Two Weeks in Another Town (38 page)

Jack and Bresach watched in silence for a moment. The blood mounted in Bresach’s cheeks.

“He asked me, didn’t he?” Bresach said harshly. “What did he expect me to say?”

“He asked you,” Jack said, “and you told him. Bully for you.”

Bresach put his hand up to his cheek. “I should’ve punched him in the nose.”

“He’d’ve killed you,” Jack said pleasantly.

“Well, there’s no sense in hanging around now,” Bresach said, “watching the cowboy. Let’s get out of here.”

“Don’t be silly,” Jack said. “You still want that job, don’t you?”

“I have about as much chance of getting it as that horse there,” Bresach said bitterly.

“Nonsense,” Jack said, watching Delaney mount and pull the roan’s head around to face the jump. “He’s making up his mind right now. I know him. He’s digesting what he thinks’re the insults and figuring out just how you can be of use to him. Actually, the way you talked to him was the best thing you could’ve done.”

“I was just beginning,” Bresach said. “I have a dozen other…”

“All in good time,” Jack said. “Don’t push your luck.”

Delaney was facing the jump now, twenty yards out. The roan was as nervous as ever, tossing his head and rolling his eyes and pulling against the bit. Delaney clucked to him and dug in his heels and the roan broke away with a leap that had Delaney rocking in the saddle. The roan approached the jump pulling to one side, and at the last moment, refused. Delaney went hurtling over the horse’s head and landed with a hollow, collapsing noise on the other side of the fence. He lay still for a moment as Jack and the riding master and the groom ran to him. Before anyone reached him, he pushed himself up from the ground, stiffly, brushing the dirt off his face.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Where’s that godamn horse?”

“I think for today that is enough, Signor Delaney,” the riding master said anxiously. “That is quite a shaking up.”

“Crap,” Delaney said. He strode over to where the groom was standing, calming the roan. The groom looked questioningly at the riding master as Delaney approached. The riding master shrugged and the groom gave Delaney a leg up. Delaney wrenched the horse’s head around and went back to the starting point.

“He forgets,” the riding master said nervously to Jack, “that he is no longer a young man.”

They both stood next to the barrier as Delaney clucked to the horse, took him toward the jump in a confused gallop, and went over. There was a lot of daylight showing over the saddle, but this time Delaney stayed on. He rode the horse over to the riding master and swung off, dismounting with a debonair little leap into the soft loam of the ring.

“Very good, signore,” the riding master said, gratefully taking the reins.

“It was lousy,” Delaney said. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped at the mud on his forehead, smearing it with sweat. “But I made it. Next Sunday I’ll be great.”

“What’re you proving, Maurice?” Jack asked, as they started back toward Bresach.

“Me?” Delaney sounded surprised. “Nothing. I’m just out for the exercise and the fresh air.” But he limped a little as he walked, and when he reached the fence he put out his hand shakily and held on for support. “Well, now, sonny,” he said to Bresach, “I’ve been thinking over all the interesting things you told me. Under pressure, you said, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Bresach.

“Do you think you could help me put this picture under pressure, too? Cut out the embroidery?” Delaney sounded angry, almost as if he were on the verge of striking Bresach.

“Yes,” Bresach said. “I could.”

“Good. You have yourself a job. You start tomorrow morning.” Delaney brushed at the mud on the worn knees of the blue jeans. “Now, I’d like a beer. Come on…” He climbed over the fence and jumped down with an elaborate show of energy. Jack smiled at Bresach, but Bresach was watching Delaney sullenly, suspecting insults. As Jack crawled through the top two bars of the fence, Delaney stopped walking. He stood absolutely still, then turned slowly on his heels to face them. His lips were white. “Oh, Christ, Jack,” he said in a voice that didn’t sound at all like his voice. “Oh, Christ, it hurts.”

Then he pitched face first into the gravel.

In the confusion of men running to the limp, muddy body lying on the gravel, and the babble of Italian and the rushing toward the car, with Jack holding Delaney under the shoulders and Delaney’s head loose and bumping against his arms, one clear, precise thought came to Jack—This is what it has been about, he thought; Delaney’s is the death that was announced to me.

