One Fearful Yellow Eye (8 page)

"He's your friend, dear."

"Not any longer, believe me."

"Run along, Mark, dear. Run on back and tell him to wait and I'll be by in a little while to take a look."

As he started to leave he looked into the studio at the new painting on the easel. "Heidi!" he cried. "It's stunning. And I believe it's transitional. Your work is getting so strong!"

After saying he hoped we'd meet again, he went hurrying off.

"Poor Mark," she said. "Everything is always a crisis. But he does work very hard. Had we finished?"

"There's a couple of questions. I'd like to get a look at those problem dogs. If you want to change, I could ask the questions on the way."

She changed to a gray flannel suit worn over a pale green sweater, and agreed it would be pleasant to walk the four blocks or so to the Tempo East Gallery. I did not have to shorten my normal stride very much to stay in step with her. I said, "Did you have any idea the bulk of the estate had been liquidated before the bank told you?"

"I had no idea! Roger and I knew he'd changed his will and was cutting us each from a half to a
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quarter. Roger even had his attorney look into it, but there was nothing we could do. I suppose we could have guessed the woman might be capable of some sort of trickery."

"How was your relationship with your father the last year of his life?"

"Unfortunate. The Doyle person poisoned his mind against his own children. We saw him a few times, of course. He seemed pleasant but... remote. Not terribly interested in what we were doing. Oh, he was a lot of help to me with the wedding, and later with the divorce from Gadge.

Actually Jeanie-Roger's wife-seemed to get along with him better than we did. She'd stop with the kids. Daddy enjoyed seeing his grandchildren."

"Gloria Geis claims that all she gets from the estate is the insurance policy that brings her in less than five thousand a year."

"A lovely smokescreen. That's what I think."

"Maybe that nurse blackmailed your father."

"Stanyard? Janice Stanyard? Nonsense!"

"Actually, since you couldn't have touched the principal, your inheritance would have been just the seventy-five hundred a year, right?"

"Meaning I shouldn't care so much about it? Mr. McGee, I do not like to be cheated. The amount is not the point at issue. I can get along without it, of course. My alimony's four times that, and I do sell many of my paintings, regardless of your opinion of my work."

"And there's an income from the gallery?"

"A small one. My divorce was final about... fourteen months. There was a settlement and the alimony agreement, and at Daddy's suggestion John Andrus advised me on handling the settlement money. I bought the building where my apartment is, and I bought some good blue-chip stocks, invested in the gallery, and put what was left in a savings account. I can get along nicely, thank you. But why should that make me feel indifferent about someone else having something Daddy intended I should have?"

"Is Roger doing as well?"

"Better, if anything. Jeanie has her own money. And Roger is very good with money, very shrewd. But he doesn't like being cheated any better than I do. Here we are."

The sign on the door said the gallery was closed. As she was looking for the key in her purse Mark Avanyan opened the door for us. When we went in, he gestured toward the dog tableau, gave a loud theatrical sigh, and turned away. Though small, the gallery was well-lighted, attractive, pleasantly designed not to detract from any work being shown. Kirstarian stood with his back toward us, arms folded, and he was as motionless as all his white muslin people. They made an eerie effect, white mummies frozen at some moment of action. The form was entirely derivative, of course. A movable spot on one of the ceiling tracks shone down upon the large dogs. Mark had not reported inaccurately.

Kirstarian turned very slowly to face us. I was astonished to see how young his face and his eyes
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were in that small area not obscured by the huge, untrimmed black beard. He wore the kind of black suit favored by European intellectuals, and I had thought from the shape of him that he was at least middle-aged. But he was merely a plump young man with bad posture.

"Avanyan," he said in a slow and heavy voice, "is incurably middle-class. He is a silly little tradesman and this is his silly little shop. Perhaps, Mrs. Trumbill, you have more integrity."

Heidi stared at the muslin sculpture, fists on her hips. "This is a necessary statement?" she asked.

"An expression of eternal relationships. Yes."

"Dear Jesus," whispered Mark Avanyan, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling.

