The Boy Who Followed Ripley (29 page)

This was more cheerful, like a crazy circus or a stage-set through which he was permitted to wander. Huge cops in blue short-sleeved shirts swung their wooden nightsticks and joshed with the prostitutes whom they were supposed to round up, Tom had read lately. Had the cops rounded up the same ones so often, that they’d got tired of it? Or were they in process of rounding these up? Teenaged boys with makeup and very wise eyes sized up the older men, some with money already in their hands, who were ready to buy them.

“No,” Tom said softly, ducking his head at the approach of a blonde girl whose thighs bulged horribly under shiny black plastic. Tom read with amazement the blunt and banal film titles on the cinema marquees. Such a lack of talent in the porn department! But this clientele didn’t want subtlety or wit. And all the blown-up color photos of men and women, men and men, women and women, naked and presumably making it, and Frank had not made it with Teresa the one time he had tried! Tom laughed a little, with a bizarre amusement. Suddenly he had had enough, and went trotting through the shuffling blacks, the pasty-faced whites toward the darkish blob of the big public library on Fifth Avenue. He didn’t go as far as Fifth, but turned southward on Sixth Avenue.

A sailor hurtled out of a bar on Tom’s right and collided with Tom. The sailor fell on the ground, and Tom hauled him up, steadied him with one hand, and reached for his white cap, which had fallen off. The boy looked in his teens and was swaying like a mast in a storm.

“Where’re your chums?” Tom asked. “Haven’t you got chums in there?”

“I wanna taxi and I wanna girl,” said the boy, smiling.

He looked healthy, and probably a couple of scotches and six beers had put him into this state. “Come on.” Tom took his arm and pushed the bar door open, looking for other sailor uniforms. Tom saw two at the bar, but a barman came round toward Tom and said:

“We don’t want him in here and we’re not serving him!”

“Aren’t these his friends?” Tom asked, pointing to the two sailors.

“We do’
want
him!” said one of the two sailors, also a bit drunk. “He can get the fuck
out
!”

Tom’s charge was now leaning against the doorjamb, resisting the efforts of the barman to wrestle him out.

Tom went up to the two at the bar, not caring a damn if he got a sock in the jaw for his trouble. Tom said with as tough a New York accent as he could put on, “Take care of your pal! That’s a hell of a way to treat a guy in the same uniform, no?” Tom looked at the second sailor, who was not quite so under the influence, and saw that he had got through to him, because he shoved himself from the bar. Tom walked toward the door and looked back.

The soberer sailor was approaching his drunken pal, reluctantly.

Well, that was something, Tom thought as he went out, though very little. He walked back to the Chelsea. Here people were a bit pissed, or gay, or merry in the lobby, but the scene was sedate compared to Times Square. The Chelsea was famous for its eccentric patrons, but usually they kept themselves within a certain bound.

Tom thought of ringing Heloise, since it would be around nine in the morning there, and didn’t. He realized that he was shattered.
Shattered.
And how had he escaped a punch in the ribs from the sailors in that bar? Tom realized that he had been lucky once again. He fell into bed, not caring when he woke up.

Should he telephone Lily tomorrow? Or would it even disturb her, upset her? Was she taking care of such things as deciding what kind of coffin would be appropriate? Would Johnny suddenly grow up and take charge? Would Tal take charge? Would Teresa be told, and would she come to the funeral, the cremation, or whatever it would be? Did he have to think about this tonight, Tom asked himself as he tossed in his bed.

Only by 9 p.m. the next evening did Tom regain some kind of composure, a sense of returning to himself. The engines had started on the airplane, and he seemed suddenly to wake up, as if he were home already. He felt happy, or happier, and he was escaping from—what? He had acquired another suitcase, at Mark Cross this time, as Gucci had become so ultra snob, Tom was inclined to boycott it, and the new suitcase was full of things he had bought: a sweater for Heloise, an art book from Doubleday’s, a blue-and-white striped apron for Mme. Annette with a red pocket on which was printed
OUT TO LUNCH
, plus a small gold pin, also for Mme. Annette because her birthday was soon, the pin in the shape of a flying goose with little spiked reeds of gold below, a good-looking passport case for Eric Lanz. Tom had not forgotten Peter in Berlin. He would look for something special for him in Paris. Tom watched Manhattan’s fairyland of lights gently rising and falling with the plane’s movement, and he thought of Frank being buried soon in the same body of land. When the American coast was out of sight, Tom closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep. But he kept thinking of Frank, and finding it hard to believe that the boy was dead. It was a fact, and yet that fact was something that Tom could not make real as yet. He had thought sleep would be a help, but he had awakened this morning with the same sense of fantasy about Frank’s death—as if he might look now across the plane’s aisle and see Frank sitting there, smiling at him, surprising him. Tom had to remember the white sheet over the stretcher. No intern would pull a sheet all the way over someone’s head, unless the person beneath was dead.

