All These Condemned (4 page)

That’s the way she was. Until we fell into the orbit around Wilma Ferris. Wilma is the strongest woman I know. My God, she’s strong. She keeps pressure on you all the time. As they say about certain entertainers, she’s always on. There is never any directness or simplicity. Only the impression thereof. And my girl became like a big fluttery moth circling the hot flame. She dived in finally and came out and she wasn’t Mavis any more. She was another edition of Wilma. Not deep on the inside, where Wilma is like steel. But all the outward manifestations. Wilma seemed to polarize her. To line up all her molecules or something. So she thinks Wilma is the mostest woman that ever walked the earth, and each day there is less of Mavis and more of Wilma. And the hell of it is, perfecting the facsimile means getting as close to Wilma’s standard of living as we can.

That alone I could adjust to. But my Mavis was a good girl. I mean good in the old-fashioned sense. Where things are black and other things are white. Wilma operates in an even shade of gray. And I have sensed that Wilma is superimposing
her own moral standards on my Mavis. That frightens me.

I think there was a time when I could have told Mavis a little story about Wilma. And the little story would have severed that umbilical cord through which she feeds Mavis. But I waited too long, and if I told her now she might look at me with that derision I saw that afternoon in Wilma’s eyes.

Wilma asked me to come up to her apartment. A chat about our tie-up with the advertising agency, Fern and Howey. But from the moment I walked in, I sensed how it was. She had set her de luxe stage, and all I had to do was reach out. I damn near did. I was very, very close. But I kept remembering Randy Hess, remembering that big ring she had put in his nose, and I didn’t want any such ring in my nose. A business relationship was entirely enough. I gingerly untangled myself and made it just obvious enough so that she could hint that I was scared. I said it wasn’t that, exactly, and was rewarded with her look of derision. From that afternoon on she started seeing even more of Mavis. It sounds a little crazy to say that because she batted zero with me, she would concentrate on making my wife emotionally dependent on her, but not when you know Wilma. She has to win, somehow. I think it was Steve Winsan who told me about the titled lady in Cuernavaca who consistently and politely declined all invitations to attend parties at Wilma’s place. Not long after that the Mexican authorities found an irregularity in the titled lady’s residence permit, and the lady had to go back from whence she came.

Wilma had been entertaining the Mexican official who was in charge of those permits.

She has to win, somehow.

I can understand some of it and I don’t blame her. She came from nothing. From a complete nothing. The lower East Side, they say, where you learn a hell of a lot about survival. Maybe it was there that she learned she had to win all the time. And maybe if she was still struggling, that desire to win would be channeled in the right direction. But she
has
won, and so it has been diverted to a lot of social and personal stuff, where it becomes just so much malicious mischief, and worse. Like those two husbands she took on. One ended up a hopeless alcoholic, and the first one shot himself. They were sort of unstable guys to start with. I sometimes think she is attracted to instability, that she sort of feeds on it. Randy Hess is a pretty good example of that.

I’ve made her sound like a mess. Actually she is a hell of a lot of woman. You’ve got to admire her. But sort of in the way you admire a parade going by. With a lot of drums.

We got in the car and started up the parkway and you could feel what kind of day it was going to be in the city. A bake job. One of those Dutch-oven days followed by a night when all that stone would be radiating heat until dawn.

Mavis said, “Dahling, it would have been a dreadful day to stay in town.” Accent, intonation, huskiness—all a lovely imitation of Wilma Ferris. And she was drenched with that damn stuff Wilma uses. Blue Neon, it’s called. Twenty bucks an ounce, and our chemists say it’s one of the heaviest in the Ferris line. I wished Wilma Ferris would be suddenly taken dead. It wouldn’t affect my job. And it might give me my wife back.

Once we got far enough north so that we had a reasonable
assurance of keeping moving, I pulled over on the grass and put the top down. I’d needed the new car like a second head, but once Wilma had casually mentioned that she thought closed cars were terribly dull, I knew that sooner or later I would have to trade.

