Take Me Home

Chapter 10

Between nine-thirty and ten, while Ivy was enjoying the illusory warmth and security of too much alcohol, Henry was on the way home. He arrived just before ten, and he was already beginning to feel uncertain of a number of things he had accepted as true in Lila’s apartment. He was also beginning to feel guilty in proportion to his growing uncertainty, and he was nagged by the suspicion that Lila, in addition to being beautiful, was extremely clever as well. He had been altogether too ready to accept her diagnosis of Ivy, which was a measure of his own cowardice in trying to justify his own injustice, and now that he was away from her beauty and her assured voice and her willing flesh, he thought that he could detect in her remembered words and behavior a pattern of deception that he had not seen before.

He faced the rather humiliating conclusion that he had probably been seduced for a purpose other than pleasure, and this purpose was simply that of making Lila Galvin appear convincingly something that she was not. After all bisexuality was not particularly rare, and certainly had a far greater incidence than was generally known. Lila was, by the nature of her ambition, especially vulnerable to a kind of disgrace that could destroy her life as she wanted it to be, including probably a marriage for money and position, and her fear of Ivy, what she might say and do, was surely commensurate with her vulnerability. He wondered if this fear could actually become murderous. He had never fully believed Ivy’s story about the sedative, but he had considered it an effect of feverish imagination, not calculated deception, and he had not doubted until tonight, in Lila’s apartment, that Ivy had believed it herself. Now, in his own rooms, where the sense of Ivy’s presence was strong and Lila’s wasn’t, he again began to believe in Ivy’s innocence, if not her reliability.

Lila had said that Ivy was a psychopathic personality, a liar and cheat and egoist as well as deviate, but this was not so. It was Lila who lied, and possibly it was Lila who was the psychopathic personality. Henry’s knowledge of abnormalities was no greater and no broader than his experience of observation and reading, but he was certain that psychopathic personalities did not commit suicide or seriously try to. They destroyed others, never themselves. And Ivy’s suicide attempt had been genuine, there was no question about that, and she had been saved only by the thinnest and most ludicrous of chances, that she could in no way have predicted.

It was Lila who lied. She was very beautiful and very clever and maybe very dangerous. She had lied with her voice and with her body, and he had believed, for a while, both lies.

And where was Ivy? Well, she had gone away, because she had been told to go in anger that was now regretted. The rooms above the bookshop seemed desolate and deserted, and it occurred to Henry that emptiness, against all logic, existed in degrees. He noted the tidiness of the living room, and the tidiness somehow emphasized the absence of the person who had accomplished it. Walking into the bedroom, he saw the packed bag against the wall, and then, looking into the drawer of the chest, saw that the twenty dollars had been taken. The packed bag indicated that she intended to return for it, but this might no be for a long time, or might be never. In the meanwhile, she was gone, because he had sent her away, and where could she possibly be?

Was she, like the night he had found her, roaming the streets? The thought of her doing this was deeply disturbing, increasing his conviction of senseless cruelty and concomitant guilt, and he had a vision of her passing like a lost child through the intermittent areas of light and darkness along the cold streets. She had taken the twenty dollars, however. Having the money, it was unlikely that she would go without shelter and a bed the first night.

Perhaps she would go back to Lila. This thought was in his mind suddenly, and it was the most disturbing possibility of all. If she roamed the streets or stayed somewhere for the night in a cheap room, it was at least a sign of stubborn adherence to rebellion, a refusal to capitulate, but if she returned to Lila it would be a final admission of failure, the definitive submission. She had not been there while he was, that was certain, and he had left late enough so that she should easily have arrived, if she was coming at all. But perhaps it had merely taken her a long while to make a decision, or to be driven to it in desertion and desperation, in which case she might be there at this moment, and it was imperative, now that he had thought of it, to know if it were so or not.

Putting on his hat and overcoat, he went downstairs to the street and turned left toward the Greek’s as far as a public telephone booth on the corner. It was very cold in the booth, and the bulb which lighted it was growing dim. He found Lila’s number listed in the directory and dialed it. Her phone rang and rang in short bursts at the other end of the line, and he was about to give up and break the connection when her voice came on abruptly. “Hello,” she said. “This is Lila Galvin speaking.”

