Then suddenly she turned as if by some primal instinct and looked straight up at him. They stared at each other for a full minute while the crowd seemed to part and move around her. Her expression changed very subtly, became more intense, then someone rushed up to her and there were giddy greetings and hugs and squeals of delight. He left the party.
I’ll think about it, he had said. That was three years ago.
………anyway, Marilyn talks too much,” Vanessa was saying.
“She talked like a best friend talks. She was concerned about you.”
“I know, I didn’t mean that. Fact is, she talked me into coming over here. I didn’t have the courage to do it on my own.”
“Courage?” he asked quizzically.
She turned her face away from him. Her voice was almost a whisper. “Oh, God, Kee, don’t you know why I really came?”
She still did not face him.
“I came because I threw my husband out a year ago. I came because I’m twenty-four years old and I’m lonely and because I’ve been thinking about you for five years and I’ve wanted to sleep with you for all five of them. I’ve never stopped wanting to sleep with you. And if that makes me a hussy or
“Hey, hold on,” Keegan said softly. Then he chuckled. “What the hell, you always did get right to the point.”
“Just hold me, will you, Frankie Kee?” she said. “Or let me hold you.”
“Hell, I’m no good to you,” he said, and it had the tone of a warning.
She shook her head and turned her back to him, looking out toward the river.
“I don’t know why I said that anyway,” she said. “What I really want is someone to hold me while I fall asleep, share my tears with me, hurt when I hurt, laugh when I laugh. I want someone to believe in me, not laugh at my fantasies.” She looked back over her shoulder at him. “Is that so very much to ask of somebody, Kee?”
“No, it’s a modest request.”
“Don’t you want that?”
“I did.”
“And you lost all that?”
“I stopped caring.”
“Why?”
“When I lost her . . - hell, I don’t know. . . maybe it was never quite as good as I remember it.”
He stopped and sorted through his darkest thoughts, questioning his memory, as he had done many times in the past, always with the same conclusion.
“No,” he went on, “that’s not true. It was, it was a very fine time in my life. It just didn’t last very long. Maybe we all have just so much happiness doled out to us and we used ours up and now we’re paying for it, except the price she’s paying is. . . much
· . . too high.”
“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe God’s that cruel. I haven’t given up yet.”
“You mean with old Turkey?”
“The hell with old Turkey,” she snapped. “I got over him a long time ago.”
“Where’s he now?”
“He has a place in the Dakota, that big gloomy building on the West Side.”
“1 know the place.”
“1 guess that’s where he entertains his show girls,” she said bitterly. “I hear he likes two or three at a time.”
“Are you divorced yet?”
“Twenty-four more days. I mark each one off on my calendar.” She stopped to catch her breath. Tears crept into the corners of her eyes and she tried to blink them away. “I tried so hard, Kee. I tried to be a good wife and make him happy. It was never enough. Lyle never gets enough of anything. His appetite for everything is insatiable. Thank God we don’t have children.”
“That little freak,” Keegan said harshly. “He never had anything going for him. He was a cheat in school—and a liar. He used to lie all the time.”
“Oh, he’s very good at that.”
Keegan tried to soften the dark tone of the conversation. “Hell, he wasn’t any good at it at all, he just lied so much people got tired of calling him down.”
And she laughed and nodded. “Yes! You’re right! That’s exactly what people do.”
“What was it about old Turkey . . . ?“
“Oh God, I don’t even know anymore. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder the same thing. And then I think . . . maybe it’s me, maybe I didn’t deserve any better . .
“Stop that.”
“No, I do..
“Stop it! Don’t lay off all the misery on yourself. There are lots of Thorntons in the world . . . they use up everything they can get their hands on and never give anything back.”
She stared at him with moist eyes. “There’s another thing about it. Sometimes I think. . . we had three years together and I think, there ought to be some happy memories. I ought to feel something for him. But I don’t.”
“I have a partner named Nayles out on the West Coast. When we were in the war together, he used to say, ‘Pal, we come in buckass naked and we go out buckass naked and everything in between is gravy.’ Maybe that’s the right attitude. Maybe we ought to make the best of whatever comes to us.”
“You’re not doing that.”
She looked up at him and her stare seemed to come from a very private place deep within her; a warm, longing, loving look that pierced Keegan’s armor like a lance.
“Oh, Kee, what’s happening to the world? What’s happening to all of us?”
His anger was like a coiled snake he had kept trapped inside him and suddenly it burst free. It was not a shrill outburst but his fists were clenched and he spoke in a voice that was low and full of rage.
“What’s happening is that we’re living in a world full of people who want us to think the way they do and act the way they do and believe the way they do and if we don’t, if we don’t conform, they destroy us. And you know the irony? They’re always in the minority. We ignore them until we wake up one morning and there isn’t any Times on the newsstand and our favorite books are gone from the library and they beat up our best friends and drag them off to prison because their hair’s the wrong color or their noses don’t measure down to their standards. Then it’s too late.”
“You really think that could happen here?”
He nodded emphatically. “There was a moment, Vannie, when I literally had to run for my life. I mean I literally had to run for it. I don’t know which was worse, the fear or the humiliation, but I think I have a better idea of what freedom is all about now.”
“Is that what happened to her in Germany?”
“That’s what happened to Germany. She got caught in the sweeper. So you don’t need to shed any tears for me, save them for her. She’s locked away for life in a cesspool run by psychopaths.”
“Oh my God. .
She reached up and ran her fingertips lightly down his cheek. Then she wrapped her arms around his waist and held him very tightly and after several moments he reached out, too, and put his arms around her and they stood on the balcony for a long time clutching each other, like two drowning people, each trying desperately to save the other.
They fell into a warm friendship that was shakily platonic. But she did not impose on that part of him. She was happy to be around him, coming to his place, fixing dinner, occasionally dropping by and listening to him and Ned discussing the news of the day. When they went out for dinner they went to offbeat places, usually late at night to avoid old friends. Only Marilyn shared their secret, sometimes spending the evening with them when her husband was tied up at the hospital. Keegan juggled his emotions between past and present. Until suddenly a voice from the past changed everything.
New Year’s Eve, 1939, three A.M.
Keegan was returning from Vanessa’s apartment. He was fumbling for his keys when a voice, thickly European, whispered from the shadows beside the entrance.
“Mr. Keegan?”
Keegan stopped, squinted suspiciously into the darkness. The man moved partly into the light. In silhouette he was an inch or so shorter than Keegan but ten pounds heavier, all of it in his muscled shoulders, chest and arms, which strained the sleeves of his black cloth coat. The bottom of his face was obscured by a thick black beard and he was wearing a black seaman’s cap, pulled low on his forehead.