Obviously,” he said, “this is a conversation that must never again be spoken of.” The cabin door closed. “What about the husband. Is he someone who we should expect to give us trouble?”
“He’s a cream puff,” I said. “And in the meantime I have missed the seventh race and I didn’t get to put a bet down on that sure thing you gave me. That was my paycheck, that was my big chance to make a killing.”
A man came out of the hangar and grabbed one end of the propellor with two hands and spun it and jumped back when the engine turned over. Then he ducked under the wings and pulled the chocks from under the wheels and the plane taxied onto the runway. It was a lovely silver plane. It paused for a moment with its ailerons flapping and its rudder waggling from side to side, and then it took off. After a moment it lifted into the air. You could see how light and fragile it was rising and sliding and shuddering through the volume of the sky. It banked and flashed in the sun and then rose on its new course and began to be hard to see. As I watched it, its outlines wavered, like something swimming. Then I felt as if it was one of those threadlike things drifting across the ball of my eye. Then it disappeared into a cloud but I was still left with the feeling of something in my eye.
“They’ll be other races,” Mr. Berman said.