The Brass Monkey Read online

  I stared at Herb, my mouth set. “Everything is all right with Troy and me!” He shrugged. “All right!”

  He began to grin again, that insipid smile that seemed to come from nowhere and mean nothing.

  “What are you grinning about?”

  “Sit down, old son, and I’ll tell you about it.”

  I sat down. The waiter brought another beer.

  “Sonny,” Herb said, grinning. “I’ve been one hell of a guy. I guess if there’s a God, He’s got sins checked up against me He didn’t even know about until I came along.”

  “You’re bragging,” I said, bored.

  “No. I’m not. Son, I’m a whipped old man of thirty. You just don’t know — ”

  “I got eyes. I can see.”

  “All right. But a guy can be sorry. Even a guy that’s thirty years old and has done things he wouldn’t even dare apologize for. Son, Carole and I are going back together — ”

  Now he began to laugh at the idea, the way you’ve seen kids laugh at Christmas.

  “That’s why I’m sorry as hell about you and Julie — about you and Troy. Everything’s a mess for you. And here I’m gettin’ another chance.”

  “I’m glad for you, Herb,” I said. “Honest to God I am. Are you going home to her?”

  “She’s coming here, on a Matson liner tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You’re in a hell of a shape to meet her.”

  “I had a lot to do to get ready. A lot of finishing up. You don’t know — the things that have happened to me would freeze the balls off a brass monkey. But this is it, Jim. This is what a guy prays for. It ain’t even that I’m so anxious to get her back because I never stopped loving her. I want to make up for the hellish things I did to her, you know? That’s what I want — to show Carole what kind of a guy I can be!”

  “I hope to God you’re not ten years too late, Herb.”

  “I’m not! Boy, I learned the hard way. When you lose something like Carole, and it’s all your fault, you don’t make any mistakes the second time.”

  “Damn it, Herb,” I said tensely. “I want it to work. It’s got to. Look at us — you and me — Carroltown’s finest. You got to make it work, Herb.”

  “Okay, pal.”

  I looked at him. “Do you need any money, Herb?”

  I didn’t like the smile he gave me. But I let it go.

  “Of course,” he said evenly. “Can you let me have five hundred?”

  “Five hundred!”

  “It took a lot of finishing, Jim. You don’t know. But I’ve a job. I’ll make it, and you’ll get it back. It’s just that right now — you know.”

  I felt myself go cold. “I’ll send you a check. Where do you live?”

  “On Aala Street.” He gave me the number.

  I frowned. “Down by the railroad station? Herb, you’re kidding.”

  “I’m not. That’s where I live until tomorrow morning. And that’s where I’d like you to send the money if you don’t have it with you.”

  I don’t have it with me, I thought, because I’ll have to ask Troy for it. God help me. I’d rather take a beating.

  3

  WHERE DID YOU meet Herb?” Troy asked when I came out on the semi-circular sun porch. Outside the screens, noon heat curled the leaves on the banyan, and below the streets of downtown Honolulu and the brown water of Aloha harbor sprawled, lifeless and hot.

  I remembered I had thought this view would be an inspiration when we took this house up here on Pacific Heights — the Waianae mountains, the rolling greens of the Oahu Country Club golf course, the ocean, the town unfolded out below us. Well, there was inspiration nowhere. It didn’t matter what was outside you, if you no longer gave a damn inside.

  Without even glancing at Troy, I dropped on the wicker lounge.

  “Are you all right?” Troy said.

  I looked at her then. Tall. Soft blond hair and deep blue eyes. Sure, hell. Everything Julie wasn’t. The first time I saw Troy, I had thought that. Nobody could be more unlike Julie. There had been arrogance in the way Troy held her head when she walked, casualness in the way she accepted the deference of headwaiters and clerks and tax collectors. Behind her were the shops of Fifth Avenue, winters in Miami, swift streamliners, ocean spanning transports, society pages. Then I was remembering the way she’d acted the first time I kissed her, holding her so close she couldn’t have breathed unless I let her. The way the soft sob fell across her lips. The way it was as if she’d never been kissed before. And afterwards, there’d been dozens of others but I was always the one. I who didn’t want it. I who had to hold back the laughter when I whispered in her ear …

  “Did you drink too much?” she said.

