The Underground Man (12 page)

“He’s lying down. He’s had a rough couple of days.”

“I’m sorry, but maybe you’d better get him up.”

“I don’t believe I should. Lester is no longer young, you know.”

She didn’t move. She was one of those dreaming blonds who couldn’t bear to face a change in her life. One of those waiting mothers who would sit forever beside the phone but didn’t know what to say when it finally rang.

“Your daughter’s at sea with a teen-age dropout, under suspicion of child-stealing and murder. And you don’t want to disturb her father.” I got up and opened the door of the sitting room: “If you won’t call your husband, I think I’d better.”

“
I
will, if you insist.”

As she passed me in the doorway I could feel the small chill presence that lived like a stunted child in her fine body. The same cold presence reflected itself in the room. The chandelier for all its blaze was like a cluster of frozen tears. The white marble mantel was tomblike. The flowers in the vases were plastic, unsmellable, giving off a dull sense of artificial life.

Lester Crandall came into the room as if he was the visitor, not I. He was a short heavy-bodied man with iron gray hair and sideburns which seemed to pincer his slightly crumpled face and hold it out for inspection. His smile was that of a man who wanted to be liked.

His handshake was firm, and I noticed that his hands were large and rather misshapen. They bore the old marks of heavy work: swollen knuckles, roughened skin. He had spent his life, I thought, working his way to the top of a
small hill which his daughter had abandoned in one jump.

He was wearing a figured red-silk bathrobe over undershirt and trousers, and his face was rosy-purplish, his hair damp from the shower. I told him I was sorry to disturb him.

He waved the thought away. “I’d be glad to get up at any hour of the night, believe me. I understand you have word of my little girl?”

I told him briefly what I knew. Under the pressure of my words his face seemed to be forced back on its bones. But he refused to admit the fear that was making his eyes water.

“There must be a reason for what she’s doing. Susan’s a sensible girl. I don’t believe she’s been taking drugs.”

“What you believe won’t change the facts,” I said.

“But you don’t know her. I spent most of the evening traipsing up and down the Sunset Strip. It gave me a real insight into what’s happening to the youth of today. But Susan isn’t like that at all. She’s very organized at all times.”

He sat down heavily in one of the conversation chairs, as if the little speech on top of the long evening had exhausted him. I sat in the other.

“We won’t argue,” I said. “One good lead is worth all the theories in the world.”

“You’re very right.”

“May I see Susan’s address book? I understand you have it.”

He looked up at his wife, who was hovering near him. “Would you get it for me, Mother? It’s on the desk in the library.”

After she left the room, I said to Crandall: “When something like this happens in a family, there’s nearly always some advance warning. Has Susan been in any kind of trouble lately?”

“None at all. Never in her life, if you want the truth.”

“Any drinking?”

“She doesn’t even like it. I give her a taste of my drink now and then, but she always makes a face.”

He made one himself. It stayed imprinted in his flesh as an expression of dismay. I wondered what he was remembering or trying to forget.

“What does she do for fun?”

“We’re a very close family,” he said. “The three of us spend a lot of time together. I own some motels up and down the coast, and the three of us go on a lot of little trips combining business and pleasure. And of course Susan has her activity program—tennis and diving lessons and French conversation.”

He was like a man with his eyes closed trying to put his hands on a girl that wasn’t there. I began to think I had a glimmering of the problem. It was often the same problem—an unreality so bland and smothering that the children tore loose and impaled themselves on the spikes of any reality that offered. Or made their own unreality with drugs.

“Does she spend much time on the Strip?”

“No sir, she never goes there—not to my knowledge.”

“Why did you?”

“A policeman suggested it to me. He said it’s a port of missing girls and he thought I might see her there.”

“What kind of boys does she run with?”

“She doesn’t have too much to do with boys. She’s gone to some supervised parties, of course, and we’ve sent her to dancing school for years—ballroom as well as ballet. But as for boys, frankly I’ve discouraged it, the state of the modern world being what it is. Most of her friends and acquaintances are girls.”

