Saratoga Trunk (2 page)

Now the photographers sprang into action. Almost automatically he and she raised protesting hands; then she smiled as though remembering something. Clint Maroon waved one great arm. “All right. Shoot! I’m through with skulking. My grandpappy fought in the Alamo. I reckon I can face a battery of cameras without flinching.” Suddenly he winced. Then he reached across his own girth and patted his wife’s hand that lay so innocently in the crook of his other arm. “No more pinching to shut me up, Clio. Time’s past for that, too. From now on I’m making a clean breast of it. This is going to be a different America. We won’t live to see it, but we said we were going to try to make up for what we’d done to it.”

She smiled again, wistfully, and shook her head a little, and the reporters thought, she must have a time of it managing the old boy now that his mind is slipping a bit. The candid camera men stood on chairs and surveyed their victims from strange angles; the little boxes clicked. The two white-clad figures posed smiling and serene.

Len Brisk of the
Telegram
dismissed the camera men with a gesture of clearing the decks for action. “All right, boys! You’ve got yours. Beat it.”

You heard the well-bred authoritative voice of Keppel of the New York
Times.
“Mr. Maroon, there are certain questions my paper would like me to ask you. Is it true ...”

The barrage was on. Is it true you are giving your Fifth Avenue house to the city, outright, to be used for a Service Clubhouse? Is it true you’ve turned your collection of paintings over to the Metropolitan Museum? Is it true your yacht is to be a government training ship? Is it true your Adirondacks estate is to be a free summer camp for boys? Is it true you’re giving away every penny of your fortune to the government after you’ve pensioned your old employes? And that you’re keeping just enough for you and Mrs. Maroon to live on in comfort? Is it true ... is it true ... is it true . . .

He replied in the soft-spoken Texas drawl that had taken on the clipped overtones of authority. “All true. But unimportant. That stuff’s not what I want to tell you about. This time I can give you a real story. It isn’t only something to write about. It’s something for Americans to read and realize, and remember. They’ll hate me for it. But anyway, they’ll know.”

“Yeah, that’ll be fine. Uh—look, Colonel, we want—”

“All right, Colonel, but first—”

“First hell! This is first I tell you. In another year, if I live, I’ll be ninety. The way the world is headed I don’t know’s I want to. Ninety, nearly, and I’m sick of being a railroad magnate and a collector of art and a Metropolitan Opera stockholder and director of a lot of fool corporations. It’s damned dull, and always has been. If I was thirty I’d learn to run an airplane. Might anyway. Next to breaking a bucking bronco that must be more fun than anything.”

“May we say that, Mr. Maroon?”

“God, yes. Say anything you like. I’ve got nothing to lose now. I’m coming clean. Listen. Millions, and I had to be respectable. Me, a terror from Texas. Here you are, smart as they make ‘em, you and your kind have been interviewing me for sixty years, ever since I found that fool railroad hanging around my neck—and you don’t know a thing about the real Clint Maroon. Not a damned thing. Or if you have got it filed away in the morgue somewhere you’re scared to print it while I’m alive. Well, go on. Use it! I’m a Texas gambler and a killer. I’ve killed as many men as Jesse James, or almost. I’ve robbed my country for sixty years. My father, he ran the town of San Antonio back in 1840 before the damn Yankees came along and stole his land for a railroad. That’s one reason why I didn’t hesitate to steal it back from them. My grandpappy, old Dacey Maroon, fought the Santa Anna Mexicans along with Jim Bowie and Bill Travis and Sam Houston. That’s the stock I come from. And what did I do for my country! Stole millions from millionaires who were stealing each other blind. Another year and I’ll be ninety—the meanest old coot that ever lived to be nearly a hundred—”

“Oh, come on now, Colonel. You know you’re a wonderful guy and everybody’s crazy about you and Mrs. Maroon. So stop kidding us and give us our story in time for the first edition.”

“God A’mighty, I’m giving it to you, I tell you! They called us financiers. Financiers hell! We were a gang of racketeers that would make these apes today look like kids stealing turnips out of the garden patch. We stole a whole country—land, woods, rivers, metal. They’ve got our pictures in the museums. We ought to be in the rogues’ gallery. My day you could get away with wholesale robbery, bribery in high places and murder—and brag about it. I was brought up on the stories my father told about ‘em—Huntington and Stanford and Crocker. Two hundred thousand dollars is all they had amongst them in 1861. And they wanted to build a railroad across a continent. So they paid a visit to Washington, and they left that two hundred thousand there. Made no secret of it. They came away with a charter and land grants and the government’s promise to pay in bonds for work in progress. What did the Central Pacific crowd do! I heard my pa tell how in ‘63 Phil Stanford—he was brother of the Governor—drove up to the polls in a buggy when they were holding elections in San Francisco over a bond issue. Reached into a bag and began throwing gold pieces to the crowd at the polls, yelling to ‘em to vote the bond issue. They voted it, all right. Do that today and where’d you land? In jail! Lives and principles, they didn’t matter. Same thing in 1880 when I got started. Say, I was as bad as the worst of’em—”

“Sure, Colonel, we know, we know. You were a bad
hombre
all right.”

