My phone call to his office had pulled him out of a conference and at first he’d asked if I couldn’t call back later. When I finally got him I told him to be home by five o’clock to greet his recovered wife or I would personally bring him back in several parts. The tardy fifteen minutes I’d give him — a tie-up on the bridge, maybe — but he’d played it awfully close.
I took her in through the kitchen door and we found him in the den mixing a drink, as though this were the end of any ordinary day. Then he frowned, his eyes flicking past me to her, and he leaned dramatically against the frame of the door. He put down his glass and stepped toward her, and in one of those magical retrogressions they were both young again and the love glowed between them for an instant like heat lightning. He said, “Bella,” thickly, and his arms enclosed her like wings.
This, I thought, is too good to be true — and of course it was. It couldn’t last any more than lightning can be fixed in the sky. But it had happened and maybe the power of the thing would linger through enough time to matter.
It made Taylor self-conscious. “Sam!” he said heartily. “Lord God, how can I thank you for this? I can’t tell you how frightened I was.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, I suppose,” Bella said almost coyly, still pressed against his chest, “you could pay him.”
“Why, certainly,” Taylor said, still hearty.
“No need, Henry,” I said. “I’ll just keep” — I pulled the envelope of ransom money from my pocket, torn corner up — “this.”
The euphoric moment shattered. Henry turned a pasty tone of grey and Bella, with some vestigial sense of values, said, “Why, Mr. Train, that’s ridiculous! Twenty thousand dollars!”
“No!” Henry said, and then cleared his throat and said it again. “No. It’s perfectly all right, darling. You’re worth twenty times that much to me.”
“I won’t hear of it,” Bella said, hut she was pleased.
“Mrs. Taylor,” I said, “you’re right. Give me a piece of paper and I’ll tote up a hill for Henry right now. Besides, I borrowed this from the U.S. Postal Service and I’ll have to turn it back in for processing. Right, Henry?”
“Right! Oh, right!”
Mrs. Taylor, out of her depth with anything vaguely legalistic, was mollified, and Henry seemed visibly delighted with the plan.
I grinned at him satanically as he pressed his wife back against his chest and mouthed something at me over her shoulder. But I turned and went to the desk in the corner of the elegant room to do up my bill.
“Dear Henry,” I wrote on a piece of his wife’s scented notepaper, “my charges to you are as follows:
“(1) Attend the opening next Friday night of your wife’s play.
“(2) Buy the Marin Mummers a new curtain for their stage. A good one.
“(3) Send me a check for whatever amount you think it’ll take for me to keep my big mouth shut.
I folded the note, sealed it in an envelope, and wrote on the outside: “Personal. For Mr. Henry Taylor.”
He was mixing drinks again, Bella slumping in a chair, the Seconals once more at work. A pair, I thought, uniquely deserving of each other, with lovelorn Bella getting the worst of it. I put the envelope on the bar next to Taylor and he said, sotto voce, “Sam, don’t go — I want to talk to you—”
“Sorry, Henry,” I said. “I’ve got to meet a guy named Murphy downtown and if I’m late by thirty seconds, he’s apt to kill me.” I didn’t want to hear his explanation just then, knowing it might even be convincing, and I didn’t want to be convinced. I wanted only to leave them alone together and give the small tender thing between them a chance to grow, because they’d both taken high risks in giving it life.
I said goodbye quietly and went back out to the Dart parked on the apron in front of the seven-car garage. I stood there for a moment, debating. I had a choice to make. I could either keep the envelope as a kind of souvenir of the day they let Murphy loose, or take it over to one of the garbage cans lined up alongside the garage and dispose of it there. I went over to the garbage cans.
I put my finger in the torn corner of the manila envelope and ripped it open along the top. Then I took one of the bills from the thick mass of them and put it in my pocket. That one I’d keep just for the hell of it. The rest I dumped into the garbage can because I didn’t know any kids I could give play money to.
Then I drove home. Very carefully.
Rock’s Last Role
by William Bankier
The Prepington Repertory Theatre was not immune to the afflictions of its time. Audiences were declining as costs were escalating. But the actor-manager of the Prepington had something else to worry about. He had to find a way to persuade Aubrey Rock to retire.
“Did you speak to him?” asked Sybil Simon in her domineering voice. She played all the Noel Coward upper-class ladies and was never out of character.
“Till I began to bore myself,” said Lance Haldane. “He just won’t take the hint. Old Aubrey feels he is at the peak of his powers. He thanks me for being concerned but insists he can carry on for many more seasons.”
“Then you must be more direct, Lance darling. Tell him the company is exhausted and fed up and completely sick and tired of his mannerisms on stage. He must be gone at the end of the current production.”
“Sybil, love. I can hardly put it like that.”
“Put it any way you like, Lance darling. But make him understand.” Sybil’s paint-and-powder face twisted itself into a gruesome expression. “The old fool can’t remember his lines. If once more I hear him say ‘or words to that effect,’ I shall scream and run off the stage.”
In his flat a few streets from the theater, Aubrey Rock sat alone trying to succeed with an English telephone. After three wrong numbers and a couple of echoing silences, he managed to achieve a connection with his young friend and protégé, Lewis Nunford. London was only thirty miles from Prepington but the line performed as if it was stretched between planets. “I can hear you when you speak slowly,” said Lewis in the manner of someone learning to read.
Rock imitated his friend’s stilted delivery. “I ring you with bad news,” he said. “Menacing events on the horizon out here.”
“They aren’t converting the theater into a bingo hall?”
“Worse. They want to get rid of me. The whole pack of them are in league. Lance Haldane keeps drawing me into ornate conversations. So far I’ve pretended not to understand.”
“But they can’t dump you, Aubrey. Why, you are the Prepington Rep. You were acting when the rest of them were sticking chewing gum under cinema seats.”
“That’s the point. They say I’m too old. But I must admit I feel as you do — I can’t imagine the Rep without me.”
The call ended with the aspiring young actor in London agreeing to stand by with any assistance that might be needed. Rock had only the vaguest idea of how Nunford might help him, but he felt less alone when he put down the telephone and began dressing to go first to the pub and then to the theater.