  I felt myself draw up inside as she uncrossed her trim ankles, got up and came over to sit beside me. Her blue eyes had that puzzled look, her hands were gentle and cool against my forehead.

  I brushed them down hard.

  “I’m all right!” I told her. I could see the hurt in her eyes. Twenty-three years she lived and nobody ever hurt her. They bowed to her, and they smiled at her. It looks like she’d have walked out on me. But she didn’t. She sat there, her fingers against my shoulder where they’d fallen, the hurt in her eyes.

  To hell with her, I thought. I even lay there hoping she’d object to giving Herb the five hundred he wanted. I’d insist. I’d raise hell if she objected. Then looking at her, I knew I had no right, and I thought miserably, why am I like that! Why do I treat her like this?

  “I told Herb I’d lend him five hundred dollars,” I told her.

  I heard the sharp little catch of her breath. For a moment she was silent, staring out through the flat leaves of the banyan.

  “All right,” she said.

  “You mean you agree to lend money to my drinking friend?”

  “I don’t care about the money,” she said. “You know I wish I didn’t have it if it’s going to cause more trouble between us.”

  “That’s a lie,” I told her. “You just don’t know what it’s like without money, or you’d never say that. It isn’t just doing without your fifty-eighth pair of shoes, you know. It’s maybe doing without any shoes at all. It’s eating canned beans, and canned milk and — ”

  “Can’t you see? Are you so blind? I want only you. I’m brokenhearted. I’m not smart enough to pretend I’m not. I haven’t changed. I followed you out here. Yes, like any cheap little girl from the streets, I followed you out here. I’ve done everything I know to make you love me. Why is it like this? Why? Is it anything I’ve done? I’m so miserable, Jim. Can’t you be kind?”

  “Hell yes. I can leave you. You’d be better off, wouldn’t you? If you’d never met me?”

  “God yes. Oh God yes. When I think of the dull, stupid men who loved me, who’d have gone on loving me, or at least pretended. I’ve learned, my angel, it’s far better to be loved than to love. There’s nothing lonelier in the world. But I have met you, Jim. It’s too late for that. I love you. And if you’d only tell me what’s the matter. Once you loved me. Once you worked. Now you seem to hate me. You don’t work. You seem to be waiting for me to go away.”

  After a moment I said, “Herb thinks I need a change of seasons — it’s always the same here.” I watched her. “Perhaps I should go back alone.”

  Her fingers clenched on my shoulder. “Don’t leave me out here,” she said, her voice a tense whisper. “Please don’t leave me out here.”

  … As we sat there talking, I thought about Julie. I remembered the way it had been:

  I could still see the way the snow was piled up around the doorways and windows and against the fences in the yards along Temple Street. The lights sprayed out from the windows, and in the lights you could see the people you knew, at supper, playing bridge, or reading alone in their pleasant parlors, you could hear the strains of a violin, and there was something haunting and sad in the beauty of the simple music.

  That day the letter had come from the publisher. It was three
weeks after Christmas and there hadn’t been money enough to buy a present for Julie. She had gone back to her mother’s home just after Christmas, and I had gone on living in our apartment, not minding the cold so much as the loneliness.

  And now the check had come. What had been a bleak winter looked suddenly bright. I bought food for the kitchen pantry. And flowers for the antique vase on the piano. Julie had bought the vase at an auction. She’d paid twenty-two dollars for it. Twenty-two twenty-five to be exact. Someone was bidding against her and after they reached eighteen dollars they’d dueled with quarters and halves. “I was hypnotized,” Julie had admitted ruefully. “But I love flowers, and you can buy me flowers for it.” And the vase was valued at seventy-five cents we’d found out when in dire need a few weeks later, we’d tried to pawn it.

