Джеймс Кейн - Root of His Evil [= Shameless]

Somehow, by asking a number of his friends to help and practically using main force, Mr. Hunt got the photographers and reporters out and Mrs. Hunt must have dealt with Lula for she wasn’t there any more, and then for fifteen or twenty minutes everybody stood around and talked about it, except that when I approached they hurriedly began to talk about something else. Then they all went, shaking hands with me very hurriedly, and then I found myself alone in the living room, as Grant, his three sisters and his mother having gone somewhere else. But in a moment Mr. Hunt came in, made two highballs and said: “Let’s go in here — it’s not so public.”

He took me into a small library and closed the door. We sat down and sipped our drinks and he kept rubbing the moisture on his glass with his thumb. Then he said: “I’m not sure, but I think that sinks you.”

“You mean Lula?”

“Couldn’t you have pretended it was a case of mistaken identity or something?”

“If I were sick or needed somebody she’s the one person on earth that I could call on.”

“I suppose there was nothing else you could do, but if you think the noble Grant is going to take a broad attitude toward it, you’re very optimistic.”

“Grant is not a complete fool.”

“No, but he’s a complete snob, and that’s serious.”

“I haven’t seen any signs of it.”

“Did you ever hear of the silver cord?”

“What’s that?”

“An intangible but terrible bond, that sometimes exists between mother and son, and invariably spells trouble for them both. Not one thing about Grant is on the up-and-up except his interest in Indians. His phony radicalism, his rebellion against Uncle George, his nutty talk about breaking the system, and all the rest of it merely represent his feeble effort to break the silver cord, and whether he can do it I wouldn’t like to say. But I know this much: Lula will give Mama a club over him that he’ll feel from morning to night. And don’t make any mistake about it: Grant is the worst snob of the lot.”

“He married me. That doesn’t look much like a snob.”

“Masochism.”

“... What did you say?”

“Torturing himself, going out in the back yard and eating worms so Mama will feel ashamed of herself, for trying to make him marry Muriel.”

“Why, by the way, did she try to make him do that?”

“Money, partly. With those two fortunes blended many things would be possible. But mainly because Muriel is a dull cluck of a girl that Mama wouldn’t have to be jealous of that Grant hates. The silver cord binds two ways.”

“Why does she oppose the Indians?”

“Sadism.”

“You’re using words I’m not familiar with.”

“She also likes to torture him, and she’s not done yet.”

“What else can she do?”

“One thing she can do is begin trotting around with some man. That’s what she usually does, and when she starts it this time I predict Grant will go simply insane. I don’t think you quite understand this yet. It’s not pretty. It’s unnatural, unhealthy and tragic. But it’s what you’re up against.”

“You mean — she wants to make him jealous as though she were some girl he was in love with — or that was in love with him?”

“Exactly. Except that it’s a love that can never get anywhere. If you ask me, Mama has some strange youth complex. I think she resents Grant — why Grant and not the other three I can’t explain, except that he came first — because he compelled her to become a woman instead of the seventeen-year-old girl that she instinctively wants to be. When he arrived, that was the end of her youth. But it doesn’t help any that her youth is still with her, so far as her appearance goes, and so is a habitual interest in men and a trained technique at getting them. As to her morals, I prefer not to speak. Grant had the misfortune to be born to a woman who could still be his sweetheart, and it’s the blight of his life.”

I didn’t feel depressed or hysterical as I had felt before in these last few days. I merely felt cold and weak from encountering things that I didn’t understand. Still, I heard myself say: “Well — what am I going to do about it?”

“Perhaps there’s nothing you can do about it. Reckoning condition of the track, form of the starters and confidential information from the paddock, I would rate your chances at about one to ninety-nine. If it were myself, I think I’d scratch my entry and be done with it. Of course you may feel differently.”

To that I made no reply. He sipped his drink, then came over to me, sat on the arm of my chair and turned my face up to him. “I like you, for some reason. I could see your head working in there this afternoon. You played your cards well and if there’s one thing I enjoy it’s seeing somebody lead into dummy, finesse through trouble and win through a grand slam. But you haven’t got the cards, that’s all. I’m on your side, and if there’s anything I can do you can call on me. But what I really think is: You’re sunk.”

When we went back in the living room everybody except Grant had gone and he had his hat and stick and was waiting for me. I thanked Mrs. Hunt and she said it had been a pleasure, but her eyes had the same glassy look I had seen in her mother’s and I knew that her little flurry of friendliness was over and that so far as she was concerned the whole thing had been a fiasco that would not be repeated.

Grant and I walked down Madison a few blocks, then crossed over and had dinner at a place on Fifty-fifth Street. There would be long silences and then he would talk feverishly about things like the Army Air Force and the new planes they were building. It was well after eight when we left the Hunts and it must have been ten o’clock when we got through dinner. We walked down Fifth Avenue to Fifty-fourth Street, then over toward the apartment. As we crossed Third Avenue a truck was unloading tabloids at a newsstand. I stopped and bought one and there, sure enough, was the first of those terrible pictures that came out showing Lula at the cocktail party with numbers all over it and down at the bottom the names, corresponding to the numbers, of all the prominent-people who were present. We started along again but as we went I was looking at the paper. Suddenly he stopped, snatched the paper out of my hand and threw it down on the pavement. He ran toward it and kicked it, then kicked it again and again until it was just a litter of pages flying all over the street. Then he stood there panting, and I knew that everything Mr. Hunt had said was true. He hated that picture, hated Lula and I think at that moment hated me. In spite of all his fine talk he was really what money, education and family had made him, a snob who had no respect for what my life had made me. A terrible sense of helpless pain swept over me, of being hurt more than I knew I could be hurt, and it was then that I knew how much I loved him and how desperately I had to fight, even if the chances were one to ninety-nine against me.

From then on grant and I were almost strangers to each other. There were times when we forgot everything else and were terribly close, but they were merely occasional interludes in what was beginning to feel like the unreal dreams one has in a fever. The newspapers were only incidental so far as I was concerned. What made it so terrible was Grant and the grim, hunted look he had all the time, and especially when he came back to the apartment after going out for a little while, and I knew he had seen his family or his friends or somebody and had felt compromised and embarrassed in talking with them.

However, the worst was yet to come, for I wasn’t done yet with Lula Schultz. On the Monday after the cocktail party, about ten o’clock in the morning, a few minutes after Grant had gone down to his office to pick up his mail, she had shown up. The desk phoned in a very queer way that a woman was in the lobby to see me. I told them to send her up and when I opened the door there she was, a straw suitcase in one hand and looking like something that had come out of a bread line. Her eyes were red, her face pasty, her clothes all bedraggled, and when she saw me she swayed as though she were about to fall. I caught her and brought her inside, then hastily went out and took in the suitcase, for the elevator man was still there, staring as though he could hardly believe his eyes. When I got inside she was half lying on the big sofa and began to talk in her usual rough and ungrammatical way. “I hope I may drop dead, Carrie, I never meant to ask anything off you. I wasn’t going to bother you, but I couldn’t pass out right in Central Park, could I? Being drug down to Bellevue in a police car wouldn’t do you no good. Soon as I give my name them papers would have started in on you all over again. I know ’em. They don’t never give you no break.”