belly?
He knuckled his eyes. If Cranston had helped him to get out of that
impossible situation, did that mean that if at any time in the last two days he
had turned himself over to Cranston, that Cranston would have helped him get out
of the forgery rap? No... unless his father had gotten to Cranston. It wouldn't
be the first time that the old man's money had brought in help...
He thought back to the night when he'd been out on the town... it had been
a big night, all right. His lips curled in a sneer at his own idiocy as he
realized that he couldn't even remember the name of the hat check girl for whom
he had forged the check. That made it perfect. Perfectly futile. What had been
her name? Bunny... no, Bobby? No, that wasn't it. He was sure it began with a
B, but that was all... whooo... he had been tight, all right.
Why had he forged the check? It came back slowly through gray mists...
he'd picked her up in a cellar night club. She'd suggested... or had he?...
that they gamble. No, she suggested it. That was it. She was a steerer. He'd
gone for a bundle on the crap table. He hadn't wanted to look small in her
eyes, so he'd forged the check to get more money to throw away on the dice...
and now he couldn't even remember her name, let alone her face. She was blonde.
He was sure of that. He never went out with brunettes. So she was blonde... so
what?
He looked back at the wasted and futile pattern of his life. As long as he
was in his own milieu, the asininity of what he did had never struck him. But
now, away from the pattern of athletic clubs, of golf and getting drunk at the
nineteenth hole, of wasted nights in unamusing night clubs where the only
entertainment was provided by the guests, and that very unentertaining... he
could see that in the last analysis, it wouldn't matter very much to anyone
whether he lived or died.
There might be a few head-waiters here and there who would wonder where
the sucker who usually tipped so lavishly was, there might be a girl here and
there, worried about her rent, who might think of him... his father?
In his mind's eye, his father had no features. Instead of a head, there
was a check book. Instead of features, there was a dollar sign.
Did his father have any real affection for him? Stanton could not figure
it out. As far as he could see, the only thing he represented to his father was
someone who could be dominated, made to obey commands.
He wondered what kind of person he might have been if he had been brought
up differently. If his mother had lived. For while she had lived, she had acted
as a buffer between his father and him. He thought of her despairingly. The only
person who had ever wanted him, who ever seemed to have any love for him and she
died when he was what? Six? No seven. That left twenty-one years in which he had
gone through a period of dry rot.
But that was a pretty easy out, he thought honestly. There were plenty of
people who had lived under the same conditions as he had and not grown up into
that which he had become.
No, the dry rot was within himself... of that he was sure. He wondered if
he could do anything about it. But this was hardly the time.
He leaped from the bed with a start. The door had opened. Surely he had
locked it! What was worse, he hadn't even heard a key inserted in the lock!
"Hello," Cranston said.
"Oh, it's you." Stanton's heart had missed a beat. "Uh... c'mon in."