T
HEY GAVE DELANEY OXYGEN
and anticoagulants, and called for a priest. When the car had driven to the modern white hospital, set on the hill among lawns and palm trees (California and Rome in a confusion of influences, echoes, borrowings), and while Delaney was being gently lifted onto the stretcher, the nun had asked Jack what the patient’s religion was. Jack had hesitated, then said, “Catholic,” for simplicity’s sake. No matter what he had said, Jack was sure, with a name like Delaney, the nun wouldn’t have taken any chances. The nun was a small, rosy-faced woman of about forty, brisk and competent, who spoke English with a slight touch of Irish brogue mingled with her soft Italian accent, as musical evidence of the influence of the Irish church in Rome.

First came the doctor, a self-assured, dapper man, who stayed behind the closed door a long time and who answered no questions when he came out. Then came the priest, young and pale and professorial, who prepared Delaney for eternity, everybody hoped, with no adverse effects on blood pressure or systolic beat. When the priest came out of Delaney’s room, his expression was noncommittal, and Jack was sure that there had been no time for full confession. The priest’s face, no matter how hardened he might have become, in his calling to the sins of the world, would not have been so serene if Delaney had been strong enough to compose a complete list of his transgressions.

After the priest came the publicity man for the picture, magically called off a golf course, as if by some prodding of instinct, to ensure that Delaney’s death—or survival—would be properly used for the advantage of the company in the newspapers, magazines, and over the radio circuits of the world. The publicity man was a big, heavy-set, youngish American, balding and with glasses, who set himself firmly in front of the white door at the end of the marble corridor, with a bulging brief case on the floor at his feet. In the brief case, Jack found out later, there were mimeographed copies of a biography of Delaney that the publicity man had prepared as soon as he was hired. Jack looked at the photographs and read the biography. The photographs had been taken ten years before. In them, Delaney looked young, eager and fierce. The biography only mentioned the last of his wives and none of his failures. Reading the mimeographed sheet, one would believe that Delaney’s life had been a virtuous and triumphant parade, with success following success in an uninterrupted procession.

“How do you like it?” the publicity man asked as Jack read the release in the light from the window at the end of the corridor.

“When I die,” Jack said, “remind me to hire you to write my obituary.”

The publicity man laughed good-naturedly. “They don’t pay me to rap them,” he said. His name was Fogel. The breast pocket of his sports jacket was filled with cigars. From time to time he would take a cigar out to put to his lips. Then he would remember that he was in the presence of death and would soon be in the presence of the Press, and he would sadly put the cigar back into his pocket, preserving decorum.

Fogel talked briefly to Bresach, who stood next to the window, smoking cigarettes one after the other and staring down at the gardens. Then Fogel came over to Jack and said, in a whisper, “Get that kid out of here.”

“Why?” Jack asked.

“I don’t want the press to get to him,” Fogel said. “He has the wrong attitude toward the hero.” Fogel nodded toward the closed door. “And I’m sure he’ll talk.”

Jack recognized the correctness of Fogel’s intuition. Bresach’s account of what had happened that morning, with his interpretative remarks, certainly would not fit neatly with the mimeographed eulogy. So Jack went over to Bresach and told him that there was no need to hang around. Bresach nodded. He seemed subdued and a little stunned, youthfully unable to comprehend the sudden disasters that can fall upon aging flesh. “I can’t believe it,” Bresach said. “He was so full of piss and vinegar up on that horse. You’d think he was going to live forever. If you get to him, will you tell him I don’t take back anything I said to him this morning, but I’m sorry I said it.”

“Oh, hell, Bresach,” Jack said, “it’s Sunday. Give your precious integrity a day off. Go on home.” He spoke harshly and with impatience. Now that Delaney was defenseless, he felt driven to protect him against all attack.

“Anyway,” Bresach said, “I hope he gets better. You can tell him
that,
can’t you?”

“I’ll tell him, I’ll tell him,” Jack said.

Bresach took a last look at the white door, then walked slowly toward the elevator, as the first reporter, accompanied by a photographer, came hurrying down the corridor.

Jack started down toward the phone in the nurse’s office in the middle of the floor, trying to look as if he had nothing to do with the Delaney case. He didn’t want to have to fence with reporters and he didn’t want his picture in the papers.