“You tell us all about that some time. Some other time. And about the day you rode your horse right up to the bar of the Perfessor Saloon in San Antone.”

They were being good-natured about it, but they did wish Mrs. Maroon would stop the old coot’s nonsense. Pretty soon it would be too late, the races would be over and they’d have to hop back to New York without a chance to use that tip on Honey Chile.

“Sixty years ago, young fella, I’d have wiped that grin off your face with a six-shooter. Fights and feuds and fiestas and fandangoes, that was the program back in Texas where I came from in 1880. People call it romantic now. Well, maybe it was. Anyway we had the use of our legs and arms instead of being just limbless trunks riding around in automobiles the way you softies are today. It’s got so you have to jump into a car to go down to the corner to get a pack of cigarettes. Two years ago I went down to Texas, went in an airplane from New York in less time than it used to take us to gallop into town on a Saturday night in the old days. Houston’s a stinking oil town now, Dallas sets up to be a style center, San Antonio’s full of art and they’re starting a movement to run gondolas on the San Antonio River for tourists. My God, I almost had a stroke.”

“That’s very interesting, Mr. Maroon, but look—”

“I can tell you things if you think that’s interesting. Ninety, or nearly. Let ‘em put me in jail. If I was to eat two pieces of chocolate cake this minute and drink a quart of champagne I’d be dead in an hour. What can death do to you at ninety that life hasn’t done to you already!”

“You’re right, Colonel. Uh, look, we’ve got our edition to make, see. And if you’ll just give us what we came for, first, and then—”

“You’re deaf and dumb and blind, the lot of you!” His face was dangerously red considering his age and the weather. He snatched his arm free of his wife’s restraining hand, his voice rang out with a resonance incredible in an organ that had known almost a century of use. “I tell you I’m giving you the real story if you’d have the sense to see it. I’m giving up my money now because I robbed widows and orphans to get it. That was considered smart in those days. But I’ll say this for myself—I didn’t want money or position or power for myself. I wanted Clio Dulaine and I had to have those to get her. So I outwitted them and I’ve outlived them, too, the whole sniveling lot of them—Gould and Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Morgan and Fisk and Drew. We skimmed a whole nation—took the cream right off the top.”

Tubby Krause spoke up soothingly, but even his unctuous voice had the gritty sound of patience nearing exhaustion. “Yep, that’s right, Mr. Maroon. You ought to write a book about it. I bet it’d make ‘em sit up. Ever read
The Robber Barons?
Great book. Yeh, those were the bad old boys all right. Now, Mr. Maroon, if you’ll just answer a couple of questions.”

Mrs. Maroon took his great freckled hand in her own two delicate ones; she looked up into his face, earnestly. “You see, Clint, they don’t want to hear it. I told you they wouldn’t. They don’t believe it. Let it go. What does it matter now?”

“Thanks, Mrs. Maroon.” It was Quinlan with an edge to his voice. “You understand how it is. We’re here to get our story. We’ve always been on the square with you and the Colonel. And you’ve been more than square with us. This is our job, see.”

“Yah, your jobs!” snarled Maroon to their astonishment, for he had always been as charming as he was considerate. “You young fools! You deserve to lose ‘em. I suppose if I told you that Mrs. Maroon is the daughter of a Creole aristocrat and the most famous
placée
in New Orleans back in the ‘60s, you wouldn’t be interested!”

“What’s a
placée?”

“I suppose you never heard of José Llulla, either? Pepe Llulla, they called him, isn’t that right, Clio? Long before your day. He fought and won so many duels that he had to start his own cemetery to take care of them. Cemetery of St. Vincent de Paul on Louisa Street. Anybody’ll show it to you. Well, now, Mrs. Maroon’s grandmother was killed by Pepe Llulla. Jealousy.”

The newspaper people were smiling rather uncertainly now. After all, a joke’s a joke, they thought, but the old boy was going too far. Mrs. Maroon’s musical indolent laugh reassured them. Mischievously she shook her husband’s arm as one would remind a dear forgetful child.

“Don’t leave out the important things, Clint,
chéri.’’’’
She shut one handsome eye in an amazing and confidential wink. “Surely you won’t forget to tell them that Mama was accused of murder. And the scandal was hushed up,” Clio Maroon went on, equably. “They said he had died of a heart attack. So then Mama was smuggled out of New Orleans, they sent her to France, and of course that’s how I—”

“—came to be educated in a convent,” chimed in two or three rather weary voices.

