Death of a Tall Man (29 page)

Now, thinking back, she tried to decide what it was that had made her think the man was Bruce. She tried to make what she had seen vivid again in her mind. A big man—yes, big as Bruce Kirkhill was big. He had been walking south, on the east side of the street. He had been alone; she was almost sure he had been alone. He had been walking with his overcoat unbuttoned, whipped by the wind. She remembered, now. It was that which had made her notice him, become conscious of him a she had not been conscious of other men she must have seen and had been unaware of seeing. It was cold; it had grown colder during the afternoon. The cold had bitten into her, with the peculiar damp penetration of cold in the Navy Yard, when she had come out of Aunt Flo's house and gone through the back yard to the waiting car. But this man was paying so little attention to the cold that he did not bother even to button his overcoat.

There must, she thought, have been something in the way the man walked which had made her think of Bruce, and then, fleetingly, identify this man as Bruce. It had not been his face, she realized, looking at the scene she had re-created. She had not tried to see his face until she thought of Bruce in connection with this man, and then the car started and, although she turned and tried to look back, it had been too late to see the face of the man. So it must have been something in the way he moved, something in the rhythm of his body.

She was relieved to discover how intangible it all was, thus thought through, thus reexamined. The man had been about Bruce's size, something in his movements had suggested Bruce. That was all there was to it. She had not seen his face and now, as the picture came clearer, she saw something else which she should have seen from the first. It could not have been Bruce. Even from a distance, even seen momentarily, there had been a kind of shabbiness about the man. Although she could not fully explain it to herself, the word “shambling” came to her mind along with the word “shabby.” Then she laughed. She would never tell Bruce—or perhaps one day she would tell Bruce, so that they could laugh together?—that for an instant, in the last hours of a year, riding home in a car from the Navy Yard, she had thought a shambling, shabby man was somehow like Bruce Kirkhill. Like Senator Bruce Kirkhill, the never shabby, the inconceivably shambling—the man who was so surely going places, and with whom she was going.

She stood up in the warm, softly lighted room. She crossed the room, slim in a golden evening dress, her square shoulders high and white, and pulled aside one of the heavy curtains which shut out the night. She could look far down, now, into Park Avenue. There was a kind of blur in the night, the street lights below her were dimmed. It's snowing, she thought; it's begun to snow.

There was a brief, emphatic knock on her bedroom door. She smiled before she spoke. How like her father was that one quick, decisive rap. It was polite—never would Vice Admiral Jonathan Satterbee dream of entering another's bedroom without first knocking. But it did not, it would be absurd to argue that it did, request admission. It announced that the admiral was about to enter. As she said, “Come, Dad,” she wondered whether anyone had ever kept the admiral waiting, once he had announced his presence. Not her mother, she was certain. Not she, certainly.

Vice Admiral Jonathan Satterbee, U.S.N. (Ret.), was a tall, straight man. He opened the door, now, and stepped emphatically into his daughter's bedroom. He was in evening clothes, perfectly fitting, in all respects civilian. But one looked, subconsciously, unavoidably, for the stripes of gold above the wrist. Vice Admiral Satterbee had lived a life in uniform. It was natural that civilian clothes, conscious of their lesser status, should try, on his tall, spare body, to look as much like uniform as possible.

Vice Admiral Satterbee regarded his daughter. She smiled at him.

“Pass inspection, sir?” she said.

He smiled, very slightly, not as one much used to smiling. But the smile softened his face.

“Very satisfactory,” the admiral said. He nodded.

“Darling,” Freddie said. “Is that the best you can do?”

“My dear,” her father said, “you are a very fine looking girl. Very beautiful. As you know.”

“The dress?” Freddie said. “The dress, Dad?”

He looked at the dress.

“Fits very well,” he said. “Don't catch cold. Where's Marta?”

“Resting,” Freddie said. “She's helping with the coats and things. I told her to rest. Why?”

“Not on station,” the admiral said. “You coddle her, Freddie.”

Freddie only laughed at that. The admiral accepted the subject as dismissed.

“Tie all right?” he said. He held his chin up a little higher; it was a chin which lived high.

