Free Escape the Night by Richard North Patterson Page B

he asked to pay that each drink advanced her “Zionist plot” to become editor-in-chief. He delighted in her outrage and outrageousness. She fumed about “those racist pricks in Little Rock” and the withdrawal from Suez; demanded that he tithe ten dollars a month to orphans in Korea—“Christ,” she blurted, “put your wife to work if you can’t afford it,” then clapped both hands over her mouth until she saw his laughter; raged at publishers in general—“inbred morons too stupid to work for banks”—and Phillip Carey in particular. “I’d rather ball Franco,” she bristled one evening after a deliberate pass by Phillip. “ He’s the one having us followed—why else would he do that? He doesn’t like women, I can smell it.” After that, with the spooky prescience of the wounded, she dubbed him “Phillip Krafft-Ebing” and speculated on his private life. “I’ve got it,” she told Charles over dinner at Sevilla. “At night he visits a hooker in the Bowery and then goes home, smears himself in his own shit, jumps into an ice-cold shower and slaps his hands with a rubber hose, screaming, ‘Bad! bad!’” She grinned, pleased with herself. “What do you think?”
    â€œIt’s just delightful. Care for dessert?”
    â€œNo, really.”
    He toyed with his fork. “I guess I know enough to feel sorry for him, though I manage to forget that.”
    â€œBut he came on with me to hurt you, Charles.”
    â€œThen you hurt him worse than you’ll ever know.” He smiled. “Forget him, Ruthie—he’ll not do that again. I expect it’s HUAC still following me, hoping I’ll bump into Khrushchev or Bulganin, and distressed that you’re a woman. Besides,” he added casually, “I love you.”
    Her eyes glistened. He looked at her across the table. Her hand touched his arm, then pulled back, as if from a flame. Softly and seriously, he said, “I really do.”
    Her mouth quivered. “And Peter.”
    He looked away. In a monotone, he said, “And Peter, too.”
    They rarely talked about his son. But the fact of Peter was like a compass, defining the boundaries of speech and possibility. “She’ll do nothing as long as no one rubs her face in us,” Charles once remarked of Allie; it was understood that fear of Allie’s taking Peter from him imposed limits on his movements. Sometimes, with remembered youth, Charles would race his Jaguar through the rolling Connecticut countryside as she gasped her reluctant fear and admiration, at other times they ventured uptown—to see Olivier in The Entertainer , or Nichols and May at Down in the Depths; as months passed, and Peter or his work on Charles Carey books would keep him home at night, he missed her with more intensity. But he never stayed the night. They never talked of marriage. She never called his home.
    And then, late one spring evening, when Charles was slaving over a manuscript and Allie had left for their summer home in Maine, his telephone rang. “I want to see you,” Ruth said. “Please, for a minute.”
    Her voice jarred him from thought. “What time is it?”
    â€œPast ten. Keep working—I’ll come there.” She paused. “If it’s okay?”
    He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. Peter had been in bed since seven: Wind in the Willows was heavy going for a four-year-old, he had nearly dropped off before Charles finished. The cook and maid had long since retired.
    He had not seen Ruth for ten days.
    â€œCharles?”
    â€œAll right—yes. I’ll leave the front door open.”
    She found him in the library. He was stretched out on the couch, wearing a tennis shirt, chinos and moccasins, blue-penciled manuscript pages scattered all around him. The light from the overhead chandelier made the circles beneath his eyes