Institute (20 page)

“Hey, hey?”

“No, don’t say ‘hey,’ Dr. Palmer. He’s not gay, I promise you he’s not. It’s not like that at all. Just the same, he has some mental block about sex—
that
he halfway admitted to me. I mean, he had me do things like walking in front of him, on my hands yet, doing the upside-down split. You know what that does to a girl”

“I can guess, I suppose. And?”

“Even that didn’t help.”

“What then?”

“At the end of a week, no soap. At last we called it off. That part, I mean. But we had become good friends, and he leveled with me, what it was all about: on account of liking me, he’d hoped I could break him clear of the thrall he was under, he called it. What’s a
thrall?”

“Like handcuffs or—”

“Yeah, I betcha, I betcha!”

She was all excited and went on: “The way he told it, I knew that’s what it was like. Dr. Palmer, I think he’s banging the Swede!”

“Banging the—”

“Swede woman keeps house for him. I think he’s doing it to her morning, noon, and night. I think it’s what ails him—that she’s got the hex on him so he can’t do it with anyone else—even me, willing as I was. Because, don’t make any mistake, Dr. Palmer, as little interest as you take in me, I meant business with him. But I didn’t, you might as well know, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!”

“You said it once—you didn’t.”

“So all God’s chillen got thralls. She’s his, you’re mine, and this Hortense character is yours.
If
she is. Well, is she?”

“You think I would admit it to you?”

“Look, if she’s got your child in her belly—”

“Who says she’s got my child?”

“You do, by the way you act.”

“So ... all God’s chillen got thralls.”

I guess there was more, but not much that day, because I was jangled, and she was, and I didn’t encourage her. Pretty soon she left, but next day she was back and we resumed where we had left off. This day, however, she had on a cloth coat, not the mink one.

“I only wore it yesterday so you could see it just once,” she said. “Except when I’m going somewhere, like dress-up at night, I leave it home where I’m living now. I drive to school every day, to the university here, I mean, in the car he gave me. Did I mention that he pays all my college expenses? And set up a trust fund for me? It’s just like I made it with sin, except I didn’t. I’m pure and undefiled—at least since I met this guy, the one I showed my legs to and would take off my clothes for now if he just said he wanted me to.”

“He does, and if you do, he’ll kick you out.”

“O.K., you don’t have to holler.”

She explained that at first, when her mother saw the coat, she wouldn’t let her in the house. She wouldn’t have a daughter living there who had got a coat that way. “It took me an hour to convince her that, though I hand’t meant to be pure, I was. So—”

She stretched out and wiggled her toes in her open-end shoes.

“What made you say what you did?” I asked. “About
her,
I mean? What made you think she’s—”

“Knocked up?”

“Yes, if you want to call it that.”

“That’s what her mother thinks.”

“You know Mrs. Mendenhall?”

“Yeah, sure. We’re friends.”

“How did
that
happen?”

She didn’t answer that day or the next or the next, but then one day she did.

“She came to see me, that’s how, when I was in Wilmington one time, at the Du Pont Hotel in a suite he got for me. I may as well own up that we had retakes of the attempt he had made before. I think he had the idea that if he could take it easy, have me there convenient, so the urge would come to
him
instead of him going after
it,
things might turn out as he hoped. They didn’t, though I stayed up there for some time—a couple of weeks, at least. Why he mentioned me to her—Mrs. Mendenhall, I’m talking about—I have no idea. Maybe as a cover, to pretend that I was the one he was banging instead of this Inga. Anyway, he did mention me, and then there she was on the phone, wanting to come and see me. Curiosity killed the cat. I said, O.K., she could come. What she wanted to know was the dirt on the bash they had, the one the President came to. She was all steamed up, Dr. Palmer, because she hadn’t been asked down. So I hadn’t been asked either, but, of course, I knew all about it and kind of filled her in. But, then, by a kind of accident, I found out why she hadn’t been asked. To show how high-toned I was, I asked her if she would like some tea, and when she said yes, I made her some on an electric grill. I had bought. Then, to be really high-toned, I offered her brandy in it, and she said she’d never had it that way, but O.K., she’d like to try it. So I spooned her some brandy in. Then I spooned her some more and some more and some more after that. She got there around three o’clock, and at five I put her to bed so she could sleep it off. Dr. Palmer, she’s a really distinguished woman, with a kind of trained-nurse way of talking—which she was before she got married—and a drunk. I call her what she is. I wouldn’t have asked her to come, not to a cocktail party the President was coming to. So to that extent, though I hate to admit it, Mrs. Garrett used good judgment.”

