Benedict Hall Page 16

  Preston and Carter reached Broadway, and turned left. Only when they had to stop for a gray Packard to make a cautious turn did Preston acknowledge Frank’s presence.

  “What the hell are you doing, Cowboy, trotting after us like some sort of bloody spaniel?”

  Frank said mildly, “Just catching the streetcar.”

  Preston snapped, “What was your business at my house?” His eyes dropped to the battered bouquet. “Oh, my God,” he sniggered. “Flowers?”

  Frank stopped in his tracks. He had been on the point of throwing the flowers onto a bench, but now he lifted them, and tried to tidy them against his chest. Mrs. Volger might like them.

  The Packard pulled away, but Preston still stared at Frank, his blue eyes dark with anger, a spot of scarlet flaming on each cheekbone. “You look such a fool!” he said. “Please tell me you’re not courting my god-awful sister!”

  Frank’s jaw tightened. Preston’s glare reminded him of the mindless fury of a recalcitrant bull. There would be no reasoning with him. He grated, “None of your damned business, Benedict.”

  “Maybe it is.” Preston took a step toward him, his head thrust forward.

  Frank stiffened. He answered Preston’s step with one of his own. He was taller, but he wasn’t sure how much strength he had left in his arm. His only arm.

  With a visible effort, Preston took hold of himself. He drew a sharp breath through whitened nostrils, and pulled himself up, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Well,” he said. His voice dropped to an intimate whisper, and his eyes glittered with malice—or madness. “I suppose my sister is the best thing for a cripple like you.”

  Even Carter sucked in a breath at this crudity. Frank took another step forward, bringing himself chest-to-chest with Preston Benedict. He didn’t realize he had dropped the flowers until his hand came up to seize Preston’s well-cut lapels. “You’re a clod,” he said between his teeth.

  Preston’s laugh was light and insulting. “What! You didn’t know you were a cripple?”

  “I mean the way you speak of your sister!” A rush of fury strengthened Frank’s arm. He shook Benedict like a puppy, then shoved him backward so he stumbled into the street, soiling his fancy shoes in the gutter.

  Frank became suddenly aware that a little knot of people had paused to watch this altercation. He gave them an apologetic glance, and stepped back, straightening his coat, adjusting the brim of his Stetson.

  Preston jumped back onto the sidewalk. He gave their audience a tight smile, and spoke in an undertone so that only Frank could hear. “You’re making a mistake, getting sweet on Doctor Benedict. I’m not sure she likes men at all. You’d better find yourself a real girl, Cowboy.”

  “Don’t be a jackass, Benedict.”

  With an unsteady hand, Preston pushed back the lock of blond hair that had fallen across his forehead. He looked down at his wet shoes, and laughed. When he looked up, his eyes were as bright a blue as ever, and he was smiling as if the storm of his temper had passed off all at once. He turned to walk away, with Carter a step or two behind him. Over his shoulder he said lightly, “I don’t fight with cripples. But you’ll regret this, Cowboy. That’s a promise.”

  Frank, bending to pick up his battered flowers, didn’t answer.

  Margot spent the whole night in the hospital with Loena. When morning came at last, she left the girl in Nurse Cardwell’s care, with Leona on a stool at her bedside. Somehow, she got through her hospital rounds, forcing herself to concentrate. Not until she was done could she allow herself to think of Loena again, lying so pitifully still in the white iron bed.

  There was little else to be done for her, Margot reflected, as she stepped out into the sunny morning. She had done her best to clean up the mess the abortionist had made, but the uterine cavity already showed signs of sepsis. She had removed all the clots and necrosed tissue she could see, and disinfected the area with Eusol. She had packed the wound with iodoform gauze. When she came back in the evening, she would try irrigating with Dakin fluid. The bleeding had stopped, but as always, infection was the real danger.

  Loena was feverish and confused. Cardwell, who was as knowledgeable as any physician, looked grave. Margot was furious.

  She stalked down Fifth, her legs stiff with rage. Her heart pounded so she could feel her pulse against her collar. Her fingers, curled around the handle of her medical bag, throbbed. Her steps were quick and hard against the pavement as she hurried toward the Times. She was overdue at the clinic, but she couldn’t help that. She meant to have it out with him, and consequences be damned.

