I suppose it was better to learn early on that insanity ran in Gail’s family. For there wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that Martha Prentice had just stabbed me intentionally, with premeditation and malice aforethought.

Chapter 19

19

The Recurring Dream

Russ wouldn’t consider letting me take a trolley or taxi home. He drove me back to the Claremont, Gail riding silently in the back.

I should have been the one at the wheel, with Gail at my side as we breezily made a joke out of her mother’s attack on me. Instead, I sat in Hewett’s Studebaker like an overgrown collegiate being escorted back to my dorm by my date’s father.

When we arrived at the hotel, I got out of the car and opened the rear door so that Gail could move to the front seat. Russ was taking her back to her place alongside the Berkeley campus. She told me she was “booked” all the next day, playing a morning concert at the Campanile, then traveling to Emeryville to coach Adeline Head’s replacement. We agreed to start work in earnest on Friday. With Russ sitting there, his car’s motor idling, any thought I might have had about giving Gail a good-night kiss was laughed right out of the town where my good judgment was rumored to live.

At the end of the band’s stint that evening, I went to my hotel room, where I took a washcloth and soaked it with the contents of a half-pint bottle of emergency rye I keep in my suitcase. I howled as I held it against my flesh wound and lay down on the bed, waiting for the throb to grow dull and eventually subside.

The New York Chemical Bank was crowded with shoppers like me who had thought that fifty dollars would more than amply pay for the Christmas presents on their list. Yet Nancy, Linney, and I found ourselves standing on a line at the bank, because we had not included in our calculations that while Nancy took Linney to Santaland at R. H. Macy’s, I would go and purchase most of the dolls that had been manufactured since the previous Christmas.

I was greeted by the bank’s junior manager, a man named Felton who was a jazz aficionado and who knew me by name.

He asked what brought us to the bank. I told him we were withdrawing some money, which he seemed to take personally.

Nancy said, “Mr. Felton, each week, I deposit one dollar in our Christmas Club here, and you stamp a page in our booklet. And each year, at the end of fifty weeks, we turn in our books and you very kindly give us fifty dollars.”

Felton nodded amicable agreement.

Nancy continued, “So, may I ask . . . why are we doing this?”

Felton said, “Why, for the convenience.”

I whirl on Nancy. “Where’s Linney?”