Triumph Read online

  "Goody! Then the very first time Kit and I fight-after we're married, I mean--I'll come down and see you!"

  "Do that! You'd really be an ornament--in a military jail!"

  She responded forlornly, "Oh, Ben!"

  Then the trees under which they'd climbed opened up. Ahead he saw a stone gateway. On its summit stood an exact replica of the "tiger" god found deep inside the largest pyramid at Chichen Itza--complete, even, to glowing green eyes of Chinese jade that somehow the Toltecs had imported centuries before the Spaniards had crossed the Atlantic to smash their idols and steal their treasure in the Holy Name of a different deity.

  This great cat--a panther, Ben thought-[was beautifully modeled in what would be accepted as a most "modernistic" style.

  Beyond the gate lay a sort of plaza-as big as the game courts of Uxmal or Chichen Itza, Ben thought--surrounded by the temple-like edifices of stone, timber, and glass which were living rooms, dining chambers, and guest quarters, connected by closed passageways and looking out, on all four exterior faces, across a moat swimming pool where cool-looking water shimmered in sun or drowsed in shade. The car stopped on bluestone beside a building where half a dozen other cars glittered in the shade, and there was room for many more.

  From a door came a slender, white-uniformed Negro of middle age. "This," Faith said, "is Paulus, Dr. Bernman. Paulus Davey, our butler. Lord! It's hot!"

  To Ben's great surprise, the butler held out a confident hand. Instantly, Ben took it, aware that Faith had watched to see what he would do. Paulus Davey said, "Pleased to meet you, Doctor," and picked up the luggage.

  Faith had already started for a near door. She turned. "Wear shorts, if you like. A bathing suit'd be even better! Swim down to the terrace. Mama'll be in the front room--"

  she pointed--"and I'll meet you in a mo'."

  Ben studied the man at his side and said, "She has no imagination." Paulus Davey protested. "Miss Farr? She has too much, if you take some of her friends' attitudes."

  "None at all," Ben argued calmly. "Otherwise she'd never have suggested shorts for me. If the girl had imagination, she'd even have realized I brought no such garment!

  Shorts, indeed!"

  The butler laughed with a deep sound and in agreeable amusement. Then, quickly, he moved toward a different door. Ben followed. It was cool, mercifully so: air-conditioned--even the passageways. They went up a short flight of steps, along a flagged corridor, and were about to descend a longer flight when Paulus Davey halted, set down his burden, whipped open a door, and called, "Glyph! Get out of there!"

  Looking over his shoulder, Ben saw a large collie stop its bemused swim in the moat and turn, reluctantly, to the stone edge only inches above the water surface. The dog heaved itself out and shook, filling the air with brilliance and marking the stones with falling spray. Davey went on. Ben repeated, "Cliff?"

  "Glyph," the butler replied, and spelled it. "He has a funny patch of white on his chest--"

  "I noticed."

  "--that Mrs. Farr says is exactly like a Mayan glyph."

  "Oh."

  "Here we are."

  Ben had been ready for anything in the matter of guest accommodations at Uxmal: an Egyptian room, say, or something with a roof of corbeled arches, all stone, with feather decorations that might even have actually once been the cloak of some cruel, gaudy Aztec. Instead, he was led into a suite--living room, writing alcove, library alcove, bedroom, and bath. It made him think of the "best" suites in the newest motels. The prevailing color scheme was yellow and brown; but blue-green ornaments, bath towels and mats, curtains and small rugs cooled that rather too-warm combination.

  It was the sort of place that, save for variation in color scheme (and a book-lined anteroom), one could enjoy everywhere in America--at a price. Living quarters in which you knew exactly where to find the phone, extract ice cubes, tum on lights, press the switch that would cause a panel to slide back and expose the fifty-inch screen of a color television set, and where you'd know how to operate the light-dimmer and the electric blanket--not needed, now.

  Paulus Davey adjusted an air-conditioning control after glancing at a thermometer. He had put the briefcase and the shiny, magnesium suitcase on two luggage racks at the feet of twin beds. After Ben had thanked him and said he needed nothing more, the butler departed.

  Ben walked to the exterior wall and pulled cords which drew back yellow traverse curtains lined in brown. He had expected a vista but not so grand a one.

