Nightwork

I felt my face go rigid and I ducked my eyes. The woman laughed. 'Don't worry,' she said, 'it hasn't happened yet. Whatever else we do around here, we do not go in for orgies. Still,' she said evenly, 'if you're going to be in Washington tonight and if you tell me what hotel you're" staying at, you might like to buy me a drink.'

I won't say that I wasn't tempted. The night had reawakened all the sensuality in me that had lain dormant for so long. And the cool impersonality of the invitation was intriguing. At least for its novelty. Things like that had happened to friends of mine, or at least so they had said, but never to me. And after what I had done in room 602 of the St Augustine Hotel, I could hardly refuse on moral grounds to sleep with the friend of a lady I had only just met the night before. Let the accidents happen. But there was the business of the birth certificate. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm leaving town this morning.'

'What a pity,' the woman said tonelessly.

'But I'll be back at my hotel...' I hesitated, remembering Jeremy Hale's poker game on Saturday night. First things first. I’ll be back on Sunday.'

'What hotel are you staying at?

I told her.

'Perhaps I'll call on Sunday,' she said. 'I have nothing against Sundays.'

Money in the bank, I thought, as I was leaving the apartment building, even money in a bank two hundred and fifty miles away must give off an irresistible sexual aroma.

I tried to examine just how I felt that morning. Springy and light-footed. Lighthearted, I decided. Wicked. It was an old-fashioned word, but it was the word that came to mind. Was it possible that for thirty-three years I had miscalculated absolutely what sort of man I was? I looked carefully at the ordinary faces of the men and women on the street. Were they all on the edge of crime?

At the hotel I rented a car and took my wallet out of the vault. I was beginning to feel deprived if I wasn't carrying a certain number of hundred-dollar bills on me.

The roads through Pennsylvania were icy and I drove carefully. A car crash was one accident I wanted to avoid. This was no time to be laid up immobilized and helpless, in a hospital for weeks or maybe months on end.

6

'May I speak to Mr. Grimes, please,' I said to the girl on the phone. 'Mr. Henry Grimes.'

'Who's calling, please?'

I hesitated. I was getting more and more reluctant to give my name to anyone. 'Say his brother is calling,' I said on the phone. Since there were three brothers in the family, this ' could leave at least a small margin of doubt.

When I heard my brother's voice on the phone, I said, Hello, Hank.'

'Who's this? No, I don't believe it! Doug! Where the hell are you?' Once again I felt the same quick gratitude that had swept over me in Jeremy Hale's office because someone was go obviously glad to hear the sound of my voice. My brother was seven years older than I and when we had been growing up had regarded me as a pest. Since I had moved away from Scranton, we had only seen each other rarely, but there was no mistaking the warmth in the greeting.

'I'm in town. At the Hilton Hotel.'

'Take your bag and come on over to the house. We've got a guest room. And the kids won't wake you until six thirty in the morning.' Henry laughed at his own invitation. Behind the deep, remembered voice, there was the clatter of office machines. Henry worked in a firm of accountants and the mechanical noise of the symbols of money coming in and going out was the music of his working day. 'I'll call Madge,' Henry was saying, 'and tell her to expect you for dinner.'

'Hold it a minute, Hank,' I said. 'I have to ask you for a favor.'

'Sure. kid,' he said. 'What is it?'

'I'm applying for a passport,' I said, 'and I need my birth certificate. If I write Harrisburg it'll take three weeks and I'm in a hurry...'

'Where you going?'

'Abroad.'

'Where abroad?'

'No matter. Do you think that in the stuff you took from Mom's house you might find my birth certificate?'

'Come on over to the house for dinner and we'll look for it together.'

'I'd rather Madge didn’t know I was in town, Hank,' I laid.

'Oh.' The worry set in immediately.

'Do you think you might see if you could find it this afternoon and then come over to the Hilton and have dinner with me. Alone?'

'But why...?'

'I'll explain later. Can you manage it?'

'I'll be there a quarter after six.'

'In the bar.'

That's no hardship.' Henry chuckled. It was a drinker's chuckle.

'See you then,' I said and hung up. I sat on the edge of the single bed in the nondescript hotel room, my hand on the telephone, wondering if it wouldn't have been better to have written Harrisburg and waited the two weeks and never have come back to Scranton, never have said anything to my brother. I shook my head. If you wanted to figure out what your future was going to be, you had to have a firm grasp on your past. And my brother Henry was a big part of my past.

Because our father had died when Henry was twenty and all the other children much younger, and Henry had taken on the responsibility of the male head of the family automatically, without fuss. I had learned to respect him and depend on him. It was easy to depend on Henry. He was an outgoing, uncomplicated, clever boy, quick in his studies (he always led his class, always was elected class president, and got a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania). He had a knack for business, too, and was generous to the other children, especially to me, with the money he made after school and in the summers. As our mother kept repeating, he was the one of her children who was born to be rich and successful. It was Henry who fought our mother and overcame her objections when I decided I wanted to learn to fly. Henry had also financed the flying school. By that time he was a certified public accountant, doing fairly well for his age, and already married.

Through the years, I had paid back the money Henry had lent me, although Henry had never once asked me for a penny. But we had not seen each other often. We lived in different parts of the world, and Henry was involved with his growing family and his wife, Madge. Because of the scandal of my younger brother, Bert, the few times that we had all been together Madge had been uncomfortably persistent in trying to find out why I was not yet married.

Because of everything, my brother Henry was one of the people in my life who somehow made me feel guilty, lacking in feeling. I knew that I had received much more than I had given and the imbalance disturbed me. I was glad now that the bureaucracy in Harrisburg had forced me to come to my home town and once more ask my brother to help me.

* * *

I was shocked when I saw him come into the bar. I had not seen him for five years, and Henry had been a powerfully built, erect, confident-seeming man then. Now he looked as though the five years had ravaged him. He seemed diminished, bent. His hair had thinned and what was left was stringy, yellowish-gray. He wore thick, gold-rimmed spectacles that bit deep into the bridge of his nose. He had always had fine eyes, deep-colored, like all the family, and keen of sight, and the glasses did not become him. Even in the half-light of the bar, Henry reminded me of a small, worried animal peering fearfully out of a hole, ready to scuttle back at the first sign of danger.