I Want to Go Home Page 5

If that was true, if the two men had been talking about Jane, something very funny was going on. He tried to remember more of what they had said; tried to dredge it up. There was something about a man named Smitty. Smitty had—what was it? “Pulled a trick?” That wasn’t quite—“done his stunt,” that was it. Smitty had done his stunt, as he was supposed to. The next thing was about her, about Jane, knowing this Joe.

  Who, then, was Smitty, and what was his stunt? Unless—He was driving back the way he had come. A couple of blocks ahead, on the other side of the street, there would be a broken-down taxicab. It would be interesting if the man driving the cab were named, say, Smith. It would make things very funny indeed, but he didn’t think he would laugh much. He doubted whether he would laugh at all. He thought he might even stop, if he could find a place to park, and go over and talk to the man who drove the taxicab. It would be in the next block, now.

  But it wasn’t in the next block. Maybe the one after—no, he had known where they were when he picked Jane up; known precisely, because he had calculated the distance quickly, and realized how fine they were cutting it. The cab ought to be parked on the other side of the street, perhaps with a man from the garage sprawling on its fender, peering into its motor. He had slowed as he looked across the street for the cab, and again the horn of another car was peevish behind him. “Get along,” the horn said. “Get going. You haven’t got all day.” The horn was not only peevish, it was profane.

  He got along. If the cab had had a driver named Smith, if Smith was called Smitty, if he had done a stunt of some sort—like pretending to break down?—there was nothing to be done about it now. It was merely very funny, and he was certainly not laughing. It occurred to him that he had seldom felt less like laughing, or more as if he ought to do something and do it very quickly, because it seemed, obscurely and uncertainly, that somebody was trying to do something to Jane, or at any rate, about Jane. And if anything like that was going on, he was going to be in on it as soon as he found out what it was.

  What I need, he thought, is a string to pull. A place to get started. He thought back over what he knew, what Jane Phillips had told him. It was funny about the hotel, he thought; funny that they would make that kind of mistake. It was—He interrupted himself. I’m thinking like a B picture, he told himself. Nobody’s plotting against Jane. The hotel made a mistake, and not even a particularly odd mistake. A taxicab broke down and the driver found out what was the matter and fixed it and went back to his hacking. A couple of men in a Chevrolet offered to help a lady in distress because she was waving at taxicabs where there were no taxicabs and they were going her way. I overheard a conversation subject to a hundred ordinary explanations and came up with a melodramatic one. Nobody’s plotting against anybody. I’ve been making too many movies.

  He nodded to himself, feeling comfortably reasonable. He would, he decided, go back to the studio. And he would send a telegram to Jane, timed to catch her Wednesday in Chicago, saying—but of course in other words—“I love you, Jane. I really meant what I said Sunday night; meant it more than either of us realized. So—take care of yourself.” What was the song? “Button up your overcoat”? Was that too long ago and far away for her to remember? Would it be enough if he merely telegraphed “Button up your overcoat”? Would those be the appropriate other words? The casual words, with a deeper meaning? Or did he, just now, want to go in for the casual words with deeper meanings? He drove along, thinking of the words he might use, and found he was at the hotel, although he had thought he would be at the studio. So, he thought, the subconscious hasn’t been listening.

  He parked and went in. Mr. Simpkins, at the desk, smiled at him and began to shake his head. The smile meant that Mr. Simpkins remembered the man who had come around so often for Mrs. Phillips; the shake of the head meant that Mr. Simpkins was sorry Mrs. Phillips had checked out. Mr. Simpkins said he was sorry.

  “I know,” Ray Forrest said. “Just saw her off.”

  “Good,” Mr. Simpkins said. “Caught her train all right, then?”

  “Just,” Ray told him.

  Mr. Simpkins smiled on, and waited.

  “Told me about the little mix-up here,” Ray said. “Got to worrying about the other person—whoever it was who did telephone, you know. Saying she wanted to stay on? Got afraid this other person would be inconvenienced, somehow? You know? Thrown out, maybe?” He smiled, sharing with Simpkins a gentle amusement at the vagaries of the female. “Got to feeling responsible, somehow. I told her I’d check up and drop her a line.”