He would have to write to Lily Pierson, a proper letter in longhand, and Tom knew he could do it, politely and tenderly and all that, but what could Lily ever know about the little garden house in Moret where Frank had slept, or about Berlin, or even about Teresa’s power over her son? Tom wondered what had been Frank’s last thought as he fell downward onto the rocks? Teresa? A memory of his father falling fatally downward onto the same rocks? Had the boy possibly thought of him? Tom shifted in his seat and opened his eyes. The stewardesses had begun to circulate. Tom sighed, not caring what he ordered, beer, a scotch, food, or nothing.

What a joke, Tom thought, how useless now were the rather carefully considered lectures he had given Frank on the subject of “money” or “money and power”! Use it a little, even enjoy it a little, Tom had said, and stop feeling guilty. Give some to charity, to art projects, to whatever you like, and to whomever needs it. Yes, and he had also said, as had Lily, that there were others who could take over the administration of Pierson, at least until Frank finished school and even after that. But Frank would have had to poke his nose a little bit into Pierson, have his name (maybe along with his brother’s) at the head of the directors’ list, and Frank hadn’t wanted even that.

At some point, miles high and in a black sky, Tom went to sleep under a blanket provided by a redheaded stewardess. When he woke up, the sun was rising and blazing—as out of step with time, it seemed, as anything else, and the airplane was over France, according to the announcement which had awakened Tom.

Roissy again, and the Satellites’ shiny escalators, one of which Tom rode down with his hand luggage. He could have run into trouble with his new suitcase and its contents, but Tom put on a glassy unconcern, and made it through the Nothing to Declare barrier. He checked the timetable in his wallet, decided on a train, then rang Belle Ombre.

“Tome!” Heloise said. “You are
where
?”

She couldn’t believe that he was at Charles de Gaulle Airport, and he couldn’t believe that she was so close. “I can be in Moret at twelve-thirty easily. I just looked it up.” Tom was suddenly smiling. “Everything okay?”

Everything was, except that Mme. Annette had a sprained knee from a fall or slip on the stairway. But even that did not sound serious, as she was getting about as usual, Heloise said. “Why didn’t you write me—or telephone?”

“I was there such a short time!” Tom replied. “Just two days! I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Twelve thirty-one.”

“A bientôt, chéri!” She was going to fetch him.

Tom taxied to the Gare de Lyon with his luggage—which had still not been overweight—and boarded the train for Moret with
Le Monde
and
Le Figaro
. He was nearly finished scanning the papers, before he realized that he had not looked for anything about Frank, and realized also that there would barely have been time for a report of his death in these papers. Was it going to be, again, a possible “accident”? What was his mother going to say? He thought that Lily was going to say that her son was a suicide. And let history or gossip make what they wished of the two deaths there within the same summer.

Heloise awaited him beside the red Mercedes. The breeze blew her hair about. She saw him and waved, though he couldn’t wave back with two suitcases plus a plastic bag of Dutch cigars, newspapers, and paperbacks. He kissed Heloise on both cheeks and on her neck.

“How are you?” Heloise asked.

“Ah-h,” said Tom, loading his suitcases into the trunk.

“I thought you might be back again with Frank,” she said, smiling.

It was amazing to Tom how happy she looked. When, he thought as they drove away from the station, should he tell her about Frank? Now Heloise—who had said she wanted to drive—was in the clear of traffic and light signals and heading for Villeperce. “I may as well tell you now, Frank died the day before yesterday.” Tom glanced at the steering wheel as he spoke, but Heloise’s hands only tightened on it for a second.

“What do you mean
died
?” she asked in French.

“He jumped over that same cliff where his father died. I’ll explain better at the house, but I somehow didn’t want to say it in front of Madame Annette, even in English.”

