Eric felt keenly alive and hungry. He wanted breakfast, a big one, eggs and a ham steak, the yolks pricked and running into the hashed browns, a stack of buttered toast to mop it up with, and cups of hot black coffee. He wanted a woman, achingly and surprisingly, and a stinging shower, fresh clothes, wanted to be in one of those dark New York bars, the faint, smoke-streaked light breaking on rows of bottles and glasses, and a girl, perhaps a young actress, glancing at him from the corner of her eyes, wondering at his secret, confident smile.
The neon sign from the storefront church across the street flashed against his face, the garish tones softened by the spreading morning light. He wondered why he found it so exasperating. Perhaps it was just his normal reaction to fanatics with their convictions of eternal chumminess with the Lord, hopeless losers with their ridiculous, credulous Faith and Tithings, their tiny plastic saints hanging from windshields, blatantly arrogant bumper stickers proclaiming their faith in the Second Coming, their rapture in spiritual sex or unisex or some damned thing, their joy in having found It or lost It or shot It into a side pocket, every car begging to be rear-ended.
Suddenly, an involuntary shudder went through Eric’s body. Sitting up, he stared in a growing understanding and consternation at the tremor in his hands. He reached for the bottle and drank the last half-inch of whiskey straight from the neck, feeling the raw heat of the drink in his throat but realizing it wouldn’t touch a deep, anxious coldness that had settled in the pit of his stomach.
He knew now why those flashing church lights had irritated him at first and why they frightened him now, bringing with them as they did the nearly-forgotten memory of a disapproving lady with cold eyes and a bumper sticker on her blue Volkswagen.
Chapter Fifteen
Several days later, Miss Elizabeth Scobey sat at her desk facing the view of Philadelphia’s center city. It was a brilliant spring morning, and on such a day, superb with clean, cold winds off the rivers, she could see beyond Ben Franklin’s statue to the green expanses of Fairmount Park and from there all the way to the stone steps of the art museum.
Her phone rang suddenly.
“There’s a man to see you, Miss Scobey.” It was Emily at the front reception desk. “He doesn’t have an appointment but he says it’s personal and urgent.”
“What’s his name, dear?”
“Griffith, Mr. Eric Griffith.”
The name rang a vague bell. Miss Scobey glanced at the clutter of files and forms on her desk and said with mild exasperation, “I honestly don’t have a moment to spare. What does he want to see me about?”
After a minute, Emily was back on the phone saying, “It’s about an adoption you processed through this office about eight years ago. A little girl named Jessica Mallory. Mr. Griffith is her uncle. He wants to talk to you about something that happened back then. He insists it’s terribly important.”
Staring out at the gray-stone, gingerbread mass of City Hall, a vague, uneasy memory of a wintry countryside and Eric Griffith stirred in her. “Well, all right, send him in...”
“—I believe the human spirit is malleable, Miss Scobey. I believe it can be reshaped in the image of our Lord God, Jesus Christ. I believe in the phenomenon of redemption and rebirth—”
“Mr. Griffith, I don’t disagree but I have a deskful of—”
“—and that is why, I entreat you to hear me, Miss Scobey, that is why I’ve presumed on your valuable time. Because you, dear lady, in the mysterious ways of the Lord, may have been His instrument for the therapy of humility that led me to the higher plateaus of grace. Since you helped me once, even unknowingly, to be born again, I pray—”
“Mr. Griffith, I have every sympathy with what you’re trying to say, but would you please tell me what it is you want?”
“May the Lord bless you, Miss Scobey. Eight years ago, you came to my home to see me and my wife, Maud, to discuss our niece, Jessica Mallory...”
As Eric Griffith recreated that scene in the past, talking in a rambling, circuitous fashion, with evangelical sweeps and frequent invocations of the Deity, Miss Scobey remembered in considerably sharper detail her trip to the Griffith place in Chester County so many years earlier. And the memories were far from pleasant — Griffith with his nervous posturings, and his wife, eyes wide and round as the keys of a cash register glinting in her doll-like face, slamming the car door hard.
“Our unchristian selfishness has been a heavy burden, Miss Scobey, but like the cross itself, I have carried it as a sweet penance for my many sins.”
Suddenly, Miss Scobey realized why Eric Griffith was here. Of course. Andrew Dalworth, on the TV news and in the papers this week, still in a coma, near death from his injuries in a riding accident...
“Just what is it you want with this office, Mr. Griffith?”
“My beloved wife, Maud, is close to death, an incurable disease. I want you to help us, to join with me in bringing her into the presence of a forgiving God in this world — before she must account to Him for her sins in the next.”
Miss Scobey looked at him without expression. “Just how would you expect me to do that, Mr. Griffith?”
“You took extensive notes when you talked to Maud and me, Miss Scobey. I want to show those actual notes, that evidence of our callousness, to my wife, Maud. To make her understand how desperately she must seek the Lord’s forgiveness for having closed her arms and — yes — her heart, against our own flesh and blood.”
Miss Scobey’s phone rang. After listening a moment, she replaced the receiver and said, “Would you excuse me, Mr. Griffith? That was my boss. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Eric Griffith relaxed and looked with a musing smile at the views of the city stretching out toward cloudless horizons.
Suffused with a glow of superiority and a confident anticipation of victory, Eric savored the view along with the recollections of his meeting with Tony Saxe the day after the point-to-point at the Cadwalader estate.
Oh, yes, Tony had seen the money in it, that was clear enough, poring over the news items about Dalworth, the pictures of Easter Hill that Maud had brought to his club, holding them up for closer inspection, muttering statistics aloud in an excited voice, his face sharp and cunning as a vole’s, the smokey light in his office catching the glint of his diamond-chip cufflinks and the rings on his fingers. And the greedy glint in his eye had become as bright as those rings when Eric had pointed out that Andrew Dalworth was a widower with no children of his own, no living relatives and no one in the world with stronger emotional and legal claims to his affection and wealth than his adopted child, Eric’s own dear niece, Jessica Mallory.
Tony Saxe’s club, The Rhinestone Quaker, was located near the river on the outskirts of Camden, New Jersey, just across the Walt Whitman Bridge from Philadelphia — in a neighborhood gray with decay and noisy with funky jazz bars, with massage parlors and adult bookshops balanced in a precarious equipoise with the few respectable jewelers and furriers and pawnshops struggling for honest livings in a pocket of urban decline.
Saxe had paced behind his desk, the piano from the lounge sounding faintly around them, only the quick puffs on his slim brown cigar betraying his excitement. He hadn’t aged since Eric had last seen him, but it would have been difficult to tell in any case, because Saxe’s deeply tanned face was not only without lines or wrinkles but almost totally without expression. His eyes were dark, so dark the whites seemed strangely vivid in the frame of his hard features and cropped black hair. And he still favored the characteristic decorative and sartorial embellishments — jewelry, rings and tie-pins (this one a gold eagle with a small ruby in its claw) — and neat, dark suits, mohairs, Italian silks and gabardines.