An American Dream (22 page)

We had a profit to spend. It was what we had gained from that last hour—so she would tell me the truth. If finally I could not bear to hear it, then, said her face, we had not deserved the profit.

“Yes,” I said. “Carnal.”

“The trouble is,” said Cherry, “I hardly saw him. He would install me in some pleasant apartment in some city or other, and then I might not see him for a week. I would get the impression he had been across the country back and forth three times.”

“Didn’t you mind being alone?”

“No, I’d find the best singing coach around. And I did a lot of reading. I’d just wait for Daddy Warbucks to come back. It was a delight to talk to him. So long as I thought he was just a rich intelligent man with a family somewhere, it was all right. But one day I saw his picture in a news magazine, and realized he had not even told me his real name. I was ready to leave him then. But he convinced me to come with him to Vegas. He said if I were willing to live there, we could be together in public. So then I dug. Because in Vegas I naturally came to meet a few of his friends, and—click—they were the big dogs of the Mafia.”

“He was in the Mob?”

“He was wealthy. A very respectable man. He liked to gamble. Sometimes I would believe we were in town just for that. Sometimes I would come to the conclusion he might own some of Las Vegas. Because now when he would leave me for a week or often
enough a month—my telephone didn’t ring unless the call was from him. And that did not figure if he was simply a rich man who’d left his young lady behind. So I had to think I was either too unattractive to draw anybody near me, or Daddy was some special big dog. But very special. He was obviously not the type to be in the Mob, not in any way directly. You want some more coffee?”

“I’m fine.”

“I guess I am too.” She had been stopping at odd times in her account. There had been several pauses when she told me about her brother, and now there was one again.

“Of course, there’s always been an argument,” Cherry went on, “about ‘The Big Guy.’ Does he exist or doesn’t he? You could have two big-time hoods discussing this, brother peas in the pod right down to the same number of carats in the diamond on their tiepin, but one would say, ‘The Big Guy don’t exist, forget it,’ while the other would just about cross himself.”

“What did you decide?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I used to think Daddy Warbucks could be The Big Guy, nothing less. Then I would decide that was too farfetched.”

“What would you say today?”

“I think he wasn’t Mob at all. But the Mob did very special jobs for him. Very large intricate jobs. Some of it was overseas. I had that impression.”

Another of her pauses came here. “And then,” she said finally, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to know too much. Because there came a time when I wanted to get free of this man, and I didn’t know how to do it. He wasn’t the kind who would threaten or any of that discord, but I knew I’d get mangled on the way out, and the question was how badly.” She came to a full stop. “Well, we parted as friends. We had a quiet little talk, and he passed me on to an acquaintance—with my consent. I figured this was the way to pay my dues. So I got the friend—the king of narcotics in L.A. I found
out two days later. The friend had secret inclinations which could blast you to the moon. And he did threaten to kill me when I told him it wouldn’t go. I got my guts together for that one. I finally stood up to somebody, even to even. ‘Better not,’ I told the gentleman, ‘or I’ll make it a point to haunt you.’ These Mafiosos are superstitious as a witch. I had said the right thing. Only I didn’t know it then. I couldn’t sleep for the next two months waiting for the door to open. But at least I had the sense to stay where I was in town. One of the smartest men I knew once said, ‘Flee from a knife, but charge a gun,’ and this narcotics gent was strictly a pistol. If I’d tried to run to another city, I’d have gotten it in the back—which is a poor position from which to go out, for it makes the haunting less impressive.”

“What a pro you are.”

“Better believe it.”

“No, I’m impressed.”

“I was just a dry leaf waiting to fall off the tree. But I had good luck. So I was able to get myself together. Then I began to break in with singing dates in Vegas—because of my previous associations I had cartel—and I had a couple of nice years. I only went with men I liked, and there were a few I spent some time with, a couple of Italians with class whom I just did manage to find. Hoods, but I liked them. Italians are all so treacherous I used to feel virtuous next to them.” Pause. “But then I knew it was time to get to New York.”

“Why?”

“Some day I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me now.”

