Джеймс Кейн - The Enchanted Isle

“You mean you’re going to ask them, ‘Did you call the cops?’ Oh, boy! Talk about me being dumb!”

“No, I know what I’m going to ask, but...”

“Well, can’t you call from here?”

“And have these girls listen in?”

“Rick, get with it, for God’s sake. Wake up where you are! You could be president of the United States and these girls would not listen in! They’re too busy! This place is too big! It’s...”

“OK, OK.”

He grabbed the coat, which was still on the other bed, turned the pocket down to look at the label, and when he had the name of the store found the number in the book. He gave it in, and when the store came on he said, “Fur coat department, please... Fur coats? Did a girl come in today to buy a mink coat off you? Young girl around sixteen, paying with twenty-dollar bills?... Oh, she did! Well, I’m her husband, and I just called to say I’m bringing that coat back! She had no business buying a mink coat at all! That money was given to us, to both of us when we got married, for sheets and blankets and carpets and chairs, to help furnish our home!.. What did you say?” Then he held on for some time and listened while some woman talked at the other end. Then, in kind of a different tone, he said, “Then, you won’t take it back? OK, it’s what I wanted to know.” He hung up, fell back on the bed, and gasped, “Thank God, thank God, thank God!”

“Yeah? For what?”

“They haven’t called the cops — I could tell from how she talked, that woman who came on the line. She said money was money, and it wasn’t up to them to ask any questions about it. She said the girl did mention her wedding present, but if that much cash was unusual, there was nothing about it that the store had to question at all or pass judgment on. And merchandise on sale is not subject to return. And, she gave me no lead at all to find out who I was or bait me into the store. All she gave me was the brush. So...”

“Seems that God didn’t make little apples — just big ones, maybe.”

“Now there’s a thought. There’s a thought and a half.”

He squirmed in the bed some more, then burst out, “I’ve got to find out about Vernick! Whether he called the cops, or what! I’ve got to check on him!”

So he looked in the book again and gave the number in that I knew so well. Then: “Mr. Vernick, you don’t know me, but I’m calling about a girl who was out to your house today, or so I understand...” Then a voice cut him off and there came a click. He hung up and said, “Thank God, thank God once more, thank the all-merciful God. He didn’t call any cops either. If he had, he’d have tried to find out who I was, where I was calling from, and where Mandy Vernick was. He didn’t — just said, ‘I’ve nothing to say about her. Goodbye!’”

“So you got all worked up over nothing.”

“I’m sorry, Mandy.”

“And we are sitting pretty, aren’t we?”

“If we are.”

“Well? Are we or aren’t we?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know! Mandy, I’m shot.”

“...You mean... you got hit? ”

“I mean I’m jittered. Bad.”

“Oh! You scared me there for a minute.”

At last I calmed down, then took off my clothes and went marching around naked. Then I put my pajamas on and got in the other bed. Sitting pretty or not, I felt like holy hell and wanted arms around me. I own up he didn’t turn me on, at lease not much, but any port in a storm, and I’d been through one. I was hoping he’d come to me, and if it meant that other, then, OK, I’d even have stood for that. But nothing happened. I didn’t know why, especially after that pass that he’d made the night before, talking about my legs and then making a pest of himself to get me in bed with him. He just lay there, now and then sipping his drink. He wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t taking too much, but he seemed to need it, the way he was acting. He said he’d ordered it up from room service, along with the afternoon paper, and signed for it, tipping the boy out of the money I’d given him while we were buying our things at the plaza. He had put the tray on the luggage rack, the sawhorse thing with tapes, and offered me a drink, but I told him I didn’t like it. So it went on for some little time, him sipping and thinking and me sighing and hoping, and then all of a sudden I knew why he was not coming over, not slipping into my bed when he must have known I’d say yes. It was because he was scared, or “shot” as he called it — not on account of me, of that, or of anything in particular, but of everything, especially the cops. And I thought about last night, the way I’d thought about it, on account of being mad. And I realized if a girl gets mad enough, she won’t, and if a guy gets scared enough, he can’t.

After a long time, he said, “Mandy, I’ve been thinking about it, ’specially about him, this guy today, Vernick. I mean he could be right. Maybe he’s not your father.”

“He has to be! He and mother were married!”

“That don’t prove anything.”

“Well, why wouldn’t he be?”

“He told you. He knows stuff, of course, that he didn’t mention to you, but on top of that your looks told him, so he said. You don’t look like his kith or kin.”

“What’s kith?”

“I don’t rightly know. Friends, maybe.”

“His friends could be my father? Was that it?”

“Mandy, I don’t know what it was.”

“Well, what was he getting at?”

“That some other guy is your father.”

“Oh! That’s all!”

“Mandy, it could be true. And it would help, I would think, if you got with it now, ’stead of cussing him out about it.”

“You mean if I believed it?”

“Well? I believe it.”

“...You believe it? Why?”

“The stuff you told me, Mandy, about yourself, about your mother, about him, and about Steve, this guy who beat you up who seemed to know more, to know a whole lot more, than he was telling you.”

“And it’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“At lease you’d quit plaguing yourself about him.”

“But then I wouldn’t know! Who my father is!”

“I was coming to that.”

For the third time I’d been hit in the stomach and started to cry again. When I could talk I said, “Here it’s all I’ve thought about, this last year and a half, my father, my real, sure-enough father, how I would go to him, how he’d ask me in real nice, how he’d take me in his arms, and how we’d be happy. And now look how it’s turned out!” I told him then, for the first time, about the desert island and how I’d dreamed about it, that my father and I would swim there after our plane was forced down, and we’d stay there and live, eating clams and drinking coconut milk. I said, “Maybe we never would, maybe it was just silly, but I would imagine that we were there and laugh to myself about it, thinking how we would live there.” He listened and didn’t make any cracks, just let me talk along. Then he got out of bed and sat on the floor beside me, there between the beds, in front of the liquor tray, so his face was close to mine. Then he took my hand and kissed it. Then he said, “Mandy, why can’t I be your father?”

“...You! You be my father, Rick?”

“Yeah, starting right now.”

“You’re not much more than a boy.”

“I’m that much more than a boy that I can eat clams with you and drink coconut milk on that island we’re going to have.”

“You mean you’re not laughing at it?”

“I mean we’re going to have one!”

“...When? And where? ”

“In Florida! Now! Now we know where we’re going! Mandy, they have them down there! Cays, they call them — big ones, little ones, whatever size you want, some with palm trees on them, some with nothing but grass, but all of them with clams! We’ll buy ourself one! We got money, haven’t we?”