He called the Grand Hotel and asked for Clara Delaney. The phone rang a long time and he was just about to hang up when he heard Clara’s voice, sounding shaky and low, in the earpiece.

“Clara,” Jack said, “I’m at the Salvatore Mundi Hospital and…”

“I know,” Clara said, in the same subdued, flat voice. “They called me. I know all about it.”

“When are you coming over?” Jack asked. “Do you want me to pick you up at the hotel?”

“You don’t have to bother, Jack,” Clara said. “I’m not coming over.”

And she hung up.

By eleven o’clock that night, only the doctor, the priest, and the nurses had gone through the blank white door of Delaney’s room. Fogel had set up a kind of office for the newspapermen and photographers on the ground floor, but most of them had gone, after taking pictures of the doctor, of Jack, despite his protests, and of Tucino and Tasseti and Holt, who had arrived early in the afternoon and who remained, with Jack, in the corridor outside Delaney’s room.

Jack didn’t know why the others were keeping this vigil in the dark corridor, and if he had been asked about himself he would not have been able to reply coherently. Without formulating his reasons, even for himself, into words, he stayed within reach of Delaney’s door because he felt that he was keeping his friend alive by his devotion. While he remained there, Delaney would not die. He was sure that as soon as he could, Delaney would make a signal to him, would instruct him, absolve him. He knew that he had to hold himself ready for the communication that he knew Delaney must be struggling to make. Until that communication was made, he could not leave.

The others might have felt that they were doing Delaney no good by their attendance, but no one suggested going. So they all stayed, for their own reasons, taking turns sitting on the two wooden chairs that the nurses had set out in front of the window at the end of the corridor.

The doctor had merely said that Delaney was doing as well as could be expected and could not see visitors at the moment. The doctor said all this in Italian for Tucino and Tasseti and in excellent English for Holt and Jack. The doctor had a habit of speaking in a whisper, which made his words seem freighted with hidden meanings and forced his listeners to lean toward him to catch what he was saying. By eleven o’clock at night Jack was unreasonably irritated with the doctor.

Tucino and Tasseti paced back and forth restlessly, their leather heels tapping importantly on the stone floor, as they talked in a hushed, excited hiss of sound throughout the evening. From time to time their voices rose and Jack had the feeling that they were engaged in a long argument that they had had many times before and which rose to regularly defined climaxes after every fifty lines.

Holt stood calmly at the window, a small, vague smile on his lips. His sombrero was hung neatly on a radiator valve, a touch of Oklahoma, a breath of the plains, in the sick Roman night.

“I questioned the doctor carefully,” Holt said, “and I have the feeling Maurice won’t die. Naturally, the doctor won’t make any promises. If he says a patient will live and then he dies, it would put him in an embarrassing position professionally, and I appreciate that. But quite a few of my friends have gone through the same thing. In the oil business. The strain…That’s one of the reasons Mother insisted I arrange to take six months a year in Europe. If you enjoy being alive, there no sense in working yourself into your grave, is there, Jack?”

“No,” Jack said.

“I’m surprised about Maurice, though,” Holt said, shaking his head, with the Stetson marks in a neat oval on his graying hair. “There’s so much vitality there. He works hard, of course, but I don’t think that’s what did it. I have my theories, Jack…” He hesitated. “You don’t mind if I speak frankly, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“I know Maurice is an old friend of yours. He’s a friend of mine, too, I like to think. I’m honored to be able to call him my friend,” Holt said seriously. “What I’m about to say I say in the friendliest manner possible. I don’t want you to think I’m talking behind a sick man’s back or making a criticism. What I’ve observed about Maurice, Jack, is that he’s abnormally ambitious. Am I right? Am I unfair in that deduction?”

“No,” Jack said. “It’s not unfair.”

“He feels now that he’s not living up to his ambition,” Holt said. “That can affect a man’s heart, can’t it?”

“I would think so,” said Jack.

Holt peered soberly out the window. It was raining lightly and the palm trees gleamed here and there in the black, windless drizzle. “Somehow,” Holt said, “before I came here, it never occurred to me that it rained in Rome.” He cleared his throat. “The other thing about Maurice—and again, I want you to bear it in mind that I don’t mean it as a criticism—he doesn’t lead a normal home life.”