Root of His Evil (7 page)

He had to go down to the Battery to turn around, and then was when I heard newsboys screaming the name Harris and saw the big headlines. I bought a paper out of the cab window and there it was:

HARRIS JILTS DEB, WEDS WAITRESS

Underneath was a big picture of Grant, with the caption Heir to Railroad Millions, and a smaller picture of a girl named Muriel Van Hoogland, with a brief item in very big type saying their engagement was announced last June, the wedding to take place in September, but that when she flew in from California that morning, she found he had just two hours before married me. I began to see things a little more clearly, or thought I did. I looked to see if there was any more, but there wasn’t except for a small item about the Karb strike. It had started, apparently, only a few minutes before I drove up there. The demands adopted at the big meeting had been presented to the management, which refused even to consider them at all, whereupon the girls had been called out on strike.

By now, I realized that except for the coffee at the shack, I hadn’t had anything to eat, so instead of going at once to the apartment, I had the driver let me out at Times Square, and went in a restaurant for a sandwich. But while that was coming I went to the phone booth and called NBC and checked on the programs that had gone on ahead of Bergen on that station. And one of them was the young man who does interviews with people boarding planes at Lockheed Airport, in Burbank, California.

When I came out on the streets again there were later editions, with longer items in them. One was an interview with Muriel Van Hoogland, in which she said she didn’t care a bit, and then burst out crying and slammed the door in the reporters’ faces. One was about me and my work at Karb’s and in the headline of that occurred for the first time the nickname, Modern Cinderella, which stuck. So by now I was not only feeling miserable, but afraid and worried, and I wanted time to think. I didn’t feel glad I had married a rich man. That part hardly entered my head, important though I hold money to be. I merely felt in some bitter way that I had been made a fool of, and when I ate my sandwich I walked up to the Newsreel Theatre and went in and sat down. There was nothing about me on the screen that day. I suppose it was too soon, though there was plenty later. I don’t know how long I sat there, but finally it all seemed to focus that I had to have it out with Grant, and yet I even hated the idea of going back to the apartment. So after a long time I left the theatre, and it must have been three or four o’clock.

When I came out into the sunshine, I was startled to see my own picture in the papers, very big, with Grant’s picture much smaller, and Muriel Van Hoogland’s just a little circle down at one side. It was the picture I had had taken when I graduated from high school in Nyack, and that meant it must have come from there, and that frightened me. And sure enough, there was a whole long item about the orphan asylum, and being a waitress in the hotel, and all the rest of it that I had wanted to keep to myself.

But what made something turn over inside of me was the big headline at the top of the page:

CINDY EMBEZZLED, CHARGE

And the main story was all about how Clara Gruber said I had absconded with the union funds, and had sworn a warrant out for my arrest.

I went to a drug store and called the Solon, and told them I was quitting. I didn’t take a cab over to the apartment. I didn’t want to go that fast. I went clumping over on my two feet, and the nearer I got the slower I went. I went up in the elevator, let myself in, and Grant was in the bedroom making a phone call. It took several minutes, and seemed to be about somebody that was ill, whom I took to be Muriel Van Hoogland, but that was a mistake. I sat down and waited. He hung up, and came out and began marching around again, and seemed to be under a great strain. He went to the window and looked out. “It’s hot.”

“Quite.”

“By the way, I was thinking of something else this morning when you went out and didn’t realize what you meant. You don’t have to bother about that job. There’s no need for you to work.”

“I didn’t.”

“You—oh. That’s good. It’s terribly hot.”

“They’re on strike.”

“Who?”

“The girls. The slaves. Remember?”

“Oh. Oh, yes.”

The bell rang, and he answered. It was a reporter who had come up without being announced. “Well—I suppose you’d better come in.”

I remembered what Muriel Van Hoogland had done, and thought that was a pretty good idea myself. I went and slammed the door in the reporter’s face, then went back and took my seat again. “Now—suppose you begin.”

“About what?”

“About all of it.”

“I don’t quite know what you mean. If there’s something on your mind suppose
you
begin.”

