Desert of the Heart: A Novel (27 page)

“And those facts are enough to establish cruelty?”

“Anything that has caused you extreme suffering is cruelty in the eyes of the law, Mrs. Hall. People have been granted divorces whose complaints seem extremely petty. It is not the act itself that’s important. It is the effect of that act upon the plaintiff.”

“I see,” Evelyn said. Plaintiff was an unpleasant word. It whined into sound and then cut itself off with martyred abruptness. One consolation she would have if George brought a countersuit was that she could be called the defendant. It was a title that seemed more accurate.

“It sometimes helps to remember that you are not on trial. Your husband is, in absentia of course; so it needn’t be unpleasant for either of you.”

“I wish I found that comforting,” Evelyn said. “Mr. Williams, is there any possibility that the divorce might be contested?”

“I had assumed not. Are you expecting your husband to cause any trouble?”

“Not expecting, no, I …” Evelyn hesitated. She could not bring herself to ask the questions she must ask because, with them, she would be forced into explanations she could not offer. “No.”

“It’s natural for you to feel a little nervous, Mrs. Hall, but there isn’t any reason for you to worry. Everything is in order. It’s a perfectly straightforward case.” He smiled reassuringly. “Now, are there any other questions you’d like to ask?”

She must ask him to phone George’s lawyer, to find out, but all she could force herself to say was, “Do I just go to the courthouse?”

“I’ll meet you and Mrs. Packer right by the main door at quarter to ten. If there are no delays in the court, it shouldn’t take much longer than twenty minutes.”

He got up, and Evelyn felt in the tension of his body his intention to end the interview. She could not allow herself to be danced out of the room until she had somehow managed to tell him of Bill’s threat.

“Do you happen to know Ann Childs, Mr. Williams?”

“Ann?” Her question had obviously thrown him more violently off pace than she could have anticipated, for he echoed the name as if to ward it off, and his body froze in an incompleted gesture. He had to struggle into movement and speech. “Her father was my partner.”

“I didn’t realize that. Of course, you know her then. Do you know any of the people who work with her at Frank’s Club?”

“Know them? Yes, I know them,” Arthur Williams answered, and he seemed to take this question as a kind of lifeline, for he pulled himself up to it with a rhetorical vigor that was almost desperation. “The husband of that wretched woman you just saw leaving this office, for instance. He was a dealer until his gambling habits were too much even for the management. He was always paid in cash, of course, and given a free dollar chip with each week’s pay, but he was allowed to lose only all that he earned, no more. Most of my local clients are employees or customers or married to employees or customers. I had a man in here the other day who makes twenty thousand dollars a year, and his children don’t have shoes because his wife can’t stay out of the casinos. He’s begun to use company funds to pay her debts. She’ll send him to prison eventually. Yes, I know them. I know them all because their stories are all the same. And I could tell you stories, such stories of suffering that you wouldn’t believe. You’ve been in the casinos, I suppose?” He had begun to pace his office, but he stopped to pose his question.

“Yes,” Evelyn answered tentatively. His growing excitement was alarming to her in the same way his elaborate manners had been. She wished he would sit down again behind the desk which seemed to inhibit and discipline his responses, but he remained standing.

“And what did you think of them? And what do you think of those of us who live here, tolerating places like that … even working in them? It’s true: most of the people who live in Reno are numb to them. We’re just like the Germans who turned a blind eye to the exterminating of the Jews because we stand by and do nothing about these Buchenwalds of our own. Why? I’ll tell you why. The gambling interests in this state are getting so strong that they control the laws of the state. People are afraid, and they have reason to be afraid. When I spent money trying to back an honest politician, my wife was threatened and so were my children. And people don’t even realize what’s happening. The political power building up in this state will control the whole country soon, and then it will be too late.” He paused, standing under the picture of his father in judge’s robes. “It’s already too late for most of us. When I came to Reno twenty years ago, Frank’s Club was nothing. These places began as penny roulette wheels in the backs of stores. Look at them now. And who speaks out? The University? No. The churches? No. Pay Caesar what’s due to Caesar, they say. But Caesar’s paying them. There’s no state tax. And there isn’t a department at the University or a church in town that doesn’t have a hand in someone’s pocket. The ministers drive Lincolns and go to the Islands for their vacations. Even the Catholic Church is silent. My wife’s a Catholic. She begs me not to argue with the priests. She’s afraid something terrible will happen to me if I speak my mind to anyone. I ask myself, if all the people who know in their hearts that gambling is a sin, one of the blackest sins there is, would speak out, would it do any good? Maybe not. Maybe not now. We have to protect our children.”

