The Cut of the Whip Page 6

  “On the surface he paid up, don’t worry. He put her on an allowance. It’s a lifetime thing and very comfortable. Every month she gets this check from a trust company in New York. And when I was two or so, he took me over. To do right by his obligation—”

  “Do you remember that?”

  “I don’t know if I remember,” he said, “I just have nightmares.”

  And then he started to scream. “Guilt and obligation! All my life I’ve been nothing but his guilt and obligation. I’ve got to suffer it! I’ve got to listen to it! I ought to do this, I must not do that—” It stopped with an attack of coughing, like a retch. It racked the man, doubled him over, and when he stopped, wheezing for breath, Heering was limp and weak.

  Port moved behind the wheel, snapped on the headlights, then put the car in gear. It might help to drive, to change the mood.

  Port maneuvered slowly until the car was out of the arroyo and on the highway. Then he drove fast. He opened the vent on his window so that the wind drummed past the slit and he couldn’t hear anything else. He’d been driving like that for twenty minutes when Robert Heering said, “I’m not finished. You have to understand the rest.”

  “All right,” said Port. He closed the vent, drove slower. He said, “I understand about your father. I don’t think I want to know any more.”

  “I’d like you to turn back to town,” said Heering. “That’s part of it.”

  “All right,” said Port.

  He U-turned on the wide highway and headed back to Lubbock.

  “You got a cigarette?” asked Heering.

  Port was out. He said he’d buy some and he’d like a cup of coffee. They found a trucker’s restaurant and went inside. It was a change from the arroyo. There was a lot of light, there was steam on the windows, and two truckers were arguing about a brand of fishing tackle.

  “Sometimes, like now,” said the young Heering, “I think about it and it isn’t bad—I mean bad the way it is at home, the destructive kind of bad.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Port.

  Robert Heering didn’t act as if he’d heard. He stared at nothing, slurped his hot coffee without tasting it, and stared. And then Port saw the tense hate come into his face.

  “My father makes it that way—what he touches becomes a special kind of bad—filthy with shame. Look,” he stared at Port now, never blinking, “I grow up without a mother—all right. Except the swine makes it bad with secretiveness. Is she dead, is she alive, will she come, why don’t I have one? Then he got me one, he married. Jane’s mother. She was nice, she tried her best—but the swine makes it bad: treat the daughter like a normal child, but watch out for that boy! He’s delicate, he’s sick, he’s got a burden… When I was fourteen my father’s second wife ran away, or maybe he sent her away, and I’m sure she gets a monthly check.

  “When she left it got worse. She took Jane along—Janey didn’t come back until she was fifteen. She took everything along except the duty-preaching swine, the guilty old man teaching me right from wrong and everything was wrong. It was out now, about my mother, so he switched his method and wouldn’t let me forget about it for a moment: she was no good, she came from some lowly stock, with bad bred into her, and that’s why I’m the way I am, and on and on—” Robert looked up and said, “Did he tell you I’m nuts?”

  “Unbalanced, he said.”

  “It wasn’t hereditary. Is a nervous breakdown hereditary? Listen, there’s a building on the place, back of the main house—I used to live there. I used to get the best. A private sanatorium all to myself, handlers all to myself, to play therapeutic games, a doctor on the premises, to give me needles—Christ!”

  Heering was bad now. He didn’t breathe right, his hands were moving back and forth, hunting for specks or smudges on the table top, touching them and pulling back not to get dirty. But he kept talking.

  “And later private tutors there, instead of school. It got so I had nothing to look forward to except the nights. I started sneaking out, sneaking around the place, my place in back, the main house—a feeling like I was invisible. That’s what I wanted. I started sneaking all over, prying into drawers, closets, that kind of thing. I lived in the main house now, you understand, but I kept this up as if I were a thief, breaking into someone else’s place. Anyway, that’s how I found the letters. He had the safe open in his room—he’d gone downstairs with something from the safe—and I got in there. I just read one and I ran out of there. I got sick again, maybe a month. A touch of the flu, a touch of fever, a touch of nightmares. I was dying with disgust, that was the real reason.”

  Robert looked sick, thinking about it. He swallowed some cold coffee and went on, looking at his hands.

  “After a while it changed into something else. I don’t care what you think about it, but to me it means something healthy. I had to have those letters. I had to have those letters and find the woman they were written to. She was just a woman—a nice, live woman. And she was my mother. I had to take those letters and look at them and then go find her, just see her once in case it turned out awkward, but go and see her and find out she was no monster, and I’m no monster, but flesh and blood. I don’t care what you think about it, to me that’s right!”

  Port nodded, but Robert didn’t see it. He was afraid to raise his head. He spoke again, and now he sounded stubborn.

  “I’m going to see her. I have this notion everything will be different after that. Or at least one thing. She’s flesh and blood. Then I will be too.”

  They stood outside the diner and had nothing else to say. Robert stood hunched over, as if the wind along the building were too much for him.

  “You want the Benz?” said Port.

  “What?”

  “You’re going back to Lubbock, aren’t you? I thought you might want the car we left back in the gulch.”

