You Might As Well Die (10 page)

Benchley didn’t know what to say. He stammered, “Bert Clay, right?”

“Yeah. Who wants to know?”

“We met at the—the Elks Lodge fund-raiser?” Benchley heard himself say.

“Elks Lodge? I’m not an Elk.”

“Oh no?” Benchley asked, eyeing him up and down. “You certainly look like one.”

“Not a chance in hell! I’m a Freemason. Dyed in the wool.”

“Oh yes, of course. That’s how I know you. I should have recognized a fellow Mason.”

He offered Clay his hand, which Clay grasped with his much larger one. Benchley guessed at a secret Masonic handshake—attempting an elaborate maneuver of rotating his thumb around Clay’s thumb, his pinkie inside Clay’s palm, and pumping his hand up, then up higher, and then down with a wrist-wrenching drop.

Clay yanked his hand away from Benchley. “What kind of dimwit, knuckleheaded lodge are you from?”

 

Midge continued to stare at the glorious array of flowers.

Dorothy wasn’t sure if Midge had even heard her, so she repeated the question. “You and Ernie were high school sweethearts?”

“No,
we
weren’t.”

“So how did you meet Ernie?”

“Oh, I had a silly idea I wanted to go to college.”

“That’s not a silly idea. I wish I’d gone to college,” Dorothy said sharply. It was one of her biggest regrets, but she didn’t have the money. And it wasn’t easy for a girl to attend college, especially during the years of the Great War.

“You know how it is when you’re eighteen,” Midge sighed, taking no notice of Dorothy’s sharp reply. “You put on a dress and you think you’re a woman. You put on a tennis skirt and you think you’re a tennis pro. I put on a plaid wool skirt and I thought I should go to college.”

“You wanted to leave the small town and live life in the big city.”

“Exactly. But we’ve been here five years, and I haven’t been much of a student. I’ve taken a few classes, but I’m a long way from graduating. Perhaps I never will. Did you come from a provincial little town, too?”

“I certainly did, if you consider the Upper West Side a provincial little town, which I do.”

Midge smiled politely, but she didn’t get the joke or didn’t think it was funny. “So you’re a native New Yorker?”

Dorothy nodded. Actually, she was born while her family was on a seaside vacation in New Jersey. But this wasn’t the time to split hairs. She wanted to keep the focus on Midge—and Ernie. “So Ernie was your ticket to New York?”

“Yes. I felt I stood out in Elmira. I’m five foot eleven, so I thought I would blend in among the skyscrapers. Ernie said we could get married and go right away to New York. Of course, there were other boys back in Elmira.”

“Of course,” Dorothy said.
Such as Bertram Clay, perhaps?

Midge clasped her hands in her lap. “But Ernie was a talented artist, with a lot of big ideas. I could see he was really going somewhere. He offered to take me with him. He offered me a new last name. He offered a chance for me to change. So I took it.”

“And you regret it?”

Midge looked away. “Now I do.”

“I think I understand. I once married a man named Parker, a nice clean last name. Only good thing he ever gave me.”

“It didn’t work out?”

How could she explain that Eddie Parker had gone off to war just days after they were married, and then came home a couple of years later a changed man? And while he was off becoming shell-shocked, Dorothy had changed also. She was building a name for herself using his clean last name. When Eddie Parker finally did come home, he was a broken man. And Dorothy was a woman he didn’t recognize and, truthfully, no longer much cared for. His addiction to morphine didn’t help. Things went downhill from there.

But Dorothy couldn’t explain all this to Midge. She merely nodded. “No, it didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But look at us now!” Dorothy smiled and gently slapped Midge’s knee. “We’re both women who reinvented ourselves. Put on a new dress and you feel like a new woman. Put on a new name and you are one.”

Midge smiled wistfully. “My name was Klausner. Harriet Klausner.”

Dorothy kept her smile plastered on her lips.
Harriet Klausner?
Not a fitting name for such an elegant woman. “Well, now you’re Midge MacGuffin.” Dorothy looked around the nicely furnished room. How would Midge keep herself in such style without a job and without a husband? Dorothy foresaw her returning to Elmira. “You’ve made quite a transformation.”