“Henry Harper,” Henry said.

There was a long pause before she spoke again, and in the pause a suggestion of wariness. Her voice, when she spoke, was so cool and impersonal that it seemed completely unrelated to the voice in which he had heard, a few hours ago, the soft solicitations and gutturals of passion.

“What do you want?” she said. “Why are you calling me at this hour?”

“Is Ivy there?”

“Ivy? Certainly not. I supposed that she was with you.”

“She’s gone. She was gone when I got home.”

“What made you think she came here?”

“I only thought she might have. It was the only place I could think of that she might go to.”

“Why did she leave? Was it because of something you did to her?”

He had been made sensitive to inference by his feeling of guilty responsibility, however irrational it might be, and he was, sitting cramped in the cold and dimly lighted booth, shaken of a sudden by a diffused and futile fury that was at once directed inwardly upon himself and outwardly upon both Ivy and Lila.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Whatever I have done to her is not one-tenth so bad as what you have done to her, or what she has done to herself. Anyhow, it will do no good to make accusations or call names. She’s gone, and where she may go finally and do to herself in the end is something I don’t like to think about. Neither do you, I’ll bet. You don’t like to think about what she may do to herself and, incidentally, to you.”

“Are you trying to threaten me?”

“If you’re threatened, it’s not by me.”

“I thought earlier tonight that you might have a little intelligence, but I see now that you’re a complete fool.”

“On the contrary, you thought earlier that I was a fool, and I was, but you’re beginning to think now that I may not be. Never mind that, however. There’s no use talking about it. I’ll look for Ivy, and if I can’t find her I may report to the police that she’s missing.”

“No! Wait a minute.”

He waited, listening to the humming wire, and he could feel in the little booth, as though it came through the wire on the sound he heard, the anxiety and calculation of the woman at the other end.

“Are you there?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re quite right about making accusations and calling names. There’s nothing to be gained by it. Where are you now? Are you at home?”

“No. I’m in a sidewalk telephone booth.”

“Where can I meet you?”

“I’m not sure that I want you to meet me. Why should I?”

“Because you want to find Ivy, and so do I. I can be of help. You don’t have a car, do you?”

“No.”

“Do you propose to walk the streets all night? In my car, we may have a chance of finding her. At least we can check the cheap hotels in your area. I don’t suppose she had much money.”

“Twenty dollars, I think. Not much more.”

“That won’t last long, and God knows what she may do after it goes. We must find her, that’s all, and then she must come back to stay with me. I hope you’re convinced by this time that no other arrangement will work. She simply can’t be allowed to go on jeopardizing herself and causing endless trouble for others.”

“What she does is something she will decide for herself.”

“All right. Will you tell me where we can meet?”

“There’s an all-night diner down the street from here. The Greek’s. You’d better meet me there.”

“Give me the address.”

He told her how to find the place, and then he hung up and went there to wait for her. George, behind the counter, watched him with a frown as he crossed from the door and sat down on a stool. The customary warmth of his reception was totally lacking, and in the severity of George’s gaze there was more than a hint of disapproval.

“It’s apparent,” George said, “that you are feeling despondent tonight. Could it be because your conscience is bothering you?”

“Why the hell should my conscience be bothering me?”

“One’s conscience becomes a bother when one has done something he should not have done, or failed to do something he should have. Provided, of course, one has a conscience to begin with.”

It was obvious that George was making some kind of point about something, preferring for his own reasons to be devious instead of direct, but Henry was in no mood for subtleties. It had been, since the bad beginning of the abortive fiasco of the morning, a long and difficult day, coming to a kind of climax in the feverish episode in the apartment of Lila Galvin, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that he had not, on the whole, accounted very well for himself in the day’s events.

“George,” he said, “I have a notion that you’re referring obliquely to something specific in which I seem somehow to be involved. With all due respect for the subtlety of the Greek mind, which is notoriously devious, I’d appreciate it if you’d say directly what you mean.”