  But now there were flowers in the vase, roses and ferns and white carnations. The apartment was warm, and secure with food, and I ran along Temple Street in the snow to bring her back home from her mother’s house. The night was bitterly cold, the snow was hard packed, and crisp and white and it crackled in the dry cold. I’d been too busy, too anxious to bring her home to stop to redeem the top coat I’d hocked in an effort to keep Julie from leaving me. But I wasn’t cold. Even now there was no memory of being cold. I heard the violin, I felt the throb of my heart as I ran, I could see the breath smoking across my lips.

  Julie was not at home. There was some post-holiday dance at the Country Club and naturally her mother insisted Julie go! Naturally. Oh, naturally. Julie, her mother pointed out, was too young for the responsibilities of marriage. She’d had no fun, and because of my stubborn pride, almost no food. She needed fun and excitement. So I waited. Julie’s parents went up to bed at eleven, yawning and frowning that I should insist upon waiting. From the stairway, Julie’s mother belatedly congratulated me upon the sale of another story, her voice plainly implying that God knew it was long enough between checks. Too long.

  The dance ended at midnight. It was one of those small town curfew laws of Carroltown. I waited. At one I heard the whispered conversations upstairs. Then Julie’s father had leaned over the banister in his bathrobe and suggested it was so late, why didn’t I just come back in the morning? But even now, even at one o’clock, the excitement of that check made me certain Julie would want me to wait for her. At three o’clock, I wasn’t so sure, and when she hadn’t returned at four, all the thrill of the check deserted me, and I was empty and agonized inside. I turned off all the lights then, waiting, sweating and miserable and sick in the darkness until she came at five. All the pleasure was gone out of the world, and my heart thudded dully over my churning stomach. I waited until she was in the hall and then I snapped on the lights. She was in the arms of this man, clinging to him from under the mussed, wrinkled depths of spoiled dress and drooping furs. She whirled on me in rage and her hysterical screams brought her mother and father down the stairs. And all I could say, all I could think to say was, I love you, Julie, I’ll always love you, Julie. How lovely, she screamed. How lovely! Spying on me! Hiding in the dark.

  I love you, Julie …

  • • •

  Troy’s ugly little maid came out on the sun porch. Her parents had brought to her the blood of almost every race that clutters the island of Oahu. The maid Cari had inherited all the flat, unfortunate features of those ancestors, and the beauty of none of them. She nodded, and that had come to mean to Troy and me, that dinner was served.

  “You talk too much, Cari,” I said, getting up from the lounge.

  She giggled. I reached out to pull one of her pigtails and Troy stepped sharply between us. I just looked at Troy and grinned. Troy acted as though nothing had happened. Cari stood there holding her breath as we walked past her into the dining room.

  I went in and sat at the table. Cari brought me a bowl of soup, but this time I didn’t even look up at her. Troy went on in to the library and after a moment, she came back waving a check in the air to dry it.

  With a gesture of contempt she pushed it toward my plate. Her blue eyes were cold now, the way only blue eyes can chill over. She’d made it payable to Herb Baldwin. Five hundred dollars. And kiss the stuff goodbye. Her grandfather had been a peddler, a small time merchant, but Troy had a million dollars in her own name, fixed so that no matter what happened short of the H-bomb, Troy was all right.

  Well now, I thought, wasn’t this easy. There was nothing difficult about getting anything from Troy. All you had to do was tell her you were going to leave her. Tell her to go to hell. Torture her. Politely of course. In a very civilized way.

  “I’ll take this to him after lunch,” I said. “He may need it.”

  She shrugged, tasted her soup and pushed it away. “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “It’s not pretty where he lives,” I told her. “Why soil your shoes?”

  “You’re going.”

  “My shoes are soiled to my knees already.”

  She sighed. “Will you be home soon?”

  “As a matter of fact, I may never be back.”

  “Oh, I know. I know that every time you leave.”

  “You mustn’t care!” I told her tensely. “You mustn’t let people matter, Troy. You must not let them hurt you.”

  “People don’t hurt me. You hurt me.”

  “That’s why it will be better if we break it up, Troy. I try not to hurt you, but I can’t help it. I don’t want to hurt you, but I do it. It’s the only thing that gives me any pleasure.”