“Do you still see Mrs. Mendenhall, Teddy?”

“Oh, all the time. We’re thick as whipping cream.”

“What do you talk about?”

“She does the talking, always, and always about one thing—‘Horty,’ as she calls her. I suppose she must love Horty, but if she thinks Horty ever did something right, she’s never let on to me that she does. She keeps getting off on Horty’s ‘genius for wrong decisions,’ she calls it, her going to Delaware U instead of Vassar, her marriage to Mr. Garrett, her moving out and going to Washington. But I don’t think she knows about you. And certainly I didn’t tell her. I just didn’t care to own up that I had flopped with you.”

Then suddenly: “You taking me or not?”

“Taking you? Where?”

“Bed. Where do you think?”

“I thought we’d been all over that.”

“Then I’ll take myself off—and I guess I won’t be back. There’s a limit to what I can stand. Being nice about it, lying here dreaming dreams.”

She got up and picked up her coat. As I stepped over to help her with it, I got a flash of the beautiful shape inside the pantsuit she had on. For a second I had an impulse. To fight it back, perhaps, I snapped:
“Where is she?”

“I don’t rightly know. But she was in Wilmington, first. Then she went to New York and then came on back to Wilmington.
That’s
what his goons report. Mr. Garrett’s, I’m talking about. You’re goofy about her, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve admitted it to you, haven’t I?”

“More times than I wanted to hear it.”

T
HEN BACK TO THE
cards and the nothingness for several days, maybe a week. One night when I answered the phone, a familiar voice said: “Lloyd?”

“Mr. Garrett!” I croaked, sounding shaky.

“Is Hortense there?”

“No, she’s not.”

“Where is she? Do you know?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. She disappeared one night, just walked out on me. Since then, I haven’t seen her. And you may as well know: I’d see her in hell before I’d lift one finger to find her.”

“Lloyd, I
have
to find her.”

“O.K., but if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t.”

“Also, I have to see you. Can you come in tonight?”

“Mr. Garrett, it’s true I’ve done nothing to find her, but at the same time, she might call me, and I feel I should be here in case she does. If it’s that important, why can’t you come out here?”

“O.K., O.K., I’ll do that.”

He arrived in less than an hour. I waited for him out in the hall. When he stepped out of the elevator, we shook hands. We went inside and I hung up his hat and coat and followed him into the living room. He wandered around, looking. Then he mentioned that he was just back from Europe, “from Brussels where I was setting up a new outfit to bid on NATO hardware. I shouldn’t have gone, with Hortense playing it wild, but when something like this comes up, you more or less have to be there.” Then after looking at more pictures, he said: “Lloyd, when I was here before and you threw the headlock on me, I didn’t tell you quite all of it. There was no need to, and I left part of it out, a shameful, terrible part. The night Hortense had her miscarriage, I carried her down to the ambulance and went to the hospital with her. But when I got back, I could hardly straighten up, and I knew I had strained myself. Inga was there, of course, so she took over. She brought me back to her room where she had a vibrator already plugged in, and she put it on my back. It was the first I knew what a mean little place we’d given her to live in. But, Lloyd, it had a
smell.
It smelled like her. While she was working on me, that smell was working, too. We just melted together—the first time, the first time in my life that a woman responded to me. It stood me on my ear ... I’m still standing on it. But she had an ear, too, so she began dreaming dreams—of marrying me. And when I stalled and sidestepped, and waffled and said how tough that would be, how Hortense would never consent, so I couldn’t get a divorce, I suddenly knew that she believed me and that soon I would be free.”

“Free? How?”

“As a widower, free.”

“Could you make that a little plainer?”

“She meant to kill Hortense.”

“Are you serious, Mr. Garrett?”