“Why on earth do you stay here, feeling like that?” Evelyn asked.

Arthur Williams paused, the rhythm of his protest broken. “My wife has sinus trouble,” he said, the force gone from his voice. “The climate’s good for her.”

“Surely there must be other places. …”

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe if we’d moved ten years ago…. We used to talk about it. I’m not as young as I was then.”

He turned away from Evelyn and stared out of the window. Once she would have found such an outburst of morality ending in so pathetic a confession at least pitiable, at worst contemptible. Now, as she looked at the back of the small gray man in the gray suit, who was perhaps contemplating the destroying price of his own Lincoln, she saw only how like George he was and how like herself. She felt neither pity nor contempt. Everyone must vacillate between a vision of himself as plaintiff and as defendant, as Abel and as Cain. And the world must always seem to be either the Garden of Eden, from which he is about to be expelled, or a circle in hell, into which he has wandered like Dante or Orpheus only to find that he can’t get out. How guilty the innocent always feel, how innocent the guilty. And, if paradox is a symptom of misconception, then the world itself is probably misconceived, a profound error in the very nature of things.

“Excuse me,” Arthur Williams said at last, turning to Evelyn. “You were asking about Ann Childs.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Evelyn said.

“She was a gifted child. I tried to help her. I couldn’t.”

He did not want the interview to continue, but he seemed unable to end it. Evelyn herself had to make the move that would free him. He did not even go to the office door with her. On the way out of the building, Evelyn remembered one of the drawings in
Eve’s Apple
and now recognized in it Arthur Williams’ particular stance in the universal dilemma. This was not the discovery she had gone to make, however. She knew no more about Bill’s activities than she had this morning after breakfast. Evelyn realized that, if she was going to find out what he had or had not done without exposing herself or Ann, she had only one choice. She must see Bill himself.

She had not been to the Club before in the early evening, but her sense of time deserted her almost immediately after she had let herself be pulled through the doors by the urgent and inevitable crowd. The noise she was prepared for still sent its violent and continual prophecies like currents of fear along her nerves. She was afraid, not in decorous timidity as she had once been, not in anticipation of personal encounter. It was pure claustrophobia which embraced her like the intimacy of her own skin but with a pressure so appalling that, for the moment she suffered it, it was a physical agony she did not imagine she could endure. Then it was over, and she was moving quite naturally through the crowds, carefully stepping onto the escalator, even more carefully stepping off, just as if she were going to find Ann at her accustomed station by the guns. But the Corral, for all its gross familiarity, was a different place without Silver’s garish presence and uncertain greeting, without Ann’s preoccupied and unnatural height in the far corner. Both their positions were filled by young women Evelyn had never seen before, but they were not new; they worked with an efficiency and personal assurance of employees who had been there for some time. Evelyn checked her resentment of them both, for, though she missed Silver and was angry about Ann’s dismissal, she certainly should be as happy as Frances to know that Ann was free.

Evelyn herself should be free now to see the Club as she would have seen it if Ann had not been working there. Would she have taken an attitude similar to Arthur Williams? He saw it as a place of the most corrupt usury and human suffering, a Buchenwald, the third ring of the seventh circle of hell. If it was not moral, it was visual melodrama. Nothing here recalled the terrible, skeletal despair of the Jews, nor were there the contorted expressions of greed and rage that were accredited to the money breeders. If the crowd reminded her of anything at all, it was a cluttered drawing of Hogarth, and even that was an exaggeration. Where was the suffering, innocent or guilty? She could see it here and there in the desperate and in the resigned; but most of these people were tourists. There were no tourists in Buchenwald and only a few distinguished tourists in hell. Surely no one enjoyed himself.

But Evelyn was not here to define the moral climate of Frank’s Club. It should not really matter anymore. That it did was only an indication of Evelyn’s private uncertainty. She studied the general to avoid the particular. She was studying the crowd to avoid Bill, not to find him. Evelyn forced herself to look for Bill, but she could not see him. She went to the cashier to inquire.

He’s on his break, love, but he ought to be back to check in with us in about ten minutes.”

“Thanks.”

