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Rudolph hesitated. He doubted that the boy liked him enough to confide in him and he was afraid he might do more harm than good by going to the school. “Of course I’ll go,” he said, “if you want. But don’t you think it might be better if his father went?”
“No,” Gretchen said. “He’s a bungler. If there’s a wrong word to be said, he’ll say it.”
The front door was ringing now. “Hold on again, Gretchen,” Rudolph said. “There’s somebody at the door.” He hurried over to the door and threw it open. “I’m on the phone,” he said to Jean and trotted back into the room. “Back again, Gretchen,” he said, using his sister’s name to show Jean he wasn’t talking to another lady. “I tell you what I’ll do—I’ll drive up to the school tomorrow morning and take him to lunch and see what’s up.”
“I hate to bother you,” Gretchen said. “But the letter was so—so dark.”
“It’s probably nothing. He came in second in a race or he flunked an algebra exam or something like that. You know how kids are.”
“Not Billy. I tell you, he’s in despair.” She sounded unlike herself, near tears.
“I’ll call you tomorrow night, after I see him,” Rudolph said. “Will you be home?”
“I’ll be home,” she said.
He put down the phone slowly, thinking of his sister alone, waiting for a telephone call, in the isolated house on the mountain crest, overlooking the city and the sea, going over her dead husband’s papers. He shook his head. He would worry about her tomorrow. He smiled across the room at Jean, sitting neatly on a straight-backed wooden chair, wearing red-woolen stockings and moccasins, her hair brushed and bright and pulled together low on the nape of her neck in a black-velvet bow, and falling down her back freely below the bow. Her face, as always, looked scrubbed and schoolgirlish. The slender, beloved body was lost in a floppy camel’s-hair polo coat. She was twenty-four years old, but at moments like this she seemed no more than sixteen. She had been out on a job and she had her camera equipment with her, which she had dumped carelessly on the floor next to the front door.
“You look as though I ought to offer you a glass of milk and a cookie,” he said.
“You can offer me a drink,” she said. “I’ve been on the streets since seven this morning. Not too much water.”
He went over to her and kissed her forehead. She smiled, rewarding him. Young girls, he thought, as he went into the kitchen and got a pitcher of water.
While she drank the bourbon, she checked the list of art galleries in last Sunday’s Times. When he was free on Saturdays they usually made the rounds of galleries. She worked as a free-lance photographer and many of her assignments were for art magazines and catalogue publishers.
“Put on comfortable shoes,” she said. “We’re in for a long afternoon.” She had a surprisingly low voice, with husky overtones, for such a small girl.
“Where you walk,” he said, “I shall follow.”
They were just going out the door when the phone rang again. “Let it ring,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
She stopped in the doorway. “Do you mean to say you can hear a telephone ring and not answer it?”
“I certainly can.”
“I never could. It might be something absolutely wonderful.”
“Nothing wonderful has ever happened to me over the phone. Let’s get out of here.”
“Answer it. It’ll bother you all day if you don’t.”
“No, it won’t.”
“It’ll bother me. I’ll answer it.” She started back into the room.
“All right, all right.” He pushed past her and picked up the phone.
It was his mother, calling from Whitby. From the tone in which she said, “Rudolph,” he knew the conversation was not going to be wonderful.
“Rudolph,” she said, “I don’t want to interfere with your holiday—” It was his mother’s fixed conviction that he left Whitby for New York only for unseemly, secret pleasures. “But the heating’s gone off and I’m freezing in this drafty old place—” Rudolph had bought a fine old low-ceilinged eighteenth-century farmhouse on the outskirts of town three years before, but his mother referred to it at all times as this crumbling dark hole or this drafty old place.
“Can’t Martha do anything about it?” Rudolph asked. Martha was the live-in maid who kept the house, cooked, and took care of his mother, a job for which Rudolph felt she was grossly underpaid.
“Martha!” his mother snorted. “I’m tempted to fire her on the spot.”
“Mom …”
“When I told her to go down to look at the furnace, she flatly refused.” His mother’s voice rose a half octave. “She’s afraid of cellars. She said for me to put on a sweater. If you weren’t so lenient with her, she wouldn’t be so free with her advice about putting on sweaters, I guarantee. She’s so fat, swilling down our food, she wouldn’t feel cold at the North Pole. When you get back home, if you ever do deign to come back home, I implore you to have a word with that woman.”
“I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon and I’ll talk to her,” Rudolph said. He was aware of Jean smiling maliciously at him. Her parents lived somewhere in the Midwest and she hadn’t seen them for two years. “In the meanwhile, Mom, call the office. Get Brad Knight. He’s on today. Tell him I told you to ask him to send one of our engineers.”
“He’ll think I’m an old crank.”
“He won’t think anything. Do as I say, please.”
“You have no idea how cold it is up here. The wind just howls under the windows. I don’t know why we can’t live in a decent new house like everybody else.”
This was an old song and Rudolph ignored it. When his mother had finally realized that Rudolph was making a good deal of money she had suddenly developed a gluttonous taste for luxury. Her charge account at the store made Rudolph wince every month when the bills came in.
“Tell Martha to build a fire in the living room,” Rudolph said, “and close the door and you’ll be warm in no time.”
“Tell Martha to build a fire,” his mother said. “If she’ll condescend. Will you be home in time for di
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “I have to see Mr. Calderwood.” It wasn’t quite a lie. He wasn’t going to dine with Calderwood, but he was going to see him. In any case, he didn’t want to have di
“Calderwood, Calderwood,” his mother said. “Sometimes I think I’ll scream if I ever hear that name again.”
“I have to go now, Mom. Somebody’s waiting for me.”
He heard his mother begin to cry as he hung up. “Why can’t old ladies just lie down and die?” he said to Jean. “The Eskimos do it better. They expose them. Come on, let’s get out of here before anybody else calls.”
As they went out the door he was glad to see that Jean was leaving her camera equipment in the flat. That meant she’d have to come back with him that afternoon to pick it up. She was unpredictable in that department. Sometimes she’d come in with him when they’d been out together as though it were inconceivable that she could do anything else. Other times, without any explanation, she’d insist on getting into a taxi and going downtown alone to the apartment she shared with another girl. Then, on several occasions, she had merely appeared at his door, on the off chance that he’d be home.
She went her own way, Jean, and pleased her own appetites. He had never even seen the place she lived. She always met him at his apartment or in a bar uptown. She didn’t explain this, either. Young as she was, she seemed self-reliant, confident. Her work, as Rudolph had seen when she came up to Whitby with the proofs after the opening of the Port Philip center, was highly professional, surprisingly bold for a girl who had seemed so young and shy when he had first met her. She wasn’t shy in bed, either, and however she behaved and for whatever reasons, she was never coy. She never complained that because of his work in Whitby there were long periods when he couldn’t see her, two weeks at a time. It was Rudolph who complained of their separations, and he found himself plotting all sorts of stratagems, u