  It sounded a little thin, he thought. But a good many people never listened carefully enough to anything to tell the thin from—well, presumably, from the thick. Simpkins might be one of those. Apparently he was, because now he smiled and nodded.

  “No harm done,” Simpkins told him. “No harm at all, tell her. In fact, there doesn’t seem to have been any other person. Mrs. Phillips was the only guest who’d said she planned to checkout today. So—you see?”

  “Odd,” Ray said, making it sound only amusingly odd. “Somebody playing a joke, you think? Funny kind of joke.”

  “Must have been,” Simpkins said. “Very,” he added, taking them in order. He continued to smile, but now with the expression of one who has finished a conversation. “No harm done,” he said again, with pleasant finality. Then he turned away and said, “What?” He was answering the girl at the switchboard. He went back and talked to her and returned to the desk.

  “Dora just wanted to remind me about the telephone call,” he told Ray. “Call for Mrs. Phillips from New York. Came through just after she left, unfortunately. I don’t suppose it was anything important.”

  Why don’t you? Ray wondered, and did not ask.

  “Find out who it was from?” he did ask. “I could wire her on the train. Give her a chance to answer the call.”

  Simpkins shook his head. They hadn’t gone that far.

  “Just Los Angeles Operator Forty-five,” Dora said, from the switchboard. “I said she’d checked out.”

  Ray nodded. He said, “Thanks.” He said he would write Mrs. Phillips that nobody had been inconvenienced by the mistake. He said he’d mention the telephone call. “Probably one of her family, wanting to know if she’d left,” he said. “She might want to call, on the chance.”

  He would have found it difficult to explain why he went past a public telephone booth in the hotel lobby, went on outside, and walked a block to a drugstore. He got change there, and went into a booth. He got Operator 45, Los Angeles; he said, “Was there a call for Mrs. Jane Phillips?” and named the hotel. He said he was taking the call for her, at her request. The operator said, “Just a moment, please, hold on,” and there was a pause, the open circuit wheezing gently. Then Operator 45 said, with great cheeriness, “I will try to get your party,” and he visited several cities, voices floating to him as the call strode across the continent. “Calling Somers, New York, Two-seven-one,” Operator 45 said. “Just a moment, please.” This last apparently was to Ray Forrest, leaning against the wall in the booth. He said, “Um.” He heard the regular sound of a telephone being rung; heard Operator 45, whose voice was getting very familiar, repeat the Somers number and say, “Ready with your Los Angeles call.”

  “What?” a male voice answered, faintly, far away.

  “You called Mrs. Jane Phillips in Los Angeles,” Operator 45 told him. “Ready with the call.”

  “This is Mrs. Meredith’s residence,” the male voice said, even more faintly. “What?” There was a scraping noise on the wire. An entirely new feminine voice said, wearily, “N.C.”

  “I’m through, New York,” Operator 45 said. “I’ve got a circuit. Hello? Somers Two-seven-one?”

  “What?” the male voice said. It seemed to have come closer.

  “You put in a person to person call to Mrs. Jane Phillips in Los Angeles,” Operator 45 said. “Ready with the call.”

  There was a tiny click, very far away. A new voice, lighter, more hurried, said,
“Ja—” and then was broken off, as if, thousands of miles away, a hand had been put over a mouth. There was another tiny click and the first male voice said, “Wait a minute.”

  “I’m trying to get your party,” Operator 45 told Ray Forrest. Ray said, “Um.” He was very interested.

  The first male voice came back from Somers.

  “There’s some mistake,” the voice said. “Nobody called Mrs. Phillips. Nobody from here.”

  “But—” operator 45 said.

  “There was no call from this number,” the male voice said, with finality. There was a new and louder click. And then there was an odd, wordless sound from Operator 45. It was a very human sound; it was clearly a substitute for an indignant “Well!”

  “Somers Two-seven-one will not accept the call,” Operator 45 told Ray, and the inflection still held indignation. “I am sorry.”

  “I heard,” Ray said. “O.K. Skip it.”

