The Man with Two Wives Read online

  Then, without the slightest warning, the end came. We were both in Portofino and so was Charles Maitland, when Paul Fowler turned up from my Marine days glamorously and prosperously with his new wife on the Callingham yacht. I had never met really rich people before and the Callinghams’ bland assurance before a world which had been conquered both fascinated me and made me even more aware of my own failure. They had been in Portofino a week when I dined one night on the yacht without Angelica who had stayed with Rickie. As it happened, C. J. had picked up Heat of Noon and read it. With the vagueness of the very rich, he hadn’t realized that I was the author and mercilessly tore it apart. Somehow that was the last straw. When I left the yacht, I got drunk in a little dockside ostería and staggered home in the blackest mood I had ever known. I remembered climbing the stairs to our room, thinking: If it wasn’t for Angelica, I’d kill myself.

  I turned on the light in the bare little bedroom. Rickie was lying in his cot, but Angelica wasn’t there. Instead there was a note. It said:

  I’m sorry, Bill. I’ve left with Charles. You get the divorce and take Rickie. I won’t contest. ANGELICA.

  For a moment, as I lay in the dark bed next to Betsy, the bitterness of that remote betrayal seemed as real as if I were still in that hot little waterfront room. My moment of night anxiety was over now. Of course it was absurd to harbor any feeling of guilt about Angelica. She’d gone her way, with her eyes wide open, and I had gone mine. Luckily, my way had been the Callinghams’ way and through the Callinghams, particularly through Betsy, I had found health again.

  I moved over in the bed until my body was touching my wife’s. She was asleep. I kissed her, put my arm around her and slipped back into untroubled sleep…

  At that time my position at Callingham Publications was even trickier than usual. There was going to be a VP opening and C. J., with his perverse passion for tantalizing his employees, had already half promised the job to me and half to Dave Manners who had been with the concern far longer than I and who, inevitably, resented me as the Boss’s Pet.

  As it happened, I wasn’t the Boss’s Pet at all. Being Betsy’s husband was, if anything, a handicap because, although C. J. only half realized it, he was exasperated by Betsy’s independence and success with the Fund and with her marriage. I was always certain that, if I made one false step, he would be delighted to turn with magnificently righteous indignation on Betsy. “You see? This is what comes of giving a job to a broken-down novelist just because you married him.”

  That next morning, the atmosphere was tense. Once Dave Manners was summoned to the Presence and then I was summoned twice. On both occasions, I was sure C. J. was going to make some statement about the Vice-Presidency and on both occasions he fooled me. The first summons was for nothing at all. At the second he merely beamed over his huge desk, looking, with his broad shoulders, his broad mouth and his bright protuberant eyes, even more than usual like a very clever, very dangerous frog.

  “I’ve just remembered. Isn’t it tonight Betsy’s coming out to plague me about that damn charity?”

  He knew, of course, exactly what he was doing to me. C. J. always knew what he was doing, and he had worked out some devious method of testing people by keeping them in suspense. If I hadn’t known him so well and, in a funny way, been fascinated by him as by a complicated character I’d created in a novel, I could gladly have killed him right there and then.

  “I hope you’ll be along,” he said. “I’ll need a little moral support. These single-minded females! Scare me to death.”

  “I’ll be along,” I said.

  “Fine, boy. And for God’s sake, tell that wife of yours not to deliver her speech until after we’ve dined. Terrible for the gastric juices. Make it seven sharp.”

  We made Oyster Bay at seven sharp, in full evening regalia, in spite of the fact that Paul Fowler’s car was being repaired and we had to pick him and Sandra up on the way.

  I was glad that Paul was along. Betsy, ironically enough, just because she needed her father’s love and approval so much, was always tense and at her worst around him, and the stately splendors of C. J.’s establishment, now I had gotten over being dazzled, were a strain on me too. Paul’s combination of cynicism and childish gusto, which had endeared him to me when we were in the Marines together made him the perfect catalyst at C. J.’s. A Californian whose family had been wealthy and prominent generations before the Callinghams were ever heard of, he was the one person who dared to kid C. J., and the old man liked it. C. J. also had a connoisseur widower’s weakness for Sandra, Paul’s decorative and disarmingly bone-headed wife whose official title with Paul was always the Prop.