As she found a place to stand and wait, claustrophobia threatened her again. She focused her eyes on a sign:
FRANK’S CLUB FOR FUN AND GAMES
. And she focused her mind again on the crowd with determined and cheerful detachment. People were having fun. If the Club was making money which made the Dicks family rich and powerful, it was also creating a rather marvelous, mock welfare state, based on the redistribution of wealth by means of acts of pure charity, support of education and religion, road building … and law buying, but Ann would argue that all industry buys law.
PLAY ONLY WHAT YOU CAN AFFORD
. The Club encouraged moderation. Had there ever been such a sign at a department store sale? If the employees were given free dollar chips with their pay, surely the practice was no different from the ten per cent discount and generous credit (carrying compound interest) granted to any clerk. Frank’s Club felt a particular moral responsibility to its employees, teaching and reteaching the Golden Rule. Ann had brought home the latest paraphrase:
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS PUT YOURSELF IN THE OTHER GUY’S PLACE AND DO HIM LIKE YOU’D LIKE TO BE DONE. THIS IS IT IN ESSENCE.
There was a failure in aesthetic values, one had to admit; but in the culture of North America Frank’s Club could not really be singled out for its bad taste. Its writers and interior decorators had at least some dim sense of historical tradition. She was begging the question, of course. Frank’s Club was corrupt in its purpose, and no matter how amusingly, honestly, and generously that purpose was carried out, it should not be overlooked or excused. Hiram O. Dicks made money out of men’s weakness for gambling. Was gambling evil in itself then? A good many churches did not think so. Bingo had become an important source of income. Then the evil must be in the fact of private enterprise. Hiram O. Dicks made money. Even the dimmest witted congressman could recognize this morality as subversive.

Her mind was playing games much more dangerous than any Frank’s Club could offer. If she could accept this place as a microcosm, no better and no worse than any other, simply representative, she could as easily rationalize the last vestige of her private morality into meaninglessness. And she wanted to. Her fear was that she could not accept this world, that she could let Ann go.

“You wanted to speak to me?”

“Yes, Bill, I do.”

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, cordial but uneasy.

“Thank you, no,” Evelyn said. No sociability could alter the directness of the question she had come to ask, and neither delay nor privacy would alter the threat of his actual aggressive presence. “I’ve heard this morning that you were thinking of going to see my husband’s lawyer.” Bill’s face tightened, and his cheek was shadowed by a flickering nerve. “Have you seen him?”

“No,” Bill said. “I was angry. Anyway, there was nothing he could have done.”

“I had to be sure,” Evelyn said.

“I loved her.” He spoke with energetic, defensive anger. “I wanted to marry her.”

“I understand that.”

“Do you? Do you really know what it’s like for a man to watch the woman he loves … doing what she’s doing? It made me mad.” He stopped, forcing himself to be quiet. “It doesn’t matter now. It isn’t any of my business. I suppose I should apologize.”

“No,” Evelyn said.

“Is she going away with you?”

“I think not,” Evelyn said.

They stood, looking at each other. Then Evelyn turned away and walked through the crowd to the down escalator. If anyone should apologize, she should or Ann should. But Ann, at least, had the sense to know that she could not marry Bill. If he was suffering now, he’d get over it. He did not have to live for sixteen years with a woman who could not be his wife and yet could not bring herself to admit it. Evelyn wondered if he’d ever know how lucky he had been.

Ann was free then, of the Club, of Bill, and, because there was no threat of countersuit, of Evelyn. Evelyn could let her go, and now she must. Why? Because, even spared this particular exposure, the world would not let them alone for long. There would be other Bills, a great many more of them in Berkeley than in Reno, who, loving Ann or not, would be self-appointed judges. And few of them would be as reticent about taking action as Bill had been. They would live among an army of special assistants to the Dean who felt morally obliged to uphold that old dictum: marriage is the best life for a woman. Clichés were only a sin in literature. In life, if they happened to be true, there was no intellectual campaign that would defeat them. Did she believe that marriage was the best life for a woman? Of course. She believed it just as she believed that this huge, penny arcade was not, as Ann would have it, only another of the many mansions of God. As Ann would have it. Ann could not argue for the Club. And she would not argue against marriage. She would say, “for the while then.” And, if she ever wanted to marry, Evelyn would let her go. But she must let Ann go now. If she would not let Ann go under these circumstances, she never would.