  He hung up. Of course, there was another slip-up somewhere. Mrs. Meredith was Jane’s great-aunt. She lived in a big house up in Westchester near Somers, apparently. There was a mistake, but it was not the one the male voice indicated. Probably whoever had called had gone out, after hearing that Jane had left the hotel. No one remaining knew about the call. But it was obviously not a mistake that someone from the Meredith house had telephoned across the continent to Jane Phillips. And somebody—it was difficult even to tell the sex from the hurrying voice, the half word—had said “Ja—” and had been cut off. It was funny. Again it was funny. He walked back to his car thinking that a good many funny things seemed to be happening about Jane Phillips. The call to the hotel had been funny, the cab’s motor trouble, the two men in the elderly Chevrolet and the conversation of one of them with somebody, the quick recovery of the taxicab. And now it was funny that the hotel had not merely got a name wrong, confusing one guest with another, and that nobody had gone to the trouble of telephoning across the continent from the Meredith house. Each one of these things was in itself a little funny. Taken together, the progression was still funnier. It was very funny indeed. Coincidence, Ray Forrest decided, staggered under the load.

  He sat in his car, not starting it, trying to decide what these things meant if they had meaning. There had been—unless, of course, the two men in the Chevrolet had had plans—no real effort to harm Jane. The things which had happened had merely served to delay her. They had almost made her miss her train. But, obviously, it was absurd that anyone would go to so much trouble merely to make a young woman miss a train. There were other trains. There were also airplanes. It didn’t add, he decided. But—if it didn’t add to that, what did it add to? He couldn’t think.

  He started the motor of the convertible. Well, whatever had been planned, if anything had been planned, had not worked. Jane was safely on the Chief, safe in a double bedroom on the through Santa Fe–New York Central car, safely rolling east. Nothing would happen now, he thought, and put the car in gear. He would go to the studio, arrange to leave Wednesday or Thursday, find Jane, laugh with her about his imaginings. Until then, he would shut the whole thing out of his mind.

  He shut it out. Instantly, it returned. It returned in a shape which, obscurely reflecting itself in his muscles, caused him to take his foot suddenly off the accelerator and, as suddenly, put it back on, hard. The car hesitated, coughed resentfully and jumped. What makes me so sure she’s safe? he thought. Who told me she was safe? Who can know?

  It was September 15, an odd-numbered day. It was El Capitan’s day, not the Super-Chief’s. That made it easier. The Super-Chief probably would be booked solid; El Capitan might not. It also meant sitting up. There was always, alternatively, a plane to Chicago. But he dismissed that before he reached the studio. Somehow, obscurely, the point was to follow along the same route Jane was taking, overhaul her in Chicago. He was not sure why he felt this way; it was merely the way he felt.

  He got a chair on El Capitan. Nobody tried to make him miss the train; nobody, except one or two people at the studio, seemed to care whether he went or not. Eight hours behind Jane, scheduled to overtake her in Chicago, Ray Forrest started his pursuit. He felt only a little silly about it; only a little as if he had been imagining things. He thought how fine it would feel when he knocked on her room door in the Chicago Station and said—whatever he would say. Something foolish, probably; something foolish and casual and meaningless, like “Hiya, pal?” It would be enough to be there, whatever he said.

  The Chief was beginning its trip across Arizona when, at 8 P.M., El Capitan started after it. Jane Phillips, facing forward at a table for two in the diner, said, “Oh, Washington, San Diego, Pearl, finally,” to the rather plump young man sitting across from her. He had a button with flaring wings on his lapel, a button you did not see very often—the inactive insigne of the United States Naval Reserve. Jane could not remember having seen another since she got out except once, incongruously, in the window of a pawnshop. There had been, she thought, a kind of conspiracy not to wear the insigne in preference to the more familiar honorable discharge button.

  The plump young man had been immediately behind her when a table for two became available. He had followed her in and, very politely, with the proper smiling hesitancy which she met with the proper smiling consent, taken the seat opposite her. With the soup, he had moved the salt and pepper nearer her; with the entree he had discovered, and his smile had recognized, that they had identical tastes. After the first bite, his raised eyes had conveyed the opinion that their taste had been good.

