“You said it once — you didn’t.”
“So all God’s chillen got thralls. She’s his, you’re mine, and this Hortense character is yours. If she is. Well, is she?”
“You think I would admit it to you?”
“Look, if she’s got your child in her belly—”
“Who says she’s got my child?”
“You do, by the way you act.”
“So... all God’s chillen got thralls.”
I guess there was more, but not much that day, because I was jangled, and she was, and I didn’t encourage her. Pretty soon she left, but next day she was back and we resumed where we had left off. This day, however, she had on a cloth coat, not the mink one.
“I only wore it yesterday so you could see it just once,” she said. “Except when I’m going somewhere, like dress-up at night, I leave it home where I’m living now. I drive to school every day, to the university here, I mean, in the car he gave me. Did I mention that he pays all my college expenses? And set up a trust fund for me? It’s just like I made it with sin, except I didn’t. I’m pure and undefiled — at least since I met this guy, the one I showed my legs to and would take off my clothes for now if he just said he wanted me to.”
“He does, and if you do, he’ll kick you out.”
“O.K., you don’t have to holler.”
She explained that at first, when her mother saw the coat, she wouldn’t let her in the house. She wouldn’t have a daughter living there who had got a coat that way. “It took me an hour to convince her that, though I hand’t meant to be pure, I was. So—”
She stretched out and wiggled her toes in her open-end shoes.
“What made you say what you did?” I asked. “About her, I mean? What made you think she’s—”
“Knocked up?”
“Yes, if you want to call it that.”
“That’s what her mother thinks.”
“You know Mrs. Mendenhall?”
“Yeah, sure. We’re friends.”
“How did that happen?”
She didn’t answer that day or the next or the next, but then one day she did.
“She came to see me, that’s how, when I was in Wilmington one time, at the Du Pont Hotel in a suite he got for me. I may as well own up that we had retakes of the attempt he had made before. I think he had the idea that if he could take it easy, have me there convenient, so the urge would come to him instead of him going after it, things might turn out as he hoped. They didn’t, though I stayed up there for some time — a couple of weeks, at least. Why he mentioned me to her — Mrs. Mendenhall, I’m talking about — I have no idea. Maybe as a cover, to pretend that I was the one he was banging instead of this Inga. Anyway, he did mention me, and then there she was on the phone, wanting to come and see me. Curiosity killed the cat. I said, O.K., she could come. What she wanted to know was the dirt on the bash they had, the one the President came to. She was all steamed up, Dr. Palmer, because she hadn’t been asked down. So I hadn’t been asked either, but, of course, I knew all about it and kind of filled her in. But, then, by a kind of accident, I found out why she hadn’t been asked. To show how high-toned I was, I asked her if she would like some tea, and when she said yes, I made her some on an electric grill. I had bought. Then, to be really high-toned, I offered her brandy in it, and she said she’d never had it that way, but O.K., she’d like to try it. So I spooned her some brandy in. Then I spooned her some more and some more and some more after that. She got there around three o’clock, and at five I put her to bed so she could sleep it off. Dr. Palmer, she’s a really distinguished woman, with a kind of trained-nurse way of talking — which she was before she got married — and a drunk. I call her what she is. I wouldn’t have asked her to come, not to a cocktail party the President was coming to. So to that extent, though I hate to admit it, Mrs. Garrett used good judgment.”
“Do you still see Mrs. Mendenhall, Teddy?”
“Oh, all the time. We’re thick as whipping cream.”
“What do you talk about?”
“She does the talking, always, and always about one thing — ‘Horty,’ as she calls her. I suppose she must love Horty, but if she thinks Horty ever did something right, she’s never let on to me that she does. She keeps getting off on Horty’s ‘genius for wrong decisions,’ she calls it, her going to Delaware U instead of Vassar, her marriage to Mr. Garrett, her moving out and going to Washington. But I don’t think she knows about you. And certainly I didn’t tell her. I just didn’t care to own up that I had flopped with you.”
Then suddenly: “You taking me or not?”
“Taking you? Where?”
“Bed. Where do you think?”
“I thought we’d been all over that.”
“Then I’ll take myself off — and I guess I won’t be back. There’s a limit to what I can stand. Being nice about it, lying here dreaming dreams.”
She got up and picked up her coat. As I stepped over to help her with it, I got a flash of the beautiful shape inside the pantsuit she had on. For a second I had an impulse. To fight it back, perhaps, I snapped: “Where is she?”
“I don’t rightly know. But she was in Wilmington, first. Then she went to New York and then came on back to Wilmington. That’s what his goons report. Mr. Garrett’s, I’m talking about. You’re goofy about her, aren’t you?”
“Well, I’ve admitted it to you, haven’t I?”
“More times than I wanted to hear it.”
23
Then back to the cards and the nothingness for several days, maybe a week. One night when I answered the phone, a familiar voice said: “Lloyd?”
“Mr. Garrett!” I croaked, sounding shaky.
“Is Hortense there?”
“No, she’s not.”
“Where is she? Do you know?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. She disappeared one night, just walked out on me. Since then, I haven’t seen her. And you may as well know: I’d see her in hell before I’d lift one finger to find her.”
“Lloyd, I have to find her.”
“O.K., but if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t.”
“Also, I have to see you. Can you come in tonight?”
“Mr. Garrett, it’s true I’ve done nothing to find her, but at the same time, she might call me, and I feel I should be here in case she does. If it’s that important, why can’t you come out here?”
“O.K., O.K., I’ll do that.”
He arrived in less than an hour. I waited for him out in the hall. When he stepped out of the elevator, we shook hands. We went inside and I hung up his hat and coat and followed him into the living room. He wandered around, looking. Then he mentioned that he was just back from Europe, “from Brussels where I was setting up a new outfit to bid on NATO hardware. I shouldn’t have gone, with Hortense playing it wild, but when something like this comes up, you more or less have to be there.” Then after looking at more pictures, he said: “Lloyd, when I was here before and you threw the headlock on me, I didn’t tell you quite all of it. There was no need to, and I left part of it out, a shameful, terrible part. The night Hortense had her miscarriage, I carried her down to the ambulance and went to the hospital with her. But when I got back, I could hardly straighten up, and I knew I had strained myself. Inga was there, of course, so she took over. She brought me back to her room where she had a vibrator already plugged in, and she put it on my back. It was the first I knew what a mean little place we’d given her to live in. But, Lloyd, it had a smell. It smelled like her. While she was working on me, that smell was working, too. We just melted together — the first time, the first time in my life that a woman responded to me. It stood me on my ear... I’m still standing on it. But she had an ear, too, so she began dreaming dreams — of marrying me. And when I stalled and sidestepped, and waffled and said how tough that would be, how Hortense would never consent, so I couldn’t get a divorce, I suddenly knew that she believed me and that soon I would be free.”