  She looked shocked. “Jim. What do you mean?”

  I smiled at her. “You mustn’t worry about it.”

  “Is it my fault you hate me? Tell me, I can’t stand it here alone all afternoon worrying about you!”

  “Take a nap, Troy. Forget about it.”

  “How can I sleep?” she demanded.

  “Take your sleeping pills.”

  The doorbell rang as Cari brought in the meat. Troy told her to answer the door, and unless it was important to say that the Pattersons were out. I sat there listening to her at the front door, saying we were out, saying it over and over. And then she came in, her face twisted with worry. She spoke to me, not even looking at Troy.

  “There is a man to see you, sir. He will not go away. No matter how many times I tell him, and I tell him, Mrs. Patterson,” she darted a look of cold fear at Troy, “he will not go away.”

  “What did he want, Lover?” I said.

  She let out half a giggle, and then went tense. “It is about your business.”

  I was standing up, before I realized I didn’t give a damn any more. I looked at Troy, she was smiling. I said to Cari, “I’ll talk to him, you forgot to season the meat anyway.”

  • • •

  He was a stocky, dark-skinned man, with thick brushlike hair that was growing gray. For a moment I was sure I’d seen him somewhere, but it eluded me, and I let it go. It didn’t matter, he was about forty-five and worried. He wasn’t rich, but he was well-off, not a landowner, but at least he leased his property from the landowner. He went through all this while I stood at the double window and waited.

  “It’s my daughter Ona,” he said at last. “She has run away.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged eloquently. “Why would she leave my house? We do not quarrel. We eat well. We are not rich. But we are well-off — ”

  “Have you been to the police?”

  He shook his head violently. “I do not want notoriety. I do not want any scandal at all. Ona is a sensitive girl. That is why I wish quietly for you to investigate. A gentleman.” He looked about the room, the smart trappings of Troy’s home. “A man who understands a sensitive girl. All I want you to do is to find her and return her to my home.”

  “It would cost you twenty-five dollars a day and expenses,” I told him.

  He shrugged again. “Believe me, the cost is nothing. My daughter is everything.”

  I shook my head. “No. There are other agencies in town. Good ones. Q
uiet. I don’t want it.”

  Troy was standing in the door. “I wish you’d take it,” she said.

  I didn’t look at her, just hoisted my shoulders and stared out of the window. “How long has she been gone?” I said to Ona’s father.

  “Only since yesterday. But it is very unusual for Ona to be gone over night. And when there was no word — ”

  “Have you a picture of her!”

  “Yes, of course, sir. Here.”

  “Give it to me.” I shoved it in my sport jacket pocket. “I’ll look at it later,” I said. “Where do you live?”

  He told me and I scribbled the address on a card. He began to bow and thank us, thanking Troy over and over for using her influence with me. Cari snowed him to the front door. I told Troy I was going to use her Packard convertible, and she said of course. I looked at her as I went by, and I could feel her eyes on my back watching me, all the way to the door.

  4

  I RODE AROUND town for a couple of hours. I let the top down on the convertible, feeling the sun and wind against my face. For the moment, I was pleased to be working again. It didn’t mean anything, the money would amount to nothing. But it was a problem, not an earth-shaking one, but I made a bet with myself about how long it would take me to find Kalani’s daughter, Ona. I didn’t even want a drink just now, and I forgot about the check for five hundred made out to Herb. He’d said any time before tomorrow and I had this other thing on my mind.

  I had nothing to go on. Just a photographer’s colored likeness of Ona. Her smile seemed vapid, and her gaze fixed, as though she’d been staring at the birdie for a long time.

  There were not too many people on Fort Street. I drove along King to Kapiolani Boulevard. I was headed out toward Waikiki, asking myself where I would go if I were a nineteen year old girl, unmarried, pampered and named Ona. I turned around and drove over to Alkea and then to the Wahiawa Transport Service, Ltd. I showed the picture to the bus drivers standing near, the girl in the ticket booth. It’s usually a slow process like that, just asking around, until you find someone who has seen her and remembers.