changed clothes without any memory of returning home or performing these tasks. His watch said it was eight o'clock. He felt rested, sober, clearheaded. But how had he gotten home?
He had pushed through the front doors of the Chancel Building with two appointments in mind, one still to be made, the other already fixed. At some time before he left the building today, he had to see his father to talk about Hugo Driver's manuscripts and doing a definitive edition of the novel, and this evening he was going back to the Hellfire Club. He was ready for both encounters. His father would welcome an idea sure to bring more prestige to the firm, and to his meeting with Paddi he could bring the good news from his father. If Alden Chancel had taken charge of the manuscript of
His ordinary duties devoured the morning until eleven, when he had to go to a meeting. After the meeting, he went up two floors to his father's office, where the secretary told him that Alden had left for lunch and would not be free until three-thirty.
At three twenty-five, Davey went back to see his father.
At first impatient, Alden grew interested in the project Davey described. Yes, it might be possible to publish such an edition as a paperback intended for classroom use. Yes, let's think about using the cover of the GI edition, we got a lot of mileage out of that. As for the manuscript, hadn't that gone back to Driver?
Davey said that an assistant in the art department, the person who had come to him with the idea, had already told him that Driver's son thought it was still with Chancel House. When he named the assistant, his father said, Paddi Mann, interesting, the meeting I just came from was about an idea of hers, using two different covers on the new paperback of
For the next two hours, Davey searched the wrapped manuscripts on the conference room shelves and looked in broom closets and the windowless cubicles where copy editors toiled. He stopped only when he noticed that it was twenty minutes before he was to meet Paddi.
A low conversational buzz came from the bar, and Davey glanced through the arched opening as automatically as he had read the admonitions on the inner door. For a moment he thought he saw Dick Dart, but the man vanished behind the crowd. Dick Dart? Should he be in the Hellfire Club? Was
The voice of the concierge forced him to turn away iron the bar. 'May I assist you, sir?'
Davey placed himself in the chair beside the fern, the concierge opened the drawer, removed the heavy microphone, positioned it; with excruciating exactness, and uttered his sentence. Paddi came through the mahogany door. She had her Hellfire Club look, even though she seemed to be wearing exactly what she had worn to work. They ordered the same drinks from the same waiter. Davey described his searches, and Paddi told him it was important, crucial, to find the manuscript. Wasn't there a record somewhere of everything that came in and went out?
'Yes,' Davey said, 'but it didn't start until a month or two after the founding of the house. Before that, things were less formal.'
'We'll think of something,' Paddi said. Think - what did you forget?'
'The storage area in the basement,' Davey said. 'I don't think anybody knows what's down there. My grandfather never threw anything out.'
'Okay. What would you like to do tonight?'
'There were some new movies, how about a movie?'
'Or we could go upstairs. Would you like that?'
'Yes,' he said. I would.'
After they dressed and left the room, their arms around each other's waists, Davey felt that his life had undergone a fundamental change. His days and nights had been reversed, and his daytime self, which did boring things at Chancel House, was merely the dream of the more adventurous night-self, which bloomed under the ministrations of Paddi Mann.
They unclasped at the staircase, too narrow to permit them to walk down side by side. Paddi went before him, and he placed his hands on her shoulders. His shirt rode up on his wrist, uncovering his square gold watch. It was a few minutes past six. He wondered what they would do when they reached the street - it was scarcely believable that an outer world existed.
Davey followed her down the last of the stairs, past the empty desk, and outside into a world far too bright. Noises clashed and jangled in the air. Taxis the color of brushfire charged along Second Avenue. A drunken teenage boy in jeans and a denim shirt three times his size lolled against a parking meter; poisonous fumes of sweat, beer, and cigarette smoke came boiling through his skin and floated into Davey's nostrils.
'Davey-'
'Yes?'
'Keep looking for that manuscript. Maybe it's in the Westerholm house.'
A bus the size of an airplane whooshed up to the curb, displacing thousands of cubic feet of air and pulverizing a layer of rubble. Davey clapped his hands over his ears, and Paddi waved and glided away.
Alden must have looked into the unused office and seen him leafing through a stack of forgotten manuscripts, some so old they were carbons, because when Davey looked over his shoulder his father loomed behind him. Where the hell had he been the last two nights? His mother had been trying to get him out to Connecticut for the weekend, but the kid never answered his phone. What happened, had he found a new girlfriend or was he turning into a barfly?
Davey said he had been feeling antisocial. It had never occurred to him that it might be his parents who were calling. After all, he saw his father every day.
He was expected at the Poplars for the weekend, beginning Friday night. Alden turned and marched out of the little office, which had the dreariness of all empty spaces meant to be occupied by busy and productive people.
Paddi's trophy did not appear among the papers in the empty office. Davey took the elevator to the basement.
At two twenty-five, he emerged from the storage enclosure with blackened hands and smears of dust on his suit and his face. He had found boxes of letters from deceased authors to deceased editors, group photos of unknown men in square double-breasted suits and Adolphe Menjou mustaches, a meerschaum pipe, a badly tarnished silver cocktail shaker with a silver swizzle stick, but he had not found his trophy.
Two hours before he was to meet Paddi at an address she had printed on a slip of; paper now in his jacket pocket, he returned to the basement and again attacked the boxes. He unearthed a carton of Artie Shaw seventy- eights and a deerstalker hat once likely paired with the meerschaum. In a jumble of old catalogs he came across copies of his mother's two early novels, which he set aside. A fabric envelope tied with a ribbon yielded a copy of the photograph he had described to Paddi, and this, too, he set aside.
An element of disaster, however muted, was built into all of Davey's weekends at his parents' house. Daisy might appear for dinner too drunk to sit upright, or a lesser degree of intoxication might bring on a bout of weeping before the end of the soup course. Accusations, some so veiled Davey could not understand exactly who was being accused of what, might fly across the table. Even the uneventful weekends were tainted with the air of oppression, of mysterious but essential things left unsaid. This weekend, however, was an outright calamity.
The Italian girl's nephew, Jeffrey, had recently joined the Poplars household. At this point, his presence seemed an unnecessary affectation on Alden's; part. Until Davey arrived in Westerholm on Friday evening, he had expected a younger male version of Maria, a cheerful, smiling person with the stout physique of a tenor hurrying forward to snatch away his weekend bag. But once Davey and Alden came in through the front door, Jeffrey was revealed to be a tall, middle-aged man in a perfectly fitted gray suit who showed no signs of hurrying forward, snatching bags, or doing anything but nodding at them and continuing to pass through the rear of the hall, presumably on his way to the kitchen. His face seemed to suggest a quantity of thoughts and judgments held in check, and his eyes were hooded. Davey thought he must have been some foreign publisher his father had enticed into his web. Then Alden had introduced them, and the two had exchanged a look, Davey imagined, of mutual
