“She’s hardly ‘my’ Miss Harriwell,” I said. “And I’m certain she wouldn’t talk if she saw a fight. She’d very likely be little-girl sick.”
Catherine laughed. “How poorly you understand! Shed breathe deep and live, really live, for a while.”
I said, “Don’t tear it apart, Catherine. All right, Harriwell was talking. So is much of the island. Shall we drop it?”
“Dear Guru! The things you do for others! Hut, yes, let’s drop it. Let’s talk about our immortal souls. You’ll like that. But I don’t know about Robert. Really I don’t. Do cock-fighters have souls, Robert?”
She turned to Holden, who sat quite still, not looking at any of us.
“I’m sure you have a soul, Robert. You’re so fair about people. And so clean and nice. Oh, I mustn’t forget that. Clean. Do you think cock-fighters might be like you, Robert?”
“They’re human beings,” he said, slowly and very carefully. “I’ve watched them pray before a silver-spur match.”
“Do they? Thank you, Robert. You’ve been considerate of me again. Such a love.”
Catherine turned to me, her eyes sparkling. Jim Wheeling watched her over the top of his glass. Holden crushed his cigarette in his saucer and took up his glass.
“Guru,” said Catherine. “Don’t be shocked. But I’m going to a silver-spur match tomorrow.”
Holden looked up, gray eyes alert under the white brows. “You can’t do that. Jim’s been barred, if you remember, after that last scrap with a native owner. And you can’t go alone, Catherine.”
She looked at Wheeling then, for the first time, and it was very unpleasant. There was a silence. Wheeling spoke his first words.
“You mustn’t go alone, Catherine,” he said hoarsely.
“Oh, I shan’t, Jimmy!” She waved long crimson-tipped fingers, watching his face. “Our driver’s taking me over. I asked him this morning and he promised, and you know he’s a fine, sweet boy. He keeps his word.”
Her lips, wide and red, curled up slightly at the corners. And with this stated defiance of taboo, something rose up between her and the thick-bodied man, spreading out and infecting the four of us. Wheeling stared at his wife and took another drink from his glass, and it was like a mechanical toy that lifts one stiff arm while nothing else moves.
I envied Holden in that moment. I think I envied him a little at all times. His smooth tanned features under the close-cropped blond hair exposed nothing of his mind. You always had a strange feeling, looking at his pleasant lack of expression, that no matter what the circumstance, here was a part of yourself — but not a part you knew very well.
“What would you call my husband?”
Catherine moved her glittering eyes toward Robert Holden, then on to me. No one spoke. She looked past me toward the bar and waved for more drinks, and no one protested.
“You’re the big man here,” she said to Holden. “What d’you call him? Supernumerary? Or is he too weak even for that?”
“I call him by his name, Catherine.”
“His name? Really: I thought perhaps even a dear man like you would whistle.”
She turned a shining look on her husband.
“He answers whistles so well. Sometimes you just have to crook your finger. When you leave him, I mean really leave him alone for a while, you can wiggle your finger. You don’t have to whistle. Didn’t you know that? When he sobers up he cries, and he crawls along on his hands and knees until he gets a drink or you whistle at him. I had to teach him how to drink, you know. After we met. He never drank anything but fraternity beer and I had to show him — make it straight liquor on rocks and he wouldn’t get sick. That’s tunny, too. Isn’t it?”
She reached across and patted Wheeling’s cheek, dragging her nails over the skin. Parallel streaks of reddened skin sprang from beneath her claws, the flesh not exposed but responding to the vicious salute of the fingers drawing languidly to a fist. She held the fist against his chin briefly and neither of them stirred so much as a fiber.
“He was such a big man,” she muttered; “a big man in our little two-acre town, and it was really fun to marry him. Marry him right out of the hands of that silly soft child he thought he wanted. He was the one way out — weren’t you, Jimmy? So cute and stupid. And you get more precious every year, don’t you, Jimmy?”
No one attempted to interrupt her. Billy X. brought the fresh drinks himself, but only Wheeling drank. That same toy motion, his stare on Catherine. He started his glass down toward the table and it missed the edge, falling to the floor with a thundering tinkle of splinters and ice. His face loosened and he wet his lips, his black hair like a wig over the face so quickly sallow under the alcoholic flush, his eyes wild-blue and dilated with sickness.
“Would you mind so much if you couldn’t get a drink, Jimmy?”
His mouth opened. “Please,” he said. “Please, you can’t, Catherine.” She made a very abrupt movement, picking up her glass and draining it. Setting it down, she looked again at Wheeling. Then she got up and walked out of the bar.
Wheeling watched her out of sight. He sat hunched in upon himself. His sick stare came back and moved emptily over us. We said nothing. He sighed lightly then, like a tired child, and rose.
For an instant he looked down at Holden’s bowed head. He did not appear to have truly focused on the smaller man, and there was an odd dignity about him. We could hear his breathing in the silence before he moved carefully through the scattered tables toward the exit his wife had taken. He didn’t look back.
I lit a cigarette and met Holden’s friendly gray eyes.
“My God,” I said.
“Yes.”
“How does he stand it? How does he sit there and lake it?”
“What else can he do?”
“Leave her. She’s poison.”
Holden shrugged. He turned his cigarette like a burning wand in his slender fingers, watching ash fall slowly from the tip.
When Holden called me on the inter-office communicator early next afternoon, I had no notion of what he wanted. It had been a routine morning; I had not left my office nor called anyone. I found Holden sitting very erect in his old high-backed chair — a traditional item in the executive office — looking quite young and small behind the naked width of his desk. I accepted the chair he indicated.
“Wheeling hasn’t been in yet today,” he said icily. “I called the hotel bar. Not there. I sent a runner round to all the joints down here. Not in any one of ’em. Called Wheeling’s house. The native girl, between respectful giggles, told me Catherine went across the island to the cockfights — escorted by the native driver. Half an hour later. Wheeling was after her in a taxi.”
“Throwing it in his face,” I said.
“Obviously.”
After a pause, I said as firmly as I could, “He wouldn’t be fool enough to make another scene among the natives. Granted he’s no longer a first-class intelligence, I don’t think—”
“I sent a driver with a car to find him and bring him back to his house under my written order.” Holden waved aside the assurances. His voice, as always, was restrained. “You hop up there and meet him. Tell him he’s going back home as soon as I can arrange it. In times like these, we can’t afford difficulties for any of our men; the balance everywhere is much too precarious. You tell him that, Merrill. Tell him if he can’t control that—” Holden stopped and moved restlessly in his chair, clearing his throat — “if he can’t control his family life in the house up there, they’ll be asked to come to the hotel. I’ll take those quarters right out from under them.”
I watched his face and thought of Catherine’s words to him the night before. What was it, exactly, that caused this brittleness with overtones of fear in Catherine when she talked to Holden? Her contempt for Wheeling was a much simpler emotion, a feminine reaction that was old when recorded history was new; it was a situation that could be duplicated on any block of any town in our homeland, but at the Point there was no way for Catherine to camouflage herself. In this society and before Holden, she was no mystery. Was that it? — the cause of the peculiar defensiveness displayed with Holden and with no other?