The girl was jangling her keys again. Pinata switched off the projector, thanked her, and left.
He drove back to his office, thinking of the money Camilla had left in the envelope. Obviously the police hadn’t been able to prove it had come from a robbery, or Camilla wouldn’t be lying now under his stone cross. The big question was why a destitute transient would want to spend $2,000 on his own funeral instead of on the food and clothing he needed. Cases of people dying of malnutrition with a fortune hidden in a mattress or under some floorboards were not common, but they happened every now and then. Had Camilla been one of these, a psychotic miser? It seemed improbable. The money in the envelope had been in large bills. The collection of misers was usually a hodgepodge of dimes, nickels, dollars, hoarded throughout the years. Furthermore, misers didn’t travel. They stayed in one place, often in one room, to protect their hoard. Camilla had traveled, but from where and for what reason? Had he picked this town because it was a pretty place to die in? Or did he come here to see someone, find someone? If so, was it Daisy? But the only connection Daisy had with Camilla was in a dream, four years later.
His office was cold and dark, and although he turned on the gas heater and all the lights, the place still seemed cheerless and without warmth, as if Camilla’s ghost was trapped inside the walls, emanating an eternal chill.
Camilla had come back, quietly, insidiously, through a dream. He had changed his mind — the sea was too noisy, the roots of the big tree too threatening, the little bed too dark and narrow — he was demanding reentry into the world, and he had chosen Daisy to help him. The destitute transient, whose body no one had claimed, was staking out a claim for himself in Daisy’s mind.
I’m getting as screwy as she is, he thought. I’ve got to keep this on a straightforward, factual basis. Daisy saw the report in the newspaper. It was painful to her, and she repressed it. For almost four years it was forgotten. Then some incident or emotion triggered her memory, and Camilla popped up in a dream, a pathetic creature whom she identified, for unknown reasons, with herself.
That’s all it amounted to. No mysticism was involved; it was merely a case of the complexities of memory.
“It’s quite simple,” he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice was comforting in the chilly room. It had been a long time since he’d actually listened to himself speak, and his voice seemed oddly pleasant and deep, like that of a wise old man. He wished he could think of some wise old remarks to match it, but none occurred to him. His mind seemed to have shrunk so that there was no room in it for anything except Daisy and the dead stranger of her dreams.
A drop of sweat slid down behind his left ear into his collar. He got up and opened the window and looked down at the busy street. Few whites ventured out on Opal Street after dark. This was his part of the city, his and Camilla’s, and it had nothing to do with Daisy’s part. Grease Alley, some of the cops called it, and when he was feeling calm and secure, he didn’t blame them. Many of the knives used in brawls were greased. Maybe Camilla’s had been, too.
“Welcome back to Grease Alley, Camilla,” he said aloud, but his voice didn’t sound like a wise old man’s anymore. It was young and bitter and furious. It was the voice of the child in the orphanage, fighting for his name, Jesus.
“All those bruises and black eyes and chipped teeth,” the Mother Superior had said. “You hardly looked human, half the time.”
He closed the window and stared at his reflection in the dusty glass. There were no chipped teeth or bruises or black eyes visible, but he hardly looked human.
“Of course, it’s a very difficult name to live up to...”
The City
10
But there was love, Daisy. You are proof there was love...
Through all of Fielding’s travels only one object had remained with him constantly, a grimy, pockmarked, rawhide suitcase. It was so old now that the clasps no longer fastened, and it was held together by a dog’s chain leash which he’d bought in a dime store in Kansas City. The few mementos of his life that Fielding had chosen to keep were packed inside this suitcase, and when he was feeling nostalgic or guilty or merely lonesome, he liked to bring them out and examine them, like a bankrupt shopkeeper taking stock of whatever he had left.
These mementos, although few in number, had such a strong content of emotion that the memories they evoked seemed to become more vivid with the passing of the years. The plastic cane from the circus at Madison Square Garden took him back to the big top so completely that he could recall every clown and juggler, every bulging-thighed aerialist and tired old elephant.
The suitcase contained, in addition to the cane:
A green derby from a St. Patrick’s Day party in Newark. (Oh, what a beautiful binge that had been!)
Two pieces of petrified wood from Arizona.
A silver locket. (Poor Agnes.)
A ukulele, which Fielding couldn’t play but liked to hold expertly in his hands while he hummed “Harvest Moon” or “Springtime in the Rockies.”
A little box made of sweet grass and porcupine quills by an Indian in northern Ontario.
A beribboned cluster of small gilded pine cones that had been attached to a Christmas present from Daisy: a wristwatch, later hocked in Chicago.
Several newspaper clippings about exotic ports on the other side of the world.
A package of letters, most of them from Daisy; the money orders which had been enclosed were long since cashed.
A pen which didn’t write, made of gold which wasn’t real.
Two train schedules.
A splinter of wood — allegedly from the battleship West Virginia after it was bombed at Pearl Harbor — which he’d got from a sailor in Brooklyn in exchange for a bottle of muscatel.
There were also about a dozen pictures: Daisy holding her high school diploma; Daisy and Jim on their honeymoon; a framed photograph of two identical middle-aged matrons who ran a boardinghouse in Dallas and had inscribed across the picture “To Stan Fielding, hoping he won’t forget ‘the Heavenly Twins’”; an enlarged snapshot of a coal miner from Pennsylvania, who looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln and whose chief sorrow in life was that Lincoln was dead and no advantage could be taken of the resemblance. (“Think of it, Stan, all the fun we could have had, me being Abraham Lincoln, and you being my Secretary of State, and everybody bowing and scraping in front of us and buying us drinks. Oh, it just makes me sick thinking of all them free drinks we missed!”)
Another picture, mounted on cardboard, showed Ada and Fielding himself and a ranch hand he’d worked with near Albuquerque, a handsome dark-eyed young man called Curly. On spring days, when dust storms obscured the range and made work impossible, the three of them used to play pinochle together. Ada had been a good sport in those early times, full of fun and life, ready for anything. Having a child had changed her. It was a year of drought. During the months of Ada’s pregnancy more tears had come from her eyes than rain from the skies.
He brought the suitcase out now and began unpacking its contents on the big round table under the green-shaded ceiling light.
Muriel came in from the kitchen, the only other room in the apartment. She was a short, stout middle-aged woman with a hard mouth and eyes soft and round and pale green, like little mint patties with a licorice drop in the middle. She snorted at the sight of the open suitcase. “What do you want to go dragging out that old thing again for?”