Someone said, “Oh, listen, Mrs. Maroon! You going to start kidding us too? After we’ve given you the best years of our lives!”

Clio Maroon smiled up at her husband. “You see, dear? Next time. Next time.”

“That’s right,” Len Brisk assured her. “Next time we’ll run all that movie stuff, Mr. Maroon, just to show you our hearts are in the right place, even if our heads aren’t. Then what’ll you do to us?”

“Sue you for a million dollars,” Mrs. Maroon put in, swiftly.

“But it’s all true!” Clint Maroon shouted. “Damn it, it’s all true I tell you! I just want you boys and girls to write it—to write it so that Americans will know that this country today is finer and more honest and more free and democratic than it has been since way back in Revolutionary days. For a century we big fellows could grab and ran. They can’t do it today. It’s going to be the day of the little man. Tell them to have faith and believe that they’re the best Americans in the decentest government the world has ever seen. It’s true, I tell you. We’re just coming out of the darkness. Don’t let anyone tell you that America today isn’t the—”

“Sure. Sure. We know.”

She turned to go then, with a glance at them over her shoulder—a whimsical and appealing glance from those fine eyes that seemed to convey a little secret understanding between her and them. I am leaving an old and sick man in your care, the glance said. Be lenient. Be kind. Aloud, “Don’t keep Mr. Maroon too long, will you? And please help yourselves to drinks and sandwiches there on the table. If I come back at the end of—oh—fifteen minutes don’t be too cross with me. Mr. Maroon finds this heat rather trying.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Maroon. You’ve been swell. . . . Think it’s safe to leave a bunch of newspapermen with all this scotch and rye?”

She went then, carrying herself with such grace and dignity that if it had not been for her steel-gray hair you might have thought her a woman of thirty, her soft draperies flowing after her, her head held high. As she closed the door and vanished she heard Keppel’s voice, not quite so suave now, for time was pressing. “Now then, Mr. Maroon, is it true that you . . .” And then the hard incisive tone of Larry Conover’s voice keyed to the tempo of the tabloid he represented. “Hi, wait a minute, fellas. Something tells me Mr. Maroon isn’t kidding. Are you, Mr. Maroon? Say, listen, maybe we’re missing the real story. What was that again about—”

She made as though to turn back and re-enter the room. But she only hesitated a moment there before the door, and shrugged her shoulders with a little Gallic gesture and smiled and did not listen for more.

She and Clint Maroon had met and fallen instantly in love at breakfast in Madame Begué’s restaurant that April Sunday morning in New Orleans, almost sixty years ago. Though perhaps their encounter in the French Market earlier in the day should be called their first meeting. Certainly there he had persisted in staring at her and following her, and he had even attempted to speak to her. She had had to administer punishment, brisk though secondhand—for his boldness.

Clio Dulaine was back in New Orleans after an absence of fifteen years. Though she had left it as a child and had not seen it again until now, when she had just turned twenty, she was as much at home in it, as deeply in love with it as if she were a Creole aristocrat with a century’s background of dwelling in the
Vieux Carré.
Throughout the years of her life in France she had heard of New Orleans and learned of it through the memories and longings of two exiled and homesick women—her mother, the lovely Rita Dulaine, and her aunt Belle Piquery. These two, filled with nostalgia for their native and beloved Louisiana city, had lived unwillingly and died resentfully in the Paris to which they had been banished—the Paris of the 1870’s. In those years the mind of the girl Clio had become a brimming reservoir for their dreams, their bizarre recollections, their heartsick yearnings. Though they dwelt perforce in France, they really lived in their New Orleans past. The Franco-Prussian War, the occupation of Paris had been to them a minor and faintly annoying incident. Their chief concern with it was that in those confused years their copy of the New Orleans French newspaper
L’Abeille
sometimes failed to arrive on time. Its arrival was an event. They fell upon its meager pages with the eager little cries of women famished for news from home. They devoured every crumb of information—births, deaths, marriages, society, advertisements. Though these two women belonged to that strange and exotic stratum which was the New Orleans underworld, Rita’s life had been for many years entwined with that of one of the city’s oldest and most aristocratic of families. In that fantastic society she had been the mistress of Nicolas Dulaine, only son of that proud and wealthy family; not only that, she had been known by his name, she was Rita Dulaine, she had lived in the charming little house he had purchased for her in Rampart Street, she had borne him a daughter, she was queen of that half-world peopled by women of doubtful blood. She was a
placée,
she had taken the name of Dulaine, she was the acknowledged beauty in an almost macabre society of strangely lovely women. Her gowns came from Paris, her jewels from the Rue de la Paix, she had traveled abroad with Nicolas Dulaine as his wife. Love, luxury, adulation, even position of a sort, Rita Dulaine had had everything that a beautiful and beloved woman can have except the security of a legal name and a legal right as the consort of Nicolas Dulaine.