Midge sat up straight. “But I haven’t! I had a new name, but I found out I was still the same old me. In Elmira I had felt outlandish, and I thought I had outlandish ideas. But it turned out I had nothing of the kind. I had no ideas in my head whatsoever. New York didn’t change me at all.”

“If that’s true, you’re the first person in New York history to be unchanged by it,” Dorothy said cynically. “So then what happened between you and Ernie?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Everything was fine. I loved him, in my own way. And he seemed happy with me, though he was very focused on his career. As time passed, I started to feel adrift. But we never once had a harsh word. Even until the end.”

“When he killed himself?” Dorothy spoke gently. “I guess that took you quite by surprise?”

Midge looked away, like a child caught doing something wrong. Was she thinking of the obvious affair with Bert Clay so soon after Ernie’s death?

Or, Dorothy began to wonder, was there something else?

R
udy was polishing up Bert Clay’s second shoe, and soon Clay would get up and leave. Clay was studiously ignoring Benchley.

Despite the cool October breeze, Benchley began to sweat. He racked his brain for engaging conversation. What do Masons talk about? Secret rituals? Initiations? Robes and rings with special symbols?

Then Benchley noticed Clay squinting up at a skyscraper under construction, a latticework of girders and beams.

Masons talk about buildings, of course!

Benchley cleared his throat. “Great new skyscraper, isn’t it?”

“You like it?” Clay smiled, full of pride. “It’s mine.”

“You got it. I’m the chief engineer on the project. Been working on it for three years.”

Benchley gazed up at the building with new interest. “Ah, yes, of course. Great girder work. Delightful I beams.”

“You think so?”

“I do indeed. I beam at your I beams.”

Clay guffawed as though he never heard anything so funny. “You’re all right, fella.”

He slapped Benchley on the back with such force that Benchley thought he dislodged several vertebrae.

 

Dorothy spoke with gentle care. “So you were as surprised as we were that Ernie committed suicide?”

Midge replied with equal caution, picking her words hesitantly. “Well, yes and no.”

Dorothy was sympathetic. “I know this is difficult to talk about. . . .”

Again Midge displayed that guilty look. “It certainly is.”

“Did Ernie give you any clue about what he was planning to do?”

“As a matter of fact, he did.”

“What did he say?”

Midge stared off into the middle distance. Again she picked her words carefully and deliberately. “He said that everyone would be so surprised when they heard that he’d jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. Everyone would think completely differently about him.” Midge turned to Dorothy. “I guess since you’ve come here to ask about him, to write an article about him, then it proves that he was right, doesn’t it? People are interested in him now.”

All of a sudden, Dorothy felt manipulated. Had MacGuffin orchestrated this whole thing? Had he given her the suicide note knowing full well she’d be the one sitting in his art deco armchair a few days later talking to his wife in order to write a feature magazine story about him?

Goddamn MacGuffin. Had that second-rate twerp really been so calculating?

 

Benchley realized he had opened Pandora’s box. Once Bert Clay started talking, he would not shut up.

“So they delivered ten barrels of three-inch rivets instead of five-inch rivets,” Clay blathered. “Of course, they wouldn’t take them back. And waiting would put us two weeks behind schedule. So I said, you deliver those five-inch rivets to the work site tomorrow or I’m going to shove every last one of these three-inch rivets right up your you-know-what.”

Benchley forced a chuckle. “You said that, did you?”

“Damn right, I did. And you know what?”

“No, what?” But Benchley knew exactly what.

“At sunup the next day, here comes the truck with ten barrels of five-inch rivets.” Clay took out a handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. “Now, it turned out that on the work order, I had specified three-inch rivets after all. But
they’re
the ones in the rivet business. No matter what we specified, they should have known we needed five-inchers, not three-inchers. How could they think we would build a seventy-story skyscraper with three-inch rivets? Ridiculous!”

Benchley shook his head sympathetically. “It certainly is. Well, you had the last word with them, didn’t you? Speaking of the last word—” He rose to leave.

“Hold on.” Clay grabbed Benchley’s arm, pulling him back into his seat. “I didn’t tell you the best part.”