“Gladly,” George said. “I was referring to your shameful treatment of Ivy.”

“Oh? Am I to understand from this that you’ve seen her today?”

“She was here this morning to say good-by and to have breakfast.”

“I suppose she gave you a full report on all my qualifications as a son of a bitch. Is that it?”

“On the contrary, she had nothing bad to report. She said, merely, that you had ordered her to leave. Although I had doubts about her in the beginning, especially in relation to you and the book, I confess that I have become very fond of her since, and I don’t mind saying that I consider it more than likely that I was worried about the wrong person.”

“The hell with that! Did she say where she was going?”

“Not knowing, she couldn’t say. But she asked me to recommend a cheap hotel as a place to go for the time being, and I suggested the Hawkins.”

“Did she go there?”

“I don’t know.

“You going down there and see?”

“I don’t know why I should.”

“She’s a nice girl, Henry. She has her trouble.”

“She has a hell of a lot more trouble than you know about.”

“I will tell you one thing, Henry. I would never take a sweet girl with trouble into my house for shelter and then put her into the cold street for no sufficient reason. Sometimes I, too, am inclined to believe that it will be a lousy book that no one will buy.”

“By God, it looks right now as if it will never even be written. How the hell do you know I had no sufficient reason?”

“In spite of certain foolishnesses, she is a nice girl. It would be too bad if she came to a bad end.”

“All right, George. You can get off my back now. I’ll go down to the Hawkins and see if she’s there. Damn it, I intended to go from the start. Why the hell do you think I’m out prowling the streets, if not to try to find her?”

“In that case, I’ll spare you the ignominy of explaining how you got the scratches on your face that look as if they may have been made by fingernails.”

“That’s right, George. Spare me. And, incidentally, go to hell.”

Getting off the stool at the counter, he walked over to the door and stopped, making a pretense of adjusting his collar against the cold outside. He was sick and tired of being unfairly accused by others, and most of all he was sick and tired of being unfairly accused by himself. He wished, however, that it had not come to this between him and the Greek. He liked George and did not wish to lose his friendship, and he waited now inside the door in the hope that George would say a healing word. Having sustained the pretense of adjusting the collar as long as he could, he reached for the door handle and was about to leave when the Greek finally spoke.

“Henry,” George said.

“Yes.”

“It would also be too bad for friends to become strangers.”

“Yes, it would.”

“I spoke hastily about the book. It will be good and sell well.”

“Thank you, George. And I, for my part, don’t really want you to go to hell.”

“I hardly thought so.”

“Good night, George. I’ll see you soon.”

“Let us hope so.”

Henry opened the door and went out. He felt better after the pacific exchange, but at the same time he began to develop a premonition that grew stronger with each step in the street until it was so strong that he could not dispel it by reason or disregard, and the premonition was that Ivy was dead.

He walked rapidly down the street toward the Hawkins, exercising restraint to keep from breaking into a trot, and his compulsion to hurry was as irrational as his conviction of death, for if Ivy was dead hurrying had no point. But he hurried, nevertheless, and he had covered half the distance to the hotel before he remembered that he had agreed to wait for Lila at the Greek’s. Well, she would probably inquire for him there, and George would tell her where he had gone. She could follow if she chose, and if she did not choose, it did not matter. His only concern now was to see as quickly as possible if his premonition was true or not, and he could not doubt that it was.

To give the premonition credence, there was the fact that Ivy had already tried once to kill herself, and had almost succeeded. In addition to this, he attached an ominous significance to the report that she had apparently gone immediately from the diner to the hotel. Hotel rooms were often used by suicides. He had read about; such deaths in the newspapers, and there were probably many more that were kept quiet or passed off as being natural. The odd thing about it was that many such suicides could much more easily have destroyed themselves elsewhere, in their homes or offices, for instance, and it was possible that they were trying in a twisted sort of way to remove the shame and sorrow of their self-destruction from the places and people they knew and loved, simply be removing the act to a strange place among strangers. It could be that Ivy had been so motivated. She had had the day alone above the bookstore in which to kill herself, but she had thought of him in the end, as she had not thought of him in her first attempt, and had gone away to a hotel to save him trouble.

