“Why don’t you stay here?” she asked him.
He laughed and shook his head. “Not me. Maybe you can get Nick to stay here, but I’m going with you. I’ve put up with your snottiness all afternoon: now I’m going to bask in the sunshine.”
Gilbert Wynant was with Nora when we reached the Normandie. He kissed his sister and shook hands with me and, when he had been introduced, Harrison Quinn.
Dorothy immediately began to make long and earnest and none too coherent apologies to Nora.
Nora said: “Stop it. There’s nothing to forgive. If Nick’s told you I was sore or hurt or anything of the sort he’s just a Greek liar. Let me take your coat.”
Quinn turned on the radio. At the stroke of the gong it was five thirty-one and one quarter, Eastern Standard Time.
Nora told Quinn, “Play bar-tender: you know where the stuff is,” and followed me into the bathroom. “Where’d you find her?”
“In a speak. What’s Gilbert doing here?”
“He came over to see her, so he said. She didn’t go home last night and he thought she was still here.” She laughed. “He wasn’t surprised at not finding her, though. He said she was always wandering off somewhere, she has dromomania, which comes from a mother fixation and is very interesting. He said Stekel claims people who have it usually show kleptomaniac impulses too, and he’s left things around to see if she’d steal them, but she never has yet that he knows of.”
“He’s quite a lad. Did he say anything about his father?”
“No.”
“Maybe he hadn’t heard. Wynant tried to commit suicide down in Allentown. Guild and Macaulay have gone down to see him. I don’t know whether to tell the youngsters or not. I wonder if Mimi had a hand in his coming over here.”
“I wouldn’t think so, but if you do–”
“I’m just wondering,” I said. “Has he been here long?”
“About an hour. He’s a funny kid. He’s studying Chinese and writing a book on Knowledge and Belief–not in Chinese–and thinks Jack Oakie’s very good.”
“So do I. Are you tight?”
“Not very.”
When we returned to the living-room, Dorothy and Quinn were dancing to Eadie Was a Lady.
Gilbert put down the magazine he was looking at and politely said he hoped I was recovering from my injury.
I said I was.
“I’ve never been hurt, really hurt,” he went on, “that I can remember. I’ve tried hurting myself, of course, but that’s not the same thing. It just made me uncomfortable and irritable and sweat a lot.”
“That’s pretty much the same thing,” I said.
“Really? I thought there’d be more–well, more to it.” He moved a little closer to me. “It’s things like that I don’t know. I’m so horribly young I haven’t had a chance to– Mr. Charles, if you’re too busy or don’t want to, I hope you’ll say so, but I’d appreciate it very much if you’d let me talk to you some time when there aren’t a lot of people around to interrupt us. There are so many things I’d like to ask you, things I don’t know anybody else could tell me and–”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I said, “but I’ll be glad to try any time you want.”
“You really don’t mind? You’re not just being polite?”
“No, I mean it, only I’m not sure you’ll get as much help as you expect. It depends on what you want to know.”
“Well, things like cannibalism,” he said. “I don’t mean in places like Africa and New Guinea–in the United States, say. Is there much of it?”
“Not nowadays. Not that I know of.”
“Then there was once?”
“I don’t know how much, but it happened now and then before the country was completely settled. Wait a minute: I’ll give you a sample.” I went over to the bookcase and got the copy of Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America that Nora had picked up in a second-hand-book store, found the place I wanted, and gave it to him. “It’s only three or four pages.”
ALFRED C. PACICER, THE “MANEATER,” WHO MURDERED
HIS FIVE COMPANIONS IN THE MOUNTAINS OF COLORADO,