Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) (20 page)

“I’ve no pretensions about that.”

“Ah—then you’ll be quite safe. If you have courage, too, that is.”

Rona looked at him. He was a man in love with the word courage.

“Moral courage,” he said bitterly, and finished his drink. “Come on, let’s find the bar.”

“But—”

“The circus hasn’t begun yet. You ought to stay and complete your first steps in political education.”

“Charles, you’ll get drunk again,” Thelma said, appearing beside his chair. She looked down at him dispassionately. He was the first man, Rona thought, who seemed to rouse no emotion in Thelma. The effect on Charles was odd. He rose to his feet, making the most of his five feet four inches. He looked at Thelma, not with hatred but with almost a touch of shame in his disgust.

“I like getting drunk,” he said, his low voice rising to its highest pitch. He kept staring at Thelma. She laughed and turned away, leaving them. “Silly boy!” she said. But her mouth closed in an angry line.

Rona said hurriedly, “I have to leave.” She watched Thelma’s gold-braided head as it made its way toward the spinet. When Charles didn’t answer, she looked at him. He was still standing as Thelma had left him. His smooth face was now emotionless, but the knuckles that gripped his empty glass were white. Suddenly, the glass cracked and splintered. He threw it into the fireplace behind him, bringing Rona to her feet. No one else seemed startled. Someone laughed.

“Your hand!” Rona said, searching for a handkerchief.

He looked at her gloomily, sadly. Then he left her as abruptly as he had first spoken to her. Blood dripped on the blue and gold rugs, leaving a thin small trail to the door.

Rona watched him leave. If this party is a circus, she thought, I’m afraid Charles is one of the clowns. Then she quickly forgot Charles. At the door Paul Haydn was standing. He looked around the room, hesitated, and then came straight toward Rona.

“Hello,” Paul said, “you look frightened.”

“I’ve lost Scott,” Rona said, trying to keep her voice gay. “What on earth brought you here?”

“I thought you needed some reinforcements.” He, too, was speaking lightly. He had meant to avoid Rona, but when he had come into the room and had suddenly seen that look of real fright on her face, he had broken all his resolutions.

“I guess I do,” Rona admitted. “I’ve had a very odd time. But what I meant was—why are you in this place?” She was remembering their last evening together at the Tysons’ some weeks ago. Paul Haydn’s conversation then did not match an appearance here.

“You don’t like it?”

“To be quite candid, it’s the phoniest dump.”

He grinned. “You flatter me. Actually, it was Murray who brought me along.”

“Murray?” She was startled now. Then she looked at Paul disbelievingly.

“He’s been very polite, recently.” Paul was still smiling.

“I always avoid him at
Trend
,” Rona said pointedly.

“I don’t seem able to,” said Paul.

They looked at each other for a moment.

And then, the sound of someone playing the spinet caught their attention. The talk around them died down.

“Have a chair,” Paul said, pulling a spindle-legged bench near them. “We are evidently going to have a few cultured pearls thrown before us. We might as well catch them in comfort.”

More people were crowding from the hall into the room, chairs were being pulled together, there was a minute of noise and bustle and then silence again. A blonde girl with a good figure, well displayed in a black sweater, was leaning over the spinet. She wore heavy gold earrings and rows of gold bracelets that jangled as she moved her arms. “Sing, Anna!” someone called. “Sing!” And Anna, in a clear sweet voice, began to sing while the white-haired man at the spinet accompanied her with simple chords. At the end of each ballad, the applause was wholehearted. During the singing, the silence was unbroken. From the other rooms, beyond the hall, the talk and laughter had died away.

At first, Rona listened quite naturally. She liked ballads. She liked the girl’s voice. She liked the way people joined in the choruses. And then she noticed that she wasn’t enjoying it as she ought to have. There was an intensity on many of the faces that was unnecessary, and when they sang they would look at each other with a smile as if they shared some secret. Rona stopped looking at Anna, and began studying the faces around her. Here and there, someone felt the same way she did; and he would look uncertainly around him, a little worried or perhaps amused. But the others were caught up in a private world, intense, exciting.

“Sing ‘Guadalajara’ again, Anna,” a man called.

So it was sung for the third time, and sung with attack and feeling.

“It’s a good song,” Paul said, watching Rona.