He saw the sign of the hotel hanging high above the sidewalk ahead of him. Increasing his pace until he was in fact moving at a kind of awkward lope, he crossed an intersection and was no more than thirty feet from the hotel’s entrance when he stopped abruptly in his traces with a gasp, as if he had suddenly been struck a powerful blow to the solar plexus, and he had for a moment an absurd fear that he was going to faint. For there ahead of him, coming from the opposite direction, was Ivy herself with a man. The man had a hand on her arm in casual, public intimacy, and she seemed to be allowing this intimacy with complete congeniality, but whether she was congenial or not, she was certainly not dead.

The absurd faintness having passed, Henry was furious. He felt that he had been made a fool of, as though Ivy had maliciously put into his mind by telepathy the premonition of her death, and it was far too much to bear calmly at the end of a day in which he had been a fool too many times before. But the fury left him, passing only a little less quickly than the faintness, and he wondered in dismay, remembering her in his bed that morning, if she was attempting now with this stranger a kind of radical surgery that had failed with him.

Moving again, he went into the hotel lobby and saw the floor indicator above the closed elevator doors moving upon the number two. He started up the stairs three at a time, staying always a floor behind the elevator, until he found the indicator unmoving on the number six. Looking down the hall to his right, he was just in time to see a door closing.

He stood looking at the door in indecision. He assumed, from what he had seen, that Ivy had willingly admitted the man to her room. He guessed at her motive and feared the consequences of her behavior, but he had no desire, by intruding where he was not wanted, to make a fool of himself again. He was still standing and looking at the closed door, wondering if he should intrude or retreat, when Ivy cried out. It was not a loud and piercing cry. It had more of the quality of a plaintive cry of despair, rising barely above the volume of a normal voice, and he was not certain, after it was gone, that he had heard it at all.

But it was enough to make him act decisively. He went down the hall to the door and tried the knob. The door, unlocked, swung inward before pressure. Ivy, on the floor, was struggling with a man who was trying to pinion her flailing arms, and as he stood fixed in the doorway, she lifted her shame-filled eyes over the shoulders of the man and saw him standing there. Her lips formed the shape of his name, but she made no sound.

Henry, for a couple of seconds, went blind with rage. Everything was obscured by a pink mist deepening through red to black, and he stepped forward into the mist as it began to lift, striking with all his strength at the kneeling figure of the man. The man, Charles Neal, had not heard the door open behind him, but he was made aware of Henry’s presence by the direction of Ivy’s gaze and the sudden rigidity of her body. He whirled to one side, and this turning saved him from the force of Henry’s blow. Henry’s fist brushed his jaw, spinning him away and sending him sprawling. He rolled to the wall beyond the bed and came up like a cat onto his feet. In his hand as he rose, apparently by some kind of legerdemain, was a switch knife. The long blade of the knife sprang out of its handle, shining, with a snick of sound. Slowly, with a calculated deadliness of purpose that went oddly with the insane light in his shallow eyes, Charles Neal, feinting and weaving and driving in, brought the knife held low and ready with the blade angled up.

Henry’s movement was hampered by his overcoat, which weighed suddenly a thousand pounds, but it was too late now to remove it, and it was luck for him that it was, for it saved him from the shining blade. Charles Neal feinting and weaving and driving in, brought the blade upward in a short, flashing arc. Henry, falling back and aside, felt a dull blow in the belly, a hot prick of flesh above his navel. The blade caught and held for a second in the thick fabric of his coat, and his motion away from the blow pulled Neal off balance for that second. He stumbled, bent over, and Henry brought a heavy fist down like a club on the back of his neck at the base of the skull. Driven to his knees, he remained for another second in the kneeling position, and then he lay down on his face on the floor with a rattle of breath.

Henry looked down at him and drew his own breath with heavy labor.

No one, he realized, had spoken a word or made an unnecessary sound since he opened the door, and except the sound, of breathing, the room was now utterly sill.

Lifting his eyes and looking around, he saw that he was alone with the stranger at his feet. Ivy was gone.