Two Weeks in Another Town (33 page)

“As for my so-called political activities,” the letter went on, “you’ve obviously been coached on that subject by my mother, who is a hysterically nervous woman, a condition which I have no doubt you did your best to aggravate. She is married to a timid, third-rate man, whose mumblings would not be taken seriously by an intelligent ten-year-old child. As far as you’re concerned, the position you hold, and which you seem so proud of, makes everything you say suspect. Your whole job, your salary, the soft life you lead in Paris with your frivolous wife, all depend upon your being a willing stooge for the system. Do the generals call for bigger bombs and bigger tests? You’ve got to say yes to them. Is the level of radioactivity rising dangerously throughout the world? You’ve got to pretend it is the propaganda of Communists and professional alarmists. Do most sane people think that giving atomic weapons to the Germans is like putting a loaded pistol in a criminal lunatic’s hands? You’ve got to make believe you think the Germans are kindly, gentle folk whose reputation has been somehow blackened by a conspiracy of villains. I left Paris so abruptly last summer, because I didn’t want to have to tell you these things. But now your letter has forced me to write what I feel.

“You advise me to be reticent. Like you, I suppose. Your reticence has been bought, and in your letter you suggest what price I might expect for mine. I tell you, if we all came as cheap as you, our reticence would bring us, very quickly, to a world of freaks and ruins.

“You write that the government is perfectly prepared and willing to hand out punishments to the men who oppose its policies. In saying that, I know you meant to get me to stop opposing those policies, even though I believe they are inhuman and suicidal. In reply, I’d use exactly the same argument to you to try to make you get out of the system, where every move you make, however insignificant and harmless it may be in itself, is a tacit vote of support and approval. You are not highly placed enough to oppose policy from within. All you can do is obey. If you think you are obeying sane and reasonable orders which will lead to a peaceful, healthy world, you are a fool, and I will have nothing to do with you. If you obey out of timidity and love of comfort, you are a coward, and I will have nothing to do with you. If you decide at any time to get out and come back to America, where it counts, and speak your mind, I will be most happy to treat you as my father.

Steven.”

The sheets of air-mail paper were shaking in Jack’s hands as he finished. He felt bruised and battered. This is what I started, he thought, the night I looked down into the crib on Twelfth Street and was sorry he had been born.

That is the end of my son, he thought, and crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it into the wastebasket and sat down on the edge of the desk, with his hands trembling.

There was no answer possible. The wall of arrogance, of hatred, finally revealed, was impossible to breach. The calm and reasonable arguments which could, with so much justice, be used to attack his son’s position, would have no effect.

He remembered, with annoyance, his son’s description of Hélène. Your frivolous wife. The idiot, he thought, she is gay, not frivolous. Even at twenty-two, a man should be able to tell the difference.

I should feel worse, Jack thought, looking down at the crumpled ball of paper in the wastebasket. A normal father would be in despair. He was angry and regretful, but no more. This afternoon it was more important to him to find a young girl whom he had met by chance on a street in Rome and who had disappeared than to come to grips with his estranged son. Maybe some other afternoon all this would change. Maybe some other afternoon he would feel he had to search out his son and give him his answer. But not this afternoon.

He went into the bedroom, picked up the script of Delaney’s picture, and lay down on the bed to study the scenes he had to do the next day. At five o’clock, sharp, he called the number of Dr. Gildermeister.

A man’s voice answered, after three rings.
“Pronto,”
the man said.

“Signor Bresach,
per favore,”
Jack said.

The man talked for thirty seconds in Italian that even Jack could tell was marked by a heavy German accent.

“Do you speak English?” Jack asked.

“Yes.”

“I would like to speak to Mr. Bresach, please.”

“Not here,” the man said impatiently.

“Is this Dr. Gildermeister?”

“This is Dr. Gildermeister. Who are you? What do you want?”

“This is a friend of Mr. Bresach’s, Doctor,” Jack said. He spoke quickly, because he had the impression that the man was on the verge of hanging up. “I understood that Mr. Bresach came to see you every day at five o’clock.”

“Well, he is not here now,” the man said testily. “He has not come for the last three days.”