She pursed her mouth as though adding a bill. “I’d picked up power in Vegas I didn’t deserve. I didn’t know what to do with it. Nobody in the Mob knows how much anybody else knows. In fact nobody knows how much he knows himself. So considering the men I traveled with, other people I hardly knew were ready to do
favors. They thought I was more important than I was, and that helped to make me just a bit important. It’s not exactly cool to brag on this, but I had the power to get people killed. It also occurred to me I could get killed myself, and this time I wouldn’t know what for or who. It didn’t put itself together. I may have been greedy, but I was full of scarcity—know what I mean? I grew up in a stingy town. When the food got too rich, I felt just like a skinny little Southern girl all over again.”

She sighed. When she started out, she explained, she always felt as if she had a small angel accompanying her. All orphans did—that was part of the economy of nature. And for companion, the angel had a whore, because the two got along with each other. “I mean,” said Cherry, “the tart would have herself a fling and the angel would say, ‘That’s okay, honey, you’re entitled to a bit of fun after all that misery.’ ”

But in Vegas, the angel became an asset, it kept drawing people in. “I’ve always been independent,” Cherry said, “or at least I like to think so. I believe there’s a side of me doesn’t want anything from anybody, and maybe that’s what those hoodlums liked. But then the other side of my character was swelling up like a frog—I was becoming as bad and evil as a colored madam. I was ready to make that angel hustle.” She looked wistful as she said this. “And then, too, I had to keep an eye on my killer. There
was
a crazy killer right inside.”

“For certain?”

“Honest-to-God killer.”

“Maybe you borrowed him from your friends.”

“I’ll never know,” she said. “The ugly fact, if I was to trace it out, is that one or two men in Vegas are probably dead because of me. They were at the other end of a string, but I was vindictive enough about them to have been the one who pulled the string. I started thinking of that small-town hatred I had always considered beneath me, that envy and spite, and it was now a part
of me. I came to the conclusion I’d flip out so far I’d not come back if I stayed in Vegas too long. So I decided it was the year for New York.”

“Did the angel bring you to Shago Martin?”

“No,” she said, and then, “Yes,” she said. It was obvious we were thinking of her sister.

“Well, look how nice you are now,” I said.

“I’m a spirit now,” she said, and gave a tough sensuous grin full of her flesh.

“I should have had you on my program.”

“I could have set it straight. I would have told America some people got souls, and some are spirits.”

“I’m sure.”

“People with souls are the ones who make the world move,” she said in her Southern voice, the accent became as thin and precise as any little old Southern Baptist lady, “and if they fail, but honorably, why then, God, as a mercy, or as a compromise, may it be, takes their soul away and makes them a spirit. That’s a sad thing to be because you can’t live with other spirits—too sad. So you have to look for somebody with soul even if they’re mean and awful.”

“Like Eddie Ganucci?”

“He’s awful. He’s a sick old man who never had any class.”

“But the ones who have class are afraid of him?”

“Yes.” She nodded several times. “Maybe that’s another reason I left. It’s not good to be around men who stand up most of the time, but know there’s one thing they never stand up to.” She gave a radiant smile. “I was sure you were going to back off from Romeo last night.”

“I was so far gone I didn’t care if he beat me to death.”

“You were better than that.”

“Did Shago teach you how to sing?” I asked.

“He taught me a little bit. But I’m a lousy singer, I fear.” That
ended conversation about Shago. She stretched her arms and yawned prettily. I was very relaxed. Somehow I had been prepared for something worse in her story. So the mood was settling in again. Soon we’d be ready to go back to bed.

“Steve?” asked Cherry.

“Yes?”

“Did you kill your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re a cunning little cutie.”

“No, baby, I knew you did it. Oh God.”

“How did you know?” I asked.

“I saw a man once just after he came back from a killing. You looked like he did.”

“How did he look?”

“Like he’d been painted with a touch of magic.” Her face crumpled. “I was hoping I was wrong,” she said, “but I knew I wasn’t. Oh, I hope it’s not too late for us.”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid.”