“Who was that you were so concerned about just now?”

“My mother. This thing seems to have upset her.”

“You mean your marriage?”

“Yes, of course.”

“To a waitress?”

“—All right, to a waitress, but if I’m not complaining, I don’t see that we have anything to discuss.”

“I do, so we’ll discuss. Who are you, anyway?”

“I told you my name. In case you’ve forgotten it, you’ll find it on the marriage certificate. I believe you took it.”

“You seem to be a little more than Grant Harris, Esquire. May I ask who the Harrises are—why the newspapers, for example, give so much space to the marriage of a Harris to—a waitress?”

“U. S. Grant Harris, my grandfather, was perhaps the worst scalawag in American history. He stole a couple of railroads, made a great deal of money—$72,000,000, I believe was the exact figure—and died an empire builder, beloved and respected by all who knew him slightly—or at any rate by the society editors. He left two children—my father, Harwood Harris, who died when I was five years old, and my uncle, George Harris, head of Harris, Hunt and Harris, where I have the honor to be employed. My uncle carries on my grandfather’s mighty work—he stole a railroad in Central America only last week, come to think of it. I could have told him the locomotive won’t run, now that all the wood along the right-of-way got burned off in a mountain fire a few months ago, but he didn’t consult me, and—”

“Never mind the mountain fire. Whose house was that—where we spent the day yesterday?”

“...My sister’s, Mrs. Hunt’s.”

“Why did you say it belonged to a friend?”

“Well—of course, it really belongs to her husband. I hope I can call Hunt a friend.”

“I’d call him a brother-in-law.”

“I guess he is, but I never think of him that way.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this sooner?”

“Well—you never asked me, and—”

“And, in addition to that, there was this little matter of—Miss Muriel Van Hoogland. Who is she?”

“Just a girl.”

“Whom you had promised to marry?”

“That was all my uncle’s doing. My uncle continues another pleasing custom of my grandfather’s, by the way—the negotiation of what he calls favorable alliances, meaning marrying his nephews off to girls who have money. It wouldn’t have meant anything except that my mother let the wool be pulled over her eyes and before I knew it, mainly to make her happy, I had got myself into something pretty serious.”

“And then Muriel went west?”

“Yes, that was in July.”

“To buy her trousseau?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Oh, I think we can take it for granted, that to be worthy of a Harris, Muriel would buy her wedding clothes at Adrian’s.”

“What she did in California I don’t-know and I’d rather we took nothing for granted, if you don’t mind.”

“And then?”

“And then
you
came along.”

“And then true love was so irresistible that you left Muriel stood-up at the airport and married me, is that it?”

“I guess that about covers it.”

“Well I don’t. You didn’t say anything about love when you asked me to marry you—not at first, and it hurt me, and I ought to have known that any other reason was an insult, and—”

“Is a marriage proposal an insult?”

“Oh, it can be, even from a Harris, if that one thing isn’t there—”

“Don’t you
know
how I feel about you?”

“Sometimes I know—or think I do. But that wasn’t why you asked me. It was all about the system and getting back at them, whoever ‘they’ are. Is that the only reason you wanted me, so you could get back at your uncle for trying to make you marry Muriel?”

“No!”

“Then
what
was it?”

“It would take me a week to explain it to you.”

“I’ve got a week.”

“They won’t let me do what I want to. They—”

“And who is ‘they’?”

“My uncle!”

“And your mother.”

“We’ll leave my mother out of this.”

“Oh no, we won’t.”

“I tell you my mother has nothing to do with it. If everybody in the world were as fine as she is—the hell with it! I—I’ve got to go see how she is. She’s my mother, can’t you understand that? And she’s sick. I’ve—I’ve brought this on her. I—”

He started for the door but I was there first. “And I’m your wife, if you can understand that. And you’ve brought this on
me.
You’re not going to your mother. I don’t care how sick she
is—if
she’s sick, which I seriously doubt. You’re staying here, and we’re going into it. I told you—I’ve got a week, I’ve got a lifetime. They won’t let you do what you want to do, I think that’s what you said. What is it you want to do?”