I broke the impasse by saying, "I think it's fabulous, Mr. Kirstarian." I caught his hand and pumped it

"Thank you, sir. But, please, not mister. Just Kirstarian."

"Let me give you my card," I said. I had managed to turn him and position him perfectly. I fumbled in my wallet and dropped several cards. "Oops!" said I, and ducked for them as they were still fluttering down, and put my right foot crosswise, an inch behind the heels of his shabby black shoes. As I straightened up, I managed to nudge him in the chest with my shoulder. He teetered, waved his arms wildly, then sat solidly upon his dogs. As I had dared hope, the hardening agent made the structures brittle. Muslin love ended in a huge Nabisco crunching, a spanging of wires, a rattle of dogfragments across the floor.

With loud sounds of apology and dismay, I lifted him up out of the unidentifiable ruin. As he sputtered I turned him and heartily whacked all the white powder off the back of his shiny black suit. He was in despair at the tragic accident. He kept picking up parts and dropping them. We all tried to comfort him. He said he hadn't even photographed it. He went trudging sadly off, a blackness marching through the brightness of the Saturday midday.

At one point during the helpless laughter I learned something about Miss Heidi. She clung to me, tears rolling down her face, and then suddenly, became aware of my hands on her waist. She froze at once, and turned rigidly away, taking a tissue from her purse and dabbing at her eyes.

She said she had some errands, and left so abruptly it was very much like flight.

After she left, when Mark wanted to know how I knew Heidi, I explained that I was investigating the disappearance of Fortner Geis' estate. He had no ideas. He wanted to be helpful, because I had extricated the gallery from an idiotic impasse. There is a delicate protocol in such relationships. He was carefully flirtatious, looking for any subtle encouragement. So I managed to drop into the conversation quite casually those clues which turned him off for good. His acceptance of the inevitable was philosophic.

I am always skeptical of the male who makes a big public deal out of how he hates fairies, how they turn his stomach, how he'd like to beat the hell out of them. The queens are certainly distasteful, but the average homosexual in the visual and performing arts is usually a human being a little bit brighter and more perceptive than most. I've had the opinion for a long time that the creative work of the homosexuals tends to be so glossy and clever and glib that it has a curious shallowness about it, as though the inability to share the most common human experience of all makes it all surface and no guts, and when there is an impression of guts it is
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usually just another clever imitation.

But once he knows that it is absolutely no dice, there is no persistence. They know how to keep their worlds separated. And most of them are wryly aware of the ugly fact that the overly male type who thinks he hates them so thoroughly is the man who is, deep in his heart, unsure of his own masculinity. The man who knows that his preferences are solidly heterosexual has no need to go about thumping everybody who lisps.

That outraged and muscular attitude always reminds me of a curious aspect of the Negro problem in the South. It is something seldom if ever touched upon in learned surveys of the situation, but the intelligent Negroes have been sourly amused by it for many years. When you see photographs of violence directed against Negro civil rights workers, photographs in newspapers and magazines and on the television screen, it is inevitable that among the most hate-filled and violent faces on the whites you will spot an interesting incidence of a touch of the tar brush a few generations ago. Through ugliness and violence they are trying to overcompensate for that inner awareness of an ancestor who studied himself in the mirror one day and decided he could pass and get away with it, and who-young man or young woman-went underground and reappeared a hundred or five hundred miles away as a white, married white, and prayed to God almighty that every baby would be fair enough. And, because the dark skin of the Negro is genetically a recessive characteristic, the babies were fair-unless, of course, by cruel chance both parents carried the recessive gene. Other characteristics of race are there, exposed these days by the impartial lens.

So, sitting in the back of the gallery, drinking cold beer, from a small refrigerator, I asked him what made Heidi tick. I knew that in the close associations of work they would have been like girls together, exchanging confidences.