We had the big fight before we got to Albany. I guess I started it. It was some damn thing she said that parroted an opinion of Wilma’s. And I asked her if she would please, for God’s sake, start being herself and stop being a cheap imitation of Wilma. And she told me that Wilma was the finest woman she had ever met, and Wilma was doing so much for her, and I ought to be grateful instead of stinking about it, and it was any wife’s job to improve herself and she wanted to be a credit to me, and it helped me for her to be so close to Wilma, her best friend practically, and I wanted to shut her up in a jail or something so she couldn’t have any friends, make a nun out of her or something. And then she got as far away from me as she could and she cried in a way that was entirely alien to her. An aloof weeping, full of pain and dignity. I just wished she would cry the way she used to. A lusty, puff-eyed yowling, full of snorts and wet noises.

“It’s going to be a dandy week end, isn’t it?” I said.

“Divine,” she said remotely.

Traffic was heavy, but out of annoyance with her and with myself I drove too fast, so we got to Lake Vale a little before five. I looked at the marked map. Her place was on the opposite side of the lake from the village. Mavis sat forward, obviously excited at seeing the place. She was the one who spotted the sign. A varnished plaque swinging from wrought iron, with the name written on it in brass in
flowing script with no capital letter, the same as on the trade-mark:
ferris
. I turned left down the narrow gravel road toward the lake.

Except for the obvious fact of a power line and a phone line going in, the winding rutted road would make you think you were heading for a beat-up cabin. We went through over a thousand feet of woods, a thick stand of birch and pine and maple, all downhill, then we saw the blue gleam of the lake through the trees and saw the house itself. It would take your breath away, that house by the lake. Not just because it was so damn big. I’d heard she brought up some kid architect from Miami on the assumption that at least he’d do something different. He’d done it, all right. Stone and wood and a lot of glass, but none of that business about looking as though it grew out of the rock ledge on which it stood. That place looked as if it had glided in and was ready to take off across the lake as soon as you fired the rockets. Mavis looked at it in a glaze of ecstasy, lips parted, fingers wound in knots.

There was a sizable parking area, with five cars already parked. One beat-up station wagon, Wilma’s little steel-blue Austin-Healey, which she drives like a banshee with her hair on fire, a yellow Buick Skylark that I recognized as the Hesses’ car, a new-looking black MG that might be Steve Winsan’s, and a white Jaguar with a little line-drawing caricature of Judy Jonah on the door, leaving no doubt as to its ownership. I parked our crate at the auto show and a big Mexican with a long sad face came trotting out. I unlocked the rear end so he could get at the luggage. He told us to take the path around the house.

There was a big grass terrace on the right, all set up for
English croquet with umbrellaed tables for the gallery. We went around the wing of the house to the big concrete terrace enclosed by the U of the structure. There were two sets of concrete steps that made slow curves down the rocky bank in front of the place to another and shallower terrace and two huge docks that stuck out into the blue lake. Two identical runabouts, fast-looking, well kept, were tied up at the dock. I saw water skis on the dock, or pier I guess would be a better word. They were built like Fort Knox, probably to withstand the ice in winter. Judy Jonah was down on the pier, face down on a red mat, and Gilman Hayes sat near her, his brown back heavily muscled, legs dangling over the edge.

Wilma came hurrying across the big terrace toward us, making little sounds of delight. She spread her arms as though she would hug us both at once. She wore a white dress so painfully simple that you could almost read the price tag. She kissed Mavis and cooed at her, and patted my arm and got between us and led us back to the group. Randy Hess and Steve Winsan untangled themselves from some sort of lounge affairs.

“Of course you know everybody,” Wilma said. “That’s the point of this whole party. We’re all friends. No strangers to adjust to.”

Noel Hess smiled at us in her mild way. Steve shook my hand in that outdoor-boy manner he uses as stock in trade. Randy Hess greeted us with that sort of apologetic nervousness of his that reminds me sometimes of a child that suspects he shouldn’t be hanging around the grownups so much.

“Your house is absolutely lovely,” Mavis told Wilma.

“Thank you, darling. Now come on, dears. I’ll show you your room. José should have your luggage in by now.”

We went off the terrace through a door in a glass wall and through a perfectly tremendous room, and then down the corridor of what was apparently a bedroom wing, to the first door. José was putting the last suitcase on a rack. We had a big window overlooking the lake. The room was paneled in some silvery wood. Everything was built in. A big dressing room between the bedroom and the bath turned it into a semisuite.