“What about Jerry Kilpatrick? I understand he visited your daughter.”

Crandall flushed. “Yes. He came here back in June. He and Sue seemed to have a lot to talk about, but they shut up when I came into the room. I didn’t like that.”

“Didn’t you have an argument with him?”

He gave me a quick narrow look. “Who told you that?”

“Your wife did.”

“Women always talk too much,” he said. “Yes, we had an argument. I tried to straighten the boy out on his philosophy of life. I asked him in a friendly way what he planned to do with himself, and he said all he wanted was just to get by. I didn’t think that was a satisfactory answer, and I asked him what would happen to the country if everybody took that attitude. He said it had already happened to the country. I don’t know what he meant by that, but I didn’t like his tone. I told him if that was his philosophy of life he could leave my home and not bother coming back. The little twerp said he’d be glad to. And he left and never did come back. Which was good riddance of bad rubbish.”

Crandall’s face was dusky red. A pulse at the side of his forehead throbbed. My sore head throbbed in sympathy.

“Mrs. Crandall thought at the time I’d made a mistake,” he said. “You know how women are. If a girl isn’t married or at least engaged by age eighteen, they think she’s bound to be an old maid.” Crandall lifted his head as if he’d picked up a signal that was inaudible to me. “I wonder what Mother’s doing in the library.”

He got up and opened the door of the room, and I followed him down the hall. His body moved heavily and dolefully, as if it was weighted down by a kind of despair which hadn’t yet reached his consciousness.

The sound of a woman crying came through the library door. Mrs. Crandall was standing up and sobbing against a wall of empty shelves. Crandall went to her and tried to quiet her shaking back with his hands.

“Don’t cry, Mother. We’ll get her back.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Susan will never come back here. We had no right to bring her here in the first place.”

“What do you mean?”

“We don’t belong in this place. Everybody knows it except you.”

“That’s not true, Mother. I’ve got a higher net worth than anybody on this block. I could buy and sell most of them.”

“What good is net worth? We’re like fish out of water. I’ve got no friends on this street—and neither has Susan.”

His large hands grasped her shoulders and forced her to turn and face him. “That’s just your imagination, Mother. I always get a friendly smile and nod when I drive past. They know who I am. They know I’ve got what it takes.”

“Maybe you have. It doesn’t help Susan—or me.”

“Help you do what?”

“Just live,” she said. “I’ve been trying to pretend that everything is okay. But now we know it isn’t.”

“It will be. I guarantee it. Everything will be hunky-dory again.”

“It never was.”

“That’s nonsense, and you know it.”

She shook her head. He reached up and stopped her movement of denial with his hands, as if it was merely a physical accident. He pushed the hair back from her forehead, which looked clear and untroubled in contrast with her tear-streaked face.

She leaned on him, letting him hold her up. Her face on his shoulder was inert, and unaware of me, like that of a woman who had drowned in her own life.

Walking in a kind of lockstep, they went out into the hallway and left me alone in the room. I noticed a small red-leather
book lying open on a corner table, and I sat down to look at it. The word “Addresses” was stamped in gold on the cover, and inside on the flyleaf the girl had written her name in an unformed hand: “Susan Crandall.”

There were three other girls’ names in the book, and one boy’s name, Jerry Kilpatrick. I realized what Susan’s mother had been crying about. The family had been a lonely trio, living like actors on a Hollywood set, and now there were only two of them to sustain the dream.

Mrs. Crandall came into the room and startled me out of my thoughts. She had combed her hair and washed her face and made it up quickly and expertly.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Archer, I didn’t mean to break down.”

“Nobody ever does. But sometimes it’s a good idea.”

“Not for me. And not for Lester. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he’s an emotional man, and he loves Susan.”

She came over to the table. Her grief still clung to her body like a perfume. She was one of those women whose feminine quality persisted through any kind of emotional weather.

“You hurt your head,” she said.

“Jerry Kilpatrick did.”

“I admit I made a mistake about him.”

“So did I, Mrs. Crandall. What are we going to do about Susan?”