  Jane had been amused, pleasantly. It would have been simpler, of course, if he had said, simply, “Why don’t we get acquainted? Why don’t we talk?” But probably, if you were a man sitting opposite a young woman—well, a pretty young woman—you moved in with delicacy, even toward harmless remarks about the weather. She took pity; said she saw he had been in the Navy.

  “Sure enough,” he said, obviously gratified. “How—?” Then he reached up and touched the lapel button “This?” he said. “Not many people recognize it.”

  “Some of us do,” she said, and smiled, and he said, “Oh—hello, Navy.” It was easy after that; easy and casual and passing of the time. They finished dinner; they went back to the lounge car and he nodded hopefully toward two empty chairs. They went on talking, still lightly and casually, and sipped Scotch. She sipped very slowly and kept adding water and he suited his pace to hers. It was tactful and pleasant of him, Jane decided. He was a tactful and pleasant young man. He had a happy, open face, she thought; he was agreeable and without guile. He was a salesman, now, but his mind went back to the Navy.

  It was easy. Inevitably, he had been in Washington during the time she was there. It was true that he had been there only a day, and then at the Bureau of Personnel; it was true that, she sometimes thought, almost everybody in the Navy had been in Washington at least once. It was true that they had not come anywhere near meeting. But, intangibly, their paths had crossed, or almost crossed. The idea apparently delighted the young man, who was Roger Montrose, lieutenant, junior grade, (D), United States Naval Reserve (Inactive). It was a pleasant discovery, evidently, that they had held the same rank; it was almost as if they had known some of the same people. He brightened and beamed, and drank his drink very slowly, and managed to convey, she thought, an impression of bubbling innocence.

  Encouraged, she reminisced, remembering amusing things and dull things; agreeing about red tape, agreeing, too, about the normal ponderousness of the Naval shore establishment; remembering for his benefit, the slightly absurd size of the stockpile of unattached officers which had collected at Pearl during the late months of the war.

  He had been a long way from all that, he told her.

  “A DE in the Atlantic,” he said. He beamed. “Rugged, sometimes,” he said. “Rugged and cold as—very cold.”

  It had been, he told her without too much detail, exciting now and then. He told her, not too heavily, not at too great length, of one action against a
submarine pack. It was a rather famous action; even before the war ended, the Review Section of Navy Public Relations had let part of it out and she, far away in the Pacific, had read about it.

  “Oh,” she said, “you were in that! That was something.”

  He flushed a little, as if he had been caught boasting. He said that, so far as he was concerned, it hadn’t been much. The flyers had done most of it, he said. He said that was really rugged, flying.

  “Off a big carrier it must have been something,” he said, admiringly. “Off one of the little babies, like ours, it was—” He apparently could think of nothing adequate as description. He took, he said, a dim view of flying duty. Give him a ship everytime, he told her.

  It sobered her and he noticed it. He was tactful again; he sobered to match her mood. Somehow his attitude touched her.

  “My husband was a flyer,” she said. “Off a carrier. He—he cracked up. Quite early.”

  He shook his head. His face mirrored regret, but for a moment she forgot him, remembering back. For several minutes he said nothing. Then, as the train began to slow down, he spoke of that, casually, as if there had been no talk of Naval flyers. He looked at the watch on his wrist.

  “Ash Fork,” he said. “Right on the nose.” She looked at him. “We’re right on time,” he said. He fished a time-table out of his pocket and looked at it.

  “Say,” he said, “we lay over here until midnight. About an hour. I wonder—” He examined the time-table again. “Oh,” he said. “Connecting trains.”

  The Chief stopped. There were lights outside and people moving.

  “What d’you say?” he said. “Care to get off and stretch your legs a little? Give Ash Fork a looking over?”

  He half stood, expectant.

  “No use sitting here an hour,” he said, and he was boyishly hopeful.

  “Are you sure about the time?” she said. “If you are, I’d like to.” She smiled up at him. “I’d hate to miss the train,” she said. “I’m going home.”