  From his position in the center of a glass wall he could see far, far away a black-brown opacity where the air was smoky, and, vaguely, in that, verticles which were the faint, sun-illumined edges of Manhattan skyscrapers. In front of the floor-to-ceiling, crystal-clear plate-glass wall was a table which, he thought, had been placed there to prevent people from bumping into the invisible surface. Looking down at it, however, he saw a map under glass on the table top, a map marked with ruled lines pointing from Sachem's Watch to the old Empire State Building, the new Pan-American Building, Bridgeport, and other objects and places.

  Distances were marked on the lines:

  Forty-three and seven-tenths miles to the Empire State, a mere shimmer in the heated smog now; forty-two and three-tenths miles to the Pan-Am tower; a bit less than forty to the bluish haze that in clear weather would be Long Island Sound.

  His eyes lifted and moved among the steeples and trees and flashing clapboard walls of Fenwich Village. Five and three-tenths miles to--apparently--the steeple of the Congregational Church. In that drooping, dusty greenery he caught sight of a frothy rainbow where the Lute River splashed down a short falls. Nearer still was the titanic tailing, the down-slide of boulders new-blasted from the cliff on Sachem's Watch.

  What were they mining? Mining, because this was not evidence of quarrying.

  This colossal slide of limestone had not been taken from the hill for itself: the rock lay unused and there was no sign of machinery to cut, trim, or otherwise work the vast stones. Still, perhaps he was wrong. For he noticed a railroad spur that went, evidently, to the foot of the cliff. The rails shone in the sun, blue and recently-used. He gave up.

  Probably they hauled off the stuff, after dynamiting it again into manageable size.

  His thoughts turned to Faith.

  Her stunning question echoed in his mind. He wondered how long it would go on echoing there. And he could not quite explain it. Faith was impulsive, but not mean. She enjoyed jokes, but it hadn't been said in jest, exactly. She was curious, yet not idly and inconsiderately curious. So, why?

  He began to unpack. Then to change into slacks, a sports shirt, and loafers. He thought of the Priscilla-John-Alden-Miles-Standish classic: Speak for yourself, John.

  He grinned, and without realizing it, said aloud, "Pfui!"

  CHAPTER 2

  When he entered the Farr living room he heard Faith's mother but, at first, could not see her. She was talking on the phone. A fountain was busy making muted cascade noises somewhere, too. And music was issuing from an unseen loudspeaker.

  "Too bad, Vance!" Valerie said. "Of course, I understand. You'll be late. And bring Mr. Lee with you. What's that?"

  Mrs. Farr's voice was a good deal like her daughter's: deep and deft and broad-A-ed. But she talked more rapidly and she now slurred an occasional word slightly.

  It was, Ben reflected, after five. And the sun went over the yardarm, for Mrs.

  Valerie Farr, about four, he knew. All day long the tall, dark woman who didn't look her fifty years and did look attractive would be integrated, busy, sober. But by six o'clock she would be a bit squiffy. By eleven or twelve, every night, plain drunk. Faith's mother was an alcoholic, a fact he'd learned in the days when Faith had been mending in the hospital on Long Island, not far from Brookhaven National Laboratories or from the spot where he'd found the young woman under the snow.

  He knew Mrs. Farr that well, and her husband, too, for they had liked him, he was certain, from the first. But he had not
presumed. After Faith had been discharged--

  limping, still, for a while, but healed--Ben had seen her several times in New York City.

  He'd had a lunch or two with Vance. However, this invitation to the Connecticut place was Ben's first, of its sort, and the first time he'd seen any member of the family since late May. Still, he knew about Valerie Farr . . . and her drinking.

  She now repeated, "What's that?" And paused. Then she said, lightly, amiably,

  "All right, dear. We'll expect Miss Lee for dinner. And I'll have a guest room ready for her, and one for her father, whenever you both come in." She added, not quite sincerely,

  "Have fun, you and your Mr. Lee!" And hung up.

  Ben had located her by then.

  The living room in Uxmal had a deeply-recessed "well" in one end, an oval pit of the sort that had grown increasingly popular in the past dozen years among those who built new houses and could afford such, to Ben, incomprehensible innovations. Black, gray, robin's-egg-blue and gold, this long room had magnificent glass walls now half-shaded by an outside awning. Like the window in his suite, it faced south. Valerie Farr was sitting on a banquette that ran around the depressed part of the room, with a plug-in telephone in one hand and a drink in the other, a greenish-yellow potion in an old-fashioned glass.