  She was about to cross the street when the Essex pulled up beside her. Blake climbed out more swiftly than she would have believed possible. He blocked her path as she stepped off the curb.

  “Dr. Margot,” he said. “Let me take you to your office.”

  Her voice scraped in her throat. “Thank you, Blake, but no. I have to see Preston.”

  She tried to pass, but he stopped her, taking her arm with his hand. She stood still, feeling the beat of her blood against the warmth of his palm. She wouldn’t shake him off. She cared too much for him. A passerby stopped, staring at the odd sight of a Negro man with his hand on a white woman’s arm. Blake dropped his hand, but he still stood in her way.

  “Blake—” Margot began. Her voice broke, and a sob of pure frustration rose in her throat.

  “Margot,” he said. “Not here, sweetheart. Get in the car.”

  He was right, of course. She was about to shame herself, right here on the street. He held the door, and she slid into the car, dropping her bag beside her. As he came around to settle into the driver’s seat, she stripped off her gloves and pressed her fingers against her eyes.

  “Oh, God, Blake, I could kill him. I could just kill him,” she grated. “You should have seen what that—that meat cutter—did to poor Loena! She’ll never be the same.” She dropped her hands, picked up her gloves, and twisted them into a knot.

  Blake put the Essex in gear, and pulled out into the street. He didn’t speak, but Margot knew he was listening. “I have to do something!” she exclaimed. “I can’t let this pass. She could have died! In fact,” she said, her voice trembling with the real emotion that underlay her anger, “she may still die. It looks as if someone used a pair of pruning shears on her.”

  Blake pulled the Essex up to the end of Post Street. He turned off the motor, but instead of getting out, he turned, stiffly, his right arm stretched along the back of the seat. His eyes were reddened and troubled. When he spoke, it was in the old Southern drawl, something she rarely heard.

  “You have to be careful,” he said. His eyes were intent on hers. “I know you’re upset, and rightly so. So are Mrs. Edith and Hattie. But mind you don’t humiliate him in public. He’s not a little boy anymore. He’s a man now. And he was a soldier.”

  “I know,” Margot said miserably. They sat in silence for several minutes, until she drew a long, shaky breath. “I know. Thank you, Blake. Again.”

  “It’s what I’m here for,” he said.

  “You haven’t called me sweetheart in so long. You used to call me that all the time.”

  “Mrs. Edith didn’t like it. She said it wasn’t proper.”

  Margot made an exasperated sound as she put on her gloves again. “Oh, Mother! I suppose she’s more worried about the scandal of all this than she is about the danger to Loena.”

  “It’s the way she was raised. It’s her culture.”

  “What about your culture?” Margot said peevishly.

  That won a chuckle. “Your daddy gave me a new start in life, young lady. I owe him a lot. Everything. And then, when you children came along—” His gloved hand lifted and fell on the back of the seat.

  Margot wanted to say more, to find the words to explain how important he had always been to her, but they wouldn’t come to her weary brain. She put her hand on the door handle. “I’d better get to the office. You go on home, Blake, and please ge
t some rest. If the hospital telephones, have them call me here.”

  “I will.”

  She opened the door, and when Blake made a move to get out of the car, she said swiftly, “No. I’ve got it.” She reached in to retrieve her bag, then closed the door. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “I’ll be right here.”

  She gave him a small wave as he backed and turned the car. Sleeplessness made her eyes gritty, and though she had drunk some orange juice and coffee in the hospital canteen, she felt parched. She glanced down the street at the diner. Its door stood open, propped by a doorstop in the shape of an iron rooster. She probably should eat something, but she couldn’t face it just yet. She kept seeing Loena’s wan, shocked face, Leona’s terrified one, Nurse Cardwell’s stern features. Margot sighed, unlocked her office door, and went in to begin her day. Sleep seemed a very long way off.