A small shrill of alarm rang somewhere in Jack’s brain at this news. “Oh, I see,” he said, trying to sound offhand. “That’s too bad. It’s about a job that’s come up that I’m sure Mr. Bresach would be interested in.”

“A job? What sort of a job?”

“A movie company is…” Jack began.

“I see, I see,” the man said. “Well, he is not here.”

“I wonder if you can tell me his telephone number,” Jack said.

“He has no telephone.”

“Could you let me have his address?” There was silence on the other end and Jack waited, tensely.

“Ah, why not?” the man said. He shouted the address, and Jack wrote it down. “And while you’re at it,” the man said furiously, “you might tell him it is absurd to skip three days. Absurd. That is no way for a sick man to behave. Tell him I am waiting for him, I am worried about him, and I expect to see him here tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell him. Thank you,” Jack said, and hung up.

T
HE ADDRESS THAT DR.
Gildermeister had given Jack was that of a building on a narrow cobbled street without sidewalks not far from the Palazzo Farnese. The building was dark with age, a cracked fountain leaked in the courtyard, the windows along the worn marble staircase were broken and there was a dank smell of winter, like a cold river passing over stone, in the hallway. Chipped plaster angels, darkened with soot, gave evidence that in the distant past the inhabitants of the building had combined piety and wealth. The heavy black wood doors on the landings looked like prison entrances. Mingled with the smell of cats and winter there was the peculiar sour cheese smell of Italian poverty.

Bresach lived on the fourth floor. Jack stood in front of the heavy door, taking a little longer than was necessary to catch his breath after the climb. Then he knocked on the door. While he waited he heard children playing on the floor below and a radio screeching out,
“‘Volare, oh, oh!…Cantare…oh, oh, oh, oh!’”
loudly.

It was hard to imagine Veronica, with her shining long hair and her bright clothes, climbing these stairs and using her own key to enter the apartment behind the grimy door.

Jack knocked again. The door swung open, as though whoever was behind it had been waiting there silently, hoping that the knock would not be repeated and the door need not be opened. There was a man standing in the mouth of what seemed to be a dark tunnel, holding the door half-open. But it was not Bresach. The man was tall and a little stooped and he wore glasses and he was wearing a sweater and had a scholarly, gentle face and inquisitive, weak eyes.

“Yes?” the man said.

From behind him, at the other end of the tunnel, which Jack now saw was an entrance hall that led, at right angles, into a room, there came the sound of typing, rapid and nervous.

“I’m looking for Robert Bresach,” Jack said. “Is he in?” He moved a little closer, prepared to thrust his foot in the door if the man tried to close it.

But the man merely called back down the tunnel. “Robert, it’s somebody looking for you.” The man had an accent, not too strong, that was difficult to place at the moment.

The typing stopped. “Tell him to come in,” Bresach’s voice called out.

The man in the sweater smiled in a friendly manner and made a little, almost courtly bow as he opened the door wide and indicated to Jack that he should enter. The typing started up again as Jack went down the hall, which was hung with clothes, among them the khaki duffel coat. Jack turned into the room. It was small and irregular, but there were two long windows leading out onto a small balcony with an iron railing, and there was a jumbled view of terraces, vines with their roots three stories in the air, washing, roof-tops, and the evening sky, filled by soft gray clouds, with patches of deepening blue, over the city of Rome. In front of one window there was a small table and Bresach was sitting at it, his back to the room, typing intently, by touch, bent over, peering at a pile of manuscript which he seemed to be copying or translating. He didn’t turn around. He was smoking, and he had obviously been smoking a good deal, because the air of the room, with its closed windows, was hazy. There was one big bed, covered with an old piece of brocade, and a table in one corner on which stood a hot plate and a coffee pot. There were two or three wooden chairs, one of them broken, and a washbasin, and more clothes hung, neatly enough, on hooks along one wall. There were books on the floor. A large painting, done mostly in yellow and black, of a not quite recognizable animal, either in ecstasy or in terror, hung over the bed, and there was a cracked and gilded wooden crucifix about two feet high, leaning casually in a corner. The gilt was almost all flaked off the body of Christ and the limbs had a disconcerting uneven texture that realistically suggested flesh. There was no sign in the room that a woman had ever lived there.