  After replacing the phone she fini6hed the drink; ice tinkled, jewels on her fingers flashed, and a ray of sun leaked through an awning aperture. It set the red in her nearly-black, wavy hair gleaming with a beauty that, Ben thought, was probably natural, though carefully nurtured.

  She saw him. "Ben, darling! Join me!"

  He approached on a carpet so deep it almost seemed to require a balancing effort. She added, "Mind the stairs! Five of them. down to here! If you trip--and people have done it-

  -you can land in the goldfish poo!."

  He laughed, lightly came down the steps, took her hand. "You look marvelous, Valerie!"

  She surveyed him, holding his hand, standing--tall, graceful, and glad to see him, plainly. More glad, he thought, than usual. And perceived the obvious reason: Faith was engaged to Barlow so he was no longer a potential peril. He noticed that her dark eyes had a too-wet glitter not from tears but owing to her sad affliction. Her addiction. He wondered how many hundreds of thousands of women like this one "had everything" and also had the same disease. Women similarly shielded in their illness by friends and family and by their own refusal to acknowledge that they were alcoholics.

  "You look, Ben," she finally said, "as pale as an oyster; and you seem to get more round-shouldered every month. You need to get outdoors more, take some exercise!

  Meantime, how about a slalom?"

  "Slalom?"

  Valerie lifted her glass and rattled the ice. "A little drinkee I concocted, and named. 'Slaloms' are those tricky zigzags in skiing that make so many people fall down!"

  She laughed, a bit too heartily.

  Ben shook his head. "Not cocktail time for your round-shouldered, pallid, physicist friend. But, iced coffee?"

  Valerie nodded, pressed a button, spoke into something invisible from his angle, and ordered another slalom with his iced coffee.

  Afterward she chattered. "Vance just phoned. He's still in New York, at the office.

  He had expected to come out for dinner but he has a meeting." She paused. "Meeting,"

  she repeated, rather dully. "With his Far East manager, he says. Who was to be out here also. And has a daughter. Charming, Vance says. The girl was in Maine but she's driving down and expects to reach here any minute. I haven't met these Lee people." She waited while Paulus Davey brought the two beverages and until she could take a few slow, multiple swallows of her slalom. Her ensuing, "Thank you, Paulus!" was a trifle too stiff and at the same time too vigorous. The Negro bowed--sadly, Ben felt--and left.

  Valerie mused, "I wonder if they're related to the Robert E. Lee family. I know half a dozen people who are."

  He sipped his sugared and creamed cool coffee and reflected that he had never before considered the probability of living relatives of the Civil War general, either direct descendants or collateral. No doubt there were many, and no doubt the Farr's knew those who were illustrious, wealthy, or social--or all three. He also reflected that, as a Bernman, he was related to sundry other Bernmans, to Koviskis, a Cohen, certain Steins, and one Walters family that had once been Wildenbeiter.

  Faith appeared, then, in a dress like amber mist, and when she crossed a ladder of sunbeams he had a momentary glimpse of most of Faith. She was smiling and her eyes danced. "Imagine!" she exclaimed. "I've just had a long, long talk with Kit. And he's not coming for dinner! Because why? Because he's down at the Yacht Club and he made a bet he could swim from the dock there to Savin Rock--must be a dozen miles. The idiot is starting right now!"

  "We're being abandoned right and left," Valerie said to Ben, somewhat irritatedly; she carried that tone in her subsequent words to Faith: "You seem to be totally undismayed."

  "Why, of course! Because now I'll have Ben to myself all evening!"

  Mrs. Farr's eyes gleamed briefly with temper. But she controlled it. Or perhaps a new thought erased it. "Maybe. But a Miss Lee is due here soon. And she may find the Great Scientist as fascinating as you do, dear." Valerie explained about Miss Lee.

  Faith seemed interested, but not worried. She rang, if that was what happened, and ordered a martini on the intercom, which eventually Paulus Davey brought. He had changed to a mauve dinner jacket, black silk trousers, pumps, and a dark-purple bow tie.

  Whether that was his own idea or Mrs. Farr's, Ben could not guess.

  The faint sound of door chimes made Paulus change his course. Presently they heard his gentle voice say, with an undertone none of the three people in the living room could interpret but all three caught, "Oh. Miss Lee. Of course! I'll take your luggage and put your car away. You'll want to greet Mrs. Farr."