“The best part? I hope you saved the best for last,” Benchley said truthfully. “Really I do.”

 

Dorothy was dumbfounded. “So Ernie told you beforehand he was going to commit suicide? Did you try to talk him out of it?”

“No,” Midge said simply.

“Well, I would have. . . .” Midge’s words tapered off.

“Yes?”

“It’s rather complicated.”

“You mean you didn’t believe Ernie would go through with it?”

“No, I believed him. He was dead set on it.”

“He was? So then you felt you couldn’t talk him out of it?”

“That’s right. His mind was made up.”

Dorothy was stunned. Who in his right mind could be so certain about suicide? She pictured MacGuffin whistling a merry tune as he strode purposefully to the Brooklyn Bridge, to his doom.

But, at the same time, this information gave Dorothy a bit of relief. She hadn’t quite realized until this moment how guilty she had felt about MacGuffin’s death. He had handed her his suicide note. He had picked
her
specifically. Until now, Dorothy had been thinking that if she had been more suspicious—if she had found and opened the letter earlier, despite Ernie’s directions not to do so—she would have been able to intervene, maybe even stop him.

But Midge’s account contradicted this. If his wife couldn’t talk him out of suicide, how could she?

Dorothy said, “He gave me his suicide note.”

“Yes, I know. Ernie told me you and he had a connection because you had once tried suicide.”

Dorothy couldn’t believe this woman. She spoke so bluntly, as though talking about the weather, not death. Was she still in shock? Dorothy decided to speak as straightforwardly as Midge.

“I must admit,” Dorothy said, “suicide did Ernie a hell of a lot more good than my attempt did for me.”

“What do you mean?” Midge asked, with a blank, curious look.

Dorothy explained about the auction, about how Ernie’s paintings could sell for a hundredfold of what Ernie was originally paid for them. “Ernie’s more successful now than he ever was,” she concluded.

“Oh yes,” Midge said, finally showing some enthusiasm. She was clearly gratified. “I’ve heard from Mr. Snath on several occasions. I’ll receive quite a pretty penny if the paintings sell as well as Mr. Snath expects.”

Of course, Dorothy thought. Midge would be Ernie’s primary beneficiary. So Midge—and Snath, through his hefty commissions—would be rolling in dough. Meanwhile, Ernie would get his long-awaited recognition. And even Mistress Viola, charging twenty-five dollars a head, was getting a piece of the action.

Dorothy spoke ruefully. “Ernie’s death seems to have worked out pretty well for nearly everyone.”

Midge smiled. “Yes, I suppose in a strange way it has, hasn’t it?”

Everyone except me and Benchley,
Dorothy thought, feeling the article deadline looming heavily over her head.

 

Benchley chuckled weakly. “And that’s the best part, is it?”

Bert Clay smiled smugly. “The icing on the cake is that we stuck it to those Polack bastards. They have a stranglehold on the rivet business.”

Benchley winced. He hated slurs. Time to wrap things up. “Well,” he said diplomatically, “you certainly seem to be a man of strong passions.”

“Hell yes. A man has to be passionate about life, doesn’t he? You have to love what you do. Otherwise, what’s the point? Why even bother to get up in the morning?”

“I asked myself that very question today,” Benchley sighed.

Clay looked up dreamily at the skyscraper. “A building is a work of art, you see. People just don’t understand that. Look at me. I call myself an engineer. But really I’m an artist.”

“I can see that. You certainly have the temperament.”

“Only my art is steel and concrete, not paint and paper,” Clay spat.

Benchley had had enough of Bert Clay. But unfortunately, he sensed that Clay had more to say about this subject, which could indeed be related to Ernie MacGuffin. So reluctantly, he goaded Clay on. “How right you are. Give me reinforced concrete any day. You can have your van Goghs and Gaugins. I’ll take granite and glass.”

“Now you’re talking,” Clay said, slapping Benchley jovially but roughly on the back.

“That makes two of us,” Benchley winced.

 

Midge sat with a dreamy smile, her head either completely empty or else filled with thoughts that her comfortable lifestyle not only would continue uninterrupted, but would significantly improve.