  “Yes. I shouldn’t leave it there.”

  “Can you change a tire?”

  “I think so.”

  He looked miserable. He wished he could say more, but there was nothing else important. He licked his lips, the way Port had seen him do before, and then he thought of something, something to say to rile himself up, to make excitement.

  “Do you know my mother isn’t even sure that Carl Heering, this Carl Heering in the town of Heering, is the father of her—of me? He did some kind of conniving, some kind of planting of evidence, to make her think that her Carl Heering was working on a British dam project in Madagascar. And then he made up a rumor about some Carl Heering who died in the Burma campaign. So if she should have it in mind to make trouble, there would be all this confusion. You get what I mean?”

  “Your father is very clever. You want to go now?”

  “Of course, I don’t think she ever tried anything.”

  “Robert, I’m leaving. I’m taking back these letters, and I’m leaving you to do yours.”

  “I’d like the Benz back. If you think it’ll run—”

  Port drove back to the arroyo and stopped at the mouth.

  “I wish you luck,” he said.

  “Listen, Mr. Port, would you help me with that tire?”

  He drove up to the Benz, and by the light from the beams showed Robert Heering how to change the tire. Then he said good-bye and drove back to the highway.

  He parked not far away, without his lights, and sat for fifteen minutes. The Benz came out then, stopped, the engine idling. Port didn’t drive away until the big car had slowly turned into the highway and headed towards town.

  Chapter VII

  PORT DROVE all night. Once, in the early morning, he pulled off into a stretch of sage and slept behind the wheel. What woke him, so he thought, was the silence. The sky was light now, more white than blue, and the night wind had stopped. Without the wind the air seemed dull as lead. He drove again, feeling too much awake, too sharp, with nothing anywhere to look at, with nothing else to do.

  By three-thirty in the afternoon he saw the town of Heering; He must
have been driving like hell, he thought. This detail he hadn’t noticed.

  The feeling of being nowhere got worse when he drove up to the plateau where Heering’s place stood. He’d never seen it in the light. The strange needle trees were all one mass, not very high, a thin, green color with the vacant sky overhead. This made the main house look very large. It was of dark brick, a sullen red, thousands of bricks.

  Port stopped the car in front of the main entrance and got out. There wasn’t a soul anywhere. The windless air made him want to shout.

  He rang the bell and waited. When the door opened a man in a black silk jacket was there. He looked as silent as the air.

  “I’m Dan Port. Is Mr. Heering in?”

  “Ah, of course,” said the houseman, and looked past Port to the car.

  “Robert Heering isn’t with me,” said Port.

  As much as was possible for him, the houseman showed concern. He finally said, “I see,” and stepped aside for Port to enter.

  “Mister Heering,” said the houseman after closing the door, “isn’t here. You were expected tomorrow.”

  “I know. I hurried.”

  What else could he say? Disgust with the new delay, with the need to sit uselessly waiting, kept Port from saying more. He would have to wait for Heering, to tell him that his, Port’s part of the business was over, and try to explain the rest. It would be useless.

  “Your room was kept ready for you,” said the houseman. “May I take you up?”

  “I’ll wash up,” he said. “After that, I suppose it’s all right to take a walk out there?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Port.”

  Then they went upstairs. He caught himself walking carefully which put him in mind of young Robert, making his pitiful, thieving rounds of the house.

  When the houseman left Port at the door to his room, Port remembered to ask something else.

  “When is Mr. Heering coming back?”

  “Tomorrow. He assumed—”

  “Can he be reached? I think he’d like to know…”

  “I hardly think so, but you could call his Galveston office. Mr. Heering himself has gone to Anchorage.”

  “Alaska?”

  “Yes. Though he may be on his way back by now.”

  There wasn’t any point in trying.

  Port washed and shaved, and changed into one of the shirts that had been put into his dresser. Then he went outside and walked around the house. There was no garden anywhere, just planted pines. Port lit a cigarette, threw it away.

  Standing on the veranda he could see the roof of Robert’s old house. It would be morbid going there, thought Port, but nothing worse than how he felt already.

  And then he heard the car. He hoped immediately that this would be Heering, so the waiting would be over and he could finish.

  The low convertible shot up the drive, dipped hard and stopped.

  “Dan!” she called. “How good! Where’s Robbie, Dan?”

  For one short moment Port forgot about everything except the girl. For that short moment, when she came around the bend, then waved at him and called, Jane was the opposite of everything Port had gone through in the last twenty-four hours.

  She got out of her car, came over. Port would have liked to see her run, anxious perhaps, but happy. She came over with the concern showing in her face, the same distraction Port remembered from the first time, but this time he knew a lot more about it. He also knew how useless her concern was…

  “Is—is something wrong, Dan?” She put her hands on his arms and looked up, at his face.

  “No,” said Port. “I’m just glad to see you,” and he smiled at her, meaning it.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “He’s inside?”

  Port took her arm and walked her towards the house.

  “No, Jane. It’s a long story. He isn’t here.”

  The main door opened and the houseman made a little bow at Jane.

  “Will you and Mr. Port have dinner together?”