There was only the one doorway, and the single room constituted the entire apartment. If a girl like Veronica were to come to live with you in a place like this, Jack thought, naturally you’d believe she loved you.

“Robert,” said the soft, accented voice of the man in the sweater. He had followed Jack into the room.

Bresach finished a page, dragged it from the typewriter and put it down on top of a pile on the floor. Then he swung around. He looked gravely at Jack, squinting through his glasses. He needed a shave and there was a light, uneven stubble on his jaws and chin and he seemed tiled and young and in trouble.

“Look who’s here,” he said flatly. “What’s the matter—didn’t you like my message?” He didn’t stand up.

“I want to talk to you,” Jack said.

“All right,” Bresach said. “Talk.” He took a cigarette from a crumpled pack and tossed the pack to the man in the sweater. He did not offer a cigarette to Jack.

“I think we’d better do it alone,” Jack said, looking over at the man in the sweater, who was lighting his cigarette with extreme care, cupping his hands around the little wax match as though he were standing in a high wind.

“Max can hear anything you have to say,” Bresach said. On his own ground he seemed sure of himself, offhand, sardonic. “I have nothing to hide from Max. Max, this is Mr. Andrus. I told you about him.”

“Delighted,” Max said. He made a half bow. “Robert has told me enormously about you.” There was no irony or reproach in the man’s voice.

“Max lives here,” Bresach said. “He moved in when half a bed fell unexpectedly vacant. You wouldn’t want to chase a man out of his own house, would you, Andrus?”

“Robert,” Max said, “I could easily go stand in the hall and smoke my cigarette while…”

“Stay where you are,” Bresach said loudly. “Well”—he peered malevolently at Jack through his glasses—“how’s flaming middle-age these days?”

Jack walked over to a chair near Bresach and sat down. “When you stop joking,” he said, “I’ll talk to you.”

“Ever since Max moved in here,” Bresach said, “the place has been ringing with childish laughter. Max is a Hungarian, and everybody knows that Hungarians are noted for their gaiety. We’re saving up to buy him a violin, so we’ll have it with music. He left all his violins in Budapest when the Russians brought up the tanks.”

“Bresach,” Jack said, “why’ve you stopped going to see Gildermeister the last three days?”

“Huh?” Bresach made a nervous, twitchy movement with his shoulders, and he stubbed the almost unsmoked cigarette out in an ashtray on the table. “What’re you talking about?”

“I called the doctor,” Jack said. “That’s how I got your address. He’s worried about you.”

“He is?” Bresach said flatly. “Well, I’m worried about him. There aren’t enough lunatics in Italy to keep a psychiatrist alive. I’ve promised him that when my godamn old man dies and leaves me his money I’ll pay his passage to the States. Fifty dollars an hour I promised him. On Park Avenue.”

“Why haven’t you been to see him for three days?” Jack repeated, watching the boy closely.

“What the hell is it to you?” Bresach said. “Look—I’m busy. I’m translating a six-hundred-page book from the Italian and my Italian stinks. I promised it in four weeks. Leave me alone.”

“Where’s Veronica?” Jack asked softly. “What’ve you done with her?”

“Me?” Bresach said. “What’re you talking about?”

“Where is she?” Jack stood up. He would have loved to take the grinning, sardonic boy by his skinny throat and strangle the truth out of him. At that moment he understood, for the first time, the passion of policemen who beat prisoners to obtain confessions.

“How do I know where she is?” Bresach said. “I haven’t seen her since the day she walked out of here.”

“Why did you stop seeing Gildermeister?”

“What the hell is it to you?” The nervous tic pulled at the corner of his mouth. “If you must know, I got tired of the old man. He was beginning to play God. I’ve had enough of that. I felt it was about time to give my poor old psyche a rest for a while.” He jumped up suddenly and flung the window open. “Ah, it stinks in here,” he said. “All this smoke.” He peered out over the rooftops. “Try to find anybody in this city,” he said bitterly. He turned on Jack. “If anything bad has happened to her,” he said, “you’re going to pay for it. I swear it. The next time you won’t get away.”

“Robert,” Max said softly.

“I was trying to forget the whole godamn thing,” Robert shouted at Jack. “I tried everything else, and now I was trying that. Now you come and start all over again. What do you want from me?”