“Gosh!” Mavis said. It was the first honest sound I had heard out of her in a month. She recouped lost ground immediately, saying, “It’s perfectly dahling, dahling.”

“Suppose I send José in with a drink while you dears are freshening up,” Wilma said.

“Please,” Mavis said. “A Martini …”

“Extra dry, coming up. And you, Paul?”

“Bourbon and water, thanks,” I said. Mavis gave me the stone glare. I am supposed to take up Martinis. It makes no difference to her that to me they taste like battery acid and get me howling drunk in twenty minutes. I’m supposed to conform.

Wilma left and we did some unpacking in sepulchral silence. Mavis stalked into the bath first. José brought the drinks, Mavis’ in one of those little bottle things the way they’re served in the better bars. I laid out a pair of fresh slacks and a gray gabardine shirt. Mavis came out of the bathroom with her dress over her arm and took a fast knock at the Martini.

“Go easy on that nitro, honey,” I told her. “Last time you lost your sawdust.”

“Did I indeed?” she asked, one eyebrow high, a Wilma look.

“Your samba with that Hayes phony was more utilitarian than graceful.”

“Gil Hayes is a talented artist.”

“Gil Hayes is a carefully calculated eccentric. The rhythmic integrity of spatial design.” I made a rude noise.

“Oh, shut up,” she said. It was the second honest sound she’d made within twenty minutes. Maybe there was hope left. From the neck down she looked very pink and pleasant indeed. She detected the examination and turned away quickly, saying, “Don’t get messy.”

When I came out of the bathroom she was gone, glass and all. I sat on the bed and finished my bourbon and thought dark thoughts about the week end. We couldn’t legitimately leave until Sunday before noon. That meant getting through two evenings and one day of fun and games. And it would be a week end like one of those simplified models of the structure of the atom, with Wilma as the nucleus, and all her pet electrons whirling around the edge.

I dressed and went out. I found Randy in the big living room. He was biting his lip and fiddling with Wilma’s high-fidelity setup. It was built into the west wall. I know a little bit about such things, so I went over and watched him diddle around. There was a Magnecord tape recorder racked the way you see them in radio studios. It had the hubs for one-hour tapes. There was a big Fisher amplifier, a Garrard changer fitted into a drawer, a Craftsman tuner, a big corner speaker enclosure. There was a control panel with switches marked for the various rooms so you could shunt the music around where you wanted it, an electronic mixer panel, and
a studio mike. It looked like a good three thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. Randy, with shaky hands, was trying to thread the tape around the empty hub and across the heads of the recorder. He gave me a nervous smile. “Little music coming up,” he said.

Wilma came in off the terrace. “Really, Randy,” she said in a most unpleasant voice. “A simple little thing like that. Just get out of the way. Here. Hold my drink.”

He held her glass. Her fingers were deft. She threaded the tape, fastened it to the empty reel, turned on the recorder. The tape began to turn slowly onto the empty reel. “Bring me a fresh one, Randy.” He hurried off obediently.

The music started. It was alive in the room. Clear and perfect. It made the back of my neck tingle. She adjusted the volume, frowned at the panel board, then clicked a switch labeled “Terrace.”

She said, “You lose something if you try to operate too many speakers at once. This one is the best one here. I’ll turn it off so we can get the most out of the terrace enclosure. Don’t try to answer any question Judy might ask you about the program.”

The abrupt change caught me off balance. I had the stupid idea she meant the program of music. And then I realized she meant the television program we had sponsored until Judy went off for the summer.

“I can’t answer any questions because I don’t know the answers, Wilma.”

She patted my cheek. “That’s a dear.” She was standing quite close to me. There is an odd quality about her. When you are close to her you are so very conscious of her physically. Her mouth looks redder, her skin softer; her breathing
seems deeper. It is an almost overpowering aliveness, and it has a strong sexual base to it. It is impossible for any normal man to stand close to Wilma and talk to her without having his mind veer inevitably toward bed. It is, perhaps, the same quality that Miss Monroe had. It fogs up your mind when you want it to be clear. And she is perfectly aware of that.