The tie was perfect. Watkins was an artist with a bow. As Dad knows perfectly well, Freddie thought, as she always thought. But she went to the tall, erect man and reached up and pretended, but only pretended, so as not to mar perfection, to adjust the bow a little.

She stepped back and smiled up at the admiral, and he patted her arm lightly, gently.

“You're a good child, Winifred,” he said. “You coddle everyone.”

It was a special moment; because it was a special moment, he called her Winifred, which had been her mother's name. She did not say anything, but she put both her hands for a moment on his arms. Almost at once, before the touch became a caress, she dropped her hands.

“By the way,” he said. “Invited a young couple to drop in.” He paused. “This publisher fellow,” he said. “Going to bring out this book you know. North.”

Freddie said, “Of course, Dad.”

“Still think the other plan might have been better,” the admiral said. He looked down at his daughter. “Ought to feed people,” he said.

“Dad,” Freddie said. “It's always awkward. It sounds fine, but it's always awkward. And I know I wouldn't like to be one of the late ones. You wouldn't either.”

The admiral seemed to entertain momentarily, and to dismiss at once, a preposterous thought. Freddie watched her father's expression, and her smile did not show. The darling has never considered that, she thought; if some were to come to dinner, others to drop in later, the category of Vice Admiral Jonathan Satterbee was preordained. His was a confidence beyond conceit.

“Better this way, darling,” she said. “Really better.”

The admiral made a sound which was, as much as anything, “wumph.”

Probably, Freddie Haven thought, he knows perfectly well that it isn't only the awkwardness. Aunt Flo and Uncle William, not yet “ret.”; the commodore; Captain and Mrs. Hammond; Aunt (by courtesy) Angela; Mrs. Burton, the “Dowager Admiral,” whose for some time lamented husband had, in the year before his retirement, achieved Cominch. All very cultivated and delightful, all very Navy, all very—well, call it familiar. Those would have made up the dinner party before the party to which the others, the lesser, the non-Navy, might be invited. And there, of course, Bruce Kirkhill would have presented a hostess's problem, as well as a fiancée's. Had there been a dinner, he could hardly not have been invited. (By her; the admiral's position would have been equivocal.) But Senator Kirkhill and the “Dowager Admiral” would, undoubtedly, have presented a problem. Mrs. Burton had little use for politicians.

“Better this way, Dad,” Freddie repeated, and the admiral said “Wumph” again, but with moderated emphasis. He is a darling really, Freddie thought, and patted one of the arms which should have been to the elbow in gold braid.

“Suppose you've heard from Kirkhill?” the admiral said, changing the subject with authority.

“No,” Freddie said. “He's coming on the Congressional; going to the Waldorf to change, coming on. It's all arranged.”

The admiral said “Wumph” again and seemed about to continue. The hesitancy was untypical. Freddie said, “Yes, Dad?”

“Nothing,” the admiral said. “I'm—I'm fond of you, Freddie. Know that, don't you? You know what you're doing?”

“Of course,” Freddie said. “We've been over it, Dad.”

“Well,” the admiral said, “he's a politician, you know.”

“Darling,” Freddie said. “Please, Dad. We
have
been over it. Bruce is a senator—a United States senator.”

The admiral said “Wumph,” doubtfully.

“And,” Freddie said, “you like him. You know you do.”

The admiral briefly raised square shoulders.

“Nothing against him,” he said. “As a man. Seems all right. Good war record.” He smiled, with his lips only. “Set in my ways, Freddie,” he said. “Probably there's nothing to it.”

She was puzzled by that. She looked an enquiry. She thought, surprised, that her father had not meant to say the last—not out loud, not to her.

“Nothing to what?” she said. “What is it, Dad?”

The admiral said “eruh,” as one word, which he did on those few occasions when he was uncertain. He resumed command at once.

“Prejudice against politicians,” he said, with finality. “What do you people say? An allergy.”

She said, “Oh.”

“And I'm fond of you,” he said. “Don't want you to make a mistake. Damn those monkeys.”

She knew what he meant by that. Damn the “monkey,” the hideously courageous, horribly skillful “monkey” who had crashed his plane against the bridge of a destroyer off Okinawa; against the bridge of Commander John Haven's destroyer.