  “I can tell you, Bill, my oldest war-buddy, in the darkest secrecy, the Prop isn’t made of flesh and blood. She was manufactured from the most expensive plastic. By whom? By the wicked advertisers in your wicked magazines. And for what purpose? To be the most irresistible object on which to hang diamonds, Cadillacs and mink. And I, poor simple soul, am doomed to do the hanging. Pity my dilemma. Think of the vast drain on my moral resources and my pocketbook. The Betsy Callingham Leukemia Fund! It ought to be the Sandra Fowler Fur, Jewel and Automobile Fund.”

  That particular evening at C. J.’s was much like all the others, with too many servants, too much to eat, too much to drink and far too much Daphne. At nineteen, Daphne Callingham was the most spoiled brat I had ever known. It was all C. J.’s fault, of course. If he hadn’t adored her so blindly and convinced her that every man was her natural slave, she might have been rather a dear. At least she was pretty enough with her blue pug eyes and her mane of red hair. In her scatterbrained way, she was even kind and generous, too, if it didn’t inconvenience her too much.

  That night she sat next to me at dinner and directed at me an absurd battery of allure. She always made mad charm at me and I knew it was almost entirely to annoy Betsy. That was the one thing about her I actively disliked. Ever since I’d known the Callinghams, she had been obsessed with proving the point that she was the “glamorous” one and Betsy “the mouse.” I resented it because, even now, Betsy was still sensitive enough to be flustered and hurt.

  C. J., when he wasn’t being gracious with the Prop, glanced down the table purringly at Daphne. Paul, too, the shrewd politician, was busy flattering her. All this isolated Betsy and the whole mood of the table was such as to make her feel stuffy and clumsy and fun killing. I grinned encouragement at her between the elaborate prongs of the central silver epergne and she grinned back. But I knew she was unhappy.

  And nobody mentioned the Fund.

  It only came up after we men had sat baronially around the port for a while and finally “joined the ladies.” Paul managed to ease Daphne away into a corner of the huge living room. I settled on a Louis Quinze sofa next to the Prop, shutting her off from C. J. This left Betsy and her father facing each other, relatively alone. Even then C. J. made it as difficult for her as possible. But she did at last force herself into beginning her little obviously prepared plea. C. J. broke in almost at once.

  “My dear Betsy, please spare me a harangue. I am under no delusion as to why you are here tonight, and you, I am sure, are under no delusion that any rhetorical pyrotechnics on your part can influence my decision to the slightest degree.”

  C. J., who had been born in the slums of Cincinnati and had educated himself with the same savage determination with which he had enriched himself, relished polysyllables. He smirked his frog smirk and twisted his balloon brandy glass. Then, with the unctuousness of one of his own editorials, he launched into a speech about Standing On One’s Own Feet. Ever since the Fund started, he said, he had been the one who had buttressed it. If Betsy had the right pride in her work, she should have realized by now that she couldn’t depend for ever on an indulgent father…

  I listened with indignation. It was not only unkind; it was preposterously unfair. Betsy had started the Fund with money left her by her mother; she had done everything herself; all she had ever asked
from him had been an annual subscription and reasonable publicity in his periodicals. He knew all that as well as I did. And yet, the lecture rolled ponderously on.

  Over in their corner, I saw Paul lean toward Daphne and whisper in her ear. Then they both joined us. C. J. was winding up his peroration.

  “And so, my dear Betsy, I have decided, after the most mature reflection, that this year you should prove to yourself that you can get on perfectly well without any assistance from me whatsoever.”