“Yes, I’ve always liked it.” Her voice was hesitant, and low like his. In Mexico, she had heard it constantly, played gaily and charmingly. Down there, it was a ballad. Here, it was given another meaning.

“But...?”

“There’s no need for them to be so intense about it,” she said angrily, still speaking in almost a whisper.

Paul Haydn said nothing. In front of them, a man sitting cross-legged on the floor looked round with a disapproving frown.

“Paul, am I dreaming things? See how these people draw together. Emotionally. They’re sharing some secret understanding. Aren’t they?”

“We’ll be thrown out,” he said, and then frowned back at the man who was still disapproving. “You must learn to disguise your feelings,” he added with a grin.

“But don’t you feel this odd atmosphere?” she whispered. “Oh—I know it’s silly, it’s perfectly silly. I’m going crazy. People can’t be so childish.”

“You’re insulting children,” he said gently. “But you aren’t going crazy.”

She stared at him for a moment. “Paul—” she began anxiously, but the man in front of them turned around with a commanding hush. So she kept silent, but she exchanged a smile with Paul as the man began drumming with his hands on the floor accompanying the rhythm of “The Song of the Plains.” It was a song Rona had always liked for its drama, but now as she listened to the drumming hands and heels, beating out the gallop of a troop of Red cavalry through a Park Avenue apartment, she wanted to laugh. Only, inside her, there was a deep irritation, an unexplained anger, that turned the laugh bitter.

At the doorway, she saw Scott at last. With Thelma. Thelma’s gold-braided hair had slipped a little. She was wildly excited, madly applauding. Scott was looking grave, almost worried, perhaps bored. Rona waved and attracted his attention. He nodded. He was smiling now. Then he caught sight of Paul Haydn beside her. Scott was no longer smiling as he left Thelma and started to plough his way across the crowded room. But it was a slow job, and he had to stop while the singer made a little announcement. “My voice is giving out,” she said with her charming smile. “So just once more—the last one. What shall it be?” Cries of disappointment, calls of “More later,” suggestions for songs, all crossed and meshed into each other. There was a sudden sharp lull, as the girl held her hand up for silence. Her bracelets jangled prettily. “What shall it be?” she asked again.

“‘From the Halls of Montezuma’,” Rona called in her clear voice.

There was a shocked moment followed by a babel of voices.

“Well,” Rona said with a smile to the man in front who had turned to stare, “it has a good marching rhythm, too.”

Paul Haydn bent his head to hide his wide grin. “Naughty,” he said, “that was very naughty of you, Rona.” The grin deepened and he began to struggle with a laugh. There were some others, too, who were trying to smother their amusement.

But someone did laugh, a loud high laugh that brought complete silence once more to the room and swung every head toward the piano. Charles, his red hair disarranged, his white face excited, his hand bandaged roughly with an incongruous guest towel, had climbed on to the piano stool. He stood there, balancing himself precariously, holding up his glass. “Time for a toast,” he shouted in his high thin voice, beaming around the room.

“Stop him, someone!” It was Thelma leaving the doorway, struggling to reach him.

Charles turned to look at her, slipped and regained his footing. “Time for a toast,” he repeated. “I give you, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the theories of Karl Marx—the opium of the intellectuals!” He raised his glass still higher, and he lost his balance, falling with a smashing clang into the open piano. Waves of wild chords jangled through the room as Charles’s bandage got caught in the piano wires. He was climbing out now, slowly, choosing his exit by way of the piano keys. The discordant crashes overpowered the chorus of voices.

“He’s drunk again,” the man on the floor said angrily, as Charles was at last pulled free.

“Poor Thelma,” said his companion, “she’ll really have to put him away some place.”

Rona turned to Paul. “Who
is
Charles?”

Paul watched the red-haired, white-faced man telling everyone to give him another drink and he’d oblige with plenty more toasts, he’d been thinking them up for months. He answered grimly, “Didn’t you know? He’s Thelma’s son.”

“Oh, no!” Rona said nothing more. Charles was trying to shake himself free from a restraining hand. He was now inviting everyone to come and start on the smoked turkey and salmon and baked ham in the dining-room. “Arise!” he called. “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!”

It was at that moment that Scott reached them.

