Росс Макдональд - The Far Side of the Dollar

She flung out her arm, with the fingers spread at the end of it.

“Very likely it is. I think that’s why your husband and Miss Drew got together this morning. He probably phoned her early in the week. Tuesday afternoon.”

“He did! I remember now. He was phoning from the bar, and I came into the room. He cut it short. But I heard him say something to the effect that they must absolutely keep quiet. It must have been that Drew woman he was talking to.”

The scornful phrase made me wince. It was a painful, strange colloquy, but we were both engrossed in it. The intimacy of the people we were talking about forced intimacy on us.

“It probably was her,” I said. “I’d just told Lieutenant Bastian that she was a witness, and Bastian must have passed it on to your husband.”

“You’re right again, Mr. Archer. My husband had just heard from the lieutenant. How can you possibly know so much about the details of other people’s lives?”

“Other people’s lives are my business.”

“And your passion?”

“And my passion. And my obsession, too, I guess. I’ve never been able to see much in the world besides the people in it.”

“But how could you possibly find out about that phone call? You weren’t here. My husband wouldn’t tell you.”

“I was in Miss Drew’s apartment when the call came. I didn’t hear what was said, but it shook her up.”

“I hope so.”

She glanced at my face, and her eyes softened. She reached out and touched my arm with gentle fingers. “She isn’t a friend of yours?”

“She is, in a way.”

“You’re not in love with her?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“That’s a puzzling answer.”

“It puzzles me, too. If she’s still in love with your husband it would tend to chill one’s interest. But I don’t think she is.”

“Then what are they trying to conceal?”

“Something in the past.”

I hoped it was entirely in the past. Susanna, I had learned in the course of the morning, could still hurt me where I lived.

“It would help if you’d go into it a little deeper. I know it will also hurt,” I said to myself and her.

“I can stand pain if there’s any purpose in it. It’s the meaningless pain I can’t stand. The pain for Tom, for instance.”

She didn’t explain what she meant, but she touched her blue-veined temple with her fingertips.

“I’ll try to make it short, Mrs. Hillman. You said the affair has been going on for twenty years. That would take it back to around the end of the war.”

“Yes. The spring of 1945. I was living alone, or rather with a woman companion, in a house in Brentwood. My husband was in the Navy. He had been a squadron commander, but at the time I’m talking about he was executive officer of an escort carrier. Later they made him captain of the same ship.”

She spoke with a kind of forlorn pride, and very carefully, as if the precise facts of the past were all she had to hold on to.

“In January or February of 1945 my husband’s ship was damaged by a kamikaze plane. They had to bring it back to San Diego for repairs. Ralph had some days of leave, of course, and of course he visited me. But I didn’t see as much of him as I wanted to, or expected to. I found out later why. He was spending some of his nights, whole weekends, with Susanna Drew.”

“In the Barcelona Hotel?”

“Did she tell you?”

“In a way.”

She had given me Harold Harley’s picture of Carol, and the printing on the back of the picture had sent me to the Barcelona Hotel. “About herself she told me, not about your husband. She’s a loyal girl, anyway.”

“I don’t want to hear her praised. She’s caused me too much suffering.”

“I’m sorry. But she was only twenty, remember.”

“She’s closer to forty now. The fact that she was twenty then only made it worse. I was still in my twenties myself, but my husband had already discarded me. Do you have any idea how a woman feels when her husband leaves her for a younger woman? Can you imagine the crawling of the flesh?”

She was suffering intense remembered pain. Her eyes were bright and dry, as if there was fire behind them. The cheerfullest thing I could think of to say was: “But he didn’t leave you.”

“No. He came back. It wasn’t me he cared for. There was the money, you see, and his postwar plans for his engineering firm. He was quite frank on the subject, and quite impenitent. In fact, he seemed to feel that he was doing me an enormous favor. He felt that any couple who couldn’t have a child–” Her hand went to her mouth again.

I prompted her: “But you had Tom.”

“Tom came later,” she said, “too late to save us.”

Her voice broke into a deeper range. “Too late to save my husband. He’s a tragically unhappy man. But I can’t find it in my heart to pity him.”

Her hand touched her thin breast and lingered there.

“What’s the source of the trouble between him and Tom?”

“The falsity,” she said in her deeper voice.

“The falsity?”

“I might as well tell you, Mr. Archer. You’re going to find out about it sooner or later, anyway. And it may be important. Certainly it’s psychologically important.”

“Was Tom – is Tom an adopted son?”

She nodded slowly. “It may have to come out publicly, I don’t know. For the present I’ll ask you not to divulge it to anyone. No one in town here knows it. Tom doesn’t know it himself. We adopted him in Los Angeles shortly after my husband left the Navy and before we moved here.”

“But he resembles your husband.”

“Ralph chose him for that reason. He’s a very vain man, Mr. Archer. He’s ashamed to admit even to our friends that we were incapable of producing a child of our own. Actually Ralph is the one who is sterile. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why he has insisted from the beginning on the great pretense. His desire, to have a son was so powerful, I think he has actually believed at times that Tom is his own flesh and blood.”

“And he hasn’t told Tom he isn’t?”

“No. Neither have I. Ralph wouldn’t let me.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be a poor idea, with an adopted child?”

“I told my husband that from the beginning. He had to be honest with Tom, or Tom would not be honest with him. There would be falsity at the center of the household.”

Her voice trembled, and she looked down at the carpet as if there was no floor under it. “Well, you see what the consequence has been. A ruined boyhood for Tom and a breakdown of the family and now this tragedy.”

“This almost-tragedy. He’s still alive and we’re going to get him back.”

“But can we ever put the family back together?”

“That will depend on all three of you. I’ve seen worse fractures mended, but not without competent help. I don’t mean Laguna Perdida. And I don’t mean just help for Tom.”

“I know. I’ve been wretchedly unhappy, and my husband has been quite– quite irrational on this subject for many years. Actually I think it goes back to Midway. Ralph’s squadron was virtually massacred in that dreadful battle. Of course he blamed himself, since he was leading them. He felt as though he had lost a dozen sons.”

“How do you know?”

“He was still writing to me then,” she said, “freely and fully, as one human being to another. He wrote me a number of very poignant letters about our having children, sons of our own. I know the thought was connected with his lost fliers, although he never said so. And when he found out he couldn’t have a son of his own, and decided to adopt Tom, well–”

She dropped her hands in her lap. Her hands seemed restless without knitting to occupy them.