He sipped his coffee. He said, “I’m the man who came to help. What can I do?”
She smiled in a bitter way. “There have been other guys very eager to help, and they came around with a detailed plan.”
“Really?”
“I’ll give you a sample. Johnny Dorran. Pretty good friend, I thought. He had a peachy, dandy little unlisted growth stock. I should cash the insurance and sock the money into it right away. It was a special favor on account of the favors Mitch had done him. It was a steal at three dollars a share. Western Devices, Inc. Pick up ten thousand shares. Nobody knew it yet, but Westinghouse was dickering to buy it in order to pick up the patent rights. In six months and a day I could sell out again, and I had his personal word it would sell at least twelve. So, after capital gains taxes, I’d walk away with a hundred thousand dollars. He had me all steamed up, Cal. It seemed like the answer to everything. I had to keep it a dark secret but, thank God, Bill Wandell wormed it out of me. Seems Johnny Dorran was in that little company up to his eyeballs, and my thirty thousand would have been bailing him out of a very serious hole. Bill investigated. He had a little talk with Johnny. One friend gone. Bill told me last month, just as a matter of personal interest, that Western Devices is selling for a dollar and a quarter a share. Nice?”
“The world is full of wolves, Lollie.”
“And they look just like people. When I think how close I came to doing such a fool thing, I feel sick. But there’ve been a couple of other things I can feel even sicker about.”
“The same kind of thing?”
“No. Johnny takes the prize for that. A different thing entirely. Dear, sweet Ralph Becklund. More a friend of Mitch’s than mine. But he helped a lot and he was very sweet. Sometimes the dam breaks and you have to run blindly into somebody’s arms, just to be held for a minute, blubbering like a child. Mitch gave me a lot of physical affection, Cal. I like being held. About two weeks after the funeral, Ralph brought some papers out to be signed. Something set me off. I can’t remember what it was now. Some little thing. He was nearby and I trusted him, and I flung myself against his manly chest. And in a little while I suddenly realized the son of a gun was trying to turn it into a big opportunity. He was all hands. As soon as I was certain, I wrenched myself free and I swung and I hit him right on the nose. With my fist. He stood there, dazed and bleeding, and I went into the worst case of hysterics I’ve ever had. You know, he worked with Mitch for... at least six years. What kind of friendship is that? What did he take me for?”
“For vulnerable.”
“Never that vulnerable, Cal. Never. But to get back to advice. You know me, I guess, as well as anybody. I want to ask you an impossible thing, dear. You know the situation. You know the kids. You met my best friends last night. Tell me what my direction should be? Tell me what to do with my life.”
“That would be presumptuous and...”
“I need the objective viewpoint.”
“Maybe I’m too close to it. I miss Mitch too, Lollie. I’ll miss him the rest of my life. How many close, close friends can one man have in a lifetime? Two? Three? I loved that guy too.”
She felt it beginning to happen. She got up and managed a smile and said, “Sit tight. Back in a minute.”
She shut herself in the bathroom and muffled the hard familiar explosions of sobbing in a woolly bath towel. She accepted it with a dreary practicality, a spasm she could not help, like the morning sickness when she had carried Kit.
When it had dwindled, she washed her face, bathed her eyes in cold water, replaced her lipstick and went back to the kitchen.
“Don’t get feeling too responsible, Cal. I’m not saying I’d plan my life around what you think it should be. Maybe I’m only checking my own ideas.”
“I’d want to think about it.”
“Of course.”
“One thing comes to mind. And I don’t know if I can say it properly. Mitch was doing well in a very tough competitive industry. And you were part of it. Success isn’t just what goes on down in that office building. Part of the fight went on here too. Suburbia is just as rough a battlefield. You win the social and the political skirmishes here. And renew the guy for the next day’s wars. This is probably a stupid analogy, Lollie, but considering you as the drummer boy, how much sense does it make to have you keep right on marching toward the enemy after the troops have been shot down?”
“The analogy isn’t stupid.”
“It turns into a lot of motions without meaning, doesn’t it?”
“But when they’re the only motions you know...”
“Down in town the brass used to say Mitchell Barnes is a smart, aggressive guy. And he has a lovely wife, nice kids, an attractive home. They entertain well. They take an interest in their community. They have a wonderful stability. Now, regardless of the gags about the executive wife, that made Mitch potentially more valuable to the firm than if he were... a Cal Burch in a bachelor apartment in the city.”
“We joked about it, about being a team. We knew there was a phoniness about it, but we went along with it because that’s the way the world is.”
“Of course.”
“So that becomes the basic question, doesn’t it? Why should I live the same kind of life? Because, damn it, it’s what I know!”
“But you’re looking for purpose, aren’t you? Some purpose above and beyond the kind of negative purpose of not upsetting the life you and your kids are used to?”
She scowled at him. “But even that negative purpose is gone, Cal. Even if I stay here, it won’t be the life we were used to. It’ll be something else no matter what I do. And it can turn me into somebody else. Somebody I don’t want to be. I can feel that happening. The wives close ranks, you know.”
“What?”
“Oh, not my good friends. The rest of them. Lollie Barnes is a widow now. Predatory, dangerous.”
“Come, now!”
She laughed. “Golly, you can look very fierce and indignant, Cal. I don’t blame them, really. Some of them have good cause to be nervous. Not on my account. Just because they’ve let themselves go dumpy and dreary. I think it’s a primitive thing, really, worrying about the unattached female in the tribal village. But if you go on for a long time with wives clutching their husbands and steering them away, it can have its effect on your own personality, you know. A lady could eventually start walking as if she were just about to start twisting. I could buy eyelashes out to here and develop a significant chuckle.”
“Cut it out, Lollie.”
“Anyhow, you put your finger on the problem, Caclass="underline" Something positive to do with my life.”
“So all I have to do is come up with a good answer?”
“Won’t you?”
“Any minute now,” he said, and grinned. His grin was a rare thing. It broke all the somber planes of his face. It had always made her feel good to see Cal Burch grin.
He went into the city for an early afternoon appointment concerning the acquisition of a large tract in Georgia for one of the subsidiary companies. On the way in, the city looked better than usual to him. He seemed to feel a pleasant nostalgia he could not quite identify. Later in the day, as he came out of the office building on Lexington Avenue, he realized that the two long talks with Lollie had sent a part of him back into the past, way back before he had met Barbara and made a bad marriage, soon ended. Mitch and Lollie had the apartment on Gay Street, and sometimes the three of them talked all night. And running through the traditional cynicism of all such talk had been the clean, clear thread of hope and confidence. The world was a shabby, sleepy old beast and they were the ones to saddle it and ride it into the golden era.