  Frank wished he had thrown the damned flowers into the gutter after all. He had carried them home, and presented them to Mrs. Volger with a story of an impulse purchase. She had fluttered and preened like a girl, delighted by the bouquet, and had arranged it in a vast pink vase on the hall table. Now, as he walked past it, it reminded him of his clash the evening before with Preston Benedict. Such an ugly scene. He would much rather forget all about it.

  His day passed in a blur. Something had gone wrong with one of Bill Boeing’s private seaplanes, and that distraction helped. Frank tried to follow his routine, stopping for supper, picking up the Times, strolling up to Mrs. Volger’s through the long, pale June evening. The flowers in the hallway brought it all back, the look on Margot Benedict’s face as she bundled her maid into the Essex, Carter’s amusement, the sneer on Benedict’s face. Even more, he remembered the feeling of having Benedict’s lapels in his hand, the sense that he could have shaken him until his teeth rattled. Until his neck broke. Frank didn’t like that feeling. Any inclination to violence his younger self had possessed he thought he had shed forever.

  But there was something about Preston Benedict that made his scalp crawl and his fist yearn to strike something. What was it? Benedict was a selfish man, spoiled no doubt, with his smooth features and bright hair and family money. But there was something more there, something dark and frightening. He reminded Frank of a horse they had when he was twelve, a good-looking bay gelding with a well-cut head and the ironic name of Softy.

  Softy had been a strange one. He had a nice gait, and a nice manner when he felt like it. But sometimes, without warning, he would whirl and kick at whoever was trying to saddle him, or bare his teeth and bite at someone walking past. He bucked the hired man off in the road on the way to Missoula, then tried to stomp him with his forefeet. The hired man had hidden beneath a cattle guard until Softy lost interest and went to grazing on a grassy bank. Frank’s father refused to sell him, saying it wasn’t fair to stick an unsuspecting stranger with an unpredictable horse. He put him down instead, leading him out behind the barn and putting a bullet into his handsome head. There was nothing else they could do.

  Frank settled at his small table, and unfolded the newspaper. He skimmed the headlines: more news of unemployment and union complaints. He turned the pages as he sipped his evening whisky, his mind drifting, not really paying attention until he reached Benedict’s column. He spun his glass over the title, “Seattle Razz,” obscuring the words with wet circles. He wouldn’t read it. It would only irritate him further. He picked his glass up again, closed the newspaper, and stood to go to the window. The sky had begun to darken at last, the long summer twilight coming to a close, a bank of clouds building in the west and casting shadows over the waters of the bay.

  He tossed back the last of the whisky, and told himself he wouldn’t have a second tonight. It worried him that he might come to need more and more. He’d be like one of those dipsomaniacs hanging around the waterfront, wrecked human beings so dependent on alcohol that the search for it consumed their whole lives. He had a job, a good one. He didn’t want to lose it.

  He took the tooth glass back to the bathroom, washed it, and left it there. He pulled his curtain, undressed, and got into bed, but when he lay back on his pillow, he couldn’t sleep. The fabric of Mrs. Volger’s cotton sheets, which smelled so sweetly of bleach and sunshine, seemed to grate against the nerves of his amputation. He tried putting his arm outside the blankets, but that didn’t help. He twisted this way and that, trying to get comfortable, arguing with himself over more whisky.

  At last, when he could see by the darkness outside that it must be at least midnight, he got up and retrieved the flask from the inner pocket of his overcoat. He unscrewed its cap, and tipped it up to take three good swallows. At last, with the liquor burning his stomach, he went back to bed, and fell into an uneasy slumber. He dreamed of the gelding, and then of Preston Benedict, until the two of them seemed indistinguishable in the turmoil of his brain.

  It was raining when he woke. Rainstorms in Montana tended to be the sudden, drenching sort, often with thunder and lightning to accompany them, and floods of water to turn beige fields green overnight. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the rain was of a more hesitant kind. It was wet enough to create mud puddles in the streets, and to make some commuters carry umbrellas, but not heavy enough to do more than dampen his hair and face. It suited his mood of the morning. He had overslept after being awake too long in the night, and he hurried through his breakfast. He trotted to the streetcar with his briefcase clamped under his arm.