  A voice that had a strange quality and yet was without accent, an alien but American voice which, to Ben, seemed enchanting, said, "Yes, of course. I'll unpack and change soon, though. So--"

  Then she appeared. She had black, shining hair and dark, dark eyes. She was exquisitely made and dressed in a soft, rosy suit of some sort. Her lips were a rosy-red of the same hue but with a heightened intensity. She came in smiling a little, walking with a very straight and yet not self-conscious carriage. She was--at Ben's guess--a little younger than Faith Farr. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes sloped and almond shaped, and her skin a golden-tan color . . . the ensemble, Ben thought, beautiful as water lilies. Miss Lee, he also thought, and turned to see Valerie react, was not a relation of Robert E., or any such Lee. Indeed, it proved that the lovely young woman spelled her name in a different way: not L-e-e but L-i. Lotus Li.

  She was Chinese, a fact Vance Farr had either neglected to tell his wife or deliberately omitted. Ben wondered which. Overlooked, he decided. Farr wasn't the sort of man who would risk embarrassing a girl to play games with his wife. Besides, the Farr family was cosmopolitan beyond the American norm.

  Valerie exhibited that quality almost instantly. After a sub-audible gasp, her face broke into a smile and she actually went up out of the recessed area to greet the girl.

  "You're Miss Li! How perfectly charming, my dear! We're delighted to have you--though we're also a bit disappointed! Did you know your father and my husband won't be here for dinner. Not till late, in fact."

  Miss Li was bowing slightly. She took Valerie's hand. "Yes, I know," she said. "I have a phone in my car. I talked to Daddy--oh, a half hour ago--while I was stuck waiting for the police to clear up a wreck on the Turnpike. I do hope I'm not delaying you?"

  "Of course not."

  Introductions. Faith was first. She said to Miss Li, frankly, "I think the Chinese are the most lovely women on earth--and you are one of the loveliest I ever saw!"

  At dinner they were to find her first name was Lotus but everybody at Radcliffe, from which she had just graduated, called her "L
odi." Now, she flushed faintly at Faith's words and then, realizing they were frank and intended, she smiled with a vividness that Ben found breath-taking.

  "Thank you," said the Chinese girl, and, looking straight at Faith, "You can easily afford to say such a thing!" Whereupon they both laughed.

  Everybody did.

  Lodi Li soon departed to change for dinner. Faith and her mother waited till the footfalls died on distant flagstones and then both said, though differently, "Well!"

  Ben supposed Mrs. Farr meant, "What a surprise!" and Faith, "What a beauty!" In any event, he said, "Exactly." And that seemed the right word, for Valerie smiled at him and Faith, after an appraising glance, gave him a sudden, almost undetectable wink. . . .

  Ben sat on a terrace after dinner with Lodi and Faith, in sling chairs, beside coffee cups on low tables. Valerie had made her apologies at the end of the meal and vanished, not quite steadily but unaided.

  The last sun fell on the upper leaves and structures of Fenwich Village and the long, sloping, hazed land that led to the sea, the Sound, Long Island, and the Atlantic beyond. Ben mused absently over Lodi Li's slight reaction to Valerie's going.

  The Chinese girl had watched, of course, then turned to Faith and said, with the utmost quietude, "Does she often--?"

  Faith had replied softly, "Always."

  Lodi Li had finished the conversation insofar as that topic went: "Oh, dear! How pitiful."

  The terrace was shielded from the near-horizontal sun, a red ball, about to set behind the lesser ridges west of Sachem's Watch, which dominated them. A hazy sky began to accumulate tints: salmon-pink, orange, meringue-tan.

  Far to the south a darker darkness emitted occasional flares or pink light. A thunderstorm, there, moved toward Connecticut and then retreated, leaving them in sultry calm.

  "Which do you like better?" Faith asked. "Sunsets or sunrises?"

  Ben waited but Miss Li didn't respond. So he said, "Why, I don’t know. Both, equally, I guess. Some of my scientist-colleagues probably take the same view, on different grounds. The grounds that both phenomena are merely the result of light rays being reflected by dust, and absorbed, too--and by water vapor, of course. This, with the rotation of the planet, causes sunrises and sunsets--misnomers, they'd also doubtless point out--optical effects readily explained and of no special novelty or import."