“What cliff do you mean?” Heloise asked, still in French.

“The cliff on their land in Maine. It overlooks the sea.”

“Ah, yes!” Heloise suddenly remembered, perhaps from the newspaper stories. “You were there? You
saw
him?”

“I was at the house. I didn’t see him, no, because the cliff’s some distance away. I’ll—” Tom was finding it difficult to speak. “Really there isn’t much to tell. I spent one night at the house. I was intending to leave the next day—which I did. His mother and a couple of her friends were having tea. I went out to look for the boy.”

“And you saw he had jumped?” Heloise said in English now.

“Yes.”

“How awful, Tome!— That is why you look so—absent.”

“Do I? Absent?” They were now approaching Villeperce, and Tom gazed at a house he knew and liked, and then the post office, then the bakery, before Heloise made the turn to the left. She had taken the route quite through the village, maybe by accident, maybe because she was nervous and wanted to go by a slower way. Tom went on, “Maybe I found him ten minutes after he’d jumped. I don’t know. I had to go back and tell the family. It’s quite a steep cliff—rocks down there. I will tell you more later maybe, darling.” But what more would there be to tell? Tom glanced at Heloise, who was driving through the gates of Belle Ombre now.

“Yes, you
must
tell me,” she said as she got out of the car.

Tom could see that this was a story she expected to hear in full, because Tom had not done anything wrong, and was not going to conceal anything from her.

“I liked Frank, you know?” Heloise said to Tom, and her lavender-blue eyes met his for a second. “Finally, I mean. I didn’t like him at first.”

Tom knew.

“This is a new suitcase?”

Tom smiled. “And a few new things in it.”

“Oh!— Thank you for the German handbag, Tome!”

“Bonjour, Monsieur Tome!” Mme. Annette stood on the sunlit doorstep, and Tom could just see a pale elastic band below her skirt hem, under her beige stockings or maybe tights, around one knee.

“How are you, dear Madame Annette?” Tom said, putting an arm half around her, and she replied that she was very well, and gave him a token kiss, but paused hardly at all before crossing the gravel to take the suitcase Heloise was carrying.

Mme. Annette insisted upon carrying both suitcases up, one at a time, despite her sprained knee, so Tom let her do it, because it gave her pleasure.

“It’s so good to be
home
!” Tom said, looking around at the living room, the table set for lunch, the harpsichord, the phony Derwatt over the fireplace. “You know, the Piersons have ‘The Rainbow’? Did I mention that or not? You know, one of the—a very good Derwatt.”

“Rea-ally?” said Heloise, rather mockingly, as if she had or maybe had not heard of this particular Derwatt, or maybe because she suspected it was a fake.

Tom simply couldn’t tell. But he laughed with relief, with happiness. Mme. Annette was coming down the stairs, carefully now, with one hand on the banister. At least he had dissuaded Mme. Annette years ago from polishing the stair steps.

“How can you look so cheerful, when the boy is dead?” Heloise had asked that in English, and Mme. Annette, reaching now for the second suitcase, paid no attention.

Heloise was right. Tom didn’t know why he could feel so cheerful. “Maybe it hasn’t sunk in as yet. It was so sudden—a shock to everyone at the house. Frank’s older brother was there, Johnny. Frank was very unhappy because of a girl. I told you that. Teresa. Plus his father’s death—” That was as far as Tom wanted to go. John Pierson Senior’s death would always be a suicide or an accident, whenever he spoke to Heloise about it.

“But that is terrible—to kill oneself at sixteen! More and more young people are killing themselves, you know? I am always reading about it in the newspapers.— Would you like some? Or anything?” Heloise extended the wineglass full of Perrier which she had just poured for herself, Tom knew.

Tom shook his head. “I want to wash up.” He went toward the downstairs WC and basin, and en route glanced at the little stack of four letters on the telephone table, yesterday’s and today’s post. That could wait.

During lunch, Tom told Heloise about the Kennebunkport house of the Piersons, about the odd old servant called Susie Schuhmacher, who had been housekeeper and in a way governess of the boys years ago, and who was now laid low with a heart attack. He succeeded in making the house a mixture of luxury and gloom, which was the truth, Tom thought, or anyway the way he had felt about it. From Heloise’s slight frown, Tom knew that she knew he was not telling the whole truth.