  When he reached the Boeing offices, the men in the workroom looked at him strangely. Self-consciously, he ran a hand over his hair in case something was out of place, and refolded his sleeve into his pocket. He tried to catch a glimpse of himself in a window, but he couldn’t find anything wrong. He went upstairs, and set his briefcase down under his drafting table. As he turned to hang his coat on the rack, Harry came across to him.

  “Good morning,” Frank said. Harry, too, had an odd look on his face.

  “Have you seen the paper, Frank?” Harry asked. He had a folded copy of the Times in his hand, and he held it out.

  Frank said warily, “Read it last night. Why?”

  “Did you read ‘Seattle Razz’?”

  “No. It’s a gossip column.”

  Harry shrugged. “Well, sure, gossip. The wife loves it, though, reading about all the rich bitches and what they wear.”

  Frank waited, his hand in his pocket, for the explanation. Harry held out the paper. “You’d better read it,” he said. Curiosity vied with apology on his ruddy face. “You’re sure to hear about it sooner or later.”

  Frank took his hand out of his pocket and accepted the newspaper. He left Harry standing beside the coatrack, and went to lay the paper on his drafting table. It was folded back to Preston Benedict’s column. Reluctantly, Frank began to read.

  Anyone who hoped the rough-and-tumble Seattle of the unlamented Klondike era was past would have been disappointed last night. The peace of the summer evening was broken on Broadway by a brawl initiated by an employee of the Boeing Airplane Company. This tale is, sadly, a firsthand report. There were no charges filed, out of sympathy for a war amputee. Though no lasting harm was done this time, it was an undignified and ill-bred display of violence more suited to the mountains of Montana than a civilized modern community. This reporter believes the mayor and his chief of police must do more to quell the violence that still erupts all too often on the streets of our fair city. One can’t help but wonder if Mr. Boeing is aware of the proclivities of one of his engineers. And one can wish a decorated war hero would display more discipline.

  As Frank stared at the paper, his arm flared as if someone had held a match to it. He dared not lift his head. He was sure the rage in his face would convince everyone in the room that Benedict was right about him. The audacity—and the overwhelming unfairness of it—stunned him. It was obvious everyone here knew Benedict was talking about him. What good would it do to try to explain? Harry and the others were collegial with him, but they
didn’t know him. In his inclination to solitude, he had prevented any opportunity for a relationship to develop. It had not seemed to matter, until now. Now, he lacked a single friend to defend him.

  He shoved the paper away. It teetered on the edge of his desk, and fluttered to the floor. From the corner of his eye, he saw Harry cross the room and bend to pick it up. When he straightened, he hesitated, as if he wanted to speak, but couldn’t think what to say. Frank couldn’t bring himself to meet his gaze, to encourage him. His heart beat furiously, so hard he was afraid Harry could hear it from where he stood.

  “Mr. Parrish?” It was the stenographer from the workroom. She was standing in front of his desk, a slip of paper in her hand.

  Frank forced himself to look up. “Yes?” He heard how stiff his voice was, hard with anger.

  “Mr. Boeing wants to see you. In his office downtown.” She held out the paper.

  Frank took the note and tucked it into his pocket as he went back to the coatrack. He put on his coat, and carried his Stetson in his hand as he walked toward the stairs.

  “Frank,” Harry called softly.

  Frank stopped, his eyes on the staircase, his jaw aching with tension.

  Harry came close enough to speak in an undertone. “Listen,” he said. “Everybody loses their temper now and again.”

  Frank nodded.

  “And you—Frank, you’re a great engineer. We all like you.”

  “Kind of you,” Frank said through tense lips. He felt every eye on him, and he felt as if he were being stripped naked, his broken body exposed for all to see.

  Harry cleared his throat, and rumpled his hair with nervous fingers. “If you—if there’s anything I can do—”

  Frank stood where he was for a long moment, the note from Bill Boeing a dead weight in the pocket of his trousers. At last he turned to look into Harry’s sympathetic face. “Thanks,” he said. He glanced up at the rest of the men, and saw their eyes skitter away from him. “It’s okay, Harry,” he said in a stronger tone. “I’m fine.” He settled his hat on his head, nodded to Harry, and started down the stairs to the front door.