Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“Did you hear me?” he said. “We have to deal with reality, not the way things should be. Fairly or not, she’s been tagged a Communist. No politician, particularly in the state of Texas, is going to risk his career for someone accused of being a member of the Communist Party.”

“Which United States senator were you talking to?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone can help Rosita.”

“You’re the bottom of the barrel, Roy.”

“You’re angry, so say what you wish. But you’re wrong.”

“I think I’ve figured you out,” she said. “You want to be a hero. But your heroic deeds have to be public. There has to be a trade-off. You won’t take risks unless there’s personal gain.”

Her words seemed to have no effect on him. “The

se photos and this note are the work of a miserably unhappy human being. The people who want to destroy Weldon are a far more serious group. They have ice water in their veins. When they decide to act, you’ll know it. They don’t send a warning.”

“What’s your idea of serious? What do you call locking up an innocent and perfectly sound woman in an asylum?”

“The people I’m referring to are capable of killing the president of the United States. I’ve heard them talk about it.”

“I don’t believe anything you say.”

“Your innocence is your great virtue, Linda Gail. I knew that when I first met you. I knew it would prevail over your ambition and your temporary lapses into the temptations of celebrity. That’s why I fell in love with you. That’s what Jack Valentine recognized in you when you walked out on the porch of that country store. Jack was a swine, but he knew a winner when he saw one.”

“On a train, two newsmen asked if I knew that Rosita was a Communist. I said I would report her if I thought that. What do you think of me now?”

“You break my heart, that’s what I think of you.”

He sat down behind his desk and stared at the photographs, breathing audibly through his nose, his thumbs pressed into his temples. Then he gathered the photos and the note and pushed them back into the mailer and handed it to her. “I talked to my father about helping Rosita. He walked out of the room. Do you know whom I actually have influence with? Hollywood people. And that’s because most of them aren’t that bright. The other bunch are Frankie Carbo’s friends. Everybody does business with them, but I’m the only one who’ll have dinner with them.”

At that moment Linda Gail realized she would probably go through many changes, even dramatic transformations, on her journey toward the grave. The laws of mutability were not unlike the wind blowing on a weather vane, and in all probability they would take their toll on her or reward her in ways she never anticipated. Her career would fail or succeed; age would steal her looks but perhaps give her a degree of wisdom; she might divorce and remarry, or stay with Hershel, or live out her life as a single woman. One day she might enjoy enormous wealth, the kind that was the envy of every person she had grown up with. But there was one thing she was absolutely sure of: She would never be entirely free of Roy Wiseheart or understand how she had slept securely in the arms of a man who was more wraith than flesh and blood. Nor would she get over her lover’s greatest tragedy—his total ignorance of how much joy he could have given others. So who had been the greater loser? She didn’t want to answer that question.

IT’S FAIR TO say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable. Hershel was sitting in the passenger seat of the Cadillac when Linda Gail turned in to our driveway. I went outside to greet them. He rolled down his window. “How you doin’, Loot?” he said.

I knew the purpose of their visit would not be a cheerful one. It was hard to put a good hat on our situation. I also knew that the odyssey we had begun in the immediate aftermath of the war was approaching its conclusion. They followed me into the living room and showed me the photographs and the typed note Linda Gail had gotten in the mail. “Who do you think sent these?” I said.

“I showed them to Roy. He said they came from someone who was miserably unhappy,” Linda Gail replied.

“Such as his wife?” I said.

Hershel had not taken off his coat and was looking out the front window. It was a grand gold-and-green winter day, the kind that makes you remember the Deep South with fondness. “You didn’t gather your pecans this fall,” he said.

“Didn’t have time,” I said.

“Remember in the Ardennes when I was fussing about Steinberg? You know, about him being a Jew and getting the heebie-jeebies on patrol?”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“You remember it, Weldon. You told me to knock it off. Then you asked me what my folks did at Christmastime. I told you we picked pecans on the gallery and my mother baked a fruitcake and my daddy made eggnog with red whiskey in it, not moonshine, and we went squirrel hunting with a colored man who worked on shares with us. I remember it just like it happened yesterday.”

I smiled but didn’t say anything.

“The pecan and oak trees in your yard look just like they do in Louisiana this time of year,” he said. “They have a soft quality, like in an old postcard. It’s like going back to when we were kids, isn’t that right, Linda Gail?”

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“Don’t be looking at those photographs,” he said. “They’re meant to hurt us. Don’t give these people any more satisfaction.”

“I think you’re right,” I said, and put the photos and note back in the mailer.