Some re-evaluation of Hildy was in order. “I don’t know what my reaction is to you, Hildy. Mostly I don’t know exactly what to say. Joe said Ken was troubled. I thought maybe—”
“Some of the trouble was me? I don’t think so. He was a friend. We talked. If he’d wanted to put us on a different basis, I don’t know what I would have said. It just never came up.” She smiled a bit bitterly. “Which can be called a new experience for Hildy. Being given no chance to say no, I mean. I don’t know yet if I liked it. I guess I did. He needed somebody around who didn’t make any demands.”
“That doesn’t fit so well. Ken was never a moody guy.”
“I never saw him otherwise, Gev. Something was nibbling him. I tried to get him to talk it out. He talked, but not enough. Ever.”
“Did you ever get any clues?”
She had a pleasant trick of raising one eyebrow. Her arms were round, and her skin had that golden tone. “He carried his drinks pretty well. Too many drinks. One night he went over the edge a little too far. That was the night he told me dead men didn’t have any troubles. You know the way a drunk talks. He said it like it was a big discovery. I told him he was being morbid. And he said that he could tell the medical profession what it felt like to be torn in half. That didn’t make much sense to me. I got him into a cab and sent him home. The next night he was worried about what he might have said to me. He acted relieved when I told him he hadn’t said anything I could understand.”
“Torn in half. Funny thing to say. The only way it makes sense is if you think of it as being some decision he had to make and couldn’t make. Like Solomon threatening to chop the baby in two hunks.”
She drew on the table top with her thumbnail and stared at the little paper tent which advised us to order a Gardland sour. “I read once a out a lab where they trained rats to find their way out of mazes. Then they’d put them in a maze with no way out. The rats would finally lie down and chew their own feet.”
“Was Ken about to do that?”
“Something like that. A guy with no way out. I wanted him to talk it out. I thought it would help. But he seemed to like just being with me, and he wanted me to stay in type. Sweet, dumb little songstress. So that’s what I was, most of the time. When I stepped out of character it bothered him.”
I reached over and put my hand on hers. “I’m glad you were around, Hildy.”
She pulled her hand away slowly. “Don’t, please. You’ll make me cry and I don’t want to. Let’s get back to our guessing game, Gev. Was it wife trouble? I know there was trouble at the plant, but it didn’t seem to bother him that he wasn’t running the show out there.”
I thought of Niki leaving me for Ken. And then, perhaps, leaving Ken for somebody else. I thought of her voice on the phone. It didn’t seem possible. And yet, the night before I had found her with Ken, she had been all eagerness in my arms. All soft words and sighs. Maybe neither of us had known Niki.
“I don’t know, Hildy. I just don’t know.”
“Sometimes the love bug is a virus, and after a while you go dead inside.”
“I know that,” I said softly.
She studied me for a few moments, head tilted again, eyebrow raised. “Is your whole family messed up?”
I saw then what Ken had seen in her: that capacity for warmth and understanding which seems, always, to be the product of a very special kind of heartbreak. She said, “You’re a stronger one than he was. You’re not as much like him as I thought. Now I know why he missed having you around.”
“Did he say that?”
“Yes, he said that, Gevan. And said he didn’t blame you for not being around.”
“Don’t kid me, Hildy. I should have been around and I wasn’t.”
I wanted to believe what she said about Ken. I had to believe it.
She looked at her small jeweled watch. “I’ve got to go sing for the people, Gev.”
She stood up and I stood up too. She was a very small girl. She looked up at me, biting her lip, speculative. I said, “You’ll be back?”
“We’ve said what we had to say about Ken. And all you can give me now is a load of some of your own trouble, Gev.”
“I wouldn’t want to do that.”
“You’d do it without trying to do it.”
“You see a lot, don’t you?”
“I guess. And this whole thing has made me feel older than hills. Old enough and tired enough so I don’t want any new trouble. Come back some time, Gev. When things are straightened out for you, and when we can have some laughs.”