I still stood there by the door, and he began tramping up and down the room, his eyes set and his lips twitching. He kept that up a long time and then he dropped into a chair, let his head fall on his hands and ran his tongue around the inside of his lips before he spoke to stop their twitching. “Study Indians.”

“You—what did you say?”

He leaped at me like a tiger, took me by the arms and shook me until I could feel my teeth rattling. “Laugh-let me hear you laugh! I’ll treat you like a wife! Just let me see a piece of a grin and I’ll knock it down your throat so fast you won’t have time to swallow it! Go on—why don’t you laugh?”

“Is that why you have all these Indian things here?”

“Why do you think?”

“And you want to read books about them? I still don’t quite understand it.”

“What do I care whether you understand it or not, or anybody understands it? You don’t study Indians out of books. You study them on the hoof. You go where they are, and—oh, God, what’s the use?”

“You mean in—Oklahoma?”

“If you knew anything—or if you or
any
of them knew anything—you’d know that all the Indians aren’t in Oklahoma. More than half the population of this hemisphere is Indian—millions and millions of them—they’re the one surviving link with this country’s past—they’re anthropologically more important than all the tribes of Asia put together and—skip it. I’m sorry. It would be impossible to make you understand it, or any of them understand it, and I apologize for even trying.”

“You study them—and then what?”

“Write a book. That’s all—just a book.”

I sat down and then looked around the room at all the things he had in there and after awhile I got up and walked around looking at them one by one. There were little typewritten labels on most of them which I hadn’t noticed before, telling exactly where they came from, what their use was and what their names were in Indian languages and in English. Then I walked over to the big built-in bookcase that filled one side of the room and pulled out one or two books and looked through them. They were different from any books I had ever seen—most of them were bound in leather, some of them in parchment, and they were filled with all sorts of footnotes and scientific references. I knew then at least what he was talking about, the kind of books he wanted to write anyway, even if I had never read any books like that, or even knew there were such books. But there was still more I had to find out. “Why won’t they let you—study Indians?”

“Costs money.”

“In what way?”

“All you have to have is an expedition, a flock of assistants, an army of porters and a boatload of equipment. It runs into money, big money. And I’ve
got
money—all the money it takes—or will have some day, when George Harris is no longer trustee. That’s why I said I’d marry that Muriel idiot. I thought if I did that George might kick in, but when he got coy about it I knew that was just a dream.”

“You didn’t make the money.”

“Neither did George Harris. Neither did my grandfather. He stole it—and a lot I care. But isn’t it better to have it put to some decent use? Am I supposed to jump up and cheer when George Harris uses it to win a race with one of his yachts? All right, you want to know why I hate the system—any system’s wrong that lets useful wealth be wasted so George Harris can sail yachts— the Alamo, the Alamo II, the Alamo III, and the Alamo IV—aren’t they a lovely end-product for a civilization? For them men sweat and walk tracks in blizzards and tap flanges and get killed in wrecks, and for them I have to give up something that’s worth doing.”

“And to break that system you tried to organize a junior executives’ union?”

“Anyhow, I tried to do
something!
All right, George made me a junior executive. The day after I got out of Harvard he had a job waiting for me—a swell job where I can learn the business from the ground up, so one day I can acquire a knowledge of stealing, so I know how it’s done. I beat that rap by going in the Army. But Okinawa didn’t last forever and pretty soon here we were again, and this time I told him O.K. And so I don’t disgrace him when I board his yacht he gives me an allowance of $200 a week. And so I get thoroughly integrated, as he calls it, he tells me to marry Muriel. Well, you’re right. Going after George by organizing an office-workers’ union is like hunting an elephant with a cap pistol. But a kid with a cap pistol is fire-arm conscious, at least. I’ll get him. I’ll get him yet.”

“I see. Marrying a waitress was merely exchanging a cap pistol for a pea shooter. They’re not much good against elephants either.”

“Listen, I’ve got you, and you’re my first step in cutting loose from George, his yachts and everything he stands for.”