“There’s a balcony outside one of the bedroom windows of the Wilmington apartment, and I caught her out there—imagining things! One push was all it would take, and what could anyone prove?”

“What did you do?”

“Fired her, sent her to London and kept on meeting her there. I told Hortense she’d been called back to Stockholm. Then you entered the picture, Hortense moved down with you, and I brought Inga back. But now Hortense is in it again. She was in Wilmington week before last, staying at the Du Pont but seeing Inga at the apartment. Then she went to New York and Inga went with her. Then back to Wilmington, the two of them still together, and then down here to Washington at the Watergate apartment. That’s where he lost her tonight, this gumshoe I got to watch her. And that’s when I called you on the chance she was here. Incidentally, I gave him your number so he’d know how to reach me in case he had something to report. Oh, I forgot to mention: the Watergate place has a balcony much like the one in Wilmington. Lloyd, I’ve got the shakes. I feel that something is up, but I’m helpless to do anything.”

He stopped talking but kept walking around. I opened my mouth to say it fit what Teddy had told me, but changed my mind.

Pretty soon he sat down on the sofa across from me. I must have showed the strain because he said: “I’m sorry, Lloyd; it’s hard for me to realize that someone else—meaning you—can be just as concerned as me. To me, there is only one Hortense—”

“There couldn’t be two.”

Then I added: “However, what’s going through my head right now is an angle you seemed to have overlooked. You’re concerned about Inga’s interest in balconies. Try that in reverse—for Hortense.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“By one little push, Hortense could also—”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Of course, it wouldn’t really be like Hortense.”

“The hell it wouldn’t. It would be exactly like her.”

We sat there awhile, studying our feet. He started to say something, but I held up my hand. I had just heard the freight elevator speak. It was now after midnight and a most unlikely time for anyone to be using that elevator—except one person. It creaked and creaked and creaked. Then it stopped. From the sound it made, I could tell that it had stopped at the seventh floor, my floor. Then came the sound of a key and the door to the hall opened. The person who came in was a dumpy little woman, maybe forty years old, with a halfway good-looking face, a black winter coat, and a little black hat. She was kind of foreign-looking. Behind her, closing the door, was Hortense in her mink coat, without a hat. My heart skipped a beat as the coat broke in front in a way that suggested the bulge of her belly. She led the way into the living room, but when she got as far as the sofas, the other woman stopped and made two “knicks.”

So far, Garrett hadn’t moved and neither had I. Suddenly Hortense was furious, blazing away at us: “It’s customary for gentlemen to rise when ladies enter the room—or
are
you gentlemen?”

“We do get up when ladies enter the room,” I said very loudly, “but when idiots enter a room, we’re all crossed up. What was the big idea, just walking out like that? Why couldn’t you call just once? Didn’t you have any money for a phone call? Why?”

“Don’t you talk to me that way!”

“It’s my place. I’ll talk as I please.”

“It’s my place, too, and—”

“That’s what you think, sister.”

She screamed, then came charging over in back of the sofa, and began slapping my face from behind. She yelped at Garrett:
“Why don’t you get up?”

He still hadn’t moved. Now he yawned a big phoney yawn which he pretended to hide behind the back of his hand. “I would have got up,” he said, “except I wasn’t quite sure I was here. Thought perhaps I had died or turned into glass or something or into air like a ghost. No one has spoken to me since they came into this room or even noticed that I exist.”

“I did speak to you—just now.”

“Oh, yeah, but I mean, to
greet
me. I have feelings, and they’re tender, like young asparagus. And—”

“Then hello.”

She snapped it out, but Garrett got up. “And hello, yourself,” he said with a cold little smile. “What do you want?”

“From you, nothing. We’re calling on Lloyd Palmer, so keep out of it, please, until someone asks you in. As to what’s going to be said that concerns you, you’d better stick around so you’ll know what’s going to be done. Then perhaps we’ll talk.”

“I’ll sit down, if you don’t mind.”

After Hortense had glowered at him for a moment, she turned to me. “Lloyd,” she began very dramatically, “will you, for Inga’s benefit, repeat what you’ve said to me, that you want to marry me, that is, if you still want to?”

“This is Inga?”