“I don’t know what to do.” She stood above me sighing, leafing over the empty pages of the address book. “I’ve talked to the girls she knows, including the ones in here. None of them were really friends. All they ever did together was go to school or play tennis.”

“That wasn’t much of a life for an eighteen-year-old girl.”

“I know that. I’ve tried to promote things for her, but nothing worked. She was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“I don’t know, but it’s real. I’ve been fearful all along that she’d go on the run. And now she has.”

I asked Mrs. Crandall to show me the girl’s room, if she didn’t mind.

“I don’t mind. But don’t mention it to Lester. He wouldn’t like it.”

She took me to a large room with a sliding glass door which opened onto a patio. In spite of its size, the room seemed crowded. The bedroom furniture, ivory with gold trim, was matched by stereo and television sets and a girl’s work desk with a white telephone. The place suggested a pampered prisoner expected to live out her life in a single room.

The walls were hung with mass-produced psychedelic posters and pictures of young male singing groups which only seemed to emphasize the silence. There were no pictures or other traces of any actual people the girl might have known.

“As you can see,” her mother said, “we gave her everything. But it wasn’t what she wanted.”

She opened the wardrobe closet for my inspection. It was stuffed with coats and dresses like a small army of girls crushed flat for storage and smelling of. sachet. The chest of drawers was full of sweaters and other garments, like shed or unused skins. The single drawer of the dressing table was jammed with cosmetics.

There was a telephone directory lying open on the white desk. I sat on the cushioned chair in front of it and switched on the fluorescent desk lamp. The directory was open to the motel section of the yellow pages, and at the bottom of the righthand page was a small advertisement for the Star Motel.

I didn’t think that this could be a coincidence, and I
pointed it out to Mrs. Crandall. It suggested nothing to her. Neither did my description of Al.

I asked her to give me a recent photograph of Susan. She took me into another room, which she called her sewing room, and produced a pocket-sized high school graduation picture. The clear-eyed blond girl in it looked as if she would never lose her purity or youth or grow old or die.

“That’s the way I used to look,” her mother said.

“There’s still a strong resemblance.”

“You should have seen me when I was in high school.”

She wasn’t boasting, exactly. But a little earthiness was asserting itself behind her careful manner. I said:

“I wish I had. Where did you go to high school?”

“Santa Teresa.”

“Is that why Susan went up there?”

“I doubt it.”

“Do you have relatives in Santa Teresa?”

“Not any more.” She changed the subject. “If you get any word of Susan, will you let us know right away?”

I promised, and she handed me the picture as if to seal the bargain. I put it in my pocket along with the green-covered book, and left the house. The shadows of the palms lay like splash-marks of dark liquid on the pavement and across the roof of my car.

The Star Motel stood with its rear end on pilings in a narrow crowded place between the highway and the sea. The lights of the all-night service station beside it shone on its yellow stucco walls and on the weathered “Vacancy” sign which hung on the office door.

I went in and tapped the hand bell on the counter. A man came plodding out of the back room and peered at me through his creased and sleepy face.

“Single or double?”

I told him I was looking for a man, and I started to give him a description of Al. He cut me short with a shake of his frowzy head. An anger that floated like a pollution near the surface of his life came up in his throat and almost choked him.

“You got no right to wake me up for that. This is a business establishment.”

I laid two dollar bills on the counter. He sucked his anger back into his body and picked up the money.

“Many thanks. Your friend and his wife are in room seven.”

I showed him Susan’s picture. “Has she been here?”

“Maybe she has.”

“You’ve seen her or you haven’t.”

“What’s the rap?”

“No rap. She’s just a floating girl.”

“Are you her father?”

“Just a friend,” I said. “Has she been here?”

“I think she was, a couple of days ago. I haven’t seen her since. Anyway,” he said with a slanted grin, “you got your two dollars’ worth.”

I left him and moved along the railed gallery. A high tide was slapping disconsolately at the pilings. The reflection of the neon from the service station floated on the water like iridescent waste.