  Betsy’s face was carefully expressionless, but I knew how shrewdly calculated to hurt her that had been. I was so angry that I blundered to her defense. C. J.’s brow started to furrow with displeasure. In the middle of my speech, I caught a desperate glance from Paul and, feeling awkward and frustrated, let it all drop. For a moment, there was a long, clammy silence.

  Then Daphne exclaimed, “So you’re not going to give Betsy her subscription, Daddy?”

  “No, Piggy. She must fend for herself.”

  “Why, of all the mean, dreary old tycoons.” Daphne gave her fashionable-girls’-school giggle and sat down on C. J.’s lap, curling her thin bare arms around his neck. “Really, I’ve never heard anything so depressing in my entire life. Poor old Betsy! What’s she got but her dismal old Fund? And you know it’ll fall flat on its face without you. How can you be so square?”

  With a quick glance at Betsy, she started pulling one of his ears. Her crude cozening was obviously motivated just as much by a desire to flaunt her power over him as by any genuine impulse to help her sister. It embarrassed me in the extreme. It was even more embarrassing when I saw from C. J.’s face that he was succumbing to it. His cheeks became pink and puffy; his mouth pursed; he even giggled in a basso imitation of his daughter.

  In less than a quarter of an hour, he had abandoned his platform of Standing On One’s Own Feet as if it had never existed and was signing a check “just this time as a favor to Piggy.”

  As he handed Betsy the check, I noticed a gleam of satisfied malice in his eyes and it dawned on me that, as so often before, he had completely taken me in. Both his pompous speech and his foolish-father routine with Daphne had been merely games, part of an obscure, perverse, rich-man’s joke. In his infinite complexity, he had decided from the beginning to give Betsy the money, but he had had an impulse to humiliate her first and Daphne had provided him with the most effective method of insult.

  At times like that the whole Callingham atmosphere depressed and frightened me, and the rest of the evening, so far as I was concerned, was stifling. But C. J. seemed to enjoy it immensely. Luckily, he always went to bed early. At ten-thirty we were dismissed.

  As I was getting my coat, Daphne pulled me aside and, grinning in triumph, held up a twenty-five-cent piece.

  “Paul bet me a quarter I couldn’t break the old boy down. Pretty smooth work, wasn’t it?” She batted the lashes over her big eyes. “I’m coming to town tomorrow. Now that I’ve saved her dreary old Fund for her, the least Betsy can do is to loan you to me for lunch.” Lunching with Daphne was a lengthy and exhausting occupation. But I knew that crossing her would only make the whole family thing more difficult for Betsy.

  “Sure,” I said.

  In the car, Betsy was wonderful. She made no mention of my ill-starred effort at championing her, and no one would have known her father had hurt her. It was, I knew, a matter of pride with her. Paul was fine, too. He didn’t refer to the quarter episode. He merely took it all as a run-of-the-mill successful transaction.

  The Fowlers decided to come home with us for a drink, but when we had almost reached Beekman Place the Prop discovered she had a headache. After any evening in which she hadn’t been the center of attraction, she was apt to have a headache. It was the only method of asserting herself that she had figured out. Paul, as always, was as gentle as a lamb with her.

  “My poor baby, it’s all that weight of gray matter.”

  “No, Paul, it isn’t. It’s those liqueurs of C. J.’s.”

  I let Betsy off at Beekman Place and drove the Fowlers down again to their apartment. As I started back uptown alone, my depression hadn’t left me. Even after three years of happy marriage, there were still moments when I felt trapped, when I felt that Betsy and I, for all our show of independence, were nothing but slightly superior slaves in C. J.’s vast empire. That had been a particularly unfortunate day. I’d been frustrated about the Vice-Presidency; I’d had to watch helpless while C. J. goaded my wife; and, on top of it all, I’d had to let a dizzy nineteen-year-old girl command me into taking her to lunch. Like the Prop, I suppose, I felt a desire to assert myself.