  Neither of them felt like thinking about food, but the houseman stood there, needing an answer.

  “Is there some soup? Could I just—”

  “Of course, Miss Heering. And Mr. Port?”

  “Whatever you have will be fine, thank you,” and then they went into the dining room because they had to eat.

  They talked very little during the meal. All Port said was yes, he had seen Robby in Lubbock, and yes, Robby was all right. And all Jane said was that she didn’t understand all of this, but either Port or her father would have to explain things to her later. They could both go to her room, she said, when they were through, because none of the servants came up there unless they were called.

  What Jane called her ‘room’ was a small apartment. She had a living room with thin-legged period furniture, a bedroom which was light blue with white trim, and a large bathroom beyond that. After they were in her place, she closed the door and started to talk immediately.

  “What went wrong, Dan? Please tell me everything. Father said you and Robby wouldn’t be back ’til tomorrow and—”

  “Jane,” he said. “I’m a little puzzled by you. Tell me, do you know your brother well? Are you two close?”

  She took a deep breath and leaned forward with her arms on her thighs. It made her full hair fall forward along the sides of her face and Port could not see her.

  “It isn’t easy to be close to Robby. Perhaps once or twice, I remember, we started to be warm, really warm with each other, but—” She sat up again and shook back her hair. “He’s secretive, and distant. The truth is,” she said, “half the time I’m concerned about him just because it’s a convention. Brother and sister type convention—”

  “You may find it unpleasant to be closer to him,” said Port. “That’s why I won’t tell you anything, unless you ask me again.”

  “About Robby?”

  “And your father.”

  “You sound as if you know this family’s most well-guarded secret.”

  “How many people,” he asked her, “know about your father and his first wife?”

  “They were never married!”

  Her tone showed him her loyalties, and that her version of how Heering had deserted the Semmerling girl must be something tragic; the evil Semmerling girl, the suffering Carl Heering, paying terribly for his once-in-a-lifetime mistake.

  “I don’t care if they were married or not,” said Port. “I’m asking about your father’s secretiveness. On one hand he seems willing to fight heaven and earth to keep his secret hidden, and on the other hand I find that both his children know about this.”

  She looked very cold and said, “You are being insulting. We are his family.”

  “Ah. And Robby?”

  “That’s why father suffers even more. Robby must have told you about this, didn’t he? He finally did let it out.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are,” said Jane Heering, “the first outsider who ever knew.”

  “And heaven help me once your father finds out, is that it?”

  He was sorry he had put it that way, even though it had been Jane Heering’s meaning. It created an awkward and hostile air between them now, the opposite of everything Port might have wished for with Jane.

  “And your mother? She and your father didn’t part friends. Doesn’t your father worry…”

  “You are going too far,” said the girl. “My mother is not vindictive. When a person has breeding—”

  “All right. I’m sorry. And Emmy Semmerling? He isn’t worried about her?”

  “She is a drunk,” said Jane. “She is somewhere in California, I think, and by the description I—”

  “You don’t know her?”

  “Certainly not.”

  The old Heering had surrounded his guilt, and his secret, with three powerful safeguards. He was safe behind three of the stiffest conditions: good breeding, blind belief, and stupidity. The chink had been Robert Heering, and then he had pushed him too far.

 
A lot would collapse for the old Heering.

  “You asked me where your brother was and whether something is wrong. Robert is with his mother, and as for the second, a hell of a lot is wrong.”

  And then he told Jane Heering everything he had seen and how he himself felt about it, and he watched how the girl, at a cruel pace, changed through a spectrum of strong emotions. She was hostile, angry, then stubborn, then weak; she showed fear and disgust; she became anxious with her confusion. She opened up, after a while, to the whole impact of Port’s story, and when he was done she closed her eyes and her only movement was breathing.

  The light was all gone now. Port killed his cigarette and looked at the low table for a moment. He stood up, rubbed his face, and wished he were walking somewhere in the open, and whistling maybe.

  “Please,” said Jane, “Don’t put the light on—not yet.”

  Port hadn’t known that he had been about to turn on the light. He pulled his hand back and turned to see Jane. Her voice had been different from any other time, without any intentional meaning, without trying for anything; as if she were through.

  Port sat down next to her and put his arm on her shoulder. He held her face with the other hand and made her rest against him. It was too dark to see her, but he felt how she leaned close to him and drew together, as if for warmth.

  They sat for a while and he stroked her arm.

  “It’s bad,” he said, “isn’t it?”

  “I’m confused. Everything is so much more confused, so terribly complicated—” and then, by her movement, Port knew she had started to cry.

  In his way, Port felt as badly as she, but no longer about the filth in the Heering affair and not about anyone except Jane. He wished they could have been this close for other reasons, for sheer joy of closeness and not fear of being alone and confused.

  They held each other close with the warmth and the need growing in them, and then reasons didn’t matter at all.

  “Dan,” she said, “I want something simple to happen. I just want something to be very simple…”

  He took her through the dark room and into the dark bedroom. They undressed each other, staying close, neither wanting to lose the touch of the other.