“I am a little myself.”

“Do you have to be somewhere tonight?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Who is it you’re going to see?”

“Deborah’s father.”

“Barney Oswald Kelly?”

“You know his name?”

“I read the papers today.”

But I could feel her receding from me. There had been something wrong with what she said.

“You’ve heard of him before this?”

A look came into her face. We had the longest pause. It went on so long I could hear a ringing in the air.

“Stephen,” she said, “I used to know Kelly.”

“You did?”

“He was the man who took me to Vegas.”

I had a repetition of that vision in Ruta’s bed, of that city in the desert with its lights burning in the dawn.

“I don’t want to talk any more about it,” she said. And as if revelation had stripped her naked, the wheat-colored wrapper came slowly apart, it opened with a grave movement.

“How the hell could you?” I broke out.

“He’s an attractive man.”

“He’s odious.”

“No, he’s not.”

And he wasn’t. In fact, he wasn’t. It was different than that. I felt as if Kelly and I were running in the same blood. And that sensation of not belonging to myself, of being owned at my center by Deborah—that emotion which had come on me not five minutes before I killed her—now came back. I felt murder. It frightened me. The possibility that what I felt, when we made love, was a sensation which belonged to me alone, left me murderous. For how did one distinguish love from the art of the Devil?

But then like a child, I said to myself, “The Devil has no wings.” Those roses which washed from the sea, that angel which went by the room … “Do you think we made a child this morning?”

“Yes.”

There was no quiver in the air. If she were lying I was blind to the point of death, or she was a perfect invention of evil. Moments went by. A gentleness came back to me. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“I’ll tell you one thing, mister,” she said, “it’s a boy
or
a girl.”

But there were operations we must get through. I had a lover’s practical savagery. “Let’s go into all of it,” I said.

“We did.”

“There’s more.”

I saw her temper rising, a flash of that sun-tanned sensual pride
with which she had sung her set last night. But something humble took her over. “All right,” she said.

“You ever pregnant before?”

“Yes.”

“Kelly?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the child?”

“I didn’t have it.”

“Any other time?”

She was silent.

“Shago Martin?”

“Yes.”

“Afraid to have it?”

“Shago was afraid to have it.”

“How long ago?”

“Three months.” She nodded. “Three months ago. And last week I broke up with him.”

Once, in a rainstorm, I witnessed the creation of a rivulet. The water had come down, the stream had begun in a hollow of earth the size of a leaf. Then it filled and began to flow. The rivulet rolled down the hill between some stalks of grass and weed, it moved in spurts, down the fall of a ledge, down to a brook. It did not know it was not a river. That was how the tears went down Cherry’s face. They began in some tight knurled pit of grief, some bitter hollow, rose to her eyes, flowed down her face, dripped to her open breast, fell to her thigh, and collected in the grove—a teaspoon full of ten years’ sorrow. “You see,” she said, and now she began to weep, “I thought I could never have a child. The doctor Kelly sent me to hinted something was wrong, and I never tried to find out. I just never got pregnant all those years. And then with Shago I did. He turned on me. He said I was a white devil—after all the time we spent together.”

“And you didn’t want to have it by yourself?”

“I didn’t have the guts. You see, I
had
cheated on him.”

“With Tony?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Habit, I guess.”

“Habit, hell. Why with Tony? What does he have?”

She shook her head. She seemed almost in pain “There’s something sweet in Tony, believe it.”

“How can I?”

“I was aching so. Shago can be evil.”

That did it. She put her head on the table, and gave herself up to grief. I stroked her hair. It had been fine hair once, but hairdresser’s tint had roughened the silk. As she wept I heard an echo from the little silence of each pause she had made as she talked. “Lordy, Lordy,” she said at last, brought her head up and tried to smile. She had that look of naked relaxation which is shared by sex, grief, and the end of huge physical exertion. “Give me a cigarette,” she said.

I lit it for her.

“How about me?” I asked. I was not far from a child with my desire for an answer. “Do I manage to kiss the bruise? Is that what my sweet rep is?”