  I glanced out of the car. I was almost in front of Angelica’s apartment.

  chapter 3

  I knew that it was rash to stop the car. I didn’t kid myself that I owed Angelica a duty call. I didn’t even particularly want to see her. It was just a stubborn, confused impulse to do something which had nothing to do with the Callinghams—something, in fact, of which C. J. would heartily disapprove. For, in his Champion-of-American-Morality moods, he still tiraded against “that shoddy woman we rescued you from and all that degenerate bunch in Europe.”

  I parked in front of the house, pressed the buzzer and, when the door catch was released, went up the dismal stairs to the apartment.

  Angelica opened the door. I had been expecting the wan invalid of the day before. The change was astonishing. She was fully dressed in a black suit with a yellow scarf knotted at her throat. The suit wasn’t anything much, but the way she wore it and her extraordinary, unaffected beauty made the Prop seem synthetic and Daphne a nouveau riche little floosie. I felt unreasonably happy that I was there.

  “I was passing,” I said. “I thought I’d drop up and see how you were. You look much better.”

  Her gray eyes, taking in my evening clothes, showed no surprise and no particular welcome. “Do you want to come in for a minute?”

  I followed her into the shrimp-pink living room. It was scrupulously tidy. The door was open into the bedroom. It, too, seemed just as neat. The effect was still one of extreme poverty, but the squalor was gone. In my rebellion from C. J.’s flamboyant luxury, its sparseness struck me as refreshing.

  Angelica took a cigarette out of an open package and lit it with a kitchen match. She was treating me like a formal acquaintance, studiedly rejecting me as an ex-husband.

  She said, “I was silly and hysterical last night. I must have given you a very wrong impression.”

  “You were sick,” I said.

  “About Jaimie, I mean. I exaggerated it all, made it seem most melodramatic. It isn’t. I want to make that clear. I don’t need any help. I am not, in any way, a Damsel in Distress.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “He’s difficult, of course, particularly when he’s drunk, and last night he’d been drunk for a week. But he’s all right again now. He came around this afternoon. He was fine. Everything’s fine.”

  Her ludicrous attempt to whitewash Jaimie and her obvious desire to slam the door of her life in my face exasperated me.

  I said, “It sounds like a beautiful romance. How long has it been going on? Did it, by any chance, overlap with Charles Maitland?”

  She looked faintly surprised rather than angry at that shabby crack. “I’d almost forgotten Charles. Jaimie and I met in Positano two years ago.”

  “Then isn’t it about time you made an honest man of him?”

  “Married him, you mean? Jaimie would never marry me. Never in a million years. He’s all set to marry an heiress with diamonds in a strongbox and a yacht. Isn’t that the established pattern for all authors and ex-authors?”

  Although I knew I had that taunt coming to me, my anger flared up. I realized it was pointless to be angry. It was three years out of date. But I had been cheated out of a final scene in Portofino and here it seemed to be coming, soured from being so long bottled up.

  “And you’re satisfied with that sort of a relationship?”

&
nbsp; “Completely.”

  “You weren’t satisfied with me.”

  “Bill…!”

  “I see what was wrong now. I was the right type. Bumming around Europe, making like the Great American Novelist! But I wasn’t quite far enough down the drain, was I? Charles Maitland had it all over me, and Jaimie’s got it all over both of us. I didn’t try to strangle you. I even did my best to support you and, of course, I committed the cardinal, bourgeois sin of marrying you.”

  Her face was white and gaunt. My body was tingling with a need to hurt her, to pay her out, now, years later when it no longer mattered.

  “Congratulations. It’s a glorious life you’ve built up for yourself. No wonder you threw your own kid away; no wonder you haven’t even bothered to ask me how Rickie is. No wonder…”

  I saw her hand flying out toward my cheek. I caught it. For a moment we stood glaring at each other. Then, suddenly, my anger collapsed like a pricked balloon.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business. I’ll go now.”

  “Yes. it’s best if you go.”

  I looked at her standing there, so beautiful, so pigheaded, so convinced she wasn’t doomed. Without any justification at all I felt an obligation to protect her.