“Time to leave,” he said angrily. He looked at Paul Haydn, his eyes narrowing.

Rona, still watching Charles being persuaded out of the room, only nodded. The spinet sounded a chord, the singer leaned on one elbow and brushed back a lock of gold hair. She smiled and began to sing. It wasn’t about the Halls of Montezuma or the Shores of Tripoli, though. It was “Guadalajara,” for the fourth time that evening.

Rona got up, smiled to Paul and began to leave. Scott hesitated for a moment, and then followed her. The music lovers looked at them angrily, motioned to them to wait until the song had ended. But Rona, and then Scott, reached the hall. The other rooms were empty now. The dining-room waited with its large table decorated with food—Charles had been right about the smoked turkey and baked ham. But Charles, himself, was nowhere to be seen.

“I’m sorry,” Scott said, as he waited for the stiff-faced butler to find his hat. “That was a shocking performance.” He took her arm, trying to smile. But he looked tired and worried. She noticed the drawn look at the side of his mouth, the lines at his eyes. “Let’s go and have dinner,” he said, but he couldn’t disguise his anger. “Let’s find a quiet place.” He held a tight grip of her arm all the way down to the street. They didn’t speak at all.

He helped her with excessive politeness into the car. It was then she knew just how angry he was. As he edged the nose of the car out toward the stream of traffic, his anger suddenly exploded. “Why the hell is Paul Haydn following you around, everywhere, all the time?” Then as they waited for a line of cars to pass them, he reached a hand over and gripped hers. “Why do you do this to me, Rona?” he asked.

So that was it. She relaxed. But still, she was thinking, we are going to talk frankly at dinner. We must. I’ve had a lot of questions boiling up for months, and I’ve always taken them off the fire and laid them aside. Tonight, they are going to be served up, and Scott will give me the answers. And then, with everything cleared off, we’ll be able to begin again. We’ll reach right back to the happiness we had last summer, and we’ll start from there.

She felt the tears sting her eyes. She leaned over quickly and kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “But why did we go to that frightful place? We ought to have known that anyone as awful as Thelma would have no taste in anything.”

He swung the car out into the avenue. “Don’t worry, I shan’t take you there again.”

“Let’s write off Thelma and Murray completely,” she said eagerly.

Scott was watching traffic. Usually, he liked to take chances. Tonight, he was being more cautious than usual. “What did you think of Charles?” he asked.

“I became very sorry for him,” she said slowly.

“For that little drunk? He’s a manic depressive, you know.”

“But who made him that way?” she asked quietly, thinking of Thelma.

“Made him?”

“Yes. What could you do, if you had a mother who filled her house with people like that? He’s still loyal to her, which is odd. She forfeited that, long ago, I’d think.”

“Loyal? Do you call him loyal to Thelma?”

“Loyal enough not to go to the FBI and tell everything he knows.”

“What on earth would the FBI have to do with him or Thelma?”

Rona said, “I don’t know about such things, Scott. But I just supposed that Charles, knowing what he knows, must feel he’s got to tell someone. Unless he believed in Thelma’s politics. And he obviously doesn’t.”

“You’ve been reading too many accounts of those Washington witch-hunts, Rona.” He was smiling, shaking his head over her simplicity.

“I haven’t been studying them enough,” Rona said sharply. “I’ve been too quick to disbelieve a lot of things. But from now on—oh, Scott!” The car swerved and avoided hitting a woman who had stepped off the sidewalk before the lights changed. A taxi, behind them, screamed to a sudden halt, and the driver’s red face leaned out to yell what he thought of Scott’s brain power.

Scott ignored the vehement descriptions, but his mouth tightened and his jaw clenched. Rona, remembering now how he hated scenes, began to wonder what he had felt this evening when the fireworks started. And she had been to blame. She knew that. Charles had laughed at her request for the Marines’ hymn, and that had given him the courage to climb on the piano stool. Poor Charles, even his little protest had been so ineffectual. Drunk, everyone had said. Drunk? His voice had been clear enough, on either of its octaves.

“We’ll have dinner at Carlo’s,” Scott said suddenly. “His place is open on Sunday, I think. Hungry?”

“Yes.” It had been a long time since breakfast together, a very long time since they had set out this morning with nothing to worry them except a list of apartments.