"Poor Heidi," he said. "She's blocked. She's all tied in knots. She can't make out. Gadge had sort of a snowmaiden complex, I guess. But the kiss didn't awaken the virgin, the way it says in the books. To her it was just a lot of terrible senseless nastiness. Heavens, Gadge Trumbill would have been one of the least likely anyway. He's a possessor. He's a brutalizer. Horribly demanding. I met him through Heidi, of course. And I rue the day. I suppose it does give Heidi and me some kind of sick something in common. Disaster victims. A dear friend of mine, Anna VanMaller, the cellist, you must have heard of her, took a great interest in Heidi last spring, but poor Heidi can't go either way. She sublimates every bit of sexual drive into her work, and she uses the most fantastically subtle erotic symbolism without even realizing it. I keep telling her psychiatry might help, but she says she is perfectly happy the way things are. I think it is some sort of a father thing. When she was little, she adored him. Once I tried to tell her that she married an older man because the father had betrayed her by marrying the Doyle woman, and I actually thought she was going to scratch out my eyes. I will tell you this, though. It is a damned good thing Dr. Geis brought some good tough lawyers into that divorce action last year. I think Heidi would have settled for peanuts, just to get out of Gadge's bed forever. Funny, though, if Heidi had turned into what Gadge thought she might become, he wouldn't have had to go catting around after everybody in sight."

As I trudged back to the hotel for a late lunch, I decided there was no point in trying to sort out the fragments of inference and information until I had more.

In many ways life is less random than we think. In your past and mine, there have been times when we have, on some lonely trail, constructed a device aimed into our future. Perhaps nothing ever comes along to trigger it. We live through the safe years. But, for some people, something
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moves on the half forgotten path, and something arches out of the past and explodes in the here and now. These are emotional intersections, when lives cross, diverge, then meet again.

Rational examination of the specifics, like Janice Stanyard, Gretchen's disappearance, Heidi's coldness, Anna's denial of her daughter, would do me no good, not yet.

I had to get more of the feel of Former Geis' life before I could understand how he could accept so blandly a condition which caused him to steal the inheritance his heirs expected and then die without leaving any explanation, though he knew that it would create a curious kind of emotional and legal chaos.

It is almost impossible to bully a dying man, particularly one with the inner strength of Fortner Geis.

FIVE

AFTER LUNCH I rode up to my floor in an elevatorload of very noisy jolly fellows wearing nickname badges and smelling of sour mash.

I sat on my bed and checked the big phone directory and found several Stanyards. One was Mrs.

Charles Stanyard. The others were male. It was a number on Greenwood. I had picked up a city map. Apparently the address would be reasonably handy to Methodist Hospital. Glory had given me Roger Geis' address in the Evanston area off Glenview. I wasn't interested in Roger. If there was anything he could add, Heidi would have known it. I was more curious about his wife, Jeanie, who'd gotten along well with Fort. Most of all I wanted to talk to Gretchen, to Susan, and again to Anna Ottlo.

I arranged for a rental Ford and drove out to the Roger Geis home, red brick with stubby white pillars, some fine old trees. I got there a little after three. The maid was there alone with the youngest child. She wouldn't take the chain off the door, and told me through the opening that the mister was playing golf, and that Mrs. Geis was at the Countryside Tennis Club with the two older children. When I asked her how to find it, she closed the door.

I got my directions at a gas station. The day was turning colder, but most of the dozen courts were in use. In a large play area noisy platoons of small children were keeping two young girls very busy. I asked a big winded lady carrying three rackets if Jeanie Geis was on the courts, and between pantings, she pointed to a game of mixed doubles and told me she was the girl on the far court. I moved over and watched them. Jeanie was a sturdy woman nearing thirty, not tall, a bit heavy in the leg. Brown legs, arms, face, hair. The heavy legs were the hard, muscular, springy legs of the athlete. She covered more than her share of the court. Her partner was a spry old man with white hair. They were playing a boy and girl in their early twenties. It was very respectable tennis, craftiness against power. Jeanie's little white pleated skirt whipped around as she twisted, cut back, dashed to the net. They weren't jolly about saves and misses. It was a blood game. On set point, Jeanie banged a cross-court shot to the young girl's backhand, and the girl took a nasty fall trying to get to it, but missed it. They gathered around her. She had taken some hide off her arm. She said she was all right.