“I will, Hildy.”
Her hand rested in mine for a moment and this time her smile was shy. I watched her walk toward the mike, her small back very straight, her brown hair bobbing against her shoulders with the cadence of her walk. I left while she was singing about a love that would not die, her eyes glistening in the subdued spotlight. Her voice followed me out the door.
Dreams kept waking me up that night, and fading before I could grasp them. Each time I woke up I knew that Niki had been in the dream. But the words she had said were lost.
Chapter 4
The nine-o’clock telephone call interrupted my morning shower. Lester Fitch greeted me in a mellow, oiled voice and informed me that he would be pleased to purchase my breakfast for me.
I stood dripping, holding the phone. “Gevan?” he said.
“I’m here.”
“Oh, I thought we were cut off. I’ll wait right here in the lobby. I didn’t get much chance to brief you on the current status of things at the plant.”
That was just a bit too much. I didn’t want my head patted by Lester Fitch, and I didn’t want to listen to his large editorial we. It’s odd how much of our lives we spend being polite to people in whom we have absolutely no interest. ‘No’ is a word which, if said at the right moment, is the greatest time-saving device in the world. I said it.
“What was that?” he asked, shocked and plaintive.
“No, Lester. Don’t wait.” I hung up.
It was Wednesday morning. If Lester knew, then Niki would know, and Mottling would know, and they would be interested in finding out who I intended to back. I was interested in knowing that myself. I told myself it was the reason I had come up, to make an investigation on my own. Duty to the family firm and all that. Four years of indifference, and then a sudden burst of dedication. But, last night, Joe and Hildy had given me another problem. Maybe there would be no answer to that one. Maybe it was locked forever in the dead brain of my brother. Sooner or later I would have to see Niki. But I wasn’t ready yet.
Perversely, turning down Lester had improved my morning mood. I rode the elevator below the lobby floor just in case Lester might be hanging around in hopes of my changing my mind. I went out through the grill and up the steps onto Pernie Street. The rain had washed the air. The day sparkled. It felt good to be back where most of my life had happened. Even Pernie Street had a special meaningfulness. My high school class held the graduation ball at the Hotel Gardland. Ken was a sophomore when I was a senior. He attended too, and I couldn’t remember the name of his date. Mine was named Connie Sherman. Somebody had a bottle and Ken and I nibbled on it a few times in the men’s room. Later we took the girls down to the grill when the dance was folding. I had parked my car, a beat-up old Olds as big as a hearse, in a lot down Pernie Street, so we went out the Pernie Street entrance.
There were some boys there we didn’t know, probably North Side High, hanging around to make trouble with the southsiders. Some of them had tried to crash the dance earlier and were tossed out. As we came out, one of them, in the shadows, made a remark about Ken’s date. It was very explicit and anatomical. Ken turned toward them and his date tugged at him and told him to ignore it. I didn’t want trouble, not with the girls there. I think Ken was going to turn away, but he never got a chance. The sucker punch sent him sprawling. I shoved Connie toward the doorway. She used her head and grabbed Ken’s date by the arm and they ran inside. Ken bounced up as one of them tried to kick him and grabbed the leg and spilled the guy on the sidewalk. Then I couldn’t see what was happening because I was suddenly very busy. Somebody banged me under the eye and I swung back and missed and the scrap moved into the shadows. It was very confusing. I hit somebody solidly and got kicked in the leg. There was grunting, and the sounds of blows, and then I heard somebody making that distinctive sound of trying to suck air back into the lungs after getting hit in the pit of the stomach. I wondered with part of my mind if it was Ken. Somebody ripped my coat and I got hold of a wrist and heaved and sent somebody spinning out across the curb into the lights. Then there was a police whistle and men running out of the hotel. The ones we were fighting ran down Pernie Street. The police were going to take us in, but Connie was very convincing about what happened. We were a mess.