“That was another day,” Freddie said. “A fine day. It won't come back, Dad. There's no use.”

She looked up at him.

“This isn't a mistake, Dad,” she said.

The admiral said “Wumph” once more. He patted her bare shoulder. She thought, for a moment, that he was about to say something further; she had a feeling, not easy to explain, that he had more to say about Bruce, was hesitating to say it. But there was nothing tangible to indicate this, and when the admiral spoke again it was merely to ask her if she were coming down. She shook her head, said there were finishing touches.

“Can't see where,” her father said, looking at her with approval. “I'll go down, then.” He patted her shoulder once more. He was more demonstrative than usual, she thought; more anxious that she should know his fondness for her. It was as if he were, secretly, uneasy about her. She watched him turn, go out the door, and felt her own previous uneasiness returning. She tried to shake it off, to persuade herself to accept the obvious. Fancied resemblance; fancied implication in a sentence; imagined note of concern in her father's voice. One led to the other; one heightened the other. If she had not imagined Bruce in a big man walking somewhere on the lower east side, glimpsed briefly, with a shabby overcoat open on a cold night, she would not have gone on imagining. “Probably there's nothing to it,” her father had said, and seemed to hesitate when she asked an explanation, but then had given her an explanation entirely reasonable. There was nothing to any of it.

She returned to her dressing table and the finishing touches. For several minutes she was able to occupy her mind with them. But then the slight feeling of uneasiness, the ridiculous feeling of anxiety, came creeping back. She could not keep it from creeping back.

Well, she thought, if I'm going to be this way, I may as well call Bruce and—and know he's all right. He would, she thought, be at the Waldorf by now; he would not yet have left to come to the apartment.

She went across the room to her desk near the bed and took up the telephone of her extension. Then she heard her father's voice, speaking on one of the other extensions, and instinctively started to replace the receiver.

“—as of tonight,” she heard her father say. “Circumstances have changed. Send me your bill and—”

She had replaced the receiver by then. But she stood looking at it. “As of tonight.” For no reason, no explicable reason, the words entered into, became part of, her anxiety. She lifted the receiver again.

A man's voice she did not think she had ever heard before was speaking.

“—to you,” she heard the voice say. “What we've got begins to make it look like there was something to it. But it's up to you, Admiral. He's going to be your son—”

“That's all,” her father cut in. “That's enough. I've told you what I want. I'll expect your bill.”

“Sure,” the other voice said. “Sure, Admiral. Whatever you say.”

“Goodbye,” the admiral said. She heard the click of his replaced receiver.

She put the telephone back in its cradle and stood for a moment without moving. She stood erect, as her father had taught her, her square shoulders high, her slim body motionless in the moulding golden dress. She looked at nothing; saw nothing. She could feel a kind of tightening in her mind. Her mind seemed to be tightening, almost quivering, under repeated, inexplicable, tiny blows. It was as if something were flicking at her mind, something invisible were stinging it.

“Going to be your son—” Son-in-law, the man must have been going to say when her father, his voice firm with authority, sharp with impatience, cut him off. Bruce—it was, again, something about Bruce. “Probably there's nothing to it,” her father had said. That had been something about Bruce. The shambling man seen from the car window—but that could not have been Bruce Kirkhill.

Something was happening to the day, the last day of the year; something was happening to her, to the order of things, to tranquility. It had been a day like any other day, with the difference that it, more than most, had slanted upward toward the evening, toward the party and the drinking in of a New Year; toward the party which was, tacitly only, for her and Bruce. It was to be the first party for both of them, for them as a unit.

There had been the not arduous responsibilities of a hostess with an adequate staff, in an apartment more than adequate to any probable party. There had been lunch at the Colony with Celia, and Celia's young, happy excitement about almost everything, and Celia's admiring eyes. Remembering the way Celia looked at her, Freddie smiled faintly, her shapeless anxiety momentarily lessened. Anyway, it was going to be fine with Celia; Celia's admiration of this not too much older woman who was to be her step-mother was evident and undisguised. Celia might have been eight, instead of eighteen, when she looked at Freddie Haven. Sometimes it was almost embarrassing. No one, Freddie thought, and least of all I, can be what Celia thinks I am.